Category: Uncategorized

City Hall, Development, housing, Renters, Uncategorized

Council Amendments to Comprehensive Plan Reveal Competing Priorities
Maritza Rivera’s amendments would shrink neighborhood centers—areas where 3-to-6-story apartments would be newly legal—across her northeast Seattle district.

The comprehensive plan sets rules for how Seattle develops in the future, including where the city will allow its renter majority to live.

By Erica C. Barnett

After nearly a year of delays, the city council is finally getting ready to put its stamp on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 10-year Comprehensive Plan—a document Harrell has branded with his campaign slogan as the “One Seattle Plan.” The council has been meeting for months to discuss elements of the plan, including the creation of a few dozen new “neighborhood centers” where apartments will be allowed for the first time in decades, but this week was the council’s first opportunity to propose tweaks to the plan—107 amendments in all.

The comprehensive plan sets policies for growth and development, designating where new housing, transportation, and other infrastructure should go and placing limits on housing density in the city’s neighborhoods. It’s updated every 10 years, with periodic amendments, and inevitably reflects the political priorities of whoever is in office at the time.

We’ve reported previously on the Harrell Administration’s reluctance to allow significantly more housing in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods as part of the plan.

After killing an early draft of the plan that would have allowed significantly more density, Harrell released a plan last year that fell far short of the changes necessary to create enough housing for new and current residents—including renters—to live in Seattle affordably. After intense criticism of that proposal—the city’s Planning Commission said it upheld exclusionary policies rooted in redlining and failed to provide the housing Seattle needs—the mayor came back with a new plan that allowed slightly more housing, though still less than the proposal most members of the current city council said they supported when they ran for election in 2023.

The council’s proposed amendments are a mixed bag. Several proposals would collectively shrink the size of the proposed “neighborhood centers”—areas within 800 feet of certain frequent transit stops where 3-to-6-story apartments would be allowed—by hundreds of acres, in a blatant retreat to old single-family zoning patterns that benefit people who already own property and don’t want renters living in “their” neighborhoods.

Others would impose new restrictions on any new development that requires removing trees, including one that would give the city free rein to force builders to redo projects if even one tree, of any size, was threatened.

Still others would provide new incentives for developers to build dense housing, serving as a counterpoint to other councilmembers’ proposals to shrink the areas of the city where people who can’t afford to buy a house in Seattle are allowed to live.

Breaking the substantive amendments down into broad categories, we have:

Expanded Neighborhood Centers

On balance, the proposed amendments that make it easier to build housing—including everything from density bonuses for affordability to expanded and brand-new neighborhood centers—outweigh NIMBY proposals to restrict housing, although some of the proposals are probably nonstarters—or negotiation starters—in their current forms.

Harrell’s final comprehensive plan proposal included 3o neighborhood centers—down from 48 in an early draft, but more than the 24 included in an early version of the plan. Since then, though, there’s been intense pressure on the council to further reduce the number of neighborhood centers in the plan, coming primarily from incumbent  homeowners in neighborhoods like Wedgwood, Madrona, and Maple Leaf.

Although several council members did end up proposing amendments that would scale down the size of neighborhood centers, in some cases dramatically, the amendments to add new areas of potential density outweigh those proposals, meaning that if every proposed change to the neighborhood centers was adopted, the amount of land in designated neighborhood centers would increase significantly.

Council members who proposed new or expanded neighborhood centers included Dan Strauss (who proposed a new East Ballard neighborhood center and called for expanding the boundaries of five others, including in Magnolia), Bob Kettle (who proposed a new North Queen Anne/Nickerson Neighborhood Center) and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who’s proposing eight new neighborhood centers, one in each council district.

“Seattle needs more housing,” Rinck said. “Seattle also needs full and thriving communities, and we’ve heard an overwhelming call from constituents to achieve these goals with more housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods which haven’t seen proportional growth.”

Build This, Not That

Other proposed amendments would add density bonuses and incentives for different types of housing, such as stacked flats and affordable apartments.

Kettle, for instance, proposed getting rid of an “amenity area” requirement for new housing in neighborhood residential zones, freeing up more land for housing.

Under the current proposal, 20 percent of the space around new apartment buildings in the city’s traditional single-family areas would be reserved for open space, typically a yard, for residents to “recreate on site”—as if what apartment dwellers in cities really want is a tiny lawn where they can all hang out together.

An amendment from Sara Nelson would retain a requirement that residential buildings, including new apartments in all parts of the city, be exempt from environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA); that exemption is otherwise set to expire next month, making housing harder to build.

Other amendments, from Hollingsworth, Nelson, Kettle, and Rinck, would provide bonus density for developers who agree to build specific types of housing, including social housing, accessory dwelling units, and low-income or affordable housing. Several proposals would create incentives for developers to build stacked flats—apartments spread out across a single story of a building—including density bonuses for retaining trees and amendments that would allow stacked flats to be denser than other types of apartments in neighborhood residential (former single-family) zones.

Rob Saka also has an amendment that would give a density bonus for one- or two-story “cottage” apartments surrounding a large common area, a style that resembles single-family housing more than the three-to-six-story apartments that will be allowed in the new neighborhood residential zones under the current plan.

Strauss proposed an amendment that would increase the maximum height in these areas from six to seven or eight stories immediately next to a major transit stop, and Rinck proposed changing the definition of “major transit stop” to include high-frequency buses.

15-Minute City

Several amendments would reduce or remove mandatory parking requirements. The most ambitious, from Rinck, would “remove parking requirements citywide for all land uses in all zones,” a phrase that brings joy to my car-hating little heart. (Yes, I own a car. No, I don’t think the city should socially engineer car culture, as it currently does.)

Builders wouldn’t be barred from including parking in their developments, but they wouldn’t be forced to do so, as they are in many places under the city’s current code.

Another amendment from Rinck, essentially a backup if her first parking proposal fails would reduce parking mandates to comply with a statewide parking reform bill that requires cities to eliminate some of their parking mandates by 2028. Another proposal, from Strauss, would establish parking maximums in the city’s regional centers—the densest areas, including downtown, Capitol Hill, and Strauss’ home turf of Ballard. In a concession to the tree-preservation lobby, Rinck’s amendments also include one that would eliminate parking mandates for developments that preserve trees.

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A proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods could also see some meaningful changes.

In the past, we’ve dunked on Harrell’s proposal to allow corner stores in neighborhoods, because it would only allow new stores and restaurants  on literal corner lots, with restrictions that don’t apply to other businesses in the city, such as a mandatory 10pm closing time. Several amendments attempt to remedy those issues. The amendments range from extremely modest (a Nelson amendment that would remove the literal-corner requirement but retain restrictions on business type, size, and closing hours) to ambitious, by Seattle standards (a Rinck proposal that would remove the corner requirement, allow businesses to be open past 10pm, and add bars to the list of businesses that are legal in neighborhoods.

Three amendments, from Rinck, Strauss, and Nelson, would make it easier to open stores and restaurants in residential neighborhoods where they’re currently banned. As we’ve reported, Harrell’s comp plan proposal would allow corner stores in neighborhoods, but only on literal corners, with additional restrictions such as mandatory 10pm closures and a stipulation that they can include restaurants, but not bars.

The amendments range from modest (amendments from Strauss and Nelson to allow stores throughout residential zones, not just on corners) to ambitious (a Rinck proposal that would allow restaurants and bars throughout these areas, eliminate a requirement that businesses be closed from 10pm to 6am, and ditch a 2,500-square-foot size restriction included in the mayor’s proposal). Allowing bars in neighborhoods, a policy that works fine in big cities across the country, may be a bridge too far for censorious Seattle, but a compromise between these proposals could be a first step toward creating more 15-minute neighborhoods in Seattle.

Homeowners vs. Renters

Of course, it wouldn’t be a zoning update without some NIMBY poison pills. Although no one, including newly appointed District 5 Councilmember Debora Juarez, has proposed reviving former D5 councilmember Cathy Moore’s quixotic effort to remove an entire neighborhood center from Maple Leaf, several councilmembers have proposed reducing the amount of land in their districts where people who rent apartments can live.

Maritza Rivera, who has frequently claimed that the city did insufficient outreach to single-family neighborhoods before allowing apartments near frequent transit stops, has three amendments to shrink neighborhood centers in Bryant, Ravenna, and Wedgwood. Her proposal to scale back the Wedgwood center is the most radical of the three, in that it would reduce the size of the center by about 40 percent, limiting apartments to 35th Ave. NE, already a busy arterial, and prohibiting them in the adjacent blocks. (In contrast, one of Rinck’s amendments would expand the Wedgwood neighborhood center to the south; expect strong objections from Rivera to that one).

“Based on months of feedback from community members who live in and near the proposed neighborhood centers, my amendments modify the boundaries of the neighborhood centers in the D4, including Wedgwood, Bryant and Ravenna, to reflect resident concerns….  around the ability of local neighborhood streets to handle increased growth and the infrastructure,” Rivera said.

A Rivera amendment for Ravenna traces a similar line to carve single-family houses in a designated historic district (itself a way for older neighborhoods to oppose density) out of the proposed neighborhood center around Third Place Books, leaving the commercial area but ensuring that there would be no apartments in the neighborhood surrounding the commercial center.

Separately, Rivera proposed an amendment that would give the city the HOA-like authority to dictate what kind of external siding would be allowed on buildings within designated national or local historic districts, based on factors like the “historic character” of an area; this extraordinary new power would also apply to historic districts that might be designated in the future, including those proposed by house owners who oppose new development in their neighborhoods.

Joy Hollingsworth wants to cut the Madrona Neighborhood Center by about seven blocks, concentrating new housing into a smaller area that already includes parks, schools, and other areas where housing can’t be built.

Joy Hollingsworth has proposed shrinking down another controversial neighborhood center in Madrona, whose homeowning residents showed up en masse to oppose the zoning change in their neighborhood. Hollingsworth’s amendment would shrink the Madrona center by nearly 40 percent, slicing off big chunks of current single-family areas on the east and west sides of the proposed center and concentrating any new housing around an existing commercial stretch that includes an elementary school, library, and playfield where housing can’t be built.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a conversation about housing in 2025 without hand-wringing over trees—not planting or maintaining trees in public spaces, which are actions the city could take at any time, or encouraging property owners to plant new trees themselves, but preserving trees that already exist, generally at the expense of new development.

In addition to the tree preservation incentives I mentioned earlier, there’s an amendment from Strauss to “recognize the importance of the natural environment and native species, including trees, bees, salmon, orca, and herons,” plus several from Rivera to make it harder to develop housing if trees are on site.

The most extreme proposal from Rivera—and the one that made Rinck confirm with council staff that the amendment really would do what it appeared to do—would allow the city to require developers to come up with a completely new alternative plan if it turned out their housing proposal would require the removal of any tree, no matter its size, age, or viability.

It’s easy to see how this could grind development in traditional single-family areas to a halt. If someone planted a sapling on a property slated for development, or if there was already unremarkable small tree on site, the city could stop the project and require the developer to start from scratch.

Housing is already tremendously expensive to build in Seattle, and construction permits are declining as developers pull out of the city. Empowering unelected city staffers to force full project redesigns around every existing tree would exacerbate the housing crisis, adding costs to projects that are already financed while reducing the amount of housing that could be built in every project with a tree on site. And forget about expanding the city’s tree canopy—who would plant a new tree on a property they may want to sell in the future, knowing it would instantly reduce their property value?

Mayor Harrell, Police, Privacy, Uncategorized

As Police Roll Out Live Cameras in Purported Crime “Hot Spots,” Not Everyone Is Thrilled to Be Under Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the uses of new closed-circuit cameras that currently allow police to surveil 57 locations around the city, from Aurora Ave. N to the Chinatown International District, at a press event at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center on Tuesday. The department plans to add cameras in additional locations soon, including the area around Garfield High School, in Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor, and around the two downtown stadiums.

The city council funded the cameras, along with the expansion of SPD’s existing Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), last year, adding 21 full-time police positions and expanding the program beyond its originally proposed boundaries at an ongoing cost of several million dollars a year. SPD plans to integrate feeds from private cameras, such as surveillance cameras outside local businesses, into the system.

At Tuesday’s event, SPD Captain James Britt showed reporters how RTCC staff could use a live, map-based feed to monitor the cameras in real time, zooming and panning to see an area up close and from different angles. A six-minute video showed how footage from one camera at Aurora Ave. N and N 100th St. was used to apprehend a shooting suspect, along with footage from King County drones, private businesses, and the top of an apartment building.

Barnes said the cameras had been used in “600 incidents” and more than 90 investigations, but SPD did not provide a further breakdown of those incidents or say whether the city’s cameras duplicated the private surveillance footage that the police have always used in investigations.

City officials took pains to reassure residents that SPD won’t hand its surveillance footage over to ICE for use in immigration raids. “I can’t say enough, we’ll make sure everyone’s rights are protected and the right constitutional safeguards are in place,” Harrell said.

As a city council member, Harrell added, he was “the first person who proposed body cameras” for police and the “author of the privacy surveillance ordinance”—an apparent reference not to the far-reaching 2017 surveillance ordinance, authored and sponsored by then-councilmember Lorena González, but a 2013 law Harrell co-sponsored with then-councilmember Nick Licata that required council approval for new surveillance technologies.

The city has promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking and gun violence. But not every business owner in the areas under surveillance considers them a benign crime-fighting tool.

PubliCola spoke with Cory Potts, who owns the Center for Bicycle Repair near 12th and Jackson— a longtime “hot spot” for drug use and sales of both drugs and stolen goods. One of the new cameras faces his shop, which is located in a nearly 100-year-old building that was occupied by Japanese businesses before Seattle’s Japanese population was removed from the area and interred in concentration camps during World War II.

After a mass stabbing in front of his building, Potts said, a representative from the mayor’s office showed up at a community meeting to tell them the city was installing the cameras, which Potts later learned was not actually a response to the violence, but a plan that had long been underway.

The city had already made what Potts considered some troubling decisions in the neighborhood, which was historically known as Japantown. First, they placed signs around the areas banning “buying or selling merchandise” in public spaces. “I was struck  by the historical similarities,” Potts said. “There was no outreach about the signs whatsoever—all of a sudden, they went up.”

Shortly after that, city trucks began cleaning the streets with a foaming disinfectant that seeped into Potts’ building. A worker with the Seattle Department of Transportation told Potts the foam was meant to clean up urine, but “based on observation” and talking to the people who hang out near his business, “I don’t believe that was the actual purpose for the foaming,” he said.

“The city doesn’t give those people enough credit for how sensitive they are to the neighborhood and the stuff that happens here. I think they know what it means when a city truck drives by them and shoots foam at the place where they spent most of their time.”

As a business owner in the area since the pandemic, Potts says he doesn’t see how cameras will benefit him, given that he’s seen police hanging around all day without interacting with people on the street. The police department, and Harrell, promoted the cameras as a way to prevent and respond to major crimes like human trafficking, but the building that used to house Viet Wah burned down after the building was improperly secured against intruders for months, Potts said, and no one did anything to address the situation.

He’s asking the city to blur out his business on footage from the cameras as a way to “stand up for what the building represents and what the history of the neighborhood represents.” On Tuesday, Captain Britt told PubliCola SPD generally only blurs footage of residential property, because commercial buildings are open to the public. “We would want to be cautious about [blurring out] businesses that front onto a sidewalk, because the sidewalk is an area that we would want to make sure that we had good footage of,” Britt said.

The RTCC expansion was one of many mayoral priorities that added $100 million in costs, most of them ongoing obligations, to the 2025-2026 budget despite a known revenue gap of around $250 million. In April, the City Budget Office issued a new revenue forecast showing that the city will need to close an additional, previously unanticipated budget shortfall of $241 million during 2025 and 2026. (The budget already assumed deficits starting in 2027).

On Tuesday, Harrell said his 2026-2027 budget proposal could include more funding to add more cameras and expand surveillance into additional neighborhoods. “We think this is good technology, and there could be a push to expand its citywide,” Harrell said. “Everyone in this room understands we have some constraints on our budget, and so it becomes a question of priorities.”

The city’s surveillance ordinance requires agencies like SPD to complete a Surveillance Impact Report, or SIR, before deploying any new surveillance technology. In its SIR for the new surveillance cameras, SPD said it was in the process of creating a new “omnibus surveillance policy” that would include a specific policy for CCTV. To date, an SPD spokesperson confirmed, the department has not completed either the omnibus policy or specific camera and real-time crime center surveillance guidelines, and has “no firm timeline” to finish the work.

According to the spokesperson, SPD’s two-person policy shop has been busy drafting new crowd-control policies but has already begun the work of researching and drafting the new policies around the RTCC.”

The city’s Office of the Inspector General has hired researchers from the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a two-year assessment of the RTCC and the new camera surveillance program.

Uncategorized

Three Fun Things for June 29, 2025

It’s been a while. Hope you’re hungry.

By Erica C. Barnett

1. I was back in the old country recently, by which I mean south Mississippi, and I finally got around to trying a gas-station snack I’ve always skipped over to save more room for fried chicken—potato logs, whose ugly-sounding name really fails to sell what’s going on with these unassuming treats.

Potato logs: Not to be confused with jojos, a Pacific Northwest invention in which potatoes are cut into thick wedges, heavily seasoned, lightly breaded, and fried. I used to buy them all the time at the Red Apple on 23rd and Jackson before it closed, and they’re like zazzed-up steak frites.

Compared to a Mississippi potato log, as this Southern Living recipe refers to them, jojos are restrained. To make potato logs, you take a baked potato, slice it into four wedges, and thickly batter and fry it until the inside is fluffy and the exterior has the exact texture of crispy chicken skin. I suspect that true potato-log flavor comes from a deep-fryer that’s been cooking chicken all day, but since I’m rarely at a gas station in the south, I’m going to try making them at home, adding a bit of chicken bouillon powder to the spice mix. And next time I’m in Hattiesburg, I know where I’m headed.

2. Much, much closer to home is Saigon Drip Cafe, a popular spot for bánh mi and phở in Pioneer Square. Josh loves Saigon Drip for its tofu sandwiches, but I’m going back as soon as conscionable for the Bánh Mi Drip, a flavor bomb that includes deeply caramelized onions, tender, anise-scented brisket, and mayo, along with a side of pho broth for dipping or sipping. At $17, and stacked inches thick, it’s not the cheapest or lightest lunch, but I promise you it’s worth the money and the indigestion. This is the best fusion-style banh mi I’ve had outside of the New Orleans area, and one of the best sandwiches in the city.

3. Guys, did you know there is such a thing as SPRING panettone? I happened into a deal on an orange-scented loaf through Too Good to Go this week via ChefShop.com, a local gem on 15th Ave. W that sells hard-to-find international snacks and kitchen goods. I wasn’t expecting much—the standard cinnamon-laced, raisin-dotted Christmas panettone leaves me cold—but the second I peeled back the floral wrapping paper I knew I had lucked into something special.

The rich yeasted cake, made by this Italian company, was pillowy, lightly sweet, and vividly yellow thanks to copious egg yolks, orange essence, and threads of candied orange peel, topped with a rich streusel and a smattering of whole almonds. ChefShop.com appears to be sold out, but you might be able to find it at other online sources—or set a calendar alert for next year, when this extremely seasonal delicacy will be available again.

What I’m reading:

Fiction: Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. You may think it’s hard to sympathize with a story about intergenerational trauma among the very wealthy, and you’d be right: No one in this novel, which starts with the violent kidnapping of the scion of a polystyrene manufacturing empire, goes unscathed, and every character is horrible in their own unique, larger-than-life way—like the Righteous Gemstones of the old-money set. I’m calling it: Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is the Philip Roth of her generation.

Nonfiction: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. Before writing her sweeping interrogation of inequality, Caste, Wilkerson wrote the definitive history of the Great Migration of 6 million Black Americans from the South to the North and West, telling the stories of three people who participated in that exodus to illustrate why millions left and how they fared. I thought I knew about the Great Migration, but Wilkerson’s book made me think about America in a different way, as a place where every single region was profoundly shaped not just by the reprehensible history of slavery but millions of brave individual decisions to leave for parts unknown.

City Council, Police, Uncategorized

Interim Police Chief Answers Council Questions About Protests, Women at SPD, and ICE

The “30 by 30” pledge, SPD’s commitment to having a police recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030, is “unachievable in current market conditions,” Barnes said.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s public safety committee held its first official hearing for Interim Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’ confirmation on Tuesday, setting Barnes up with mostly friendly questions like “Can you talk about what transformational relationships looks like to you?” (Joy Hollingsworth) and expressions of gratitude, like” I just wanted to say thank you so much for everything that you’ve done so far.” (Cathy Moore.)

Barnes nomination is a gimme, so it wasn’t surprising that a council dominated by SPD cheerleaders spent most of their time lavishing fulsome praise on Barnes. (Moore also praised Barnes for his “homespun wisdom,” which she said must be because he’s from North Carolina.)

Not to pick on Barnes, who’s been in the position for just over three months, but the council probably should have had more questions about how he will actually change the culture of the department, which is currently being sued for, among other things, racial and gender discrimination, and which has already faced criticism under Barnes’ leadership, for harassing sunbathers at a longtime LGBTQ-friendly nude beach and arresting dozens of people who protested two anti-trans rallies by a far-right Christian group.

Many of Barnes’ remarks on Tuesday, along with the written responses he submitted to council questions earlier this month, suggest that his  policies, which are similar in name and content to programs he implemented as police chief in Madison, WI, will be less than transformative.

Barnes’ marquee proposal, called “Seattle-Centric policing,” sounds similar to the “Madison-Centric policing” model the Madison Police Department adopted in 2023.

According to Barnes’  lengthy written responses to councilmember questions, “Seattle-Centric Policing is a comprehensive plan focused on reducing harm and crime while enhancing the quality of life for Seattle residents” that involves “fostering integrated partnerships” with existing community and business groups to “create a safer and more vibrant city.”

Many of the specific strategies, like opening up storefront-style police offices in neighborhoods across the city, have been tried before and abandoned for various reasons; many others, like putting police officers in schools, are also controversial and not up to SPD alone. And one policy Barnes proposed, expanding the Find It/Fix it app to include a category for “general open air drug use and general disorder,” is already basically in effect, in that many people already use it for this purpose.

During Tuesday’s meeting, the only slightly spiky questions came from progressive councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who asked how Barnes planned to deal with protesters against federal immigration policy, given “the lengths SPD will go to protect the free speech rights of anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-abortion, Christian nationalists calling for the ousting of Mayor Harrell,” a references to SPD’s actions during two protests against a far-right Christian group last month.

In response, Barnes said SPD is “neutral in all matters of protest” and added that “at some point I will probably go to jail and be in prison, because we have an administration that has threatened to jail politicians.” While this offhand remark garnered significant coverage in the Seattle Times and local TV stations, Barnes’ claim that SPD doesn’t pick sides during protests probably rang hollow to those who protested against the anti-trans events, given that SPD effectively served as security guards for the right-wing group that organized both events.

In his written response to a similar question, Barnes said SPD should work with protest leaders to establish lines of communication, but said that given that SPD was operating with a “paper-thin margin in staffing” during last month’s counterprotests he believes that “by and large, officers appropriately met their responsibility of facilitating the First Amendment rights of all involved.”

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A large chunk of Barnes’ response to questions about how SPD should handle protests in the future was taken directly from a Sentinel Event Review of the 2020 protests in Madison, produced by an outside firm called the Quattrone Center, with the word “departments” substituted for “MPD.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Rinck pressed on, asking Barnes how SPD is verifying the identities of ICE officers in Seattle, given that many people who say they’re ICE officers are wearing masks and obscuring their identities. “Every law enforcement officer should have a badge of some type, and they should have an identification of some type, and it’s not unreasonable to ask, ‘May I see your identification please?'” Barnes said. “If they do not have [ID], then certainly they can call the police and try to verify.”

(Editorial aside: This comment reminded me of Bob Kettle’s admonition, earlier in the same meeting, that protesters for immigrants’ rights should behave “responsibly” to avoid giving the Trump Administration an excuse to send troops to Seattle. It sounds like a transmission from a different reality than the one we’re currently experiencing—one where people can simply reason politely with officers sent in to facilitate deportations, and where being well-behaved will protect Seattle from federal crackdowns on civil rights.) Barnes did not know whether ICE was required to notify SPD if they are doing raids in the city, but said no one from the Department of Homeland Security had called his office.

Barnes defended SPD’s record on police accountability, arguing that the city’s accountability system is one of the best in the nation; even when the US Department of Justice placed SPD under a federal consent decree in 2011, Barnes wrote, they “found that Seattle’s accountability processes were ‘sound and that the investigations of police misconduct complaints are generally thorough, well-organized, well-documented, and thoughtful,’ [and] the work Seattle has done since has only strengthened this system.” 

The interim chief also pushed back on Rinck’s question about the department’s use of monitored CCTV cameras along Aurora Ave. N., in downtown Seattle, and in the Chinatown/International District, disagreeing with her premise that CCTV surveillance is not an effective crime-fighting tool.

As a counterpoint, Barnes pointed to a recent triple homicide in which SPD used private camera footage after the fact to help arrest and identify suspects—and said SPD’s 34 cameras have helped the department “materially assist” in more than 50 incidents since May 20.

Barnes also disputed Rinck’s claim that CCTV doesn’t address violent crimes, writing that “there is evidence that CCTV cameras reduce violent crime, as events that lead to continued violence may be interrupted.” The study he cited, however, is most often used to illustrate the opposite—cameras don’t deter violent crime, but they can be useful in solving car thefts after the fact. The study also found that private cameras are more effective at helping police solve property crimes than those operated by police.

Finally, Barnes acknowledged that many women in the department say SPD is a toxic work environment, and that this perception is one reason the department has historically found it hard to recruit and retain female officers. (As of the end of April, SPD had hired just five women this year.) But, he continued, the problem isn’t unique to SPD. Nationally, women make up just 13 to 15 percent of police recruit classes—in part, Barnes wrote, because younger women are doing better than men academically and have more types of professional opportunities than they once did.

Seattle, like many cities, signed the “30×30” pledge, a commitment to having a police recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030. In his written comments, Barnes said this goal was probably “unachievable in current market conditions,” particularly in “large urban markets” like Seattle, “which despite offering unique opportunities also come with unique risks and cost of living challenges that may render them less attractive to younger officers.”

Instead of a specific number, Barnes concluded, the “30×30″ commitment is really about “making law enforcement a profession where qualified women who are drawn to it feel welcomed and supported while ensuring agencies address their unique needs and foster their success.”

Barnes will appear at one more committee meeting before the council votes on his appointment; you can read his to written questions here.

Uncategorized

Seattle Nice: The Seattle City Council Is Un-Cathy Moored

 

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we talked about the big city news of the week: City Councilmember Cathy Moore’s announcement that she’ll resign from the council on July 7, just over 18 months into her four-year term.

Moore said she’s resigning over health and “personal” reasons. Among those personal reasons, quite clearly, is that she quite visibly (and sometimes dramatically) dislikes the part of her job that involves hearing negative feedback from the public. Going back to the very beginning of her brief term, Moore has taken political criticism personally. In February 2024, she demanded that protesters seeking financial support for homeless refugees—who had already been locked out of council chambers—be arrested en masse “threatening” her by chanting and pounding on the wall of council chambers. That was just an early taste of how she would react to criticism for the next year and a half.

While the public can be impolite and annoying, listening to what they have to say (and brushing off personal insults and attacks) is part of the job of representing the public. Seattle residents are extremely engaged in local politics, which is a good thing. Public feedback is how elected officials konw what the public thinks of what their representatives are doing; when elected officials hear overwhelming feedback that, for example, no one likes their proposal to change the council’s ethics rules to allow conflicts of interest, they should listen, not shut down council meetings and threaten arrests.

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Moore’s instinct to accuse the public of “hate” and abuse shows what a poor temperamental fit she is to represent a city council district in Seattle. It’s fine to think being a city council member is a crappy job—in many ways, it is—but perhaps Moore should have watched more council meetings before signing up to run. Given that the most recent spate of meeting disruptions came from a group led by former council member Kshama Sawant, I’d have advised her to watch some of the meetings where Sawant brought hundreds of people to yell and protest, which were far rowdier than this year’s meetings, where she’s rarely mustered more than a couple dozen supporters. That was under the previous council, whose “divisive” nature most of the new council members promised to fix when they were elected in 2023.

Big picture, as Sandeep and I discuss on this week’s podcast, this city council (which includes an unprecedented six members in their first terms, and a seventh who was appointed, not elected) is acting as if it had a mandate from the voters to enact their campaign agendas. In reality, most of them defeated more progressive opponents by small margins in a low-turnout election year, and their constituents include vast numbers of people who didn’t vote for them and don’t like what they’re trying to do. Dealing with that fact requires some humility and a willingness to engage with people you don’t agree with.

Instead, Moore (and others elected in the 2023 anti-progressive backlash) have chosen to lash out at their constituents, blaming the public for being too mean or disruptive and conflating mild criticism with “hate” and abuse. Just this week, on Wednesday, Moore got emotional on the dais over the fact that some people have called her a NIMBY—an acronym that means Not In My Backyard, and aptly applies to politicians who put barriers in the way of development, which Moore has consistently tried to do.

The legislation she was supporting would have added more process to the construction of Sound Transit light rail facilities in Seattle requiring even more “community feedback” on the already-delayed light rail extension from Ballard to West Seattle. Moore, who represents north Seattle, said it was “classist” and offensive to suggest that she and Maritza Rivera, who represents northeast Seattle, wanted to apply different standards to light rail in these neighborhoods than were applied in their districts, which already have light rail.

“This is not about NIMBYism, and it’s going to be spun that way,” Moore said. She continued:

And just the public comments that came were, you know, personal attacks, the ‘Moore-Rivera double punch’ kind of nonsense, personal attacks. It’s just more hate because people don’t agree with the particular positions that we’re taking, in this attempt to make it sound like we don’t give a flying F about anybody that [we] disagree with. It’s nonsense and it’s insulting. I’ve spent my entire life in public service. I started as a public defender. I ate peanut butter sandwiches because I didn’t make enough money. I lived with three other people as a professional. I have spent my entire life working to better others and this, I’m just cannot begin to tell you how tired I am of this narrative.

“Feel free to come and talk to me about how I’ve dedicated 30-plus years to public service and improving the lives of people who don’t have a voice and have chosen to put myself out here, for all this love that I get every day,” she concluded.

While Moore’s comments were about pushback on a light-rail process amendment, I think they summed up her frustration with being on the council in general. As a former judge, Moore came onto the council unaccustomed to taking criticism in person, including harshly worded critiques from a public she couldn’t gavel down. Future council candidates should consider whether they really want every part of the job before seeking to represent the unmanageable public.

Mayor Harrell, Police, Uncategorized

New Records Shed Light On Investigation that Led to Former Police Chief Diaz’ Ouster

 

The inside of the infamous Ewok card. Investigators say it is “highly probable” that the card was written to Adrian Diaz by Jamie Tompkins.

By Erica C. Barnett

Newly released records from the investigation into former police chief Adrian Diaz and his former chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins, shed new light on efforts by Tompkins and Diaz to discredit SPD staffers who believed Diaz had hired, and created a new position, for Tompkins because they were having an affair. They also show that Diaz’ security staff, who reported directly to Tompkins, were afraid of speaking out about the alleged affair because they believed they would be fired or criminally investigated if they talked.

The records, which PubliCola received in response to a public disclosure request, include transcripts of interviews with Tompkins, Diaz, and three members of Diaz’ security detail, along with a copy of a love letter written on an Ewok birthday card that investigators determined Tompkins wrote, based on an expert analysis of her handwriting.

Outside investigators determined last year that both Tompkins and Diaz had lied to investigators about their relationship, and that Tompkins had falsified evidence in the investigation by disguising her handwriting in an effort to prove that she didn’t write a love note to Diaz.

The investigation, by attorney Shayda Le from Barran Liebman LLP, was limited to “fact-finding” and came out after Tompkins resigned; she has since filed a $3 million claim against the city, alleging she was sexually harassed over the rumors about her and Diaz. Mayor Bruce Harrell demoted Diaz last May and fired him in December.

A comparison of the handwriting in the “Ewok” letter to Diaz and a sample of Tompkins’ writing from another document.

“It Scared the Crap Out of Me”

One of Diaz’ security officers, Andre Sinn, found a (since much-discussed) apparent love note, written on an Ewok-themed birthday card, in the Toyota Highlander Diaz had been driving while waiting for a new Chevy Tahoe he had ordered to arrive. Sinn brought the card along to his interview and handed it over to investigators, saying he had held on to it for more than a year because he and the other members of Diaz’ detail didn’t know what to do with it and who they could trust. “To be honest, it scared the crap out of me,” Sinn said.

Tay Gray-McVey, another member of Diaz’ security team, said the team discuss “different ways to turn it in without getting in trouble for not turning it sooner.” He assumed Diaz would fire them for telling anyone about the card; during the interview, a union representative, Matt Newsome, noted that Diaz kept a box in office that contained the badges of officers he’d fired, as if to say, “this is what could happen to you,” Newsome said.

The handwriting analysis compared the writing on the card to two separate samples Tompkins submitted to investigators—one impromptu sample, a standard handwriting analysis worksheet, that Tompkins provided at the end of her interview, and another she submitted about two weeks later. The final sample looked noticeably different than other examples of Tompkins’ writing, and caused the certified handwriting analyst to conclude that Tompkins had purposely disguised her handwriting so that investigators would be unable to conclude she’d written the card.

The handwriting expert, a certified document examiner, concluded that Tompkins wrote the love note and that her final writing sample “showed evidence of disguise.”

Tompkins and Diaz have denied the allegations, and Diaz hired his own handwriting expert who he claimed had discredited the outside investigator’s finding that Tompkins most likely wrote the love letter and later attempted to disguise her handwriting.

Side-by-side comparison of pages from Jamie Tompkins’ handwriting submissions on August 30 and September 11.

Special Treatment?

Many of the people interviewed during the investigation, including Sinn, said they didn’t really care one way or another if Diaz and Tompkins were having an affair—that was between them. “But when you hire a person into that role and you … bring them into our department, that, to me, is a huge problem, and then without divulging their relationship,” Sinn told investigators.

Specifically, Diaz was accused of creating a new position—Chief of Staff—for Tompkins, then promoting her to his command staff and putting her in charge of Clancy as well as Diaz’ own security detail. Then, SPD staffers claimed, he proceeded to give Tompkins special treatment, allowing her to work from home at a time when most people were expected to be in the office and spending large amounts of the work day “socializing,” as Sinn put it, instead of actually doing work.

“I don’t think anyone really knows what her job is honestly,” said Gray-McVey, who was interviewed when Tompkins still worked for SPD. “For a good portion, up until we got Chief [Sue] Rahr, we didn’t see her much in the office. Maybe one or two days for a couple hours.”

Tompkins said in her interview that Diaz hired her for her expertise in journalism, attention to detail, and willingness to tell him the truth while others on his staff were content to be “yes men” telling him what he wanted to hear. “I’m a perfectionist and it needs to be executed in just the right way,” he said.

Both Diaz and Tompkins claimed that the SPD chief had a chief of staff before Tompkins. For example, they said that Chris Fisher—SPD’s chief data analyst, whose title was Director of Strategic Initiatives—was Diaz’ previous chief of staff, even though he had a different title and responsibilities. “This isn’t a new fancy position and it’s not special,” Tompkins said.

Investigators seemed unconvinced by this argument, noting that Diaz already had a different Director of Strategic Initiatives, Heather Marx, when Tompkins was hired. The Chief of Staff title has not been use since 2001, although various people has served as adjutants or aides to police chiefs since then.

Throughout her interview, Tompkins returned to the idea that people at SPD were inventing the controversy over her role, along with the alleged affair, because she looked and acted different than a typical SPD employee. Tompkins told investigators Diaz’ executive assistant told her Gray-McVey “had a thing for me” and was “enamored” to the point of updating the Q13 FOX website constantly to see when her bio would come down (indicating she was about to start at SPD).

Diaz’ assistant, Tompkins continued, “would get phone calls: ‘What is she wearing today, where is she, is she going to be at this event?’ And I asked her, like, ‘Why—why would they want this?’ and she’s like, “because they want to experience you. They want to have an experience with you. … [because] you’re from television.”A communications training consultant once told her “they don’t know what to do with you here,” Tompkins told investigators. “She’s like, ‘People just stare at you, like… I can’t possibly have a brain and really great ideas.”

If Diaz did create a position for Tompkins because he was in a relationship with her, that would be a form of misconduct and potentially a misuse of city funds. Proving this kind of misconduct would require the city to demonstrate that the affair actually occurred.

“Nervous and Scared”

Many of the most salacious details of Diaz’ alleged comments about Tompkins have been reported before, including his alleged statement that he couldn’t keep up with Tompkins sexually and told her to use her Rabbit vibrator when he wasn’t around. But the interviews show that the stories Diaz’ security detail told investigators were remarkably consistent and limited to information each man could have obtained firsthand—for example, in one instance when one person was driving and another was riding in the back with Diaz, investigators concluded that each story reflected what they could have heard from their relative positions in the car.

Brandon James, a member of Diaz’ detail recalled Diaz telling him he couldn’t have sex as often as Tompkins wanted, and said that he specifically suggested Cialis, not Viagra, as an effective male-enhancement pill. The two had initially bonded, James said, after he confided in Diaz about his own divorce and Diaz helped him get off the night shift so he could see his kids, James said. During one drive—around the time James took Diaz on a “road trip” to get a specially tailored suit—James said Diaz confided in him that he was considering a divorce from his wife because he and Tompkins “were dating and wanted to be together,” and James advised him on how expensive and complicated divorce can be.

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Around that time, both Gray-McVey and James said, they separately discussed various “cover stories” Diaz could use to explain why he was away from home so often, including the excuse that he was seeing a personal trainer. Diaz did later tell investigators he was seeing a personal trainer—Tompkins’ brother—at her apartment building, meeting for their sessions in the conference room. James said he told Diaz he needed a more specific excuse that wasn’t so easy to disprove. “I said, ‘Quite frankly, you need to have better cover stories.'”

In her final investigation report, investigator Le concluded that Diaz and Tompkins most likely had had the affair and lied about it, based on testimony from the three security detail members as well as their obvious fear of retaliation by Diaz. “I noticed how nervous and scared all of the members of the security detail were to participate in the investigation,” Le wrote.

“The members of the security detail described fear of retaliation from Mr. Diaz based on his historical behavior, explained that their trepidation came from the fact  that their testimony would be easily identifiable and traceable back to them, and suggested that the investigation could seek other sources of information, such as phone records or vehicle data in order to reduce the pressure and potential backlash they expected to experience from providing truthful testimony that would be damaging to Mr. Diaz.”

Additionally, Le wrote, there was no obvious reason why all three men would lie about Diaz. In an interview with investigators last October, Diaz suggested that Gray-McVey and James were both lying to help an unrelated officer who had sued the department, who Diaz said was “sleeping with” Gray-McVey. The interviewer seemed confused by this somewhat byzantine tale, and ultimately didn’t find it germane, concluding that “Mr. Diaz made direct statements to Det. Gray-McVey and Lt. James about sexual and intimate interactions with Ms. Tompkins.”

During her interview, Tompkins said there was “no way in hell” Diaz would have said he was having an affair with her, adding that the suggestion was “insulting” and “a form of sexual harassment.”

 

“Paranoid” 

Both Diaz and Tompkins claimed that people were surveilling them. Tompkins, as previously reported, believed officers from the West Precinct, which is directly adjacent to the her condo building, were hanging around her building to see if Diaz was going in and out. Tompkins had Diaz do “counter-surveillance” around her building, on one occasion watching a white SUV that she said had been “parked weird” and was “always facing my apartment”; she also put sensors on all her doors and “invested in all different types of security things.”

Diaz, too, believed he was being surveilled and followed, and was worried his car and office might be bugged with listening devices. James recalled Diaz telling him he was sure he was being followed, and was “paranoid about believing his cars were being bugged.” In an interview with investigators, Diaz said he believed people followed him home, and said “there were many times when I took in plenty of license plates because I thought I was being followed.”

Although other SPD personnel, including Maxey, told Diaz that physical tracking devices are mostly a thing of the past—”if you want to get somebody, you don’t plant a bug anymore, yo can hack their phone. Just go directly to the microphone they’re already carrying around with them,” Maxey told investigators—Diaz insisted on having his car swept for “bugs” and was alarmed when a sweeping device appeared to pick up something near one of the rear tires—most likely the Bluetooth system that monitors tire pressure on modern cars.

James said that, at Diaz’ insistence, he searched his office for bugs, but told investigators it was really “just for show”—to demonstrate to Diaz that he had nothing to worry about. But Diaz continued to believe he was being followed and targeted. Often, he would stop in a parking lot and just sit there for “20, 30, 40 minutes,” Sinn recalled, while his security escort waited for him to leave for home.

During those times, members of Diaz’ detail believed he was on the phone with Tompkins. In an interview with investigators, Diaz denied calling Tompkins during those times, then said he talks to “hundreds of people” and finally conceded that it was possible she was among the people he talked to on the phone before going home.

“We Have This Bomb That’s Going to Go Off”

Shortly after Mayor Bruce Harrell demoted Diaz in response to multiple sexual harassment complaints against him, Diaz came out as gay, telling people inside and outside the department that he had begun to question his sexuality a few years before making the announcement.

Both Gray-McVey and James told investigators it seemed clear that Diaz believed that if he came out as gay, it would be impossible for Harrell to fire him, because he would be a member of a protected class. Maxey said Diaz initially told him that “we have this bomb that’s going to go off, it’s going to reset all of this.” After Diaz made this cryptic remark, Maxey recalled, he told Diaz that being gay didn’t mean he couldn’t have had an affair with Tompkins and created a position for her—the two things weren’t mutually exclusive; sexuality is fluid.

At that point, Maxey said, Diaz “got very angry with me—he kept saying, you know, ‘This means somebody would be betraying their true self and acting contrary to  their feelings and their beliefs and what was right for them.'”

Diaz told investigators, and the public, that one reason he spent so much time hanging out with Tompkins was because she was one of his key emotional supports when he made the decision to come out as gay. However, investigators noted that in their lengthy interview with Tompkins, she never mentioned this among the many reasons she said she spent time with Diaz; nor did she mention personal training or working out, which were among the main reasons Diaz said he might have been seen entering and leaving her apartment building. Tompkins also told investigators she  stopped “socializing” with Diaz outside of work once she started at SPD.

It’s clear from the interviews with SPD staff that no one was bothered by Diaz’ profession that he was gay; even the members of his detail who didn’t believe him said it didn’t matter to them if someone was gay or straight. This included OIG director Lisa Judge, who Diaz and Tompkins accused of “outing” him to other SPD staff before he announced his sexual orientation publicly.

Although Diaz and Tompkins both claimed Judge was telling people Diaz wasn’t really gay,  Maxey said the opposite was true—Judge told her she thought Diaz might have come out to her, and she wanted to know if she should offer him advice on coming out later in life, as a fellow member of the LGBTQ community “She was genuinely concerned that he was hurting,” Maxey said. “You don’t have that level of concern if you’re doubting the reality of it.”