Addiction, City Council, Drugs, Mayor Harrell

At Downtown Event, City Attorney Praises Plan to Jail Repeat Overdose Victims, Police Chief Blames Blake Decision for Rise of Fentanyl

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson said she’s “working on updating the city’s return to work policy,” which currently requires city employees to work from their mostly downtown offices at least two days a week, in order to help increase the number of people downtown during the daytime.

Nelson was speaking at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual State of Downtown event, where she also praised her new council colleagues for requiring their staff to work in the office five days a week and for being physically present in council chambers during public meetings, which members of the previous council did not always do. (One, Teresa Mosqueda, has a young child; another, Debora Juarez, is immunocompromised.)

“We’ve come a long way since two years ago, when I talked at this event, and I said, ‘My job is to give a damn about downtown,'” Nelson said. “Well, now I’ve got company and it’s really exciting.

Nelson also said that under her leadership, the council would continue to “stop disruptive behavior” in council chambers—a reference to the council’s decision to limit public comment, shut down council chambers, arrest demonstrators, and conduct a meeting from behind locked doors last week. The demonstrators included asylum seekers and advocates who were asking the city for funding to help pay for refugees’ hotel rooms in South King County, including many who argued the city could use the $1.5 million it has set aside for a gunshot surveillance system.

When the same group of advocates marched to the King County Council earlier this week, the council (which now includes Mosqueda) gave them all two minutes to speak, listened, and found funding in the budget to help refugees stay in the hotel rooms where they’re currently living, all without kicking people out of their (much smaller) chambers or calling in the police.

During a panel discussion at the end of the event, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison affirmed that she supports setting a limit on the number of times a person is allowed to overdose in public before they’re arrested and booked into jail. (People who overdose inside their houses are presumably exempt from this proposal). “We shouldn’t think that that’s something we should shy away from,” Davison said. “We should not be reticent to enforce our laws and to put that [provision] in there.”

Proponents have said this law would only apply after people are revived from overdoses and “refuse treatment,” but treatment is not readily available. (Davison said there should be more treatment in jail.) And there is no clinical evidence for the widespread belief that people will stop using—that is, stop being addicted—in response to a threat of punishment, nor that forced or jail-based treatment is more effective than a harm-reduction-based approach that focuses on building up the supports (like a place to live) that people need to enter recovery and stay there.

During the same panel, Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz offered his own opinion of the state of downtown. Although targeted policing in known “hot spots” for drugs and sales of stolen goods, like 12th and Jackson and Third and Pine, is “having an impact,” Diaz said, crime is still getting worse because the city doesn’t have enough police.

Specifically, Diaz contradicted Mayor Bruce Harrell’s claim, during his recent State of the City speech, that property crime is going down. Although statistics show that crime is going down, Diaz said, that’s because people “don’t call the police anymore” because they think “‘I’m not going to end up getting anything from the police department [besides] a police report.'”

Diaz offered a novel explanation for the rise of fentanyl in Seattle: The Blake decision, which overturned Washington State’s felony drug possession law. “The Blake decision really created a huge infusion of fentanyl into our community,” Diaz said.

In fact, the rise of fentanyl is a nationwide issue, not one localized to Seattle, and the King County prosecutor had not prosecuted drug users under the old law for years before the Blake decision; the state legislature has repeatedly re-criminalized simple drug possession since the decision went into effect, and recently made possession a gross misdemeanor, a law Seattle replicated in its own local law last year.

Asked about the state legislature’s decision to adopt a Republican-backed initiative that will allow police departments across the state to chase drivers on mere suspicion that they have violated a law of any kind, Diaz noted that the city’s own pursuit policy is more restrictive, allowing pursuits only when police believe there is probable cause to believe someone has committed a violent or sexual crime. But, Diaz added, the city may reconsider its policy now that the new law has passed.

“We’re actually evaluating, right now, our vehicle pursuit policy as well as our vehicle tactics policies, such as pinning vehicles,” Diaz said, “especially [given that] people are sometimes passed out because [they] are going through fentanyl overdoses [and] passing on the wheel.” At the same time, he added, “we also have mindful of, when you loosen up some of the standards, our biggest payouts for traffic deaths is because of a pursuit pursuit death, are in this area. And so we tend to be a lot more restrictive when it comes to our vehicle pursuit policy.”

City Council, labor, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

Officer Who Killed Pedestrian Got Recruitment Bonus, Decent Wages for City Workers Will Add Tens of Millions to Budget Gap

1. Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in January 2023, was part of the cohort of new recruits who received $15,000 bonuses under the first of former mayor Jenny Durkan’s police recruitment programs. The plan, adopted in February 2019, provided $7,500 to new police recruits and $15,000 to officers transferring “laterally” from other departments. Dave was previously an officer in Tucson, Arizona, but was fired from that previous position in 2013 after failing to meet minimum standards during his 18-month probation period.

Dave’s personnel file, obtained by PubliCola reporter Andrew Engelson, indicates he received the $7,500 bonus in two payments in exchange for agreeing to stay at the department for three years after his hire date in November 2019.

Durkan, along with then-police chief Carmen Best, argued for hiring bonuses in 2019, 2020, and 2021 on the grounds that they would help SPD recruit a younger, more diverse cohort of police officers. Dave, a white man, checked “I choose not to disclose this information” next to demographic questions about his race and gender—an unusual move (in 2023, all 41 SPD recruits provided this information) that, if widely adopted, would muddy SPD’s demographic data and could make the department appear more diverse than it is.

SPD could announce how it will discipline Dave, as well as Daniel Auderer—the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president caught on tape laughing over Kandula’s death—as early as this Friday. Last week, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison announced she was giving Dave a traffic ticket for second-degree negligent driving, an infraction.

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2. A text-based poll sent to Seattle residents this week asked about how the Seattle City Council should close a $230 million budget gap this year, along with a list of quality-of-life questions that reflect items the city could prioritize for funding or target for cuts. Among questions about policing, homelessness, and crime, the poll included a number of questions about the state of downtown Seattle—a top priority for Mayor Bruce Harrell and business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber—and taxes.

One question asked whether, after “rais[ing] taxes to fund new programs and initiatives” for several years, the city should “maintain the spending levels and programs in place today and raise new taxes to cover this $230 million deficit” or ” work to offset the deficit by prioritizing government basics, supporting our city’s most vulnerable residents, and reducing non-critical spending before considering tax increases.” Other questions ask whether respondents would feel safe visiting downtown Seattle during the day and at night; “how much impact … closing encampments in parks, on sidewalks, and on other public right of ways would have on improving quality of life in Seattle”; and whether they agree that “Downtown Seattle cannot fully recover until the homelessness and public safety problems are addressed.”

It’s unclear who is behind this poll, which mentions the city council but not the mayor. Harrell has indicated he does not plan to propose any new taxes to close the budget gap, and city departments are already making plans for significant budget cuts amid an ongoing hiring freeze.

3. Meanwhile, Harrell announced that he and the Coalition of City Unions have reached a tentative agreement that will provide a retroactive pay increase, known as a wage adjustment, of 5 percent for 2023 and a 4.5 percent wage adjustment for this year, for a total increase of 9.7 percent this year. (Because the 4.5 percent is an increase above the adjusted 2023 amount, the total works out to 9.7 percent rather than 9.5—math!) The final agreement, as we’ve reported, is a victory for the city unions, which dismissed Harrell’s initial 1 percent proposal as “insulting” and spent much of the last year fighting to increase it.

The final step is approval by the city council, which now includes several members who have suggested the city “has a spending problem” rather than a structural budget problem. Departments are reportedly coming up with plans to lay off employees if the mayor and council stick with their promises to eliminate the budget shortfall without raising new revenues. The new labor contracts are expected to add tens of millions of dollars to the budget this year and in 2025.

homelessness

Claiming Need for “Protection” from Unsheltered People, Burien Bans Nighttime Homelessness Throughout City
Burien City Councilmembers Hugo Garcia and Linda Akey

By Erica C. Barnett

This post has been updated with a comment from King County about enforcement by the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Burien, the Seattle suburb that recently banned sleeping outdoors at night in the vast majority of the city, tightened the vise on the city’s homeless residents last night by making it a misdemeanor to “camp” outdoors on any public property in the city, including all sidewalks. The new ban expands on an earlier (and already much-amended) law that allowed people to sleep at night in public spaces where camping wasn’t “explicitly prohibited,” including some sidewalks in downtown Burien.

The city council passed the new sleeping ban 5-2 last night after a brief debate.

The hastily proposed amendment came just one week after PubliCola was first to publish a video in which Councilmember Linda Akey ranting at homeless people who had set up tents on the sidewalk outside her condo building downtown, telling them that she had the “authority” as a homeowner to call the police on them. In the video, which made it all the way to the Daily Mail, Akey can be seen roaming up and down between the tents, telling people to go somewhere else because “I live here and you do not belong here.”

The expanded ban, which one public commenter referred to as a “survival ban,” prohibits people from sleeping or setting down items like tarps, blankets, and cooking equipment at any time of day on any public property in Burien. (Almost as if it was being sarcastic, the law says it’s fine for homeless people to sleep in apartments and other types of homes.)

“This reads like a middle-schooler’s parody of a Fox News story,” one resident, Paul Hood, said of the legislation.

Although the law includes a now-standard exemption saying police can’t arrest or move people if there’s no available shelter, it defines shelter so broadly that a bed 15 miles away in Seattle would probably qualify, as would a church-based shelter that required a person to enter treatment or participate in a religious program; under the existing and amended law, people whose addiction or mental illness makes staying in congregate or sober shelters untenable could be arrested for violating the law.

To accommodate the possibility, however remote, that people might end up sleeping in certain areas because no shelter was available, the ordinance also explicitly bans “camping,” under any circumstances, within 500 feet of schools, daycares, libraries, and parks, on the justification that “the Burien community has vociferously asserted that the significant increase in unhoused individuals has resulted in an incredible increase in crime and public indecency, and has made the use of libraries, sidewalks, and other public places uninviting if not dangerous.”

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The new law gives Burien’s city manager, Adolfo Bailon, absolute authority to add any amount of city land to the “areas protected from unhoused encampments” without any public discussion or legislative approval. Bailon, as we’ve reported, received a critical performance evaluation and improvement plan last year, but has refused to release it to the public; late last year, the firm that evaluated Bailon resigned their contract with the city because, in their view, the city had failed to take its recommendations seriously or “take constructive action” to address Bailon’s performance.

Three homeless Burien residents, along with the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, have sued the city over the previous version of the ban, arguing that it violates the state constitutional ban on cruel punishment, among other violations. SKCCH director Alison Eisinger said the plaintiffs’ attorneys are currently amending the complaint to reflect the new, even more restrictive ban.

“Burien residents told their city council in public comment that history will not look kindly on those who wrote and passed this law and drew the outrageous map, and we agree,” Eisinger said. “Our co-plaintiffs and others braved snow and freezing temperatures outside while five council members pretended that excluding people from their community means helping them.”

The bill makes creative use of “whereas” clauses, ordinarily used to cite facts that justify a piece of legislation. In lieu of facts, the law asserts political views, using unsourced, unsubstantiated, and sometimes outrageous claims to make the case that homeless people are a uniquely menacing threat to “the Burien community,” meaning Burien’s housed residents.

One clause cites “allegations of sex trafficking, sexual assaults, drug use, thefts, and trespasses in or near unhoused encampments” as a justification for the ban; another claims that “the Burien community, including business owners and residents, has demanded that the Burien City Council and law enforcement address this significant increase in crime.” A third asserts, again without evidence, that “young girls” are being “taken into tents” by predatory homeless people.

“If council wants to adopt this ordinance, there may not be the votes to prevent it,” said Councilmember Sarah Moore, who—along with Councilmember Hugo Garcia—voted “no.” “But please consider if you want [the whereas clauses] in our recorded history.”

“It’s really hard to be here and have your entire community turn their backs on you. I grew up in this town. My last listed address is here. I had my daughter in this town and I graduated [in] this town, and it’s crazy watching y’all just try to push us out.”

Many public commenters who opposed the ban noted that they, too, are part of the Burien community, and often outnumber anti-homeless voices at city council meetings. “This reads like a middle-schooler’s parody of a Fox News story,” one resident, Paul Hood, said of the legislation.

Others noted that the buildings the legislation purports to “protect,” using buffers similar to those that keep sex offenders from living in most areas, are closed at night—people aren’t using the library or going to school at 10pm, making the specific justification for the “protection areas” patently absurd. (Homeless people are still allowed to exist in Burien libraries and parks during daytime hours, for now.)

In fact, most of the commenters at Monday night’s meeting opposed the ban, including several residents of an encampment outside City Hall whose names were called while they were outside, laying tarps over their belongings as a heavy snow began to fall.

One who made it back in just as the comment period was winding up, Marina, almost didn’t get to speak. Deputy mayor Stephanie Mora tried repeatedly to shut her down, telling her she was out of order and did not have the right to speak. After several people in the crowd intervened—pointing out that Robert’s Rules of Order allow people to speak at the end of the meeting if they weren’t in the room when their name was called—Marina spoke for two minutes as Mora stared off in another direction. Here’s some of what she said:

It’s really hard to be here and have your entire community turn their backs on you. I grew up in this town. My last listed address is here. I had my daughter in this town and I graduated [in] this town, and it’s crazy watching y’all just try to push us out. … We’re waiting here for any kind of help. But you guys don’t want us here. The cops told us the other day to keep walking north. They’re the ones who shuffled us into the alleyway in the first place.

[Homelessness] can happen to anybody. I lost everything so fast, and I was trying my hardest not to. I feel like most of us are maybe just a couple bad steps away from being homeless. And we need help. And I thought y’all had the money to help us. We don’t want to be out here like this. All my friends, my family, they’re out there right now, covered in snow under tarps, miserable, cold, and completely alone. … I have nerve damage in my fingers from the cold. … Some of our people are really sick and they’re not getting the help that they need. They’re out here fighting demons, because that’s what they’re treated like. We’re treated like trash around here and that’s just not nice.

When Oasis Home Church opened a temporary encampment for homeless residents last December, Marina noted, she didn’t have to sleep on public property. The city threatened a lawsuit to stop the church from hosting the encampment.

The ban, which the city passed as an “emergency” ordinance, goes into effect immediately.

UPDATE: The King County Sheriff’s Office told the city of Burien it would not enforce the new camping ban, prompting the city to issue a statement attacking the county for “claiming the authority to decide the constitutionality of existing laws and potentially politicizing an important public safety issue”—as if a ban on homeless people existing at night was not political, and as if the existence of homeless people was an inherent public safety threat to housed Burien residents.

Asked how the King County Sheriff’s Office, which serves as the police department for Burien, plans to enforce the expanded ban, a spokesperson for King County said, “Burien adopted this ordinance with minimal notice to the public and no outreach to King County, which provides law enforcement services to Burien by contract.  This is atypical.  It is unclear why this measure was adopted as an emergency ordinance when prior versions of the same ordinance allowed for full public input and debate.  It is crucial for law enforcement to follow constitutional norms when enforcing any law. King County is currently evaluating the ordinance to ensure that it fits within the proper mission of the Sheriff’s office.”

 

Density, Development, housing, Mayor Harrell

Draft Comprehensive Plan Would Increase Housing Less Than Needed to Accommodate 250,000 New Residents
Left image: Previous Alternative 5, with neighborhood centers represented by purple circles. Right image: Proposed One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, with neighborhood centers represented by blue circles.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell finally released a draft Comprehensive Plan for the next 20 years this week, outlining a growth plan for the city that continues to concentrate housing around busy arterial streets while allowing some four-unit buildings in most areas—an upgrade of one unit from what’s currently allowed in Seattle’s “neighborhood residential” areas. Developers could build six units in these areas if two of the units are affordable, or if the location is within a quarter-mile of a frequent transit stop.

According to the city, the plan would make it possible to build at least 100,000 new homes in Seattle between now and 2044—a period when the city itself estimates about 250,000 new people will move here. Unless those new residents live in households that average 2.5 people—defying current trends toward smaller household sizes and solo living—those units will not be enough to accommodate everyone who wants to live here.

Seattle is already experiencing a well-documented housing shortage—one data point: You now have to earn $214,000 a year to afford a house here—so the plan, if implemented as-is, will also do little to address the current shortage by relieving upward pressure on housing prices. If you can’t afford to live here now, you probably won’t be able to do so in the future.

Importantly, none of the changes to formerly single-family areas were optional; legislation passed last year requires all cities, including Seattle, to allow up to four units per lot in formerly single-family areas. (Currently, Seattle allows up to three—a single-family house plus one attached and one detached accessory unit.) And there’s a real question about whether four-unit buildings will pencil out; other cities that have allowed this kind of extremely low-density multifamily housing have found that developers aren’t interested in building it.

Compared to the old Alternative 5, the new map nixes potential new density near Alki Beach, Fauntleroy, North Capitol Hill, Magnolia, and Laurelhurst, along with Harrell’s own neighborhood, Seward Park. None of these areas is on the city’s list of neighborhoods with a high risk of displacement or low access to opportunity.

The plan would also re-legalize corner stores and some home-based businesses, but only on corner lots—a hyper-literal interpretation of the colloquial term “corner store.”

Harrell’s proposal, which remains light on certain details, would exempt up to 15 percent of the city from the new zoning rules—less than the 25 percent HB 1110 allows. In areas where  there is a “high risk of displacement,” including parts of Southeast Seattle, the plan would adopt new zoning that effectively preserves the current three-unit limit, preventing new housing as an anti-displacement strategy for existing property owners. The plan does not identify all the areas the city plans to exempt from the new density mandates, so it’s unclear exactly how much of the city would remain under existing “neighborhood residential” zoning rules.

The proposal also modestly expands the areas where apartments (renters) are allowed, creating a new “neighborhood center” category in all areas within 800 feet of frequent transit stops, where developers could buildings between three and six stories tall. These “centers” are tiny compared to a 2022 proposal from Sen. Marko Liias (D-Edmonds), which would have allowed up to six-story buildings within three-quarter of a mile of major transit hubs, and within a half-mile of frequent bus stops. According to the plan, they were chosen based on “local conditions” and intended to provide more. housing within a three-minute walk of transit.

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Comparing the proposal to the five options the city put forward for discussion last year, Harrell’s proposed comprehensive plan update is most similar to Alternative 5, although it reduces potential density in many areas by eliminating a significant number of “neighborhood centers,” and not just in areas whose residents are at high risk of displacement.

For example, the new map nixes potential new density near Alki Beach, Fauntleroy, North Capitol Hill, Magnolia, and Laurelhurst, along with Harrell’s own neighborhood, Seward Park. None of these areas is on the city’s list of neighborhoods with a high risk of displacement or low access to opportunity; in fact, the majority of the neighborhoods that would have received modest upzones under Alternative 5 but will retain Seattle’s lowest-density zoning under Harrell’s proposal are in wealthy areas with low displacement risk, as defined in the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability plan.

Like the existing comprehensive plan, Harrell’s proposal would place most density along busy arterial streets and highways, renaming the city’s “urban villages” but preserving the same basic residential patterns the city has followed since the 1990s, when the city adopted the urban village strategy. In these areas, now known as “urban centers,” buildings will continue to be capped at eight stories, with potential exceptions near light rail lines.

The plan also adds a new urban center around the 130th Street future light rail station and slightly expands the boundaries of other existing urban villages. The term “urban center” previously referred to the city’s densest areas, like downtown and First Hill, where greater density is allowed; these areas will be rebranded as “regional centers,” and a new one—Ballard—will be added to the list. According to the plan, Ballard is expected to gain 5,000 new housing units over the next 10 years.

Seattle is supposed to adopt the comprehensive plan update this year, a process that will require the new city council (whose six new members all said on the campaign trail that they would support some version of Alternative 5) to approve it. Before that happens, the city will hold seven open houses—one in each council district—beginning on March 14 in North Seattle.

City Council, Police

For Years, SPD Has Ignored a Law Requiring Them to Restrict their Use of Less-Lethal Weapons
A protester talks with a Seattle police officer on May 31, 2020 (Flickr: Derek Simeone; Creative Commons license).

By Erica C. Barnett

Nearly three years after the Seattle City Council passed legislation that constrained the Seattle Police Department”s use of  “less lethal” weapons during protests and required SPD to come up with a new crowd-control approach, SPD continues to operate under a policy that is out of compliance with that law.

The council passed the less-lethal weapons bill in 2021, after a federal judge concluded that an earlier, more restrictive version of the legislation might violate a longstanding consent decree between the city and the US Department of Justice. The 2021 law instructed SPD to come up with a new crowd control policy that complied with the law within 60 days. Instead, the department ignored the requirement until last December, when it submitted a proposal to the court monitor overseeing the consent decree.

Accompanying the policy: A memo from SPD denouncing their own proposal as “dangerous” and unworkable and asking the court to instead approve the department’s existing “interim” crowd control policy, which does not ban or substantially restrict the use of a single less-lethal weapon.

“SPD believes that [the legally compliant] policy is not grounded in best practices, would compromise public safety, and would unnecessarily endanger SPD employees,” the memo, written by SPD’s chief operating officer Brian Maxey, says. “SPD has drafted the ordinance policy, which is attached to this  submission, but completely disavows that policy.”

The department’s defiance leaves the 2021 law in limbo. As the city works through the remaining vestiges of the 2012 consent decree—among them, the crowd control policy—DOJ and court monitor are unlikely to force SPD’s hand. Meanwhile, a majority of the new city council has gone out of their way to demonstrate that they see themselves as SPD’s cheerleaders, not critics.

The draft policy SPD “disavows” would go much further than the largely toothless “interim” policy SPD adopted last year, by banning the use of blast balls, limiting the use of pepper spray and tear gas, and restricting the use of 40-millimeter chemical launchers, tear gas, and “flash-bang” grenades to trained SWAT team officers.

It would also reduce SPD’s ability to use a specific list of less-lethal weapons for crowd control during demonstrations and protests, restricting their use to “violent public disturbances” in which a crowd of 12 or more people are using, or threatening to use, physical violence.

In its memo, SPD argued that adopting any crowd control policy through legislation—especially these particular policies—would impede officers’ ability to act nimbly in dangerous situations and would lock the department into rigid rules that could only be changed through new legislation. The department also argued that if they adopted a policy consistent with the 2021 legislation, they’d have no ability to control violent crowds, use less-lethal weapons to respond to property destruction, or “rescu[e] victims in a crowd.”

SPD  alsocontends that the ordinance would prevent them from using most less-lethal options to move crowds in situations that fall short of the “violent public disturbance” standard, essentially forcing them to fall back on striking people with batons and shoving them with bikes.

The department made a similar argument in response to the original law back in 2021, arguing that it would render them helpless to respond to violent demonstrations or address individual acts of violence in crowds.

The sponsor of the 2021 legislation, former city council member Lisa Herbold, says this claim is false, because the ordinance only defines certain weapons as “less lethal,” while still allowing police to use weapons like Tasers and sponge-tipped 40-millimeter rounds to respond to violent situations in crowds. A council memo about the legislation includes a table describing the situations in which police could and could not use different types of less-lethal weapons under the ordinance.

Shortly before the end of her term last year, Herbold wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to SPD’s memo.

“The idea that SPD’s only recourse under the less lethal weapons regulations … is to disengage if a group smaller than 12 people is threatening to use unlawful violence, seems to discount the value that SPD places on de-escalation” and their ability to use other weapons that aren’t in the ordinance, Herbold wrote.

SPD argues that they’ve improved their crowd control policies even without the ordinance. “SPD has continued to refine and develop its Crowd Management policy while this process continues,” an SPD spokesperson told PubliCola, “and is proud of its success in managing often contentious and polarizing free speech events based on lessons learned from 2020 and consultation with international experts.”

In February, however, the Stranger reported that police dispersed a nonviolent pro-Palestine demonstrators on the downtown waterfront using pepper balls —one of the weapons that would not have been available for crowd control if SPD had adopted a policy in line with the 2021 ordinance.

Herbold’s memo to SPD concluded with a plea for the court to reject SPD’s request that it review the interim policy and ignore the one drafted in response to the law.

“SPD seems to be asking the Court to ‘double-down’ on limiting the democratic legislative process by suggesting that the Court review only SPD’s existing Interim Policy, and not the policy that incorporates the requirements of the ordinance,” Herbold wrote. “SPD’s request is that the Court not only limit the Council’s legislative authority in an area covered by the Consent Decree, but, in practice, eliminate it.”

Antonio Oftelie, the court monitor overseeing the consent decree, told PubliCola that his office and the DOJ have decided to step back and see if SPD, working with the mayor and new city council, can come up with a policy in the first quarter of this year that complies with the consent decree and is something all sides can live with.

“This represents an opportunity for the City to develop complex policy without federal and Court supervision,” Oftelie said. “Ideally, the City will develop a crowd management policy that ensures Constitutional rights to speech and expression and protection of life and property, as well as design tactics that are feasible to implement by the police department.”

Herbold told PubliCola the monitor should review the policy SPD submitted on the merits, rather than punt the issue back to the city. In 2021, she said, the council sought outside legal advice about how they could force SPD to develop the policies required by the law, but did not take action because they “wanted to try and work in good faith towards SPD fulfilling this legal requirement.” Now she said, “I’m left wondering whether the consent decree has been successfully weaponized to completely undermine the authority of the legislative branch and is now rewarding SPD for their failure to adhere to the rule of law.”

Courts, Elections, Morning Fizz, Police, public safety

City Attorney Disqualifies Judge from Criminal Cases, Issues Traffic Ticket to Officer Who Killed Student With His SUV

1. City attorney Ann Davison made two significant announcements via late-afternoon press release on Friday. First, she announced that the city’s criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson—whose last day was Friday—has issued a “standing affidavit of prejudice” against Seattle Municipal Judge Pooja Vaddadi disqualifying her from hearing criminal cases brought by the city attorney’s office.

The affidavit is a kind of peremptory challenge, similar to the challenges attorneys can make to disqualify jurors at at trial; in addition to the standing order, the city attorney’s office has to file an individual challenge in every case they want removed from Vaddadi’s courtroom.

In an internal memo about Vaddadi, Walton-Anderson said she often reversed other judges’ findings of probable cause or failed to find probable cause “in situations where, clearly, probable cause exists,” releasing people accused of DUI and domestic violence without considering their criminal history or the severity of the offense.

Additionally, Walton-Anderson said in a statement, “The resounding input from attorneys that have appeared in her courtroom is that her decisions demonstrate a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

Vaddadi worked as a public defender for 10 months before challenging then-presiding judge Adam Eisenberg in 2022.

Filing a blanket affidavit of prejudice against a sitting judge is essentially the nuclear option, which is one reason the city attorney’s office hasn’t exercised it in recent memory. Pete Holmes, the former city attorney, considered filing one against Ed McKenna, a politically conservative former judge whom Holmes accused of violating the rules of judicial conduct, but didn’t—reportedly because it would be an extraordinary act against a separately elected official. The King County Department of Public Defense, however, did, arguing that McKenna was biased against defendants and disqualifying him from cases repeatedly during his final two years in office.

The blanket affidavit isn’t technically permanent, since the city attorney’s office could just stop filing individual affidavits, but it will force the court to move Vaddadi to an assignment that doesn’t involve deciding criminal cases, like hearing challenges to traffic infractions. We have reached out to Vaddadi, the city attorney’s office, and municipal court presiding Judge Faye Chess, and will post an update when there’s more to report.

2. Also on Friday evening, Davison announced that her office will be issuing a traffic ticket to Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour—three times the speed limit. The infraction, second-degree negligent driving, carries a fine of up to $5,000. The city attorney will not file criminal misdemeanor charges against Dave.

Last week, as PubliCola reported, the King County Prosecutor’s Office announced that it would not file vehicular homicide charges against Dave because he was responding to a “legitimate, life-threatening call” as he sped down Dexter Avenue. That call was an “overdose” to which the police later said Dave was responding “as a paramedic,” suggesting he had to get there right away. However, as we reported last year, the caller was awake, lucid, and standing outside his apartment building as he told 911 operators he was afraid he had taken too much cocaine.

County prosecutors also said the fact that Kandula stepped into the crosswalk while Dave gunned his SUV in her direction could serve as a defense at trial, where Dave’s attorneys could argue it was a “superseding cause” that contributed to Kandula’s death. In its legal analysis, the county prosecutor’s office noted that the standard of proof for reckless driving—”willful or wanton disregard” for safety—is higher than the requirement for vehicular homicide, which only requires that a person is driving in a “reckless manner.”