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.

City Council, Crime

Council Passes New Laws Against Graffiti, Expanding Police Power to Shut Down Businesses for Off-Premises Violations
“Blight”

By Erica C. Barnett

On predictable 7-1 votes (with progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck dissenting), the council passed two pieces of legislation yesterday that PubliCola—and our podcast, Seattle Nice—have covered extensively: A bill empowering the City Attorney’s Office to pursue civil actions for graffiti and fine individuals $1,500 per tag, and a bill expanding the city’s nuisance property law to allow police to penalize property owners and shut down businesses for off-premises activities, such as drug use or liquor law violations in the vicinity of a nightlife venue.

If police document three violations of the new law in 60 days, or seven in a year, they can begin abatement proceedings against a property owner, which can mean anything from corrective action to shutting down a business for repeated violations.

As we reported last week, Councilmember Rob Saka added a number of amendments in committee that dramatically expanded police power to take action against private property owners for violations of both city and county laws.

Although the ostensible purpose of the legislation was to reduce gun violence and dangerous criminal activity outside bars and clubs, a Saka amendment expanded the list of items that could qualify a property as a “nuisance” to include local laws against animal cruelty and garbage dumping as well as violations of the King County health code, including laws on rodent control, on-site sewage, chemical contamination, and more. (Saka also amended the bill to increase fines for violations by 50 percent, in line with his amendment boosting the fine for graffiti from $1,000 to $1,500 per tag.)

Because the nuisance ordinance allows police to go after property owners who rack up three or more violations, the law, with Saka’s amendment, would have allowed the city to fine or potentially shut down a business for non-criminal health code violations that fall entirely under the county’s purview, and which Seattle police are not trained or authorized to enforce.

On Tuesday, the council passed another amendment to correct Saka’s overreach, removing all of the language he added (and that the public safety committee approved) that would have made the presence of rats near a property the legal equivalent of shooting someone on a nearby sidewalk.

As District 2 Councilmember Mark Solomon put it, people in his district may complain about neighbors with “a junky yard,” but it isn’t appropriate to get police involved in a dispute that can already be resolved through the city’s inspections department or King County Public Health. “My concern is that adding the chief of police into the mix on what is actually a public health issue is not necessary,” Solomon said.

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As amended, the law still allows a court to order property owners to take care of public health nuisances, but it doesn’t count those hazards as “nuisance activities” that police can use to shut down a property.

The council also passed an amendment exempting nonprofits from potential police abatement because of activity that happens around their properties. Dan Strauss, the amendment sponsor, said the change would ensure that police couldn’t shut down food banks or other social service providers based on things like drug use or other criminal activity committed by clients of those providers. “There are other ways for the city to address the issues that don’t result in a loss of social services,” Strauss said.

Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Maritza Rivera opposed this exemption, arguing that the police should have the authority to target what Rivera called “bad actor” nonprofits, beyond simply arresting people for doing things that are already illegal, like selling stolen property or using drugs in public.

Nelson, citing an unnamed “small business owner” who complained about “spillover” from a nearby nonprofit, said allowing police to target nonprofits would create “an opportunity to really bring not just the nonprofit but the small business together to really think about what could be some solutions.”

Rivera, who cited an unnamed nonprofit in her district that “has refused to meet with me to discuss any way that they can be better neighbors in the community,” said the city has few tools to stop nonprofit organizations from allowing illegal activity outside their properties. “it’s not my intent to ever use it against” food banks or housing providers, Rivera said, b”ut other providers, that are not ones that we fund, where we don’t really have much of a mechanism for compelling them to behave better in community.”

Councilmember Rinck noted that the intent of a particular elected official in 2025 is less relevant than what the law actually says. “This bill gives not just this mayor, but any future mayor, broad power,” Rinck said. “We may trust this mayor, we may trust this city attorney, but I’m thinking about … the potential for this to be misused in the future.”

The council also passed the new anti-graffiti law, which proponents have argued will “deter” graffiti by imposing fines that could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. The ordinance now includes a last-minute walk-on amendment by Kettle that makes the law—which City Attorney Ann Davison has said she plans to enforce using social media posts—retroactive for the past three years, meaning that people could be fined for graffiti that no longer exists. Rinck and Strauss were the only votes against that amendment, which Kettle—inaccurately—called “technical.”

“This is not about murals,” Kettle said. “The murals are essentially commissioned art and beautiful … [going] back to Renaissance Italy. … This is about taggers who damage public and private property. This is about the taggers who bring blight to our community, to our neighborhoods, and then create the challenges that result from that.”

Kettle—always on brand—took the opportunity to say that the two bills were part of his six-pillar “public safety framework,” rather than one-off proposals based on the individual priorities of the mayor and city attorney, who advanced the bills to the council.

“This is not a standalone bill,” Kettle said. “It’s part of a broader strategy and a plan that we have here on council, particularly to the Public Safety Committee, to address the the public safety challenges that we have.” Kettle cited “20 public safety bills” the council has passed since 2024.

This number includes hiring bonuses for new police officers, a bill making it easier for police to shut down after-hours hookah lounges, two bills authorizing closed-circuit police surveillance cameras around the city and funding the expansion of the city’s Real Time Crime Center to monitor them, and bills that created new tools to crack down on sex work and drug use and to banish people from large swaths of downtown and north Seattle if they violate the new sex work and drug laws.

City Council, Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Seattle Solved All the Crime, So We’re Talking About Graffiti

By Erica C. Barnett

Because there are no other public-safety issues in the city of Seattle, our main topic on Seattle Nice this week is one of the mayor and council’s top current priorities: Cracking down on graffiti— already a crime!—with a new law imposing a per-tag fine that’s higher than the ones for animal cruelty or (and I know people really feel strongly about this one) cutting down trees.

Proponents on the council, echoing Republican City Attorney Ann Davison, argue that statistical data shows that the most prolific graffiti artists and taggers are white, middle-class men with plenty of money to pay for attorneys or fines—yet for whom, they also claim, the new fines will be an effective deterrent.

I pointed out that their “data” is based on a statistically insignificant sample, ranging from several dozen people (for the city’s race and gender breakdown) to a majority 17 individuals (for the purported income data.) David argued that these statistics are still valid, and that I believe we should “only use demographic data when it’s politically convenient.” And Sandeep agreed with me that we shouldn’t use fake stats to justify new crackdowns, but for a different reason—he said  talking about the racial demographics of taggers at all is a kind of “identitarian” (i.e. woke) policy that the city should stay away from in general.

For the record, I do think it’s ridiculous that the city is trying so hard to prove that Seattle’s graffiti artists and taggers don’t slot easily into stereotypes, but I also think we shouldn’t be spending so many resources ensuring Seattle’s walls remain bare and gray. I actually think both my co-hosts agree with me about this. As much as Sandeep likes to cite statistics from unknown stories that, according to him, prove that the broadly discredited “broken windows” theory works to deter crime, he had to admit that he doesn’t really consider graffiti a top public-safety priority.

We also talked about a new pro-Bruce Harrell message testing poll that attempts to sell the idea that mayoral candidate Katie Wilson is the second coming of Kshama Sawant. Even Sandeep—who usually leaps at a chance to tie progressive candidates to the former city council member, who left the council more than a year and a half ago—agreed that it’s ridiculous to paint the thoughtful, wonkish Wilson as abrasive, politically conniving, and “loud,” but don’t be surprised if you receive a mailer this fall showing Wilson and Sawant Photoshopped together like they’re running on the same ticket.

Elections

PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Ry Armstrong

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has been an elected official for 16 of the last 18 years, and is now trying to become the first two-term mayor in Seattle since Greg Nickels was knocked out in the primary in 2009. Several candidates are hoping to keep him from achieving that goal. Ry Armstrong, the co-executive director of Sustainable Seattle as well as an actor and member of the city’s LGBTQ Commission, says they represent a “new generation of leadership” for Seattle.

Armstrong grew up in Kenmore and Bothell before going to school at Central Washington University, where they say they were “politicized” by a proposal to establish a fee to fund the arts on campus, equivalent to an existing sports fee, and ran for student body president on a platform supporting the fee.

After moving to New York after school (“I looked around” at the cultural zeitgeist in Ellensburg in 2016 and “said, ‘fuck this'”), Armstrong returned to Seattle during the pandemic, deciding to run for City Council in 2023 because “I was living in District 3 and saw that no democratic socialist was running.

This time, they said they saw a mayoral field that didn’t feature any young LGBTQ+ candidates. “When I didn’t see anyone stepping up, there were queer folks asking me to run,” Armstrong said.

PubliCola spoke with Armstrong earlier this month; this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

PubliCola (ECB): What are some ways in which your political agenda differs from Katie Wilson’s, the progressive frontrunner in the race against Harrell, and what’s the case for progressives to vote for you over her?

Ry Armstrong (RA): I think people are really open to change. They feel disconnected from a City Hall that doesn’t necessarily listen. I think Katie’s one of the most brilliant policy wonks I’ve ever met. I think she’s done some amazing organizing. I would love to see where she stands on Israel and Gaza. I’d love to see her come out against sweeps. Because I know Bruce is going to sweep. I really worry about where we’re headed in the city over the next three years and the bloated city government that has become ineffective under his leadership.

ECB: How do you think Harrell has made the city bloated or inefficient?

RA: I served on the LGBTQ Commission for the city, and for the two years I served on that commission, I never was set up on Outlook or Teams, and we’re supposed to have access to those systems. I think Seattle as a city has a fear-of-failure complex, where we don’t move fast enough to address the crises. Instead, we set up a task force to hire a consultant. I look at city unions suing for wage theft. We can’t even run payroll well. [Harrell] says he wants to hire the best talent, then we have Pedro Gomez happen.

I would be having town halls across the city to see how we can respond to the Trump administration. I would like to see a customer service help desk where people can come in and ask, is this [a] county [problem], is this city, is a this state? I’d love to leverage technology to streamline that. There are so many different ways we could have the city function so much better.

ECB: Are there any areas where you think Harrell is doing a decent job?

RA: I would say the only thing I agree with him on is the pedestrianization of Pike Place and this new tax from [Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s] office. In terms of failures, I think one of the large items that really angered me was seeing JumpStart be changed from what its intended purposes were. It is not a stable income source for the city. I understand that that there was a deficit and that was the easiest path, but sometimes we can choose a harder path.

And just the way Denny Blaine was handled. I was also at Cal Anderson when the Mayday protest happened. These people were speaking in tongues all day, saying I shouldn’t exist. Sure, free speech, but why Cal Anderson? Why wasn’t there infrastructure built out for counterprotests?

ECB: Give me your critique of the mayor’s handling of social housing so far. What steps would you take to ensure that the launch of social housing is a success?

RA: I think social housing is the coolest tool we have in the toolbox. The voters very clearly wanted it. [A local] capital gains [tax] is going to only raise 30, maybe 40 million dollars. I would love to see an earmarked expansion of taxes going toward social housing. I think it could be the way we get out of this mess. We need to come together with a strategic plan and we need a leader who will sit down and figure out what that’s going to look like.

And the $2 million loan is not enough to get something off the ground that’s going to be substantial. I would love to see using our bonding capacity beyond that $2 million loan to leverage a social housing capital gains tax to support them.

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ECB: You recently told the Urbanist you would build 1,000 shelter beds in the first 100 days. How would you go about doing that?

RA: During the pandemic we literally built hospitals overnight. Why can’t we take the 200 tiny homes from SoDo and move them somewhere? I think we have to do it to scale and do it fast enough to meet the moment. I think there are a lot of spaces we can acquire in the city and have it be temporary shelter housing. In the pandemic, when the virus affected everyone, we moved fast enough for that moment.

I want to see real progressive revenue for that. I would be open to expansion of JumpStart, looking at the richest corporations among us. I think we have triple the amount of millionaires than unhoused people—the money is there, we just have to grab it and go. And I want to be the kind of mayor that is down in that space, using a hammer, getting it done—actually building the damn things and not just saying stuff, because talk is cheap.

ECB: Do you agree with other candidates in the race, including Katie Wilson, that we should be hiring more police, and why or why not? Tell me more about your public safety plan.

RA: I don’t know if we need more police. The marketing war against defund—I think progressives lost that war, and I think that’s okay to let that go and move on. The CARE Team [of civilian first responders] is really interesting. There are so many cities that are doing better than us on public safety. There’s so many duplicative systems.

So I think my answer is, let’s put police back on emergency response and put CARE on unarmed response [CARE Department chief] Amy Barden should have more more sway over her department. We’re not meeting the crisis with a human, medical approach. Let’s give the CARE Team an actual shot. Let’s move it from being a pilot program. Twenty-four people citywide is not enough to meet the moment. Throwing money into a bucket with a bunch of holes in it is not going to solve our problems long-term.

ECB: A big reason you don’t see that happen, I think, is that the police union has been successful at getting favorable contracts without new accountability concessions year after year after year.

RA: I think we need someone [as mayor] who’s going to go in and negotiate against the Seattle Police Officers Guild and get that [collective bargaining agreement] negotiated. A [memorandum of understanding] is not as legally binding as I’d like it to be, but I do think we have to have some stronger provisions for transparency. Records requests taking months or years—we don’t actually know what’s going on in the city.

ECB: How would you change the mayor’s “downtown activation plan,” and is the city putting too much emphasis on downtown at the expense of other areas?

RA: We’ve been activating downtown for four years but we now have the highest vacancy rate that the city has seen—30, 36 percent. Adding twinkly lights is one thing, but what if we actually had services for people? I look at the pit next to City Hall and I’m like, that could be a great overdose prevention center with microstudios above it. Looking at 12th and Jackson, where they’re pushing everyone to, and the [Chinatown International District]—small businesses are struggling over there as well.

In terms of downtown activation, I think we have lost a little bit of the culture of Seattle. I think we have let the largest tech corporations redefine our city. Obviously, the waterfront overlook is going to be a tourist attraction, but working artists, teachers, health care workers can’t afford to live in the city. I think to solve downtown activation, you have to solve some equality [issues] also.

My top thing I keep harking back to is child care reform. The Working Families Party says that what actually affects young people most is the cost of child care. We have not build new child care centers because a majority of the zoning regulations haven’t been updated since the 1970s, when we had to put them a certain distance away from liquor stores. The scarcity of those centers makes it super burdensome for people to raise kids in the city, so they go outside the city. That’s a huge priority for me.

First-time homebuyers’ grants are so hard to negotiate. When I bought my tiny little condo I had to put $500 down but I had to become more poor to qualify for a first-time homebuyer’s grant through BECU. If we actually want people to live in Seattle, we have to make it easier for people to buy homes.

ECB: If you weren’t in the race, would you vote for Katie Wilson?

RA: Absolutely. I wish we had ranked-choice voting so it could be a Brad Lander-Mamdani moment. I’ve unfortunately seen a lot of hate from people who have enthusiasm for her—people saying I’m just a cisgendered gay LARPing as a trans person.

A lot of people in this city have treated me with a pretty harsh silent treatment just for standing for something different and trying to be [part of] a next generation of leadership in the city—whether that’s people who think Katie is the only person they can support or whether that’s people who are scared of Bruce Harrell, from Democrats to labor to business. If we want to affect change in this city, we have to start listening to a younger generation.

I want to get really crystal clear on her plans and policies and how she plans to win the general [election], because if it’s me or Katie, there’s going to be millions of dollars spent against us.

This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: Funding Treatment, Fining Taggers, Testing Campaign Messages, and More
A page from Police Chief Shon Barnes’ schedule.

Also: Does it matter if the police chief is out of town on the weekends?

Monday, July 7

The More We Love Launches Six-Month “High Accountability” Out-of-Town Shelter for Commercially Exploited Women

The More We Love’s first contract with the city is for 10 beds for women trying to leave the sex trade. According to the contract, the shelter is is “intentionally low barrier to enter and has high accountability to stay.” Women with substance use disorders “are asked to commit to a pathway towards recovery to stay in the shelter unit” after what the contract calls a 72-hour “recharge” phase. The maximum stay is 30 days.

Seattle Nice: Sara Nelson Proposes Funding Treatment With New Public Safety Sales Tax

On this week’s podcast, Sandeep and I discussed Council President Sara Nelson’s “Pathways to Recovery” proposal, which—if passed—will commit up to 25 percent of a planned local sales tax increase to addiction treatment services. We agreed that if the city is going to increase the regressive sales tax, it should all go to expanding treatment options, not more funding for cops.

Tuesday, July 8

Council Advances Bills Expanding Power to Prosecute and Fine Graffiti Taggers, “Nuisance” Properties

The council’s public safety committee advanced two bills their advocates argued are critical to public safety in Seattle on Tuesday. The first allows the city to pursue civil cases against taggers (in addition to criminal charges), fining them up to $1,500 per tag. The second dramatically expands police leeway to go after business and property owners for civil and criminal violations that happen on or around their property.

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Wednesday, July 9

In First Four Months, Seattle’s New Police Chief Spent Most Weekends Out of Town

New police chief Shon Barnes, whose family still lives in Wisconsin, spends the majority of his weekends out of town, with nothing on his official schedule starting most Friday afternoons. His new spokeswoman, a former corporate communications consultant and writer for USA Today, responded to detailed questions, including “who is in charge when the chief isn’t here?” with an all-time brushoff that ended “thank you for your interest in SPD.”

Poll Tests Message that Katie Wilson is “Angry,” “Divisive,” and “Loud”; No Charges Yet for County Assessor Accused of Stalking

Two stories in Wednesday’s Afternoon Fizz: A poll testing negative messages against mayoral candidate Katie Wilson told voters the soft-spoken, wonkish longtime advocate has no convictions and is basically the second coming of Kshama Sawant, so look for that misleading mailer in your mailbox soon.

And a prosecutor has declined so far to charge King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson for stalking and harassing his ex after he was arrested last week for repeatedly showing up at her house despite a restraining order.

Friday, July 11

Former Councilmember Juarez Applies as “Caretaker” for Vacant Council Seat, Along with 21 Other Applicants

Former City Councilmember Debora Juarez submitted her application for the open District 5 City Council position that was just vacated by Cathy Moore. Juarez reportedly already has the support of a strong majority (perhaps as many as eight) council members for the appointment, for which 21 other people also applied.

John Wilson Drops Out of Race He was On Track to Lose, We Heart Seattle Lashes Out Against Harm Reduction

In Friday’s Afternoon Fizz: John Arthur Wilson dropped out of the race for King County Executive, but says he’ll remain in his current position, despite intense pressure for him to step down. And the head of We Heart Seattle, a group that “cleans up” encampments, criticized the heads of two longtime organizations that embrace harm reduction, accusing them of enabling drug users instead of using more punitive approaches.

Saturday, July 12

PubliCola on Hacks and Wonks: Mayoral Polling, Council Vacancy, Graffiti Crackdown, and More

I went on Crystal Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast this week, where we talked about the city’s relentless focus on graffiti, the appointment process for the city council’s most recent vacancy, a recent poll that attempts to paint mayoral candidate Katie Wilson as a “loud,” “angry” radical with no core convictions, and more.

podcasts

PubliCola on Hacks and Wonks: Mayoral Polling, Council Vacancy, Graffiti Crackdown, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

I had the pleasure of guesting on Crystal Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast this week, where we talked about the city’s relentless focus on graffiti (because there are simply no other issues that need addressing), the appointment process for the city council’s most recent vacancy, a recent poll that attempts to paint mayoral candidate Katie Wilson as a “loud,” “angry” radical with no core convictions, and more.

Two of these stories are ultimately about the cynicism of local politics. The council appointment process, which used to involve a real debate among council members about which applicant was best for the position—with sometimes surprising results—has now become a pantomime of transparency, with one or, at most, two frontrunners chosen in advance.

Although mainstream media outlets routinely start their stories about council vacancies by saying something like, “You could be the next city council member,” that simply isn’t true. You, in fact, can’t be the next city councilmember, unless you have relationships with a majority of the council and they are predisposed to support you.

Moving on, we also discussed Republican City Attorney Ann Davison’s successful effort to get a bill allowing new civil fines for graffiti to move forward. (It passed committee this week, with amendments from Rob Saka making it harsher and more sweeping).

As we also discuss on a forthcoming episode of Seattle Nice, the basis for council members’ claim that prolific graffiti taggers are “well-heeled” white men in their 30s with “careers” consists of data from two sources. First, the five-year average of graffiti referrals to the city attorney’s office shows that of the average 43 people with misdemeanor graffiti referrals every year, 85 percent (36) are men and 79 percent (34) are white.

The claim that taggers are well-off comes from an even smaller source—17 people who were prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor’s office on felony graffiti charges. Of those 17, a majority were not indigent and eventually were able to pay restitution. But not qualifying as indigent and being “well-heeled” are two very different things. A single person making more that $19,562 a year has to pay for their own attorney—a level that hardly justifies the assumption that taggers are middle-class, based on a sample so small it’s closer to anecdote than statistic.