City Council, Elections, Police, Transportation

Council Wants To Expand Drug User Banishment Zones, Complaint Against SPD Attorney Dismissed, and Ex-Councilmember Pedersen Denounces Transportation Levy

1. City council members Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, and Bob Kettle have all proposed amendments to legislation proposed by City Attorney Ann Davison and sponsored by Kettle that would create zones from which people accused of drug-related crimes, including public drug use or possession, can be prohibited.

The legislation, which Davison proposed in June, expands on the old “Stay Out of Drug Area” zones established and expanded under former city attorney Mark Sidran, who is primarily remembered for instituting a number of punitive laws and policies, among them the “teen dance ordinance,” the poster ban, and many laws targeting homeless people, including a notorious prohibition on sitting down on public sidewalks.

As we’ve noted, banishment areas (whether for drug users or sex workers, who would be banned from Aurora under a different law proposed by Councilmember Cathy Moore) have an expansionary logic: When people are banned from existing in one area, they move just outside the banishment zone, until enough people complain that they are banned from that area as well. The result the last time these zones were widespread in Seattle  was that people eventually give up even trying to stay out of the expanded no-go zone, as Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert discussed in their 2010 book Banished.

In each amendment, the sponsoring council member justifies the SODA zone in their council district with the phrase, “Due to high levels of significant drug activity.” The zones will not stop this significant drug activity, but they will push it outside the zones, which will then require expanding, until most of the city is once again off-limits to people who have no choice but to display the symptoms of their addiction in public. The bill, which expresses concerns about “reducing overdose deaths,” does not address drug use and overdoses inside people’s homes.

Also Friday, Moore proposed a promised amendment to her legislation that would bring back the old prostitution loitering law and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) banishment zones, clarifying that only people accused of being sex buyers to pimps would be subject to SOAP bans and prohibited from going anywhere near North Aurora Ave. As we reported last month, Seattle has attempted to focus on sex buyers in the very recent past, and it did not result in a decrease in the sex trade on Aurora and in other SOAP areas.

Moore’s amendment would also slightly expand the proposed Aurora SOAP zone and add a few more nonbinding recital clauses about diversion and the need for an “emergency receiving center” for women leaving the sex trade, which the legislation does not fund.

2. The Office of Police Accountability declined to interview Seattle Police Department general counsel Becca Boatright when it investigated a complaint about a Facebook post that appeared to dismiss female officers’ concerns about harassment and discrimination in the department as “clickbait.”

“Negative headlines may be the clickbait but for the honest brokers interested in an honest discussion, we’re here to have it. I’m so proud to be a member of the SPD and of the incredible work my teams do. Real change comes from within. Follow the data, lean into the science,” the post said.

Boatright’s post went up shortly after the release of a report in which a dozen women in the department described their experiences, which included sexual harassment, casual misogyny, and story after story of women getting passed over for promotions in favor of less-qualified men.

The person who filed the OPA complaint said the post constituted “harassment, unprofessionalism, and retaliation against female SPD employees who alleged mistreatment by SPD.”

A spokesperson for the OPA said the case was “certified for an expedited investigation. That means OPA and [the city’s Office of the Inspector General] agreed that OPA could issue recommended findings based solely on its intake investigation without interviewing the named employee.” Generally, an expedited investigation means that OPA decided an officer didn’t violate SPD policy—in this case, the policy prohibiting SPD employees from ridiculing or maligning protected classes.

3. Former City Councilmember Alex Pedersen co-authored an opinion piece for the Neighborhoods for Smart Streets lobby group, which formed during the heated debate over a bike lane in Wedgwood, urging a “no” vote on the Seattle Transportation Levy, which would provide $1.55 million for new sidewalks, road maintenance, spot improvements to help buses operate more smoothly, and protected bike lanes, among many other projects. The ballot measure includes the biggest investment in new sidewalks in the levy’s history.

Pedersen, along with former councilmember Margaret Pageler and Latino Civil Alliance board chair Nina Martinez, argues that the proposal is a “$1.5 BILLION boondoggle” (the word “billion” is capitalized like that throughout the piece) that “uses Seattle’s middle class like an ATM machine” to fund projects that only “bicycling clubs”—apparently a reference to the Cascade Bicycle Club, a perennial bugbear for the Seattle Times—will ever use.

“Lobbyists larded the levy with unnecessary projects – including costly bike lanes that are rarely used and impede access to brick-and-mortar small businesses,” Pedersen and his co-authors write. “It’s inequitable because it shoves 100% of the cost onto Seattle residents.”

During his single term on the council, Pedersen was a big fan of “impact fees” that would divert the cost of public street improvements onto housing developers. Based on the premise that new apartments have a negative impact on cities, transportation impact fees drive up the cost of new housing (and thus directly increase rents), but don’t impact incumbent single-family homeowners because they aren’t taxes.

Pedersen and his co-authors go so far as to claim the levy is inequitable to people of color, based on a January 2024 survey that they claim shows “most people of color oppose this levy.” While a majority of people the survey lumped into an undifferentiated “BIPOC” category did say they’d oppose a hypothetical $1.2 billion or $1.7 billion levy back in January, the city didn’t release even preliminary details of the actual levy until almost four months later. The high-level conclusion of that poll Pedersen cited? A strong majority of voters supported a $1.7 billion levy even without knowing the exact details of what it would fund.

City Council, Development, Equity, housing

Maritza Rivera Said She Never Intended to Gut the Equitable Development Initiative. Records Tell a Different Story.

 

Records also show that Rivera, who blamed the city’s planning director for delaying a meeting “for months,” was chiefly responsible for the delays.

By Erica C. Barnett

In late May, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed freezing 2024 funds intended for the Office of Planning and Community Development’s Equitable Development Initiative, the city’s largest anti-displacement program, prompting outrage from community-based organizations and residents across the city.

She backed down after thousands of people flooded council members’ inboxes with objections to her proposal, which would have frozen about $24 million in 2024 funding for EDI projects unless OPCD spent all the funds that were currently available for the program, around $53.5 million, by September. Because it can take many years to spend capital funds, the measure would have effectively halted all projects planned for 2024 as well as future projects, putting a halt to the program.

EDI provides partial funding, such as startup capital costs, to community groups and nonprofits doing projects that benefit low-income people and communities of color, largely in Southeast Seattle. Freezing the 2024 funds would have opened up a path for the council to spend these targeted dollars closing the general-fund budget, at the expense of dozens of projects lined up to get EDI funds this year.

Rivera insisted at the time that she wasn’t trying to kill the initiative, and said she never intended to vote against the budget “carryforward” ordinance that would have preserved funding for projects that are already under contract.

But documents obtained through a records request show that Rivera was scoffing at EDI well before she began raising questions publicly, and that as late as May 15, she was suggesting that she might vote to kill the $53.5 million in projects as well, telling OPCD director Rico Quirindongo in an email, “At $50.5 million dollars and given the $250 million budget deficit, I need to have information that will give me confidence in voting for the proposed carryforward and in general, by which to show my constituents the accountability we are giving to OPCD’s programs.”

Even earlier, in March—shortly after OPCD did a lengthy presentation on EDI— Rivera texted Councilmember Cathy Moore, saying, “I could not disagree more that EDI has addressed housing displacement across the city and for low income families.”

In May, Rivera defended her proposal after three hours of public comment against it, accusing her colleague Tammy Morales of spreading “disinformation” and confusing people into believing that her bill would cut funding for projects that were already funded.

A review of thousands of emails that poured in opposing Rivera’s proposal, however, suggests the opposite—community groups, including many that have received EDI funds, understood exactly what her bill would do.

For instance, Wa Na Wari, the Black arts and culture organization, noted in their email that their plans to purchase a permanent home include future EDI funding that would be at risk under Rivera’s proposal. The director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle wrote, “It is imperative to the flourishing of our city that you do not pass any amendment which would freeze funding for the Equitable Development Initiative.” And even a mass email, which referred to the more than 50 organizations whose EDI funding was secured prior to 2024, noted that the proposal would harm ongoing and upcoming projects by halting the program.

Rivera also mischaracterized her attempts to get information from OPCD about the program. During a May council meeting,  for example, Rivera complained that she had repeatedly sought meetings with OPCD, but the department had “consistently rescheduled and delayed.”

But emails and scheduling records only show one instance in which OPCD rescheduled a meeting, moving a one-hour sit-down with Rivera from Friday, May 17 to Monday, May 20 so that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief operating officer, Marco Lowe, could be there. (OPCD met with Rivera a second time later that week.) “As a consequence” of this schedule change, Rivera told a council central staffer on May 15, she was pulling EDI program out of “carryforward” legislation for a separate vote, setting up her proposal to freeze funding for the program.

Ironically, the May meeting would have happened a month earlier if Rivera herself had not rescheduled it, after Quirindongo said he had COVID and would need to meet virtually instead of at Rivera’s office.  “I think we should reschedule and give you time to recover,” Rivera wrote. “Feel better soon.”

Quirindongo did meet briefly with Rivera on May 8, but only after Rivera moved the meeting at least twice, according to scheduling records, prompting his assistant to ask Rivera’s legislative aide, “Are you able to clarify about the delay in this meeting getting scheduled? You had said she would be available today, then Monday morning, but now not until midday Wednesday, and I’d like to better understand if there are special steps we need to take in the future to get on her calendar if we have time-sensitive requests.”

Despite being chiefly responsible for putting off the meeting with OPCD, Rivera sent multiple emails to Quirindongo excoriating him for delaying their meeting “for over two months.” Quirindongo responded that, in the case of the May meeting that OPCD bumped from Friday to the following Monday, Lowe was invited to help answer some of Rivera’s questions—including a list she sent Thursday night, just hours before the meeting was scheduled.

Rivera responded, “I have always been clear on the request. Not sure where the disconnect is on OPCD’s end. Looking forward to the set of briefings occurring before next Tuesday,” which was the deadline for council members to amend the budget legislation. Rivera didn’t introduce her amendment to freeze EDI funding until three days after the deadline, filing it late in the afternoon on May 24, the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend.

Police, public safety

Jaahnavi Kandula’s Family Sues City for $110 Million Plus $11,000, In Direct Reference to Officer’s Callous Comments

photo of Jaahnavi Kandula

Kandula, a 23-year-old student, was struck and killed by Seattle police officer Kevin Dave last year.

By Andrew Engelson

Attorneys for the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour, filed a lawsuit this afternoon against the city of Seattle and SPD officer Kevin Dave for more than $110 million. In the claim, filed in King County Superior Court today, attorneys wrote that Kandula “experienced terror, severe emotional distress, and severe pain and suffering before dying.”

The sizable figure —$110 million, plus $11,000—is a direct reference to the callous comments made by SPD officer Daniel Auderer shortly after the fatal collision.

Auderer, the vice chairman of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, had been called to the scene to investigate Dave for signs of intoxication. Caught on body cam video in conversation with police union leader Mike Solan, Auderer joked and laughed about Kandula’s death, saying, “Just write a check. $11,000. She was 26, anyway. She had limited value.”

Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in July. In response, he filed a $20 million tort claim against the city for “wrongful termination.”

“It is absolutely abhorrent to get on the phone and laugh about anyone’s death,” attorney Vonda Sargent told PubliCola.  “He’s suing for $20 million, so I guess he thinks the value of his life is far greater than the value of Jaahnavi’s.”

The figure, if awarded by a jury, would represent the largest personal injury claim ever against the city of Seattle. The highest award paid out by the city was in 2016, when the city and its insurers paid $65.7 million to the family of an attorney who was struck and severely injured by a Seattle fire truck.

The city attorney’s office and SPD both declined to comment on the lawsuit.

PubliCola reached out to the mayor’s office on Friday afternoon and will update this article with their response.

Kandula, a 23-year-old engineering student from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, was crossing Dexter Avenue at Thomas Street when she was killed on the evening of January 23, 2023. The legal complaint was filed by Kandula’s mother and father, Vijaya Laksmi Gundapuneedi and Sreekanth Kandula, who both live in India. 

“It is absolutely tragic. I don’t think that they’ll ever get over it,” Sargent said of Kandula’s parents. “Your first-born child is gone forever. Parents are not supposed to bury their children.”

The claim notes that “[a]s a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ negligent conduct, Plaintiff Kandula sustained extreme pain and suffering after being slammed into by Defendant Dave’s speeding patrol vehicle traveling up to 70 MPH,” the lawsuit says. The claim also notes that Kandula’s parents “continue to endure severe emotional distress as a result of their daughter’s death.”

In March, Sargent and attorney Susan Mindenbergs, working for family members representing Kandula’s estate, filed a tort claim—also for $110 million plus $11,000—with the Seattle City Attorney’s office. According to the claim, the family sought damages for wrongful death, “loss of familial consortium” (emotional, non-economic losses due to the loss of a family member), and negligent planning and construction of the crosswalk and street infrastructure at Dexter and Thomas, where Kandula was struck.

Dave struck and killed Kandula while driving to assist the Seattle Fire Department, which was responding to a call from a South Lake Union resident who said he was “freaking out” after taking cocaine. Though Dave turned on his signal lights, the filing notes that Dave only “chirped” his siren while going through red lights and “failed to activate his patrol vehicle siren before approaching the intersection of Dexter Avenue North and Thomas Street.” 

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Sargent said that officer Dave had no reason to exceed 70 mph on this particular call. “It was unnecessary,” she said, “because the urgency of it had already passed.”

She also said Dave’s high speed wasn’t necessary. “The difference in speed with him going 35 or 40 miles per hour and 74—the time he’s ‘making up’ is negligible,” Sargent said. “It’s not as though doing 74 miles an hour is going to get you there 15 minutes sooner.”

The lawsuit also says that Dave “was driving with one hand on the steering wheel” just prior to hitting Kandula. 

The lawsuit notes that Dave was driving at least 70 mph in a 25 mph zone and that the force of the collision “caused Plaintiff Kandula to fly 136.99 feet before crashing into the roadway.” According to data from the Transport Research Laboratory, the fatality rate for crashes at 70 mph is close to 100 percent.

Though a SPD police report on the collision noted that a “pedestrian’s expectations when crossing a street are that they will likely encounter traffic traveling at speeds near the posted speed limit,” Dave chose to drive nearly three times that limit. As PubliCola previously reported, Seattle Police Department’s emergency vehicle operations policies are extremely vague and give officers wide latitude in how and when they may break traffic laws when responding to a call, advising them to speed and run lights “only when the need outweighs the risk.”

The Kandula family’s lawsuit also notes that Dave did not have a valid Washington State drivers license, another detail PubliCola first reported.

Sargent said SPD was negligent on many levels, from hiring Dave to having vague guidelines for when police can speed to unsafe street design. “The people who are responsible for the care and safety of the citizenry should have at least the base level of care for the citizenry. That means being cautious when you drive. Having the requirements, all the qualifications for driving, like a license. And knowing that if you’re screaming up and down city streets that you’re likely to hit someone.”

In its complaint, attorneys for Kandula’s family allege that SPD “negligently hired Defendant Dave whose employment record included being terminated from the Tucson Police Department for numerous incidents of poor performance, bad judgment, and misconduct.”

The lawsuit directly refers to many details PubliCola has uncovered over the past year and a half about the collision and Dave’s history, including his firing by the Tucson Police Department and his “checkered history” there before SPD hired him in 2019.

TPD fired Dave in 2013 after numerous investigations, including one involving a “preventable collision” for which he was suspended right before being fired. 

“He should have never been hired,” Sargent said. “You can’t take just all comers. Everyone is not suited or fit to be a law enforcement officer.” Sargent said that the fact SPD knew about Dave’s troubled history and hired him anyway points to a systemic problem rather than the misconduct of one officer.

As we reported earlier this year, an SPD sergeant contacted Tucson police while investigating an incident in which Dave was seen “apparently filming the facilities” at an SPD training center in August 2020. The Tucson police told SPD about Dave’s history, including a troubling incident that occurred shortly after he was fired, when an officer pulled him over for speeding, Dave was pulled over by a Tucson police officer for speeding. 

According to a TPD report on that incident, Dave was “unable to stand still, he was talking very fast, and his pupils were dilated.” The officer filing the report suspected Dave appeared to be “possibly on some type of narcotic.”

In February, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion declined to file felony charges against Dave, and City Attorney Ann Davison issued him a negligent driving traffic ticket with a $5,000 fine. Last month, PubliCola reported that Dave and his attorney are challenging that ticket in municipal court. 

The lawsuit also refers extensively to Seattle Department of Transportation’s planning and construction of pedestrian infrastructure and street design at and near the site of the collision. It notes that SDOT has delayed planned improvements at the intersection, as we noted in our initial report on the collision. 

“There are issues with that particular intersection,” Sargent said. “And then we learned that citizens were calling in about that intersection.”

The claim quotes from an SDOT customer service summary dated February 2023, that observed, “An Indian student died at the intersection of Dexter and Thomas on Jan 23rd. She was apparently hit by a police cruiser 4 weeks ago [at] the same intersection I requested to install new stop signs to avoid such accidents from happening.”

In addition, the lawsuit quotes from SPD detective Brett Schoenberg’s internal report on the incident, which stated “The speed at which Ofc. Dave was traveling did not allow Kandula or him sufficient time to detect, address and avoid a hazard that presented itself.”

The claim also notes that when investigating whether Dave was intoxicated, Auderer did not order a breathalyzer or blood test but only did a visual assessment of Dave.

Sargent said Kandula’s family plans to set up a foundation in Jaahnavi’s memory if a jury makes an award.

“I think most people can understand on some level, this sort of loss,” Sargent said. “You send your child to a foreign country to educate herself, to make herself better, to help the family, and she’s taken from you,” Sargent said.

“And then when she’s taken from you, it’s turned into an international joke. You have people laughing and guffawing about the loss of your daughter,” Sargent said.

“The family wants justice. They want some accountability. Because it should have never happened.”

City Council, Development, housing

Back from Recess, Council Takes Up Design Review Downtown, Continues Delay on Social Housing Measure

By Erica C. Barnett

In a surprise cameo, former city councilmember Kshama Sawant showed up at the council’s first post-recess meeting Tuesday to denounce the “council Democrats” for a shelved proposal—which was not on the agenda—to adopt a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. The plan, proposed by Sawant’s District 3 council replacement Joy Hollingsworth, would allow restaurant and bar owners out of an agreement they made a decade ago to start paying the full minimum wage by next year.

In response to pushback, Hollingsworth pulled her legislation and announced that she’s working on a “balanced solution.” The last time that happened, Council President Sara Nelson quietly dropped her proposal to reduce the mimimum wage for “gig” delivery drivers.

The meeting also included a perfunctory, unilluminating discussion of Initiative 137, which would fund the city’s social housing developer by increasing business taxes on employee compensation above $1 million a year. Before going on break, the council delayed a vote to put the initiative on the November ballot, ensuring that it will appear in a low-turnout February special election rather than the general election in a Presidential election year; they’re required to discuss the measure at the beginning of every council meeting until they take action.

The delay is already lengthy by recent historical standards. In 2014, the city council delayed a vote on the preschool levy on the ballot by one week; in that case, the city proposed a tax increase to pay for affordable preschool, but also placed a competing a union-backed measure that require a higher minimum wage for preschool workers, without new funding, on the ballot alongside it.

During the meeting, Morales tried to ask whether the council was working on an alternative ballot measure, but was shot down by Councilmember Dan Strauss, who said he could respond to that question privately or in a closed executive session.

“The point of having this as an information item is so that we can share with the public what we’re contemplating, and if we’re contemplating
an alternative, I think the public deserves to know that we’re contemplating an alternative,” Morales responded, then Nelson cut off the discussion, ordering the audience, “Do not speak!” when they shouted their opposition to the opaque process. (It’s becoming a familiar move.)

Earlier this month, the Seattle Chamber was polling on an alternative to I-137 that would siphon money away from the housing levy to pay for social housing, rather than raising taxes. One possibility is that the city attorney’s office is still wordsmithing the council’s alternative, which has to be on the same topic as the original initiative.

On Wednesday, the council’s land use committee held an initial public hearing on a proposal that would temporarily exempt residential, hotel, and life sciences buildings in the downtown area from design review—a lengthy process in which volunteer review board members look at the aesthetic aspects of a development and, more often than not, require developers to change their buildings.

Design review has been used to require changes to materials and brick colors, reduce the number of apartment in multifamily developments, and mandate specific retail footprints, often in the interest of making new buildings conform to the existing scale and “character” of nearby single-family areas. According to a Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections memo on the proposal, which would last three years, design review for residential projects currently takes between 10 and 25 months.

The proposal, billed as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan would also give the OPCD director more authority to approve some specific variances from the land use code for developments that are exempt from design review downtown—like setbacks, the location of mandatory open space and landscaping, and the type of street-level uses that are allowed.

Somewhat unusually, several councilmembers took issue with the conclusions of a memo from the council’s central staff that seemed to argue against the temporary exemptions.

“It is unclear what problem [the bill] seeks to solve,” the memo says. “Greater downtown, the general planning geography subject to the proposal, is not capacity constrained. The City’s development capacity dashboard, which was last updated in 2022, indicates that greater downtown has zoned capacity for approximately 110,000 additional jobs and 41,000 additional housing units.”

Ketil Freeman, the staffer who wrote the memo, added Wednesday that the city could make other decisions to encourage a more residential vibe for downtown, such as creating more “green streets” like Bell Street in Belltown.

Nelson—not always a supporter of new development—pushed back on the “zoned capacity” argument, citing data that shows a decline in the number of units permitted and under construction the downtown area. (The “plenty of zoned capacity” argument is more commonly used by anti-growth activists pointing out that the city has sufficient zoning to build more than enough housing already—always failing to note that most of this “capacity” isn’t accessible, because it’s under people’s current homes).

Bringing more receipts, Nelson noted that while there may be capacity to build 41,000 more housing units downtown, that isn’t translating into actual housing: According to current data, development permits and construction starts downtown declined over the last year. Finally, she said the green street in Belltown “does have a lot of complaints surrounding it around public safety, and it’s clear that that eyes on the street, more people circulating downtown, is a better way of of ensuring more public safety.”

Several public commenters argued that the legislation would give too much authority to unelected experts, rather than the city council, to—as one speaker put it—”zone the city.” What the legislation would actually do is take away some authority from the unelected design review boards, and the city’s unelected hearing examiner, to delay projects because board members don’t like the brick color, think the exterior walls aren’t “curvy” enough, or decide a new building looks “too historic”—all real examples we covered last year.

The land use committee didn’t vote on the proposal on Wednesday, but could do so at its next meeting on September 18.

public disclosure

Updated and Improved: The City of Seattle’s Employee Directory, Only On PubliCola
Photo by Mark Daynes, via Unsplash.

By Erica C. Barnett

Since 2021, when then-mayor Jenny Durkan disappeared the city’s online employee directory (and promised, falsely, to repeat it), PubliCola has been filing records requests, consolidating, editing, and converting multiple spreadsheets in various formats into a single database that anyone can search to find contact information for virtually anyone in the city. (So DON’T COMPLAIN TO ME IF YOU CAN’T USE IT. Just kidding. I love your feedback!)

The reason I publish this database, a process that routinely includes pulling my own hair out, is because this information is public, and it should be publicly available. It is standard practice for other governments, including cities like Bellevue, counties like King and Pierce, and the entire Washington State government, to make their employees’ contact information publicly available. Seattle became an outlier, under Durkan, in 2019, and has continued to withhold this information from the public under current Mayor Bruce Harrell.

City officials often talk about “access,” “transparency,” and “public-facing databases,” suggesting they value keeping themselves accountable to their constituents. But when Seattle (or any city) replaces a standard directory of public employees and their contact information with a short list of gatekeepers and links to generic internal websites, that’s a blow against transparency. And while it’s easy to throw up our hands and say that this kind of slow erosion of accessible information is inevitable, it’s important to remember that it hasn’t always been this way.

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So, as we have in the past, we’re publishing a searchable database—also available as a Google spreadsheet—of all publicly available contact information for city employees. This version, unlike one we published earlier this year, includes each listed employee’s name, contact information (email and/or phone), department, and title.

A few notes on the data: Each employee is listed in Lastname,Firstname format in a single cell, so my name would be listed as Barnett,Erica (but searching in the “Name” column for “contains” “Erica” would pull me (and any other Ericas, Americas, etc.) up. Or, if you want to find everyone who works in a department, searching by the department’s acronym—say, SDOT, for the Seattle Department of Transportation—will pull up everyone in that department. Alternately, you can just go into the Google spreadsheet and search or sort by whatever you’re looking for.

Employees who asked the city to remove them from publicly available contact lists, such as some victims of domestic violence, have been removed from this database.

As we’ve said every time we’ve published this information since 2021: Although this database duplicates much of what was in the official city directory, representing an accurate contact list for city employees as of this summer, it does not provide a substitute for transparency from the city itself, which is ultimately responsible for providing this kind of basic information to its residents.

Uncategorized

Three Fun Things for September 2, 2024

A timely book, a seasonal recipe, and a podcast about getting things wrong.

1. Banished: The New Social Control In Urban America, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert

Ordinarily, I try to keep work-related stuff out of this column—no celebration of the city’s super-useful online crime database here!—but I’m making an exception for this 2010 book about urban banishment zones, because I can’t stop thinking and talking about it.

The book traces the recent history of laws that punish people accused of relatively minor crimes, such as sex work, drug use, and various types of “loitering,” by banishing them from certain areas, such as parks, business districts, or entire neighborhoods, as with the Stay Out of Drug Area and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution zones that the Seattle City Council is hoping to recreate. These laws penalize people for simply being in an area—prohibiting their “future lawful behavior,” as Beckett and Herbert put it, and effectively penalizing people for belonging to the class of “banished.”

For an academic book, Banished goes a long way to humanize the people who were impacted by these laws, explaining precisely how people are impacted by being banished and why they continue to return to the same places again and again, even when the consequence is often longer and longer stints in jail. A key chapter titled “Voices of the Banished” concludes,

As we demonstrated, compliance with banishment is difficult and therefore rare. … [M]ost of our interviewees reported that they did not comply with their exclusion orders, largely because they experienced the areas from which they were banished as essential to their physical and mental well-being. The fact that so many found in their exclusion zone meaningful social connections, important social services, and a place to call home reveals a problem at the core of the practice of banishment: a profound discrepancy between how officials understand “disorderly” areas and how those same places are experienced by the banished.

As officials once again begin to draw lines on maps delineating areas where people can be arrested for simply existing, this book—available at the Seattle Public Library and online booksellers—is a powerful reminder of the ways in which banishment harms individual people and fails to achieve its purported goals.

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2. Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce

As someone who grew up in the South with access to a huge, beautiful garden, I am aware that there is such a thing as a “bumper crop” of tomatoes; if I wasn’t, the food blogs and magazines I read are constantly reminding me, with recipes promising to help me “use up” all those excess fruits I must surely have lying around. But until this year, my plants (with the exception of cherry varieties) rarely produced more than a handful of ripe, full-size specimens—that is, until this year, when even my most optimistically planted heirlooms came through with at least a few softball-sized beauties.

While I’m still enjoying those on tomato sandwiches with Duke’s mayonnaise (now available this far north, through some miracle of distribution), one single Roma plant produced at least a dozen pounds of gorgeous paste-style tomatoes that were perfect for this three-ingredient sauce, which I’ve already frozen in anticipation of the dark season to come. (Note: If you are making this sauce with fresh tomatoes instead of canned, you’ll probably have to cook it a little longer than the recipe says). The only fiddly (but necessary) step is blanching and peeling all those tomatoes, which doesn’t take very long at all; if you have a dehydrator, you can dry out the skins and pulverize them into a powder that will give a summery, umami boost to anything savory, from scrambled eggs to pasta to a winter beef stew.

3. The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong

This discursive, engaging podcast is about “accidents, mistakes and bad ideas that helped misshape our world”—from the disputed election of 1876 to theories about the heritability of human traits (did you know that Darwin didn’t understand how babies happen?) Written and presented by the irrepressible Mark Chrisler, this filthy, hilarious podcast is history as you’ve probably never heard it told.

Dive in anywhere, or start here.