Tag: ACLU of Washington

Courts, criminal justice, King County, Police

King County Plans to Move Up to 150 Inmates to Address Capacity Issues at Downtown Jail

By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this year, King County Executive Dow Constantine quietly added $3.5 million to the county’s budget for “potential contracted services to address jail capacity issues”—a reference to understaffing at the King County Correctional Facility in downtown Seattle, which is currently facing a shortage of about 120 officers. Despite offering bonuses of up to $15,000, the county Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) has found it challenging to hire and retain jail guards, thanks in large part to long shifts and poor working conditions; the more guards leave, the worse the problem becomes.

Last month, DAJD director Allen Nance provided more details about what that $3.5 million would pay for. In a memo to all DAJD staff, Nance explained that the department is “pursuing a contract with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE),” a misdemeanor jail in Des Moines, to house some of the 1,250 or so people currently incarcerated at the downtown Seattle jail. SCORE is a public development authority, a type of government-funded nonprofit, that was established to provide jail services to seven South King County cities. The department plans to start in January by moving about 50 people to the jail about 15 miles south of Seattle, a number that could grow to 150 later on. SCORE, which provides jail services for six south King County cities, has a capacity of 802.

“The partnership with SCORE is being piloted to see if it might ease the workload on our staff and prevent a need to expand booking at the [Maleng Regional Justice Center (RJC) in Kent], given the Department’s limited resources and our current reliance on overtime to cover shifts,” Nance continued. About 260 people are currently incarcerated at the RJC, which is only accepting bookings by appointment. “At the same time, we will continue to explore other strategies to run our two jails more efficiently.”

Noah Haglund, a spokesman for DAJD, said that “if we finalize an agreement with SCORE, we would prioritize people with extended time between court dates or those who are serving jail sentences.” King County’s jails would “continue to house people with greater medical needs and those deemed to pose a higher security risk,” he said.

Most of those housed in the downtown jail face felony charges; about 9 percent have been charged with misdemeanors. Although SCORE is currently a misdemeanor jail, its director, Devon Schrum, said the facility is “constructed and staffed to hold any classification of arrestee, including those accused of felony-level offenses.”

Defense attorneys and the jail guards’ union—odd bedfellows that have increasingly found themselves on the same side of issues related to crowding and understaffing at the jail—oppose the move. “We’re already facing a staffing crisis,” said Dennis Folk, head of the King County Corrections Guild. “Let’s say we’re housing 50 or 100 inmates down there, and now they need to go to the hospital—who’s going to be responsible for taking them? How are they supposed to get to the court if that work falls back on us?”

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Haglund said the department has not worked out an agreement with SCORE to transport residents from Des Moines to Seattle; according to a rate sheet provided by Schrum, the jail charges $75 an hour for transportation by an officer.

The union that represents King County Department of Public Defense employees, SEIU 925, has similar concerns. Molly Gilbert, the the president of the SEIU 925 chapter that represents DPD staffers, said SCORE’s location and hours of operation could make it hard for attorneys to meet with clients and for clients to get to the downtown Seattle courthouse for in-person hearings. Bonnie Linville, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services,

In a recent survey of public defenders, many attorneys said moving downtown jail inmates to SCORE would make it more challenging for them to manage their caseloads, because they would have to drive between three jails instead of two; others, however, said SCORE has more reliable video visitation than either King County jail. The union has filed a demand to bargain over the change—the first time the union has ever moved to challenge a management decision through bargaining outside the regular contract negotiation process, Gilbert said.

Schrum says SCORE —unlike the King County system—is fully staffed and has had little trouble recruiting “highly trained” guards and staff. But some who oppose relocating inmates point to previous evidence of poor conditions at the jail, including a highly publicized 2018 case in which a woman experiencing a mental health crisis died in her cell later spending four days consuming huge amounts of water.

In 2016, Disability Rights Washington’s AVID (Amplifying Voices of Inmates with Disabilities) Jail Project released a report outlining significant problems with SCORE’s treatment of inmates with mental illness, including excessive use of solitary confinement and lack of access to psychiatric care. The report also outlined steps SCORE had taken to address some of the issues AVID raised; a spokesman for DRW said he could not speak to current conditions in the jail.

Many advocates say relocating 50 (or even 150) people from the downtown jail to SCORE will do little to address deteriorating conditions in the jail. For months, people in the jail have limited access to medical care, showers, laundry, and recreation outside their cells.

“There are requirements that people be provided adequate medical and mental health care, be taken to outside medical appointments and be allowed a certain amount of out of cell time per day and it is clear that the jail is not meeting those requirements. Pursuant to the Hammer settlement agreement, the jail is required to meet certain benchmarks regarding each of these issues.”—La Rond Baker, legal director, ACLU of Washington

“We’re hearing routinely from folks that they’re sending [requests for physical or mental health care] that aren’t getting answered, or the answer is, ‘sorry, we’re understaffed,'” said Bonnie Linville, an attorney for Columbia Legal Services, which provides legal aid to low-income clients. “We’re also hearing about fewer transfers and delays in transferring people to Harborview [Medical Center] for necessary care, which is really concerning.” Suicide has become such a problem in the jail that the department has removed bedsheets from all cells. The county’s 2023-2024 budget includes $1 million for “jump protection panels” at the jail.

With conditions inside the jail at a breaking point, advocates say the county may be in violation of an agreement it signed almost 25 years ago called the Hammer settlement. In 1988, the ACLU of Washington represented a man named Calvin Hammer who said he was denied medical care after an assault at the jail left him with a badly fractured skull. Eventually, the ACLU and King County reached a settlement that required the county to increase staffing and improve conditions at the downtown jail. Now, the ACLU believes the county may be in violation of the Hammer settlement, and could challenge the county’s compliance with the agreement.

La Rond Baker, the legal director for the ACLU-WA, declined to get into the details of any potential legal challenge. However, she said, “many of the conditions at the jail show that the jail is out of compliance with the Hammer settlement.” For example, “there are requirements that people be provided adequate medical and mental health care, be taken to outside medical appointments and be allowed a certain amount of out of cell time per day and it is clear that the jail is not meeting those requirements. … Pursuant to the Hammer settlement agreement, the jail is required to meet certain benchmarks regarding each of these issues.”

Continue reading “King County Plans to Move Up to 150 Inmates to Address Capacity Issues at Downtown Jail” →

Courts, Elections, homelessness

Compassion Seattle Appeals Ruling Striking Down Ballot Measure on Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

Defying expectations, Compassion Seattle has appealed last week’s King County Superior Court ruling that their proposed ballot initiative, Charter Amendment 29, was beyond the scope of the initiative process. The state Court of Appeals is expected to hear the case on Friday. If the appeals court decided to stay the lower court’s ruling, the measure could still make it onto the November ballot, although it would cause a certain amount of chaos at King County Elections, which is currently putting ballots together in multiple languages for more than 400 unique jurisdictions.

Last week, Judge Catherine Shaffer ruled that the charter amendment, which would require the city to fund 2,000 shelter beds or housing units next year using existing resources, violated state law giving local governments, not local voters, the authority to write budgets and adopt policies on land use and homelessness. To remove this authority from local jurisdictions, Shaffer said, would require a vote by the people of the entire state.”You can’t amend a city charter to conflict with state law,” Shaffer said, because “that would be local folks seeking to overturn the will of the state population as expressed through our state representatives in legislation. And that’s not how it works.”

Attorney Knoll Lowney said he’s not surprised that Compassion Seattle “felt the desire to appeal, but I’m surprised that they appealed without coming up with any appellate arguments.”

Compassion Seattle, the campaign for the charter amendment, said last week that they didn’t believe the appeals court could resolve an appeal in time for the measure to appear on the November ballot. (Charter amendments can only be on the ballot during local general elections, which come once every two years). In a statement Tuesday, the campaign said that Judge Shaffer’s ruling “caused an outpouring of support over the weekend from supporters who want us to press on with an appeal. We decided that we must take this action to represent the interests of tens of thousands of voters who signed petitions to put this amendment on the ballot.”

Compassion Seattle has raised more than a million dollars, almost all of it from large real estate developers and commercial property owners in downtown Seattle.

Knoll Lowney, the attorney for the ACLU of Washington, Transit Riders Union, and the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, who sued to stop the measure, said he’s not surprised that Compassion Seattle “felt the desire to appeal, but I’m surprised that they appealed without coming up with any appellate arguments.” In their emergency motion requesting a stay, Compassion Seattle’s attorneys reiterate many of the same arguments they made in the original case— the same arguments Judge Shaffer rejected. “The appellate court is not going to resurrect this measure—I don’t see that happening,” Lowney said.

“We decided that we must take this action to represent the interests of tens of thousands of voters who signed petitions to put this amendment on the ballot.”—Compassion Seattle statement

If the appeals court does allow the charter amendment to move forward, King County Elections will have to scramble. Elections spokeswoman Kendall LeVan Hodson says the elections office is already building ballots in four languages for more than 430 sub-jurisdictions within King County, and any delay or late addition to local ballots makes it harder to hit two September deadlines to print ballots and mail them to service members overseas.

“Obviously, will comply with whatever the court directs us to do,” she said, but it might take some doing; for example, the elections office could create two different potential ballots, one with Charter Amendment 29 and one without, for all its jurisdictions within Seattle. “We’ll make something work” if it comes to that, she said.

City Council, Elections, homelessness, housing, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

Effort to Expand Hotel Shelters Has Broad Support, Recycled Statements Replace False Endorsement Claims on Compassion Seattle Website

1. City council homelessness committee chair Andrew Lewis introduced legislation this week that would lift spending restrictions on $12 million the council allocated earlier this year for hotel-based shelters, in the hope that Mayor Jenny Durkan will finally agree to invest in JustCARE, a county-funded program that has been moving people from tents to hotels in the Chinatown/International District, or other hotel-based shelter programs.

The bill, which Lewis hopes to fast-track to a vote on June 14, “no longer makes seeking FEMA reimbursement a strict requirement” for the money, Lewis said Monday. As PubliCola has reported, Durkan has declined to seek federal FEMA dollars set aside for noncongregate shelters, such as hotels, arguing that this form of federal funding is a risky proposition.

Lewis told PubliCola the city could use a number of new, non-FEMA sources to pay for hotel rooms, including $40 million in unanticipated 2021 revenues, additional American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) funding that’s coming next year, or the $10 million fund Seattle Rep. Nicole Macri created to provide an insurance policy for cities that open non-congregate shelters.

The Downtown Seattle Association and Seattle Metro Chamber are supporting the legislation, which Lewis has described as a way of improving the climate for workers and tourists downtown while actually helping people living unsheltered instead of sweeping them from place to place. Five council members, including socialist Kshama Sawant, are sponsors.

“There’s no such thing as a cheap program for people who have really really chronic public health challenges. There’s no way for us to say we’re only going to assist these people if it comes at a certain price point.”—Seattle Councilmember Andrew Lewis

“For all the talk about division in Seattle, and all the acrimony and everything else, this is an issue where the Chamber of Commerce will stand shoulder to shoulder with Kshama Sawant, and I think that speaks to the good work that this consortium of providers have done in creating the JustCARE model,” Lewis said.

JustCARE provides hotel-based shelter to unsheltered people with high needs and multiple barriers to housing and provides intensive case management and services to put them on a path to housing. Durkan’s office has frequently derided the approach as too expensive, claiming a per-client cost of well over $100,000, which the organizations behind the program dispute. Whatever the actual cost, Lewis said the city needs to “come to terms with the fact that there’s no such thing as a cheap program for people who have really really chronic public health challenges. There’s no way for us to say we’re only going to assist these people if it comes at a certain price point.”

Lewis said he hopes to pass the legislation, and for the mayor to spend the money, before Seattle’s economy officially reopens on June 30, when the statewide eviction ban is also scheduled to expire.

A spokeswoman for Durkan said the mayor’s office “won’t be able to comment until we’ve had time to review the legislation.”

2. Compassion Seattle, the group supporting a ballot measure that would impose an unfunded mandate for the city to build more temporary shelter beds in order to keep public spaces “open and clear of encampments,” was forced to take down its “endorsements” page last week because the homeless advocates and service providers listed there had not actually endorsed the measure. Tim Burgess and Seattle Chamber CEO Rachel Smith, who talked up the measure on a Geekwire panel last week, waved away the story, suggesting that the groups just had to go through their own endorsement “processes” before officially signing on.

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This week, Compassion Seattle updated its website, replacing the “endorsements” page with one called “What People Are Saying” that uses quotes from the leaders of homeless service organizations to strongly imply endorsement while no longer overtly claiming their support. The page now includes quotes from the leaders of Evergreen Treatment Services (which runs the REACH outreach program), the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and the Chief Seattle Club, all taken from an April 1 press release announcing the campaign.

The Chief Seattle Club said they do not plan to make an endorsement, and the director of DESC, Daniel Malone, said that although he “stands by the statement I made,” the group is “not working on a formal endorsement process right now.

3. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Washington announced their opposition to the initiative. In a statement, the civil-rights group said the measure focuses on “stopgap measures” like temporary shelter to get unhoused people out of public view while doing nothing to fund long-term solutions—most importantly, housing. Continue reading “Effort to Expand Hotel Shelters Has Broad Support, Recycled Statements Replace False Endorsement Claims on Compassion Seattle Website” →

Cops, legislature, Police

State Senate Considers Expanding Program to Provide Legal Counsel to Youth Interacting with Police

By Paul Kiefer

Following the guidance of youth rights advocates, the Washington State Senate is considering legislation that would require police officers statewide to connect young people to attorneys before questioning them or asking them to consent to a search. The bill, originally introduced in the state house by Rep. Jesse Johnson (D-30, Federal Way), would prompt Washington’s Office of Public Defense to create a hotline to connect young people to legal advisors.

The Seattle City Council and King County Council passed similar legislation at the end of last summer, requiring law enforcement officers to connect young people to attorneys from the King County Public Defender’s office after reading their Miranda rights or asking them to consent to a search of their belongings. Both ordinances were named for Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens, a Black teenager from Des Moines shot while running away from King County Sheriff’s deputies during a disastrous sting operation in 2017. Though deputies never read Dunlap-Gittens his Miranda rights—he ran away from the plainclothes deputies after they burst from the back of an unmarked van—the ordinances were named to honor his aspirations to work as a youth rights attorney.

“If a police officer knows that there’s going to be someone available to represent the youth, they’re not going to be able to use their position of power to bully or coerce a child into having a conversation with them or making a statement.”—Kendrick Washington, youth policy counsel for the ACLU of Washington

The bill before the state senate, HB 1140, would not only expand the same protections statewide, but require that young people speak to an attorney before answering any questions during so-called “Terry stops”—a brief detention based on an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that someone has committed a crime. Because “Terry stops” are not arrests, the Seattle and King County ordinances don’t address the rights of young people to speak to attorneys in those contexts.

Specifically, the proposed law would require Washington’s Office of Public Defense to hire a team of six attorneys who would provide brief legal advice to young people in person, by phone or over a video call, after a stop; the attorneys would work in shifts and respond to calls from youth across the state. If a police officer stopped a young person in any circumstances that would require them to waive their Fifth Amendment rights, the law would require officers to connect the young person to an attorney—typically by providing the number for the state-managed hotline—before asking any questions or searching the young person’s belongings. The legislation makes an exception for searches done in the interest of an officer’s immediate safety, including searches for weapons.

According to Kendrick Washington, the youth policy counsel for the ACLU of Washington—which played a key role in shaping the bill—young people are typically unaware of their rights during encounters with police. The point of requiring young people to consult with attorneys before responding to police questioning, Washington said, “is not to tell [young people] what they have to do—it’s about telling them what their options are, because they usually don’t know.”

In practice, the law might look like this: An officer searching for a burglary suspect in a green sweatshirt stops a teenager wearing a green sweatshirt. Before the officer can ask the teenager any questions, they would have to call the Washington public defender’s office and put the teenager on the phone with an attorney. The attorney would explain the teenager’s options—asking whether they are being detained, answering the officer’s questions and risking self-incrimination, refusing to answer questions and walking away—allowing the teenager to make an informed decision about how to respond to the officer.

Law enforcement spokespeople voiced their opposition to portions of the bill during a hearing before the Senate Ways and Means committee on Tuesday. James McMahan, the policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, criticized the legislation for prohibiting young people from waiving their right to counsel, and he called into question the proposed budget for the program, which assumes that the Office of Public Defense would field only 4,000 phone calls from young people per year. Continue reading “State Senate Considers Expanding Program to Provide Legal Counsel to Youth Interacting with Police” →

Addiction, Courts, homelessness

Mercer Island Public Sleeping Ban Could Violate Landmark Ruling on Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday night, after more than four hours of public testimony mostly favoring the move, the Mercer Island City Council voted to pass an ordinance barring people experiencing homelessness from sleeping outdoors or in their vehicles inside the boundaries of the wealthy suburban enclave. As PubliCola reported Monday, the new law empowers police to remove anyone living unsheltered from the island, either by driving them to shelter in Bellevue (five miles away) or Kirkland (11 miles away) or by sending them to jail in another city for up to 90 days.

PubliCola covered the public comments—which focused largely on the evergreen fear that “homeless addicts” would victimize women and children and litter the island with needles and feces—and vote on Twitter as they happened. Only one council member, Craig Reynolds, voted against the proposal, which goes into effect on March 1.

But that may not be the end of the story for Mercer Island’s homeless ban. (Local media, adopting the whimsical language used by proponents of such laws, have referred to the bill as a ban on “camping.” In fact, it prohibits anyone without housing, who are disproportionately people of color, from sleeping on the island after dark; a more apt metaphor would be a sundown law.)

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To understand the potential avenues for a legal challenge, it’s important to know a little bit about a landmark 9th Circuit District Court ruling on homelessness, Martin v. Boise, which established that cities cannot ban sleeping, sitting, or lying in public spaces unless there is adequate available shelter for people to utilize as an alternative.

“Any ban on camping in most of Washington likely can’t comply with Martin v. Boise, just by sheer numbers: How many people are unhoused in the cities versus how many shelters are available.”—ACLU of Washington staff attorney Breanne Schuster

Put plainly, the ruling means that cities like Seattle can’t enforce encampment bans unless there is adequate shelter available for every homeless person the city wants to remove from public spaces. The definitions of adequate and available have been a source of heated debate ever since.

“Really any ban on camping in most of Washington likely can’t comply with Martin v. Boise, just by sheer numbers: How many people are unhoused in the cities versus how many shelters are available,” ACLU of Washington staff attorney Breanne Schuster said.

The next question, she said, is, “Are those shelters acceptable?” The four shelters to which Mercer Island plans to send people caught sleeping outdoors are far away, small, crowded (a particular concern during the ongoing pandemic), high-barrier, and often full; any of these factors could be used as an argument that the shelter isn’t really “available” or acceptable for a particular person. The Ninth Circuit “made pretty clear that you can’t, for example, force somebody to adhere to a religious doctrine or practice a religion to access a shelter,” or be “clean and sober,” Schuster said.

“In Washington, at least, substance use or abuse can be considered a disability” subject to civil rights protections, Schuster added—another potential avenue of attack on the ordinance, which defines substance use as one of many possible “voluntary actions” that a person can take to reject available shelter by refusing to follow whatever rules the “available shelter” happens to impose on clients. Continue reading “Mercer Island Public Sleeping Ban Could Violate Landmark Ruling on Homelessness” →

Mayor Durkan, Police, Privacy, public safety, Tech

ACLU Calls on Durkan to Ban Facial Recognition Software After Possible SPD Violation
Clearview AI Software Logo (Source: Creative Commons)

By Paul Kiefer

In early November, a blogger’s public records request turned up evidence that a Seattle Police Officer has used a widely-criticized facial recognition software called Clearview AI for over a year, possibly violating Seattle Police Department policy and raising questions from privacy advocates about the use of prohibited surveillance technology within SPD.

On Wednesday, the ACLU of Washington responded to the revelation by calling for Mayor Jenny Durkan to issue a specific ban on the use of facial recognition software by city agencies, as well as for a city council hearing to question SPD representatives about their use of surveillance tools.

As PubliCola first reported in November, the ACLU first sounded the alarm after the department released roughly 200 emails containing references to Clearview AI, a search engine for faces that enables law enforcement agencies to identify unknown people—protest participants, for example—by matching their photos to online images, allowing police to arrest or interrogate them.

Clearview AI has been the subject of harsh condemnation from privacy and police accountability advocates since it first drew national attention last year. The company’s business model relies on scraping billions of images from across the internet without permission; as a result, Clearview AI’s database of faces includes untold numbers of people with no criminal background whatsoever.

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Most of the emails SPD released were promotional offers sent from Clearview AI to SPD officers of all ranks, including former Police Chief Carmen Best. But one officer—Detective Nicholas Kartes of the South Precinct’s burglary unit—accepted the company’s offer, opening an account with his work email in September 2019. In the past year, Kartes corresponded with a Clearview AI representative about his experiences “experimenting” with the application, and login alerts sent to Kartes’ work email indicated that the account was used on at least two desktop computers. Both computers’ IP addresses place them in Seattle city government buildings, and one IP address belongs to a secure city network.

The revelation was alarming enough to prompt Office of Police Accountability Director Andrew Myerberg to launch an investigation into Kartes’ use of Clearview AI. However, Myerberg told PubliCola in November that merely opening an account with Clearview AI might not constitute a policy violation, though using the account for law enforcement purposes would be a clear violation of department policy. He added that there is no precedent for that kind of misconduct.

But the city council’s 2018 surveillance ordinance that restricts SPD’s use of surveillance technologies might not cover Kartes’ use of an unapproved software. Mary Dory, a public safety auditor working with the Office of the Inspector General on the case, told PubliCola in November that the ordinance was designed to address the use of surveillance technologies by SPD itself, not the behavior of an individual officer using surveillance software without the department’s knowledge.

That dilemma is now at the center of the ACLU’s disagreement with Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz. Jennifer Lee, the manager of the ACLU of Washington’s Technology and Liberty Project, told PubliCola that her organization sees Kartes’ use of Clearview AI as a violation of the surveillance ordinance, and believes that SPD is liable for Kartes’ infractions. She cited Kartes’ use of his work email—and, possibly, his work computer—as evidence that the detective opened a Clearview AI account for law enforcement purposes.

Lee says that the ACLU of Washington is calling for Durkan to issue a targeted ban on facial recognition technology. “We have a surveillance ordinance which is supposed to prevent exactly what happened: SPD secretly using a surveillance technology,” she told PubliCola. “But it’s clear that without an explicit prohibition on facial recognition use, there are risks that remain.”

A press release from the ACLU sent out on Wednesday morning also called for council members Lisa Herbold and Alex Pedersen, the chairs of the council’s public safety and transportation and public utilities committees, respectively, to hold a public hearing to “get answers from SPD about its use of Clearview AI and other surveillance tools.”

In a response sent to the ACLU of Washington on Wednesday afternoon, Diaz categorically denied that SPD has sanctioned the use of Clearview AI by its officers. “We have no intention or interest in pursuing a partnership with Clearview AI or acquiring the use of any facial recognition technology,” he wrote. He also challenged the ACLU’s assertion—included in their press release—that multiple SPD detectives have used Clearview AI since September, pointing out that the emails only clearly point to Kartes’ use of the technology. (In November, Lee told PubliCola that the login alerts from multiple desktop computers point to the possibility of multiple detectives using Kartes’ account).

Diaz also made a passing reference connecting the Clearview AI promotional emails to a possible phishing attempt involving city of Seattle email addresses; PubliCola has reached out for clarification.

Because Diaz’s response dismisses the ACLU’s assertion that the department is liable for Kartes’ conduct, the ACLU’s call for Durkan to issue a specific ban on facial recognition software is effectively dead in the water.