1. In several recent campaign debates, mayoral candidate (and 12-year city council veteran) Bruce Harrell has pointed to a 2017 bias-free policing ordinance he sponsored as proof of his commitment to police reform. During a debate hosted by the ACLU of Washington last week, his opponent, current city council president Lorena González, countered that the ordinance—which requires anti the Seattle Police Department to conduct anti-bias training and collect data about stops and detentions—didn’t “result in a less-biased police force.”

One important detail neither candidate mentioned is that SPD still hasn’t fulfilled all the requirements of the four-year-old law. In a response to a query from City Councilmember Lisa Herbold, interim SPD chief Adrian Diaz informed the council in July that his department hasn’t been collecting data from all traffic stops, as the 2017 law requires. Instead, his department has only collected data on “Terry stops” (also known as stop-and-frisks), in which an officer detains someone who they suspect of “criminal activity.” SPD classifies roughly 70 percent of all stops and detentions as Terry stops.

Data released by SPD in January revealed that Indigenous people are nine times more likely to be stopped by police than white people, and Black people seven times more likely. In contrast, officers were more likely to find a weapon on a white person during a Terry stop than on people from any other racial or ethnic group.

SPD has not collected data on other common types of stops, including traffic citations. The four-year delay in following the letter of the law, Diaz wrote, came down to outdated reporting protocols: According to Diaz, SPD’s traffic unit only keeps paper records of their stops, warnings and citations. As a result, Diaz wrote, the department “does not have a complete count or description” of the citations and warnings its officers have issued, nor does it have complete demographic data about the people they’ve stopped.

According to Diaz, SPD was able to find a “work-around” to collect data about Terry stops, as required by the federal consent decree but not for other types of stops, leaving the department in compliance with the federal court’s orders but out of compliance with a city law. For now, Diaz said the department pieced together an imperfect system for manually collecting data from paper records, supplemented by the limited data about traffic stops collected by the Seattle Municipal Court. Based on that “imperfect data,” SPD estimates that it has conducted 52,764 traffic stops since 2015. According to that incomplete data, only 17 percent of drivers stopped were Black—likely an undercount, given that Black people account for roughly 30 percent of the department’s Terry stops.

Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who has led the push to get SPD to comply with the data collection and reporting requirements of the 2017 ordinance, noted that the council asked the department in November 2020 to produce data on all traffic stops by July of this year. If SPD has made any progress toward that goal, “we don’t have evidence of that, because we still haven’t received a report on the data,” Herbold said. SPD has not yet responded to Herbold’s or PubliCola’s inquiries about when the department began to work toward full compliance with the 2017 law.

2. With the mayoral election just weeks away, outgoing Mayor Jenny Durkan asserted at a recent homelessness town hall discussion that, “in four years, we’ve never really done a sweep,” because the city does outreach and offers “housing” before it removes encampments. (The HOPE team offers shelter, not housing.)

The counterfactual comment prompted panelist Tiffani McCoy, the advocacy director at Real Change, to describe several stories she has heard from Real Change vendors “of all of their possessions being taken from them forcibly during a sweep.”

“The idea that hasn’t happened in four years is absolutely astonishing to me,” McCoy said.

Durkan also repeated her talking point that most people are homeless in Seattle became homeless somewhere else—a claim Durkan has made many times over the past year to suggest that Seattle pays more than its fair share to address regional homelessness. “If you look at what’s being spent right now in an emergency shelter, Seattle is the lion’s share, and if you look at the data, about six out of 10 of the people that we are serving, their last place to have stable housing was outside of Seattle,” Durkan said. “They became homeless somewhere else but because we have the services here,” they migrated to Seattle.

The number uses comes from the county’s internal Homelessness Management Information System, which is only one of many contradictory data points about where people lived before they became homeless; other sources, including surveys done as part of the annual Point in Time County in January, have concluded that a large majority of people who are homeless in King County became homeless here and did not move here from somewhere else—exactly the opposite of the mayor’s talking point.

3. A shelter on Lower Queen Anne that was supposed to reopen last summer, providing shelter for about 40 people displaced from a temporary COVID shelter at Seattle Center, now faces another setback: Squatters who moved into the vacant building smoked copious amounts of meth, leaving dangerous residue on every surface. A spokeswoman for Seattle City Light, which owns the building, confirmed that the city hired decontamination specialists to remove drug residue, and said the contractor “completed decontamination work” earlier this month. Continue reading “SPD Hasn’t Fully Complied With 2017 Anti-Bias Law; Durkan Says City Has Never Done “Sweeps”; Meth Cleanup Further Delays Shelter Opening” →