Tag: Bob Kettle

City Council, criminal justice, Elections, Police

Wild Day at City Hall as Council Blocks Social Housing from Ballot, Shuts Down Meeting, Retreats to Their Offices to Approve New Jail Contract
City Council President Sara Nelson, after reconvening the meeting from inside her council office.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council delayed a vote on an initiative, I-137, to fund social housing, citing unspecified legal concerns, on Tuesday. The council’s last-minute maneuver prevents the measure from going onto the ballot in November, when progressive voter turnout is likely to be high. A majority of the council appears to oppose the measure, which would impose a 5% tax, paid by employers, on employee compensation above $1 million a year.

Voters approved a separate measure, Initiative 135, last February; that initiative created a new public developer to build permanently affordable, mixed-income public housing for people making between 0 and 120 percent of the Seattle median income. Initiative 137 would provide a funding source to build that housing. The campaign for I-135 and I-137, House Our Neighbors, collected about 35,000 signatures to support putting the measure on the November ballot.

The delay gives the council more time to draft and approve an alternative ballot measure that would appear alongside the social housing measure. Last week, the Seattle Chamber put out a poll testing messages on I-137 and an alternative measure, “Proposition 1-B,” that would amend the housing levy voters adopted last year to use some of its funds for social housing, defined as “housing with a mix of income levels not to exceed 80% of median income, that is developed or acquired by, and then owned in perpetuity or as long as lawfully possible by, a public developer.”

A question from a Chamber-sponsored poll testing messages against I-137, which would fund social housing.

Ordinarily, when a council majority opposes an initiative, their recourse is to put a competing initiative on the ballot—something that happened with voting alternatives in 2022 and with the Families and Education Levy in 2014, to name just a couple of examples. What councils generally don’t do—what appears, in fact, to be unprecedented in recent history—is use delay tactics to keep a measure out of the election for which it qualified, in order to push the measure to a later, less favorable election cycle.

Councilmember Tammy Morales, the only council member to vote against the delay, later called the vote “one of the most undemocratic moments I’ve seen in Seattle,” noting that not only did the council vote to keep I-137 off the Presidential election-year ballot, Council President Sara Nelson also cut off public comment, refusing to hear from people who showed up and signed in to speak.

Nelson had already cut the allotted time for each comment from two minutes to one, a practice the city council once used far more judiciously, and admonished the audience repeatedly for clapping and cheering, which she said slowed down the public comment process.

Near the end of in-person public comment, Councilmember Bob Kettle—whose legislation approving a contract with the SCORE jail many members of the public had come to City Hall to oppose—could be heard on a hot mic, immediately after a person spoke against the jail contract and proposed anti-drug and prostitution laws, muttering, “This fucking drives me nuts” (listen below):

Nelson herself was responsible for most of the delay in Tuesday’s meeting, because she called two ten-minute recesses, which were both followed—unsurprisingly—by shouts from the crowd, who chanted, “You didn’t let us speak!”

In the past, council members in charge of meetings have often defused similar situations by letting people speak, or (less productively) forcing the public to leave, using security or police to move or arrest people who refuse to go. This time—perhaps hoping to avoid the spectacle of arresting members of the public—Nelson  stopped the meeting and had the entire council retreat to their offices, where they reemerged, virtually, a few minutes later. (Nelson, somewhat ironically, has insisted that in-person meetings are infinitely superior to virtual ones.)

Back in the relative solitude of their offices, the council resumed its discussion about the city’s contract with SCORE, a jail in Des Moines where the city hopes to jail people accused of committing misdemeanors, such as public drug use and (soon) prostitution and drug loitering, in all parts of the city. Councilmember Bob Kettle, the council sponsor for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s legislation, said he was assured by a visit to SCORE that their facility was high-quality and the medical care was stellar. “They’re fantastic at providing care at SCORE,” Kettle said.

Shortly after the meeting, Andrew Engelson, who’s been covering SCORE for PubliCola, reported on X that a 42-year-old man died at SCORE one week ago—the seventh death at the jail in less than 18 months.

The downtown King County jail recently began booking people on misdemeanors committed in the so-called Downtown Activation Zone, but generally only books people accused of crimes that endanger other people directly, such as domestic violence and DUI, or people who are on City Attorney Ann Davison’s “high utilizers” list.)

The contract would cost well over the $2 million annual sticker price listed in the legislation, because that estimate doesn’t include any of the new court staff, defense attorneys, and technology upgrades the municipal court has said will be necessary to implement it. The cost to transport people between Des Moines and Seattle—a 30-to-40-minute drive—is also unknown, since the city hasn’t identified which kinds of cases it plans to send to SCORE; most people booked on nonviolent misdemeanors are back out on the street in a day or two, but those with more complex cases may stay longer, necessitating more travel back and forth for court appearances.

According to a fiscal note produced by Harrell’s office, the SCORE contract will have no race and social justice implications, and the city did not perform a racial equity toolkit or any other racial equity analysis on the legislation. “The ability to utilize the jail for misdemeanor bookings is not a new process for the city and has historically been utilized as one of many tools when upstream approaches and community-based interventions have been unsuccessful,” the fiscal note explains.

The city’s Reentry Work Group, established in 2015 by a city council that included Harrell, recommended in 2018 that the city reduce its reliance on jails as a response to misdemeanor offenses, noting that “Black individuals only comprise 7% of the King County population, but account for 36% of the King County Jail population; Native Americans only comprise of 1% of the King County population, but account for 2.7% of the King County Jail population.” That same work group recommended removing drug and prostitution loitering laws from the criminal code. Although that recommendation was released in 2018, the council didn’t pass it until two years later; now, arguing that the previous council went “too far” in adopting progressive legislation, the new council is preparing to reinstate both laws.

As its last act of the day, the council approved the SCORE contract (with an amendment by Councilmember Dan Strauss requiring a report on “identified operational issues”) on an 8-1 vote, with Morales voting “no.”

Note: This story originally reported that Tammy Morales abstained from the SCORE vote, and that the vote was 7-1. This error has been corrected.

City Council, criminal justice

Council Committee Approves Contract With SCORE Jail in Des Moines; SCORE Inmate Died of Overdose in June
City Councilmember Bob Kettle

1. The city council’s public safety committee advanced a contract with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) yesterday that will allow the city to rent out 20 beds from the jail in Des Moines, which is jointly owned by six South King County cities.

According to an analysis by city council central staff, the contract could cost well over the estimated total of $2 million a year, because that estimate does not account for the cost to pay Seattle Police Department officers overtime wages (on average, $105 an hour) to ferry people back and forth from SCORE to Seattle Municipal Court in downtown Seattle; medical services for anyone who has to go to the South King County hospital where SCORE sends inmates who need medical attention; and up to $300,000 for a new “data bridge” connecting the jail to the Seattle Police Department and Municipal Court systems.

The city could also have to pay for additional marshals at the courthouse, additional public defense attorneys to handle the increase in caseload, and potentially an eighth judge to handle cases, including first appearance cases and mental health court. Mayor Bruce Harrell, who initiated the legislation, has not identified any funding source beyond this year; the city, meanwhile, is going into the 2025 budget cycle with a deficit of around $260 million.

The beds at SCORE would be in addition to those at the downtown Seattle jail, where King County just agreed to begin booking people for minor misdemeanors committed in downtown Seattle, after a long period of booking restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic.

The contract just gives the city the right to use the beds, but does not commit Seattle to paying for beds at SCORE on an ongoing basis. If the jail opened up more beds, the city would likely find it more convenient to house misdemeanor offenders, who usually don’t spend more than a few days in jail, at that facility.

“If they solve their staffing problems, much like we have with our SPD [hiring] challenges, then we can reset those levels and then focus more on the King County Jail,” Kettle told PubliCola Wednesday. “The problem is, we do have that delta” between the number of people the city wants to jail and the number of available county jail beds, “and we have to address it.”

The full council is scheduled to vote on the SCORE contract on Monday.

According to the staff analysis, “Unless a specific funding source is identified (e.g., potential future KCJ savings), the ongoing costs for the use of SCORE will add to the budget deficit the City faces in 2025.”

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2. Last week, SCORE  responded to a records request from PubliCola about a death in custody that occurred at the jail on June 27, 2023. Ismail Mamatov, a 25-year-old man, was transferred to SCORE on June 26 from another facility and booked on theft and failure to appear charges. He’d previously been held for four months at the other facility and had been incarcerated 17 other times at SCORE.

According to a report filed with the state Department of Health and heavily redacted incident reports written by SCORE staff, Mamatov was found unresponsive in his cell at around 3 pm on June 27. Fire department medics were called and Mamatov was declared dead about 3:20 pm. The King County medical examiner determined the death was caused by acute fentanyl and methamphetamine intoxication. 

SCORE’s report said that a review of video surveillance showed Mamatov appeared to share an unknown substance with other cellmates, and was seen snorting that substance, though the report said he had been extensively searched prior to booking. The inmate had been subject to periodic detox checks, SCORE’s report said, but one check was missed just prior to Mamatov’s overdose.  

In its report to the State Department of Health, SCORE lays some blame for missing the 120-day deadline for submitting a death in custody report to the state on the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, noting “Additionally, the autopsy report related to this fatality was not available to SCORE until June 13, 2024, more than 120 days following the incident, which was an additional reason for the extension.”

But according to Kate Cole, a public information officer with Public Health – Seattle & King County, SCORE waited until May 21, 2024 to request a full autopsy report from the medical examiner’s office, and “they received the report from us on 6/12/24.”

The death was one of six at SCORE in a little over a year.

—Erica C. Barnett, Andrew Engelson

 

City Council, public safety

Council Members Approve Fine for Street Racing, Claiming It Will “Deter” Racing, Save Lives
Charlie XCX would never.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved a bill this week that will impose fines on people who engage in or watch street racing, with fines that begin at $500 and range up to $1,500.

Supporters of the bill, originally sent to the council by City Attorney Ann Davison, vastly overstated its likely impact, suggesting that the “deterrent” threat of fines would not only prevent people from racing in the first place, but save lives that might otherwise be lost to gun violence. (A young man was recently shot and killed at a street racing event on Alki).

“Too many people are dying,” Councilmember Rob Saka said. Addressing a public commenter who raised concerns about the constitutional rights of spectators, who can now be ticketed and fined for being present at a street race, Saka noted that the city of Kent has long had a similar law, “and I think this bill … strikes the right balance between the competing demands of constitutional rights and the rights of people who want their community safe across the city.”

Bill sponsor Bob Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, praised Saka’s amendment creating graduated fines, rather than the fine of $500 per incident Kettle originally proposed, “because checking in [with] the community, you know, $500 wasn’t enough to deter. … And we have to have that deterrence point. Otherwise, more people are going to lose their lives.” The legislation also received an emergency designation, meaning it will go into effect immediately.

Street racing is already illegal under state law, and has been for more than 100 years; reckless driving, which encompasses street racing, is illegal on both the state and local levels. Under these laws, people convicted of illegal racing can be fined up to $5,000, jailed for up to 364 days, and lose their license. Compared to these existing potential penalties, a fine of $500, or up to $1,500, is fairly minor.

Tanya Woo, who co-sponsored the bill, said there are already legal outlets for people who “feel the need to express themselves with speed,” like racetracks and official races, and suggested that people “leave these high risk maneuvers [like drifting and burnouts] to the professionals in a controlled environment.”

Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, said that what the city needs isn’t more criminalization of something that’s already illegal and subject to significant penalties, “but what we do need is safe places for young adults to go. We need better lighting on our streets. We need to design our streets to make it difficult for drivers to race on them, and that’s why we just approved a $1.5 billion transportation levy package to begin to address all of that other infrastructure that’s needed.”

Morales cast the lone vote against the bill.

City Council, Police, public safety

Council’s Public Safety Chair: “We Don’t Have the Luxury” of Being Picky About Police Test Scores

By Erica C. Barnett

City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle took some time at the beginning of this week’s committee meeting to address what he called misleading media reports about the city council’s efforts to replace the current police hiring test, provided by the National Testing Network, with a test used in smaller jurisdictions that has a 90 percent passing rate, provided by Public Safety Testing.

“One of the things in these articles, they keep speaking to the fact that the legislation that we recently passed was to replace the NTN [test] … with the Public Safety Test. That was never the case with our legislation. It was all about augmenting the NTN with the PST test,” Kettle said.

We can’t speak to anyone else’s coverage, but PubliCola accurately reported that Council President Sara Nelson originally broached the idea of replacing the NTN test with the PST test, then walked that plan back after the Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC) reminded her that the city council can’t dictate what test the independent commission uses.

The legislation Nelson introduced said the PSCSC “should seek to use” the PST test—defined, in the bill’s legalese, as the test “that is also used by law enforcement agencies operating in King County, and geographically contiguous counties, and that provides greater access to candidates who wish to make multiple applications with such local law enforcement agencies.”

The bill that eventually passed no longer mentions a specific test, saying only that the PSCSC should seek to use a test “that conforms to the extent possible to all City of Seattle policies that address recruiting, hiring, and retention.”

PSCSC director Andrea Scheele told PubliCola that it has never been “an option for the city of Seattle to use two exams. Other jurisdictions might do it, but the city of Seattle is the largest law enforcement agency, serving the greatest number of people, in the state—more than twice as many as the next largest city, which is Spokane.”

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Whatever exam the city uses, it has to comply with the federal consent decree and test for qualities Seattle has identified as priorities, including problem solving, empathy, and the ability to make decisions without racial bias. According to a PSCSC report released last week, that means PST would have to create a customized test for Seattle, and officer candidates would have to take that test; they couldn’t just “transfer” their application over from a different jurisdiction that uses a more generic PST test.

Additionally, PST’s test has not been “validated” to confirm that test results predict actual job performance—in other words, that people who score higher on the entrance exam perform better as cops than those with lower scores.

Kettle said he liked the idea of ranking applicants by their test scores and hiring only highly ranked applicants, but added that the city no longer has that luxury because the previous council drove down police applications. (Police hiring and recruitment declined nationwide after the murder of George Floyd sparked a racial reckoning and short-lived debate about the role of police in maintaining public safety.)

“That would be applicable if, for example, we were looking for two out of 10 qualified candidates,” Kettle said. “But the bottom line, sadly, and [this] just comes out of the actions of the previous council, is that we’re dealing with a situation where we need 10 of 10 qualified candidates.”

The qualifying test, Kettle continued, is “just the first step” in hiring and there are many more stages, including the time a new officer spends on “probation,” where SPD can filter out people who are unfit to be officers.

PST told the PSCSC that it “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now,” according to a report released last week.

Kettle noted that most Seattle police officers come from inside Washington state, “and that’s a problem, because PST is the most used [test] in Washington State. … This fact puts us at a disadvantage, a major disadvantage, when we’re trying to recruit against neighboring jurisdictions.”

Scheele called this comment “confusing. … Yes, most of our Seattle applicants are from in-state, and they seem to be applying just fine using NTN. It sort of proves the point that [the NTN test] is accessible to say that most of our hires are from within Washington, and it’s just a guess to say that we would get more applicants” by switching to a different test, she said.

During the same meeting, the committee discussed new legislation, initiated by the City Attorney’s Office, that will let the city impose a $500 fine on the registered owner of any vehicle an officer sees engaged in street racing, including vehicles in videos posted online (though not automated traffic cameras, which are governed by a state law that limits how they can be used). Kettle, who’s sponsoring the bill, said it would help address the “creation” and “reinforcing of this permissive environment” in Seattle.

As council members and police observed during the presentation, street racers often take off their license plates or trade them out to prevent cops from identifying them, so it’s unclear how many people will actually be subject to the new tickets. Also, people don’t always pay tickets for moving violations—for instance, Kevin Dave, the police officer who struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk while driving nearly three times the legal speed limit, has failed to pay the $5,000 negligent driving fine that was his only legal punishment for Kandula’s death.

Traffic calming measures like speed bumps and narrower streets can deter racing in specific hot spots, but so far, the council has not proposed addressing street racing with proposals to make it harder to break traffic laws.

Addiction, City Council, Equity, homelessness, Police, Transportation

Afternoon Fizz: Encampment Removal Recommendations, Transportation Equity, and Police Testing

Council members say no to homelessness recommendations; equitable transportation advocates decry proposals to cut community-based programs; and police recruits won’t get a chance to take an easier hiring test any time soon.

1. Seattle City Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Sara Nelson declined to sign off on a set of recommendations for responding to encampments at a King County Board of Health meeting yesterday; the recommendations, created by the Board of Health’s homelessness and health work group, include limits on encampment removals, adopting harm-reduction policies such as a “housing first” approach to people with addiction, and increasing access to mental health and substance disorder treatment.

“If we do not remove [encampments], resolve, whatever it is, we are complicit in allowing a situation where more and more people fall into or [fall] deeper into addiction and chronic homelessness because their lives are further disrupted,” Nelson said. “I think that it’s also an issue of nomenclature— ‘forced removal’ versus ‘resolution’… so much depends on the words in the statement, and so therefore, for these reasons, I will not be signing on.”

Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, said, “I’ve often said that we need to lead with compassion, we need to start with the empathy, but then we also have to have the wisdom to understand that we have the broader community to also look after.” Kettle praised the work of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s encampment removal team, the Unified Care Team, and said he liked the model at the Salmon Bay tiny house village and RV safe lot in Interbay, which “gives people the ability to basically graduate from the RV to a tiny home.”

King County Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Jorge Baron, who are both on the Board of Health, signed on to the “call to action.”

2. In response to proposals to cut funding for community-initiated transportation safety projects from the 2024 transportation levy, the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Transportation Equity Workgroup wrote a letter to the council saying the proposed cuts “will exclude your marginalized constituents who rely on a safe and accessible transportation system for their everyday needs.”

PubliCola reported this week on amendments by Councilmembers Rob Saka, Cathy Moore, and Sara Nelson to scale back or (in the case of Moore’s amendment) eliminate a proposed new participatory budgeting program aimed at building 16 projects identified and “co-created” by historically marginalized communities. Moore and Saka proposed moving funds from the proposed new program, known as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program, into a separate fund for projects council members themselves would select.

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“After expressing our concerns at the previous two council meetings through public comments and letters, we are disappointed in your lack of commitments to the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) through cuts to equitable investments that center low-income, BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, disabled, and aging communities,” the workgroup wrote.

“Community-driven projects take time in order to engage those who have been historically disengaged from city planning processes due to barriers such as: language access, lack of trust, and capacity. Relying on district-level decision-making only, as outlined in councilmember amendments, does not adequately address these barriers to full participation, and risks neglecting community-identified safety concerns in underserved areas.”

3. The president of the company that created Seattle’s police officer exams, which some City Council members have suggested replacing with a test that has a higher passing rate, appeared at a meeting of the independent Public Safety Civil Service Commission on Thursday to explain how the test is designed to predict future job performance. The Seattle Police Department began using the test, created by the National Testing Network in collaboration with SPD, in the wake of a consent decree by the US Department of Justice in 2012.

To “validate” that the test predicts job performance, NTN president Carl Swander told the commission, the company compares police officers’ test scores, which are ranked, with their subsequent on-the-job performance evaluations. Swander said by demonstrating that “at [a higher score level], people are more likely to do better than at [a lower] score level,” NTN can create a “cut score”—the maximum passing score—that weeds out people who are obviously unqualified to be police officers.

Other tests, like the Public Safety Testing exam that City Council President Sara Nelson has suggested as an alternative to the NTN test, don’t “actually substantiate… that you’re that what you’re doing is predictive of job performance,” Swander said. Ninety percent of applicants who take the PST test pass it, compared to a 73 pass rate for the NTN exam.

PSCSC director Andrea Scheele also confirmed that if Seattle did contract with PST in the future, it would have to create a custom exam for Seattle, which “eliminates or reduces, at least, the benefit of working with that company.” Nelson and other proponents of changing the hiring test have suggested that switching to PST would allow applicants to submit their test results to multiple agencies at the same time.

A report the commission issued earlier this week notes that the PST test “is not an option” because the company “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now.”

 

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police

Police Contract Gives Big Raises to Officers, Still Fails to Meet Baseline Set in 2017 Accountability Law

By Andrew Engelson

On Tuesday afternoon, a little more than two weeks after Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office publicly announced a new three-year retroactive contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, the Seattle City Council ratified the agreement 8 to 1, with councilmember Tammy Morales casting the lone dissenting vote. Almost immediately after the vote, Harrell signed the contract, calling it a needed step to advance “our vision for a city where everyone, in every neighborhood, is safe and feels secure.”

Morales, in an amendment that failed, moved to delay the Tuesday vote, noting that the contract was fast-tracked directly to the full council without any public hearings and after just twenty minutes of public comment—nearly all of it in opposition.

 “The community deserves a chance to make their voice heard before we vote on it. We shouldn’t be rushing this,” Morales said.

Before the vote, Morales noted that the new contract offers almost no changes to accountability measures for police officers. “I believe this contract as bargained does not protect the city and the lack of accountability measures puts us in continued violation of the federal consent decree,” she said, referring to the 2012 federal agreement between SPD and the US Department of Justice.

In 2023, US District Judge James Robart modified the consent decree to lift most restrictions on SPD, but on the condition that the department make additional reforms to its accountability and crowd control.

Speaking in defense of the new contract, Council President Sara Nelson said, “We have to attack our staffing crisis from both retention and recruitment and hiring angles, and this is an important piece of legislation to accomplish both of those goals – because it will also help attract new officers to the force and facilitate our recruitment efforts as well.”

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The contract, which PubliCola acquired and published in early April, retroactively gives police officers a 24 percent raise – broken down to 1.3 percent in 2021, 6.4 percent in 2022, and 15.3 percent in 2023. The raises will boost SPD’s starting pay, before overtime, to $103,000, making Seattle officers the highest-paid in the region.

According to an economic briefing before the vote by Ben Noble, director of the city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, the contract adds $39 million annually to the existing annual SPD salary budget of $170 million. In sum, the retroactive cost over three years totals $57 million, and adds $9.2 million to the city’s existing budget deficit, because the city didn’t put enough in reserve to account for the total cost of the raises.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, chair of the Public Safety committee, said before the vote, “Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it is a challenge for our budget. But if we don’t compete in this labor market, we won’t accomplish our goal of achieving a safe base in our city.” T

After signing the bill, Harrell said the agreement “will make meaningful improvements to officer pay and staffing, to accountability so misconduct is investigated, and to new efficiencies through diversified response options.”

However, critics point out that the contract offers only minor changes to accountability for police officers. It allows a 60-day extension of Office of Police Accountability’s (OPA) 180-day deadline for completing investigations into the most serious misconduct; tells arbitrators tasked with reviewing officer firings to “give deference” to the police chief’s decisions; adds just two more civilian investigators at OPA, bringing the total to four; and increases the amount of time OPA has to inform an officer of an investigation from five days to 30. Continue reading “Police Contract Gives Big Raises to Officers, Still Fails to Meet Baseline Set in 2017 Accountability Law” →