Tag: Carmen Best

King County, Police, public disclosure

No Charges Against Durkan and Best for Deleted Texts; Investigation Reveals Holes in City Records Retention Policies
Dan Clark, Mainstream Criminal Division Chief, King County Prosecutor’s Office

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Prosecutor’s Office announced yesterday that they will not pursue criminal charges against former mayor Jenny Durkan, former police chief Carmen Best, and other city officials who deleted thousands text messages during the 2020 protests against police violence. Officials from the prosecutor’s office said yesterday that they were unable to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the officials intentionally deleted the messages with the intent of destroying public information.

“There’s no evidence that the involved individuals intended to permanently delete anything,” mainstream criminal division chief Dan Clark said. “And for most of the individuals, they were actually trying to recover access to their phones, when the deletions occurred.”

Six of the 27 records requests that involved texts that were deleted from the phones of Durkan, Best, and other city officials were filed by PubliCola—the most from any individual news organization. In these requests, we asked for communications about the use of encrypted messaging systems, demonstrations by Black Lives Matter activists, the decision to use tear gas, flash grenades, and other weapons during the 2020 protests, and meetings between Durkan and community groups, among other issues we were covering at the time. PubliCola frequently relies on records requests for internal information from city officials, so the destruction of these messages harmed our ability to provide newsworthy information to the public.

In a civil case against the city filed by businesses in the vicinity of the 2020 protests, US District Judge Thomas Zilly said Durkan’s “various reasons for deleting her text messages strain credibility.” The city settled that case in February. Clark noted that the burden of proof for a criminal case is higher than the standard for that civil case, which requires only a “preponderance of the evidence” deo show that officials intentionally deleted text messages with the intent of destroying public information.

The investigation, conducted by King County Sheriff’s Office detective Joseph Gagliardi, included a review of thousands of pages of depositions with Durkan, Best, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and other city officials, all taken during previous lawsuits against the city. The investigators did not interview any of the individuals who destroyed city records during this investigation, relying on existing documents, including forensic analysis of city-issued phones.

In former police chief Carmen Best’s case, the investigation found that she, as well as other city employees, had a “reasonable belief” that her text messages were being backed up somewhere, based on the fact that city emails go to a central server even if people delete them on their city devices.

In his investigation, Gagliardi described two types of situations in which text messages were destroyed. The first, more common, type involved officials getting locked out of their phones, either temporarily or permanently, because they forgot their passwords or through other mishaps. In these cases, according to Gagliardi, the officials lost their messages either after doing a “hard reset” that deleted all their information, or because they, or some other unidentified person, changed the settings on their phone in a way that led to mass deletions.

The investigation concluded that Chief Scoggins, SPD Captain Eric Greening, SPD Chief Strategy Officer Chris Fisher, Seattle Emergency Operations Center coordinator Ken Neafcy, and Seattle Public Utilities manager Idris Beauregard all got locked out of their phones because of errors related to their passwords, usually because they made too many password attempts and their phones automatically reverted to factory settings. Fisher, for example, “stated that he’s had to reset his work phone multiple times, because the passcodes have to be changed frequently and he’s very bad at remembering them.”

Scoggins testified that he took his phone to the Apple Store after city IT employees couldn’t get it to work again, and store employees performed a hard reset, deleting all his data.

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The investigation notes that city phones require employees to reset their passwords every 90 days, which Gagliardi said contributed to officials’ tendency to forget their passwords. In response to a question from PubliCola about text retention, Gagliardi quipped, “I would also argue with the expectation that these people know how phones work.”

Durkan said in earlier depositions that she dropped her phone in a puddle on the beach, dried it out in a bag of rice, and then restored all her messages from an iCloud account. City officials, in general, are not supposed to save things to cloud servers because of security concerns, so this was actually a violation of a separate city records policy.

Later, someone changed her settings from “keep messages: Forever” to “keep messages: 30 days,” which was “the single factor that caused the destruction of all of Mayor DURKAN’s text messages sent or received between 10/30/2019 and 6/24/2020,” according to the investigation. Durkan denied changing this setting, as did her longtime friend and assistant, Colleen O’Reilly Bernier.

However, the investigation noted that Bernier made a number of “demonstrably false” statements during her deposition—falsely claiming, for example, that she didn’t handle Durkan’s phone after it was damaged on the beach, when she actually made changes to the phone’s settings with the help of a city IT employee. This suggests, according to the investigation that Bernier may have changed the setting, resulting in the destruction of thousands of messages; however, Gagliardi wrote in his investigation notes that there was no way to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.

“They’ve basically encouraged the deletion of transitory messages almost immediately. They said there’s no reason to keep those messages at all. They have left the termination of whether or not a message is transitory up to their employee.”—Chief investigator Detective Gagliardi, King County Sheriff’s Office

In Best’s case, the investigation found that she, as well as other city employees, had a “reasonable belief” that her text messages were being backed up somewhere, based on the fact that city emails go to a central server even if people delete them on their city devices.

“We don’t have any evidence to suggest that to the contrary, that she believed anything else,” Clark, from the prosecutor’s office, said. “There’s no smoking gun, if you will—there’s no admission by her of, you know, ‘Hey, everybody, let’s get together and delete all of our text messages’ or anything of that nature to call into question her reasonable but mistaken belief.'”

Even if Best hadn’t believed the city was backing up her text messages on a server somewhere, the investigation found, the overwhelming majority of her messages were “transitory” in nature, meaning they didn’t deal with substantive policy decisions and were of “short-term, temporary informational use.”

“They’ve basically encouraged the deletion of transitory messages almost immediately,” Gagliardi said yesterday. “They said there’s no reason to keep those messages at all. They have left the termination of whether or not a message is transitory up to their employee.”

Jennifer Winkler, the city’s longtime records manager, told investigators that employees could theoretically ask to have their messages saved on a secure server. However, “they have not identified such a secure server to save those text messages. Essentially, the city of Seattle established the policy and not the practice,” Gagliardi said. This means that unless the city changes its policy, it will continue to be up to individual employees, all the way up to the mayor of Seattle, to decide whether their messages or worth saving or to delete them permanently.

Example messages from the investigation, however, included a number of texts that are similar to texts reporters receive routinely in response to city of Seattle records requests, suggesting that this “transitory” standard is applied inconsistently. Additionally, the texts included information that could be of interest to the general public, including messages sent during the protests about immediate strategies and tactics, such as movement of police from one place to another. According to the investigation, these messages were exempt from rules against deletion because the information in these texts “was subsequently documented in official Seattle Police incident reports and after-action reviews.”

Ultimately, Best deleted almost every text in her phone manually, later justifying the deletions by saying all the messages were “transitory.” Similarly, Durkan “stated that she avoided using text messaging for policy decisions, stating that due to the pandemic and then the protests, she was having cabinet meetings almost every day and that most of her communications were in person. She specifically stated that “the practice would be to not communicate things of substance by text.”

As for the “reasonable belief” that all text messages are stored in a server somewhere, Gagliardi noted that most of the officials named in the investigation were not particularly tech-savvy and wouldn’t realize, for example, that text messages in general don’t automatically go to a separate server once they’re deleted. When you delete messages from your personal phone, your cell-phone provider does not pay for a server to save them for you; unless you save them to a separate server or cloud service, they’re just gone.

When PubliCola asked Gagliardi if it was possible for any city official to save their text messages after deleting them, he laughed and responded, “Yes and no.” Jennifer Winkler, the city’s longtime records manager, told investigators that employees could theoretically ask to have their messages saved on a secure server. However, “they have not identified such a secure server to save those text messages. Essentially, the city of Seattle established the policy and not the practice.” This means that unless the city changes its policy, it will continue to be up to individual employees, all the way up to the mayor of Seattle, to decide whether their messages or worth saving or to delete them permanently.

Mayor Durkan, Police

Assistant Chief Who Ordered Abandoning East Precinct Cleared of Wrongdoing

SPD East Precinct, June 2020

By Paul Kiefer

Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability released findings on Monday afternoon clearing former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best and current Assistant Chief Tom Mahaffey of wrongdoing in the evacuation of the department’s East Precinct last June.

Questions about the decision to abandon the precinct swirled for more than a year without any clarity from the department until KUOW published an investigation in July that identified Mahaffey—the commander in charge of managing the department’s protest response on June 8—as the person who made the call.

OPA director Andrew Myerberg criticized SPD for being silent about the decision to abandon the precinct, writing that the decision created “a sense of distrust within community and the belief that there was something nefarious at play.” In a statement issued on Monday afternoon, City Council President Lorena González echoed the same frustration, writing that the OPA’s report “shows how SPD treated responsibility as a ‘hot potato’ that no one wanted to get caught holding… You can’t always predict the outcome of key decisions—and mistakes will happen—but the damage to public trust is made much worse when high-ranking SPD leaders play games of hot potato and fail to be forthright with elected officials, the media and the public.”

However, Myerberg also concluded that Best had the authority to delegate decision-making to Mahaffey. Similarly, he determined that Mahaffey’s decision to evacuate the precinct was based on the information available to him—including flawed claims from the FBI of a terrorist threat—and that his decision allowed SPD to temporarily de-escalate. “No one—including OPA—can say that [an] alternative strategy would have produced better results than those that occurred or that it would have prevented CHOP/CHAZ from forming,” he wrote, “just as no one can say this unidentified alternative strategy would not have resulted in more uses of force to disperse the crowd and, potentially, to rescue stranded and endangered officers left inside of the precinct.”

Assistant Chief Brian Grenon described panicked officers “ripping open lockers” and “kicking in doors” during a mad-dash attempt to gather all the weapons, computers and hard drives in the building. After supervisors intervened, the precinct’s officers departed for the West Precinct.

The OPA’s investigation, which relied on interviews with Best, Mahaffey and other SPD employees and members of Mayor Jenny Durkan’s staff, largely mirrored KUOW’s version of events, with two exceptions. In early June, with the East Precinct at the center of nightly protests on Capitol Hill, SPD leaders were increasingly anxious about the risk of an attack on the precinct. Protesters in Minneapolis had burned a police precinct to the ground less than two weeks earlier, and SPD leadership worried that the same thing could happen in Seattle.

Meanwhile, the department’s initial protest response, which relied heavily on barriers, fixed lines of officers in riot gear, and weapons like tear gas and pepper spray, only escalated the conflict on the streets outside the East Precinct. Continue reading “Assistant Chief Who Ordered Abandoning East Precinct Cleared of Wrongdoing” →

Addiction, Courts, Crime, homelessness, King County, Mayor Durkan, Media, Morning Fizz, Police

Women’s Shelter Rejected, More Hyperbole About “Basic Needs” Defense, Former Chief Equates Right Wing Riots to BLM Protests
Image by Robert Ashworth on Flickr.

1. For more than two months, the homeless women’s shelter provider WHEEL has been asking Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to let them operate a nighttime-only women’s shelter on the Fourth Avenue side of City Hall—an area known colloquially as the “Red Room” because of the frosted red glass doors that give the space a bloody cast. Although staffers in the city’s Human Services Department have reportedly expressed a willingness to let the group open a shelter in the space, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office tells PubliCola that they need to keep the Red Room vacant in case they need it for winter emergency shelter.

“We’ve received WHEEL’s request and HSD is working to identify potential locations to operate a program hosted by that agency,” Durkan’s communications director Kamaria Hightower said. She did not offer any additional information about the timeline for this work or where the potential locations might be.

Even before COVID, the city had few shelter beds available for women on a typical night, particularly for single women who don’t want to stay in co-ed shelters. Now, with shelters either full or admitting only a couple of new clients a night, there are even fewer open beds.

WHEEL’s current shelter, at Trinity Episcopal Parish near downtown, can only accept about 30 clients a night because of COVID social-distancing restrictions, down from a high of as many as 60 pre-COVID. In its most recent letter to the mayor, on January 6, a group of WHEEL representatives wrote that “[w]ith the capacities of so many shelters cut in half or more, we need to add capacity to make up for the loss. … Shelters have been closed for intake due to COVID outbreaks-this will happen again, and again. Others are top bunkbeds [which aren’t accessible to people with mobility issues], or require a COVID test and a quarantine for intake, or require staying put and making curfew, or just have higher-barrier requirements for stay.”

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A WHEEL member told PubliCola that the only response they received from Durkan’s office was a form letter touting her administration’s work on homelessness titled “Helping to Address Homelessness in Our Region” and addressed to “Dear Neighbor.”

Until last November, the Red Room and the main lobby of City Hall on Fifth Avenue served as an overnight shelter space for 75 people, operated by the Salvation Army on a walk-in basis. That month, the Salvation Army shelter was relocated to a former car dealership in SoDo and stopped accepting walk-in clients.

SHARE, WHEEL’s partner organization, also requested permission to operate the main lobby as a co-ed shelter.

Anitra Freeman, a SHARE/WHEEL member, said WHEEL’s low-barrier model makes it more accessible than other shelters, which have “very strict rules” about client behavior, substance use, and willingness to participate in case management. “There are a lot of people out on the street who don’t fit in a very structured program,” she said. “These are the hardest-to-serve people who are also the most vulnerable and the most likely to die outside.”

In an email to a contract specialist at the city last month, an unnamed WHEEL representative gave several examples of recent clients that fit into that category, including a woman who showed up at the shelter, soiled herself, and remained nearly “catatonic” when the shelter took her in; a frequent client with “significant and profound mental health issues” who was kicked out of the hotel where she was staying; and woman who had just been released from a hospital in the middle of the night.

2. City Councilmember Lisa Herbold’s legislation that would allow attorneys to argue that an indigent client committed a misdemeanor, such as shoplifting, to meet their basic needs is prompting a new round of misinformation, this time from the Downtown Seattle Association, which claimed in an email to members yesterday that the bill would “simply make crimes legal.”

This, as PubliCola has written previously, is untrue. The legislation would simply allow attorneys (general public defenders) to assert that a client committed a crime to meet an “immediate basic need,” such as the need for food or shelter, as a defense in court. A judge or jury would then consider whether the person’s actions met the burden—did they commit a low-level crime to meet a basic human need, or not?—in determining whether the person’s behavior was criminal or not.

Opponents of a basic-need defense have argued that it will legalize all crime and allow people to ransack the city, particularly downtown businesses hit hard by shoplifting and other low-level offenses. But the fact is that the current policy of demonizing and jailing people who commit low-level survival crimes has not worked to reduce these crimes, nor does it benefit the city to lump all misdemeanors together as if people all commit the same crimes for the same reason. Someone operating a large secondary market in stolen merchandise is not engaging in the same act as someone stealing a loaf of bread from the grocery store. Continue reading “Women’s Shelter Rejected, More Hyperbole About “Basic Needs” Defense, Former Chief Equates Right Wing Riots to BLM Protests” →

City Council, Mayor Durkan, Police, Politics

Durkan Will Veto Council Budget Over Cuts to Police Department; Council President Hopes for Compromise

As I first reported on Twitter this morning, Mayor Jenny Durkan will announce this afternoon that she will veto the city council’s midyear budget rebalancing package, a move that could effectively remove one co-equal branch of government from the city’s budget process by reinstating Durkan’s original budget proposal with no input from the council. The council could overturn the veto, as they did the mayor’s recent veto of a COVID relief package that relies on future revenues from the JumpStart payroll tax. Or—as seems likely—the council try to work with Durkan to come up with a rebalancing package that the mayor will accept.

“The bills I am vetoing today were passed without the level of collaboration that I think we need, and more important, that the city expects of us,” Durkan said at a press conference this afternoon, “but I am optimistic that we can continue to work together to bridge the gaps. I continue to believe that we can [reach] common ground on the vision for SPD that has been laid out by Chief [Carmen] Best and I.”

The objections Durkan raised were familiar to anyone who has been following the debate over police defunding: The mayor said that the council is attempting to change things “overnight,” “without a plan,” and that her budget proposals already contain large cuts to the police department. The vast majority of those cuts, however, come from transferring some current SPD functions, such as the 911 dispatch center, into other parts of the budget—not from transforming the city’s approach to public safety or reducing the number of SPD officers, as protesters have been demanding since May.

City council president Lorena González said in an interview that she is “incredibly disappointed’ in the mayor’s decision to veto yet another council spending proposal. “It is obvious that there is a significant difference of opinion between the City Council and the mayor and the chief on what can and should be achieved in 2020 in order to respond to the calls from community to reduce the Seattle Police Department’s budget this year and begin the process of investing in community safety programs,” González says.

The rebalancing proposal was necessary to deal with a midyear budget shortfall of around $300 million, a number that keeps getting edited upward as new revenue projections come in.

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The council’s plan included more significant, but still relatively minor, cuts. The version they adopted cuts SPD’s budget by 7 percent by eliminating the encampment-removing Navigation Team, reducing the salaries of SPD command staff (including Best, whose 2020 pay was reduced by $6,000) and cutting 100 positions at SPD through a combination of layoffs and attrition. The council’s proposal also provided $3 million to start a participatory process to reallocate SPD to community-based public health and safety programs, plus $14 million to a combination of city and community programs, funded through an interfund loan that Durkan said was the main reason for her objection to that particular spending proposal.

“Look, it’s a loan that I’m not sure we can repay, and we know with the coming budget that we will have to do some interfund loans just to keep the city services that we have,” Durkan said.

Durkan mentioned the Navigation Team specifically at several points during her press conference, suggesting that the council wanted to cut the team “without a plan” to deal with dangerous encampments. “I’ve had open houses with a number of community and neighborhood groups in the last weeks, and the impact that some of these encampments are having are real— and they are also real for the people living in those encampments,” she said. “We have to have a way to bring people inside and address the public safety [issues], and the cuts did not allow us an opportunity to do that.” Since the pandemic began, the city has provided only about 100 new shelter spaces for the thousands of people living unsheltered in Seattle.

Under the city charter, the council must take a vote to overturn or sustain the veto within 30 days. Council president Lorena González says her hope is that, rather than simply overturning another mayoral veto, the council will be able to “come to some agreement  with the mayor around a rebalanced package, and that’s going to be a two-way street. We need her to make a good-faith effort to engage in order to meaningfully move this forward.”

Otherwise, González says, the council and mayor will likely stay stuck in “this constant back and forth” of vetoes and votes to overturn. “This mayor has made a historical number of vetoes. I’m not aware of any other mayor in the history of the city of Seattle who’s used veto power at this level, and I think that she is sending us a clear message that she will continue to do so,” González says.

It’s clear that there are still significant gaps between what the council wants and what the mayor will accept. In particular, it’s unclear what, exactly, the mayor would consider “on the table” when brokering a future “compromise” with the council. The Navigation Team, community spending, participatory budgeting research, command staff salaries, and SPD personnel cuts seem to be off the table.

But there is also now precedent for compromise between the mayor and the council. This afternoon, Durkan also announced an agreement on the COVID relief package that is much smaller than the council’s original proposal but that will, in the words of JumpStart sponsor Teresa Mosqueda, enable the city to “mov[e] forward jointly as we cannot wait another day” for relief to residents and small businesses impacted by the pandemic.

Media, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: Stranger Editor Nixed, Former County Dems Director 86’d

By Erica C. Barnett

Doing a retro Morning Fizz this morning to round up a few items I haven’t been able to get to.

1. Bailey Stober, the former head of the King County Democrats who lost his position in 2018 due to allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, and financial mismanagement, called police late one Friday night in July to report what he described as a 10-person bar brawl at the Cloud 9 tavern in Kent. According to reports from witnesses, the fight started when security asked Stober to take his feet off a bar stool and he refused. I documented Stober’s downfall as head of the county Democrats—a saga that included misogynistic text messages, thousands of dollars spent on office rent, booze, and boys’ club getaways, and accusations that one of his accusers was an unreliable drug addict—on the Crank.

Stober resigned from his $90,000-a-year job as communications director for the King County assessor in 2018, amid an investigation into whether his behavior as head of the Democrats disqualified him from the position. But he quickly landed on his feet, taking consulting jobs for local campaigns before getting a full-time position as communications director for Kent Mayor Dana Ralph.

Witnesses interviewed by police who arrived at the Cloud 9 around 2 in the morning on July 11 said that after refusing to take his feet off the bar stool or leave the bar when asked to do so, Stober “began yelling that he works for the City of Kent and that he works for Kent PD.” According to the police report, “As [Stober] was proclaiming his employment, he began waving around his City of Kent ID card.”

Stober later told an officer that he had only claimed to work for the mayor, not the police.

At that point, several witnesses told police, someone punched someone else in the face, and a confusing fight between security guards and several patrons who were with Stober ensued.

Stober, according to all accounts, left the bar and went outside to call 911 without getting mixed up in the fight himself. When officers arrived, he told one that “he believed he may have instigated a bar fight without intending to,” according to one officer’s account.

Another officer reported that “[b]efore I could ask any further questions, he stated ‘I already called the Mayor and the Chief.'” Later, the same officer reported, “Bailey was advised he was trespassed from Cloud Nine for life. Bailey said he understood and would not be coming back.

“Bailey appeared to be very intoxicated during this investigation,” the officer’s account continues. “Bailey mentioned he worked for the Mayor’s Office and made comments to myself and other officers’ that Cloud Nine’s liquor license would not be renewed.”

The Kent City Attorney declined to file charges against Stober and the case was closed in early August.

Contacted by email, Kent Mayor Dana Ralph said her office “has reviewed Mr. Stober’s conduct from a personnel standpoint, taken proper disciplinary action, and documented it in his personnel file. We consider the matter resolved.” Ralph did not specify what disciplinary action she took against Stober, and Stober himself did not respond to an email seeking comment.

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2. A Seattle resident has filled a complaint with the city’s Office of Police Accountability against police chief Carmen Best for “using her official position to promote her private affairs.” The complaint centers on Best’s use of the police department’s website to complain about demonstrators who attempted to show up at her house in Snohomish, a small town about 30 miles north of Seattle.

“[T]he time she, and other employees spend on posting the article on the blog, is not a matter for the City of Seattle, and as a resident of Seattle, my tax dollars should not go to waste on this issue outside of the city,” the complaint says. “This is a serious matter, and a full investigation of what resources Carmen is directing to support her private residence needs to come to public attention.”

The complaint bounced around a bit, going to the city auditor’s office and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission before landing on OPA director Andrew Myerberg’s desk. Myerberg says OPA is doing intake on the complaint (along with thousands of others stemming from ongoing protests against police violence) now, a process that takes up to 30 days. Once that’s done, the office will determine whether Best violated any city policy and, “even if we close it as a contact log”—a designation that means OPA found no misconduct—”we’ll send some kind of explanation.”

3. Longtime Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle is no longer employed by the publication. Last week, a majority of the Stranger’s editorial staffers reportedly told upper management it was him—or them. The decision didn’t come out of the blue; according to sources, editorial staffers have been dissatisfied with much of the online content, including daily video messages from people in the Seattle arts scene, and had issues with Frizzelle’s management style.

The paper has not published a print edition since early March, and has downsized dramatically since the onset of the pandemic, laying off all of its print production staff and many editorial staffers. 

City Council, Police

“This Was Never Personal. It Was Always About Changing Systems.” Council Members Stand Behind “Corrected” Statements on Police Chief Departure
Tammy Morales and Teresa Mosqueda; image via City of Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

Reporters covering the reactions to Seattle police chief Carmen Best’s resignation yesterday received two different versions of a joint statement from council members Lorena González, Teresa Mosqueda, and Tammy Morales. The first pushed back explicitly on Best’s claim that the council cut SPD’s budget, and the salaries of the department’s command staff, for personal and “retaliatory” reasons. The second, less than half the length of the original, thanked Best for her service and reiterated the council’s commitment to systemic changes in the city’s approach to public safety.

The original statement, which the council’s communications office “recalled” and replaced minutes after sending it, contextualized the cuts as part of a larger effort to address “accountability and systemic racism in Seattle’s Police Department [and repair] the harm done by this City to Black and Brown communities.” It also emphasized that both Best and the three Latina council members were all women of color, who “face the impossible task of reforming and improving institutions never designed to serve our communities.”

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“As women of color in public service, it can feel impossible to do this work in very visible positions of power. We cannot lead by tearing each other down, despite whatever policy disagreements we may have,” the initial statement said.

Although the hasty recall and overhaul of the original statement might imply that the three council members regretted their original comments, all three confirmed to The C Is for Crank that they still stood by what they said in the initial press release.

“This was never personal; it was always about changing systems,” Mosqueda said Wednesday afternoon. “It’s unfortunate that she saw [cuts to the police department] as personal in nature. This was never, ever an adversarial comment made about the chief. This was always about the system.”

González, who said “gave [the chief] my commitment that I would never tear her down because as a woman of color I understood what a difficult position she was in,” said she didn’t regret her vote to cut the command staff’s salaries, a decision Best has explicitly called “vindictive and punitive.”

“When we were looking at the budget and attempting to respond to the calls of community to take action, to invest in solutions that produce racial justice outcomes,  the reality is that everything is on the table,” González said, “and the SPD executives’ salaries were clearly out of line with the salaries of other executive teams in the city.”

And Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, said that although she’s “sad to see Chief Best go” because she “brings a unique perspective and lived experience that would have been valuable to the work we’re going to try to do,” the city has been trying to address police accountability and violence since long “before Chief Best was the chief.

“It wasn’t about her—it was about the institution she was a part of, and this is an institution that’s rooted in racism,” Morales said. “Chief Best is loved by her staff and her department, but they are all still part of that system, and that’s what we’re trying to change … the institution and the harm that it’s done. Speaking as the representative from District 2″—the most diverse, and Blackest, district in the city—”that’s what I came into this office to do.”