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.

Cops, 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, Cops, Featured, 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.

Cops, Democratic Party, Featured, 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, Cops, Featured, 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.”

Cops, Featured, Mayor Durkan, Police, race

Police Chief Carmen Best Explains Her Decision To Resign; Durkan Says No Search For Replacement This Year

By Paul Kiefer

In a press conference Tuesday morning that she insisted was not “a wake,” Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said she is stepping down on September 2 because, in her words, “When it’s time, it’s time.” 

Best announced her resignation to SPD’s sworn and civilian staff on Monday, shortly after the Seattle City Council voted to approve cuts to the Police Department’s budget that are supposed to be first step in a larger effort to shift resources away from traditional policing and towards community-based alternatives. Those cuts are meant to reduce the police force by roughly 100 officers (although many of those cuts will be through attrition) and cut the salaries of SPD’s command staff, including Best. After some debate about the optics of reducing the chief’s salary by nearly 40 percent, to $171,000, the council voted to cut is from $294,000 to $275,000. 

Best said she felt that the council was targeting her personally, which she said she took as a sign that she could no longer effectively lead the department. “At some point, every leader has to recognize when you can’t move the needle forward for the men and women in the organization,” she said. “I don’t want the animus that has been directed at me to affect the people who work for me. Targeting my command staff and their pay felt very vindictive and very punitive.”

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If you enjoy breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going.

If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. I’m truly grateful for your support.

Best has consistently claimed that any layoffs would have to target the most junior officers—a more diverse group than SPD as a whole—in order to avoid age and race discrimination against white officers who have been on the force longer, and she cited this as another key factor in her decision. She also called the council’s plan for downsizing the department “duplicitous,” pointing to the council’s $1.6 million investment last year in SPD’s efforts to hire a more diverse class of recruits. “Less than a year later, we’re told to turn them all away,” she said. 

Mayor Jenny Durkan took the podium after Best to offer the chief an emotional goodbye, praising her as “the right person to help reimagine policing in this city.” Durkan’s portrayal of Best as a model reformer is not entirely surprising—driven together by ongoing protests against SPD policies in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the two have worked together closely for the past few months—but it is a remarkable turnaround from the 2018 police chief selection process, when Durkan didn’t even include then-interim chief Best as one of the three finalists.

Like Best, Durkan also directed harsh criticism at the city council for their approach to reconfiguring the SPD budget, placing the greatest emphasis on her claim that the council actively avoided hearing input from Best. “It has been mystifying to watch city council plow ahead without talking to her, consulting with her, or listening to her pleas to be thoughtful,” Durkan said. City council member Lisa Herbold points to budget policy, established by the council and executive, that prevents department heads from consulting the council about their budget during the budget process. 

In her response to Best’s resignation and sense that the council had not shown her respect, Herbold—the council’s public safety committee chair— offered an apology. “I am deeply and sincerely sorry that the Chief feels Council’s actions have been disrespectful toward individual officers, and that our journey to reimagine community safety has been personally directed at her,” Herbold said in a statement.

But Herbold also pushed back on some of Best’s past claims that the council treated her unfairly. “After the first weekend of demonstrations, after the Chief addressed the Council, she told me that the Council had disrespected her in questioning her in committee about the actions of the police,” Herbold recalled. “Indeed, it is the Council’s job to ask questions.”

“You know what a Black city council member would have done? They would have held a press conference, even if they disagreed with the Chief, and asked why the council wasn’t consulting with the Chief.” — Community Police Commission member Rev. Harriett Walden

Other council members who voted for the cut to Best’s salary stood by their votes by expressing regret over Best’s departure. In an interview, city council member Tammy Morales said “the work that the council has been doing the past two months is not personal,” but added that while “it is important that the chief of police is responsible for the behavior of SPD during the George Floyd protests, it’s hard to see a woman of color in a leadership position make this decision. I think the city will lose out for not having somebody like her leading.”

In separate statements today, the three council members who did not vote for the pay cut— Debora Juarez, Alex Pedersen and Andrew Lewis – echoed some of Best’s criticisms. Juarez, who was not present for yesterday’s vote, was the harshest in her rebuke of her colleagues, writing that “Chief Best’s resignation is a wake-up call for the Council and the Mayor’s office that we must work cooperatively to re-envision public safety.” Juarez also placed some responsibility for Best’s resignation on demonstrators, adding, “it’s also a reminder to the public that their actions have consequences too. Harassment and intimidation are not social justice tools.”

“We know that only deep structural change—not the resignation and replacement of any single person—will protect Black lives and stop racist policing.”—Statement from Decriminalize Seattle

Juarez is the only council member who has refused meet with Every Day March demonstrators who have protested outside the homes of council members and other officials; when the marchers attempted to visit Chief Best’s home in Snohomish, they were turned away by a brigade of residents, at least one of them armed. Best later used the police department’s website to denounce the protesters and applaud her neighbors.

Community members had a mix of reactions to Best’s resignation. Reverend Harriett Walden, a member of the Community Policing Commission from its outset and a Best supporter, said the inexperienced, “anti-Black” council refused to collaborate with Best and helped drive her away. “This is the first time in 50 years that we haven’t had a Black person on the council and we’re supposed to be all right with that,” Walden said after the press conference. (Bruce Harrell, the council’s last Black member, was replaced by a Latinx woman, Tammy Morales.) “You know what a Black city council member would have done? They would have held a press conference, even if they disagreed with the Chief, and asked why the council wasn’t consulting with the Chief.”

In a statement released this afternoon, Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County seemed to agree with Walden’s assessment. “It does nothing to further our fight for authentic police accountability and the safety of Black lives that the first Black woman to hold the position of Chief of Police of the Seattle Police Department has been forced out of her job by the Seattle City Council. Racism is racism,” representatives of the organization wrote. “We demand transparency and accountability for the series of actions and inactions that led to Chief Best’s resignation. And we demand a successor that serves Black Lives.”

Decriminalize Seattle, which has been a prominent influence in the council’s recent decision-making, did not attribute Best’s resignation to racism on the council. Nor did they celebrate it as a victory. “Our goal has never been to oust Chief Best,” the group’s leadership wrote on their Facebook page this afternoon. “We know that only deep structural change—not the resignation and replacement of any single person—will protect Black lives and stop racist policing.”

When Best’s resignation takes effect on September 2nd, Durkan has chosen Deputy Chief Adrian Diaz—until recently the assistant chief responsible for the department’s collaborative policing bureau—to become the interim chief. During the press conference today, Durkan announced that she will not launch a search for a new permanent police chief this year, citing the tensions between her office and the city council and the “infuriating” cuts to the department’s budget. “If we started a search right now, I doubt that we could attract the candidates that Seattle deserves,” she said, “because they don’t know what they’re applying for.”

City Council, Cops, Featured, Mayor Durkan, Police

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best Stepping Down September 2

By Erica C. Barnett

Shortly after the city council’s vote to reduce the Seattle Police Department’s budget about 7 percent this year—with a promise of much more to come—Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best announced she is stepping down on September 2. Assistant police chief Adrian Diaz will serve as interim chief.

The C Is for Crank independently confirmed Best’s resignation.

Best, the first African American woman to serve as police chief in Seattle’s history, has been criticized by advocates for police defunding, including those who were injured by “less-lethal” weapons such as tear gas during recent protests, and praised by the mayor and SPD supporters for defending her department in the face of proposals to cut its funding.

Best recently made headlines when she praised her neighbors in Snohomish, where she lives, for chasing away a group of protesters who attempted to go to her home; video posted by the Every Day March demonstrators show a blockade of pickup trucks across the road and at least one man wielding a shotgun.

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The C Is for Crank is supported entirely by generous contributions from readers like you.

If you enjoy breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going.

If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. I’m truly grateful for your support.

In a letter to her staff, Best directed her praise toward Mayor Jenny Durkan and the rank and file, thanking the mayor “for her continuous support through good times and tough times” and assuring officers that despite “these difficult times…the vast majority of people in Seattle support you and appreciate you.”

“I look forward to seeing how this department moves forward through the process of reenvisioning public safety,” Best continued. “I relish the work that will be done by all of you.

She said nothing about the city council, which voted last week to reduce her salary from nearly $300,000 to $171,000, then decided against it today.

Durkan responded to Best’s letter by sending her own letter to officers, which called Best’s leadership “unmatched nationwide, which is why it is a sad day for our City to lose her.”

Best (and the mayor) have consistently opposed attempts to defund the police department, arguing that the city has been a model of reform and transparency and that cuts would jeopardize SPD’s ability to respond to crimes in progress like burglaries and rapes.

Although Best didn’t give a specific reason for her resignation, Durkan did, saying in her letter to SPD staff that Best left because “she concluded that the best way to serve the city and help the department was a change in leadership, in the hope that would change the dynamics to move forward with the City Council.” 
“I also know it seems like the real strides SPD has made in recent years are going unrecognized,” Durkan wrote. “[Y]our work and dedication is probably more important than it has ever been, and … the city needs and supports you.”
City Council, Economy, Featured, homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Police

Council Takes a Small Bite Out of Police Budget As New Forecast Predicts Even Bigger Shortfall

This post originally appeared at the South Seattle Emerald.

By Erica C. Barnett

Advocates for an immediate 50 percent cut to the Seattle Police Department’s budget may have walked away unsatisfied Monday evening, when the city council passed a midyear budget package that lopped just 7 percent off SPD’s remaining 2020 budget. But the council majority left no question that they consider the short-term cuts a down payment on a more substantive proposal next year—one that, importantly, has a shot of making it through labor negotiations with the powerful police officers’ union.

The budget would eliminate the equivalent of 100 full-time officers through a combination of layoffs and attrition. The council made requests for specific layoffs—zeroing in, for example, on the Navigation Team, the mounted patrol, and the sworn portion of SPD’s public affairs office—but they have no power to actually dictate how the police department spends it budget, which is why no “defund the police” proposal (short of eliminating the department altogether) actually requires the chief to spend her budget in the way the council wants.

As a result, the rhetoric around the council’s cuts has often been far more heated than the modest changes suggest.

Council member Kshama Sawant, who cast the lone “no” vote against the rebalancing package (Debora Juarez was absent), accused her colleagues of passing an “austerity budget” that “fails working people” because it did not include her version of the so-called “Amazon” (payroll) tax. (Budget chair Teresa Mosqueda’s retort: “No one is siding with Jeff Bezos.”)

Mayor Durkan, who has held numerous press conferences to denounce the council majority’s more modest plan, issued a statement after the vote saying it was “unfortunate Council has refused to engage in a collaborative process to work with the Mayor, Chief Best, and community members to develop a budget and policies that respond to community needs while accounting for – not just acknowledging – the significant labor and legal implications involved in transforming” SPD.

The package of bills adopted Monday would also:

• Express a commitment to creating a new a civilian-led Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention by the end of next year—a proposal Sawant mocked as “resolution to hope to study defunding the police”;

• Start the process of civilianizing the 911 system by putting a civilian director and deputy director in charge of the 911 call center (which is already run by non-sworn SPD personnel);

• Reallocate funding that Durkan originally allocated for an expansion of probation to community groups working to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable populations;

• Cut the salaries of SPD’s command staff (with the exception of Best, who would see her $294,000 salary reduced by less than $20,000);

• Allocate $1.7 million to non-congregate shelter, through a proviso that would prohibit Durkan’s Human Services Department from spending the money on any other purpose

• Empower the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program to enroll new clients into its Co-LEAD program, which has been held up by the executive branch for months, without SPD participation; and

• Earmark $17 million for community organizations working to create new systems of community safety outside the police department.

• Move millions of dollars from levy funds that were supposed to pay to expand programs or create new ones to pay for the ongoing operations of city departments, such as the Seattle Department of Transportation and the Department of Education and Early Learning;

The changes adopted Monday amend Mayor Durkan’s original budget-balancing proposal, which relied heavily on a hiring freeze, emergency funds, federal grants, and levy dollars that had been allocated for other purposes to close an anticipated shortfall of more than $200 million. On Monday morning, just minutes before the weekly council briefing meeting, the mayor’s office distributed a memo from CBO director Ben Noble projecting an additional revenue shortfall of $26 million this year alone.

Near the end of almost eight straight hours of budget discussions, council member Lisa Herbold said she wanted to state for the record that “we as a council and the mayor’s office are in a really unique position to seize upon a moment in the city and in this country” by taking seriously community demands to redefine public safety and defund the police. “I am hopeful that we are more aligned in our desire to do that than it has appeared in the last two weeks.”

That hope seems optimistic. In adopting the midyear budget Monday, the council rejected Durkan’s proposal to discard the historical practice of two-year budgeting, demanded a report that would provide more transparency into how SPD is actually spending its budget, and prepared to overturn Durkan’s veto of a COVID relief plan that would temporarily drain the city’s emergency reserves until they can be replenished with funds from the new payroll tax that goes into effect in 2022. The council will start the whole process over again next month, when the mayor proposes her 2021 budget.

City Council, City Hall, Featured, labor, Police, public safety

“Out-of-Order” Layoffs at Center of Police Defunding Debate
Seattle police chief Carmen Best

By Paul Kiefer

For the past several weeks, Mayor Jenny Durkan and Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best have argued that the City Council’s plan to reduce SPD’s budget through targeted layoffs would be infeasible and potentially illegal. Council members say that isn’t true, and argue that the mayor and police chief are digging in their heels because they don’t want to do any layoffs at all.

The council’s proposal would use a series of provisos (legally binding restrictions on spending) to eliminate 70 sworn staff, although the council assumes some of this reduction would be through higher-than-normal attrition. The cuts would come both from specific areas—such the elimination of the Navigation Team—and SPD’s general budget. Council members have suggested that the police department prioritize officers with multiple sustained misconduct complaints when making discretionary layoffs.

The mayor and police chief have said labor rules require SPD to lay off its newest hires first. Those rules are the purview of the Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC): a three-member quasi-judicial body with one member appointed by the council, another by the mayor, and a third elected by the city’s civil service employees.

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The C Is for Crank is supported entirely by generous contributions from readers like you.

If you enjoy breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going.

If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. I’m truly grateful for your support.

Implementing the PSCSC rules as written would require laying off the youngest, most diverse group of recruits in SPD’s history—a group, Durkan said during a press conference Wednesday, who “joined the force knowing that [SPD was] under federal oversight” and are therefore “committed to reform.”  Conversely, doing layoffs out of order would require eliminating the jobs of more white men—a move that Durkan and Best argue could constitute racial discrimination against white officers.

“You can’t make layoffs based on race,” Chief Best said during a press conference Thursday. “I think the [council’s] request would be to skip over some folks in order to retain people based on race and I don’t think that’s allowable.”

“The executive and council should work together to figure out how to use it to meet our shared objectives, and we should not start with the supposition that a rule that exists to be used can’t be used.”—Seattle City Council member Lisa Herbold

Best isn’t alone in this concern. In a council discussion of the proposal late last month, council member Debora Juarez said out-of-order layoffs could constitute “discrimination based on age and sex” and a violation of the 14th amendment. “The means doesn’t always justify the ends if it’s illegal,” Juarez said.

Council member Lisa Herbold, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, and the other council members who support the proposed cuts, are counting on a rarely (if ever)-used clause in the PSCSC’s rules that allows the police chief to request the permission of the PSCSC director for out-of-order layoffs if they would serve the “efficient operation” of the department.

The problem, according to a letter that Office of Labor Relations director Bobby Humes sent to Durkan’s office on Tuesday, is that “[t]his rule has never before been cited or tested, and there is no definition of what the ‘efficient’ operation of the department looks like.”

However, it’s unclear that it’s true that the rule hasn’t been tested; on Wednesday, for example, Durkan said the rule has “historically been used” for individual layoffs. And Durkan’s assertion that Best would “have to justify every single” request for an out-of-order layoff is somewhat at odds with Humes’ memo, which only mentions a possibility that Best may have to justify each individual layoff.

“The [council’s] request would be to skip over some folks in order to retain people based on race and I don’t think that’s allowable.”—Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best


A memo explaining the mayor’s position on out-of-order layoffs distributed to members of the media this week does not list legal precedents to back her statement that out-of-order layoffs would need to be argued individually.

In a press conference with council president Lorena Gonzalez and council member Tammy Morales on Thursday, Herbold responded to some of the mayor and police chief’s claims, starting with Durkan’s claims that out-of-order layoffs are impossible. “The rule exists, and thus it can be used,” said Herbold. “The executive and council should work together to figure out how to use it to meet our shared objectives, and we should not start with the supposition that a rule that exists to be used can’t be used.”

Herbold added that she and her colleagues hope to collaborate with Best to craft the requests for out-of-order layoffs to be sent to PSCSC Director Laura Scheele. The question now, according to Herbold, “is whether [Best] will work with us in developing a request… that has the best chance to preserve the diversity of the police department in a way that is constitutional, legal according to labor law, does not choose layoffs by race, and preserves the efficient functioning of the department as the rule itself requires.”

Best has not yet said whether she would be willing to bring a request for out-of-order layoffs to the PSCSC. At Thursday’s press conference, she said that the council had not asked her to sit down with them (although the council has talked to other members of SPD’s command staff), and said “it definitely feels very personal to me.”

Herbold and her colleagues are still working with the city’s law department to review their options for arguing that out-of-order layoffs serve the “efficient operation” of SPD. She says one of the council’s proposed strategies– targeting officers with extensive records of complaints – would be based on the argument that the time and resources spent processing complaints, disciplinary actions, and appeals undermine the department’s efficiency. However, Herbold acknowledged that the council will have to grapple with the possibility that their strategy will be challenged on the grounds that it involves punishing officers twice for the same offense, which could be illegal.

At the front of Herbold’s mind, however, is convincing Best to bring requests for out-of-order layoffs to PSCSC Director Laura Scheele. “She’s the one who has to make the argument,” says Herbold. “She runs the department, so she’s best placed to make the argument.”