Tag: Cathy Moore

City Council

Cathy Moore Directs $1 Million for Survivor Services to The More We Love, Bypassing Competitive Bidding Process
The city’s schedule for the competitive bidding process for $2 million that got underway last year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore directed the city’s Human Services Department to award $1 million in funding for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) through a direct contract with The More We Love, a group that began as a company offering private encampment sweeps and now holds most of the city of Burien’s homelessness contracts.

Moore’s move, which the city’s Human Services Department immediately agreed to implement, effectively ended a competitive bidding process that had been underway since last year, when providers who work with sexually exploited adults and minors in Seattle began meeting to discuss what a fair and equitable competitive distribution of new local funding could look like. The groups first met with Moore’s office last September, and came away believing that the funds would be distributed to various groups through a fair, competitive bidding process, according to several people involved in those discussions. HSD later created a timeline for this process and distributed it to the potential bidders.

City staff reiterated their commitment to a fair, open process in meetings that included organizations that work with survivors as well as law enforcement, Harborview, and other “system partners” that could potentially refer people to the new services the $2 million was going to fund.

“From the very beginning, when we heard there might be an opportunity for additional funding and resources to support the community of survivors that work against trafficking, we were thrilled—and the next thing out of our mouth was, ‘Providers deserve an open and fair process,'” said Amaranthia Torres, co-executive director for the Coalition Ending Gender Based Violence.

Unless Moore rescinds her directive—or HSD decides not to fulfill her request—the funding decision will be final. The mayor’s office, which oversees HSD and was included in email conversations about Moore’s directive to forego the usual bidding process, directed all of our questions to HSD. After this story posted, HSD responded to PubliCola’s questions with the following statement: “No contract or award has yet been processed for [Moore’s budget action[. HSD is continuing conversations around next steps for implementing these investments.”

“It was shocking that all of the work to engage with the community this whole time is being thwarted,” Torres said. “It seemed obvious to me that the way city funds get allocated shouldn’t feel like its rigged. Everyone should have a fair shake.”

The $1 million, which is supposed to add 10 beds to The More We Love’s shelter for sexually exploited women in Renton, was part of $2 million Moore set aside to help survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in the city budget last year to help providers respond to a new law reinstating Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zones. Currently, the only overnight space specifically for people escaping the sex trade in Seattle is a six-bed temporary housing facility run by Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST).

Representatives from existing Black-led groups that work with survivors said that by giving $1 million to a white-led group that has not previously held a contract to work with CSE survivors, the city is ignoring and undermining the expertise of organizations that focus on Black and brown survivors, who make up a disproportionate number of people in the commercial sex trade. In recent years, organizations that help survivors have made concerted efforts to end what several described as a “white savior” mentality, in which white leaders (often women) believe they know what’s best for Black and brown survivors.

The news was “a slap in the face,” a leader from one Seattle organization, who requested anonymity because her group works with the city, said. “It’s more than a funding issue—it’s about power and whose voices get amplified.”

Another longtime organizational leader said she was disappointed, but not surprised, that Moore was directing the funds to The More We Love.  “It’s not to say their organization couldn’t have been funded, but you should not be giving this organization all the funding,” she said. “You’re saying, ‘We’re going to fund this white-led group and let them run this pilot without any of you,’ but they need all of our support.”

It’s highly unusual for an individual council member to ask an executive department to spend a large amount of money on a single organization through a direct contract without holding a vote to release the funds. It’s perhaps even more unusual for an executive department to take this kind of direction from a legislator.

And there’s another odd wrinkle in this case: Moore apparently asked HSD to give $500,000 of the $2 million to REST to expand its own receiving center in February, but rescinded that offer after HSD had already informed REST that they were getting the money, according to emails and sources familiar with the offer. REST participated in all the conversations leading up to the planned RFP and supported the process; the organization’s leaders were reportedly surprised to learn that the city had decided to bypass the RFP and award some of the money to them directly.

Earlier this year, the Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (MODVSA), which is part of HSD, launched a series of meetings to discuss the upcoming request for proposals (RFP) for the funds, which was supposed to come out in May. Under an expedited schedule, the city was set to release the funds to the winning bidders in September.

“We’re going to focus on how to get that $2 million and get all of this work organized and coordinated in a very timely fashion,” HSD Director Tanya Kim told Moore’s housing and human services committee during a public meeting in January. “That $2 million requires us to expedite an RFP to get those services online as soon as possible.”

Elizabeth Dahl, executive director of Aurora Commons, said a competitive RFP “is the only way to ensure a fair and equitable process, with appropriate oversight, to ensure the funds allocated to respond to the SOAP legislation are used effectively. Organizations and leaders in the [gender-based violence] field, including ours, were leaned on for their expertise throughout the SOAP legislation process, and we were ensured there would be a fair process for distributing the funds awarded through an RFP. That is not what is happening.”

“Bypassing the RFP process is a blatant dismissal of the work we did and the expertise of those of us who have been doing this work for years,” the first CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said.

Neither Moore’s office nor HSD responded to questions by press time, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Emails between Moore and her staff and Kim, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, and other city officials show that Moore directed HSD to give the funds to The More We Love about a week after visiting their shelter in Renton, where she spoke to women living there and found their stories “compelling.”

“Given the urgency of the need for additional receiving beds in a safe location … and The More We Love’s ability to immediately add an additional 10 beds with wrap-around support and 24/7 access, I am requesting $1 million of the $2 million [allocation] be awarded to The More We Love for the provision of 10 emergency receiving center beds at their facility as soon as a contract can be finalized,” Moore told Kim in a March 12 email.

“HSD will move forward with the below, piloting The More We Love’s emergency receiving center—ensuring there’s a clear nexus to Seattle given the location [in Renton]—at $1 million, and implementing the remaining as proposed by HSD,” Kim responded. Renton is about 20 miles away from Aurora Ave. North, where Seattle’s street sex trade is concentrated.

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In a subsequent email directing HSD staff to “move forward with implementation,” Kim said it was unclear how much will be left over from the original $2 million, which also has to pay for a new city staffer, consultants, and any costs associated with the work the city has already done on the planned competitive bidding process.

The More We Love recently opened a small shelter at a house in Renton, but otherwise does not have any track record working with CSE survivors; the group’s leader, Kristine Moreland, worked at REST for a couple of years but was never a direct service provider, according to several people familiar with her role there.

Moreland did not respond to a request for an interview.

In an email inviting Moore to visit The More We Love’s Renton shelter, Moreland said a staffer for the group had recently sat down with the group of women and learned about gaps in service they faced, finding the revelations “both eye-opening and heartbreaking because many of the challenges they described seem like they should be simple to fix, yet they persist.”

The language is similar to the pitch Moreland made to city officials in Burien, where she claimed that she, unlike existing groups with more experience working with chronically homeless people, could easily get people into housing and treatment; subsequently, the Burien council ended the city’s contract with the longstanding outreach group REACH and handed that money to The More We Love.

It’s unclear what services The More We Love provides at its Renton facility. According to Moore’s email to HSD Director Kim, Moreland told the city her organization offers  “substance use treatment, counseling, job training, advocacy in the criminal legal system as victims as well as defendants, and assistance accessing housing.”

But people that have been working in the field for years or decades are skeptical. Because the groups that assist CSE survivors have varying levels of funding and offer different services, they typically work together to provide wraparound support rather than trying to do everything themselves, several representatives from these organizations said. Moreland’s group has never been part of those conversations.

A slide from The More We Love’s five-page “year end report” for 2024

Moreland’s claims about The More We Love’s results have been hard to verify.

Earlier this year, Moreland presented The More We Love’s “year end report” to the Burien City Council. The five-page document says The More We Love “assisted” 303 people, including “25 survivors helped,” between August and December 2024, with a numberless pie chart providing a very high-level breakdown of the services the group claims to have provided. The More We Love provided the same five-page report to Seattle leaders, including Moore, as part of their pitch for funding.

The group has not published a more detailed breakdown of its services or data showing more detailed measures of effectiveness, such as how many people obtain and remain in permanent housing, how many people are able to stay sober or in recovery after treatment or detox, and how many people return to the sex trade after going through their program.

The More We Love has been criticized in the past for distributing private health information about their clients to police, elected officials and at least one private business owner in Burien, and one provider we spoke to expressed concern about the fact that the organization publishes the photos of sexual exploitation survivors on its Facebook page, potentially revealing information about their location and lives to their former traffickers.

Despite holding a major homelessness contract with Burien and securing a million-dollar promise from Seattle, The More We Love just organized as a nonprofit in mid-2023, and did not have enough revenue to file a full 990 tax form with the IRS that year. “They haven’t been on the scene long enough to have results,” the longtime provider said.

Many of the organizational leaders who spoke to PubliCola said they felt the city had not only wasted their time but violated their trust.

The longtime CSE leader called the outcome “really sad, because at the end of the day, the city is breaking the trust of the community. … The city talked about providing a forum to share critical information about investments, and now they’re going behind our backs.”

“We already know that white people are in power and that Black and brown people have to fight ten times as hard to get the same respect,” the other CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said. “It reinforces a harmful pattern where white-led groups secure resources and Black-led groups that have the solutions to these critical issues are sidelined.”

City Council, Density, housing

Councilmembers Claim City Didn’t Do “Broad Engagement” on Comprehensive Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s comprehensive plan committee, chaired by Joy Hollingsworth, spent much of its two-hour meeting on Wednesday morning lambasting staffers from the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development, who were there to describe the past three years of public engagement on the comp plan, for purportedly failing to do the right kind of public outreach (flyers in mailboxes) to the right kind of people (property owners).

At various points in Wednesday’s meeting, council members claimed OPCD had ignored advocates for “neighborhood character” in favor of “fringe policy wonk types” (Rob Saka); said existing residents weren’t consulted about the new neighbors they will have “to live with” if the plan goes through through (Cathy Moore); and argued that homeowners who’ve decried the plan in public comment don’t oppose housing, they’re just upset at the “lack of broad engagement” about the plan (Maritza Rivera).

“We need to do a better job of bringing in public comment,” Moore said. “My takeaway is that when you actually manage to get broader engagement, you actually found that there was a lot less buy-in to the plan that had been put forth,” she continued. “And what troubles me is that when it became clear that there was less buy-in from the people that are going to have to live with this development on the ground, there’s still no willingness to truly engage and refashion this” plan.

Later that evening, the council would take public comment for five and a half hours. The first several hours, starting at 5pm, were dominated by longtime homeowners arguing that housing would destroy the environment and make Seattle unlivable. As they had at previous meetings on the plan, many of the public commenters complained that no one had told them about the public meeting where they were giving public comment.

The comprehensive plan update aligns the city with a new state law requiring all cities to allow up to four units of housing, such as a duplex and two accessory units, on every residential lot. It also includes 30 new “neighborhood centers”—small nodes of density within 800 feet, or a three-minute walk, of existing commercial areas or frequent transit stops. These neighborhood centers, where modest three- to six-story apartment buildings would be allowed, have become a flash point in the comp plan discussions. Ironically, or predictably, a majority of the new council members—including Saka, Moore, Joy Hollingsworth, and Bob Kettle—explicitly endorsed a comp plan alternative during their campaigns that included 18 more neighborhood centers than the plan many of them are objecting to as too dense now.

For the second time in several weeks, Moore railed against potential neighborhood centers inside and outside her district, claiming the change would “open the floodgates to… unlimited development” everywhere in the city. Moreover, she said, it makes no sense for the council to give up a key bargaining chip against future density by approving neighborhood centers in areas where the current residents don’t want apartments anyway.

Addressing OPCD director Rico Quirindongo, Moore said he appeared to be saying that OPCD would allow the city council to designate the zoning details of each neighborhood center in future legislation, which is true. But what Moore said she was “hearing” from Quirindongo was “‘You give us a [neighborhood center] designation, then we’ll negotiate the height.’ My position is, why bother negotiating the height? Because I think down the road, we are looking at keeping the door open to putting up five- and six-story buildings, because we’ve zoned it that way. So that is not a sufficient response.”

To which housing advocates might say: Yeah. Allowing more housing, whether it’s three stories or six, is the entire point of increasing density in places where people want to live, like neighborhoods with easy access to transit. The proposed Maple Leaf neighborhood center, at 90th and Roosevelt, is one mile away from two light rail stations—Northgate and Roosevelt—and has frequent bus service serving both. It’s hard to conceive of a more favorable spot for modest transit-oriented development.

Moore wasn’t done. She wanted to know why, “if we can send out a flyer about social an initiative on social housing, we ought to be able to send out a flyer about a comprehensive plan that is going to completely remake the way the city looks for the next 10 and 20 years—not only looks, but operates.” (Again, we’re talking about 30 neighborhood nodes that stretch a block or two into Seattle’s low-density urban sprawl). Moore appeared to be referring to a political flyer paid for by the campaign for Proposition 1B, a private political effort that received no funding from the city.

At another point, Moore also claimed the comprehensive plan would “remov[e] parking”—using “we’re not going to have any parking” as a reason to doubt that the city will really plant new trees in public parking strips. In fact, the plan would roll back current minimum parking mandates for new housing. It would neither remove existing parking nor restrict developers from building it.

Maritza Rivera agreed with Moore that there has been “a lack of broad engagement” on the plan, and added that many of her Northeast Seattle constituents do support “more housing,” but want an opportunity to express their concerns about trees, parking, and where that housing should be allowed. “I have a lot of constituents who have kids who can’t afford to come back and live where they grew up,” she noted. Rivera’s district includes the University District, home to many thousands of young renters, yet her example of a “constituent” concerned about housing prices is a homeowner whose kids can’t afford a house here.

Moore’s complaint about a lack of “broad engagement” is interesting, because the city has never failed to engage with anti-density property owners, who organize themselves politically in groups with names like “Tree Action Seattle,” “Seattle Fair Growth,” and “The Queen Anne Community Council.” What’s different this time is that the city also made a concerted effort to reach groups that have historically been excluded from the process of deciding where housing will go and how much there will be. As OPCD’s outreach summary notes, the city reached out to “specific racial, cultural, and other- marginalized communities,” contracting with community groups that “serve communities—particularly BIPOC populations—that have been historically left out of the City’s engagement processes.”

Actions that promote equity can feel like discrimination to people who are used to being the only voices in the room. Twenty years ago, you didn’t hear homeowners complaining that renters were getting too loud and uppity, because renters didn’t have a voice at city hall—they just weren’t a factor. Now that they are, the BANANA lobby is trying to turn YIMBY into a dirty word.

Will it work? A majority of the council seems poised to remove at least some of the neighborhood centers from the plan, rolling back potential housing in some of the areas where it makes the most sense. Then again, there’s a chance that some council members may back away from some of Moore’s more radical ideas, such as requiring that anyone who wants to build four units on their property must make two of the units affordable to low-income people. The poison-pill requirement would ensure that no such housing gets built, effectively end-running the new state mandate that cities allow up to four housing units per lot.

On Wednesday, Moore said that contrary to what some seem to believe, it isn’t true “that we’re going to solve all the problems for renters by just building a lot of housing,” adding, “you’re not going to get stabilized rent.” No one is claiming that more housing is the unitary solution to the city’s housing crisis (nor has anyone said brand-new apartments will be either cheap or rent-controlled), but it is a necessary condition. In the future,  Moore might consider spending less time listening to homeowner complaints about the people they might  “have to live with” and more hearing from constituents who just want more places where they’re allowed to live.

City Council, Density, housing, neighborhoods, This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: January 11, 2025
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection Maple Leaf (circled on map)

Cathy Moore Says Young People Want Yards, Bob Kettle and Rob Saka Test Blast Balls, and PubliCola Predicts the Future

Monday, January 6

Anti-Housing Activists Hope for Receptive Audience as Council Takes Up Comprehensive Plan Update

As the city considers density increases so modest that its own planning commission called them utterly inadequate, single-family preservationists are creating petitions to oppose any changes in “their” neighborhoods, especially those that allow more renters to live in more parts of Seattle.

Tuesday, January 7

SPD Fires Officer Who Struck and Killed Pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula Two Years Ago

Kevin Dave, the police officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula while driving almost three times the speed limit, finally got fired after spending two years on SPD’s payroll after killing Kandula, whose family is suing the city for more than $110 million.

Wednesday, January 8

It’s Time to Appoint Another New Councilmember!

Tammy Morales’ resignation opens a spot for yet another new council appointment. The appointment process, which should wrap up before the end of this month, will result in a council with only one member, Dan Strauss, who has served for more than three years, including seven members who have served one year or less.

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“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments

One of those recently council members, Cathy Moore, came out hard against a proposal to allow apartments along the periphery of single-family neighborhoods, saying that allowing three-to-six story apartments within 800 feet of 30 transit stops across the city would destroy neighborhood character, denude the landscape, and produce “unstable” housing occupied by renters, who, she said, aren’t “engaged socially and politically” the way property owners are. About six in ten Seattle residents rent their homes.

Thursday, January 9

Seattle Nice: Bob Kettle Talks Public Safety, Density, Why He Opposed the Capital Gains Tax, and More

The Seattle Nice podcast sat down with City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle to talk about his priorities for 2025, how much density the city should allow in single-family neighborhoods like Queen Anne, and at what point the new council will stop blaming their predecessors for the real and perceived public safety challenges in Seattle.

Afternoon Fizz, SPD Edition: Councilmembers Test-Drive Blast Balls, SPD Sued Over Records Violations, and More

Four stories in this week’s afternoon Fizz: Bob Kettle and Rob Saka take a field trip to SPD’s firing range to test blast balls for themselves; the Community Police Commission proposes changes to SPD’s proposed policy allowing the use of “less lethal” weapons, which is moving forward at breakneck speed; the Seattle Times sues SPD for violating an agreement over public records requests; and former police chief Adrian Diaz loses his longtime attorney.

Friday, January 10

PubliCola’s Seattle Predictions for 2025

PubliCola’s founders give you our predictions for 2025. Sandeep thinks Seattle will fail to break out of its political inertia; Josh says you’ll start to hear more open MAGA rhetoric in public places in Seattle (which, he also predicts, will still be riddled with dogs), and I predict that new, even more stringent tree protections will be used to prevent housing for renters in the name of the environment (despite the fact that car-oriented sprawl, which results from insufficient housing in cities, is an existential environmental risk.)

Also, despite a $2 million budget setaside, I predict that SDOT will find reasons not to remove an 8-inch traffic safety curb that prevents dangerous left turns into the parking lot of the preschool Rob Saka’s kids attended, which Saka claimed his constituents found “triggering” and “extremely traumatizing” because it reminds them of Trump’s border wall.

City Council, Development, housing, Opinion

“I’m Not Prepared to Sacrifice My Neighborhood”: Councilmember Cathy Moore Takes Hard Line Against Apartments
Cathy Moore says she won’t “sacrifice” her neighborhood to three-to-five-story apartments around an intersection in Maple Leaf (the lavender blocks inside the circle above)

By Erica C. Barnett

Councilmember Cathy Moore came out swinging against the extremely modest, geographically limited density increases Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed in his comprehensive plan update on Monday, taking aim at straw “urbanists” who, she claimed, believe the “lie” that brand-new housing is affordable and that new apartments automatically lead to frequent transit.

“Too many of our young people cannot afford to live in this city, and this is what’s driving a lot of this. And yet they are told, ‘Well, if you just let us have a free rein and build, you’ll be able to have the housing.’ It’s not true,” Moore fulminated. “Allowing free-range zoning is not going to get you into the home that you want. It’s not going to create the homeownership opportunity that you need to grow your wealth [and] create a stable society where people are engaged socially and politically.”

Moore’s specific objection to the plan was Harrell’s refusal to eliminate a small node of density in her neighborhood, Maple Leaf, where the current comp plan proposal would allow apartments within one to two blocks of a small commercial center at 90th and Roosevelt. The intersection, she noted, is still “slated for a neighborhood center, despite my two formal requests to the mayor’s office to remove it.”

“I’m not prepared to sacrifice this particular—my particular—neighborhood, and the reason that I live here and support this neighborhood, so that we can just throw a bunch of townhouses up that start at $700,000,” Moore said.

The planned neighborhood center includes eight and a half blocks around an existing commercial district around 90th and Roosevelt, where apartments between three and six stories would be allowed. The location is smack between two light rail stations and on a frequent bus route that arrives every 15 minutes, which Moore referred to as the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.

An example (from the proposed comp plan) of a neighborhood center.

Density is code for rental housing, Moore continued, and “rental housing isn’t working. … When I talk to young people, they want a place of their own. They want a little garden. They want the amenities that us current homeowners have, and we’re creating a false promise what we’re putting out here and what the urbanist people are telling us.”

Moreover, Moore said, “people seem to believe that if you build all this multifamily housing, transit will come. Let me tell you, it will not come. That’s not how it works.”

Phew. OK. It’s hard to fully capture to the condescension in Moore’s comments about renters and “young people,” but let’s start here: Sixty percent of the people who live in Seattle—young, old, and in between—rent their homes, and it’s pretty insulting to dismiss all of them as naifs who don’t understand basic realities about the cost of housing in Seattle. Nor, frankly, is it the place of homeowners in their 60s, 70s, and 80s—including those who showed up in the middle of the morning on Monday to argue that apartments don’t belong next to houses—to talk about what working renters need or want.

Maple Leaf’s planned neighborhood center already has a commercial district that includes bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and businesses.

Much like the idea that most current renters will ever be able to afford a house in Seattle, Moore’s straw urbanist is a fiction. Real-world urbanists have never argued that brand-new rental housing is cheap; rather, they point out that in cities with acute housing shortages like Seattle, artificial scarcity—the kind city governments create by imposing sweeping prohibitions on new housing—pushes non-wealthy people out. “Rental housing isn’t working” because too many renters are paying half their income to live far away from their jobs, not because they don’t understand that what they really want is a mortgage. (Note to the “buy a house like I did” crowd: Given that at least half of all renters pay more than they can afford on rent, how exactly are they supposed to save up for the $462,000 downpayment they’ll need to qualify for a home loan in Seattle?)

Second, she’s actually wrong about how transit decisions work—King County Metro makes bus planning decisions precisely based on housing density—the more people live in an area, the more demand there is for bus service, which is why you don’t see frequent transit in places like west Magnolia or Laurelhurst. “If you build it, they will come” is literally how it works.

Moore and Councilmember Maritza Rivera represent some of the wealthiest, lowest-density areas of the city; although Moore’s district includes Northgate, Lake City, and other urban hubs, it also encompasses vast swaths of single-family urban deserts, represented by the beige areas in the northeast corner of the map above. Seattle has always concentrated density and growth along large arterials,

The council is discussing the comprehensive plan over several meetings in January and February. Because Harrell took so long to finalize the plan (amending it repeatedly to decrease, then slightly increase, the amount of housing it would allow), the council has a hard deadline: If a new plan isn’t in place by June, the state’s model code, which would increase density citywide, will go into effect.

City Council, Police

Council Amendments Could Restore Some Oversight in Bill Removing Restrictions on “Less-Lethal” Weapons

By Erica C. Barnett

Legislation to repeal Seattle’s current restrictions on police officers’ use of “less-lethal” crowd-control weapons is moving forward quickly, with a committee vote scheduled for January 14, shortly after the council returns from a winter break that starts this Friday afternoon.

That leaves just five days for council members to propose amendments to the bill; council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, who’s sponsoring legislation sent down by Mayor Bruce Harrell, told council members in an email last week that he needs amendments to come in early “in part to ensure transparency but also because of the unique aspects of the Federal Monitor, DOJ, and the Court as this impacts the Consent Decree process.”

The legislation repeals a law governing SPD’s use of less-lethal weapons that has been in effect since 2021. SPD has never followed that law, which their legal counsel argued would “compromise public safety”; instead, the department created its own “interim policy” that does not specifically restrict or bar police from using any less-lethal weapons. (The 2021 law replaced a total ban on less-lethal weapons that the federal district judge overseeing the consent decree, James Robart, enjoined earlier that year).

The bill the council is considering empowers SPD to come up with its own crowd control policy, guided by with a list of “values and expectations” in the legislation—effectively instituting a lightly amended version of the interim policy SPD has been using, in defiance of existing law, for more than three years.

The passage of the crowd-control bill could set the stage to end the 12-year-old consent decree between the city and the US Department of Justice.

Council public safety chair Bob Kettle, who’s sponsoring the legislation sent down by Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, was unavailable for comment Friday, so we weren’t able to ask him directly why he wants to push the legislation through so quickly. After all, the council and mayor have known for years that the Seattle Police Department considered the law on less-lethal weapons unworkable, and took no action.

Last week, Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed concerns about the timing, noting that passing a new crowd-control law isn’t a guarantee that Judge Robart will release the city from the consent decree.

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“I appreciate that we want to get out of the consent decree,” she said. But given the many unknowns, Moore added, “I just don’t think there can be a false sense of urgency that we’ve got to get this done so we can get the consent decree lifted. There’s no guarantee that what we do here today is going to result in the consent decree being lifted, and I think we need to use this opportunity as we are to be very thoughtful about this policy going forward.”

Moore (who, like Kettle, said through a spokesperson that she was unavailable on Friday) is expected to propose several amendments, including some co-sponsored with new Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck.

The first potential amendment would require the mayor to approve the use of blast balls—grenades, used widely during the protests against police brutality in 2020, that can cause serious injuries—in addition to tear gas, which requires mayoral approval under a recently passed state law.

In a November memo suggesting changes to the legislation to improve safety and accountability, the Seattle Office for Civil Rights included several examples of injuries caused by police using “less lethal” weapons. At a meeting last week, Councilmember Rob Saka appeared to dismiss these examples, saying they were from “all across the world.”

A second amendment would require council approval for new less-lethal weapons that emerge in the future. The current proposal gives SPD carte blanche to approve new technologies, as long as the department believes they comply with the “values and expectations” laid out in the legislation. According to a central staff memo, the change would let SPD use new weapons against the public “without the delay associated with the legislative process, and without drawing the Council into technical, rather than policy-level, judgements about appropriate tools and methods.”

Saka praised this aspect of the mayor’s bill last week and suggested expanding it, saying he saw no reason the council needed to approve surveillance technologies like “throw phones” used in hostage standoffs.

Another potential amendment would require police departments outside Seattle that provide “mutual aid” during large events to either follow SPD’s policies or be assigned to desk duty, freeing up Seattle officers to respond on the street. The legislation, as written, exempts mutual aid agencies from following Seattle’s law, or SPD’s internal policies, when doing crowd control on the city’s behalf.

Finally, council members are exploring whether to retain a private right of action, included in the 2021 law the new legislation would repeal, for people injured by police using less-lethal weapons. “It is important to provide accessible opportunities for residents to pursue their claims under city law rather than under state or federal law where the proof required is more stringent and the doctrines of qualified immunity and public duty may prevent them from receiving damages for their injuries,” SOCR wrote in its memo.

City Council, Police

Legislation Would Remove Restrictions on SPD’s Use of “Less Lethal” Weapons for Crowd Control
SPD Assistant Chief Dan Nelson speaks to the city council’s public safety committee on Tuesday.

The proposed new law, which establishes “values and expectations” for SPD’s crowd control policies, could be the final step toward ending a 12-year-old federal consent decree.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council is considering legislation proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and sponsored by Councilmember Bob Kettle, to repeal restrictions on the Seattle Police Department’s use of “less lethal” weapons for crowd control. The bill would allow SPD to continue operating under an amended version of its “interim” policy, which allows cops to use tear gas, blast balls, and other weapons against groups of people if they perceive “an imminent risk of physical injury to any person or significant property damage.”

If passed, the new law will allow the use of “blast balls”—grenades that explode and send out projectiles and, in some cases, pepper or tear gas—for crowd control. SPD contends that these projectiles, which can cause severe injuries when police deploy them to disperse crowds of people, are less problematic than tear gas because they are more targeted.

The ordinance would also align city law with state law requiring the mayor to sign off on any use of tear gas.

“We have changed our policy to say that officers will deploy blast balls into open spaces when feasible,” SPD Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey told the council on Tuesday. A bit of history: In response to SPD’s brutal actions against protesters in 2020, the city council passed legislation banning the use of all crowd control weapons. However, Judge Robart effectively enjoined the city from enforcing that law, leading the council to pass a new law that allowed less-lethal weapons but established rules governing how SPD could use them.

That law limited the use of pepper spray and tear gas, stipulated that only trained SWAT officers could use certain weapons, restricted cops’ use of less-lethal weapons use to “violent public disturbances” involving 12 or more people, and created a private right of action for people injured by crowd control weapons.

The department immediately disavowed the new law, arguing that it wasn’t the city’s role to dictate SPD’s crowd-control policies through legislation, and has never followed it; on Tuesday, both SPD and central staff insisted that the law is “not in effect,” although it is very much still on the books and has never been enjoined. Instead of following the new restrictions, SPD came up with its own “interim policy” on crowd control and began operating under that policy.

Harrell and Kettle’s legislation would formally repeal both of these crowd control laws: The one Judge Robart enjoined and the one that is still technically in effect. The proposal includes a list of “values and expectations” that are supposed to guide any crowd control policy SPD adopts in the future, but it otherwise leaves SPD to come up with its own approach to crowd control, officially sanctioning what SPD has been doing, in practice, since 2023 when it created its own interim policy.

The legislation would set the stage to end the federal consent decree between the city and the US Department of Justice, which has endured for the last 12 years. In October, federal district judge James Robart told the city that crowd control is one of the last remaining issues the city needs to address before he will release SPD from the 12-year-old agreement.

SPD argues that it’s inappropriate for the city to legislate what kind of weapons police can use against crowds of people, and in what circumstances. Instead, they’ve drafted a policy that lays out how police are supposed to behave in an escalating series of circumstances, from “lawful assembly standoff” to “unlawful assembly (riot)” and “immediately life safety.”

The ordinance also repeals a requirement police officers from departments outside Seattle follow Seattle’s policies when providing “mutual aid” in responding to large events—a change that leaves open the possibility that agencies with fewer restrictions on crowd control weapons could deploy them without SPD approval.

Maxey told the council that these outside officers are “not going to be issuing dispersal orders and throwing blast balls tear gas without a whole lot of other involvement from command,” but said it would be counterproductive to place formal restrictions that might dissuade other police departments from coming to Seattle’s aid, given SPD’s current hiring challenges.

The new ordinance would also eliminate a private right of action for people injured by crowd-control weapons, such as blast balls and 40-mm projectiles, to sue SPD.

SPD representatives assured the council that their policies have evolved since 2020 and seem to be working. “We have a much more reduced footprint at these events,” Assistant Police Chief Dan Nelson told the council. “Our goal is to differentiate criminal conduct and not penalize the crowd as a whole. …  And we’ve actually recently had a lot of really positive success with this strategy.”

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However, Councilmember Cathy Moore pointed out that SPD’s new policies haven’t been tested by massive, largely spontaneous protests since 2020, so it may be premature to declare the department’s new internal policies a success. “It seems to me that, in a way, we could take a scalpel to the current ordinance, rather than repealing it entirely and basically just saying we’re going to rely on [SPD] policy,” Moore said. Moore said she was most concerned about the use of blast balls, given their potential to cause grave injury, and the likelihood of mass protests under the second Trump administration. “Frankly, we do need to be very, very much in the weeds on this issue.”

Councilmember Rob Saka, in contrast, argued that the council should have much less direct authority over how SPD conducts crowd control and other aspects of its work, including new technologies that require significant vetting under the city’s surveillance ordinance.

“I find it really poignant that this ordinance would allow SPD to address changes in both available crowd control technologies and emerging best practices or emerging trends, without the delay associated with the legislative process,” Saka said. “That is a proposition that I strongly agree with. And I think the same challenge kind of manifests itself in other policy areas and topics, including with respect to policing.”

Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, one of the original members of the city’s Community Police Commission, recalled that while the CPC didn’t recommend completely banning blast balls, they did seek a suspension of their use until SPD adopted a policy that meaningfully addressed the risks of using them at in crowds, where “crowd flow is chaotic and the explosion radius is hard to control.”

Since then, Daugaard said, nothing “has really changed that analysis—blast balls haven’t been used since 2020, and in 2020, there were similar outcomes to those seen while I was on the CPC.” That doesn’t mean there needs to be a law prohibiting blast balls,  Daugaard said, but “it does mean that there’s important work to be conducted on policy guidance on how to use them—for example, instead of saying ‘don’t fire them at people,’ say ‘fire them away from people and no closer than X distance.'”

After years of inaction on SPD’ crowd control policy, the city is suddenly in a hurry to get it done. This week, Kettle said he would not consider any council amendments submitted after January 9, “and it really needs to happen beforehand, because there’s so much coordination [that has to happen], due to the fact that it has these other aspects to it, related to the consent decree.”

Because of the short timeline, the city’s Community Police Commission is scrambling to come up with a response to, and potentially recommendations on, the proposal. “Once the ordinance passes, [and SPD has] they think is aligned with it, they’re probably going to run to the court with that policy and say, ‘Look, we’re done,” CPD co-chair Joel Merkel said. “What I’ve been trying to do is make sure the CPC doesn’t get skipped over in this process.”

Currently, CPC members and staff are looking over SPD’s proposed crowd control policy and raising concerns, most of which have related to “the circumstances under which certain less-lethal weapons could be used.” If the city is going to let SPD off the leash to develop its own crowd control policies, Merkel added, “the policy is really important, and how you train on the policy is really important.”

Judge Robart has said that he would not release Seattle from the consent decree unless SPD had a crowd control policy in place that is consistent with city laws; repealing the crowd control laws that remain on the books will remove that obstacle and could be the last step toward ending the consent decree. For years, there has been a growing consensus at the city that the consent decree unduly restricts Seattle’s authority to govern its own police department; whether SPD will use its new autonomy by responding appropriately to the next wave of mass protests remains an open question.