In mid-October, the Seattle Police Department released new emergency vehicle operations (EVO) policies that instruct officers to “drive no faster than their skill and training allows and [what] is reasonably necessary to safely arrive at the scene.” The new rules were a belated response to community outrage after an SPD officer, Kevin Dave, struck and killed 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula in a South Lake Union crosswalk while driving 74 mph.
The new guidelines also advise officers to consider specific factors before deciding whether to break speed limits or traffic laws when responding to emergencies – including the priority level of the call, whether pedestrians can see and respond to an officer’s vehicle, the “character of the location (i.e. freeway vs. side street)” and weather and road conditions.
The new emergency driving policy now more closely aligns with SPD’s pursuit policy, which directs officers to pay attention to various factors before deciding whether to pursue a subject. SPD’s previous policy was extremely vague and gave little specific guidance to officers about when they can engage in emergency driving other than “where there is a legitimate concern for the preservation of life” and “only when the need outweighs the risk.”
Joel Merkel, a co-chair of the CPC, was encouraged by the new policies, which he said incorporated some of the CPC’s suggestions. “I appreciate the requirement that officers are not supposed to drive any faster or more dangerously than is reasonably necessary to get to the call safely,” Merkel said. “These are all positive developments that make the policy much less vague, a lot more clear, and provide some safeguards to ensure that emergency responses are safer and that there can be some accountability when they’re not.”
SPD did not make one change the CPC requested—specific restrictions on how fast officers can drive in an emergency, such as a certain amount over the legal speed limit. SPD chief operating officer Brian Maxey said specific limits would put additional burdens on officers trying to assess the risks and require them to “perform calculations in real time, which presents additional distractions.”
According to Maxey, the new policy restates previous guidance to officers to balance the risk of the response against the urgency of the call – but now spells out what factors increase those risks. “Consistent with recommendations from the CPC, the new policy sets out some specific criteria to consider under the totality of the circumstances faced by an emergency driver,” Maxey said.
Maxey said all sworn officers will be trained on the new policy. “The plan is to update the entire department on high-speed emergency driving in 2025,” he said. “That will provide a skills refresher, but will be guided by the policy.”
Merkel said training will be critical in implementing SPD’s new policy. “The type of driving that is contemplated by officers in emergency responses is far beyond the capabilities of the average citizen,” he said. “So there absolutely must be robust training to ensure that when officers are responding to an emergency, they have those skills necessary to do it safely.”
The CPC expressed concerns last year that SPD does not have a dedicated facility for training. In the past, the department has contracted with a racetrack in Kent as a training site.
Merkel also noted that the new policy instructs officers to use lights and sirens during emergency responses, with only a few exceptions. The previous policy only directed officers to use “audible signals” (such as chirps rather than ongoing sirens) and had no explicit recommendations about when to use emergency lights.
“I think the new policy makes it clear that that’s the default,” Merkel said. “You should be using your lights and sirens, and turning them off is the exception.” Dave had his lights on but was only chirping his siren at intersections before he hit Kandula.
Whether the new policy will lead to stronger discipline for officers who drive at excessive or dangerous speeds is an open question. Dave is still on SPD’s payroll and so far has only received a traffic ticket for the incident. According to an analysis of GPS data acquired by PubliCola, SPD officers frequently drive at excessive and dangerous speeds, often when they aren’t even responding to an emergency.
The new policy says officers should not disregard the safety of others during emergency driving, “nor is the sworn employee protected from the consequences of their reckless disregard for the safety of others.”
Though Merkel said he was skeptical that SPD officers will now face stronger discipline for unsafe driving, he does believe the new policy spells out what officers need to consider to improve safety. “With a clearer rule and a clearer standard, it is much easier to hold an officer accountable when the rule or standard is violated,” Merkel said. “If it’s a vague policy, a vague standard, it becomes much more difficult to enforce accountability. So because the rule has become clearer, I think it does make accountability easier.”
Former Community Police Commission Director Cali Ellis and Co-Chair Joel Merkel
By Erica C. Barnett
Cali Ellis, the former executive director of the embattled Community Police Commission, has reportedly threatened to sue the CPC for discrimination, alleging that she was fired because of a disability she recently disclosed to the commission.
Ellis was quietly put on indefinite administrative leave earlier this year and replaced on an “acting” basis in August by former CPC director Bessie Scott, who just accepted a position as city manager of Antioch, California.
Before leaving, Ellis proposed eliminating the positions of several staffers, apparently in lieu of firing or disciplining the people currently in those positions.
Although Mayor Bruce Harrell asked every city department to identify potential cuts of 8 percent to help close the city’s $250 million budget gap, the CPC and its 10-person staff were exempt from this directive because the police department is still under a federal consent decree, with a hearing on the agreement coming up in Judge James Robart’s courtroom on October 16.
Nonetheless, PubliCola has learned, Ellis submitted a 2025 budget that cut two of the CPC’s community engagement staffers—a reduction that would represent far more than 8 percent of the commission’s budget. The move caused immense consternation among commissioners, who were unaware of Ellis’ decision until it was too late to undo it.
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Although the City Budget Office finessed the budget-in-progress to reduce the the proposed cut by half, they did so by keeping both positions but cutting them in half—a move designed to satisfy no one, except perhaps Judge Robart, because the budget would not show a reduction in the number of CPC positions.
Because the mayor’s budget proposal is balanced and almost out the door, the CPC will have to go to the city council and propose cuts to some other department if it wants to claw back the positions—a potentially daunting task with a new, inexperienced council just going into its first budget cycle, with an agenda that has so far been heavy on police hiring and light on police accountability.
The CPC recently hired a deputy director, but currently lacks a policy director and is short several several staff, including a community engagement staffer who’s on loan to another department and may not return. Another community engagement staffer recently resigned in a mass email to the commission, CPC staff, and a list of CPC stakeholders.
“I was excited by the CPC’s mission to uplift the voices of the underrepresented and those most impacted by unconstitutional policing, along with helping to build bridges between SPD and the community for healthy police reform,” the staffer, Jo-Nathan Thomas, wrote. “However, I believe the CPC has become a farce that I can no longer serve with true integrity.”
Neither Ellis nor the commission’s most recent policy director, Linnea Lassiter, responded to PubliCola’s questions. Lassiter worked for the CPC briefly this year but also reportedly left involuntarily. CPC co-chair Joel Merkel declined to respond to questions, except to confirm that Ellis is “on leave.”
The CPC has stopped holding regular meetings, which used to happen every two weeks; the most recent meeting, in early September, consisted entirely of an executive session to discuss pending litigation.
1. Just weeks after her appointment to head up the struggling Community Police Commission, acting CPC director Bessie Scott is leaving for a new position as city manager for Antioch, California. The Antioch City Council confirmed Scott’s appointment Tuesday night.
PubliCola reported on Scott’s appointment to head the CPC last week. Scott was supposed to serve as a bridge between current Executive Director Cali Ellis, who is on administrative leave, and whoever fills the position next, whether that’s Ellis again or a new director. Several CPC staffers told PubliCola they left the agency because of Ellis’ management style, which they called authoritarian and condescending.
CPC co-chair Joel Merkel declined to comment last week about why Ellis was put on leave. In the past two months, almost every other member of the CPC’s small staff has resigned or gone on leave. The agency recently hired a deputy director (a new position), and has gone from biweekly to monthly meetings until the staffing problems are resolved.
Scott, who previously served as CPC director, was deputy director of the Office of Inspector General, which oversees the city’s police accountability system. According to the San Jose Mercury-News, Scott will make just over $263,000 as city manager, up from her current salary of $221,000 as acting CPC director.
Still from SPD ad about an officer rescuing a drowning man
2. The Seattle Police Department has begun running recruitment ads on podcasts—part of the city’s $3.4 million contract with the local marketing firm Copacino Fujikado. A reader reported hearing the ads on Unspooled, on the Earwolf podcasting network.
The ads consist of the audio from SPD’s existing video ads, which include simple animations of male officers rescuing people from dangerous situations. (SPD has since replaced the videos with two new live-action ads highlighting women officers). One typically melodramatic voiceover, interspersed with voice actors dramatizing the scene, described a Harbor Patrol response to a man struggling to swim in Portage Bay:
As the boat got closer, the officer could see the fear in the man’s eyes as he struggled to stay above water. (Sounds of gasping and coughing. ‘Help!’) The water was murky, making it impossible to see below the surface. (“Where is he?”) The officer dove into the water… again… and again… and again. The officer dove a fourth time. (“He’s got him!” “Just hang on!”) The officer carried the man to shore. After the officer performed CPR, the man revived, coughing and gasping for breath. (“All clear!”) The officer reassured him that he was safe, that the worst was over. There are many ways to protect and serve the city of Seattle. Find yours.
PubliCola has reached out to SPD to find out how much the ads cost and will update this post if we hear back. Last month, at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s request, the city council approved an $800,000 increase to Copacino Fujikado’s contract, which runs through the end of this year.
3. The Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council—the central body of labor organizations in King County—just adopted a resolution opposing a slate of legislation that would crack down on drug users and sex workers by reinstating anti-loitering laws and creating zones where their mere presence would be grounds for arrest and gross misdemeanor charges.
Councilmember Cathy Moore has proposed legislation that would reinstate an old law against “loitering for purpose of prostitution” that would make it easier for police to question, search and arrest women they suspect of being sex workers; the bill would also create a new “Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution” zone from which judges could ban people who are accused of participating in the sex trade; although prostitution and patronizing a prostitute are misdemeanors, anyone caught violating a SOAP order could be charged with a gross misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of 364 days in jail. The council will also consider legislation establishing similar zones for people caught violating the city’s misdemeanor laws against using or possessing drugs while in public.
The resolution says that SODA and SOAP orders “directly impact freedom of movement, public accommodation, equitable access to resources, and due process by way of restricting people who have been accused of drug or prostitution offenses from certain areas of the city,” and that spending limited city resources to arrest and jail sex workers and drug users could divert funding from already underpaid nonprofit workers “who use evidence based strategies like harm-reduction, housing first, and permanent supportive housing.”
1. The Community Police Commission, whose internal struggles we covered earlier this month, has appointed Bessie Scott, the deputy inspector general at the city’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), as its acting director, a temporary position, CPC co-chair Joel Merkel confirmed.
Cali Ellis, the current director, has been on administrative leave since last month amid staff complaints about her leadership; in the past two months, almost every member of the CPC’s small staff has resigned or gone on leave, and the commission itself has struggled to maintain a full roster of 15 members.
The CPC is a fully independent arm of the three-pronged police accountability system Seattle established in response to a federal consent decree in 2012; its mission is to listen to feedback from diverse communities and advocate for policies that improve police accountability. The Office of Police Accountability investigates complaints against police, and the OIG provides oversight of the entire police accountability system.
Scott, who did not respond to calls for comment, was the policy director of the CPC between 2018 and 2020 and served as interim director from 2019 to 2020.
The CPC ordinarily holds meetings twice a month, but canceled its meeting this week and plans to hold meetings monthly while it addresses internal issues and hires a deputy director (and, presumably, a permanent executive director); the deputy director is a new position.
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2. The city of Burien will not hold an open, public process for selecting a new police chief to replace popular former chief Ted Boe, who was effectively pushed out after City Manager Adolfo Bailon began demanding his removal in March. Boe resigned in June and took a job as police chief in Des Moines.
Burien contracts for police service with the King County Sheriff’s Office, which is currently suing the city over its total ban on sleeping outdoors, which the sheriff’s office—meaning Boe and his deputies—have declined to enforce.
Instead of a public process, the city council and manager will choose the new police chief after a series of private meetings with a handpicked group of stakeholders and the entire council, divided up into two groups of three.
The council’s meetings may constitute a “serial meeting” under the Open Public Meetings Act, which prohibits government bodies from taking collective action in private. One type of illegal serial meeting is when a legislative body, like a city council, splits up to have a series of private meetings that result in collective action by the larger body.
Earlier this year, a man sued the city after a majority of the city council held a press conference, and took public comments, without providing notice of the meeting or inviting the public to attend. The plaintiff, Arthur West, accused the council of violating the OPMA.
In an email to Burien City Councilmembers, Bailon said he knew that “some members of our community long-for” the “public component” of the selection process the city used when choosing Boe six years ago.
“However, the new process includes considerably more direct input from people of color and is more representative of the cultural and ethnic diversity that exists in Burien I believe firmly that it is far more important to seek and include input from people of color – that make-up a considerable percentage of our population – than it is to provide a venue for politically-extreme activists – with little to no diversity in culture or race – that drown-out voices from people of color.” (Emphasis in original).
The community panel includes five people of color. The rest of the people of color giving input on the police chief are city staffers (including Bailon) and council members themselves.
Bailon—who frequently calls 911 to report people he believes are setting up tents or using drugs outside his office—has expressed frustration about people who oppose the city’s harsh stance on homeless encampments.
1. City Councilmember Cathy Moore reportedly plans to wait until after this year’s fall budget season—which, practically speaking, means until next year—to introduce legislation to roll back renter protections adopted by the previous city council. So far, we’ve heard Moore plans to introduce legislation that would roll back:
• A law requiring landlords to accept the first applicant who qualifies (under criteria set by the landlord, which can include standards like a minimum credit score). Landlords opposed this legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Lisa Herbold, because it prevents them from using vibes-based criteria such as “questionable character traits” and “who will best fit into the building’s community,” which can be a de facto form of discrimination.
• A law barring larger landlords from evicting their tenants between December 1 and March 1, which passed the council on a unanimous vote (with Debora Juarez and Lorena González absent) in February 2020. Landlords said this took away their right to evict nonpaying tenants who say “It’s winter. You can’t evict me.”
• A law requiring landlords to allow immediate family members (or one roommate, who can be kicked out if they don’t pass a screening test) to live with a tenant, within existing occupancy limits. Landlords have claimed this law results in overcrowding and takes away their right to screen family members, such as a spouse or parent, and reject their tenancy.
Moore is reportedly also considering legislation thatwould allow landlords to recover fees from groups like the Housing Justice Project, which provides representation for tenants facing eviction, for “frivolous” defenses against eviction
Asked about forthcoming renter-related legislation, Moore’s office responded, “Discussions around this topic are evolving and when we have something more definitive to share we will do so.”
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2. PubliCola reported last week on problems at the city’s Community Police Commission, a staffed, independent city commission that is supposed to engage with Seattle residents from diverse communities and develop policy recommendations based on that engagement. Our story described a sparsely attended meeting in April about the then-upcoming police union contract; the meeting devolved into shouting and a debate about what kind of behavior is appropriate for the public and the commission.
A consultant hired to facilitate future public meetings, AV Consulting, issued a report after the meeting that made recommendations about how the CPC could improve its relationship with the community, which PubliCola obtained through a records request this week.
In the memo, AV Consulting identified a number of issues that came up during the meeting—including a need for more transparency, a lack of immigrant and refugee representation on the commission, the need to let community engagement staffers lead engagement work, and the importance of acknowledging and responding to community members’ concerns.
This last recommendation reflected an uncomfortable confrontation during the meeting, when Donnita Martin, whose son was killed during the 2020 protests after paramedics refused to go into the CHOP zone on Capitol Hill, asked the CPC what they were doing to help families like hers. Instead of responding to her question, CPC co-chair Joel Merkel thanked her for her testimony while Executive Director Cali Ellis sat silently and smiled.
AV Consulting recommended letting community members speak first at meetings, providing more transparency into the commission’s actions and budget, and being more respectful of people who have lost loved ones to violence, including police violence. “Demonstrate EMPATHY for lost loved ones FIRST in any reply. Acknowledge, validate, and respond,” they wrote.
The consultant also recommended a process of identifying past harms the CPC has caused to communities and addressing them to “rebuild trust with the community.”
Ellis responded to the report by informing AV Consulting, in an email PubliCola also obtained through a records request, that their services would no longer be needed. “At this time, we have decided not to move forward with further facilitation work,” she wrote. Ellis, who has been permanent director since last November, is currently on administrative leave, and the CPC is searching for another executive director.
Donnitta Sinclair Martin, whose son was killed at CHOP in 2020, confronts the Community Police Commission at a meeting in May.
The CPC, which is supposed to represent community views and come up with recommendations to improve police accountability, has struggled for years, with frequent staff upheavals, political disputes, and a lack of internal accountability.
By Erica C. Barnett
In late April, as the Seattle City Council considered a contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that would give all police officers a 24 percent pay increase, the city’s Community Police Commission held a public meeting at the Van Asselt Community Center in Southeast Seattle to get the public’s input on the agreement.
The CPC is the community-based arm of the three-pronged police accountability system Seattle established in response to a federal consent decree in 2012; its mission is to listen to feedback from diverse communities and advocate for policies that improve police accountability. In 2017, the city adopted a landmark police accountability law that professionalized the CPC and made it fully independent.
“This is the first of many meetings that we’re going to have on the contract,” CPC executive director Cali Ellis told the small crowd, who were sparsely distributed on folding chairs throughout the community center’s gym.
Right away, though, it was clear that most people hadn’t shown up to talk about the SPOG contract. Donnitta Sinclair Martin, whose 19-year-old son, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, was fatally shot in the CHOP protest area in 2020, stood up. The city, she said, had failed to take accountability for her son’s death—and the CPC had failed to put pressure on them to do so. “And we sit here having these meetings. I came here to ask you: What are we going to do? And when are we going to do it?”
CPC co-chair Joel Merkel, sitting with Ellis at the front of the room, responded, “Thank you,” prompting Martin to snap, “No, that’s not the answer!” Ellis remained silent, wearing a placid smile. “Don’t smile at a mother that lost their child. Please don’t smile. Because you could be in the same position. What happened to me can happen to you. So don’t. Don’t smile. This is not funny,” Martin said.
Other speakers criticized the CPC and the city’s police accountability system, prompting the CPC’s other two co-chairs, Rev. Patricia Hunter and Rev. Harriett Walden, to argue that the CPC’s role was to recommend policies for SPD to adopt, not protest against the police. “Marching in the street is important,” Hunter said. “We may feel good at the end of the day because we marched the street, but if the policies didn’t change, then nothing happened.”
As the meeting wound down, SPD staffer Victoria Beach stood up and apologized to Ellis and Merkel. “I have to say, this was a waste of time coming here. This isn’t the time or place for these kinds of conversations,” she said. “I’m sorry about you being humiliated. I support you. This is ridiculous.”
Afterward, accusations flew about who was to blame for the poorly attended forum, which ended up being the only meeting the CPC ever held on the contract, despite the commission’s promises that it would be the first of many meetings. One staffer told PubliCola that the CPC had failed to engage with the community before holding the meeting, which was scheduled on the same night as a major public safety forum in the Central District. Another said the fact that the CPC had not allowed public comment for more than a year made it inevitable that pent-up frustrations would come pouring out. A consultant who was hired to facilitate CPC meetings filed a critical internal report about the meeting, and was quickly relieved of her duties. And commissioners pointed the finger at staff, saying they failed to rise to the occasion or had even tried to sabotage the event.
It was, in other words, a mess. And if it had been a one-off planning failure, it probably wouldn’t matter. The CPC could figure out what went wrong, regroup, and hold another meeting. It could do better outreach in the future. Heads, if necessary, could roll.
But the fiasco was a sign that something was fundamentally amiss with a group whose primary purpose is to channel public input on police accountability and turn it into policy
For the better part of a decade, the CPC’s internal and external problems have recurred on a predictable cycle, suggesting that the flaws in the agency aren’t due to any particular director, set of staffers, or group of commissioners, but are endemic to the body itself. After more than a year of dramatic upheavals and messy meetings—including a different public forum, last February, that devolved into a tearful screaming match—the CPC is once again at a critical inflection point. I wanted to understand why this commission, among all the other agencies in the city, keeps falling apart.
Over the past two months, I spoke to many current and former CPC members, staff, and people involved in establishing the CPC. They describe a top-down organization where employees have no formal outlet to complain about abusive behavior by management or commissioners; where community engagement staffers are devalued and required to carry out menial tasks; where communities affected by violence are ignored or harmed; and where a few people at the top dictate the priorities and practices of an organization that was meant to be a bottom-up reflection of community values.
Most of the people I talked to have come to the conclusion that the CPC isn’t workable in its current form. While many, especially current and recent staff, were deeply critical of Ellis’s leadership, they also described structural issues that go beyond current staff and commissioners—issues that have been present for many years.
In addition to the CPC, the 2017 accountability ordinance established two other “accountability partners”: The Office of Police Accountability, which investigates police misconduct claims and the Office of the Inspector General, which oversees OPA and SPD. Of the three city-funded bodies, only the CPC is administratively separate and independent from the city, with no direct line of accountability to the executive or legislative branch. Three of its 15 members serve as co-chairs; these co-chairs are the direct supervisors of the executive director, who in turn oversees of staff of about seven people.
Of the three accountability agencies, the CPC is supposed to be the one most responsive to, and representative of, communities impacted by violence and police misconduct.
“For the CPC’s first five years, it functioned as it was intended—as a platform for the combined insights of various community sectors on public safety, policing and police accountability,” said Lisa Daugaard, a founding CPC member who served through 2019. Daugaard is the co-director ofPurpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), which created the LEAD diversion program. “The whole point was to ensure that community expertise was not shoved to the side or steamrolled over by officials’ pronouncements that everything was solved.”
“We were also intended to forge consensus from divergent points of view, and we did that, bridging the gap from accountability activists to active duty police officers and commanders,” Daugaard said.
But since the city formalized the three-prong police accountability structure in 2017, the CPC has struggled to have an impact. For years, commissioners have complained that the city ignores the CPC’s recommendations, and over time, many insiders say, the commission has become less like a committee of dedicated subject matter experts and more like a club overseen by an insular group of leaders who preside over a constantly changing cast of characters.
Former commissioners described arriving to their first meetings eager to gather community feedback and come up with policy recommendations that would make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, only to leave months or years later, convinced that their time had been wasted.
“The CPC is a great idea in theory, but the CPC does not have the power to change things,” a former commissioner, Alina Santillan, said. “The entire time I was there, we wrote a lot of letters, recommended a lot of things, expressed disappointment. … I don’t think the CPC has ever been bold in the statements we’ve made or the things we’ve advocated for, and that has resulted in a lot of harm, both internally and externally.”
“A Lack of Leadership”
Current and former CPC staff point to the current executive director, Cali Ellis, as the source of recent problems within the agency.
Ellis, originally hired as the CPC’s policy director, was promoted to the top position after the commission put then-director Brandy Grant on leave in late 2022 (Grant subsequently resigned.) Although some on the City Council questioned whether Ellis—an academic and policy expert who had never held a management position—was prepared to take on the permanent job, the council approved her appointment in December 2023 after a delay of about four months. Ellis’ husband, Steven Ellis, is a legislative aide for Sara Nelson, who is now city council president and who voted to approve Ellis’ appointment.
Several staffers and commissioners praised Ellis’ work as policy director, where her job involved overseeing a small staff of analysts who do research and come up with proposals to improve police accountability in Seattle. But once she became head of the entire CPC, staff began raising concerns about her management style, which staffers and a CPC commissioner described to PubliCola as condescending, indecisive, and controlling.
As an example, several people independently mentioned a CPC work group that was asked to research and make recommendation on two potential police surveillance tools—a Shotspotter-style acoustic gunshot locator system and CCTV cameras—earlier this year. Ellis assigned a CPC staffer to help the group with their work.
Once the group was ready to present their recommendations, however, Ellis and the CPC co-chairs used a flurry of procedural objections to delay their presentation, telling the group that commission bylaws required them to attend the commission’s governance subcommittee meeting, which is made up of the CPC co-chairs and Ellis, prior to the regular CPC meeting. Members of the group, which was made up entirely of Black commissioners, expressed frustration that they were being sidelined, and some suspected that the reason was that the recommendations didn’t explicitly support the surveillance technologies.
Co-chair Harriett Walden, who has served on the commission since 2013, is a veteran of the police accountability movement, founding a group called Mothers for Police Accountability in 1990. In recent years, Walden has become a vocal advocate for more police presence in communities of color, and she was an avid supporter of the surveillance tools, arguing they would help reduce gun violence in Black communities.
Her views are generally shared by her co-chair, Rev. Hunter, and decried by other Black advocates for accountability—a reminder, if anybody needed one, that no group of people impacted by city policies is monolithic. (Hunter resigned her CPC position in June, leaving Merkel and Walden as the two co-chairs).
The delay in the Shotspotter and CCTV recommendations led one staffer to make the unusual move of calling out Ellis in a public meeting for her “lack of leadership.”
“Thiswassomethingthatwewereaskedto dobyourexecutivedirector, Cali,withtheexpectationthatwewouldbetalkingaboutittoday,” the staffer said during a regular CPC meeting in February. “ItwassomethingthatweweretoldwasurgentandapriorityfortheCPC,andthatweneededtoworkreallyquicklytogetitdone.Sowegottogetherandwegotitdone,andthenweweretoldthatwecouldn’ttalkaboutittoday.” Moments later, the staffer said Ellis had instructed them over Teams to stop talking, so they did.
The work group was finally able to present their recommendations in March. But at the following meeting, the CPC didn’t even bring the recommendations up for a vote. Instead, they put out a statement written by a white CPC member, attorney Lynne Wilson, who was not involved in the work group; it said the CPC “does not oppose a time-limited and location-limited surveillance pilot with the primary aim of reducing gun violence in our City,” given that “a significant number of CPC Commissioners report that the communities they represent are profoundly suffering from the daily trauma of increasing gun violence in Seattle.”
At a meeting in March, Wilson said she worked with Walden on the statement and had proposed it on a fast time frame in what she called “my Mothers [for Police Accountability] mode,” which she had developed over 30 years of working with Walden.
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The statement did not go over well with those who researched and drafted the original recommendations. “All the people who worked on it were people of color, and what we used was something one white lady put together from her own brain,” one CPC staffer said. “They felt super disrespected by that, and since then they have been super disengaged from the commission and the work groups.”
Ellis was abruptly put on administrative leave in late July for reasons co-chair Merkel declined to discuss; she did not respond to questions sent to her personal email. The commission’s co-chairs are currently in the process of hiring a deputy executive director to support her or a future executive director—in the hope that that person can share the load of a role that has been a challenge for every person who has filled it over the past eight years.
“A Vacuum of Accountability”
Current and former staffers say they were unable to get anyone to listen or take action on issues with Ellis’ management—not the City Council that approved of her appointment, not the mayor, and not the human resources department that ordinarily adjudicates internal workplace disputes. This, they say, is because of the CPC’s unique position as an independent agency: Other than the appointment process, the council and mayor are supposed to have no direct involvement in internal CPC decisions, and the CPC’s bylaws provide no recourse for staffers to complaint to HR about the director.
In practice, staffers say, they did talk to HR and the CPC’s internal ombudsman about Ellis but were told nothing could be done. This lack of internal accountability, current and former staffers said, is a key reason internal issues tend to escalate to the point where everyone goes on leave or quits.
“We were operating in a vacuum of accountability,” a former staffer said.
As the council deliberated over Ellis’ appointment, several staffers who opposed her appointment sought a meeting with then-City Council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold, a longtime champion for police accountability who held considerable sway over the decision. Ellis, who had access to the email account of another staffer who had just quit in response to her nomination, found out about the meeting from an email to that staffer and ordered her staffers not to go, according to several people who were on staff at the time.
Eventually, staffers did meet with Herbold to express their concerns about Ellis. Although Herbold ultimately voted to approve Ellis’ appointment, she conditioned her support on the requirement that Ellis get executive coaching, according to emails PubliCola obtained through a records request.
The CPC’s three co-chairs—Walden, Merkel, and Hunter—pushed back on the coaching requirement, according to an email exchange. They argued that Ellis had performed “admirably” in the face of “unprofessional and insubordinate conduct” by staff, including the request for a meeting with Herbold, and showed “emotional intelligence, professionalism, and clarity on the vision and goals of the CPC.”
Herbold, who was wrapping up her final year on the council, told PubliCola that the four-month delay in Ellis’ appointment “was related to a number of factors ranging from the budget process to my efforts to secure agreement from the CPC co-chairs on several matters related to the confirmation process.” Herbold declined to comment on Ellis’ performance.
Community Police Commission Director Cali Ellis and Co-Chair Joel Merkel
“We Were Constantly Told That We Weren’t Doing Work”
Community engagement is the core of the commission’s work; as the city’s only police accountability agency designed to reflect and represent community input, the CPC’s small community engagement staff is critical to its mission. But current and former CPC staffers and commissioners say community engagement staffers, and their work, have been devalued for many years.
At the CPC, community engagement involves listening to community concerns, gathering feedback for the commission, and helping direct the policy staff toward solutions the commission can then advocate for with the mayor, city council, and state legislative leaders.
Current and former staffers said Ellis’ behavior toward the community engagement staff could be dictatorial and demeaning.
“One of the things that has been consistent with the CPC is their lack of respect for community engagement staff and not valuing community engagement as much as they value policy work,” Roxana Pardo Garcia, who served as the CPC’s first community engagement director, said. Commissioners told staff that they suspected them of not doing any actual work, Pardo Garcia said, and that “we were resistant and defiant.” In reality, she said, “we would do all this work and it would never make it to the CPC agenda.”
Exit interview documents from several other staff paint a similar picture; according to a memo submitted by a former community engagement staffer when she quit, “Commissioners and executive directors repeatedly characterized the Community Engagement team as untrustworthy, lazy, and unskilled,” and accused them of “riding the gravy train.”
Last year, all three community engagement staffers went on medical leave because of stress and stress-related illnesses, as did Ellis’ executive assistant; all four are Black, and three have since left the agency. (Historically, community engagement staffers have been mostly people of color, and policy staff have been mostly white).
According to one staffer, CPC employees “take the appropriate avenues by going to HR and [the CPC’s internal] ombudsman, but there is literally nothing they can do or are willing to do. “They were like, ‘You can take unpaid medical leave,” so that’s what they all did.”
Two community engagement staff, both Black women, quit the CPC while I was reporting this story.
One, Mergitu Argo, is a former SPD community service officer, OneAmerica staffer, and case manager who chaired SPD’s East African Advisory Council and served on the Seattle Women’s Commission. She said Ellis often treated her more like a personal assistant than an experienced community advocate and subject-matter expert.
“She would pull me out from staff meetings—like, ‘Come here,’ from the hallway, saying ‘Go make phone calls to remind the commission about the meeting,” Argo recalled. (Other staffers backed up this account.) “I said, ‘I can do it when I finish the staff meeting,’ [but] she said, ‘No, you can do it now.” According one former staffer , “she was dismissed—literally waved out of the meeting to go make phone calls.”
On another occasion, multiple staffers recall, Ellis ordered Argo to carry commission co-chair Walden’s purse across the street to her car. Felicia Cross, who was Argo’s supervisor, recalls telling Ellis, “She will not. And [Ellis] is saying, ‘Well, somebody needs to carry Reverend Walden’s purse,’ and I said ‘Why don’t you take it?’ I said, ‘Mergitu’s not leaving, and if Reverend Walden can’t carry her own purse she shouldn’t bring it.'”
On another occasion, prior to the November 2023 election, commission co-chair Joel Merkel asked a community engagement staffer, Felicia Cross, if she could volunteer for his wife, Sarah Reyneveld’s, King County Council election campaign, and ask others to volunteer. Argo agreed to pose for a group photo, and later volunteered to doorbell for Reyneveld, but later felt that “I was being used” to make it look like Reyneveld had support from diverse communities.
“I’m an immigrant and a Black Muslim woman,” Argo said. “I’m always afraid when someone in that position—someone white—talks to me because I feel like I just have to get up and do it.”
Shortly after the incident when Ellis reportedly asked her to go make phone calls, Argo said she decided to take medical leave to deal with stress-related health problems; the other community engagement staff took leave around the same time, also citing stress-related medical issues.
When they returned this past March, Argo and other staffers recalled, Ellis told them she was going to “micromanage” the community engagement team, deciding when they could take breaks and requiring them to keep a detailed accounting of how they spent their time. Cross recalled that another staffer asked Ellis, “is that just for us? Because you let all the white people go.’ And she said, ‘You’re the only ones I have trouble with.'”
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Cali Ellis, the current director, has been on administrative leave since last month amid staff complaints about her leadership; in the past two months, almost every member of the CPC’s small staff has resigned or gone on leave, and the commission itself has struggled to maintain a full roster of 15 members.
• A law requiring landlords to accept the first applicant who qualifies (under criteria set by the landlord, which can include standards like a minimum credit score). 
