Tag: consent decree

City Council, Police

New Crowd Control Law Includes Few Restrictions on Use of “Less-Lethal Weapons”

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved legislation yesterday that retroactively authorizes the Seattle Police Department to adopt its own policies governing how officers can use “less lethal” weapons such as pepper spray, foam-tipped bullets, and blast balls—rubber grenades that can cause serious, even life-threatening injuries when they explode. The bill imposes a handful of new restrictions—requiring cops to throw blast balls “underhand, like a bowling ball,” in most cases—but otherwise retroactively authorizes a set of policies SPD has been using, without official approval, since early 2023.

The council passed legislation in 2021 restricting SPD officers’ use of less-lethal weapons and instructed them to come up with a crowd control policy that complied with the new law. Instead, the police ignored the law for years, eventually adopting their own “interim” internal policy that placed limited restrictions on the use of less-lethal weapons for crowd control.

The crowd control legislation the council adopted Tuesday doesn’t incorporate any of these policies into law; instead, it authorizes SPD to create its own policies, consistent with a handful of new restrictions, and to change those policies (to allow the use of novel weapons in the future, for example) without coming back to the council for approval or review.

The council approved the crowd control ordinance, which explicitly authorizes the use of blast balls, 6-3 vote, with Cathy Moore, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Joy Hollingsworth voting “no.” Ever since the WTO protests of 1999, blast balls and other types of grenades have caused serious injuries during protests, and the city of Seattle has doled out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits by people harmed or maimed by the grenades.

As we’ve reported, the new law directs SPD to follow a set of general principles, such as respect for free speech, in crafting its crowd control policy, and says less-lethal weapons should only be used when “specific facts and circumstances are occurring or about to occur that create an imminent risk of physical injury to any person or significant property damage.”

It also restricts the use of tear gas to “riots” (defined in existing SPD policy here), putting SPD in compliance with state law, and directs officers to throw blast balls “underhand” and “away from people,” unless throwing them overhand into a crowd is necessary to stop someone who, in an officer’s opinion, is causing an “immediate threat to life safety.”

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On Tuesday, the council rejected several amendments that would have placed guardrails around SPD’s use of less-lethal weapons, arguing that it would be inappropriate for the council to impose too many restrictions on internal police policies.

Objecting to an amendment from Moore that would have required the mayor to approve any use of blast balls, Council President Sara Nelson said, “If we tie SPD’s hands too much, or complicate things so much in the moment… and they’re not able to use less-lethal weapons or tools in certain situations, we risk the likelihood of of them having to turn to other tools that are not less lethal or are even more dangerous.” (That amendment failed 6-3, with Moore, Hollingsworth, and Rinck voting “yes.”).

The same 6-3 majority voted against another Moore amendment that would have created a legislative pathway for the council to object to, and potentially prohibit, the use of new less-lethal weapons in the future. Councilmember Bob Kettle argued that Moore’s proposal was tantamount to “crowding out our accountability partners,” specifically the Community Police Commission—a purely advisory body that Kettle argued was a more appropriate venue for the public to raise concerns about SPD’s use of new types of less-lethal weapons.

Seven councilmembers, including Hollingsworth, voted down a Moore amendment that would have prohibited SPD from deploying officers from outside jurisdictions, such as the Washington State Patrol or National Guard, if those officers refused to comply with Seattle’s crowd control policies.

Moore said the amendment was more necessary than ever at “a time when we are asking for mutual aid from other jurisdictions [and] we are not entirely sure where they line on the spectrum of law enforcement issues.”

Kettle retorted that if the city imposed this requirement, “”jurisdictions will not come to our aid” in the future. “If we get too precise in terms of policies… that will basically mean that nobody will show up. Nobody will show up,” Kettle said. “And if we’re in a dire situation, and our officers are on the street and they don’t feel anybody’s going to show up, that’s problematic. That creates even more danger, more danger. We should not put ourselves in that position.”

Speaking to reporters before the vote, Kettle said he considered the crowd-control legislation the final step before US District Judge James Robart will lift a 12-year-old consent decree between Seattle and the US Department of Justice. Last year, Robart said the city needed to adopt crowed control policies that complied with the settlement, which also covered biased policing and use of excessive force by SPD officers.

“We have a very different Seattle Police Department today” than when the consent decree started in 2012, Kettle said, “and this legislation is the final piece of the puzzle, [to] get to a place where we can go to Judge Robart, go to the court and seek for the consent decree to be ended,” Kettle said. “Going through this process, getting this bill complete, and [enabling] the end of the consent decree would also acknowledge all the work that’s been done over the last dozen-plus years in terms of reform of the Seattle Police Department.”

Courts, Mayor Harrell, Police, Uncategorized

Consent Decree Will Remain In Place Until City “Gets It Done” On Crowd Control Policies, Judge Says
Deputy mayor Tim Burgess. Photo by Andrew Engelson.

by Andrew Engelson

In a status hearing in US District Court on Wednesday about the consent decree between the US Department of Justice and the Seattle Police Department, Judge James Robart expressed frustration that his efforts to pressure SPD to adopt tougher accountability and discipline policies for misconduct were like “rolling a rock uphill.” But he hinted that, if the city council passes legislation addressing SPD’s responses to large protests, Robart may be willing to finally terminate the decree after twelve years.

Seattle has been under federal oversight since 2012, after a Department of Justice investigation found SPD had engaged in biased policing and excessive use of force and that it lacked meaningful oversight and accountability mechanisms to address misconduct. Last year, Robart ended most of the consent decree, with the exception of SPD’s crowd control policies and its accountability and discipline system. 

The hearing centered mostly on those two items, as Robart grilled assistant city attorney Kerala Cowart about SPD’s progress–or lack of it–on those remaining issues. 

Robart questioned Cowart about crowd management, which has played a key role in the consent decree hearings after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, saying, “You acknowledge in your briefing that the termination of the consent decree will not take place until we have a crowd management policy.”

Cowart replied that the “process has not proceeded as quickly as we would like,” but that the mayor’s office will be submitting legislation to the city council in the next few weeks outlining a new crowd control policy.

The legislation, according to an email that the mayor’s office sent to the city council on Wednesday, will prohibit the use of crowd control tools unless “unless specific facts and circumstances are occurring or about to occur that create an imminent risk of physical injury to any person or significant property damage.” It also prioritizes de-escalation, and makes SPD policy consistent with recently passed state legislation.

A DOJ attorney said he was “pleased to see a proposal has been sent to the city council. But we need to get a policy submitted to the court and to the monitor.”

Robart then addressed the second, thorniest remaining issue: accountability and discipline. The judge lamented his own “inability to affect the collective bargaining agreement,” noting that while the mayor and city council approved a retroactive police contract, they largely left new accountability measures off the table. 

Cowart pointed to small concessions the city got in that contract, including modification of the 180-day deadline for OPA investigations and a request that outside arbitrators, who hear discipline appeals, “give deference” to the police chief’s decisions about whether to fire officers or not.

Robart, however, pointed to recent cases such as a former SPD officer seeking $600,000 in back pay after an arbitrator said she had been wrongly fired in 2017 after shooting at a fleeing stolen vehicle.

Toward the end of the hearing, Robart, seeming exasperated, urged the city to “get it done” on crowd control policies “and then get [officers] trained.”

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Joel Merkel, the only current co-chair of the Community Police Commission, said “the judge seemed to accept that he may have some limitations as to what he can achieve, and he wasn’t interested in leaving the consent decree open just to ensure better outcomes in collective bargaining.”

The CPC, which filed an amicus brief prior to today’s hearing, reminded Robart in that document that he found the city out of compliance in 2019 because of inadequate accountability measures, and noted that the new SPOG contract still requires an “elevated standard of review …for termination cases where the alleged offense is stigmatizing to a law enforcement officer,” making it harder to prove misconduct in cases where discipline might make it harder for an officer to get another job.

Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action (formerly: the Public Defender Association) said, “It’s time for the consent decree to end. It’s time for the public to be able to turn directly to Seattle officials for responsibility with respect to all these matters.”

Daugaard said the decree has mostly been a distraction from reform, though she did praise it for pushing SPD to more accurately track data on bias in policing. “It has not been helpful to have this theory that there was someone else who was going to intercede,” she said. Daugaard said the council and mayor should negotiate a return to the reforms passed by the city council in 2017, and largely abandoned in the 2018 SPOG contract. “We should return to that framework, and the city should negotiate to accomplish it.”

After the hearing, deputy mayor Tim Burgess, who oversees public safety for the mayor’s office, took a few questions. When asked what accountability improvements the mayor’s office would like to see, Burgess said the process of investigating misconduct through the city’s Office of Police Accountability  is “working exceptionally well,” but that he would like to see the state legislature pass a law making it harder for arbitrators to reverse the police chief’s disciplinary decisions.

“We are not going to achieve reform of arbitration through collective bargaining,” Burgess said.. 

Burgess also said there are currently 42 applicants for the chief of police position and that the mayor intends to make a decision by December. “The mayor is going to appoint a citizens committee or group, or whatever we’re going to call it, that will be involved with the semifinalists,” he said.

When asked if former chief Adrian Diaz, who is still on SPD payroll at $380,000 a year, will remain on staff after the new chief is hired, Burgess said, “I don’t think I want to talk about that.”

Courts, Police

City Asks Judge to End Consent Decree; Outstanding Issues Include Protest Response and Accountability

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle and officials from the US Department of Justice asked US District Judge James Robart to release the Seattle Police Department from federal oversight under a 2012 agreement known as the consent decree yesterday, asking Robart to find SPD in “substantial compliance” with the consent decree with the exception of two areas—crowd control and accountability—that the city says will finish addressing this year.

“After more than a decade of cooperation, the United States and the City of Seattle… agree that the Seattle Police Department (SPD) has implemented far­-reaching reforms and achieved remarkable progress through the hard work and dedication of SPD officers and civilian staff at all levels of the organization and from extensive contributions by community members and leaders throughout Seattle,” the draft agreement says. Specifically, the motion cites improvements SPD has made to its policies on use of force, investigative (“Terry”) stops, bias-free policing, and supervision of officers.

The city has been under federal oversight since 2012, after a 2011 DOJ investigation found police had engaged in unconstitutional policing practices, including bias and excessive use of force, and that it lacked meaningful oversight and accountability mechanisms to address unconstitutional behavior by officers.

Since then, Judge Robart has repeatedly declined to rule that the city has complied with terms requiring the department to address the problems outlined in the consent decree, citing incidents of excessive force and the city’s failure to implement an effective accountability system.

In 2019, Robart ruled the city out of compliance with the consent decree after the council adopted, and then-mayor Jenny Durkan approved, a contract with the city’s main police union, the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), that conflicted with historic police accountability legislation the council adopted the previous year.

And then, in 2020, police responded to protests against police bias and brutality by using force against protesters and tear-gassing Capitol Hill, prompting more than 19,000 complaints against the department.

The risk of a victory lap is obvious: The next time SPD uses force inappropriately or fails to be transparent about potential officer misconduct (as it has, most recently, with the January death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck by patrol officer Kevin Dave), the department could find itself back in Judge Robart’s crosshairs.

Although the agreement notes that the end of the consent decree will not end the department’s commitment to “continuous improvement” and ongoing reform, separate memos and statements from city officials make yesterday’s proposed agreement sound like a conclusive vote of confidence in SPD’s commitment to bias-free policing, accountability, transparency, and reasonable use of force going forward.

For example, the city’s official memo supporting the agreement, signed by City Attorney Ann Davison, calls SPD “dramatically transformed”—a department whose use of force “now presents a night-and-day contrast to the practices found by DOJ in 2011.” SPD’s dramatic use of force against people protesting against police violence in 2020 represented “one, temporary lapse” in the department’s reduced use of force in general, the memo says, and overall, “SPD’s hard work over the past decade has improved outcomes for the people of Seattle.”

The risk of a victory lap is obvious: The next time SPD uses force inappropriately or fails to be transparent about potential officer misconduct (as it has, most recently, with the January death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck by patrol officer Kevin Dave), the department could find itself back in Judge Robart’s crosshairs. Robart has demonstrated repeatedly that he’s willing to withhold a finding of full compliance and send SPD back to square one in the past, most recently after the 2020 protests, so overconfidence is probably ill-advised.

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Many of the memos and statements supporting the new agreement, including a declaration by the city’s labor negotiator, Danielle Malcolm, explicitly mention the ongoing contract negotiations between the city and SPOG, highlighting the significant changes SPOG’s sister organization, the Seattle Police Management Association, accepted as part of their new contract in 2022. Those reforms included a higher burden of proof for arbitrators to overturn misconduct decisions; a change in policy that makes it harder for arbitrators to overturn the police chief’s disciplinary decisions, such as firing an officer for misconduct; and improved transparency into the arbitration process.

The implication is that any contract the city signs with SPOG will need to include similar reforms. However, the proof will lie in the contract itself; again, the city council, which included now-Mayor Bruce Harrell, adopted reforms in 2017, then immediately abandoned many of them in the SPOG contract it signed the following year.

The proposed short-term agreement acknowledges the police department still needs to make progress on “ensuring sustainable accountability and improving policy and practices for using force in crowd settings,” and commits SPD to adopting a revised crowd management policy and “alternative reporting and review process for force used in crowd settings”; in addition, the city will hire a consultant to make recommendations about the accountability system.

Many of the memos and statements supporting the new agreement, including a declaration by the city’s labor negotiator, Danielle Malcolm, explicitly mention the ongoing contract negotiations between the city and SPOG, highlighting the significant changes SPOG’s sister organization, the Seattle Police Management Association, accepted as part of their new contract in 2022.

According to a statement by SPD COO Brian Maxey, the changes to crowed management will include things like “meeting with event organizers ahead of a protest, maintaining a low-profile (less visible police presence) when feasible, and using social media to communicate information to protestors in real time.” Maxey also cites new officer trainings, including Before the Badge and a system called Outward Mindset, which was developed in Utah by the LDS-affiliated Arbinger Institute.

In a statement, Seattle City Councilmember and public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold said, “When I share the data that demonstrates SPD’s reduced rates of force use, I often hear concerns about growing racial disparities. I appreciate SPD’s commitment in the Agreement to identify, study, and work towards ‘eliminating policies and practices that have an unwarranted disparate impact on certain protected classes’ and ongoing work to ‘develop a plan that details the technologies, policies, and practices that it will seek to employ to reduce disparities in policing.'”

Critics of the consent decree have argued that it has, paradoxically, prevented the city from adopting reforms because substantial changes to the way the department functions, such as funding cuts or proposals to replace some police with civilians, would require approval by the federal monitor.

Once the consent decree is lifted in its entirety, which could happen later this year, the city’s Office of the Inspector General (established during the consent decree) will take over the bulk of the responsibility of ensuring SPD is complying with its commitments to reform—the so-called pillars of the consent decree.

This work could include providing more transparency into the work of the Force Review Board, which reviews serious uses of force, and expanding the scope of its investigations; doing a deeper dive into potential bias during stops and detentions; and making policy recommendations. The agreement notes that Harrell’s budget included funding for three new staffers at OIG—positions that will become permanent after the consent decree is lifted.

Courts, Police, public safety

Police Monitor Praises Progress, But Does Not Recommend Ending Federal Consent Decree (Yet)
Seattle’s court-appointed police monitor, Dr. Antonio Oftelie

By Erica C. Barnett

As soon as next year, US Judge James Robart could lift the consent decree with the Seattle Police Department that has been in place since 2012, when the US Department of Justice concluded that SPD routinely used excessive force, engaged in biased policing, and lacked appropriate structures to ensure accountability for bad actors.

But the department still has to make significant improvements to its accountability and crowd control practices before seeking release from federal oversight, according to a report released last week by the court-appointed monitor who oversees SPD’s reform efforts, Dr. Antonio Oftelie, and his three-person team.

Overall, the monitor’s report found that SPD is in compliance with the consent decree in key areas, including crisis intervention, stops and detentions, and use of force, “except during the waves of protests over the summer of 2020, in which the serious concerns from both the community and the Monitoring Team described herein evidenced a need for further work in the area of policy and training around use of force, force reporting, and force review in large-scale crowd management events.”

The report does not deal explicitly with police accountability, which Oftelie told PubliCola is “still very much an open area” in the consent decree that will have to be addressed in the future; however, it notes that Oftelie’s team will conduct an assessment of Seattle’s entire accountability system as part of a larger monitoring plan that could wrap up as soon as the end of this year.

“The accountability system in Seattle is one of the best in the country, but it does have certain gaps or areas that could use improvement,” Oftelie said.

SPD has been under federal oversight since 2012, after the US Department of Justice determined that the department routinely engaged in unconstitutional policing practices, including bias and excessive use of force, and that it lacked meaningful oversight and accountability mechanisms to address unconstitutional behavior by officers.

Since then, the city has asked Judge Robart to release it from the consent decree on two occasions, both times unsuccessfully. The most recent request, from former city attorney Pete Holmes and former mayor Jenny Durkan, came in May 2020—just before protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, when police targeted large groups of demonstrators with blast balls, tear gas, and other “less-lethal” weapons, leading to more than 19,000 complaints.

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Setting aside the protests, which the report addresses separately, the monitor concluded that SPD has sustained its compliance with the consent decree on use of force, stops and detentions, and how the department responds to people experiencing a behavioral health crisis.

“SPD officers respond to nearly 10,000 people in crisis per year, and Crisis Intervention Teams have dramatically improved interactions and outcomes – with force used in only 1.5 percent of contacts with individuals experiencing crises and many improvements made in connecting individuals in crisis to supportive human services,” the report says. (Crisis Intervention Team officers have gone through special training to respond to behavioral health crisis.)

“And when officers stop or detain a person, they must now articulate the reason for a stop and provide justification for searches,” the report continues. “As a testament to this progress, policing organizations around the nation, to advance their own reforms, have come to Seattle to learn from SPD and adopt policies and best practices in crisis response, de-escalation, and critical decision-making models.”

In a letter to Oftelie shortly before the monitor released the report, City Council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold noted that the report also found a sharp increase in the number of people contacted by SPD officers while in crisis more than five times, with the greatest increase among people contacted more than 16 times.

Chart showing police stops by race in Seattle

The report also notes that even when it’s impossible to prove officer bias, disturbing racial disparities persist in almost every kind of police contact the report covers. Black and Native American people “are disproportionately stopped, detained, subjected to force,” according to the report, which also notes that officers are more likely to frisk Black people than white people, even though “frisks of White subjects more consistently find weapons.” Officers are also more likely to stop and frisk people when they’re in a neighborhood with more people of a race other than their own, the report found, and more likely to point their guns at Black individuals than people of any other race.

“Significant and persistent racial disparities suggest that continued monitoring of implementation of biasfree policing could result in positive community outcomes,” Herbold wrote.

The report also notes a strikingly high percentage of people—23 percent of those subjected to force, 16 percent of crisis contacts, and 17 percent of people stopped by police—whose race officers recorded as “unknown.” (Excluding the 2020 protests reduces the proportion of “unknown” use-of-force subjects to 15 percent.) The percentage of people of “unknown” race SPD interacted with spiked dramatically starting in mid-2019, when SPD stopped recording “Hispanic” as a racial category, according to the report, and apparently started reporting the race of most Latinos as “unknown.”

The report incorporates findings from several preliminary assessments, which found that officers’ use of force declined 33 percent between 2015 to 2019 and 48 percent between 2015 to 2021, with a more significant reduction in the most serious types of force, such as shooting; that officers responding to people in crisis rarely resort to force, “a dramatic improvement from DOJ investigative findings that led to the Consent Decree”; and that although there are still troubling racial disparities in who gets stopped and detained by police, officers are generally able to articulate “sufficient legal justification” for their actions by establishing “reasonable suspicion” when stopping or frisking a person. 

“I would describe the challenge right now with the number of officers as a crisis from the consent decree perspective. Are officers being supervised, is data being analyzed, is force being analyzed at the right level? All those systems are near collapse.”—Seattle Police Monitor Dr. Antonio Oftelie

The consent decree, Oftelie says, does not define aspirational goals for SPD; it establishes a “floor,” not a ceiling, by setting minimum standards for constitutional policing. Although the city council has groused at times that the consent decree makes it hard for them to pass laws reforming the department—for example, by transferring some of its duties, and funding, to civilians outside the department—Oftelie argues that “the ceiling is relatively unlimited,” and that the city could impose new rules on SPD—requiring special training on how to deal with people who are walking brandishing knives, for example—without violating the terms of the consent decree.

“I don’t agree that the judge has put any limitations on polices and practice that the city can put in place,” Oftelie said. “It’s situational, but I think that issue has taken on a narrative in the city that’s overblown… I think the community, and maybe sometimes the council, has used the consent decree as an excuse not to innovate new things.”

The report cautions that that the final phase of the consent decree will be “challenging,” and notes that SPD still has work to do to build on the progress it has made and restore trust with Seattle residents, particularly when it comes to protest response and accountability.

“In the comprehensive assessment, we deemed SPD in sustained compliance with use of force exclusive of crowd management, stops and detentions, and crisis intervention—what I didn’t say is that I recommend that these paragraphs in the consent be closed out and terminated,” Oftelie said. “SPD will have to write a new policy for crowd management that takes into consideration state law and the less- lethal weapons ordinance, and that policy will need to be reviewed by the DOJ, the monitor, and ultimately the court.” Continue reading “Police Monitor Praises Progress, But Does Not Recommend Ending Federal Consent Decree (Yet)” →

Courts, Police, race

Report Shows Ongoing Racial Disparities in Use of Force, Sparking Criticism and Questions About Future of Consent Decree

By Erica C. Barnett

A review of the Seattle Police Department’s use of force over the last three years, released by the federal monitor who oversees the consent decree over the department, found that despite a decline in the use of all levels of force, officers remain far more likely to use force against Black and Native American people than white suspects, and that Black people were most likely to experience the most serious type of force, which includes shootings by police. Thirty-six percent of use of force incidents involved Black individuals, who make up just over 7 percent of Seattle’s population.

Between 2019 and 2021, SPD officers used the highest level of force (known as Type 3 force) against 15 Black people, compared to 15 white people and 15 whose race officers listed as “unknown.” Overall, the race of nearly one third of all use-of-force subjects (and more than half of the people police used force against during the summer 2020 protests) was recorded as “unknown” (compared to 9 percent of people arrested overall), making it hard to draw clear conclusions about the true extent of racial disproportionality in use of force. This data gap could simply mean “a box wasn’t checked,” Oftelie said during a public meeting about the report Tuesday night, or it could be “something a bit deeper and more culturally nefarious, like officers have not wanted to check that box… in order to avoid repercussions” related to racial bias.

At Tuesday’s meeting, community members, including members of the city’s Human Rights Commission and a staffer for City Councilmember Alex Pedersen, raised questions about the report’s conclusions and how they’ll be incorporated into upcoming negotiations with the city’s largest police union, the Seattle Police Officers Guild. Malik Davis, a staffer for Pedersen, expressed frustration about the secrecy surrounding contract negotiations, noting that SPOG’s 2018 contract, which invalidated major elements of the city’s landmark 2017 police accountability ordinance, was the reason the federal judge overseeing the consent decree, James Robart, ruled the city partly out of compliance with the agreement the following year.

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Oftelie is expected to recommend a path toward ending the consent agreement later this spring.

Meanwhile, the city’s Human Rights Commission, which is not one of the city’s official “accountability partners,” is seeking amicus status on the consent decree in order to share “the stories and solutions of our residents and community stakeholders most affected,” according to an SHRC press release. “In simple terms, the amicus status will enable the Commission to be a ‘friend of the court’ and have the ability to petition the court for permission to submit a brief in support of our neesd for continuous police accountability,” the SHRC wrote.

Two members of the city’s Community Police Commission, which does have amicus status with the court, said Tuesday night that amicus status does not give them carte blanche to “petition the court” or communicate with Judge Robart directly; it does allow them to “file on on the city’s brief, like we did in 2020 when the city tried to come out from under the consent decree,” CPC member Rev. Harriett Walden said. Continue reading “Report Shows Ongoing Racial Disparities in Use of Force, Sparking Criticism and Questions About Future of Consent Decree” →

City Council, Crime, homelessness, Morning Fizz, Police

Councilmember Pushes “Seattle Is Dying” Narrative, Data Confirms Stop-and-Frisk Disparities, Someone Is Posting Fake Sweep Signs, and More

1. Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson, who owns Fremont Brewing with her husband, invited 11 business representatives to discuss their public safety concerns at her economic development committee on Wednesday. Nelson’s committee doesn’t deal with crime or homelessness and isn’t considering legislation; instead, the meeting served as a kind of open mic for business owners to trade alarming anecdotes and agree that the ultimate solution is more police.

Nelson teed up the conversation by saying Seattle is in a state of “crisis,” one that will require swift action by Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Attorney Ann Davison, who she hoped will “really put some things in place that can make a difference right now.” Last week, Harrell announced a new “hot spot” policing effort targeting high-crime areas; Davison announced she would dramatically expedite charging decisions for misdemeanors in an effort to move cases more quickly through her office.

“These issues that we’re hearing about, they are escalating,” Nelson said. “They’re intensifying, becoming more brazenly disruptive to businesses and dangerous to staff and customers. … Even having more officers on the street won’t cut it, because even before there was such a staffing shortage, there still did not seem to be enough to start addressing rising crime well before the pandemic hit.”

The panel included business owners from every council district except District 5, whose council representative, Debora Juarez, said she no longer goes to Pike Place Market downtown “unless it’s Saturday in broad daylight” because of the “safety issue[s]” there. Pike Place Market (which closes at 6) remains one of the few areas downtown that is consistently bustling and full of people—the antithesis of a high-crime area.

To a person, the panel blamed rising crime and a challenging business climate not on the global pandemic, which has decimated business districts worldwide and led to rising crime and poverty in every American city, but on the fact that there are not more visible police in Seattle’s neighborhoods.

Calls for more police (and prosecution) are standard fare when crime ticks up, but Seattle’s experience with ramped-up policing efforts—from the Stay Out of Drug Areas zones of the mid-2000s to the Nine and a Half Block Strategy of 2015—has demonstrated repeatedly that police crackdowns alone don’t reduce crime. Downtown, in particular, is less populated during the day because so many people continue to work from home; without daytime commuters as customers, it’s hard to keep a business open, and criminal activity thrives in depopulated spaces.

Even if crime could be solved (as opposed to merely shifted) by flooding the streets with cops, Seattle is struggling to hire and retain officers and has fewer officers that it did in 1970.

2. The federal monitor overseeing reforms to the Seattle Police Department released a report on Monday detailing ongoing disparities in who Seattle police officers stop and frisk, though the monitor, Dr. Antonio Oftelie, stopped short of blaming the disparities on officers’ racial biases. Since SPD began gathering data on the race of the people officers stop, frisk, and detain in 2015, the racial disparities revealed by that data have not changed much: police are more likely to stop Native American and Black people than white people. Although officers frisk white people less than any other race, they are more likely to find a weapon when frisking a white person.

In his new report, Oftelie argued that while the persistent disparities are “concerning” and contribute to public distrust of the department, the demographic data does not “prove bias by individual police officers or agencies—as they operate within the context of social factors that may contribute to disparities.”

Oftelie’s report also noted that SPD stopped fewer people in 2021 than in any other year since the department began gathering data on stops in 2015. Last year, officers stopped 4,282 people: 30 percent fewer people than in 2020, and more than 50 percent fewer than the department’s recorded high in 2018.

The sharp reduction in the number of stops reflects a combination of changes, including SPD’s shrinking ranks, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and new state laws setting stricter standards for when police can use force—including, some officers argue, grabbing someone’s arm to prevent them from walking away from a stop. In 2020, more than half of SPD’s stops did not end in an arrest or citation; Native American people were the most likely to be arrested after being stopped by police.

3. One block away from the spot where someone placed fake “no camping” and no-parking signs last year, another set of alarming fake signs has cropped up. The new signs, which are designed to look like the city’s official encampment removal notices, warn encampment residents that they must “REMOVE ALL PERSONAL PROPERTY” by 9:00am on February 9; if they haven’t left by then, the sign continues, “THE CITY WILL BE NOTIFIED AND ALL REMAINING ITEMS WILL BE REMOVED.” Unlike official notices, the signs don’t have a city seal and are laminated and attached to stakes in the ground.

A spokesman for the city confirmed that the signs were not official city notices and “there are no plans to remove the encampments at the locations listed in the notices tomorrow.” The spokesman did not know who had posted the signs.

The city’s official encampment removal schedule called for at least three other “priority site” removals this week: Prefontaine Place in Pioneer Square; Third and Yesler; and N 46th Street and Greenlake Way.

4. The Seattle Fire Department debuted a new feature of its emergency dispatch center on Tuesday afternoon: A team of nurses will join the center’s staff to field calls from people with lower-acuity medical needs, which SFD Chief Harold Scoggins says will free up dispatchers, paramedics and ambulances to focus on the most serious medical emergencies.

Scoggins said the new Nurse Navigation Program—a partnership with one of the city’s ambulance providers, American Medical Rescue—will initially take between 8,000 and 10,000 of the roughly 160,000 calls the fire department receives each year. “In many cases, this will help to divert 911 callers with non-emergency issues away from an ambulance transport to a hospital’s emergency department, and connect patients instead towards self-treatment, Urgent Care or a Telehealth appointment,” he said.

AMR paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines to Seattle in 2016 for not meeting the city’s response time requirements.

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