Tag: graffiti

Courts, Mayor Harrell, podcasts, Police

This Week On PubliCola: December 21, 2024
Not Art, say the city and county: A memorial mural for tagger Joseph “Gride” Johnson, whose personal struggles were documented in the film “Make It Rain.” Both the mural and the film were used as evidence in this week’s felony graffiti case.

The mayor’s war on graffiti, ex-police chief Adrian Diaz fired, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, December 16

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

The city council will take up Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal, sponsored by council public safety chair Bob Kettle, to repeal most of the legal restrictions on their use of “less-lethal” weapons for crowd control, in January. Cathy Moore and Alexis Mercedes Rinck were discussing amendments to the bill that would restore some guardrails, such as requiring council approval for new weapons and putting police from other departments on desk duty if they won’t agree to follow Seattle policies.

Tuesday, December 17

Head of Anti-Eviction Group Leaves for Job at Homelessness Authority, Ferguson Appointment Could Shake Up Legislature

Edmund Witter, the longtime head of the Housing Justice Project, is leaving to become general counsel for the regional homelessness agency; two top King County human services staffers will also take top roles at the agency. Also: Council president Sara Nelson went on KUOW to gaslight Tammy Morales, who’s leaving the council, in part, over a toxic work environment, and some Gov. Elect Ferguson-adjacent news that could lead to a search for another Seattle state legislator.

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Wednesday, December 18

Mayor Harrell Fires Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz

After praising ex-police chief Adrian and calling him a “good man” and a friend earlier this year, Mayor Harrell officially fired the former police chief this week, citing an investigation that found he had an affair with a woman, Jamie Tompkins, whom he as his chief of staff, bypassing a standard check and violating four SPD policies, including one requiring honesty.

Seattle Police Chiefs Routinely Minimize Discipline; City Will Pay to Defend Former Chief Diaz Against Lawsuits

An audit from the city’s Office of Inspector General (who conducted the investigation into Diaz) concluded SPD has not made progress on problems identified several years ago, including chiefs’ tendency to impose the lowest possible discipline for officers who violate policy. Also, the city attorney’s office confirmed that taxpayers will fund lawyers for Diaz, who currently faces four lawsuits by women who say he sexually harassed or discriminated against them.

Friday, December 20

“Illegal Vandalism” Is “Not Art”: Prosecutors Announce Felony Graffiti Charges

City, county and state prosecutors and police have been working for much of this year to build felony cases against 16 local taggers who they say are responsible for nearly $100,000 in damage. Officials, and the business reps they invited, spent a surprising amount of time defining what “art” is and isn’t and trying to distinguish between appropriate “murals” and illegal “graffiti.”

Seattle Nice: Harrell Fires Ex-Police Chief, Metro Killing Raises Transit Safety Questions, and What IS Art, Anyway?

We discussed the biggest news of the week (with details from the investigation that were first published on PubliCola) before turning to the tragic killing of a Metro bus driver this week, which (I argued, and believe) was immediately and inappropriately politicized by fear-mongering politicians who want infinite spending on police. Finally, we talked about graffiti: I’m fine with it (and like quite a lot of it), Sandeep says Seattle will look like NYC in the ‘70s if we don’t send a strong message that graffiti is unacceptable.

Courts, Mayor Harrell, podcasts, Police, public safety, Transportation

Seattle Nice: Harrell Fires Ex-Police Chief, Metro Killing Raises Transit Safety Questions, and What IS Art, Anyway?
I had AI generate “a beautiful sunrise” on a freeway wall as an example of what would qualify as “art,” according to Mayor Harrell. It’s fine I guess?

By Erica C. Barnett

Continuing with the era of good feelings on Seattle Nice, we had some mostly cordial disagreements this week on the issues of public safety, graffiti, and the firing of former police chief Adrian Diaz, although it’s hard to say we fully agreed on any of it (would it be Seattle Nice if we did?)

We started with this week’s biggest news—Mayor Bruce Harrell’s decision to finally fire former police chief Adrian Diaz, nearly seven months after formally removing him from his position and replacing him with interim chief Sue Rahr. (Harrell’s selection of Madison, Wisconsin chief Shon Barnes as permanent police chief, announced this morning, hadn’t happened yet when we recorded on Thursday).

Diaz was accused of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and several SPD policy violations stemming from a long-rumored affair with his chief of staff, Jamie Tompkins. After his removal as chief, Diaz went on a right-wing talk show to announce he was gay, calling the allegations against him “absurd.” He’s been receiving a salary of more than $350,000 since May.

Sandeep gave Harrell his flowers for firing Diaz after months of diligent investigation; I said the situation was more complicated than that, noting that former Office of Police Accountability director Gino Betts was shown the door after some on his staff complained that Betts had slow-walked the OPA’s own investigation into Diaz, slowing down the process and potentially keeping Diaz on the payroll longer than necessary.

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We also discussed the murder of a Metro bus driver in the University District earlier this week. Like many local elected officials, Sandeep said the tragedy demonstrated the need for more police, security guards, and fare enforcement officers on buses and at transit stops to prevent future violent crime.

I argued that the murder—the first such killing in more than 26 years—would not have been prevented by flooding the transit system with officers, nor does it demonstrate that “transit is dangerous.” (Murders and assaults, obviously, do contribute to a perception of danger, as the killing of a bus driver on the Aurora Bridge did in 1998. After that tragedy, elected officials and the drivers’ union also said buses were unsafe and called for more police.)

Even if flooding the system with police was an effective strategy for preventing crime, it would be financially impossible for King County to put an officer on each of the hundreds of buses that are running at any given time in order to prevent assaults on bus drivers, or retrofit all its buses with inaccessible driver compartments, as some are already suggesting. Such assaults, though terrible, are fairly rare: According to the Seattle Times, there have been 15 reported assaults on bus drivers in the first 11 months of 2024, down from 31 in 2023.

Finally, we talked about the graffiti arrests I reported on earlier today. If you think the tone of my story is too relentlessly neutral, and you’re wondering how I REALLY feel about government officials defining what is “art,” listen to this segment and find out.

Arts, Courts, Crime, Mayor Harrell

“Illegal Vandalism” Is “Not Art”: Prosecutors Announce Felony Graffiti Charges
“Not art,” according to prosecutors and Mayor Bruce Harrell

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion, and City Attorney Ann Davison announced charges against 16 people for graffiti in and around Seattle. According to Manion, it cost more than $100,000 to clean up graffiti by the 16 charged individuals.

One tagger whose name came up frequently in the charging papers, Joseph Johnson—best known by his tag GRIDE—died earlier this year.

The investigation took more than a year, according to Manion, who declined to estimate the cost of investigating, arresting, jailing, prosecuting, and potentially imprisoning the 16 charged individuals.

“I can tell you that I’m sure that it cost way less than $6 million for us to bring this case, but we know that in the city of Seattle alone [it costs] $6 million to remove graffiti, and that does not consider the expenses that private business owners have to spend,” Manion said.

According to Harrell’s office, the $6 million includes all annual expenditures for an interdepartmental team that includes the Office of Arts and Culture, Seattle Center, Finance and Administrative Services, Seattle City Light, the Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle Public Libraries, Seattle Parks and Recreation, and Seattle Public Utilities. It’s unclear how much of that is direct graffiti abatement. Harrell’s “One Seattle Graffiti Initiative”  includes 11 full-time employees in the parks department, including executive-level staff and nine “graffiti rangers.”

Charging documents show that much of the evidence collected over the past year stems from a publicly available documentary called “Make It Rain,” posted on Youtube in June. Investigators watched the video (which is dedicated to Johnson’s memory) and compared it to publicly available images on Instagram and mug shots of the featured taggers, most of whom had arrest records already. In addition to the videos, some of the charges stem from arrests made as far back as 2021, as well as messages and videos on phones seized by police.

Ewing and Clark president Tom Graff: “How would you feel to go to your favorite restaurant and the glass has this caked film on it and is scratched to death? You would not feel safe and it would no longer be your favorite restaurant.”

Tom Graff, president of the Ewing and Clark real estate company and the head of the group Belltown United, told reporters that graffiti has made his neighborhood, and the condo tower where he lives, feel unclean and unsafe.

“How would you feel if your garage door was spray-painted [by] a tagger?” Graff said. “That happened on my tower. … How would you feel to drop off your child in a school that has its front door covered with a graffiti image? You would not take your child there, and we expect the people who live and work downtown to put up with it, and it is unacceptable, and it has to stop.”

Manion is charging all 16 suspects with second-degree malicious mischief, a Class C felony that carries a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of $10,000. She said her primary goal is to make the taggers pay restitution to all the property owners they have harmed.

“We are seeking accountability for what amounts to felony- level behavior, so it is appropriate to file felony charges,” Manion said. “It is not the jail time and the incarceration that we think will make a difference. It is getting folks to pay for the damage that they have caused.”

MSP tag on a billboard that previously read “Cool Cats, Happy Homeowners”; from “Make It Rain”

During the press event, officials repeatedly offered their own definitions of what is, and isn’t, “art.”

Manion insisted that there is a “clear distinction between art” and “illegal vandalism.” Art, she said, includes government-sanctioned wall murals displayed in “appropriate outlets for talented artists and appropriate places for them to display public art,” like the county-funded murals visible to light rail riders in SoDo.

Art, Graff added, is an officially sanctioned mural that “the landlord approved,” like 12 city-funded murals in Belltown that received city funding. “The artist was assigned this wall,” Graff said. “It is not done randomly, and it doesn’t damage the property.”

Art, Harrell said, might include a freeway wall that, with approval from the state Department of Transportation, might be used as “a canvas that can be painted by an artist, some of our beautiful sunsets, sunrises, or some of our Native American art.”

What isn’t art? Manion gave a few examples. “Dangling above freeway lanes to tag a traffic sign is not art,” she said. “Destroying a mural in Kent with a tag is not art. … Tagging Metro buses and Sound Transit cars is not art.” The charging documents say graffiti tags exist for two purposes, and art is not one of them: They can either be “ideological”—a category that includes hate speech—or designed for “fame and glory.”

The history of government officials deciding what is and what is not art has, shall we say, a long and ignominious history.

But even assuming officials’ definition of “art” (to summarize: pre-approved murals; sunsets and/or sunrises; “Native American art” generally) is partial and not didactic, Seattle has an obsession with graffiti, cleanliness, and the need for “order” that warps city spending and serves as cover for cracking down on people whose ideologies (or existence, in the case of encampment “cleans”) conflict with official government priorities.

City Council

Seattle Nice: Is Civility Dying in Seattle?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we ask whether recent graffiti targeting Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo—which said, among other things, “Fuck Tanya Woo—Get Her Out” and “Tanya Woo Hates Black People”—is another sign of what Sandeep has described as a new era of “toxicity” in Seattle politics.

The graffiti, which most council members have denounced as reprehensible hate speech targeting Woo as an Asian-American woman, was  undeniably milder than the violent, directly threatening language used to target women on the council who voted against a basketball stadium, and did not have the impact of the literal brick someone threw through the home window of a progressive council member during the 2020 protests.

But Sandeep argues that the tone of local politics was poisoned by former councilmember Kshama Sawant, who routinely denounced her council colleagues and organized crowds of red-shirted activists to show up on her behalf, and has never recovered.

I countered that “Fuck [council member/mayor/city attorney Whoever” has been a staple of local political rhetoric since long before I arrived on the scene. See, for example, posters declaring “Fuck Mark Sidran: This poster is legal!!!  in 2003;”  “Fuck You, Greg Nickels,” a view expressed in the Stranger in 2005, when both Sandeep and I worked for that paper; and, of course, our former boss Dan Savage’s tirade against the whole mayor and city council, written in 2000:

I wanna say to five of Seattle’s nine city council members: Fuck you people. Fuck you, Richard McIver, and you too, Heidi Wills. Fuck you, Jan Drago. Fuck you, Jim Compton. And fuck you, City Council President Margaret Pageler. And I’d like to say the same to you, Mayor McOneTermWonder: Fuck you, Paul “Protest-Free Zone” Schell. There isn’t a city in this country being run by a bigger collection of log-stupid assholes.

My point being: The rhetoric against Tanya Woo isn’t new, nor is it the product of some new era of “incivility” brought on by Sawant’s “redshirts,” the 2020 protests (remember when Jenny Durkan claimed “Dykes for BLM” was an example of “homophobic” graffiti?) or the most recent city council, which lost most of its progressive members in the 2023 backlash election.

But that’s just, like, my opinion, man. Sandeep and David have different ones, and you can hear us all hash it out by listening to our latest episode below, or wherever you get your podcasts.

City Council

Councilmember Tanya Woo Reported Graffiti to FBI as Hate Crime
Graffiti on the alley side of the Louisa Hotel, owned by the family of City Councilmember Tanya Woo

The “xenophobic” messages include “Fuck Tanya Woo—get her out” and “Tanya Woo Hates Black People”

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, the Northwest Asian Weekly newspaper ran an article denouncing what the author described as “anti-Asian hatred and xenophobia” targeting Seattle City Councilmember Tanya Woo. According to the story, historic buildings and parking pay stations had been tagged with graffiti that “included hate speech, references to race, and evoked themes of exclusion.”

The image accompanying the story shows a parking pay station on which someone has crudely scrawled “fuck Tanya Woo get her out”—a phrase that, while disrespectful, isn’t hate speech. (Posters bearing similar messages about various council members have been seen on Capitol Hill for many years, generally targeting whoever happens to be the most conservative members of the council members.)

A quick afternon walk around the area identified in the NW Asian Weekly article—which, according to the Stranger, was submitted by Woo herself—turned up just one other clear example of anti-Woo graffiti: A message scrawled in two-inch-high letters in the alley behind the Louisa Hotel apartments, owned by Woo and her family: “Fuck Tanya Woo/Tanya Woo Hates Black People!” The Stranger apparently took a similar walk and turned up another example that, while hard to read, seems to call Woo racist.

During the city council’s weekly briefing on Monday, Woo said she had been reluctant to say anything about the “hateful attacks,” but was persuaded to speak up because “the graffiti was done on historical buildings and landmarks”—a reference, apparently, to her family’s own property. She also said the CID community “doesn’t understand politics” and would be more likely to think of “exclusion laws and xenophobia” when they saw the graffiti than booting Woo out of office.

By Tuesday, the parking pay stations had been painted over with lumpy gray paint, but the graffiti on the bricks remained. “With the landmark structure,” Woo said, “we can’t take that off. It’s still there. That’s going to require even more thought and permitting and implementation to get that repainted.” Woo did not mention that the landmark structure was her family’s property.

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Woo said she was threatened by two men in the CID some time after the graffiti went up, including one who said he was going to kill her and another who “came at me with a large stick that he’s swinging around like a bat. He pointed it right at me, and just kind of repeated what the graffiti said,” Woo recalled.

During their comments, other councilmembers referred to the graffiti as “misogynistic [and] xenophobic” (Rob Saka), a “racist attack” (Sara Nelson), “destruction [of] historic buildings” (Joy Hollingsworth), and “hate speech” (Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore) that was designed to “try to intimidate [Woo] out of office” (Nelson again.)

A spokesperson for the Seattle Police Department said Woo herself reported the graffiti to the FBI. “Our Bias Crimes detective is aware of this incident,” they said, but “SPD has not yet received a police report.”

A spokesman for the FBI’s Seattle branch, Steve Bernd, said that while he couldn’t comment on a specific case, investigators looking into hate crime allegations generally consider three factors: “Use of force or the threat of force or conspiracy to use or threaten force or willfully cause bodily injury; [t]argeting the victim because of actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, or familial status; and [a]dditional motive to injure, intimidate, or interfere with some specific federally protected activity or right,” like the right to vote.

“No matter how offensive to some, we are keenly aware that expressing views is not a crime by itself and that the protections afforded under the Constitution cannot be compromised,” Bernd said. “Non-threatening hate conduct is protected by the First Amendment and the FBI does not investigation that conduct.”

Woo responded to PubliCola’s questions, which included a request for any additional examples of graffiti that might include more explicitly anti-Asian, xenophobic, misogynistic, or hateful messages, by referring to her remarks during the council briefing.

“My hope is that people will direct their comments to me, as their city council representative, instead of defacing property and local businesses,” Woo said. “It’s unacceptable that workers and small business owners should have to deal with these types of property crimes.”

During the 2020 protests against police violence, then-mayor Jenny Durkan argued for closing down the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone because of “homophobic slurs” left-wing protesters had supposedly graffitied in the area, harming the queer community in a “historic sanctuary” for LGBTQ+ people, Capitol Hill. As we reported, the so-called “slurs” turned out to be tags from self-described “fags against cops,” “dykes for anarchy,” and “dykes for BLM,” protesting Durkan’s administration and policies.

Business, Police

New Bite of Seattle Owner Will Keep Despised Payment App; City Will Resume Graffiti Prosecutions

1. Last year, many people attending (or hoping to attend) the Bite of Seattle were dismayed to discover that the annual food festival’s new owner, payment processing company Cheq, was forcing people to view menus and purchase food from vendors using a clunky app that slowed down orders, eliminated interaction between local vendors and the public, and effectively barred anyone without a working smartphone or credit card from attending. (It also required vendors to adopt Cheq’s payment platform instead of using their own systems or accepting cash.) Local Reddit threads chronicled attendees’ complaints in real time, and a followup article on Eater detailed the difficulty vendors had using the new system.

The Puget Sound Business Journal reported last week that Cheq sold the Bite of Seattle to a Bay Area-based food-festival producer called FoodieLand, which produces branded events around the country.

On Tuesday, Seattle Center director Marshall Foster confirmed that Cheq will still be the payment system for the event, “but it won’t be your only choice.” In theory, that was true last year as well; Cheq set up a separate line where people who couldn’t use the app could buy tickets to exchange for food, but it was reportedly far away from vendors and added an extra step to an already cumbersome process.

Cheq “took on Bite of Seattle as an opportunity to really beta test its new software platform” last year, Foster said. “The company had a good experience. They learned a lot. They decided, ‘We’re not in the event business.’ And they found an organization … [whose] sole mission as an organization is to create local food focused events.”

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2. On Friday, City Attorney Ann Davison announced the city will resume enforcing its law against graffiti, after a panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling by a US district judge in an ongoing case brought by protesters who were arrested for writing slogans on a barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct during protests against police brutality in 2020.

In a statement, Davison called the ruling an “important victory” for “the people of Seattle.”

“Graffiti is a massive problem for our City, costing taxpayers, businesses, and residents millions of dollars while creating widespread visual blight. We must have as many tools as possible to protect neighbors and residents impacted by graffiti,” Davison said.

Davison has asked for a jury trial in the case. The protesters’ defense rests, in part, on the argument that the city’s graffiti ordinance is so overbroad that, if interpreted literally, it would ban children from using chalk on sidewalks; the defendants also argued that the city violated their freedom of speech, by selectively enforcing a supposed prohibition on chalk writing while explicitly encouraging chalk writing in other contexts.