Tag: hate crimes

Violence Against Unsheltered People Spikes, Social Housing Moves Into Startup Mode

1. People living unsheltered are increasingly vulnerable to attacks from people targeting them specifically because they’re homeless. The Seattle Police Department’s 2022 crime report, released earlier this month, showed a 229 percent increase in hate crimes targeting homeless people (an increase of 16 individual crimes), and an increase of 11 homicides in which the victim was homeless over last year.

During a recent meeting of the council’s public safety committee, City Councilmember Sara Nelson used these numbers to imply that expanding the city’s gun-violence prevention efforts to include older adults may be unnecessary, because an uptick in shootings among people older than 24 “could be because of the increased association with gun violence in encampments” rather than a citywide trend.

According to SPD, about a third of gun homicides with victims older than 24 had a “homelessness nexus,” meaning they most likely involved people experiencing homelessness. However, since the interventions that could help people living unsheltered (housing, behavioral health treatment, and job assistance) are similar to the ones that could help older shooting victims who are housed, it’s unclear why this distinction matters, beyond its usefulness as a pro-sweeps talking point.

“It’s a good thing that more [homeless] people are coming forward” to report hate crimes, Police Chief Adrian Diaz said. It also highlights the urgency of efforts to get people inside where they’re safer from both the elements and people who want to target them.

Overall, the number of shots-fired and shooting incidents that involved people experiencing homelessness increased only slightly from 2021—about 4 percent—but that requires context: In 2021, the number of shootings with a homelessness “nexus” increased by 122 percent, meaning both of the last two years have been especially dangerous for people experiencing homelessness. 

Despite this alarming increase in violence against people living unsheltered, Nelson focused on the danger encampments supposedly pose to children who may attend school or live nearby. “We need to address the safety of the children first,” she said. In reality, however, living outdoors is most dangerous for unsheltered people themselves, who are increasingly targeted by people who “take things into their own hands,” as Seattle Police Chief Diaz put it, lashing out at people living in encampments for being unhoused.

“It’s a good thing that more [homeless] people are coming forward” to report hate crimes, Diaz told PubliCola earlier this month. It also highlights the urgency of efforts to get people inside where they’re safer from both the elements and people who want to target them.

2. Now that Initiative 135, which establishes a public developer to build permanently affordable “social housing” in Seattle, has passed, supporters have switched gears and are working to get the new agency up and running. They’re up against a deadline: Once the election is certified on February 24, they have 18 months of city support, including staffing and office space, to establish a public development authority and come up with an initial funding source that will allow the PDA to start building housing.

Tiffani McCoy, the advocacy director of Real Change and a leader of the group’s House Our Neighbors! (HON) social-housing campaign, said the group has already discussed initial steps with Councilmember Tammy Morales, including the creation of the agency’s initial board of directors. This board will include seven members appointed by the Seattle Renters’ Commission and six members appointed by the city council, the mayor, and labor and housing representatives. Although HON doesn’t have any official role in the appointments and “we don’t want to overstep,” McCoy said, “it would be cool to have a [Real Change] vendor or someone from the Housing Justice Project,” which advocates for tenants’ rights and provides legal assistance in eviction cases.

Next, the new agency will have to come up with an ongoing funding source to keep itself going, along with a plan to actually pay for social housing, which was not funded by the initiative. State Rep. and former Solid Ground director Frank Chopp (D-43, Seattle), who supported the initiative, has proposed a budget proviso that would pay for the agency’s startup costs.

Chopp says the state is considering new funding sources that could pay for social housing in Seattle, including an expansion of the real-estate excise tax to include a new taxing “tier” for property sales above $5 million; that proposal includes a local option that the city could use to fund social housing.

Pointing to a number of mixed-income projects that are already underway thanks to the state’s Home and Hope program, which acquires public properties and develops them into affordable housing and early-learning centers, Chopp said he doesn’t see the new social housing PDA as a competitor to traditional nonprofit housing providers. “The point is, we need more capacity—the speculative real estate market is not solving the problem, and there are plenty of nonprofits who see the value of this,” Chopp said.

McCoy said initiative backers are considering a few potential progressive local taxes to pay for social housing, including one novel option that she says would not conflict with the city’s efforts to create new progressive revenue to fund the city budget amid ongoing annual shortfalls. A new progressive revenue task force is meeting privately once a month to hash out a set of proposals to supplement Jumpstart payroll tax revenues, which the city has used for several years to backfill general-fund shortfalls.

Although McCoy said she couldn’t discuss specifics on the record, any new revenue source (as opposed to expansion of an existing source, like JumpStart) would likely require a separate ballot measure. In theory, the city council could just put a proposed new tax on the ballot—the same way it put a levy to fund improvements at Pike Place Market, which is run by a PDA, on the ballot in 2008—but a more likely scenario is that I-135 backers would have to run another initiative campaign for funding sometime next year.

SPD Touts “Safe Space” Hate-Crimes Program, but Advocates Say There’s No Evidence That it Works

Interim SPD Chief Adrian Diaz, Detective Beth Wareing and LGBTQ Liaison Dorian Koreio at Hing Hay Park

By Paul Kiefer

Hand-sized stickers bearing a rainbow-colored police badge are ubiquitous in storefront windows around Seattle. They are the calling card of the Seattle Police Department’s “Safe Place” program, a six-year-old project that theoretically recruits business owners to provide shelter to victims of hate crimes and to report hate crimes to the department. The project doesn’t cost the department much—stickers, printed materials and a single staff member are the only expenses. But whether it has made a difference for victims of hate crimes is still hard to discern.

The Safe Place program is one of SPD’s points of pride. Since launching the program in 2015, SPD has trained and licensed nearly 300 other law enforcement agencies to replicate it across the country. The goal of the program, Interim SPD Chief Adrian Diaz said during a press conference to announce new translations of Safe Place materials last week, is to give victims of have crimes a “safe place” to call the police—inside a business with one of the program’s stickers in its window. Business owners who sign up for the program gets a sticker, written instructions, and a short training from an SPD officer on how to respond if the victim of a hate crime enters their business in need of help.

“As far as we know, the program is mostly a way for businesses to signal that they’re inclusive, whether or not that’s actually true in practice.”—Catherine West, Legal Voice.

But does the Safe Place program work? According to SPD LGBTQ Liaison Dorian Koreio, who administers the program, the department has no way to track whether the Safe Place program has led to an increase in reports of hate crimes, which is how SPD would know the program was having an effect. Koreio said SPD doesn’t review hate crime reports to determine whether a Safe Place business sheltered the victim or reported the crime—in fact, he said, the department doesn’t keep track of Safe Place businesses’ locations. “I know where they are roughly,” he said, but he has no data to test the program’s impact.

Those who work with the groups most frequently targeted in hate crimes—in Seattle, Black and LGBTQ residents—say the program may not live up to the fanfare. “As far as we know, the program is mostly a way for businesses to signal that they’re inclusive, whether or not that’s actually true in practice,” said Catherine West, an attorney with the women’s and LGBTQ rights advocacy group Legal Voice. “And more importantly, some members of the LGBTQ community do not feel safe engaging with law enforcement, so the other question is whether encouraging people to document hate crimes by calling the police will really give you an accurate picture of who experiences those kinds of crimes and harassment.”

Detective Beth Wareing, who investigates hate crimes for the department, argued that it’s possible that the Safe Place program prompted more people to report hate crimes to SPD over the past six years. After the department launched the program in 2015, Wareing said, there was a roughly 60 percent increase in reports of hate crimes compared to the previous year; between 2013 and 2014, hate crime reports only rose by roughly 15 percent.

In the years since, reports of hate crimes have continued to rise steeply; SPD received nearly 800 reports in 2020, compared to 205 in 2015. The increase in hate crime reports in Seattle vastly outpaced the rise in hate crime reports nationwide. According to Wareing, who spoke with PubliCola after last week’s press conference, a steep rise in the number of reported hate crimes doesn’t necessarily mean that more hate crimes took place—instead, she said, it may mean that more people were able to report hate crimes to the police than in past years. The number of crimes that still go unreported, she added, is “unknowable.”

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Wareing hypothesized that the program might achieve results by relieving some pressure for victims fleeing an attacker. “When we talk to victims, they talk about the barriers to reporting, or the things that would make calling 911 more attractive option,” she said. “And having a safe place to do that where they can wait is undeniably one of those ways.”

While some advocacy organizations in Seattle collect reports on hate crimes independently of SPD, Wareing told PubliCola that she doesn’t see any clear alternatives to calling the police to report a hate crime, despite concerns like those raised by West. “I never advocate for calling anything other than 911 as a first step,” she said. Continue reading “SPD Touts “Safe Space” Hate-Crimes Program, but Advocates Say There’s No Evidence That it Works”

Morning Fizz: Downtown Business Cash Funds Homelessness Initiative, Council Funds Hate-Crime Prevention Position

1. The campaign for a proposed charter amendment on homelessness, Compassion Seattle, just filed a batch of contribution reports that show who is funding the campaign so far. The donors, a laundry list of developers, downtown businesses, and deep-pocketed private equity firms and investors, reveal who is really supporting the initiative, which began its life as a Tim Burgess-backed proposal to reinstitute homeless encampment sweeps.

The latest version of the charter amendment (which may not be the last) would impose a new, unfunded mandate on the city to provide 2,000 new shelter beds in the next year. It would also require the city to spend 12 percent of the city’s general fund on homelessness and human services in perpetuity, and to “ensure that City parks, playgrounds, sports fields, public spaces and sidewalks and streets (“public spaces”) remain open and clear of encampments.”

The top donors to the initiative campaign so far include:

• Developer Martin Smith ($50,000)

• Downtown (and Weyerhaeuser building) developer Greg Smith ($50,000)

• Vulcan, Inc. ($25,000)

• Mariners owner and retired Microsoft guy Christopher Larson ($25,000)

• Pioneer Square-based timber company Weyerhaeuser ($20,000)

• Property management firm Vance Corporation ($20,000)< • Clise Properties ($20,000) • 4th Ave. Associates, a property management firm ($20,000) • Consolidated Restaurants/E3 Restaurants, which include the Metropolitan Grill and Elliott's Oyster House and others ($10,000) • Private equity firm Five Point Capital, ($10,000) • Investors Mikal & Lynn Thomsen ($10,000) The campaign also reported a $5,000 in-kind donation from political consultant Tim Ceis, a former deputy mayor who was heavily involved in drafting the charter amendment (and is the partner of Seattle Chamber CEO Rachel Smith); and a $182,050 expenditure to Landslide Political, a Salt Lake City-based signature gathering firm. Compassion Seattle's filings do not include any work or contributions by homeless advocates, homeless service providers, or any members of the supposed "unlikely coalition” that is backing this sweeps-and-shelter measure. 

2. In a unanimous vote, the Seattle City Council voted to slightly alter the course of a $1 million spending bill intended to address the past year’s increase in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during Monday’s council meeting.The original bill, which Mayor Jenny Durkan presented to the council in March with support from Council President Lorena González and Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, proposed allocating $150,000 from the city’s general fund to create at least one civilian “bias crime prevention coordinator” position within the Seattle Police Department.

Though the bill also added investments in community nonprofits that provide mental health resources and advocacy services, the proposal to finance a new position inside SPD drew vocal opposition from advocates of police abolition. Most speakers during Monday’s public comment session testified against the bill; some seemed to be reading from a similar script. “This legislation exploits tragedy to push expansion of policing and the criminal legal system,” one commenter said.

Behind the scenes, both González and Mosqueda were also skeptical of the proposal to finance an ill-defined civilian position within SPD. Ahead of Monday’s meeting, the council members and their staff reached an agreement with Durkan’s office to the bill to direct the $150,000 to a “public safety coordinator” position in the Department of Neighborhoods.

González told PubliCola on Monday that a “public safety coordinator” model would not be new to the Chinatown-International District. After Donnie Chin, the director of the International District Emergency Center, was murdered in 2015, González said she championed a similar program “after community leaders expressed the deep need to call someone other than the Seattle Police Department to report safety concerns.” The initial public safety coordinator program, she added, later spread to other neighborhoods, including South Park and Georgetown. The Chinatown-International District’s current public safety coordinator works for the neighborhood’s Business Improvement District.

Rosanna Sze, an organizer with the Massage Parlor Outreach Project, was one of the few commenters during Monday’s meeting to highlight the amendment. “If this position is supposed to be housed under the Department of Neighborhoods,” she said, “the funding [for the position] should still come from SPD’s budget and not the general fund.”

Sze’s suggestion did not spur any action by council members: a separate plan to cut $3 million from SPD’s budget has stalled under pressure from the federal court that supervises reforms to the department, which all but precludes any additional cuts to the department’s budget. Instead, the council passed the amended bill without argument.