By Erica C. Barnett

Three years ago, before the City Council unanimously appointed Derrick Wheeler-Smith as director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, a few voices of dissent stood out among the many supporters who showed up to urge the council to approve his nomination. SOCR conducts investigations into alleged civil rights violations, enforces fair-housing law, oversees several city commissions, and is in charge of the city’s internal Race and Social Justice Initiative.

Wheeler-Smith is a longtime community advocate, high-school basketball coach, and Rainier Valley resident who headed up King County’s Zero Youth Detention Program and has advocated for treating gun violence as an urgent public health issue. Appointed by then-mayor Bruce Harrell, Wheeler-Smith publicly criticized Harrell’s high-profile initiative to put several neighborhoods under police camera surveillance, signing his name to a memo that laid out the harms cameras can pose to the communities of color that most often find themselves under police surveillance.

But back in 2023, not everyone considered Wheeler-Smith a well-rounded choice to head the civil rights department. The dissenters included members of the city’s LGBTQ Commission, who raised concerns about Wheeler-Smith’s previous employment by a Christian nonprofit with explicitly homophobic workplace policies. They also criticized Wheeler-Smith’s decision, shortly after taking the interim director position at SOCR, to send staff a long quote about morality that was written by a homophobic Kirkland pastor, which Wheeler-Smith misattributed to George Carlin. The quote criticized premarital sex, overweight people, and people who take psychiatric drugs.

“I don’t have any doubt that Derrick is a great leader,” LGBTQ Commission member Andrew Ashiofu said before his confirmation. “I do admire his community leadership and all he’s done, but I’m saying it’s not the time.”

Kristina Sawyckyj, a member of the city’s Disability Commission, testified that Wheeler-Smith had refused to meet with commission members and had been absent from their meetings. “He doesn’t reach out. He doesn’t participate with us. We don’t hear from him at all,” Sawyckyj said in public comment. “He might have some great skills on racial equity, but disability equity, and disability social justice, is also equally important here in Seattle.”

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Nearly three years later, employees at SOCR say that many of the concerns raised during Wheeler-Smith’s nomination have borne out. On December 1, the union representing SOCR employees, PROTEC17, sent a memo to mayor-elect Katie Wilson’s transition team urging them to remove Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, from their positions.

“Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights cannot credibly enforce equity and justice in the community when its own leadership engages in discriminatory conduct,” PROTEC17 representative Matt Edgerton wrote.

The memo cited an internal survey of SOCR staff in which a majority of respondents reported witnessing or experiencing workplace misconduct or inappropriate behavior. It also described about 20 of these incidents in detail. PubliCola spoke to a racially and gender-diverse group of ten current and former SOCR employees, including about a quarter of SOCR’s current staff, who corroborated the details in the memo and provided additional insight about their own experiences working at the office.

Staffers alleged that Wheeler-Smith texted misogynistic memes to his employees, ignored repeated requests for gender-neutral restrooms, downplayed the rights of LBGTQ+, Asian, Latino, and disabled people, and argued that SOCR shouldn’t weigh in on the rights of homeless people because homelessness is a temporary status—a sharp departure from previous practice. (Prior to 2017, SOCR was in charge of monitoring encampment sweeps).

The employees also raised concerns about an AI-generated racial bias worksheet that Wheeler-Smith directed them to fill out and submit using the city’s email system, potentially exposing staffers’ private information to people making public records requests.

“SOCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith and Deputy Director Fahima Mohamed have created a workplace environment characterized by discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and mismanagement,” the union’s memo concludes. “PROTEC17 respectfully recommends that you remove SOCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith and Deputy Director Fahima Mohamed early in your administration.”

SOCR staffers requested anonymity when they spoke with PubliCola in order to share their stories candidly without fear of retaliation.

Neither Wheeler-Smith nor Mohamed responded to a detailed list of questions PubliCola sent in late January or a followup request in February.

SOCR staffers told PubliCola and their union representatives that they were initially reluctant to speak about their concerns, even through relatively private channels, out of fear of retaliation. PROTEC17’s memo documents one incident last year in which a staffer who contacted human resources said both Wheeler-Smith and Mohamed told them “that ‘we keep things in house at SOCR’ and the next time this staff member contacts HR, ‘there won’t be a next time.”’

It was only once SOCR union stewards distributed the staff survey and started scheduling coffee check-ins, several staffers told PubliCola, that they started to realize that they weren’t alone. “The union survey was the first time I’ve seen a properly conducted staff survey,” one current staffer said. “That matters so much when trust has been broken, and through shared experiences coming to light, we were heard. It’s taken a lot to trust the process. Staff organizing made that happen.”

LGBTQ+ Concerns Sidelined

SOCR staffers said it was clear early on that Wheeler-Smith’s personal views on LGBTQ+ civil rights did not align with the longstanding values of the department. One staffer recalled an incident that occurred before Wheeler-Smith’s confirmation, in which the then-interim director asked whether had to go to mandatory LGBTQ flag raising and Pride events, given his “personal objections,” as the memo puts it, and his view that supporting LGBTQ+ rights was a matter of personal choice.

“He draws a pretty clear boundary between what he describes as the community that is most associated with civil rights, and then queer folks, which of course, betrays the history of civil rights in the United States,” one staffer said.

At times, these internal conflicts have led to public controversies. One such incident involved a partnership between SOCR and Wheeler-Smith’s former employer, the nonprofit World Vision, with SOCR on a school supply drive in 2023. World Vision is a conservative Christian charity that does not hire people in same-sex relationships. The partnership prompted some employees to ask Wheeler-Smith during a meeting why the city’s civil rights office was partnering with a group that had explicitly discriminatory employment policies, staffers said.

According to one SOCR staffer who attended the meeting, “Derrick’s hands were both on the table, and he had his head down the whole time while the rest of us were discussing it. [When he] eventually started speaking, he was really defensive, and said, ‘Good people do bad things, and if we vetted everybody out who did something wrong, we wouldn’t have any partners.'”

The following year, SOCR signed a $40,000 contract with Wheeler-Smith’s former supervisor at World Vision, Leonetta Elaiho, to “provide support and strategic planning” for a leadership training fellowship. Elaiho was one of the commenters who urged the council to approve Wheeler-Smith’s appointment in 2023, saying she’d known him and his family for more than 20 years.

Around the same time as the World Vision controversy, several staffers said, Wheeler-Smith sent an email to staff that included a long quote by a controversial Kirkland pastor, Bob Moorehead, about the ills of modern society.

While the quote didn’t include any explicitly anti-queer content, it criticized wives who work outside the home and people who use psychiatric drugs, along with “throwaway morality, one night stands, [and] overweight bodies.”

“It was very slut-shaming, looking down on folks who took medication, fatphobic,” the former SOCR staffer recalled.

“I regularly got misgendered”

The former staffer, who’s nonbinary, said they repeatedly asked for a gender-neutral restroom at SOCR’s office, located in a leased space in the Central Building downtown, only to be dismissed or told “we’ll consider that when we move” to a different building in the future. During their entire time at SOCR, the staffer said, they had to use a public restroom on the ground floor of the building.

The slight felt especially cold, the former staffer said, coming from the only city department with an official mandate to focus on gender justice. Among other anti-discrimination laws, SOCR enforces the city’s gender-neutral restroom law.

“We’re mandated to be in the office and there’s no equitable bathroom access for me,” the former staffer said. “It feels especially bad for SOCR, which had, at the time, the only gender justice position in the city, that has been vacant for five years, with no efforts to fill it.” Current staffers brought up the same story independently, and one recalled that Mohamed, the SOCR deputy, questioned allowing “men” to use the women’s restroom.

“I regularly got misgendered by the department director—by Derrick,” the former staffer recalled. “When I tried to bring that to him and say, ‘This is really hurtful, especially given the position you’re in,’ it felt like it was dismissed in the classic way—’I’m trying, it’s not coming from hate in my heart.’ It felt like one of those apologies where I was supposed to say ‘It’s okay, it’s not a big deal.'”

According to the union memo, deputy director Mohamed also “repeatedly misgendered staff members who identified as gender non-binary by continuing to use incorrect pronouns despite correction.” A current SOCR staffer said Mohamed routinely refused to participate when people identified their pronouns during meetings, despite being asked to do so.

“We have a standard of, you use your names and pronouns so that folks can know how to refer you, and she’ll just not use pronouns, like, 90 percent of the time—just refuses to do it. It’s jarring, because everyone else is doing it,” the staffer said.

In another incident, recounted by several current employees, a DJ hired for an all-staff SOCR training directed the group divide up between men and women (or “boys and girls,” as one staffer remembered it) for a team-building game, leaving those who did not identify as either men or women standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. “It was straight-up division by cisgender women and cisgender women,” one staffer, who refused to participate in the exercise, said.

In 2024, a group of employees organized a two-day gender justice training for department staff. Two staffers told PubliCola that Wheeler-Smith went to the training for a few hours on the first day, then left and did not return. During one of the discussions, two staffers recalled, a staffer raised the issue of transphobia they had witnessed at the office. As the staffer was talking, Mohamed sent them a text message that said “tread lightly,” effectively shutting down the conversation.

Other staffers said Wheeler-Smith and Mohamed reacted inappropriately to high-profile incidents that impacted the LGBTQ community, such as former mayor Harrell’s efforts to shut down the longtime queer nude beach at Denny Blaine Park. According to one staffer, Mohamed laughed openly, in front of multiple SOCR staffers, when she saw that Harrell sent a text message to wealthy homeowner Stuart Sloan saying “I share your disgust” with queer people who use the beach. At the time, Sloan and Harrell were collaborating to build a playground that would have forced the nude beach to close.

“It was very clear that we couldn’t say anything because we could be retaliated against, even though it was deeply uncomfortable to have the second in command at the Office for Civil Rights laughing about, you know, disparaging comment in connection to queer folks in the city,” the staffer said.

The same staffer recalled that Wheeler-Smith criticized Harrell’s public statements supporting a counter-protest against the right-wing, anti-trans “Mayday USA” event in Cal Anderson Park. “He said, ‘Christians have religious freedom,”’ the staffer recalled. “Christians are not a embattled minority group in this country, and for anyone to frame the Cal Anderson protest as if it was this symmetrical conflict just reveals how little he understands power.”

LGBTQ Commission Co-Chair Ashley Ford recalled that after the Cal Anderson protest, Wheeler-Smith “tried to prevent us as a commission from contacting the mayor’s office or council,” sending an email to commissioners titled “Coordination on External Communications” that chided commission members for speaking out against the police escalation.

“I request that for future communications, particularly with the Mayor’s Office and other city departments, that you include me in advance. This will assure that we present a unified message,” Wheeler-Smith wrote.

According to the PROTEC17 memo to Wilson, Wheeler-Smith also “directed [the] removal of LGBTQ imagery from a general office publication, questioning its connection to civil rights and Black history” and “shared a podcast titled ‘Can You Be LGBTQ and Christian’ with staff”; the memo alleges that Wheeler-Smith talked about his own Christian beliefs and asked employees about their personal religious views at the office.

“Grotesquely inappropriate”

Staffers who spoke to PubliCola also accused Wheeler-Smith of making inappropriate remarks about Black women and about sex.

Several employees also said Wheeler-Smith sent misogynistic messages to male staff, including a series of tweets by Kanye West about women “selling pussy” and a meme of Kamala Harris with bruises on her knees that read “CONGRATS to Kamala on her new promotion! I don’t know how you do it!”

“The clear message of this meme was that Kamala Harris, an accomplished woman of color, exchanged sexual favors for career mobility,” PROTEC17’s memo notes.

“I’ve come to know that he he has some deeply held sexist, and I will say almost disdain for, Black women,” one employee who received the messages said. “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I was socialized like every other American male, but I wouldn’t be in this work if I still held those beliefs.”

Distributing the image, the memo continued, “perpetuated harmful stereotype about women trading sex for advancement, [had] racist undertones targeting woman of color, created hostile environment for women and people of color, [and was] grotesquely inappropriate for civil rights office director.”

At an after-hours event at a mandatory staff retreat, for example, multiple staffers said Wheeler-Smith the following toast: “Life has its ups and downs. I hope all of yours are in the bedroom.” At other mandatory events, staffers recalled, Wheeler-Smith brought up sex unprompted—like an all-staff lunch where he told a strange story about being propositioned after accidentally ending up at a swingers’ resort. Both these incidents are included in the union’s memo.

“Can We Talk About Xenophobia?”

Many of the staffers who shared stories with PROTEC17 and spoke to PubliCola said they appreciated Wheeler-Smith’s focus on anti-Blackness in Seattle, an issue that Seattle’s white leaders and residents have frequently dismissed, ignored, or addressed with performative statements rather than meaningful action. But staffers also said that Wheeler-Smith’s focus on anti-Black discrimination and bias has sometimes come at the expense of other marginalized people who face hate and discrimination—including people with disabilities, Asian Americans, Latinos, and people experiencing homelessness.

During the COVID pandemic, for instance, staffers said Wheeler-Smith was unreceptive when they tried to talk about directing resources toward addressing anti-Asian xenophobia and hate crimes. “One of our staff members said, ‘Can we talk about the xenophobia and show support for our Asian community?'” one staffer recalled. “And he was like, ‘Who cares about that?'”

That staffer said Wheeler-Smith walked out of a staff tour of the Wing Luke Museum designed to educate SOCR employees about Asian American history and anti-Asian discrimination in America. Partway through the tour, the staffer said, Wheeler-Smith excused himself and did not return. When staffers started asking where he was, the staffer recalled, they were told,  “‘Oh, Derrick left. He went home.’ He doesn’t care enough to be there to even support us, his own staff members, and stay for the whole event.”

Staffers told PubliCola it has been equally difficult to get Wheeler-Smith engaged on the issue of federal immigration enforcement, arguably the most pressing emergent civil rights issue facing blue cities across the country. SOCR’s website includes links to resource guides produced by the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. And the department recently posted a “Statement on ICE Actions and the Importance of Solidarity” from Wheeler-Smith that touches on a grab bag of civil rights issues, including book bans and Medicaid cuts. Continue reading “Staff Call for Removal of Civil Rights Office Director, Citing “Discrimination, Harassment, Retaliation, and Mismanagement”” →