Tag: protests

LGBTQ+, Mayor Harrell, Police

Pro-LGBTQ Protesters Stuck Outside Barricades As Far-Right “Rattle In Seattle” Took Over City Hall

By Erica C. Barnett

You might think that after granting a permit for a day-long anti-LGBTQ rally in a park named after the first gay state representative in the city’s most LGBTQ+-friendly neighborhood, the city might have put some guardrails around a second rally by the same group at City Hall, dubbed the “Rattle In Seattle.” A less intimidating police presence, perhaps? Denying the group a permit to have amplified sound (or, you know, pulling the plug on their speaker stacks)? Asking them nicely to leave once they’d overstayed their official end time by more than an hour?

Nah—I mean, have you MET Seattle city government?

Instead, the city shut down Fourth Avenue and other streets around City Hall starting at around 1:30 pm, setting up barricades to keep counterprotesters out on the street. (To get past police and enter the plaza, people simply had to say they were affiliated with the Christian rally.) Phalanxes of bike officers assembled at the entry points to the event, occasionally leaping on their bikes and mobilizing when it seemed like there might be a conflict—typically a verbal altercation between one or two people on each side—and retreating to their posts when the yelling was over.

Overall, SPD officers arrested eight people, one at a time, over the course of about seven hours. I saw four of the arrests as they were happening or immediately after, and I didn’t witness anything that looked like a serious assault. Jonathan Choe, the far-right broadcaster (“I’m going live for Newsmax and I have to deal with this shit too?” I heard him complain), posted a video of himself clubbing a protester who touched him. The protester was arrested; Choe was not.

The purported purpose of the “Rattle In Seattle” event was to demand Mayor Bruce Harrell’s resignation for “silencing” and “intimidating” them (he issued an anodyne statement saying the city supports LGBTQ rights and, for good measure, accusing “anarchists” of “infiltrating” the counterprotest and causing chaos). It was essentially a replay of last Saturday’s event in Cal Anderson Park: Anti-LGBTQ sermons railing against, as one speaker put it, people who engage in “perverse sexual acts,” interspersed with endless praise songs sung off-key and off-beat. Brandi Kruse, another right-wing broadcaster who, like Choe, used to work for a conventional TV station, addressed the crowd, praising their bravery and thanking police officers for doing such a good job protecting them.

Rallies outside City Hall do not require permits, but amplification—like the massive speaker system the rally group brought in, along with a giant diesel generator, to project their sermons and songs so loudly they could be heard blocks away—does. Several internal sources said the group did not ask for or receive a permit for their speaker system; they simply set it up, and the city let them, providing police protection as they loaded in and out.

Asked directly whether the group had permit for all their equipment and their speaker system, a spokesperson for the city’s department of Finance and Administrative services said only that the city sent the group a copy of the city’s rules, which state that any amplification or use of equipment requires a special permit from the city.

Police were generally more restrained during Tuesday’s rally than during Saturday’s event on Capitol Hill Although some officers were wielding pepper spray (and many carried the long wooden batons that are used for holding police lines and pushing crowds), they didn’t deploy chemical weapons, likely because of the widespread backlash to their violent actions last weekend. They did use their bikes to shove crowds backward down the street, but quickly pulled back to a barricaded area overlooking the rally.

The question of what to do when far-right groups come to Seattle seeking (and getting) negative attention from the people who live here is not going away: A different far-right group has reportedly received another permit at Cal Anderson Park for a “Revive in 25” event on August 30, and the likely result if it goes forward is another high-profile standoff between out-of-town activists and members and allies of the LGBTQ community in Seattle.

Although all kinds of speech are protected under the First Amendment, the city is not required to issue a permit for the location of an organization’s choice. (As a counterfactual, consider if the city would grant an anti-Asian hate group a permit for a rally at Hing Hay Park in the Chinatown-International District).

In fact, an ordinance passed in 2001 establishes that while “the City has no interest in basing special event permitting decisions, including decisions regarding reasonable permit conditions, on the viewpoint or message of the proposed event, [it] does have the responsibility to develop reasonable and effective permit conditions” based on parameters that include “the history of problems associated with the event or similar events and the event’s or event organizer’s compliance with previous permit conditions designed to deal with those issues and problems.”

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said that prior to Saturday’s event, the Mayday group sought a permit for “a street location between 1st and 2nd Avenue on Pike Street, which was not a fit given size and logistical needs. To be clear: the group did not apply for a permit at Victor Steinbrueck Park,” as some outlets have reported. The group then asked for a permit at Cal Anderson, and the Parks Department granted it “as the park was available and met the size and logistical needs for the event requested.”

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That same ordinance says that the city’s Special Events Committee—a group that includes the mayor, police chief, and the directors of several other departments—can set time, place, and manner conditions on events, such as where the event takes place, based on the “size, scope, complexity, and history of the event, as long as the restrictions are content-neutral.

The Parks Department did not respond to multiple inquiries about why it granted the permit. The special events committee is generally involved in permitting all major public events, including those in city parks.

Harrell has not explicitly said that granting a permit to an anti-LGBTQ group in the heart of Capitol Hill was a mistake; instead, he has issued several statements condemning the group’s beliefs. “Mayor Harrell will continue to lead our city’s fight against bigotry and unfairness and stand for Seattle’s values of inclusion, welcoming, and justice,” the most recent such statement says. “We will not be intimidated by the kind of fear mongering or divisiveness inspired by the rally and extreme rhetoric endorsed by Matt Shea”—the former Washington state representative who was accused of domestic terrorism for his extremist activities—”and others that takes aim at our residents and at Seattle’s second Black and first biracial mayor.”

Harrell also released statements from several local Christian and Jewish leaders condemning the event.

SPD says it will do an “after-action” report on the events on Saturday, when police pepper-sprayed counterprotesters and arrested 23 people. Most of the arrests involved “obstructing a public officer,” although in several cases police accused people of “pushing” them, spitting, or hitting or punching them. In one case, the police said a counterprotester hit another person with a baton, smashed their phone, then “threw a rock with an explosive” at a cop, an allegation that brings to mind the “incendiary device” police accused a protester of throwing at them in 2020, which turned out to be a candle.

Police Chief Shon Barnes, whom Harrell recently praised for a “record-breaking” first 100 days, was out of town during the weekend’s events, according to city sources. Through an SPD spokesperson, Barnes told PubliCola it’s “unrealistic to expect that any individual in the police department can be available around the clock for unexpected emergencies.”

Being the Chief of Police in a bustling city like Seattle is truly a 24/7 responsibility. This role necessitates a team-oriented approach, and we are fully committed to that mission. It’s unrealistic to expect that any individual in the police department can be available around the clock for unexpected emergencies. That’s why I’ve focused on building a leadership team grounded in constant communication during crises, which was clearly demonstrated this past weekend. My strategy ensures that I am actively involved in all emergencies, regardless of whether I am in Seattle or on personal leave.

Neither the King County Prosecutor’s Office or the City Attorney’s Office has announced any charges yet. The City Attorney deals with misdemeanors and the county prosecutor deals with felonies.

City Council, Police

Legislation Would Remove Restrictions on SPD’s Use of “Less Lethal” Weapons for Crowd Control
SPD Assistant Chief Dan Nelson speaks to the city council’s public safety committee on Tuesday.

The proposed new law, which establishes “values and expectations” for SPD’s crowd control policies, could be the final step toward ending a 12-year-old federal consent decree.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council is considering legislation proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and sponsored by Councilmember Bob Kettle, to repeal restrictions on the Seattle Police Department’s use of “less lethal” weapons for crowd control. The bill would allow SPD to continue operating under an amended version of its “interim” policy, which allows cops to use tear gas, blast balls, and other weapons against groups of people if they perceive “an imminent risk of physical injury to any person or significant property damage.”

If passed, the new law will allow the use of “blast balls”—grenades that explode and send out projectiles and, in some cases, pepper or tear gas—for crowd control. SPD contends that these projectiles, which can cause severe injuries when police deploy them to disperse crowds of people, are less problematic than tear gas because they are more targeted.

The ordinance would also align city law with state law requiring the mayor to sign off on any use of tear gas.

“We have changed our policy to say that officers will deploy blast balls into open spaces when feasible,” SPD Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey told the council on Tuesday. A bit of history: In response to SPD’s brutal actions against protesters in 2020, the city council passed legislation banning the use of all crowd control weapons. However, Judge Robart effectively enjoined the city from enforcing that law, leading the council to pass a new law that allowed less-lethal weapons but established rules governing how SPD could use them.

That law limited the use of pepper spray and tear gas, stipulated that only trained SWAT officers could use certain weapons, restricted cops’ use of less-lethal weapons use to “violent public disturbances” involving 12 or more people, and created a private right of action for people injured by crowd control weapons.

The department immediately disavowed the new law, arguing that it wasn’t the city’s role to dictate SPD’s crowd-control policies through legislation, and has never followed it; on Tuesday, both SPD and central staff insisted that the law is “not in effect,” although it is very much still on the books and has never been enjoined. Instead of following the new restrictions, SPD came up with its own “interim policy” on crowd control and began operating under that policy.

Harrell and Kettle’s legislation would formally repeal both of these crowd control laws: The one Judge Robart enjoined and the one that is still technically in effect. The proposal includes a list of “values and expectations” that are supposed to guide any crowd control policy SPD adopts in the future, but it otherwise leaves SPD to come up with its own approach to crowd control, officially sanctioning what SPD has been doing, in practice, since 2023 when it created its own interim policy.

The legislation would set the stage to end the federal consent decree between the city and the US Department of Justice, which has endured for the last 12 years. In October, federal district judge James Robart told the city that crowd control is one of the last remaining issues the city needs to address before he will release SPD from the 12-year-old agreement.

SPD argues that it’s inappropriate for the city to legislate what kind of weapons police can use against crowds of people, and in what circumstances. Instead, they’ve drafted a policy that lays out how police are supposed to behave in an escalating series of circumstances, from “lawful assembly standoff” to “unlawful assembly (riot)” and “immediately life safety.”

The ordinance also repeals a requirement police officers from departments outside Seattle follow Seattle’s policies when providing “mutual aid” in responding to large events—a change that leaves open the possibility that agencies with fewer restrictions on crowd control weapons could deploy them without SPD approval.

Maxey told the council that these outside officers are “not going to be issuing dispersal orders and throwing blast balls tear gas without a whole lot of other involvement from command,” but said it would be counterproductive to place formal restrictions that might dissuade other police departments from coming to Seattle’s aid, given SPD’s current hiring challenges.

The new ordinance would also eliminate a private right of action for people injured by crowd-control weapons, such as blast balls and 40-mm projectiles, to sue SPD.

SPD representatives assured the council that their policies have evolved since 2020 and seem to be working. “We have a much more reduced footprint at these events,” Assistant Police Chief Dan Nelson told the council. “Our goal is to differentiate criminal conduct and not penalize the crowd as a whole. …  And we’ve actually recently had a lot of really positive success with this strategy.”

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However, Councilmember Cathy Moore pointed out that SPD’s new policies haven’t been tested by massive, largely spontaneous protests since 2020, so it may be premature to declare the department’s new internal policies a success. “It seems to me that, in a way, we could take a scalpel to the current ordinance, rather than repealing it entirely and basically just saying we’re going to rely on [SPD] policy,” Moore said. Moore said she was most concerned about the use of blast balls, given their potential to cause grave injury, and the likelihood of mass protests under the second Trump administration. “Frankly, we do need to be very, very much in the weeds on this issue.”

Councilmember Rob Saka, in contrast, argued that the council should have much less direct authority over how SPD conducts crowd control and other aspects of its work, including new technologies that require significant vetting under the city’s surveillance ordinance.

“I find it really poignant that this ordinance would allow SPD to address changes in both available crowd control technologies and emerging best practices or emerging trends, without the delay associated with the legislative process,” Saka said. “That is a proposition that I strongly agree with. And I think the same challenge kind of manifests itself in other policy areas and topics, including with respect to policing.”

Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, one of the original members of the city’s Community Police Commission, recalled that while the CPC didn’t recommend completely banning blast balls, they did seek a suspension of their use until SPD adopted a policy that meaningfully addressed the risks of using them at in crowds, where “crowd flow is chaotic and the explosion radius is hard to control.”

Since then, Daugaard said, nothing “has really changed that analysis—blast balls haven’t been used since 2020, and in 2020, there were similar outcomes to those seen while I was on the CPC.” That doesn’t mean there needs to be a law prohibiting blast balls,  Daugaard said, but “it does mean that there’s important work to be conducted on policy guidance on how to use them—for example, instead of saying ‘don’t fire them at people,’ say ‘fire them away from people and no closer than X distance.'”

After years of inaction on SPD’ crowd control policy, the city is suddenly in a hurry to get it done. This week, Kettle said he would not consider any council amendments submitted after January 9, “and it really needs to happen beforehand, because there’s so much coordination [that has to happen], due to the fact that it has these other aspects to it, related to the consent decree.”

Because of the short timeline, the city’s Community Police Commission is scrambling to come up with a response to, and potentially recommendations on, the proposal. “Once the ordinance passes, [and SPD has] they think is aligned with it, they’re probably going to run to the court with that policy and say, ‘Look, we’re done,” CPD co-chair Joel Merkel said. “What I’ve been trying to do is make sure the CPC doesn’t get skipped over in this process.”

Currently, CPC members and staff are looking over SPD’s proposed crowd control policy and raising concerns, most of which have related to “the circumstances under which certain less-lethal weapons could be used.” If the city is going to let SPD off the leash to develop its own crowd control policies, Merkel added, “the policy is really important, and how you train on the policy is really important.”

Judge Robart has said that he would not release Seattle from the consent decree unless SPD had a crowd control policy in place that is consistent with city laws; repealing the crowd control laws that remain on the books will remove that obstacle and could be the last step toward ending the consent decree. For years, there has been a growing consensus at the city that the consent decree unduly restricts Seattle’s authority to govern its own police department; whether SPD will use its new autonomy by responding appropriately to the next wave of mass protests remains an open question.

 

Courts, Police

Jury Awards $680,000 to Seattle Protesters Arrested and Jailed for Chalk Graffiti
Police camera footage taken after four people were arrested for writing messages in chalk on a temporary barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle has to pay $680,000, including punitive damages, to four people arrested and jailed for writing anti-police messages in sidewalk chalk on a temporary concrete barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct building during a January 2021 protest against police brutality. The jury verdict came after a six-day trial in US District Judge Marsha Pechman’s courtroom.

The four plaintiffs in the case—Derek Tucson, Robin Snyder, Monsieree de Castro, and Eric Moya-Delgado—were arrested and booked into the King County Jail on January 1, 2021 after writing messages in chalk on a temporary concrete wall outside the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct. The county jail was not accepting bookings at the time because of COVID, but, according to the lawsuit, SPD was able to override the county’s policy by using a so-called “protester exception.”

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison argued, on behalf of SPD, that the chalked messages—which included “BLM,” “peaceful protest,” and “fuck SPD”—violated a local law against “property destruction,” a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail.

“Based on the evidence presented at trial, the jury found the defendants arrested and booked the plaintiffs because of the content or viewpoint of their speech,” an attorney for the four plaintiffs, Braden Pence, said in a statement. “We hope this verdict will be a warning and a lesson to police officers and other government officials across the country who violate the First Amendment—that they are and will be held accountable when they arrest and jail people for protected speech.”

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Last June, Pechman issued an injunction against the portion of the property destruction law that pertains specifically to graffiti, calling it so vaguely worded that it effectively “criminalizes innocent drawings,” including sidewalk chalk drawings by children. In practice, the judge, Marsha Pechman noted, the law allows police to arbitrarily decide which speech is acceptable and which is cause for arrest based on viewpoint, creating “a real and substantial threat of censorship.”

Although the injunction, which prevented the city from enforcing its graffiti law, was eventually overturned, the city attorney’s office continued to pursue the underlying case.

The lawsuit gave several examples in which the police department has encouraged and even participated in sidewalk chalking when it supports their political viewpoint—chalking messages across the sidewalk outside City Hall, for example, during a “Back the Blue” event in the summer of 2020, a time when protests against police violence were happening across the city.

According to the protesters’ attorneys, the jury found not only that the SPD officers made the wrong decision by arresting and booking the four defendants, but that their decisions were “retaliatory” and that they acted “with malice, oppression, or reckless disregard for the plaintiffs’ rights.”

A spokesman for City Attorney Ann Davison said that because the city hired outside attorneys to defend SPD, they do not know yet how much the lawsuit will cost the city. Davison not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.

City Council, Police

For Years, SPD Has Ignored a Law Requiring Them to Restrict their Use of Less-Lethal Weapons
A protester talks with a Seattle police officer on May 31, 2020 (Flickr: Derek Simeone; Creative Commons license).

By Erica C. Barnett

Nearly three years after the Seattle City Council passed legislation that constrained the Seattle Police Department”s use of  “less lethal” weapons during protests and required SPD to come up with a new crowd-control approach, SPD continues to operate under a policy that is out of compliance with that law.

The council passed the less-lethal weapons bill in 2021, after a federal judge concluded that an earlier, more restrictive version of the legislation might violate a longstanding consent decree between the city and the US Department of Justice. The 2021 law instructed SPD to come up with a new crowd control policy that complied with the law within 60 days. Instead, the department ignored the requirement until last December, when it submitted a proposal to the court monitor overseeing the consent decree.

Accompanying the policy: A memo from SPD denouncing their own proposal as “dangerous” and unworkable and asking the court to instead approve the department’s existing “interim” crowd control policy, which does not ban or substantially restrict the use of a single less-lethal weapon.

“SPD believes that [the legally compliant] policy is not grounded in best practices, would compromise public safety, and would unnecessarily endanger SPD employees,” the memo, written by SPD’s chief operating officer Brian Maxey, says. “SPD has drafted the ordinance policy, which is attached to this  submission, but completely disavows that policy.”

The department’s defiance leaves the 2021 law in limbo. As the city works through the remaining vestiges of the 2012 consent decree—among them, the crowd control policy—DOJ and court monitor are unlikely to force SPD’s hand. Meanwhile, a majority of the new city council has gone out of their way to demonstrate that they see themselves as SPD’s cheerleaders, not critics.

The draft policy SPD “disavows” would go much further than the largely toothless “interim” policy SPD adopted last year, by banning the use of blast balls, limiting the use of pepper spray and tear gas, and restricting the use of 40-millimeter chemical launchers, tear gas, and “flash-bang” grenades to trained SWAT team officers.

It would also reduce SPD’s ability to use a specific list of less-lethal weapons for crowd control during demonstrations and protests, restricting their use to “violent public disturbances” in which a crowd of 12 or more people are using, or threatening to use, physical violence.

In its memo, SPD argued that adopting any crowd control policy through legislation—especially these particular policies—would impede officers’ ability to act nimbly in dangerous situations and would lock the department into rigid rules that could only be changed through new legislation. The department also argued that if they adopted a policy consistent with the 2021 legislation, they’d have no ability to control violent crowds, use less-lethal weapons to respond to property destruction, or “rescu[e] victims in a crowd.”

SPD  alsocontends that the ordinance would prevent them from using most less-lethal options to move crowds in situations that fall short of the “violent public disturbance” standard, essentially forcing them to fall back on striking people with batons and shoving them with bikes.

The department made a similar argument in response to the original law back in 2021, arguing that it would render them helpless to respond to violent demonstrations or address individual acts of violence in crowds.

The sponsor of the 2021 legislation, former city council member Lisa Herbold, says this claim is false, because the ordinance only defines certain weapons as “less lethal,” while still allowing police to use weapons like Tasers and sponge-tipped 40-millimeter rounds to respond to violent situations in crowds. A council memo about the legislation includes a table describing the situations in which police could and could not use different types of less-lethal weapons under the ordinance.

Shortly before the end of her term last year, Herbold wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to SPD’s memo.

“The idea that SPD’s only recourse under the less lethal weapons regulations … is to disengage if a group smaller than 12 people is threatening to use unlawful violence, seems to discount the value that SPD places on de-escalation” and their ability to use other weapons that aren’t in the ordinance, Herbold wrote.

SPD argues that they’ve improved their crowd control policies even without the ordinance. “SPD has continued to refine and develop its Crowd Management policy while this process continues,” an SPD spokesperson told PubliCola, “and is proud of its success in managing often contentious and polarizing free speech events based on lessons learned from 2020 and consultation with international experts.”

In February, however, the Stranger reported that police dispersed a nonviolent pro-Palestine demonstrators on the downtown waterfront using pepper balls —one of the weapons that would not have been available for crowd control if SPD had adopted a policy in line with the 2021 ordinance.

Herbold’s memo to SPD concluded with a plea for the court to reject SPD’s request that it review the interim policy and ignore the one drafted in response to the law.

“SPD seems to be asking the Court to ‘double-down’ on limiting the democratic legislative process by suggesting that the Court review only SPD’s existing Interim Policy, and not the policy that incorporates the requirements of the ordinance,” Herbold wrote. “SPD’s request is that the Court not only limit the Council’s legislative authority in an area covered by the Consent Decree, but, in practice, eliminate it.”

Antonio Oftelie, the court monitor overseeing the consent decree, told PubliCola that his office and the DOJ have decided to step back and see if SPD, working with the mayor and new city council, can come up with a policy in the first quarter of this year that complies with the consent decree and is something all sides can live with.

“This represents an opportunity for the City to develop complex policy without federal and Court supervision,” Oftelie said. “Ideally, the City will develop a crowd management policy that ensures Constitutional rights to speech and expression and protection of life and property, as well as design tactics that are feasible to implement by the police department.”

Herbold told PubliCola the monitor should review the policy SPD submitted on the merits, rather than punt the issue back to the city. In 2021, she said, the council sought outside legal advice about how they could force SPD to develop the policies required by the law, but did not take action because they “wanted to try and work in good faith towards SPD fulfilling this legal requirement.” Now she said, “I’m left wondering whether the consent decree has been successfully weaponized to completely undermine the authority of the legislative branch and is now rewarding SPD for their failure to adhere to the rule of law.”

City Council, homelessness, Morning Fizz, Police

Proud Boys Hoax Only Most Recent SPD Disinfo Effort, Council Member Deflects Questions About Anti-RV Eco-Blocks, and More Questions about Police Dogs as “Less-Lethal” Weapons
A person rests on top of a concrete ecology block, one of thousands used to prevent RVs from parking on the street in industrial areas throughout the city
A person rests on top of a concrete ecology block, one of hundreds used to prevent RVs from parking on the street in industrial areas throughout the city

1. A series of fake radio transmissions by Seattle police officers in June 2020 that described a group of armed, far-right extremists wandering through the downtown core “improperly added fuel to the fire” during a tense summer of citywide racial justice protests and clashes with police, according to Office of Police Accountability (OPA) Director Andrew Myerberg, whose office released its investigation of the incident on Wednesday.

The transmissions were a part of a misinformation campaign conceived by Brian Grenon, then the captain of the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct. The transmissions came only hours after officers evacuated the precinct at the instruction of Assistant Chief Tom Mahaffey. In an interview with the OPA, Grenon explained that the ruse was intended to convince demonstrators that the department had “more officers out there doing regular stuff” at a time when SPD was stretched thin. Grenon didn’t seek approval for the campaign from then-police chief Carmen Best or Mahaffey, nor did he tell his subordinate officers what to say.

The lower-ranking officers chose to describe a group of armed Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group known for street brawls that featured prominently in the attack on the U.S. Capitol last January, gathered near Seattle City Hall. In interviews with the OPA, the officers said that they had never taken part in a disinformation campaign before.

City council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold noted, however, that SPD has faced scrutiny over disinformation in the recent past. In 2019, the OPA launched an investigation into an officer who lied to a driver suspected of a hit-and-run; though the incident only damaged a group of parked cars, the officer claimed that the crash left a person in critical condition. Less than a week later, the driver died by suicide after agonizing over the incident, believing he had killed someone.

While Washington state law allows police officers to use a ruse while undercover, to gather information for investigations and to address “an exigent threat to life or public safety,” the same law prohibits ruses that are so “shocking” that they lack “fundamental fairness.” In the 2019 case, Myerberg ruled that the officer’s ruse was not necessary or appropriate, and that it likely led directly to the driver’s suicide. SPD suspended the officer responsible for the ruse for 6 days, and Myerberg recommended that SPD begin training officers on ruses, “including when they are appropriate and when they shock fundamental fairness.”

On Wednesday, Herbold noted that SPD has yet to fully implement Myerberg’s recommendation, and said she has asked Myerberg to issue a new recommendation, specifying that officers need to document any ruses so that investigators can review their appropriateness.

Although Myerberg noted that the Proud Boys ruse likely contributed to some protesters’ decisions to arm themselves, it appears that none of the officers involved in the ruse will face discipline. Grenon and another commander who supervised the effort have since left SPD, and Myerberg held that while the four lower-ranking officers who took part in the ruse exercised poor judgment, their supervisors were to mostly to blame.

“I stepped down from my responsibilities at Fremont Brewing to run my campaign and, to avoid conflict of interest, I formally separated from Fremont Brewing after the election.”—City Councilmember Sara Nelson, in response to an email from Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett, Vehicle Residency Outreach program

2. When new Position 9 City Councilmember Sara Nelson took her oath of office Tuesday afternoon, she emphasized her experience as the co-owner of Fremont Brewing, referring to herself as “the first small business owner on City Council since 2009.” (Jan Drago, who owned a Häagen-Dazs franchise on the Ave, retired that year).

In an email responding to a homeless service provider’s concerns about Fremont Brewing’s use of large concrete “ecology blocks” to obstruct parking on the streets surrounding its Ballard brewing facility, however, Nelson said she no longer has anything to do with the business, which she co-owns with her husband, Matt Lincecum, and could not respond to any requests for Fremont Brewing to remove the obstructions.

“I stepped down from my responsibilities at Fremont Brewing to run my campaign and, to avoid conflict of interest, I formally separated from Fremont Brewing after the election,” Nelson said in an email to the Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett, head of the city-funded Vehicle Residency Outreach program. “This is why I haven’t spoken to any reporters about this matter and why I must decline to engage in discussion with you now. For current information about SDOT’s enforcement of complaints of street use violations, I have referred inquiries to [the public information officer] at SDOT (copied).”

Kirlin-Hackett’s initial letter asked Nelson to “now abide as a sitting Councilmember [with] what the law requires; that is removing the ecology barriers that surround your brewery.” In his response to Nelson’s email, Kirlin-Hackett wrote, “I know it is a very usual thing for those elected to want to wash their hands. But it’s clear by your response you know this is a problem and violation of the law. If you read the letter from SDOT I sent, you’ll know their very problem is their inability to have the support of the Executive or Council in how to apply the law.”

Many property owners in industrial areas, including several in the blocks immediately adjacent to Fremont Brewing, have placed ecology blocks in the public right-of-way to prevent people living in RVs (which, under Seattle law, can only park overnight in industrial areas) from parking on the street. The use of ecology blocks to obstruct parking is illegal, but SDOT has not enforced the law, opting instead to send warning letters to businesses, including Fremont Brewing, that use the blocks to deter RV parking.

SDOT’s laissez-faire approach to street use has not extended to RV owners themselves; shortly before the most recent snow and ice storm, the city showed up with tow trucks to remove a group of RVs from West Green Lake Way, part of a sweep that also forced people camping in the area to move their tents to a different part of the park.

Nelson did not immediately respond to questions Thursday about what her “formal separation” from Fremont Brewing entails.

3. A Seattle police officer shot and killed a man suspected of burglarizing a South Seattle home on Wednesday afternoon after the man killed a police dog and stabbed the dog’s handler, Officer Anthony Ducre, in the face.

The dog, named Jedi, was previously at the center of a lawsuit against the city of Seattle by a woman he attacked during a training exercise in a Tukwila parking lot in January 2020. At the time, SPD was using the parking lot as part of a training course for K-9 units. Ducre was leading Jedi through the course on a long lead and lost sight of him around a corner; there, Jedi found a woman taking a break from her job in a nearby building and—acting on training—bit her leg. The woman, Valerie Heffernan, later settled with the City of Seattle for $225,000. Continue reading “Proud Boys Hoax Only Most Recent SPD Disinfo Effort, Council Member Deflects Questions About Anti-RV Eco-Blocks, and More Questions about Police Dogs as “Less-Lethal” Weapons” →

City Council, Elections, Morning Fizz, Police

Sawant Recall Down to the Wire, No Charges for Cop Who Rolled Bike Over Protester, Long Waits for Non-Emergency Calls

1. The results of a second day of vote-counting in the Kshama Sawant’s recall election substantially closed the gap between pro- and anti-recall votes, leaving Sawant within 250 votes of victory. On election night, with an unusually high number of ballots counted, Sawant was behind by 6.4 percentage points. Ordinarily, that would be an easy margin to make up, since later ballots tend to strongly favor left-leaning politicians and issues, but in this instance, the election-night vote represented far more ballots than usual, meaning that some of the “late” ballots that would typically be counted in the days after an election were included in the Tuesday tally.

On Wednesday, as King County Elections counted more last-minute ballots from drop boxes, the tide turned strongly in Sawant’s favor. About 62 percent of more than 7,100 votes counted Wednesday favored Sawant. Despite this trend, the election remained too close to predict, for a couple of reasons. First, King County Elections said it expects to count just 1,200 more ballots, total. Assuming that estimate is correct, Sawant will need to win around 60 percent of those ballots to narrowly prevail. That’s lower than 62 percent, but there is one potential reason for caution: Many of the ballots that will be reported Wednesday are ballots that were mailed in before election night, which could end up favoring Sawant by a smaller margin than the ones reported Wednesday.

The second reason for caution is that, according to the elections office, the signatures on 656 ballots have been challenged, which can happen when a signature does not match the one the elections office has on file or if a voter fails to sign the envelope when they submit their ballot. The next “drop” of votes arrives at 4pm today.

2. Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz ordered an officer to serve a seven-day unpaid suspension for rolling his bike over a prone protester’s head during a protest on Capitol Hill in September 2020. The suspension came in response to an Office of Police Accountability (OPA) investigation that found the officer used unreasonable force and violated SPD’s professionalism policies.

The protester, Camilo Massagli, was wearing a hard hat and lying in the street to create a barrier between a line of police officers with bicycles and a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. A widely circulated video of the incident shows the officer, Eric Walker, rolling his bicycle over Massagli’s head without attempting to lift his wheel. Massagli was not injured, and officers later arrested him for failure to disperse and obstruction.

In interview with the OPA, Walter insisted that he did not intend to run over Massagli’s head. “Such a belief, even if convincingly articulated and strongly held,” the OPA investigators wrote in their findings, “cannot serve to overcome the clear video evidence in this case.” Ultimately, investigators ruled that Walter had no justification for rolling his bicycle over Massagli, and that he did so intentionally.

OPA Director Andrew Myerberg and Walter’s superiors recommended the seven-day suspension, both because of Walter’s misconduct and the damage the incident did to SPD’s public image. The Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, which represents Walter, is appealing his suspension. Walter also may be able to break his suspension into smaller portions to serve over multiple weeks.

The incident spurred a criminal investigation by the King County Sheriff’s Office, which didn’t find probable cause to charge Walter with assault; the Seattle City Attorney’s Office also did not bring charges against Walter. The sheriff’s detective assigned to the case reasoned that Massagli—a well-known figure during last summer’s protests—might have lain down in the street in hopes of provoking police officers to use force, and that the incident was not a clear-cut case of excessive force because “rolling a bicycle tire over someone would not necessarily be expected to cause someone pain.”

Massagli also chose not to pursue charges, telling the sheriff’s office that he does “not recognize the legitimacy of any U.S. court or police department” and doesn’t believe in using the criminal legal system as punishment.

The OPA also recommended that SPD supervisors reprimand another officer for hitting a protester with his bike during protests on Capitol Hill last fall. 

3. Seattle’s Community Safety and Communications Center, which houses the city’s 911 dispatch center, is struggling to answer calls to its non-emergency line, prompting more than a quarter of callers to hang up after long waits. Non-emergency calls range from noise complaints to reports of suspicious activity. The call center, which moved from the Seattle Police Department to the CSCC in June, has struggled to manage call volumes while short-staffed; in November, the center had 30 vacancies on its roughly 130-member staff, including 10 positions left vacant by dispatchers who lost their jobs in October when the city began firing employees who refused to get vaccinated.

In the final week of November alone, nearly 30 percent of callers to the non-emergency line didn’t reach a human being, waiting an average of five minutes before hanging up. Callers transferred from 911 operators to the non-emergency line were even more likely to give up before reaching a person: 35 percent of transferred callers hung up, waiting an average of 7.5 minutes.

The CSCC has reported that Seattle’s temporary hiring incentive program, which offers $10,000 bonuses to new police officers and 911 dispatchers—and $25,000 to officers and dispatchers who transfer from other agencies—doubled the number of applications they received to fill vacant positions. For now, callers to the non-emergency line will hear a pre-recorded message suggesting alternative ways to seek help during the center’s peak hours.

—Erica C. Barnett, Paul Kiefer