Tag: Seattle Nice

City Council, podcasts

New Councilmember Dionne Foster Tells Seattle Nice: Police Cameras “Should Be Turned Off and Come Down.”

By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest for this week’s episode of Seattle Nice (don’t worry, we’ll get back to our traditional bickering format soon) is new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, who beat Position 9 incumbent Sara Nelson in a blowout last year. Foster, like fellow newcomers Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who’s been there a year), is a progressive, with a resumé and policy priorities to match.

Since Foster heads up the council’s Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights committee, we started out by talking about homelessness: How’s new Mayor Katie Wilson doing so far, and does Foster want to see fewer encampment removals?

Wilson is expected to release plans for a “shelter surge” in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the city has continued moving unsheltered people from place to place, though now—according to Wilson’s office—in a way that attempts to “minimiz[e] harm.”

We also talked about laws passed by the previous council that increase penalties for using or possessing drugs in public, which include “stay out” orders banishing people from certain “drug areas” before they’re found guilty of any crime. Foster affirmed that she doesn’t plan to propose repealing the law, but did say she expects police to limit arrests to situations where someone poses a threat of harm to themself or others—a concept that’s codified in the law, but that remains troublingly vague.

We turned next to the Seattle Police Department’s use of 24/7 surveillance cameras, which Foster unequivocally said “should be turned off and come down.” Wilson’s office hasn’t made an announcement about the cameras yet, but Foster noted that the ones installed most recently have not been turned on yet. In addition to concerns about police surveillance generally, opponents have pointed out that the federal government can easily demand access to camera footage, putting immigrants and other vulnerable people at risk.

SPD claims the cameras deter and help them solve crimes, but has not presented specific, compelling evidence that camera surveillance helped them solved a crime that could not have been solved using other methods, including private surveillance cameras and traditional police work.

Nor, Foster noted, do they seem to address violent crime, one of SPD’s most frequent justifications for putting them around the city. “When we’re thinking about the technology matching the challenge, that’s where I see sort of a misalignment,” she said. “I do want to make sure that we’re … making sure our tools match the issues that we are trying to solve.”

We also squeezed in time to talk about the upcoming library levy, the new neighborhood centers, and former mayor Harrell’s “deeply unsustainable” budget, which sets up Wilson and the council for budget cuts—and potentially new revenue options, like a local capital gains tax.

 

Courts, Crime, podcasts

Scott Lindsay, Deputy for Ousted City Attorney Ann Davison, Doesn’t Mince Words

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we spoke to former deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay. Voters soundly rejected Lindsay’s former boss, Republican Ann Davison, last November, but Lindsay argues that many of her prescriptions for addressing crime and disorder were sound—including “stay out” zones for people accused of using or possessing drugs in public, extra penalties for people who commit misdemeanors like shoplifting over and over, and the elimination of community court, which Lindsay called “a complete disaster and shame and stain on the record of city attorney [Pete] Holmes.”

Although the city has arguably been ruled by a moderate-to-conservative supermajority for at least the last four years, Lindsay says they failed to accomplish all their goals, in part, because former mayor Bruce Harrell wouldn’t always get with the program. Seattle, Lindsay argues, still has “radically too few police officers,” “no consensus about what to do about our most pressing public disorder problems,” and neighborhoods that have been “destroyed” by people using and selling drugs in public.

PubliCola has frequently pushed back on the notion that cracking down on so-called “prolific offenders”—the subject of a report Lindsay wrote for the Downtown Seattle Association in 2019—is a solution to the problems facing neighborhoods like Little Saigon that have faced decades of neglect and disinvestment. Lindsay agreed—and said that isn’t the point.

“More people will die every year of fentanyl and meth overdose than will be successful in getting out of the life and getting into treatment and turning their lives around,” Lindsay said.

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“I’m not saying give up, but I’m saying we need to balance our treatment approach with, how do we stop the havoc that these folks create? And one effective way at stopping the havoc that they create is to constantly disrupt. Use legal tools to disrupt their behavior. Convince them that being on the streets at 12th and Jackson smoking fentanyl is going to get you incarcerated. Even if that’s for eight or 12 hours that is in effect, can be an effective tool at disrupting the problem behavior and saving neighborhoods. Little Saigon is gone, but others are on the brink.”

Listeners will probably have strong feelings about this conversation, which also includes a discussion of Police Chief Shon Barnes, community court, and the “radical abolitionists,” in Lindsay’s words, at King County’s Department of Public Defense, which provides attorneys for indigent defendants.

Crime, Drugs, podcasts

Seattle Nice: City Attorney and LEAD Founder Set the Record Straight on Drug Diversion

By Erica C. Barnett

Sandeep and I sat down with new Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion founder Lisa Daugaard on this week’s episode to talk about changes Evans is making to the way the city handles low-level drug cases.

Under Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, people arrested for simple drug possession or using in public were either jailed and prosecuted or sent to a “drug prosecution alternative” where they have to get an assessment to confirm they have an addiction and stay out of trouble for six month.

Evans directed her prosecutors to go back to the pre-Davison policy of reviewing people’s cases to see if they’re eligible for LEAD, the city’s pre-filing diversion program. In response to this reasonable directive, Police Chief Shon Barnes told his officers that going forward, officers had to refer every drug case to LEAD—an overstatement that led to a right-wing media freakout when police guild director Mike Solan claimed Mayor Katie Wilson had ordered an end to all drug arrests.

Evans and Daugaard set the record straight, explaining what LEAD does, who it’s for, and how they believe this policy shift will actually help people addicted to fentanyl who use in public—which, they both reminded is, is encoded in the 2023 “Blake fix” law that empowered the city attorney to prosecute minor drug cases in the first place.

“What we’re doing is not anything inconsistent with what the law has already recommended for our office to be doing,” Evans told us. “But nothing’s off the table. If someone is not making meaningful progress with LEAD or in diversion, then we do reserve the right to do traditional prosecution.”

We also discussed ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis and what the city can do if Trump sends masked shock troops to Seattle. And we asked Daugaard, who co-founded Purpose Dignity Action and started LEAD, why she’s taking a leave of absence to work inside the Wilson administration.

podcasts

Seattle Nice: Our Hopes and Predictions for Seattle In 2026

 

By Erica C. Barnett

For the final Seattle Nice show of 2025, we brought in our returning special guest, PubliCola cofounder Josh Feit, to talk about what we’re hoping (or expecting) will happen in Seattle in 2026.

Josh and my New Year’s wishes included a lot of the items we included in our 14-Point Plan for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson, including Josh’s proposal for Funded Inclusionary Zoning—an idea for boosting housing development that involves giving developers a break on their taxes if they build affordable housing on-site at their new buildings. And to encourage more density in areas that have suburban-style housing—including Seattle’s actual suburbs—Josh wants to see Wilson pass a sprawl tax on people who park in Seattle’s densest neighborhoods.

In tandem with those ideas, I talked up my hope that Wilson and the City Council will get ambitious about the city’s comprehensive plan, which was supposed to be done in 2024 but still isn’t finished, grabbing at the opportunity to upzone more of Seattle, allowing renters to live anywhere in the city, not just on polluted arterial roads.

David predicts that the price of pizza won’t go down, referring to the (at this point, old) viral video in which Wilson explained what the lack of affordable housing in Seattle has to do with the cost of food in Seattle. (Notably, she did not say she would lower the cost of pizza.) And he says he expects Wilson will be far more pragmatic than her biggest detractors have predicted—noting that, despite opponents’ (including, at times, Sandeep) attempts to paint her as a radical leftist, the mayor-elect is surrounding herself with subject-matter experts and people with deep experience at City Hall.

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We also discussed the future of two teams with the word “Care” in them—the 116-person Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and tells their displaced residents about available shelter beds—and the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Team, a team of social workers that responds to some 911 calls instead of police.

The latest police contract, which raises police recruits’ salaries to $118,000 ($126,000 after six months), allows CARE responders to go to some calls without a police escort, but also dramatically restricts what kind of calls they can respond to—requiring a police response if drug paraphernalia or a weapon is visible, if there is evidence someone violated a law, if a person in crisis is inside a building or car, or if a person in crisis is exhibiting “extreme” behavior, such as nudity.

The two dads on the show, Sandeep and David, bemoaned the current state of Seattle Public Schools. David said maybe it’s finally time for the city to take over the public school system, and Sandeep said Washington should be embarrassed by the fact that Mississippi showed so much improvement on school test scores over the past few years while our state fell behind.

I hadn’t heard of this dramatic turnaround when we recorded (again, not a parent!), so I looked it up. Turns out it’s either mostly or at partly a fiction—while requiring low-performing students to repeat the third grade may (or may not!) have improved their fourth-grade test scores, the performance boost disappears in later years, returning Mississippi to its regular position near the bottom of the barrel.

 

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: New Police Contract, Wilson Keeps Police Chief, and We Celebrate our Four-Year Anniversary!

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice celebrated our fourth anniversary this week, and to celebrate, we’re… bringing you the same spicy, insightful content we’ve been putting out week after week since 2021! (And encouraging you to donate to our Patreon, which pays for editing, hosting, and other expenses.)

This week’s topics: Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s decision to retain Police Chief Shon Barnes, the generous new police contract that had police guild president Mike Solan gloating that the “socialists” had lost (Mike, are the socialists in the room with you right now?)   and the Trump Administration’s latest erratic moves on homelessness funding.

The Barnes news was pretty big. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced Barnes was his pick for chief year ago, foregoing the usual public process for selecting such a high-profile (and high-paying) position. In the past year, Barnes has stacked his office with people with no experience at SPD (including people who worked for Barnes in previous positions in North Carolina and Madison, Wisconsin), pushing out longtime civilian insiders and listening primarily to his inner circle. Fresh insights from elsewhere can be a breath of fresh air, but the lack of people with knowledge of how SPD functions and what Seattle residents expect from police reportedly contributed to some of Barnes’ high-profile early missteps.

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None of your podcast cohosts— that’s me, Sandeep Kaushik, and David Hyde, if you’re not a regular listener—could really speculate on what Wilson will do if Barnes fails to “make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action,” as she put it in a statement announcing she would retain Barnes along with CARE Department Chief Amy Barden, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and Office of Emergency Management director Curry Mayer.

However, we did agree that Wilson’s decision made sense–given that the alternative would have been firing Barnes, appointing an interim, and going through a search process that could be internally disruptive and externally divisive. If Barnes’ leadership style and commitment to creating an inclusive (and, specifically, woman- and LGBTQ-friendly) department don’t live up to Wilson’s standards, it’s likely she’ll launch a search (PubliCola has heard the name of a woman who may have the inside track), but with more direct knowledge of what’s working and what isn’t at SPD.

 

King County, Mayor Wilson, Police

Seattle Nice: Shakeups at the County and City as Zahilay and Wilson Take Over

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the changes that are taking shape at King County and the city of Seattle, as County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson start filling out their staff.

As I reported earlier this week, Zahilay put more than 100 executive branch staffers on notice on a Friday that unless they heard from HR by the end of the day the following Mondday, they should not expect to have jobs after the end of the year.

Employees I spoke to said they expected the executive’s staff, which includes dozen of political appointees, to turn over. But they were dismayed to learn that many other staffers doing technical or bureaucratic work, including land use planners and data analysts, will also lose their jobs in this “restructuring” process. They also said Zahilay’s team handled the delivery of this bad news poorly, damaging morale on teams that worked on reducing the county’s climate impact, promoting racial equity, developing the comprehensive plan, and working to improve the quality of government services.

While I argued (based on what I heard from a half-dozen staffers impacted by the changes) that Team Zahilay could have taken more time and care when deciding the fate of apolitical staff, Sandeep said county employees without civil service protections shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs when a new executive comes in.

We also discussed how the mayor-elect is building her own executive team and speculated about which city department heads she plans to replace or retain. As I reported, Wilson is reportedly still on the fence about Police Chief Shon Barnes, who has fans and detractors inside and outside the city. During his brief time as chief, Barnes has come under scrutiny for the department’s crackdown on nudity at Seattle’s historic LGBTQ nude beach, Denny Blaine, for firing SPD’s top two civilian staffers, and for appointing as East Precinct commander a captain infamous for driving his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with protesters in 2020.

To reiterate something I said on the show (and caught a lot of flak from my co-hosts for saying): Barnes, who has talked openly about how God sent him to Seattle (and, before that, Madison), is a weird cultural fit for a deeply irreligious city with a large LGBTQ+ population and a history of anti-police protests. (And, though I didn’t mention it, an appropriately adversarial press.) Having grown up in the Southern Baptist church myself, I personally have zero patience for the mingling of religion and government, and I’m always surprised when otherwise lowercase-l liberal people argue that it’s intolerant to expect government officials to keep their faith separate from their jobs.