Tag: Seattle Public Library

Addiction

In Rare Tragedy, Man Dies Inside Rainier Beach Library Branch
Image via SPL.org.

By Erica C. Barnett

A 41-year-old man died at the Rainier Beach library just after 3pm February 13 after library staffers tried but were unable to revive him with Narcan and CPR. The library shut down for the rest of the afternoon.

According to library spokeswoman Laura Gentry, library patrons “alerted staff that there was something wrong with a patron at the computer area”; thinking the man had overdosed, a staffer administered Narcan while other staff called 911. The 911 call taker told them to try CPR, but library staffers and medics who showed up a few minute later couldn’t revive the patron.

The King County Medical Examiner’s Office later reported that the man died of “chronic alcohol use disorder,” not an overdose. According to the CDC, about 178,000 people die in the US from excessive drinking every year.

It’s extraordinarily rare for a patron to die inside a library, although several people have died of overdoses outside library branches after hours. The experience of witnessing someone can be extremely traumatic, especially for workers whose jobs don’t ordinarily involve trying to save lives. Gentry said staff who witness a serious or traumatic incident get access to resources including free counseling, and can ask to move to a different location or take leave if they aren’t ready to return to work.

Staff don’t receive any specific training in recognizing alcohol-related medical emergencies, and training on how to respond to opioid overdoses is optional, Gentry said.

Drugs

New Drug Sensors Lead to Restroom Closures at Four Seattle Library Branches
Seattle’s Ballard branch library. Photo by Dennis Bratland, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-4.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

If you need to use the restrooms at the Lake City, Ballard, Capitol Hill, or International District libraries and find them closed, it may be thanks to new “air-quality sensors” that detect vapor from drugs that don’t set off regular smoke detectors, like fentanyl and meth, and alert staff to immediately close the restrooms down for at least 15 minutes or until the air quality improves to a minimum threshold level.

Library staff already have the authority to issue temporary or permanent bans for people who use drugs in the restrooms and other violations of the library’s code of conduct or the law.

According to Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Elisa Murray, SPL decided to start shutting down restrooms at certain branches in response to drug use as a way to protect patrons and staff.

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“Prior to implementing this technology, staff only became aware of unsafe conditions when fumes reached the service desks or when a patron comment prompted staff to enter the restrooms and detect smells, at which point they’re already risking exposure,” Murray said. “An alert allows the behavior to be interrupted as early as possible, and access to live data informs staff decisions about whether or not the restrooms should remain closed without exposing staff to harmful chemicals.”

King County has long advised that fentanyl “fumes” are generally harmless. “When someone smokes fentanyl, most of the drug has been filtered out by the user before there is secondhand smoke. It doesn’t just sort of float around,” Washington Poison Center medical director Scott Phillips said in a King County Public Health blog post in 2022. “There’s no real risk for the everyday person being exposed to secondhand opioid smoke.”

Despite this, Murray said library “staff have reported feeling sick from drug-related fumes, and we have had to close restrooms because of fumes related to drug activity. Air quality sensors help us maintain a safe and healthy environment for both staff and patrons.”

Murray said the library has received no complaints from patrons or staff about the restroom closures. Using or possessing drugs in public became a misdemeanor in 2023, and people accused of either offense can be banished from certain parts of the city even without a conviction.

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City Hall, immigration, Media

No, the Library Did Not Tell Employees to “Capitulate to Fascism”

By Erica C. Barnett

A story posted earlier today in the Burner—an online publication started by former Stranger writer Hannah Krieg—claimed that the Seattle Public Library was “capitulating to fascism,” as Krieg put it on X, by forbidding frontline workers from recording ICE raids in library buildings on their phones and telling them that ICE does not need warrants to barge in and make arrests.

Citing a memo titled “Protocols for Immigration Enforcement: Compliance and Readiness at The Seattle Public Library” as well as an all-staff email from library director Tom Fay, the post also claimed that library staffers can’t ask ICE for a warrant to make arrests, and that SPL will not protect any employee who’s arrested for allegedly interfering in an ICE arrest.

What’s more, according to the article (written by a guest writer but posted by Krieg) the memo itself was apparently written by someone every progressive hates—Republican City Attorney Ann Davison.

Banning staffers from asking ICE agents for warrants? Prohibiting people from recording arrests on their phones? It all sounds quite alarming—and it would be, if any of it was true.

The Burner, which represents itself as independent journalism with a lefty twist, seems to have forgotten the journalism part. I got a copy of the memo, which was not linked in the post, and it took about five seconds to realize that at least one of the statements the publication represented, between quotation marks, as quotes from the memo … is not actually a quote from the memo.

These misrepresentations would just be sloppy if the memo actually did tell library staff that ICE never needs a warrant or that people can’t record ICE on their phones, as the story explicitly claims. But the memo (which is 12 pages long) basically says the opposite, so the misquotes are really misinformation.

The false quote from the memo is “Do not record interactions on a phone.” In fact, the memo (and a followup email to staff from Fay) emphasizes that it is legal to record ICE interactions, but that employees should use their personal devices to do so and understand the risk that a cop might get excited (as they do) and decide to arrest them. Describing a shitty fact about police behavior is a far cry from the saying that the “City will not defend, support or represent them in any legal case,” which is how the article describes the policy. The memo does not say any of that.

“This guidance does not intend to to strip library staff of their citizen right to film law enforcement,” Fay wrote, adding a link to  guidance on recording police officers from the Freedom Forum, a First Amendment advocacy group.

UPDATE: On Wednesday, in an email to staff that also advised staff about the Burner’s inaccurate reporting, Fay said the library’s guidance not to record on city-owned phones was “the result of a misunderstanding that occurred at a citywide training in February.” That was the only part of the guidance that was specific to SPL’s protocols; now, the rules at the library are identical to those for all other city of Seattle staff.

This change won’t actually impact any frontline library staff, because none of those staffers have city-issued phones. In fact, just 76 of the library’s more than 650 employees have phones, including regional managers, supervisors, gardeners, and maintenance workers.

The story also says the memo directs staff that “warrants [are] not required” for ICE to make arrests. “[A]rrest warrants definitely are required except in limited cases (the memo does not acknowledged this),” the piece claims, contrasting the library’s policy unfavorably with a Seattle Public Schools policy that requires ICE to present a warrant before entering school buildings.

In fact, the memo dedicates several pages to the library’s protocol for barring ICE officers from all non-public spaces unless they can present a judicial warrant; explains the difference from a judicial and administrative warrant and notes that the latter isn’t sufficient; and gives staffers a script to use if an ICE officer tries to get into areas where they aren’t allowed without a warrant.

“Officers need a judicial warrant to enter and search non-public areas,” the memo says. (Emphasis in original.) “DO NOT consent/grant access to non-public areas. Please tell them the following: ‘You may not enter this non-public area, and I am not authorized to let you enter. I will notify Library administration, and someone will be coming to verify.” At that point, staffers are supposed to call their manager and document everything that happens.

Legally, ICE can make arrests in most public places, including libraries; schools were exempt under a federal policy that designated them as “sensitive” areas ICE needs a judicial warrant to enter. Although Trump rescinded that Biden-era policy in January, his executive order—which also covers churches, where the sanctuary movement began—is being challenged in court.

The library’s guidance comes directly from a citywide training on February 27 about how city employees should respond to ICE raids, among other topics related to immigration. The training was created by the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, which has a ton of other know-your-rights resources on its website.

More than 1,000 employees across the city took part in the training, which explained existing city policies for dealing with ICE (which have not changed, but have obviously become more urgent) and included resources from Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the National Immigrant Law Center.

I posted obliquely about this on Bluesky earlier, and I see that since then, the Burner has posted a whole separate post that now includes a completely different two-page memo, and has changed the headline on the original post, which was “Seattle Public Libraries Tells Workers Not To Interfere With ICE Raids.” Once you tell people they should be outraged at the local library for violating the First Amendment and forcing staff to roll over for ICE arrests, and shout on social media that they’re basically fascists, it’s pretty hard to walk that back.

“Library memo describes citywide ICE policy for public buildings, developed by Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs” isn’t much of a headline, though. That’s because it isn’t much of a story.

Update Wednesday: The original story has been removed, replaced by a new piece by Krieg asserting essentially the same facts and with a misleading headline that still suggests the library has ordered staff to stand by passively and not ask for warrants when they are required, which is false. The story was purportedly taken down because it did not include “copies of the memos” laying out the city’s policy, but the new piece still doesn’t include the the 12-page memo laying out the policy, which includes a script for demanding warrants and barring ICE from entering areas of public buildings where they are not allowed to be. The new piece also argues that SPL should order its frontline workers to be confrontational toward armed ICE agents. By doubling down on the false narrative and failing to correct or acknowledge any errors, the new post does not address any of the the issues outlined below.

LGBTQ+, Uncategorized

Burien City Manager Filed Complaint Against Public Commenter; Seattle Library Hosts Another Anti-Trans Event

1. The Seattle Public Library is, once again, renting out public space to an organization dedicated to eliminating the rights of trans people—this time, a trans eliminationist group called Women’s Declaration USA, which will hold a panel discussion in the large auditorium of the Central Library downtown at 7 pm on Sunday, November 17.

Like other anti-trans groups, the WDI argues that being trans is an “ideology,” and that their goal is to stop people from believing they are trans, not to eliminate specific trans people. However, their policy prescriptions are dangerous for trans women, in particular, making them potential targets for anti-trans violence and subjecting them to legal discrimination. For example, the group supports banning trans women from using all women-only spaces as well as girl’s and women’s sports; one of the speakers at next week’s event, April Morrow, recently wrote that allowing trans women to be jailed with other women will subject cis women to attacks by “serial killers, pedos, and rapists.”

According to the invitation, WDI’s event will include discussions about “the atrocity of pediatric sex change”; a rehash of the Olympus Spa case, in which a trans woman sued a Tacoma women’s spa for kicking her out; “K-12 indoctrination”; “how women’s prisons in Washington state are no longer safe for women due to the inclusion of men,” and other inflammatory topics. (In fact, trans women in men’s prisons are at high risk for sexual assault, forced prostitution, and other dangers. According to The Marshall Project, just 10 of the approximately 1,000 trans women in federal prison are incarcerated in women’s prisons.)

The panel will include six different anti-trans activists, including Morrow; Amy Sousa, who argues that “the cult of trans ideology is one of body dissociation and external validation seeking”; detrans activist Elle Palmer; and Carol Dansereau, an activist who argues that parents should avoid “affirming” their gender-nonconforming kids’ gender identities and raise them as the sex they were assigned at birth.

Echoing a blog post the library posted last month, library spokeswoman Laura Gentry said, “Unless speech expressed by a group booking a Library meeting room directly incites imminent criminal activity or comprises specific threats of violence, it is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“The Seattle Public Library works hard every day to support and amplify the voices of vulnerable or historically excluded groups, including trans and queer communities,” Gentry added.

The directors of Capitol Hill Pride and Lynnwood Pride, Charlotte LeFevre and Philip Lipson, asked the library to cancel the event, arguing that members of WDI are associated with far-right militia groups. In response, library director Tom Fay said the library couldn’t cancel the event, but doesn’t endorse the views of WDI or any other group; he also noted that WDI agreed to hold their event after hours “to mitigate potential disruption and address concerns from staff,” and that the library will have additional security, including Seattle Police Department officers, on hand.

The library hasn’t figured out how much it will cost to have extra security, including police, on hand for the event, but Gentry said the funding for security comes from SPD’s budget, not the library’s. WDI paid $1,150 to rent the auditorium, including a $250 security fee.

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2. The state Public Disclosure Commission has dismissed a complaint against a Burien resident by Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon, who accused Rashell Lisowski of violating state law during a Burien City Council public comment in October, when she urged the council to pass legislation raising the city’s minimum wage to $20 an hour instead of sending the proposal to voters.

During the meeting, Burien City Attorney Garmon Newsom II told Lisowski to stop “campaigning for an initiative.” She did not urge a yes vote on the measure, but did say Burien residents supported a higher minimum wage.

In addition to asking the council to pass the higher minimum wage, Lisowski—who owns a small business in Burien and works for Washington Community Action Network—used her two minutes to talk about her personal experience working for low wages in the service industry.

Lisowski said it was her first time speaking at a city council meeting, and she found the way the city attorney and city manager “zoomed in on me” shocking. “I didn’t know why they were treating me like that,” she said. “If I wasn’t someone that had been in public speaking situations or had experience dealing with people treating me like that, I would have felt very intimidated and silenced. …  I’m a constituent, and they treated me like I had no stake at all in the community.”

The state’s Open Public Meetings A/ct prohibits elected officials and public employees from using public facilities, or allowing them to be used to promote political campaigns. The PDC dismissed the complaint because Lisowski is not a public official, and noted in their dismissal—issued just one week after Bailon filed his complaint—that it’s up to the presiding officer of the city council to stop people from electioneering, meaning that Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling, rather than any member of the public, could be liable if he let people use public comment to campaign.

In his complaint, Bailon described Lisowski as “the perpetrator” and provided “screenshots of the Washington Community Action Network website that promotes Ms. Lisowski as an organization employee [and] a website screenshot hosted by the Transit Riders Union, sponsor of Initiative Measure 24.001, that promotes involvement from Ms. Lisowski in their campaign effort.” According to Burien budget documents, Bailon made $225,000 as city manager this year.

 

 

Elections, LGBTQ+

Candidate Says Bagel Giveaway Is Strictly Business; Big Business PACs Back Harrell-Allied Candidates; “Books Unbanned” Still Open to Minors In Library Book Ban States

1. Stephen Brown, the president of Eltana Bagels and a candidate for City Council in District 1 (West Seattle), said a mailer emblazoned “Seattle Deserves Better… – Stephen Brown” that included an offer for free bagels was just a routine promotional pitch for his local wood-fired bagel chain, not a campaign expenditure.

The flyer (which opens to the word “Bagels!”) offers a half-dozen free bagels and a “spread of your choice”—a “more than $25 value!” to anyone who comes in to either of Eltana’s two locations, which are both located outside District 1. In small print below the offer, the mailer says the offer expires at the end of August and has “no cash value.”

Contacted by email, Brown said the flyers were part of Eltana’s routine direct-marketing strategy and went out “to various addresses in the city that are close to retail grocery stores selling Eltana bagels. … As part of its promotions, Eltana regularly gives bagels away in an effort to garner trial and acquire customers.”

“The intention was to use a banal, stereotypical message as a parody—to use humor to sell bagels,” Brown added.

“This effort is not a campaign expense—it is not electoral in nature.” —District 1 city council candidate Stephen Brown

Eltana has also purchased four billboards, including at least one in West Seattle, prominently featuring Brown’s name.

“Eltana has never bought billboards in the past but the incredibly low price for billboards this summer ($1000 a month) made this promotional offer too attractive for Eltana to pass up,” Brown said. “We have used me, as the founder, in the past to promote Eltana[.] …. This effort is not a campaign expense—it is not electoral in nature.”

If the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission determines that the mailers, giveaway, or billboards do promote Brown’s candidacy, the campaign would be in violation of Seattle election law, which bars candidates who participate in the democracy voucher program (as Brown is) from accepting more than $300 in cash or in-kind contributions from any campaign donor. The commission declined to comment.

Brown said “the campaign will not be reporting on the performance of the Eltana trial promotion,” as “the offer is made and distributed by Eltana, is city wide, and doesn’t promote any candidate for public office nor does it mention any elections or geography.”

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2. A developer-funded independent expenditure campaign poured more than $27,000 into the effort to elect Maritza Rivera—whose campaign focuses on hiring more police—to City Council District 4, where urbanist Ron Davis is the other top contender.

“University Neighbors Committee” received its largest donations from developers John Goodman and George Petrie—two frequent Republican donors who bankrolled the failed Compassion Seattle campaign and poured $150,000 into the political committee that helped elect Bruce Harrell in 2021. The other donors backing the pro-Rivera PAC include developer Jordan Selig, developer Martin Smith, developer Matt Griffin, and Amazon bigwig David Zapolsky.

The PAC’s first pro-Rivera mailer says that as a parent of a child at Ingraham High School, where a 17-year-old was shot last year, she “decided to run for city council because our current council isn’t doing enough to keep us safe. “If voters elect Rivera, the mailer promises, they’ll get “More cops. Better training. Faster response times”—Rivera has said wants to reduce Priority 1 911 response times to five minutes, which would require hiring hundreds more officers—a goal SPD has acknowledged isn’t realistic—and making Seattle the exception to a nationwide trend.

The exact same group of donors has contributed more than $32,000 to the “Elliott Bay Neighbors” PAC supporting Rob Saka—another Harrell-allied candidate—in District 1 (West Seattle).

If you’ve seen any mailers and want to send them our way, email erica@publicola.com. 

3. Earlier this month, the state of Mississippi effectively banned people under 18 from accessing e-books or audiobooks through any of its public libraries—part of the growing trend of book bans and other restrictions aimed at preventing young people from accessing information about gender, sexuality, race, and anything else Republican lawmakers consider objectionable.

The law requires vendors of digital materials like Libby and Hoopla to ensure that no minors can access anything the state deems “sexually explicit,” which includes everything from textbooks that include human anatomy sketches to “descriptions [of] homosexuality or lesbianism.”

Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Laura Gentry said the library will continue to offer Seattle library cards to people with Internet access living in Mississippi, whose ban on online materials for minors only extends to public and school libraries in that state, through its Books Unbanned program. Currently, she said, the program has 17 participants from Mississippi, including a 23-year-old teacher who submitted this comment: 

“Living in Mississippi, a lot of books with vital information/stories/perspectives are banned or being banned. Being a Black woman in the city with the highest population of Black people, I know how important it is for us to protect our history. Also, being a teacher, I see how certain books being banned has already affected the younger generation. There is a lot that they don’t know and may never know so it’s extremely helpful to have access to this catalog.”

LGBTQ+

Seattle Public Library Kicked Out of Trans Pride After Hosting Anti-LGBTQ+ Activist Kirk Cameron
Image from Kirk Cameron's latest anti-"woke" children's book, "Pride Comes Before the Fall," issued to coincide with the first day of Pride Month.
Image from Kirk Cameron’s latest anti-“woke” children’s book, “Pride Comes Before the Fall,” issued to coincide with the first day of Pride Month.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Gender Justice League has barred the Seattle Public Library from participating in the Trans Pride event on Friday, June 23, after the library decided to rent a large auditorium at the downtown library to former child star Kirk Cameron, a conservative activist who is touring to promote his latest “traditional family values” picture book.

PubliCola broke the story about Cameron’s appearance in April.

Responding to PubliCola’s questions about the cancellation, Gender Justice League Executive Director Danni Askini said the decision wasn’t just about Cameron’s appearance, but a response to a longstanding pattern of “deeply problematic behavior by the Library toward Two-Spirit, Trans, and Gender Diverse People,” such as denying a trans man access to a restroom in 2017 and renting the auditorium to a group that advocates against trans women’s rights two years later.

“We know there are situations where intellectual freedom, equity, and inclusiveness are in conflict at the Library—we have seen it and lived it, and we should discuss it.”—Chief Librarian Tom Fay

“We look forward to the City Librarian, the Library, and the City of Seattle taking this opportunity to reflect on the harm that platforming hate groups have on our community, at a time when there have been 450+ anti-trans laws, including calls to remove trans youth from their families, banning constitutionally protected healthcare, creating felonies for using restrooms with minors, and outlawing all forms of gender affirming care,” Askini said.  “We absolutely refuse to allow government entities that platform hate mongers into our sacred, holy, and inviolable space,” she added.

The library has maintained that it has the legal obligation to rent its rooms to anyone who applies, regardless of their views, and that to make judgment calls about who uses their facilities would amount to government censorship and a violation of the First Amendment,” as well as “intellectual freedom.”

Cameron has said that public schools are “sexualizing” and “grooming” kids, that being gay is “unnatural” and “destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization, that women who have abortions are “murderers,” and that his book tour offers a “wholesome alternative to the Drag Queen Story Hours promoted by woke Marxist librarians.”

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Cameron released his latest children’s book, “Pride Comes Before the Fall,” to coincide with the first day of Pride Month because, as he told the Washington Times, “When you have an entire nation setting aside a month to celebrate something as dangerous as pride, I feel it’s my responsibility to hold up the truth of humility so kids can have a chance.”

In a letter to library staff, SPL Chief Librarian Tom Fay said he understood and shared the Gender Justice League’s “concerns” about the anti-trans laws that are proliferating around the country in response to the efforts of prominent right-wing activists like Cameron.

“Library leadership will continue to discuss and investigate options for handling meeting room requests from groups outside of our community that strain the community relationships we have worked hard to build and that strain our limited publicly-funded resources,” Fay wrote. “We know there are situations where intellectual freedom, equity, and inclusiveness are in conflict at the Library—we have seen it and lived it, and we should discuss it.” However, his proposal boiled down to a “facilitated discussion” with trans and queer library staffers, rather than a change in policy.

In a public interview for the chief librarian position last year, Fay said the library had the “legalistic” obligation to rent its rooms to any person or group, and suggested in order to “at least state where we’re at on an issue without being so neutral,” the library could say that it “in no way endorses this particular group.”

A library spokesperson was unable to respond to a request for comment on Thursday; we will update this post when we hear back.