Tag: Seattle School District

Cops, homelessness, Morning Fizz, Parks

Unannounced Lake City Sweep Impacts Nearby Encampments; Report Highlights SPD’s Risky Gun Storage Practices

1. Last week, the Seattle Parks Department removed an encampment next to the Lake City Community Center without prior notice, removing tents and possessions in the middle of the day, when many residents were reportedly away. According to Mike Mathias, a volunteer who’s working to house about 50 people living on Seattle School District-owned land on the south shore of Bitter Lake, three miles away, the sweep has had spillover effects. When people are removed from one location, Mathias said, “they go into areas in the immediate vicinity and have conflicts with those people, and it trickles down. It’s almost like a wave, and we knew it was coming.”

Mathias’ organization, Anything Helps, has been out at the Bitter Lake encampment daily for more than a month, trying to connect residents with services, diversion, and housing, but more people keep arriving every day. Currently, despite Mathias’ efforts to prevent people from setting up additional tents, there are more people living at the Bitter Lake encampment, 56, than there were last month, when the school district set a goal of moving everyone off the property by September 1.

As we’ve reported, the city of Seattle has refused to send outreach workers to the Bitter Lake encampment, because the city doesn’t own the property; Mayor Jenny Durkan has suggested that the school district dip into its reserves to set up a parallel human services system to help the people living on its property. Recently, a large sharps container appeared by the restrooms at the city-owned park right next to the school district land, and residents said the city has started picking up their trash.

According to a Parks Department spokesperson, the department removed the encampment without providing prior notice to its residents because tents were “set up in parking spots,” and because someone had connected electrical wires through the roof of the Lake City Community Center, which is closed. “Parks stored property as per the City storage policy,” the spokesperson said. The parks department did not immediately respond to a separate request for information about the sharps container and trash pickup on Monday.

The community center sweep was the second in Lake City in less than a week; on July 29, the city removed a longstanding encampment at the Lake City Mini Park, prompting a protest by advocates for people experiencing homelessness. Unlike the removal last week, the city provided advance notice to the Mini Park residents.

2. A newly released audit by Seattle’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) casts light on risky firearms storage practices at the Seattle Police Department’s training facilities that enabled an 18-year-old participant in an SPD program for young people interested in law enforcement to steal a handgun from a storage room in 2019.

The thief was a teenage participant in SPD’s Law Enforcement Exploring Program who subsequently threw the handgun off a bridge while driving; SPD eventually found the gun on a nearby roof.

The audit, which began in January 2020 but was delayed when the OIG shifted attention to SPD’s protest response, discovered that the department may have violated the city’s gun storage rules by failing safely store firearms at two training annexes.

The problems came to light when an officer leading a training for SPD’s Law Enforcement Exploring Program—which offers courses on police procedures and tactics for 14- to 21-year-olds—discovered that his handgun was missing from the training facility’s storage area. The thief was a teenage participant in the LEEP program who subsequently threw the handgun off a bridge while driving; SPD eventually found the gun on a nearby roof.

When the OIG eventually reviewed the gun storage systems in SPD’s training annexes, investigators discovered obvious shortcomings. In one annex, officers stored their guns in a metal cabinet secured with a single padlock; in the other, officers stored their firearms in room protected by a padlocked door. “If the padlocks are inadvertently not used, left unlocked, or the keys are not secured,” investigators wrote, “anyone accessing the [storage cabinet or room] would be able to access every firearm inside.” Even the padlocks themselves, investigators added, can easily be picked with common tools. Continue reading “Unannounced Lake City Sweep Impacts Nearby Encampments; Report Highlights SPD’s Risky Gun Storage Practices” →

education, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

Durkan Says Schools Should Use “Reserves” for Encampment Response; Homelessness Authority May Hire Ex-HSD Director as Consultant

1. On an appearance on KUOW’s “The Record” Thursday, Mayor Jenny Durkan doubled down on her assertion that it’s up to the school district, not the city, to shelter and house people living in an encampment next to Broadview Thompson K-8 school in north Seattle. The encampment is on district-owned land on the south shore of Bitter Lake, directly adjacent to property owned by the city.

As we’ve reported, the school district has asked the city not to sweep the encampment without providing outreach and access to shelter to the dozens of people living there. Durkan has responded that the since the school district has made it clear they don’t want the city to remove the camp, it’s up to the district to “stand up their own process” for providing outreach and shelter to the people living there, using their “billion-dollar budget” to do so. 

Responding to a question posed by PubliCola’s Erica C. Barnett on KUOW, Durkan said the school district would “have to address [the encampment] the same way we do—you have to do outreach and really try to find places for people to go. You can’t just push them onto the city property [next door] and expect the city to deal with it.” Other than a rough line in the grass, there is no clear demarcation at the site between school district and city property.

Durkan disputed the idea that the school district doesn’t have the funds to stand up its own human services system. For example, she said, if the school district “want[s] to contract with an entity like JustCARE, they do have the reserves, plus money in their transportation budget that they didn’t use this year.”

The school district actually has an ongoing shortfall in its transportation budget, and can never have a surplus in that funding source because the state reimburses school districts for transportation costs after the fact.

JustCARE is a program that provides hotel rooms and intensive case management to people living in encampments in Pioneer Square and other areas. In a memo to the school board and other district officials in April, then-deputy mayor Casey Sixkiller estimated that the district could shelter 30 people through JustCARE for one year for around $1.5 million, or “set up a new tiny home village and provide services to 30 individuals, not including site selection and completing the SEPA process which adds both time and additional costs,” for $1.1 million.

“Our billion-dollar budget is intended for the education of children. We don’t have funding in excess to divert to rehousing adults living in Seattle.” — Seattle school board director Liza Rankin

“The school district so far has declined to act” to provide shelter, housing, and services to residents,” Durkan said on KUOW. “We’re hoping the school district makes a different decision, but they as a board have to decide what their priorities are.”

2. At a school board meeting on Wednesday, board director Liza Rankin, who represents the district where the encampment is located, responded directly to Durkan’s previous comments suggesting the district should set up a system parallel to the city’s to fund shelter, outreach, and encampment removals. “Our billion-dollar budget is intended for the education of children,” Rankin said. “It runs 104 schools, it employs about 8,000 staff, it serves 54,000 students, and it is still not enough to cover counseling, nursing, full-time librarians and more at each and every school.”

“So we don’t have funding in excess to divert to rehousing adults living in Seattle,” Rankin continued. “That being said, we continue to be open and wiling to partner with any and everyone who wants to support the district in the compassionate rehousing of people in our community who deserve much better.”

3. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority is in conversations with former interim Seattle Human Services Department director Jason Johnson about consulting on “sub-regional planning” in South King County, PubliCola has learned. Specifically, Johnson would work to map out the existing resources in South King County for the homelessness authority.

KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said the agency is “still talking through potential scope,” adding, “we don’t actually have a contract in place, so there’s nothing official” yet. Johnson was Durkan’s pick to lead HSD, but he failed to win confirmation from the city council and served in an interim capacity throughout his two years in the position, which ended in December 2020.

education, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Media, neighborhoods, public safety

Hysteria Over North Seattle Encampment Ignores Larger Issue: The City Has No Plan for Most Unsheltered People
Just a few of the many headlines “Seattle Is Dying” station KOMO News has posted about a single encampment in North Seattle in recent weeks.

By Erica C. Barnett

Sinclair-owned KOMO TV, which produced the infamous “Seattle Is Dying” segment and its followup, “The Fight for the Soul of Seattle,” has posted at least 11 pieces in recent weeks whipping up fear about a homeless encampment on the shore of Bitter Lake in North Seattle. The latest, by reporter Kara Kostanich, began: “A drug overdose at a homeless encampment on the property of a local school has parents and neighbors asking when will something be done?”

However, according to numerous encampment residents who were present when the so-called “overdose” occurred, the man didn’t have an overdose at all—he had a seizure. And the encampment is not “on the property of a local school”; it’s on school district property next door to Broadview Thomson K-8, separated from the school itself by both a tall fence and a steep hill.

The incident KOMO characterized as a “drug overdose” happened past the bottom of that hill, on the shore of the lake that forms the encampment’s northern boundary. On a recent weekday, the area was quiet and almost bucolic, more like a large recreational campground than a homeless encampment.

According to numerous encampment residents who were present when the so-called “overdose” at the center of KOMO’s story occurred, the man didn’t have an overdose at all—he had a seizure.

A man named Tony, who was there when encampment residents found the man, whom I’ll call A, lying unconscious, said several people quickly gave the man Narcan “as a precaution” before paramedics arrived. Narcan works by quickly reversing the effects of opioids, such as fentanyl or heroin, and putting a person into instant, extreme withdrawal.

“I’ve seen people get Narcan and they usually come out swinging,” Tony said. “They’re usually really sick and upset. He didn’t seem anything like that—he just jumped up and took the oxygen mask off and said he was okay. He ended up leaving and going back to his tent. It was definitely not drug-related.”

Two other encampment residents said they didn’t think A used drugs, and said that he had mentioned having infrequent seizures in the past.

But We Heart Seattle leader Andrea Suarez, whose group started as a one-person encampment cleanup effort last year, is convinced what she saw was an overdose, no matter what the people who live at the encampment say. “It certainly looked like a duck smelled, like a duck and was a duck,” Suarez said. “Now, I’m not an expert, but… if I were to give it Vegas odds, I’d say sure that seemed like a classic OD.” Suarez told me she has seen other people overdose at encampments in the past, so it was “it was extremely traumatizing for me to witness the whole process.”

“We have offered technical assistance to Seattle Public Schools, but the City is focused on addressing encampments on City property where thousands of individuals are living unsheltered—not WSDOT, private property or SPS property“—Durkan spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower

Suarez said she called 911 while “eight people were on top of [A] arguing about whether to give him a fourth dose of Narcan,” and that once paramedics showed up, “everybody took off—they all fled the scene quite quickly and I was still front and center.”

Encampment residents dispute nearly every aspect of Suarez’s account, but agree that she was “front and center”; she stood nearby shooting videos and photos on her phone as paramedics administered to the man, which she posted a couple of hours later on Facebook. Suarez said she took A to her car after he recovered and tried to convince him to go to the hospital, invoking the “Good Samaritan” law, which protects people who seek medical assistance for overdoses from criminal prosecution.

Paige, a woman who has lived at the encampment off and on with her boyfriend, Chris, for about a year, said Suarez comes around the encampment frequently offering “help” that consists mostly of offers to bus people to places they used to live or to “some kind of three-month camp [in Oregon] that you have to pay $250 for,” Paige said. “They’re not offering people places to stay.”

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Suarez, along with a drug counselor named Kevin Dahlgren who instituted a “tough-love” approach to homelessness in Gresham, Oregon, acknowledges that she has offered encampment residents rides to the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, a clean-and-sober housing program located in a former jail in Oregon that charges people $250 a month and requires them to do 10 hours of unpaid “community service” work every week. She says she has also offered to take people to Uplift Northwest, a nonprofit labor agency formerly known as the Mlilionair Club.

Paige and Chris said what they really need is a permanent place to stay—somewhere where they can take a shower—”not having a shower makes you feel kind of crazy; it’s no bueno,” Chris said—wash their clothes, and do dishes without having to beg for water and haul it down to their campsite. But the city hasn’t offered services, and the only useful assistance the camp receives is weekly trash pickups—one reason the encampment, unlike others in the city, is neat and tidy. Continue reading “Hysteria Over North Seattle Encampment Ignores Larger Issue: The City Has No Plan for Most Unsheltered People” →