1. Former police chief Shon Barnes’ $700,000 settlement agreement with the city, which PubliCola received Thursday through a records request, includes a year of paid health care, 18 months’ full salary, the $50,000 “lateral officer” bonus Barnes took when former mayor Bruce Harrell hired him, and a $60,000 relocation allowance for Barnes to move to Seattle from Chicago. (Barnes rented a apartment downtown, listed on Trulia in December 2024 at $3,228 a month, while retaining his family home in Chicago and frequently visiting his family there).
That adds up to $700,000. But the deal also includes a payout for any time off Barnes has accrued but not used. SPD has not responded to any of PubliCola’s questions since last week (except to tell us the chief’s schedule was “locked down” when he left) and the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to our question about how much time Barnes had accrued. Barnes made $179.54 an hour and his accrued time off was paid out at that rate.
As we reported, Barnes began calling around last Wednesday to tell people he’d been fired (one of our sources was a retired officer who got the news directly from an SPD captain). In reality, Mayor Katie Wilson had asked him to resign and he refused. As a result, rumors swirled for almost a full day before the two sides signed the settlement agreement late Thursday afternoon.
In the agreement, Barnes agreed not to sue the city, and the city agreed not to say anything negative about him to potential future employers. Although Wilson critics have demanded to know exactly what Barnes did wrong (beyond the obvious), the agreement to refrain from badmouthing Barnes likely restricts Wilson’s ability to provide more details about why she fired him. But we can make some educated guesses based on issues that came up before last week, when Barnes confronted a reporter who asked him about PubliCola’s reporting on his frequent travel.
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2. Seattle and King County provided more details this week about their plans to claw back homeless service contracts from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as part of the “right-sizing” they announced last month that will dramatically reduce the size and responsibilities of the homelessness agency.
After the contracts return to the city and county, which oversaw homeless services before setting up the KCRHA through an interlocal agreement in 2019, the KCRHA will be in charge of the county’s severe weather shelters (but not the city’s), the annual federal funding process (already at risk due to Trump Administration changes to the funding criteria), and the completion of this year’s Point In Time Count analysis of the region’s homeless population. As the region’s Continuum of Care for homeless services, it will also hang on to a number of administrative functions, like overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database, at least for now.
The city will take back 117 contracts with 40 providers, totaling around $113 million. The county will take back 100 contracts with 40 providers totaling around $46 million.
Seattle plans to hire 23 new staffers in the Human Services Department to administer the contracts, and the county will hire 11 people.
It’s unclear how much staff duplication will occur while the contracts move from KCRHA to the two local governments. Currently, KCRHA has 73 staffers. The “right-sizing” announced more than a month ago included between 20 and 25 layoffs, but so far, none of those layoffs have occurred. The city is facing a budget deficit of at least $175 million, so it will need to cut KCRHA’s budget (and staff) by at least the equivalent of the new staff it’s hiring to avoid paying for double staffing next year.
Almost all of the KCRHA’s $203 million budget comes from Seattle and King County.
Mainstream media outlets and many Seattle City Councilmembers have expressed outrage over Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to remove Shon Barnes as police chief after he confronted a reporter who asked him about my stories on Barnes’ frequent absences from Seattle. (Barnes, as I reported in 2025, rented an apartment here and regularly visited his family home in Chicago; he also attended frequent conferences, like the one he was attending when shooting broke out at Seattle Center on Sunday, July 26).
Critics have overwhelmingly suggested that Wilson made the decision to remove Barnes rashly, with no real justification other than his outsize reaction to the South Connor Nash’s question and the fact that he spends time out of town. A typical complaint came from the editorial board of the Seattle Times, which insinuated that Wilson fired the chief to create a “distraction” to hide her own incompetence, and not for any actual reason.
Wilson, as I pointed out on Seattle Nice last week, signed a binding settlement with Barnes (he got a total of $700,000) that almost certainly includes a mutual nondisparagement clause that prevents her from saying exactly why she asked him to resign. But Barnes was only police chief for 19 months, so the current collective shortsightedness about the controversies that arose during his tenure feels almost deliberate.
When Wilson came into office, Barnes’ future at SPD was very much in doubt, and questions about his performance as chief had not receded in the seven months since Wilson took office. But for those with short memories, here are just a few of the issues that had been swirling around Barnes prior to last week’s events.
No girls allowed: Although Barnes’ supporters touted the high percentage of female oficers at the department where he was previously chief, in Madison, WI, skeptics noted that the progress happened mostly before he took over. Under Barnes, SPD’s progress toward the “30 by 30” goal of having a 30 percent female recruit class by 2030 has stalled and even reversed.
In April 2025, for example, SPD had only managed to hire five women, compared to a total of 12 women in 2024. By the end of the year, the department had added just 12 more women to that total. Women accounted for just 10 percent of new police hires in 2026, a year when SPD spent millions of dollars on a macho ad campaign featuring burly, tattooed men fighting in a ring, male cops racing around on motorcycles and boats, and men busting down doors, SCUBA diving, and defusing bombs. The toxic culture at SPD preceded Barnes, but it persisted, and may have gotten worse, during his brief time in Seattle.
Anti-LGBTQ accusations: Not long after taking over the department, Barnes oversaw a dramatic crackdown on nude sunbathers at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ+friendly nude beach that former mayor Harrell previously tried to shut down by siting a playground there. (The planned children’s play area would have been funded by a wealthy neighbor and Harrell donor who has continued to campaign relentlessly against the people who use the beach.)
In a later tort claim, it would come out that Barnes’ chief of staff Alex Ricketts allegedly responded “we’re not here for the gays” when a top staffer raised concerns about the chief’s apparent indifference to Seattle’s LGBTQ+ residents.
Barnes also passed over a gay lieutenant who was a fixture in the Capitol Hill community and had been serving as acting captain of the East Precinct, Doug Raguso, in favor of an infamous officer named Mike Tietjen.
Tietjen’s name was synonymous with his misconduct during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the neighborhood, when he drove his SUV onto a sidewalk full of protesters, likening them to “cockroaches” as they ran out of his path. Tietjen was also disciplined for an incident that same year, in which he was among a group of officers who harassed a trans woman, asking if she “had a dick under” her skirt.
When PubliCola broke the news about Tietjen’s promotion and Raguso’s reassignment, Barnes launched an internal search to find out who had “leaked” the information, which was posted on SPD’s own social media. Barnes eventually replaced Tietjen—not with Raguso, but with Jim Britt, another straight white man. Raguso was reassigned to the department’s Real-Time Crime Center.
Under Barnes, SPD also badly blundered its response to a pro-LGBTQ counter-protest at an anti-trans event by a religious-right group at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill. Instead of maintaining a distance (as they did at the much larger No Kings protests), police pepper-sprayed, tackled, and arrested counter-protesters, behaving—as a subsequent review by the city’s Office of Inspector General concluded—like security for the religious group, even referring to counter-protesters as “transtifa.”
SPD officers repeated the performance during a second event by the same group at City Hall, blocking off access to the public plaza to everyone except the anti-trans activist group and escorting the activists from place to place. At the same time, police on bikes mobilized repeatedly against a small group of counterprotesters, using their bikes as weapons and shields.
Discrimination lawsuits: Raguso, the former East Precinct acting captain, and detective Anna Fishel filed discrimination claims against SPD earlier this year, alleging the department denied them promotions because of their sexual orientations and, in Fishel’s case, her gender. Fishel, who had a young child, was the only woman up for promotion to sergeant; in her claim, she said Barnes refused to promote her in place and instead offered her an overnight shift she couldn’t take because she needed to be home with her daughter. The position went to a straight man.
An earlier tort claim, from two department veterans Barnes fired in 2025, also accused Barnes of retaliation and discrimination. Barnes fired Brian Maxey, the department’s chief operating officer, and Rebecca Boatright, SPD’s general counsel, after the two disagreed with some of his decisions, including an initiative to send embarrassing letters to men the department suspected of paying women for sex on Aurora. Barnes replaced Maxey with Sarah Smith, a staffer with a slim resume who had risen through the ranks at Harrell’s office.
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Alternative response stymied: Before Barnes came on board, the Seattle Police Officers Guild negotiated a generous contract with Harrell and the City Council that—in addition to giving officers huge raises—put limits on the ability of the CARE Team, a group of social workers that is supposed to respond to crisis calls that don’t require an armed response, to do its job. The restrictions prevent CARE from responding at homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or to calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”
The CARE Team has been expanded repeatedly, but can’t be dispatched even in situations where the contract’s restraints don’t apply unless a police sergeant agrees to let them go to a call.
Despite these restrictions, CARE Department Chief Amy Barden hoped to negotiate some wiggle room with Barnes that would allow her team to respond to 911 calls involving people in crisis. Instead, she said earlier this year, the constraints actually tightened under Barnes, to the point where CARE was told it couldn’t respond to someone having a mental health crisis in a QFC parking lot, because the person was technically on private property. The team has also been prohibited from responding to calls where a child is present, which Barnes said has resulted in a gender disparity in the team’s responses, since women are more likely to be accompanied by their kids.
Barnes appeared at times to reject the entire concept of allowing social workers to respond to mental health crisis calls, suggesting that every type of 911 call can easily escalate into violence. This contradicts national research showing that most 911 calls do not involve any crime and could be handled by someone other than a police officer. It’s also contrary to the city’s own policies on unarmed first response.
“I’ve been to calls before where it was ‘dementia,’ but when I got there, there was a gun stuck in my stomach,” Barnes said. “So it is unpredictable. … Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”
Bloated staff, big bonuses: As I reported exclusively last year, Barnes and two of his new chiefs, deputy chief (and now interim police chief) Andre Sayles and assistant chief Nicole Powell, took $50,000 bonuses that were created explicitly to recruit more trained rank-and-file police officers during a staffing shortage.
This $150,000 payout was on top of the $3,000 Barnes and his other deputy chief, Yvonne Underwood, took after Barnes hired new executive staff. Barnes got two $1,000 payouts for hiring Powell and Sayles, while Underwood got $1,000 for Sayles. These bonuses, like the $50,000 “lateral” hiring incentives, were explicitly created for SPD employees to recruit new rank-and-file police officers.
Sayles and Powell were just two of several new executive hires Barnes made when he started, expanding SPD’s command staff substantially at an additional ongoing cost of more than $1,000,000 a year. Those new positions included a second deputy chief (Sayles), a new executive director of crime and community harm reduction (Lee Hunt), a chief communications officer (Barbara DeLollis, and a chief of staff (Alex Ricketts). Ricketts, Hunt, and Sayles had worked with Barnes previously.
Ricketts was the only one of Barnes’ new executive hires that technically counted as a replacement; previous chief Adrian Diaz, who was appointed and fired by Harrell, appointed Jamie Tompkins to a job with the same title, but she was the first SPD chief of staff since 2001.
Barnes’ top staff got top perks to go with their top salaries, which in most cases topped $300,000. Hunt, for instance, got at least one month’s free stay at the four-star Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, at a cost of more than $6,000, while he looked for a place to live. And Barnes himself got a $60,000 relocation bonus to move to Seattle. As we’ve reported, Barnes kept an apartment here while he traveled back and forth to his permanent home in Chicago; under his settlement, he gets to keep that money.
Barnes presented this graph at community events, minus the Madison, WI branding.
Policy by buzzword: Barnes frequently touted two ideas he claimed were innovations, and featured them in his PowerPoint presentations to community meetings that were mostly attended by SPD and city staff. Both ideas faced criticism inside and outside the department as not particularly innovative or unique. “Stratfied policing” consisted of focusing on crime “hot spots” and focusing higher-ranked officers on more serious crimes, and “Seattle-centric policing” seemed to involve working with communities to come up with solutions to crime.
Although Barnes’ defenders have given him credit for reducing crime and recruiting more police to the city, both those trends are explained by other factors. Crime of all kinds is down in cities nationwide compared to the relative highs of the pandemic, so it’s unsurprising that Seattle’s crime rate has followed the national trend. And hiring spiked as soon as the police guild signed a new contract that guarantees brand-new officers a minimum salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.
And, OK, all that travel: Not only did Barnes’ defenders treat Wilson’s decision as an out-of-nowhere shock, they also made light of his travel, even misrepresenting his time out of town as no different than that of previous police chiefs. On KUOW’s “Week In Review” last Friday, KIRO’s Angela Poe Russell and KUOW editor/reporter Catherine Smith ripped my coverage, calling me an “influencer” who “hung out a shingle” and called myself a “news person” (Poe) and asserting, “”It’s not quite fair to criticize him for that when other chiefs travel like that.” (Smith).
Smith’s co-bylined story said that according to an SPD spokesman, “Barnes’ level of travel is consistent with past chiefs of police.” Since that contradicted all of my own current and past reporting on the subject, I contacted the same spokesman. He told me he told KUOW that all police chiefs go to conferences held by groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, but that he never said Barnes’ overall travel, including his trips home to Chicago, was typical. That’s because it isn’t: While other police chiefs went to conferences, too, Barnes traveled more. For example, Barnes was out of town nearly 40 percent of the time during the 17 weeks for which SPD provided his schedule.
This post has been updated to include the information that former chief Barnes is receiving a $700,000 payout to leave the city.
A press conference with Mayor Katie Wilson and new interim Police Chief Andre Sayles revolved, somewhat predictably, around questions about why Wilson didn’t talk to the press sooner both after Sunday’s mass shooting and yesterday, when she finally announced at 3:30 that she had asked for Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’ resignation.
Sayles, Barnes’ replacement, was previously the police chief of Beloit, Wisconsin, a small town near the Illinois border. Barnes hired Sayles as his second deputy chief as part of a hiring spree that included several other brand-new executive positions. During the press conference, Sayles confirmed that his family, like Barnes’, lives in Illinois (not Wisconsin, as I previously reported); property records indicate they live in a town called Belvidere, just across the Wisconsin border.
“I do frequently go back to visit my family, probably about every eight weeks or so, but my wife spends most of her time out here with me” at a second home in East King County, Sayles said. “We’re looking to make this our home. It’s our area that we can retire from one day. But right now, we have kids that we need to get settled, and one day we’ll make this area our home.”
Wilson emphasized the need for the next permanent police chief to live here full-time and be part of the Seattle community. Unlike Harrell, who appointed Barnes with no public process, Wilson said she’ll appoint a search committee “that reflects the full diversity of Seattle to conduct “a meaningful engagement process.”
Reporters, including many TV reporters who spent much of yesterday fuming about the lack of information from the mayor’s office, also asked why the mayor was firing a chief who’s popular with so many current council members.
Five council members issued statements (and several did interviews) yesterday excoriating the mayor for firing Barnes. Four of the five (Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Bob Kettle, and Debora Juarez) are centrists elected as a bloc in 2023 and most explicitly supported Harrell over Wilson last year. (Juarez, who described herself as an “elected leader” in an interview with KOMO, declined to run for reelection in 2023 and was appointed last year to replace Cathy Moore, a member of the Class of 2023 who quit less than a year and a half into her term).
Asked about the council’s opposition to her decision, Wilson said, “As the executive of the city, I do have a different window into our police department,” adding that she was confident that she made the right decision.
As I reported yesterday, one reason police took so long to release information about Sunday’s shooting was that the police chief, who spent much of his time out of town and whose family lives in Chicago, was at a conference in Dallas. Barnes reportedly wanted to be briefed on the shooting before he would allow SPD assistant chief Tyrone Davis to brief the press, who had gathered at the scene of the shooting and spent hours irritably standing around waiting for information on the shooting.
Wilson has not directly explained the reason for yesterday’s delay in releasing information. However, my own reporting indicates that Barnes did not agree to a settlement until late afternoon—a full day after rumors that he had been fired began swirling.
Barnes will receive a settlement of $700,000—about two years’ annual salary—as part of his agreement to step down. Wilson wouldn’t say how much he’ll receive; I’ve filed a records request for that information.
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I was able to confirm that Barnes gets to keep the entire $50,000 “lateral hiring bonus” he and several of his new staff received when Harrell hired him, a story I broke last August. The city approved the lateral hiring bonus during what Harrell and most of the city council claimed was a police hiring “crisis,” and it was designed explicitly to recruit “new police officers”—not top executives—from other police departments. Under the law, any officer who receives the bonus and doesn’t remain at the city for five years has to pay the bonus back on a pro-rated basis, so Barnes has received an exemption from that requirement.
Although the mayor declined to elaborate on why she gave Barnes the boot, it’s clear that his temperament and frequent travel out of town, both to his family home in Chicago and to conferences around the country, were factors in the decision. Barnes was also reportedly unpopular with many rank and file officers, and gave short shrift to the CARE Team, a group of social workers created to respond to 911 crisis calls that don’t require police. Barnes did not meet with CARE Department Chief Amy Barden for more than a year, and CARE has been hamstrung since last year by a police union contract that restricts what kind of calls they can respond to.
In searching for a new chief, Wilson said, she’ll be looking for a person “who can earn the respect of our police force while also leading needed changes to culture and protocol in a way that’s firm and fair. I will be looking for someone who can practice clear communication in stressful situations. I will be looking for someone who is consistently present in Seattle, keeping travel to an appropriate minimum, and who also ensures that when they are away, there is sufficient SPD leadership in town to guide our city from any emergency.” Wilson also name-checked the CARE Team, saying she wants a police chief “who understands the value of our alternative crisis response system, our CARE and fire departments, and our service providers.”
We discussed Barnes’ ouster, which was still unconfirmed at the time we recorded, on this week’s edition of Seattle Nice, and will be doing another episode over the weekend, so stay tuned.
After a silence of nearly 24 hours, Mayor Katie Wilson announced at 3:30 this afternoon that Police Chief Shon Barnes has resigned and will be replaced on an interim basis by one of his two deputies, Andre Sayles.
Wilson asked for Barnes’ resignation yesterday, but discussions over how much he will receive in severance did not conclude until late this afternoon, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
In an interview late Thursday afternoon, Wilson told PubliCola, “Last night, we agreed [on Barnes’ resignation] at a very high level and needed some extra time to make sure that we were entirely on the same page about the path forward and how we were rolling it out. And in addition, we had to figure out interim leadership for the department. So there were a lot of details and moving pieces that needed to be settled before it was appropriate to make a public statement.”
PubliCola reported on the mayor’s decision last night.
Barnes’ family lives at their home in Chicago while he rents an apartment here, and he has been under fire recently for his frequent absences from the city. Those absences have included trips around the country to conferences as well as trips home to see his family in Chicago. PubliCola first reported on Barnes’ heavy travel schedule last July, and was the first to report that he was out of town, at a conference in Dallas, when a mass shooting took place at Seattle center on Sunday.
When South Seattle Emerald reporter Connor Nash asked Barnes about my reporting on his absences, the police chief lashed out, telling Nash “no, you listen to me!” before he was hustled away, still sputtering, by his chief of staff Alex Ricketts.
Asked if Barnes’ outsize reaction to a reporter’s question about his schedulewas a factor in her decision to ditch the chief, Wilson said, “there were multiple factors and considerations that informed the conversation that the chief and I had that led to this call, and obviously, how Sunday unfolded and the aftermath was part of that, but not certainly not the only thing. I don’t believe I’m someone who acts rashly, and there were multiple considerations in this decision.”
Sayles’ family, like Barnes’, lives outside the state—in Illinois, just across the border from Beloit, WI, a small town where Sayles was police chief before Barnes appointed him deputy chief in Seattle. We’ve requested his schedule to see how much time he has spent with his family in Illinois. Asked if she was concerned about hiring another chief whose family home is out of state, Wilson said, “I want to emphasize that this is an interim role, and also that Deputy Chief Sayles understands the importance of presence in Seattle during this interim period.” (Editor’s note: This post originally said Sayles’ family home is in Wisconsin; we’ve updated the post to reflect that they live in Illinois.)
City council members have criticized the mayor’s decision, which leaves the police department without permanent leadership during an active investigation of a major shooting incident and with one potential suspect still at large. City council members were quick to criticize the decision, with Rob Saka and Maritza Rivera criticizing the decision before it was official on Thursday. A majority of the council has reportedly expressed disapproval of the decision, according to sources familiar with the council’s reaction.
Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck expressed frustration with the lack of information from the mayor’s office, saying in a statement, “I am disappointed that I found out about the possible dismissal of Chief Barnes from reports on social media last night and did not receive any update or information about this development from the Mayor or Mayor’s Office until mid-morning today. Chief Barnes’ recent interactions with press have been concerning, but I have yet to receive an explanation of what decisions have or haven’t been made, or full rationale behind why any decision has been made.”
Wilson said she gets that “many of the council members strongly disagree with the path that we’re on with this decision” but dismissed the idea that they would try to block her when it comes time to appoint a new permanent chief. “I believe that moving forward, we will be able to work together to select an excellent candidate for our next chief.”
Barnes issued a statement Thursday evening, which read in part, “Dr. Barnes is a long-time law enforcement leader known for establishing a culture of excellence and procedural justice within the departments he has led and the communities he has served. He brought the same steadfast leadership and professionalism to the City of Seattle that has defined his law enforcement career, which resulted in a substantial reduction in the city’s crime rates and an important vision for further reduction in the years to come.” Barnes, who has not typically used the title “doctor” while serving as police chief, has a Ph.D. in Leadership Studies from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
On Thursday afternoon, reporters swarmed the lobby of City Hall, doing standups at 4pm waiting around all day for interviews and information. Wilson gave one-on-one interviews to a handful of reporters (Publicola’s is supposed to happen at 4), which prompted those left downstairs, including TV reporters who have hounded Wilson and blamed her for inaccurate information and delays in the hours and days after the shooting. Cameramen and reporters could be heard grousing about the differential treatment; Wilson plans to hold a general press conference at 11:00 tomorrow morning.
“I understand the frustration and the desire for information, and in this case, I don’t think that was avoidable,” Wilson said.
Interim Chief Sayles, like Assistant Chief Nicole Powell and Barnes himself, accepted a $50,000 hiring bonus intended to recruit experienced rank and file police officers from other departments during what police described as a hiring crisis. The terms of the bonus require officers to return the money, on a prorated basis, if they serve less than five years. We’ve reached out to the mayor’s office to find out whether Barnes will have to return his bonus.
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes speaks outside City Council Chambers
By Erica C. Barnett
Update on Thursday at 11:30 am: As of this morning, Mayor Katie Wilson’s office still has not responded to multiple requests for comment or clarification on Barnes’ employment status. Sources have told PubliCola that Wilson asked for Barnes’ resignation yesterday and that he declined to resign, which would force Wilson to fire him if she wants him out. The silence from the mayor’s office makes it impossible to clarify exactly what is going on with Barnes.
Meanwhile, a group of mostly older Black community leaders held a rally at City Hall calling on Wilson to keep Barnes this morning, saying they represent “the Black community” in Seattle.
Some City Councilmembers have reportedly begun pushing back on the mayor’s decision, although none of them have said anything publicly. Under the city charter, the mayor can fire the police chief “upon filing a statement of his or her reasons for so doing with the City Council.”
Original story follows:
On Wednesday night, multiple sources in several branches of city government told PubliCola that Mayor Katie Wilson fired Police Chief Shon Barnes earlier this afternoon. Barnes was reportedly seen leaving Wilson’s office on the seventh floor of city hall Wednesday evening after a lengthy meeting. Barnes was in his uniform when he arrived at an early-evening vigil for the victims of a mass shooting on Sunday at Seattle Center, but left before the vigil was over.
Multiple sources, including a recently retired SPD officer, said Barnes called at least some of the department’s captains Wednesday night to tell them the news.
PubliCola has not been able to officially confirm Barnes’ firing with either SPD or the mayor’s office. An SPD spokesperson said they had no information, and neither Wilson nor her communications office responded to requests for confirmation and comment tonight. The mayor reportedly canceled all regularly scheduled staff meetings this afternoon before meeting with Barnes in her office.
Rumors had been swirling about Barnes’ future at the department all afternoon, after Barnes canceled about a half-dozen TV interviews he had scheduled to discuss the shooting and address questions about his travel schedule. I reported on the canceled TV interviews Wednesday afternoon.
Barnes was out of town, attending a conference in Dallas, when gunfire broke out Sunday night; I broke the news about his absence from Seattle on Sunday.
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As I reported last year, Barnes rents in Seattle while his wife and kids remain in the family’s home in Chicago. The chief has traveled frequently throughout his time in Seattle, giving keynote speeches, attending conferences, and visiting his family in Chicago. He kept up his heavy travel schedule this year, traveling nearly seven weeks in the past seven months, on top of about two weeks spent on vacation and out of the office. SPD provided a partial copy of his schedule in response to PubliCola’s request, so these are conservative estimates based on information SPD provided for the first three months of the year.
A breaking point in Barnes’ relationship with the mayor may have come after clips of the chief confronting a reporter who asked about my reporting on his travel. When South Seattle Emerald reporter Connor Nash asked Barnes how often he was out of town, the chief Barnes tried to shut him down, said my reporting was inaccurate, and had to be hustled away by his chief of staff Alex Ricketts, who inserted himself physically between Barnes and Nash.
The confrontation, which Barnes brushed off a day later by saying he was just showing his “passion” for the job, made international news. It also sparked new interest in Barnes’ whereabouts since former mayor Bruce Harrell hired him in late 2024.
Barnes, under fire after we reported on his absence from the city during Sunday’s mass shooting, had planned a half-dozen TV interviews to talk about his schedule today. All were canceled.
By Erica C. Barnett
In response to PubliCola’s request for Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes’ schedule for 2026, the Seattle Police Department provided a copy of his schedule that begins in late March, along with limited information about his trips to his family home in Chicago, where his wife and kids live. Prior to Sunday’s mass shooting at Seattle Center, Barnes was scheduled to be out of the office from July 22 until August 3 at the earliest.
The partial 2026 schedule was altered before SPD provided it to PubliCola and no longer says where Barnes planned to be this week; instead, it includes events related to the shooting. We’ve asked SPD Barnes’ original August schedule.
Barnes has been under fire for several days over his frequent absences from Seattle, after I reported on Sunday (with a followup on Monday) that he was out of town, at a conference held by the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) in Dallas, when gunfire broke out at the Bite of Seattle event at Seattle Center.
When I first reported on Barnes’ frequent absences back in 2025, I noted that during the four months for which SPD provided his schedule, he spent most weekends out of town, typically traveling to Chicago, delivering keynote speeches, or attending conferences.
An SPD spokesman said Barnes has been to Chicago to visit his family four times so far this year, in February, March, June, and July, totaling 17 days. During one of those trips, he attended a Jack and Jill Teen Leadership Conference with his son, according to his schedule and social media posts.
Additionally, according to his April-through-July calendar, Barnes attended five conferences in those four months, including a different NOBLE event as well as conferences held by the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing, the Police Executive Research Forum, and the Major City Chiefs Association. Those conferences took Barnes out of town for 21 days (Barnes’ schedule shows him out of commission this past Monday as well, but he returned to town from Dallas so was here that day).
Editor’s note: This post originally described two additional events as “conferences”—a two-day event in Chicago and a breakfast at the Jack and Jill Teen Leadership Conference, also in Chicago. PubliCola has since confirmed with SPD that the second event was part of a planned family visit; because the other event, at the University of Chicago, was also in Chicago and came immediately prior to three days when Barnes had nothing scheduled in Seattle, we removed it from the list of conferences as well. Those two events totaled four days.
As PubliCola previously reported, he also went on a five-day recruiting trip to the Central Intercollegiate Athletics Association (CIAA) basketball tournament in Baltimore; the group of 12 Historically Black Colleges and Universities includes Barnes’ alma mater, Elizabeth State University.
And Barnes’ schedule shows he was on vacation from April 23 to 26, with Deputy Chief Yvonne Underwood serving as acting chief.
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The travel on the calendar provided to PubliCola, plus the earlier trips, add up to 47 days or almost seven weeks, out of town through July 26 of this year. Since we don’t have the chief’s calendar for January, February, or most of March, it’s impossible to say with certainty if Barnes was out of town for additional periods during those three months. Barnes’ weekends are mostly empty, except when he is at a conference.
Additionally, Barnes’ calendar shows that he was out of the office, with Deputy Chief Andre Sayles serving as acting chief, between July 8 and July 13. The calendar does not say where he was those six days. Deputy Chief Tyrone Davis stepped in as acting chief of police between April 3 and April 5, also with no indication of where Barnes was when he was out those three days.
Altogether, Barnes’ out-of-office days when someone else stepped in as chief, his vacation days, and his documented out-of-office time, indicates Barnes has been in other cities or out of the office for almost nine weeks so far this year.
Barnes’ planned absences during late July and early August has been the source of questions from the media ever since I reported he was absent during the shooting and referenced my previous reporting that his family lives in Chicago.
The altered version of the police chief’s schedule does not say where Barnes originally planned to be this week. SPD’s media relations office told me yesterday that he had planned to be out of the office between at least July 22 and August 3. Subsequently, Barnes told me at a press conference that he’s having a medical procedure on Friday, and that if he’s not “good to go” on Monday, “I’ll take all the time that I need to make sure that that I’m okay.”
PubliCola has requested the original version of Barnes’ schedule for this week as well as the entire month of August, as well as his schedule for the time prior to March 29, and will update this post when we receive it.
On Tuesday, Barnes bristled at questions about how often he is out of town, saying (inaccurately) that I had reported that he would be out of town for “the entire month of August.”
On Wednesday, the chief scheduled a round of at least six interviews with TV reporters, who have generally been sympathetic to Barnes, to discuss his schedule; all of these interviews were canceled, however, reportedly after Barnes was informed that holding six interviews about his schedule three days after a mass shooting would not be a good look.
That adds up to $700,000. But the deal also includes a payout for any time off Barnes has accrued but not used. SPD has not responded to any of PubliCola’s questions since last week (except to tell us the chief’s schedule was “locked down” when he left) and the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to our question about how much time Barnes had accrued. Barnes made $179.54 an hour and his accrued time off was paid out at that rate.
