New Seattle City Council President Nick Licata faced a large and frequently angry crowd at last week's public hearing on police accountability. Speaker after speaker used the hearing as an opportunity to vent about ugly run-ins and frustrating encounters with the SPD and its internal watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA). The hearing was supposed to be a rare chance for the public to provide input on the Seattle Police Guild's contract, which is up for renewal this year. Instead, it devolved into a one-way shouting match as some of Seattle's loudest disgruntled citizens (among them: Paul Schell assailant Omari Tahir-Garrett and Kurt Cobain conspiracy theorist/videodiarist Richard Lee) challenged the Public Safety Committee. The angry speakers included both those who believed they had been mistreated or ill-served by the police department or OPA, and those who felt the legislation Licata proposed—that would give the OPA's civilian oversight committee, the OPA Review Board, new rights and legal protection—did not go far enough.

In the latter camp were those like NAACP committee member James Bible, who brandished a three-year-old nine-point proposal for "effective police accountability" supported by numerous local civil rights groups, and demanded to know why all nine components weren't part of Licata's legislative proposal. In the former camp were speakers like Tahir-Garrett, who called Seattle Police "gangsters" and "terrorists." (Another speaker screamed obscenities at Licata, accused him of "smirking" and shouted, "What the fuck?")

Licata says he wasn't shocked by the overwhelmingly hostile tone of speakers' comments, which effectively drowned out supportive comments. "When you hold a public hearing on a topic like police accountability, you're going to get a lot of people who just show up because they're frustrated," he says. However, Licata adds, there's a difference between "having to deal with stuff from the outside and the inside... I could easily get headlines by proposing stuff that gets shot down right away, but what would that accomplish?"

Licata's conciliatory tone bears little resemblance to the more strident positions he has taken in years past, when he earned a reputation for fighting principled battles to the bitter end, frequently losing votes by a margin of eight to one. Many of the suggestions in the nine-point proposal were "very reasonable," he added, but several may be subject to contract negotiations, meaning they must be negotiated as part of the police guild's contract, not legislated by the council.

barnett@thestranger.com