Charles is the mayor's senior policy advisor on public safety--a job that oversees the police. Nickels met her on the campaign trail when she ran for city attorney. She lost to Tom Carr with 41 percent of the vote, despite an endorsement from The Seattle Times.
When Nickels won, he pulled Charles into his transition team, and then named her as an advisor. Charles--a petite 39-year-old black woman (her first name is pronounced Ed-SAHN-ya, not Ed-SONE-ya)--brought along her experience as a federal prosecutor and as executive director of the Seattle Human Services Coalition.
Charles is at the helm at a time when public safety issues are paramount. The city council is debating how to collect data on racial profiling, the police department's Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) is still trying to find its legs, and new contract negotiations are coming up with the Seattle Police Officer's Guild.
Charles represents the mayor's office on the Racial Profiling Task Force. The thorny issue is whether or not to identify individual officers on the data forms. Charles says the mayor supports a less-controversial identifier, like the officer's squad number, or demographic information such as gender and race.
Though Nickels seems to be in line with the police on that issue, he does plan to wrestle for more accountability, starting with the OPA (the police oversight office).
"One of the things that we've already done is publish the jaywalking incident OPA report," Charles says, referring to the Asian students stopped in the International District last summer. She's working with OPA director Sam Pailca to identify other ways to open up the OPA. So far, they've discussed releasing information on unsustained complaints (those in which the police department's Internal Investigations Section finds no wrongdoing).
"People only get the information when something is sustained, and it feeds the public misperception of what our police officers do," she says.
Increased accountability is also something the city will strive for in upcoming police contract negotiations. Charles acknowledges that the city has little money to bring to the table, and she didn't name specific accountability reforms.
