It's been a busy week for the People's Coalition for Justice (PCJ). Last Wednesday, members of the young and feisty group shut down the lobby of the mayor's office for five hours with chants, songs, and demands for police accountability, until they were arrested for trespassing. (They had stayed put after the building closed.) However, on the following Friday, they returned to city hall and gave Mayor Greg Nickels a congratulatory cake.

Why is PCJ--a group that's worked tirelessly for the past two years on police accountability--giving Nickels such schizophrenic treatment? Well, PCJ demanded stepped-up police accountability, and last week, without going all the way, Nickels headed in the right direction.

On Wednesday, July 17, PCJ held a five-hour-long sit-in on city hall's 12th floor because it wanted the mayor to endorse a city council plan to study racial profiling. The council's June 17 resolution called for a year-long data-collection project that would require officers to fill out an additional form every time they pulled someone over, noting things like the driver's age and race, the reason for the stop, and what happened after the stop. The mayor didn't like the council's plan. ["Political Profiling," Amy Jenniges, June 27].

He had his reasons: A stand-alone study couldn't prove whether cops are racially profiling (unless it could read officers' minds). The data could, however, show a disproportion in who gets stopped or searched (something an in-house police study and a Seattle Times study have already shown). After the council's yearlong project wrapped up, we'd have a pile of numbers that would be fun to look at, but no way to fix racial profiling. More importantly, the council didn't outline what it planned to do about a racial-profiling problem.

Regardless--skeptical that the mayor could come up with anything better (he was working with the police chief)--PCJ demanded Nickels endorse the council's resolution.

And they made those demands clear on the 17th. At 2:30 p.m. in the mayor's lobby, 23 people, including PCJ leaders Dustin Washington, K. L. Shannon, and Vanessa Lee--in matching T-shirts displaying the results of a recent PCJ community survey: 87 percent of the over 2,000 Central District folks polled had no confidence in the police ["Negative Sign," Amy Jenniges, July 11]--pushed furniture aside and refused to leave until they could talk to the mayor.

"We will not leave here today until he's met our demands," protester Sandra Herrera, a young Hispanic woman with a long ponytail, said in a prepared statement. But the mayor was in Olympia meeting with the governor, Nickels' communications director Casey Corr said.

"Doesn't he have a cell phone?" a few of the protesters asked Corr. "Call him!" At first, Corr said he might be able to get the mayor on the phone. "A conference call?" one protester asked. "That would be great!" Corr demurred at the idea of a conference call, suggesting instead one spokesperson could talk to the mayor. The call never happened.

Corr recommended that instead of shutting down Nickels' office for hours--a strong-arm protest tactic that reportedly hasn't been used since 1994--the group should come back the next day and listen to the mayor's own racial-profiling plan. "I'm sure you'll be very happy with it," Corr told the group.

They didn't leave. Instead, they stuck around, eating pizza and guzzling city-provided Pepsi, smoking on the mayor's balcony, and dancing like Michael Jackson in Thriller until 7:00 p.m., when police arrested everybody. Outside, a few people cheered the arrestees. One cop jokingly told a protester to stop smiling, and to look angry. "Remember," he said, "you're supposed to be mad." The group was quickly released, and met up at Bill's, a Capitol Hill pizza joint, to rehash the day.

Surprisingly, the next day Nickels presented his plan, and PCJ was pretty happy with it.

Nickels' plan--despite conventional lefty wisdom that it would be worse than the council's--has two strong components. First, it has a data-collection aspect that is ongoing, and easier to do than the council's plan. And second, there are a half-dozen built-in solutions to the problem of racial profiling, giving the plan teeth.

Nickels' data-collection proposal is simple: An independent consultant will compile and analyze traffic citations and a new "contact report," issued when cops give a warning. The same information proposed by the council--race and gender of the driver, reason for the stop, what happened after the stop--will all be caught by Nickels' study. Essentially, it's as if the Seattle Times' 2000 study, which the paper did via a public-records request, will be done continually by the city.

And Nickels' weighty solutions take his plan way past the council's: He's proposed amped-up racial-sensitivity training for officers, a new SPD policy against racial profiling, and adding citizen seats to two committees--one that chooses new police officers, and one that will pick the data-collection analyst. And while the council recently voted to put video cameras in about 20 cop cars, Nickels pledged digital cameras for the entire fleet.

"We commend the focus on accountability," PCJ member Lee said. "Video cameras, that was one of our demands. Training is a step in the right direction. Community surveys, that's what we just did. There's some really great components [to the plan]."

But the group is still cautious about Nickels' proposal, saying it's going to wait and see how the data-collection aspect pans out.

That's where Friday's cake came in. A dozen PCJ members delivered a white, frosted QFC chocolate cake, chopped in half, to the mayor's office that afternoon. It was symbolic of their half-approval of the plan. "Congratulations on an almost good plan on racial profiling," the accompanying card read.

They said Nickels can have the other half of the cake when he spells out the data-analysis details, and pushes for an independent civilian review board.

amy@thestranger.com