Last Thursday, April 19, at 4:00, The Stranger--along with Seattle citizen Vanessa Lee--showed up for the meeting. We were promptly escorted out.
"These meetings are closed," Bob Scales from the city's Strategic Planning Office said to us as he showed us the door. According to sources familiar with the Citizen Task Force on racial profiling, at the previous Thursday's closed-door session, the 14 members voted to keep the meetings off-limits to the public.
Blocking the door to the conference room, Scales explained that the meeting was closed because the Citizen Task Force was simply discussing "internal process" rather than deliberating on the task force's mission. (The Citizen Task Force was created by city council resolution to design a study on racial profiling that will collect data to help the Seattle Police Department combat racial profiling.) Asked what "internal process" would not be of interest to the public, Scales said, "Well, for example, we'll be discussing whether or not future meetings should be open."
Meanwhile, Scales claimed that this Thursday's closed meeting was an anomaly. (He said with the exception of the previous week's meeting, three earlier sessions had been open.)
However, this wasn't the first time that Lee, a composed 24-year-old volunteer with local civil-rights group the People's Coalition for Justice, had trouble getting access to the Citizen Task Force on racial profiling. Lee says that she called City Council Member Jim Compton's office on Thursday, March 29, the date of a previous "open" meeting, to ask where the meeting was taking place. (As head of the city council's Public Safety Committee, Compton ushered through the Citizen Task Force resolution.) Lee says that Compton staffer Irene Namkung "couldn't say" where the meeting was and that even though the meeting was public, the task force hadn't decided "how" to make it public.
"Conversations that are really going to strike at the heart of this problem need to be open, need to be accountable to the public that they serve," Lee says. "If the folks on the task force are not comfortable having meetings about racial profiling in front of the public, then they really shouldn't be serving on the task force in the first place."
When Council Member Nick Licata learned about the closed-door meeting, he said, "I don't think the racial-profiling task force resolution would have passed the council if [the resolution] specified that [meetings were] going to be closed." The resolution--passed by the city council 9-0 on November 6, 2000--does not authorize closed meetings.
Council Member Richard Conlin, who, like Licata, resigned from the Mardi Gras task force to protest its closed-door status, said he wouldn't have voted for a resolution creating a closed racial-profiling committee, either. "Obviously racial profiling is a community issue, and I don't know how you can talk about a community issue behind closed doors," Conlin says.
The fact that this Citizen Task Force on racial profiling was created by an official act of the city council--not convened informally like the mayor's Mardi Gras task force--makes these closed meetings a much more serious and potentially illegal problem. According to the state's 1971 Open Meeting Act, when "the people's business" is being conducted, meetings must be open to the public. The city council voted to create a task force to formulate recommendations--which means "the people's business" is being discussed.
"A committee was formed to do the people's business. They're not simply advising. They're developing policy that the city council and other agencies are going to use," says Michele Earl-Hubbard, media law attorney with Davis Wright Tremaine. "In effect they've stepped into the shoes of the governing body, and therefore they themselves are a governing body under the statute, and their meeting should be open just like every other government-run body. (Scales says the city attorney's office okayed the closed meetings.)
However, Earl-Hubbard raises another serious point: "The broader question is, why is this meeting closed when they're supposed to be addressing the public's interest? The very clear doctrine of the open meeting law says the government shouldn't decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for the people to know. The whole purpose is so the public gets to watch the development of public policy, and that's exactly what this committee is doing."
Not only was the Citizen Task Force on racial profiling created by a council resolution, its members were confirmed by a subsequent city council vote on March 19.
"If it were simply citizens coming together to give advice to a public official, then it could be closed," says Licata. "But in this instance, the city council created a group to help us determine public policy. We created it and endorsed it to do the 'people's business'--and the 'people's business' is the definition under state law of what a public meeting is."
Ironically, members of the Citizen Task Force have been instructed to claim that Compton's resolution obligates them to meet in secret. Task force ground rules instruct members to deflect questions about closed meetings by saying they are simply "following the city council resolution" that created the task force. Again, the resolution that was passed by the city council does not mandate closed meetings.
Adding insult to injury, the makeup of the city's Citizen Task Force on racial profiling troubles onlookers like Lee.
"There are no youth at all on the task force," complains Lee, who is Asian. "Young African American males are the people most impacted by racial profiling, and they're the voices that need to be heard the most. They need to be part of this dialogue."
Voting members on this citizen task force include a city hall staffer from Compton's office (George Allen), a staffer from Mayor Schell's office (Walt Hubbard), and a former staffer from Mark Sidran's City Attorney's Office (Bonnie Glenn).
"I don't think the makeup of the task force is reflective of the people who deal with racial profiling," says Dustin Washington, youth action program director for the American Friends Service Committee. (Washington, 29, is black.) "I think the perspective of the people who deal with profiling would have to be part of coming up with the solution--that would make common sense. This is another example of the city creating a dynamic where they are not being challenged."
Ironically, Task Force member and Compton assistant George Allen, partially justifies the closed meetings by citing the "wildly diverse" make up of the committee. (There are several older African American members.) As for shutting the public out, Allen says, "The committee wanted to maintain the ability to have some private conversations. Members want to speak with emotion and candor without the concern that every word becomes a headline." Allen says some future meetings will be open to the public.
Given the tattered legitimacy of the Citizen Task Force on racial profiling--a "citizen's" task force that meets in private, includes zero citizens likely to be victimized by racial profiling, yet includes mayoral and city council staff--members like former ACLU attorney Song Richardson, head of the public defender's office Robert Boruchowitz, and police accountability activist Harriett Walden should follow the lead of former Mardi Gras task force members like Council Members Licata and Conlin. They should resign.
