Anger, Grief, Exhaustion at Hearing for Charleena Lyles: “What is fucking going to be different this time?” one speaker asked the Seattle City Council and a crowd of hundreds gathered at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall last night. Over the course of two hours, speakers mourned Lyles, a pregnant mother of four who was killed by Seattle Police on June 18, and urged members of the council to work for change. The event’s moderator allowed members of the Lyles family to speak first and then asked the crowd to prioritize voices of women of color. So, for two hours, black women and other women of color explained the fear they and their children have of the police, their grief over Lyles, and their anger at a system that some said failed her and others said worked just as it was built. “We’ve been working on this for 20 years and it failed her,” said Reverend Harriett Walden, a longtime advocate for police reform, including more crisis intervention training and Tasers. (Neither officer who shot Lyles was carrying a Taser, though one should have been, according to department policy.)
While some members of Lyles family declined to participate in the hearing, others did. Her father, Charles Lyles, dismissed a theory that his daughter may have falsely reported a burglary to lure officers to her apartment to kill her. She “loved life to the fullest,” he said. “There’s no way she would have called the police over to kill her.”
Sheley Secrest, a vice president of the Seattle-King County NAACP, told the council she was there not as a candidate, but “as a black woman.”
“We cry because we are dying,” Secrest said. “We cry because we are burying our children… We are depending on a system that has failed us too often.”
Roxanne White, a member of Nez Perce and Yakima Nations, said five members of local tribes have been killed by police, including “two of our sisters, our live givers…one of them, Renee Davis, also in front of her children.”
“For 500 years, this government, this place named America has not served our people, both African American and Native American people,” White said. “We’re tired. We’re angry. And we’re not going to accept it.”
So, What Are City Council Members Going to Do? Each of the council’s nine members spoke at the end of the hearing, all promising to work on the issue of police use of force but some with more specifics than others. A recently passed package of police reforms currently awaits approval from a federal judge and then negotiations with the police union. Mike O’Brien and Tim Burgess agreed to write to that judge asking him to review the legislation quickly. Lorena González said “we’ve already begun” asking the judge for a faster review. She also promised to urge Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole to hold a public meeting and said the city should lobby harder to change state laws that make it nearly impossible to prosecute officers who wrongfully kill civilians. Kshama Sawant continued her call for a third-party investigation of the shooting. Bruce Harrell pledged to continue work on bias-free policing legislation.
#SeaHomeless: Media outlets across the city are highlighting their coverage of homelessness today to draw attention to the problem and potential solutions. At last count, 11,600 people are homeless in King County, about 5,500 of them unsheltered.
Here’s an Idea: Build More Fucking Housing. The Seattle Times‘ Mike Rosenberg reports that while rent hikes are slowing around the country, they’re increasing in Seattle. Why? Because, while the city has been on a building spree—at least in the limited areas of the city where developers can actually build apartment buildings instead of only single-family housing—the influx of high-paying new jobs means all that new development isn’t keeping up. Plus, with home prices on the rise, people who would otherwise buy are renting,” Rosenberg reports. Seattle needs more housing and, if that new private market housing continues to meet mostly the needs of high-income newcomers, some others will need publicly funded housing.
How should the city pay for that? Perhaps not more property taxes, as it has used in the past. “Another factor pushing rents even higher: Property taxes in King County are up 35 percent in the last four years, largely because of initiatives passed by voters,” Rosenberg reports. “Property taxes here are among the highest in the country, and landlords often pass those extra costs on to renters.” Last year’s $900 million housing levy, funded by property taxes, will build or save 2,150 subsidized apartments. That’s a fraction of the region’s homeless population. Where else could money for public housing come from? Council Member Kshama Sawant, mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver, and city council candidate Jon Grant say tax big business.
Optimism Does Not Pay for Schools: “If optimism were money, the state’s legislative leaders would be swimming in riches,” writes Joseph O’Sullivan from the Seattle Times‘ Olympia bureau. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Democrats and Republicans in Olympia remain stalled without a deal on funding education and the rest of the state budget, but Governor Jay Inslee and legislative leaders are trying to sound hopeful that they’ll come up with something before Friday. If they don’t, the state government will shut down.
State Courts to Consider Bail Reform: A new state workgroup will spend the next year and a half considering ways to change a pre-trial bail system that disproportionately hits poor people and people of color.
Union Alleges Intimidation by King County Sheriff John Urquhart: The Puget Sound Police Managers Association has lodged a list of serious complaints against Urquhart, including that he threatened to “destroy” any sheriff’s commander who supported his opponent in this year’s election, the Seattle Times reports. The sheriff denies the allegations.
King County Democrats Endorse Bob Hasegawa: The state senator running for mayor won the group’s sole endorsement last night. While that group’s endorsement committee recommended Jessyn Farrell and Jenny Durkan, 66 percent of the full group voted to endorse Hasegawa, according to his campaign.
Danny Westneat Has Some Opinion About What “Real Liberals” Would Do: Which is, apparently, give serious consideration to flawed research. In case you were waiting for Seattle’s authority on what it means to be a “real liberal” to weigh in on that University of Washington minimum wage study, his column is here.
