Reporting to legal counsel and not the Chief Operating Officer like the Director of Public Affairs concerns me. Transparency needs programmers writing code not a bunch of meetings. As for Toby's comments about portal that launches on Feb 17 according to emails provided by PDU.

Dont clean out the poison, just replace the bandaid and hope no one notices!

Brilliant idea! Lets hire another city attorney from Pete Holmes office to manage accountability...I mean, if anything we KNOW the Seattle City attorney's office has NEVER worked with the SPD to obfuscate information on improper police activities, or hiding/destroying dashcams, or 'modifying' testimony when beating unarmed handcuffed black or hispanic suspects (or shooting unaggressive deaf native american suspects in pioneer square).

Anyone else buying this shit? The answer is NEVER "hey lets hire ______ person, they wont clean up shop, but theyll do a better job covering for it". Thats why O Toole was hired, and why Bailey was hired before her, and how DIaz got the job before that. Deflection. Hell, its why 3 of the 5 OPA member were formerly on Local PD payrolls in one way or another as 'advisors' or as cops outright.

Fucks sakes...until the city/state gets the balls to stand up to the police unions, this little elephant dance will continue.

@2 you watch too many movies

So is the purpose of this new position to gloss things over and cover up as much as possible the misdeeds of the Seattle Police Department, in the same way staff members of the City Attorney's office and the City Auditor's office, not to mention eight of the nine City Council Members (the sole exception being former CM Nick Licata) colluded to pretend that that the McDonnell Report never happened in Seattle?

None of these officials supposedly concerned now with SPD transparency and public accountability would allow Marie McDonnell to finalize her report (which the Seattle City Council commissioned the public paid for!!!), or present it to the Council.

Fortunately, McDonnell came to Seattle recently and presented her massive report to a group of citizens. The amount of public records fraud and disorganization of records in the King County Recorder's Office revealed by this report was absolutely shocking. Fortunately, a copy of the draft report was accidentally given to a citizen, who passed it on to reporter David Dayen, who wrote about it in The Intercept:

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/14/offi…

Dayen has also published a forthcoming book on this topic:

http://www.amazon.com/Chain-Title-Americ…

Multnomah County wasn't as secretive as Seattle and King County, because back around 2012-2013 they filed a lawsuit over fraudulent mortgage recording. Though they sued for a lot more money, it is highly significant that the County won a $9,600,000 settlement against Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. (MERS), over a type of fraud that the Seattle City Attorney's Office insists did not happen here, so move along people, there's nothing to see.

http://portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/288…

Unlike the the Seattle City Council and the King County Council, the Multhomah County Council and its staff attorney talked OPENLY and HONESTLY about how the TBTF banks and the shadow company they created, MERS (which, incidentally, has only has about 60 employees), screwed about 3,000 counties nationwide of massive amounts of money by depriving them them of mortgage recording fees, as well as hopelessly messing up chains of title of countless innocent homeowners, many of whom got royally fucked over by illegal foreclsures, and still are getting fucked over.

The extremely frank discussion of this by the Multnomah County Commissioners starts in this video at minute ~46:30:

http://multnomah.granicus.com/MediaPlaye…

In conclusion, one of the Multnomah County Commissioners said that though the $6.1 million the county will take into its general fund as the result of this settlement isn't all that much--and is chump change to the TBTF banks--it’s still "a legal bang" and will have huge national implications. "$6,100,000 are dollars we use for our mission to take care of kids who are sick, to shelter families, to come to the aid of people in crisis." She then went on to urge that this money be used to help with the very real and highly damaging affordable housing crisis in Multnomah County.

Once again, SHAME on our COWARDLY City and County Council Members, the City Attorney, and the City Auditor for trying to gag Marie McDonnell. Marie and her supporters aren't going away, and courageous, justice-oriented Councilmembers in jurisdictions elsewhere in the United States will be very interested in this lawsuit, and in getting their state and local laws changed to make it easier for similar lawsuits to be brought in their jurisdictions. Multnomah County is fully committed to making all the information they can possibly disclose about this case to the public through the use of Oregon's outstanding public disclosure laws.

As for this new SPD staff member, it remains to be seen whether SPD or any other branch of Seattle government will actually become more "open," "transparent" and "accountable," or whether the public will continue to see only tiny, brief peeks at what goes on behind the curtain.

One more example of Seattle's chronic effort to obfuscate what its CMs do is that the Seattle Clerk doesn't post anything that looks like a simple "How Your Council Members Voted" account of law-making that is readily accessible to the public. The only way the public can find out what the fuck the Council is up to is to attend all city council meetings and take notes, or to devote your life to watching all the CM's public meetings, including public meetings. I confirmed this with the Clerk's office. The Clerk simply doesn't have a website like this, nor do they plan to create one. Examples at the federal level abound, for example this:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how…

...or even this:

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news…

The bottom line is, Seattle is far less committed to transparency than it pretends to be.

@7 Time for another Charter Amendment in 2017?