When Seattle elected Bruce Harrell in 2021, voters were clear they wanted safer streets, housing they could afford, and far fewer people living without a home. They’re still our top concerns, and they’ve all gotten worse in the last four years. He has also presided over a city hall marked by misogyny, abuse, and a culture of contempt.

Harrell doesn’t break promises and produce abysmal results because he’s overwhelmed. It’s because fixing these problems is in direct conflict with his guiding principle to protect the powerful at any cost. The Chamber of Commerce, mansion-owners, corrupt cops, and serial sexual predators—he is their knight. We pay the price. 

Public Safety: The $100 Million Lie

Harrell campaigned on public safety. He told voters he’d reduce crime, remove drugs from the street, and restore confidence in a police department that had abused its citizens before, during, and after the George Floyd protests. Instead, he has supervised a downward spiral.

Since Harrell took office, homicides have increased by 23 percent and rape is up by 15 percent, as of the end of 2024. Horrible on its own terms—but catastrophic in context. When Harrell took office, homicide was falling in our generally low-homicide town. But while national violent crime and murder fell fast during his term, Seattle bucked that trend. The homicide rate declined a bit last year, but we’re still much worse off than when he started.

Harrell’s actions in office certainly haven’t helped. He poured an extra $100 million into the police department in 2024 and bagged exactly one net new officer, a predictable result given the acute national and regional shortage of police at the time. Now that the market is recovering, hiring is increasing some, but the spending levels relative to return remain obscene. Compared to similar cities, he slow-walked an alternative to armed response, which he has chronically underfunded. His feeble negotiating with the police union means we have a civilian crisis team capped at 24 members, no new police accountability, and zero leverage left because he gave it all away. And instead of restoring trust in the department, this city has given police new surveillance tools and placed blast balls back into their hands.

Drug deaths followed a path similar to crime. Fentanyl overdoses nearly doubled during Harrell’s first two years in office. As San Francisco began turning the tide, Seattle got worse. Instead of scaling up behavioral health care and diversion programs, Harrell slashed funding. The results have been fatal. San Francisco’s death rates are below those from 2021—ours are up 47 percent.  

Housing: Gutting the Future to Appease the Rich

While public safety struggled, housing costs soared. Under Harrell, the median monthly mortgage payment in Seattle jumped from 32 percent of income to 45 percent. For the middle class in Seattle, homeownership is out of reach. Interest rates played a big part, but some cities, like Austin, have built enough housing to actually reduce their housing prices compared to 2023. Not Seattle. Renters have fared slightly better, but prices certainly haven’t dropped. They're just treading water because Harrell has failed to build.

Permitting has plummeted to a decade-long low. If we follow Harrell’s underwhelming comprehensive plan proposal, we’ll be even less affordable in 20 years than we are now. And when his own planning staff proposed a more ambitious alternative that would have made much more space for the housing the county says we need, Harrell overruled them–including on parts of the plan designed to keep residents from getting pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Harrell has cut nearly $100 million a year in funding for affordable housing. He also tried to kill the city’s new social housing developer at the ballot box.

Homelessness: Surging on His Watch

You have to fix housing to fix homelessness. Harrell’s failures on housing have had a domino effect on homelessness.

When the pandemic hit, homelessness grew by 13.7 percent in Seattle. On Harrell’s watch, it has risen by 26.2 percent. But we’re not talking about an abstract statistic, we’re talking about people: at least 3,480 more homeless people, 2,125 of them sleeping outside. Harrell promised 2,000 shelter beds. We’ve actually lost 128. 

Harrell claims to support Housing First. But as anyone can see, his real strategy is “sweeps first”—an expensive, cruel cascade of displacement that’s eating nearly half our shelter budget. We spend half of it—half—on sweeps. The state knows they don’t work. The county knows they don’t work. Even Harrell knows they don’t work. The point is to create an illusion of progress. It’s a show.

Worse still, Harrell slashed funding for effective programs LEAD and CoLEAD, rental assistance and food support.

Harrell’s Hostile Workplace

This preference for the powerful seems to know no bounds.  

His own former deputy mayor and niece, Monisha Harrell, recently said the administration’s culture of “casual cruelty” toward women came from the top. The evidence backs her up. Six other female members of his staff told KUOW he was condescending to women and shut them out of essential meetings, favoring his white, male advisors. 

Harrell defended former Mayor Ed Murray even after multiple credible accusations of child sexual abuse. He dismissed it as something that “maybe didn’t happen” and awkwardly joked about the fallout afterward on a podcast, where he insisted that his “judgment was spot on.”

He kept disgraced police chief Adrian Diaz on payroll even as sexual harassment, sexism, and bias lawsuits in the police department piled up. He let Diaz keep his $338,000 salary, reassigned him to "special projects," and praised his “integrity” at a press conference. He didn’t fire Diaz until months later—only after new evidence forced his hand.

And he did the same with longtime associate Pedro Gomez, who was credibly accused of rape. Harrell didn’t act for months—not until the case was referred to the King County Prosecutor. 

In fact, his indifference to those who do not have power seems to extend to his off-hours as well. He reportedly pulled a gun on a woman who was eight months pregnant, her husband, and her mother over a parking spot. 

We Deserve Better

This November, voters will be told that Harrell is the steady hand. That he’s the adult in the room. A man of experience, a man of action, a man with a plan. But look around you. He has been mayor for more than three years, and was on the council for a dozen more. Has he addressed your concerns? Has he delivered on his promises? Has he represented your values? 

Seattle needs a mayor who tells the truth, stands against entrenched power, and fights for the people this city is squeezing. Bruce Harrell is not that guy. He’ll never be. It’s time to replace him.

Ron Davis is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, and past candidate for Seattle City Council.