Thursday night marked the unofficial kickoff to Seattle’s general election campaign season. For the first time since the August primary, candidates for King County Executive, Seattle Mayor, Seattle City Attorney, and citywide Council positions 8 and 9 were all under the same roof, answering the same questions, seated side by side. And if your kink is candidates having the ability to make bold claims with zero followups, two-minute answers to 20-year problems, and Rachael Savage trolling North Seattle libs with her praise for Trump, only to get booed as a fascist (I mean, if it quacks like a duck), then the Haller Lake Community Club had a candidate forum for you!
The room was a crush of bodies and heat, a democracy sauna where civic virtue mingled with sweat. The audience skewed very North End and very white, “Imagine a seasoning rack that only believes in salt,” as one observer put it. On stage, though, half the candidates were people of color, which meant the dais had more flavor than the crowd. People fanned themselves with programs, campaign flyers, anything flat. A man behind me muttered, “I’ll vote for whoever brings AC.” Hard to argue with a platform that concrete.
Last night’s event was the warm up for a general election campaign cycle that promises to be heated. Each candidate faced off with their challenger for the first time, giving us an early glimpse into how they hope to run their campaign in the coming months. Moving race by race, questions flying, answers clipped short by the tyranny of the timer, here’s what we learned from this season’s preview.
Mayor: Katie Wilson vs. Bruce Harrell
The marquee matchup of the night was, of course, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Katie Wilson. This is the first time they’d been on a stage together since Wilson finished first in the August primary with more than 50 percent of the vote. It was the night’s heavyweight bout.
The first question landed on Harrell’s signature One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, the document meant to guide 20 years of the city’s growth. Harrell leaned on his familiar style of managerial command-and-data-driven assurance.
“A plan is a plan—and it’s malleable,” Harrell says. “We put a stake in the ground for 330,000 units, and we’re listening on water quality, trees, livability. We can do better.” He added that his job was to plan for growth while balancing neighborhood concerns, rattling off specifics about water rates, tree ordinances, and even cubic-foot pricing for utilities. The mayor’s approach was part technocrat, part neighborhood whisperer: I hear you, Madrona. I hear you, Mount Baker.
Wilson, by contrast, cast Harrell’s plan as both too timid and too selective. “We need more neighborhood centers, more of the city sharing growth—including ones struck from earlier drafts,” she says. “That includes the mayor’s own neighborhood, Seward Park, which somehow got pulled off the list. Build more housing and protect mature trees. We can do both.”
Wilson went further, arguing that Harrell’s version of One Seattle still leaves too much of the city insulated from change, while pushing the burden onto already-dense areas. Her framing was sharper, almost prosecutorial: the mayor’s plan is not bold enough to match the scale of the crisis.
The contrast deepened when the conversation turned to public safety. Harrell touted falling violent crime numbers and new leadership at SPD. “I won’t rest until my granddaughters can walk any neighborhood,” he says. “Violent crime, homicides, shots fired—they’re all going down. We measure everything. We’re modernizing policing.”
He pointed to his hire of Chief Shon Barnes, and, in a moment clearly designed to preempt criticism, said he personally visits precincts at 4 a.m. and 11 p.m. “I told our officers: if you don’t think George Floyd was murdered, you should not work for me,” Harrell said, reusing a refrain from his first campaign.
Wilson wasn’t convinced. She reminded the audience of the messy interlude before Barnes’s hire (former police chief Adrian Diaz’s chaotic exit, and suing of both Harrell and the City): “We lost high-integrity officers, morale cratered, and Seattle had excess homicides compared to national trends,” she says. “We need to hire more officers, yes, but also more civilian responders. And we need to finally implement accountability through the police contract.”
Her critique wasn’t just about staffing; it was about culture and structure. “Other cities have built far larger alternative response systems,” Wilson says. “We are behind. And the accountability ordinance from 2017 is still not real because it hasn’t been implemented in the contract. That is a failure of leadership.”
If Harrell came off like the guy assuring you the bus is “just five minutes away,” Wilson reminded everyone that the bus actually broke down three stops back, and leadership never called a tow truck. Harrell leaned on his greatest hits: steady delivery, lots of numbers. Wilson pressed the point that tinkering around the edges isn’t cutting it, and the moment demands urgency, not another round of wait-and-see.
But if you were looking to understand what Harrell’s strategy is going to be after his poor primary showing, the lightning round told us everything we need to know. The candidates were asked to answer, in one word, if they were to the right or the left of their opponent. Harrell initially balked at the premise (“I don’t really like the question”) before relenting with, “I’m to the left, and I can prove it with data and 1,600 pieces of legislation.” (Fact check pending.) Maybe there’s a multiverse where Mayor Harrell is Che Guevara with a city pension. But in this universe? That was late breaking news. Wilson wasn’t about to let that one slide: “I learned something new. Bruce Harrell is to my left,” she quipped, before pivoting to remind the room that “all people care about right now is results.”
City Attorney: Ann Davison vs. Erika Evans
The City Attorney race represented the clearest binary of the night: deterrence vs. treatment, lawsuits vs. alternatives.
The moderator’s first question asked why Shoreline has been more successful limiting drug use. The framing felt suspect—it’s largely understood that Shoreline simply pushed the drug use further south—but it was the perfect question to clarify the valley between the candidates.
“Our laws have to matter,” Davison says, a mantra she’s been chanting for four years. She pointed to her authorship of Seattle’s drug possession law and SOAP/SODA restrictions. She argued that focus should be on the “118 people responsible for more than 2,400 referrals” and highlighted her lawsuit against gun manufacturer, Glock.
Evans shot back that this was missing the point. “What works is going after traffickers and high-level suppliers—not criminalizing people who are unhoused or in substance use,” she says. “That’s ineffective policy.”
On the unfilled behavioral health beds due to a public defender shortage, Evans was direct: “Hire more public defenders. That’s important. It’s basic, and it’s urgent.”
Davison responded that competency restoration is a state-level gap. “We should not be walking by people and leaving it at ‘we don’t know what to do,’” she says. “I’m not in charge of housing—but I can build re-entry and diversion that actually reduces recidivism.”
City Council Position 8: Alexis Mercedes Rinck vs. Rachael Savage
Position 8 had the widest gap in the primary, Rinck bested Savage by a whopping 65 percent, and it delivered the sharpest, and most entertaining, clash of the night.
The tree ordinance question should have been a layup: candidates were asked whether they supported the city’s 30 percent canopy goal and Councilmember Rivera’s Amendment 93 to protect trees. Rinck kept it squarely on climate justice, warning about urban heat islands and underscoring the need to expand the city arborist’s office. “We need to make sure that we’re having a clear focus on getting to 30% tree canopy across this city,” she said. “These heat events are dangerous, and we don’t have the infrastructure in place to keep people safe. Expanding canopy isn’t just aesthetics, it’s climate resilience.”
Savage, meanwhile, swerved hard into her favorite culture-war cul-de-sac. “My opponent thinks that permanent, supportive housing—housing that allows drug addicts to use drugs and die in our city—has miraculous powers,” she declared, calling Housing First “a colossal failure” that “crushed businesses” and “destroyed[ed] neighborhoods.”
“I thought we were talking about trees,” Rinck snapped back.
Savage doubled down, describing Capitol Hill and Belltown as “a nightmare” and calling permanent supportive housing “a harvest for drug addicts for free.” Her refrain: “I’m a pro-police candidate. The first thing I’ll do is amend the public drug use law so police can arrest for public drug use. That protects all of us—and it helps get people into treatment.”
It was the starkest contrast of the evening: Rinck, who sees safety rooted in housing stability and climate resilience, versus Savage, who sees disorder everywhere and wants to police her way out of it.
In the lightning round, Rinck went for the jugular: “My opponent is a Trump supporter. I think everyone up here is to the left of her.” Savage, never one to duck the spotlight, leaned into the heel role, “Proudly to the right. Common sense.”
During the closing arguments, Savage’s praise of Trump and declaration that she’d left the Democratic Party over their inability to address crime, prompted a man in the back to shout “fascist” and “that she was full of shit.” Some in the crowd expressed agreement, while organizers asked for “quiet.” A man later identified as Savage’s campaign manager marched over to the man, and started screaming at him. After a tense shouting match back and forth the disruption eventually quieted.
City Council Position 9: Sarah Nelson vs. Dionne Foster
In Position 9, the divide was less combustible but still clear. Sara Nelson, often pausing to ask moderators to repeat questions, reminded the audience she supported the current tree ordinance but admitted, “The way it was rolled out was very unfortunate… it was flawed.” She leaned on her pragmatic record, saying she supported Rivera’s amendments because “we have got to incentivize smart design of housing… that’s exactly how we get past this growth versus tree mindset.”
Her challenger, Dionne Foster, countered by making accountability her watchword. She argued that she supported amendments aimed at police reform—such as restricting SPD’s use of blast balls and providing a private right of action for people harmed by SPD that Nelson voted against. “We need both adequate policing and accountability,” Foster said. She also pressed for expanding the CARE department so alternative responders don’t have to be co-deployed with police, saying, “We can’t keep asking them to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back.”
Nelson, meanwhile, returned to the City Charter as her anchor. “Our charter requires adequate police presence in every district of the city,” she said. “That is our responsibility.”
During the lighting round, Foster stuck with a clean “Left,” while Sara Nelson finally offered, “I quite frankly don’t know what her politics are because I haven’t heard enough specifics from my opponent.” Which led the moderator to once again say “in one word.” The lightning round proved one thing: brevity is the first casualty of campaign season.
County Executive: Claudia Balducci vs. Girmay Zahilay
In the lightning round, when they were asked to say if they were left or right of their opponent, Balducci hedged with a “pretty similar,” though she joked that she was sitting to the right of Girmay. That’s been her line since the primary: that they’re vastly similar on most counts, and vote together 99 percent of the time. But since she lost to Zahilay handily in the primary, she’s been making small gestures to the right, appearing to court the Republican voters who no longer have a horse in the race.
But in the forum, they didn’t have a wide gulf between them.
On the recent Department of Community and Human Services audit that found that the county’s lax oversight potentially paved the way for fraud, Balducci was blunt: “We don’t know where it’s gone. We don’t know how much has been wasted. We don’t know if there has been fraud.” The fix, she argued, can’t wait: “We need to have an internal audit function, and we need to get on it now. The report said… we’ll finish implementing recommendations by the end of 2026. No. We need to start implementing basic financial controls immediately. This is the basic function of government, and we know how to do it.”
Zahilay argued for deeper structural reform. “Absolutely the findings in that audit were unacceptable. We need much stronger financial controls,” he said. “Like my colleague mentioned, we need a proactive, automatic audit system. I would hire a chief operating officer tasked with auditing every single department. That audit happened because one of our colleagues requested it—we shouldn’t have to wait for someone to ask. There should be internal audits automatically.” He added that his King County Delivers plan would require quarterly reports—“just like every public company does”—to track whether goals are being met.
When asked about behavioral health, Zahilay reframed the “repeat offender” narrative. “Ten years ago, King County did a study called Familiar Faces,” he said. “They looked at people who’d gone to jail four times or more in two years. Out of that population—2,500 to 3,000 people, 95% had overlapping substance use and mental health disorders. So what we’re calling a repeat offender crisis is actually a behavioral health crisis.”
Balducci countered with frustration over delays. “Voters have been very generous with King County,” she says, pointing to the five crisis care centers approved two years ago. “We haven’t opened the door to a single one of them yet.” She also noted the stalled Harborview behavioral health expansion: “We voted five years ago… not a single spade of dirt turned.” For Balducci, the issue isn’t money or ideas, but competence: “We need to push harder to deliver results for the things we’ve already promised.”
The Last Word
Former mayoral candidate Colleen Echohawk who lives in the area and attended Thursday’s event, appreciated the forum but didn’t mince words about her discomfort with how some of the questions were framed, especially the one about crime and safety on light rail.
“As a District 5 person whose family rides light rail every day, that didn’t feel real,” Echohawk says. “There was some fear-mongering going on. The way the question was phrased, it made it sound like light rail is this crime-ridden danger zone. That’s not the experience of most people I know. For a lot of us, it’s just how we get to work, how our kids get to school, how we live our lives.”
She also took exception with the way candidates were pushed to talk about “prostitution” in the neighborhood. “The framing erased their humanity and made it sound like they’re a problem to be managed instead of people who deserve rights, safety, and dignity,” she says.
Echohawk acknowledged that a few candidates stood out, though she’s undecided about who she’ll vote for come November. “Katie Wilson’s public safety answer was fantastic, and it was truthful,” Echohawk says. “[Harrell] also made strong points about housing and showing the data around what’s been built. Could we do more? Yes, but he has done a lot.”
Glaringly missing on the night was any discussion of immigration, climate change, or displacement.And without allowing for followups, a candidate could’ve claimed they pulled world peace straight out of their ass, and we would have swiftly moved on to the next question.
Democracy in Seattle, at least last night, looked like a hot room with too little oxygen and too many questions made for two minute clips. It looked like people fanning themselves with campaign flyers that doubled as sweat rags, and an audience that was, demographically speaking, a salt shaker waiting for pepper. It looked like a predominantly white audience listening to why tree canopy, police staffing, and transit safety are less separate issues than variations on the same crisis: how you build, who you protect, and what you value.
It also looked like choices, some trivial, some tectonic. Whether we confuse punishment for treatment. Whether we let slogans stand in for systems. Whether we keep treating housing as a NIMBY skirmish over buildings instead of the scaffolding that holds up everything else: safety, equity, climate survival. Ultimately, these formats have limited value. They’re “made for social media clip” spectacles, where essentially the wannabe (re) elected’s job is to simply not royally fuckup, and come across amiable enough.
The real question for the next two months, as candidates haul themselves to almost-weekly forums and debates, is whether we’ll convert all this civic heat into something illuminating, or whether we just keep sweating through our civic underwear and call it actual political engagement.
Bruce Harrell is an candidate of color, but Katie Wilson is not.
Nice writeup, MHG. Amusing, informative, no axes to grind.
“Are you to the left or right of your opponent? Please answer in one word.” That is just such a superficial, reductive question. And it’s still on the candidates not to get flustered by dumb questions like this.
Speaking of superficial, great photo. I’m loving Bruce’s pastel purple shirt–and marveling at his not visibly sweating through it. As for Katie Wilson, she looks like she just emerged from an Andrew Wyeth painting. Or maybe a Willa Cather novel.
“We lost high-integrity officers, morale cratered, and Seattle had excess homicides compared to national trends,” she says.
Glad to see even Katie Wilson and the Stranger admit “defund” had some terrible and lasting effects!
(Wait, what?!?)
‘In the lightning round, Rinck went for the jugular: “My opponent is a Trump supporter. I think everyone up here is to the left of her.”’
Glad to see even Rinck and the Stranger now admit Sawant is no longer on the left in Seattle.
(Wait, WHAT?!?)
‘During the lighting round, Foster stuck with a clean “Left,” while Sara Nelson finally offered, “I quite frankly don’t know what her politics are because I haven’t heard enough specifics from my opponent.” Which led the moderator to once again say “in one word.” The lightning round proved one thing: brevity is the first casualty of campaign season.’
Also that stupid campaign stunts aren’t limited to candidates. (What on earth was the “one word” nonsense supposed to demonstrate, again?)
Was any media outlet there to take video of this? Is there anywhere I can go to watch it?
“We need to hire more officers, yes,
but also more civilian responders. And we need
to finally implement accountability through the police contract.”
Her critique wasn’t just about staffing; it was about
culture and structure. “Other cities have built far
larger alternative response systems,”
Wilson says.
“We are behind. And the accountability ordinance
from 2017 is still not real because it hasn’t
been implemented in the contract. That
is a failure of leadership.”
let’s lighten the Po-po’s Load:
Reallocate Precious Resources
to where they’re Needed
the Most
oh and Hold them
Accountable
Whilst we
are At it.
they (supposedly) Work
for WE, The People:
Let’s Make It So.
Erika Evans is such a a try-hard theater kid, it sucks the choice is between her and incompetent Giuliani wannabe Davison.
Look for Rachel Savage to start a Choe-esque amateur JoUrNaLiSt Twitter account immediately after getting wrecked in the general.
Harrell is the epitome of a self-serving bog-standard pol, the city should offer him $100k/year and a weekly Times op-ed to just fuck off and let someone who actually wants to make things better take over.
@7, @8, @9, @10, @11 — We all got together and bought you a two-month vacation to the no-internet-access location of your choice! Congrats!
@3 solid try, B+ trolling. Your quote of police loss conveniently cuts out the context above it, which is the former chief’s scandal, not “defunding”. It’s incredible that people keep talking about a defunding that never happened. In 2025 the SPD got $458M (!), which is $60M more than 2019. They have and have always had, a very generous budget. They started quitting because they realized everyone hates them for being abusive a-holes. Cry me a river.
@4 Exactly what I came on to say. Where can we watch a full replay of this forum and listen to the candidates for ourselves? I ran several searches on youtube, including at various local news station youtube channels, but I can’t find anything.
@13
The only reason that the defunding didn’t happen is because its proponents failed.
@Mayella, just write one fucking post and wait for people to respond versus 5. You’re like that annoying stream of consciousness texted that keeps texting 20 times versus 1-2 texts to say 1 thing.
Tenny, it’s been proven over and over and over and over and over and over again that Seattle CIty Council never defunded the police in 2020 or since then. In fact they gave them even more fucking money in 2020 and have bent over for them every year since. You bootlickers need to get over this dumb lie, it’s been 5 years, no one believes it anymore.
@13: “It’s incredible that people keep talking about a defunding that never happened.”
“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices in Seattle, Washington are 29.27% higher in 2025 versus 2019…” (https://www.in2013dollars.com/Seattle-Washington/price-inflation/2019?amount=815#:~:text=Prices%20in%20Seattle%2C%202019%2D2025,inflation%20in%20Seattle%20was%20higher.)
So, ($458M – $60M =) $398M in 2019 dollars would be ($398 x 1.2927 =$514.49) over $514M today, or a reduction in real terms of over $56M since 2019. It’s incredible that people keep talking about a defunding!
“The Seattle Police Department has lost more than 700 officers in the past five years and is at its lowest staffing level since the 1990s. Currently, the department has 913 actively working police officers.” (https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle-police-staffing-shortage-action-needed-councilmembers-say/281-c3f43855-f877-4ba9-a37b-aeaf27e1ec67)
The stated goal of “defund” was to cut the number of SPD officers in half. More than 700 departures, leaving 913 remaining, came pretty close.
For progressives, it’s mightily inconvenient that people keep talking about defunding which happened, and was effective, especially as (going back to the point I was mockingly making) this year’s progressive candidates have never disowned this stupidly destructive idea.
@17: Standing on a law-abiding citizen’s porch taking a report about a crime that happened the previous night.
Taking photos of skid marks on asphalt after a motor vehicle accident.
Cajoling a smelly naked guy who has face planted on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to a parking garage to move along (and maybe get back on his meds and get some treatment for the nasty looking abscess on his shoulder).
Responding for the third time in a week to a shouting match at the same address because Fido has taken to tearing up a neighbor’s rose garden.
Every one of these tasks cannibalizes time that could be invested in the unique capacity of armed officers with the power of arrest to deter, confront, and apprehend criminals.
Every minute officers spend doing these things is a gift to bad guys, a bad deal for taxpayers, and disrespectful of those sworn officers with talent and passion for proactive policing and fire in the belly about moving the needle on crime.
SPOG doesn’t care because this problem means infinite overtime with no accountability.
Harrell’s plan is to ignore it.
Wilson’s plan is to fix it.
“Number of police officers” is a red herring. “Police officer heart beats on the job we use wisely and well” is the metric that matters.
Inflation and cops quitting of their own accord, they weren’t let go due to the SPD budget being reapportioned to elsewhere. Then there is the difficulty in recruiting new cops despite hiring bonuses, why even try to hire more if the department had been defunded. Somehow this is a direct cause of the defund chanters and their representatives? No, that’s corelative at best.
@18: Nice job of goalpost-moving, and you’re right: you should simply make up examples, and talk big about “Wilson’s plan,” rather than what she actually advocated in the past. Just as I noted at the end of @17, the latter cannot help her.
@19: Officers started leaving the SPD in droves immediately after the Council started talking “defund.” As @13 foolishly admitted, the SPD’s budget has not been restored to 2019 levels — in fact, it’s been cut by over (56M/514M =0.109)10% in real terms, as the population of Seattle grew past 800,000.
@16: Great timing! Now, shoot your other foot.
@20: Wilson’s plan is on her website, and it’s the only sensible thing to do. Anything less is pro-bad guy, anti-good cop, and a raw deal for taxpayers:
“Seattle’s CARE Department, our primary alternative response for crisis calls, has shown success — but its expansion has been stymied by a poorly negotiated police contract, which caps the department at just 24 civilian responders. We are still deploying highly paid, highly trained armed officers to mental health and other non-crime calls they’re neither suited to nor needed for — and many other jobs civilians can do, from directing traffic at events to taking down crime reports. This crowds out proactive police work and limits the immediate availability of officers to respond to crimes in progress.”
The choice is clear.
@13 try again. Defunding did happen. As recently as 2022 the council abrogated positions that SPD was unable to fill. This is defacto defunding via budget tricks.
https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/11/23/council-returns-parking-enforcement-to-spd-abrogates-80-vacant-cop-positions/
The only reason defunding didn’t happen in 2020 at the scale that was proposed was because it was against the city charter and would have been ruled illegal, the manner in which the council wanted to implement was discriminatory and would have led to massisve civil litigation and the public was overwhelming against it as they are now. WA has the lowest per capita level of officers in the country and Seattle ranks 4 for overall crime and 3 for property crime nearly double the national average
https://mynorthwest.com/crime_blotter/seattle-total-crime-rankings/4125465#:~:text=Seattle%20ranked%20third%2Dworst%20on,the%20national%20property%20crime%20average.
Any talk that we don’t need additional SPD officers is complete bullshit.
Didn’t we already try the Sawant-type progressive governance model already?
Did anyone think it went well?
Ask yourself: Do you want to be Portland, Oregon; or Zurich, Oslo, or Copenhagen?
Hint: Portland sucks and is 100% progressive
@30: “Portland sucks and is 100% progressive”
As the story linked @29 repeatedly reminds us:
“Seattle was ranked fourth out of the 30 largest American cities for total crime in 2024. The study provided Seattle’s total crime rate per 100,000 residents was 5,782.7. Additionally, Seattle’s total crime numbers in comparison to the national average were 172.9% higher.
“Portland, Oregon, was listed as the second-worst city for total crime in America, with a total crime rate of 6,246.4 per 100,000 people. Portland’s total crime numbers were also 194.8% higher than the national average.”
[…]
“Portland was slightly worse for property crime with a No. 2 ranking, one spot ahead of Seattle.”
One bright spot for Portland, though:
“The U.S. total average for violent crime was 359.1, and Seattle was nearly double the national average, with a violent crime rate of 775.1 per 100,000 residents in 2024. Portland was slightly better than Seattle, with a violent crime rate of 720.1.”
As we see up-thread, the progressive response to these facts is flat-out denial, salted with name-calling when we persist in citing such facts.
@21: As no one has provided a URL for Wilson’s plan, what does it envision for the “mental health and other non-crime calls” which become violent? If the responders will call the police, then there’s no real savings of officer time in those cases, correct? Also, it might be a good idea to train the responders in working with the police, both for the non-violent cases which become violent, and for the violent mental health cases, where the responders can accompany the police to help de-escalate the situation. Looks like all the savings from defund will get spent on just the 24-person response team, hmmm?
I’m not saying the alternate responder teams are a bad idea; in fact, I think they are a great idea, and should be tested at the current level, with the results analyzed towards program expansion. But anyone who pretends this program will reduce SPD’s need for more officers hasn’t been paying attention to the facts, and given Wilson’s prior support of defund (again, which she has never renounced) I can easily imagine she hasn’t.
@31: The ship has long sailed on testing solo civilian crisis response. As of last year, more than 100 cities were doing it, and here’s what the data says (from the Marshall Project):
“There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job so far, according to experts. And data suggests unarmed responders rarely need to call in police. In Eugene, Oregon, which has operated the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (known locally as CAHOOTS) response team since 1989, roughly 1% of their calls end up requiring police backup, according to the organization. Albuquerque responders have asked for police in 1% of calls, as of January. In Denver, the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) had never called for police backup due to a safety issue as of July 2022, the most recent data available. In Durham, members of the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART) reported feeling safe on 99% of calls.”
By way of numbers, as of last year Albuquerque’s equivalent of CARE had more than 100 staff working 24×7 to handle 5% of all police calls for service.
“given Wilson’s prior support of defund (again, which she has never renounced)”
LOL in the piece she wrote years ago which folks twist into claiming she’s a defunder she refers to an article I myself wrote about police reform. I’ve since spoken with her face to face about it. She’s not a defunder now and never was – she was and is a reformer.
Wilson’s public safety plan is here: https://www.wilsonforseattle.com/publicsafety
Including
“Seattle’s CARE Department, our primary alternative response for crisis calls, has shown success — but its expansion has been stymied by a poorly negotiated police contract, which caps the department at just 24 civilian responders. We are still deploying highly paid, highly trained armed officers to mental health and other non-crime calls they’re neither suited to nor needed for — and many other jobs civilians can do, from directing traffic at events to taking down crime reports. This crowds out proactive police work and limits the immediate availability of officers to respond to crimes in progress.”
For those curious, you can read about how it aligns with modern police management best practice and all the ways that Seattle lag behind other departments in this publication from the 50-year-old police-led Police Executive Research Forum publication called “Embracing Civilianization: Integrating Professional Stafft o Advance Modern Policing” – https://www.policeforum.org/assets/Civilianization.pdf
@35/36 you hvae not heard anyone saying a civilian led response team is not a good idea. The issue is what takes precedence. There are two key facts here. The state and the city do not have enough sworn officers to serve the population as evidenced but our last place ranking in per capita officers and high crime rates. The state and the city are also facing severe financial headwinds because of their mismanagement of the budget during our progressive glory years of massive growth. Wilson, if elected, will be staring down a nine figure budget deficit. Bringing SPD up to the appropriate levels of staffing has to be priority 1, then you can look at alternative response units.
I also think given the activist viewpoint that these people in crisis should be given autonomy and allowed to do whatever they want until they are “ready” many of us are rightly suspicious whether a civilian led until will make any progress on the issue. One only need look at the recent news coming out of King County regarding youth diversion programs (hint there is massive fraud and waste and zero accountability) as an example.
@38: You are making the slam-dunk case for civilianization here. Imagine Smallville has 10 police officers, and its residents are really worried about crime. However Smallville currently assigns its officers to spend 40% of their time polishing doorknobs in the station house. So in point of fact, Smallville only has 6 officers working on crime.
Now imagine Mayor Barell says Smallville should add 4 more officers to reach a total of 14 – but without fixing this. His plan would mean (eventually) for the cost of 14 officers, only 7 will be working on crime.
His challenger, Filson, says Smallville should instead hire 4 civilians, which it can do for the cost of 2 officers, to handle the doorknob polishing. Within the new budget that costs what 12 officers would otherwise cost, we get all 10 of the existing officers spending 100% of their time on crime.
And if we wanted to invest up to a budget that could sustain 14 officers like Barrell, we’d then be adding net +2 officers 100% focused on crime for a total of 12 versus Barrell’s plan for 7.
With the caveat that these smaller numbers and simpler model make it easier to explain, Seattle is like Smallville, Barrell is like Harrell, and Wilson, like Filson, has the superior plan to more quickly get more police officer person power focused on crime–either at a lower cost, or with a “civilianization divided” we can invest to add to the force.
@39 are you just not reading what I wrote? We are dead last in officers per capita and our crime rate is one of the worst in the country This isn’t polishing doorknobs in the station. Doorknobs don’t even show up in the stats because no one is looking at that.
We tried this with parking enforcement and guess what? They have to be sworn officers. Get the SPD at least to an average staffing number and then maybe the doorknobs can be a consideration.
@40: You have to reckon with the fact we waste sworn officers’ time hand over fist. Nothing you say about the number of officers makes any sense until you do that.
The city studied computer assisted dispatch (CAD) records from 2017-2019. During that time, SPD officers spent 2.4 million hours on non-criminal matters — 66% of all call response time. Harrell’s plan is to build back to a world in which we waste 800,000 sworn officer hours per year on things others can do equally well or better for less.
It’s nonsensical, as is the idea that what we need to do is hire exclusively sworn officers in order to then proceed to waste 2/3 of their time.
@35: “She’s not a defunder now and never was…”
Oopsie — and you were doing so well, there, too!
“Defunding the police, therefore, also means redirecting those funds (and likely more) to other workers and other purposes — unwelcome news for anyone hoping that cop cuts might help with the massive revenue shortfalls cities are currently facing. But it’s the work that needs to be done. Can Seattle do all this? Can America do all this? There’s never been a better time to try.”
(https://www.cascadepbs.org/opinion/2020/06/what-defunding-seattle-police-could-look/)
‘”We didn’t win everything, especially on the police divesting front,” said Katie Wilson, General Secretary of the Transit Riders Union. “There’s a lot of work to be done next year. We want to give people a sense of what we’ve accomplished and be able to celebrate that because we did win a lot, but then also recognizing that there’s a long way to go and hoping that people will be able to keep taking action in the future.”‘
(https://southseattleemerald.org/news/2020/11/24/after-council-vote-solidarity-budget-celebrates-victories-but-battle-against-spds-hugely-bloated-budget-continues)
Wilson did admit the terms, “defund,” and “abolition,” were driving voters away:
‘Mainstream media are more than happy to provide one explanation: “Defund the police” and “abolitionism” are ideas that repel, rather than attract, a majority of the electorate, across all racial groups and even in the nation’s most progressive enclaves. I think the election results do force us to reckon with this argument. Minneapolis voters declined to replace their police department with a new public safety agency, even as they voiced support for rent control; in other words, this wasn’t a wholesale anti-progressive turn.’
So, should progressives abandon “defund”? Nope, they should just call it by some other name:
“To entertain this does not mean that the goal is wrong, or that progress toward it cannot be made by electoral means, or even that the slogan should never be used. But if the left wants to win elections, we may need to think more deeply and strategically about what messages are right for what purposes.”
(https://www.cascadepbs.org/opinion/2021/11/what-seattle-election-results-mean-progressives/)
Better luck next time!
@35: “The ship has long sailed on testing solo civilian crisis response. As of last year, more than 100 cities were doing it, and here’s what the data says (from the Marshall Project)…”
Did those “more than 100 cities” include any from the (tiny) number with higher crime rates than Seattle? If not, then Seattle is an outlier from that data set, and you cannot assume Seattle’s experience will follow any trend(s) exhibited by that data set.
In particular, did any of those “more than 100 cities” have a chronically large homeless population, one whose members go into crisis, sometimes violently? If not, then assuming the safety of civilian responders could result in violent injuries to some of those responders. I think we can agree we do not want that to happen, especially during the trial period for civilianized responses in Seattle.
@44: Congratulations, you’ve crossed into the “Seattle’s Fire Department should carefully test, at a small scale, the practice other departments use of putting water on fires in order to extinguish them in order to test whether that could possibly work here” territory.
@45: So, Mayor Wilson would send civilians into a homeless encampment to address a person in crisis, without police backup, even though shootings have already been reported there? Because simply ignoring all the caveats I listed @44 implies she doesn’t care about local conditions, only about your sacredly unquestionable report.
To complete your fabricated example, Seattle’s fire is hotter, and been burning longer, than any yet fought. You’re saying the exact same tools and methods will work on it as did on smaller fires in faraway cities, no need to worry about the safety of SFD.
Good luck with that.
@42: “”Defunding the police, therefore, also means redirecting those funds (and likely more) to other workers and other purposes — unwelcome news for anyone hoping that cop cuts might help with the massive revenue shortfalls cities are currently facing. But it’s the work that needs to be done. Can Seattle do all this? Can America do all this? There’s never been a better time to try.”
Re-directing what was a vague cry for knee-jerk changes back toward police management best practices that are good for good cops, bad for bad guys, and a better deal for taxpayers is brilliant leadership, actually.
@47: “…a vague cry for knee-jerk changes…”
No, the topic was “defund,” which had two very specific points: cutting the SPD’s budget in half (which would magically reform SPD all by itself, BTW), and spending the resulting windfall on other wish-list items, such as non-police responders. Wilson correctly noted this windfall would likely all get spent on the non-police responders (who would actually require even more money), but she agreed the hack-and-slash approach to SPD’s budgeting — the literal origin of the name, “defund,” — was a good idea.
(At least you’re starting toward recognition of her embrace of “defund,” instead of just trying to deny your way out of it. Baby steps!)
@48: You’re so close. Try this: “Wilson correctly noted that rather than taking a chainsaw to the police budget out of rage, using the money from vacant sworn officers to hire civilian staff to unburden the officers we had of all the non-crime tasks we had been forcing them to do would be good for good cops, bad for bad guys, a better deal for taxpayers, and comport with modern professional police best practices.”
@49 you are vastly overestimating the amount of non crime tasks going on.
@50: We know for a stone cold fact that 66% of officer call handling time 2017-2019 was spent on non-crime calls because the city studies computer aided dispatch (CAD) records. And if you want to eyeball whether things have changed, the SPD’s CAD dashboard is public…you can select year by year and see what the biggest buckets of calls are. Same old same old.
(We also know from the data the department submits to the FBI how many serious crimes per officer are handled per year by the department overall – even at the lowest level of staffing in the last few years it never reached the number per handled in 1990.)
@49: Dude, just take the “L” and move on. She was in favor of “defund,” and you haven’t even tried to produce a quote from her renouncing “defund,” which strongly suggests no such quote has ever existed, and you know this full well.
(And I have confidence Herbold and the rest would not take kindly your claim they acted out of “rage,” as they seemed actually to believe they were calmly making good policy. Another valiant — if doomed — effort at goalpost-moving for you there.)
@51 That was six years ago, pre pandemic and pre George Floyd so I’m gonna say your data may be a bit old. Since then we’ve lost half the number of officers. Assuming those statistics are the same today is not even close buy obviously you wont be deterred. Don’t fret though once Comeade Katie takes over I’m sure she’ll lean fully into your plan so we’ll get to see what happens together.
@53: Think about the implications of officer workload shifting. (It hasn’t, but let’s assume it has). That would mean in order to focus on crime, SPD simply stopped responding to non-crime calls, since it hasn’t hired anybody else to redirect them to (except for a few CARES team folks lately).
Which would mean that Harrell’s hiring spree is about spending hiring bonuses to hire sworn officers in a national police shortage in order for officers to…once again pick up non-crime calls.
It would make even less sense under those conditions than it already does.
@54: In a world where all police officers ever do is respond to crime calls, you might have a point.
But here in the real world, if the Wilson administration makes a habit of sending unarmed responders into the homeless encampments Seattle actually has, and one of those unarmed responders gets shot or stabbed, then no amount of you chasing their ambulance, waving your sacredly unquestionable study, shouting about how this didn’t hap– well, wasn’t reported in the past few years, anyway — in Denver or wherever will help that responder, nor the city with any lawsuit that responder might file.
@55: (1) Even if the Wilson administration were to take the unnecessary step of always doing co-response specifically into homeless encampments, a fully staffed CARE team could still handle the vast majority of crisis calls in the city solo. (2) Unless you think both dispatchers and CARE team members are stupid, both of them at any time have the discretion to direct or request police assistance – in the case of the latter, their discretion includes hanging back until police officers arrive.