Now he's off to grift on the political prisoner schtick. Credit: STEPHANIE KEITH / GETTY

Happy first day of school: Yesterday evening, contract negotiations between Seattle Public Schools and the union representing building staffers (custodians, cafeteria workers, etc.) hit an impasse that threatened to delay the first day of school, but the two sides reached a tentative agreement last night, according to the Seattle Times. Good luck catching up on that learning loss, everybody!

Gasp: KUOW ran with the story about Seattle Police Department officers spreading rumors of Police Chief Adrian Diaz having an affair with a staffer he promoted. The rumor has been circulating among cops and right-wing social media / media since February, and KUOW’s story provides … no concrete evidence of the affair, which, to be fair, would be a tough thing to do. 

KUOW’s “goods”: According to the outlet, Chief Diaz’s lawyer, Ted Buck, denied the affair and called Diaz a family man, but he admitted that Diaz visited the woman’s apartment “as the two are friends.” Over the phone, Buck told The Stranger that Diaz “only” visited her apartment with other people “on a couple of occasions” to “assist him with a speech he was working on” in late winter or early spring. KUOW also mentioned that Diaz didn’t advertise for the high-level job; Buck told the outlet that such a move wasn’t unusual, but the station’s “high-level” source said that was unusual. KUOW left it at that; you decide! 

For his part, according to KUOW, Diaz told the Mayor’s office and the ethics commission about the rumor, launched an investigation to find the person/people who started it, and now he’s got one dude on the hook. Buck said a guy confessed to spreading the rumor, and the results of that investigation will drop internally today. (We’ve filed a records request, and Ashley will keep you updated.) Finally, former Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell, who oversaw cop stuff for her uncle’s administration, didn’t buy the rumor and told the NPR affiliate that she thinks “someone is attempting to undermine the chief.” 

Weirdness: It’s obviously news if the police chief is sleeping with a subordinate and promoting her to high-ranking positions, but KUOW found no real evidence of an affair. And, as Harrell is hinting at here, Diaz has political enemies in many places. Anyone in the Mayor’s office and/or any high-level commander at SPD who wants to take a more punitive approach than Diaz has reason to invent and spread this rumor to embarrass him and get him fired. As journalists, we have a duty to substantiate or disprove these sorts of explosive rumors to the best of our abilities, but this piece really only offers one takeaway: If SPD spent as much time trying to clear cases as they do spreading rumors, then maybe they’d earn the public trust they so desperately pretend to want from Seattleites. 

In other news, Bumbershoot looked cool: The Stranger was there. Check it out: 

And now, a brief word from Ashley re: another 2020 protester suing the City for the cops for a violent non-arrest: 

Every Day March organizer files lawsuit against the City: Late last month Tealshawn Turner, who helped organize marches during Seattle’s 2020 George Floyd protests, filed a lawsuit against the City of Seattle over injuries she sustained after an SPD cop allegedly threw her against a window. On Sept 7, 2020, Turner, also known as TK, said she then fell and hit her head, which caused a traumatic brain injury and required her to get 13 stitches. Cops did not render first aid and they did not allow her to contact an attorney despite saying she wasn’t under arrest, according to the lawsuit. Turner asked for an unspecified amount in damages from the City.

Thanks, Ashley! Now back to me. 

Not helping the cause: Former finance director Susana Tantico pleaded guilty to “embezzling more than $3 million” from Country Doctor Community Health Centers (health clinics for poor people) and Community Passageways (a nonprofit that aims to prevent youth detention) over the course of 11 years. According to the Seattle Times, she’ll spend three years and five months in prison. 

And it’s not just nonprofit finance directors: A Tumwater fire chief named Jeff Jernigan “falsified time sheets” between 2020 and 2023, stuffing his pockets with $13,000. “…No disciplinary action was taken against Jernigan because he offered his resignation in June and the outstanding funds were taken out of Jernigan’s final paycheck,” according to KING 5. 

Fuck cars: After the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office finally got around to checking the messages on their non-emergency line, they discovered an “elderly woman” reporting that she hit something on Waller Road in Tacoma at 3 am Saturday night. That something, according to KIRO 7, may have been a 27-year-old guy named Brandon, who was skateboarding. He remains on life support and isn’t expected to survive. Authorities impounded the woman’s car. 

Proudest Boy gets 22 years in jail: A judge sentenced Henry “Enrique” Tarrio to “the longest sentence yet among the hundreds convicted of disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021,” according to the Washington Post. Before the judge imposed the sentence, Tarrio apologized for causing cops grief during the insurrection, but not for serving as “the ultimate leader” of the attempted coup. As he left the courtroom to enter his martyrdom era, “he looked back at his family and supporters, held up two fingers, and blew a kiss with a smile.”

Georgia’s attorney general tries to criminalize protest: The New York Times reports that Republican AG Christopher Carr convinced a grand jury to indict 61 anti-police protesters under the state’s racketeering statute (RICO) for allegedly “engaging in violence, intimidation and property destruction” to stop Cop City, a massive police training facility in the middle of a forest “surrounded by primarily Black residents who overwhelmingly oppose the project.” The state already charged 42 of those protesters under “domestic terrorism” laws, which raised alarms at the ACLU. The state’s claims read like a bad joke: 

If only Democrats had an ounce of this gall: A federal court told the vile Republican racists who run Alabama’s State Legislature to redraw the state’s political boundaries to include two majority-Black districts instead of only one, and the vile Republican racists on the US Supreme Court agreed. Alabama’s vile Republican racists simply refused and submitted another map with only one majority-Black Congressional District, and the same federal court panel struck down the map again. While an “independent” commission draws up a new map, the vile Republican racists plan to appeal the new ruling back up to SCOTUS, according to Politico. All of this power play for only ONE seat in the House of Representatives, perhaps the least consequential position in politics. 

Ukraine update: Ahead of an expected arms deal between the two countries, Nat Sec boy wonder Jake Sullivan “said North Korea would pay ‘a price’ if it sells weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine,” according to Al Jazeera. US officials say Russia maybe possibly making a weapons deal with North Korea shows that sanctions are working. Okay! Meanwhile, this morning Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived in Ukraine for an unannounced visit to announce $1 billion more to help them fight off the Russians, and a couple hours later a Russian missile hit a city close to the eastern front lines, killing 16. 

Bad weekend for sunny singers: Over the weekend, Smash Mouth cofounder Steve Harwell died of liver failure at 56 years of age. On Friday, skin cancer took Boomer King Jimmy Buffet. Among others I often found Buffet at the butt of jokes, but I’ve always had a soft spot for him for two reasons that do not sit well next to one another. The first: Dad and I often listened to Jimmy Buffet on the car ride between mom’s place and his, and we shared several quiet, unacknowledged father-and-son moments while listening to “Son of a Son of a Sailor.” The second: “A Pirate Looks at Forty” soundtracked one of my earliest sexual experiences; we were on a basement couch while my girlfriend’s parents held a Jimmy Buffet party upstairs lol lord forgive us. For both of those reasons, I gotta pay my respects by leaving you with this somewhat charming Letterman interview, wherein Buffet sings one of my favorites, “Come Monday.” 

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com