Seattle Forward

Seattle Needs A Vision Reset . . . Quickly

Seattle needs a vision reset.

The mayor is not seeking re-election. The school superintendent has resigned. The police chief was pushed aside by the city council. The coronavirus pandemic has left us isolated. Downtown is desolate. Where and how we work is being transformed. Many essential workers are struggling mightily to keep up and pay the bills. Our infrastructure systems are inadequately maintained. First responders are overloaded and stretched thin. Campers have taken over many of our parks, greenspaces and sidewalks, preventing others from accessing them safely. Ideological and political divides are pushing us further and further into our dogmatic corners. Herein, opportunity presents itself.  

The urban theorist Richard Florida argues cities and surrounding regions will thrive as we move beyond the pandemic, just as they have following previous calamities: “Covid-19 is a once-in-a-century catastrophe, but it also hands us a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild communities to be

Where Are We Headed?

The challenges of policing in our country did not arise in a vacuum. They connect to a broad array of factors . . . They connect to the fact that in this country police shootings and police misconduct disproportionately affect Black people. The challenges connect, as well, to the shameful American legacy of slavery, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration, to the “war on drugs,” to redlining, and to public schools that have and continue to fail Black children.

 

In this context, and at this time, it is important for someone in my position to say clearly — Black Lives Matter.

 

Black Lives Matter in policing.

 

Black Lives Matter in education.

 

Black Lives Matter in our economic system.

 

We must squarely face our history of racism and injustice, and, frankly, that’s something I don’t believe our country has truly done. We will know that we have when all people of color have equal opportunity, equal protection under the law, and never doubt their standing as Americans.

 

I spoke the above words in an address to the City Council on September 25, 2017, when I was serving as Seattle’s interim Mayor. Now, nearly three years later, here we are again grappling with the same challenges in policing and criminal justice.

The Importance of Naming

Sometimes it is important to identify things, to name them, to call them out. Naming allows us to remember. It gives us a reference point, focuses our attention.

The Orlando attack very early in the morning on June 12 on Pulse, a gay nightclub, is one of those times. It was hate aimed at a specific population, our sisters and brothers in the LGBTQ and Latino communities. The man who committed this horrific hate crime killed 49 people and injured dozens more.

Hate crimes target LGBTQ people more than any other group. The New York Times reported last week that the FBI

Some Good News About State Prisons

The following article was sent out in my City View Newsletter, which you can sign up to receive here.

The state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) has been in the news a lot recently because of the data errors over prisoner release dates. But there’s another little noticed story from the DOC that is very worthy of highlighting.

In 2010, the City Council hosted UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman at Seattle’s Town Hall to talk about his new book on how to have less crime and less punishment. It was a packed event. Professor Kleiman talked about an innovative approach in Hawaii for how parole violators were supervised involving a shift away from sporadic and severe sanctions when parole violations were discovered to more modest sanctions applied consistently.

The old model: you may have multiple parole violations, you likely won’t get caught, but when you do you’ll be in big trouble (weeks, months or even years back in jail or prison).

The new model: if you violate the terms of your release, you will be held accountable for your actions immediately, but sanctions will be much more modest (a day or two in jail).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the new model was way more effective at curbing criminal behavior, while at the same time saving resources and reducing jail time. What’s not to like?

Final Decisions on 2016 Budget

The Full Council voted to adopt the City’s 2016 budget today, incorporating changes Councilmembers have made from the Mayor’s proposal over the last two months.

The Mayor’s proposed budget provided us with a good start, including funding for a hospital-based gun violence intervention program at Harborview Medical Center.

I’m happy to report that all of the items I pushed for were adopted into the Council’s final package. These included funding to study an educational center for immigrants and refugees with foreign professional degrees, increasing dedicated funding for arts programs, support for small manufacturers, advancing a study to incentivize shared parking facilities in private buildings, expanding funds for the reentry and job assistance program Career Bridge, and language to direct City staff to work with Seattle Public Schools on student population growth planning.

I also have been working closely with community leaders and Councilmember Harrell to provide City support for a new “Opportunity Center” in southeast Seattle. This budget will provide nearly $2 million in seed funding for this project, which is expected to include job training, affordable housing, meeting space, or other amenities a community-led process will help determine.

The Hard Work of Innovative Policing

Two weeks ago I spoke on a panel at a White House forum on innovations in policing about Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program. The LEAD program allows the police and prosecutors to redirect nonviolent, low level adult offenders away from the criminal justice system and to social service providers.

I’m a big fan of necessary innovations like LEAD as we seek on many fronts to address the failure of mass incarceration in this country. You may have heard this statistic: the United States accounts for 5% of the world’s population, but we hold 25% of the world’s prisoners. Our country incarcerates far too many people (including juveniles) and perpetuates a criminal justice system that punishes people of color at a much higher rate than their white counterparts. We’ve even shamefully nurtured a for-profit prison industry that now applies political pressure to achieve higher levels of detention and incarceration.

It’s just wrong to put individuals addicted to alcohol and drugs or suffering through a mental health crisis in prison if their crimes are low-level, non-violent, petty offenses. Unfortunately, as a society, we do it far too often.

LEAD is one response to this tragic reality.

The False Promise of the Death Penalty

Two high-profile death penalty trials are underway in King County Superior Court: the 2009 assassination of Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton and the 2007 Christmas Eve mass murders of three generations of the Anderson family in Carnation. Both crimes were horrific, senseless acts of hatred and violence that caused incredibly searing pain, suffering and loss for the victims’ families, friends, neighbors and the broader community.

But, the death penalty delivers nothing more than a false promise.

I was a Seattle police officer in the 1970s. I spent many nights in my patrol car doing exactly what Officer Brenton and his partner, Britt Sweeney, were doing when they were shot. As a Councilmember, I went to Harborview the night Officer Brenton died. I spoke briefly with Officer Sweeney. The targeted murder of Officer Brenton strikes a deep chord of grief within me. As a father of three and grandfather of two, the slaying of the Andersons does the same.

I want swift and certain justice delivered to their killers, but the death penalty won’t provide that swiftness or certainty.

Some people believe they are safer because of the death penalty; they’re not. 

Reflections on Ferguson and Seattle

The following article was posted today on Crosscut.

It has been just over a week since the grand jury made its decision in the Ferguson case, my hope is that we can soon get beyond the conflicting evidence presented to the jurors and focus on the undeniable and powerful subtext that permeates this story. Understanding this subtext holds the key to the change I believe we all want to see. We must also identify specific actions that will contribute to this change or risk losing an opportunity to move forward.

Among African Americans, tension and conflict with the police is deeply rooted in decades of mistrust and weariness over police misconduct, corruption and persistent crime in many neighborhoods. It is a relationship that is profoundly troubled and, as we have seen, all too often leads to tragic consequences.

Tragic for black men and boys who are arrested and imprisoned or killed by police at a disproportionate rate. Tragic for black families who often live in neighborhoods with high rates of crime and who urgently desire effective police services. Tragic for entire cities that must carry the moral and monetary costs of this reality.

How did we get here? And, looking forward, what can we do to change it?

Justice for Our Youth

The City Council voted Monday to pass a land use amendment that will allow the County more flexibility in designing a new Children and Family Justice Center on 12^th Avenue in the Central District. (In 2012, King County voters approved a nine-year, $210 million levy to replace the deteriorating facility.)

While a text amendment to the land use code initiated the Council’s process, the public discussion wasn’t really about a land use decision. It was a discussion about the nature of our juvenile justice system. Many community advocates gave eloquent and passionate testimony about how the current system fails youth – particularly youth of color who are disproportionately represented among those detained. They don’t want more money spent on a system that perpetuates these inequities.

While King County has made admirable progress reducing the use of juvenile detention over the last 15-20 years, continuing high levels of racial disparities show that we have not escaped the nationwide scourge of mass incarceration. We know that detention is not a good place for our youth and yet we struggle with how to balance that reality while keeping the broader community safe.

Boiled down, the juvenile justice system centers on a few important desires:

• The desire to help our youth in difficult situations;
• The desire to have a fair justice system free from racial disproportionality; and
• The desire to keep our communities safe.

I believe everyone involved in the discussion to date – members of the community, City government, and King County government – shares these desires. At the same time, I think those working within the system sometimes feel that community advocates ignore hard realities about public safety, while the advocates sometimes feel that individuals in the system lack imagination and motivation to try alternative methods of justice.

If we move past these initial feelings, there is space for a very productive dialogue that leads to action.

A Groundbreaking Shift in Criminal Justice

Yesterday, amid a very full day discussing gun safety measures, criminal background checks, public campaign financing and homeless encampments, the Council heard about a groundbreaking shift in the way Washington State supervises individuals recently released from prison. 

The simple premise behind the change is this: swift and certain sanctions are more effective in changing the behavior of offenders under community supervision than sporadic and more severe punishments. In other words, an immediate night or weekend in jail successfully reinforces the message that condition-of-release violations bring consequences; a longer sentence announced a month after a violation occurs feels arbitrary to the violator and is not an effective way to change behavior.