Tag: public safety

Drugs, Economy, homelessness, land use, Mayor Harrell

“Downtown Is You”: Harrell Unveils New Downtown Plan Against Backdrop of Anti-Sweeps Protest

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks to a crowd of supporters and press at Westlake Park

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell gathered supporters in Westlake Plaza Wednesday morning to announce his latest downtown activation plan, officially titled “Downtown Is You.” But the press event was initially sidelined by a group of anti-sweeps protesters holding signs and chanting, “stop the sweeps” and other slogans from a few feet away. After halting his prepared remarks, Harrell hopped down from the stage and attempted to get the protesters to be quiet, but gave up and returned to the stage after several responded that they didn’t trust his offer to talk to them in a different venue.

“Westlake Center is a center for civic engagement,” he told the audience. “Unfortunately, that’s not civic engagement—that’s just yelling.”

“These [unsheltered] folks you see down here, they’re not strangers to me. I grew up on these streets,” Harrell continued. Gesturing toward the group of young activists, he added: “How dare anyone say I’m going to sweep anybody. I don’t see anyone over there I grew up with.”

Under Harrell, the city has dramatically increased the speed and frequency of encampment removals.

The seven-point downtown plan Harrell announced Wednesday does not directly address encampments. However, it does envision a downtown occupied by shoppers, sports fans, and residents of new high-rise apartment towers along a section of Third Avenue between Stewart and Union Streets, where drug users and unsheltered people frequently congregate. The proposed upzone includes the block that includes a McDonald’s and a check cashing outlet as well as the block anchored by Ross Dress for Less.

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At a press briefing on Tuesday, mayoral advisor (and soon-to-be deputy mayor) Tim Burgess said “several” developments in the area were “ready to go” once a proposed upzone goes through. The proposal would increase the maximum height for new buildings from 170 feet to 440 (460 if new developments include child care or education facilities) on about five blocks that are adjacent to a area where 450-foot-high buildings are already allowed. The city’s land use database does not include any active permits for these blocks.

On Tuesday, Burgess said the proposed rezone reflects “a recognition that we need to make some dramatic changes in order to shift what’s been several decades now of problematic street uses and disorder.”

Police almost outnumbered protesters during a demonstration at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s announcement of his downtown activation strategy.

Harrell’s plan also includes legislation to allow a broader mix of uses on the ground floor of buildings (apartments or conference spaces instead of retail, for example) and throughout buildings themselves, in the form of “vertical residential neighborhoods within buildings” that allow residents to access everything they need, from child care to retail stores to pickleball courts, inside their buildings.

The idea is a nod to the fact that—Harrell’s back-to-work order and admonishments notwithstanding—many people have continued to work at least partly from home, leaving significant vacancies in downtown office buildings. “I don’t think this is a philosophical shift away from retail” serving downtown office workers, McIntyre said Tuesday. “It’s embracing some flexibility and some new ideas and wanting to encourage a different mix on the ground floor area as the as the city continues to change.”

Another piece of legislation would make a half-block of Pike Street between First and Second Avenues pedestrian-only, connecting Pike Place Market Market to—well, one half-block of downtown directly adjacent to, but not part of, the market. (Asked whether the mayor would consider prohibiting car traffic in Pike Place Market—where pedestrians compete for space on the historic brick streets with exhaust-spewing cars—Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre said the city was still “talking to Pike Place Market … to figure out what what that might look like,” but had no immediate plans to get rid of cars in the Market, a change pedestrian advocates have been demanding for decades.

 

Beyond those concrete legislative proposals, the plan consists mostly of expanded pilot projects (doubling the number of businesses participating in Seattle Restored, a pop-up project that fills empty storefronts), initiatives that are already underway (reopening City Hall Park, “more murals” downtown), and ideas that are still very much in the whiteboard stages. It also incorporates many aspirational ideas that would require significant additional funding, such as completing the downtown streetcar, putting a lid over I-5, and creating a new “arts district” from South Lake Union to Pioneer Square.

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks to a group of Stop the Sweeps protesters at Westlake Park.
Mayor Bruce Harrell briefly spoke to protesters before returning to his press event.

And, of course, it assumes a heavier police presence downtown—a mostly unspoken, but bedrock, element of the proposal. “Make Downtown Safe and Welcoming” is actually number one on the plan’s list of seven priorities, starting with arrests of people “distributing and selling illegal drugs” (and, presumably, using them—Harrell mentioned that a bill criminalizing drug possession and public use will likely pass in July). The safety plan also includes a number of initiatives to address addiction that Harrell announced in April, along with a plan to help private property owners remove graffiti—a particular burr under Harrell’s saddle.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the police from arresting people for tagging or graffiti, finding that Seattle’s broadly worded law “likely…violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by being both vague and overbroad.” On Wednesday, I asked Harrell—who had just expounded on the difference, as he sees it, between “art” and “graffiti” (“One word: It’s unwanted”)—what he would do if the judge overturned the law.

“We have to have the ability to arrest people for unwanted graffiti, so if there’s precise language in the law that is unconstitutional, that is vague, that’s ambiguous, we have to fix it,” Harrell said. “If we lose the lawsuit, we go back to the drawing board and figure out what the deficiencies are in the law, and we fix it or remedy it.”

“This graffiti stuff just drives me nuts,” Harrell added.

City Council, Cops, Mayor Durkan, Police, public safety

As Public Demands for Police Cuts Continue, Parking Enforcement Officers Could Take On Greater Role
Seattle Parking Enforcement Officer (Photo via Seattle Police Department)

By Paul Kiefer

During a public safety budget hearing last Thursday, Seattle City Council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold suggested a wider role for an agency that’s received relatively little attention during the recent debates about reducing the size and role of the Seattle Police Department: SPD’s Parking Enforcement Unit.

The idea of expanding the role of parking officers to include duties currently performed by armed police comes as the city council deliberates on Mayor Jenny Durkan’s proposed 2021 budget, which includes only minor cuts to SPD’s budget. At a public hearing Tuesday night, dozens of residents asked the council to amend Durkan’s proposal to defund SPD by at least 50 percent, in line with what protesters and advocates have been demanding for months.  

After raising the issue of overtime spending for SPD staffing at special events, Herbold said she was “grateful to [parking enforcement officers] for signaling their willingness to take on that work.” She pointed to a letter written by the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers’ Guild to council members expressing interest in expanding their duties to include not only a greater role at special events, but also an array of other roles currently filled by more highly paid sworn SPD officers. As Herbold noted, SPEOG also said that they would prefer to move into the proposed new Department of Public Safety, rather than the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), as Durkan has proposed.

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The concept of the Department of Public Safety originates in a resolution the council passed in August recommending the creation of a “civilian-led Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention to remove certain functions from the Seattle Police Department.” However, the absence of any concrete foundations for the department has become a sticking point in the ongoing budget discussions. The budget Durkan transmitted last week limited budget cuts to SPD on the grounds that the city has not yet developed alternatives to police, while the council contended that developing those alternatives will require shifting money from SPD’s budget.

In the letter to council, the parking officers offered to take over array of “services that were formerly provided by sworn SPD officers” ranging from managing red light violations to responding to car prowls, minor accidents, illegally parked RVs and abandoned vehicles. Currently, those types of incidents make up roughly 20 percent of the calls for service to which SPD responds; traffic incidents alone account for nearly 15 percent of all calls. While parking enforcement officers can’t replace SPD at to every traffic- or car-related incident, the guild argues that they can take on a sizable portion of SPD’s workload, which would in turn significantly reduce interactions between civilians and armed police officers.

Union president Nanette Toyoshima, who wrote the letter to council, said Durkan’s proposal to move parking enforcement into SDOT caught her unit off-guard. “We only learned of this potential move through Twitter and a press conference,” Toyoshima said, referring to Mayor Durkan’s July 13 announcement that she intends to move a variety of civilian units out of SPD, including parking enforcement and the 911 call center. “It was a bit of a rude awakening after over 50 years with SPD.”

She said the guild had no complaints about being housed in SPD, but that they were also responsive to the public push to civilianize some roles held by police. “No matter where we’re moved—to a new [public safety] department, to SDOT, or if we stay in SPD —we’re interested in being part of the solution,” she said. Continue reading “As Public Demands for Police Cuts Continue, Parking Enforcement Officers Could Take On Greater Role” →

City Council, Crime, criminal justice, Mayor Durkan, Police

As Seattle Weighs 911 Options, a Promising Program Shows the Potential, and Limitations, of Community-Based Crisis Response
Reverend Martin Lawson at the scene of a shooting in Pioneer Square on September 20th.

By Paul Kiefer

Just before 7:00 on Sunday night, an argument between two men at the encampment next to the King County Courthouse in Pioneer Square ended in a shooting. The shooter ran away into the night; the wounded man was carried by ambulance to Harborview Medical Center, where he was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

About 30 minutes later, as a police officer was busy taking down the crime scene tape, a man in a black motorcycle helmet appeared from below the Yesler Avenue Bridge. He walked down the row of tents and tarps along the courthouse wall, asking witnesses for details about the shooter and the victim. He couldn’t get answers about the shooter, but longtime park residents said they didn’t recognize the wounded man—he was new to the encampment. Meanwhile, Seattle police officers standing a few yards away were busy searching a stolen car found on the scene for any evidence the shooter may have dumped when he ran.

The man in the motorcycle helmet was Reverend Martin Lawson, the head of the new four-person Critical Incident Response Team organized by Community Passageways, a South Seattle-based nonprofit that has been a center of attention in this year’s citywide conversations about alternatives to policing.

In the past four months, members of the Seattle City Council and the Mayor have regularly pointed to Community Passageways as a model for community-based public safety. The group already holds three city contracts: two for programs that divert young people from the criminal legal system and provide mentorship and counseling (together totaling $845,000) and a third, $300,000 contract for the Critical Incident Response Team, which formally launched three months ago.

As the city weighs its options for non-police 911 response, the Critical Incident Response Team provides a case study in the role community organizations might play in improving emergency responses to violent crime. Among the clearest lessons of that case study, however, are the team’s limitations. Because their model is grounded in community relationships, the Critical Incident Response Team can only work within the boundaries of their community. Introducing the model city-wide would involve replicating the team, not expanding it.

As new as the team may be, Community Passageways founder and CEO Dominique Davis says the program is modeled after work he’s been doing for years. Davis, a former gang member, first began responding to shootings in South Seattle while working as a football coach nearly two decades ago. “I was getting calls from kids I coached, kids I knew from around the neighborhood who would say, ‘coach, come get me—someone just shot at us, my friend just got shot,” Davis said. “So I started doing critical incident response on my own. I would go pick them up, and sometimes I had to take them to the hospital.”

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Davis says that he soon began to run into barriers to his informal crisis response work. “I would show up at the scene of a shooting, and a kid might be laid out in the back seat of a car with a bullet in him, but he wouldn’t want to go to the hospital because he didn’t want to get interrogated by police,” he said. “So I wound up calling prosecutors in the middle of the night, having them connect me to detectives and saying, ‘look, I need to get this kid to the hospital and I can’t convince him to go if you’re going to interrogate him.'” As Davis started reaching agreements with law enforcement, he says he saw an opportunity to formalize the role of community members in responding to violence.

For much of the past decade, Davis’ criminal justice reform work has centered on diversionary programs: He co-founded the program now known as Choose 180, which works to reduce legal penalties for young people facing misdemeanor charges, nearly a decade ago, and he narrowed his focus to serve gang-involved and incarcerated Black youth (ages 15-25) by founding Community Passageways in 2017. Those programs, he says, rely on pre-existing relationships within Seattle’s relatively small Black community.

Deshaun Nabors, an ambassador-in-training for a Community Passageways diversionary program called Deep Dive, echoed Davis. “This is about as community-based as it gets,” he said. “There’s barely ever more than two degrees of separation between any two people—I mean staff and clients. That’s where [Community Passageways’] soul is.” Nabors is a testament to the organization’s reliance on existing relationships: Davis knew Nabors’ uncle, and reached out to him while Nabors awaited sentencing for a robbery in 2019. Nabors entered the Deep Dive program earlier this year.

In many cases, the Critical Incident Response Team relies on the same community relationships to field emergency calls. Lawson said they’ve received emergency calls from the parents of shooting victims and witnesses who have team members’ phone numbers; in other cases, including the fatal shooting in July near Garfield High School that killed 18-year-old Adriel Webb, team members lived close enough to the incidents to hear the gunshots and arrive at the scene within minutes. The team has received about 15 calls a month so far.

“This is about as community-based as it gets,” he said. “There’s barely ever more than two degrees of separation between … staff and clients. That’s where [Community Passageways’] soul is.” —Deshaun Nabors, Community Passageways ambassador-in-training

Lawson, who joined Community Passageways in March after three years directing a prison ministry in North Carolina, said team members have also taken peacekeeping roles at another 20 gatherings—including memorials, rallies, and a multi-day assignment at the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone (CHOP)—to de-escalate any conflicts among young people, especially those with gang ties, whom they know through their personal networks.

Lawson said he was on peacekeeping duty at CHOP on June 20th when Marcel Long shot and killed 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson after a dice game went awry. While he wasn’t able to respond in time to stop that shooting, Lawson said that he and fellow Critical Incident Response Team members rushed to the scene and spotted another several other teenagers—familiar faces—drawing guns to retaliate. “They knew us, we knew them, and we talked them down before anyone else got hurt,” he explained while standing on the corner of 4th and Yesler as witnesses to Sunday night’s shooting started to disperse.

Lawson said he was also present as a peacekeeper at the memorial for Adriel Webb on the night after his killing. Unfortunately, he said, “we’re still so short-staffed, so we decided to leave once it got late.” Not long after the team members left, a still-unidentified gunman shot 19-year-old Jamezz Johnson in the head, killing him.

The unit’s role as crisis responders, Lawson explained, doesn’t look like the job of police—in order to maintain community trust, and particularly the trust of gang-involved youth, it can’t. In fact, Lawson said his team members make a point of not interacting with police when responding to a call or serving as peacekeepers; at the scene of the shooting in Pioneer Square on Sunday, Lawson never came within twenty feet of an officer.

Lawson said the Critical Response Team often interviews witnesses and gathers intelligence after shootings, although they don’t share the intelligence they gather with investigating officers to maintain their network’s trust. Team members’ personal relationships with community members, and particularly with gang-involved community members, have allowed them to keep tabs on the movements of known gunmen and to intervene before gang members can retaliate against their rivals. At least one of the team members is an inactive gang member himself, said Davis; that member maintains a direct line of communication with his gang’s leadership, and Davis claims he used it to stop a retaliatory attack earlier this year. 

But when Lawson arrived at the scene of the Sunday night shooting in Pioneer Square, the limitations of the Critical Incident Response Team’s role as a violence prevention program became clear. After his brief conversations with park residents, Lawson signaled that he didn’t plan to stick around. “When shootings happen in this part of the city, we show up because there’s a possibility that one of the kids we know was involved. Sometimes they come here to sell drugs to the people who live in the park, and if they shoot someone or get shot, we should respond.” Continue reading “As Seattle Weighs 911 Options, a Promising Program Shows the Potential, and Limitations, of Community-Based Crisis Response” →

City Council, Crime, criminal justice, Featured, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Police

Durkan Withholds Funding for Nationally Recognized LEAD Diversion Program
Mayor Jenny Durkan on a tour of Ballard businesses in October.

After squabbling with the city council over funding for Seattle’s nationally recognized arrest-diversion program Mayor Jenny Durkan has decided to withhold a majority of the program’s funding for 2020 and hire a consultant to analyze the program and make recommendations on whether and under what conditions to fund it.

The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program, created and run by the Public Defender Association in collaboration with city and King County law-enforcement agencies, provides case management and referrals to services and housing for people engaged in low-level drug and prostitution crimes. Started as an arrest-diversion program in Belltown in 2011, LEAD has expanded to cover much of the city, and now accepts referrals through “social contacts” in addition to arrest diversions. Last year, PDA director Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Foundation award (commonly known as a genius grant) for her work on the program.

The council agreed to provide an additional $3.5 million to LEAD last year after lengthy negotiations and a promise of $1.5 million from Ballmer Group that was contingent on the $3.5 million in additional city funding. The money was supposed to allow LEAD to reduce case managers’ caseloads and expand the popular program geographically. Last month, though, at Durkan’s direction, the city’s Human Services Department sent LEAD a contract that only includes the $2.6 million the mayor proposed in her initial budget, with the rest contingent on an evaluation by New York City-based consultant Bennett Midland, which signed an $86,000 contract with the city in late December.

“The consultants will address appropriate protocols for referrals in partnership with SPD and LEAD and surface best practices in case management, behavioral health treatment and diversion,” senior deputy mayor Mike Fong told LEAD’s senior management in an email in December. “This information will inform their recommendations of relevant performance metrics to be incorporated into an amended contract and for overall consideration of what caseload levels should be. We expect the final report and recommendations this Spring.”

“Revising the contract to add the increased funding of $3.5 million will be informed by the recommendations from an independent program evaluation,” Fong wrote.

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According to Bennett Midland’s contract, the goal of the consultants’ work will be “to establish a shared understanding of LEAD’s existing deliverables, reporting capabilities, protocols, and procedures in order to develop an appropriate set of performance metrics, inform future program evaluations, and align future budget resources and contract provisions with the program’s foundational goals.”

LEAD says that if the mayor does not release the approved funding this year, LEAD will have to cancel its expansion plans and lay off staff. Currently, LEAD project director Tara Moss says, “LEAD is breaking, because legitimate demand far exceeds our capacity to provide case management. By its nature, it’s a program meant to help officers resolve new current problems, as well as provide long term support to people whose behavior has been problematic in the past.  So for LEAD to be healthy and useful, it has to take appropriate, priority new referrals from police and businesses.  Our police partners are making appropriate high priority referrals that we have no space to absorb, and even if we shut our doors to new referrals tomorrow—which would be the end of LEAD as we know it—we can’t even sustain the current caseload.”

“We are hopeful that the Mayor’s office will release the full funding. We would be really disappointed to see the nature of our grant fundamentally change from expanding a successful program to simply paying for something we thought government had agreed to fund. That would be a loss for the city.” — Statement from Ballmer Group

Durkan’s decision to withhold approved funding from a city contractor is highly unusual and introduces a new uncertainty into the annual budget process. Ordinarily, the mayor proposes a budget, the council amends it, and the adopted budget becomes the budget for the following year. There is little if any precedent for for the mayor’s office to reject the adopted budget for a specific program on essentially a line-item basis. Council member Lisa Herbold, who chairs the council’s human services and public safety committee, says she can’t recall “any budget adds not being funded” after a budget was finalized and passed in the two decades she has worked as a council aide or council member. A resolution “declaring that the City is committed to ensuring that evidence-based, law enforcement-engaged, pre-booking diversion programs, such as LEAD, receive the funding necessary to accept all priority qualifying referrals” passed unanimously in November.

Funding from Ballmer Group was explicitly tied to the $3.5 million in additional city funding, although [UPDATE] a spokesperson for the group says they do not intend to rescind the funding now. In a statement, Ballmer Group said, “We are hopeful that the Mayor’s office will release the full funding. We would be really disappointed to see the nature of our grant fundamentally change from expanding a successful program to simply paying for something we thought government had agreed to fund. That would be a loss for the city.”

“Very sad that we are facing this uphill battle AGAIN.  I thought we had your funding straightened out and on a smooth path; after our budget was complete, Council’s  intentions to fund LEAD expansion was clear.”—Former City Council member Sally Bagshaw

LEAD had already begun to expand its services to include new parts of the city, signing leases on new field offices in SoDo, Capitol Hill, and North Seattle and preparing to add staff through a nationwide search, Daugaard told key LEAD stakeholders in an email last month. “Now it’s far from clear that we should proceed with any of this.” According to Moss, LEAD’s current preference is to “act as if” the $3.5 million will come through midyear, but that’s a gamble—one that Moss says “requires City assurance that the approved funding will be made available by mid-year,” regardless of whether Durkan decides to fund the program after her consultants come out with their report.

Continue reading “Durkan Withholds Funding for Nationally Recognized LEAD Diversion Program” →

Affordability, City Council, Crime, Density, Development, Diversity, Election 2017, Elections, gentrification, homelessness, land use, Transit, Transportation

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Pat Murakami

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Image result for pat murakami seattle

Most Seattleites had probably never heard of Pat Murakami, a Mount Baker neighborhood activist and a candidate for the Seattle City Council seat held for the last two years by Lorena Gonzalez, until the Seattle Times endorsed her in July. But for those who pay attention debates over development and crime in the South End, Murakami’s name is familiar. As head of the Mount Baker Community Club and president of the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council, Murakami opposed efforts to locate Casa Latina, the day-labor center that serves primarily Spanish-speaking immigrant workers, to a site on Rainier Avenue; unsuccessfully fought El Centro De La Raza’s plans to provide services and affordable housing at the Beacon Hill light rail station; and led efforts to prevent transit-oriented development out of the Rainier Valley. In its endorsement, the Times editorial board wrote that Murakami would “broaden the council’s representation and strengthen the voice of residents who own homes as well as those who rent.”

The Times endorsement helped push Murakami through the primary with 19.71 percent of the vote, although it scarcely reduced Gonzalez’s landslide; she came out of this year’s primary with 64.17 percent of the vote, compared to 65.02 percent in 2015, when she faced a neighborhood activist opponent with similar political views, Bill Bradburd.

I sat down with Murakami, who runs an IT and computer repair firm, in her office in Georgetown.

The C Is for Crank [ECB]: I know you’re opposed to a lot of the policies the city council has adopted over the years, but what’s your specific critique of council member Gonzalez?

Pat Murakami [PM] Public safety is a big priority to me, obviously, and I don’t think she’s done enough in that role. I believe that body cameras should have been on officers a long time ago. I think we need Shot Spotter (an acoustic gunshot locator system) down here in South Seattle.

Another thing on public safety: I don’t think she’s doing anything to address major disasters like an earthquake in Seattle. I was in Alaska in 1964 [for the so-called Good Friday earthquake]. I remember that earthquake like it was yesterday, and I take disaster preparedness extremely seriously. Here, in my other office, at home, I have food, I have water, I have cookstoves and propane for heat or cooking, and I’m ready to sit in for two weeks. But we have the highest density of poverty of anywhere in the city [in South Seattle] and we don’t have the resources that the folks who don’t have the money to buy the dehydrated food would need, and we’re going to have a hot mess on our hands in South Seattle in particular.

ECB: Do you take issue with the police accountability legislation council member Gonzalez’s committee passed? What steps would you take to improve police accountability in Seattle?

PM: First, I would give credit where credit was due—the Community Police Commission wrote that legislation. Lorena likes to take credit for it. Well, passing good legislation shouldn’t give you a gold star as a city council member.  And it should have been done a long time ago. We have a serious problem. I was there testifying that [former police chief] John Diaz should not have been our chief of police. She wasn’t there. She was in Seattle at the time. She could have spoken out.

Another issue—we have we only have 60 percent of the police officers we should have. I want a fully staffed police department so they can be out in the community and engaging with people and doing preventative work—going into the schools, serving as a mentor, playing late-night basketball with the kids, talking to people on the street, like, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ Think of the dynamic of Jackson Street. Everyone knows gang members hang out on certain parts of Jackson Street. What if there was a foot patrol officer that just kind of walks up and down the street and is talking to those men? The whole dynamic could change and they could redirect them to other activities.

“I didn’t initially like the signs, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ because I was thinking that’s one more thing that’s divisive, because all lives matter. But I’ve changed my mind and I’ve decided that until black lives matter, no lives matter.”

I know Lorena is very opposed to bringing in former members of the military, and I disagree with that. There are military people and people that served in the military, and we just need to find the ones that served in the military but are not militaristic in their approach. They actually would be further along in the training [when they join the force] and we could get them into uniform a lot sooner. We are having some problems with recruiting. We need the officers. They’re our first responders, and if there’s an emergency, almost all of our police officers live outside Seattle. So if we have an earthquake and it’s supposed to be all hands on the deck, they might not be able to even get to us, depending on conditions of the roads. Then we’ll be in big trouble. So we actually need a larger contingent of officers on the street during each shift, in the event we have something where we’re cut off.

“There are military people and people that served in the military, and we just need to find the ones that served in the military but are not militaristic in their approach. They actually would be further along in the training [when they join the force] and we could get them into uniform a lot sooner.”

ECB: Is there anything in particular you would do to accelerate police reform?

PM:  I’d like to see more citizen oversight. Let’s say an officer seemed aggressive or angry. I think minor things need to be reported and dealt with, that won’t necessarily go on their employment record, but that they should realize that they need to be more polite to whomever they’re dealing with—whether it’s somebody that just robbed somebody or they’re breaking up a fight or somebody calls them names, they still need to be polite to the person that they’re dealing with. I don’t care what kind of criminal it is. I think we need the citizen commission to do things like visit the precincts and have a conversation with the police.

I don’t think they have a single former officer on the Citizens [Police] Commission. I think we should have about two. There should not be enough of them that they can outvote the group. but have two that are former officers that have good records. so that they can explain to the folks what their perspective would have been as an officer and everyone that’s on the commission should go through the [Community] Police Academy. I think it gives you a sense of how stressful their jobs are.

I think we need we have serious problems in this country, but we also need police, and we need to have that conversation where somewhere in the middle is the right thing for our society. I think there is still too much division. I didn’t initially like the signs, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ because I was thinking that’s one more thing that’s divisive, because all lives matter. But I’ve changed my mind and I’ve decided that until black lives matter, no lives matter. So we really need some serious changes in society, and I’m willing to work on those things from a balanced perspective. I think Lorena just tends to be more anti-police, and I realize the sacrifices that good officers make.

I want junior officers, and apparently the union doesn’t want that. I want people in a white shirt that don’t carry a gun that could go to a burglary, where you know it’s safe, the burglar is long gone, and they could take the report photos and dust for prints, so then we’d have more officers [on the streets].

ECB: As an opponent of the mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability plan, which your opponent supported, which parts of HALA would you like to revisit?

PM: I think the whole thing should be revisited. It was written by developers for developers, and we need community input. I don’t know why the city is so averse to actually listening to community members. They’ll make up all kinds of excuses, like, ‘Oh. the people in the room aren’t diverse enough, blah blah blah.’ I’m throughout this community. I have friends in subsidized housing. I have friends in a huge variety of ethnic backgrounds and races, and everybody wants the same four things. All we have to do is make decisions that help ensure that people eventually become property owners, if possible, so that they can build wealth; that their kids get to go to a good school; that they have a job that pays decent wages; and that they can live in a safe community. If we make decisions on that basis and never try just to dump stuff in one area and have one part of the community in one neighborhood bear all the burden of social problems, we’d have a better city.

My dream is: I went down to South Center, to the Olive Garden, and I looked around and was like, ‘This is like the who’s who of the United Nations. There are people from all over the world there, of all different races, and it’s not the cheapest restaurant. This is, to me, diversity. Everybody’s financially comfortable. In Seattle, the diversity is, people of color tend to be impoverished. You go over to Bellevue and you’ll see middle-class racial diversity. That is my vision.

I’d like to think about the entire community when development is done and not just the best interest of the developers. I want neighbors to have a say in where the density goes, and I want the density to fit into the neighborhood. Let’s take Eastlake, for example. You’ve got houses going up a hillside that all have views, and they’re talking about raising the height limits on everything. Why not just put all the density up against the freeway, not affect the views, and just go much higher than you were planning to along the freeway? Then they get a view and everybody down the hill maintains theirs.

“My dream is: I went down to South Center, to the Olive Garden, and I looked around and was like, ‘This is like the who’s who of the United Nations. There are people from all over the world there, of all different races, and it’s not the cheapest restaurant. This is, to me, diversity. Everybody’s financially comfortable.”

If we have people driving around and around looking for a parking spot, that’s not helping the environment. We have to have enough parking to accommodate those people. If we want our streets to be parking lots like they are in New York City, then just go ahead and develop anywhere without off-street parking. We can have the economy go to a grinding halt and force everybody out of their vehicles, but we have to face reality. We’re getting the cart before the horse too often.

ECB: What do you mean by a workable transit system?

PM: I’d like to see more connector buses. They actually cut bus lines after light rail went in, and made it more difficult for people, and I know people in my neighborhood [Mount Baker, which has a light rail station] that drove all the way to Tukwila to park for free to ride light rail into downtown. Now, how does that make environmental sense at all? They should have built parking lots near the light rail stations. There’s no parking along ML King [Jr. Way], and I know what the crimes are. Most people are mugged within 300 feet of light rail or a major bus stop, and that’s been true for years and years. I personally would not ride light rail without five other people after dark ever, okay?

ECB: Why not?

PM: People have bene mugged right after they get off, especially a woman by herself at night. I stopped wearing my necklace that my husband gave me because necklaces are literally just snatched right off your neck. You don’t take out your electronics when you’re on the light rail. The police know. They tell us there’s somebody that sits on there, they case it, they get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, I’m following this person’ and the car comes up behind. Once they’re at the stop, the guy will try to take something from the person that’s walking, and if they don’t give it freely, then the other people will get out of the car and forcefully take it, and then they hop into the car and zoom off.

I think we need to think outside the box. Maybe we need to take advantage of our topography and have aerial trams going from hilltop to hilltop. They would be a lot less expensive to put in, less intrusive, and you maybe lease space from an existing building owner and have the stop on top of their building.

ECB: What do you think of Mike O’Brien’s proposal to create more places for people living in their cars to park without getting towed away for unpaid tickets?

PM: I don’t think it’s a good idea. Not all, but some—enough—people in RVs are actually dangerous and have assaulted parking enforcement, so they’re not necessarily people that should be indefinitely in neighborhoods. That’s one issue. The biggest issue is, I don’t support anything that is going to encourage the creation of a permanent underclass. Accepting that people live in RVs and tents is wrong.

We are now getting a rat infestation problem where a lot of RVs are located. I was at a meeting in South Park and seniors were complaining that they live in a facility called Arrowhead [Gardens, run by the Seattle Housing Authority], and they couldn’t open up their windows because the stench of human feces that’s out on the street is enough to knock them over. It’s not just a public safety issue, it’s a public health issue.

“Just like with sex offenders, it’s better that everybody knows where [people with criminal records] are, versus, they could be anywhere and you don’t know who you’re getting as a potential tenant. If they’re in one place and they’re kind of being monitored, you can see if they’re going back to their old habits.”

ECB: But would you agree that the larger problem is that we don’t have adequate affordable housing, and won’t for a long time?

PM: I’ve heard that churches have been willing to host them, and we need to let them do that. [Ed: A pilot program called Road to Housing, in which churches offered spaces in their lots to people living in vehicles, only provided spaces for 12 cars.] I can’t believe the expense of what it was for the sanctioned RV sites [which the city has since abandoned]. They said it was about $1,700 a month per RV. At that amount give them a friggin’ housing voucher! And maybe they’ll be renting in Renton or Kent or Auburn but at least they’d be in decent housing. We also have surplus city property that we could be looking at. Let’s build single-occupancy boarding houses, like we used to have, and when the crisis is over with, those could be converted to youth hostels for tourists.

ECB: What do you think of the fair-chance housing legislation that just passed, which prohibits landlords from asking about a prospective tenant’s criminal history?

PM: I have mixed feelings about it. I really think that our low-income housing providers, like SHA, should take all of these folks as tenants initially, let them establish themselves back into the community, show a good year or two of credit history, that they’ve paid their rent on time, etc., and then have them go out into the general public.

ECB: It seems like that would create a weird situation for SHA residents—if you think these folks are too dangerous to be allowed to rent on the private market, why do you think low-income people should be forced to live next to them?

PM: They could have one building that’s for transitional housing and have it separated somewhat. Just like with sex offenders, it’s better that everybody knows where [people with criminal records] are, versus, they could be anywhere and you don’t know who you’re getting as a potential tenant. If they’re in one place and they’re kind of being monitored, you can see if they’re going back to their old habits. I think in some ways, there should be an exchange program so that people are sent to a new community where they’re connected with services and they get a fresh start. When they’re forced to go back to the county where they committed the offense, sometimes the easiest thing to do is go back and hang with the same people you did before, that got you into trouble in the first place.

ECB: What do you think of expanding programs like LEAD [Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion] and the therapeutic courts?

PM: I think that’s a good idea. I’d like to see more community courts and restorative justice. I think the city should fund social workers in every single school. And kids whose parents are engaged tend to be more successful in school, so we need to develop programs that help parents be successful. In the South End, for example, I think we need more acculturation classes. We’ve brought in lots of people from East Africa. Many of them are single women who lost their spouse to conflict in their home country, and they’ve not been given enough information about how things work in America. We need to empower them to stand up—like if their oldest kid is a male, they sometimes give away way too much power to the child. They still need to be a parent. We need to teach them, ‘Okay, in this country, you can’t hit your kids but you still can control them, and this is how you do it.’ There’s just so much more we could do to ensure success. Their chances of success are diminished when we’re not properly supporting them. We are really letting people fall through the cracks.