Public Safety  

POLICING: We need to reform the police in a manner that keeps communities safe and holds officers accountable for misconduct — and then fund accordingly. I support a balanced approach to improving the police that has earned me the support of leaders like Rev. Harriett Walden, Founder of Mothers for Police Accountability, and Victoria Beach, Chair of the African American Community Advisory Council.

My opponent’s plan to abolish the police won’t improve public safety nor advance equity. But my plan to reform the police will.:

• Reestablish the Community Policing Teams which served as a liaison between residents, neighborhood business owners, people experiencing homelessness, and patrol officers. This builds trust between SPD and community through familiarity with neighborhood issues and relationship-building.

• I’ll push for improved accountability measures and disciplinary protocols in SPOG’s new contract and tie its renewal with compliance to the terms of the consent decree.

• I’ll push to recruit trainees from Seattle’s majority-BIPOC neighborhoods. This will reduce language and cultural barriers as well as build public trust and improve accountability.

• I’ll advocate to bring back the Seattle Police Academy which provided the de-escalation, anti-bias, and protest management training that isn’t taught at the state-run academy.

• Nearly 100 of the  258 items in the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance, brought forward by the Community Police Commission, have not yet been implemented. I'll work to identify and implement the most important of these priorities. Community voices matter.

While I do not support abolishing the police, police reform is among my top priorities. Put simply, I believe that everyone who dials 911 has the right to a fast, effective, and fair response. The “fair” part is no less important than “fast” or “effective”. Seattle’s Police Department MUST do better. I’ll work hard from day one to ensure that happens.

GUN VIOLENCE: In the first half of 2021, there were 230 gun assault cases, including 9 homicides – the highest number of incidents in a month since 1984. Clearly we’ve got an emergency on our hands and the only way to reduce gun violence is to treat it as the public health crisis that it is and direct all the resources and policy tools we can at preventing a continued escalation. My approach is simple: fund what’s working and invest in new strategies. But first, City Council needs to step up, speak out, show some heart to the families grieving the loss of a loved one, and most importantly, have the courage to lead on gun violence prevention.

• Identify the community-driven approaches that are working to prevent gun violence, divert people out of the school-to-prison pipeline, support people already in the prison system, and reintegrate people back into the community and invest more funding in the organizations doing the work such as Choose 180 and Community Passageways.

• Support the Silent WAR Campaign to address ongoing violence in the African American community. Founded by Reverend Harriett Walden of Mothers For Police Accountability in 2011, its mission to stop the violence, increase the peace, and break the silence.

• Gender-based violence is a major cause of gun deaths as well as a precursor to homelessness, unemployment, mental illness, addiction, and a continued cycle of violence. So we must do much more to to prevent gender-based violence by targeting resources at survivor-driven mobile advocacy with flexible financial assistance to enable survivors to exit their abuse, preferably before engaging law-enforcement. I will allocate up to $4 million to expand the work being done by the Coalition to End Gender-Based Violence.

• Firearms in the home are a significant risk factor in domestic violence so we need to support research into the effectiveness of firearm removal enforcement in preventing domestic gun violence. This will lend support for expanded public education about Extreme Risk Protection Orders as a tool to get guns out of the hands of people at high risk of harming themselves or others with a gun. 

• Get guns off the streets through gun buy-back programs, tightened gun registration laws, and more investigatory resources.

• Prioritize funding for youth violence prevention programs in the Seattle’s Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy.

SEATTLE FIRE DEPARTMENT: You know how when you call 911 because an elderly person collapsed and can’t get up and the paramedics come right away, take vitals, stabilize the person and then rush them to the emergency room? Or you smell gas in your apartment even though your oven’s off and a fire engine comes right away? Or when the lithium battery in your son’s remote-controlled  truck starts the house on fire and you hear a siren moments later? Well, I do. I want to talk about the dispatchers, paramedics, firefighters, Health One units, and everyone else at SFD who respond to crises and put their lives on the line to keep us and our loved ones safe because they don’t get the attention or resources they deserve when we discuss public safety.

Seattle’s tremendous growth over the past decade has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of emergency responses, but SFD’s staffing has remained relatively static. In fact, SFD has fewer firefighters than in previous years. On top of that, our homelessness crisis has dramatically increased the number and type of emergency responses, particularly incidents in encampments and abandoned buildings. And then came the pandemic and SFD stepped up to run the cities COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites. All of this has resulted in severe staffing and resources shortage – in personnel and equipment. The Seattle Fire Department is an overlooked but equally critical component of our public safety network. These first responders have come to my aid several times — and Seattle can do better by them. So, I will:

• Fight to ensure they have the resources they need to perform their duties safely (funding the replacement of bunk suits, for example) and that staffing levels keep up with the sharply increasing demand for their services.

• Push for pay increases for paramedics to incentivize the department’s EMTs to go through the additional medical training in order to increase the number of paramedics we’re losing to retirements and meet the rising demand for Medic One responses.

• Advocate for expanded mental health resources and healthcare benefits for all firefighters because the performance of their duties subject them to significant health risks and emotional stress.  

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