Seattle has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve public safety outcomes by civilianizing more tasks and focusing police on major crime. That’s what mayoral candidate Katie Wilson’s public safety platform proposes, which Bryan Kirschner argues would be anti-bad guy, pro-good cop, and taxpayer-
Seattle Times opinion columnist Alex Fryer gets pretty much everything wrong in his hit piece about new South Park townhomes. The project will add trees, despite dramatic photos the newspaper took before the developer finished its planned tree plantings, which is not advised in the winter.
The Local Sightings film festival juxtaposed The Beacon, a film about a break-dancing studio fighting to survive in South Seattle, with a film about Wallingford grappling with change and potentially embracing a more inclusive, diverse future.
It would be a big mistake for Seattle City Council to approve the new Seattle Police Officers Guild contract because it fails to ensure Seattle is safer by promoting proactive policing and civilian alternatives for low-level calls.
SPD’s refusal to offload low-priority calls is undermining its ability to solve serious crimes. Over recent decades, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) has increasingly handled fewer serious crimes less efficiently, as I’ve previously explained here. Since 1990, both the number of serious crimes handled per officer per year
Elections have consequences – sometimes far greater than we would have initially imagined. Progressive urbanist Shaun Scott’s loss to Alex Pedersen in the last Seattle City Council District 4 election, for example, was disappointing – but just recently could have become a true disaster. With House Bill 1110 signed into law,
An organization called Historic Wallingford is proposing to have a section of my home neighborhood encompassing more than 600 homes designated as an historic district in the National Register of Historic Places. Their application is scheduled to be heard by the state committee that administers the program in Washington state
The “Visions of Wallingford” project poses a question: “How does a neighborhood learn?” It’s one that strikes me as both fascinating and important. It’s important because in Seattle the city government has traditionally given geographically defined “neighborhoods” pride of place in city planning. The 1990s neighborhood planning process
I admit to having mixed feelings about the phrase “defund the police.” When I was working on community policing in the 1990s, police budgets paid my salary. But as our candidates for elected office in Seattle debate the future of how we invest in public safety here, the right answer