Permanent SPD Hiring Bonuses and Expanded SODA Zones
Budget Talk:
Looking for last-minute plans for tomorrow afternoon? Hosted by the 46th District Democrats, I will be joined by Ron Davis tomorrow, Saturday 9/14 at 2pm to give a presentation about the Seattle city budget and the upcoming budget season. We’re meeting at the Northeast Public Library, 6801 35th Ave NE, and the program will be 90 minutes long. Feel free to come on up and brush up on budget basics!
Seattle News:
On Monday morning, the Seattle City Council is holding a special Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee meeting to discuss legislation that would make SPD officer hiring bonuses permanent. It would also increase the lateral hiring bonus from $30,000 to $50,000. Officers would be eligible for these bonuses if they left SPD for a period of at least two years and then elected to return. Any officer receiving a bonus must then serve at SPD for at least five years. The annual estimated cost of this program is $1.5 million.
Last Tuesday, the Public Safety committee met to discuss the SODA and SOAP legislation, both of which they unanimously passed. You can read my live tweets of the meeting here.
Several new SODA zones were added to the legislation: Pioneer Square, Belltown, Capitol Hill, and the University District, and some added blocks to the CID proposed zone. The SOAP zone ordinance was changed so that the SOAP zones will no longer apply to sex workers, only to buyers and promoters. However, the prostitution loitering law is still part of the ordinance.
The Stranger reported that in an initial draft of the SOAP bill, Moore tried to include funding for The More We Love, a one-year-old nonprofit organization that is mostly known for conducting sweeps. As such funding would be required to go through a competitive bidding process, Moore later retracted that part of the legislation. Currently no additional funding for services is included in the ordinance.
The final vote on this legislation will be on Tuesday, September 17 at 2pm.
In a graffiti case against SPD, a judge has ordered the city to pay over $750,000 in legal fees for the plaintiffs, who won their jury trial back in June.
In the case of the death of Black Lives Matter protester Summer Taylor, a jury ruled that the state was not negligent, and that the driver who struck Taylor must pay their family $6 million in damages.
The family of Jaahnavi Kandula is suing Seattle for $110 million plus $11,000 in a reference to SPOG VP Daniel Auderer’s cruel comment about Kandula’s life having no value. PubliCola reported that attorney Vonda Sargent said Officer Kevin Dave should have never been hired, and the fact that SPD knew about his history and still hired him points to a systemic problem.
The Seattle Indian Health Board is walking away from working with SPD to improve how officers track cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people and behave with Indigenous communities. In doing so the organization is walking away from a contract of $87,500 per year.
Abigail Echo-Hawk, the organization’s executive vice president told The Seattle Times, “I’m tired of sitting on committees while people die. We’re going to work with entities that want to change, and I hope SPD will eventually be an organization that wants to meaningfully help.”
PubliCola has given a rundown of the OPA’s current investigations on former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz. There are currently 14 intake investigations on the former Chief that are pending at OPA.
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