curated by Vee Hua 華婷婷
by Michael “Renaissance”
Simply doing anything because something needs to be done is often the enemy of doing the right thing. People are dying because of fentanyl. People are also being swallowed by addiction. However, adding laws that criminalize drug use, expanding the prison industrial complex with laws that lead police to stop-and-frisk and are used to target Black and Brown folx, all under the pretense of helping people struggling with addiction, is a failed strategy.
Continue reading OPINION | The War on Drugs Failed: Will Seattle Choose a Losing Strategy?by Carolyn Bick
The Emerald’s Watchdragon reporting seeks to increase accountability within our city’s institutions through in-depth investigative journalism.
Seattle Human Rights Commissioners past and present say that since the commission announced its intention to seek amicus status with the federal court in the matter of the Consent Decree, they have faced repeated warnings of ethical and legal violations.
These warnings have come from the Seattle City Attorney’s Office — the topic of this story — along with members of the Seattle City Council and the Community Police Commission, which is the focus of today’s story.
Continue reading ‘Like an Ambush’: Human Rights Commissioners Detail Pressure From Council, CPC, Not to Pursue Amicus Statusby Carolyn Bick
The Emerald’s Watchdragon reporting seeks to increase accountability within our city’s institutions through in-depth investigative journalism.
Seattle Human Rights Commissioners past and present say that since the commission announced its intention to seek amicus status with the federal court in the matter of the Consent Decree, they have faced repeated warnings from the Seattle City Attorney’s Office.
Continue reading City Attorney Warns Human Rights Commissioners of Legal Action if SHRC Pursues Amicus Status — Fails to Cite Specificsby Anita Khandelwal and Mark Stroh
The Seattle City Attorney’s Office has embarked on a strategy that will harm our community’s most vulnerable members and lead to the incarceration of individuals too mentally ill to stand trial. The city attorney should abandon this counterproductive effort and allow service providers to work with these individuals without criminal legal system interference.
Continue reading OPINION: End Harmful and Ineffectual Prosecutions in Seattle Municipal Court“I have never felt so backed into a corner as I have in the past 24 hours.”
—Erika Chen, Seattle Human Rights Commissioner
by Carolyn Bick
The Emerald’s Watchdragon reporting seeks to increase accountability within our city’s institutions through in-depth investigative journalism.
The Emerald has obtained the unredacted email the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (SCAO) sent to the Seattle Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in which the SCAO told the SHRC that it could not seek amicus status with the federal court overseeing the Consent Decree. The Emerald originally reported on this email in this breaking story. It has also obtained two new recent memos from the SCAO addressed to the SHRC.
Continue reading BREAKING: Leaked SCAO Memo — Amicus Status for HRC ‘Neither Fruitful Nor Efficient’by Carolyn Bick
The Emerald’s Watchdragon reporting seeks to increase accountability within our city’s institutions through in-depth investigative journalism.
The Emerald has today received confirmation that the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (SCAO) told the Seattle Human Rights Commission (SHRC) not to seek amicus curiae status shortly after the commission’s vote to do so at its public meeting on April 7, 2022. It is immediately unclear exactly who in the SCAO told the commission this and why.
Continue reading BREAKING: SCAO Tells Human Rights Commission Not to Seek Amicus Statusby Carolyn Bick
The Emerald’s Watchdragon reporting seeks to increase accountability within our city’s institutions through in-depth investigative journalism.
In February of last year, lawyer Sarah Lippek lodged a complaint against former Office of Police Accountability (OPA) Dir. Andrew Myerberg with the Office of Inspector General (OIG). The complaint regarded Myerberg publicly releasing a client’s medical information in a Case Closed Summary (CCS). Lippek’s client is the young woman whom an officer hit directly in the chest with a blast ball. The young woman subsequently went into cardiac arrest multiple times on her way to the hospital.
Continue reading City Hires Outside Agency to Investigate Former OPA Dir., SPD After OIG Bows Outby Paul Faruq Kiefer
(This article was originally published on PubliCola and has been reprinted under an agreement.)
The Seattle City Council is backpedaling its plans to add diversion to the Seattle City Attorney’s list of mandatory responsibilities.
Earlier this year, City Council President Lorena González said she would propose legislation to require the city attorney to send some misdemeanor cases to diversion programs instead of filing charges. Instead, on Thursday, Dec. 9, González introduced a pared-down bill that would require the city attorney to notify the Council 90 days before making any changes to, or eliminating, the office’s diversion programs and provide quarterly reports to the Council about the effectiveness of any diversion programs.
Continue reading Council Changes Course, Won’t Require City Attorney to Run Diversion Programsby Alexa Peters
The race for Seattle’s next city attorney has been a surprising one since three-term incumbent Pete Holmes conceded in the August primaries, leaving newcomers Nicole Thomas-Kennedy and Ann Davison to duke it out.
The typically uneventful race for an often overlooked office heated up after many of Thomas-Kennedy’s controversial anti-police Tweets from 2020 resurfaced, prompting local media and previous Seattle municipal court judges to question her fitness for the City Attorney’s Office. Even Fox News’ Tucker Carlson took a stab at the candidate during a September segment of his show, calling the candidate flat-out “crazy.” Meanwhile, Davison, who recently switched from Republican to “moderate Democrat,” has come under fire for her Republican rhetoric and ties to a video campaign organized by a Trump supporter who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In looking beyond political warfare, experts say the race for city attorney gets to the heart of a question all the more relevant since anti-police protests broke out in 2020: In Seattle, what do we consider justice and how should it be administered? Our selection for city attorney will be decided on voters’ answers to those questions.
Continue reading What Is Justice and How Should It Be Administered: Seattle’s City Attorney Race
