Issue 11: Community Power

Keep dollars out of SPD, get cops out of pride, and Block the Boat Seattle

Jun 15, 2021

June 1 action

Thanks to ongoing pressure from the community, Council rejected CB 119981. Council Members (CMs) Morales, Sawant, González, Mosqueda, Strauss, and Pedersen voted no. CMs Herbold, Lewis, and Juarez voted yes. You can watch the whole council meeting on the Seattle channel.

On a white background is a graph comparing the money that City Council pledged towards Participatory Budgeting vs. SPD. The X axis indicates time from December 2020 to May 2021. The Y axis indicates dollars in millions, from ($10M) to $15M. The PB graph is in blue, starting at just over $10M and gradually decreasing to zero. SPD is represented in red, beginning at ($5.4M) and increasing to over $5M in May 2021. A grey text box reads: “12/4/20: CB 119981 was introduced to defund the Seattle Police Department (SPD) by $5.4M and fund community-led participatory budgeting (PB). This action was intended to compensate for SPD’s over-budget, violent overtime spending in 2020. PB was already slated to receive $5M of SPD’s anticipated 2021 salary savings thanks to November’s Council Budget Action SPD-011-B-002.” A second grey text box reads: “3/23/21: CM Herbold amended CB119981 to provide $3.4M more for police use. The amendment also changes CBA SPD-011-B-002 to allow SPD to retain $5M of salary savings instead of providing it to community.” A third grey text box reads: “5/11/21: An amendment allows SPD to retain an additional $2.5M of salary savings.” A fourth grey text box reads: "6/1/21: An amendment re-allocates $2M from PB to JustCare. 6/1/21: Bill is voted down, 6-3." Finally, an orange text box with bold black letters reads: “You helped defeat CB 119981. Distributed power is real power.” — Complete timeline of CB 119981

This means

SPD's budget doesn't increase this year.
SPD is not held financially accountable for last summer's overtime violence.
Money for community is still available in SPD's $13M+ of ongoing salary savings but will require additional legislation.

What’s next?

Council must hold SPD accountable for their patterns of violence by reducing the size, scope, and budget of SPD this year and in the 2022 budget negotiations. They can begin by re-allocating SPD’s $13M+ of 2021 salary savings to community.

PB Update

On June 1, in addition to voting against more funding for SPD, Council unanimously passed CB 120087, which authorizes the first million dollars (of $28M) to be spent by the Office of Civil Rights to ramp up community-led Participatory Budgeting.

The Consent Decree

The primary argument that CM Herbold used when amending CB 119981 and supporting more money for SPD was her belief that legislation affecting SPD’s budget falls under the purview of the consent decree, an agreement between the City of Seattle and the U.S. Department of Justice.

CM Herbold: “The objective of this bill is to exercise fiscal oversight of the Seattle Police Department, while simultaneously ... heeding the authority of the consent decree in these matters where the court is suggesting our actions overlap with consent decree obligations.”

The concern over “heeding the authority of the consent decree” will undoubtedly be used again during the fall’s 2022 budget negotiations to avoid defunding SPD. It is therefore necessary to dive deeper.

What is a consent decree?

This resource by Andrea Ritchie and Wesley Ware provides an excellent short history of consent decrees and specifically addresses their role as obstacles to funding public safety outside of a police department.

At its core, consent decrees are settlements that allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) “to step in whenever it believes that a police department is engaging in ‘a pattern or practice of conduct’ that deprives people of their constitutional rights.”

Regardless of this intention, “cities with consent decrees continue to kill, brutalize, profile and harass Black, Indigenous, disabled, migrant, queer and trans people and people of color. Moreover, consent decrees drastically increase local police budgets at a time when organizers across the country are calling on cities to defund the police and limit their scope and powers.”

In Seattle, SPD’s violence continues despite $100M being spent on police reforms during the city’s time under the consent decree.

What is a better solution?

When a police department exhibits problematic patterns and practices, a more sound and affordable solution is to reduce the amount of contact people have with police in the first place.

In fact, most of the goals of consent decrees -- reducing use of force, racial profiling, lack of transparency and accountability -- can be addressed by reducing the amount of contact people have with police, including by: *reducing the size of the force; *reducing the scope of police work, including by shifting mental health crisis response, "homeless outreach," traffic enforcement out of the police department; *reducing the technology and weaponry police have access to; and *reducing police department budgets.

This PubliCola article elaborates on the tensions between the consent decree and community safety in Seattle:

“We are seeing the consent decree being wielded as an obstacle to community demands to divest from policing and invest in community safety,” said Angélica Cházaro, a University of Washington professor and organizer with the activist group Decriminalize Seattle, “when in reality the surest way to address issues of racial profiling, use of force, and other violations of constitutional rights by cops is to reduce police power and contact and ensure that communities have what they need to be safe, survive, and thrive.”

One possible path forward is to build solidarity among the community stakeholders who requested that the DOJ investigate SPD in the first place. Those organizations are the signatories of this 2010 letter requesting federal investigation of SPD.

The full text of Seattle’s consent decree can be found here.

A nice timeline of Seattle’s consent decree from the ACLU can be found here.

Opportunities for Solidarity

Juneteenth

South Seattle Emerald has a list of events happening this week to celebrate Juneteenth, learn, and acknowledge our history. This article by William C. Anderson, published on Juneteenth 2020, reminds us of the harms of denying the Black radical roots of abolition and mischaracterizing it as reform.

“On Juneteenth, let’s declare ourselves finished with this punishment system that lies and calls itself justice. Let go of it, and let go of the legitimacy it has in your mind. Let it die so we can experience what it’s like to have more than enough.”

Cops Out of Pride

This year, Capitol Hill Pride is making their event police-free. This decision serves to decrease the influence of police in Seattle’s streets and conforms with a recommendation made by Mariame Kaba in a 2015 article called Summer Heat:

“On the way to abolition, we can take a number of intermediate steps to shrink the police force and to restructure our relationships with each other.” One of those steps is “Crowding out the police in our communities.”

twocsolidaritynetwork

A post shared by @twocsolidaritynetwork

You can support a cop-free pride by making a financial contribution to drag performers here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/funding-seattle-drag-performers-for-pride.

Liberation Not Deportation Coalition

Free Them All WA held a teach-in on May 24th about stopping the DOC to ICE pipeline. If you missed it, you can watch here (begins at 8 min).

Are you part of a group (workplace, business, faith community, etc.) that wants Governor Inslee to end the practice of collaborating with ICE? Please sign on as an organization or as an individual to this letter by the end of June, and stay tuned for the plan to deliver it to the Governor.

Block the Boat Seattle

This weekend, Falastiniyat (a grassroot, Palestinian, feminist collective) hosted multiple Block the Boat protests to prevent the Israeli owned ZIM San Diego from docking. After the most recent acts of violence commited by the Israeli goverment to the Palestinian people, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) called on international unions and dockworkers to boycott Israeli owned ships/companies as an act of solidarity. This is a callback to Block the Boat actions taken in 2014 and is part of the larger BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. As abolitionists, it’s especially important to participate in international solidarity movements as an abolitionist framework does not believe in borders and our aim is to reduce harm everywhere. It’s also important to recognize the direct harm and complicity the United States plays in violence done to the Palestinian people.

Participate

As of Monday night, ZIM San Diego has been prevented from unloading and SSA President Edward DeNike has asked the ship to leave the Port of Seattle but they have refused. The Israeli Consulate General is still pressuring to get the ship unloaded.
Additional action may still be needed as early as this afternoon. For alerts regarding when to mobilize, follow Falastiniyat on social media and/or text this number 833-584-1948 to for occasional updates.
Email city council to demand an end to the deadly exchanges between SPD and Israeli Occupation Forces: tinyurl.com/EndDXLetter (takes 30 seconds).
Bit.ly/RiseUpWithPalestine provides an easy way to email your congressional representatives and tell them to stop aiding this genocide with billions of taxpayer dollars.

Learn More

These articles, websites, documentaries, podcasts, and social media accounts provide more information about last weekend’s action and BDS in general:

Article: BDS Is Gaining Momentum With #BlockTheBoat Actions in Oakland and Seattle
Website: bdsmovement.net/what-is-BDS
Documentary (26 minutes): My Neighborhood

Documentary (1hr, 24 minutes): Gaza Fights for Freedom

Podcast: The Palestine Pod: https://www.palestinepod.com/
Social media: @falastiniyat, @mohammedelkurd, @muna.kurd15, @joegaza93, @itsmesubhi, @eyes.on.palestine, @paliroots, @letstalkpalestine, @we_are_not_numbers, @palestinianyouthmovement

Abolitionist Education

Read this recent article by Shuan Scott: Seattle police had a chance to prove abolitionists wrong. They didn't.

“If Seattle police could not maintain at least the appearance of neutrality in a contest between civil liberties and political repression when it most benefited them to do so, what hope is there really for police reform?”

Watch this Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) Abolition 101 Workshop with Mariame Kaba: Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) Abolition 101 Workshop - [captioned]

Like this newsletter and want more like it? Join our google group! There tend to be just a few messages each week. You can find more ways to connect with people and get support for your own abolitionist ideas. Just look over our organizing principles here and click through to the “request to join” link.

We have a book club! Join the next meeting on June 16th from 6:30-7:30pm, where we will be discussing the first 66 pages of adrienne maree brown's book, Emergent Strategy. Contact renee.lamberjack@gmail.com for zoom details if you’d like to join.

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