In a similar fashion, when Davison assumed office in 2022, she reported having a backlog of close to 5,000 misdemeanor cases from her predecessor, Pete Holmes. At the time, the problem was shrugged off as being mostly due to the chaos caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. However, the recurrence of this issue now that newly elected City Attorney Erika Evans has taken office could suggest a deeper issue. 

Among the over 5,000 cases in this new backlog, at least 1,700 are domestic violence cases, which are among the most serious cases handled by the City Attorney’s Office. There are also at least 1,210 backlog cases categorized as criminal traffic cases, which include Driving Under the Influence (DUI) cases. Davison’s challengers criticized her alleged mishandling of DUI cases as part of their campaign pitches.

In its capacity to handle criminal matters, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office only handles misdemeanor cases, while more serious felony cases go to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. 

Evans said the oldest case in the backlog is from 2022, which was the first year of Davison’s term.

Further confusing matters is the installation of a new data management system within the City Attorney’s Office, transitioning from the previous system that had been in use since 1999, according to Jenna Robert, the criminal division chief. About 1,000 of the backlog cases don’t currently have a crime category assigned to them, meaning the numbers above represent the confirmed cases but could grow over time. 

Robert told The Urbanist that because of the new system’s migration issues, it has taken the last two months for the office to try to determine the magnitude of the backlog.

A spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office told The Urbanist that the methods by which the Evans administration determines the size of the case backlog are different from the methods used by previous administrations. The Evans administration is counting a backlogged case as one where a prosecutor has not-yet filed or declined the case, whereas Davison’s administration removed some of these cases from the backlog, such as DUI cases waiting for a toxicology analysis. Due to this discrepancy, the Davison administration reported a much lower backlog than that discovered by the Evans administration.

The existence of this backlog creates a dilemma for the Evans administration. They must balance dealing with these old cases, including determining which are past their statutes of limitations, with handling new cases coming in the door. However, changing the method by which the backlog is counted does muddy the waters in terms of how systemic a problem the office is actually facing.

Evans and Robert believe the main reason for this backlog is insufficient resources for the office. 

“We have been an under-resourced office the whole time I’ve been here,” said Robert.

Robert began as an attorney in the City Attorney’s Office in 2009 and stayed until 2021, right before Davison’s term. She left to work at the Attorney General’s office and returned to the City Attorney’s Office this year. She referenced how technology has changed the way cases are dealt with due to the large amount of video footage that needs to be processed. A case can require video footage review from body-worn cameras, in-car cameras, footage taken inside precincts, and surveillance video from both public and private cameras.

“Our juries expect all of this evidence. It’s so much more complicated to try a case, to prepare a case, to gather all of the evidence: magnitudes more difficult than it was when I first came into this office,” Robert said. “Yet, when you look around, we have not resourced up for that. So we just are always struggling with the resources that we have to actually be able to handle 10 to 12,000 reports that were referred by the police department every year.” 

Public defenders experience similar issues. Increasing attrition rates for public defenders, who are likewise contending with mounting piles of digital evidence, have raised the possibility of a public defense crisis. In response, in September 2023 the Washington Supreme Court asked the Washington State Bar Association to analyze a landmark study on public defense and make recommendations for workload standards at the state’s criminal courts. This recommendation ultimately led to the state Supreme Court significantly reducing public defense caseloads last summer, although municipalities have up to 10 years to implement the new rules. 

The Seattle Municipal Court has also been struggling with reduced capacity due to updating its digital filing system and operating without one of its elected judges. In March 2024, Davison announced the office would file a blanket affidavit of prejudice against Judge Pooja Vaddadi, which left Vaddadi unable to hear her usual docket of cases. 

Changes being made

In one of her first acts of office, Evans banned all blanket affidavits of prejudice, meaning Judge Vaddadi is now able to resume a normal caseload. 

Another issue plaguing the City Attorney’s Office has been a growing backlog at the state toxicology lab that processes DUI blood tests, thereby slowing the office’s ability to file cases. In this legislative session, Evans has been a strong supporter of SB 5880, which would allow private labs to perform these DUI blood tests. 

“We know that justice delayed is justice denied,” Evans testified during a January public hearing. “You asked Senator Salomon about what it takes right now for the current delays. Right now, if someone has a drug and alcohol DUI, it takes 22 months for the toxicology lab to get that report back to us, which means that if someone commits a DUI today in Seattle, it won’t be until the end of the summer of 2027 that we can actually file charges in that case.” 

The bill passed out of the House on Friday with very little time to spare before the cut-off and now returns to the Senate to concur with changes. Being able to utilize private labs should speed up the office’s ability to prosecute DUI cases. 

Evans wants to see the number of case dismissals drop, saying that more than half of the cases filed under Davison were ultimately dismissed, which she says represents a waste of taxpayer dollars. She pointed to her and Robert’s experience as prosecutors, which differs from both Davison’s and Holmes’s backgrounds. She thinks that experience will allow them to better evaluate which cases to file. 

“I think because we have the experience we have as prosecutors, some of the things that happened under the last administration will not be happening under this administration,” Robert said.

The office’s priority for filing will be violent misdemeanor crimes, including domestic violence, DUI, and assault. 

Meanwhile, the office will determine certain non-violent cases, such as public drug use and drug possession, to send to diversion, which will help avoid clogging the court system. Evans previously criticized Davison’s administration for its approach to the City’s new drug ordinance, which did not appear to prioritize the diversion services the ordinance identified as the preferred course of action.

To this end, Evans still plans to collaborate with the Seattle Municipal Court and the Department of Public Defense to design a “reimagined community court.”

In contrast, Davison slowly ramped up the drug possession misdemeanor cases filed since the drug ordinance passed in 2023, with a more extreme escalation in her last months in office. PubliCola reported an increase from an average of four per week from mid-June to mid-September 2025 to 16.4 per week from mid-September to mid-December. 

Davison also disbanded the former community court a year and a half into her term.

The criminal division of the City Attorney’s Office will be converting to a vertical prosecution model from a horizontal model, starting with the domestic violence unit. A vertical model means that the same prosecutor handles a case from its initial filing all the way through to sentencing. This model can be more time efficient, and it also allows an attorney to take ownership and accountability over their cases, which Evans said could lead to fewer dismissals. 

The office will be forming a DUI team similar to their domestic violence team to give extra focus to filing those cases.

One of the strategies Davison said she’d use to deal with her inherited backlog of cases in 2022 was to shorten filing times. Robert said the existence of this new 5,000 case backlog illustrates the failure of this approach. She explained that quick filing times can lead to poor filing decisions and a higher rate of dismissal.

“A bunch of cases that should have never been filed go into the system,” Robert said. “They do harm to the people that are subjects of those–all those defendants now have a crime that should have never been on their record as charged–and then the taxpayers and the clogging the court and all of the cascade of issues that happen.”

What’s next

Even with the approach outlined above, Evans believes the office needs to hire more attorneys. 

The timing could be challenging, given the City faces a $140 million deficit next year. At the end of February, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson asked all city departments for plans of cutting 5-10% of their budgets. Wilson will also likely be searching for funds for her own mayoral priorities, which are almost certain to include standing up more emergency housing.

That being said, WIlson has been a big proponent of new progressive revenue sources and may propose one or more new revenue streams during the City’s budget process this fall. The most likely candidate remains a city-level capital gains tax. While this might assist in future budgets, most new revenue sources do take some time to implement, meaning the new funds wouldn’t be collected immediately in 2027.

Evans said being able to hire more attorneys sooner would be ideal, signalling the possibility of a mid-year supplemental budget request from the City Attorney’s Office. The office would have another chance to advocate for more funding during the regular fall budget season.

On the other hand, city councilmembers might wish to wait to see the effect of the procedural changes within the City Attorney’s Office before attempting to find more money in an already strapped budget.

As for the new data management system, right now the City Attorney’s Office’s system is unable to interface with the Seattle Municipal Court’s system, the integration of which is part of the next phase with the vendor. Robert estimates it could take up to six months to gain this functionality. 

More long-term, Robert said the administration is going to be faced with ongoing challenges adapting to the new system and getting it working smoothly, potentially for a year or more. 

The post Seattle City Attorney Says ‘Tough-on-Crime’ Predecessor Left Big Case Backlog first appeared on The Urbanist.

These were the alleged stories documented in a lawsuit recently filed at the Pierce County Superior Court against The Geo Group, Inc., which runs Tacoma’s Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC), a private, for-profit immigration detention facility used by the federal government.

Two specific guards were also named in the suit. 

Three plaintiffs are alleging abuse at the NWIPC in bringing the suit against The Geo Group. All three are Black men who have been detained at NWIPC, two of whom remain in detention at this time. All the alleged events described above happened in 2024, during the Biden administration, but it appears such abuses could be ramping up under Trump. 

The plaintiffs contend that the treatment described above is part of a pattern of misconduct by detention guards, that new guards are trained to follow suit, and that Geo Group covers up said misconduct. Furthermore, they allege that one of the detainee beatings described above was utilized in a training video to provide new recruits “an example of what guards can get away with if they feel a Black male detainee is mouthing off.”

The NWIPC is located in the 27th Legislative District, which is represented by Washington State Senator Yasmin Trudeau (D-Tacoma). Trudeau told The Urbanist the facility operates like a black box, in that it is very difficult to learn what’s going on inside. 

“If it gets to the point where there is something that egregious being leaked [such as the lawsuit], there are definitely horrific things that are being accepted in that institution,” Trudeau said. She referenced the “level of violence and flagrant disregard for people’s bodies” showcased in the lawsuit. 

Trudeau said that civil detainees at the NWICP are treated much worse than people charged and convicted of murder in this country. 

The NWIPC contains 1,575 beds and has a long history of poor conditions. In 2008, Seattle University’s International Human Rights Clinic collaborated with One America to publish a report documenting human rights violations at the center (then called the Northwest Detention Facility).

“Conditions are substandard, and are not even in compliance with the National Detention Standards, much less international human rights law,” the report reads. “These violations, unacceptable in any circumstances, are even more notable given the fact that detention—originally intended to be short-term—often lasts for months or even years.”

The report documents a laundry list of horrifying conditions, including violations of constitutional due process rights, overcrowding, inadequate emergency medical care, inhuman and degrading treatment by guards, insufficient and poor quality of food, and more.  

“My perception is that that facility has continued to operate more or less the same under Democratic and Republican administrations alike,” Angelina Godoy, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) director, told The Urbanist. “The reality is that abuse has been happening even when presidents spoke more palatable language about immigrants, and that abuse is hardwired into the system as a whole.”

Elected officials such as Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, and Representative Adam Smith all documented their concern about this facility in 2018 and 2019. 

The Washington Attorney General has been fighting an ongoing case against The Geo Group since 2017, in which The Geo Group has been found to have violated the state’s minimum wage law. Detainees at NWICP used to have the option to participate in a voluntary work program that paid $1 per day. The state won an appeal last year in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The facility’s contract with the federal government was due to expire in September 2025, potentially giving Congress the leverage to improve conditions during contract negotiations. Thus far, The Urbanist has been unable to confirm the status of this contract. 

More recent research into conditions at the NWIPC

The UWCHR published a series of reports about conditions at the NWIPC in 2020, some of which have since been updated. This research gives context to the allegations in the recent Pierce County lawsuit. 

The lawsuit, for example, alleges that Geo Group “has long employed openly racist employees and permitted discriminatory conduct.” It refers to a Proud Boys sticker on the mug of one of the prison guards named in the suit. The Proud Boys are a far-right, anti-immigrant group known to have ties to white supremacists. 

Godoy, who led the research, told The Urbanist she’s heard many anecdotes about racial slurs used in the Tacoma detention center.

“It’s certainly clear to me from what I have learned about the place that it’s not uncommon for the racial characteristic of a given detained person to influence the treatment they receive,” Godoy said.  

UWCHR’s research also directly pertains to the lawsuit’s allegations about the Tacoma Police Department (TPD). The lawsuit said that two of the three plaintiffs reported the incidents to TPD, but the department “effectively ignored them and allowed Defendant Geo Group to investigate itself.”

A spokesperson for TPD said the complaint has been reviewed, and the department doesn’t comment on active litigation. 

UWCHR published a report in 2025 that found that of the 157 reported incidents of abuse or assault at the facility between 2015 and 2025, only two resulted in prosecution. These two cases were incidents where facility personnel were the reported victims, even though overall, most of the reported victims were detainees, not staff.

Godoy said she hasn’t seen evidence that conditions at the NWICP have worsened in the past year, other than the strain of the facility operating at capacity exacerbating already-existing abuse.

“In this sense, the abusive conditions documented for eight years by the UW Center for Human Rights—such as the overuse of solitary confinement, the denial of access to quality medical care, poor hygiene and sanitation, frequent uses of physical force and chemical gases, and a lack of adequate responses to reported sexual abuse — not only persist, but may in fact have become even more acute as the facility approaches its maximum capacity of 1575 people,” the report read.

Because NWIPC is a privately operated facility, it falls into TPD’s jurisdiction, but Godoy says that hasn’t always been clear to police officers or detention officers. However, in September 2025, TPD released a public policy acknowledging their jurisdiction over the detention center. Godoy says that while UWCHR has requested records to determine whether having an official policy is changing TPD’s response to calls within the facility, the slow records response time means there isn’t yet sufficient data to make an assessment. 

UWCHR’s research also revealed the detention center’s flagrant use of solitary confinement. In 2020, the report found that the NWIPC detained people in solitary confinement for longer than any other detention facility in the country, based on the average duration of each confinement. More than 80% of reported placements in solitary confinement met the international human rights standards definition of torture. The facility regularly used solitary confinement for people suffering from mental illness and people exercising their First Amendment rights (for example, through hunger strikes).

UWCHR was only able to obtain this data by filing a lawsuit against the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act. Once received, they found discrepancies between the data provided by The Geo Group and the data provided by ICE.

“Under international standards, the mere use of solitary at all in civil consent confinement facilities like the Northwest Detention Center is considered extraordinarily inadvisable and something that should not be done, period,” Godoy told The Urbanist. “So the fact that it’s not only happening, but it’s happening in ways that are secretive and unclear, and even the same facility has multiple books, like an accountant with two books, should lead to grave concerns about how effective any mechanisms for oversight or accountability are.”

ICE in Washington State

While abusive conditions at the NWIPC have been documented for almost 20 years, it is undeniable that immigration enforcement has greatly accelerated during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. In mid-January, ICE was holding about 73,000 people in detention, the highest number in ICE’s history. 

Data collected by the Deportation Data Project shows that during the first nine months of Trump’s second term, ICE arrests quadrupled. Street arrests became much more common, leading to a sevenfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions. Deportations increased by a factor of 4.6.

In the past, people would interact with ICE and not necessarily be detained, but this has shifted as well. “Once people have been arrested, changes in policy have kept them locked up in detention centers for longer or indefinitely,” writes Aaron Reichlin-Melnick for the American Immigration Council’s website.

“Maybe that’s what the [Trump] administration is trying to do, is get people so scared that they are leaving,” Trudeau said. “But they’re scared because they know that once they are in the system, they are going to be treated like animals, and that their family may never find them. […] We can’t abide by a system like that.”

Recent reporting from The Washington Post details ICE’s plan to spend $38.3 billion to acquire warehouses – the plan says 16 – and retrofit them into immigration detention centers. People will move from the converted warehouse facilities to eight large-scale detention centers that will hold between 7,000 and 10,000 people.

In 2025, Congress lavished funding on departments carrying out Trump’s mass deportation campaign. “The so-called One Big Beautiful Act allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year,” the Brennan Center wrote. “That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States.”

Investigative reporting by Wired showed ICE working to spread its physical presence across the U.S., with documents for more than 150 leases and expansions, giving ICE a presence in nearly every state. Those documents indicate a potential new planned detention center at Riverfront Technical Park in Tukwila, Washington, a convenient distance from Boeing Field. This news came after a December posting on a government website indicated ICE’s interest in having more detention space in the Seattle area.

Both ICE and the owners of the Riverfront Technical Park declined to comment to KUOW about any upcoming lease.

“I would imagine, especially in a place like Tukwila that’s so diverse, the ripple effect that will have in a community in that area,” Trudeau said. “You’re talking about Renton, Tukwila, Kent, this is where a lot of immigrant communities live. I think you’re actually going to find a chilling factor if something like that is introduced. I think you’ll find a lot of people that do not want to participate in any systems, including probably even taking their kids to school, if something like that happens.”

Other cities are taking action to prevent detention centers within their jurisdictions. In 2017, the Tacoma City Council passed legislation rezoning land around the NWIPC to prevent any meaningful expansion. The City won the lawsuit brought against it by The Geo Group trying to overturn the legislation in 2021. 

Meanwhile, Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck is sponsoring legislation that would put a one-year moratorium on any new or expanded jail or detention center within the city limits. The bill treats the siting of a detention center as a zoning issue, giving the City time to develop permanent regulations over the next year. 

“We cannot make it clear enough, the human rights violations at facilities like the Northwest Detention Center are unacceptable, and we refuse to stand by while the federal government continues their inhumane practices,” Rinck said.

The bill will move directly to consideration by the full Seattle City Council, with a possible vote as early as Tuesday, February 24. Should the bill pass, there will be a public hearing within two months to give the public the opportunity to weigh in.

The City of SeaTac, where a federal detention facility is already located, just passed a temporary detention moratorium, and King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda announced she’s working on a detention moratorium for unincorporated King County. 

Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa is planning to introduce an order on February 24 that would disallow nonpublic Port of Seattle properties from being converted to new or expanded use for immigration detention or enforcement support. 

However, the news of the potential new immigration detention center in Tukwila underscores the difficulty for individual jurisdictions to respond to what is a regional, or even statewide, issue. 

Trudeau, along with Senator Lisa Orwall (D-33rd LD, SeaTac), introduced several bills designed to address detention facilities on a state level. SB 6286 would have fined the NWICP if the Geo Group didn’t allow the center to be inspected at will by the Department of Health.

SB 6109 would have prohibited the state from investing in (and therefore profiting from) private detention facilities. SB 6304 would have insured responsible principles be used by the state for its investments more generally. All three bills died at the fiscal cutoff deadline. 

HB 2464, on the other hand, was passed out of the House on Monday. Sponsored by Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self (D-21nd LD, Everett), the bill would require private detention facilities to report allegations of abuse, death, and suicide. Law enforcement agencies would also have to report annually about calls and investigations at the facilities. The bill also includes standards to improve food access and quality for detainees. 

Meanwhile, The Geo Group continues to profit in spite of the documented abuses at the NWIPC. The publicly-traded company, ticker symbol GEO, reported a net income of $254.3 million for 2025, an increase of almost 700% over its reported income for 2024, which was only $31.9 million.

“Not only are you creating a situation where you’re dehumanizing people in concentration camps, but you’re also making excessive and exorbitant profit off of it,” Trudeau said. “I think we call that slavery and human trafficking.” 

The post ICE’s Tacoma Detention Center Targeted in New Lawsuit Alleging Abuses first appeared on The Urbanist.

“The ICE memorandum […] that basically instructs agents to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, to throw it in the trash, that represents a constitutional crisis at the level of everything the founders of this country warned us against, warning us against the tyranny that could arise if we put our heads in the sand,” Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown said.

Early in January, ICE released a memorandum saying their agents can enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant in a direct assault to the Fourth Amendment. A large-scale operation in Minneapolis that began in December has resulted in ICE agents killing two U.S. citizens who didn’t pose any danger to the agents in question. 

“It feels like Minneapolis is being used as a testing ground, both in the brutality of the tactics, and we have seen since they killed Renee Good, we have seen such an acceleration in the brutality and illegality of the tactics that are used against observers, violating people’s civil rights with just absolute impunity,” said Minnesota Rep. Aisha Gomez on an episode of The Majority Report. 

Meanwhile, at least 31 people died in ICE custody last year, which Axios reported is a 20-year high.

Earlier this week U.S. District Court Judge Katherine M. Mendez explored the question as to whether the surge of federal ICE agents has been meant to coerce local and state governments into changing their policies. 

A few days later, Tom Homan, the executive associate director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), made a statement that implied ICE enforcement is in fact being used to extort cooperation from state and local governments.

 “The withdrawal of law enforcement resources here is dependent upon cooperation,” Homan said. 

Given the behavior of the federal government, state and city elected officials are being forced to come up with response plans to prepare for the possibility of a large contingent of federal forces being sent to invade Washington state. 

State-level response

On Monday, Governor Bob Ferguson joined Brown to outline how the state is preparing to respond if ICE were to come in greater force to Washington. However, they kept their remarks very broad. 

“People have asked what we can do if ICE descends on Washington state, as they have in Minnesota, and I will not speculate on our strategy,” Brown said. “I’m not going to hand our playbook to them.”

In addition to aggressive legal action – Brown brought 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration in its first year – Ferguson outlined other steps he was taking, including meeting with the head of the Washington State National Guard and coordinating with state and local partners. 

However, Ferguson was clear that he cannot prevent ICE from operating in the state. 

This week, Ferguson and Brown sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem condemning the actions of ICE in Minneapolis and objecting to the illegal orders to ICE that violate the Fourth Amendment.

“If ICE agents attempt any such unconstitutional measures in the state of Washington, we will do everything in our power to oppose it. Our state will consider all legal options to hold the U.S. Government and individual ICE agents accountable for violating Washingtonians’ constitutional rights,” the letter reads.

Ferguson also mentioned bills being considered by the state legislature this session, chief among them Senate Bill 5855, which would prohibit law enforcement officers from wearing face coverings, and Senate Bill 5876, which would prohibit people from having badges and using law enforcement insignia if they aren’t law enforcement. 

In spite of Ferguson’s promises to “not be shy” about taking ICE agents to court if they choose to flaunt the law and wear masks, there are questions about how enforceable SB 5855 would be in practice. The bill includes a private right of action for people detained by a masked officer, but in addition to the potential dangers for a private citizen who chooses to sue an ICE officer, officers wouldn’t be liable for wearing a mask as long as they complied with other state identification requirements.  

SB 5855 passed the Senate on Wednesday and will now be considered by the House. 

Brown cited the Immigrant Worker Protection Act, House Bill 2105, which would require employers to give notice to workers of federal agencies asking for employment eligibility records within 72 hours and make sure employers aren’t sharing personal employee information without a subpoena or judicial warrant. 

Also relevant is Senate Bill 6045, which would give farmworkers more collective bargaining rights. Right now farmworkers don’t receive the institutional protections provided by the National Labor Relations Board, but this bill would allow farmworkers to be represented by Washington’s Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) for the purpose of enforcing workers’ rights.

Senate Bill 6286 would allow the Department of Health to fine private detention facilities, such as Tacoma’s Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC), if the department isn’t allowed to inspect the premises. The fees escalate to up to $1500 per day if a center doesn’t allow an inspection for more than 60 days. 

While this bill doesn’t go as far as taxing detention facilities, which could lead to their existence being financially untenable in the state, it does at least provide real consequences for a failure to comply with inspections. Lawmakers are already aware that NWIPC doesn’t provide adequate medical care to its detainees.

“What we know from the Department of Health is they’ve had a huge number of complaints that have come in, in the hundreds, around nutrition, undercooked food, black mold, not getting access to medical care. The list goes on and on,” Senator Tina Orwall (D-33rd Legislative District, Des Moines) testified at the bill’s hearing. “And so the reason that we’re putting this hefty fine is it’s urgent. People’s health and their lives are at stake here.” 

Notably, at the press conference Ferguson didn’t mention his failure to address the current loophole that allows ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to access private drivers’ information from the state’s Department of Licensing (DOL). Researchers from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) released a report in early January, finding that at least nine cases of federal immigration enforcement between September and November of last year involved a search in the DOL database. 

Since that time, UWCHR has identified six additional cases and say they expect to find more cases as they continue to investigate. UWCHR confirmed that as of January 22, state officials have taken no action to cut off CBP or ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), leaving Washington drivers’ information vulnerable. 

Response in Seattle

Under new Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans, Seattle, along with King County, have submitted amicus briefs in a lawsuit brought by the State of Minnesota against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other federal officials challenging ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge.” 

Seattle’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (OIRA) presented at a council meeting this week, sharing the increased difficulties being faced by immigrants and refugees in Seattle over the last year. 

Azmi Haroun, the communications advisor at OIRA, told the committee that between December 2025 and January 2026, the 10 partners they work with have seen over 100 community members having their citizenship appointments abruptly canceled with no reasons given. 

Haroun said they’ve seen an increased demand for services and increased barriers to representation, such as “lawyers being allowed into the Tacoma detention center.” Many people are being held in prolonged detention without communication, pressuring them to choose deportation.

The Deportation Data Project found that since January 2025, nearly 2,000 people have been arrested for immigration detention in Washington state. 

Councilmember Eddie Lin spoke of the expected escalation of the need for legal assistance if Seattle sees an ICE occupation, and how various City departments can be a part of a response. 

“I’m concerned [with] how long it’s going to take to staff up and get prepared and get people ready,” Lin said. “And I know it’s a little bit hard to predict, right? But it seems like a natural disaster coming our way, but it’s the federal government.”

Lin called out the federal government for its role in spreading fear and inaccurate information.

“It is so critical that we provide accurate and timely information, and it is just so difficult to do so when our federal government is not sharing information with us,” Lin said. “I want to put blame, the primary blame, where it should sit, which is with our federal government intentionally causing this fear and chaos.”

Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck spoke of the atmosphere of fear preventing Seattleites from carrying on daily activities such as going to work, sending their kids to schools, and receiving medical care. “The stakes could not be higher,” Rinck said. “Our neighbors are quite literally being disappeared off of our streets.” 

Rinck also spoke of community members sharing a noticeable increase in visible racism and xenophobia in Seattle’s streets. 

Meanwhile, earlier in the week, Mayor Katie Wilson’s “Standing Up for Our Values” transition team held a town hall to discuss how to protect Seattleites, particularly immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities, from federal threats. More than a hundred people attended the meeting to share their experiences and concerns and stand in solidarity with community members. 

Immigrant and refugee community members spoke of how afraid they were to even be attending the meeting, and how the fear of being detained or killed impacts their daily lives. They also spoke of the fear of not being able to go safely to work, which would mean being unable to pay their rent and ultimately being evicted. 

Transgender community members spoke of their experiences of transphobia in Seattle and the current transgender relocation crisis. In a recent survey, 9% of transgender respondents said they’d moved to a different state between November 2024 and June 2025, which one person estimates could mean 400,000 transgender people moved during that time period. 

Attendees expressed a mixture of distrust in the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and the desire for SPD to step in to protect people from ICE and arrest ICE agents who are acting illegally. 

One attendee, who was a circus artist, noted police’s mistreatment of left-wing protestors: “I also don’t think that the solution is to take that power and give it to SPD, because the Seattle Police Department is a menace to a lot of us. Last summer, when the counter protesters at Cal Anderson Park were just brutally beaten by SPD, they came out with a statement afterwards from their union reps that said, we operate in the heart of antifa land. What makes you think that they have any interest in protecting those of us who are anti-fascist?”

Many community members spoke against widespread surveillance in Seattle, saying it was making them less safe. 

A person who grew up undocumented in Texas argued many companies are profiteering off mass deportation and surveillance: “I’ve witnessed the economics of criminality, of deportation, and locking people up in jails for as long as I’ve been an activist: families being torn apart, Black or Brown people being surveilled unlike ever before, while putting billions of that money into the pockets with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Palantir, Axon, Flock and many others that profit from the economy of mass surveillance, deportation and incarceration.”

Community members had a list of requests for Wilson, including:

• Turning off the surveillance cameras, license plate readers, and the real time crime center in Seattle.
• Providing more support for immigrant and refugee communities.
• Providing more support for transgender people, especially those relocating to Seattle, including job programs.
• Canceling contracts with companies with a direct relationship to ICE.
• Requiring SPD to withdraw from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Washington State Fusion Center so they are not directly cooperating with ICE and DHS agents.
• Banning all staging and operations of any federal law enforcement activities on public and City property.
• Preventing SPD from arresting protesters who are protesting ICE or other immigration enforcement and/or trying to protect community members from ICE.
• Eliminating the use of SPD to attack local mutual aid networks that have organized to protect at-risk residents.

While Wilson wasn’t invited to attend this event, several community members expressed disappointment that she wasn’t present. More than one person shared feelings that WIlson hasn’t acted decisively enough since taking office. 

“I think we should be clear that there are stakes for Mayor Wilson as well and the longevity of her administration,” a participant said. “So far, what you’ve seen is a lot of talk and not a lot of action. We’ve seen this during the campaign, she spoke openly against the establishment of the CCTV system in the city, and now, since she’s in office, it’s still going. What happened to that? She says she’s waiting to hear from immigrant rights groups. They’ve already spoken. They’ve said those surveillance cameras should be gone, and they’re still there.”

The Wilson administration’s response

The Mayor’s Office issued a press release on Thursday afternoon outlining the steps Wilson plans to take in response to the current constitutional crisis and federal violence.

The list of commitments includes providing City employees with updated training about how to report and respond to enforcement activity, having all departments conduct a data privacy review, posting clear signage of private spaces on city properties, and coordinating with other elected officials in the state.

In addition to moving quickly on spending money designated during the budget process last year for supporting immigrant communities, Wilson will issue an executive order prohibiting civil federal immigration authorities from using property that is City-owned and -controlled for civil immigration enforcement activities. 

The Mayor’s Office announced the new “Stand Together Seattle Initiative,” which will invite private property owners to post notice that their properties cannot be accessed by federal agents without a warrant. 

A hotline will also be established, led by a “trusted community-led organizational partner,” where city departments and community organizations can share information about federal enforcement activities that can then be passed along to concerned community members. 

Finally, Wilson will “require the Seattle Police Department to investigate, verify, and document any reports of immigration enforcement activity.” This will include SPD officers validating the identity of ICE agents, using body-worn and in-car video, and securing scenes where ICE might have done something illegal in order to gather evidence. 

However, the Mayor’s Office said the mechanism for the above is an updated directive, with no plan to enshrine the instructions in official SPD policy, which would provide accountability for SPD officers to comply. 

The press release contains no mention of the surveillance technology currently operating in Seattle, which appears to allow the current surveillance status quo to continue. 

“So many of us are shocked and heartbroken by the news out of Minneapolis, and share a growing concern that our city too could come under attack by the federal government,” Wilson said in the release. “The federal government is causing profound, long-term harm to so many communities, and we all have a shared responsibility to organize, practice solidarity, and do what we can to keep Seattle safe.”

As Washington and Seattle elected officials scramble to respond to the possibility of a federal incursion, Gomez has lessons to share from Minneapolis.

“The fact of the matter is that we have to be clear-eyed about the truth, which is that state and local policy are not the tool with which to respond to an authoritarian federal regime,” Gomez told The Majority Report. “Those tools are inadequate.”

Gomez presented an alternate solution to authoritarianism on the march: “We, the people” coming together, being courageous, and taking care of one another.  

The post Washington State Reacts to Feared ICE Invasion, Constitutional Crisis  first appeared on The Urbanist.

Sponsored by Senator Yasmin Trudeau (D-27th Legislative District, Tacoma) and Senator Jeff Holy (R-6th LD, Spokane), Senate Bill 6002 – titled the Driver Privacy Act – would add guardrails to the use of license plate cameras, including how long data is retained and how data is shared.

Should the bill pass, Washington would join 23 other states with laws on the books regulating the way ALPR data can be collected, accessed, and shared.

“These license plate cameras are powerful surveillance tools, and I think most people would agree there should be clear rules governing how the data collected on all of us is stored and accessed,” Trudeau said in a press statement. “We have a balancing act before us. We want law enforcement to have the tools they need to solve crime, but we also need to respect community surveillance concerns and ensure the use of this data aligns with our values as a state.”

Trudeau told The Urbanist she’d been tracking the data use and misuse of ALPRs for some time, specifically citing a University of Washington (UW) report that came out in October that showed several Washington agencies had enabled either direct sharing with or back or side door access to the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP).  

The chair of the Members of Color Caucus and the first Muslim American to serve in the state legislature, Trudeau also cited her experience at the Attorney General’s office, working on data privacy concerns and consumer protections, and her recent advocacy for immigrant issues.

“Overall, I think the bill puts forth a lot of protections that are really important in terms of disrupting the status quo right now in Washington State, which is that there are no regulations,” said Tee Sannon, the ACLU of Washington’s Technology Policy Program Director. “The bill does some important things around identifying agencies that can use ALPRs, prohibiting them from using the readers for things like tracking people for engaging in constitutionally protected activity, and also has some common sense data protections.”

Sannon said the bill puts into place a requirement for law enforcement to obtain a felony probable cause warrant before searching old ALPR data for a particular case. 

While Californian law enforcement agencies have repeatedly broken their state law governing ALPR usage, Trudeau thinks the three paths of enforcement included in her bill might give the policy more teeth. 

The bill contains criminal penalties (a gross misdemeanor) for any individual who violates the policy and a civil right of action so people who have been harmed by a breach of the policy can sue. Violations of the bill will also be subject to the consumer protection act, which would allow the state to get involved if specific vendors are behaving in a way that’s harming Washingtonians.

Sannon said Trudeau’s bill compares positively to the one in California.

“There’s this audit requirement that agencies need to conduct an internal audit once a year to review all of the access that’s been taking place to their LPR systems,” Sannon said. “And coupled with the enforcement mechanisms and the penalties […] I think that this actually makes it a strong provision, because then it basically means that agencies can’t claim that they weren’t aware that access was taking place.”

“I think that we have the strongest enforcement in this bill,” Trudeau said. “As far as every mechanism we have available to us to both deter and respond to misuse, that’s what we have in the bill.”

In addition to guardrails to guide agencies’ usage of ALPR technology and enforcement mechanisms, Trudeau’s bill states that data from ALPRs would no longer be subject to disclosure under the Public Records Act except in the case of “bona fide research.” This clause specifically addresses a recent court ruling in Skagit County Superior Court that found that videos captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records and must be disclosed.

Several Washington cities paused or delayed their ALPR programs while waiting for the above verdict, which continues to raise privacy concerns. 

While the bill doesn’t explicitly mention whether audit trail data from ALPRs would still be subject to public record requests, Trudeau said this data would still be available to researchers and journalists. According to Trudeau’s office, this information should include the user’s identity, date of access, search terms, and sharing details, and the audit trail is supposed to be preserved for two years. 

Journalistic outlets such as 404 Media, independent privacy watchdogs, and UW researchers have been using public records requests of these audits over the past year to determine that local agencies have been sharing their ALPR data with federal immigration agencies, as well as a Texas agency searching for an abortion seeker. Language added to the bill to make more explicit this intention about the audits would strengthen the bill further. 

Trudeau spoke about the importance of the bill for all Washingtonians.

“This is something that really, if I could just emphasize, we should all care,” Trudeau said. “This should not be a partisan thing. This should not be an immigrant issue. We have to do better by our personal information, and we’re watching in real time what happens when we have not been proactive.”

Data security in the age of ICE surveillance

License plate readers were first invented in the United Kingdom in 1976, but the systems didn’t enter into widespread use at that time because of high costs and accuracy issues. Even now, a recent report found that 1 in 10 ALPR readings contains an error, which can have disastrous consequences.

However, the cost of the cameras came down in the mid-2010s, allowing more, and smaller, law enforcement agencies to consider their use more seriously. A survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police published in 2022 found that 40% of agencies reported using a license plate reader system.

In the last few years, Flock Safety – one of the biggest providers of license plate reader technology – began expanding its network of license plate readers in Washington State, with an estimated 80 cities, six counties, and three tribes using Flock ALPRs. 

In May 2025, 404 Media reported that Flock’s data was being shared with federal agencies for immigration enforcement purposes. After The Urbanist reported that the King County Housing Authority’s (KCHA’s) Flock data appeared to have been shared for immigration enforcement as well, KCHA chose to discontinue their Flock pilot. And U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) discovered that Flock had run a pilot (since discontinued) that shared its data with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without properly informing its clients.

In October, the UW Center for Human Rights published its report finding that several law enforcement agencies in Washington State had been sharing their Flock data with federal agencies involved in immigration enforcement. 

Under sustained criticism, Flock has been changing its policies in ways that appear to be circumventing increased transparency instead of improving it.

Experts have been warning the audit data might not always provide a necessary check on what has become a massive and nation-wide surveillance network. And when, earlier in January, several police departments accidentally leaked information about millions of their surveillance targets, Flock responded by limiting the information available in audit logs.

As 404 Media reported, “In recent weeks Flock severely limited the amount of information available on its audit logs, which are designed to be a transparency tool, raising questions about how much information journalists, regulators, and government agencies will be able to get about police use of Flock cameras in the future.”

In December, Flock CEO Garrett Langley claimed that criticism of Flock and its data privacy issues constituted an attack on law enforcement. In January, Flock told 404 Media that the concern over their data privacy policies amounted to “activists trying to let murderers go free.”

Seattle and Tacoma use license plate readers from Flock’s competitor Axon. While Flock’s data privacy issues have featured heavily in the media over the past several months, other license plate reader providers, including Axon, Genetec, and Motorola, have similar privacy concerns. 

The ACLU of Washington puts the stakes of the surveillance net created by these companies in stark terms: “The risks from unregulated ALPRs are particularly significant in this current moment when the federal government seeks to silence dissent and go after political enemies. The Trump Administration is performing a retribution campaign that seeks to silence and punish critics who oppose the president’s agenda.”

Remaining issues

One of the most hotly contested provisions in Trudeau’s bill is how long agencies can retain the data collected by their license plate readers. 

Across Washington state, 30 days has become a bit of a standard, although the Seattle Police Department (SPD) retains their license plate reader data for 90 days. Data privacy advocates have asked for a much shorter retention time, pointing to New Hampshire as an example, which only retains the data for three minutes. 

In its current form, the bill allows agencies to retain the license plate data for 72 hours. Trudeau said the Institute for Justice, a nonpartisan group, suggested 24 hours, but law enforcement agencies are saying they need at least 30 hours. 

Sannon said the ACLU of Washington has pushed for this number to be as low as possible. She also emphasized that the data being deleted after the time limit is not data associated with any crime, which would come under one of the many exceptions for retention outlined in the bill. 

While there is language in the bill that says it takes effect immediately upon passage, it gives the attorney general until July 1, 2027 to develop model policies for license plate readers and sets a deadline of December 1, 2027 for agencies using the readers to adopt a consistent policy based on the model and start their annual reporting. Given the data sharing that has already been happening, this delay could be a cause for concern.

License plate readers would be banned from use around facilities providing protected healthcare or conducting an immigration matter, as well as around schools, places of worship, courts, and food banks. This requirement should be relatively easy to meet for fixed license plate cameras. However, for those cameras attached to vehicles, such as all of SPD’s ALPRS, figuring out how to stop recording at certain locations while an officer is driving around the city could be a challenge, begging the question as to whether mobile ALPRs can be used responsibly in a sanctuary city. 

Sannon says her biggest concerns with the bill right now are the provisions allowing agencies within Washington direct access of each others’ license plate data and allowing direct data access to third party vendors, many (if not all) of whom aren’t located within the state. 

“If this becomes a regional network [in Washington], then it’s also super charging law enforcement’s ability, even within the state, to tap into different local jurisdiction data and make it available at a much broader level than people, and I think councils, intended it to be accessed,” Sannon said.

Out-of state vendors could be directly subpoenaed by ICE or DHS for the data to which they have access. Sannon said this would allow agencies to bypass the Shield Law, which protects Washingtonians’ access to reproductive care, and the Keep Washington Working Act.

It’s possible some of these concerns could be addressed in future drafts of the bill. 

Just the first step

Given Flock’s recent move to severely curtail information available in its audits, advocates view this bill as simply one step in addressing concerns around license plate readers and the broader data privacy landscape.  

Another UW report released earlier this January showed that ICE and U.S. Border and Customs Patrol likely still have access to data from the Washington Department of Licensing. Advocates are calling for state agencies to start collecting less data in response. 

As ICE continues to build out its nationwide, comprehensive surveillance apparatus, the overarching conversation around data privacy will be continuing in Olympia.

“I’ve watched what’s happened a lot on the privacy front, more broadly than this bill,” Trudeau said. “Right now we don’t have any data privacy law in Washington State. I think we should continue to have concerns that any efforts around data privacy legislation have predominantly been crafted and pushed by the very same tech companies that don’t want enforcement permissions. So I hope that this gets folks to pay attention to a larger conversation about how their information is being used and misused. But I think in this instance, where I have a chance to make a difference and protect people’s information as much as I can, that’s what I’m going to do here.”

But not everyone agrees that the bill goes far enough. Privacy advocates are concerned this bill would encourage cities that have put their license plate reader systems on hold to move forward with more surveillance.

“The bill would be an improvement on the current situation, but sanctioning bulk data collection regardless of suspicion risks further normalizing surveillance architecture, chipping away at our rights and freedoms,” local anti-surveillance group DeFlock Redmond told The Urbanist. “An outright ban on the use of ALPRs and other dragnet mass surveillance technologies by law enforcement would be preferable.” 

The bill will have its first hearing in the Senate’s Law & Justice committee on Tuesday at 8am.

The post State Lawmakers Move to Regulate License Plate Readers, Fearing ICE Misuse first appeared on The Urbanist.

A new report released last Thursday by the University of Washington (UW) Center for Human Rights shows that driver information from Washington state’s Department of Licensing had been used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for federal immigration enforcement through at least mid-November. 

While state officials said two separate times last year that improper driver data was no longer being shared with federal immigration officials, it appears there is still a simple way for agents to obtain Washingtonians’ data.  

Researchers identified nine cases between September and November of last year where federal immigration enforcement occurred to Washingtonians while they were driving, following a search of their license plate numbers in the Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) database. Federal access to this data required the cooperation of both the DOL and the Washington State Patrol through Nlets and ACCESS, which are switchboard-type systems that allow users to query data held in a variety of institutions’ systems, including federal and state databases and records from undisclosed private companies.

At least seven of these cases are confirmed as civil immigration enforcement, in spite of this kind of state cooperation being against both agency policy and state law, including the Keep Washington Working Act. Several of the cases took place in King County, with traffic stops leading to immigration detentions in Renton, Auburn, Tukwila, Burien, and Puyallup. 

In the first 11 months of 2025, federal agencies used ACCESS/Nlets to query WA DOL data a total of 2,671,776 times, according to data provided by DOL. While many of these queries had nothing to do with civil immigration enforcement, the large number illustrates the possible scope of the problem. 

Through the ACCESS/Nlets data connection, immigration officers are able to access information such as date of birth, height, hair color, home address, and often most useful to agents, identifying photos. 

“We know [this number of confirmed cases] likely represent the tip of the iceberg,” Professor Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, the director of the UW Center for Human Rights, said at a press conference. “In fact, later today, we expect another batch of records about other arrests that have been reported to us, so it’s likely that the number of confirmed cases and affected Washingtonians will only continue to climb with time.”

Department of Licensing’s history of security issues

The Seattle Times first discovered the DOL was sharing driver data to assist federal agents in civil immigration enforcement back in 2018, when ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) would directly email the department and receive records. ICE and CBP were also able to search the DOL’s Driver and Plate Search (DAPS) database. 

At that time, the DOL changed its policy to stop emailing data except in the case of a judicial warrant. It also canceled several DAPS contracts with federal offices to protect its data. The next year, the legislature passed the Keep Washington Working Act. 

However, in July of last year, King 5 discovered that the DOL was once more sharing driver information with ICE through the DAPS database, leading to multiple immigration arrests. The DOL initially denied the allegations but then said that ICE had lied about how they were using the data. By the end of August, the DOL had terminated the two ICE DAPS accounts that had been used to obtain the data. 

In November, a group of lawmakers revealed that immigration authorities had another way to access driver data through the Nlets system. At that time, Governor Bob Ferguson quickly moved to block ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations’ (ERO) access to the data via this new pathway. 

However, eight of the nine cases identified by UW researchers showed that the Nlets system had been accessed by CBP, not by ICE ERO. CBP was never blocked from accessing the Nlets system. “We know the Border Patrol is engaging in civil immigration arrests and therefore failing to block their access, there’s no reason to believe that this would have stopped,” Godoy said.

The report referenced recent sworn testimony from federal officers in Portland, Oregon, explaining that they traveled to locations they considered to be promising for finding immigrants and then randomly ran license plates. Once they had the name associated with a vehicle, they could run the name in other databases, and if that information suggested the owner of the vehicle may have immigration issues, they would either arrest them during a traffic stop or visit their registered address to arrest them later.

The report said, “Records reviewed by UWCHR researchers, including ICE documents and records of Nlets queries using ACCESS, show that similar tactics appear to be being deployed by immigration agents in Washington.” 

Maria Abando, representing Whose Streets? Our Streets!, a BIPOC-led workgroup that formed as an offshoot of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, spoke about the fear and anger caused by ICE’s assault on civil liberties and the state’s failure to protect sensitive data.

“We are infuriated that we have been misled to believe that state institutions like the Department of Licensing were keeping us safe,” Abando said. “We are disgusted that our leadership is not taking action to eliminate institutional surveillance of the people, knowing that they’re putting us in harm’s way. There should be no negotiation, no compromise, no prioritizing of business partnerships with tech companies when it comes to our lives – for all data, not just with the Department of Licensing.”

ICE’s attack on civil liberties

The timing of this report’s release highlights the dangers presented by Washington state’s lack of data security when it comes to protecting immigrants.

On Wednesday in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good. Good had been participating in a protest against an ICE raid in the neighborhood and appeared to be attempting to drive away when she was shot. 

The Department of Homeland Security claimed Good was trying to run over an agent who feared for his life. However, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the claim “spin” and “bullsh*t.” 

An analysis from The New York Times shows Good’s vehicle appears to be turning away from the agent at the time he shot her. 

“We’ve dreaded this moment since the early stages of this ICE presence in Minneapolis,” said Frey in a statement. “This was a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”

The New York Times said this shooting is the ninth ICE shooting since September. 

“ICE is tearing families apart, detaining people regardless of immigration status, often targeting people based on race and language. District 2, Seattle’s most racially diverse district, has already seen an uptick of activity by ICE and other federal officers,” Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin wrote in a statement. “Let me be clear — ICE is not welcome in Seattle.” 

Also on Wednesday, masked ICE agents reportedly arrested three men in Seattle at Evergreen Washelli Cemetery.

“I am furious at the federal government’s abuse of power. It is unacceptable to kidnap people who are simply going about their lives. There is no place for it in Seattle,” Wilson wrote in a statement.

I joined today’s ICE Out vigil to grieve for Renee Nicole Good & the many others who have lost their lives to ICE. To mourn. And to organize too. To everyone who makes Seattle home: this is your city, and you belong here. You deserve to be safe here. And together, we’ll fight to make it so.

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— Mayor Katie B. Wilson (@mayorofseattle.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 3:59 PM

On Thursday, federal agents from the CBP shot two people in Portland, Oregon. Oregon’s attorney general is opening a formal investigation into the shooting. 

ICE also continues to ramp up its nationwide surveillance apparatus. 

“With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history,” wrote Cooper Quintin, the senior staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Multiple instances over the last year have illustrated how data collected by Washington State can be incorporated into this surveillance system.

Politico reported at the end of the year that ICE has new data-sharing agreements with several federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Health and Human Services. These agreements appear to enable bulk data-sharing in spite of the 1974 Privacy Act, which ostensibly barred such arrangements. 

President Donald Trump also went on a firing spree of inspector generals and government watchdogs when he took office last January. 

Meanwhile, in October, Radley Balko interviewed former immigration judge George Pappas, who was fired by the Trump administration in July.

“I can tell you that today, the immigration courts are substantively dead,” Pappas said. “They are completely absent of due process. Of fair hearings. They exist only for show, and in name only. Period. The courts are dead.”

Locally, the state democratic congressional delegation has grave concerns about the conditions at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. A December letter cites insufficient medical staff, two suicide attempts in April, and pregnant women not receiving appropriate pre-natal care. The detainees have also not been receiving enough food and face barriers to receiving necessary legal counsel.

State officials have the options of rescinding the business license of GEO, the operator of the ICE center, and taxing the facility per detainee per day in an effort to make its operation financially untenable. Rescinding the business license would be a job for Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, while a detention tax could be instituted by the state legislature during this session. 

The behavior of ICE and status of immigration courts and detention facilities raises the stakes for protecting Washingtonians, and their data, ever higher. 

Next steps for Washington State and Seattle

In an interview with The Urbanist, Wilson reiterated her concern for the threats surveillance data poses to vulnerable people in Seattle.

“We’re going to be reviewing all the surveillance policies and programs that are in place, and talking to the folks who have written in with concerns and others, and coming up with a plan,” Wilson said. “I don’t have the details of exactly what that looks like, but it’s very important to me that we’re protecting people’s privacy and not unnecessarily handing tools to the federal government that could be used to target people.”

In a statement reported on by The Washington Standard, Governor Bob Ferguson said “he stands prepared to take further action.” 

The statement goes on to say he’ll do so “with reason and care.”

The UW report contains three recommendations for next steps regarding the DOL data:

1. Immediately block Nlets searches by any agency associated with ICE and federal immigration, including CPB and Homeland Security Investigations.
2. Institute a process of accountability for the harm that has been caused to people through the improper data sharing that has taken place.
3. Commit to transparency of data-sharing by state agencies, including providing various logs to independent researchers.

However, reporting from the Seattle Times indicates the state might be reluctant to cut CBP’s access to Nlets, with Brionna Aho, a spokesperson from the Governor’s Office, saying it’s not a straightforward issue. “Misleading reports like this do more harm than good,” Aho said.

According to the report, one of the reasons the state hasn’t yet blocked CPB from Nlets is because of the need for agents to check enhanced drivers’ licenses at the border. However, there is a technical fix that would alleviate the problem should the state choose to invest in it. 

Regardless, both Godoy and Nina Martinez, executive director of Latino Civic Alliance, agreed that even if CBP’s access is revoked, they are concerned ICE will simply find other agencies and avenues that aren’t blocked to get to the state’s data. Godoy suggested that if the state was either conducting audits itself or allowing audits by independent auditors, the migration of which agency was sharing data with ICE could be more easily tracked.

However, if the data sharing with ICE is happening on a more informal basis, as it does with law enforcement officers performing casual look-ups of license plate reader data on behalf of ICE, audits might not be enough. 

Abando and BJ Last from Stop Surveillance City referred to this as a game of Whac-a-Mole and asked for more action from the state, including state agencies deliberately trying to scale back their collection of data. An example of this would be the DOL no longer sharing photos with Nlets or ceasing to permanently store photos at all.  

“Whose Streets? Our Streets! would like to say to our Washington State leadership, do something,” Abando said. “We urge you to stop playing this game of Whac-a-Mole when ICE shows its ugly head on our streets, and be accountable. We paid into this system, registering our licenses, not expecting our information to be treated so carelessly. We call on you to reduce data being collected to only what is absolutely essential to providing the services, and store that data for as little time as possible, and delete all non-essential data about us to help prevent us from getting targeted, harassed and snatched up on the streets.”

The post UW Report: Immigration Agents Still Accessing WA Driver Data first appeared on The Urbanist.

Continuing his slide into fascism, Donald Trump has now unleashed federal immigration enforcement agents across our country, openly attacking, injuring, murdering, and imprisoning immigrants, citizens, advocates, children, old people, our friends and neighbors, and the people we depend upon for wellbeing.

In Seattle, three residents were kidnapped by the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this week. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, ICE personnel executed Renee Good, an American citizen, mom, poet, and wife, who was actually trying to avoid a confrontation with ICE.

We protest, as we should, but our legislature can do much more than protest.  

In Tacoma, the state of Washington has its very own ICE penal colony, operated by the GEO company. At any one time, 1500 people are imprisoned this detention facility. Their imprisonment is in direct violation of Article 1, Section 3 of the Washington state constitution. That “personal rights” article states: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” 

Having a private profit-making prison in our state is an insult to all of us and an assault on those who are taken prisoner with no due process. Additionally, this violates  Article 1, Section 13 of our state constitution which states: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless in case of rebellion or invasion the public safety requires it.”  

None of the people in the ICE prison have been afforded due process. They have been forcibly picked up by ICE. We should not stand by and just watch. The state Attorney General should go after the GEO company for violation of the state’s constitution and demand due process for those incarcerated, and immediate release from imprisonment.

GEO is a private for-profit company registered to operate in Washington state as a foreign limited liability company. In 2017, then Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit against GEO for paying incarcerated people $1 a day for cleaning and maintenance work at the facility (while GEO was receiving from ICE $100 a day for each of these people). At that time, GEO’s profit from the Tacoma facility was $20 million annually.

GEO was also ordered to hand over $17 million in back wages, plus $6 million for “unjust enrichment.” What did GEO do? In typical Trumpian fashion, it appealed the decision.

Even though GEO has failed to pay back wages to incarcerated people, Washington state just renewed its license in December, with “no disciplinary action.”  

It is time for Washington Attorney General Nick Brown to review and rescind GEO’s business license. 

GEO gets $165 a day for each incarcerated person. The average stay is 64 days, before the detainee is sent out of our country or released back to his or her home in Washington. That’s over $10,500 per detainee from the federal government to GEO. That adds up to $90 million a year, to enhance GEO’s bottom line. GEO expects to have an annual profit in 2025 of between $455 million to $465 million.

In 2003, the state of Washington helped to launch this insult to humanity with a loan of $57 million from the Washington Economic Development Finance Authority. In 2011, the Washington Economic Development Finance Authority loaned GEO another $54.4 million.

Our state government can not only loan money to dubious entities, it can also tax these entities. That’s exactly what our legislators should be doing… next week. The state Legislature should penalize GEO by making imprisonment without due process untenable in Washington. The Legislature could tax GEO $50 a day for every person in their custody, all of whom are victims of GEO’s violation of due process. That would be easy to track, as GEO has to keep an “inventory” of the people it locks up. Such a tax would bring in over $25 million annually. This could even force GEO to close up shop in Washington to protect their profits.    

Such a tax could be replicated by states across the country. We could launch this effort to bankrupt GEO, ICE’s accomplice, across our country. Such a move would show the constitution is still in force, and it still is our country.  

As patriotic Washingtonians, we must stand up to ICE. We also must stand up to GEO. Our own state government financed their facility. So, now our legislature must tax GEO, ICE’s private sector profiteering partner in beating down immigrants. Diminishing the profits of corporate imprisoners should be at the top of our agenda, for our Governor, our Legislature, and everyone else.

The post Op-Ed: It’s Time to Uproot ICE Penal Colonies Like Tacoma’s GEO first appeared on The Urbanist.

Evans is the first Black person to be elected to this role, as well as the first woman of color. 

In a discordant note, right-wing media attacks against Evans began before the ceremony had even been conducted, with a concerted effort to brand her as soft on crime already underway from the Seattle Police Officers Guild and right-leaning media sources.

Evans was sworn in by U.S. Federal District Court Judge Richard Jones after remarks by former Washington State Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu, whom Evans called a mentor, University of Washington student and campaign worker Towa Nakano-Harris, and Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown. 

“My purpose, my North Star, is serving others,” Evans said in a speech following her swearing-in. “Service to others is something that has always guided me. Dr Martin Luther King Jr, said that life’s most urgent and persistent question is: what are you doing for others? This has guided me in my life and in my career in public service.”

Evans’s speech culminated in a standing ovation and the audience singing to mark her birthday. Many notable local elected officials attended the event, including Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay (and his daughter), former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, and most of the Seattle City Council. Seattle Police Department (SPD) Chief Shon Barnes was also present and served on Evans’s transition team.

Evans ran as a progressive Democrat, pledging to follow evidence-based policies and stand up against the overreach of the Trump administration. Evans spoke strongly against her predecessor’s tough-on-crime policies, especially the Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) and Stay Out of Area of Prostitution (SOAP) zones, policies that Evans said are racist and ineffective. 

Known as the city’s top lawyer, the Seattle City Attorney defends and initiates lawsuits on behalf of the City, advises elected officials such as the mayor and the city council, and enforces city regulations, including labor laws and tenant protections.

In a criminal capacity, the City Attorney only handles low-level misdemeanors, the most serious of which are driving under the influence (DUI) and domestic violence cases. Other misdemeanors handled by the City Attorney’s Office include shoplifting, trespassing, disorderly conduct, vandalism, and as of the fall of 2023, simple drug possession and public drug use. 

Meanwhile, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office handles all felonies, which include charges such as murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, arson, and drug trafficking. 

Brown spoke about a time in the past when he advised Evans against taking a career opportunity, which later led to her being free to run for office. 

“There was going to be a future opportunity to lead, to shine, and see what she could become,” Brown said. “I did not know it would be serving as the City Attorney for the City of Seattle, but I knew that she had the skill set and the character to do something bold and visionary that would have an impact on more people.” 

Assuming office at a time of legal challenges

Evans assumes the office of the Seattle City Attorney at a challenging time, between a slew of lawsuits from current and former members of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), a new mayor who’s interested in passing more progressive revenue and pushing for a bolder vision for the City’s comp plan, and an erratic United States president who has spent the last year regularly trying to withhold federal funding and threatening to send a more active U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence and/or the National Guard to Seattle. 

“You step into the role at a time when the challenges facing our cities across the nation are complex, ever changing,” said Yu during her speech. “But with those challenges come opportunities, opportunities to strengthen trust, to uphold transparency, and to ensure that every voice in our community is heard and respected. I am confident that your leadership will help guide us towards solutions that reflect the values that we hear.”

As she stressed on the campaign trail and in an interview with The Urbanist following her victory, Evans reiterated her pledge to be proactive in protecting the city from federal overreach, whatever form that might take.

Evans also has the opportunity to shape the city through her legal interpretations and level of risk aversion.

During a discussion of council amendments to the Seattle Comprehensive Plan last fall, councilmembers used legal advice given to them by the City Attorney’s Office as a reason to oppose the addition of several neighborhood centers that had been included in the planning department’s original growth plan before then-Mayor Bruce Harrell’s team intervened. If Evans were to take a more pro-active approach than Davison, one obstacle or excuse for council action for adding density to the comp plan would be removed from the table. 

On the criminal side, Evans plans to focus strongly on DUI and domestic violence cases, which she has said are not being filed quickly enough. 

Now that she’s in office, Evans plans to determine the methodology Davison was using in her High Utilizer Initiative, which focused on a list of people who frequently cycle through the City Attorney’s Office because of low-level violations. Many of these people have been found to be homeless and suffering from substance use disorder and/or behavioral health disorders, and some of them aren’t competent to stand trial. 

Evans will be working with King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion to ensure the City and County are aligned in their methodology for who belongs on such a list. 

“[The High Utilizers] definitely need our attention and focus because we need to be making sure we’re being good stewards for the whole city and for people that need help, or providing the right help in treatment and services and for public safety,” Evans told The Urbanist. “I see it all weaving together.”

Evans is also full steam ahead on implementing her reimagined community court, which she sees as a key component to breaking the cycle of people committing misdemeanors. Evans told The Urbanist she has already met with the Seattle Municipal Court, who are very excited about the idea of a new community court. 

Immediate right-wing attack

The Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) did not wait for Evans to settle into office before going on the attack. 

The night before Evans’s swearing in ceremony, SPOG published a social media post making the inaccurate claim that SPD would no longer be arresting people for open drug use. SPOG president Mike Solan signed the post, which specifically attacked the City’s Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD) diversion program, identifying its ideology as “meeting people where they are who are in the throes of addiction.”

“Most cops know that the LEAD program supports this ideology and they don’t want to refer cases,” Solan wrote. “It is a waste of time. We’ve all seen how our streets can be filled with death, decay, blight and crime when ideology like this infects our city.”

This post appears to have been inspired by a memo issued by Evans last week and a department-wide email Barnes sent to SPD in response. 

In her memo, Evans states that all arrests for drug possession and public drug use should be referred for review to a team within her office, who will determine whether each case is suitable for referral to LEAD. Evans confirmed with The Urbanist that the cases will not be directly referred to LEAD without review.

In his email, Barnes appears to misinterpret that guidance: “Effective immediately, all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use will be diverted from prosecution to the LEAD program.” 

This statement isn’t strictly correct, since cases with those charges will be sent to an internal team within the City Attorney’s Office to determine whether a LEAD referral will be made. 

On Monday, SPD released a statement saying “SPD has not changed its policy around public drug use and SPD will continue to enforce Seattle’s laws” and “Seattle Police officers will continue to make arrests for drug-related charges if they have probable cause.”

This clarifying statement from SPD did not prevent Seattle City Councilmembers Bob Kettle and Maritza Rivera from making statements of their own. Kettle recognized the misunderstanding that had taken place and expressed a wish for continued improvement, but Rivera said she found the news “concerning” and expressed a fear that Seattle might “go backwards.”

When asked for her response to SPOG’s statement, Evans referenced her experience as a federal prosecutor working on fentanyl drug trafficking cases.

“To say that we shouldn’t be aggressive in our approach to help get folks connected to treatment to stop this extremely addictive drug is really out of touch,” Evans said. “Jail isn’t the solution. It’s not a treatment facility. I have prosecuted folks that have smuggled fentanyl into our jails, and so it’s very clear that that is not the place for people that are dealing with substance use disorder to get any meaningful recovery.”

Evans cited the failure of Davison’s approach to the fentanyl crisis, talking about kids and teenagers she’s seen on the streets addicted to fentanyl.

“You have to provide the right response so people are not back out on the streets using [drugs],” Evans said. “That’s what we all want at the end of the day. And we’re going to be smart and evidence-based in our approach to accomplish that, and not just say things that sound tough, but actually in substance, are failed.”

Moving forward

This SPOG offensive against diversion services is likely to be just the beginning as Evans joins fellow progressives Wilson and Councilmembers Dionne Foster, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and Eddie Lin in beginning new terms of office. 

Solan announced at the end of the year that he’ll be stepping down from the SPOG presidency in a month, but he has already endorsed a possible successor: Kent Loux, whose campaign video says that he served on SPOG’s board and the contract negotiations team. 

Kent Loux, Mike Solan's hand-picked successor to lead SPOG, is somehow an even bigger dope, but he's a "proven fighter with miles left in the tank," according to his campaign video:

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— DivestSPD (@divestspd.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 9:06 AM

The video utilizes bombastic music and images of flashing patrol lights, a pack of wolves, and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) battle ropes and a riled-up boxer. 

“Make no mistake: Seattle’s politics have veered sharply left, unleashing a storm that threatens to dismantle everything we’ve built brick by brick,” Loux says in a voiceover.  “SPOG is staring down its most brutal years yet—a relentless assault on our unity, our resources, and our resolve.”

During the voiceover, the video alternates between photos of Wilson, Foster, and Rinck.

It's the 5th anniversary of Jan 6 & Mike Solan is stepping down. Good time to share an excerpt from Capt. Robert Brown's journal. On 1/6, Solan's chosen successor, Kent Loux, told a roomful of cops that the 2020 elections were "'clearly stolen" and needed to be "set right."

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— DivestSPD (@divestspd.bsky.social) January 6, 2026 at 1:05 PM

Regardless of the results of the SPOG presidential election and right-wing propaganda efforts, Evans has expressed her readiness to fight for Seattle’s values. 

During her swearing-in speech, Evans referenced her grandfather, Olympian and two-time gold medal winner Lee Evans. Lee Evans wore a black beret and raised his fist while accepting one of his Olympic medals in 1968 as part of the Black Power movement, embracing what his granddaughter Evans referred to as a sacrifice and risk to make things better for others. 

“I’m approaching this with eyes wide open that the road ahead will not be easy,” Evans said. “I think about what my grandfather did at the Olympic Games, how it was met with outrage, but it stood the test of time, and it was on the right side of history. And now we are in a moment where young leaders like Towa will look back and ask what the leaders in this moment were doing to be on the right side of history. And we are going to do that work right now.”

The post Erika Evans Takes City Attorney Oath, SPOG Goes on Attack first appeared on The Urbanist.

Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Eddie Lin, and Rob Saka voted against the new SPOG contract, citing lack of progress on key police accountability issues. Rinck flagged continued obstacles to deploying civilian crisis responders. 

“The badge earns trust not from its shine, but from the conduct behind it,” Saka said. “The proposed SPOG CBA (collective bargaining agreement) is a bad deal for the City of Seattle. Accountability provisions contained in that contract are too lightweight and do not at all close the gap between what’s set forth and our accountability ordinance, our city values, and the terms and conditions and the final agreed upon contracts. For those reasons, I will be opposing and voting against this deal.” 

Both Saka and Lin referenced personal past experiences with police brutality.

“It’s important to recognize that the grief and the anger and the frustration that led to the nationwide protests in 2020, those are just as real today as they were then,” Lin said. “We have never addressed the root causes, the generational trauma that was inflicted upon our communities. It continues to be inflicted upon too many. And you know, we can’t just sweep it under the rug. We can’t just ignore it or move past it, although many people would like to, because it is a festering wound that will continue to impact our communities, continue to impact our ability to provide true public safety.”

Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth voted in favor of the contract, in spite of saying on the campaign trail in 2023 that she would oppose a SPOG contract that didn’t grant subpoena power to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and didn’t remove limitations on how many OPA investigators are allowed to be civilian versus sworn. The new SPOG contract doesn’t achieve either of these goals. 

Councilmembers voted unanimously in favor of the less contentious Seattle Police Management Association’s (SPMA) new contract. Both police guild contracts cover the term from 2024 to the end of 2027. SPOG represents the rank-and-file of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), while SPMA represents SPD’s lieutenants and captains, a much smaller number of employees. 

The mayor’s office takes the lead role in negotiating the contract with SPOG leaders, but the City’s Labor Relations Policy Committee (LRPC) plays a key role in the bargaining process, and consists of five city councilmembers. By design, this composes a majority when it comes time for the council to vote on the contract. Should any of those five councilmembers vote against a contract approved by the LRPC, SPOG could choose to file an unfair labor practice, saying the City didn’t bargain in good faith. 

However, some police accountability and civilian alternative response advocates, tired of waiting for reform that continues to be kicked down the road, believe such an action would be worth the legal risk. Beyond the lack of accountability wins, critics contend the contract’s generous terms will strain the City budget and siphon resources from other programs that contribute to safety and wellbeing. 

The SPOG contract raises the starting base salary of an SPD officer to $118,000, with a pay bump to $126,000 after six months. This base doesn’t include overtime, special event bonuses, or the newly negotiated premiums for language fluency and education. 

The negotiated raises, bonuses, and special incentive pay are not tied to accountability standards. Officers with a colorful misconduct record – or, in the case of backpay, even officers who have been terminated – will receive the same negotiated benefits.

Council’s central staff estimates that the contract will cost the City an additional $131.7 million during its term. Financial planning reserves will cover the additional costs through 2026, leaving $43.6 million in extra 2027 spending unaccounted for. Any net new officer hires in 2027 would also require SPD’s budget to grow. 

Outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell made the completion of bargaining for this SPOG contract a priority before the end of his first term. Its passage now, however, a few short weeks before he leaves office, means that Mayor-elect Katie Wilson, along with new Councilmember-elect Dionne Foster and City Attorney-elect Erika Evans, won’t have as meaningful a chance to influence police accountability and alternative response, both important issues in Seattle. 

Accountability in the contract

Police accountability didn’t used to be included in police guild contracts, which typically cover wages and working conditions. Moving accountability issues to the bargaining table has drastically reduced their transparency to the public; accountability measures are now enshrined in difficult-to-understand legalese in labor contracts and require confidentiality during the bargaining process, meaning the public doesn’t know what’s happening until a full contract is presented and inevitably framed as a fait accompli. 

In turn, this shift to bargaining away accountability has contributed to reduced public trust in police departments, as well as local government overall. 

Seattle’s landmark accountability ordinance, passed in 2017, was meant to enshrine a basic level of police accountability, a minimum floor that advocates and community groups intended to build upon and improve in subsequent years. While some aspects of the ordinance needed to be bargained with SPMA and SPOG, that bargaining was intended to happen quickly to allow further progress. 

However, a new SPOG contract passed in 2018, negotiated by the office of then-Mayor Jenny Durkan, broke that promise and failed to bargain key aspects of the ordinance, which remain unrealized to this day. As a result, the City has been unable to enact basic police accountability measures, and the conversation has remained essentially frozen for the last several years. 

This inability to make accountability progress was a major inspiration for the movement seeking to divert police funding to other programs, which caught fire in 2020 protests reacting to the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police. The defund movement unsuccessfully pushed to cut SPD funding by 50% in 2020 — instead SPD funding has grown — outpacing growth rates at most other departments. Seeing the continued power of SPOG to block commonsense accountability measures while SPD responded violently to protests against police brutality highlighted the systemic issues with policing and the failure of earlier reform efforts. 

The newly passed SPOG contract continues the status quo, with the accountability ordinance remaining unfulfilled. 

A small gain in the contract that allows longer retention of OPA misconduct files regardless of outcome of the investigation is the result of needing to be in compliance with a state law passed in 2021. The clarification of the 180-day investigation clock modifies a system that some experts have recommended against in its entirety. OPA’s civilian investigators may now assist in serious misconduct cases that might end in termination, but they can’t be the sole lead on such a case. These changes are incremental at best. 

On the other hand, SPD will now be allowed to deal with “less than serious” misconduct cases in house instead of referring them to the OPA, in a move SPD leadership has been requesting for years. While this change could potentially free the OPA to spend more time on serious cases while building the leadership skills of SPD officers, the implementation of the system will be key. Removing the OPA entirely from the system and relying solely on the OIG for any review, as the contract states, could lead to problems, as in-house discipline still needs to be consistent, timely, and fair. 

The City and SPOG will be entering interest arbitration to determine several issues around arbitration used to appeal disciplinary decisions around officer misconduct. That being said, information about the issues being arbitrated provided by Mayor Harrell’s Chief of Staff Andrew Myerberg indicates that while the changes sought by the City would be an improvement, they would still fall short of the 2017 accountability ordinance, which requires disciplinary appeals to go through a public hearing in front of the Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC).

The interest arbitration process could take several months to complete.

The CARE team

Supporters of the contract have been citing its new provisions for the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team that provides alternative civilianized response to behavioral health-related calls that don’t require a police response. The contract makes the CARE team permanent and allows it to expand at will.

The contract also allows the CARE team to be “solo dispatched” directly from 911 without police co-response. However, the contract also imposes so many restrictions on when solo dispatch is possible as to serve as a serious impediment to the team actually being able to do their jobs. 

For example, the CARE team is not allowed to go by themselves to help anyone in a private residence or business, a car, or a homeless encampment. They also aren’t allowed to respond alone if there is any chance a crime has taken place such as public drug use or possession or if expected drug paraphernalia is present, which includes aluminum foil. 

All these restrictions prevent the independence of Seattle’s 911 dispatch to determine which responder should go to which calls. CARE Chief Amy Barden has repeatedly explained that dispatch independence is required to make 911 call response times faster. 

Earlier this year, the City championed a bill at the Washington State Legislature, sponsored by Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43, Seattle) that would have provided the right for the City to establish an alternative response team that wouldn’t need to be bargained with law enforcement personnel. SPD’s Dan Nelson, who at the time was an assistant chief, testified before the House committee. 

“Alternative responses to non-criminal 911 calls is crucial for ensuring that individuals in crisis receive the most appropriate care while allowing law enforcement to focus on serious public safety concerns,” Nelson said at the hearing. “We have proven that the rank and file appreciate the service, and they leverage the service.” 

In early March, SPOG’s President Mike Solan released an episode of the police guild’s podcast that featured doctored photos of Mayor Bruce Harrell, Scott, and Nelson dressed in colorful clown wigs, condemning the bill in question.

Several months later, in mid-September, a post on SPOG’s X social media account announced Nelson’s demotion from assistant chief to captain with the caption FAFO (eff around and find out). The post appeared to take credit for Nelson’s demotion as a retaliatory response after he supported the bill that would ensure the smooth operation of alternative response. 

Options moving forward

In addition to continuing to push important accountability issues into interest arbitration, many elected officials have highlighted the importance of a state-level fix that would remove police accountability issues from the collective bargaining process entirely. 

A bill that would have achieved that goal was introduced in the state legislature in 2021 and again in 2022. However, it faced stiff opposition from organized labor, who worried that even narrowly targeted changes to collective bargaining could represent a slippery slope for labor rights in the state.

“Our system is fundamentally broken,” Saka said. “Our state law keeps it broken. It is past time to address this root cause. Washington’s system is built to produce weak oversight. State law prevents cities like ours from unilaterally strengthening police disciplinary rules. That means anything and everything tied to misconduct must be specifically negotiated, bargained for, and agreed to by both parties. Under current state law, even police misconduct matters are considered routine or standard, quote unquote, terms […] and conditions of employment.”

Saka went on to explain why police misconduct in particular shouldn’t be considered standard or similar to other collective bargaining rights.

 “Police officers carry the state’s authority to use deadly force… Nothing about this solemn authority is routine or standard,” Saka said. “This authority to use force and potentially take a life requires a stronger set of oversight, not oversight designed to collapse during negotiations. The legislature must act. The legislature must change this law now so discipline and misconduct rules cannot be bargained away. Without that change, Seattle will continue to face contracts that undermine our values. Lives are literally dependent on it.”

Barring a state law change, another possible recourse is to change the City Charter mandating the existence of SPD so it can be disbanded, as was done in 2012 in Camden, New Jersey. In Camden, the city opted to build a new department from scratch. 

During his Seattle City Attorney campaign earlier this year, Rory O’Sullivan suggested something similar: that Seattle move to disband its police department and instead contract its policing services from the King County Sheriff’s Office.

“The point that I was trying to make during the campaign was […] that SPOG has created a whole bunch of roadblocks, and, I believe in a number of instances, hasn’t really negotiated in good faith,” O’Sullivan told The Urbanist. “And so the City should be prepared to keep all options on the table. And one of those options is marshaling a charter initiative to change the charter to allow the City to contract with the county as a bargaining piece to hopefully give the City a better opportunity to hold SPOG accountable.”

Aside from the two larger possibilities outlined above, Wilson will have to get creative in finding ways to move police accountability and alternative response forward during her first term. Since the new contract runs until the end of 2027, SPOG will have the option of stalling and working without a contract for two years in an attempt to avoid having to bargain with Wilson, should she fail to win a second term. 

Chief Barden of CARE already has a lot of ideas of how to deploy her team of alternative responders. While she’s hoping SPD will be willing to refer appropriate 911 calls to the CARE team, she’s also setting up arrangements with the King County Jail and local hospitals to be able to receive direct CARE response. The CARE team could also potentially be dispatched through 988, which isn’t a body of work SPOG can attempt to claim. 

Plus, the CARE team can continue its proactive patrols in areas where crisis calls are common.

In addition, Wilson can find ways to encourage better accountability directly through SPD and the accountability agencies, focusing on issues that don’t have to be bargained. For example, SPD’s promotion process could be reformed, requiring consultation with a candidate’s supervisor and review of their misconduct record instead of relying solely on test scores. The department’s backgrounding process that resulted in the disastrous hire of former Officer Kevin Dave could potentially be reviewed and changed.

Wilson could encourage more enthusiastic support for the CARE team from current SPD Chief Shon Barnes, whose services she just announced she will be retaining. Wilson will have the opportunity to decide who should serve as the director of the OPA, as the current director Bonnie Glenn only serves until the end of 2026. 

In a written interview with The Urbanist last month, Wilson underlined her commitment to transparency, which has often been lacking around issues related to SPD. 

“I want people to see a city government that’s transparent about what we’re doing, what’s working, and what challenges we’re facing,” Wilson said. “That’s how we rebuild trust so we can make real progress.”

However, undoing the damage from another SPOG contract that falls short will be an uphill battle, and it could take a long time. Harrell signed the new contract on Thursday, three weeks before his term ends.

The post Seattle Approves Controversial Police Guild Contract, Three Councilmembers Dissent first appeared on The Urbanist.

Law enforcement agencies across the state have been purchasing Flock Safety ALPRs, which the company claims will “stop crime in its tracks.” The University of Washington’s (UW) Center for Human Rights’ report highlighted Flock Safety surveillance data being exposed by local law enforcement agencies in order to assist in federal immigration enforcement. 

In May, 404 Media originally broke the news that Flock’s data was being shared with federal agencies including the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for immigration enforcement purposes. Anonymous researchers obtained Flock ALPR audit data through a public records request to the police department in Danville, Illinois. 

In June, The Urbanist reported that the King County Housing Authority’s (KCHA) Flock camera data had been shared with law enforcement agencies across the country. KCHA’s data appeared to have been used in immigration enforcement searches, as well as in a search for someone who had sought an abortion. This information was likewise discovered through a public records request of Flock audit data. 

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) wrote a letter to Flock stating he’d learned Flock had run a pilot earlier in 2025 that gave data access to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) (which includes ICE), the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service without properly informing its law enforcement and other clients. 

Wyden has also written a letter requesting the Federal Trade Commission investigate Flock for possible negligent cybersecurity practices. 

The UW report built on this previous work with its researchers filing public records requests with law enforcement agencies across Washington state. Records showed at least eight agencies enabled direct sharing with U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) and at least 10 agencies had “back door” access available to USBP. Researchers also found limited instances of “side door” access with officers across the nation performing searches on USBP’s behalf.

“This report further confirms that Flock ALPR is ripe for abuse that leads to real harm for the most vulnerable among us, including immigrants,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia said. “Flock provides a constant, warrantless digital dragnet that sweeps up everyone who passes in front of its cameras whether they’re suspected of any crime or not, and in increasingly authoritarian times, that’s a real danger to our freedoms.”

Washington State has no laws regulating the use of ALPR technology. Even states that have such laws have found they are not a panacea. California prohibits state agencies from sharing ALPR data with out-of-state and federal agencies, but agencies all over the state have broken this law. 

“For me, the shocking finding of our report was not so much just that Border Control had access to systems, because that’s what others had reported and we thought we were going to find, but it was that all these agencies said they didn’t realize either that they were directly sharing with Border Patrol or that Border Patrol was able to access their networks through the national lookup feature in Flock,” said Phil Neff, Research Coordinator for the UW Center for Human Rights. “So the fact that these agencies didn’t even have awareness of the full scope of the systems that they were employing is concerning.”

Local agencies pause use of Flock

In the wake of the UW report, several local cities have moved to pause their use of Flock ALPRs.

Lynnwood City Council approved their Flock cameras in a two-year agreement in January. Following the release of UW’s report in October, Lynnwood Police Department disabled all system access and turned off the cameras. Some residents would like the contract to be canceled altogether. 

The KCHA told The Urbanist they have discontinued their pilot trial of Flock cameras, which were installed at 5 of their 95 subsidized properties. The cameras were deactivated in mid-September.

The Redmond Police Department suspended their use of their Flock cameras as of November 5, after a council vote earlier in the week and several ICE arrests made in the city. The city council plans to review the ALPR program’s governance before making a decision about how to move forward. Further council discussions are planned for November 12 and 18, with the opportunity for public comment on November 18.

“The real-world harms caused by mass surveillance systems like Flock are not merely hypothetical; the repercussions of the abuse of this sensitive data are being seen in the news around the country on a weekly basis,” local anti-surveillance group DeFlock Redmond told The Urbanist. “The recent questioning by Redmond City Council Members (based on concerns raised from the community) were very encouraging and their request for this suspension was a welcome first step. It showed us that they are listening and willing to take action to protect the community from the many threats this dragnet exposes us to. We remain optimistic in asking that the council does the right thing and cancels this contract outright.”

While some cities pull back from their Flock surveillance programs, others remain committed. Just last month, Federal Way voted to expand their use of Flock ALPRs by buying two new cameras.

Meanwhile, some cities have been waiting for the resolution of a lawsuit to make up their minds.

Public Records Act case

In June, the city of Stanwood received a public records request for all ALPR camera footage during a one-hour time window on a specific date. Unlike red-light cameras, ALPR camera footage shows the faces and license plates of all the drivers who pass by as opposed to being limited to people who are suspected of a crime. 

In response to the request, the cities of Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley filed a motion asking for Flock camera footage to either not be public record or be exempt from the Public Records Act for privacy reasons. State law already exempts red-light camera data from public records.

While waiting for a ruling, Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley paused their ALPR programs. Woodway delayed its vote on whether to enter into a contract with Flock, and Mountlake Terrace delayed installation of its Flock cameras. 

Last week, Judge Elizabeth Yost Neidzwski of Skagit County Superior Court ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records and must be disclosed. 

However, the case didn’t address the issue of whether the ALPR audits are public records, which is pertinent since some local agencies are denying public records requests for the audits. 

The Urbanist has obtained attorney-client privileged communications accidentally released and decoded from a public records request made by Rose Terse to the City of Prosser. These communications include an email sent to a records division employee of the City of Prosser from Nikki Thompson, a partner at Thompson, Guildner & Associates, Inc., P.S., which is the law firm that handled Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley’s case.

“The first question is whether or not you actually ran an audit report that meets the criteria identified by the requestor,” Thompson wrote. “If you did not, you do not have an obligation to create a record in response to a request. If you did run the audit reports before the request date, the general consensus among city attorneys is that the external audit report contains information that does not belong to us. Most cities are denying the request for external audits. The internal audits are somewhat different.”

The external audit report is the type of audit that shows if out-of-state and federal agencies, including ICE, have accessed the ALPR data. This legal opinion both discourages agencies from running the audits in the first place, preventing them from pro-actively discovering any issues, and tries to limit the transparency these audits can provide the public.  

Each municipality is creating its own policies around whether it will release the audit reports via public records request, a trend that is likely to continue until the issue is brought to the question via a lawsuit. 

The landscape ahead

Trying to provide accountability and transparency around these surveillance tools going forward will be a challenging endeavor.

“We need access to audits that frankly go beyond what Flock provides you,” Neff said. “And I think it goes back to just a fundamental question of civilian oversight, of law enforcement in particular, and public oversight, which I think becomes more challenging, but also more necessary, when the reach of the technology that they have access to is so broad.”

While the Flock audit reports have shown widespread sharing of Flock ALPR data with out-of-state and federal agencies such as ICE, there’s no guarantee the audits will continue to provide a window of transparency for the public.

Not only are cities refusing to fulfill public record requests, but Flock Safety itself has changed its policies. In the summer, the company introduced what it first called “a proactive search term tool” and later a “keyword filter” that can block attempts to search for terms related to immigration enforcement, for example. However, agencies who want to avoid the controversy can simply be vague or dishonest when filling in the “reason” column that is preserved in these audits.

At the end of October, Flock made a few new changes. It added a “mandatory offense type selection” from a drop-down menu that must be selected before any search is performed, which seems fairly simple to circumvent. More alarmingly, agencies can now choose to remove all search reasons from their public search audits.

“While Flock’s audit logs have been successful in bringing to light certain abuses, that very fact is likely to deter many officers from honestly describing the purposes of their searches moving forward,” wrote Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “The bottom line is that the public simply can’t count on these kinds of logs to be a reliable check against the enormous power that its mass surveillance system is placing in the hands of law enforcement.”

Right now, there isn’t an obvious plan in place to provide that reliable check. As case law begins to accumulate, the Washington State Legislature might also choose to intervene, although as the example of California illustrates, that path is not without its own pitfalls. 

Of course, individual municipalities and agencies can always choose to discontinue surveillance programs that don’t match their values. 

“We’re seeing locally, you can turn [surveillance technologies] off, so we don’t have to go necessarily that direction of just subjecting ourselves to increasing surveillance at all times,” said Neff. “We can make decisions about what kinds of technology are appropriate, but that requires us to have access to tools of transparency and democracy.”

The post Washington Cities Question Use of License Plate Readers Citing Federal Overreach first appeared on The Urbanist.

Evans will be the first person of color to hold the office of Seattle City Attorney.

While the Seattle City Attorney’s Office serves both criminal and civil functions, the city attorney only handles low-level misdemeanor cases. More serious felony cases are handled by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. The city attorney also defends the city from lawsuits, advises the city on legal matters, and enforces city regulations such as labor laws and renter protections.

And as Davison has ably shown, the city attorney can act as an advocate to advance criminal legal policy. 

Davison was elected in 2021 as a rare Republican in office in Seattle after a tight race with abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy. Her election, along with that of Bruce Harrell as Seattle Mayor and Sara Nelson as a city-wide city councilmember, was hailed as a backlash against the more progressive ideas championed during the 2020 George Floyd protests. 

At the same time, crime numbers were going up, most likely caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Seattle Police Department’s crime numbers peaked in 2022 and have shown a marked decrease this year. 

The results of last week’s election signal another shift in voter sentiment, delivering a resounding rejection of Davison’s punitive tough-on-crime policies and what some residents have perceived as an insufficiently hard line against the Trump administration from the City’s only Republican elected official. 

In contrast, Evans touted her federal experience, her community connections, and her commitment to supporting evidence-based policies proven to help folks suffering on the streets. She’s also a mainstream Democrat who has pledged to stand up to Trump overreach.

“I’m just really excited for bringing in that heart and compassion and care that aligns with our values here in Seattle,” Evans said.

Evans told The Urbanist that she would focus the City Attorney’s Office on bringing cases they could actually win and expanding pre-filing diversion to keep less serious crimes out of the court system and into restorative justice pathways.

“Last year, there was a 60% dismissal rate for all cases set for jury trial, and that’s too high,” Evans said. “Too many cases are just being overcharged for numbers.” 

Councilmember Sara Nelson, who won in 2021 on a law-and-order platform that mirrored Davison’s approach, also lost her re-election bid last week by more than 23 points. Nelson endorsed Davison, along with many of her centrist colleagues. Challenger Dionne Foster emphasized affordability, progressive revenue, and addressing root causes of crime during her run.  

Davison’s four-year term

Upon winning office, Davison faced a huge backlog of cases, which she blamed on her predecessor Pete Holmes, but which was almost certainly partly due to pandemic chaos. Within a few months, she’d announced she was dismissing almost 2,000 misdemeanor cases. Later that year, she dismissed even more cases.

Although she campaigned against Holmes by criticizing the time his office took to file cases and his failure to prosecute the more serious cases of the office aggressively enough, an analysis by PubliCola shows that Davison often performed very similarly. Her opponents in this year’s race were especially critical of the lengthened filing time for domestic violence cases under her tenure.

Davison came out in strong support of both 2023’s new drug criminalization law and the subsequent Stay Out of Drug (SODA) and Stay Out of Area of Prostitution (SOAP) zone laws in 2024. Both Evans and Matt Sanders, the director of the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD), have said these laws are ineffective, likening Davison’s enforcement of them to a new war on drugs that disproportionately impacts communities of color and particularly Black men.

In the first six months after their passage, the SODA and SOAP orders were rarely issued, but their use ramped up later this year, assisted by Davison’s new Drug Prosecution Alternative program that requires defendants to agree to SODA orders in order to have the chance to get their drug charge dismissed. A recent report from the DPD stated the City has been falling short in offering diversion and treatment to people criminalized under the new drug laws.

While in office, Davison began the High Utilizer Initiative, which focused on a specific cohort of people who were cycling through the City Attorney’s Office for low-level crimes. The program focuses on booking these people in jail to reduce misdemeanor referrals, even though most of the people suffer from some combination of homelessness, behavioral health disorders, and substance use disorder. 

Davison’s antagonism against homeless people didn’t stop with this initiative. She wrote an amicus brief for the Grants Pass Supreme Court case, with the court ultimately ruling that it’s legal to arrest or fine homeless people who are sleeping in public places, even if they haven’t been offered any alternatives. Advocates said they saw an increase in “brazenness” around homeless sweeps in Seattle after the ruling.

Davison also became notorious for interfering with the Seattle Municipal Court (SMC), first by unilaterally ending its Community Court program that tried to connect people to services, and later by announcing her office would be filing a blanket affidavit of prejudice against a single SMC judge, Pooja Vaddadi. This policy basically served to sideline Vaddadi from the job she’d been elected to do. In addition to interfering with the independence of the judicial branch, this decision hampered SMC’s ability to run efficiently since they’ve essentially been down a judge for almost two years. 

Change of the guard

Evans already has plans for what her first term as Seattle City Attorney is going to look like.

On the criminal side, Evans plans to prioritize domestic violence and Driving Under the Influence (DUI) cases, with especial emphasis on filing domestic violence cases faster. She told The Urbanist she wants to be careful and intentional in filing cases because of the huge impact it has on the lives of those involved. 

Evans wants to expand the office’s partnership with Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD) and increase pre-filing diversion within the office. While campaigning, she committed to no longer asking judges to issue new SODA and SOAP orders, prioritizing wage theft and tenants’ rights cases, and not seeking cash bail for nonviolent misdemeanors as long as a judge doesn’t think the person is a significant risk to the public. 

Near the top of her list, Evans wants to institute a new community court in Seattle, which she imagines as a kind of resource hub that would connect people to services, potentially including medical and substance use disorder treatment, housing, and a pet fostering program for people interested in in-patient treatment. She’s hoping to get the program up and running as quickly as possible. She expects the main barrier to be funding and will be looking for grants, organizational backing, and potentially City dollars to bring the project to fruition. 

“If Bellevue can do it, I know we can here in Seattle too,” Evans said. “So I have high hopes that we’re going to be able to get it up and running.”

Evans is excited to start up an anti-hate and -bias unit in the office, which will have its own dedicated prosecutor. 

“Making sure that those cases are getting the attention and dedication with a dedicated, trained prosecutor to work on those cases is really important to me,” Evans said. “Because that was not something that has ever been in that office, and it’s needed to properly charge those cases because those instances of hate- or bias-related crimes have been increasing in our city.”

Creating a hate crime unit is likely to lead to more prosecution of such crimes, but addressing the root causes that allow and even encourage hate crimes to propagate will be a more difficult endeavor, especially in the current federal environment that is painting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts as anathema. 

Evans said she wouldn’t be issuing a blanket affidavit of prejudice on any judge, instead dealing with any issues with judges in the standard manner.

The City Attorney does not have a seat at the bargaining table with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), but the office does advise the Mayor’s Office on these negotiations. Given the new SPOG contract currently waiting for City Council approval, The Urbanist asked Evans how she’d approach this issue moving forward.

“I think it’s important that we lead with accountability and what we’re hearing from community. So that was one of the big things at the consent decree hearing with Judge Robart that he talked about,” Evans said. “How is accountability going to be measured? Or how is this still going to be at the forefront of people’s minds, ensuring that we have leaders and a City Attorney like me that’s going to make sure that that is at the forefront?”

The morning before The Urbanist spoke with Evans, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) announced they had fired two of their top civilian command staff: Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey and General Counsel Rebecca Boatright. Both Maxey and Boatright worked closely to move SPD into compliance with the consent decree, an effort that finally bore fruit when the consent decree was concluded in September. 

Former assistant chief Leslie Cordner, who also played a large role in compliance with the consent decree, retired last year. The loss of these key players in the consent decree might leave the department with little remaining institutional knowledge at a time when they need it most. 

Pushing back against federal overreach

Evans’ other main priority is preparing the City to stand against federal overreach, whether that takes the form of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramp-ups, National Guard deployment, or the withholding of federal dollars. 

Evans said the office needs to make sure “we’re just being proactively ready to prepare the City for any federal overreach, attacks from the administration, and being really good partners with our Attorney General Nick Brown on that.” 

Evans expects President Donald Trump to send the National Guard to Seattle at some point, which she says would violate the 10th Amendment. As City Attorney, she can file a temporary restraining order to try to prevent that from happening. She also said she is ready to file lawsuits to protect immigrant communities from unconstitutional arrests and other illegal ICE actions. 

The recently passed Laken Riley Act means that undocumented immigrants charged with petty crimes like shoplifting could be in danger of detention and deportation. Evans hasn’t committed to not filing cases that might fall into this bucket, although she said she’ll want to have a good partnership with the DPD so her office is aware of this kind of information before filing.

When The Urbanist asked about the recent surveillance expansion in Seattle, Evans emphasized that community leaders were saying the expansion was too fast, given the initial surveillance pilot had only just begun. 

“I think it is important to be listening to community stakeholders before quickly moving on things like this, especially when we know what’s happening at the federal level with the federal government getting access to DOL [Department of Licensing] records and wanting our mailing record,” Evans said. “It just seems like it’s just not a safe time right now for our communities and what’s happening at a federal level.”

Evans will be sworn into office on January 1, 2026.

Editor’s note: The Urbanist Elections Committee endorsed Erika Evans in the primary and general election. Amy Sundberg is not a member of that committee.

The post Evans Trounces Republican Seattle City Attorney, Shares Plans for Transition first appeared on The Urbanist.