Seattle’s botched experiment with defund the police keeps getting worse
June 4, 2022 at 6:00 am

Police patrol Third Avenue and Pine Street in downtown Seattle in March.
More than 400 officers have left the Police Department while crime has
soared. (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)

A woman pays for her parking at a meter in Seattle’s Chinatown
International District. The city announced this past week that it has to
refund 100,000 parking tickets and void another 100,000 because of an
oversight. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Danny Westneat By Danny Westneat
Seattle Times columnist

Whether you think defund the police has some merit to it, or not, it’s
becoming clear that no entity in the country has bungled the idea more
than the city of Seattle.

We couldn’t even get the meter reader part of it right.

It never made much sense how moving parking enforcement out of the
Police Department, and into the roads department, would further social
or racial justice. But it was proposed in the hot summer of 2020 anyway,
as a way to stick it to the cops by cutting their budget. Along with
more meaningful moves, such as moving the 911 dispatch center to a new
department to try to shift how many calls are answered by officers with
guns.

The City Council initially cut the police budget by about 17%, never
reaching the 50% goal. But the agency has been in a tailspin ever since.

More than 400 officers have left while crime has soared. This past week
The Seattle Times and KUOW reported new sex assault cases aren’t being
investigated because of understaffing. Meanwhile, the softer approaches
envisioned for community safety still are in the pilot stages.

This past week the city announced it is refunding 100,000 parking
tickets and voiding another 100,000 because of an oversight — namely
that the parking enforcement officers, who are civilians, were not
regranted the authority to write tickets after they were switched out of
the Police Department last fall.

It’s a $5 million mistake — or it would be if that’s hopefully the end
of it. But there’s another wrinkle, which like most of the defund the
police efforts so far, could snowball more in an unintended direction.

It turns out that during the seven-month period when the meter readers
lacked the right commission to do their jobs, they also authorized more
than 10,000 tows of cars and trucks from city streets.

“We’re still crunching our data, but so far we count 10,256 impounds
authorized by the Seattle PEOs [parking enforcement officers],” said
Chuck Labertew, president of Lincoln Towing, which has the sole contract
for city-initiated towing.

Most of these impounds were “peak-hour tows,” in which parking officers
OK an impound and tow trucks swoop in to clear the road lanes of parked
cars at rush hour. If the tickets aren’t legit, then there’s little
doubt some people will also now contest the tows, Labertew says.

“We also auctioned off some of those cars,” Labertew said. He estimated
about 1,700 of the 10,000-plus cars were sold off.

In a statement Friday, the city said it is not planning on automatically
refunding towing and storage fees related to bad tickets, on the grounds
that it doesn’t necessarily require a ticket to get towed.

“This decision does not affect the rights a person has to request a
hearing to challenge a tow as provided by City law,” the statement added.

Labertew, of the tow company, was skeptical.

“What’s going to happen here is that we’re going to get sued, I can
guarantee it,” he said. “And I’m going to forward every one of those
lawsuits on over to the city.”

Well this is one way path toward defunding — via lots of bureaucratic
make-work.

One Seattle City Council member, Alex Pedersen, summed up about the
ticket fiasco: “This reinforces that rearranging our public safety
systems is complicated, and can result in unintended consequences unless
implemented with the utmost care.”

Yes, and it isn’t clear, yet, who in administration failed here. But all
nine members of the council did vote for this back in the
activism-fueled atmosphere of 2020. At that time there hadn’t been an
in-depth study of the move, nor was anyone really asking for it. The
Black Lives Matter protesters weren’t clamoring about parking meter
readers; they were focused on the work of actual cops.

There’s been some talk of expanding the parking enforcers’ duties to
include some things cops do now, like directing traffic or responding to
car prowls. But if they’re going to be doing some crime work in the
future, why shift them to the roads department in the first place?

The real reason for all this was performative — it was to appear to be
slashing the police budget, without actually cutting any city services
or saving any money.

No matter what happens with the tows, or how much the bad tickets end up
costing the city, those pushing for the true concept of defunding the
police ought to be the most infuriated by this botched theater. Because
transferring parking enforcement was supposed to be the easy part.

The hard part — softening some of the city’s public safety response — is
a worthy goal. It’s incredibly complex and delicate work, though. It
means setting up a system that can assess, accurately, safely and often
instantly, whether to dispatch to volatile street scenes some social
help, or uniformed officers with guns.

What’s happened with the meter readers sure doesn’t lend much confidence
to the effort.

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an
opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.
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