GTA Everett
Yesterday, in Everett, several police cruisers were totaled in a chaotic morning chase involving a stolen 18-wheeler. The pursuit started in a Safeway parking lot and ended in the semi-rural Silver Lake neighborhood after the driver rolled to a stop in someone’s yard. The only injuries were minor, but it could’ve been a lot worse. The roads in the neighborhood are extremely narrow—one lane in each direction—and there’s no shoulder. The rig hit several cars, and a police cruiser struck a bystander’s vehicle during the pursuit. Everett’s pursuit policy says that a pursuit is justified if the “safety risks of failing to apprehend or identify the person are…greater than the safety risks of the vehicular pursuit under the circumstances.”
Whatever safety risks an inexperienced, joyriding truck thief poses are magnified tenfold when a bunch of police officers are chasing them. What’s more, officers were firing 40mm foam-tipped rounds and pepperballs at him while he was driving, according to a department release. This pursuit would be prohibited in most large cities, and it would’ve been disallowed under the pursuit law that megamillionaire oligarch Brian Heywood overturned. Everett has Flock Cameras and drones, which are often pitched as alternatives to risky pursuits like this, so why play Smokey and the Bandit?
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Dueling gun violence strategies
After a bloody weekend in Belltown, everyone is coming in hot with ideas to fix gun violence in Seattle. The public safety committee passed a resolution this week by Councilmember Maritza Rivera that “intends to commit” to a two-year partnership with the National Network for Safer Communities at the John Jay College, with a price tag of $418,000. NNSC’s model, known as Group Violence Intervention, adopts a stick-and-carrot approach, combining the carrot of services, jobs, and mentorships for high-risk groups with the stick of policing. On KUOW’s Soundside podcast, Mayor Katie Wilson said the resolution called for a “premature, very large investment in an out-of-state organization,” adding that it was not a time for “grandstanding and politicking.”
Former Governor Christine Gregoire’s Challenge Seattle, a group of large business executives, put out its own public safety plan, calling for cops, cops, and more cops. They’re demanding a crackdown on drug markets, more patrols in high-crime areas, and lower 911 response times. At the public safety committee meeting, Chair Bob Kettle unsurprisingly echoed this view. He said that “low staffing” at SPD was a contributing factor to recent gun violence in Belltown—one of the best-staffed areas in the whole city. It’s also one of the neighborhoods already inundated with CCTVs, which have not been subject to Mayor Wilson’s “pause,” even as misinformed surveillance proponents at public comment have tried to suggest otherwise. The resolution will go to full council on Sept. 15.
911 has used undisclosed AI for years
During a presentation at the public safety committee on Tuesday, fire department officials mentioned that it had been using an artificial intelligence agent called Corti since December 2023, but it had not publicly disclosed this until it was made public around June of this year. SFD Chief Harold Scoggins claims that the dispatchers are still making decisions, but that the Corti AI agent screens for “words that the caller is using, the pace, the tone, the tenor of the caller.” It then displays a suggestion to the dispatcher, who can decide to send the call to the nurse line or not. Corti AI was implemented without going through a surveillance impact report required for any technology that “observes, monitors, or collects data about individuals”, but SFD claims that isn’t required because it “doesn’t store audio or identify callers.”
Rudeness, not violence earns sergeant a suspension for street vendor’s arrest
Last fall, Seattle Police Sergeant Nathan Patterson threw an unlicensed street vendor down and punched him while another officer tasered him, but Patterson faced no consequences for those actions. However, he was suspended for antagonizing and threatening people who gathered to watch the arrest, according to documents and vid…
Leftist tech platform shuts down
Italian collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) recently shut down after being designated by the US State Department as a “Global Terrorist Organization.” Arguing that it could no longer safely exist, A/I shut down on Sept. 6, which is 19 days before the deadline it was given to cease operations. Among the several services provided by A/I, the most well-known is their noblogs platform. Supporting autonomous organizing for 25 years, noblogs hosts bloggs, zines, historical documentation, and report backs. This kind of repression is not new, but it’s certainly escalating. Organizers are already finding new homes for this work and ways to continue disseminating information. It’s still a tremendous blow as we struggle to weather this kind of censorship going forward. On a related note, the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair is coming up soon on Sept. 26 and 27. They previously used noblogs and had to switch to a new website. We’ll be tabling at the fair on both days, so come say hi.
We didn’t fight the fire
The Seattle police must be struggling for heroic content these days. Their story about the 60-year-old cop saving baby ducks from a storm drain didn’t get much traction, so they had to up the ante. Two weeks ago, SPD officers entered an apartment building, breaking the front door glass, saying they saw a fire in a second-story unit from the street. Bodycam video does show smoke in the building, but the video SPD released was slyly edited so that we never actually see the fire itself. As the officers open the apartment door, the video cuts to scenes of firefighters entering. The usual local police stenographers have rendered what could be described as a moderately smoky building containing a small fire in one unit into “SPD runs into burning building.” According to a press release, the officers received commendations.
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