When Bruce Harrell was running for mayor in 2021, the top three concerns on Seattle voters’ minds were homelessness, housing costs, and public safety issues, including crime and drugs. Four years later, these remain the top things that worry voters. Voters trusted Harrell on those issues in 2021, but the question is do they trust him now, especially since those concerns remain high.
I’ll be diving into Harrell’s performance on these three top issues in a three-part series.
Today I’ll start with public safety, and the issues of crime and drugs that have dominated that debate. After all, Harrell campaigned hard on these issues and pledged to restore safety and drive down open drug use.
Instead of steadying the ship, we see a mayor who is on his third police chief, after his first hire, Adrian Diaz, turned out to be a lying failure who led a frat-like culture rife with sexual harassment rather than accountability. Nonetheless, Harrell as recently as May called Diaz a “fine leader” with his “utmost confidence,” despite demoting him pending an investigation into numerous scandals that were festering.
“We don’t make panic moves, we make strategic moves,” Harrell said in May. “And if there’s one takeaway from this press conference, it is: I stand with this fine leader. That is his sacrifice for 27 years that we are building upon, so the people of Seattle should have the utmost confidence that we’re trending in the right direction with the right policies and the right people and we’re going to keep on keeping on.”
By December, Harrell fired Diaz, saying his trusted chief had lied to him about his romantic relationship with his chief of staff. Perhaps a panic move would have been better than an incompetent lack of movement that caused department morale to tank and culture change to stall out under failed leadership.
The statistics bear out that Harrell’s public safety approach has failed.
A failing record on violent crime
Despite the campaign pledges, Harrell’s record on violent crime is terrible. While some crimes are down from pandemic peaks, those drops do not coincide with Harrell taking office or implementing new interventions — which have mostly been re-hashed old interventions anyway.
Homicide and rape rates dropped in Seattle in 2021, the year before Bruce took office. This drop was after comments from now-former councilmembers about cuts to police budgets. The spike in crime came later, on Harrell’s watch. Blaming it on the previous council hardly seems like leadership, and the causal links are flimsy at best.
After Harrell became mayor, homicide jumped by 26%, and rape increased by 7%. Aggravated assault was up too.
Harrell has not been remotely successful in addressing the scariest crimes. Homicides are still up – 26% higher in 2024 than it was in 2021, and rape is up 12% over the same period.
How does this hold up considering national trends? It’s even worse.
Nationally, murders peaked in 2021 and have been quickly falling ever since. Ditto for rape. This means that under Harrell’s watch, Seattle’s most violent crimes were increasing while nearly everyone else’s was falling. That is a colossal failure.
A look at the numbers is genuinely shocking. Murder is down nationally by about 30% from 2021 to 2024 – but in Seattle it is up 26% If Harrell’s tenure had been merely average, we would have fallen to 30 homicides last year. We had 54 instead. That means murder is 80% worse than it should be if we were just average!
Property crime still elevated over pre-pandemic levels
Harrell’s performance on property crime isn’t as bad, but it’s still pretty meh.
Compared to when Harrell took the reins from Durkan, property crime appears to be improving – the Seattle Police Department’s statistics for arson, burglary and larceny are all down. However, our own former police chief said last year these improving property crime statistics are misleading, because the department says many of these crimes now go unreported in Seattle.
And even using SPD’s potentially underreported stats, some property crime is certainly getting much worse – motor vehicle theft is up a whopping 38%.
Given that there has been a lot of movement in national crime rates, how should we view this in terms of performance? When it comes to property crime – Seattle mostly paralleled the national crime spike (though we were a year early)–with a spike around 2021 and a modest reduction since. (Note: National property crime data is still pretty spotty and still being tabulated for 2024.)
If you look at it one way, Harrell is failing. By 2023 (latest available), the US is down 8% on property crime from its pre-pandemic (2019) rate, while Seattle is up 7% over the same period. That’s not good. But to be fair to Harrell, some of that increase predates him. If we look at the peak nationally in 2022 to the end of the available data in 2023, property crime was down 2.5%. From Seattle’s peak in 2022 to 2023, the drop was more like 9%. So that is something, but that really only represents a year of falling crime data, and voters were promised a much more dramatic turnaround, much earlier.
Drug crisis still festers
Since drug overdose deaths are measured by the County, which is responsible for public health, it’s tough to say how large of a role the city government plays in overdose death rates. Seattle certainly is involved in trying to interrupt the drug trade, hand out and administer overdose meds, and push people toward treatment. Yet the heavy lifting comes from the County.
But Harrell and his allies made big promises about fixing the drug problem. So do our best to let’s look at what he has accomplished.
The rate of drug death increases during Harrell’s time at the helm has been dramatic. After two years in office, drug deaths in King County nearly doubled, increasing by 89%! They are currently improving from that terrible level, but, since Harrell took office, drug deaths are still up by 48%. Like violent crime, these overdose death rates accelerated after Harrell took the helm. The two years after Harrell became mayor, overdose death rates increased about 22 percentage points faster than they did in the two years prior to his term. This undermines his excuse of blaming the previous city council for drug overdose issues.
Now to be fair to the mayor, the huge jump in fentanyl deaths was part of a national epidemic and even a mayor who isn’t as hapless as Harrell cannot do anything about that. So we should compare Seattle to a peer city, with San Francisco offering perhaps the closest comparison.
As mentioned, in Harrell’s first two years, Seattle’s overdose death rates increased by 89%. In San Francisco they only went up by 26%, less than one third of Seattle’s increase. By the end of 2024, Seattle drug overdose deaths were still up 48% from 2021, whereas San Francisco’s were actually slightly below their 2021 rates. Since California did not enter the fentanyl epidemic any earlier than Washington did, Harrell cannot blame unlucky timing.
San Francisco is a pretty strong comparison for Seattle. The populations are similar. King County income levels in 2022 ($116,000) are fairly close to San Francisco County’s ($136,000) Seattle and San Francisco are both top tech towns and both have huge ports — and trade exposure is predictive of fentanyl death rates.
So, Seattle should be performing like San Francisco, and yet we are not. Given this, Harrell has been an underachiever in combating drugs.
Harrell’s reelection pitch and where it falls flat
If Harrell’s boosters cannot point to results, could they perhaps point to interim progress that should eventually lead to results? Harrell made this argument in his recent “State of the City” speech, but this argument breaks down when you look not just at the troubling statistical trends, but also stalled-out initiatives. It’s hard to point to strong momentum either in results or standing up programs that we should expect to deliver results, especially to trumped up campaign pledges.
Big money for SPD hasn’t worked, police staffing still flat
On the campaign trail and again in 2022, Harrell said 1400 cops was a “reasonable goal” for SPD. This would mean an increase of about 500 officers in a time when the agency was losing officers much faster than they could hire them.
In an act of what is arguably journalistic malpractice, the Seattle Times and the major TV outlets covered this pledge as if it was feasible and reasonable, failing to highlight the key constraint – a national police officer shortage – alongside SPD’s own recruiting struggles and bottlenecks. Harrell claimed it was possible by changing the culture at SPD and making officers feel supported. But vibes are hardly a plan.
Candidates (like me in 2023) and progressive pundits pointed this structural hurdle out time and time again, but the mainstream media mostly brushed this aside. In fact, the Seattle Times Editorial Board even forced candidates to sign on to Harrell’s 1400-cop pledge or answer for themselves in their endorsement process. In so doing, they amplified this deception by demanding candidates go on the record as “for” or “against” this so-called “plan.” The Seattle Times refused to let candidates say – “we need to address our hiring shortage, AND I don’t think we should lie to voters about magically conjuring up hundreds of cops,” in their survey — despite repeated efforts from candidates like me.
Despite Harrell’s bold pledge and media cheerleading for it, the police force had shrunk every year in a row since 2019, Harrell and the media pretended his fanciful number was a real plan.
So how is Harrell doing on getting those 500 officers?
Well, to his credit, we didn’t lose officers on net in 2024. But after bargaining away everything we needed and dropping a hundred million extra on police last year – we netted one police officer.
One.
Actually, if you just zip forward to January 6th, SPD went back to zero growth for last year. Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr fired an officer the department had recklessly hired, knowing he had a history of dangerous driving and intoxication. That officer killed a young woman named Jaahnavi Kandula in Seattle by running her over in a crosswalk. And it took two years to fire him – in large part because mayors like Harrell have bargained away accountability measures.
Harrell’s backers might want to give him credit for more officers – after all, we were losing officers prior to 2024. But as I have shown elsewhere, the losses had nearly leveled off, and the turnaround didn’t come until Harrell reluctantly fired his scandal-ridden Chief. It’s tough to say there was much return on this massive outlay of cash.
$100 million for no net new officers is where we stand right now. So much for improving efficiency.
Mismanaging the police department
Harrell promised police reform, but passed over a reformer for chief and hired department insider Adrian Diaz as police chief instead. Since then, under Harrell and Diaz’ leadership, the department has been mired in one scandal after another, and lawsuits related bullying and sexual harassment and racial discrimination. But Harrell never batted an eye at this, even giving the aforementioned brotastic “heckuva job Adrian” public press conference after Diaz finally had to step down amid all the scandal. Even then, Dias continued to collect on his $338,000 salary.
Finally, when it got out that Harrell’s chief was sleeping with an employee, the mayor had to give in and let his top pick go. It took until 2.5 years into this mayor’s term to bother with appointing a remotely serious reformer in Sue Rahr, who came out of retirement to serve in an interim capacity. Now, three quarters of the way through his term, Harrell has finally installed someone who seems like he might be a reformer: former Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes.
This isn’t the only time Bruce has turned a blind eye to disgusting behavior by his employee. NW Asian Weekly and the The Stranger have reported that Harrell’s external relations director Pedro Gomez was credibly accused of raping a community member. Bruce had “connected the pair for a business meeting,” according to the report. Bruce’s spokesman says Harrell’s office was notified of the police report in late September. So they placed Gomez on leave. But Harrell didn’t make him resign until January when the case was referred to the King County Prosecutor.
Police accountability bargained away
Under a federal consent decree for 13 years, Seattle’s police department has had a national reputation for excessive force, racially biased policing and a lack of accountability. Harrell talked about accountability on the campaign trail, of course, because it is popular.
But actual police reform advocates doubted he was serious about any of this, and they were right. Under Harrell’s leadership SPD has done a terrible job of handling complaints, and the mayor is only sort of bothering to do anything about it three years into his term. And what he is doing will be severely limited, because last year he made it so the police cannot be held accountable by the city for violating people’s rights.
He did this by “negotiating” a labor agreement where Seattle gave away all its leverage by increasing cop salaries to the highest in the state, while getting no new accountability measures in return. This means he surrendered the City’s negotiating leverage to have any sort of independent oversight for our police department.
While the next police contract is negotiated, Seattle police officers will pull a much higher salary and feel less urgency to strike a new deal with accountability and no restrictions to expanding the civilian crisis response program — which the police contract capped at a measly 24 responders.
The Seattle Police Officers Guild owned the mayor in the negotiation and we have to live with the consequences. What a legacy.
Harrell’s failure to negotiate a fair deal has forced advocates to go to the state legislature to get the right to hire civilian responders to increase public safety in Seattle.
Stunted police alternatives
Polls make it clear that Seattle’s general population wants alternative civilianized responses for many 911 calls even more than cops, which they also support. Centrist candidates know this so they pretend they want civilian response too, and then do as little to support it as possible. Harrell has done the same.
A year into Harrell’s term, then-councilmember Andrew Lewis tactfully prodded him in the Seattle Times to pull his head out of the sand and accelerate to the pace of rolling a civilian crisis responder program to that of cutting edge city, Albuquerque, New Mexico. But to no avail! The mayor moved so slowly on police alternatives that even the Seattle Times started to criticize him for it.
Finally, three years in his team, Harrell proudly proposed investing a tiny bit of money in alternative response, the equivalent of about 1% of Seattle’s police budget. And because Harrell has made sure the police call the shots, these behavioral health specialists are not even allowed to respond to the vast majority of 911 calls.
Cutting investment in crime prevention
Of course, while Harrell was dumping a hundred million dollars into SPD’s coffers (and getting nowhere with police hiring) and barely adding any money to our behavioral health emergency response, he was simultaneously gutting crime prevention. Here are a smattering of cuts in the budget this last fall for extremely important prevention programs noted by The Urbanist.
- Nearly $1 million for food and meal programs.
- $2 million from the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) and CoLEAD programs.
- $200,000 for pre-filing diversion.
- $100,000 for survivors of police violence.
- $450,000 for programs addressing gender-based violence.
- $800,000 for public health programs providing behavioral health services for the Latino community and comprehensive substance use disorder treatment.
- $123,000 for legal counsel for youth and children
- $527,000 less rental assistance for tenants.
Note that LEAD was featured in the New York Times for its effectiveness in reducing felonies, and its founder received a MacArthur Genius Grant for it. It got the biggest ax.
How to pay for this? Harrell changed the law so that he could take over $80 million from affordable housing to fund his priorities, such as boosting SPD staffing by one more police officer.
Stacking up the losses
So, let’s see – way more murder and rape, roughly steady on most property crime. Pretty bad performance relative to peers on drug overdoses. A hundred million in extra money for a dysfunctional police department, but no more actual police to show for it. Failed management, failed reform, and throwing up a brick wall to stop any effort at achieving accountability. Oh, and slow walking alternative response and gutting prevention.
Honestly, I knew it was bad, but until I wrote this article, I wasn’t quite clear just how bad.
On public safety, Harrell has failed, utterly.
Ron Davis (Guest Contributor)
Ron Davis is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, political consultant, and past candidate for Seattle City Council. He is focused on making his community a place where anyone can start a career, raise a family, and age in place without breaking the bank. He has a JD from Harvard Law School and lives in Northeast Seattle with his wife — a family physician — and their two boys.
