Burien City Manager Demands Removal of Police Chief Who Won't Arrest People for Being Homeless
The chief testified in a lawsuit opposing the city's total "camping" ban, raising questions about retaliation, Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall says.
By Erica C. Barnett
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon sent a letter to King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall this week demanding a replacement for Burien Police Chief Ted Boe, whose "actions," Bailon wrote, "no longer represent the City of Burien best interests, vision, and goals, in a manner that supports trust between the City and King County Sheriff's Office."
The sheriff's office provides officers, including Chief Boe, who serve as the city's police force through a contract with the county.
Last month, Cole-Tindall sued Burien over its total ban on "camping" in the city, calling the ban unconstitutional. Burien responded by countersuing the sheriff's office, alleging breach of contract—an ironic claim, given that Bailon responded to the county's lawsuit by directing city employees to stop paying the sheriff's office for the services it provides under the same contract.
In his letter, Bailon accused Boe of violating a portion of an agreement between the city and county that says the police chief will act "in a manner that supports and maintains trust" with the city, and another that says "Police Chiefs are expected to represent the City’s point of view, consider City needs in carrying out their duties and advocate on behalf of their City similar to other City departmental directors.” Effectively, Bailon is saying Boe has an obligation to enforce a law he and his actual employer, the Sheriff's Office, believe is illegal.
In her response dismissing Bailon's request, Cole-Tindall noted that just "two hours prior to Bailon’s letter, Burien was given detailed statistics on the first three months of 2024 that demonstrate the high level of police service in Burien," including an uptick in arrests for drug-related crimes and an overall reduction in both violent and property crime since last year. In February, Cole-Tindall continued, city council members lauded Boe for his "excellent" performance.
By demanding Boe's removal, Cole-Tindall continued, Bailon appeared to be retaliating against Boe for statements he made as part of the sheriff's lawsuit against the city. In his declaration, Boe laid out some of his concerns with Bailon's, who he said repeatedly demanded that Boe "redeploy resources away from other public safety matters such as 911 calls and to address several non-criminal aspects of camping. ... He also made repeated calls to 911 to redirect patrol resources away" from actual emergencies—at least 45 last year, as PubliCola recently reported.
"State law prohibits any local government from retaliating against a person for raising concerns with the constitutionality of government action," Cole-Tindall wrote. "King County cannot be party to retaliatory action against the chief."
Boe's statement notes that until the city council hired Bailon, "I had limited challenges in addressing the unhoused persons living in Burien. I worked collaboratively with the City Manager who was not focused on addressing homelessness as a crime." But once Bailon arrived, Boe said, "the approach to unhoused persons began to shift," as Bailon began asking the department to arrest unsheltered people rather than working with service providers like REACH to find shelter and services.
Bailon unilaterally canceled the city's contract with REACH, which is funded with federal ARPA dollars, earlier this year. He is reportedly working toward a new contract that would replace REACH with The More We Love, a controversial group that until recently advertised "sweeps" at a rate of $515 for each homeless person they remove from a site. (The city's contract was with Discover Burien, a downtown business group that led its own encampment sweep last year, because The More We Love was unable to get the required insurance.) It's unclear whether The More We Love meets federal requirements for ARPA funds.
Last year, The More We Love was paid to remove an encampment outside the Burien Grocery Outlet; although Moreland claimed her group had housed every "human" on site, some of that housing consisted of a short-term stay in a Renton hotel with no services or path to actual longer-term shelter or housing. The More We Love does not have access to the region's Homeless Management Information System, the entry point for homeless services in the county; instead, they appear to rely heavily on the United Gospel Mission's shelter and Bible-based rehabilitation program in downtown Seattle, along with a handful of beds in a house run by Moreland for survivors of sex trafficking.
As we reported last year, The More We Love provided a spreadsheet containing confidential personal and medical information to city officials, including Boe, as well as a Grocery Outlet owner who paid her group to sweep an encampment on his property. In an email to former mayor Sofia Aragon and the Burien city attorney, which PubliCola obtained through a records request, Bailon claimed the spreadsheet Moreland distributed "did not include names" or any medical information that would potentially violate medical privacy laws.
In fact, the spreadsheet included names, phone numbers, emails, birthdates, demographic information, and descriptions of purported medical conditions for dozens of people. It also noted which people on the list reported being victims of domestic violence, among many other forms of identifying and private information.
Although Bailon said in his email that he "could concede" that the city should have redacted this information before providing it to PubliCola, the real issue is that a nonprofit working with vulnerable homeless people sent out this kind of information in the first place. Groups like REACH are extremely protective of their clients' information and do not distribute confidential data. Now, the city could be preparing to spend federal dollars on a group that has failed, on at least one occasion, to comply with federal privacy guidelines.