Auditor's Gun Violence Recommendations Prompt Defensive Response from Mayor's Office

"The mayor's office agrees with the audit findings, but we were already doing the things that were in the audit findings."

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last month, the City Auditor's Office released a report on Seattle's response to gun violence that concluded the city has failed to create the kind of systematic, transparent, multi-departmental approach that has been adopted successfully in other cities like Baltimore and Milwaukee, which have dramatically reduced their rates of gun violence even as Seattle's has increased. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of (reported) shots fired in Seattle increased 71 percent, non-fatal shootings increased 58 percent, and fatal shootings increased 23 percent.

The auditor's office, which presented their findings to Council President Sara Nelson's governance committee last week, made four broad recommendations.

First, they said, the city should develop systemic, transparent reporting on patterns in gun violence and make that information available to the public. Second, the mayor's office should provide an update on its work to integrate all the city's violence prevention programs under the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department, which "has not yet begun," according to the audit, despite being a key element of the department's mission since it was established in 2023.

Third, the city should implement evidence-based approaches to gun violence, such as problem-oriented policing (a proactive strategy that addresses underlying factors that contribute to crime), homicide review panels, and training requirements for organizations that get city funds for violence prevention to ensure they're using evidence-based problem-solving methods; a previous audit found that many city-funded programs judged their own success against measures like how many people enrolled in a program, rather than whether the program reduced gun violence.

And fourth, the city should use multi-departmental, place-based methods to prevent and respond to gun violence, rather than just being reactive.

The audit—originally requested by Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Nelson as an update on a 2012 report on the city's crime prevention strategies—noted that the city never implemented many of auditor's previous recommendations on crime and public safety, including several on street outreach programs that the office "stopped tracking" last year because "we had no evidence that they would ever be implemented."

The report noted that the city doesn't need to invent its own strategy out of whole cloth: Other cities have already created frameworks that Seattle could adopt, including public-facing dashboards that provide access to a broad range of data about gun violence, post-homicide review panels, and investment in community-based programs that have been shown to reduce gun violence, rather than those that don't produce results.

Milwaukee, for example, has a Homicide Review Commission that includes case management and services for victims' families, along with an ongoing, detailed review of every homicide in the city that includes an analysis of "community-level contributing factors and ... community interventions that may be appropriate."

Baltimore's comprehensive crime prevention strategy established a new Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) that is based on four "pillars": A public health approach to violence; youth justice and violence reduction; community engagement and interagency collaboration; and evaluation and accountability." Since the two cities implemented these new approaches, homicides in Milwaukee have dropped 52 percent over eight years; in Baltimore, fatal shootings declined 23 percent between 2023 and 2024.

"We tried to lift up the examples that we found from other jurisdictions where there's just more visibility and more of a comprehensive view of gun violence," Claudia Gross Shader, the audit's lead author, told PubliCola. "There's not an action plan for gun violence in Seattle that we can look at like like Baltimore has developed."

For example, Gross Shader said, Baltimore has a public safety accountability dashboard that's maintained by MONSE, not the police department, and includes information from police, prosecutors, and community-based providers. "That level of visibility into what the city's doing and how things are changing over time does not exist in Seattle," Gross Shader said.

Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who said during last week's meeting that she felt "validated" by the fact that the audit identified Magnuson Park as number four on a list of city parks with the highest incidences of gun violence, said she spent last summer asking police, the Parks Department, and the mayor's office to do something about a spate of shootings and other criminal activity in and around Magnuson Park.

"I was asking them what their plan was for addressing this, and I definitely got responses form SPD and from Parks, in terms of action items, but I felt that the things I was bringing to the mayor's office were getting diminished or dismissed," Rivera told PubliCola. "I didn’t feel like there was that recognition that things were happening and we have a plan for addressing it. I didn’t get the sense of urgency."

Shortly after the meeting, the mayor's office reached out to Rivera and they had "a great conversation" about what the city can do in the short term to address issues in her Northeast Seattle district, Rivera said.

But, she added, "we should be taking a centralized approach" to gun violence, the way Milwaukee and Baltimore have done. In those cities, "it seems like it's all-hands-on-deck to address gun violence in general, and the audit showed that the centralization wasn't there like it should be."

Tensions flared during last week's meeting about how much the city is actually doing to address gun violence holistically and whether the audit was even necessary.

After Harrell's office initiated the audit last January, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess told the city auditor to stop working on it in April, "because [the Human Services Department] is preparing to issue a new round of [requests for proposals] that will result in new funding opportunities" for community safety organizations. HSD subsequently postponed the community safety RFP until later this year, and in October, Nelson directed the auditor's office to move forward with its work.

Harrell formally "concurred" with all the audit's recommendations, but it became clear during the committee meeting that the mayor's office considered the audit unnecessarym even insulting. "The mayor's office agrees with the audit findings, but we were already doing the things that were in the audit findings," Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told the committee.

When PubliCola asked if the mayor's office or SPD plans to implement any new strategies in response to the audit, as opposed to policies that are already underway,, Harrell spokeswoman Callie Craighead said, "Our office plans to incorporate the findings of the Auditor’s report into existing strategies and initiatives. The report validated the approach of our One Seattle Restoration Framework, which states that improving public safety within our city involves collaboration across multiple City departments and programs and taking a place-based approach to our needs, as seen with the launch of our Downtown Activation Team."

Speaking more bluntly at last week's meeting, Washington told Nelson, "When you were getting ready to launch this, my argument to you [was], we are working on this, and we didn't get that same respect. ... It would have been nice to know that you guys heard us when we were telling you that we were already working on it."

"I have a master's degree in human services," Washington added, along with a "personal degree" as someone directly impacted by gun violence. "I don't need an audit to tell me the things that I can see on the streets and tell me the things that I hear from constituents."

As examples of things the city is already doing, Washington pointed to the establishment of the CARE dual-dispatch pilot; the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments; Harrell's "One Seattle Restoration Framework," which includes a section on gun violence; the establishment of a real-time crime center that will be connected to new CCTV cameras around the city; the enrollment of the city's gun violence liaison in a national workshop on violence interruption; and new Police Chief Shon Barnes' plan to implement "stratified policing."

According to Craighead, stratified policing "focuses on identifying and tackling crime and disorder issues by analyzing immediate, short-term, and long-term patterns, ensuring they are addressed swiftly and effectively through a collaborative approach that emphasizes community partnerships."

Although the audit found that "the city has not systematically implemented" problem-oriented policing (identifying it as one reason the city hasn't successfully reduced crime and overdoses at two well-known hot spots), SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright told the council that "SPD routinely does a fair amount of work with problem- oriented policing and place-based policing" and would continue to do so.

As for the recommendation that the city create a systemic public safety dashboard like Baltimore's, Boatright said the department is working to put more information online, but that providing too much specific information could harm ongoing investigations.

Gross Shader said she hopes the city will respond to the audit in more detail in the future to explain how some of the city's existing approaches are working to reduce gun violence and how Harrell's One Seattle Restoration plan compares to the holistic approach like the ones Baltimore and Milwaukee have.

She also noted that the city already has at least one home-grown example of a systematic public safety plan—the Phố Đẹp (Beautiful Neighborhood) Little Saigon Safety Plan that Friends of Little Sài Gòn released last month, which identifies a list of eight public-safety problems in the neighborhood, interventions to address those problems, and the outcomes that will result when each problem has been addressed. That framework focuses almost entirely on strategies that don't involve police, such as the creation of a business coalition to combat EBT (food stamp) fraud, increased funding for affordable housing in lieu of policies that "criminalize poverty," including sweeps, and funding for dedicated outreach workers in the Chinatown-International District.