Seattle Nice: Bob Kettle Talks About Public Safety, Density, Why He Opposed the Capital Gains Tax, and More
Welcome to Season 4!
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle Nice team sat down with City Council Public Safety Committee chair Bob Kettle this week to talk about his plans for 2025. Our wide-ranging conversation touched on the new "stay out" zones for people accused of using drugs or engaging in sex work, how he thinks the city should respond to anti-Trump protests, and whether he and other new council members deserve any blame for the resignation of Tammy Morales, a progressive councilmember who left after what she described as a year of mistreatment by her colleagues.
After a year of explicitly blaming the previous council for increases in misdemeanor crime since 2020, Kettle was reluctant to say when the current council, which is made up almost entirely of recently elected members, will begin to bear responsibility for the success or failure of its policies. "We're in a transition," he told us.
The council spent the latter half of 2024 reversing many of the progressive policies adopted by the previous council (reinstating the old "prostitution loitering" law); resurrecting policies the city abandoned because of their negative and racially disproportionate impacts (reviving banishment zones for drug users and people involved in sex work); and expanding police powers to surveill and book people for misdemeanors (installing live CCTV cameras in neighborhoods across the city and signing an agreement to jail misdemeanor offenders at SCORE jail in Kent.)
So when will the current council start to share some of the blame if its own policies fail to reduce misdemeanor crime in Seattle? According to Kettle, the "permissive environment" he talked about in his campaign is already "shrinking" thanks to laws the council adopted and the presence of more police officers on the streets. (Yesterday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that the police department grew by one officer last year, the first year-over-year gain since the pandemic). Police, Kettle said, are "booking the drug dealers, not those that are suffering from addiction, unless there's some additional [crime], because we do believe in the diversion piece."
We didn't have time to get into this, but the new drug law does not address drug dealing, which was already a felony under state law. Instead, it criminalized simple drug possession and using drugs in public places, which empowered police to arrest and potentially book people for those crimes. The city did not increase funding for the city's primary diversion program, LEAD; instead, LEAD has shifted away from community referrals, which don't require an arrest, to arrest diversions—a more inefficient process for serving the same cohort of public drug users.
We also asked Kettle why the city council has been so quiet about the potential that Seattle will lose federal funds because of its "sanctuary city" status for immigrants and refugees as Trump carries out the mass deportations that are his number one priority. Federal dollars pay for transportation, housing, and emergency response during natural disasters and public health crises like pandemics, yet city officials have been mostly silent about what happens if disaster strikes and federal funds don't come through.
And we pressed Kettle for his position on Mayor Bruce Harrell's proposed comprehensive plan update, which calls for more housing in traditional single-family areas like Queen Anne, which he represents.
Listen to our full interview below, and subscribe to Seattle Nice to get a new episode in your podcast app every week.
Also, on last week's episode, we discussed the increase in Seattle's minimum wage (which tipped workers will finally receive, after a 10-year transition period for restaurant and cafe owners) and return-to-office mandates, which managers love because it makes their jobs seem necessary.