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These sort of stories—a deaf man allegedly Tased, beaten, and arrested by Hawthorne, California officers who mistook his attempt at sign language as a physical threat—generate the usual outrage over excess use of force. But there’s one detail consistent with nearly every excessive force incident that doesn’t seem to generate the outrage it should:

In February, Meister had been loading boxes of winter clothes and a snowboard that belonged to him at a friend’s house when a neighbor mistook him for a robber and called police. When officers Jeffrey Salmon, Jeffrey Tysl, Erica Bristow, and Mark Hultgren arrived on the scene, they encountered Meister and ordered him to stop. The only problem is that Meister is deaf and couldn’t hear the officers so he couldn’t obey their commands.

After grabbing his hand, a startled Meister began communicating the only way he can- by using sign language. As he desperately tried to make them understand him, the cops decided that Meister was trying to resist and assault them. So they jumped him, took him to ground, shot him twice with a Taser and punched and kicked the crap of him until they finally arrested him and charged him with assault.

This automatic charge of assaulting an officer and/or resisting arrest nearly every time officers assault a suspect is one of the more pernicious practices of modern policing. I understand that police use it to justify their actions, and that it gives prosecutors and city attorneys leverage in negotiating plea deals or in persuading victims to drop lawsuits (“We’ll drop our charges if you drop yours”).

But the officers are lying.

It is one thing to be so fucking stupid as to beat and arrest a deaf man for not adequately responding to verbal commands. But by the time those charges were formally filed, everybody involved had to be totally aware of what had actually transpired. And yet they filed the assault charges anyway.

If I were to knowingly file a false report with the police, it would be a crime. Officers who file false reports to cover their tracks should be held criminally liable too.

Some combination of my ancient computer being a problem while I type on public transit and how I’m using jokes for the date instead of actual dates this week, and I seem to have somehow posted this into the Open Thread for Monday, and I’m not quite sure how to undo it. So I’m reposting it here, as an open thread. Um, sorry to people who really wanted whatever ephemera I’d posted there.

– I know that there is a large group of the chattering class that hate Seattle passing resolutions. But I think this opposition to the Hyde Amendment is right the fuck on.

– Sad face for Mars Hill.

– I’m not sure I’m qualified to say anything about Ray Rice that goes outside of just cliche. But holy shit, Fox News, shut the fuck up.

– Redmond will fund Overlake Village bike/walk bridge

– We tend to think of activism as an “all-in” sort of affair where one eats, sleeps, and shits the struggle. If you don’t live up to this romanticized notion, you’re a fraud. In reality, many of the people fighting for basic things like access to clean water, good schools, and affordable housing are, in fact, people with lives and families and other responsibilities.

So I’m wreaking havoc in the other Washington for a few days, but that doesn’t stop me from reading the Seattle Times editorial page. (Because I’m stoopid.) And for obvious reasons, I just couldn’t wait to click through to the following headline: “Washington’s tuition stability good for students, GET program.”

WASHIINGTON’S prepaid tuition plan rebounded into financial solvency on the wings of a rebounding stock market and a shift in legislative policy. That’s good news for the state: In 2013, the Guaranteed Education Tuition (GET) program was underfunded by $631 million. Absent the rebound, Washington would’ve been on the hook.

But the real winners in the rebound are Washington college students and their families, whether they had GET accounts or not. The prepaid plan’s deficit had been compounded by a ruinous state policy of huge tuition increases.

But if you were expecting the editors to eat a little well-deserved crow, think again. Absolutely zero mention of the editorial board’s prior advocacy to shut down GET at a taxpayer cost of $1.7 billion. Though in their defense, perhaps not even Seattle Times editors can bear to read the paper’s awful editorial pages.

One other comment, though:

The Legislature wisely reversed the gouge on college students and froze tuition increases for the past two years.

To be clear, freezing tuition after four years of double-digit increases is good. But the legislature has not “reversed the gouge.” Lawmakers who paid an inflation-adjusted $2,500 a year for their own tuition a generation ago have still left today’s students paying around $13,000. It would take a couple decades of tuition freezes to truly reverse the gouge. And we all know that’s not likely to happen.

So if the editors truly care about Washington college students and their families, they would marshal their advocacy on behalf of raising the tax revenue necessary to both add capacity and restore some fiscal balance to our state college and university system.

– I know that there is a large group of the chattering class that hate Seattle passing resolutions. But I think this opposition to the Hyde Amendment is right the fuck on.

– Sad face for Mars Hill.

– I’m not sure I’m qualified to say anything about Ray Rice that goes outside of just cliche. But holy shit, Fox News, shut the fuck up.

– Redmond will fund Overlake Village bike/walk bridge

– We tend to think of activism as an “all-in” sort of affair where one eats, sleeps, and shits the struggle. If you don’t live up to this romanticized notion, you’re a fraud. In reality, many of the people fighting for basic things like access to clean water, good schools, and affordable housing are, in fact, people with lives and families and other responsibilities.

Hey, remember how just a year and a half ago the oh so wise Seattle Times editorial board vociferously (and dishonestly) backed up Rodney Tom’s call to shut down GET (the state’s Guaranteed Education Tuition Plan), deriding it as “too generous,” while arguing that “lawmakers should be seriously concerned about a projected $631 million future shortfall” in the program?

“Closing GET to new enrollees would cause a $1.7 billion hit to the state treasury,” the editors wrote in January 2013, back when they were editorializing in favor of, you know, closing GET to new enrollees. And yet just 19 months later, according to today’s Seattle Times, GET is now funded at 106 percent of obligations:

The state’s prepaid college tuition is no longer underfunded, and has fully recovered from the recession.

That’s right: following the editors’ sage advice would have cost Washington taxpayers an unnecessary $1.7 billion, while eliminating our state’s only college savings option that allows middle-class families to securely plan for their children’s college education. Oops. Not that this wasn’t entirely predictable. As I explained in my contemporaneous fisking of this insane editorial:

Why the fuck would we want to lock in a $1.7 billion loss that we’d never have to pay if we’d just fund higher education at the level we all say we want to fund it? I mean, that’s just crazy. Inflation has averaged between 2 and 3 percent over the past few decades. Limit tuition increases to 7.5 percent a year and the GET program easily outgrows its shortfall.

As it turns out, the legislature ended up freezing tuition for two years. That and a booming stock market predictably led to GET’s full and speedy recovery.

Seriously… where do these clowns get off telling us how to run a government? Nobody should ever, ever, ever listen to their budgetary advice.

– I guess there’s a game of foot sports today. Given how crazy the city got for preseason foot sports, it might be a good idea to leave downtown right now.

– Phyllis Schlafly has great ideas that sure sound neat.

– So if you could use a Taser instead of killing someone, then logically a civilized society would want police to have them. But I see no reason for Tasers to even be in the hands of cops if that’s the way they’re going to look at it.

– It’s tough to see potential February Metro cuts.

– Pumpkin Spice is a real sign that this too hot summer is ending, so I’ll take it.

Republican challenger Pedro Celis’s chances of toppling Eric Cantor just got a little bit better. To bad for him, though, that he’s running against Democratic incumbent Suzan DelBene:

After a shaky primary-election showing, Republican congressional candidate Pedro Celis has reshuffled his campaign, replacing his campaign manager and hiring a pair of young strategists who helped tea-party challenger Dave Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor earlier this year.

Brat’s campaign manager, Zachary Werrell, is now managing Celis’ campaign, replacing local Republican strategist Don Skillman, who had been campaign manager for the primary. Gray Delany, another Brat campaign staffer, is now Celis’ campaign spokesman.

Uh-huh. He can blame his former staffers all he wants, but the problem, according to people who have watched Celis in action, is that he is just an awful candidate. Flat. Unoriginal. Uninspiring.

This was supposed to be a competitive race: a first term Democrat in a midterm election being challenged by a well-financed Republican in a swing district. But the Republicans simply did not field a competitive candidate.

When the editors at Yes! Magazine first asked me to write a piece on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage struggle, I initially joked that they’d have to change their name to No! Magazine, because, you know, I don’t have much of a portfolio writing upbeat, forward looking pieces on local politics. But in fact, if there’s ever a political story to instill optimism, it’s “$15 and Change: How Seattle Led the Country’s Wage Revolution…”

Shortly after 11 p.m. that night, May 29, 2013, Durocher walked off her $9.19 an hour job to become the first fast-food worker in Seattle to strike for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The next day, hundreds of Seattle fast-food workers and their supporters followed her lead, temporarily shutting down as many as 14 restaurants to chants of “Supersize our salaries now!”

It was an outrageously ambitious goal—a 64 percent pay hike to more than twice the federal $7.25 an hour minimum wage. Yet only one year and four days later, the Seattle City Council met their demands, unanimously approving the first $15 minimum wage in the nation. Seattle’s path to a $15 minimum wage is a winding tale of effective organizing, smart messaging, bold experimentation, opposition missteps, and blind dumb luck. It is also a roadmap for bypassing our nation’s partisan gridlock by rolling out a broader progressive agenda one city at a time.

You can read the whole thing in the latest issue of Yes! Magazine, available online and on newsstands now.

It’s maybe not the smoothest piece I’ve ever written, but that’s totally my fault—I turned in a kajillion more words than they asked for (I originally included a historical context that stretched all the way back to 1905, because I’m just like that), and so some of the narrative flow necessarily got lost in the editing. Still, I think I give a pretty good overview of how the fast food strikes, the SeaTac $15 minimum wage initiative, and Kshama Sawant’s unlikely victory all played off of and into each other to yield the larger victory, sowing the seeds for similar victories nationwide.

Give it a read and let me know what you think.

And if you’re wondering what else I’ve been doing to pay the bills since leaving The Stranger, well, I’ve got news to share soon on that front too, as well as what it might mean for the future of HA. Stay tuned.

From the Stating the Obvious Department:

In an open revolt, more than 100 Seattle police officers suing to block new use-of-force polices assert that high-level city, police and union officials privately agree with their contention that the court-ordered changes put them and the public in danger.

But the officers who filed the suit aren’t naming those high-level officials, saying only that the officials told them they won’t seek to alter the policies because of the “politics” of the situation and the “perceived inability” to fight federally mandated reforms, the officers allege in newly filed court papers.

“This means that the City is now knowingly and willingly playing politics with Plaintiffs’ lives and the lives of the law-abiding citizens of Seattle,” the officers wrote in a 34-page amended complaint filed late Wednesday with U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman.

While I don’t think the court will view this complaint with much credence (“Evidence of police injuries is mounting,” the complaint says, without providing a scrap of, you know, evidence), I think this “playing politics” charge does provide a window into a fundamental misconception underlying many police abuses: some officers seem to have forgotten who is actually in charge.

See, it’s our democratically elected civilian government that writes the rules, not the guys with the guns and the pepper spray and the scary demeanor. And politics is the process through which democratic governments craft and enact policy. So of course the City is playing politics with the use of force of guidelines. That’s how city governments work.

Is it the perfect method for crafting and enacting policy? No. The perfect method would be to appoint me benevolent dictator. But alas, in a democratic republic, we’ll just have to rely on politics to get public policy done as best we can.

Ironically, by filing this complaint and giving it to the press, the rebel SPD officers are playing politics too. Which is fine. But the fundamental assertion implicit in their complaint—that it is the officers who should write the use of force rules, not their civilian overseers—is downright disturbing:

In the complaint, the officers allege the use-of-force policies do not reflect the work of department members who were asked to develop them and instead were hijacked by Bobb and the Justice Department.

“Those personnel will testify that the UF policy they wrote was altered almost in its entirety and replaced with specific language provided, and required, by the Monitor,” the complaint says, referring to the overall use-of-force policy.

“This supports,” the officers wrote, the “contention that DOJ, in partnership with Mr. Bobb, intends to use consent decrees in Seattle, as well as other jurisdictions, to rewrite longstanding constitutional law and principles intended to protect officer safety, and eliminate reasonable police practices, with which they — from the comfort and safety of their desks and with no experience facing dangerous threats — disagree or find distasteful.”

This is were some police officers go wrong. It is the officer’s job to enforce the law, not write it. And if these rebel officers truly harbor such arrogant disrespect for civilian authority, then I’m not sure we should feel comfortable arming them to the teeth and trusting them to patrol our streets.

I hate to say I told you so, but… no… wait… I actually kinda love saying I told you so:

Some UberX drivers in Seattle are no longer working for Uber as a way to protest how they’ve been treated by the transportation company.

About 100 drivers from a new group called Seattle Ride-Share Drivers Association gathered Wednesday to show their frustration with a recent price reduction Uber has implemented.

[…] The Seattle Ride-Share Drivers Association, which has 500 members, said Uber’s claim that its drivers are making more overall income is “unfounded.” It noted how some drivers, when expenses are accounted for, are actually now losing money when accepting a ride.

“No sensible person would stop working if he or she is making more money,” association board member Jamal Ahmed told GeekWire.

One of the more insulting and Orwellian attacks on me for advocating a more gradual and regulated entry of so-called “ride share” into Seattle’s taxi and for-hire market, was the charge that I was “anti-driver”—that I was shamelessly (and perhaps racistly) shilling for exploitive taxi owners at the expense of the city’s largely immigrant for-hire work force.

Well, you tell me: who is exploiting who?

Yes, under the old system we had a regulated monopoly with legal barriers to entry, but at least we had government regulators charged with looking out for the interests of drivers and consumers. But when Uber and Lyft are done with their creative destruction, there will be one, maybe two out-of-state for-profit monoliths dominating the market and dictating terms to drivers and customers alike.

Uber is going to have to do something to justify its $17 billion market capitalization. And as UberX drivers are beginning learn, that something will come at their expense.

Meanwhile, the lack of caps leaves aggrieved drivers nearly powerless to wage a meaningful protest. With over a thousand drivers in its system UberX apparently suffered no slow down in pick up  times due to the labor action. It’s like UberX has a virtual scab feature built right in. Hooray for progress!

 

– The best way to make sure McCleary is enforced is to make sure that there are no penalties on anyone.

– Tim Eyman said that the biggest lie of his life was when he paid himself when he told people he was campaigning out of the goodness of his heart. But I think the idea that there’s any traction, even statewide, to repeal Seattle’s $15 minimum wage is a bigger lie of his lifetime.

– More Than ‘Just Women’s Issues’ in Moral Week of Action

– I like the idea of time limits on Sunday parking.

– Probably was cited for something more serious than parking in the bike lane.

The Seattle Times on “How to fix Yakima’s racially polarized elections“:

Legislators should also rectify this un-American disparity, too common in the state, and pass the Washington Voting Rights Act, which empowers local jurisdictions to solve problems of voter exclusion at the local level.

No doubt. But also, you might want to stop endorsing all those Republican senators who are blocking passage of the Washington Voting Rights Act. Just sayin’.

What do you think? Sounds like a great opportunity to improve the quantity and quality of content here on HA, doesn’t it?

Dear Sir/Madam,

How are you? I hope you don’t mind that I contact you today. I am emailing to ask if you would be interested in accepting articles for your site.

I have a campaign I am currently running for which I feel that your website would be a great fit. My client is a respected provider of online casino. I am looking to provide you with an informative, entertaining, and well worded article which contains only one text link to the page of my client and does not look like advertising.

We are keen to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with you. Could you please let me know if you would be interested?

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Kind Regards,

Juliette Duprès
Marketing Specialist – Omnibuzzmedia

I get these sort of emails all the time. Yes, an “article” from a “respected provider of online casino” would be a “great fit” on a blog like HA with a long history of passionate screeds against expanding legal gambling. Makes me wonder how much of the Internet is composed entirely of advertorial link spam?

That said, I am always open to taking on new contributors. So if you’re a great local writer looking for your big shot at the minor leagues, let me know and I’ll give you read.

It may be too soon to pull on your Seattle Metropolitans jersey, but sports business journalist Howard Bloom says that the NHL is planning to expand by 2017, with four new teams slated for Las Vegas, Quebec, Toronto, and yes, Seattle. All that’s missing here is an owner and an arena (and an actual plan to expand, says NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly, who denies Bloom’s report), but that can’t stop local hockey fans from dreaming.

Bloom told Q13 that Seattle’s rich junior hockey tradition and geographic proximity to Canadian markets makes it an ideal expansion city. No doubt the lack of winter sport competition from the NBA wouldn’t hurt either as a new team worked to win fans’ hearts and wallets.

So Bloom thinks Seattle should strongly consider revising the Memorandum of Understanding on the Sodo arena deal, to allow for construction with an NHL team first.

“Look, it’s pretty simple Seattle. If you want to have a major winter sport in your market, the NHL is knocking on your door then you’re going to entertain the people that are coming to you.”

Yeah, except it’s not that simple. The politics have gotten more complicated since former mayor Mike McGinn’s defeat, and there’s no indication that would-be new Sonics owner Chris Hansen has any interest in building an arena without an NBA team in his pocket. Still recovering from our abusive relationship with the NBA, if there’s any big city politically primed to tell the NHL to fuck off, it’s Seattle.

Which is a shame. Because I was really looking forward to pulling on that Seattle Metropolitans jersey.

I am sympathetic to those advocating for the Woodland Park Zoo to shutter its inadequate elephant exhibit and move its inmates to more humane sanctuaries. But I’m not sympathetic to stupid defamatory writing:

While the immediate cause of Watoto’s collapse will not be known until a medical examination is complete, it is hard to escape the sense that this was a preventable and premature death, and one for which the community bears a collective responsibility.

Shorter Seattle Times: “It would be wrong to speculate on the cause of Watoto’s death, but we’re going to do so anyway.”

And the editors don’t stop their uninformed opinionating there. In maligning the Woodland Park Zoo for “keeping the world’s largest land mammals in confined spaces, in inappropriate climates,” the editors point out: “In the wild an elephant might live 20 years longer.”

Okay. Maybe. But 20 years longer than what? Captive elephants in general? Woodland Park Zoo elephants in particular? Watoto herself? I mean, if you’re going to burden Seattleites with collective guilt for the “premature death” of Watoto, I presume you’ve got the elephant actuarial tables to back you up. Well, no:

The researchers found that the median life span for African elephants in European zoos was 16.9 years, compared with 56 years for elephants who died of natural causes in Kenya’s Amboseli park. Adding in those elephants killed by people in Africa lowered the median life span there to 35.9 years.

Again, I’m all for moving Woodland Park’s elephants to more elephant-appropriate facilities. But let’s be fair. Compared to her fellow African elephants, 45-year-old Watato lived a pretty long and healthy life—nearly three times the median lifespan of your typical zoo elephant, and almost a decade longer than the median life span of elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli park. So given these numbers, it’s not even accurate to characterize Watato’s death as statistically “premature,” let alone blame Woodland Park zookeepers for it.

Also, it’s just one elephant. Hardly much of a statistical sample.

Yes, in the wild, elephants can live to be 70. But the oldest documented human was 122-year-old Jeanne Calment of France. So to say that Watoto “might” have lived 20 years longer in the wild is kinda like saying that recently departed 89-year-old Lauren Bacall “might” have lived 30 years longer in France. She might have. But it wasn’t likely.

The first rule in reading a Seattle Times editorial is that when they use a number, they’re probably using it deceptively (or at least, wrong). But the irony is, this deception wasn’t even necessary. First, just look at those median life expectancy numbers: Zoo elephants live less than half as long as those on African reserves, and less than one-third as long as those wild elephants that die of natural causes. That’s awful! And a powerful indictment of elephant zoo captivity on its own. Second, go to Woodland Park Zoo. Take a good hard look at the elephants. Then take a good hard look at the size of their enclosure. Tell me if that looks right to you?

But barring some sort of damning evidence from the medical examination, Watoto’s death at age 45 is about as strong an argument for shutting down the zoo’s elephant enclosure as the sale of the estate-tax-exempt McBride “Farm” is for repealing the estate tax. Even when the facts are on their side the editors would obviously rather manipulate and mislead their readers than treat them with respect.