Woodward reveals plan to boost safety in Spokane for the tourist season as mayoral challenger Brown says city is in 'free fall'

Jun. 15—Mayor Nadine Woodward gathered with other officials and business leaders Thursday morning under the Spokane Pavilion to unveil her Safe Spokane Summer initiative, promising to clean up downtown ahead of an influx of tourists and others to "the region's front porch."

Minutes before her news conference began, Woodward's primary challenger in the upcoming mayoral election, Lisa Brown, announced her own plans for how public safety and law enforcement would be handled if she is elected. In her plan, titled "Restoring Public Safety, Restoring Trust," Brown asserted that the city under the Woodward administration was in "a free fall," and highlighted an increase in violent crimes downtown in the last year.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with conservative councilmembers, police Chief Craig Meidl and key figures with Visit Spokane, the Downtown Spokane Partnership and Greater Spokane Incorporated, Woodward said she wanted to put Spokane's best foot forward in the coming months.

"One of the best things about Spokane, I think, is summer in Spokane," she said. "It's when downtown hosts the region's largest events, like Bloomsday, the Lilac Parade, Fourth of July, Pig Out in the Park, the Podium and the new Spokane Stadium, which opens this fall."

Woodward highlighted the importance of tourism to the local economy, stating it brings thousands of jobs and has a nearly $1.5 billion economic impact. Woodward said her summer safety initiative "gets our house ready for guests this summer."

"It focuses on making sure that those who live, work and recreate in our downtown enjoy their experience while they're here," Woodward said.

Key elements of the initiative include a renewed emphasis on cleaning up homeless camps . The mayor also highlighted a "high utilizer initiative" to arrest "the most prolific repeat misdemeanor offenders," defined as anyone with one misdemeanor in the past eight months or those with a dozen misdemeanor referrals in the past five years.

Other police focus points include preventing retail theft and arresting violators of various drug laws, Woodward said.

Nonpolice actions include expanding the work of the city's homeless outreach team to connect people with available services, engaging downtown businesses to create and promote events downtown, and relaunching the Give Real Change initiative, directing people to donate to homeless services that the city has partnered with rather than give cash directly to homeless people.

"That's something that we really want to emphasize, because panhandling is an issue downtown. It's not safe for anybody in their vehicles, it's certainly not safe for the individual panhandling," Woodward said. "The majority of the time, that money is not used for positive activities, it does go to drugs or whatever it might be."

Woodward also highlighted actions previously announced or already taken, including a major reorganization of the police department to place additional emphasis on patrol officers and increased police presence downtown, as well as ongoing work to establish a virtual court inside the city's largest homeless shelter, the Trent Resource and Assistance Center.

Meidl noted that bike patrols will be a daily presence in downtown Spokane. He also highlighted ongoing work, saying arrests in the downtown area were up 33% compared to the same time last year and highlighting quick response times to criminal activity in the area, including a recent shooting in Riverfront Park. Since the city passed a local law criminalizing drug possession and open drug use in early May, Meidl said the department had already made 90 arrests using that new authority.

But Brown argues that public safety in Spokane — as well as faith in police and the independent oversight role of the ombudsman — is trending in the wrong direction. In her public safety plan, she stated that in the last year there had been a 35% increase in violent crimes in downtown Spokane, a 34% increase in residential burglary in the Indian Trail, Audobon/Downriver and Northwest neighborhoods, and a 40% increase in residential property crimes in the Nevada Heights, Shiloh Hills and Whitman neighborhoods.

She also noted, in 2022, the Spokane Police Department only responded to around 42% of all calls for service, a statistic that Meidl acknowledged in January as Woodward and the department were unveiling a major reorganization of the department. In addition, Brown pointed to a 14% increase in domestic violence incidents citywide in the last year, as well as a 30% increase in homelessness.

Brown stopped short of claiming she could stop the underlying issues contributing to the drug and homelessness crises, but said she felt that Woodward avoided honest conversations about the shortcomings of her approach and "why that's not working," and instead blames others.

"I believe this mayor has had little success, and in response to that, because there's not a good way to say, 'We haven't had much success on issues I ran on four years ago,' has looked for ways to blame the state Legislature or certain city councilmembers," Brown said.

Woodward rejected Brown's criticism of police response statistics, saying not all calls required police response, and that the department responds to around 100,000 calls per year, though she acknowledged that there is "always room for improvement."

She blamed state policies for increasing crime and said she and Meidl lobbied hard for controversial police reforms passed in 2021 to be rolled back. An ongoing drug crisis punctuated by fentanyl has also contributed to a rise in crime and homelessness, Woodward said, and she pointed to work to create a violent crimes task force in the police department to address some of the worst spillover of those trends.

"In its first year, our officers have arrested 70 prolific and violent offenders, created tougher cases for them to get longer sentences, and today we just announced the high utilizer initiative that goes after repeat chronic misdemeanor offenders who are committing these quality-of-life crimes," she said.

Woodward also argued that homelessness had gone up statewide "under the leadership of Lisa Brown as Commerce Secretary."

But Brown argued that she could find success where Woodward has faltered. She said she would update the city's level of service standards for both police and fire response, and would direct the police chief to publicly report response rates by neighborhood by quarter, while setting policy goals to increase citywide response rates every year.

She also said she would reinstate the neighborhood resource officer program, positions that were reassigned to patrol duties during reorganization efforts earlier this year, and criticized Woodward for eliminating that program.

Woodward argued the reorganization she approved earlier this year made "every single officer on that shift a neighborhood resource officer," and said the reorganization had been spurred and planned by officers themselves.

"That she thinks she knows better than our officers should be concerning, not only to the community, but to our police department," Woodward said.

Brown said she did not plan to reduce patrol officer positions in order to reinstate the neighborhood resource officer program, but instead said she believed more officers should be hired.

"That, I think, is part of the issue. It appears to be a zero-response game," Brown said.

Both candidates agree strongly that more officers are needed, though they don't necessarily agree on how to pay for them.

Woodward said it was the obligation of state and federal governments to provide that funding, and that she had advocated for those outside funding streams. Brown also said she would pursue state and federal money, but suggested she may be willing to explore additional revenue streams, such as a levy, and noted that as a candidate for mayor, Woodward had opposed such a levy in 2019.

Woodward pounced on this suggestion, repeating a common refrain from her campaign and that of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers when she faced a challenge from Brown in 2018: Lisa Brown likes taxes.

"Lisa Brown has never seen a tax increase that she doesn't like, and sued voters when she was Senate majority leader in the Legislature to increase their taxes," Woodward said, though she did eventually concede that she might support a levy, if only because voters themselves would get to make the decision.

Woodward also expressed a possible willingness to cut other city programs in order to find the funding, but didn't specify what that entailed.

Brown also proposed strengthening the Office of the Police Ombudsman, which she said is necessary to restore trust in law enforcement. Many of the restrictions on the ombudsman's ability to investigate, including that officers can refuse to be interviewed, are created by the Police Guild's collective bargaining agreement.

"To the extent that things need to be done in collective bargaining, I would be bringing that to the table," Brown said. "I don't think we've had an administration that's really supported that office."

Woodward noted a tentative four-year contract with the Police Guild released Wednesday included some additional powers for the ombudsman, but argued that Brown would take it too far.

"With Lisa Brown as mayor, there will be a mass exodus from our police department," Woodward said.

Brown's proposals to improve public safety go beyond law enforcement, including expanding crisis intervention programs — Brown said she was interested in the work Eugene, Oregon was doing with the CAHOOTS program — and tackling youth gangs and crime by creating programs similar to the Walk About Yakima program.

"I think this is a good plan, but I think the big-picture issue is leadership that can bring people together and move forward," Brown said. "The biggest challenge we face is probably not 'Have we heard the best idea?' It's more about the division and even D.C.-style politics of just blaming the other side when things aren't going well."