1. In addition to shutting down the spray park at the Ballard Commons—a story first reported by My Ballard on Friday—the Settle Department of Parks and Recreation confirms that 11 of the city’s 22 wading pools will also be closed all summer due to “budgetary and staffing impacts from the pandemic,” according to a spokeswoman for the department.
The Ballard spray park is located in the middle of a large encampment that has persisted despite sweeps by the city and the repeated installation of hostile architecture designed to deter sitting and camping at the Ballard library branch next door. “Because of health and safety concerns of Seattle/King County Public Health and our own Safety Office regarding ongoing encampments and other activities at Ballard Commons Park, we regretfully decided not to operate the spraypark there this summer,” the Parks spokeswoman said. “No other SPR sprayparks are closed this year.”
During last week’s historic heat wave, city-run options for people living unsheltered to escape the weather were limited to some library branches, a handful of senior and community centers, and a cooling center at Magnuson Park. Amazon opened its own headquarters as a cooling center for up to 1,000 people last Monday, but required ID at the door—something many unsheltered people don’t have.
2. Interim Seattle Police Chief issued a one-day suspension for a South Precinct detective who used an unapproved and controversial facial recognition technology to search for suspects in criminal investigations.
According to Office of Police Accountability investigators, Detective Nicholas Kartes opened an account with Clearview.AI—an artificial intelligence software which bills itself as a kind of Google search for faces, using images scraped from the internet without their owners’ permission—in the fall of 2019.
Over the following year, Kartes used the program to search for suspects in ten SPD cases and approximately 20 cases from other law enforcement agencies. His searches returned one match—a possible suspect in a case under investigation by a different agency—though Kartes didn’t keep records of his searches or inform his supervisors that he was using the software. Kartes told investigators that he had informed his counterpart at the other agency that the found the match using Clearview.AI; he did not know whether his counterpart used the evidence to bring charges.
Kartes argued that facial recognition software like Clearview.AI doesn’t qualify as “surveillance technology,” as defined by the surveillance ordinance passed by the Seattle City Council in 2018, because the ordinance only addressed technologies used to track the “movements, behavior or actions of identifiable individuals.” SPD policy doesn’t prohibit officers from using facial recognition technology; in fact, SPD’s policy manual is silent on the issues raised in the surveillance ordinance.
OPA Director Andrew Myerberg concluded that Kartes hadn’t clearly violated any law or department policy, though he advised Diaz and the City Council to close the loophole as quickly as possible. Instead, Myerberg ruled that Kartes violated SPD’s professionalism policies.
This is not Kartes’ first brush with the OPA over the issue of surveillance. In 2020, the office investigated Kartes for using a personal drone to take photos of the house of a suspect in an ATM theft investigation, and for suggesting that his colleague lie about the source of the photos. In that case, Kartes told investigators that he was unaware of the surveillance ordinance, though after he familiarized himself with the law, he argued that his use of a drone to photograph the outside of a house wasn’t technically “surveillance” as defined in the ordinance.
“We know that while many of you have grown accustomed to teleworking during this time, in-person interactions are important to our work culture and employees’ wellbeing by creating opportunities for relationship building, collaboration, and creativity,” Durkan wrote.
Instead of disciplining Kartes, Myerberg recommended that SPD send a reminder to officers about the contents of the surveillance ordinance and directed Kartes to receive re-training. By the time Kartes received retraining from his supervisor, the OPA had already begun investigating his use of Clearview.AI.
3. Now that the state is officially out of COVID lockdown, Mayor Jenny Durkan wants city employees to come back to the office. In an email to city staff on Friday, Durkan said that all employees will “return to the office in some capacity” by September 12, unless they get special approval for an alternative work arrangement (AWA, because everything has to have an acronym) from the city.
Internal surveys of city employees have reportedly been consistent with surveys of US workers, which have found that the majority of people who started working from home during the pandemic would prefer to keep working from home at least some of the time. (This number was actually higher for federal government workers).
“We know that while many of you have grown accustomed to teleworking during this time, in-person interactions are important to our work culture and employees’ wellbeing by creating opportunities for relationship building, collaboration, and creativity,” Durkan wrote.
Many studies have concluded that working from home actually boosted overall productivity, particularly among so-called knowledge workers—likely because people who work at offices have more distractions, tend to get drawn into large meetings unnecessarily, and take more breaks. Women, numerous studies have shown, particularly benefit from flexible work hours, because they bear most of the burden of caregiving responsibilities that require attention during the day. And people who commute to work waste tens of millions of hours, collectively, every single day—time that could be spent hanging out with friends and family, pursuing school or hobbies, or doing literally anything else—even working more.
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Wading Pools Closed, Cop Who Used Facial Recognition Software Gets Slap on Wrist, Durkan Orders City Workers Back to the Office - PubliCola
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