2026 Episode 23: Public Safety/Street Closure Emergency Ordinance, Mayoral Office Shakeup, and More

Well, our top story again this week, the city's plans to improve public safety on Aurora Avenue North.

This was announced late last week and over the weekend, some barriers that were set up by residents to actually block traffic and reduce gun violence in that way.

Imagine being in that neighborhood.

Those have been replaced by city calming treatments, as they're called by the Seattle Department of Transportation.

So these are concrete barriers that still allow cars to get through, but not as easily.

They're spaced out, so cars are kind of forced to weave their way past them.

Are they working? Well, my Northwest reports, maybe not exactly.

More gunshots reported on Sunday morning.

Shell casings found 50 feet from a daycare.

David, I wanted to follow up on this because the city is clearly trying to bear down on this issue.

We're going to talk about some of the legislation they're working on in a minute.

It's just not that often that within 24 hours of an announcement, the city crews actually do it, take action like this, set up barricades.

What do you make of this barricade piece of it in terms of what the city's trying to do here? Is this going to work? I think is my big question.

I don't know if it's going to work.

I couldn't necessarily guess that.

You know, the barricade thing is fascinating in a way because it is sort of like the perfect example of when people talk about public safety measures that do not involve law enforcement.

Changing environment in like the built environment is kind of a preferred alternative to just flooding the zone with more police.

You know, we hear a lot about that downtown.

Sure.

You know, the term they often use is activating and, you know, kind of change Westlake Park, for example, or put up some lights along Third Avenue.

It's interesting to see it being used on Aurora Avenue, you know, because I think there's some feeling that Aurora is unchangeable, or at least the area near Aurora, that it is like a very cast in stone built environment that would be difficult to change.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's an interesting experiment in some ways of the city doesn't have a lot of disposable police officers to spend all of their time in this particular area.

And so they were resorting to something that actually, you know, during 2020 and some of the police protests, a lot of people were making the argument that this was the preferred approach to public safety is changing the environment, making it so that it discourages the sort of behavior that you want or

don't want.