This is a second blog post reflecting on some of the meta-lessons that came out of local elections in Thurston County this year.

The New York Times recently ran a story about how The Stranger sets the tone in Seattle politics. This is not breaking news for anyone who has watched Seattle politics for the last two decades.

The secret is simple: The Stranger shows up. It is consistently present, consistently relevant, and consistently part of the political conversation.

On a recent episode of The Olympia Standard, campaign consultant Rob Richards talked about the failure of the Workers’ Bill of Rights and how the yes campaign faced an uphill battle from the start. The opposition narrative was already circulating almost a year before the campaign really got rolling. And he’s right. The first public attention the idea got wasn’t from the campaign; it was from a flare-up of misinformation about a possible minimum wage increase more than a year earlier.

The campaign eventually launched with a petition drive last spring, but real messaging didn’t start until August. And in a town with fewer than half a dozen full-time local reporters, what earned media campaign can you realistically run? There simply aren’t enough people covering local government closely or consistently to help counter a false narrative once it takes hold.

We saw this same dynamic in the Regional Fire Authority vote a few years ago. The JOLT, in particular, published a lot of stories leading up to the election that, while not necessarily inaccurate, clearly shaped the public conversation. The RFA election became a turnout election. The precincts that voted “no” were the ones where people just didn’t vote at all. Many voters were confused, caught between the campaigns’ messaging and the churn of coverage and commentary on social media. Faced with confusion, they defaulted to the “safe” choice: not voting or voting no.

I’ve heard some fair criticism that JOLT’s model (reporters overseas watching meetings remotely and writing from the recordings) made it difficult to provide the broader context of why the RFA mattered. That coverage tended to highlight debate and points of disagreement, because that was what stood out in public meetings. Without interviews, on-the-ground sourcing, or deeper reporting, the coverage didn’t really capture the larger picture of why the RFA might be beneficial. That isn’t a slam on the reporters; they were doing the best they could with limited resources and time.

Could the cities or RFA supporters have engaged more with JOLT? Absolutely. But it’s also fair to say that the resulting coverage skewed toward highlighting the questions and the drama, not the underlying case for the proposal. That imbalance, born from limited capacity, not ill intent, helped create confusion.

And that’s the common thread between Proposition 1 and the RFA: a negative discussion, powered by limited local reporting and social media algorithms that amplify emotional scepticism, grew in the absence of steady, contextual information. Confusion became the common voter experience, and in low-turnout elections, confusion is fatal.

What we need is clarity.

I generally appreciate news coverage. I’m not someone who gets angry every time a reporter writes something that makes a campaign uncomfortable. But we have to be honest about something: in a community with shrinking traditional media, campaigns still spend money on mailers and consultants and ads. But aren’t investing in the thing that makes campaigns possible in the first place: local media.

There’s been a lot of talk about how much the Prop 1 campaign spent on signature collection and basic campaign work. But how can complex, structural policy changes succeed when there isn’t a consistent media presence helping the public understand them? A community cannot hold informed elections without informed voters, and voters don’t have the time or energy to attend every meeting, read through every governing document, or fact-check every post on Facebook. That’s what journalism is for.

Which brings us back to The Stranger. It is only one outlet in a city that still has a relatively healthy Seattle Times. KUOW spends a significant amount of airtime on Seattle politics. Smaller niche outlets like PubliCola and The Urbanist also contribute to the political conversation. But for capturing the mood and narrative arc of Seattle politics, The Stranger is uniquely powerful, not because it is perfectly neutral, but because it is present, consistent, and willing to frame debates with a point of view.

In Thurston County, with so few journalists, coverage is often reactive. Journalism focuses on the easiest available material: summaries of meetings, recaps of official statements, and the occasional story on a high-profile incident. There isn’t enough capacity for the proactive, explanatory reporting necessary to unpack something like a Workers Bill of Rights. And when a reporter tries to be fair in that environment, “balance” can easily look like “There’s a real debate here,” even when one side is working with a year-long head start fueled by fear, confusion, and online misinformation.

Without sustained reporting, balance becomes ambiguity. And ambiguity becomes a “No” vote.

The absence of robust journalism means our community lacks the civic infrastructure necessary for democratic decision-making. The cost of a policy failing, of housing going unaddressed, fire services going unfunded, worker protections never advancing, is far higher than the cost of supporting journalism that helps voters understand what’s at stake in the first place.

If campaigns can’t count on local media to provide that clarity, then some of that investment needs to shift. Local media is not optional. It is foundational civic infrastructure. Until we treat it that way, we will keep re-running the same story: big ideas, complex policies, passionate campaigns, and a confused electorate that never gets the chance to truly understand the choice.

We can add Olympia, Washington, to the growing list of Cascadian cities moving to loosen zoning laws that ban all but detached houses from most of their residential land. Washington’s state capitol (pop. 52,000) adopted on Monday new rules that would relax restrictions and legalize more types of modest multifamily dwellings citywide.

The intention is bold: in most US cities, tampering with single-family zoning laws has been a political third rail for decades. But as home prices and rents continue to rise faster than incomes, and as the climate change clock keeps ticking, the case against reserving large swaths of cities solely for big, expensive houses on large lots is getting harder for city officials to ignore.

Olympia’s newly-adopted changes cover the full spectrum of so-called “missing middle” housing options, including: duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes, townhouses, cottages, courtyard housing, small apartments, and accessory dwellings (also known as mother-in-law apartments). Some of the rule changes open up more areas of the city to housing types that were previously banned, and some loosen restrictions such as building size limits.

But there’s a catch: the liberalization isn’t likely to boost Olympia’s flow of homes by all that much. Planners estimate that the changes could yield between 948 and 1,892 additional new homes city-wide over the next 20 years. In a city with 23,000 housing units, that corresponds to an increase in homes of just 0.2 to 0.4 percent per year. Two main reasons for low expectations:

• off-street parking requirements will make many potential homebuilding projects unworkable
• minimum lot size restrictions will exclude a large portion of lots from the new allowances

That said, Olympia’s planners and elected officials deserve big kudos for pushing through allowances for more housing options in single-family neighborhoods. With this first step taken, Olympia need only continue ratcheting back the restrictions to reap the full affordability and sustainability benefits of missing middle housing.

Cascadia’s big three—Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC—please take note: a city one tenth your size is getting ahead of you on making zoning more equitable. Read on for the deets.

Housing in Olympia

Rents and prices in Olympia, though far lower than in Seattle an hour’s drive to the north, have risen rapidly in recent years. Average rents for all apartments in Thurston County, in which Olympia is the largest city, increased from $854 per month in 2013 to $1,187 per month in 2018, a gain of 39 percent.

Prices for single-family homes in Thurston County jumped from $267,500 to $297,000 from 2017 to 2018 alone. Meanwhile, census data show total housing units in Olympia rose from 21,729 in 2010 to 22,701 in 2016, an increase of 4.5 percent.

In Olympia today, 55 percent of housing units are detached single-family houses. Similar to other Cascadian cities, much of Olympia is dominated by neighborhoods of single-family homes. Interestingly, duplexes and multi-unit townhouses were allowed in all but a tiny sliver of the city, even before the recently-adopted liberalization. That is to say, technically Olympia already had almost zero single-family zoning—and the new rules have pushed much of the city’s land even further beyond the traditional definition. The low-density residential zones primarily affected are known as R4-8 and R6-12 (the numbers indicate the range of allowed density in dwelling units per acre), which together comprise 53 percent of the city’s land (excluding rights-of-way).

Here’s the rundown of Olympia’s changes for each missing middle housing type

Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)

Olympia already allowed one ADU per lot, either attached to the main house (as in a basement apartment) or detached (as in a backyard cottage), and currently has 98 permitted ADUs. The new rules include these important fixes:

• removal of the requirement for the owner to live on site
• removal of the requirement for an additional off-street parking space
• increase in the allowed height from 16 to 24 feet

Duplexes

Olympia already allowed duplexes in its R6-12 single-family zones, and there are 684 in the city. The new rules extend the duplex allowance to R4-8 zones. However, minimum lot size requirements of 6,000 square feet in R6-12, and 7,200 square feet in R4-8 may preclude duplexes on a large portion of the city’s lots.

Triplexes and fourplexes

Olympia formerly treated triplexes and fourplexes like apartment buildings and only permitted them in specified, limited portions of the city’s R6-12 zones. The city has 151 housing units in these two types. The new rules allow them throughout R6-12 zones, and also in R4-8 zones if located within 600 feet of commercial zones or selected transit routes (definitions here). The changes also impose restrictive minimum lot sizes ranging from 13,000 square feet for a fourplex in an R4-8 zone, to 7,200 square feet for a triplex in an R6-12 zone. Together, the transit/commercial zone proximity and lot size requirements remove 94 percent of the lots in R4-8 and R6-12 zones from eligibility for a triplex or fourplex.

Townhouses

Townhouses are two or more homes with shared walls and a property line running beneath each shared wall that separates each unit onto a different lot. Olympia already allowed townhouses in R4-8 and R6-12 zones, and according to the census there were about 1,000 of them in 2016. The changes remove the maximum of four units per structure and reduce all side setbacks to five feet.

Courtyard Apartments

Olympia’s rule updates establish a brand new allowance for courtyard apartments, which are defined as up to 12 attached apartments arranged around a central courtyard. Courtyard apartments will be permitted in R6-12 zones with a height limit of two stories, and in R4-8 zones if located with 600 feet of a commercial zoning district or a selected transit route, with a height limit of one story. The new rules also set minimum lot sizes of  17,500 square feet in R4-8 zones and 13,000 square feet in R6-12 zones. These limits remove 97 percent of lots from eligibility for a courtyard apartment.

Single-room occupancies (SROs)

SROs are apartment buildings in which residents share bathrooms and in some cases also kitchens. Previously, Olympia only allowed SROs outright in downtown, but the changes extend the allowance to R6-12 zones, with one off-street parking space required for every four units. SROs have the same minimum lot sizes as those for courtyard apartments noted above.

Cottage Housing

Olympia already allowed cottage housing—that is, small homes clustered around a shared open space—in R4-8 and R6-12 zones. The rule changes grant an increase to the allowed home size and density, along with a few other minor flexibility improvements.

The two big flaws: parking and minimum lot sizes

With the exception of ADUs and SROs, Olympia’s new rules mandate one off-street parking space per home for all of the missing middle housing types we listed. Requiring parking may be politically expedient, but it undermines the whole intent of the city’s missing middle strategy.

Off-street parking makes housing more expensive directly through the cost of its construction and the space it consumes, and indirectly by making homebuilding projects either physically or financially unworkable, depriving the city of much needed new homes that would relieve upward pressure on prices. Accommodating parking in small-scale multifamily housing on small lots is particularly problematic because underground garages are prohibitively expensive, and paved surface parking spaces eat up greenspace.

The typical size of single-family house lots in Cascadian cities is 4,000 to 5,000 square feet. As noted in the descriptions above, most of the building types are subject to much larger minimum lot size restrictions that, in combination with the transit/commercial zone proximity requirements, exclude all but roughly one in twenty of the city’s residential lots. That limit quashes the potential for Olympia’s otherwise promising rule changes to actually yield new missing middle homes.

Two-story duplexes, triplexes, and even small apartment buildings can fit comfortably on 5,000 square foot lots. In fact, before zoning laws were imposed to prevent it, most cities built these types sprinkled in with single-family houses, as Sightline has documented in Seattle. An alternative to minimum lot sizes is to keep the same size and setback limits that apply to single-family houses, regardless of the number homes inside the building, as proposed in Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda.

Conclusion

Olympia’s liberalization of missing middle housing is an instructive example for cities throughout Cascadia and beyond that recognize the need to increase housing options in single-family neighborhoods. The city’s revamped regulations are laudable in that they relax the rules for a broad range of modest multifamily housing types and legalize them throughout most of the city. In practice, however, the new rules are likely to fall short because they retain too many restrictions—most critically, large lots and too much parking. But Olympia has taken an important incremental step to build on.

Thanks to Sightline Research Associate Nisma Gabobe, who provided considerable research for this article.

The post Olympia Moves to Further Loosen the Stranglehold of Single-Family Zoning Laws appeared first on Sightline Institute.

Ryan examines the role Secret Lairs have as storytelling mediums, across several different artist spotlights.

The post For a Limited Time: Experimental Storytelling in Secret Lair Artist Series appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

In the 1990s, I worked on one of the best and boldest implementations of Bill Bratton-style community policing bar none. After leading successful reforms as police chief in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston, Bratton is considered “one of the leading architects of modern policing.”  (For a brief explanation of why, see the note at the end on “Bratton’s Pivot from “Three R’s” to “Three P’s.”)

In New Haven, Connecticut, a sergeant and a team of police officers were assigned to each neighborhood with the time, talent, and a mission to solve the highest priority crime problems in each one. It made a real difference.

Here in Seattle we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do even better. That’s how anti-bad guy, pro-good cop, and taxpayer-friendly Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson’s public safety platform is.

In contrast, Harrell’s plan would completely blow our chance.

If you can’t square this with what you’ve seen on social media, read in Harrell’s campaign literature, or god forbid Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) propaganda you had to suffer through, I urge you to read on.

The ground truth of the moment we’re in

Let’s start with the stone-cold facts that either candidate will inherit the day the winner is sworn in:

1. Early next year, sworn officer staffing will be about 1,000 officers.
2. Between 2017 (peak sworn officer staffing in Seattle) and 2019, Seattle Police Department (SPD) averaged 1,429 officers. 
3. During that same 2017-2019 period, the city’s analysis of computer aided dispatch data shows that sworn officers spent 2,413,916 hours on non-criminal calls for service. That’s an average of just over 800,000 hours per year, almost exactly 400 FTE’s-worth.

Aside from civilian crisis responders–the Community Assisted Response & Engagement (CARE) department — Harrell plans to ignore points two and three and recreate the status quo ante. Once again–to the benefit of bad guys, the detriment of good cops, and in a raw deal for taxpayers–we would burden a sworn force of 1,400 plus officers with lots of things civilian staff can do equally well for less.

To add insult to injury, Harrell just offered SPOG a contract that gives officers a big raise — a 42% pay increase in just five years–while hamstringing the deployment of CARE through a list of arbitrary restrictions.

One of the more head-scratching examples: if someone is having a mental health crisis on the sidewalk outside of a Safeway, CARE can be solo dispatched. But if they are just inside the Safeway, sworn officers must also be dispatched — a needless waste of officers’ time and talent.

But what’s more egregious is that Harrell is negotiating dispatch protocols with SPOG at all. Albuquerque’s CARE equivalent has handled more than 100,000 calls for service. They clearly know how to successfully and safely operate civilian crisis response and Seattle should simply be adopting their well-proven protocols rather than letting SPOG put an uninformed thumb on the scale.

Wilson in contrast understands the upside for all involved (well, except criminals) of building back better.  From her platform:

Seattle’s CARE Department, our primary alternative response for crisis calls, has shown success — but its expansion has been stymied by a poorly negotiated police contract, which caps the department at just 24 civilian responders. We are still deploying highly paid, highly trained armed officers to mental health and other non-crime calls they’re neither suited to nor needed for — and many other jobs civilians can do, from directing traffic at events to taking down crime reports. This crowds out proactive police work and limits the immediate availability of officers to respond to crimes in progress.

Katie WIlson’s platform

Here’s the kicker, from which all good things follow: based on what other cities are already doing, hiring 400 civilian responders to unburden officers of all those non-crime calls will only cost as much as 300 sworn officers.

And that civilianization dividend would be a big deal.

Where we could go from here

At this point, I will ask you to focus on one fact and one happy assumption.

The fact is that Harrell’s plan is to staff up to more than 1,450 sworn officers and fund CARE team responders as a net addition on top of that. So it’s 100 percent certain Wilson wouldn’t need to come back to taxpayers for more than what her opponent is already committed to spending to implement a civilianization plan.

The happy assumption is that the civilianization plan is doable. The good news is that it is, as I’ll explain. But first I want to focus on the possibilities it unlocks.

If within the same public safety budget we were going to spend anyway we were to free up 100 sworn officers’ worth of salary, benefits, and overhead, we could do any combination of three things:

(1): We could go ahead and hire an additional 100 sworn officers. This would result in 200,000 more hours per year of sworn officer time focused on proactive police work and handling crime than the city has ever had. 

It’s enough to staff every “Urban Village” with a best practice Bill Bratton-style community policing team of a sergeant and foot patrol officers fully dedicated to 100% proactive police work.

(2):  Accountability for results is at the heart of Bill Bratton-style community policing. In my department, if you were a police officer and wanted to make sergeant, a sure-fire way was to reduce crime on your beat. If you were sergeant and wanted to make lieutenant, a sure-fire way was to reduce crime in the district (based on neighborhood) you supervised. 

We could take the next logical step and offer annual cash bonuses for excellence at proactive police work and community policing where it’s needed most. It’s enough for (say) 200 of the best line officers and street supervisors to get as much as half their salary as an award.

Over the course of their career a great beat officer could earn more than $1 million in bonuses, making Seattle a magnet for the very best police officers and aspiring officers in the country.

(An albeit less exciting but more tried and true approach to achieving the same goal would be using the dividend to create a budget for master police officers and street supervisor roles. With a strong community policing track record, officers and sergeants could be promoted in place to continue frontline work at a higher base salary.)

(3): We could split the difference, allocating (say) half of the civilianization dividend to staffing 100% proactive teams that could take rotational assignments.

Little Saigon behind the eight ball? Ongoing trouble at Magnuson Park? Hot rod street takeovers on Capitol Hill? Teams could be assigned to take responsibility for hotspots and chronic problems until they are well and truly fixed.

And we’d still have a budget to reward excellent police work.

The cash bonuses are my idea, but community policing best practices are already in Wilson’s platform:

Pilot a problem-oriented, place-based model of public safety, assigning individual police officers and civilian responders to several specific neighborhoods to increase responsiveness and focus on reducing crime, crises, and disorder.

Why the right thing to do is obvious

The Bizarro World thing you need to internalize about the public safety discussion in Seattle right now is that the fact that sworn officers tend to get burdened with tasks that are neither proactive police work nor handling serious crime is something the profession has been wrestling with since the 1960s.

While the will and wherewithal to do something about it has varied by place and time, it was never, ever regarded as a good thing.

Getting officers out from under it was always regarded as a plus.

For example: the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommended the creation of an unarmed civilian position, a community service officer (CSO), within police departments in 1967.

The Worcester, Massachusetts police department proved community service officers could help (with majority approval of the role from sworn officers) in 1975. 

I had an FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin with a feature article about civilianization on my desk, in a police department, in 1994. 

Today, lots of cities and police departments are way out ahead of Seattle at unburdening officers from tasks that don’t require a gun and the power of arrest.  The infographic below provides a mapping of how proven, already deployed roles in other cities could enable Seattle police officers to enjoy the same relief. 

Civilian roles fall into three basic categories (shown left to right on the infographic in their relative numbers from most to least):

1. Community service officers, who are general purpose responders when a gun and the power of arrest isn’t needed.
2. Crisis responders, who are specialists at dealing with mental health and related problems (this includes Seattle’s CARE team).
3. Report takes and investigators, who can handle the paper work and documentation of after the fact theft reports and processing accident scenes.

These are all proven and successful roles just waiting for the right leadership to deploy (in the right numbers) here in Seattle.

Each of these roles cost less than sworn officers. At maximum step, CSOs in San Jose make 55% of a sworn officer’s salary. Denver report technicians make 75%. And CARE workers here make 87% (that’s prior to Harrell’s latest pay raise for SPOG members and not counting sworn Seattle officers’ longevity and body camera pay).

Civilianizing: good for good cops and bad for criminals

But the most important reason for civilianizing non-crime tasks isn’t financial. It’s good for good cops and bad for criminals.

Imagine an officer who chose the job for all the best reasons. She’s also been well-trained in Bill Bratton-style community policing.

So she’s psyched to have been assigned to Little Saigon, because she knows a good beat officer can make a real difference in communities that are up against it because of rampant criminal activity.

To that end, she’s doing directed foot patrol in the worst hot spot in the neighborhood when she’s called away. For the third time this week, she has to respond to 911 calls about a shouting  match between neighbors over a dog pooping in the yard next door. Only this time the owner is also saying the neighbor trespassed in order to deposit the droppings on his porch.

So now on top of everything else she has to visit said porch to determine if there is indeed a smelly pile of poo there or not.

After she clears that call–at least for today–she’s diverted from getting back to executing on her anti-crime game plan by another call.

A homeless woman who is a frequent flyer for mental health episodes is lurching around a 7-11 parking lot crying and screaming for help finding her baby (which she’ll need to be reminded she doesn’t actually have). 

At first she’s relieved because the CARE team will take care of it.

But then there’s a second 911 call: the woman has entered the store and is limping through the aisles wailing. So now the officer has to respond as well because CARE’s not allowed to handle the exact same situation on their own if it’s inside a building instead of outdoors.

When she hopes she’ll finally be able to return to where her beat needs her most, she’s diverted to a car crash.

Instead of following up on local business owners’ complaints about sketchy characters gathering in a parking lot after sunset and scaring off customers, she spends the rest of her shift taking he-said, she-said statements about a car running a red light and photographing skid marks on asphalt.

This is an illustration of a triple whammy of crummy.

First, it wastes public safety dollars that could be better spent (including as described above, adding more police officers, rewards for excellence at community policing, or both) by over paying for handling the non-crime calls.

Second — and worse for the officer — it needlessly randomizes the officer and interferes with carrying out a focused deterrence strategy based on time, location, and people.

Good beat officers exploit three criminological facts (assuming they’re freed up to do so). First: crime clusters geographically, with about 10% of locations accounting for 50% of crimes. Second: a few offenders commit a disproportionate amount of crime (also about 10% and 50%). And finally: deterrence is a function of the perceived likelihood of getting caught.

So if you can raise the fear of getting caught in the worst bad places and among the worst bad guys, you can make a real difference on your beat.

Third and every bit as important: we all only have so much gas in the tank for doing hard work every day. We’ve bogged her down, body and mind, in stuff that doesn’t need to be her problem, tiring her out for tackling what motivated her to take the job in the first place. 

A vote for Harrell is a vote to deprive Seattle police officers of the opportunity to have more focused and fulfilling jobs like those in Orange County, San Jose, Denver, and the other cities referenced in the infographic.

At the end of the day, sworn officers are the only municipal employees we have trained and equipped to deter, confront, and arrest determined or violent criminals.  

If we’re serious about making Seattle a bad place to be a bad guy, the very best thing we can do is to invest in freeing sworn officers to spend every bit of time, talent, and energy on doing just that.

A few words about SPOG

Existing labor agreements between the city and the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) make it possible for SPOG to obstruct civilianization.

But I want you to consider what that would mean in relation to these proposals.

Standing in the way of Seattle getting more officer hours per year devoted to proactive police work and handling crime than the city’s ever had is straight up pro-criminal.

Standing in the way of Seattle police officers getting big rewards for excellent community policing is straight up anti-good cop. 

There’s no middle ground.

If SPOG isn’t willing to do the right thing and lead, follow, or get out of the way, it needs to be pushed out of the way.

A city charter amendment could reboot public safety in Seattle. (An option referenced by Seattle Councilmember Andrew Lewis in 2023 during the Harrell administration’s sluggish rollout of the CARE team).

State legislative action could make civilianization non-bargainable provided no presently employers officers are losing their jobs. (As it should be: the city does not have to bargain with SPOG to hire civilian mechanics to service cruisers or civilian accounting clerks to process payroll, even though using sworn officers to do those jobs would increase the raw number of sworn officer jobs.)

SPOG shouldn’t be allowed to prevent law abiding Seattle citizens and Seattle’s best police officers from having nice things. A better mayor than Harrell would have started tackling this issue on day one in office. 

But it’s not too late to change course this election day.

A Note on Bratton’s Pivot from “Three R’s” to “Three P’s”

As a police chief, Bratton was willing to tackle a big problem facing the profession head-on. By the 1970s U.S. police departments had committed to a strategy of reacting to 911 calls, random patrol, and reactive investigation — or the three R’s. And in his own words: “Clearly, what we were doing was not working.”

Community policing emerged from police leaders, academics, criminologists, and elected officials thinking about what could be done differently. Its strategic principles were, instead, “partnership, problem-solving and prevention.”

The glass half full take is that on his watch (and many other places) community policing was effective at reducing crime and fear of crime. The glass half empty is that since its heyday in the early 1990s, many police departments–including  New York City’s and New Haven’s–went back to the old way of doing things.  

To this day there is still a tug of war in the profession between advocates of community policing and those who prefer the old ways.

Harrell and SPOG Rush Police Contract, Hamstringing Civilian Responders, Accountability Agencies

The post Op-Ed: Katie Wilson’s Civilian Safety Plan Would Unlock More Effective Police Department first appeared on The Urbanist.

It's my 61st birthday this weekend and I have to say, I never expected to get to be this old—or this weirded-out by the world I'm living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. (Here's looking at you, Ben Bova.)

Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that's going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup ...

I'm calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

It's pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we're seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point.

Until approximately 1750, humanity's energy budget was constrained by the available sources: muscle power, wind power (via sails and windmills), some water power (via water wheels), and only heat from burning wood and coal (and a little whale oil for lighting).

During the 19th century we learned to use combustion engines to provide motive power for both stationary machines and propulsion. This included powering forced ventilation for blast furnaces and other industrial processes, and pumps for water and other working fluids. We learned to reform gas from coal for municipal lighting ("town gas") and, later, to power dynamos for municipal electricity generation. Late in the 19th century we began to switch from coal (cumbersome, bulky, contained non-combustible inclusions) to burning fractionated oil for processes that demanded higher energy densities. And that's where we stuck for most of the long 20th century.

During the 20th century, the difficulty of supporting long-range military operations led to a switch from coal to oil—the pivotal event was the ultimately-disastrous voyage of the Russian Baltic fleet to the Sea of Japan in 1906, during the Russo-Japanese war. From the 1890s onwards Russia had been expanding into Siberia and then encroaching on the edges of the rapidly-weakening Chinese empire. This brought Russia into direct conflict with Japan over Korea (Japan, too, had imperial ambitions), leading to the outbreak of war in 1905—when Japan wiped out the Russian far-eastern fleet in a surprise attack. (Pearl Harbor in 1941 was not that surprising to anyone familiar with Japanese military history!) So the Russian navy sent Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, commander of the Baltic Fleet, to the far east with the hastily-renamed Second Pacific Squadron, whereupon they were sunk at the Battle of Tsushima.

Rozhestvensky had sailed his fleet over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) from the Baltic Sea, taking seven months and refueling numerous times at sea with coal (around a quarter of a million tons of it!) because he'd ticked off the British and most ports were closed to him. To the admiralties watching from around the world, the message was glaringly obvious—coal was a logistical pain in the arse—and oil far preferable for refueling battleships, submarines, and land vehicles far from home. (HMS Dreadnought, the first turbine-powered all-big-gun battleship, launched in 1905, was a transitional stage that still relied on coal but carried a large quantity of fuel oil to spray on the coal to increase its burn rate: later in the decade, the RN moved to oil-only fueled warships.)

Spot the reason why the British Empire got heavily involved in Iran, with geopolitical consequences that are still playing out to this day! (The USA inherited large chunks of the British empire in the wake of the second world war: the dysfunctional politics of oil are in large part the legacy of applying an imperial resource extraction model to an energy source.)

Anyway. The 20th century left us with three obvious problems: automobile driven suburban sprawl and transport infrastructure, violent dissatisfaction among the people of colonized oil-producing nations, and a massive burp of carbon dioxide emissions that is destabilizing our climate.

Photovoltaic cells go back to 1839, but until the 21st century they remained a solution in search of very specific problems: they were heavy, produced relatively little power, and degraded over time if left exposed to the sun. Early PV cells were mainly used to provide power to expensive devices in inaccessible locations, such as aboard satellites and space probes: it cost $96 per watt for a solar module in the mid-1970s. But we've been on an exponential decreasing cost curve since then, reaching $0.62/watt by the end of 2012, and it's still on-going.

China is currently embarked on a dash for solar power which really demands the adjective "science-fictional", having installed 198GW of cells between January and May, with 93GW coming online in May alone: China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going. They've also acquired a near-monopoly on the export of PV panels because this roll-out is happening on the back of massive thin-film manufacturing capacity.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it's cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.

China is also banking on the global shift to transport using EVs. High speed rail is almost always electrified (not having to ship an enormous mass of heavy fuel around helps), electric cars are now more convenient than internal combustion ones to people who live in dense population areas, and e-bikes don't need advocacy any more (although roads and infrastructure friendly to non-motorists—pedestrians and public transport as well as cyclists—is another matter).

Some forms of transport can't obviously be electrified. High capacity/long range aviation is one—airliners get lighter as they fly because they're burning off fuel. A hypothetical battery powered airliner can't get lighter in flight: it's stuck with the dead weight of depleted cells. (There are some niches for battery powered aircraft, including short range/low payload stuff, air taxis, and STOVL, but they're not going to replace the big Airbus and Boeing fleets any time soon.)

Some forms of transport will become obsolescent in the wake of a switch to EVs. About half the fossil fuel powered commercial shipping in use today is used to move fossil fuels around. We're going to be using crude oil for the foreseeable future, as feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries, but they account for a tiny fraction of the oil we burn for transport, including shipping. (Plastic recycling is over-hyped but might eventually get us out of this dependency—if we ever get it to work efficiently.)

So we're going through an energy transition period unlike anything since the 1830s or 1920s and it's having some non-obvious but very important political consequences, from bribery and corruption all the way up to open warfare.

The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.

I was wrong repeatedly in the past decade when I speculated that you can't ship renewable electricity around like gasoline, and that it would mostly be tropical/equatorial nations who benefited from it. When Germany is installing rooftop solar effectively enough to displace coal generation, that's a sign that PV panels have become implausibly cheap. We have cars and trucks with reasonably long ranges, and fast-charger systems that can take a car from 20% to 80% battery capacity in a quarter of an hour. If you can do that to a car or a truck you can probably do it to a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle, insofar as they remain relevant. We can do battery-to-battery recharging (anyone with a USB power bank for their mobile phone already knows this) and in any case the whole future of warfare (or geopolitics by other means) is up in the air right now—quite literally, with the lightning-fast evolution of drone warfare over the past three years.

The real difference is likely to be that energy production is widely distributed rather than concentrated in resource extraction economies and power stations. It turns out that PV panels are a great way of making use of agriculturally useless land, and also coexist well with some agricultural practices. Livestock likes shade and shelter (especially in hot weather) so PV panels on raised stands or fences can work well with sheep or cattle, and mixed-crop agriculture where low-growing plants are sheltered from direct sunlight by taller crops can also work with PV panels instead of the higher-growing plants. You can even in principle use the power from the farm PV panels to drive equipment in greenhouses: carbon dioxide concentrators, humidifiers, heat pumps to prevent overheating/freezing, drainage pumps, and grow lamps to drive the light-dependent reactions in photosynthesis.

All of which we're really going to need because we've passed the threshold for +1.5 °C climate change, which means an increasing number of days per year when things get too hot for photosynthesis under regular conditions. There are three main pathways for photosynthesis, but none of them deal really well with high temperatures, although some adaptation is possible. Active cooling is probably impractical in open field agriculture, but in intensive indoor farming it might be an option. And then there's the parallel work on improving how photosynthesis works: an alternative pathway to the Calvin cycle is possible and the enzymes to make it work have been engineered into Arabidopsis, with promising results.

In addition to the too-many-hot-days problem, climate change means fluctuations in weather: too much wind, too much rain—or too little of both—at short notice, which can be physically devastating for crops. Our existing staple crops require a stable, predictable climate. If we lose that, we're going to have crop failures and famines by and by, where it's not already happening. The UK has experienced three of its worst harvests in the past century in this decade (and this decade is only half over). As long as we have global supply chains and bulk shipping we can shuffle food around the globe to cover localized shortfalls, but if we lose stable agriculture globally for any length of time then we are all going to die: our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it's great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience. We don't have the reserves we would need to survive the coming turbulence by traditional means.

This, in part, explains the polycrisis: nobody can fix what's wrong using existing tools. Consequently many people think that what's going wrong can't be fixed. The existing wealthy elites (who have only grown increasingly wealthy over the past half century) derive their status and lifestyle from the perpetuation of the pre-existing system. But as economist Herbert Stein observed (of an economic process) in 1985, "if it can't go on forever it will stop". The fossil fuel energy economy is stopping right now—we've probably already passed peak oil and probably peak carbon: the trend is now inexorably downwards, either voluntarily into a net-zero/renewables future, or involuntarily into catastrophe. And the involuntary option is easier for the incumbents to deal with, both in terms of workload (do nothing, right up until we hit the buffers) and emotionally (it requires no sacrifice of comfort, of status, or of relative position). Clever oligarchs would have gotten ahead of the curve and invested heavily in renewables but the evidence of our eyes (and the supremacy of Chinese PV manufacturers in the global market) says that they're not that smart.

The traditional ruling hierarchy in the west had a major shake-up in 1914-19 (understatement: most of the monarchies collapsed) in the wake of the convulsion of the first world war. The elites tried to regain a degree of control, but largely failed due to the unstable conditions produced by the great depression and then the second world war (itself an emergent side-effect of fascist regimes' attempts to impose imperial colonial policies on their immediate neighbours, rather than keeping the jackboots and whips at a comfortable remove). Reconstruction after WW2 and a general post-depression consensus that emerged around accepting the lesser evil of social democracy as a viable prophylactic to the devil of communism kept the oligarchs down for another couple of decades, but actually-existing capitalism in the west stopped being about wealth creation (if it ever had been) some time in the 1960s, and switched gear to wealth concentration (the "he who dies with the most toys, wins" model of life). By the end of the 1970s, with the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the traditional wealthy elites began to reassert control, citing the spurious intellectual masturbation of neoliberal economics as justification for greed and repression.

But neoliberalism was repurposed within a couple of decades as a stalking-horse for asset-stripping, in which the state was hollowed out and its functions outsourced to the private sector—to organizations owned by the existing elites, which turned the public purse into a source of private profit. And we're now a couple of generations into this process, and our current rulers don't remember a time when things were different. So they have no idea how to adapt to a changing world.

Cory Doctorow has named the prevailing model of capitalist exploitation enshittification. We no longer buy goods, we buy services (streaming video instead of owning DVDs or tapes, web services instead of owning software, renting instead of buying), and having been captured by the platforms we rent from, we are then subject to rent extraction: the service quality is degraded, the price is jacked up, and there's nowhere to go because the big platforms have driven their rivals into bankruptcy or irrelevance:

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

This model of doing business (badly) is a natural consequence of the bigger framework of neoliberalism, under which a corporation's directors overriding duty is to maximize shareholder value in the current quarter, with no heed to the second and subsequent quarters hence: the future is irrelevant, feed me shouts the Audrey II of shareholder activism. Business logic has no room for the broader goals of maintaining a sustainable biosphere, or even a sustainable economy. And so the agents of business-as-usual, or Crapitalism as I call it, are at best trapped in an Abilene paradox in which they assume everyone else around them wants to keep the current system going, or they actually are as disconnected from reality as Peter Thiel (who apparently believes Greta Thunberg is the AntiChrist.)

if it can't go on forever it will stop

What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so. It's already leading to resource wars, famines, political upheaval, and insecurity (and when people feel insecure, they rally to demagogues who promise them easy fixes: hence the outbreaks of fascism). The ultra-rich don't want it to stop because they can't conceive of a future in which it stops and they retain their supremacy. (Also, they're children of privilege and most of them are not terribly bright, much less imaginative—as witness how easily they're robbed blind by grifters like Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman Fried, and arguably Sam Altman). Those of them whose wealth is based in ownership of fossil fuel assets still in the ground have good reason to be scared: these are very nearly stranded assets already, and we're heading for a future in which electricity is almost too cheap to meter.

All of this is without tackling the other elephant in the room, which is the end of Moore's Law. Moore's Law has been on its death bed for over a decade now. We're seeing only limited improvements in computing and storage performance, mainly from parallelism. Aside from a very few tech bubbles which soak up all available processing power, belch, and ask for more, the all you can eat buffet for tech investors is over. (And those bubbles are only continuing as long as scientifically naive investors keep throwing more money at them.)

The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and dying. Massive AI data centres won't keep the coal mines running or the nuclear reactors building out (it's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using pre-trained models running on local hardware). They're the 2025 equivalent of 2020's Bored Ape NFTs (remember those?). The forecast boom in small modular nuclear reactors is going to fizzle in the face of massive build-out of distributed, wildly cheap photovoltaic power plus battery backup. Quantum computing isn't going to save the tech sector, and that's the "next big thing" the bubble-hypemongers have been saving for later for the past two decades. (Get back to me when you've got hardware that can factor an integer greater than 31.)

If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.

But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can't go on. So it's going to stop. And then—

The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. (via colossal)

Tags: art · cats · ShouXin

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