Political credit before public safety? Inside Mayor Katie Wilson’s gun violence strategy, disputed quotes and stakeholder concerns

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has said from the beginning that her administration is committed to transparency, collaboration, and delivering results for Seattle.

But KIRO Newsradio has uncovered a series of episodes that raise questions about how those commitments have played out behind the scenes. What may have initially looked like the normal missteps of a new administration are beginning to look — to some people inside and close to City Hall — like a broader pattern of how the administration handles information, political competition, and the people whose words and support it uses publicly.

Taken individually, each episode has an explanation. Taken together, they raise questions about where the lines are between political strategy and obfuscation.

Gun violence plan exposes tensions between Wilson and City Council

The pressure had been building inside City Hall for weeks.

The city had endured the deadly Bite of Seattle shooting, a string of shootings in Belltown and escalating gun violence along Aurora Avenue in North Seattle. Residents wanted answers. Business leaders wanted action. And inside City Hall, council members were increasingly demanding that Wilson produce a public safety strategy.

Wilson did not yet have one to unveil.

In August, Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle, the chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said publicly that the mayor had no public safety plan.

“The city isn’t looking for a debate on public safety,” Kettle said. “They want action now to solve it.” He called on Wilson to take immediate action and deliver results to better protect Seattle residents.

And the criticism was not coming only from City Hall.

In a letter, 35 of the state’s largest corporations and business organizations, like Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, Nordstrom, the Seattle Mariners and Virginia Mason, also called on Wilson and the Seattle City Council to act, including more police patrols in high-crime areas, faster 911 response times and a crackdown on open-air drug markets.

“As such, we’re requesting your partnership and a concrete set of actions around the following key public safety items that have overwhelming support by the public and businesses,” the letter stated in part.

“The city should produce a public safety action plan within 100 days, with measurable goals and monthly progress reports,” it added.

In response, Wilson said, in part, “I appreciate hearing from the business community on our shared priority of increasing safety outcomes for people in Seattle. As they know, many of the specific requests they made are well underway.”

Meanwhile, Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera was already working on a plan of her own.

Rivera had been pushing the mayor to embrace focused deterrence — an approach that identifies the relatively small number of people driving much of the violence and brings together police, prosecutors, social services and community organizations to intervene.

As Rivera’s plan developed, her office reached out to Wilson’s team with requests to join forces and work together with the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC), which has helped cities implement focused deterrence strategies.

Rivera said Wilson rejected those requests, and on Aug. 17, Rivera introduced a proposed resolution for a two-year, $418,000 partnership with the NNSC to help Seattle implement focused deterrence.

Rivera’s resolution headed for a committee vote. If the Council approved it, Rivera would have a plan and Wilson would not.

According to a City Hall source, Wilson’s office began discussing how to beat Rivera and her resolution to the punch, and on Sept. 8, Wilson announced her administration would soon unveil a comprehensive gun violence prevention strategy.

Two days later, the fight broke into the open.

Appearing on KUOW’s Soundside, Wilson characterized the council and Rivera’s effort to establish a gun-violence plan as “grandstanding and politicking,” and Rivera fired back.

“When your neighborhood has had three shootings in a weekend, and there’s a proven strategy that could stop future tragedies – is that grandstanding?” Rivera said to the media. “Or is it the job we have been elected to do?”

The morning of Sept. 15, Wilson unveiled her gun violence reduction plan ahead of the council’s 7-0 vote to adopt Resolution 32217 and partner with the NNSC.

Rivera subsequently attacked the mayor’s plan publicly as a continuation of existing investments and urged Wilson to act on the council’s NNSC partnership instead.

“The mayor’s plan shows she is trying to appease her activist supporters who do not want to work with police,” Rivera stated. “There is nothing in the mayor’s plan that would prevent the city from partnering with NNSC, as City Council requested… I hope she will act on council’s request, and I am committed to working with her to make this a reality. Seattleites are rightfully demanding meaningful results – now.”

Questions about transparency and collaboration

That kind of political maneuvering between Wilson and Rivera is common. How the administration rushed to get there raised serious questions.

The mayor’s office left key stakeholders including King County prosecutors, the U.S. Attorney and, according to City Hall sources, City Council, community and victim advocate groups, and the King County Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention, in the dark.

In her pitch to the public, Wilson used quotes from people who had no idea their words would be used in the mayor’s blog or press release announcing her plan.

The result, sources close to City Hall said, was a safety plan rushed into the spotlight with stakeholders shut out of the process while their own words were used to help sell it.

How stakeholder quotes were used to promote Wilson’s gun violence plan

As KIRO Newsradio previously reported, the day the mayor unveiled her plan, members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office were surprised to learn about Wilson’s plan through local TV coverage.

Public Safety Committee Chair Bob Kettle told KIRO Newsradio he learned about the announcement by reading the news. And a source inside City Hall said the mayor’s office did not notify other Council members about the announcement, either.

“I too did not receive the plan from the mayor’s office,” Kettle told “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “I heard about it, and then I was searching for it on my phone, on my apps.”

At the KCPAO, the surprise continued when officials saw a quote from Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion prominently featured on Wilson’s official mayoral blog as an endorsement of the administration’s broader gun violence reduction plan.

Manion was not given an opportunity to review the plan or see how her quote would be presented before the announcement.

“To my knowledge, KCPAO was not given a copy of the plan when reporters were given an embargoed copy of it, so KCPAO first learned the specifics from media reports,” KCPAO spokesperson Casey McNerthney told KIRO Newsradio.

“If it was clear that the release was to roll out a gun violence reduction plan, the KCPAO would have requested to see the specifics of the plan.”

In response last week, the mayor’s office told KIRO Newsradio, in part, “We regret that in the mayor’s urgency to take forward action on reducing gun violence we were not able to reach everyone impacted by the issue.”

However, since that first story was published, KIRO Newsradio learned there were other similar cases.

Dr. Rebecca Neusteter, executive director of the University of Chicago’s Health Lab, told KIRO Newsradio Seattle’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department reached out to her and asked for a quote to support their work. She said she did not know it would also appear in the mayor’s blog. Neusteter said she also never saw a draft of the mayor’s gun violence plan before it was sent to the media.

Tahir Duckett, executive director of the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown Law, told KIRO Newsradio he knew his quote would be used, although he did not know when the announcement would be made.

Two of the eight people quoted in Wilson’s gun violence blog post said they understood how and where their words would be used, and two never responded to KIRO Newsradio’s questions.

A spokesperson for City Attorney Erika Evans emailed KIRO Newsradio: “… what context makes the inside baseball about a quote of interest for you?”

In response to these additional findings, the mayor’s office said, “The quotes for the press release were obtained either directly from the mayor’s office staff, or in limited circumstances, provided to us via other city leadership. We accepted and included those quotes on the understanding that they were asked for and provided in the context of the gun violence plan.”

Mayoral patterns?

Multiple sources told KIRO Newsradio in the early days of Wilson’s term that they expected missteps as her team learned how to navigate City Hall.

Nine months later, some inside and close to city government said they began noticing those missteps develop into clear patterns.

According to a City Hall source, Wilson’s team purposely looked for opportunities to steal political thunder from the city council and claim credit for the mayor instead.

Multiple sources across different levels and areas of city government described instances of quotes, statements, and endorsements being repurposed, editorialized, or presented in ways that the people involved later disputed.

Quotes edited, context changed and questions raised

A source familiar with discussions at City Hall described one of those disputes between Wilson and Kettle over a quote Kettle provided for the mayor’s Aug. 25 announcement launching the search for Seattle’s next police chief.

According to the source, Kettle provided the following quote to the mayor’s team to be included in Wilson’s press release:

“As Chair of the Public Safety Committee, selecting the city’s next Chief of Police is of paramount importance to me,” he stated. “While Seattle is benefiting from a downturn in violent crime that is similar to the rest of the country, we continue to experience unacceptable tragedies from youth gun violence, drug dealing that targets vulnerable community members, and public disorder offenses that deny residents, workers, and visitors safe use of our sidewalks and public transportation, and safe enjoyment of our parks, libraries, and other public spaces.”

Wilson’s team included Kettle’s quote in their press release and emailed the release to media. Moments later, Kettle sent the mayor’s team a new quote that added a new sentence that read:

“It is critical for our city to have a search that will bring a candidate with strong experience in policing, a commitment to reform efforts to include alternative response, and an understanding of our accountability partners and their role,” it stated.

According to a source close to City Hall, the mayor’s team was unwilling to resend a second press release with a corrected version of Kettle’s quote. Instead, they included it in the mayor’s blog, which was published the same day.

In response, a spokesperson for the mayor told KIRO, “It is the policy of the mayor’s office communications team to publish quotes provided to us in full and without unauthorized edits.”

However, sources said the mayor’s team didn’t like the new quote, and Kettle’s office questioned whether the mayor’s decision was editorializing.

“Since it wasn’t in the main release by the mayor, we pushed out a standalone statement which I added to the original in order to present a fuller position on the topic,” Kettle told KIRO Newsradio Thursday.

Timing of mayor’s budget announcement dropping on same day as Bite of Seattle report

Sources inside and close to City Hall tell KIRO Newsradio the mayor’s team likes to rely on a common PR strategy to schedule major announcements on the same day as competing plans, initiatives, or legislation. If it helps mitigate unfavorable news coverage, even better, sources said.

On Sept. 22, Wilson’s administration scheduled the mayor’s proposed 2026-27 budget announcement — the same day the city’s public safety committee was set to hear SPD’s after-action report on the deadly Bite of Seattle mass shooting.

That morning, interim Police Chief Andre Sayles and Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis described how the mayor’s office distracted command staff and pulled them away from their duties, and how Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt repeatedly told SPD not to hold a press briefing until the mayor was ready.

Davis told the committee that even when he offered to hold a press conference and then hold another later on when the mayor arrived, he was turned down.

“I suggested a couple of alternatives,” Davis explained. “I was also asked to wait.”

Davis said the delay was compounded by meetings requested by the mayor’s office that he considered unnecessary.

“We spent a lot of time talking about the active shooter incident management checklist,” Davis said. “This wasn’t an active shooter incident. I knew that at the time. That was a waste of time.”

Davis’ testimony dominated morning news headlines, but by the early afternoon the story had competition as Wilson stepped up to a podium and unveiled her budget proposal.

Sources inside City Hall told KIRO Newsradio it was clear to them Wilson and her team were at it again.

“From day one, the mayor has been clear that she shares Seattleites’ sense of urgency around reducing gun violence,” a spokesperson for the mayor’s office told KIRO Newsradio. “In the aftermath of the Bite of Seattle shooting, she heard loud and clear that bringing those strategies and investments into a cohesive plan and releasing them to the public was a top priority. Ahead of the budget, it’s key to get these strategies out so that the public knows what their leaders are doing and what outcomes they are investing in. The mayor is committed to that transparency, and the release of her plan was timed with delivering for and explaining to the public in mind.”

Other issues, other patterns

Last year, KIRO Newsradio shared allegations that candidate Wilson falsified an endorsement by Claude Burfect, a prominent civil rights activist who was the first vice president of the Seattle-King County National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). However, Burfect told Frontlines he never endorsed Wilson.

Burfect also accused Wilson of photoshopping a picture of him for her campaign and tagging it with the word “endorsed.”

“She used me to elevate her,” Burfect said in the report. “She’s dishonest.”

Wilson told KIRO Newsradio that Burfect did endorse her over the phone and subsequently confirmed his endorsement through an email exchange.

Earlier this year, Wilson endorsed Ron Davis and Hannah Sabio-Howell in their races for the state general assembly. It was a somewhat controversial move by Wilson to support Davis and Sabio-Howell and not the Democratic incumbents, Rep. Gerry Pollet and Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen.

However, at a news conference to promote the World Cup, Wilson publicly altered the nature of those endorsements, explaining she made them “in my personal capacity” rather than as mayor.

Some sources characterize these same tactics as commonplace politics. Politicians routinely time announcements, control messaging and try to shape news cycles to their advantage, they said.

But other sources inside and close to City Hall told KIRO Newsradio there is growing concern with the tactics Wilson and her team deploy, which they say test ethical and political boundaries and, at times, push them too far.

Some sources characterized our findings as a series of mishaps made by an evolving administration. Others said they are evidence of a deeper problem with how the mayor’s office operates.

One source told KIRO Newsradio: “Wilson knows exactly what she is doing.”

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