Homelessness, police, Amazon top Seattle mayoral debate

SEATTLE (AP) – The two Seattle mayor candidates agreed on Thursday that tackling an ongoing homeless crisis was the main problem facing the northwest’s largest city, but they differed greatly on how to pay for it.

Lorena González and Bruce Harrell also argued over police funding and the role and responsibility that tech giant Amazon has for problems in the city where it is headquartered.

González, the city council president and former civil rights attorney, said Amazon and other wealthy interests would have to pay more taxes.

“I have made it my life’s work to stand up and fight for working families,” she said during a debate, adding that she would also hold the police accountable for the “extraordinary abuse of our lives and our freedom”.

During protests last year against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she accepted calls for the police to “discover”.

That’s a position taken by Harrell, a former city council president.

“I’m not signing the Defund story … I want an effective police force,” he said.

The November mayoral election will be watched closely across the country as Seattle is one of the major cities in the country where the police funding debate is a central theme. In the New York mayoral campaign earlier this year, the Democratic primary election elected a former police officer who opposed calls to “police discovery”.

González has called for federal government police reform after the US Department of Justice found a pattern of excessive violence and evidence of biased policing.

Harrell said González’s calls for a 50% cut in police funding would exacerbate the crime problems of minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Harrell also said the current city council has not taken concrete steps to find shelter for those who sleep on the city streets and in camps in public parks in Seattle, one of the worst homelessness problems in the country.

“We get pointers, excuses,” he said.

Reforming Washington state’s regressive tax law, which is heavily reliant on an income tax, is key, Harrell said. He also said he wanted to work with Amazon and other wealthy companies to solve homelessness and other issues.

González criticized Harrell, a lawyer endorsed by most of the city’s businessmen, as the preferred candidate of the money interests.

“I’m not going to go to the state legislature to solve our revenue problems,” she said. And she said Harrell was backed by people fighting attempts to get companies to pay more taxes in Seattle and across the state.

González has won the approval of many unions in the region. Her parents were migrant agricultural workers in central Washington

As council president, she has helped enforce a payroll tax for large companies like Amazon to pay for city services, as well as worker protection like a safe planning law.

Harrell called for more police officers to be hired to curb the increase in the shootings.

He grew up in Seattle’s Central Area, a red-line neighborhood; his father was a black transplant from Jim Crow South and his mother’s family were Japanese and interned during World War II.

The incumbent mayor Jenny Durkan is not standing for re-election. The last three mayors elected by Seattle voters have served no more than one term.