Seattle mayoral primary sets up fight between liberal camps

SEATTLE (AP) – Seattle mayoral voters on Tuesday held a election among candidates who represent the political divide between left-wing activist residents and more moderate progressives in one of the country’s most liberal cities.

Bruce Harrell, a former city council member who has called for more cops to be hired to curb a surge in shootings and who is backed by the business community, led all the early return candidates. The first two winners of the non-partisan race will qualify for the elections in November.

In the general election, he is likely to face the President of the City Council, M. Lorena González. González, who took second place, criticized Seattle’s police force and called for reform of a department under federal oversight after the Justice Department found a pattern of excessive violence and evidence of biased policing.

She accepted calls to “discover” the police after the murder of George Floyd last year.

Votes are counted for several days in the city’s mail elections, but Harrell and González easily outperformed the other candidates.

The Seattle primaries came amid a sustained spike in shootings, a recent phenomenon that was heard in other major US cities. Concerns about inequality in a city with skyrocketing property prices and an annoying problem of homelessness were also major problems between candidates for the city’s highest office.

But it was the rise in violence that marked the final weeks of the primary campaign.

At the end of July, four people were shot dead across the city within 24 hours. Incumbent Mayor Jenny Durkan, who is not running for re-election, and interim police chief Adrian Diaz have announced more than $ 10 million for violence prevention and $ 2 million for a pilot program that addresses violence from a public health perspective.

Diaz said more than 200 officials have left the department since the large, sometimes violent, protests in Seattle last summer. He said the department, criticized by city council members and others for being too aggressive and quick to use tear gas and other measures during protests, is in “a staffing crisis”.

The Seattle primary came weeks after the Democratic primary in New York’s mayoral campaign elected a former police officer who opposed calls to “police the police.”

Harrell has pledged to recruit more officials “to address both the gun violence epidemic and other pressing public safety concerns.” 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. As a lawyer, he served three terms on the city council, advocating police accountability.

“People are fed up with these fighting in Seattle,” Harrell said after the initial results were released. “The city expects new solutions from me.”

González’s parents were migrant agricultural workers in central Washington; As a child, she picked cherries before becoming a lawyer representing victims of police brutality. 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.

On Tuesday evening, she said people wanted a mayor “who opposes big, wealthy corporations.”

Home to Amazon and legions of wealthy technicians, Seattle is a notoriously difficult city to rule and a city with a fickle electorate. The last three popularly elected mayors have served no more than one term.

___

AP writer Gene Johnson contributed to this report.