Tacoma’s leaders are elected to be a voice for the people. It’s time to unmuzzle them
Like so many of her constituents, City Council member Catherine Ushka first saw the videos of what transpired at South 9th Street and Pacific Avenue on Twitter.
Ushka watched in confusion and disbelief on the evening of Jan. 23, taking in the viral videos as they hit her phone, one after another.
Ushka is an elected leader of Tacoma, meaning many residents expect her to have direct, immediate access to city staff and the most up-to-date information available. But in the days after Tacoma police officer Khanh Phan drove his police SUV through the large, unruly crowd that had gathered downtown, Ushka said she had as much insight into the situation as those sitting at home watching the situation play out in real time.
That is to say — just like anyone on the outside of the Tacoma Police Department and the Pierce County Force Investigation Team — Ushka knew very little.
That’s one reason why Ushka — like other City Council members — was reluctant to quickly issue a statement or respond definitively to the growing number of social media and email inquiries from concerned citizens, she said.
“Things were rolling out fairly quickly … (City Council members) got the media response that TPD sent out, but I’m waiting for something that tells me, ‘It’s over and this is what happened. These are the facts,’” Ushka recalled by phone last week.
“That summary doesn’t really come in that fashion,” Ushka said.
As Tacoma’s latest turn in the national headlines once again proves, perhaps it should.
While there are valid reasons why Tacoma City Council members often need to choose their words carefully, we’ve been reminded of how trust can be fractured when leaders go silent in an overabundance of caution.
Following the Jan. 23 incident downtown, Tacoma residents heard from TPD, Breitbart, their uncle on Facebook and pundits like me — among others — in short order.
What they didn’t know, at least in large part, is where most of their elected leaders stood, for three days, until the council finally issued a joint statement the following Tuesday.
For a concerned public whose only conduit to city government is their elected leaders, it raises the valid question: What if there was a different way?
What if the city could make sure those chosen to represent the people of Tacoma had the information they needed to respond more quickly and were then empowered to do so?
They’re concerns the council hears loud and clear, Ushka acknowledged.
“We are going to be challenging ourselves on those very items, because we need to feel like we can communicate with you more directly,” Ushka said during the Jan. 26 city council meeting, pondering whether the City Council has become too risk-averse for its own good.
The aversion to risk — and, more specifically, the possibility that a council member will say something publicly that ends up affecting an investigation or hurting the city in court — is certainly a big part of where the problem starts.
Even in instances that don’t rise to the level of police use of force, we’ve seen the council clam up so many times that the uncomfortable silence can start to take on an element of inevitability, or worse, interpreted as an unspoken complicity.
During the Great Methanol Debate, we were left trying to decipher the true meaning of former City Council member Marty Campbell’s fashion choices. When billboards were the talk of the town, residents were often left disheartened that they’re elected leaders were reluctant to take stronger public stances. The list goes on.
For City Council members like Keith Blocker, it’s a familiar — and sometimes frustrating — scenario. In some ways, it can feel like a conundrum without a clear solution, Blocker said, noting that he “was trying to process information, like every other human being” after a Tacoma police officer drove over at least one person during an illegal street racing gathering.
Blocker also said he isn’t necessarily one to use social media to quickly communicate with the public, preferring the platform he’s provided during City Council meetings on Tuesdays.
“I mean, it’s frustrating, but it’s just kind of the reality,” Blocker said. “We have to wait for information that generally flows through a chain of command.”
It’s a valid point, but that doesn’t mean it simply has to be this way. No one is asking for council members to become compulsive tweeters, but — fair or not — we elect council members to do more than just craft policy.
When we send someone to the dais, we also expect them to serve as a voice of the people, particularly in times of crisis or when the city’s values are at stake. To his credit, Blocker rose to this occasion when he sought to refocus an emergency City Council meeting discussion that had shifted far too much of its focus toward the perils of illegal street racing, but it was an unnecessarily lonely stance that earned the only Black man on the council the scorn the International Union of Police Associations, among others.
City manager Elizabeth Pauli is a former city attorney, meaning she’s all too familiar with the ways that a misfired public statement can come back to bite a city. Potential liability will always be a concern, Pauli said, noting that if a council member chooses to speak out in a haphazard or imprecise way, those statements can be interpreted as coming on “behalf of the city,” which can lead to negative legal consequences.
In the case of an open investigation — like the inquiry into Manuel Ellis’ death or the Jan. 23 incident downtown — Pauli said it’s important for City Council members to “honor the independence” of these processes, as difficult as that might be.
Still, during an interview last week, Pauli said that there’s room for improvement.
At the very least, Pauli said, the city should find ways to “adapt our communications” for the evolving demands of local government, helping staff and elected leaders to “speak quickly, (and) tell the full truth of what we know at the time.”
In some cases just “acknowledging the fact of an incident, even if we don’t have all the facts of an incident,” would be a step in the right direction, the she indicated.
“I think we need to take some of those risks,” Pauli said.
For Tacoma, it would mean turning over a new leaf, to be certain.
Sometimes, that’s precisely what the situation calls for.
This story was originally published February 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
