Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka’s community safety town hall sowed distrust with residents, who say he’s neglected them.
Last week, Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka hosted a packed town hall to address gun violence in three specific neighborhoods in his District 1, which covers North Delridge, Snake Hill, and High Point. About 150 community members attended the meeting, which consisted of city leaders speaking for almost 90 minutes. The event ended in frustrated shouting, as residents said Saka hadn’t delivered on what he’d promised.
Saka’s office had assembled a panel of leaders to speak, including Council President Sara Nelson, Chief Public Safety Officer Natalie Walton-Anderson, Seattle Police Department (SPD) Chief Shon Barnes, Seattle City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, and Parks Superintendent AP Diaz. Live questions were not accepted at the event.
High Point resident Phil Brandt pushed Saka to host the town hall meeting after his minivan was shot up with stray gunfire last month. But Brandt left feeling unsatisfied.
“What we heard — this is not what we asked for tonight,” said resident Phil Brandt at the end of the meeting. “We asked for the live discussion Q&A, and that’s not what we got. What we’ve got is the councilmember giving us a stump speech for 30 minutes. It took me taking this car seat to city council to get him to answer an email and to get this set up.”
Brandt’s car seat ended up pierced with a bullet hole during a gunfire incident on the evening of April 17 near Walt Hundley Playfield, which involved a long volley of gunfire between two vehicles. Police said they found more than 60 shell casings at the scene.
Brandt was out of town at the time, but when he returned home, he discovered two bullets had hit his minivan, parked in the driveway outside his home. One of the bullets had gone through his three-year-old’s car seat.
The following Monday, Brandt was in communication with SPD’s Southwest precinct and also spoke with a member of Saka’s staff, who encouraged him to come to the city council meeting the next afternoon. Brandt did so, bringing the damaged car seat with him to prove his point, only to find that Council President Nelson had cut the public comment time from two minutes to one.
“I’m here because there was bullets fired into my car parked outside of our home near Walt Huntley Park Thursday night,” Brandt said during public comment. “One of those bullets went through my child’s car seat, which I invite all of you to come down here and look at when I’m done talking. There have been eight shootings in West Seattle in the last 34 days. There’s been two in the last five in High Point alone. What’s been done? Nothing. I called my precinct 25 times on Sunday and Monday to no response.”
Gun violence in Seattle overall is down 30% year-to-date in 2025 compared to 2024. But in the West Seattle neighborhoods of High Point and North Delridge in 2025 year-to-date, there have been two more gun violence incidents compared to last year, an 18% increase. Gun violence first increased in these neighborhoods back in 2022 during a nationwide spike that many experts attributed to the Covid pandemic. A recent Seattle Auditor report criticized SPD’s approach to gun violence as disorganized and lacking appropriate professionalism.
“Unfortunately, the incident that brought all this to a head is actually not the worst one that happened,” said Landon Harris, the president of the High Point Homeowners Association (HOA). “There unfortunately was a young man who lost his life at the end of last year.”
Harris is referring to a 15-year-old who was shot and killed in High Point last December.
Broken street lights saga
Brandt had three requests for city council, two of which were specific to Saka. His first request was for High Point’s streetlights, which have been experiencing persistent outages, to be repaired. Brandt said there were 33 streetlights out in High Point at this time.
“Who I strongly believe was the one that really got the lights there – the lights in front of my house were fixed by 10am the next day – and I was very, very confident that was Rinck’s team,” Brandt told The Urbanist, referring to Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck. “They were following up with me daily for that whole week. So I have a big problem with Saka trying to take credit that his team is the one that got all the lights fixed, and it was something that they were working on. It’s not something they were working on.”
Brandt said the majority of the streetlights have now been fixed.
“It’s great that they’ve been fixed, but it’s also really disappointing to me that it took Phil barging in on a city council meeting with a car seat with bullets in it to get City Light to pay attention,” said High Point HOA member Chelsea Waliser. “There are two huge concentrations of street light outages in West Seattle. One is in High Point. One is by White Center. So like, what do those areas have in common? Those are the historically low-income neighborhoods.”
During her remarks, Lindell spent a long time discussing the copper wire theft from streetlights. “We go to red when we’ve got to completely rewire, and unfortunately, that is our biggest issue, is the theft of the wire,” Lindell said.
However, The Urbanist has obtained a screenshot of streetlight outages in High Point from March 10 showing exclusively yellow and green dots, which indicate minor and medium-level fixes, not the more difficult electrical system issues represented by red dots.
“Why is High Point literally left in the dark when the more affluent parts of West Seattle don’t have these kinds of lingering, concentrated outages?” Waliser asked.
Regarding copper wire theft, Julie Moore, the Director of Communications for City Light, told The Urbanist that Lindell “was speaking to it being a broader challenge throughout our service area. While there have been some instances of wire theft in the High Point area, copper theft is a system-wide issue, not unique to that neighborhood. She did not intend to attribute any specific High Point outages to copper theft.”
Seattle City Light confirmed that at present in High Point, there are six open green tickets and three open yellow tickets as well as a planned street light upgrade project on SW Brandon Street.
Town hall request
Brandt’s second and third requests were for a community town hall style meeting with Saka and SPD Captain Krista Bair, who is in charge of the Southwest precinct, and for a neighborhood walk-through with Saka and somebody from SPD.
“Saka’s team has been spinning this narrative that they rushed together to get this town hall scheduled,” Brandt said. “That is not true. We were the ones pushing them for this.”
Brandt said Saka’s office even asked him for recommendations on where to hold the event.
Brandt also has an issue with the fact that it took 11 days for Saka to call him personally to discuss the shooting in the neighborhood. Brandt said Saka didn’t call him until a few hours before a story was scheduled to be released by KOMO for which both Saka and Brandt had been interviewed.
The panel gathered for the town hall did not accept live questions, only questions submitted ahead and via notecards, which is not what Brandt had expected. While the crowd sat quietly for most of the meeting, by the end the event had devolved into a lot of heckling and even shouting.
“[Saka’s] office thought they were doing a good thing by taking questions ahead of time and trying to be prepared,” Landon said. “But what they failed to realize is that they were coming across as not listening and a bit out of touch.”
Brandt is not quite as charitable in his interpretation of events.
“Yes, they didn’t follow through. Yes, it’s not what we wanted,” Brandt said. “But at the end of the day, [Saka is] manipulating the storyline for himself. And that’s a problem that creates distrust in the community when you are not open and honest with your intentions. So that leads me to question his intentions going forward. How am I supposed to trust him or his team? And they have repeatedly in the last two weeks, they’ve not followed through or have directly put out statements and made public statements that are just frankly not true. What else is he lying about? That is my concern.”
As of the end of last week, Brandt said he hadn’t heard from Saka’s office about scheduling a neighborhood walkthrough, which had been his third and final request.
Solutions offered
Saka spoke of several responses to the increased gun violence in High Point, Snake Hill, and North Delridge, leading with promising 10 blocks of new sidewalks to these neighborhoods. While street lighting has been studied as being a factor in decreasing crime, associations between sidewalk condition and numbers of homicides have not been found to be significant.
Saka went on to announce street light upgrades, SPD conducting a hot spot analysis of the three neighborhoods, and adding two West Seattle parks to the City’s summer action safety plan for parks: Greg Davis and Cottage Grove Parks.
“As your councilmember, I’ll tell you the candid truth,” Saka said. “I think what we’re seeing in these three neighborhoods in particular are the direct results of historical underinvestment in these neighborhoods.”
Notably absent from Saka’s list of solutions was the promise to invest in a gun violence prevention program for the affected neighborhoods. One such example is Rainier Beach’s A Beautiful, Safe Place for Youth initiative, which was inspired by the SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) Strategic Prevention Framework recommended in a 2024 report on overdoses and crime by the Seattle Auditor’s Office.
Gregory Davis, the managing strategist of Rainier Beach Action Coalition, which took part in the above initiative, said in an educational forum that “we’ve been able to decrease crime over the last 10 years by 30%, 40% on any given year” through the youth gun violence prevention program.
Also not mentioned was any plan to distribute gun lock boxes in the impacted neighborhoods.
Chief Barnes said SPD has increased its directed patrols in the affected neighborhoods, added an extra weekly gun violence meeting for the department, and implemented a city-wide crime reduction plan called “Seattle-Centric Policing,”
Barnes also touted SPD’s new real-time crime center and CCTV cameras, which were scheduled to all go online on May 20. “At some point we do want to have cameras in your areas,” Barnes said.
Right now CCTV cameras are located on the 3rd Street corridor downtown, Aurora Avenue in North Seattle, and the Chinatown-International District (CID). CCTV cameras have not been shown to have a significant effect on violent crime and may have a disparate impact on minority communities. There is also concern that data collected by the real-time crime center could adversely impact immigrants, many of whom live in High Point and North Delridge.
Barnes brought up a program for people to register their own surveillance cameras with the department, as well as an interest in deploying “noise detection” software and equipment. SPD did not respond to The Urbanist’s request for clarification on whether said noise detection system would be an acoustic gunshot location system such as Shotspotter or some other type of technology.
Next steps
Meanwhile, community members in High Point, North Delridge, and Snake Hill are already planning next steps.
High Point’s HOA, along with the High Point Open Space Association, have hired a security consultant to complete an assessment of how to make High Point safer.
“We think that will give us some really clear next steps around how we can best work with SPD, how we can work with the Mayor’s Office, and how we can increase community engagement, so that we can help neighbors get more involved, be more likely to know their neighbors, know where to turn and what to do if they see something that that is concerning,” Waliser said.
Harris says he expects the assessment to be completed sometime in mid-June. He’s also looking forward to scheduling monthly neighborhood walks with Walton-Anderson and someone from Saka’s staff. He’s hoping High Point’s Open Space Association will be willing to host a community meeting about safety issues with more community input as to the format. Overall, he’d like to see more folks get involved and connected with one another.
Waliser thinks the town hall was a missed opportunity for real community engagement.
“But on the other hand, my goal with the HOA and the board is to get people more engaged in their community,” Waliser said. “And so from that perspective, it was an incredible success because it made High Point residents so angry that they are getting more engaged and wanting to take action in ways that they haven’t before.”
Amy Sundberg is the publisher of Notes from the Emerald City, a weekly newsletter on Seattle politics and policy with a particular focus on public safety, police accountability, and the criminal legal system. She also writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. She is particularly fond of Seattle’s parks, where she can often be found walking her little dog.
