‘Less of the dissertation’ — Hollingsworth backs big business demands for 100-day Seattle public safety plan

You can watch the Hollingsworth interview here

Seattle City Council President Joy Hollingsworth is backing demands from a coalition of major Seattle-area employers calling for the city to produce a comprehensive 100-day public safety action plan.

In her appearance Friday on a talk radio news show on KIRO FM, Hollingsworth took jabs at Mayor Katie Wilson and city leaders she says depend too much on theoretical discussions over visible enforcement.

“There have been too many people in this city that have workshopped their public safety dissertations on communities, right now,” Hollingsworth said during the KIRO appearance. “Well, let’s pull this lever. Well, what if we turn this off? What if we do this? You’re listening to the people right now, and they’re telling you to their face: ‘This is what we want. We want a positive relationship with our police officers. We want gun violence prevention programs to work for us. We want after-school programs.’ They’re telling us everything they want.”

Hollingsworth thanked the business leaders for keeping their companies anchored locally rather than abandoning the city. “They could have did us like the Baltimore Colts did. When the football team woke up in the middle of the night and just left,” she said.

CHS reported Friday on the letter organized by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and signed by leadership at companies including Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, and Alaska Airlines calling on Wilson to create an immediate “100-day public safety action plan” with “concrete” performance metrics, just ahead of fall city budget debates. The letter cites low officer totals, slow 911 response times, and the stalled expansion of SPD’s Real Time Crime Center camera system as issues that require immediate response and cites an August Chamber survey where only 34% of 500 registered voters expressed confidence in Seattle’s public safety approach.

CHS reached out to Hollingsworth’s office for her response to the letter but the District 3 leader elected in 2023 with support from then-Mayor Bruce Harrell took to the airwaves Friday instead,

Addressing the public safety strategy survey, Hollingsworth said the metric indicates “people don’t trust us, potentially, to execute certain things.” She endorsed employer priorities—including active CCTV surveillance and increased police presence—while emphasizing that she tracks outcomes through five indicators: police response times, encampment activity, overdose deaths, crime categories, and victim vulnerability.

Wilson responded to the letter by defending ongoing municipal initiatives, saying the city doubled crisis responder hours and bolstered police presence across key neighborhoods. “Seattle is making progress, step by step,” Wilson said, pointing to decade-low shooting and homicide rates while acknowledging that “we have far too much crime and public disorder, and people have a right to be frustrated.”

he business coalition’s public safety push arrives as Wilson faces a looming budget deficit and explores expanding progressive taxes on large employers.

Wilson has prioritized civilian alternatives, harm reduction, and administrative accountability over traditional police expansion — forcing out Chief Shon Barnes, targeting hotspot patrols, and freezing surveillance camera expansion.

The council president and the Pike/Pine clean-up crew (Image: @cmjoyhollings)

Hollingsworth has been critical of the Barnes decision and has typically taken a middle ground approach on public safety, balancing police staffing and deterrence tools like Stay Out of Drug Areas zones with the civilian CARE department, community violence intervention at Garfield High School, and localized business improvement resources.

Last week, Hollingsworth lauded the work of one of the budget investments she says she advocated for in last year’s budget process to help address public safety issues in the Pike/Pine neighborhood — a new “Pike/Pine street cleaning crew out there at 7am picking up litter, power washing sidewalks.”

Hollingsworth said Friday that the City Council remains “willing and ready to work with the mayor” to achieve safety results, concluding: “I need to see action. I need to see boots on the ground.”

“I need to see people with active actions and less of the planning and the dissertation and the workshop of that.”

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