Week in Review: A new drug ordinance, SPD bodycam controversy, and wildfires

Bill Radke discusses the week’s news with science journalist Jane C. Hu, health journalist Joanne Silberner, and Seattle Times reporter Amanda Zhou.

This week, the Seattle City Council passed and signed a new law that makes having or publicly using illicit drugs a gross misdemeanor in the city, which means the city attorney can prosecute those crimes. Mayor Bruce Harrell is preparing guidance for police on when to make arrests and when to divert people to treatment and other services. Who will actually be arrested, prosecuted, counseled, treated?

This week, a man with a sledgehammer broke nine windows at the Wing Luke Museum in the Chinatown-International District. He allegedly told police “the Chinese" had been torturing him for years. He's been charged with a hate crime. There was an op-ed in the Seattle Times that linked the Wing Luke crime to recent home invasion robberies against Asian Americans, and with a Seattle police officer laughing as he discussed the killing of an Indian grad student in a crosswalk by a speeding officer. The authors asked elected officials to “keep our Asian community safe.” What are they proposing?

Last week, it came out that the Seattle police officers union vice president was laughing as he told the union president about a woman just killed by an officer who was speeding in a police cruiser. A California news organization is reporting that after that conversation got recorded, the union president asked to cancel a contract for a software program that analyzes what officers say on body camera. How come?

Air quality has been improving in Washington state and most of the U.S. since 2000. The bad news: Wildfire smoke has erased 75% of the progress, in Washington, and all of the air quality progress in Oregon in the last couple decades. That's according to new research published in the journal “Nature.” What should we know about our air?

On Sept. 16 at 9:40 PM, two and a half hours after sunset, people were woken up to loud boom from Ballard to Bainbridge Island. It was a private fireworks show, with the same pyrotechnics company that does the July 4th show at Gas Works Park. They got a permit form The Seattle Fire Department to load the firework shells onto a barge in Ballard. They tugged it off of Bainbridge, outside the city's jurisdiction. The Coast Guard told Seattle Times the company applied for a marine event permit, and they told them you don't need a permit because “the event does not introduce any extra or unusual hazards that would jeopardize the safety of human life on the navigable waters for the U.S.” The permit from Seattle Fire says that the pyrotechnics company was hired by a mysterious company called WYBO that's been doing surprise fireworks shows since at least the 1990s. What do we make of this?