An op-ed responding to King County’s public safety announcement of August 3, 2026
Paul Tan · Good Protocols, SPC
Before anything else come the names. Ashley Whitehead was fifty-six. Carlos Israel Sanchez Villalba was forty-four. Junior Cee Niko Semo was nineteen. Police have named him a suspect, and he is still one of our dead. A toddler was wounded. A fifteen-year-old boy is charged, and the prosecutors want him tried as a man. I put the names first because everything I am about to say about money and programs is downstream of them, and because grief that skips the names is already halfway to becoming policy.
I have spent years sitting on a community accountability board with King County Superior Court, across the table from boys of fifteen and nineteen. I have spent thirty years alongside nonprofits in this county, in youth homelessness and foster care, grief groups and family work, and twenty-nine of those years living in the Rainier Valley, coaching its baseball, soccer, and softball teams. So when the Executive’s office announced this week that fifteen million dollars in state public safety grant funding will help answer the heartbreak at Seattle Center, I read the announcement the way a carpenter reads a board, with respect and with attention to the grain. And I want to say two true things about it, because our public conversation keeps choosing only one.
The first true thing is that much of this money is good. Crisis intervention and de-escalation training for officers is good, and so are the mobile crisis teams and the mental health professionals riding alongside deputies. When someone is in danger tonight, the county must be able to respond tonight, and I will not join any argument that closes that door. Emergency response is a covenant a government keeps with its people, and this package strengthens it.
The second true thing is harder, and it is the one that doesn’t get its press conference. Read the line items. Nearly all of this investment funds what happens after crisis arrives, or the professionals who intervene when risk is already high. That is response machinery, and we need it, but it is not prevention, whatever the summary paragraph says. And I have watched this exact grammar for forty years, in Boston, in Chicago, and in the other cities where I have worked: the horrific event, the announcement, the words holistic and comprehensive and wraparound, the ribbon of programs, the fade. Midnight basketball has been reborn under a dozen names since the eighties. Some of those programs did real good for kids, and I honor the people who ran them. But the communities themselves did not change, because a program that sits on top of a neighborhood is not the same as a neighborhood, and when the funding cycle ended, the program left, and the neighborhood remembered that it had been, briefly, a service area.
Here is the question the announcements never ask, and it is cheaper than fifteen million dollars and harder than anything money can do. Who knew that fifteen-year-old by name? I do not mean his case number, his risk score, or his school attendance record. I mean his name, who was home when he got there, what he did after school, the thing he was good at that he had not been told yet. Which adults were positioned to know him, and what would it have taken for our systems to stand behind those adults instead of around them? I ask it without excusing him; the accountability board taught me that accountability is a form of respect, and a community that expects nothing of its boys has already discarded them. But accountability and formation are the two hands of one raising, and we have built a public apparatus that funds neither hand. It funds interventions. An intervention is what you purchase when formation has been left to chance.
My decades in Rainier Valley have shown me that the village exists. It is not a metaphor and it is not gone. It is the grandmother who feeds half the block, the barber who hears more than any counselor, the parish and the mosque and the storefront church, the coach who drives kids home after practice and idles at the curb until the door opens. The night after the shooting, hundreds of people stood at the International Fountain with candles. The vigil had no funding and no staff, and no request for proposals produced it. The village showed itself, the way it does in grief, and then our public grammar did what it does: it looked straight past the village and purchased programs, because programs can be procured and villages cannot. You cannot buy a village. You can only recognize one, and join it, and stand behind the people who already hold its children.
So I would ask Executive Zahilay to take some real fraction of what flows through this moment and change the question it answers. Instead of asking what can be funded, ask each neighborhood what it already holds. Fund the keepers who are already keeping: pay the coaches and the aunties and the congregation youth workers whose work is real work, so the ladder from neighbor to steady adult presence is a ladder someone can afford to climb. And measure differently, because what we measure is what we will buy. Do not count units of service delivered. Count whether a named adult still knows each of these young people in five years. If no funded effort can answer that question, we have bought throughput and called it safety.
And I do not aim any of this only at government, because my own sector holds the other end of the board. We in the nonprofit world learned to write ourselves into the intervention economy, describing our neighbors by their deficits because deficits are what the applications pay for, and philanthropy taught government half of this grammar before government ever taught it back. So what I ask of the county, I ask of us. A foundation can fund keepers without waiting for a press conference. An agency can inventory a neighborhood’s capacity before it assesses the neighborhood’s needs. Any of us can adopt the five-year measure tomorrow, and the organizations brave enough to be evaluated that way will be the ones worth funding. The harder conversation is not somebody else’s to start.
None of this is quick. The candles at the fountain will burn out, the cameras will leave, and the fifteen million will be spent, mostly well. The harder conversation is the one worth having while our grief is still honest: that safety is not primarily a service, that it grows the way orchards grow, tended by people who stay, and that our county’s deepest resource was never in the budget. It is in the hands of neighbors who already love these kids, waiting for their government to notice them and ask how it can help. Ashley, Carlos, and Junior deserve a response that outlasts the news cycle. So does the fifteen-year-old. So does the toddler, who will be a teenager in this city in twelve short years, walking streets that will be exactly as safe as the village we chose, starting now, to stand behind.
Paul Tan is a nonprofit executive, youth coach, and community accountability board member in the Rainier Valley. August 2026.