An op-ed responding to King County’s public safety announcement of August 3, 2026
Paul Tan · Good Protocols, SPC
Before anything else, the names. Ashley Whitehead was fifty-six. Carlos Israel Sanchez Villalba was forty-four. Junior Cee Niko Semo was nineteen, and investigators believe he may have been among those firing when he fell. 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 with King County Superior Court sitting on a community accountability board, across the table from boys the age of both shooters. 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, since both are true and yet 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. Mobile crisis teams and mental health professionals riding alongside deputies are good. 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, 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 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, in every city 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, his jump shot, his father’s absence or presence, the thing he was good at that nobody had told him 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.
Because here is what my decades in Rainier Valley have actually shown me. 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, thousands of people stood at the International Fountain with candles. Nobody funded that. Nobody staffed it. No request for proposals produced it. The village showed itself, the way it always does in grief, and then our public grammar did what it always 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 here is what I would ask of Executive Zahilay, whose own story runs through this district’s living rooms and who knows, better than most in his position, that what saved and shaped him was never a line item. 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 the asks above belong to us as much as to the county. 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, and that is the point. 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 build behind him.
Paul Tan is a nonprofit executive, youth coach, and community accountability board member in the Rainier Valley. August 2026.