Police Chief Adrian Diaz recalls his work undercover and shares his plan for reducing crime

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to the Seattle Magazine podcast.

I’m Jonathan Sposato, the owner and publisher of Seattle Magazine.

Welcome to part two of our fascinating conversation with Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz.

In part one, you heard the views of chief Diaz on SPD’s efforts to hire and retain officers, his work as interim police chief when former chief Carmen Best departed and his relationship with the mayor and the city council.

Now in part two, you’ll hear about chief Diaz’s views on alternative police strategies, including some thoughts on unarmed police officers, the surprising drop in violent crime, his observations on the shift in culture of the SPD and what he’s done to influence that change, how he observed his officers react to recent national news concerning police brutality, and finally, our perception of safety in Seattle and how it just might not be rooted in the actual data.

I am joined by Seattle Magazine executive editor and chief Rob Smith and chief of opportunity Linda Lowry.

And now here’s part two of our interview with chief Diaz.

You have mentioned alternative approaches to public safety.

What does that mean?

You know, that’s interesting, because as we look at policing, we find ourselves policing a lot of social issues.

You look at homelessness, you look at behavioral crisis and mental health.

There’s a lot of areas that we find ourselves with not really the skill sets that we’ve gone to school and spent a lot of time learning about.

We train officers into how to de-escalate and really how to deal with people in crisis, but could there be another area that people do that have specialty skills in this can do a better job?

And I think that’s the reason why I’ve been so willing and open to have these discussions.

I’ve been early in my career when I started working on the South Park Action Agenda, the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative.

We worked with a lot of social services.

And my job was to identify when I saw a youth that was going down the wrong path, but I wasn’t the case manager.

I wasn’t the person that was going to provide the mental health services.

I wasn’t the person that was going to get him a job.

I wasn’t the person.

So for me, it was like, I need to know one stop shop.

Like, who do I call for when I need somebody to get wraparound services?

And so using that same model into where we’re at today, we know that we are dealing with a lot of people with challenges.

And we’re going to deal with the criminal side, but who do we end up being able to respond with us to be able to deal with some of the social issues side?

It’s long conversations about dual dispatch.

So how do you dispatch a police officer and maybe a social worker?

Maybe we’re the primary and then the social worker is secondary.

Maybe we’re the secondary and the social worker is the primary.

And so these are all things that we really want to get to.

Because as we have lost more officers, and as I’m trying to hire back the officers, this is really a challenging time because many issues are still not getting solved.

And so having social services at our fingertips and being a part of that process is better for us because we’re going to get that call the second time and the third time and the fourth time.

And if there is another avenue that people already know, like a social worker says, I already know Joe, I’ll follow up with them.

And I, you know, I’ll touch base with them in an hour.

And that right there will go a long way to solving some of the issues that we face today.

Now, Mayor Harrell recently said the city would start sending unarmed social workers to respond to some of the 9/11 calls.

Does that concern you at all as a police officer?

Or how do you vet those to make sure that that’s going to be a safe environment?

Yeah, so, you know, we actually built a risk management program to actually look at all the calls for service that we have and seeing what calls could potentially be handled by maybe a social service worker or a mental health counselor.

But we already have been doing some of this work ourselves.

So we actually have a co-responder model.

So we have officers paired up with mental health case workers that actually respond to many crisis calls.

But we also have, back in about 2019, 2018, I helped reinvigorate the community services officers program.

And officers will handle the initial call, but for follow up, they’ll actually reach out to a CSO to do kind of that extra care.

And so there’s already models that we’re working towards back in the day when it came to a shooting.

I would actually send a text message over to youth violence interrupters.

And so that way they were aware of a shooting.

So they can do on their back end work to make sure that they reduce retaliatory shootings.

And so there’s already been products of this same work.

But it’s really trying to formalize it rather than just trying to just meet, you know, the little demands, little pockets of demands.

We really need to figure out how do we look at it as a whole system.

And we want to do it right because we got to have a plan when we move forward on these things and not just try to like rush it through because we’re not thinking about all the intricacies of it because you do run the risk of putting somebody in potential danger on some of these calls for service.

And that’s one of the things in that risk management program was really try to identify, like we know that we’re, people are potentially going to be at risk, is how do you mitigate that risk based on the calls for service. – What did the department do during your leadership to cause the 18% drop in violent crime in the fourth quarter last year? – One of the programs that we set up was really our plan when it came to violent crime, which was what we call CAPE, which is community.

So it’s how do you utilize community groups to help offset potential issues?

Like sending a text message over to a violence interrupter, hopefully, you know, for them to really do the followup work to reduce potential shootings.

It’s the analytics of where I need to make sure I put officers at and understanding like the different dynamics that are going on in the community.

We test every shell casing, every gun from where it potentially could have been used in another violent crime.

And then how to make sure that we’re actually taking steps.

We actually do two meetings, internal meetings, every single week that are what we call our gun violence tactical calls, that all of our precinct captains, all of our investigations teams and our assistant chiefs are at the conversation of literally analyzing every shooting to figure out what we can do to either capture somebody that has been harmed in our community or being able to figure out like where these shootings are actually resonating from.

Then I look at prevention side.

So it’s like safe storage, making sure that we extreme risk protection order.

So what are we doing to get guns off the streets and prevent, you know, potential shootings?

The fourth one is environment.

So creating better lighting spaces, cutting back brush, there’s all sorts of things that community can do, but also as a city, like what can we actually do to make sure that we create welcoming spaces for a community and utilizing that kind of environmental design elements to really enhance places.

And then the last one is enforcement.

And so, you know, really that’s making sure that our officers are at the right location, knowing where we know we, like just this year alone, I can tell you when it comes to Saturday more, or Saturday night, a Sunday morning at midnight, we’ve had six shootings during that time.

And it’s, okay, where are those shootings occurring?

Are they occurring in the same place?

Is it related to a business?

Is it related to a house?

And so it’s really making sure that we’re putting our officers in those locations to help prevent it.

And even if we might not prevent that shooting, that we’re very close to responding to that shooting that we’re getting there in a timely manner and making good arrests out of that.

What leadership skills and our tools have you implemented to navigate your career in the police force as a person of color? – You know, I’ve always sought out different opportunities to really kind of educate myself and learn.

I actually went back to school when I was in the department during my patrol years.

I went and finished out my bachelor’s degree.

I was actually majoring in American Ethnic Studies, Chicano Studies.

So I had a big background in kind of just understanding police and race and all the different challenges because I wrote a lot of papers on it before I actually had this career.

And I didn’t think that I was actually gonna have this career and didn’t think it was gonna play a full circle.

But I ended up going back to school.

I actually changed my major and major in law and justice, did my masters.

And so I’ve taken those opportunities that’s really helped me guide some of the choices.

But I read it all the time.

And it’s really helped me just kind of, as I read, just really digest stuff.

And really, I read books sometimes multiple times just because I learned something new.

And I’ve gotten a different training.

So I’ve gotten to the FBI National Executive Institute.

I’ve gotten to Senior Management Institute of Policing.

So I’ve taken those opportunities to help really kind of develop my skills.

And people always say like, you’re a national leader.

And I’m like, no, I’m just, you know, Chief Diaz.

Like I’m just a normal guy that literally just wants to just learn and understand how they can make, how we can make policing better.

You know, I always talk about the four virtues of Stoke Philosophy, which is wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.

But wisdom is always being the student and always learning.

And really that helps kind of guide me into like, not only taking classes to really develop the skills, but it’s also how I apply them.

And really trying to make sure that I’d treat everybody with just respect.

And you will not hear me raise my voice.

You will not hear, like I will always make sure I give people respect.

And that is really what’s kind of, you know, something that I have to hold true, you know, to who I am.

And I appreciate that all of the mentorship that I’ve been able to get, I think mentorship is like probably to me the single most important thing in anybody’s career.

Like we can always think about all the people that have helped guide us into who we are.

I mean, it’s Chief Bass, it’s Chief Kierolkowski and Chief O’Toole and Chief Diaz and all the people.

But also like I had good national leaders like Chief Vasaveta, who’s the chief in Aurora and, you know, Chief Finner and who’s a Houston chief.

And like there’s just so many people that have helped me, you know, guide me through many difficult challenges.

And so I’ve taken a lot of those skill sets and really just kind of developed myself all the time.

And it’s a work in progress.

It’s a work in progress. – And then how do you recognize and incorporate the different cultures into your SPD community? – Yeah, so one of the things that we’ve done with the SB before the badge is actually we start off with, we’re actually incorporating some of this into our in-service officers, but we’ve actually brought community members from every different community, from the native community, from the black community, from the Asian communities, and really get people to understand the history of policing in their communities.

And then also having those difficult conversations.

So right on the very front end of an officer’s career, or recruits career, that they’re learning just understanding community dynamics.

And I think honestly that helps build resiliency because we’re gonna put you in places where you’re gonna be challenged and you’re gonna have to be vulnerable and you have to have those difficult conversations and that is what is actually gonna make you better and stronger.

And so we’re already doing that on the front end with the recruits and then we’ll figure out how we actually expand it to all of our officers.

And this is one of the things that, as we talked about the 125 officers that we’re hiring every year, if you think about it, that’s 125 officers over the next five years, that’s 600 officers.

And so one of the things that we have right now, we have close to just under a thousand deployable officers.

So if you think about just how much turnover and how much culture change that creates, you’re doing it on the front end, but you’re in five years, you’re really changing the dynamics of how an agency functions and works.

Now that means that one thing that you do have is you have a lot of young personnel coming into the job, but it really helps really give the skill sets that you’re hoping for to kind of change the dynamics of what we’re at in policing.

And I go into this function of like, really as we’ve looked at the last couple of years of the dynamics of when I took over, we last year in 2022, I talked about this in our crime stats, we actually made more arrests in 2022 than we had in 2019 when we had full staffing.

So officers are going out and doing really, really hard work.

It was the second highest year of gun recoveries than we’ve ever had over the last, since we started tracking it for about a 13 year period, which is exceptional because it’s, when you have less officers to recover more guns, seems like weird, but it also tells you how the violence is occurring as well, that how many guns are out in the street, which is scary as well.

But then I look at use of force.

And when we started our consent decree, and really in how we were tracking it in 2015, to compare it to now, we had about 2000 cases of use of force in 2015.

Now we had just a little over a thousand.

So it’s like 48% reduction last year from 2015.

And then we look at complaints.

So I’m like, our officers doing it right.

Our officers are reducing the amount of complaints that they have.

And if you look at the numbers from 2019 to now to 2022, we’ve actually put them in half.

So officers are not only making more arrests, they’re going out and recovering more guns, they’re doing it with less force, and they’re doing it with a lot more professionalism ’cause they’re getting less complaints.

And so all of that is a testament to their hard work.

It’s a testament to like, what our department’s trying to do.

And it’s giving the foundation of skill sets on the very front end of an officer’s career.

And so all of this is just important to me as I look at the future of the agency.

Do I see sometimes things going up and down?

It’s gonna be ’cause we’re gonna increase the amount of personnel, but it’s really infusing a different level of culture in the department. – Well, and what you’re really getting at, that constantly shifting and evolving culture, both the challenges and the opportunities that that brings.

And I think that people ask me, I think we asked this question, like, what’s the most challenging time in your tenure as a chief and what’s the funnest time?

And I said, and tell you it’s chaos in both.

Because in chaos, like the most challenging, you’re dealing with constant crisis, right?

You’re trying to manage through all the different challenges.

But some of the funnest things is when you’re in chaos, you create the most change.

You can really develop and challenge people to really think about how to do things differently.

And it’s actually the time where you actually get things done at a different pace.

And so while chaos is sometimes bad, but it’s also fun because it’s really allowing us to think completely different in how we do this department.

And so that’s an exciting part of me.

That’s actually one of the things that drives me into the, to do this job drives me every single day to come into work.

And I actually, every single day, I go through 12 in Jackson.

I drive through 12 in Jackson.

I drive through third and pine just to see what it looks like on the streets.

Like, are we making progress?

Is it making a difference?

So when a community member comes to me and says, Chief Diaz, like, I feel a little bit safer.

I’m thinking, that’s the path.

That is the path that we’re going down and things are going in the right path.

I mean, we talked about 18% reduction in violent crime in the last quarter of four.

In the month of January, we’re at 30% reduction from the year before. – Wow. – And we’re still maintaining, midway through February, we’re still maintaining that 30% reduction.

And so that doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna have challenges.

It doesn’t mean I still have a lot more shots fired.

I’m still like, the homicides hasn’t stopped.

But I feel like when people are coming to me and saying, it feels a little safer, it feels better.

Like, that is the path that we continue down.

You know, we continue to make sure that I’ve got a plan moving forward, that I’m constantly adjusting and evolving those plans.

And, you know, I expect my team to do that. – Chief, when incidents like Tyree Nichols happen in Memphis, what’s the conversation like inside the Seattle Police Department?

What goes through your mind?

What do the officers say to you? – Yeah, you know, I think that it is something when you see a Tyree Nichols, it’s very obvious.

You know, that’s, I think every officer was disgusted by it, disgusted by the conversations that happened, by the officers that were involved, the treatment of not actually providing medical treatment.

I think there’s, you know, no good officer likes a bad officer.

It makes their job that much harder.

And so, you know, I think that those are clear cut cases of just how you wanna make sure that those officers are completely weeded out of our profession.

But, you know, what it really also is coming down to is I think that as, you know, as our younger officers are kind of experiencing, they’ve experienced Ferguson, they’ve experienced, you know, George Floyd and Tyree Nichols and really getting officers to understand the dynamics of how we serve community, I think we’re getting a better officer.

I mean, I’m watching the compassion that I see in many of the officers.

You know, I’ve been, you know, putting out some videos of our officers and their conduct and just the great work that they’re doing, talking down people that have literally been armed out of, you know, machetes, out of knives, out of, you know, other situations.

And I’m just, I’m sitting there thinking to myself, you know, that would not have happened 25 years ago.

And that might have resulted in an officer involved shooting and watching them literally just treat people with that level of compassion empathy. – Is extraordinary. – So the obvious question, chief, is how is law enforcement different than it was 25 years ago? – You know, I think that it’s actually the civil conversation.

You use the term law enforcement and it’s, you know, I think 25 years ago, that was the term that we use because that’s the job that we really focus ourselves in.

And I think that even as I try to get community to understand, like, don’t, don’t refer to us as law enforcement.

You know, refer to us as a police service because that language will actually, you know, help to create the culture change because really we are out here to serve.

We’re out here to make sure that we provide, that we help people and that we’re out here, you know, really problem solving through many of the challenges that our community is facing.

But if we say that we’re only law enforcement, then we will only have one function.

And we know that majority of our department and majority of our calls for service are not about enforcing the law.

It’s sometimes educating and sometimes it’s providing some different dynamics to help solve problems.

It’s connecting people to resources and services.

And so I think that’s really the dynamic is helping change that language of, of not necessarily saying law enforcement really about a police service.

And I think that’s evolved over the last 25 years and we still have a long way to go, but it’s getting, you know, people to, to also adjust the language as well. – Speaking of the community, how does the SPD create a positive collaboration with the community now? – You know, one of the things that we’ve, it’s been a challenge because we don’t have as many staff.

And I think the, the unique part of this job is, I had done so much community work and that I had always had programs and I had officers to be involved and engaged in these programs.

And to now be the chief when I don’t have the staff into has all, has been a really significant challenge because I want us to be involved intimately with our community that always engage in different activities and being able to provide the service.

But right now a lot of officers are stepping up, they’re coming in on their, you know, days off and they’re helping out in many different ways, not only to augment shifts, but they’re also to just engage community on a different level.

And I think that that is such an important part of this job is to make sure that community is part of it and not just responding to 911 calls, but to build those relationships prior to that 911 call.

Because, you know, we have to figure out how do we establish a relationship before a crisis happens.

And so having that community engagement on the front end is going to be an important role as we rebuild this agency. – Can you provide some examples where you guys are doing to make that happen? – Yeah, so we have our Seattle Athletic League, our Seattle Police Activities League.

So we run programs such as Detective Cookie’s Chest Club.

We’ve been running sporting events.

We had a right now an eight week program out over in South Park.

We also have, we’ll be starting up another program over in the Rainier Beach area in around Rain Beach High School.

And these are all activities to engage our officers in our community.

I actually met with a youth group over in Rainier Beach High School and to be meeting with them again on following up.

But they wanted to, simple thing is understanding the rights.

And they also wanted to just have dialogue with officers and not in an aside where there was enforcement.

And I think that those are, you know, having, hearing that from youth means that the youth want to engage the police officers.

And that’s a good thing.

And that’s really what we want to take advantage of is making sure that we have officers engaging the youth and just having that conversation on the front end. – We can’t get out of here without asking you this question.

You spent years working as an undercover officer.

I mean, that just sounds sexy.

I mean, there’s no crime fighting welders on TV, right?

They’re all about undercover officers, so many shows.

So what attracted you to that?

And is there any notable case, even if it’s a little anonymously that you can share with us? – Well, so my work is working undercover is with our anti-crime team.

And so what we would do, I actually would work patrol.

And then I would change clothes after my shift and I would work undercover.

And so I would buy and sell narcotics as part of our buy bus operations.

And we then would make an arrest in those cases.

And I’ve had an experience of a lot of different ones from being involved in kind of the rave environment.

And so it was chaos and craziness in those rave environments to also be on the streets.

And it was an amazing learning experience.

I think one of the probably biggest cases that I, it wasn’t a huge case that was a public case, but it was a case that brought a lot of attention to me, like feeling like that could have gone a different way and for a small amount of money.

And so I had already bought narcotics in a case in around third and pine.

We were transitioning out of that area to another location when we got called over by two people.

I mean, my other officers that was with me and working undercover role, I started walking up to it.

So the two other people came across over to us and wanted to sell narcotics.

We front the money for the narcotics.

And basically they were wanting to rob us from the money.

And they said that they had a gun, both of them said that they had a gun.

And being in the situation, you’re kind of like, okay, yeah, but I’m just, all I want is the $20.

And one of them ends up pulling out a gun and put it in my stomach.

And so we ended up finding, being able to break contact, I was able to talk myself out of the situation, but it could have gone a lot of different ways.

And it was an experience that, you always will remember in your career, that we ended up getting a gun off the gentleman and we ended up getting a knife.

He was actually pulling out his knife and folding it out and locking it into place.

And we got arrest teams coming in and they made arrests on both people.

And the person that actually pulled out a gun, it was actually third strike.

And so, could he have just shot me and that would have, he was gonna spend the rest of his life in prison anyways.

So it could have easily happened at that point.

But I think that those are the types of situations that sometimes what we’re trying to do is make sure that we get sometimes guns and drugs off the streets, but at what cost.

And that’s always things that think in my mind, is we experienced even to the last couple of years, we’ve seen this massive increase in fentanyl.

And at what point do you realize like how much we really need to figure out how we tackle it, how do we tackle it with really smart tactics?

Because I don’t wanna put my officers in harm’s way, but I also need to make sure that we don’t put the community that’s, we had over 1.1 million fentanyl pills that were recovered last year, which is enough to kill this entire city.

And that just tells you just how much drugs are coming through.

So you wanna make sure that you’re holding people accountable so they don’t harm others.

But you also wanna make sure that you’re doing it in a safe manner, that your officers are maybe able to go home at night as well.

And that they’re able to go to their families and be able to make sure the city’s safe. – Are there some officers who just don’t wanna do undercover work? – You know, there’s plenty of officers.

I think everyone has a different role.

When I started through the undercover works, I was part of the rest teams, then observer.

So working in an undercover role, but not necessarily making contact with people and then to being the undercover officer.

And I’ll be honest, I felt like I was good at it.

Maybe it was just being a youth and being young and really being able to talk the language.

And now I look at myself, I’m like, there’s no way I could do that work anymore.

And I was like, people are gonna know that I’m a police officer.

Like I don’t have that language skill anymore.

So, but I do think that it was such an important role and experience for me.

I did it for a number of years, probably close to about four years.

And like I just loved it.

I really thought it was a really good police work.

I had a good team that I got to work with, good people.

My partner would not only patrol, and then he went permanently to the ACT team and we’re still good friends to this day.

But you develop a connection and a partnership that will always translate through your whole life. – Thank you for sharing that.

That’s fascinating.

Thank you. – The next question that I wanna ask is, oftentimes I have to admit, in all honesty, when I have neighbors or friends tell me that they feel like that the city is unsafe and sometimes they move, right?

They talk about how amazing the East side is and it is amazing.

What’s sort of your response to those kinds of comments?

When they say that they don’t think Seattle is safe anymore? – It’s challenging for me to hear.

I understand where people are at.

I understand that 2020 really had a different changing dynamic.

Violet crime started to raise.

It started to raise in 2021.

It continued into 2022.

I feel like we’re on a better path.

And I do think that I’m hearing much more of the stories of people saying it feels safer.

And really it’s about recovery.

It’s about when I look at our downtown core and I spent eight and a half years working patrol and also working the anti-crime team.

So I’ve seen it evolve.

I’ve seen literally abandoned buildings to now having 50 story high rises and just the development of the downtown core.

And I know it’s gonna come back.

I already see that there’s revitalization of it.

I look at areas like the U village who’s, you know always been occupied by people doing shopping.

This city is gonna come back.

And I know that it might not be an easy hurdle but nothing in life is gonna be easy.

And I think that it’s really trying to make sure that we make the city as safe as possible.

Mayor will always tell you, you’ll hear him all the time, the conversation will be our number one charter in the city is public safety.

And that is making sure that our officers go out and make sure they serve this community as best they can in the best manner they can.

And that’s my commitment.

That’s my rule to the mayor.

We’re gonna do it. – That’s right.

Yeah.

And I appreciate the wonderful data points that you brought up about the reduction in crime year over year or same period year to year.

Those are important data points that we wanna make sure that we surface to our listeners and to our readers in the magazine.

Obviously there’s a lot to unpack when someone says that they feel unsafe in the city, whether that’s sort of some of the vestiges of how they might have felt about Black Lives Matter or CHOP or actual, sort of day to day crime and drugs or things that are associated with those who are unfortunately unhoused in our segment, which has gotten to be a large segment.

These are very, very complex issues that accretively they cause an emotional response of people feeling unsafe.

And I know that if we can all look at the data and be data-driven and keep a cool head about it, I think that we can all keep our chins up that and with the work that you’re doing that we can all lean in and we can all help and frankly manifest the kind of wonderful city that we deserve. – My next question to you, Chief Diaz, is how do you influence, inspire and motivate your team? – Yeah, you know, I think really for me, it’s just about making sure that I give them something to reflect on and to what my values are.

So I always talk, I was just talking to them.

I was reading a book, “Ego is the Enemy” and really just harping on, that we’re always students of learning and understanding that don’t allow ourselves to think that we know it all.

And I think earlier in our conversation as we all are getting to know each other, I kind of came on with the idea that I tell all my staff, if I’m the smartest person in the room, there’s a problem.

And my job is to really bring in personality to the best of the best, that know their stuff better than I do.

And my job is then to just bring them and coalesce them together and really, you know, bring their ideas to see how we actually can translate them into really positive outcomes in the community.

And so that’s what I’m constantly doing.

It’s bringing in the right personnel.

So not only do what I refer to as my professional or civilian staff, but it’s my sworn staff.

And ’cause what we will find ourselves is getting stagnated with thoughts if we do not always constantly challenge each other.

And I love Pete Carroll’s model, which is always compete, right?

And it’s always challenging ourselves, always making sure that we’re adept.

And that’s kind of my leadership process is really just constantly just trying to get people to understand like you are not going to rest.

If you rest, you’re probably not gonna be in my style, in my level of command. – Yeah, speaking of sports, I don’t know if it’s safe to say if you’re allowed to even say that, but do you have a favorite Seattle sports team? – Oh, I do.

I actually, I went to the University of Washington, so I am a diehard Husky fan.

And I know that some might in the city might go for the Wazookoogs, but I do have to just say go Huskies.

And for those that are from Oregon, they wanna say, they wanna give me this oh thing.

I gotta just throw out, no, we are the Huskies and I will actually love always supporting the teams.

And I get to actually do photos, sometimes down on the field, taking photos for them.

And I just love capturing that. – Chief Diaz, I wanna thank you on behalf of the magazine and our community for spending so much time with us.

Our goal is always to humanize, to paint, to help portray a fuller picture of someone that you’re not just someone in uniform, but you’re also like a thoughtful leader who cares a lot about the community and with intelligence and integrity and all of that really came through and just really appreciated how much we all learned listening to you today.

So thank you so much for joining us. – Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. (upbeat music) – Thank you everyone for listening to part two of our conversation with Chief Diaz.

To learn even more about how our city’s policing is impacting crime and safety in our community, read our in-depth interview in the May, June issue of Seattle Magazine and be sure to never miss an issue by subscribing at siadomag.com.

Thank you for listening and remember that it all starts here in Seattle.

A special thank you to the entire Seattle Magazine staff and to podcast producer Nick Patrie.

Contact Lisa Lee at lisa@siadomag.com for partnership opportunities.

Until next time, let’s keep celebrating Seattle. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]