Seattle gun violence governance — audit finds City lacks systematic reporting, CARE integration mandate unstarted, $1.5M+/yr RPKC funding without evaluation

A March 2025 Seattle City Auditor report documented that the City has no systematic reporting on gun violence patterns, that the CARE Department’s ordinance-mandated integration of violence-intervention programs had not begun 17 months after CARE was established, and that HSD has funded the King County Regional Peacekeepers Collective since 2021 without receiving any evaluation data back. The Mayor’s Office concurred with the audit on paper but publicly disputed it in committee.

What happened

In 2024, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Sara Nelson jointly asked the Seattle Office of City Auditor to examine current gun violence patterns. The auditor, David G. Jones, published the report on March 25, 2025. It identified four specific accountability gaps in how the City of Seattle understands and responds to gun violence:

• No systematic reporting. The City has no mechanism for routinely sharing gun violence data across departments, with other government entities, or with the public.
• CARE mandate unstarted. The CARE Department was established in October 2023 with an ordinance-defined mission that includes integrating the City’s violence-intervention programs. As of the audit (roughly 17 months later), CARE management told the auditor that “work on this new initiative has not yet begun.”
• HSD funding the Regional Peacekeepers Collective without evaluation data. The Human Services Department has been funding the King County Regional Peacekeepers Collective (RPKC) since 2021. HSD reported a $1.5 million contract with Public Health-Seattle & King County for the RPKC in 2022. The audit states that the City has received no evaluation information from this investment.
• HSD’s own data review commitments not produced. HSD told the auditor in 2022 that it was “establishing routine data reviews of Harborview Medical Center gunshot injury information and Seattle Police Department shots fired information.” During the audit, HSD did not provide those reports.

The audit made four forward-looking recommendations. The Mayor’s Office formally “generally concurred” with all four. In the March 27, 2025 presentation to the City Council Governance Committee, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington publicly disputed the audit’s framing, telling the committee the Mayor’s Office “was already doing the things that were in the audit findings” and that she didn’t “feel respected or heard through this audit process.” Separately, CARE Chief Amy Barden confirmed to Council that she “has not been endorsed to do that part of the work yet” and that Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess had told her she did not yet have the capacity.

What the primary source says

The Seattle Office of City Auditor’s March 25, 2025 report states that the City “does not currently have a mechanism for systematic reporting on gun violence patterns,” that CARE’s integration initiative “has not yet begun,” and that the City “has not received any evaluation information” from its investments in the King County Regional Peacekeepers Collective. The report also identifies an SPD policy-compliance gap: SPD policy requires all recovered firearms suspected of involvement in criminal activity to be submitted to ATF for tracing, but only 71.8 percent of 3,596 recovered firearms from 2013-2018 were submitted.

The Seattle Office of City Auditor’s 2025 Annual Report documents that City departments implemented 10 percent of the 94 open audit recommendations in 2025 across all audits, which is the systemic context the gun violence findings sit inside.

Status

The audit findings are public and uncontested as factual matters. No corrective-action timeline has been published as of last verification. The City Auditor who issued the report, David G. Jones, retired in December 2025. The audit recommendations remain on the office’s open-recommendation tracker. The CARE Department’s status on the integration mandate has not been formally updated in public Council materials since the March 2025 hearing. The RPKC evaluation that HSD said it was awaiting from King County has not been confirmed delivered in any public record reviewed for this entry.

Why it’s in the registry

This case sits next to the DCHS contract oversight failure and KCRHA forensic audit as a third instance of the same structural pattern: a regional homelessness or public-safety program funded for years with little or no outcome verification flowing back to the funding government. The HSD-RPKC relationship is the Seattle-side analogue of what the King County Auditor found at DCHS. The CARE Department’s unstarted ordinance mandate is a separate accountability gap on the same audit page: a department created by ordinance to do a specific coordination job, not doing that job, and citing absence of executive authorization as the reason.

The Mayor’s Office concurrence-on-paper, dispute-in-committee response is itself a documented pattern across this registry’s executive-branch audits and a key argument for moving oversight outside the executive chain.

Reform implication

The audit’s recommendations are forward-looking and procedural: systematic reporting, CARE integration, problem analysis, multi-departmental coordination. The structural reform underneath all four is the same one that surfaces across nearly every multi-million-dollar Seattle and King County program audit in this registry: oversight currently flows up the same chain of command that authorized the spending. An independent Inspector General with subpoena power and a separate reporting line to the Council would have surfaced the missing RPKC evaluations, the stalled CARE initiative, and the SPD ATF-tracing gap without requiring the Mayor and Council President to jointly request a one-off audit. See [reform: independent_inspector_general] and [reform: subrecipient_monitoring].