It wasn’t the meeting the Leschi Community Council thought it would be.

Council President Ashley Martin stood nervously at the front of the crowded room at Grace United Methodist Church, wringing a copy of the council’s newsletter, The Leschi News, in her hands.

“So to address the elephant in the room…” Martin began, explaining that this was originally planned as a neighborhood Q&A with Seattle Police Department Chief Shon Barnes. “This was also posted as this is a forum to discuss the situation, I’m not even going to try and describe the right word for it, at Denny Blaine Park.”

Martin decided the first half of the meeting would stick to the original agenda and the second half would be devoted to the “situation.”

Just who was here to ask Barnes about the “situation” was visually obvious. The people with the signs and colorful hair wanted to know: Why did three of his officers make a bunch of legally nude people put their clothes on at a queer nude beach on Sunday and kicked out a trans woman who refused to get dressed?

But first, a brief (roughly twenty-minute) introduction. After discussing his history as a teacher turned cop, his wife, who’s a doctor, and three kids still back in the midwest, and his lonely home life in Seattle without them, Barnes took questions. He had just started answering one about the Before the Badge training program when Chavisa Woods, who lives in Leschi and has gone to Denny Blaine with her partner for 12 years, lost patience.

“Half of us are here to talk about Denny Blaine, and you said we’d get time for that,” Woods says.

“You told us about your college major before you got to Denny Blaine,” someone says. “You said we would get to Denny Blaine first.”

“No no,” President Martin says, now seated at a table at the front of the room. “I said we were going to get to the original intent of the meeting first.”

“Respectfully,” Woods says over the babble. “They are cracking down on queer bodies and raiding queer spaces,” Woods says.

After about twenty more minutes of questions, Woods was called on.

“We sat here politely and listened to you talk about how great the police are, but a lot of us have never had that experience,” Woods says. “I would like to know why it’s okay for the police to come to queer spaces and start cracking down on people for public nudity, which is not even illegal in the city of Seattle.”

“Is nudity illegal?” says a man at the back with long grey hair. “That’s the first question.”

“No,” people groan and yell at him.

Barnes finally pipes up. “So being nude is free expression, not illegal,” he says. “Not illegal. Let me explain to you what happened.”

Barnes explained that the officers were receiving complaints about nudity and masturbation, which Barnes (hilariously) called “activity that may shock the conscience.” The officers had been instructed to patrol the park in search of said shocking acts, Barnes says, but “mistakenly they were wrong” when they asked people to put their clothes on. Barnes was explaining that the trans woman was issued a code of conduct violation and told not to come back to the beach for a week when that woman, standing in the back of the room, interrupted him.

“It was a business card!” she says. “That’s what they gave me.”

“And to correct you,” says Colleen Kimseylove, co-leader of the park stewardship group Friends of Denny Blaine. “The officer trespassed the woman for being naked. We have photo evidence, she’s laying down, she’s doing nothing.”

“It is my understanding that that will be rescinded, alright,” Barnes says.

“Am I allowed at the park or not?” says the woman in the back.

“Yes,” Barnes says. People clapped. Later, someone in the crowd asked him to say sorry.

“I did that.”

“I was detained!” the woman says. “That’s not a thing that you apologized for.”

“That’s something you get sued for,” someone quips.

“Well, we don’t comment on pending lawsuits,” Barnes says. (It’s unclear if there is a pending suit, or if Barnes was saying he couldn’t comment on the prospect of being sued. SPD told The Stranger they're unaware of any pending lawsuits.)

At the end of the meeting, Barnes apologized to anyone who “may have been offended” by his officers misinterpreting the law. “We’re not perfect,” he says.

Sunday’s “mistake” came shortly after a neighbors group, Denny Blaine Park for All, sued the city for allegedly allowing the beach to turn into a den of cum and villainy where public sex and masturbation were supposedly commonplace. Masturbation surely happens at Denny Blaine as it does at our city’s many beautiful parks, as well as on our buses and street corners, but the more than 50 beachgoers who’ve spoken to The Stranger about Denny Blaine in the last year and half say the neighbors’ characterization is overblown. Masturbation is anathema at Denny Blaine, and beachgoers kick people out when they see it. Kimseylove, who is holding an intervention training at the beach on May 18, says they suspect neighbors are reporting masturbation in places like the parking lot where beachgoers aren’t even aware it’s happening.

But the suit isn’t just going after illegal public masturbation, it alleges that legal nudity violates the Parks Department’s code of conduct because it’s depriving them enjoyment of the beach.

The beachgoers just see it as the latest scheme to kick them out. Before the suit, an anonymous donor (later unmasked by the millionaire owner of University Village and next door neighbor to Denny Blaine Park Stuart Sloan, also part of the group that filed the suit) hatched a $1 million plan to build a children’s playground at the beach.

Before that plan went public in the fall 2023, Sloan vented his frustrations about nudity in text messages to Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s private cell phone. He sent the Mayor photos of naked people on the beach, which he called “DISGUSTING.” Harrell promised Sloan that deputy Mayor (now SDOT Director) Adiam Emery would help him. Emery and Seattle Parks Department employees met with Sloan for months, even reviewing plans for the park. After a lively and loud public meeting in December 2023, where dozens said the beach was a place of freedom and safety, Parks cancelled the playground.

Public records show Harrell met with Sloan twice, including the day after the city announced the plan was dead, but maintained he never knew the donor’s identity. In the first few months of 2024, beachgoers and neighbors tried to hash out a solution to end the conflict for good, but nothing really came of the talks.

Lately though, the city has paid Denny Blaine extra attention. As The Stranger reported Monday, in March, Seattle Park Rangers told a nude sunbather to either get dressed or move closer to the water where he couldn’t be seen from the street. In April, police showed up at least two times as part of the patrols Barnes mentioned last night. Blake Waddell, a beach regular there both times, says one officer told him higher ups were directing the patrols. A sergeant told Kimseylove the same thing at the beach Sunday. (In all these cases, no lewd behavior was found). Waddell, who was also at the beach Sunday, says he filed a complaint with a sergeant on the spot.

In an email, Harrell’s office denied directing SPD to change its approach at Denny Blaine. The Seattle Parks Department says Park Rangers have routinely stopped by Denny Blaine since March 2024 and that there’s been no change to policy.

According to the lawsuit, neighbors met with City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth three times last year. Two months ago, after Hollingsworth talked about the meetings on the podcast Seattle Nice, she told The Stranger neighbors had asked park rangers to look out for masturbation, but that there was no plan for that. Hollingsworth told The Stranger by text Monday night that she had no comment on the Sunday incident, but then posted to X that she and her staff were monitoring the “situation” and were in active communication with SPD, the Parks Department, and the Mayor’s Office about what happened. Barnes says he’s working with Hollingsworth to set up meetings between SPD and the city’s queer community. Hollingsworth also recently met with Friends of Denny Blaine.

“My ongoing hope—and priority—is that we can collaboratively develop a solution that respects the park’s unique heritage while ensuring the safety, dignity, and well-being of everyone who visits,” Hollingsworth wrote.

At last night’s meeting, Barnes said the “directed patrols” at Denny Blaine would end and that he’d bring in Park Rangers to figure out when it was appropriate to call the cops. Though, when The Stranger asked Parks about the rangers who told a man to put on his clothes, Parks said police would take the lead on complaints of lewd behavior from then on.

One woman at the meeting said the cops hadn’t been of much help to beachgoers so far. She said beachgoers used to regularly call about a “predator” harassing women at the beach. When the cops came, they’d allegedly tell the women the man was harassing to put their clothes on. That man eventually pushed someone down the stairs, nearly killing them, she says. Barnes said he wanted to follow up on that.

A man with a coif of dark hair named Michael asked Barnes if his officers would now know nudity was legal in the park and would “never again harass someone for simply being in the buff.”

“I will make sure that everyone understands that nudity is legal,” Barnes says. “But I will not, I could not commit to saying never about anything. I don’t know why they may be there. They may be there for something totally unrelated and it gets attributed to that.”

“That’s, that’s not the question,” someone says.

“Well, then that’s the answer,” Barnes says. “Next question.”

When a woman asked what she should do the next time a police officer told her to get dressed at Denny Blaine, Barnes said she could remind them nudity is “free expression”  in the city of Seattle, the exact thing beachgoers did Sunday.

“Can we say that you told us it was okay?” she asked. If he answered, laughter and applause drowned it out.

“We are committed to working with you,” Barnes says, after shooting down Kimseylove’s request for another half hour of questions. “I don’t want anyone to walk out of here, number one, thinking you have a police department that doesn’t support who you are … Lastly, let me say this, this conversation is not over.”

Kimseylove wasn’t thrilled with Barnes.

“I think that was a show of nonsense,” Kimseylove says, frustrated that Barnes did not make more time for questions and left open the ambiguous possibility of future enforcement. “If there is an incident, you are the one with the data, the resources, the money, the information to figure out a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The only variable we are asking you to control, Seattle Police Department, is your own employees.”

That much he could have committed to, Kimseylove says. Four others who spoke with The Stranger weren’t confident this was truly over either.