Three years ago, before the City Council unanimously appointed Derrick Wheeler-Smith as director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, a few voices of dissent stood out among the many supporters who showed up to urge the council to approve his nomination. SOCR conducts investigations into alleged civil rights violations, enforces fair-housing law, oversees several city commissions, and is in charge of the city’s internal Race and Social Justice Initiative.
Wheeler-Smith is a longtime community advocate, high-school basketball coach, and Rainier Valley resident who headed up King County’s Zero Youth Detention Program and has advocated for treating gun violence as an urgent public health issue. Appointed by then-mayor Bruce Harrell, Wheeler-Smith publicly criticized Harrell’s high-profile initiative to put several neighborhoods under police camera surveillance, signing his name to a memo that laid out the harms cameras can pose to the communities of color that most often find themselves under police surveillance.
But back in 2023, not everyone considered Wheeler-Smith a well-rounded choice to head the civil rights department. The dissenters included members of the city’s LGBTQ Commission, who raised concerns about Wheeler-Smith’s previous employment by a Christian nonprofit with explicitly homophobic workplace policies. They also criticized Wheeler-Smith’s decision, shortly after taking the interim director position at SOCR, to send staff a long quote about morality that was written by a homophobic Kirkland pastor, which Wheeler-Smith misattributed to George Carlin. The quote criticized premarital sex, overweight people, and people who take psychiatric drugs…