Category: criminal justice

City Council, criminal justice, homelessness, labor, Mayor Harrell, Police

Council Budget “Balancing Package” Cuts Vacant SPD Positions, Restores Human Service Worker Raises
The city council’s budget “balancing package” still leaves a large gap the city will have to address in the future, possibly through new progressive taxes that have not yet been identified.

By Erica C. Barnett

Twelve days after a late-breaking revenue forecast punched new holes in the city of Seattle’s biennial budget, city council budget committee chair Teresa Mosqueda released a two-year “balancing package” that amends Mayor Bruce Harrell’s October budget proposal by eliminating proposed new programs and initiatives, allowing revenues from the JumpStart payroll tax to fund programs that would not ordinarily qualify for  JumpStart spending, and reducing the number of vacant police positions the city will continue to hold open next year from 200 to 120.

Mosqueda’s plan would eliminate proposed new funding for Shotspotter (or another gunshot detection system); reduce the proposed increase in police recruiting efforts; reduce the amount of new funding SPD will receive for new guns and ammunition; and reduce the amount of new spending on SPD’s Develop Our People leadership academy, a management training program for sergeants.

Harrell’s budget assumes that the 120 vacant positions Mosqueda’s proposal leaves untouched won’t be filled, and “reinvests” those on-paper savings back into other police programs. Mosqueda’s budget proposal doesn’t touch this “reinvestment” and still funds the vast majority of Harrell’s police hiring and recruitment plan, which still includes large bonuses for new recruits and enough money to hire a net 30 new officers over the next two years—an ambitious plan that would represent a rapid reversal of police hiring trends over the last several years.

At Monday’s initial council meeting to discuss the proposal, Councilmember Alex Pedersen said any proposal to cut vacant positions from SPD’s budget amounted to “revisiting the debate in 2020 and 2021” about “defunding” the police department. “I see in the [budget] proviso that it takes away the police department’s flexibility to use savings to address overtime needs, despite the fact that they have a severe staffing shortage,” Pedersen said.

Mosqueda anticipated the objection that eliminating funding for positions that will never be filled amounts to a “cut” in the police department. “We are not touching the 120 [police positions] and we are not touching the hiring plan,” Mosqueda told PubliCola Sunday. But “we know we are never going to fill [the remaining 80], so we are going to put those dollars back into the general fund.”

Councilmember Alex Pedersen said any proposal to cut vacant positions from SPD’s budget amounted to “revisiting the debate in 2020 and 2021” about “defunding” the police department.

Then, Mosqueda said, she looked at the items Harrell proposed funding with the money from the remaining 120 positions, and asked “what is above and beyond on that list. It was things like [the gunshot detection system] Shotspotter— gone. They wanted a PR firm that was in charge of the [police] recruiting plan. That’s gone. They wanted a website redesign investment. That’s gone. Anything that was not essential for the policy that was passed—gone.” 

Eliminating Shotspotter, SPD’s marketing plan, and a new $1.2 million-a-year anti-graffiti program would save about $3 million a year. Cutting and delaying capital projects funded by the city’s Real Estate Excise Tax, which stands to take a $64 million hit over the next three years, would save millions more. Another source of unanticipated funding—about $5 million a year—will come from the money the city planned to spend expanding an existing shelter in SoDo, a project King County Executive Dow Constantine abandoned earlier this year.

And then, of course, there is the JumpStart payroll tax, which the council originally earmarked for housing, Green New Deal programs, equitable development, and small businesses. Harrell’s budget would have empowered the mayor to use JumpStart for non-JumpStart purposes in perpetuity, by overturning a law, passed just last year, that only allows JumpStart spending for general government purposes if the city’s general fund falls below $1.5 billion.

Although Mosqueda’s budget provides a two-year exemption to this rule, she says she’s confident the council won’t have to do the same thing after 2024,, because by then a revamped progressive revenue task force will have come up with new funding sources to make the annual budget less susceptible to economic downturns.

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The balancing package also shifts some funds around so that JumpStart will mostly go to its intended purposes; for example, instead of using the payroll tax to 14 new city employees to staff Sound Transit’s light rail expansion plan, as Harrell proposed, Mosqueda’s proposal would use money from the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, funded mostly with vehicle license fees, to pay for those positions.

Although Mosqueda made some concessions on JumpStart, her budget also funds full inflationary wage increases for human service workers, rather than the sub-inflationary 4 percent increase Harrell proposed. Harrell’s plan would have required the council to overturn a 2019 law requiring cost of living adjustments that keep up with inflation; as Harrell, then council president, said in a speech supporting the measure at the time, the point of the law was to ensure that wages keep up with inflation during “hard times,” not just when things are going well.

The balancing package also keeps the city’s parking enforcement officers at the Seattle Department of Transportation, rather than transferring them back to the Seattle Police Department, as Harrell proposed. This plan, like Mosqueda’s proposal to stop funding 80 vacant police positions that cannot be filled, could end up a target for disingenuous accusations that the council is “defunding the police.”

PubliCola has heard that Councilmember Sara Nelson plans to resurrect Harrell’s original proposal to open up JumpStart spending permanently, including legislation originally sent down by Harrell’s office that would pin the threshold for JumpStart to go to non-JumpStart purposes to the rate of inflation, rather than a fixed $1.5 billion amount.

The balancing package also keeps the city’s parking enforcement officers at the Seattle Department of Transportation, rather than transferring them back to the Seattle Police Department, as Harrell proposed, and sets up a process for determining where parking enforcement will ultimately live at the city by next April.

“We’re asking them for a little bit of time to take the temperature down, have a conversation, and ask them what they need,” Mosqueda told PubliCola. “And then we’ll figure out which department has that structure. Is it SPD? Is it [the Community Safety and Communications Center? Is it a totally different department?” This plan, like Mosqueda’s proposal to stop funding 80 vacant police positions that cannot be filled, could end up a target for disingenuous accusations that the council is “defunding the police.”

The new budget proposal also includes funding to hire up to 90 parking enforcement officers and pay for supplies and new uniforms for the parking enforcement unit, which had to cut costs when the city moved parking enforcement to SDOT. The move increased administrative costs for the department by about $5 million due to a quirk in how  way general fund spending is allocated on administration; Mosqueda said neither SDOT nor then-mayor Jenny Durkan were honest with the council about the extra costs.

Other highlights of the balancing package, which the council will discuss in detail over the coming week:

• Instead of funding the mayor’s “Seattle Jobs Center,” which Harrell described in his first State of the City address as a portal “connecting workers and employers to new opportunities, workforce development, and apprenticeships,” the balancing proposal would use JumpStart revenues to fund the MLK Labor Council’s existing online “hiring hall,” while requesting a report from the city’s Office of Economic Development on what a city-run jobs site would look like.

Looking at Harrell’s budget proposal, which does not include any new details about the jobs center, “we were like, ‘what’s the plan here? What’s this going to look like? Have you consulted with labor partners?'” Mosqueda said. “And there wasn’t a lot of there there.”

• The proposal eliminates cash spending on large projects that would be funded by the Real Estate Excise Tax (REET) and proposes funding them instead with long-term debt, which increases the cost of projects but allows the city to fund them over time, rather than paying for entire big-ticket items up front. These include the redevelopment of Memorial Stadium, at Seattle Center, in collaboration with Seattle Public Schools, and the purchase of a building on the downtown waterfront for a new, 10,000-square-foot tribal interpretive center for the Muckleshoot Tribe.

• The balancing package would preserve most of the funding Harrell’s budget added for the new Unified Care Team, a group of city staffers from several departments that cleans up around and removes encampments. As we reported, Harrell’s budget adds 61 permanent positions to this team, the majority of them in the Seattle Department of Transportation and the Parks Department—the two departments primarily responsible for encampment sweeps.

However, the package would take most of the funding Harrell proposed spending to expand the HOPE Team, a group of city staffers that does outreach at encampments, and reallocate that money to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to pay for contracted outreach providers, such as REACH. The plan would still add one new “system navigator” to the UCT, so that there will be one outreach worker for each of five areas of the city where the UCT will operate. The proposal also outlines clear, distinct roles for the city’s own system navigators and KCRHA’s outreach teams.

The formal request poses a list of 23 questions and sub-questions about “emphasis patrols” and the city attorney’s “high utilizers” list, such as “Does SPD have a theory of change for emphasis patrols?” and “How much has the City spent on jail beds for those arrested via emphasis patrols on the high utilizers list?

• As we reported on Monday, the regional homelessness authority approached the council in October, five months after submitting its annual budget request, to ask for more than $9 million in new funding to pay for ongoing programs that were originally funded with one-time federal dollars during the COVID pandemic. The balancing package provides $3.9 million—the sane amount KCRHA said it needs to continue federally funded rapid rehousing programs—and says KCRHA will use $5.4 million from its own 2022 “underspend” to fund these programs.

• The proposal includes $4 million in 2023 alone for the LEAD and CoLEAD programs, which provide case management, services, and, in the case of CoLEAD, hotel-based lodging for people who are involved in the criminal legal system, including people experiencing homelessness. The Public Defender Association, which runs both programs, has said it will need to make dramatic cuts to either or both in the absence of full funding for both. Harrell’s budget provided just $2.5 million over two years for CoLEAD, stipulating that the money was supposed to be spent moving CoLEAD clients from hotels into tiny house villages; the balancing package increases the city’s total contribution to both programs but says the PDA must come up with “other ongoing funding sources” after next year. Continue reading “Council Budget “Balancing Package” Cuts Vacant SPD Positions, Restores Human Service Worker Raises” →

City Council, criminal justice, education, King County, Mayor Harrell

Inmates Say Jail Water Still Coming Out Brown; Morales Opposes Expansion of “Inequitable” Seattle Promise Program

1. Last week, King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) announced that it had resumed the use of tap water for drinking and cooking “after new tests, like all other tests performed recently, confirmed that tap water in the jail meets EPA and Washington Department of Health drinking water standards.” The jail began distributing bottled water after complaints that the tap water in cells, ordinarily the only water source for drinking, hygiene, and heating packaged foods, was cloudy or brown.

According to DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund, the county’s facilities division “has worked diligently with water quality experts to assess the quality of the water and attempt to determine the cause of any discoloration or turbidity in the water.” (PubliCola reported exclusively on the water shutdown last month). Inmates at the jail lacked tap water for more than a month while the county was doing tests, and two current inmates told us they did not have access to adequate bottled water.

Haglund provided copies of testing results that indicated the water is safe to drink. However, multiple reports from inside the jail continue to indicate that the water is brown and cloudy. According to one defense attorney, a client at the jail reported that running the faucet in his cell “causes it to turn brown/black with visible film on top and particles in it.” The mother of another inmate said her son reported that “the water is still brown” and that guards are no longer handing out water.

Haglund confirmed that the jail is no longer handing out bottled water, and said that after following up on a complaint about water quality, a jail captain “did not observe any discoloration, abnormalities, or any other inconsistencies in the water” in the south wing of the jail. “We will continue to follow up if we receive additional reports about water issues,” Haglund said.

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2. As part of the city budget deliberations that are still ongoing, City Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle, has proposed several amendments that would claw back most of $5.7 million in unspent dollars from the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy, which funds preschool, college assistance, and other programs. Mayor Bruce Harrell has proposed investing this underspend in Seattle Promise, whose scholarships have turned out to disproportionately benefit white students, rather than the preschool programs for which the funding was originally intended.

Morales’ amendments would reduce Harrell’s proposed new spending on Seattle Promise by $1 million in 2023 and $3.7 million in 2024 and require the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to come up with a new plan to prioritize low-income kids, first-generation immigrants, and students of color for Seattle Promise enrollment. The amendments would not reduce overall funding for the program, and it wouldn’t eliminate funding Harrell’s office has already allocated for Seattle Promise purposes in advance of this year’s budget process.

“White students get more access to more [Seattle Promise] dollars. They also have better retention rates and better outcomes than scholars of color. Until the structural problem is fixed, we shouldn’t be expanding it.”—City Councilmember Tammy Morales

The Seattle Promise program, which provides scholarships (“Tuition”) and financial assistance (“Equity Scholarships”) to Seattle high school students who attend a local college in Seattle. Most of the funding for Seattle Promise goes toward tuition, with a smaller portion paying for grants to help kids of color and low-income kids, who often don’t qualify for scholarships because they receive tuition assistance through state and federal programs, to pay for other college necessities like food and transportation.

The implementation plan for the levy says that if demand for tuition exceeds available funds, “tuition funds will be prioritized for low-income, first-generation” students and students of color. It also says that any levy funds that go unspent at the end of the year, including tuition and scholarship funds, will supplement the preschool programs that make up the bulk of FEPP levy spending. However, this language has never been adopted into law, which is why Harrell was able to propose rolling $5.7 million in unspent Seattle Promise dollars back into the tuition side of the program, rather than spending it on preschool.

Seattle Promise was explicitly designed to close race-based opportunity gaps that keep kids of color from attending college. In reality, according to Morales, almost half the program’s tuition funding has gone to white students. “The way that it is currently structured is inequitable,” Morales said at a committee meeting late last month. “White students get more access to more dollars. They also have better retention rates and better outcomes than scholars of color. … Until the structural problem is fixed, we shouldn’t be expanding it.”

Courts, criminal justice, Elections, King County

So Much for That Backlash: Voters Saying “Yes” to Progressive Local Candidates

By Erica C. Barnett

Anyone hoping for a continuation of 2021’s local backlash election, when Seattle voters chose a slate of candidates who promised to crack down on crime and visible homelessness, should have been disappointed by Tuesday’s early election results, which showed progressive and left-leaning local candidates defeating their more conservative opponents by solid margins.

As of Tuesday night, public defender Pooja Vaddadi was defeating incumbent Seattle Municipal Court judge Adam Eisenberg by a margin of 56 to 43 percent; embattled progressive municipal court Judge Damon Shadid was beating assistant city attorney Nyjat Rose-Akins 69 to 30 percent; and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg’s chief of staff, Leesa Manion, was defeating Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell 55 to 44 percent.

In fairness, it’s tough to directly compare the results of an odd-year (“off-year”) local election to those of an even-year midterm when progressive voters, in particular, are keyed up and perhaps unusually attuned to electoral politics. (Creeping fascism and the imposition of forced-birth laws tend to inspire a renewed interest in democracy).

And there is a major dropoff between high-profile, ballot-topping national races and those lower down the ballot—people simply vote in the national races and ignore the local ones. For example, in King County, nearly 50,000 people voted in the US Senate race between incumbent Patty Murray and Republican Tiffany Smiley (which Murray, defying some polls, was winning handily) and then chose not to cast a vote for King County Prosecutor—a dropoff of about 10 percent. In Seattle, King County Elections has counted about 218,000 ballots; yet fewer than 130,000 of those voters bothered choosing a candidate in either of the competitive Seattle Municipal Court races.

Still, those voters who did bother to vote in local races behaved differently than last year’s electorate, choosing more progressive candidates, and by larger margins, than many (including me) predicted. Conventional wisdom before the election was that Manion would face a tough challenge, if not outright Election-Night defeat, from Ferrell, a tough-on-crime former prosecutor who had the backing of local police guilds, suburban mayors, and the Seattle Times.

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Manion, though no lefty crusader, supports alternatives to prosecution and incarceration, including the Restorative Community Pathways diversion program for young people accused of first-time felonies; Ferrell called RCP a “look-the-other-way program” that lets kids off without consequences and criticized the entire concept of pre-filing diversion.

The municipal court races offer clearer ideological splits, along with margins that are unlikely to close enough to reverse the outcome after more votes are counted.

Vaddadi, who has to bring a public defender’s perspective to the bench, has accused Eisenberg of being excessively punitive toward some defendants and inflexible in his approach to domestic violence cases. Although Eisenberg has touted his work establishing the Domestic Violence Intervention Program for DV offenders who want to change, he belongs to a faction of the court that leans toward conventional, punishment-based approaches to crime, while Vaddadi represents a sharp left turn.

Shadid, meanwhile, faced what initially looked like a daunting challenge from Rose-Akins, whose primary campaign issue was the incumbent’s management of community court—a therapeutic program that enrolls qualifying misdemeanor defendants in services, including health care and case management, instead of jailing them. The city attorney’s office office battled with Shadid earlier this year when he declined to exclude Davison’s list of about 120 “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system from community court, and Rose-Akins announced her candidacy shortly after Davison won that battle.

At the state level, Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs was narrowly defeating nonpartisan challenger Julie Anderson in a race that is still too close to call.

One wild card this year is the vote to decide whether Seattle will adopt a new election system; as of Tuesday, Seattle voters were almost evenly split on this question, with slightly more saying we should keep our existing system than those saying we should adopt either ranked-choice voting or approval voting. (The ballot measure splits voting reform into two questions, asking voters whether they support changing the system and, in a separate question, whether they prefer ranked-choice voting or approval voting, regardless of how they voted on the first question.)

Seattle could end up rejecting both potential new systems by voting “no” on the first part of the ballot measure, but even if they do, the results for the second half of the question show overwhelming support for ranked-choice voting—the option supported by most local progressive groups, including all of Seattle’s Democratic legislative districts.

King County will release the next batch of ballots around 4:00 tomorrow afternoon.

criminal justice, Elections, King County

PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Jim Ferrell

By Erica C. Barnett

Current King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a former Republican who embraced a rehabilitative approach to public safety unusual among prosecutors, will retire next year after more than two decades in office. His longtime chief of staff, Leesa Manion, played a critical role in his office, helping to set and implement the policies for which Satterberg was known, including the decision to stop charging people for low-level drug possession and the creation of a number of alternatives to incarceration, including Restorative Community Pathways, which allows young people to avoid charges for first-time felonies by connecting to community-based groups and enrolling in their diversion programs.

Manion’s support for RCP and other Satterberg initiatives has made her a target for a number of tough-on-crime officials, including a group of South King County mayors who issued a statement in August demanding “improved and timely juvenile and adult felony criminal accountability at the County level,” including more prosecutions and a greater reliance on incarceration as a response to “the rising tide of crime and violence in our communities.”

Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell, who’s also running for prosecutor, signed this statement, as well as a letter calling on legislators to adopt harsher penalties for drug use in response to the Blake decision, which effectively decriminalized simple drug possession. Ferrell has made Restorative Community Pathways a centerpiece of his campaign, calling it a “look-the-other-way” program because participants don’t have to face charges as part of their participation in the program. As mayor, Ferrell has used similar language to describe unsheltered people, supporting his city’s ban on encampments in public spaces and accusing people who live in encampments of embracing a “lack-of-accountability lifestyle.”

PubliCola sat down (virtually) with both candidates for King County Prosecutor in September.

PubliCola (ECB): Understaffing is a major issue at the King County Jail: People can’t visit with their families or meet with defense attorneys and incarcerated people are often locked in their cells for 23 hours a day. Do you support any policies that will reduce the jail population, like releasing people who are not being held for violent offenses?

Jim Ferrell (JF): When I was seeking the the endorsement of the King County Corrections guild, I actually got to hear about a lot of these issues that are just really very difficult for them. First of all, they’re about 100 officers down, according to the guild, so they’ve got to get aggressive about filling those positions.

So, to your question, what I would say is, you can’t say “we’re just going to reduce the population of the jail” in a vacuum. What people are concerned about in the region is this sort of revolving door, where people get brought over and over and over for property crimes. So where it makes sense for community safety and where you don’t have a chronic offenders getting booked multiple times, I can see exploring that. But when people get booked for an offense, and then they’re out that later that day, that really erodes the confidence of the community that something’s actually happening.

“[Keeping the youth jail open] isn’t about jailing kids, it’s about making sure that if you committed a violent offense in King County, you’re going to be held accountable. And you can’t eliminate that.”

ECB: You’ve been very critical of Restorative Community Pathways, the county’s pre-filing juvenile diversion program. One of your criticisms is essentially that it’s a pre-filing program, which means that there isn’t a case and it doesn’t go before a judge. Do you oppose pre-filing diversion in general, and would you want to institute a different kind of juvenile diversion program? What’s the evidence that RCP isn’t working?

JF: One of the things I’ve said over and over is, I could fix RCP in a day. You take about five or six crimes off the list and add a judicial component at the beginning.

I don’t think for felonies, certain types of felonies, that you should have a pre-filing diversion. If you bring a gun to school, if you’re in somebody else’s living room in a residential burglary, if you’ve committed a robbery or a felony assault, I don’t think you should be eligible for a pre-filing diversion. And at a minimum, you’ve got to have a judicial piece of this and a check back. I don’t think it’s asking too much to say, did the person show up? Did they do what they were asked to do? And that has been consistently my concern with RCP.

And it just needs to be recalibrated. I’m not against diversions—clearly, the idea is to get people get young people back on track. But when you’re talking about felons, and these felonies that I just rattled off the top of my head are not nonviolent, you’ve got very serious crimes that are part of this. They’re just not appropriate. So that’s my position.

And this was launched with zero notice to the communities. These are cases coming out of our cities. No notice of this huge change. There is no case number, no judge, no plan, no check back. We don’t have any idea of what happens [with these cases]. This isn’t a diversion program. This is a look-the-other-way program, literally.

My concern about RCP is, ultimately if you try to sort of coax young people in the right direction, you could be creating a different type of offender. I always say comfort is the enemy of change. And if somebody has made that mistake, you don’t want to extinguish someone’s hopes or dreams, and you also want to make sure that they’re not unemployable moving forward. But you also need to make sure that you have created some just some level of discomfort, so they won’t do it again, or at least are incentivized not to.

ECB: King County Executive Dow Constantine has set the goal of closing down the juvenile jail by 2025. Do you think the goal of zero youth detention is realistic?

JF: That policy is not tethered to reality. It just isn’t. What do you do with a juvenile who pulls a trigger and shoots somebody? What do you do with the juveniles that are committing violent offenses? Where are they going to go? I mean, in fact, actually, we had the two juveniles that committed a robbery here at a pawn store, in Federal Way this year. They got electronic home detention after they held everybody in this pawn store captive for a while. And then they go out and kill somebody in Pierce County.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of the juvenile population that commits violent gun-related crimes, and you need a place to hold these individuals to protect the public, victims, and even themselves before they commit offenses that they just are never going to be able to take back. So this isn’t about jailing kids, it’s about making sure that if you committed a violent offense in King County, you’re going to be held accountable. And you can’t eliminate that.

And they just need to get serious about hiring people. And it is hard. You’ve got to incentivize and you’ve got to just get the job done. And that needs to happen. But it’s not all about locking people up. I mean, I’ve got a 15-year-old son, I would never want him locked up, ever. And I think, really, we’re talking about where you find an offender, or a juvenile, or even an adult criminal defendant on the spectrum of seriousness of the offense, priors, and danger to the community.

“Sometimes, with people that are in crisis and decompensating, you can get them back on a regimen of the medication that they need. It just depends on where you find people, where they’re at in the process, and what kind of support they had with family and friends.”

ECB: The King County Jail is not known as being a particularly therapeutic place. And a lot of people are currently in a cycle where they’re in jail for a couple days and released, only to get arrested again and repeat the cycle. Do you support keeping people in jail for short periods of time on minor offenses, even if it means they might lose their job, health care, or housing?

JF: Well, they used to say that the seventh floor of the King County Jail was the second largest mental health ward in all of Western Washington. And it’s certainly not a way to treat mental illness. Oftentimes, at the end of the month, when people would run out of their medication, whether they’re bipolar or have some sort of co-occurring mental health issue, they would essentially decompensate and end up in custody. And you don’t make these decisions in a vacuum—it’s individualized in regard to the decision to hold somebody or not hold somebody. But sometimes, with people that are in crisis and decompensating, you can get them back on a regimen of the medication that they need. It just depends on where you find people, where they’re at in the process, and what kind of support they had with family and friends.

ECB: What about situations where people are held in jail for no other reason than that they can’t afford bail?

JF: My last assignment at the prosecutor’s office was in CTI, the car theft initiative. And some of these guys would go from stolen car to stolen car to stolen car, and dump it in a parking lot, and then grab the one right one to it. So those high-impact offenders do constitute a lot of the caseload. And they do have impact. I mean, if my car gets stolen, I couldn’t have this meeting with you right now. I couldn’t get to work, I couldn’t take my son to school. It has a huge impact on people.

I think that somehow or another, we got this idea that property crimes, nonviolent offenses, we’re going to allow that. But if you’re committing a felony crime, you’re going to be impacting other people. And when I talk to people, they really feel like the systematic response has been inadequate, because the community is getting victimized repeatedly. There should be some punishment for that—reasonable punishment based on a person’s prior record, but there should be some punishment.

ECB: Seattle Municipal Court recently agreed to restrict so-called high utilizers from accessing community court. I’m curious what you thought of that decision and if you think the county’s therapeutic courts, like drug court and mental health court, are doing a good job, particularly with people who may not be ready or able to comply with the conditions established by the court.

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JF: I think drug court, mental health court, all of those type of courts are really the model for alternative dispositions. And it’s not zero tolerance—they really do want people to succeed. I talk a lot about drug court, because I think drug court is really the model for how to do this. It’s just so difficult for people to get off drugs and alcohol. They mask other issues that are that are also present. So we’ve got to get to the root causes. And you need to give people enough latitude, where if they have some sort of relapse, as long as it’s not flagrant, if they’re still willing to try, you don’t give up on them. But ultimately, what’s critically important about drug and mental health court is there’s a checkbox, there are accountability steps, and you can see whether somebody is going in the right direction or wrong direction.

ECB: You’ve talked about the case backlog at the prosecutor’s office, which has been largely due to cases piling up during COVID and the fact that the courts are still not operating at full capacity. What policies would you propose to get through that backlog more quickly?

JF: The first thing is, if you think of it like a pipeline, you’ve got a capacity issue. And there’s only a certain number of judges. And you’ve got speedy trial concerns. So you’ve got to expand the pipeline. And the way to do that is you got to hire more pro tem [judges].  And the prosecutor’s office has got to come up with a discernible plan. And the homicides and sexual assault cases, those absolutely have to go first. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Jim Ferrell” →

criminal justice, Elections

PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Leesa Manion

King County Prosecutor Candidate Leesa ManionBy Erica C. Barnett

Current King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a former Republican who embraced a rehabilitative approach to public safety unusual among prosecutors, will retire next year after more than two decades in office. His longtime chief of staff, Leesa Manion, played a critical role in his office, helping to set and implement the policies for which Satterberg was known, including the decision to stop charging people for low-level drug possession and the creation of a number of alternatives to incarceration, including Restorative Community Pathways, which allows young people to avoid charges for first-time felonies by connecting to community-based groups and enrolling in their diversion programs.

Manion’s support for RCP and other Satterberg initiatives has made her a target for a number of tough-on-crime officials, including a group of South King County mayors who issued a statement in August demanding “improved and timely juvenile and adult felony criminal accountability at the County level,” including more prosecutions and a greater reliance on incarceration as a response to “the rising tide of crime and violence in our communities.”

Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell, who’s also running for prosecutor, signed this statement, as well as a letter calling on legislators to adopt harsher penalties for drug use in response to the Blake decision, which effectively decriminalized simple drug possession. Ferrell has made Restorative Community Pathways a centerpiece of his campaign, calling it a “look-the-other-way” program because participants don’t have to face charges as part of their participation in the program. As mayor, Ferrell has used similar language to describe unsheltered people, supporting his city’s ban on encampments in public spaces and accusing people who live in encampments of embracing a “lack-of-accountability lifestyle.”

PubliCola sat down (virtually) with both candidates for King County Prosecutor in September.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola (ECB): I want to start by asking about the situation at the King County Jail. Among lots of other problems, understaffing is making it harder for public defenders to meet with clients. Do you support policies that will reduce the population at the jail, such as releasing people whose crimes aren’t violent? If not, why not?

Leesa Manion (LM): An important principle of our criminal legal system is that people have a right to counsel and that means they have to be able to meet with them. And also, if I’m thinking about the backlog of felony cases, we also want charged individuals to be able to meet with their attorneys, because we want to be able to resolve cases. And that’s in everyone’s interest—having people languish while they’re waiting to have their case heard is not helpful to anyone.

Second, I do believe in lowering populations for the right cases. I’ll be really honest with you, individuals who’ve committed violent crimes, sexual assaults, gun crimes, homicides—it’s really hard to argue for their release as individuals, and they’ve created great harm to an actual individual person, victim, family member. I don’t think we have enough robust, meaningful alternatives to detention in King County. We know from research that things like community housing, electronic home monitoring, text reminders, all have an impact, and they can protect public safety and secure the release of an individual and also help guarantee their return to court. We just don’t have enough of those.

ECB: Tell me a little bit about the adult diversion program that the county is planning to launch this year—is that the kind of meaningful alternative you’re talking about?

LM: There are a lot of similarities between the community diversion program and Restorative Community Pathways. The idea is to take first-time, nonviolent felony cases and to refer those individuals to community-based resources, so that they can get to the root cause of their poor decision making and behavior, and to offer those same types of resources to victims or harmed parties, including a loss recovery fund so that harmed parties have some of their out-of -pocket expenses taken care of.

Early reports show that RCP has a recidivism rate of 8 percent compared to either 21 percent or 58 percent, depending on what metric you’re looking at. Knowing that we can have success with juveniles, it kind of implies that we could try to have that same success with adults.

“I am proud of the fact that we file conservatively, that we want people to take accountability early on, and we’re not overcharging.”

ECB: The Seattle Times editorial board recently posted an interview with you and your opponent in which the Times said only 10 percent of sexual crimes reported to the sheriff’s office are prosecuted. The report they were citing actually reflected a much more nuanced picture than the way Times presented it, but it made me curious: Why do such a large number of sexual crimes never make it to the prosecutor’s office, much less lead to a conviction, and would you propose any steps to increase prosecutions of these cases?

LM: We participated in and fully cooperated with that audit. And one of the things they did is they looked at all the cases that we had declined. And the audit found that we did not declined a single case in error. And the recommendations that they had specific to [the prosecutor’s office], we were not only in agreement with, but were in the process of implementing by the time that the report was published. And one that was really meaningful to us was ensuring that a greater number of victims receive services earlier in the process. So we have [the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center], which is a great partnership. We also added 10 victim advocate positions in the office.

Once cases are reported, we have a shortage of police resources right now. The Seattle Police Department used to have 12 sexual assault detectives, and now they have four. And since they reduced, we have received 50 percent fewer referrals from SPD. I don’t think that there are 50 percent fewer sexual assaults that are going on. But I do think that their bandwidth and their capacity to respond and investigate sexual assaults was greatly diminished.

Then once those cases get referred to us, we have to look at the evidence, and we have to make that hard call about whether we have evidence sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And if we don’t have evidence, it’s really not only responsible, but it’s unethical for us to file those cases. You know, people often are like, oh, you should just file the case and give it to a jury and see if it sticks. That’s actually not our ethical obligation. There have been movements in recent years to change the definition of consent, for example, so that it does a more systemic job of addressing some of the challenges in prosecuting sexual assault cases, because that’s often the really difficult thing to establish—that there was lack of consent.

ECB: Your boss, Dan Satterberg, said at a recent forum that the system basically wouldn’t work if more than 5 percent of cases went to trial, which is why prosecutors offer more lenient sentences to people who plead guilty without taking cases to trial. Do you think this is leading to unjust outcomes or excessive sentences?

LM: I wish I had a simple answer to that. There are two practices in our country. One: There are prosecutor’s offices where they’re like, we are charging everything up front, we’re gonna charge you with five counts of this plus enhancements. And it makes it really easy to drop charges or drop enhancements. And among public defenders or private defense counsel, there may be this sense of, yeah, that’s a pretty easy sell to my client. When you’re looking at, say, 20 years versus 10, that’s easy math to do.

(Second, there’s) the way we do it, I am proud of the fact that we file conservatively, that we want people to take accountability early on, and we’re not overcharging. I’m really proud of that. I think the challenge with what I’ve heard described to me as the challenge of adding charges, is that yes, there are some who would characterize that as a trial penalty.

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ECB: Are you open to eliminating or reducing the use of cash bail for nonviolent offenses? What do you see as the purpose of cash bail, and how to you respond to the criticism that it keeps people in jail for long periods on charges while they’re still presumed innocent?

LM: We don’t have that path in King County, I’ll just be really honest with you. Cash bail was developed as a means of ensuring someone’s return to court. And we know that the challenge around cash bail is that it disproportionately impacts the poor and BIPOC communities. That is less of a challenge here in King County than in other parts of the country. But that doesn’t mean that we can fail to address it.

When you take away cash bail, and you give judges a binary choice of release or detain, I think you will have more judges making the decision to detain out of an abundance of caution. I think that the systemic change that would be more equitable, and more fair, and more long-lasting would be to have a robust set of alternatives [to incarceration] that well funded, designed to be fair, and designed also to protect public safety. Because that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Public safety means a lot of things to me. But the challenge about having people feel like they’re not safe is that it does threaten, in my view, some of the really great alternatives and some of the really great reforms that we have built over the past 15-plus years..

ECB: What sort of alternatives are you thinking of?

LM: I mean, some people really need structure. They might need a safe place to live, they might need treatment, they may not have a way to get to court, they might need transportation. They may not have the ability to kind of follow the calendar in a way that a type A like me might follow it, so they might need a reminder. And then there are some people that maybe they’ve committed a crime that is not homicide, but maybe it was a pretty serious assault, who could maybe be at home on electronic monitoring devices. It has kind of a full menu of options. And we just don’t have that in King County right now. It doesn’t mean we couldn’t build it. But that’s an opportunity for us.

ECB: Do you think the county’s therapeutic courts, like drug court and mental health court, have been successful in helping people with multiple barriers like long term addiction and homelessness?

LM: I think drug court has been successful, because we hear it in every single graduation. It doesn’t mean it’s successful for everyone, it doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for everyone. I believe in the value of drug court, veterans court, and mental health court, and I think we should provide increased access to all three of those therapeutic courts. I also think we need to offer more community-based treatment options. And we also need to offer treatment on demand. Individuals shouldn’t have to come in contact with the criminal justice system just to get help. And I think in order to have that have the type of impact that we want, we have to be honest about the size of the need in our community. When we aren’t honest about those types of things, we can bring a lot of people around the table together, and we can have a lot of great conversation, but we won’t have the results that we want.

“I think Operation New Day was effective in this way: It interrupted a scene, if you will, a collection of behaviors that people felt was scary and intolerable, and that caused a lot of alarm and concern. Focused policing can definitely have an impact, but we also have to have focused treatment and focused services.”

ECB: You supported Operation New Day, which targeted a few key intersections, like 12th and Jackson, with intensive hot-spot police patrols. I don’t know if you’ve been to 12th and Jackson recently, but the open-air market is very much back—it’s just sort of distributed around the whole block. Do you still consider those efforts a success?

LM: I think Operation New Day was effective in this way: It interrupted a scene, if you will, a collection of behaviors that people felt was scary and intolerable, and that caused a lot of alarm and concern. Focused policing can definitely have an impact, but we also have to have focused treatment and focused services. And in a perfect world, this is what we would have: We would have the mobile [police] precinct and we would have the mobile health clinic, and they would be right next door to each other. They’d be together. And we would have not only police officers addressing some of the alarming behavior that we saw on 12th and Jackson, like selling fentanyl to vulnerable individuals, but we would also have social workers and medical professionals seeing and treating individuals, and an army of social workers helping to find safe housing and safe shelter for individuals. In an ideal world, we’d have both. It’s not an either/or, it’s a yes, and.

ECB: Given that we don’t live in that ideal world, do you think this strategy is effective? Or is it just disrupting these activities at one location for a little while?

LM: I think it does disrupt. And I think there’s some value in the disruption. But I want to be really honest: It’s a short-term option. It can be beneficial to the community, and it can be beneficial to individuals who want to feel safe. It can be beneficial to business owners who are afraid to go into their businesses, and customers who are afraid to shop in those stores. But it doesn’t mean that it’s effective for the individuals who are suffering from trauma, mental health, substance use disorder. I understand why store owners were afraid at 12th and Jackson.  I also understand that there are individuals who are really vulnerable and are fighting to meet basic needs. We have to address both. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Leesa Manion” →

City Council, criminal justice, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz

Jail Water Still “Cloudy” After Three Weeks; Advocates Want to Move City’s Homeless Outreach Team to Regional Authority

1. More than three weeks after inmates at the King County Jail in downtown Seattle first reported brown water coming out of their taps, jail residents are still relying on bottled water, as the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention awaits more test results on water the DADJ describes as “cloudy,” but safe to drink. The cloudiness comes from unidentified particles suspended in the water.

Noah Haglund, a spokesman for DADJ, said jail residents get bottled water at every meal, during medication rounds, and on request. “Out of an abundance of caution, jail staff have continued to distribute bottled water several times a day since the first reports of cloudiness were received about three weeks ago,” DADJ spokesman Noah Haglund said.

But defense attorneys and people currently incarcerated at the jail dispute this, saying people are not getting enough water to drink.

“They’re saying they’re giving it to us at our request, but it’s not like that—we get [a 16-ounce bottle of] water once every six to eight hours,” one jail resident said. Another said he had received even less. At least one incarcerated person has filed a grievance with the department, saying the brown water that was coming out of the tap in late September made him sick.

Jail inmates purchase food from the commissary, such as ramen and rice, to supplement the meager jail diet, using hot tap water to cook it. According to Haglund, the county’s Facilities Maintenance Division is still waiting on test results from water samples taken this week at the jail.

2. Some advocates for people experiencing homelessness are pushing to move the city’s HOPE Team, which does outreach and offers shelter beds to unsheltered people in encampments the city is about to sweep, out of the city and into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, PubliCola has learned. Council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda, who did not respond to a request for comment, is reportedly leading the internal discussion about this potential change to the way the city responds to encampments.

Meanwhile, one organization that has successfully moved homeless people with high needs into hotels throughout the pandemic, the Public Defender Association, is seeking full funding for its LEAD and Co-LEAD  programs. Harrell’s budget provides a total of $2.5 million for both programs next year, which isn’t enough to keep both programs going

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Harrell’s budget would expand the HOPE Team from four to 10 “system navigators” at a cost of about $1 million; moving these workers to the KCRHA, along with funds that help HOPE Team members locate available shelter beds and coordinate their work with other agencies, would shift about $2.7 million out of the city’s budget and into KCRHA’s.

That $2.7 million represents a fraction of the $38 million Harrell wants to spend on a new, consolidated encampment cleanup team called the Unified Care Team, which already includes dozens of employees in the parks, transportation, and public utilities departments. (That $38 million also includes a related effort called the Clean City Initiative). Harrell’s budget includes $15 million in new spending to increase the team to 61 members, far more than the controversial, disbanded Navigation Team had at its peak.

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The KCRHA does not oversee the city’s routine encampment removals, which include both pre-scheduled and short-notice sweeps. It’s unclear how the transfer of these employees would impact their work at encampments and their ability to coordinate with the city and homeless service providers. The request is not coming from the KCRHA, which currently has its hands full fighting against another Harrell proposal that would effectively cut homeless provider pay by permanently capping mandatory contract increases at 4 percent, far less than the rate of inflation.

Meanwhile, one organization that has successfully moved homeless people with high needs into hotels throughout the pandemic, the Public Defender Association, is seeking full funding for its LEAD and Co-LEAD  programs. Harrell’s budget provides a total of $2.5 million for both programs next year, which isn’t enough to keep both programs going. Co-LEAD provides hotel-based lodging and intensive case management to people experiencing homelessness; LEAD is a case management program for people involved in the criminal legal system, including those who are housed. In addition to underfunding these programs, Harrell’s budget assumes Co-LEAD will begin moving people into new tiny house villages, rather than the hotel rooms the program currently uses.

Building a new tiny house village to shelter Co-LEAD clients wouldn’t just represent a downgrade in terms of facilities (hotels, unlike tiny houses, have individual showers, restrooms, and running water); it would also require the PDA to plan and win approval for a new, mostly outdoor shelter complex somewhere in Seattle, where protesters just killed a 90-bed expansion of an existing homeless shelter in the industrial neighborhood of SoDo.