Police camera footage taken after four people were arrested for writing messages in chalk on a temporary barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct.
By Erica C. Barnett
The city of Seattle has to pay $680,000, including punitive damages, to four people arrested and jailed for writing anti-police messages in sidewalk chalk on a temporary concrete barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct building during a January 2021 protest against police brutality. The jury verdict came after a six-day trial in US District Judge Marsha Pechman’s courtroom.
The four plaintiffs in the case—Derek Tucson, Robin Snyder, Monsieree de Castro, and Eric Moya-Delgado—were arrested and booked into the King County Jail on January 1, 2021 after writing messages in chalk on a temporary concrete wall outside the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct. The county jail was not accepting bookings at the time because of COVID, but, according to the lawsuit, SPD was able to override the county’s policy by using a so-called “protester exception.”
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison argued, on behalf of SPD, that the chalked messages—which included “BLM,” “peaceful protest,” and “fuck SPD”—violated a local law against “property destruction,” a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail.
“Based on the evidence presented at trial, the jury found the defendants arrested and booked the plaintiffs because of the content or viewpoint of their speech,” an attorney for the four plaintiffs, Braden Pence, said in a statement. “We hope this verdict will be a warning and a lesson to police officers and other government officials across the country who violate the First Amendment—that they are and will be held accountable when they arrest and jail people for protected speech.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Last June, Pechman issued an injunction against the portion of the property destruction law that pertains specifically to graffiti, calling it so vaguely worded that it effectively “criminalizes innocent drawings,” including sidewalk chalk drawings by children. In practice, the judge, Marsha Pechman noted, the law allows police to arbitrarily decide which speech is acceptable and which is cause for arrest based on viewpoint, creating “a real and substantial threat of censorship.”
Although the injunction, which prevented the city from enforcing its graffiti law, was eventually overturned, the city attorney’s office continued to pursue the underlying case.
The lawsuit gave several examples in which the police department has encouraged and even participated in sidewalk chalking when it supports their political viewpoint—chalking messages across the sidewalk outside City Hall, for example, during a “Back the Blue” event in the summer of 2020, a time when protests against police violence were happening across the city.
According to the protesters’ attorneys, the jury found not only that the SPD officers made the wrong decision by arresting and booking the four defendants, but that their decisions were “retaliatory” and that they acted “with malice, oppression, or reckless disregard for the plaintiffs’ rights.”
A spokesman for City Attorney Ann Davison said that because the city hired outside attorneys to defend SPD, they do not know yet how much the lawsuit will cost the city. Davison not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.
1. City Attorney Ann Davison’s office reportedly plans to bring back so-called Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) orders, a change that may require legislation, PubliCola has learned. SODA orders, which the city stopped issuing under former city attorney Pete Holmes, banish people who have committed drug offenses from engering areas with “continuous drug activity,” as a state law authorizing such exclusions puts it, for any reason; people who violate the law by going into these parts of the city can be prosecuted for a separate crime.
In the past, these orders were commonly used by Seattle police and the City Attorney’s Office to target people who violated the city’s (since overturned) drug loitering law or who were caught using or selling drugs in public, including cannabis. SPD’s policy manual still includes descriptions of 17 SODA areas from which people convicted of drug offenses can be banned.
Studies of SODA areas in Seattle have found that they can exacerbate biased policing when police target people of color, as well as people who appear to be homeless, for exclusions from large swaths of the city, including the areas where most social services are located.
“[C]ompliance with banishment orders is frequently complicated by the fact that the spaces from which people are banned usually offer crucial opportunities for social contact and relationships,” two researchers, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, concluded in 2010. A 2021 community task force report found that SODA areas can also “isolate people from their friends, families, and communities within areas like downtown Seattle, the Central District, and much of Southeast Seattle, which are considered drug areas.”
The most likely initial SODA areas would be in downtown Seattle, where the sidewalk at Third and Pike is often so crowded with drug users and buyers that it’s unnavigable, and at 12th and Jackson, where razor wire and fencing around a single block has simply moved a market for drugs and stolen goods into the immediately surrounding area.
Councilmember Cathy Moore previously said she plans to revive a repealed law banning “prostitution loitering” on Aurora Ave. N; she did not respond to a request for comment on potential SODA legislation. The city has also issued “Stay Out of Prostitution Area” orders to sex workers in the past, and also had a “drug loitering” ordinance that has since been overturned.
The city attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
2. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s labor relations director, Shaun van Eyk, is out after two and a half years on the job. Van Eyk, who previously spent almost six years as the labor representative for the city’s largest labor union, PROTEC17, announced the news on LinkedIn, saying he had “recently stepped down” from the position.
A spokesperson for Harrell confirmed that van Eyk had “stepped down as Director of Labor Relations,” and said the mayor’s deputy general counsel, Chase Munroe, is the interim director. Munroe was a legislative aide to Harrell for almost six years, until Harrell left the city council in 2019; he got his law degree and founded a sports law agency before rejoining Team Harrell in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The city’s labor relations director represents the city in negotiations with city unions, like PROTEC17; earlier this year, the city approved a contract providing cost of living increases totaling 9.7 percent—a significant boost from Harrell’s initial offer of 1 percent. As labor relations director, van Eyk was also a party to the city’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which gave police retroactive pay increases of 24 percent, making SPD the highest-paid department in the region.
Last year, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office pursued charges against 30 men accused of “sexual exploitation,” or patronizing a sex worker. Most people charged with this misdemeanor are men of color, and many are immigrants; of the 30 prosecuted la required a court interpreter.
By Erica C. Barnett
Shortly before dark one evening last April, a young woman stood outside the Lowe’s hardware store at the corner of 125th and Aurora, looking for customers. Clutching a silver fanny pack, she stood alone near the entrance to the parking lot, dressed in eye-catching moon boots, a reddish cropped tank top, and a black skirt she later described as “a very, very short skirt that barely covered my rear.”
According to her later account, a young man driving a decades-old sedan honked his horn, made a U-turn, and pulled into the driveway of the parking lot, blocking traffic in his haste. After a quick negotiation, the woman later testified, the man said he would give her $80 for “quick sex,” prompting the woman—Seattle police officer Kortney North—to give a signal.
Within moments, the parking lot became a blur of activity, as teams of uniformed officers swooped in. Simultaneously, a detective driving a vehicle filled with other “decoys”—more female officers, also dressed up as sex workers—arrived to whisk North away. Four surveillance officers remained just out of sight, as did a second surveillance vehicle nearby. Once police had the man—we’ll call him James— in handcuffs, an officer drove him a nearby precinct, where still more officers awaited to process and release him.
A few weeks later, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office charged him with one misdemeanor count for soliciting a sex worker—a crime that carries a maximum of 90 days in jail, plus fines that can add up to several thousand dollars..
Most men charged with sexual exploitation—the city’s official term for soliciting a sex worker—end up agreeing to a deal with prosecutors. Last year, according to the Seattle Municipal Court, the city attorney’s office brought sexual exploitation charges against 30 individuals. Only one, James, insisted on his innocence.
And so, late last month, North found herself testifying before a jury as a witness for the prosecution in a courtroom on the 11th floor of the Seattle Municipal Court building in downtown Seattle.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this.”—Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham
Because undercover officers don’t wear video cameras or carry recording devices—and don’t collect money from the men they target—the outcome of prostitution cases depends almost entirely on whose story the jury believes. Without tangible evidence proving that James was guilty, the prosecutors tried to tell a story about a hypothetical woman forced into sex work by circumstances beyond her control.
“Eighty dollars. That’s how much [he] thought sex with Officer North was worth that day,” assistant city prosecutor Alisa Smith said in her closing argument. “There is no question about what [was] going on. [He] was out to buy sex with … someone whose life circumstances had brought her to a place where she needed some quick cash.”
The jury took four hours to find James not guilty.
Criminalizing sex work is broadly unpopular; during jury selection, echoing national sentiment, 23 of 25 potential jurors said they didn’t think sex work should be illegal. But the city remains deeply invested in penalizing the practice—and pouring resources into prosecuting men who patronize sex workers.
Like James, most of the people prosecuted for patronizing prostitutes are men of color, and defense attorneys say many are immigrants—mostly Latino—who don’t speak English fluently or at all.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this,” Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham, the supervising attorney on James’ case, said. “Often, with clients who are charged with [sexual exploitation], English is not their first language and they often have immigration issues, so this charge is not a good one for a client of be convicted of.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Publicly available police reports don’t usually indicate defendants’ race or immigration status, but it’s suggestive that a large majority of the men prosecuted for sexual exploitation last year had Hispanic, African, or Asian surnames, and that half requested an interpreter from the court. Because solicitation stings are based entirely on an officer’s claim that she made a verbal agreement to exchange sex for money, a defendant’s ability to understand what an officer is saying could be a strong argument against a guilty verdict—if any of those cases ever went to trial.
To understand why the city puts so much energy, effort, and money into chasing down men for a low-level misdemeanor that most people think should be legal, it’s helpful to know that under city law and SPD policy, sex work is virtually synonymous with human trafficking—one police source described women being sent around the country on a circuit, which—police argue—prevents women from developing ties or getting help.
This view is reflected in the language of the law itself; in 2015, then-city council member Bruce Harrell sponsored a bill, which passed unanimously, changing the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation.”
The idea, backed strongly by then-city attorney Pete Holmes (who later vacated all outstanding charges against sex workers) was to focus on the demand side of the equation by focusing on the men buying sex rather than the people, mostly women, selling it. As Harrell summarized in 2015, “we will now refer to [solicitation] as a crime relative to sexual exploitation [because] that’s what actually occurs when people are being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution.”
In about eight years of representing defendants in such cases,” Branham countered, “I’ve never seen a case where there has been any link to sex trafficking.”
A spokesman for the city attorney’s office said there has not been any “greater emphasis on sex work” since Davison took office in 2022. “However, the City Attorney is very aware of the continuing problem and the tragic impact on women and girls who are preyed upon by criminals engaged in human trafficking,” he said.
Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.
Pursuing men who buy sex is time-consuming and expensive, although it’s surprisingly difficult to determine just how time-consuming and how expensive. SPD did not respond to questions about what its sting operations cost and how they operate, and a spokesman for Davison’s office said “there is not a cost tracking system in place for criminal trials.”
But with the median SPD employee making well over $150,000 —and with a three-day trial that required, at minimum, dozens of hours of preparation for both prosecutors and defense attorneys—it’s easy to see how the costs can add up. According to data from the city, in 2022, SPD arrested 28 people for “purchasing prostitution” on Aurora over the course of five operations. In 2023, that number was 41, in six operations. Those numbers were down significantly from 2019, when police arrested 87 people, and up dramatically compared to earlier in the decade, when SPD stings were aimed at sex workers, not their customers.
Testimony at the trial provided a closer look at the scale of these stings, which can involve as many as 20 officers. In addition, before going undercover, officers have to go through “decoy school”—a two-day training where they learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios they might encounter, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to make an arrest.
“There was probably 10 pages of acronyms that we went over, just so that we would be familiar with those kinds of terms and not be thrown off if somebody approached us,” North said.
“The trial really highlighted the immense expense involved in these stings and the resources that are thrown at them, and I just can’t see what value they are getting,” said Branham, who, along with lead attorney Claire Beckett, worked on James’ defense over several months and appeared in court during all three days of his trial..
Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.
Last week, for example, the domestic violence arraignment calendar included six assault cases—cases in which women described being punched, beaten, and strangled by intimate partners—that sat around for 60 days or longer before Davison’s office filed charges. According to a 2017 report by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the longer it takes to file charges in a domestic violence case, the less likely a victim is to cooperate with prosecutors, and the harder it becomes to track down witnesses; delay also “diminishes the quality of DV cases as its sends a message to victims and courts that the case is not a priority.”
DUI cases are also stacking up. Out of 14 cases on the docket for the first week of February, 11 involved cases from early 2022 for which the two-year statute of limitations was about to run out. Delays at the state toxicology lab, which examines blood samples in DUI cases, are only responsible for about half of this two-year delay, which has been consistent for much of the last year. With two years’ lag time, successful prosecutions are rare; in 10 of the 11 cases on last week’s docket, court records indicate the defendant could no longer be found.
Should the city be spending time, money, and court resources prosecuting men who pay for sex? The question is especially relevant at a time when both the police department and the city attorney’s office say they’re short-staffed and stretched thin.
At a time when SPD claims it doesn’t have enough officers to respond to 911 calls promptly, it’s worth looking at the sheer quantity of resources they pour into apprehending sex buyers on Aurora. At a time when the city attorney’s office says it’s having trouble staffing its criminal division with qualified attorneys, it’s worth questioning why they have chosen to use those scarce attorneys prosecuting men for buying sex, rather than the “serious” misdemeanors, like DUIs and domestic violence, that Davison has said are among her top priorities.
Want to get PubliCola delivered right to your inbox? Sign up to get daily posts!
Natalie Walton-Anderson; photo via neighborsforann.com.
By Erica C. Barnett
Natalie Walton-Anderson, the head of City Attorney Ann Davison’s criminal division, is leaving at the end of February after just over two years in the position, PubliCola has learned. According to a spokesman for Davison’s office, Walton-Anderson was not fired or asked to resign; in an email announcing her resignation to staff yesterday, Walton-Anderson wrote that she needs to “take a break and reset after 27 years working in the criminal legal system.”
In an email to staff, Davison praised Walton-Anderson’s “tremendous impact at the City Attorney’s Office. … Under her leadership, the Criminal Division eliminated the 5,000 case backlog my administration inherited, created the High Utilizer Initiative, significantly increased our pre-file diversion program, and helped repair many parts of criminal justice system that were not functioning.”
The high-utilizer initiative targets people with multiple arrests on their records for prosecution, including people whose underlying problems—like profound addiction—are poorly served by arrest, prosecution, and jail. Initially, Davison’s office used the framework to exclude people from community court, a therapeutic court that allowed some misdemeanor defendants to access services without risking jail for failing to comply with court orders. Later, Walton-Anderson announced that her office was withdrawing from community court, effectively ending the program.
As Davison noted in her email, Walton-Anderson focused on “clearing the backlog” of cases by making filing decisions quickly, which initially meant dismissing many old cases that would have been difficult to prosecute, given their age.
But she has also reportedly been aggressive about filing charges in drug-related cases that would ordinarily get channeled into the city’s pre-booking diversion program, LEAD, which enrolls low-level offenders into community-based services instead of sending them through the criminal legal system. Police (and, until the passage of a law enabling prosecutions for public drug use limited its scope, community members) use LEAD as an alternative to arrest and booking; the program, started in Belltown in 2011, has been replicated across the country.
People whose cases aren’t diverted to LEAD can end up in pre-filing diversion programs; these programs, which include art therapy and online courses, are generally geared toward people with less history in the criminal legal system and those without serious underlying issues like fentanyl addiction.
The city attorney’s office did not provide details about the hiring process for Walton-Anderson’s successor; the position is apparently not subject to a citywide hiring freeze, which exempted “essential” roles. Last year, after Davison’s office said they were having trouble recruiting qualified assistant prosecutors, the city increased prosecutors’ wages by 20 percent.
City attorney Ann Davison announced Monday that the city has filed an amicus brief asking the US Supreme Court to overturn a Ninth Circuit District Court ruling that restricted the ability of Grants Pass, a city in southwestern Oregon, to criminalize sleeping in public places. In a statement, Davison said Johnson v. Grants Pass “strips local authority from a complex problem” and denies “local autonomy” to cities like Seattle.
Under a separate Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. Boise, cities are not allowed to remove homeless people from public places in most circumstances unless there is shelter available. In the Grants Pass ruling, a panel of three Ninth Circuit judges agreed with lower courts that the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which imposed fines and criminal penalties for sleeping in public and banned homeless people from using items like blankets, cardboard boxes, and pillows, is unconstitutional.
The brief—which was also joined by the National League of Cities, the North Dakota League of Cities, Colorado Springs, San Diego, and about a dozen other cities across the country—argues that by restricting cities’ authority to ban sleeping in public, Martin and Johnson “compel local governments to choose between providing shelter or surrendering public lands to encampments that harm local communities.”
The city of Seattle, in other words, is arguing that Seattle should be able to sweep homeless people without the city having to “choose” to provide them places to go.
Additionally, they are arguing that calling unsheltered people “involuntarily homeless” grants a special status on people who are, in reality, engaging in a voluntary behavior by sleeping outdoors, much as an alcoholic who is caught being drunk in public has chosen to drink of his own volition. (This is from a real Supreme Court case from 1968, whose conclusions many modern addiction experts would probably dispute).
Seattle has its own ban on sleeping in public that allows sweeps in two general situations. In some cases, the city gives people living in an encampment 72 hours’ notice that they have to leave the area, then offers shelter to the people who remain. This, in theory, meets the requirements of Martin—even though, as many advocates for unsheltered people have pointed out, the city’s “offer” may be for shelter that is across town, requires a person to abandon their spouse or partner, or is inappropriate for a person’s behavioral or physical health conditions.*
Many people decline to “accept” these untenable shelter offers, which has caused city to suggest the real problem is people “refusing” shelter, rather than a lack of appropriate shelter and housing. “A 2021 study in Seattle found that offers of shelter were declined 52% of the time,” the brief notes, echoing these perennial claims. “Undoubtedly, sleeping outdoors can afford more freedom and autonomy than congregate sleeping arrangements. But this also shows that, at least for some people sometimes, personal decisions and preferences can play a role in whether someone continues to be unsheltered.”
The brief even suggests that rules banning encampments are like city zoning laws that prohibit certain uses in residential areas, citing a 1974 Supreme Court ruling (on frat houses, of all things) that allowed to establish “zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.” Unsheltered people, according to the brief, “directly undermine these legitimate aims and turn zoning schemes into hollow promises.”
In recent years, it’s become common for the city to exploit a loophole in the rules governing encampment sweeps to remove people and throw away belongings, such as tents and survival gear, without notice. In these case, the justification is that any person or object occupying a public space, including remote areas of public parks, constitutes an “obstruction” to the public’s use or potential use of that space. Earlier this year, a King County Superior Court judge ruled this interpretation of the city’s rules unconstitutional on privacy grounds; Davison immediately appealed that case, and the sweeps continue.
The city’s argument, as expressed in the brief, is a muddle of conflicting perspectives. The brief argues that requiring cities to choose between sweeps and shelter for every homeless person is an unconstitutional imposition; cities already spend hundreds of millions of dollars on homelessness, but the problem is only getting worse, which shows that spending money isn’t going to fix the problem. Since that’s the case, the brief continues, cities should be allowed to sweep encampments using whatever criteria they deem necessary, because encampments “monopolize common spaces like parks and sidewalks” and create “enormous volumes of garbage, human waste, and other health hazards like used needles.”
“A town that is not allowed to keep its sidewalks clear and parks open is not really a town at all. It is just a cluster of people living close together,” the brief concludes.
The brief even suggests that rules banning encampments are like city zoning laws that prohibit certain uses in residential areas, citing a 1974 Supreme Court ruling (on frat houses, of all things) that said cities could establish “zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.” Unsheltered people, according to the brief, “directly undermine these legitimate aims and turn zoning schemes into hollow promises.”
“A town that is not allowed to keep its sidewalks clear and parks open is not really a town at all. It is just a cluster of people living close together,” the brief concludes.
If the Supreme Court takes up the case, it could overturn rules specific to the Ninth District that make it harder for cities to simply sweep homeless people from public places. But even if Seattle wins the right to sweep people with impunity, it won’t change a basic reality: Homeless people don’t stop existing—and needing to sleep, eat, discard trash, and use the restroom— just because cities pass bans on sleeping and deny them access to resources, like trash cans and indoor plumbing, that the rest of us take for granted.
*Other programs exist that do route people to appropriate shelter, services, and housing, but these involve extensive outreach and engagement, and are generally separate from the city’s encampment removals.
Sara Nelson, Andrew Lewis, and Lisa Herbold all supported the legislation empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute drug users.
By Erica C. Barnett
On Wednesday, the Seattle City Council adopted a new law empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people who use drugs in public, or who are caught with illegal drugs other than cannabis, on a 6-3 vote, with every council member except Teresa Mosqueda, Kshama Sawant, and Tammy Morales voting “yes.” The new law makes public drug use and simple possession gross misdemeanors for the first time in Seattle history.
An earlier version of the bill, which would have incorporated a new state drug criminalization law into the city’s municipal code, died on a 5-4 vote after Councilmember Andrew Lewis, a former city prosecutor, changed his mind in response to public testimony and Davison’s decision to unilaterally end a local therapeutic court called community court. The state law is as the “Blake fix” because it re-criminalized drug possession and public use after the state supreme court overturned an existing law that made public drug use and simple possession a felony.
The new version of the bill is significantly longer, but substantively similar, to the previous legislation. The new bill is significantly wordier, largely because it now includes more than 30 nonbinding “whereas” clauses stating the city’s intent to, among other things: Strongly recommend that police consider diversion before making arrests; avoid “repeating the mistakes of the past”; and review the impact of the legislation in the future.
The bill targets only people who use drugs in public, Councilmember Tammy Morales noted, targeting users who are poor or homeless while ignoring all the drug use that takes place behind closed doors. “If we wanted to address drug addiction, we would not be focused only on those who use it in the streets where we can see their suffering.”
It also contains new provisions saying police will, in the future, adopt policies governing when and how to divert people instead of arresting them, along with a section saying police “may” consider whether a person using drugs is harming others or just themselves when deciding whether to make an arrest.
Finally, the bill contains some reporting requirements and sets up a new committee to evaluate how the law is going in the future.
Proponents of the bill, with the exception of its original sponsor Sara Nelson, made a lot of all these nonbinding suggestions and reporting requirements. (Nelson wanted to eliminate the evaluation committee as well as a nonbinding recommendation that the police use officers who have received crisis training, who make up more than half the department, to respond to public drug use, saying both proposals infringed on the authority of Police Chief Adrian Diaz and Mayor Bruce Harrell. After other council members noted that Harrell’s office approved both provisions, a majority of the council voted down both of Nelson’s amendments.)
“This does not create new [police] authority. It seeks to limit it in a way that does not exist under state law,” one of the bill’s two sponsors, Councilmember Lisa Herbold, said. “This is a commitment to not repeat the errors of the past.”
Lewis, who co-sponsored the legislation with Herbold, said the bill was not intended to be “the magic solution that fixes the situation that we are facing,” but added that it “gives additional guidance and [a] focus on public health best practices that are alternatives to incarceration and entering the criminal legal system.”
Opponents of the bill pointed out that not only is that “guidance” nonbinding, the legislation comes with no additional funding to implement diversion or treatment; instead, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said, it offers a “hollow promise” of alternatives to arrest. Under the council’s regular process, the legislation would have been on the agenda for next week, coinciding with Harrell’s 2024 budget proposal, which will reveal how much, if any, funding Harrell will propose for expanding diversion programs such as LEAD, which is already oversubscribed for this year.
“So while the emphasis is on pre-arrest diversion and not arrest, we are not actually able to follow through with that without assurances that [these strategies] will be in the budget,” Mosqueda said.
Mosqueda, who chairs the council’s budget committee, also noted that Harrell’s “plan to invest $27 million toward facilities, treatments, and services to address the opioid crisis” is not actually a new $27 million investment. Instead, that number includes $7 million in unspent capital grants that will fund a new DESC overdose recovery site on Third Ave., as PubliCola exclusively reported last month, among other investments, plus an average of about $1 million a year from statewide settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors, spread over the next 18 years.
Additionally, Harrell can’t actually commit that future money (whose value will depreciate with inflation over time), because the city allocates funding annually through the budget, so the money—which does have to be spent on purposes related to drug addiction—could pay for other things in the future.
Tammy Morales’ challenger Tanya Woo held a rally outside City Hall before the vote. The legislation, she acknowledged, isn’t perfect, but at least it “does something” to address public drug use in places like 12th and Jackson, in the Chinatown/International District.Councilmember Tammy Morales—whose challenger in this year’s election, Tanya Woo, held a rally with Chinatown/International District residents outside City Hall to highlight Morales’ opposition to the bill—said the legislation was “ineffective… unnecessary, and dare I say, performative.” The bill targets only people who use drugs in public, Morales noted, targeting users who are poor or homeless while ignoring all the drug use that takes place behind closed doors.
“If we wanted to address drug addiction, we would not be focused only on those who use it in the streets where we can see their suffering. We would be standing up real alternative for everyone,” like medication-assisted treatment, counseling, social supports, residential treatment, and walk-in clinics, Morales said.
The bill mentions many of these things—identifying “treatment” as a preferred approach, for example, in ten different places—but does nothing to make it happen. Instead, it doubles down on a law enforcement-based approach to a public health crisis.
In the past, these orders were commonly used by Seattle police and the City Attorney’s Office to target people who violated the city’s (since overturned) drug loitering law or who were caught using or selling drugs in public, including cannabis. SPD’s 
