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.
Michelle Kfoury and Katrina Outland are domestic violence prosecutors and Emilee McNeilly is a domestic violence advocate. The three of us were involved in a DV assault trial that also took place last week, and had nothing to do with the RV case.
Thank you – I will correct this. I asked the city attorney’s office about this directly well before posting and unfortunately they did not respond to this question.
From the article above…
“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”
So you don’t like the way Davidson is dealing with hardcore drug addicts/career criminals. I understand, I get that. So what’s the way forward? I mean Seattle is getting overrun with these poor bastards. Nothing the City has tried over the past 10 years has really helped with drug fueled street crime. Community court didn’t work… so what’s next?
The saddest thing about the Seattle Left is that they have no champions, no solutions, just this constant whine against their political enemies. The Left just got routed the last couple of Seattle elections… Ms. Barnett will tell you because the evil forces of Big Business paid big money for their candidates…. and maybe she’s right, but maybe it’s because the Left just has nothing positive to bring to party? The only two City Council members who have had any real vision in the last decade are Khama Sawant and Sara Nelson. Publicola hates both of them. At what point does the “gotcha journalism” stop and the real work begins?
Overrun? More like overwrought. Notice how carefully crime statistics are deployed and you will see they never go back farther than, say, 2016, when Seattle’s crime rate was at an all time low. If you zoom out and look at the statistics over decades, while our rates have risen since 2000 we are in far better shape than we were then and the ten years following. We are hardly being overrun by hordes of mindless, slobbering murderers prowling on every citizen’s doorstep and lurking under every bed. Because some people get swept up in a deliberately induced panic doesn’t mean all people do. Most of the panicked live comfortable in sage neighborhoods; I, for one, live in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city and see what crime really looks like, and the blood curdling screams heard from the limousine liberals in Laurelhurst is a fantasy of the material world.
Yes the left has lost a couple of elections, but you are mistaking being down for being out. That is taking the triumphal crowing of the reactionary crowd as some kind of fact and is ridiculous, not worth the the time it took to type it out. Also, of course the left has solutions. You are just choosing to ignoring them.