Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson said she’s “working on updating the city’s return to work policy,” which currently requires city employees to work from their mostly downtown offices at least two days a week, in order to help increase the number of people downtown during the daytime.
Nelson was speaking at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual State of Downtown event, where she also praised her new council colleagues for requiring their staff to work in the office five days a week and for being physically present in council chambers during public meetings, which members of the previous council did not always do. (One, Teresa Mosqueda, has a young child; another, Debora Juarez, is immunocompromised.)
“We’ve come a long way since two years ago, when I talked at this event, and I said, ‘My job is to give a damn about downtown,'” Nelson said. “Well, now I’ve got company and it’s really exciting.
Nelson also said that under her leadership, the council would continue to “stop disruptive behavior” in council chambers—a reference to the council’s decision to limit public comment, shut down council chambers, arrest demonstrators, and conduct a meeting from behind locked doors last week. The demonstrators included asylum seekers and advocates who were asking the city for funding to help pay for refugees’ hotel rooms in South King County, including many who argued the city could use the $1.5 million it has set aside for a gunshot surveillance system.
When the same group of advocates marched to the King County Council earlier this week, the council (which now includes Mosqueda) gave them all two minutes to speak, listened, and found funding in the budget to help refugees stay in the hotel rooms where they’re currently living, all without kicking people out of their (much smaller) chambers or calling in the police.
During a panel discussion at the end of the event, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison affirmed that she supports setting a limit on the number of times a person is allowed to overdose in public before they’re arrested and booked into jail. (People who overdose inside their houses are presumably exempt from this proposal). “We shouldn’t think that that’s something we should shy away from,” Davison said. “We should not be reticent to enforce our laws and to put that [provision] in there.”
Proponents have said this law would only apply after people are revived from overdoses and “refuse treatment,” but treatment is not readily available. (Davison said there should be more treatment in jail.) And there is no clinical evidence for the widespread belief that people will stop using—that is, stop being addicted—in response to a threat of punishment, nor that forced or jail-based treatment is more effective than a harm-reduction-based approach that focuses on building up the supports (like a place to live) that people need to enter recovery and stay there.
During the same panel, Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz offered his own opinion of the state of downtown. Although targeted policing in known “hot spots” for drugs and sales of stolen goods, like 12th and Jackson and Third and Pine, is “having an impact,” Diaz said, crime is still getting worse because the city doesn’t have enough police.
Specifically, Diaz contradicted Mayor Bruce Harrell’s claim, during his recent State of the City speech, that property crime is going down. Although statistics show that crime is going down, Diaz said, that’s because people “don’t call the police anymore” because they think “‘I’m not going to end up getting anything from the police department [besides] a police report.'”
Diaz offered a novel explanation for the rise of fentanyl in Seattle: The Blake decision, which overturned Washington State’s felony drug possession law. “The Blake decision really created a huge infusion of fentanyl into our community,” Diaz said.
In fact, the rise of fentanyl is a nationwide issue, not one localized to Seattle, and the King County prosecutor had not prosecuted drug users under the old law for years before the Blake decision; the state legislature has repeatedly re-criminalized simple drug possession since the decision went into effect, and recently made possession a gross misdemeanor, a law Seattle replicated in its own local law last year.
Asked about the state legislature’s decision to adopt a Republican-backed initiative that will allow police departments across the state to chase drivers on mere suspicion that they have violated a law of any kind, Diaz noted that the city’s own pursuit policy is more restrictive, allowing pursuits only when police believe there is probable cause to believe someone has committed a violent or sexual crime. But, Diaz added, the city may reconsider its policy now that the new law has passed.
“We’re actually evaluating, right now, our vehicle pursuit policy as well as our vehicle tactics policies, such as pinning vehicles,” Diaz said, “especially [given that] people are sometimes passed out because [they] are going through fentanyl overdoses [and] passing on the wheel.” At the same time, he added, “we also have mindful of, when you loosen up some of the standards, our biggest payouts for traffic deaths is because of a pursuit pursuit death, are in this area. And so we tend to be a lot more restrictive when it comes to our vehicle pursuit policy.”