By Erica C. Barnett
For this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we brought in a guest expert—Purpose Dignity Action Co-Director Lisa Daugaard, whose organization established the LEAD diversion program in Belltown—to discuss the latest efforts to address misdemeanor criminal activity in downtown Seattle.
As we reported exclusively last week, King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention agreed to resume booking people who commit misdemeanor crimes, including violations of the recently adopted law re-criminalizing drug use and possession, in the “downtown activation zone,” an area that extends from the Chinatown-International District to South Lake Union. Booking decisions will be up to individual police officers.
Since the onset of COVID, the jail has limited bookings to the most serious misdemeanors, such as domestic violence and driving under the influence, with exceptions for so-called “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system and areas the city periodically designates as “hot spots,” like the area around 12th Ave. S. and South Jackson St.
Simultaneously, the city council will discuss a contract this week that would to send people arrested for misdemeanors in Seattle to the SCORE jail in Des Moines. Proponents have argued that expanding the number of jail beds the city can access is necessary to get disruptive people off the street—or, as Sandeep likes to put it, making them “spend some time in the pokey”—and deter crime. Opponents say it makes little sense to move people from Seattle to South King County for short jail stays (most people booked in jail for misdemeanors are detained for three days or less), and argue that locking people up while they wait for charges to be filed against them does nothing to reduce low-level crime.
Daugaard positions herself somewhere between both of these positions. She agrees, basically, that jail isn’t a deterrent, but argues that for people who are committing destructive crimes, like breaking windows, it can have a positive disruptive effect. “I don’t actually think this is a debate about more versus fewer people in jail,” Daugaard told us. “It’s about the city’s ability to determine when individuals, in their view, need to be booked into jail, and to not be met with an administrative barrier to that decision.”
She also suggested that booking restrictions “build up an appetite” to jail people for misdemeanors, because policy makers start to see the restrictions themselves as the cause of visible problems, such as concentrated drug use downtown. “I don’t think putting people in jail for those offenses would fix conditions on our streets,” Daugaard said, “but I do understand that absolutely prohibiting that fosters that belief. So in my opinion, it is better to allow discretion and then have a system wide conversation on [why] that is not effective. And it doesn’t really make sense to do it, except in very unusual circumstances.”
Listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast app.