By Erica C. Barnett

Municipal Court judges have only issued one Stay Out of Drug Area order so far, raising questions about why City Attorney Ann Davison, and the City Council, was so eager to pass legislation reinstating SODA zones downtown. Under a law passed last year, judges can order people who are merely accused of violating local drug laws—like the 2023 law making outdoor drug use a misdemeanor—to stay out of certain areas, including much of downtown.

On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, I argued that the minimal use of SODA orders so far is more evidence that the current city attorney and city council are ill-equipped to address the problems they’ve said they want to solve, including visible drug use and addiction. After performative promises to crack down on drug users as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to addiction, city officials are discovering that “cleaning up” areas like 12th and Jackson isn’t as easy as they think, especially when most people arrested for misdemeanors, like public drug use and possession, are released from jail almost immediately and end up right back where they came from.

But even if the city attorney started seeking banishment orders in every drug case, and even if local judges decided to grant them, the police chief, who answers to Mayor Bruce Harrell, would have to decide to redirect officer time and resources to monitoring the boundaries of the downtown SODA district to make sure no one with a banishment order is caught inside it. And even if all that happens and the city starts arresting people for SODA violations left and right, there are limits to how long the downtown jail will hold people for misdemeanors, including gross misdemeanors like violating a SODA order.

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The biggest problem is that the city did not fund drug treatment, or even detox, for the population of outdoor drug users who are ready to make a change, so our approach to drug use remains almost entirely punitive: Stop being addicted or go to jail. At least, that’s my take. Sandeep said the policy is sound, but needs more enforcement.

We also talked about a proposal to allow some affordable housing in an industrially zoned area directly south of Seattle’s two stadiums, where hotels and bland office buildings area already allowed.

And we discussed another kind of banishment area the council adopted last year as part of a law that bans “prostitution loitering” by people caught trying to pay undercover cops for sex.

As I noted on the show, the loitering laws overwhelmingly target men of color, including immigrants; although city employees aren’t supposed to disclose a detained person’s immigration status to ICE, the federal enforcement agency has been known to use publicly available jail dockets to identify undocumented immigrants and target them for deportation, which could make Seattle complicit in Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.