By Erica C. Barnett
On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we spoke to former deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay. Voters soundly rejected Lindsay’s former boss, Republican Ann Davison, last November, but Lindsay argues that many of her prescriptions for addressing crime and disorder were sound—including “stay out” zones for people accused of using or possessing drugs in public, extra penalties for people who commit misdemeanors like shoplifting over and over, and the elimination of community court, which Lindsay called “a complete disaster and shame and stain on the record of city attorney [Pete] Holmes.”
Although the city has arguably been ruled by a moderate-to-conservative supermajority for at least the last four years, Lindsay says they failed to accomplish all their goals, in part, because former mayor Bruce Harrell wouldn’t always get with the program. Seattle, Lindsay argues, still has “radically too few police officers,” “no consensus about what to do about our most pressing public disorder problems,” and neighborhoods that have been “destroyed” by people using and selling drugs in public.
PubliCola has frequently pushed back on the notion that cracking down on so-called “prolific offenders”—the subject of a report Lindsay wrote for the Downtown Seattle Association in 2019—is a solution to the problems facing neighborhoods like Little Saigon that have faced decades of neglect and disinvestment. Lindsay agreed—and said that isn’t the point.
“More people will die every year of fentanyl and meth overdose than will be successful in getting out of the life and getting into treatment and turning their lives around,” Lindsay said.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
“I’m not saying give up, but I’m saying we need to balance our treatment approach with, how do we stop the havoc that these folks create? And one effective way at stopping the havoc that they create is to constantly disrupt. Use legal tools to disrupt their behavior. Convince them that being on the streets at 12th and Jackson smoking fentanyl is going to get you incarcerated. Even if that’s for eight or 12 hours that is in effect, can be an effective tool at disrupting the problem behavior and saving neighborhoods. Little Saigon is gone, but others are on the brink.”
Listeners will probably have strong feelings about this conversation, which also includes a discussion of Police Chief Shon Barnes, community court, and the “radical abolitionists,” in Lindsay’s words, at King County’s Department of Public Defense, which provides attorneys for indigent defendants.
Erica got schooled by someone who actually knows what they are talking about. A pleasure to hear.
Lindsey says Community Court was a disaster, then adopted the model for his own drug prosecution alternative. He is a hypocrite who cannot accept when he is wrong.
Yea, yeah, yeah. Not enough cops; not enough like ICE; it’s progressive’s fault the city hasn’t entirely eliminated crime, as would happen in if “moderates” really did what they want to do; etc, etc, etc. The “moderate” utopia is exactly as Eric Arthur Blair (aka Orwell) described: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.” Yes, we hear you loud and clear.
My question for Lindsay would be, what happens to the targets of these policies? Enforce stay-out areas, disrupt areas addicts congregate, sure you make the addicts appear to go away. Where did they go to? They didn’t just magically cease to exist. They didn’t get treatment so they didn’t stop being addicts. They had to go somewhere, right? All these policies do is push the problem around the board from one place to another, usually at a very high cost, but they never DO ANYTHING about it. So why should be pour money into them?
Very very few people get into drugs because they want to. Most get into them because of other factors like homelessness, medical conditions, lack of income. Better IMO to spend the money on programs to address THOSE factors and stop the problem at the source, along with spending it on treatment to try and help cut down on those already caught in the cycle. But I notice those like Lindsay are typically the ones most opposed to spending money that way.
Yes. Lindsay fails to acknowledge that the very expensive (54K per person per year) “lock ’em up” approach from the 90s does absolutely NOTHING to get a person to stop using once they are released from jail/prison. It creates a perpetual cycle of prison-homelessness-addiction-prison which the city-county-state cannot afford.
Breaking the cycle requires full support from an array of evidence-based, successful services and treatment methods, and an acknowledgment that relapse is part of recovery. The goal is to make these relapses occur less frequently until the person is off drugs completely.
you can’t just lock up addicts and think it’ll work out. Jail is jail. Prison is prison. It’s not a detox center.
Interrupting can give a person time to think and decide to change
I was a little quick on the draw for the above comment. Just saw the Seattle Times article about City light. There is a question of why there was not more consultation with the lead workers and unions
This is actually a comment on a previous column that I didn’t get published and it is regarding the replacement of the head of the City light by the new mayor .
As far as I can see, City light has been running very smoothly for the last couple of years. No scandals, service is restored quickly when there are storms, and the rates have been held reasonably steady .
Would you look into this more and do a column on it when you get time?
I wouldn’t ask any city attorney anywhere an opinion on matters like this. Immersion invariably equals hopelessly skewed.