When former city attorney Ann Davison started her term in 2024, she pledged to swiftly eliminate a “backlog” of some 5,000 cases she said her predecessor, Pete Holmes, had carelessly allowed to pile up during his final term. And while she did clear out much of that backlog, largely by dropping thousands of older cases, her strategy for eliminating future case pileups—a “close-in-time” policy that required attorneys to decide whether to file cases within five days of receiving police reports—was largely unsuccessful.
When she left office at the end of last year, Davison left behind a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases—between about 4,700 and 5,100, depending on which DUI cases are included in the backlog. The larger number, from City Attorney Erika Evans’ office, includes nearly 400 DUI cases that have been reviewed, but not filed, because of testing delays at the state toxicology lab, while Davison’s office did not count that type of case as part of the backlog.
“My predecessor, former city attorney Davison, also inherited a backlog from former city attorney Pete Holmes,” Evans said. “It seems like it’s common to have [a backlog], and it shouldn’t be at all.”
Scott Lindsay, the former deputy city attorney, told PubliCola his own team had identified about 1,000 cases they believe shouldn’t count toward the backlog, including the DUI “tox hold” cases as well as around 200 cases where attorneys made filing decisions before December 31 but the filings didn’t go through until this year.
“We have some real questions about how they’re doing the math,” Lindsay said. But, he added, “It’s absolutely true that there was a backlog at the end of the Davison administration, and it was growing.”
In addition to the DUI cases that are sitting in tox-lab limbo, the backlog includes around 800 criminal traffic cases, 1,700 domestic violence cases, and more than 1,000 other misdemeanor cases, such as shoplifting, trespassing, and public drug use.
The total also include around 1,000 cases that are unclassified—meaning they could be anything. This problem apparently emerged last year during a long-overdue migration from a case management database, called DAMION, to a modern replacement called JusticeNexus. The new system is designed to handle more complex case files than DAMION, but the transfer has been rough. Apparently, whenever a case category didn’t fit the new system’s parameters, JusticeNexus gave it a blank, or unclassified, status; for example, incoming cases that were previously classified under “review”—as in, ready for the filing unit to review—got categorized as blank in the new system, which didn’t have a corresponding “review” category, according to Lindsay.
“I think it’s much better, as you can imagine, to be using a system that’s not from 1999,” criminal division director Jenna Robert said during a joint interview with Evans on Friday, “but there are definitely growing pains that are going to take while for us to resolve.”
Evans is a former federal prosecutor; Robert worked in the domestic violence division under former city attorney Pete Holmes before joining the state attorney general’s office in 2021. Evans said this experience gives them an important perspective that her predecessors lacked. “I think that perspective matters, when we’re talking about … understanding that not every case that comes in should be filed, and we really need to be looking at cases that affect public safety,” she said.
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Davison, a Republican, supported new laws cracking down on sex work and drug use and believed in treating “prolific offenders” more harshly than other misdemeanor defendants. But Evans acknowledged that despite her “weird fixations” on certain types of crimes, Davison “did have a lot of cases in diversion, including quality of life crimes” like shoplifting and trespassing.
Evans says there are a few key changes that could help her office address the backlog. First, legislation that just passed the state House, after sailing through the Senate, will allow cities to use private labs to analyze blood samples in suspected DUI cases. Evans testified in favor of the legislation in Olympia last month.
Second, she says the city needs to fund more prosecutors to review and handle increasingly complex cases, which often involve hours of video evidence. Evans is well aware that any request for additional funding will probably fall on deaf ears this year, when the city is facing a $148 million budget deficit. Although Davison managed to squeeze around $300,000 out of the city for two additional domestic violence prosecutors in 2022, Mayor Katie Wilson has asked each department to propose cuts between 5 and 10 percent, and Evans acknowledged that this year’s budget fight will be about preserving her office, not expanding it.
Third, Evans and Robert are restructuring the department so that a single attorney will handle each case from filing to resolution, a “vertical” structure Evans said would give prosecutors a greater sense of “ownership and responsibility” over their cases and prevent a situation where the city attorney’s filing unit is simply “filing for numbers.” Evans said that in her experience as a federal prosecutor, “there’s a different mentality when you’re like, ‘Okay, yeah. This is mine all the way through.”
For crime victims, “just getting the quality they need up front is really important, and I think that that naturally happens when you get a case, it’s yours and it’s not going to just be handed off to someone else to go and try,” Evans said.
These proposals don’t address other factors that could be contributing to chronic case backlogs, such as slow filings or the difficulty of hiring highly qualified lawyers to relatively low-paying government positions. By this time next year, we should have some sense of whether the changes Evans is implementing have started to make a dent in the city prosecutor’s workload, or if this recurring problem is due to other, more intractable forces.
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.
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“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.
Sandeep and I sat down with new Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion founder Lisa Daugaard on this week’s episode to talk about changes Evans is making to the way the city handles low-level drug cases.
Under Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, people arrested for simple drug possession or using in public were either jailed and prosecuted or sent to a “drug prosecution alternative” where they have to get an assessment to confirm they have an addiction and stay out of trouble for six month.
Evans directed her prosecutors to go back to the pre-Davison policy of reviewing people’s cases to see if they’re eligible for LEAD, the city’s pre-filing diversion program. In response to this reasonable directive, Police Chief Shon Barnes told his officers that going forward, officers had to refer every drug case to LEAD—an overstatement that led to a right-wing media freakout when police guild director Mike Solan claimed Mayor Katie Wilson had ordered an end to all drug arrests.
Evans and Daugaard set the record straight, explaining what LEAD does, who it’s for, and how they believe this policy shift will actually help people addicted to fentanyl who use in public—which, they both reminded is, is encoded in the 2023 “Blake fix” law that empowered the city attorney to prosecute minor drug cases in the first place.
“What we’re doing is not anything inconsistent with what the law has already recommended for our office to be doing,” Evans told us. “But nothing’s off the table. If someone is not making meaningful progress with LEAD or in diversion, then we do reserve the right to do traditional prosecution.”
We also discussed ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis and what the city can do if Trump sends masked shock troops to Seattle. And we asked Daugaard, who co-founded Purpose Dignity Action and started LEAD, why she’s taking a leave of absence to work inside the Wilson administration.
As Katie Wilson takes office, we reflected on her inauguration—a hopeful event heavily attended by regular people—and her commitment to try to make Seattle a city where people can live full, creative lives, not just balance their budget ledgers.
Wilson continued to build out her team at city hall this week, hiring high-profile staffers including interim public safety and homelessness advisor Lisa Daugaard, who created the LEAD diversion program; public safety director Alison Holcomb, a longtime civil rights lawyer and advocate; and homelessness director Jon Grant, a staffer at LIHI who ran for city council and once led the Tenants Union.
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes told officers last week to begin referring most people caught using or possessing drugs in public to LEAD—a misstatement of a memo from new City Attorney Erika Evans, who told her own staff to consider all drug-related referrals from SPD for LEAD. Barnes later claimed that his memo about the “change” in policy did not reflect any policy change at all—but police union head Mike Solan had already sounded the alarm with right-wing media, which reported that Wilson had halted all arrests for drug offenses.
With Wilson in office for less than a week, Barnes (a Bruce Harrell appointee Wilson chose to retain) announced he had hired two new staffers to replace two top civilian staff he fired last year. Both of the new staffers came directly from Harrell’s office. The two fired staffers, Rebecca Boatright and Brian Maxey, filed a tort claim against the city, alleging retaliation and discrimination.
City Councilmember Rob Saka, who has had trouble retaining staff, just hired Brendan Kolding—a former city council candidate who endorsed Saka’s opponent in 2023. Kolding, a former SPD lieutenant, resigned after an investigation concluded he had harassed a coworker and lied about it to the police chief.
A week of inaugurations wrapped up in city council chambers on Tuesday with the swearing-in of new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, along with reelected Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and the selection (which we previewed in a Fizz item in November) of District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth as the new city council president.
Mayor Wilson replaced two more Harrell-appointed leaders this week, removing the directors of the Office of Economic Development and the head of the city’s finance office. For the latter position, she picked Dwight Dively—a longtime city and county budget staffer who was hired away by former county executive Dow Constantine 15 years ago.
After announcing that he won’t seek reelection, Seattle Police Officers Guild endorsed a candidate who sounds like a man after his own heart—Ken Loux, a 10-year SPD officer who says SPD is under siege by the left.
Speaking to a friendly audience at the We Heart Seattle-sponsored “Great Debate” at the Washington Athletic Club, Mayor Bruce Harrell was cheerful and expansive as he complained about the healthy department, talked about how “cool” it would be to project an interactive AI version of MLK on a downtown wall, and suggested he’d be open to prohibiting protesters from wearing masks.
An SPD operation that involved a stakeout to catch shoplifters at a Marshall’s discount store in West Seattle cost the city thousands of dollars‚ including pay for the 10 officers involved in the sting, and netted low-priced merchandise like knit beanies, children’s shoes, and two sweatshirts—the highest-value items, at $30 each). Police made five shoplifting arrests.
This week’s special guest on Seattle Nice, Purpose Dignity Action’s Director of Outreach and Special Initiatives Nichole AleThis Week On PubliCola: October 18, 2025xander, spoke with us about the work PDA’s CoLEAD program is doing with drug users at a longtime “hot spot” in the Chinatown International District.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget is unsustainable and relies heavily on fiscal sleight-of-hand to come up with a balanced budget in 2026, a city council staff analysis concluded These tricks include relying on a one-time $141 million fund balance left over from 2025, which won’t be there to balance the budget next year; funding programs that will be necessary long-term with one-time resources, and assuming a $10 million “underspend” every year in the future,.
One of many new spends in the budget is $800,000 to implement unspecified new AI software at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections that, the city believes, will speed up permitting times by pre-checking applications and automating some functions currently provided by city employees.
Mothers who lost their sons to gun violence told PubliCola they felt ignored and disrespected by Mayor Bruce Harrell, who they accused of exploiting their tragedies for political points. Several described a healing circle where Harrell turned out to be a special guest, but left early after a verbal clash with one of the women, telling the group “I didn’t even want to come here.”
Harrell’s proposed budget for the police department includes more than $3 million in annual costs for (yet another) recruiting firm that has created (yet another) series of high-octane, macho ads; meanwhile, it fails to fund a staffer to advance recruitment of women, on the grounds that SPD doesn’t have enough money.
Meanwhile, Harrell’s budget uses the JumpStart payroll tax—originally earmarked for affordable housing, Green New Deal programs, and equitable development—for policing at next year’s World Cup games and the expansion of CCTV surveillance cameras into the Stadium District.
A new mailer from the pro-Harrell PAC headed up by his deputy mayor, Tim Burgess, sent out a condescending, misleading mailer featuring his opponent Katie Wilson’s resume as of 2015, when it went back to 2006 and included jobs at a bakery and as resident manager of an apartment building. The flip side featured Harrell’s resume, which revealed that he hasn’t applied for a job since 1990 at the latest.
Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks at the honorary designation of a portion of East Union Street as D’Vonne Pickett., Jr. Way in 2023. Image via Seattle Channel
By Erica C. Barnett
D’Vonne Pickett, the owner of The Postman mailing and shipping store and in the Central District, was just 31 when he was shot and killed outside his store three years ago. His public memorial service, at Climate Pledge Arena, drew thousands of mourners. Among them was Mayor Bruce Harrell, who broke down as he described learning from his son that Pickett had been killed.
“Whathappenedto D’Vonne— thishappenedtimeandtimeagainwhenIwaslittleboyinthe CD, goingto T.T. Minor, Meany, andGarfield,” Harrell said, naming his elementary, middle and high schools. “We have to do everything humanly possible to save our own community, because no one’s going to do it for us,” Harrell said. “We have to hold up the family. You don’t say, ‘What can I do?’ Do it.”
Three years after Pickett was kiled, his mother, Nicky Chappell, is planning an “angelversary” celebration of his life that will double as a fundraiser; his grave, at Lakeview Cemetery, still lacks a headstone. Despite Harrell’s comments about her family at the memorial, Chappell says the mayor didn’t acknowledge or speak to her at the event, and hasn’t reached out to her in the years since.
Over the past several weeks, PubliCola has spoken to the mothers of young men killed by gun violence who told us Harrell ignored their pleas for help during his years in office, reaching out to some of them only once he was running for reelection. We also spoke with Black business owners and advocates who are supporting Wilson because they’ve met with her and believe she’s willing to make a place for them at the table. Some wouldn’t go on the record, citing a fear of retribution if Harrell gets reelected. Others talked at length about their disappointment with a mayor they thought would stand up for their communities.
“Every time he starts talking, he talks about his roots, or ‘I grew up in the CD,’ ‘my family’ this and ‘my family’ that. That’s what he did at my son’s service and I didn’t like that,” Chappell said. “We’re not going to talk about you growing up in the CD or whatever schools you went to. My son’s service wasn’t for you to come here and talk about what you talk about on the news all the time.”
After the service, Chappell said, she reached out to the mayor’s office on social media and eventually secured a meeting, where she told him she was disappointed and hurt that he hadn’t reached out or offered help. “As the mother in a high-profile case, I think he should have done better with me. as as a mother. … We would have never talked if I hadn’t reached out to him about how he did me at my son’s service.”
“If he’s going to involve himself in situations like this, or these traumatic incidents, don’t come half-ass,” Chappell said.
Harrell is in a tough reelection battle against a challenger, Katie Wilson, who disagrees with him strongly on many major policies, from the decision to place surveillance cameras in neighborhoods around the city, including the Central District, to his support for putting police officers in schools— starting with his alma mater, Garfield High School.
In debates, Harrell has frequently tried to shut Wilson down by talking about his personal history as someone who grew up Black and biracial in the Central District; unlike Wilson, a white woman who grew up in upstate New York, “my parents weren’t college professors,” Harrell said at a recent forum.
“Race,” my colleague Marcus Harrison Green wrote in a powerful recent piece for the South Seattle Emerald, “has shadowed this race from the start.” Harrell has certainly used it, suggesting (falsely) that his white opponent “darkened” his skin on an Instagram post. (In fact, the post that gave Harrell’s skin an orange tint was created by a progressive group run primarily by people of color whose Black director called the claim “untrue and offensive.”)
At a press event to announce a housing reparations proposal, Harrell lashed out at critics, saying the people he sees on the streets are “people I grew up with. How dare they write that under this administration—which has, by the way, the most diverse set of leaders on the executive floor in our city’s history—how dare anyone question the compassion of this administration toward people who are underrepresented?”
Several mothers who lost their children to gun violence said they initially had high hopes for Harrell, but have spent the past four years trying in vain to get Harrell to listen to them and other women who struggle with grief, job loss, threats, and the financial burden of caring for grandchildren long after losing a child.
“What mothers go through in crisis is not a one-time opportunity—it’s ongoing, especially with gun violence,” said Donnitta Sinclair, whose son, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, was shot in the CHOP protest zone in 2020 and died at Harborview. Volunteer medics took Anderson to the hospital in a pickup truck as a Seattle Fire Department medic unit idled nearby.
Earlier this year, Sinclair and a group of about 20 other mothers who lost children to gun violence met for a healing circle that was coordinated by the nonprofit group RISE. About halfway through the event, they learned that a special guest would be arriving soon: Mayor Bruce Harrell. Several people who were present told PubliCola what happened next.
As a video of their children played in the background, Harrell walked in with his security and asked, “‘Do you guys want me to talk freely and keep it real?’ recalled Lonnisha Landry, whose son, 16-year-old Xavier Landry, was shot and killed in Auburn lsat July; Landry is currently petitioning the state to do advanced DNA testing on casings left at the scene of the murder, hoping they will help identify his killer. “We said, ‘Keep it real.’ And he was like, ‘Cut the cameras.'”
According to four accounts, a videographer who was filming the event turned off his camera and everyone put their phones away.
“He was just writing, kind of not paying attention—okay, that’s one thing,” Landry continued. “But then when he does get to talking, he wants to basically say, ‘I’m not one of you guys, I haven’t lost a child, but I am one of you guys because I grew up in the community. I went to Garfield and I knew Donnitta’s family and I remember when one of her uncles stole my father’s coat.’ And we were like, ‘What?'”
Sinclair confirmed that Harrell made the crack about the supposed coat incident, which would have occurred before she was born. It wasn’t the first time, she said. Harrell also mentioned it when they spoke shortly before his first election in 2021. At the time, Sinclair recalled, “I told him, ‘Mr. Harrell, I lost my son. I’m not really interested in no coat.”
After some heated back and forth with Sinclair, several people who were present recalled, Harrell slammed his hand on the table, told the women “I didn’t even want to come here,” and started walking toward the door. (Chappell, who was present, said she understood why he was mad: He and Sinclair don’t get along. On the other hand: Sinclair is a mother who lost her son; Harrell is, well, the mayor.) Landry said she asked Harrell to at least stay and talk to a woman who had been trying to meet with him for more than a year. “We’re kind of pleading and wanting him to hear us. It was cold.”
Keshia McGee, whose son, James Richardson (the hip-hop artist Tanaa Money) was shot and killed in 2019, said Harrell’s words about not wanting to be there “haunt me to this day. We finally got a chance to speak to him about our kids … and he told us he didn’t even want to come to our healing circle,” she said.
“The way he treated us was like we were little ants and he was the giant.”
It wasn’t the first time McGee had felt used by Harrell and people associated with the mayor. In 2023, Harrell held a “One Seattle Day of Remembrance for Gun Violence Victims” event but didn’t reach out to her to participate in the event itself. Instead, she said, she got an invitation to attend, which is how she found out the event would feature a slide show that included her son. (In fact, Richardson’s image was on the very first slide.)
“I said, ‘how dare you guys reach out to me to come to this event? You had my information all this time and you’ve never reached out to me before to ask me about my baby,” McGee said. By the time of the weekend retreat, “we were feeling like, ‘You’re on TV talking about our kids but never spent the time to talk to us, the mothers that carried these kids.'”
At the retreat, Harrell started speaking again, but was soon interrupted by a phone call from his daughter, which he took while still standing in front of the group. After hanging up, Sinclair recalled, “He’s grinning, laughing, saying ‘I’m glad she didn’t want no money.'” (Others who were there recounted the same story, although not everyone was offended he took the call). “I said, ‘I’m glad she’s okay and you could answer her,” Sinclair recalled. “We don’t get to answer our kids’ calls ever again.’ He said, ‘You don’t know what the hell she needed.'”
“If you were at a white meeting, you would have blocked [your phone],” Sinclair said, “but you’re here at a meeting of women of color, so you don’t.”
McGee, too, found it insulting that Harrell took his daughter’s call. “It didn’t matter why you picked up the phone. … When he was in that [televised] debate, up on the podium while millions of people were watching, I bet he had his phone off.”
Harrell’s appearance “shook up the whole room,” McGee said. They all came to heal together, “and we all left very hurt and upset and mad. Why the hell did he even come? This was supposed to be healing and then that man showed up.”
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PublCola sent Harrell’s campaign a list of 10 questions for this story. The campaign responded with the following statement: “Mayor Harrell is a champion for survivors of gun violence, and communities impacted by firearm tragedy. He is the first Mayor to hire an executive-level gun violence prevention coordinator (herself a survivor), and has the sole endorsement of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. Under Bruce’s leadership, Seattle has seen a reduction in shots fired, thousands of guns have been removed from our streets, and we are investing in proven community violence intervention and youth engagement programs. Bruce meets regularly with families and victims of gun violence, respects the need for privacy and intensity of grief often expressed in these meetings, and out of respect for all involved will not comment on specific meetings or interactions.”
Many of the women who lost children to gun violence said they want the city to fund opportunities for them to meet and support each other, from healing circles like the one Harrell attended, to a community center with services such as child care, support groups, and direct connections to emergency resources.
“I’m tired of calling 211 for help,” Chappell said. “There’s so much funding going into [programs] for gun violence—they just passed a policy the other day for more funds to help this problem—but how are you helping families? How about helping moms get into a position where they’re able to do some healing?”
Most of the women PubliCola spoke to said they’re supporting Wilson. So does Chiif Ahmed Mumin, director of the Seattle Rideshare Drivers Association. He believes that, unlike Harrell, she’ll aid in identifying the culprit in the 2022 shooting of Uber driver Mohamed Kediye by helping his organization retrieve camera footage of the shooting, which took place in downtown Seattle.
Kediye, a father of six, was “someone people really loved and respected, and he really leaves a void in the community,” Mumin said.
Mumin also said Harrell has failed to create the rider safety task force they proposed two years ago to come up with solutions to help keep drivers safe, such as cameras in cars and a quick way to contact law enforcement if they find themselves in danger. He believes that Wilson, unlike Harrell, will listen to rideshare drivers who’ve asked to be included in conversations about transportation safety.
During a campaign forum in South Seattle last month, Mumin asked Harrell what he was doing to solve Kediye’s murder. Harrell responded by accusing Wilson of wanting to defund the police and suggesting that if he’s reelected, there will be enough police and detectives to solve the crime. “It has not been solved, and that’s exactly why I support having police officers, Harrell said.”That’s exactly why I’m not defunding the police department, because we need the resources to give that family justice.”
Mumin wasn’t convinced. “It seemed like the mayor was actually diverting the question to the police department, when to the best of our knowledge, the mayor is the head of the police department,” HE said. “He’s the one who names the chief of police, and he could have taken much more of a leadership role in making sure that this crime is solved.”
After the campaign forum, Mumin said, someone from Harrell’s campaign reached out to ask him, “Why did I ask that question in public?’ And my response was very clear—this crime has taken so long to solve. We will continue to ask every time we get an opportunity to ask the mayor this question.”
