Category: Crime

City Council, Crime, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police, public safety

Police Budget Fizz: Hiring Falls Short, Shotspotter Gains Support, Burgess Misrepresents Jane Jacobs
Overtime costs at SPD continued to increase this year.

1. The Seattle Police Department is, once again, falling fall short of its annual hiring goals, and would have to increase hiring by nearly two-thirds to hit the goals it has set for 2024, despite receiving full funding for its recruitment and retention plan, which included recruitment bonuses of up to $30,000, last year. City Council central staff presented the numbers at a council budget committee meeting last week. At the end of the year, according to current projections, SPD will have lost another 27 net officers, once both new hires and departures are factored in.

During last year’s budget deliberations, in which the council eliminated funding for 80 vacant and unfillable positions, SPD predicted that by the end of September, it would have hired 82 new officers, out of 120 total this year. Instead, the department had hired just 46. Of those, just six were fully trained “lateral” hires from other departments—24 fewer than SPD predicted.

Despite losing officers year after year, SPD continues to predict robust hiring; next year, for example, SPD says it expects to hire 120 new officers and lose 120, for a net gain of 15 officers. If the city funds this plan and the department fails to hire all 120, that money will be left over for other, unrelated priorities—which is exactly what happened this year.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2024 budget proposal for SPD uses $8.1 million in salary “savings” from unfulfilled 2023 hiring projections to pay for $6.3 million in unanticipated overtime—necessitated, SPD says, by the staffing shortage. That leaves $1.8 million in free-floating revenues, which the mayor has proposed spending on new surveillance technology, including a gunshot detection system the council rejected last year.

However, Burgess misunderstands Jane Jacobs’ point about the need for ‘eyes on the street’ when he claims that 24-hour camera and audio surveillance will “complement” the city’s efforts to make Seattle’s sidewalks feel safe for everyone. Jacobs advocated for “wholesome” and “casual” oversight of city sidewalks, not 24/7 remote surveillance by police.

Several council members took exception to providing SPD with an ongoing slush fund that is expected to grow year after year as positions stay vacant but funded. Councilmember Lisa Herbold said she planned to propose a proviso, or spending limitation, on SPD’s salary savings, an idea that prompted Councilmember Sara Nelson to counter that SPD could finally hit its recruiting targets this year, so “now is not the time to be discussing reducing money” for the department.

Much of the city’s spending on overtime was to pay for police to direct traffic at events, including concerts (Beyonce, Taylor Swift), sporting events, and visits from politicians, including President Biden, Police Chief Adrian Diaz told the council.

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2. The aforementioned gunshot-locator system is back on the table again after the council rejected it last year, and most of the council now seems to be on board. What has changed? Nothing, materially, unless you count the fact that the mayor’s office now plans to add CCTV camera surveillance to the mix—and the fact that former council member Burgess, rather than the mayor’s recently ousted niece Monisha Harrell, is now the deputy mayor overseeing police and public safety.

Burgess, a longtime public-safety hawk who argued for tough-on-crime policies as a council member, said he was inspired to take another crack at Shotspotter—an audio monitoring system that alerts human audio experts when it detects any gunshot-like sound—while driving to a shooting in the parking lot of a Safeway store in Rainier Beach earlier this year.

“I asked the chief,  ‘What else should we be doing to suppress this gun violence which is increasing dramatically in our city?'” Burgess told the council. “And we had a conversation about the various interventions we could employ, including cameras in specific places. And I think that was kind of one of the beginning points of the conversation.” (Shotspotter is the most commonly used gunshot locator system, so the name is used generically to describe all such systems.)

In August, SPD signed a $2.6 million contract with the Seattle marketing firm Copacino Fujikado to create an “SPD recruitment brand” and produce video, online, radio, and social media ads for the department.

“Gun violence… happens all over the city, but it is very concentrated in very specific places,” Burgess said. “And we’re keenly aware of that. And those places deserve the city government to do what we can to stop that gun violence. The same with human trafficking.” Initially, depending on cost, SPD plans to place the cameras and acoustic devices on Third Avenue downtown, Belltown, and/or Aurora Avenue North, but the cameras could move depending on need, according to the mayor’s office. Harrell’s office has asked for an “omnibus” approval of the technology, so that once it passes a mandatory review and receives a Surveillance Impact Report, the systems can be moved to other neighborhoods without an additional review.

Civil liberties and racial justice advocates have argued that focusing surveillance on specific neighborhoods and communities puts police on high alert in those areas, leading to unnecessary stops in communities that have long been subject to overpolicing.

Shotspotter has been around for decades; closed-circuit cameras have been around even longer. There’s little evidence that cameras have any impact on violent crime, although they do seem to deter some thefts; multiple studies have found little to no evidence that Shotspotter works to reduce crime, prevent crime, or solve crimes after the fact. (Notably, many recent Seattle shootings have happened in locations that were under camera surveillance.)

“Mayor Harrell grew up in the CD and attended Garfield High, where there was another shooting last week leading to a lockdown, so I trust he’s listening to the community and wouldn’t be putting this forward again unless people living in the areas where people are dying really want this,” Councilmember Sara Nelson said.

Councilmembers Andrew Lewis and Dan Strauss, who have each tried to shake off a soft-on-crime image as they run for reelection, both said they now support funding Shotspotter, which they opposed last year, along with CCTV surveillance. Lewis, who represents downtown, compared the proposal to other “place-based strategies” like the Third Avenue Project, which is overseen by Purpose Dignity Action, the same group that operates LEAD. “I think that that this is a really innovative way for us to try to enhance, with limited resources, our presence in some of these areas,” Lewis said.

Nelson, meanwhile, said she needed no further convincing that Shotspotter is needed, citing the support of three Black women who lost children to gun violence, as well as Harrell’s personal roots in the Central District, as evidence that Seattle’s Black community supports the plan. “Mayor Harrell grew up in the CD and attended Garfield High, where there was another shooting last week leading to a lockdown, so I trust he’s listening to the community and wouldn’t be putting this forward again unless people living in the areas where people are dying really want this,” Nelson said.

3. The police department is turning to ads and other paid media in an attempt to woo new and transferring officers. In August, SPD signed a $2.6 million contract with the marketing firm Copacino Fujikado to create an “SPD recruitment brand” and produce video, online, radio, and social media ads for the department. The firm, which is based in Seattle, has previously produced marketing campaigns for Sound Transit, the Downtown Seattle Association, and Visit Seattle, among others.

4. In his memo supporting Shotspotter, Burgess quoted pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs, who wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities about the need for mutual surveillance among many people co-existing on busy, vibrant neighborhood streets—a co-existence she assumed would also include police.

However, Burgess misunderstands Jacobs’ point about the need for “eyes on the street” when he claims that 24-hour camera and audio surveillance will “complement” the city’s efforts to make Seattle’s sidewalks feel safe for everyone. Jacobs advocated for “wholesome” and “casual” oversight of city sidewalks, not 24/7 remote surveillance by police. In fact, in that same 1961 book, Jacobs warns about overpolicing on the sidewalks near public housing projects, writing that the problem wasn’t lack of police, but lack of legitimate, legal reasons for people to be on the sidewalk. “No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down,” she wrote.

Addiction, City Council, Crime, Drugs, Mayor Harrell

Council Declines to Fast-Track Law Empowering City Attorney To Prosecute Drug Users

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected Councilmember Andrew Lewis’ proposal to fast-track a bill empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for drug possession and public use, voting to allow the bill to go through the regular committee process. The impact of the vote is that the council will take up the bill after they return from the regular August recess, allowing council staff the time to draft amendments and analyze the latest version of the legislation.

Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen introduced the first version of the drug criminalization bill last April, after the state adopted legislation making drug possession and public drug use a gross misdemeanor. Initially, Lewis voted against the legislation, citing Davison’s unilateral decision to abandon Seattle Community Court, but he has since become one of the bill’s most vocal advocates, arguing that the work of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s fentanyl task force will produce policy and legal alternatives to the traditional arrest-and-prosecution system.

While the bill says diversion and other options are the “preferred” alternatives to arrest, it does not require diversion or lay out the kind of circumstances in which diversion would be appropriate. Instead, it directs SPD to develop “guidance on diversion” as part of policies that will “state that diversion and referral to services is the preferred response to possession and public use while acknowledging that arrests are warranted in some situations.”

The latest version of the bill includes 13 additional “whereas” clauses, along with eight new findings about the state of the drug crisis in Seattle. It also adds a new section to the Seattle Municipal Code stating that, in the future, police will adopt policies governing arrests for drug possession and public drug use, and that those policies will state that alternatives like diversion and treatment “are the preferred approach” when police make arrests under the new law.

At a committee meeting to discuss the drug criminalization bill Monday afternoon, council members discussed several issues with the legislation that PubliCola pointed out two weeks ago.

First, while the bill says diversion and other options are the “preferred” alternatives to arrest, it does not require diversion, provide funding for alternatives to arrest, or provide examples of circumstances in which diversion would be appropriate. Instead, it directs SPD to develop “guidance on diversion” as part of policies that will “state that diversion and referral to services is the preferred response to possession and public use while acknowledging that arrests are warranted in some situations.”

Beyond this, the ordinance delegates to individual officers the authority to decide whether a person poses a threat, based on “the totality of the circumstances and the officer’s training and experience,” which is essentially the current system, augmented by some new training on what constitutes a drug-specific threat.

“The standard mirrors the practical thought process that officers ordinarily apply in the field when deciding whether to make an arrest, and it allows for it encourages officers to exercise discretion,” mayoral advisor Andrew Myerberg told the council. If a person is only a “threat to self,” the bill says officers should “make a reasonable attempt to contact and coordinate efforts for diversion, outreach, and other alternatives,” but leaves that decision, too, up to individual officers.

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“The fundamental goal of this ordinance and executives overall approach to the synthetic opioid crisis is to increase the proportion of individuals suffering from addiction who seek and accept treatment services,” Myerberg said.

Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda pointed out the obvious: The mayor’s office has not proposed funding for addiction, treatment, or diversion programs. “It seems important that the resources be sufficiently invested into the alternative strategies so that people are not being given a false promise that there will be a diversion strategy [but] we don’t have those resources,” Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said. “And where will that funding come from?” 

The law does not address private use of illegal drugs inside people’s homes.

Second, while Harrell has stated (and mainstream media outlets have inaccurately reported) that the bill includes $27 million for treatment and other alternatives to arrest, the bill never mentions money or spending priorities. In fact, as council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda noted repeatedly on Monday, the “new” $27 million is a combination of $7 million in grant funding the city didn’t spend in previous years, plus $1 million a year from two state settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors. Harrell has indicated he wants to use the money to stand up and staff the proposed opioid response center he announced in April. That would leave no additional funding for programs like LEAD, REACH, and We Deliver Care, to which Myerberg said police could direct people who break the new law.

“When I’m talking to officers in the field about this [harm to others] concept, I guess there is a concern that it is an additional layer of complexity and standard that would be put on [officers. Personally I believe that the council should have incorporated state law, and then if some council members and others wanted to add policy or funding, they could have done that shortly after adopting the ordinance.”—Councilmember Alex Pedersen

At Monday’s meeting, Pedersen and Nelson raised concerns that the bill would create ambiguity and introduce new challenges for police officers that would make it harder for them to do their jobs.

“When I’m talking to officers in the field about this [harm to others] concept, I guess there is a concern that it is an additional layer of complexity and standard that would be put on” officers, Pedersen said. “Personally, I believe that the council should have incorporated state law into our Seattle Municipal Code and then if some council members and others wanted to add policy or funding, they could have done that shortly after adopting the ordinance.”

Myerberg said the legislation isn’t “asking [officers] to reinvent the wheel.” While it is Harrell’s “intent” to steer people toward diversion and treatment, officers will still get to make the calls they consider appropriate in all cases, including arrest if they believe it’s necessary to prevent harm or get someone to go into treatment or crisis care. “[Harrell is] asking them to do what they already do,” Myerberg said. “The executive remains clear that such a decision will be within the discretion of the officer. It will be fact-specific and individual-dependent.”

In late July, the Seattle Police Officers Guild “applauded” the new legislation, saying it would help “restor[e] public safety to the city.” This suggests that, at the very least, SPOG —which has a history of opposing substantive police reforms—does not expect the bill to cause major disruptions to officers’ usual way of doing business.

Including a preference for diversion in the police manual could lead to incremental change. But without significantly more funding, it’s unlikely to result in different outcomes, either for people using drugs in public or the general public witnessing public drug use.

Myerberg noted Harrell’s personal commitment to encouraging alternatives to arrest and prosecution, which stem partly from his direct experience as a Black man growing up in Seattle during the drug war. But intent is not the same thing as law; mayors come and go, and their lasting impact isn’t meaning well, but pushing through tangible, legally binding changes that last longer than a single administration. 

Addiction, Crime, Drugs, Mayor Harrell

Harrell’s “$27 Million Drug Diversion and Treatment” Plan Would Allow Prosecutions But Add No New Funding
Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Councilmember Sara Nelson, who cosponsored the original drug criminalization bill.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to reintroduce a local drug criminalization ordinance has been widely described as a “plan to combat opioid addiction” that would—as the Seattle Times put it—”[c]ommit $27 million toward enhanced treatment facilities, new addiction services and improved overdose response.”

But this characterization is misleading. For one thing, the $27 million includes no new funding. For another, that total includes both one-time spending and a small annual allocation from last year’s state opioid settlement that will trickle in over the next 18 years.

Of the $27 million, $7 million consists of leftover federal Community Development Block Grant funding that the city did not spend in previous years—a one-time allocation that Harrell’s spokesman, Jamie Housen said will provide “capital funding to prepare existing facilities to provide care and treatment services for substance use disorders.”

Of the $27 million, $7 million consists of leftover federal funding that the city did not spend in previous years. The rest is the total amount the city estimates it will receive from the statewide opioid settlement over the next 18 years—a little over $1 million a year each year, on average, through 2032.

The rest, $20 million, is the total amount the city estimates it will receive from the statewide opioid lawsuit settlement over the next 18 years—a little over $1 million a year each year, on average, through 2032. That’s less than seven-hundredths of one percent of the city’s general-fund budget, and about three-tenths of one percent of the Seattle Police Department’s budget.

Housen said the $1.1 million a year will go toward “programs addressing addiction and improving our treatment and service provision systems.”

Those are surely worthy goals (spending on any kind of treatment or social service is almost certainly better than further criminalizing addiction), but they do not amount to the “enhanced treatment facilities, new addiction services and improved overdose response” Harrell announced his plan would pay for. Nor is the opioid settlement funding new; we’ve been reporting on what it will mean for Seattle, and how the state has directed cities to spend the money, since last year.

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So what does the bill actually do? Exactly what an earlier version of the bill, which the council rejected 5-4, would have done: Empower City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for simple drug possession or for using drugs, except alcohol and marijuana, in public. The substantive portion of the bill, which comes after nearly six pages of nonbinding whereas clauses and statements of fact, is identical to the previous proposal.

In addition, and less substantively, the bill directs the Seattle Police Department to adopt policies governing arrests under the new law, and says that these future policies must “state that diversion and referral to services is the preferred 2 response to possession and public use while acknowledging that arrests are warranted in some situations,” including situations that threaten any person’s safety.

Harrell’s task force on addiction, which includes subgroups that are discussion diversion, treatment, and the role of the municipal court, continues to meet. According to Housen, the groups are focusing on “court systems, arrest and pretrial diversion, and treatment programs” and “are tasked with advancing efforts to improve connections between systems, map and identify gaps in diversion programs, and strengthen partner coordination.”

City Council, Crime, Police

Audit: Police Could Do More, Without Hiring Extra Cops, To Address Retail Theft Rings

By Erica C. Barnett

A report from the city auditor’s office on the city’s response to organized retail theft concluded that the city, particularly the Seattle Police Department, is not doing everything it can to combat local commercial fencing operations that resell goods stolen by individual “boosters,” typically “”people who are homeless and people with substance use disorder,” who receive drugs or small amounts of money in exchange for bearing most of the legal risk for organized theft operations.

The audit, pointedly titled “The City Can Do More to Tackle Organized Retail Crime in Seattle,” points to a number of actions the department could take, without hiring additional staff or increasing its budget, to target people organizing thefts and directing the resale of stolen retail goods. City Councilmembers Andrew Lewis and Lisa Herbold announced the audit last year, and its chief author, the City Audit Office’s Research and Evaluation Director Claudia Gross Shader, presented its findings to Herbold’s public safety committee Tuesday morning.

Cities, like Auburn, that have been successful at reducing organized theft have succeeded by taking down the organizers of fencing operations—”cutting off the head of the snake,” as Gross Shader put it Tuesday.

The police department and City Attorney Ann Davison have rolled out numerous initiatives to crack down on the people at the bottom of the fencing food chain—Davison’s “high utilizers” initiative, for example, imposes extra penalties on people arrested repeatedly for stealing from stores—but have not taken meaningful steps to disrupt theft rings by focusing on the people actually running them, the report concludes.

According to the Washington Organized Retail Crime Association, organized retail theft refers to operations in which street-level shoplifters steal items in exchange for drugs or small amounts of money on behalf of fencers, who resell the items in markets that range from sidewalk setups to international theft and resale rings.

Under state law, however, a single shoplifting incident is considered “organized” if a person steals merchandise worth $750 or more in a single incident. As PubliCola has documented, the city has used the organized theft statute to prosecute people stealing valuable items without determining whether they are actually part of any organized theft ring.

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The audit puts a number on this tendency to focus on cases that do not appear to be “organized” in any meaningful sense: Of the 49 “organized retail theft” cases SPD referred to the King County Prosecutor’s Office in 2022, 45 involved thefts that qualified because they were above the $750 threshold, while only the remaining four indisputably involved fencing. The 45 people in the former category were disproportionately Black (38 percent) and included people who were homeless and had substance use disorders.

According to the audit, responding to calls from just the top 100 retail locations in the city used up almost 19,000 hours of police time, equivalent to the work of nine full-time officers—”a significant body of work” that could be streamlined, the report suggests, by using tools like “rapid video response” (essentially a police version of Zoom) to interview store employees instead of sending officers all over town.

Although the report says nothing about police hiring, City Councilmember Sara Nelson said it validated her efforts to secure more funding for police recruitment, and suggested (for the second time in a week) that if the council would  “just lift” a budget restriction that requires council approval before SPD can spend salary savings from unfilled positions, “they could spend that those resources on whatever they need to help with the crime situation.”

Although a report on place-based strategies specifically called for eliminating “extreme measures” like the razor-wire-topped fences the city installed to prevent people from accessing a parking lot at 12th and Jackson, the fences remain, giving the area the feel of a prison camp.

Chiming in a few minutes later, Councilmember Alex Pedersen said the “defunding movement against the police” movement had led to the loss of more than 400 police officers, which he said contributed to the spike in retail theft that began in 2020.

The audit found that although the city does participate in a number of collaborative efforts to address organized theft rings—including state and federal task forces focused on the issue—SPD could be doing a lot more to access existing resources outside the department. For example, the US Department of Justice offers free assistance implementing a strategy called Problem Oriented Policing, or POP, that addresses the conditions that lead people to do things like working for fencers with the goal of preventing crime rather than just reacting to it.

“Although POP has existed since the 1980s, SPD has not systematically implemented it,” the audit says. “In fact, SPD’s lack of experience with POP was seen as a limiting factor in a federally funded pilot project designed to address two downtown Seattle crime hot spots.”

The city should also invest in “place-based strategies”—better lighting, activating vacant lots, and other non-law-enforcement approaches—to make “hot spots” less appealing places for people to operate illegal street markets. SPD proposed 68 such strategies last year for the intersection of 12th and Jackson, a frequent target of aggressive “hot spot” policing operations, but the city has only implemented three of them.

Although the SPD report specifically called for eliminating “extreme measures” like the razor-wire-topped fences the city installed to prevent people from accessing a parking lot at 12th and Jackson—specifically because they make the area feel “unsafe”—the fences remain, giving the area the feel of a prison camp.

Another problem the auditors identified is that when police arrest shoplifters who work for fencing operations, they rarely interview the people they arrest to find out how the operations work, squandering opportunities to disrupt the market for stolen goods.

Last year, as part of an effort to build cases they could actually prosecute, the prosecutor’s office created a checklist of information SPD needed to provide before sending a case to the county. According to the audit, none of the five cases SPD filed after getting the checklist had all the required information, and all five are currently on hold because they lack information the prosecutor needs to move forward. The audit recommends training detectives in how to use the checklist, which includes four items and detailed instructions on how to obtain them.

City Council, Courts, Crime, Drugs, legislature

Despite Concerns, Seattle Council Could Criminalize Drug Possession and Use in Seattle Next Week

By Erica C. Barnett

Next Tuesday, the Seattle City Council could adopt legislation to incorporate parts of a new state law criminalizing public drug use and simple possession, adopted during a short special session earlier this year, into the city’s municipal code. The proposal, sponsored by City Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen and backed by City Attorney Ann Davison, would empower the city attorney’s office to prosecute people for possessing or using illegal drugs for the first time in the city’s history.

The legislature adopted the new law, which makes public drug use and simple possession a gross misdemeanor, during a special session earlier this year. The law is a response to a state supreme court decision known as State v. Blake, which overturned a state law making simple drug possession a felony. The legislature passed a temporary law making possession a felony while it hashed out a more comprehensive proposal, which passed during a special session this year. The new law makes drug possession and public use a misdemeanor, effectively bumping drug cases down from King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion’s office to Davison.

If the council doesn’t pass the new law, Manion would still have the authority to charge drug misdemeanors in addition to felonies, but is unlikely to do so; in a letter to council members, Manion said that even if her office “magically had the staff and resources necessary to take on a new body of work, we would focus those resources on felony prosecutions because the PAO has misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor jurisdiction in only unincorporated areas of King County.  … The City Attorney’s Office is better equipped to handle these cases immediately[.]”

During the year-long period when drug possession was a felony, Manion’s office only prosecuted two possession cases, according to an analysis by city council central staff. That same analysis says that although Davison’s office “has not explicitly stated how they would act upon the authority to charge knowing possession or use of illegal or controlled substances,” a Seattle Municipal Court analysis estimates an additional 700 to 870 cases a year, “based on historical filings before the COVID-19 pandemic” and the state’s own estimate of 12,000 new drug cases annually across the state.

In a letter to the council, the union representing King County Department of Public Defense employees, SEIU 925, called the legislation “an unconscionable abuse by the City Prosecutor, which dismisses solid empirical evidence that the War on Drugs and increased incarceration cause widespread harm throughout our community.

How the new proposals will play out in practice, if they pass, is a matter of significant debate. Opponents say they will empower police to do “stop and frisk” searches and arrest drug users with impunity, clogging up courtrooms and crowding the understaffed county jail. Proponents say the changes will create consequences for people committing crimes and—as Nelson put it in a press statement—”remove any further cause for inaction on the most critical public health and public safety issue of our time.” A third group—let’s call them reluctant proponents—argue that the new laws won’t have much impact, because the city hasn’t prioritized drug cases in the past and shows no sign of changing course now.

In a letter to the council, the union representing King County Department of Public Defense employees, SEIU 925, called the legislation “an unconscionable abuse by the City Prosecutor, which dismisses solid empirical evidence that the War on Drugs and increased incarceration cause widespread harm throughout our community.” Criminalizing drug use at the local level, the letter continued, “would create the same dynamic within SPD which led to the New York Police Department’s ‘stop and frisk’ programs,” which “ultimately led to a class-action lawsuit from public defenders in New York on behalf of their clients.” The letter was signed by all four SEIU chapters in Seattle.

During an online “emergency teach-in” to discuss the proposal on Tuesday, Drug Policy Alliance director Kassandra Frederique said the pressure to re-criminalize drugs in Seattle was part of a nationwide trend toward more punitive approaches to drug use and addiction. “Not only are we criminalizing, or re-litigating, issues that we have decided were inappropriate [for criminalization], we are now creating new crimes in order as a way to deal with the issues at hand,” Frederique said.

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A majority of the City Council would probably agree that criminalizing drugs is not the best approach to the rising number of people using and selling drugs in public. However, the legislation may pass with a slim majority, if Councilmembers Andrew Lewis and Dan Strauss—both up for reelection this year—join Nelson, Pedersen, and Council President Debora Juarez in voting for the law. Both were reportedly still considering their votes this weekend.

Why would council members vote for a law criminalizing drug use in Seattle? Politics. Three council incumbents are up for reelection this year, and two—Andrew Lewis and Dan Strauss—are facing challenges from the right that could push them into voting for the law to avoid handing political fodder to their opponents. (Tammy Morales, in District 2, is also up for reelection but has already said she will vote against the bill). Although neither Strauss nor Lewis has said publicly how they plan to vote—in a recent candidate questionnaire, Strauss told the Seattle Times he was a “maybe” on the law—if they were to vote against the bill, opponents aligned with Davison and Nelson could blame them, and the council generally,  for tying the city attorney’s hands and allowing open drug use to continue. The campaign ads practically write themselves.

While it’s true that the city generally incorporates new state laws into its code, the proposed criminalization bill itself actually breaks from that convention, by picking and choosing which parts of the state law the city should adopt.

On Tuesday, expect to hear the argument that it would be highly unusual for the council not to incorporate new state laws into its municipal code, and the counter-argument that refusing to criminalize drug possession at the local level sends an important message that Seattle’s priorities are different than the state’s.

While it’s true that the city generally incorporates new state laws into its code, the proposed criminalization bill itself actually breaks from that convention, by picking and choosing which parts of the state law the city should adopt. According to the council staff analysis, the ordinance “only adopts some portions of the state bill” because some of the provisions include “work that SPD and CAO are not focused upon.” So the council does have, and is already exercising, discretion when it decides whether to make local laws conform with the state’s.

Even the bill’s proponents have acknowledged that the police and courts are unlikely to prioritize low-level drug cases over more serious misdemeanors, such as domestic violence and DUI; the Seattle Police Department is currently hundreds of officers shy of its hiring goals, and the city attorney’s office, county public defense department, and Seattle Municipal Court are also short-staffed.

The state law encourages prosecutors to refer defendants t diversion and treatment programs, but that would require additional funding beyond what the city has already provided for new adult pre-trial diversion programs. (The funding has been sitting at the Human Services Department, unspent, since the council allocated it in 2021.) The city attorney’s office has said it plans to use those diversion funds, once they’re available, for a different purpose: Taking on cases that would have gone to community court, a therapeutic court from which Davison unilaterally withdrew the city last week.

“Building out the needed infrastructure to be able to address root causes of these issues and get individuals into treatment and services may require time and resources,” the central staff memo notes.

Some—including PubliCola guest columnist Lisa Daugaard, who argues that the outcome of the drug law debate is largely beside the point—are unconvinced that the new law will result in mass arrests, prosecutions, and jail, because the city has already reduced its alliance on punitive strategies, even before the Blake decision forced the legislature to pass a new state law. Mayor Harrell, Daugaard wrote, oversees SPD, “and has gone out of his way to make clear that he has no intention of arresting, jail or referring drug users for prosecution.”

Opponents of the proposed new drug laws say that argument is short-sighted, because priorities can change, but laws are permanent. “It is extremely dangerous precedent for a bill to be passed that criminalizes [drug use] and where our elected officials try to placate advocates and community members by saying that they will that they will be able to manage it,” Frederique said during Tuesday’s teach-in. “Those people are temporary actors. Election happen all the time. And what people will look at is the law.”

City Council, Crime, Drugs, Guest Contributor

Moving Beyond Possession and Public Use: Let’s Be the City That Makes Real Progress on the Drug Crisis
City Councilmembers Alex Pedersen and Sara Nelson; City Attorney Ann Davison

By Lisa Daugaard

Seattle can continue to lead the country toward a productive approach to substance use and related problems. This is true no matter what happens when the City Council votes next week on a proposed ordinance, sponsored by Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen and supported by City Attorney Ann Davison, creating gross misdemeanors under the Seattle Municipal Code for drug possession and public drug use.

If the ordinance is defeated, its proponents are still correct that we need far more urgency in responding to the drug crisis playing out throughout the city. If it passes, its opponents are still correct that the answer to drug-related problems does not generally lie in jailing and prosecuting people for substance use. Whatever happens next week, the work before us is the same: Take the field-leading models our community has devised to foster recovery for people who are most marginalized and exposed to the legal system, and secure the resources needed for those models to have their full impact.

When responding to problematic drug use, we cannot be satisfied with engagement for its own sake. As necessary as overdose prevention and reversal and preventing disease transmission are, they are not sufficient. We have to tackle how people are living, not just prevent deaths.

As a community, we have long known and broadly agreed on what can work well to respond to individuals who use substances in a problematic way: engagement without judgment; pre-booking diversion and pre-arrest referrals to intensive case management; well-designed low barrier interim and permanent housing options for those who are living unsheltered, as well as long-term case management for people whose use is related to complex trauma and lack of other support systems.

These approaches have been branded under names such as LEAD, Housing First, JustCARE, and harm reduction, but they all share elements of evidence-based, well-researched, trauma-informed care strategies and behavior change theory. Indeed, experts in our midst have quietly been teaching other communities how to implement these approaches, nationally and internationally, for more than a decade.

Seattle led the nation in reducing arrests, jail bookings, and prosecutions for drug possession long before the 2021 Washington Supreme Court Blake decision. The fact that there is an ordinance authorizing arrest, jail and prosecution for an offense does not dictate that it be used in a stupid, counter-productive, and evidence-defying way

What we have never done is bring these approaches to scale. Despite a unanimous City Council resolution in 2019 committing Seattle to make LEAD diversion resources available in all appropriate cases, current funding limits require turning down the majority of appropriate referrals. Nor have we complemented this approach with the housing and income supports many people need to make real breakthroughs. CoLEAD and the JustCARE model, funded by temporary COVID relief dollars, began to fill that gap over the last few years, but their future is uncertain as federal relief funding recedes.

It is absolutely true that, all other things being equal, court cases and criminal charges tend to impede recovery, for complex reasons including stigma, collateral consequences, the challenge of making it to court, and the difficulty of making even well-intentioned lawyers into trauma-informed practitioners. Jail and the inherent trauma it represents, including lack of physical autonomy for people who have often been physically abused, almost always impedes recovery. These should not be the primary strategy or the first resort in our response to problematic drug use. Those objecting to the new proposed ordinance are right to raise these issues.

Yet Seattle led the nation in reducing arrests, jail bookings, and prosecutions for drug possession long before the 2021 Washington Supreme Court Blake decision. The fact that there is an ordinance authorizing arrest, jail and prosecution for an offense does not dictate that it be used in a stupid, counter-productive, and evidence-defying way. We made enormous progress as a community, and developed a consensus approach to these issues, while there was still a valid felony drug possession law in place across the state that was fully available to local officers. Police and prosecutor discretion—and the support of city and county public officials and law enforcement leaders—meant that, while the authority to jail and prosecute existed, it was rarely used.

Mayor Bruce Harrell, who has prioritized action on conditions downtown and in the Chinatown/International District, oversees the Seattle Police Department, and has gone out of his way to make clear that he has no intention of arresting, jail or referring drug users for prosecution. And the authors of the new proposed ordinance making drug possession and public use a local crime were not even proposing criminalizing simple drug possession in Seattle until Governor Jay Inslee pressured the legislature to pass a law creating these crimes statewide. It’s regrettable that lawmakers removed the option of local choice, which would have resulted in de facto legalization of possession and private use in Seattle and King County. But it’s worth recalling that, before Inslee’s choice drove us down this road, Davison, Nelson, and Pedersen, to their credit, were championing only a very narrow role for the legal system.

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We can use best practices with or without the proposed law. In six months, for example, it will be far more important whether the multi-partner Third Avenue Project is still going on—and the 400-plus people who use drugs, live unsheltered, and are having a problematic impact in the Third Avenue corridor received supportive housing and intensive case management— than whether there is formal jurisdiction for the City Attorney to prosecute these two, of many, offenses that people who use substances often commit.

Drug possession and public use are now gross misdemeanors across the state—including in Seattle. Nothing local officials can do now can formally decriminalize either. It’s evident that some local leaders feel that taking an enforcement role completely off the table sends a message that serious drug issues are unimportant or low priority, and it’s also evident that other local officials cannot stomach any steps that formally invoke the prospect of criminal system consequences for what are fundamentally health and wellness issues.

It’s important to recognize that defeating the ordinance would not in itself represent a progressive approach to drug issues. Let’s fight hardest for what will matter most: whether we actually mobilize the community-based care approach that most people in Seattle support, go and get our people, demand the housing and income support that people need to recover, and provide the wrap-around care without which there is nearly zero chance for stabilization and healing. As it stands, regardless of whether this ordinance passes, we aren’t close to scaling the plan we need—even though we know exactly what it is.

Lisa Daugaard is the Co-Executive Director for Purpose Dignity Action (PDA) (formerly the Public Defender Association), a longtime drug policy reform organization that provides project management for local LEAD diversion initiatives, technical support for other jurisdictions implementing pre-booking diversion models, and partners on the JustCARE and Third Avenue Project initiatives.

Courts, Crime

Davison Unilaterally Ends Community Court Program
City Councilmember Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison

By Erica C. Barnett

City Attorney Ann Davison informed the Seattle Municipal Court today that the city of Seattle will no longer participate in the municipal court’s pioneering community court—a therapeutic court that allows people accused of certain low-level crimes to access services without pleading guilty to a crime. The decision effectively represents the end of community court in Seattle.

“After considerable thought and discussion,” Criminal Division Director Natalie Walton-Anderson wrote in a letter to municipal court judges Friday afternoon, “the City Attorney has decided to end the criminal division’s participation in Community Court. We recognize that Community Court has been part of the Seattle Municipal Court’s practice for many years, and that many will be disappointed by this decision.

“However, I want to assure you that the City Attorney remains committed to the principles behind the original formation of Community Court, and we remain committed to working with court and the Department of Public Defense to mitigate the potential impacts of this decision and to work together to find innovative and effective ways to address the criminal justice issues in our city.”

According to Judge Damon Shadid, who established and oversaw community court, Davison’s office “never negotiated in good faith regarding the changes they wanted in community court. They came with demands and if their demands weren’t met exactly, they continually threatened to pull out of the court.” Shadid spoke to PubliCola in his personal capacity, not in his role as a judge

In a statement, King County Department of Public Defense director Anita Khandelwal expressed dismay at Davison’s unilateral decision to pull out of community court.

“We are in the midst of a public health crisis. Our community members are dying from drug overdoses and need access to housing and to community-based services,” Khandelwal said. “Evidence demonstrates that the criminal legal system does not change behavior and that it undermines public safety by destabilizing people’s lives. Community Court was a collaborative effort to reduce the harm of the system and instead connect people charged with nonviolent misdemeanor offenses to services. Nonetheless, the Seattle City Attorney … seeks to push people deeper into a criminal legal carceral system that is expensive, deadly, and deeply racially disproportionate.”

One issue that came up during internal deliberations over the future of community court was whether defendants should have to do community service as a condition of receiving services through the court. During the pandemic, the court allowed people to take a life skills class in lieu of in-person community service, an option Shadid said proved to be more effective at helping people achieve their goals than requiring them to do manual labor near the courthouse. In her letter, Walton-Anderson said the work requirement was “a central component” of the original community court plan—one that would have had to be restored for the court to continue.

“The city attorney’s office would accept absolutely no compromise when it came to community service, regardless of the information that was provided to them about the efficacy of community service in the courts or just whether or not its right or wrong to force someone to work in order to receive services.”—Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid

In recent months, Shadid said, the city attorney’s main demand was that the court require its participants to complete at least six hours of community service. However, he said, “the city attorney’s office would accept absolutely no compromise when it came to community service, regardless of the information that was provided to them about the efficacy of community service in the courts or just whether or not its right or wrong to force someone to work in order to receive services.”

Davison’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the decision to pull out of community court. In her letter, Walton-Anderson said the city attorney’s office will “shift cases where the defendant is likely to engage with service providers to a pre-filing diversion model.” The letter does not provide any details about this model or how the city attorney will determine which people are “likely to engage with service providers.”

Community court is a therapeutic, rather than punitive, court aimed at people who commit low-level crimes like theft, trespassing, and resisting arrest; people who commit serious misdemeanors, like DUI and domestic violence, are not eligible. Its goal is to address the root causes of people’s criminal activity, such as addiction and homelessness, by enrolling people in case management and services as an alternative to prosecution and jail.

Last year, Davison successfully pushed the court to categorically exclude people on her “high utilizers” list—those accused of more than 12 misdemeanor offenses in the past five years—from community court, arguing that people who commit crimes repeatedly “need meaningful accountability” in the form of prosecution and jail.

The court became an issue in last year’s municipal court elections. Davison-aligned candidates (including one of her own employees, assistant city attorney Nyjat Rose-Akins, running against incumbent, and community court champion, Damon Shadid) argued for drastically changing or eliminating community court on the grounds that it was all carrot, no stick. Rose-Akins, along with incumbent Adam Eisenberg, lost to their more progressive opponents, extinguishing conservative hopes that a new court would make community court more punitive or eliminate it altogether.

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In the letter to judges, which refers to community court as “Community Court 3.0” because it is the court’s third iteration, Walton-Anderson said the current court has not produced results, pointing to the fact that many people fail to appear in court for their first appearances—a point Rose-Akins made repeatedly in her campaign against Shadid last year. Shadid counters that the failure to appear rate for first appearances is “extraordinarily high” for misdemeanor cases throughout the municipal court system; “the only difference now is that in community court, we could try to connect people to services the day they came into court instead of warehousing them in the jail.”

Like many documents from Davison’s office, the letter uses several extreme, cherry-picked anecdotes about community court participants who went on to commit serious crimes to suggest community court is a soft-on-crime failure, including one involving a five-year-old child.

Earlier this month, Davison supported legislation sponsored by Councilmember Sara Nelson that will, if it passes, empower her office to prosecute people for possessing small amounts of drugs and using drugs in public, a first in the city’s history. (The Nelson bill stems from recent state action to make drug possession a gross misdemeanor. For Seattle to prosecute drug users under the new state law, the city has to pass a local law that incorporates—or goes beyond—the state law, which is what the proposed new law would do.)

According to some estimates, the new anti-drug law could result in up to 800 additional prosecutions per year—cases that, because they’ll be in mainstream court, will require full discovery, adding to existing court delays and further increasing the population of the downtown jail, which is currently sending inmates to jails in South King County in response to dangerous understaffing.

Crime, homelessness

Board Overseeing Federal Homelessness Funds Erupts Into Shouts Over Nomination of Sex Offender

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has asked a member of its Continuum of Care board to step down after she yelled at a fellow board member who objected to the appointment of a proposed new board member, pointing out that he is a registered sex offender and accusing him of behaving inappropriately toward her in the past.

In an email to KCRHA staff and board members last Thursday, KCRHA chief program officer Peter Lynn said he was formally asking the board co-chair, Shanéé Colston, to resign after she “shouted down committee member Kristina Sawyckyj for identifying that one of the prospective AC nominees was a registered sex offender, which is public information. Ms. Sawyckyj was also shouted down by Chair Colston when she spoke of her experience being inappropriately touched by the nominee.”

The continuum of care board plays an important role in securing homelessness funds from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. It reviews and approves applications for federal funding, oversees annual funding renewal requests and performance metrics for homeless service providers, and creates a prioritization tool to judge funding applications.

During a flurry of overlapping shouts, another board member interjected that she had had “nothing but good experiences with [the nominee]” and told Sawyckvj she should contact the police, which Sawyckvj said she had. Sawyckyj went silent, and eventually left the meeting.

The argument began a little more than 45 minutes into the meeting (viewable on the board’s website, which contains a trigger warning for the meeting), when board member Kristina Sawyckyj objected to the appointment of a man who has been convicted for multiple sex offenses involving teenage girls.

In 2010, when he was 25, he was convicted of harboring a minor, a 13-year-old runaway with whom he had a sexual relationship, according to court records. Two years later, the nominee was charged with raping a minor in a case involving a 15-year-old girl; he ultimately pled guilty to communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, a felony sex crime. In 2018, Seattle police found him living in a tent near the Seattle waterfront with a 17-year-old girl, whose mother picked her up and took her home, according to Seattle court records.

Also on the agenda at the delayed meeting: An update to the charter for the Continuum of Care Board, which the board has proposed amending to specify that all 19 members must have lived experience of homelessness or housing instability.

“[He] is a sex offender, a repeat sex offender, and I have had [a] bad experience with him,” Sawyckyj said, adding that the nominee had “touched me” inappropriately in the past.

At that point, Colston cut her off, yelling, “we don’t do that here” and saying it was against board rules to “out” someone who was convicted of a sex crime. During a flurry of overlapping comments, another board member interjected that she had had “nothing but good experiences with [the nominee]” and told Sawyckvj she should contact the police, which Sawyckvj said she had.

Sawyckyj went silent, then left the meeting, while Colston continued. “I’m telling you that you cannot talk like that in this meeting. I will not have that here!” Colston said. “If anyone wants to talk like that you will be muted and removed from this meeting,” she said. “This is about equity. And everyone—everyone— deserves housing. I don’t care if they’re a sex offender! … This is an inclusive space, and we are equitable to all.”

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The new board members were supposed to be confirmed during a special meeting last Friday, but the KCRHA canceled the meeting on Thursday. “This unacceptable behavior by leadership of the CoC Advisory Committee has created a hostile environment for KCRHA staff and committee members,” Lynn wrote in his email. “I will be working with KCRHA leadership and our attorneys to determine the next steps to ensure the safety of all those involved in the [board].

Also on the agenda at the delayed meeting: An update to the charter for the Continuum of Care Board, which the board has proposed amending to specify that all 19 members must have lived experience of homelessness or housing instability. The board, which is required by federal policy, predates the KCRHA. In its pre-KCRHA iterations, the board included elected officials, homeless and human service providers, and government staff, in addition to people with direct experience of homelessness.

City Council, Crime, Drugs, legislature, Mayor Harrell

Proposal to Make Public Drug Use a Misdemeanor Unlikely to Have Much Visible Impact
City Councilmembers Alex Pedersen and Sara Nelson; City Attorney Ann Davison

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen, along with City Attorney Ann Davison, proposed legislation on Thursday that would make public consumption of illegal drugs, other than cannabis, a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a maximum fine of $1,000.

The legislation comes in the context of the state legislature’s failure to address drug possession in the session that ended Sunday. In 2021, the state supreme court issued a called State v. Blake, which decriminalized simple drug possession—previously a felony. In response, lawmakers passed a temporary law that made possession a misdemeanor, rather than a felony, giving themselves until July of this year to come up with a permanent replacement. Gov. Jay Inslee is expected to call a special session on the issue next month.

Meanwhile, cities around the state are already proposing their own local laws criminalizing drug possession that would go in effect if the legislature fails to take action by July.

The proposal in Seattle does not directly address drug possession. Instead, it focuses on the kind of visible, public use that grabs headlines—people smoking meth or fentanyl on park benches, in doorways, and on public transit. At a press conference announcing the legislation on Thursday, Davison, Nelson, and Pedersen all framed public drug use as a public safety issue and suggested that their legislation would send a signal to drug users that they could no longer use in public spaces.

“Enough is enough. We need to reclaim our public spaces—all of them. We need to intervene in the lives of people who are suffering and to do that we must see them and say that what they’re doing in public is not okay for them, or for us collectively.”—City Attorney Ann Davison

“Our buses are unhealthy to use. Our transit centers feel unsafe to wait in, and people walking down the street feel afraid,” Davison said. “Enough is enough. We need to reclaim our public spaces—all of them. We need to intervene in the lives of people who are suffering and to do that we must see them and say that what they’re doing in public is not okay for them, or for us collectively.”

Nelson said the “economic revitalization of downtown” depended on “giv[ing] our officers a tool to interrupt” public drug consumption. Workers “are afraid to ride public transit to work or walk to their office past people smoking fentanyl on the street,” she said. “Meanwhile, summer’s around the corner, and parents want to be able to take their part their kids to the park without people doing drugs right in front of them.”

Despite all the tough talk, the legislation—if it passes—is unlikely to have much of an impact on public drug use downtown or elsewhere. (Notably, although all of its supporters focused on mitigating harm to children, the legislation is silent on private drug use by parents or caregivers, which causes far more harm to actual children than walking past a stranger smoking fentanyl in the park).

For one thing, as Davison acknowledged, the Seattle Police Department doesn’t have enough officers to enforce the drug laws that are already on the books, including laws against dealing and trafficking. For another, the downtown jail isn’t booking people on low-level misdemeanors, and won’t be starting any time soon—just last month, the county moved 100 people from the downtown jail in because of understaffing.

“I recognize that [SPD is] down 30 percent of their force, and we need to make sure that they’ve got adequate staffing levels to be able to improve the public safety of people and businesses across the city,” Nelson said. “What I’m worried about right now is getting the basics right, and making explicit that we don’t allow the public use of illegal drugs.”

As she did during Harrell’s executive order announcement, Nelson distinguished between “deadly” illegal drugs and alcohol, supporting Harrell’s proposal to legalize “sip and strolls” events where people participating in downtown events can consume alcohol on sidewalks and other public spaces. Prior to the pandemic, alcohol use killed 140,000 Americans every year, according to the CDC, and alcohol consumption as well as binge drinking has only increased since then.

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Davison said she hoped to work with “our diversion partners to get people into treatment. … The goal is always recovery—to disrupt antisocial behavior, to encourage people into treatment, and to make our streets parks and buses safer.”

The city’s primary pre-filing diversion program, LEAD, is not primarily focused on putting people in treatment as an alternative to jail; instead, it provides intensive case management based on a person’s needs, with a focus on harm reduction.

The co-director of the organization that runs LEAD, Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), said Thursday that the legislation “could be far worse, as we can see from the bill that was passed by the Democratically controlled Senate.” That bill made drug possession a gross misdemeanor, punishable by up to 364 days in jail, with a treatment alternative that carried harsh penalties for “failure to comply” with mandatory treatment.

“Aside from using the criminal system for what are fundamentally health issues, this legislation doesn’t inflict any additional problems or harm,” Daugaard said.

“I want to see that this legislation was created with appropriate input from impacted communities, law enforcement and first responders, and providers of triage and treatment. Another policy tool helping people accept services may enhance our efforts, but recreating the war on drugs would crater them.”—Mayor Bruce Harrell

In a statement, City Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, said she would “not consider a local Blake decision fix or any local drug laws” until the legislature has had a chance to meet in special session and come up with a fix. … I remain committed to Seattle’s approach, as outlined as recently as last week in Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Executive Order, to work to ensure people struggling with addiction get the treatment they need.”

As we reported earlier this month, Harrell’s executive order includes support for a new pilot contingency management program that will provide incentives for drug users who abstain from their drug of choice; it also expands the fire department’s Health One program to include a new overdose response unit.

In a statement, Harrell said that although “[i]t is never acceptable for people to smoke fentanyl or consume illegal drugs on Seattle sidewalks and public spaces… it is essential that we advance evidence-based policies, programs, and services that help those in need get the treatment they deserve–and continue focusing on arrests of those dealing or taking advantage of people in crisis, both of which are critical to restoring feelings of safety downtown and for all Seattle neighbors.”

“I want to see that this legislation was created with appropriate input from impacted communities, law enforcement and first responders, and providers of triage and treatment,” Harrell continued. “Another policy tool helping people accept services may enhance our efforts, but recreating the war on drugs would crater them.”

Addiction, Crime, King County, Opinion

“High Utilizers” Report Embraces Jail as Solution to Addiction and Crime

By Erica C. Barnett

When City Attorney Ann Davison announced her “high utilizers initiative” last year, she said it would go beyond previous attempts to punish people who commit misdemeanors by connecting them to case management, treatment, and other services. In reality, according to a report from Davison’s office, the initiative has only managed to temporarily incapacitate some people by locking them in the understaffed downtown jail, a “solution” to crimes like shoplifting and trespassing that does nothing to address the root causes that lead people to use drugs, steal from stores, and act out in public.

The report appears to feature a lot of hard numbers, but a closer look reveals that many are based on assumptions about how individual people would behave—assumptions that would undoubtedly be altered by effective interventions like housing, mental health care, and addiction treatment focused on harm reduction rather than coercion.

According to the report, the high utilizers list included 168 people over the last year—all individuals who have had at least 12 misdemeanor referrals to the city attorney’s office over the prior year, and at least one in the most recent eight months. Of those, 142 were booked into the downtown jail for misdemeanors or warrants, under a special exception to jail rules that have eliminating booking for most misdemeanors. On average, each “high utilizer” served 117 days in jail in jail last year—nearly four months per person.

In January and February 2022, before the high utilizer initiative went into effect,  the average daily population at the downtown jail was 910; for the same period this year, it was 1,220. The increase is the result of a complex mix of factors, but jailing 142 people for low-level misdemeanors is undoubtedly among them.

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Because most of the people on the high utilizers list ended up incarcerated, the report notes, they ended up fewer crimes than they had in previous years, averaging 2.7 misdemeanor referrals per year compared to a pre-initiative average of 6.3. This, the report says, is proof the initiative is working: “The principal reason for the significant drop in high utilizer criminal activity was that they were quickly held accountable and booked into jail for their criminal activity,” the report says. “Holding high utilizers accountable for repeat criminal conduct is the game-changer that reduced their impact on the City.”

Already, these numbers are speculative—who can say, for example, whether a “high utilizer” who received housing and case management, rather than blunt-force punishment, would have gone on to commit their own “average” number of misdemeanors? The report veers further into extrapolation and guesswork with an “estimate” that locking people on the list up for misdemeanors has prevented “over 750 criminal police referrals reflecting many thousands of criminal acts.” If this is true (and if “high utilizers” are really superpredators who deserve harsher treatment, including exclusion from community court), the city’s overall misdemeanor rate should have declined appreciably. Yet according to the Seattle Police Department’s 2022 crime report, misdemeanor theft (which includes shoplifting and theft from buildings) went up 5 percent last year.

The report includes “examples of reduced public safety impact” identifying some of the high utilizers by first name and last initial, making them easily identifiable—something PubliCola has not done when writing about the initiative in an effort to avoid re-traumatizing people who may have been targets of negative media attention. It also lists people, by name, who “absconded” from mandatory treatment for their addictions or died during the period covered by the report.

Not surprisingly, the report also concludes that people “failed” to follow through with coercive residential treatment, which has an extremely low success rate, particularly for people with co-occurring mental illness and those experiencing homelessness. Even people who voluntarily enter residential treatment for opiate use disorder are likely to leave against medical advice, and the vast majority of people who enter traditional residential treatment relapse—facts that ought to argue in favor of different solutions, rather than more of the same.

According to Davison’s report, though, the problem is that the people on her list just aren’t “ready” to accept the treatment they’re offered.

Image from original high utilizers initiative announcement

“While there were a small handful of success stories, the great majority of times in which out-of-custody addiction treatment services were offered and accepted, the defendant fled within the first 24 hours,” the report says. “At least five high utilizers absconded on more than one occasion when they were given a chance to address their substance use disorders with treatment. … That leads us to the conclusion that most high utilizers are not ready to go direct to out-of-custody, voluntary addiction treatment programs.”

“If individuals stabilize during in-custody time, there is an opportunity to successfully graduate the individual to out-of-custody residential treatment after they had demonstrated active participation,” the report concludes.

King County does offer medication for opiate dependency behind bars—an evidence-based solution that, unfortunately, doesn’t work long-term if a person doesn’t have immediate access to equivalent treatment when they’re released. As we’ve reported, the county’s jail-based treatment programs suffer from the same lack of staffing that has led the ACLU to sue the county over inmates’ lack of access to basic physical and mental health care; jail-based treatment also has the best chance of succeeding if people can immediately access housing and health care when they’re released, something the jail system is poorly equipped to provide.