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.
City Councilmember Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison in 2024; both will leave office at the end of this year.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison has accelerated filings of misdemeanor drug possession cases during the last few months of her term, more than quadrupling drug prosecutions from an average of 4 a week between mid-June and mid-September to 16.4 a week between mid-September and December 15.
The city attorney also prosecuted more people for public drug use, increasing prosecutions from virtually none between June and September (an average of 0.5 a day) to 3.5 a day between mid-September and December 15, a seven-fold increase.
The Seattle Municipal Court compiled the numbers for violations of the city’s recently passed drug laws, which made it a misdemeanor to possess any amount of an illegal drug in public, at PubliCola’s request.
The city council passed the law, which empowered the city attorney to prosecute people for drug possession and use for the first time in the city’s history, in 2023. The following year, they passed a companion bill that reinstated special “Stay Out of Drug Area” banishment zones for people accused of violating the new drug laws, a tactic dating back to the early 1990s that the city had long abandoned as ineffective.
Earlier this year, Davison replaced Community Court, which she unilaterally ended in 2023, with a “drug prosecution alternative” that allows people arrested under the new drug laws to have their charges dismissed if they do an assessment to confirm their addiction and don’t get arrested again.
A spokesman for Davison’s office, Tim Robinson, said the spike in filings is “simply a matter of an increase in referrals” by the Seattle Police Department—when police arrest more people for misdemeanor drug violations, they file more charges.
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“When our review and filing unit reviews the referrals, they determine if there are sufficient legal grounds to move the case forward,” Robinson said. “This includes whether or not the alleged conduct violates a specific law and if the evidence supports the elements of the alleged offense. An individual involved in a case is referred to the Drug Prosecution Alternative whenever possible.”
However, the decision to file charges is discretionary, not automatic; the entire premise of the LEAD program, which diverts people involved in the criminal justice system away from prosecution, is that services are more effective than jail.
Incoming city attorney Erika Evans, who defeated Davision by a margin of 34 points in November, said diversion to treatment and services, not prosecution, “should be the default response for people dealing with substance use disorder.”
“Traditional prosecution should only be considered after meaningful attempts at diversion and support have not been successful,” Evans said. “When diversion alone is not working, I believe a community court model for people dealing with substance use disorder can provide accountability for progress while still keeping treatment and services at the center.”
As PubliCola has reported, the overwhelming majority of people arrested for violating Seattle’s drug laws end up cycling through the system without actually getting any kind of treatment.
“I am skeptical of any drug alternative program that relies primarily on increased charging rather than meaningful diversion,” Evans said. “When I take office, I look forward to working closely with the courts, the mayor, DPD, and our office to transform the current model into one that follows the law’s legislative intent, uses public dollars responsibly, and actually helps people get out of this cycle, not deeper into it.”
If you’re still undecided about the Seattle City Attorney’s race, Seattle Nice has just the thing for you—an election debate, moderated by your three co-hosts, between incumbent Ann Davison and challenger Erika Evans!.The live debate was hosted by the Urban Community Councils of Seattle a couple of weeks ago and we’re bringing it to everyone in podcast form.
Some highlights:
City Attorney Davison thinks her “high utilizers” list of people who commit multiple misdemeanors is working to reduce crime; Evans disagrees. “We really are not seeing the people that we started the initiative with, people who had sometimes 40 referrals for theft, sometimes in one location multiple times a day.”
Evans disagrees, but says she’d maintain the list as a way of directing services to frequent offenders: “The people who are on this list are folks that are not competent to stand trial, folks that are dealing with substance use disorder, folks that are unhoused.”
Evans said she would file fewer cases against people for misdemeanor graffiti and theft charges and re-focus the city attorney’s office on more serious misdemeanors, like domestic violence and DUI. Last year, “60 percent of all cases set for jury trial were dismissed. And to be clear, as a prosecutor, your role sometimes is to dismiss cases if, if it’s an improper case, or if there’s issues with it, but 60 percent means that way too many cases are just being filed to get the numbers up.”
Davison said her focus on prosecuting offenses issues like graffiti and shoplifting contributes to a better climate for businesses. “We want to foster economic vitality. We need anchor tenants. We need small business, but we [also] need large anchor tenants to create that neighborhood of fostering of a small business environment.”
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Davison defended her decision to eliminate community court, a low-barrier therapeutic alternative that allowed participants to avoid charges if they took part in required services, including a life-skills class. Davison instituted a new “drug prosecution alternative” that is more stick than carrot, allowing people to escape charges if they take a substance abuse assessment and don’t get arrested again for 60 days. Community court, Davison said, “increased recidivism. It actually encouraged people to commit crime. So I pulled out from that.”
Evans countered that the new drug alternative doesn’t help people with addiction to recover. “Someone that’s smoking fentanyl, they have to go get an assessment …to tell them whether they have a fentanyl addiction or not. No treatment. It’s wasting resources, and it’s cycling folks in and out, and it’s not addressing what we’re seeing on our streets.”
Two notes about the recording: As we recorded, the Mariners were losing to the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, tying the two teams on the way to the World Series—hence the baseball talk. And due to a production error at the venue, Ann Davison’s voice is harder to hear than everyone else’s; please excuse the poor sound quality.
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, flanked by council members, Mayor Bruce Harrell, and department directors at City Hall earlier this month.
By Andrew Engelson
A PubliCola analysis of Seattle Municipal Court data reveals that, in the three and half years Ann Davison has served as Seattle City Attorney, her office has failed to live up to promises she made in her campaign in 2021, when she criticized former city attorney Pete Holmes for waiting too long to file cases and failing to prosecute serious misdemeanors aggressively.
Under Davison, a greater percentage of cases have been dismissed or ended in no conviction than when Holmes was city attorney. And while she has sped up the time it takes to file non-traffic misdemeanors, she’s taking more than twice as long as her predecessor, Pete Holmes, to file domestic violence cases.
Davison, a Republican who took office in 2022 after defeating abolitionist public defender Nicole Thomas Kennedy, is currently trailing challenger Erika Evans by a wide margin in her race for reelection. As of Friday, August 8, Davison had 33.8 percent of the vote to Evans’ 55.3 percent.
During her first campaign, Davison promised to more effectively prosecute people for misdemeanor offenses, crack down on repeat offenders, and critically examine community court, a therapeutic court she single-handedly dismantled in 2023. After winning the 2021 primary, Davison told KIRO NewsRadio, “We must address crimes at the misdemeanor level because otherwise it invites an increase in severity and frequency.” The city attorney’s office prosecutes misdemeanors, not felonies, and also serves as the city’s law firm.
“[The city attorney’s office] can talk a big game about wanting to get tough, but they’re not really willing to devote the resources necessary to take a tougher approach, because everybody understands that that would be too expensive and time-consuming to be worth it,” said Austin Field, political action coordinator for the chapter of SEIU 925 that represents King County public defenders.
The COVID pandemic profoundly altered how Seattle’s criminal justice system functioned. The number of cases SPD referred and the number of charges the city attorney’s office filed fell dramatically. In addition, in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the King County Jail stopped booking people on misdemeanor charges.
Both before and during this period, Holmes’ office was widely criticized for slow filing times – the period between when someone is arrested by SPD and when the city attorney decides whether to charge them with a crime. According to Davison’s office, delays under Holmes increased to a median of 162 days in late 2021. Since Davison’s election, the office has dropped the median time to file charges to 19 days.
In 2022, Davison’s office cleared a huge backlog of cases left over from the pandemic era out of the system, declining to file charges in 3,790 old cases. These cases are not included in our analysis of Davison’s record.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and the founder of the LEAD diversion program, said decreasing those delays improves things for people who are arrested. “The time to a decision about whether or not a case is going to be filed is a clear improvement. They said they were going to do that, and they did that,” Daugaard said.
But data from the Seattle Municipal Court also show that Davison is performing far more poorly than her predecessor on many metrics she promised to address.
One of Davison’s biggest supporters, Scott Lindsay—a former city public safety advisor who now serves as Davison’s deputy—wrote two reports in 2019 that heaped criticism on Holmes for filing cases slowly or declining to file charges for serious misdemeanors. In the second of those reports, Lindsay criticized Holmes for declining to file nearly half of all non-traffic misdemeanor cases, claiming that only one in three cases reached what Lindsay called “meaningful resolution.”
“[D]eclining to file almost half of all cases for multiple consecutive years leads to a significant waste of police time and effort and has significant consequences for victims,” Lindsay wrote.
However, data from the Seattle Municipal Court indicates that Davison’s office also declines to file cases about half the time.
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Lindsay also faulted Holmes for failing to reach “meaningful resolution” in 42 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases, including cases dismissed for incomplete or missing evidence, cases that were still pending two years or more after an arrest, cases dismissed because the defendant was not mentally competent to stand trial, or a dismissal in the “interest of justice”—usually a judge using discretion to toss a case they believe is without merit.
Since taking office, however, Davison’s record on this measure has been nearly identical to Holmes’, with about 38 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases between February 2022 and April 2025 failing to meet Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard— 2,218 of 5,804 cases that were resolved during that period. In April, there were an additional 2,358 cases still pending.
According to Daugaard, the similarity between Davison’s and Holmes’ record shows that Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard is a faulty metric. “A lot of cases have always been dismissed in Seattle Municipal Court, whether under Mark Sidran, Tom Carr, Pete Holmes or Davison,” she said. “That’s just in the nature of the work.”
In his report, Lindsay also claimed that Holmes declined to file charges too often after arrests, letting people who should have been prosecuted off the hook. At the lowest point for filing during Holmes’ tenure, in 2016 and 2017, the city attorney’s office declined to file charges 46 percent of the time.
But data from Davison’s most recent quarterly report indicates that the rate of declines under Davison has been similar, and at times higher, than under Holmes, hovering between 40 and 50 percent. In the first quarter of 2025, Davison’s decline rate was 48 percent—two percent higher than what Lindsay called the “worst” years under Holmes.
In addition, Davison’s office declined to file charges in an increasingly large number of those cases because city attorneys believed they were unable to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the past two years, according to the city attorney office’s first quarter 2025 criminal division report, that figure has climbed to 38 percent of all declines. This compares to an average of 27 percent in 2018, when Holmes was city attorney.
Daugaard says a high decline rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There is no absolute right percentage or right number of filings,” she said. “Declining a large number of cases may be completely appropriate and the absolute right level of filings to be pursuing.”
Field says that because Davison is declining so many cases due to lack of decisive evidence, many of his public defender colleagues are now more willing to take cases to trial. “[The city attorney’s] goal has really been to try to scoop people up and impose just enough bail so that they get held until they plead,” said Field. “For them it’s really not about taking cases to trial. So the best way to ensure a good outcome for our clients is to try to aggressively litigate.”
In its 2024 annual report, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) noted that when the city attorney’s office takes cases to trial, it often fails to get convictions. “The [city attorney’s] own data for 2024 show that they were more likely to have their case dismissed than receive a conviction,” the report said.
Despite improving filing times, Davison’s office is taking much longer than her predecessor to decide whether to file charges in domestic violence cases. According to data provided by the Seattle Municipal Court, the average time to file in DV cases more than doubled during Davison’s term—from 25 days in 2018, under Holmes, to 58 days in 2023.
Kennedy, who ran against Davison on a progressive platform, said that figure is deeply disturbing. “In cases of domestic violence, there are times when someone does need to be incarcerated, or something of that nature, for someone to be safe,” she said. “And if the time to file goes from 25 days to 58 days, that’s not really doing anything for the victim. In fact, it’s potentially putting them in more danger.”
Many of the people Davison is choosing to prosecute are homeless, dealing with substance use disorder, or experiencing mental illness. Last year, Davison’s criminal division prosecuted nearly 5,400 total non-traffic misdemeanor cases—well above the pandemic low of 3,500 set in 2021, but actually down from a high of more than 7,300 set in 2018 under Holmes.
In its 2024 report, DPD criticized Davin’s strategy, saying that her office was “reviving failed policies and a renewed focus on jailing people accused of low-level, non-violent offenses.”
“Our clients experiencing housing instability or a behavioral health disorder routinely see their needs unmet and their challenges exacerbated when they are prosecuted for nonviolent misdemeanor charges,” said Matt Sanders, Director of the King County Department of Public Defense.
“What these clients need, and what would ultimately reduce their likelihood of future involvement in the increasingly costly criminal legal system, is access to supportive housing and effective treatment options.”
A review of cases Davison show that many of the people she charges are accused of minor offenses that often result from poverty, drug use, or mental health issues.
For example, a woman was arrested in May 2023 and later charged by the CAO for shoplifting $30 worth of merchandise—several rolls of paper towels and some wine—from the Walgreens at 23rd and Jackson. Court records show that the woman was likely homeless and had a chronic history of minor shoplifting, including a 2022 conviction for stealing a pack of toilet paper and a bottle of laundry detergent. Another case, also in 2023, involved accusations that she shoplifted frozen shrimp, Lysol cleaner, a bag of frozen lima beans, and several other items from a Safeway.
The woman, who pled guilty to charges of theft and criminal trespass in the 2023 case last year, has not served her 364-day jail sentence after failing to appear at multiple court hearings, most likely because she’s homeless and can’t be located.
Another “high utilizer” of the court system identified by Davison’s office, according to municipal court records, was a woman charged with several counts of theft after a 2023 incident in which she allegedly shoplifted small items, including a pair of earrings and a hoodie, from several Pike Place Market merchants. Later that year, a competency evaluation found that the woman’s mental health prevented her from understanding the court proceedings, and her case was dismissed.
Field says Davison’s performative “tough on crime” approach to incidents like these doesn’t address underlying issues like homelessness and poverty. “Poverty is actually a political choice,” he said. “It’s something we’re imposing on folks, and one of the ways that we are keeping people poor is by prosecuting them for behavior that’s inevitably associated with having been born poor and having grown up poor.”
Before she become city attorney in 2022, Davison ran for and lost a race against Debora Juarez for Seattle city council. Then, in 2020, during the first Trump administration, she ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican Party ticket headed up by Loren Culp, losing in the primary.
Seattle’s latest revenue forecast, which will form the basis of the 2026-2027 biennial budget, reduced the. city’s projected two-year budget shortfall from around $240 million to about $150 million. The city’s revenue forecasters used a more optimistic model than the April forecast.
On the first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we discussed the broader implications of a proposed ballot initiative that would make it illegal to fall asleep outdoors in unincorporated King County, a Seattle ballot measure to raise business and occupation taxes to pay for housing stability and human services, and a lawsuit filed by City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican who’s struggling to retain support, over a seven-month-old Trump executive.
The city council approved the business and occupation tax proposal for the November ballot, overcoming objections from some councilmembers that it shouldn’t be dedicated to any specific purpose, but instead should go toward any current or future general-fund purpose elected officials decide they want to fund. In general, voters approve taxes for specific purposes, and there is no recent precedent for sending a blank-check tax measure to the ballot.
This week’s local elections represented a massive rebuke of the people elected in the wake of COVID and the 2020 protests against police brutality. Across the board in Seattle, progressive candidates were leading big, from Katie Wilson (running against Mayor Bruce Harrell) to Erika Evans (headed for victory against Davison).
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City councilmembers have proposed more than 100 amendments to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s much-delayed Comprehensive Plan update, which only deals with neighborhood residential (former single-family) zoning. Some amendments would further shrink the size of neighborhood centers—small nodes of potential future density—while others would expand them and create new incentives for housing.
On this week’s second edition of the podcast, we debated what’s behind the shift toward progressive candidates this year. I argued that it’s a combination of people’s desire to have people in office who’ll fight Trump policies that impact Seattle and a rejection of politicians who’ve prioritized cracking down on minor crimes over solving the affordability crisis; Sandeep says voters are reflexively “lurching to the left” because of Trump, not any specific local issues.
A petition to “save the trees” is more blatantly misleading than usual, as the trees in question aren’t threatened by the development people are protesting. Maritza Rivera can’t seem to keep staff for more than six months. And the latest election results put Katie Wilson at 50.2 percent to Harrell’s 41.7, while Ann Davison and City Council President Sara Nelson lost ground too: The two incumbents have 33.8 percent and 35.8 percent of the vote, respectively.
On this week’s episode, we discussed the broader implications of a proposed ballot initiative that would make it illegal to fall asleep outdoors anywhere in unincorporated King County. If enacted—proponents are still gathering signatures to put it on the ballot—the measure would make it a misdemeanor to sleep outdoors.
The proposal does stipulate that the sheriff’s office should only enforce the sleeping ban if shelter is available, but includes a carveout for situations where an officer believes someone poses a risk to himself or others, which is mechanically similar to Seattle rules allowing no-notice sweeps if someone is causing an “obstruction” in any public space, an exemption the city has interpreted quite liberally.
Whether the proposal ends up passing or not, it’s part of a broader growing intolerance for people who are visibly homeless in public spaces—one that goes hand in hand with anti-Housing First efforts to force people into treatment while they’re still homeless or unstably housed.
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We also discussed the proposed Seattle ballot measure that would raise business and occupation taxes on high-grossing businesses, using the proceeds to support housing stability, food security, shelter, substance use disorder treatment, and transportation. (The bill was originally more limited, but councilmembers piled on new spending categories and exemptions last week). After amendments to exempt Fred Hutchinson Cancer Care Center and Children’s Hospital from the tax, it will—if it passes—bring in about $90 million a year.
The three of us debated whether the tax proposal was, as Sandeep suggested, “rushed” forward to give Mayor Bruce Harrell a last-minute boost before the primary election (mail in your ballots or drop them off at an official ballot drop box before Tuesday night at 8pm!)
Harrell has certainly jumped on more than one progressive bandwagon in recent weeks to bolster his lefty bona fides in his race against progressive labor and transit activist Katie Wilson. In addition to coming out for the B&O tax, which Rinck was reportedly working on long before Harrell got wind of it, the mayor just endorsed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration filed by City Attorney Ann Davison—another local official who appears to be in for a tough reelection battle and could benefit from being able to say she proactively sued the Trump Administration, even if it took her until the week before Election Day.
