Tag: City Attorney’s Office

Courts, Crime

Facing Thousands of Backlogged Cases, New City Attorney Says She’ll Reorg Her Office for Faster Results

By Erica C. Barnett

When former city attorney Ann Davison started her term in 2024, she pledged to swiftly eliminate a “backlog” of some 5,000 cases she said her predecessor, Pete Holmes, had carelessly allowed to pile up during his final term. And while she did clear out much of that backlog, largely by dropping thousands of older cases, her strategy for eliminating future case pileups—a “close-in-time” policy that required attorneys to decide whether to file cases within five days of receiving police reports—was largely unsuccessful.

When she left office at the end of last year, Davison left behind a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases—between about 4,700 and 5,100, depending on which DUI cases are included in the backlog. The larger number, from City Attorney Erika Evans’ office, includes nearly 400 DUI cases that have been reviewed, but not filed, because of testing delays at the state toxicology lab, while Davison’s office did not count that type of case as part of the backlog.

“My predecessor, former city attorney Davison, also inherited a backlog from former city attorney Pete Holmes,” Evans said. “It seems like it’s common to have [a backlog], and it shouldn’t be at all.”

Scott Lindsay, the former deputy city attorney, told PubliCola his own team had identified about 1,000 cases they believe shouldn’t count toward the backlog, including the DUI “tox hold” cases as well as around 200 cases where attorneys made filing decisions before December 31 but the filings didn’t go through until this year.

“We have some real questions about how they’re doing the math,” Lindsay said. But, he added, “It’s absolutely true that there was a backlog at the end of the Davison administration, and it was growing.”

In addition to the DUI cases that are sitting in tox-lab limbo, the backlog includes around 800 criminal traffic cases, 1,700 domestic violence cases, and more than 1,000 other misdemeanor cases, such as shoplifting, trespassing, and public drug use.

The total also include around 1,000 cases that are unclassified—meaning they could be anything. This problem apparently emerged last year during a long-overdue migration from a case management database, called DAMION, to a modern replacement called JusticeNexus. The new system is designed to handle more complex case files than DAMION, but the transfer has been rough. Apparently, whenever a case category didn’t fit the new system’s parameters, JusticeNexus gave it a blank, or unclassified, status; for example, incoming cases that were previously classified under “review”—as in, ready for the filing unit to review—got categorized as blank in the new system, which didn’t have a corresponding “review” category, according to Lindsay.

“I think it’s much better, as you can imagine, to be using a system that’s not from 1999,” criminal division director Jenna Robert said during a joint interview with Evans on Friday, “but there are definitely growing pains that are going to take  while for us to resolve.”

Evans is a former federal prosecutor; Robert worked in the domestic violence division under former city attorney Pete Holmes before joining the state attorney general’s office in 2021. Evans said this experience gives them an important perspective that her predecessors lacked. “I think that perspective matters, when we’re talking about … understanding that not every case that comes in should be filed, and we really need to be looking at cases that affect public safety,” she said.

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Davison, a Republican, supported new laws cracking down on sex work and drug use and believed in treating “prolific offenders” more harshly than other misdemeanor defendants. But Evans acknowledged that despite her “weird fixations” on certain types of crimes, Davison “did have a lot of cases in diversion, including quality of life crimes” like shoplifting and trespassing.

Evans says there are a few key changes that could help her office address the backlog. First, legislation that just passed the state House, after sailing through the Senate, will allow cities to use private labs to analyze blood samples in suspected DUI cases. Evans testified in favor of the legislation in Olympia last month.

Second, she says the city needs to fund more prosecutors to review and handle increasingly complex cases, which often involve hours of video evidence. Evans is well aware that any request for additional funding will probably fall on deaf ears this year, when the city is facing a $148 million budget deficit. Although Davison managed to squeeze around $300,000 out of the city for two additional domestic violence prosecutors in 2022, Mayor Katie Wilson has asked each department to propose cuts between 5 and 10 percent, and Evans acknowledged that this year’s budget fight will be about preserving her office, not expanding it.

Third, Evans and Robert are restructuring the department so that a single attorney will handle each case from filing to resolution, a “vertical” structure Evans said would give prosecutors a greater sense of “ownership and responsibility” over their cases and prevent a situation where the city attorney’s filing unit is simply “filing for numbers.” Evans said that in her experience as a federal prosecutor, “there’s a different mentality when you’re like, ‘Okay, yeah. This is mine all the way through.”

For crime victims, “just getting the quality they need up front is really important, and I think that that naturally happens when you get a case, it’s yours and it’s not going to just be handed off to someone else to go and try,” Evans said.

These proposals don’t address other factors that could be contributing to chronic case backlogs, such as slow filings or the difficulty of hiring highly qualified lawyers to relatively low-paying government positions. By this time next year, we should have some sense of whether the changes Evans is implementing have started to make a dent in the city prosecutor’s workload, or if this recurring problem is due to other, more intractable forces.

Courts, Police

Family of Jaahnavi Kandula, Pedestrian Killed by SPD Officer in 2023, Reaches $29,011,000 Settlement with City

photo of Jaahnavi Kandula

In an incident that sparked widespread outrage, police guild leader Daniel Auderer joked that the 23-year-old student was only worth $11,000.

By Andrew Engelson

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office reached a settlement last week with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk in January 2023 by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour. In September 2024, the family brought a lawsuit against the City of Seattle and SPD officer Kevin Dave for $110 million, plus an additional $11,000. 

The settlement, obtained by PubliCola on Thursday, is for $29 million plus $11,000.

The added figure is a reference to callous remarks made by SPD officer Daniel Auderer, vice chairman of the Seattle Police Officers Guild at the time, who had been called to the scene to investigate Dave for signs of intoxication. Caught on body cam video in conversation with police union leader Mike Solan, Auderer joked and laughed about Kandula’s death, saying, “Just write a check. $11,000. She was 26, anyway. She had limited value.”

“Jaahnavi Kandula’s death was heartbreaking, and the city hopes this financial settlement brings some sense of closure to the Kandula family,” city attorney Erika Evans said. “We also recognize that her loss has left unimaginable pain. Jaahnavi Kandula’s life mattered. It mattered to her family, to her friends, and to our community.”

In their claim, filed in King County Superior Court, attorneys wrote that Kandula “experienced terror, severe emotional distress, and severe pain and suffering before dying.”

Kandula, a 23-year-old engineering student from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, was crossing Dexter Avenue at Thomas Street when she was killed on the evening of January 23, 2023. The legal complaint was filed by Kandula’s mother and father, Vijaya Laksmi Gundapuneedi and Sreekanth Kandula, who both live in India. 

Interim police chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in July 2024. In response, he filed a $20 million tort claim against the city for “wrongful termination,” and added an addition five million dollars to the claim, which is currently in King County courts.

Rahr fired Dave in January 2025 after the Office of Police Accountability issued a report finding Dave failed to drive with “with due regard for the safety of all persons.” The report also noted that Dave had been involved in a separate “preventable collision” as an SPD officer, and—as PubliCola first reported—did not have a valid Washington driver’s license when he struck Kandula.

Before joining SPD, Dave was fired by the Tucson Police Department; SPD was aware of what one sergeant flagged as his “checkered history” in Tucson before SPD hired him in 2019.

Tucson fired Dave in 2013 after numerous investigations, including one involving a “preventable collision” for which he was suspended being fired. 

In a troubling incident that occurred shortly after he was fired, an officer pulled him over for speeding and observed Dave acting erratically. According to a police report on that incident, the investigating officer filing suspected Dave was “possibly on some type of narcotic.”

Many of the details from PubliCola’s reporting were included in the Kandula family’s claim against officer Dave and the city. “He should have never been hired,” Vonda Sargent, an attorney for the family, told PubliCola shortly before the lawsuit was filed in 2024. “You can’t take just all comers. Everyone is not suited or fit to be a law enforcement officer.” 

Sargent did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. PubliCola will update this post if we hear back.

In November, 2024, in response to community outrage over the collision, SPD released new policies on emergency driving which direct officers to “drive no faster than their skill and training allows and [what] is reasonably necessary to safely arrive at the scene.” 

King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion declined to file felony charges against Dave, and City Attorney Ann Davison issued him a negligent driving traffic ticket with a $5,000 fine.

City Council

New Year, New City Hall: Progressives Take Office, City Council Reorganizes
City Attorney Erika Evans at her swearing-in on Tuesday.

By Erica C. Barnett

Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Joy Hollingsworth and Dionne Foster were the first two out gay/queer Black women to serve on the Seattle City Council. I incorrectly omitted Sherry Harris (1991-1995). I regret the error.-ECB)

A week of inaugurations wrapped up in city council chambers on Tuesday with the swearing-in of new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, along with reelected Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and the selection (which we previewed in a Fizz item in November) of District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth as the new city council president. (District 2 Councilmember Eddie Lin, elected along with Foster last year, took office in November because he was replacing an appointed councilmember, Mark Solomon).

Only District 5 Councilmember Maritza Rivera (who misspelled both Rinck’s and Foster’s names in a newsletter congratulating them on their wins) was absent from the room; she attended remotely.

Several city hall staffers we’ve spoken to this week described a new feeling of “lightness” at City Hall since the new cohort of elected officials, including Mayor Katie Wilson, took office.

One day earlier, new City Attorney Erika Evans was sworn in at the Bertha Knight Landes Room at City Hall, by US District Court Judge Richard A. Jones. Invoking the example set by her grandfather, Lee Evans—who, as an Olympic gold medalist, made history as one of several Black athletes who raised their fists in a Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympic games—Evans said, “When we were seeing clear rollbacks in civil rights, I knew I needed to make a decision, just like my grandfather did, to stand up and fight back what was happening. That is the vision I’m bringing [to] this office.”

Councilmember Foster—the third openly queer Black woman to serve on the council, after Hollingsworth and Sherry Harris—had a huge cohort of fans in the audience, as did Hollingsworth, who will be the first Black woman to ever serve as council president. The council president is in charge of central staff, committee assignments, and administrative decisions about the council; she also appoints the council’s labor committee. That committee’s members serve on the Labor Relations Policy Committee, which negotiates city contracts, including police contracts.

Historically, it’s been a pretty low-key position; Sara Nelson, the most recent council president, politicized it, firing a widely liked council central staff director and enforcing a strict return-to-office policy for staffers while she herself attended many council meetings remotely.

Hollingsworth. the consensus pick after brief internal campaigns by Councilmembers Dan Strauss and Bob Kettle, seems likely to return the presidency to its less-partisan past. The first indication of this, on Monday, was the fact that the council approved her new role unanimously, with no other nominees. Hollingsworth praised each of her colleagues in turn, including the absent Rivera: “There’s due diligence, and then there’s Councilmember Rivera diligence,” Hollingsworth said. (Rivera is known for asking questions about policies she opposes long after they’ve been thoroughly answered).

The second indication of the council’s more progressive makeup was the new committee assignments that the council also approved on Tuesday. While some committees will remain largely the same (Bob “permissive environment” Kettle will continue to lead the public safety committee, while Rob “Pothole King” Saka will continue to head up transportation), others are led by, and stacked with, the council’s progressives—Foster, Rinck, and Lin.

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Rinck, who previously headed up the Sustainability, City Light, Arts and Culture Committee, will now lead a new Human Services, Labor and Economic Development committee, with Foster as her co-chair. Housing, once lumped in with human services under the Debora Juarez- (and before her, Cathy Moore-) led Housing and Human Services Committee, will be part of a new Housing, Arts and Civil Rights Committee led by Foster, with Lin as her cochair. Lin will head up a reconstituted Land Use and Sustainability committee, with Strauss as vice chair and Foster and Rinck as members.

And the progressive triumvirate of Foster, Lin, and Rinck will all serve on two committees headed up by two of the council’s centrists—Saka’s transportation committee and Rivera’s Libraries, Education, and Neighborhoods committee. (See all the new committee assignments here).

On top of those changes—all standard after any election—the council is also going through a total staff reorganization, starting with the creation of a new executive administrator to oversee all council staff and serve as a kind of buffer between the council president and legislative staff, who include not just central staff but the city clerk, public disclosure officers, and IT and communications staff). Ex-council president Nelson announced the changes in late December, including the news that “as recommended by HR,” her own chief of staff, Jeremy Mohn, will fill the role on at least an interim basis.

According to a December 19 email from Nelson, the new administrator will “ensure continuity of departmental operations across CP administrations and allow for the Council President to better focus on governance and policymaking”; she added that council HR recommended appointing Mohn to the position “given his extensive familiarity with departmental processes and issues.”

Courts, Drugs, Mayor Wilson, Police

SPD Chief Sent Email Overstating New Drug Diversion Policy, Sparking False Narrative in Right-Wing Media
Police Chief Shon Barnes speaks at a press conference last year.

Chief Shon Barnes apparently didn’t consult with LEAD or the city attorney’s office before telling police they should start referring every drug arrest to LEAD.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes sent a memo to officers last week directing them to refer most people caught using or possessing drugs in public to LEAD, the pre-booking diversion program that provides case management and other services to people accused of low-level criminal activity.

“Effective immediately, all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use will be diverted from prosecution to the LEAD program,” Barnes told officers in an internal email. “All instances of drug use or possession will be referred to Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD)—a program designed to redirect low-level offenders in King County from the criminal justice system into supportive social services.”

The announcement by Barnes appears to have been a dramatic overreaction to an internal memo from City Attorney Erika Evans directing her prosecutors to refer drug use and possession cases to an internal team to determine if they are eligible for LEAD. This represents a shift from the policy established by Evans’ predecessor, Ann Davison, who allowed people charged with misdemeanor possession or drug use to avoid charges by getting an addiction assessment and not getting arrested again for six months—the opposite of a therapeutic approach.

“The LEAD Liaison Team will assess previous attempts at engagement with the referred individual in consultation with LEAD,” Evans’ memo, which PubliCola received from her office, said. “If the referred individual has failed to demonstrate a sustained level or engagement with the LEAD program or has refused to engage with a LEAD case manager, the LEAD Liaison will assess the most suitable subsequent action in consultation with the Criminal Division Chief.”

Barnes responded to Evans’ memo by sending an email blast to all SPD officers saying that “Effective immediately, all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use will be diverted from prosecution to the LEAD program,” an inaccurate description of Evans’ directive to her staff. Barnes continued:

If an individual fails to comply with the LEAD program, traditional prosecutorial measures will apply. As you know, LEAD is a familiar alternative-to-arrest program that we have been utilizing for some time. This change aligns with Seattle City Ordinance 126896. Please note that this diversion does not apply to individuals who are ineligible for LEAD or to those arrested for selling or delivering controlled substances. User-quantity cases may be diverted; sell-and-deliver cases will not.

My expectation is that officers will continue to charge individuals for drug use or possession when appropriate-for example, when the activity occurs in public view or when probable cause for arrest is established.

The announcement quickly blew up thanks to an inaccurate story by KOMO, which reported—apparently without speaking to LEAD, Wilson’s office, Barnes, or Evans—that Wilson herself had “ordered officers to stop arresting people for open drug use.” (The origin of the accusation: Bombastic police union leader Mike Solan, who recently announced he won’t run for reelection). Right-wing social media accounts ran wild with the fake version of the story, forcing Wilson to issue a statement: “You’ll know when I announce a policy change, because I’ll announce a policy change.”

(Apparently, it didn’t help: Wilson was mobbed by TV cameras after Evans’ inauguration Monday afternoon at City Hall.)

In her statement, Wilson affirmed that her public safety policy includes “enforcement of the possession and public use ordinance in priority situations and ensuring that the LEAD framework and other effective responses to neighborhood hot spots are implemented with an appropriate level of urgency, sufficient resources, and a commitment to results.”

This, in effect, is what the city’s policy toward low-level drug crime was prior to 2023, when Davison and then-mayor Bruce Harrell pushed to change city law to empower SPD to start arresting people for simple drug possession and public use.

Although Barnes insisted that the policy hasn’t changed, he also referred to “this change” in the same email email. Many officers interpreted Barnes’ contradictory memo as a directive to no longer arrest people for drug use and simple possession but instead refer them straight to LEAD.

The police chief didn’t bother seeking information or feedback from the organization that runs LEAD, Purpose Dignity Action, before emailing officers about the change in policy, and he exaggerated the policy change by portraying as a kind of blanket amnesty for misdemeanor drug crime. Even if the PDA wanted to take on “all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use” they couldn’t afford to. LEAD had to stop taking community referrals into the program after the drug law passed in 2023, and a $5 million budget boost last year will only fund another 500 to 600 slots in the program this year.

LEAD co-director Brandi McNeil said that’s “a significant number,” but it’s well “below the total number of people who would qualify and be appropriate candidates for LEAD. We will need to strategize with police, prosecutors, the Mayor, the Council, and County officials (our funders) to focus that capacity on high priority situations and individuals.”

LEAD tries to take on clients who are likely to benefit from their services, as opposed to everyone who has been accused of a particular misdemeanor. “Part of our job is to accurately forecast what capacity we will have, and to work with our partners to decide which, among the pool of people who chronically commit law violations related to behavioral health issues or poverty, should be prioritized for our available slots,” McNeil said.

Barnes also misstated the criteria for LEAD eligibility, saying people arrested for selling or delivering drugs are ineligible for the program; in fact, LEAD began as an effort to benefit this specific group of people, who were cycling through courts and jail without getting any assistance for the underlying issues that were causing them to earn a living through illegal means. LEAD still serves people accused of selling up to 7 grams of drugs, which means almost anyone involved in low-level drug sales is eligible for the program.

Finally, Barnes’ description of the conditions in which “officers will charge” people for public drug use are confusing and ambiguous: “Probable cause” is supposed to exist before officers make any arrest, and it’s unclear what distinction Barnes is making between “public drug use” and drug use that “occurs in public view.”

SPD did not respond to questions sent last week attempting to clarify what Barnes meant by these distinctions. However, they did send out an email to media in response to the right-wing blowback on Monday. “To be clear, nothing has changed when it comes to police continuing to make drug-related arrests in Seattle,” Barnes said in the statement (emphasis in original), adding that police will “continue to make arrests for drug-related charges if they have probable cause.”

 

Courts, Elections

Seattle’s Nicest City Attorney Debate
Ann Davison and Erika Evans

By Erica C. Barnett

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.

 

Courts, Crime

Ann Davison Promised to Resolve Cases Faster and Punish the Most Serious Violators. Did She Deliver?
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.