By Erica C. Barnett

During a briefing on the city’s Downtown Activation Plan last week, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, Seattle Center Director Marshall Foster, and other city officials touted improvements to the waterfront (like a forthcoming Molly Moon’s ice cream shop at the “habitat beach” next to the new eight-lane waterfront highway in Pioneer Square) and progress on filling storefronts downtown with permanent businesses through the city’s post-pandemic Seattle Restored program.

Burgess also praised the Seattle Police Department for arresting nearly 200 people on drug misdemeanor charges in the last three months, then diverting most of them to LEAD (Let Everyone Advance With Dignity), the city’s pre-booking diversion program.

What Burgess didn’t mention were the details of a new citywide public safety plan the mayor’s office will be rolling out sometime near the end of this month, the details of which have been the source of intense speculation over the past several weeks. After the DAP briefing, Burgess told PubliCola that the plan will not include new legislation, but will be more of a “framework … setting a tone of what the mayor expects for public safety” from the police department, fire department, and new unarmed response teams.

In his experience in the city, Burgess (a former police officer and city council member) said, “there has not been a mayor who has been as directive in what he wants to see in terms of public safety.” The forthcoming plan, he added, will “be very comprehensive, it will be specific in some areas, and it will be basically the mayor sharing his vision for what he expects our public safetuy departments” to do.

For those concerned about a new crackdown on low-level crimes, the lack of new legislation may be cold comfort; laws currently on the books, but not generally enforced, include a “parks exclusion” ordinance that allows the city to ban people from parks for violating park rules; a law against urinating in public; and a ban on sitting or lying down on a sidewalk, “or upon a blanket, chair, stool, or any other object placed upon a public sidewalk,” in commercial areas between 7 am and 9 pm. If Harrell’s new public safety plan includes directives to enforce existing laws like these, it would represent a significant escalation of SPD’s enforcement of low-level “civility” crimes.

Last year, Burgess was reportedly behind efforts to enforce the existing disorderly conduct law—which is most commonly used to eject people from buses for disruptive behavior—within 25 feet of bus stops on Third Avenue, which would have empowered police to arrest people for everything from using drugs to smoking to playing amplified music at any location along the entire bus-only corridor.

A reporter asked Burgess during last week’s briefing if the city planned to revive efforts to crack down on low-level offenses on Third Ave. as part of the Downtown Activation Plan. He responded, “No,” but quickly added, “just to be real clear, it is a crime to do certain things in a bus stop or on a bus. And the police will use that [law], I imagine, at certain times, but there’s no focused effort in that regard.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, then-city attorney Mark Sidran oversaw an era of aggressive enforcement of the city’s “civility” laws, which overwhelmingly targeted homeless people. (The Teen Dance Ordinance, Four-Foot Rule at strip clubs, and poster ban—yes, poster ban—targeted everyone else.) Does Team Harrell (and Burgess) plan to turn back the clock to the 1990s (or even the 2010s, when Burgess—as city council member—sponsored an “aggressive panhandling” law)? The new plan, once it’s released, will help answer that question.