Tag: Erika Evans

Courts, criminal justice, homelessness

Ex-Burien City Manager’s Excessive Complaints, KCHRA Elaborates on Money Troubles (and Lays off Key Staff) and More

Despite what my Bluesky would have you believe, there is more stuff going on in and around Seattle than just the budget!

1. Three months after we requested a report on the investigation into former Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon’s performance, the city of Burien finally provided a heavily redacted copy of the 24-page document. Although the redactions (of phrases like “city manager” and “city attorney” as well as the names of, Bailon, and former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom III) make the report a somewhat challenging read, what’s clear is that Bailon was fired not just for poor performance, but for spending much of his time filing frivolous harassment and discrimination complaints about elected officials, city staff, public commenters, and at least one person who wrote a letter to the editor of a local news site.

Bailon’s complaints included one accusing  councilmember Hugo Garcia of making a “verbal threat”  when, as Bailon told it, Garcia said they would have a problem if encampment sweeps started up in Burien. Bailon also complained that Garcia implied the city manager was racist at a council meeting at which Garcia said a council proposal to site a new tiny house village in a low-income, mostly Latino area “reeks of white supremacy.”

To back up his claim that Garcia was targeting him, Bailon complained about an email Garcia sent to Councilmember Rocco Devito (the topic was the Seahawks flag) in which Garcia misspelled Bailon’s first name as “Adolph.” This, Bailon said, “suggests a deliberate attempt to associate me and my legal work with white supremacy and with Adolf Hitler.” Bailon also filed complaints against Garcia over comments he posted on social media and threatened, in comments on a letter to the editor of the B-Town Blog, to request Garcia’s employment file and post it publicly.

On and on the complaints went. Bailon wanted the council to publicly condemn someone who criticized him on social media, then threatened to get HR involved when two councilmembers didn’t respond right away. He demanded a formal investigation into a Burien resident, claiming she made a racist comment about how he should “go back where you came from”; in fact, she had said his lack of compassion for homeless people showed he didn’t understand Burien, but he might “have better luck” in his previous home state of California. He filed a complaint against a constituent who said he had burned bridges with progressives, calling this part of a pattern of harassment. While he was filing all these complaints, Bailon also had plenty of time to call 911 on homeless people, then complain to the police chief when he got put on hold.

As we reported, the city council put Bailon on administrative leave in April, shortly after he fired Newsom, who immediately had his attorney send a letter accusing Bailon of racial discrimination. (Bailon is Mexican American and Newsom is Black). When city staff tried to put Bailon on leave to investigate the allegations, Bailon claimed they were harassing and discriminating against him; the council voted to put him on leave about a week later, prompting more complaints. The council eventually fired Bailon “without cause,” which gave him access to a severance payment of around $120,000. He still lives in Burien.

 

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2. The leader of another dysfunctional government entity, King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Kelly Kinnison, was absent during much of a King County Council committee meeting last week where she and her chief operating officer, William Towey, were scheduled to answer questions about the discovery that the agency overspent its budget by nearly $17 million, with interest on its ongoing debt to King County continuing to accrue.

Kinnison joined the meeting remotely about halfway through Towey’s in-person presentation, in which Towey revealed that the agency brought in about $250 million less, over its five-year lifespan, than it assumed it would. “Classic overspend,” as Towey described it, accounted for about $3.4 million.

Most of that overspending came from three sources: An “unplanned and unbudgeted” decision to use Salesforce to administer grants to homeless service providers; “excessive … fees” to the Robert Half temp agency, which provided financial staffers to do work that would more typically be done by employees, at a cost of $150 an hour plus fees; and interest the agency has consistently owed King County, its lender, because its bank balance has typically been negative (rather than balancing out over the course of the year as funding comes in).

The bulk of the $16.7 million gap, as we’ve reported, resulted from false assumptions about how much administrative funding the KCRHA would receive through its contracts with homeless service providers. Although some, including a certain Seattle Times columnist, have portrayed underspending as a shocking scandal, it’s typical for providers (including nonprofits that contract with the city of Seattle) to be unable to spend all of the money they’re allocated every year; the KCRHA just decided, at some point, that they wouldn’t, and kept using this assumption year after year.

One way or another, the city and county are going to have to split up the cost of the KCRHA’s poor financial decisions. How they will divvy up that expense (and when) remains an open question. Asked about the debt last week, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson would only say that the city is “in active discussion with the county” about how to fix the KCRHA’s fiscal mess.

3. Although the city and county are taking over almost all the KCRHA’s contracts with homeless service providers, the KCRHA will continue (for now) to oversee a number of federally required functions, including the biennial Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population (a process that now involves a lot of statistical extrapolation and data analysis rather than a direct count), the annual federal funding process, and the job overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database.

Given these new limitations, many at KCRHA were taken aback earlier this month when Kinnison laid off the agency’s lead HMIS analyst, a person who had been with KCRHA since the beginning and was chiefly responsible for overseeing (and understanding) HMIS. This core function will now go to other staffers who have been doing other work and are less familiar with the complex system. Kinnison also let one of the two remaining HR staffers go, meaning that there will only be one HR staffer left to oversee every aspect of human resources at the agency, which has about 50 employees.

The layoffs were not announced; in fact, according to sources familiar with the discussion, Kinnison told a group of elected officials and others working on KCRHA’s transition that she was not planning additional layoffs as of that morning.

4. Don’t miss our conversation with Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert this week. We talked about Evans’ new Connection Court, a diversionary misdemeanor court that pairs access to services with strict requirements for people who opt in. People who accumulate additional criminal charges or fail to participate in services will get kicked out to mainstream court, where they’ll face penalties including potential jail time.

Evans also announced a new program for repeat offenders that will both prohibit them from participating in any diversion program and seek harsher penalties, including “aggravated jail sentences,” for people who meet certain criteria, such as amassing more than three misdemeanor charges in three months or shoplifting at the same place twice.

A quick correction on this episode: Sandeep described San Francisco’s Reset Center, a sobering center where police remove people from the streets involuntarily for eight hours or so until they can receive a certificate of sobriety, incorrectly.

It is not true that the Reset Center offers medication-assisted treatment, such as shots of long-acting buprenorphine. The center gives referrals to outside providers but does not offer treatment.

It is also not really true that people can just get up and walk out of the Reset Center. In fact, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, which runs the site, only “[once an individual able to care for themselves, they receive a certificate of release (849 (b) PC) and are free to leave.”

Courts, Crime

Revived Community Court Will be Paired With Punitive New “High-Priority” Track for Repeat Offenders

Seattle Municipal Courthouse

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans just announced the launch of a revamped community court for low-level misdemeanor offenders, fulfilling a key promise in her 2025 campaign against then-city attorney Ann Davison, who shut down the therapeutic court in 2023.

At the time, Davison and her allies argued that community court—an alternative to prosecution that connected defendants to services through the Seattle Municipal Court’s Community Resource Center—was ineffective.  Campaigning against Davison, Evans called the decision to end community court a “disaster” and promised to restore it.

The new Connection Court, which will be presided over for the rest of the year by retiring Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, is similar to the old community court in a few respects: It’s an alternative to prosecution on low-level misdemeanor charges such as theft and public drug use, and it connects defendants to services through the Community Resource Center, which Evans said will offer more direct connections and “warm hand-offs”  to service providers than it did before.

At the same time, the court now imposes new requirements on defendants, such as mandatory service participation, that make it a much different program than the community court Davison ended—one that Davison herself might have supported. Evans’ press announcement Thursday included supportive quotes from a dozen local leaders, including interim police chief Andre Sayles and Downtown Seattle Association president Jon Scholes, all but one including some reference to “accountability.” According to Sayles, that means “[we] offer a real path forward to those ready to take it, and we hold accountable those who continue to cause harm.”

For participants, the two biggest changes are a requirement that they commit no additional misdemeanors for 90 days—the length of the court’s jurisdiction over each case— and that they prove they’ve participated in two types of services, such as addiction counseling or job training. People who fail to meet either of these requirements—by not showing up at appointments, for example, or by committing another low-level crime—will be sent to mainstream court, where they’ll face criminal prosecution on the original misdemeanor charge along with any additional charges. Anyone with a serious felony conviction in the last 10 years is automatically ineligible for Connections Court, as is anyone who has committed a rape or murder.

Evans told PubliCola the requirements isn’t prescriptive; if someone commits another minor offense, for instance, the city attorney’s office can say, “‘You know what? Let’s give  this participant an opportunity to have that second case also be in community court,'” Evans said. Most people will still be eligible, at this stage, for other diversion programs, such as LEAD. “This just another layer for people to be able to get connected to what they need, one that was not there yesterday.”

Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, the architect of the original LEAD diversion program, said she’s reserving judgment about the revived community court. :e should be diverting cases prior to filing of charges whenever appropriate, but if cases need to be filed, it’s good to have a plan for addressing defendants’ needs, using whatever leverage the charge provides,” Daugaard said. “Everything depends on whether the services offered are actually matched to the person’s situation and needs.”

Critics of the new court, including the lawyers who defend indigent clients on misdemeanor charges, say Evans is reducing its potential  by setting up barriers to entry and establishing new hurdles for participants to trip over as they try to comply with the new conditions.

Katie Hurley, special counsel for criminal policy and practice at King County’s Department of Public Defense, said she’s concerned that the services available at the Court Resource Center don’t meaningfully address the conditions that lead people to commit petty crimes in the first place, particularly homelessness. About 30 percent of people fail to show up for municipal court hearings because they don’t have an address to receive court notices, Hurley said, yet “there’s no connection to housing, which is what many people who are prosecuted for low-level behaviors struggle with.”

“The whole idea behind Connection Court is that it’s supposed to be expansive and allow these lower-level offenses to receive a quicker, more effective response because we know that the current system has failed,” Hurley said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to exclude precisely the type of folks who should be benefiting from a Connection Court response, which is people who’ve been failed by the system previously.”

A second new program Evans announced today would send more people into that system. Her office is calling it the “High-Priority Repeat Offenses (HiPRO) program.

Under this program,  people who commit misdemeanors more than three times in a 90-day span, or more than six times in six months, will be ineligible not just for Connections Court but for any diversion programs, and Evans’ office will seek “aggravated jail sentences” against such repeat offenders.

This harsher treatment will also apply to anyone steals from a store from which they were previously trespassed for shoplifting, a process that can be handled by private security and is based on policies that vary from store to store. Evans’ office will also seek stiffer penalties against anyone charged with car prowling, a misdemeanor, if they were convicted for felony car theft in the previous year.

Although HiPRO sounds awfully similar to former city attorney Davison’s “high utilizers” list, Evans and her criminal division chief, Jenna Robert, said it’s different in this key respect: Evans isn’t compiling a list of people who may commit crimes in the future, they’re putting people in the HiPRO program after they’re charged with a crime that warrants escalation into the program.

In contrast, Davison maintained a rotating list of about 150 people who had at least 12 misdemeanor charges in the past year, and at least one misdemeanor charge in the most recent eight months.

It’s a bit of a distinction without a difference. Keeping a list of repeat offenders sure seems more intrusive than imposing harsher penalties on people once they hit a criminal benchmark, but the result is the same—harsher penalties for people who have committed a certain number of misdemeanors over a certain period.

Hurley, from DPD, called the new program counterproductive. The new two-strikes rule for shoplifting, she said, was “very alarming for us” because it means that anyone who steals from the same store twice will be subject to a higher level of prosecution, regardless of what led them to commit the second theft. Many people who steal small items from stores are homeless or have other underlying conditions, Hurley said—like the woman DPD defended last year who was charged with theft for stealing $5 in candy from a CVS that had previously issued a trespass order against her.

Under the new criteria, that client would have been subject to harsher prosecution and ineligible for Connection Court. (Ultimately, she was deemed incompetent to stand trial and her case was dismissed).

Evans said Connection Court, which just started on Wednesday, isn’t set in stone; the details and eligibility could change as the court evolves. But it’s unclear what Evans believes throwing people in jail (a place with no meaningful services) a few days or weeks longer for low-level crimes will accomplish, beyond temporarily removing some familiar faces from the streets. Evans says she’s creating new opportunities for people to access meaningful services, combined with accountability if they fail to meet their commitments. But a plan that deliberately excludes and disproportionately penalizes repeat offenders may just ensure that the people who most need those services won’t be able to access them.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police, public safety

Police Chief Says No Plan to Slow Hiring Amid Budget Crunch; City Attorney Says “SOAP Orders Don’t Work” at Aurora Ave. Safety Event
Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans

1. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, responding to a question from PubliCola, said the police department does not plan to slow down hiring, despite a city council presentation this week that concluded, “SPD may need to slow hiring to live within its budget” because the speed at which it’s hiring new officers is outpacing the department’s spending capacity.

“I have not been notified that the police department will slow down on our current hiring plan for this year. We’re moving forward,” Barnes said. “I think we all share [the belief] that we need more police officers, but we also understand the constraints of a budget, and until I hear anything differently, we’re going to continue moving forward.”

A planned briefing of the council’s public safety committee, which was postponed due to time constraints earlier this week, found that SPD hiring will outpace the department’s budget by a projected $1.7 million this year. Recruitment has been up ever since a new police contract raised starting salaries, after training, to $126,000 last year, and the number of highly paid late-career officers leaving the department has declined. SPD is on pace to have just under 1,200 officers by the end of the year.

Mayor Katie Wilson has asked all city departments to come up with cuts of 5 to 10 percent to help close a budget gap of at least $175 million. The police department, whose nearly-$500 million budget is by far the city’s biggest general-fund obligation, was reportedly asked to come up with $20 million in potential cuts.

2. Barnes made his comments during an announcement about the city’s latest efforts to address gun violence and sex trafficking on Aurora Ave. N. City Attorney Erika Evans announced she would use Extreme Risk Protection Orders, a tool typically used to take guns away from domestic violence offenders, to remove guns from people accused of committing gun-related crimes, whether or not they have been convicted. (Violent gun-related offenses are typically prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor.) Evans also said she would seek funding for a full-time prosecutor to pursue the orders.

 

At the same press conference, Mayor Katie Wilson announced the Seattle Department of Transportation will install barriers on four streets that intersect with Aurora Ave. N to block traffic from getting through; residents who have demanded the city do something about increasing gun violence in the area have installed makeshift barricades in recent weeks.

City Attorney Evans broke with council members on one key issue, saying that she did not believe banishing men who pay for sex from the area around Aurora, which is designated as the city’s Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone, are an effective way to protect women and girls from pimps and traffickers. (Former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who sponsored the SOAP legislation, then skedaddled off the council, was in the audience for yesterday’s event.)

Noting that the city has had SOAP orders off and on for 30 years, Evans said, “If they were effective, Aurora and other areas of Seattle, including Little Saigon, would be safe, and they’re not. … SOAP orders don’t work. ERPO orders work.”

3. The press conference, which took place on the same day Wilson announced internally that she was reorganizing her office and that her communications director, Seferiana Day, was leaving, featured some internal drama of its own. According to sources, councilmembers frustrated with what they viewed as inaction on Aurora planned to hold their own press conference without Wilson at which they would criticize her lack of action on gun violence and sex trafficking in the area.

After a flurry of discussions, the mayor and council agreed to hold the press conference in the awkward, narrow space outside council chambers, rather than outside Wilson’s office. Councilmembers have repeatedly refused to participate in the mayor’s press conferences, despite being invited—an indication that council-mayor relations still have a long way to go after some dramatic early missteps by the Wilson administration.

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.

City Council, Courts

ACLU Drops Lawsuit After City Attorney Evans Drops Blanket Affidavit Against Judge; Council Gets New Central Staff Director

 

City Attorney Erika Evans

1. City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington jointly announced this week that the ACLU is dropping their lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified an independently elected judge from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.

In 2024, Davison disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, an independently elected judge, from hearing any criminal cases for the rest of Davison’s term through a procedure known as a blanket affidavit of prejudice. Davison justified her decision by claiming Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing unspecified past cases in which they alleged Vaddadi had demonstrated “a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

As one of her first official acts in office, Evans issued an order to her criminal division banning all blanket affidavits of prejudice and requiring attorneys to request such affidavits individually, on a case-by-case basis, returning to standard practice for every modern city attorney prior to Davison.

The move by Davison and her deputy, Natalie Walton-Anderson was widely viewed as political—Vaddadi is progressive—and further investigations by Vaddadi’s legal team and independent advocates made it clear that Davison’s office misrepresented the cases they cited in the memo denouncing Vaddadi.

In a statement on Thursday, Evans said, “As an experienced prosecutor, I believe in litigating cases—not attempting to ban judges we do not like. Under my leadership, the only time a Seattle prosecutor will seek to disqualify a judge from a case is in the rare instance where there’s a clear, strong, reason that the individual prosecutor believes the case will not receive a fair hearing.”

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2. City Council President Joy Hollingsworth just announced that Lish Whitson, a member of the Seattle City Council’s Central Staff for the past 13 years (and a 20-year City Hall veteran) will take over as head of Central Staff in March, when Ben Noble retires from the city. Central staffers are the council’s policy shop; unlike legislative aides, they provide policy advice and write legislation for the entire council.

The council president is nominally in charge of central staff, and picks their boss; former council president Sara Nelson fired central staff director Esther Handy and replaced her with Noble. Under Nelson, who took an atypically active role overseeing central staff, a large number of veteran council staffers left for other positions, creating a brain drain (particularly among women) at the council’s primary source of institutional knowledge.

Noble led Central Staff for about 14 years before heading up the City Budget Office and Office of Revenue Forecasts and returning as Central Staff director in 2024. A PhD economist who (unlike certain other city staffers) never made a point of his credentials, Noble was a budget expert and diplomat, one reason he was able to last in high-level city positions as council members and mayors came and went.

Whitson, similarly, is part of the deep state (complimentary) that keeps the city running. He oversaw the adoption of Phase 1 of former mayor Harrell’s “One Seattle” comprehensive plan update, and has worked on all four of the city’s comp plan updates since the original plan was adopted in 1994. His new deputy director, Calvin Chow, led the council’s budget process last year. Former central staff deputy director Aly Penucci left after more than 11 years at the city to become deputy Whatcom County executive in 2024; she returned as Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget director this year.

Crime, Drugs, podcasts

Seattle Nice: City Attorney and LEAD Founder Set the Record Straight on Drug Diversion

By Erica C. Barnett

Sandeep and I sat down with new Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion founder Lisa Daugaard on this week’s episode to talk about changes Evans is making to the way the city handles low-level drug cases.

Under Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, people arrested for simple drug possession or using in public were either jailed and prosecuted or sent to a “drug prosecution alternative” where they have to get an assessment to confirm they have an addiction and stay out of trouble for six month.

Evans directed her prosecutors to go back to the pre-Davison policy of reviewing people’s cases to see if they’re eligible for LEAD, the city’s pre-filing diversion program. In response to this reasonable directive, Police Chief Shon Barnes told his officers that going forward, officers had to refer every drug case to LEAD—an overstatement that led to a right-wing media freakout when police guild director Mike Solan claimed Mayor Katie Wilson had ordered an end to all drug arrests.

Evans and Daugaard set the record straight, explaining what LEAD does, who it’s for, and how they believe this policy shift will actually help people addicted to fentanyl who use in public—which, they both reminded is, is encoded in the 2023 “Blake fix” law that empowered the city attorney to prosecute minor drug cases in the first place.

“What we’re doing is not anything inconsistent with what the law has already recommended for our office to be doing,” Evans told us. “But nothing’s off the table. If someone is not making meaningful progress with LEAD or in diversion, then we do reserve the right to do traditional prosecution.”

We also discussed ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis and what the city can do if Trump sends masked shock troops to Seattle. And we asked Daugaard, who co-founded Purpose Dignity Action and started LEAD, why she’s taking a leave of absence to work inside the Wilson administration.