Seattle Police have made drug busts for years — including this alleged dealer in an operation a decade ago downtown. The bill up for vote Tuesday could bring a crackdown on lower level drug crimes in the city. (Image: SPD)
The Seattle City Council will vote on a proposal Tuesday afternoon that would allow the city to do something it has never done before — prosecute drug use and possession on Seattle’s streets.
With a new state law in place making low level drug crimes in Washington a gross misdemeanor and giving the state a harder stance on drug law penalties, Tuesday’s vote would open the door to Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s plan to act on the new status of the crimes with the King County Prosecutor’s office already slammed with more serious drug dealing and felony cases.
The move could represent a major step away from decades of efforts to better address drugs and addiction through treatment and services.
Sponsored by Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen, the bill would make possession of controlled substances and use of controlled substances in a public place a gross misdemeanor. It would codify the City Attorney’s responsibility for prosecuting gross misdemeanor drug use and possession in Seattle, a move that city council analysis says would produce an unknown increase in cases handled by the office — and costs related to the prosecution.
“The number of cases charged would be the primary driver of costs, and the decision whether to charge a case lies within the discretion of the prosecuting authority,” the analysis (PDF) reads. “The more cases charged, the more costs are likely to increase.”
Without a committee hearing to shape the legislation, Tuesday will mark the first time the proposed bill will be up for public debate in front of any of the councilmembers.
A council memo on the proposal says the city could potentially face costs even if the legislation doesn’t pass Tuesday. Under the new state law, Seattle could be on the hook for paying for prosecution of gross misdemeanor drug crimes if the county decided to pick up the cases. But that outcome is unlikely given the county prosecutor’s focus on dealing and distribution.
How the crackdown on public drug use and possession would be policed and enforced will also be part of the debate Tuesday. Under state law, officers have the discretion to refer violators to treatment if programs exist. Resources robust enough to handle what could be a massive spike in need aren’t yet in place in the city and recent attempts to include stronger treatment plans in the city budget have been cut.
Council analysis of the proposal also concludes that the change would have major racial and equity impacts. “It is well established that the criminal legal system disproportionately impacts communities of color, especially Black and Indigenous communities,” council staff analysis of the bill reads. “In general, the state’s decision to increase criminalization of the knowing possession or use in a public place of unprescribed or illegal controlled substances from a simple to a gross misdemeanor will have disproportionate impacts on those communities.”
“As related to enforcement, the more cases that are prosecuted by either the City or County prosecutors, the more likely it is that communities of color will experience disproportionate impacts,” it concludes. “Given the shortage of substance use treatment and services, even if parties in the criminal legal system wanted to divert cases, there may not be anywhere to divert.”
The bill comes amid continued efforts for the city to address its ongoing crises of homelessness and street disorder and under the growing impact of increasing addiction and overdoses due to the wide availability of relatively cheap and powerful drugs like fentanyl. Around 100 people a month have died of drug overdoses or alcohol poisoning in King County so far in 2023, totals officials say will continue to rise.
UPDATE: District 3 representative for Capitol Hill and the Central District Kshama Sawant has blasted the proposal.
“The bill is stunningly divorced from the conclusions of scientific and statistical evidence that addiction is a public health issue, and requires public health solutions,” Sawant said. “The bill does not include one penny for treatment services, and will ultimately divert more and more public resources towards imprisoning poor people and Black and Brown people, rather than helping people with addiction gain access to services proven to help, such as methadone clinics, let alone addressing the crisis of poverty by taxing the wealthy to fully fund education, housing, healthcare, and living-wage jobs.”
In her statement, Sawant also blasts “Democratic” councilmembers Nelson and Pedersen for introducing the bill and empowering “Republican City Attorney Ann Davison to decide when to prosecute and criminalize instead of referring someone to treatment for addiction” while calling for the prosecution of “Big Pharma billionaires who have made hundreds of billion dollars from selling dangerous opioids.”
UPDATE x2: With the body’s more centrist members splitting their possible swing votes, the council voted against the bill 5-4 in a session that stretched nearly 4 hours from its 2 PM start and featured Council President Debora Juarez frequently calling for quiet in the chambers as people opposing the legislation clapped, whistled, and booed.
Teresa Mosqueda, Tammy Morales, and Sawant voted against the bill as expected while bill sponsors Nelson, Pedersen, and President Juarez held tight to their “yes” positions.
More center-leaning Councilmember Lisa Herbold of West Seattle joined the “no” group saying she was prepared to support the legislation until Davison’s decision last week to end the city’s Community Court program, a potentially key diversion resource that Herbold said could have been the foundation for building much needed support for treatment into the city’s approach to drug prosecution.
Dan Strauss, representing Ballard, threw his vote in support of passing the bill. But downtown’s Andrew Lewis, the council’s third more center-leaning member, killed the bill, voting no even as he said he would eventually support the move to enable the prosecution at the city attorney level but not without a better structure and resources for treatment and diversion also put into place.
“It’s more important than whether I stay on this dias,” Lewis, one of the few incumbents seeking reelection to remain on the council, said about his vote Tuesday.
While the bill’s defeat ends for now efforts to move low-level drug prosecution into Davison’s city attorney office, Seattle Police can continue to arrest people for the crimes and refer offenders to the county for possible charges.
Following the vote, Davison spun the decision in a media statement, claiming “Seattle will now be the only municipality in the State of Washington where it is legal to use hard drugs in public.”
Councilmember Herbold responded Tuesday night, calling Davison’s statements “an inexcusable mischaracterization of the law.”
“As a result of Governor Inslee’s special session, the legislature approved a bill that adopts a statewide standard of gross misdemeanor for both possession and public consumption,” Herbold writes. “This means that there is now a clear, statewide standard, and there is not a patchwork of differing regulations across the state.”
The new state law will be effective in Seattle on July 1.
“Nothing the Council does, or does not do, can affect that,” Herbold said.
UPDATE x3: Some of the candidates the District 3 seat Sawant will leave behind weighed in on the drug prosecution bill. Candidate Ry Armstrong spoke against the bill during public comment and called the bill “a pathetic excuse for legislation called the War on Drugs.” Andrew Ashiofu also posted a statement about the bill, saying, “As a black man I know my history and how this was used to attack and punish the community. As a queer person this is harmful and dangerous.” Candidate Alex Hudson, meanwhile, shared a column critical of the legislation by Seattle Times writer Naomi Ishisaka headlined This is exactly how not to fix the fentanyl crisis. Joy Hollingsworth, leading the race so far in contributions and a cannabis industry professional, did not publicly weigh in on the proposal.
UPDATE x4: In response to CHS’s inquiry, candidate Hollingsworth called for increased harm reduction strategies, mental health services, emergency shelters, and diversion methods as she criticized a “War on Drugs” approach to the fentanyl crisis. “I want people who are experiencing drug disorders to get the best treatment and care they possibly can,” Hollingsworth said Tuesday. “That pathway might be different for everyone, but what I do know, is we have to do something and stop being so numb to what’s going on in our community.”
Since 2012, I've been working on repairing the War on Drug policies and harm it has done. In 2020, we wrote, advocated and implemented Social Equity HB2870 and reinvesting cannabis tax dollars into Black communities who were the target of these https://t.co/gSrHP5pFtg
— Joy Hollingsworth (@JoyForSeattle) June 7, 2023
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