Davison and Nelson, right, at a 2023 press conference (Image: City of Seattle)
The three main pillars of Seattle’s more aggressive approach to public safety will be asking the city’s voters to run the team back in 2025. City Attorney Ann Davison announced this week she will seek reelection joining Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Council president Sara Nelson in launching campaigns to keep their seats heading into August’s primary and November’s general election.
“In just three years, we’ve eliminated the inherited 5,000 criminal case backlog, refocused our efforts to crack down on frequent, repeat criminal offenders, and stood up for consumers and the environment,” Davison said in the announcement. “Working together with Mayor Harrell and the City Council, I’m proud of what we have accomplished, yet there is more work to do. By making Seattle safer, we’ll keep our quality of life high to keep Seattle an amazing place to live, work and raise a family.”
CHS reported early in her first term on Davison’s amped-up approach to the City Attorney’s office with an increased emphasis on low-level crime. That approach crystalized last year with passage of legislation re-establishing exclusion laws in Seattle hoped to throttle drug and prostitution-related crimes in new zones across the city. The Davison-supported bills re-created the city’s “Stay Out of Drug Areas” and “Stay out of Area Prostitution” zones while adding new areas in neighborhoods including Capitol Hill — regulations repealed by the council four years earlier after years of criticism over their ineffectiveness and dangerous implications for the victims of sex work-related crime they were supposed to be helping.
“For the past two years I have heard loud and clear from law enforcement that they need new legal tools to disrupt open-air criminal drug market activity in many areas of our city, and the tragedy of human trafficking on Aurora Avenue North,” Davison said about the zones. “I have worked on and advocated for these two new ordinances to answer that call. I look forward to partnering with the Seattle Police Department on strategic enforcement to help impacted neighborhoods and protect vulnerable victims. Thank you to the Seattle City Council for stepping up to the moment.”
In the announcement of her 2025 reelection campaign, Davison also touted accomplishments including the elimination of an inherited 5,000 criminal case backlog and “a charge rate of over 60%” compared to what her campaign says was previously a just over 40% rate of charges being filed for “general crime.”
Davison will join the mayor and the council president on the campaign trail. Harrell announced in December he will seek a second term while Nelson followed a week later calling herself the “commonsense champion” and a leader on “pragmatic, compassionate solutions to Seattle’s toughest challenges.”
The primary will take place Tuesday, August 5th. The general election tallies begin on Tuesday, November 4th.
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“Making Seattle Safer”. All these people haven’t done jack squat it’s all a bunch of lip service and no action yet the robberies, stabbings, shootings and drugs keep getting worse
Cant stand Davison on any level. What a disgrace she is to Seattle. She’s just like her hero, Trump.
Same old blather.
Why Progressives keep losing elections in one easy lesson: You equate anyone that’s not on your extreme leftist side with “Trump.” You are therefore blind to the 2/3 or so of the electorate who is neither a card-carrying Democratic Socialist, nor is a Trump/MAGA. You miss us, we’re here, and we see you very clearly.
Davison was a Biden supporter forced to run as a Republican because local Dems threw in with anarchist Nichole Thomas-Kennedy, she who was promoting burning police cars as “a policy proposal” with her antifa allies in 2020. Davison is a lot more in line with normal majority voting Seattle, and not your scorched earth practices that NTK and her allies endorsed.
This is why Progressives have lost a majority of the races they’ve run in since 2020; you overplayed your hand, and assumed your army of followers on social media equated to a voting majority, when any sane reading of the actual voting electorate would have confirmed it was not.
And here you are again. Still haven’t taken moral stock of your losses, still doubling down on idiotic false dichotomies like everyone who isn’t on your side is MAGA.
Will the RNC be giving her any campaign cash?
I’d doubt it. She was only running as (R) because NTK and the local Dem Socialists were running as D. She’s a lot more of a centrist Dem than she is MAGA.
Reagan Democrat
NTK. Hope we never see the likes of her again. Yet significant support for brain dead extreme far left progressives.
I’ll vote for her. It took longer than I’d like for her to get the SOAP and SODA passed. But encouraged by the recent crackdown at 12th and Jackson.
same, at least there’s some movement toward lowering crime
With the state of 12th and Jackson, I’m terrified of someone from the hugs not drugs crowd getting in.
agree 100%
How are we paying for it all?
we’re not yet. but i’d rather openness to talking about crime being bad rather than whatever was happening prior
Agree.
What’s been done at 12th & Jackson? As near as I can tell, the crowd moved around the corner.
That’s all people want done, moving people around the corner repeatedly forever. Suggest trying anything else and you’re accused of being soft on crime.
Where does all the money for this come from?
Jump Start
Cool. So?
It’s a typical MAGA response.
How about find revenue for the things you want. As opposed to stealing it from something you fought to oppose and lost. Yet once in power? They simply made it a slush fund instead of clean energy and housing.
If let’s say this council passed a tax that was supposed to go to a new jail and sweeps. Then if a liberal council got in, do you think they’d stick to that? Once you quit or get voted out you no longer have a say.
Maybe they should have done a better job to keep a conservative council from from forming.
Hypothetical?
okay…You have concepts? Thoughts?
So when did the progressives do it? not “woulda”.
or maybe from actually upzoning to allow housing to be built, more residents to move in supporting local businesses, increasing the tax base both for property and sales taxes, etc. just allow housing to be built instead of grandstanding
You can only cram so many people into a space. The Seattle…Whom all they might be, plan decades in advance. They gotta secure funds and pass the review process and so on.
The notion we simply build higher sounds great at first blush. But I see communal living laws were passed. So they count the rooms as housing. Thus costing everyone less in taxes. Especially the wealthy. It’s the way it’s tilted.
“just allow housing to be built” is fine. But there’s NIMBY everywhere. Traffic and trees are suddenly a massive priority. Not housing.
The wealthy have not paid their fair share since Reagan.
just allow housing to be built
stop stealing the money for it then?
rezone tomorrow and drop height limits across the city – we’d have loads of housing being built. No money needed.
And it would actually generate more money from the housing built and residents allowed to be housed.
I think that she has done a great job and that she will continue to do so in a second term. You go, Ann!
Local governments don’t stand a chance against the poverty tsunami that’s been swelling for over 40+ years due to short sighted national economic policy. Buckle up folks gonna be a rough few decades ahead.
just build more housing – i’d happily have a million folks from latin america and africa move here and “lower the area income” if we could permit housing to be built. good for them, good for us, but increasing poverty by some measures
We’ve been “Just building more housing” on Capitol Hill since 2021; over 500 new units of Low Barrier rentals being managed by non-profits like LIHI, DESC and Plymouth. All it does is create micro crime zones around the buildings, and OD / Aid Response calls are 2x to 8x more than surrounding buildings. The area becomes a drain on city resources, and drug gangs occasionally have shootings to fight over who gets to sell drugs to the buildings. SPD is aware of them but does nothing. All this because we “just gave them a home.” It doesn’t work unless we require/supervise them to get off drugs and stay off. Get mental health assistance and keep getting it. But we don’t do that.
that’s a crazy capped amount. with a more free market we’d have built 20k+ more units in cap hill in the last 20 years. more regular people to overwhelm the nasties
When is SODA going to start working for Capitol Hill? I walk along Broadway at least 5 times a week and I don’t see any improvement. Also, yesterday I spotted 5 tents in and around Cal Anderson Park. Up where I live, there’s a guy with 4 tents and his other junk pitched on 18th between the sidewalk and the street. I’ve notified the city twice about this to no avail. There is also an apodment building on Olive behind the Trader Joe’s with fentanyl users hanging around daily, waiting for the Candy Man to arrive. Why has our neighborhood been forsaken?
Yes, and also the area around the Broadway Market QFC has become a nexus for street drug use and dealing. Clusters of addicts using and doing the fentanyl fold. The other day, I saw three addicts folded over while their dealer calmly stood by smoking a cigarette, waiting for them to need another hit.
I’m skeptical that the SODA idea will be effective, but it’s worth a try. Unfortunately, the zone does not extend north of E Thomas St.
I’ve watched SPD move people along off Broadway to a few blocks away. Pushing individuals into the residential area isn’t so good either. The area parks are again getting filled with tents and piles of debris. It seems the area is back sliding hard from any improvements made in 2023 with what seems like new hardened drug users arriving in droves in mid-2024.
You actually saw some officers out on the street, enforcing the law? A rare sighting indeed!
Our neighbors are too often new arrivals who think this is normal, or who outright support druggies in parks because to them and what they’ve been taught, it’s a more moral choice. But they ignore the ongoing OD, the ongoing crime and danger to the campers in their rush to be tolerant and Progressive.
C.A. Davison: “For the past two years I have heard loud and clear from law enforcement that they need new” [patently unconstitutional under both state as well as federal law] “legal tools to disrupt …” [in a wholly disingenuous and utterly phony exercise in MAGA virtue signalling accomplishing nothing by engaging in merely theatrical political window dressing – by prosecuting an ancient futile War On Prostitution, and a century long fiscally and morally bankrupt War Upon People Who Use Drugs]. Police State Mama makes good in Seatown of the Bellicose Bourgeois Hypocrites demanding show-trials featuring theatrical criminalization and persecutions of human nature. My guess is that (likely) not one single municipal judge is (or will be) dumb enough to sign orders authorizing deprivation of liberty without due process.
sue her office then
Dude, people just want to get this stuff off the streets.
That moment when keeping a city’s sidewalks and parks functioning for more than just the drug abusing and crime fencing communities becomes in your mind, the same as MAGA. This is literally what Democratic Socialists believe.
Also why you regularly lose elections these days, folx.
To date (Feb 3, 2025), only one Municipal Court Judge has leapt upon the “let’s trample state/federal constitutional due process rights” wagon. Damon Shadid appears to have engaged in declaration of an unsupportable claim:
The one order granted so far was against a woman whom police arrested for smoking fentanyl … Prosecutors asked she be barred from … Her defense team tried to argue the order would be unconstitutional, but Judge Damon Shadid said that question had already been tested and was not for the Seattle Municipal Court to overturn. He approved the order.
Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-stay-out-zones-for-drug-arrests-going-mostly-unused
Although Shadid waxes about municipal (voluntary) “Mental Health Court”, wherein dubious fields of psychiatry/psychology are dangerously validated by Courts as if they actually represented scientifically based objective truth:
… if you could see the transformative change that a lot of these people go through it really it can make you cry. I’ve had tears in my eyes on multiple occasions. … Mental Health Court is by far my favorite thing that I do as a judge.
Source: https://namiseattle.org/an-interview-with-judge-damon-shadid-of-seattle-municipal-courts-mental-health-court
… matters of officers of the Courts such as Shadid comporting with clearly stated constitutional due process should be neither arbitrary or capricious.
I fully expect the same dead-end contingent on this forum to all check in with their hateful hot takes on Davison and her centrist and mostly successful tenure so far as City Attorney. She inherited a mess and has helped to sort it out somewhat; she ignored the naysayers and has worked well with the post 2023 Council.
The last thing we need is to revert to someone more interested in grandstanding for enabling crime than in enforcing the law as City Attorney. Or for enforcing the law unfairly based on reasons other than law.
You declare adherence to (state/federal) constitutional law to be arbitrary:
BB: “That moment when keeping a city’s sidewalks and parks functioning for more than just the drug abusing and crime fencing communities becomes in your mind, the same as MAGA.”
Yet, the next time your “golden oratory” flows forth, you contradict yourself:
BB: “The last thing we need is to revert to someone more interested in grandstanding … than in enforcing the law as City Attorney. Or for enforcing the law unfairly based on reasons other than law.”
Call it whatever you may within subsequent declarations – I consider such oratorical noodling around to reveal hypocritical reactionary-ism. No need for you to inject further situational ethical incoherence into the discussion. Readers are capable of noting/judging your inconsistencies for themselves.
jseattle, this post says the primary election is on August 19th. However, the elections calendar on the Secretary of State’s website says the election is on August 5th.
Could you please correct that date? I’ve included a link to the elections calendar below.
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/calendar
Seattle right wingers commenting on every single story about a crime: Seattle’s on the verge of complete chaos, Oh my God! Liberals/Progressives/Sawant ruined the city and it’s getting worse!
Seattle right wingers commenting on the person who has the actual job of dealing with all the crime they insist is out of control: She’s doing a great job!
She didn’t just take over either, she’s being doing this for the last three years of constant, never-ending whining by right wingers that crime is out of control. But, she opportunistically switched her party affiliation to Republican, so the right wingers that comment nonstop about crime will of course give her a pass. No sense in complaining about crime if they can’t blame Democrats. Heaven forbid I would accuse the right of being disingenuous about all their whining or anything.
Sorry, but there are very few ‘right wingers’ in this town, it’s mostly Democrats and those left of Democrats, who call everyone who doesn’t agree with them MAGA…
I could only find a county level break down, but King co went 74.2% Harris and I’m sure that Seattle proper was even more blue.
Face it, just wanting crime and drugs and trash cleaned up isn’t conservative… but no one expects it all to be miraculously cleared away in a couple of years after more than a decade of neglect.
There are few right wingers in this city but this town is not this blog. Your breakdown was pointless.
Also, I know it’s not conservative to want to fight crime and drugs, you should tell the right wingers that, not me.
Agree completely. If you don’t agree with Seattle’s extreme far left right down the line, your gonna get hated.
Pardon me, because I am a bit confused by your post.
It appears that you support the actions of Ann Davison, and so do I: but here is where I get confused – i think that the majority of the complaints about Ann are not from the Democrats or Republicans, but from Neo-Progressives. As a life long Independent who votes along liberal lines: I ask you this question. To wit: why do you think the attacks on Ann Davison are coming from the right (i.e. Republicans, conservatives)? Thanks
You must be confused to think I support Ann Davison. I do not, she is only good for trying to get rid of judges she personally doesn’t like.
The point is fairly is simple: the same group of people who nonstop complain that crime has ruined the city are the same people who support the one person who is supposed to be prosecuting it and has had that job for three years now.
The charge I make is one of hypocrisy. If crime is that bad, and the city is refusing to prosecute criminals, then the person with that job should not be supported by the those who are saying crime is bad and the city is refusing to prosecute criminals.
So, are saying that you don’t think the city is prosecuting the criminals?
And by the inaction of the city, to prosecute, that Ann Davison should go?
Exactly. The far left detest her. So I will support her. Just to annoy Seattle’s extreme far left.
Sawant went on to do great things like simp for Trump in swing states, and you guys still want to deify her…
Yup. Stumped for Jill effin Stein. Thanks Kshama. Good job! Hope you enjoy Trump 2.0.
Who else isn’t buying the stats she claims to spout? I’m more inclined to believe that any progress was rather due to external or other factors that just happened to occur during her tenure rather than because of it. I’m writing this about a month after this article was first published and a poll shared with the site Cascadia Advocate indicated Davison is rather unpopular and she already is lagging significantly behind a theoretical generic challenger. Once the race gets fleshed out, it’s safe to say that might become more evident. Regardless, nothing has changed. So it goes to prove that an outsider and a Republican couldn’t fix the issue. Maybe elect people that are actually qualified and attuned to the city and its needs and values.