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Seattle’s first — and only — STAY OUT OF DRUG AREA ORDER issued on Capitol Hill

A screenshot of a Seattle "STAY OUT OF DRUG AREA ORDER" for SODA Zone 4 on Capitol Hill

The Seattle Times reports that the city’s new criminal banishment zones aren’t being used by police or the justice system and only one person has so far been banned from a zone — a person arrested for drug use on Capitol Hill.

According to Seattle Municipal Court records obtained by CHS, the lone Seattle “STAY OUT OF DRUG AREA ORDER” was issued in December in a bust for smoking fentanyl outside the Harvard Market QFC.

“I observed XXX had a ‘tooter’ straw in her mouth. She had a piece of tin foil held up under the tooter straw,” the redacted SPD report on the incident reads. “Beneath the tin foil, XXX apparently had a lighter she used to ignite something on the surface of the tin foil and inhale the resulting smoke through the tooter straw.”

Court records show the 27-year-old defendant facing charges of use of a controlled substance in a public place and false reporting. Police say the defendant was also wanted on an assault warrant from an incident in the city a week earlier.

A judge agreed with the Seattle City Attorney’s request for the SODA order barring the defendant from Capitol Hill’s “Zone 4” through December 9th, 2025.

It is not clear why the City Attorney pursued the order in this case. We’ve asked Ann Davison’s office for more information on the decision.

UPDATE: “I can’t speak regarding a specific case, but I can say that, generally, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office receives referrals from Seattle Police and reviews the referrals to determine if there are sufficient legal grounds to move the case forward,” a spokesperson tells CHS. “This includes whether or not the alleged conduct violates a specific law and if the evidence supports the elements of the alleged offense. A referral is declined when those elements are not there.”

The defendant banned from Seattle’s Zone 4 also faces a similar restriction in a nearby municipality. Fife posts its SODA court orders publicly and the Zone 4 defendant is one of dozens included on the city of 10,000 or so people’s banishment roster.

The order includes a map of all Seattle’s zones including Zone 4

After declining to be interviewed for the story, Seattle City Council president Sara Nelson criticized the Seattle Times report Monday. Nelson, who along with Davison championed the new exclusion zones in Seattle, said the issues of an overworked police force and justice system needed to be addressed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and his administration.

“Council has demonstrated that we have a sense of urgency about public safety – downtown & 12th and Jackson, and we need the rest of the city to follow suit,” Nelson said on social media. “Council passes laws & the Mayor’s departments, including SPD, are responsible for implementing.”

CHS reported here on the Seattle City Council approval of the SODA and Stay Out of Area Prostitution zones in September.

The new zones are on Capitol Hill, and in the International District, Belltown, the University District, and Pioneer Square with the new SOAP zone covering Aurora. More could be added.

Under the legislation, a designation allows a judge to bar drug or prostitution law offenders busted in a zone from reentering the area for up to two years. A SODA or SOAP order can also be imposed as a condition of release from jail. Violating an order will become a new gross misdemeanor, punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine.

District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth drove the effort to add a Capitol Hill SODA zone. The restrictions are “established as the area of the Capitol Hill neighborhood bordered on the north by East Thomas Street, on the south by East Union Street, on the east by 11th Avenue, and on the west by Harvard Avenue.”

It includes Cal Anderson, the busy Capitol Hill Station light rail and transit facility, and the areas around the Harvard Market shopping center as well as the core of the Pike/Pine nightlife scene.

 

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Ace Ven-Diagram
Ace Ven-Diagram
6 days ago

I hope there’s more. Between the gang shootings and Johnny’s mistaken hit, our Hill needs help.

Milo
Milo
6 days ago

The ridiculously coiffed and pompadoured pin-headed charlatan amateurs creating this patently anti-state/federal (SODA/SOAP fascist display ritual) constitutional travesty just can’t understand why municipal court magistrates valuing their reputations as jurists are themselves unwilling to participate in such overt violations of citizen due process rights, not to mention the same over-worked badged minions who council professes jingoistic worship for. It makes one wonder how such obtuse foolishly elected shambolic cretins and disingenuously prancing publicity sucking nitwits presently sitting on the city council manage to find the time to lace up their own clodhoppers while also obediently buffing and shining the sparkling boots of their mayoral/corporate paymasters, addicted to their phantasmagorical existences as self-dealers.

Glenn
Glenn
6 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Very nice vocabulary. Gold star for word use. D- for substantive ideas.

Milo
Milo
6 days ago
Reply to  Glenn

Perhaps pithy professor should pause graciously grading stacks of pathetically substandard submittals of prose and get out and bust some untouchable heads in support of freedom, executing citizen arrests to maintain the unkempt streets of Naked City pursuant to a proven fiscally/morally bankrupt brand of ritualized persecutions of human natures of the great unwashed based upon moral crusading, the pseudo-pragmatic guise for which never sufficiently conceals its intentional wholly unethical unproductive authoritarianism seeking to purposely infantalize and thus systematically dehumanize adults, criminalizing their bodies, minds and fates based upon hypocritical pharmaco-toxicology in holy wars waged against molecules – where legal ethanol is vastly more harmful than (pharmaceutical) opioids.

The “war on drugs” may be understood to a significant extent as a war on people. Its impact has been greatest on those who live in poverty, and it frequently overlaps with discrimination directed at marginalized groups, minorities, Indigenous Peoples. … Globally, drug control has had massive costs for the dignity, humanity and freedom of people … the ‘war on drugs’ has been more effective as a system of racial control than as a tool to reduce drug markets. … Criminal laws and punitive use of administrative/other sanctions stigmatize already marginalized populations. … As called for by the UN system Common Position on drug-related matters, drug use and possession for personal use should be decriminalized as a matter of urgency. Drug use/dependence are never a sufficient justification for detaining a person. Compulsory drug detention/rehab. centers need to be closed and replaced with voluntary evidence-informed, and rights-based health and social services in the community.
“UN experts call for end to global ‘war on drugs’” (June 23, 2023):https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/06/un-experts-call-end-global-war-drugs

Glenn
Glenn
6 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Run on sentence. Failed to convey any cogent thought.

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
6 days ago
Reply to  Glenn

really dude? why?

emeraldDreams
5 days ago
Reply to  Milo

we’re discussing combating public use of meth and fentanyl, which are categorized as legend drugs. These are the drugs whose fumes we’ve been walking into on the street and at Cal Anderson and have been encountering on public transit.

Milo
Milo
5 days ago
Reply to  emeraldDreams

“Legend” means nada – other than statutorily criminalized. Were such demonized molecules legalized – and therefore not instead throttled by a pharmacratic thought-police state and the fabulist prohibitionist moralities of “magisterial thinkers” professing to graciously save souls while incarcerating and infantilizing warm adult bodies – many drug users would be inclined to stay home. Or, perhaps the significant problem (in any event) is that those people have nowhere else to go? (If so), “drugs”, accused as a proximal cause, would reveal themselves to instead constitute statistical confounders (meaning external phenomena existing at the input, and at the output, of a supposedly casual system).

Speaking as if being a direct witness by some unidentified “we” in making knowledge claims relating to (secondary, at distance) molecular exposures causes me to question your veracity as an reporting source. One can indeed find reliable published study results reporting that such fumes rarely (if ever) approach levels causing significant physiological exposures of “such molecular meanies” – or at least so says the Seattle Department of Health. The fear that we (or you) may favor will duly forge our (or your) own moral fetters, in unintended liabilities and collateral harms to a free society not easily dismissed by “authoritarian sweeps”. Proximal cause of societal harms are the prohibitions themselves.

Boris
Boris
5 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Yeah, I think it’s reasonable to not want people passed out and pissing themselves on a public sidewalk. If you want to criminalize the loitering aspect rather than the already criminalized drugs aspect, well, sure?

Milo
Milo
5 days ago
Reply to  Boris

You well know how I feel regarding the tyrannies and collateral societal harms of demonizing and criminalizing human nature. Whether public property could or should rightly be places where gendarmes of the corporate state are encouraged and allowed to drag lingering warm bodies off to physical confinements for the abstruse infraction of not possessing sufficiently pleasing appearance to existing powers that be (which could possibly include yourself) seems not a simple matter. It’s called “tyranny of the majority” that treasures executing control over minorities.

The most promising approach as I see it would be to not only legalize formerly statutorily controlled molecules, but to (also) make a purified and accurately measured (thus safer to use) supply available to (by default, deemed legally competent) adults for purchases at costs so inexpensive that monetary incentives to engage in illicit/street purchases from non-trusted sources disappear. It seems that people prefer an American continent collapsing into organized crime and understandably desperate efforts of inhabitants to emigrate to safer existences.

Whoever has managed to convince our society that century long utterly futile destructive weaponized moral crusades unjustified by pharmacology that obsess over personal behaviors of adults is either justified or productive is much smarter than privileged mobs clamoring for performative chemo-fascist power plays to entertain and provide comforting assurances to the pampered bourgeoisie whose ongoing satisfactions constitute a paramount priority to the steady uninterrupted collection of tax revenues, thus extracting real wealth from a sufficiently placated populace.

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Well ok then….

SoDone
SoDone
4 days ago
Reply to  emeraldDreams

Or evening of 1/5 – double door entry of Broadway Market, to get to gym- for my physical and mental health, but f me, had foil smokers bent over when entering building. Held breath and rushed it. FWIW, all under 40, white, outward identifying as males. I won’t accept this as normal, this isn’t part of a healthy social contract. At this point, I hope the social housing advocates also promote safe using spaces for the lobbies of their buildings – seems the’ let them use anywhere’/‘have rich people pay for my housing’ groups over lap. If they want to promote social progress, let them deal with the addicts.

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  SoDone

Agree.

CH Res
CH Res
4 days ago
Reply to  Milo

tell all that BS to the person that was assaulted

Milo
Milo
4 days ago
Reply to  CH Res

Speaking of bullish exudate, how does your rapier intellect get from where the above article states, Police say the defendant was also wanted on an assault warrant from an incident in the city a week earlier”, to justifying an unconstitutional court order prejudicing and depriving due process on the basis of allegation (due to criminalized drug prohibition) unrelated to said assault? Seattle Magistrates or District Judges likely would not deprive suspect of liberty (as you evidently would command), unless and until a conviction for alleged assault was registered. Your sloppily flawed conflation, evidently in service of emotion over abandoned reason makes an excellent case against “mob rule”.

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Um I like words but your post feels like an assault. Dial it back a bit and maybe we’ll hear you.

Milo
Milo
2 days ago
Reply to  Stumpy

There (within the subset of us soap-box orators in the CHS comment sections) appears to exist widespread inattention to elements of constitutional due process that – if hurriedly or otherwise abandoned in the interest of perceived expedience, serve to degrade our society, while I strongly suspect are likely to not result in desired outcomes, only further damaging society. I do respond with some specific thoughts and arguments when challenged (and/or trolled by emotive exudations of simplistic reactionary gruntings). My patience can be admittedly short.

Perhaps you may be pleased to understand that as a long term resident of the University District area, I am pissed, flummoxed, and disgusted with the (similar, though seemingly not quite as geographically concentrated in specific locations) dregs and damages of (what I see as largely caused by drug prohibitions and wrongful criminalizations of vices which are not, in and of themselves, crimes) street trading in horrifically impure and contaminated utter garbage, including fentanyl(s), the many increasing dangerous additives, as well as methamphetamine.

In part from prior personal experiences in attempting to engage them, it is my perception that SPD has been and will remain largely useless where it comes to affecting these situations. I am particularly concerned with some dealer-on dealer violence that I personally witnessed and photographed in-process. Any use of violence (related to any activities) should (although it appears in many such isolated cases, cannot) be addressed. My own bottom line is that I will not myself attempt to, or endorse, trammeling upon core state/federal constitutional protections.

Kevin
Kevin
4 days ago
Reply to  Glenn

“Liberals make up words to win arguments.”

– Dave Chappelle

Milo
Milo
2 days ago
Reply to  Kevin

What should folks call people who have no words representing their own thoughtful reasoning? Illiterate, as opposed to illiberal.

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  Glenn

Yes

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
6 days ago
Reply to  Milo

 addicted to their phantasmagorical existences as self-dealers.”

That sums it up.

CD Resident
CD Resident
6 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Adderall?

Milo
Milo
5 days ago
Reply to  CD Resident

No thanks. I eschew self-administration of all exogenous molecules – save for lively insufflation of highly purified libtardo adrenochrome.

Over it
Over it
6 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Get a grip bro

Gem
Gem
6 days ago
Reply to  Milo

Did you have Chat GPT write this, or did you just suffer a severe concussion at the hands of a really big thesaurus?

Milo
Milo
5 days ago
Reply to  Gem

You might consider renting a rumpus room together, from which you and professor could pompously cast forth vapid dispersions, ever dreaming up new one-liners, amazing your sophisticated audience.

Hillery
Hillery
6 days ago

Nothing but foil and tooter straws outdid that corner and they get ONE person lol #thatssoSPD

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
6 days ago
Reply to  Hillery

they yarded them out. Have guards outside the store etc…It’s not the same.

E Trox
E Trox
6 days ago

Am I the only one who sees how awfully racist these banishment laws are?

Might as well bring back white and black water fountains!

Nandor
Nandor
6 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

I dunno… the law doesn’t say anything about kicking people out because of their race – or are you assuming all the users on Broadway are of one particular race? Who’s the racist?

Richard
Richard
6 days ago
Reply to  Nandor

“Who’s the racist?”

At a guess, it’s probably not the one with awareness of the frequent historically racist implementations of laws like this…

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
6 days ago
Reply to  Richard

Brother, we are not talking about misuse of policies and laws.
I hear you on the history. But this is not history. It’s now and it’s Capitol Hill.

How far do you think profiling is going to get here? They had a panty raid at a gay bar and had to stop dead in their tracks and apologise and reframe the laws.

Result? No more panty raids. Also? A little more respect for the cops who stopped it and got it back on track.

It’s abusive cops that mung up laws. Not the laws themselves. Albeit, some laws are still on the books that need to go.

Nandor
Nandor
6 days ago
Reply to  Richard

So, you are agreeing there’s nothing racist in the law, right… Like the folks below say, down on Broadway the people likely to be busted are largely white, though I won’t totally agree that they are white and male – there’s a lot of couples.

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
6 days ago
Reply to  Nandor

During covid. There was a couple living in the building overhang in the building the just demolished.

I’ve never seen a couple argue more than them. She was a screamer and he was a yeller. It was almost every day all day. For like a full year+.

She’d turn tricks in the ciggy shop porta pottie and he found her in there one time. She wouldn’t come out. He was yellin’ at the top of his lungs for like 4 hours. Banging on it with his skateboard…lol

Just like 1970 sitcoms. He always took her back and they lived happily till tomorrows episode.

They’ve since moved on. Last summer was the last I saw of them.

good times, good times.

Milo
Milo
4 days ago

Such quasi-quaint literary gold reminds me of University District (not so) great crack cocaine sales craze of the Summer of 1987. I literally could not look out my window (24/7) without witnessing of local entrepreneur developers selling/combusting rocks, their fiery red eyes eerily glowing throughout the night. SPD North Precinct – despite my pleas – was absolutely worthless in every way, pouting while citing a stock of merely 5 patrol cars and 1 unmarked narco vehicle, with which they accomplished nothing. Will never forget one sultry late Summer evening when the fluffy chirping voices of around 100 young gangster orators all higher than kites fused into a single vortex of testosterone inspired BS. Nothing but crickets from SPD – until one night not long after the peak of this (crack) craze, some morally challenged individual allegedly momentarily flashed his sorry looking junk outside an apartment window in the night, mortifying a young damsel next door. (No kidding), within mere minutes all 5 of those (otherwise “too busy”) SPD patrol cars glutted the alley, with the narco car joining the party soon after. 2 detectives popped out cheerfully explaining that they were “undercover officers”. Not a single one of these hapless characters ever located said perpetrator – but the crucially important moral of the story is that if you want rapid and robust SPD interest it is imperative to “flash some genitals”, or perhaps “get some SOAP in your SODA for a real good time”.

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  Nandor

Point is what?

Guesty
Guesty
6 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

I’d say like 85%+ of the street madness is done by white dudes so….

Boris
Boris
6 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

99% of the fenny zombies on Broadway are white, so not sure what you’re talking about

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
6 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

dude…they are not using it like NYPD stop and frisk.

The vast majority of the people I see are white.

They kickin’ everyone out who is busted for stealing, or criming in general I guess. Drugs and so forth.

Gem
Gem
6 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

While there’s plenty to say about racial discrimination in this city & law enforcement, the people I’m seeing do drugs on the street aren’t primarily of any particular ethnic group…honestly, the implication that they are is kind of racist in itself.
Now, if they’re only arresting POC, that’s another matter entirely.

bru
bru
6 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

The users and fentanyl folds I see are white most of the time

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  bru

Me too.

emeraldDreams
5 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

You’re the lone wolf barking up the wrong tree.

I’m Black and I don’t see anything racist about SODA. I was also at a Black-led black-majority community event a couple of months ago and the plan for SODA was mentioned by someone with the SCC. Everyone applauded it and was happy that it was being implemented and that something was finally being done to combat the public use of fentanyl and meth and the gun violence. People don’t want to see a return of the 80s and early 90s.

Word of advice, quit speaking for the local Black and POC communities. We know what’s good for us and we’ll speak up if we think something will be detrimental to the greater good.

Kevin
Kevin
4 days ago
Reply to  emeraldDreams

White liberals feigning outrage on behalf of black communities is a requirement for Seattle liberals.

Smoothtooperate
Smoothtooperate
4 days ago
Reply to  Kevin

” feigning ”

Seriously? That’s a stretch.

It’s better than “faking” which is what right wingers do. They are deviously plotting against POC while telling them “Where’s my black? Anyone? Oh there he is.!” As the orange guy stands at his campaign podium. “I love the blacks”.

See the difference?

emeraldDreams
3 days ago

The far-left does the same as well. Remember the former unsanctioned BLM garden at the Sun bowl on Cal Anderson? The Marxist orgs happily took up the promoter of that under their arm regardless if the majority of Black Seattle residents weren’t in favor of the garden being at Cal Anderson. Even the local chapter of the NAACP called out how performative it was and labeled it as nothing but “white co-opting”.

emeraldDreams
4 days ago
Reply to  Kevin

i see that. much of the outrage is uncalled for and can be a detriment

Stumpy
Stumpy
2 days ago
Reply to  E Trox

No. Please explain your thinking here.

Matt
Matt
6 days ago

Very on brand for Council President Nelson to completely ignore the council’s role in oversight in addition to legislation… Or is it just their job to pass legislation and blame?

John Scott Campos
John Scott Campos
6 days ago

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen open fentanyl use in the dude steeets of Broadway. I also cannot count a single time in 20 years I’ve seen police merely walking along the street of Broadway. There once was a little police office up in the second floor of broadway market. No longer. Just security employed by the market that the QFC staff call as useless as QFC’s own security team.

Neighbor
Neighbor
6 days ago

They used to walk around Cal Anderson giving out stickers to kids, feels very different now.

zach
zach
6 days ago

Hopefully, the (limited) progress that SPD is making on hiring new officers will enable the department to bring back some foot patrols, and Broadway would be a prime location for arresting users and especially dealers.

Gem
Gem
6 days ago
Reply to  zach

I’d hope so. But, after seeing how SPOG has conducted itself over the past 5 or so years, I’m not holding my breath. I don’t think they’ll be happy until every officer is making a fat paycheck while actively sleeping in their cruisers parked in bus and bike lanes.

Bigcrouton
Bigcrouton
6 days ago

SODA’s are a gimmicky half-measure, but they’re not nothing. The problem is the Harrell administration. Bruce Harrell ran for mayor on a platform of improving public safety and re-invigorating neighborhoods. Once in office, however, his administration got so high on “compassion” that it forgot about common sense. The result is the scuzzy dystopia of Broadway and a Hill littered with tents.

Jules James
Jules James
6 days ago

Thank you Joy Hollingsworth for recognizing SODAs downtown would push the worst of the drug-addled transient problem to Capitol Hill. Its going to be a long few years to re-staff the Seattle Police Department to where regular patrolling — which is far more effective than target patrols based on “big data” — return to Seattle’s neighborhoods. Councilperson Hollingsworth is contributing good common sense in the interim.

E15 resitdent
E15 resitdent
5 days ago

We need a clean capitol hill – arrest these people who blatantly break the law, and throw the book at them.

Right now in DC we’re dealing with a coup – we can’t mess around locally and waste time to deal with criminals like these

Milo
Milo
4 days ago
Reply to  E15 resitdent

You might possibly be pining for stranger soul-mates than you have realized:
DT has a history of supporting draconian tactics to deal with drug traffickers and other criminals. In 2017, he called then-President Rodrigo Duterte of the Phillipines to praise him for his crackdown on drug dealers that led to the killing of an estimated 12,000 people at the hands of police and vigilantes. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,”Trump, referring to the country’s rash of extrajudicial deaths. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you’re doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
(July 28, 2022): https://hightimes.com/news/trump-urges-very-quick-trial-and-death-penalty-for-drug-dealers

emeraldDreams
3 days ago
Reply to  Milo

you’re fighting a lost battle. the majority of Seattle approves of what the city council is doing, including the majority of black residents. find something else to complain about.

Milo
Milo
2 days ago
Reply to  emeraldDreams

If you had (actually) triumphed in the imaginary battle that you imagine, wherein books (including Constitutions) are burned in favor majority rule at the hands of entitled mobs, then you would not be endlessly chirping away (here) to delude only yourself