UPDATE September 20, 2023: The Seattle City Council has approved controversial legislation that criminalizes drug possession.
The vote was 6 to 3, in favor.
Supporters said it’s not perfect, but a start at getting open drug users off city streets. They say the legislation makes unprecedented commitments to prioritizing treatment and diversion services.
The legislation was proposed by Mayor Bruce Harrell and co-sponsored by Councilmember Andrew Lewis.
Councilmembers Kshama Sawant, Tammy Morales and Teresa Mosqueda opposed it. They argue the addiction crisis has accelerated in recent years, because of fentanyl. They say it's a public health emergency and "more arrests without treatment" will cause more people to overdose.
In passionate public testimony Sept. 19 some said the legislation extends the federal 'war on drugs' for the first time to Seattle.
UPDATE June 6, 2023: The Seattle City Council has voted down legislation that would have given the city attorney the power to prosecute public drug use.
The meeting was heated, with the crowd shouting at council members. Councilmember Andrew Lewis was the swing vote. He had previously expressed support for the legislation. He changed his mind after City Attorney Ann Davison announced she was axing the city's community court, which used alternatives to jail in drug possession cases, such as referrals to substance abuse treatment.
The power to prosecute will likely stay with the county, which hasn't gone after people possessing less than a gram of drugs since 2018.
ORIGINAL STORY: Seattle city council will vote Tuesday on whether or not to give Seattle's city attorney the power to prosecute public drug use and possession. That would mean charging people with a gross misdemeanor for small amounts of controlled substances, not necessarily dealing.
The legislation comes on the heels of Washington state legislature's special session last month, when lawmakers made it a gross misdemeanor to possess small amounts of drugs, replacing an old felony law deemed unconstitutional by the Washington State Supreme Court.
Seattle's city attorney, Ann Davison, now wants the city council to give her office the authority to prosecute both charges. There's been mounting pressure on elected leaders to respond to the deadly and unprecedented fentanyl crisis, which was involved in the overdose deaths of more than 700 people in King County alone last year. Experts say the synthetic opioid is killing more people than any drug ever documented in Washington state.
Critics of the legislation — which the city attorney sponsored with two city councilmembers — say Seattle Police Department and the jail wouldn't be able to handle enforcement of a new law, and that passing it would be a return to the failed "war on drugs" of the '80s.
Mayor Bruce Harrell told The Seattle Times limited police resources should be focused on drug dealers. Davison responded that constituents want the city to do something about people using drugs on sidewalks and in buses, and that police can do both.
It has been the prerogative of King County to decide to prosecute drug possession or not — something they haven't done for less than a gram since 2018, according to former King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg.
"To me, it's kind of back to where we were in the 1980s, when we really launched the war on drugs," said Satterberg, who was a deputy prosecutor then. "I tried cases of people possessing, you know, a couple grams of cocaine. And there was really never any apparatus to help people."
Satterberg, who was elected county prosecutor in 2007 and retired at the beginning of this year, said there’s still far from enough help for people struggling with addiction. He said his office studied outcomes of prosecuting small amounts of drugs and found that they were time- and cost-intensive. More importantly, Satterberg said he's never seen evidence successful prosecutions help people with their addictions.
"Nobody really had asked the question, 'so what are we getting out of this? How much is it costing us? Is it helping anybody? And could we use that money in a better way to help people?' And those are still the questions on the table," Satterberg said.
In 2018, his office stopped prosecuting people for possessing less than a gram of a controlled substance such as meth or heroin.
Satterberg's successor, Leesa Manion, who was elected last year, has been more supportive of Seattle's desire to prosecute.
"Allowing people to suffer the effects of drug addiction on our streets is inhumane," she said in an email to city councilmembers on May 31.
"The City of Seattle and other municipalities have said they have the desire and the resources to address public drug use as misdemeanor crimes. They have also pledged to advance evidence-based policies and services to help people break the cycle of addiction, and most would welcome this necessary assistance as part of a regional, collaborative approach that addresses the immediate public need without re-igniting the war on drugs."
In an email to city councilmembers on Monday, city attorney Davison pledged to work with diversion and treatment providers. She called the speculation about an influx of cases and increased costs "unsubstantiated scare tactics."
"This law would be a modest but important tool in the toolbox for police and prosecutors as we confront the unprecedented growth of fentanyl and methamphetamine on our streets," Davison wrote.
