Advocates say prioritizing geography over root causes may be misplaced
A new report published on July 9 by the Seattle City Auditor has brought fresh attention to a handful of city blocks considered “hot spots” for controlled substance use and crimes against persons. These 10 street segments had a combination of at least 100 such reports in the 13-month period between July 2022 and July 2023. The concerns come amid a sharp rise of drug overdoses in recent years with the popularization of the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl.
However, some harm reduction advocates say that instead of focusing on geographic concentrations of reported undesirable activity — which serve as a proxy for poverty and unsheltered homelessness — city leaders should adopt a harm reduction approach that takes into account the root causes of such behavior. Advocates also raise concerns about the way the auditor report could be used to advance further policies of criminalization that could disproportionately target poor, Black, Brown and Indigenous people.
A surge in overdoses
The audit, which was commissioned by Mayor Bruce Harrell and former Seattle City Council President Debora Juarez, comes as communities struggle with the ongoing devastation of the opioid epidemic.
Between 2013 and 2020, annual drug and alcohol poisoning deaths steadily increased from 318 to 510 in King County alone, according to Public Health — Seattle and King County. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people who passed away due to drugs and alcohol more than doubled, with a record 1,339 people dying in King County in 2023 alone. As of July 23, 605 people have passed away due to drugs and alcohol in 2024, marking a slight decline from last year.
The growth in mortality is largely driven by the use of methamphetamine and fentanyl, an extremely potent drug that has become cheap and relatively accessible. Out of the 1,339 drug-related deaths in 2023, Public Health reported that 1,088 were found to have involved fentanyl, while 758 deaths involved meth. Fentanyl is commonly bought in the form of blue pills or a powder and then smoked. This consumption method results in short, intense highs that wear off quickly, increasing the likelihood of repeated or more frequent use. Fentanyl’s high potency and the risk it could be laced with other drugs also increase the chances of an overdose.
In King County, the opioid crisis has disproportionately impacted homeless people. In 2023, roughly 24% of overdose deaths were among people living unsheltered or in emergency shelter, despite making up only 0.4% of the total county population. In 2019, only 10% of overdose deaths were among people living unsheltered or in emergency shelter.
“Place-based” solutions
The core research question of the auditor report is centered on identifying specific street segments that had high concentrations of overdose crisis calls to the Seattle Fire Department and reports filed with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) of crimes against persons. According to Claudia Gross Shader, research and evaluation director for the Seattle City Auditor’s office and lead author of the report, Harrell and Juarez explicitly called for the linking of these two issues.
Most of the street segments associated with high concentrations of drug use and crime were around Third Avenue, Pike Street, Pine Street and Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. Auditors also identified two street segments in Capitol Hill, one in Little Saigon and one next to Harborview Medical Center.
The focus on these sites is not new. In Spring 2022, SPD established mobile precincts in downtown Seattle and Little Saigon to increase police presence and surveillance. The strategy, nicknamed “Operation New Day,” was unsuccessful in dispersing undesirable activities like informal street vending and drug use.
Gross Shader said the audit did not evaluate how much time SPD was spending in these “hot spots” versus other areas of the city since that was not within the scope of the report.
A major focus of the audit involved studying a section of Third Avenue between Virginia Street and Blanchard Street. The auditors found, in addition to having a large presence of unsheltered people, the street served as a major transit hub and center for social services. The report also made several “place-based” recommendations based on principles known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design to make the street more hospitable, such as installing better lighting, pruning back trees to increase visibility and ensuring construction scaffolding doesn’t obstruct line of sight.
The report stressed the importance of better cross-government collaboration, looking at Snohomish County’s Multi-Agency Coordination Group as an example of partnership between different county departments. The report also recommended inviting the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to investigate overdose deaths as homicides caused by drug dealers to learn more about why people died.
“We currently do not have that kind of information about the specific examples or the specific conditions of the fatal overdoses, and … if [the DEA] can make a federal case when there is trafficking that results in a death, they will work with the U.S. Attorney’s office to do that,” Gross Shader said.
The report pointed to a troubling trend of overdose deaths inside and near permanent supportive housing apartments. Between July 2022 and July 2023, 10 of the 11 fatal overdoses in the Third Avenue case study area happened outside a permanent supportive housing facility.
In response to the report, City Council President Sara Nelson quickly convened a meeting of the Governance, Accountability and Economic Development Committee on July 11. Following the committee’s discussion, Nelson released a statement pushing for the adoption of the audit recommendations, saying the report proved “today’s fentanyl-driven drug crisis is fueling property and violent crime.”
Gross Shader said the report did not conclude drug use or crime caused one another but instead that they occurred in the same spaces.
“We couldn’t establish any causal relationship, like, ‘This is here because of that,’ but we could establish that there are concentrations,” Gross Shader said. “So we don’t know that there is a necessarily a causal relationship, but we do know that overdoses and crimes are concentrated and co-occurring in the same spaces.”
In an interview with Real Change, Nelson said the purpose of the audit was to deploy available but underutilized resources.
“We’re not all that coordinated; we should look to Snohomish County,” Nelson said. “The goal of this audit is not to disparage. It’s to say that the resources are there; let’s use them.”
A focus on harm reduction
While members of the Seattle City Council were receptive to the auditor report, harm reduction advocates appeared to be more skeptical. Kellen Russoniello, director of public health at the Drug Policy Alliance, said the focus on specific “hot spots” of drug use was misguided.
“Increasing law enforcement actually just makes all those problems much worse,” Russoniello said. “If you’re looking at one block and you bring in law enforcement and they do arrests, sweeps or they move everybody along, if you’re only looking at that one block, it might look like your problem has been solved, but that problem has just actually been dispersed to other parts of the city.”
Malika Lamont, director of VOCAL Washington, was also alarmed by the report’s emphasis on law enforcement response. She said more criminalization would be counterproductive and instead increase harm.
“It is not people that sell drugs or end users that are making the drug supply be fentanyl,” Lamont said. “Deepening criminal penalties is going to push people further underground and further away from the help that they are possibly on the edge of reaching out for.”
Lamont added that she didn’t think involving the DEA was necessary to learn why people were dying of overdoses.
“Overdose death is a huge problem,” Lamont said. “And there are things that we know will help prevent it, such as the distribution of naloxone, connection and support of individuals to case management. There’s a lot of different things that are really helpful to people to avoid overdose, but putting resources into investigating where the person got the drugs, prosecuting the person that sold them the drugs or gave them the drugs, and then putting an effort into those type of investigations — but we don’t want to put the investment into keeping a person alive — that is concerning to me.”
Lamont said the philosophy of harm reduction originated among grassroots drug users who were coming up with ways to keep themselves safe. It is an approach, she said, that aims to meet a person’s basic needs regardless of their situation and centers their self determination and agency. Practicing harm reduction can range from trying to get people into housing or shelter to providing sterile needles to reduce the risk of transmitting an infection.
“Harm reduction is, we say, we meet you where you’re at and we don’t leave you there,” Lamont said.
For Brigid Hagan, a member of Women in Black — a group that for more than 20 years has stood vigil in honor of people who die while homeless — tinkering around the edges is not enough to prevent overdose deaths. Instead, she said, governments must scale up investments in housing and services.
“No matter how well coordinated you are, no matter how good your outreach is, if you don’t have housing and services to connect people to, you’re still leaving them on the street,” Hagan said. “If part of your big issue is that you don’t like how unattractive it is on Third Avenue to have so many people living desperate lives in public, have the resources for them to go someplace else and there will be the added bonus that their lives will be better and things will start getting better for them.”
Realities on the ground
Notable omissions from the auditor report were a qualitative survey or interviews with the unhoused people who hang out or reside at Third Avenue and other “hot spots.”
One such person who spends a lot of time on Third Avenue and Pike Street is Dylan Gordon. Gordon has been homeless since April and sells energy drinks and other merchandise to survive. He said that by selling on the street, also known as “boosting,” he’s been able to make about $130 a day on average.
“I was already in a position where I needed help and assistance, and I was getting to the point where I was frustrated; where I was like, ‘I’m going to do whatever I need to do to be able to survive.’”
One of the focuses of the auditor report was discouraging informal street vending like Gordon’s. For Council President Nelson, this is due to a perception that most of the items being fenced are originally stolen.
“Many people have said that what is being sold are things that have been taken from family-owned small businesses, large businesses, et cetera,” Nelson said.
Gordon said that while it’s true most of the items being sold at Third and Pike are indeed stolen, the city needs to open up safe places for unhoused people to go if it doesn’t want them to hang out on the street.
“I think I would start by decriminalizing drugs and having a safe place for people to go, not arresting them for it,” Gordon said. “Don’t have people getting high on one street corner downtown; give them a place to go and make it welcoming for them to get high there.”
Gordon added that people congregate in places like on Third and Pike because there is a sense of community and because getting high alone without anyone to watch you is dangerous.
Lamont concurred with Gordon’s ana-lysis about the importance of maintaining community. She said isolating people once they obtain permanent supportive housing would be harmful and counterproductive to the goal of reducing overdoses within those facilities.
“When you’re separating people from whoever has been supportive of them, and we say, ‘You’re indoors now; you shouldn’t be friends with those people anymore,’ that is not harm reduction, because harm reduction is about self determination,” Lamont said.
Although Seattle city leaders are looking toward law enforcement to respond to the opioid crisis, the city is taking other approaches as well. For example, last fall, the Seattle City Council approved funding for a new Evergreen Treatment Services (ETS) mobile van clinic that will be stationed in Pioneer Square later in this year and provide methadone to people who are in recovery for substance use disorders. ETS held a press event on July 16 commemorating the launch of the new clinic.
Sean Soth, director of health integration and innovation at ETS, said community care was the key to addressing the opioid epidemic. This, he added, requires moving away from a criminal legal system-based framework of understanding drug use.
“I think it’s also really important for people to recognize that crime exists outside of drug use,” Soth said. “Oftentimes, the drug use itself, when criminalized, creates a cycle of criminality. When we step back and start to provide treatment, when we start to provide safe spaces, when we step away from criminalizing individuals — both for drug use and for homelessness — we see some really significant social changes.”
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the July 24–30, 2024 issue.