During an Aug. 1 press conference at City Hall, “tough on crime” Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison unveiled Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA). Under the proposed ordinance, a judge could prohibit a person from entering a designated zone if they previously committed a drug-related criminal offense there. If a person violates that order, they could incur a gross misdemeanor penalty and face up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine.
Davison was joined by three fellow right-leaning politicians on the Seattle City Council: Council President Sara Nelson, Public Safety Committee chair Bob Kettle and Councilmember Maritza Rivera. The press conference also featured Downtown Seattle Association president and CEO Jon Scholes, who gave remarks in support of the legislation.
The two proposed SODAs are around Westlake in downtown Seattle and in Little Saigon in the Chinatown-International District. In a press release announcing the proposed ordinance, Nelson and Scholes referenced a recent Seattle City Auditor report that found concentrations of crime and drug use in several areas of downtown, including Westlake and Little Saigon. Real Change previously reported that harm reduction advocates were skeptical of focusing on geography over root causes of poverty and substance use disorders. They were also fearful that the report would be used to advance further policies of criminalization; these fears now appear to have come true.
This is not the first time Seattle has utilized this approach. In their 2010 book “Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America,” University of Washington professors Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert document Seattle’s use of SODA orders to target people in large swathes of the city.
In 2005, roughly half of the city was designated a drug zone. In response to a decision by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to stop prosecuting low-level drug offenses as felonies, then-Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr started requesting SODA orders against anyone accused of drug possession in order to disrupt “open-air drug markets.”
In an email to Real Change, Beckett said SODAs did not prove effective in deterring the use or sale of prohibited drugs in Seattle in the mid 2000s.
“In our research, we found that spatial exclusions such as SODAs do not achieve their stated purpose,” Beckett wrote. “Most people who were banned from certain areas frequently returned to those spaces for a host of reasons. But SODAs and other similar tactics did ensure that many vulnerable people cycled more frequently through jail, further destabilizing their lives and endangering their health.”
In 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter uprising, the Seattle City Council unanimously repealed a number of criminal statutes, including language in the municipal code referencing SODA orders. During the tenure of former Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, who served between 2010 and 2022, the city stopped requesting SODA orders.
At the press conference, Davison said the intention is to ensure downtown spaces are accessible and clear.
“The goal, again, is to protect public spaces, and hopefully we are getting people again into treatment,” she said.
Davison also said, “It is an additional way to send the message that this is not [an] activity that is OK with us societally. We do not want someone who is there with the illegal possession and selling of drugs and having a known drug market.”
Anita Khandelwal, director of the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD), said the new policy would only cause more harm while failing to solve the opioid crisis.
“I’m disappointed that the city is choosing to recycle old failed policies that are not going to positively impact our city and are going to cause harm to individuals who will receive these orders and become further ensnared in the criminal legal system,” Khandelwal said.
The DPD would be responsible for defending people in courts, including fighting potential SODA orders against its clients. Khandelwal added that stigmatizing people who use drugs does not identify the root cause of why they struggle with substance use disorders nor does it help them get support.
In response to a question from Real Change about whether the new SODA ordinance is consistent with more than 50 years of drug policies birthed from the War on Drugs, Nelson said people should not see the two as related.
“This is not the War on Drugs,” Nelson said. “We’re talking about misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor, and the War on Drugs threw people in jail on trumped-up felonies for years and years and years. So efforts to conflate the two — I believe that is a false equivalency.”
However, Khandelwal said, regardless of what label you use to characterize the new ordinance, it will have a negative effect.
“I don’t think I need to fight about whether this is the War on Drugs or not,” she said. “It is a very carceral approach to public drug use. … We know that a carceral approach to drug use is ineffective.”
The new legislation will be heard at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Aug. 13. Sponsors said they want to pass the ordinance before Sept. 24, when the city council’s attention will shift to the municipal budget.
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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 Aug. 7–13, 2024 issue.