Damn it, why didn't they listen to McNulty?

@1 Zing!

Hamsterdam didn't decrease the drug use either--it just concentrated it into one hellish zone. I nominate Bellevue.

I miss The Wire.

What do you mean, "after the jump"? I don't see a jump.

Crack dealers in prison while bankers rob us of billions.

thank you, dominic, for taking the time to write this. i wish it didn't confirm all of my worst concerns that popped up as i was reading the times story yesterday. i also wish i didn't have to feel grateful to someone for actually covering the other fucking side of the story, instead of clinging to the side of white yuppies and racist cops. oh, and i work in pioneer square: i only feel unsafe here after dark, and that's usually because of the douchebag frat boys that start wandering around, and/or creepy tourist types.

@3: are you actually talking about Amsterdam? Because if you are, you're terribly misinformed. The transition in drug use (by drug type and route of administration) in Amsterdam over the past 15 years is borderline miraculous and one of the best examples of the effectiveness of public health strategies solidly grounded on harm reduction.

Turn to registered off. There's a racist moron polluting the place with stench.

If you poll the citizens of Seattle, I'm sure > 75% would say that the government should offer more treatment and less jail time for drug users and low-level dealers. The problem is that neither the state nor the city have the $ (and/or willingness) to do that effectively, no matter how much we want it.

So you end up with a big open-air drug problem that disproportionately affects a few areas of the city. Pioneer Square, 12th & Jackson, 23rd & Union, etc.

The people who live in those areas get really tired of seeing it on a daily basis. And they complain to city leaders and police. And I bet most of the people who complain would readily agree that these people need treatment, not jail time. But they have little control over that, and at the end of the day just hope for some peace to return to their neighborhood.

Since police is one area where we haven't cut to the bone, they occasionally have time to go out and enforce the law on drugs and try to and interrupt the dealing. They're doing it because people have asked them to. Because people get sick of the aggravation of having crackheads, heroin users, and whoever else hanging around on their street all day.

So Yes! We agree that there should be more treatment! But if you live through this shit, you'll take the occasional enforcement and jail time instead, because it's better than nothing.

And it's fundamentally unfair to ask for a few areas to put up with constant mayhem due to society's larger failures.

@20: I think your comments are generally on-point. What you don't mention, however, is that law enforcement and the criminal justice system are probably the least efficient and cost-effective tools for dealing with the problems you describe.

A month of methadone treatment for an opiate addict is $360 -- or less than the cost of booking and two nights in jail. Treatment for cocaine addiction tends to be more expensive given the lack of substitution therapy, but is still far less expensive than jail.

All of which, of course, ignores the true elephant in the room: why are these drugs illegal in the first place? Wouldn't it make far more sense to just regulate them and move them totally out of the criminal justice sphere and into the public health sphere where they really belong?

@21 - I don't doubt that one bit. But I, as a resident, only have control over who I vote for and how often I can dial 911.

There's a pile of money the city puts into paying police officers. But you're not going to get buy-in to fire 100 police (in the least policed major city in US) to fund methadone treatment.
There's another pile of money the county puts into jail time and prosecutors. But again, it's unlikely that anyone would agree to fire either of those and put it toward treatment.
And the state spends hundreds of millions on the state prison system. But by this time you're dealing with a bunch of redneck legislators who are even less likely to redirect any criminal justice funds to drug treatment.

So at the end of the day you need to find a big pile of new money that you can build a comprehensive treatment program around. That's not something that Joe Apartment Dweller in Pioneer Square can really do anything about.

So until the people who feel most passionate about this (e.g. Stranger writers) succeed in getting a new statewide initiative to fund comprehensive treatment, don't blame people on the ground floor for bitching, dialing 911, and asking the city to do what they can to clean up the problem.

dominic: another great report. thank you. i agree with @11.

unregistered comment fellow: there are a many disparities in both crime and the prosecution of crime. would you deny that the greatest crimes occurring in our world - the creation of greenhouse gas emissions, the stoking of genocidal conflicts in resource-rich regions, the outsourcing of pollution, or the creation of lies for textbooks forced upon children, for instance - are done by white people?

there are also a lot of disparities in education, health care, and social capital.

I think this Pioneer Drug Bust was great!

Now ... let's issue all the cops involved pink slips.

Meanwhile, most of the cocaine users in the high rises nearby had zero arrests, showing once again that only poor black men suffer in the unjust War on Drugs.

Fuck crack. Go to jail if you're into the shit. Pioneer square can be a shit hole if you go down there at the wrong time of day. fucking crackheads

While I don't sympathize with the people caught, and don't feel like "oh my gosh the terrible hardship the SPD has given them", I hope the people in this comment thread understand what the real issue is, because it has almost nothing to do with the punishment and everything to do with the PR campaign for the "war on drugs". 2 grams? Really? We're talking about less than 8 hours worth of the drug (one would and should assume that most of them didn't have drugs on themselves because they were high).

Anti-drug activists want to claim this as a huge victory and a big step in cleaning up Pioneer Square, when the reality is that these actions are ultimately useless in the war on drugs. The cops here won 14 of the smallest possible battles and 1 small one after the department spent months trying to tackle the problem of drugs in Pioneer Square. The result is nothing, you can still get crack in Pioneer Square, and you've thrown 14 drug addicts and 1 small fry drug dealer behind bars. If the goal was to make Pioneer Square a safer place by reducing how many drugs are sold in the area, this investigation was a complete failure. If the goal was to catch anyone and anything associated with a substance we don't like very much, then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars locking them away with real criminals and treating them like 4th or 5th class citizens when they get out, then you can wave a mission accomplished banner over Pioneer Square like you accomplished something. Capitalism demands this kind of war, one that will never end, so it's ok if you don't ever want the drug war to end, I on the other hand envision a future where we are not at war with drugs. Maybe I'm just high.

good post, Dominic. I fail to see how passing along a $5 rock constitutes distribution of narcotics. They should have to prove that the dealer is actually engaged in some form of organized sales (therefore causing harm to society) to bust them for selling. I'm sure there was some borderline entrapment going on as well.

Buy busts? Sounds like Seattle PD hired Burrell.

gnossos: You should probably search YouTube for Hamsterdam.

I live in Pioneer Square (I've lived here 4 years) and it's only been a week but there seems to be waaaay less drug dealers around for now. but we'll see how it is in a month tho.