City Attorney Candidate Erika Evans Wants to Fight Trump

Erika Evans, 35, nursing a split-shot latte at Victrola on Capitol Hill, asked, “Do you like Kendrick Lamar?”

As someone with taste, I said yes. 

Evans said of Ann Davison, the current Seattle City Attorney, “When you think of her, she’s ‘Not Like Us.’”

Putting battle raps aside, Davison, a Republican, has largely avoided opposing the Trump administration since his second term began—a stark contrast to the City Attorney’s Office under Pete Holmes, which took a more active stance against Trump during his first term. Evans, a former assistant U.S. attorney, prosecuted federal cases before leaving her position to run for Seattle City Attorney with the goal of challenging Trump.

While Evans appears to share a progressive stance on issues facing the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (SAO) with her competitors in the race, Nathan Rouse and Rory O’Sullivan —all three support reopening community court and a future SPOG contract with more accountability measures— she has explicitly branded herself as the Trump resistance candidate.

So, Davison not being politically “like us” as a city is a core campaign message. 

Why quit? 

As recently as January, Evans was still working as an assistant U.S. attorney. Then, the executive orders started. 

“They were telling us to report our colleagues that are doing diversity work in the office… and that we were Trump’s lawyers,” Evans said. 

Higher ups communicated thatU.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s interpretation of the law was the law. 

“‘This is not why I became an attorney,’” Evans thought. 

The final straw came during a hearing where Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour blocked Trump’s order attempting to rescind birthright citizenship for being “blatantly unconstitutional.” Aghast, Judge Coughenour queried whether the Justice Department attorney defending the order thought it was constitutional. He said yes.

Evans couldn’t believe it. 

“It was at that moment I was like, ‘This is the wrong side,’” she said. “How can you argue that something that is so clearly unconstitutional is just and right?”

She quit and decided the ultimate way to serve her community would be to fight back against Trump, to become Seattle’s City Attorney. 

As one of the few Black women assistant U.S. attorneys, Evans worked hard to get where she was, and as a member of the hiring committee, she was working to improve diversity in the office. The decision to leave that behind wasn’t easy. 

“I’m stepping into something that I’m going to have a greater impact,” she said. “Our Republican city attorney has not done enough.”

Public Safety

Evans’ other top priority aside from telling Trump to fuck off in as many ways as the CAO powers will let her is public safety. 

One thing Evans will do is reinstate Seattle Community Court, the harm reduction model that connected low-level offenders with resources and removed the threat of incarceration. Davison disbanded SCC when she took office. Similarly, Davison’s “high utilizers initiative” uses jail as a solution for frequent misdemeanor offenders, many of whom have mental health or addiction struggles. 

“We want to get people hooked up with resources and services to be successful, and that costs taxpayers less money than just putting them in jail,” she said. 

Ideally, Evans would like to model the next SCC on the community court in Auburn, a model with wraparound services that has reduced jail bookings by 87%. She said she would work with the public defender’s office and look into various grant opportunities to bring a new-and-improved SCC back to Seattle. 

Reestablishing the SCC would also relieve some of that notorious case backlog in the CAO, Evans explained. Under Davison, domestic violence cases (the most severe cases alongside DUIs that the CAO, an office that only prosecutes misdemeanors, covers)have taken twice as long to file as they did under Pete Holmes. 

“It’s because she’s putting an emphasis on stuff that should be in community court or in a diversion model,” Evans said.

When it comes to barring people accused of prosecution or drug use from certain parts of the city, otherwise known as the SOAP and SODA laws, Evans said: “Soap belongs in the shower and soda belongs in the fridge. It’s disproportionately targeted at Black and brown folks, and that’s not okay and it’s not working.”

Lastly, on the public safety front, Evans said in the future she would vie for a Seattle Police Officer’s Guild contract that contains more accountability measures. In her capacity as the city attorney, Evans would only be “providing feedback” on the contract, but she said she would make sure the contract contains “what’s important to community.”

Civil level

The other arm of the CAO is the civil division. 

Evans, who has experience on the federal level fighting similar cases, says she’ll be dogged about wage theft. She views price-gouging by landlords as a similar issue and intends to increase staffing in those units to better fight such cases. 

“Having the actual experience doing those cases is going to be instrumental when it comes to beefing up units that focus on and that are currently doing it, but we can do even more,” Evans said. 

One aspect of the civil division that combines nicely with her Trump resistance platform is the environmental law section. Evans also wants to increase staffing there to protect against coming attacks against the environment and sustainability. 

“We know Trump is coming after and has executive orders dismantling [environmental measures] that affect our city, that affect our air, that affect our marine life.” 

Fighting back

So far, after some foot-dragging, Davison has signed onto a lawsuit from other progressive cities suing the Trump administration over sanctuary city protections. And, in the press release announcing that, as city attorney candidate Nathan Rouse pointed out, Davison didn’t even use the phrase “Sanctuary City,” rather, she used “Welcoming City.” Davison, a Republican, has done little else to stand up to Trump.

Clearly, we don’t want Davison doing that job. But is Evans the right person to resist? 

She thinks so. 

“The last thing of fighting back against Trump [is having] a voice and the force and having the experience to do that,” Evans said. 

She believes her federal litigation experience sets her apart from the other candidates in the race. So does her lived experience and perspective as a Black woman. Evan says she has been targeted by police. She’s also had the experience of intentionally working to uplift her community by volunteering to help diverse students pass the bar and working to help diverse young attorneys become leaders in the state. 

In a time where diversity is politicized, Evans hesitates to lead with her identity, but she also knows that defending equity is at the core of why she became an attorney in the first place. 

“I wanted to be an attorney because I wanted to be in a position to represent and serve my community,” Evans said. 

Trump made that impossible. Being City Attorney seems like the best way to do that now.  

“We cannot afford to lose in November again to our Republican city attorney,” Evans said. “I believe everything has prepared me for this moment.”