Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr is taking a different approach to
closing the half-million-dollar funding gap at his office than his
counterparts at King County. While King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan
Satterberg is diverting about 2,300 low-level drug cases away from
prosecution and jail to help shave roughly $4 million from his budget,
Carr is digging in his heels at city council meetings and defending an
enforcement-heavy approach to low-level drug-possession charges.
At a meeting of the city council’s Public Safety Committee in
October, Carr insisted that his office couldn’t stop pursuing low-level
drug-paraphernalia cases. Instead, to the chagrin of committee chair
Tim Burgess, Carr suggested that his office might save money by cutting
about $300,000 for high-priority programs, including funding for
prosecuting domestic-violence cases.
“I told him that it was not acceptable,” Burgess says. Although Carr
came back to the council with a balanced budget, he has shown no signs
that he’ll consider changing how his office handles low-level drug
cases.
If anything, Carr has only become more vocal about his position. In
a testy letter to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Carr chastised
the P-I‘s editorial board for suggesting that city leaders
should consider “shift[ing resources] from the prosecution of low-level
drug crimes into recovery programs” to handle the city’s free-falling
budget. That strategy, popular among Seattle progressives and several
local lawmakers, saves money and has been shown to be more effective
than incarceration.
In his letter, Carr shot back, “Decriminalization is the functional
equivalent of giving up. We have proven answers to the drug
problem.”
Reached by phone the week after the P-I published his letter,
Carr noted his support for the city’s community court, which links
low-level offenders with social services and community-service programs
instead of jail. “I would rather have someone get treatment for
addiction rather than put him in jail,” Carr said.
But the city attorney’s lip service to
treatment stands at odds
with his years of staunch support for existing drug laws, which are
expensive to enforce and have little impact on drug abuse or crime
rates.
Satterberg, in contrast, has proposed sending thousands of
drug-possession cases from King County Superior Court to the lower
county district court, where, he says, most defendants “will not get
jail.” Because those defendants would no longer be eligible for drug
court, a division of King County Superior Court, Satterberg’s approach
is actually more lax than the one advocated by the P-I‘s
editorial board.
“There are a lot of people in the system who are not otherwise
criminally oriented but for their addiction to drugs,” Satterberg says.
Under his plan, those caught with less than three grams of heroin,
cocaine, or methamphetamine “will not get a felony criminal history and
not get sent to prison, no matter what their prior record was, with
very limited exceptions,” he says.
Seattle has repeatedly rejected outdated drug-war rhetoric. In 2003,
voters approved an initiative that made marijuana possession the city’s
lowest law-enforcement priority (Carr spoke out against it,
and—full disclosure—I ran the campaign to support it). Over
the past few years, the city and county councils have both funded
innovative
programs that replace arrest with social services, such
as CURB (formerly Clean Dreams), which sends counselors to help drug
users and sellers get off the streets.
So why is a Seattle elected official like Carr the leading voice in
Seattle against drug reform?
“I have met a lot of people who have ruined their lives with drugs,”
Carr says. “Some people are deterred from using drugs because of the
fact that it is illegal.”
But Council Member Nick Licata thinks Carr’s resistance to reforming
drug enforcement is moral, not practical. “[To Carr], it’s like, if you
break the law, you have got to go to jail.” Indeed, at October’s
contentious public-safety hearing, Carr told council members, “[If]
someone commits a crime, we have to prosecute them.”
Although Carr’s proposed cuts leave drug enforcement unchanged, the
council is preparing to rethink the city attorney’s drug-enforcement
budget for him anyway.
This month, the council will begin “an evaluation of both our
policing and our prosecution strategies as they relate to low-level
drug offenses,” says Burgess. He says the council is trying to
determine if, by relaxing drug enforcement, the city might entirely
avoid building a new city jail. 
Tom Carr is such a DICK. You can sugar-coat it all you like, but it seems to me after years of observation that his primary motivating psycho-social personality characteristic is that he’s just a DICK, plain and simple. Usually people are a DICK for a reason, but in Carr’s case I believe that being a DICK is what drives him and gives him satisfaction. In specific, being a DICK to people less well off than he is. The only reason that he’s even in this town is because, in general, we’re *not* dicks. This makes Tom Carr’s DICKish behavior stand out all the more, which is, as I said, what gives him satisfaction.
God, I bet he reads this and gets all red and flushed like he does when he’s about to be trashed in public. But I bet his staff will read this and laugh and say, jesus, what a DICK!
I have an issue with your contrasting of Carr’s approach and Satterberg’s approach to drug cases.
The problem is that you are comparing two prosecutors who are working within two different organizational systems. Satterberg has two levels of court to work with – the Superior Court, which can handle felonies, and the District Court, which cannot. Because of this, he can send his felony drug cases from Superior Court down to the lower court to be treated as gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors.
In contrast, Carr only has one court system – the Seattle Municipal Court. This is the equivalent of King County District Court, in that it too only handles gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors. Carr, unlike Satterberg, has no lower court to “divert” his drug cases to.
When you compare equivalent levels – district court and municipal court, the contrast between the two begins to fail. Nowhere did I see in your article that once Satterberg has sent a drug case to District Court, it is going to be dismissed. It is going to be prosecuted as non-felony drug case, the same thing Carr is going to do in his own court system.
Bob Marley said weed is an herb, not a drug. John Sinclair said it’s a euphoriant, not a narcotic. Weed aids inspiration and free thinking. Obama and Palin smoked it, so back off on classist enforcement.