On Monday, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office announced that it would be dismissing 1,500 misdemeanor cases from 2017 due to staffing and resource shortages. The story didn’t come from the usual sources (the public information officer or some deep-digging beat reporter). Instead, the story originated on Reddit.
The headline: “For those of you wondering why property crime in the greater Seattle area is so bad…” The poster, who identified himself as a police officer, then said his friend at the prosecutor’s office told him about the dumped cases. “Imagine being a cop who works their was [sic] off to actually combat the rampant property crime we have here, only to see all of your cases get dumped,” the poster wrote. “You want non-proactive policing, this is how you get it.”
The poster continued: “Maybe Dow Constantine and Dan Satterberg could have use some of that $2.25 Million they gave to illegal immigrant defense funds to pay for a few more prosecutors…”
The story was pitch-perfect for MyNorthwest.com, home of right-leaning KIRO radio. Then the Seattle Times picked up the story and added more detail: Prosecutors were going to focus resources on serious misdemeanors like DUIs and assault, rather than “quality of life” crimes like fare evasion, shoplifting, and trespass. To be clear, this decision didn’t impact more serious felony crimes—only misdemeanors.
Nevertheless, the Seattle Police Officers Guild jumped on the story. On Tuesday, the group, which opposes changes to the state’s restrictive deadly force statute, added a Facebook status update that said they felt “sorry” for King County taxpayers and called the dropped cases “shameful.”
But, wait a minute. Is dropping misdemeanor “quality of life” prosecutions actually a bad thing?
Not according to King County Department of Public Defense policy director Anita Khandelwal.
“These are not crimes that threaten community safety,” Khandelwal said. “And they shouldn’t be in the criminal justice system in the first place.”
The King County Prosecuting Attorney doesn’t handle misdemeanors in Seattle, only those filed in King County areas without municipal courts. But after spending a day in Seattle’s Municipal Court last Thursday, it’s hard not to come away thinking we shouldn’t be criminalizing certain acts at all.
I watched one young woman brought up on trespassing and attempted theft charges at Fred Meyer. She pled guilty and was given a 180-day sentence, with 170 of those days suspended. Misdemeanors like criminal trespass are commonly seen in Seattle Municipal Court, and, according to public defenders, they often reflect another common reality in the city: homelessness.
“Many of these crimes are driven by unmet needs,” Khandelwal says. “There’s no evidence that putting these people through the system results in any behavioral change.”
Public defenders, Khandelwal says, regularly see clients cycle through municipal court on misdemeanor charges related to poverty, homelessness, or drug addiction. And rarely do they see how putting someone in jail for these crimes benefits them or the community. If someone cycles in and out of the criminal justice system without support for the underlying issues driving the charges, that person is likely to reoffend.
Recognizing this thinking, both Seattle and King County have implemented pre-trial diversion programs to try and avoid processing quality of life crimes through the system. New York City, too, has decided to get rid of all short-term jail sentences for low-level misdemeanors to try to cut down on recidivism. But in Seattle, at least, Khandelwal says pre-trial diversion isn’t enough.
Last year, for example, 751 people were held in the King County jail on trespassing charges (some had additional charges) filed in the Seattle Municipal Court. More than 10 percent of the time, prosecutors dropped those charges. More than the two-thirds of the people put in jail for trespassing were then released by the court, sometimes with conditions, but also often because prosecutors decided not to file a complaint. Still, they did jail time. For what?
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