The Seattle City Council appointed John Diaz as Seattle's next police chief, an expected move, in a unanimous vote this afternoon. Along with their blessing, council president Richard Conlin and council public-safety chair Tim Burgess issued a four-point letter (.pdf) outlining a list of tasks for the new chief.

Cut Crime: Conlin and Burgess want Diaz to reduce crime, of course, particularly in the areas of domestic violence, robbery, theft, aggravated assault, and burglary. They also remain committed to the idea that officers need to crack down on uncivil behavior on the streets. "We expect you to formulate initiatives that will lead to reductions in street disorder," they write, "particularly problems related to open-air drug markets that plague some Seattle neighborhoods."

De-Escalate Tense Situations: Apparently responding to the high-profile case of a police officer who punched a hysterical jaywalker, the council members ask Diaz to "implement the most effective training available for minimizing and de-escalating conflict in encounters between officers and civilians."

Discipline for Misconduct: This request clearly results from the infamous "Mexican piss" case. Conlin and Burgess call for a high standard for investigating and reprimanding officers who are less than professional. "We encourage you to aggressively investigate and appropriately punish misconduct of a more serious nature."

Improve Crime Reporting: The council members applaud the new neighborhood crime map but they say it's not enough. They want improvements to the "quality and timeliness of crime information." They also say Diaz should assess other cities' crime reporting systems and charter a plan to improve Seattle's system.

On the whole, these look like earnest, boilerplate expectations for any new chief, combined with requisite caveats about dealing with two lightning-rod cases that boiled over while Diaz was the interim chief. But two things stand out.

First, the call for increasing the quality of crime reporting is excellent. The current system, while more accessible to more people, can be needlessly time consuming (for instance, reports are posted online but many are empty, so you can spend lots of time opening and closing empty documents trying to find something useful). It's great to ask Diaz to compare Seattle to other cities; we should crib what's working well elsewhere.

However, I'm admittedly wary about calls to reduce street disorder and clamp down on drug markets. Street disorder is a deliberately vague term. It's not like calling to reduce crime on the street, stop fights on the streets, stop robberies on the street, or other activities documented as crimes. Street disorder has instead been Burgess and Conlin's catch-all term for people acting strangely, but who aren't breaking any existing law. Since it is hard to pinpoint, it's hard to gauge current levels of disorder, so it's hard to know if we've succeeded at reducing it. That said, I definitely support more foot patrols in areas where people feel unsafe to discourage crimes from happening and deal with them when they do crop up. As for open-air drug markets, to the extent that we can mitigate associated crime—e.g., deploy anti-car-prowl officers, increase neighborhood policing, support block watches, etc.—I'm all for it. But if that means more of the futile sweeps of drug-markets that have proven ineffective in the past, then that's not terribly helpful. Random sweeps of low-level crack addicts take enormous police resources and have only the briefest reduction on the availability of drugs or number of drug sellers in a neighborhood.

Chief Diaz is slated to be sworn in next Monday at City Hall.