Angry about public safety? Blame law and order
Seattle: We need a timeout. Our civic dialogue on public safety is fast approaching a level of fear mongering that would have made even the 1990s-era Rudy Giuliani blush. It all started when one of our local TV stations jumped the shark and went full propagandist, falsely equating homelessness with drug addiction, and blaming our homeless neighbors for increased crime. Since then, Seattle’s Law and Order™ sentiments are running rampant. “Mainstream” editorials parrot those same conservative talking points, and “political insiders” are finding new and inventive ways to justify bad public policy with debunked reports.
It doesn’t seem to actually matter that the facts say crime rates have been steadily declining. Because policymakers have now responded by using police resources to fight the perception of crime, rather than doing the hard work of actually solving real crimes. Seattle’s political climate has gotten so bad that the local police union can host a forum with city council candidates, invite a known hate group to attend, and no one bats an eye.
I am by no means an expert on this issue, but I’ve cared about it for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I watched families in my community get torn apart by our justice system. It’s true that they committed crimes, but the process by which our justice system attempted to systematically deconstruct their lives and relationships taught me an important reality: our criminal justice system, as currently designed, isn’t a model for crime prevention or justice as much as it is designed to keep crime rates high. Anyone who works with communities of color knows instinctively that this is true. However, when it comes to our civic discourse, this fact is fundamentally ignored.
In politics, the public safety argument goes something like this: increasing the number of police officers, the severity of associated punishments, and the level of incarceration will increase our public safety. When we talk about restorative justice, the central argument is: our system is inherently racist and unjust, and we need to repair it. But restorative justice isn’t just a solution to inequality — it’s how we’ll make our community safer too.
Here’s an example: In Seattle, we have a program called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD). Instead of incarcerating low-level, non-violent offenders, it directs them to supportive services and case managers. It’s particularly effective in cases involving substance abuse, mental illness, and sex work. It’s not a perfect program but the person that created it, Lisa Daugaard, did just receive the MacArthur “Genius” grant because it has become a national model for diversion. The key to its success is focusing on recidivism — the percent of offenders that reoffend in the next 36 months.
If our goal is to reduce crime, recidivism is a pretty good leading metric for how things are going. Diversion programs like LEAD have nearly 60 percent lower recidivism than incarceration and prosecution. You’d think, then, that we would have expanded the program massively in the name of law and order, right? Wrong! The program was created in early 2011, and to this day only receives $2.2 million per year in funding. Lisa Daugaard has publicly stated that LEAD’s case managers are at capacity, and they could seriously use more funding to expand the program.
Fast forward to earlier this month, as the city debates its proposed budget for 2020. Key to the public safety elements of this new budget are so-called “high barrier individuals,” a reference to the now defunct “systems failure” report on a group of individuals with high recidivism rates. Nevertheless, this could have been a great opportunity to take the LEAD program and finally bring it to scale. Instead, the budget currently only calls for $850,000 in “emphasis patrols” in neighborhoods where the city recognizes crime is already declining, and millions more into incarcerating the populations that LEAD would have served.
This week, the Seattle Police Department announced it is returning to out-dated policies that criminalize sex work, and dialing up arrests. In justifying this escalation, SPD cites pressure from business groups concerned with the visibility of sex work, and lack of capacity in diversion programs. But if they actually wanted to reduce sex work, they would have asked for more funding to expand and diversify LEAD, a massively successful program with proven results. Instead, we’ll be putting our limited resources, energy, and time into locking people up, even after decades of research showing that never forking works.
If you’re angry, frustrated or anxious about public safety in Seattle, it’s time you start blaming the policies that are actually making it worse. Overpolicing, mass incarceration, and punitive sentencing do not reduce crime — they increase it. Restorative justice, diversion programs, and a public-health approach aren’t just solutions to inequality and racism. They are how we make our community safer.
