Seattle city attorney’s race: A stark choice marks the 2021 ballot

“I haven’t seen Ann Davison at any of these meetings, and I’ve never had NTK. seen [Nicole Thomas-Kennedy] at each of these meetings, ”said Thomas, the former director of community justice initiatives for the King County Attorney’s Office. “We’ve been doing this work for years and none of these people showed up.”

If Davison and Thomas-Kennedy came out of nowhere in the eyes of Thomas – an attorney steeped in the larger debates about the future of elected prosecutors – it is certain that many voters will think the same way. Polls confirm this, showing that between half and two-thirds of those likely to vote in November failed to make a decision in the city attorney’s race.

This indecision may be because the race is between two relatively unknown people running for a relatively unknown office.

Furthermore, with the surprise defeat of twelve-year-old incumbent Pete Holmes in August, voters are suddenly faced with a more complicated choice than just between status quo and change. Instead, there are candidates who perceive the judicial system to be either too aggressive or too shy.

Seldom are there such strong differences among voters in Seattle among their candidates.

Thomas-Kennedy is a former public defender whose platform is blatantly abolitionist – a term she promises is more about building alternatives than demolishing the judicial system as it currently exists.

She decided to run for office only a few hours before the deadline, imagining it would be a stupid, topic-based campaign against a powerful incumbent that probably wouldn’t end with her election. She has never bothered to disinfect her public image, an approach she stands by but one that causes her problems as she is forced to defend her tweets, which use property destruction as a “moral imperative” and call police “pigs” a rash ridicule.

Davison, on the other hand, never worked in criminal law. Her private practice involves a mix of things including contract and immigration law. This is her third campaign for a third other office in three years. She ran unsuccessfully for Seattle City Council in 2019 and as Republican for lieutenant governor in 2020.

Each time she has come across the news that Seattle is sliding downhill, the result of an overly discretionary criminal system. Their platform is about drawing clearer lines in the sand when it comes to law enforcement, an approach their critics say has already been tried and failed.

With the defeat of Holmes, both candidates are now contesting a different race than they expected, against an opponent they each consider to be extreme. The result is a more weighty sense of duty for both of them to actually win, in a competition that puts the question more directly to the point: What is public safety?

A new direction for the office?

The public prosecutor’s office is primarily responsible for two things: criminal prosecution of administrative offenses and civil litigation on behalf of the city.

Regarding the latter, Davison says she will carry out her duties as a city attorney, even if her personal policies don’t always align with the city council’s agenda. Thomas-Kennedy said it was always more complicated for attorneys to act than just acting as an impartial arbitrator, and that the council’s agenda was likely to be more successful with her as head of the civil department.

However, it is the criminal side that is getting the most focus.

“I think it’s important because these types of cases affect most people’s lives, more than Supreme Court cases,” said Barbara Serrano, a former prosecutor who now works in the Washington prosecutor General. Shoplifting, drunk driving, minor assault: all of these are less serious but more common than murder or rape.

Whoever takes on the role of city attorney is free to decide which cases should be reported to the police and which punishment should be pursued.

Thomas-Kennedy doubts whether it makes sense to indict many cases of wrongdoing and instead promise financial programs to heal victims while offering more alternatives to prison. “I think part of that is really explaining who we are tracking and what for,” she said. “Ninety percent of people persecuted for offenses are poor enough to qualify as public defenders. We really only pursue poor people and a disproportionately large number of blacks and browns. “

Thomas-Kennedy’s path to calling himself an abolitionist was gradual. She has always viewed the criminal justice system with skepticism but was concerned that it would create a vacuum; She remembered the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care in the 1980s and the subsequent free fall of many people as examples of how breaking down something harmful can lead to worse.

But as she read more, she came to believe that abolition was about both building and demolition.

“It was an educational experience for me to realize that abolition is not just about getting rid of the police and prison,” she said. “It’s about community building and it’s a process…. I think that’s what people think it’s going to just happen overnight, like the purge, you know, and that’s not what I want. “

That doesn’t mean there won’t be any changes in the short term. She said she wanted to downsize the office’s crime department and show the door to any lawyer who has requested jail time for many low-level crimes.

At the same time, her message of nuances was often buried under her public presence. In addition to saying about property destruction, she tweeted about her “insane hatred” of the police, calling them “pigs” and “serial killers.” In an interview, she said the tweets were off the cuff before considering running for office and she wouldn’t say such things again in the future. She also called it a distraction from the bigger message she wants to bring to the table.

“Do you want these problems to be resolved?” She said. “Would you like to solve these problems practically? Or do you just want to give in to this scare tactic? “

Davison, on the other hand, believes that Seattle is already too revealing. Laws exist as they are and they need to be enforced – for the sake of crime victims and because it sees the criminal justice system as a gateway for people to get help.

“If we just sit there and say, ‘Oh, we don’t care if we keep the limits of our law,’ then we don’t really step in when we can,” she said. “Sometimes this limit is really the way to show care…. The boundaries must mean something. Because they are there so that we can intervene. “

Becoming an attorney was Davison’s second career after serving in business and the front office of Seattle SuperSonics. She said she was never political except to vote. That all changed, however, as she took notice of more storage bins, more RVs on the streets of Seattle, and more of what she viewed as the clutter in the city. In public and in interviews, she often compares what she sees in Seattle with what she saw in a Cambodian refugee camp, and describes Seattle as less hygienic.

“It was just the Seattle trajectory,” she said of her motivations for getting into politics. “It’s the only reason I talk about what I’m talking about because what we did didn’t work. And it’s not responsible. “

Davison’s decision to run for Republican lieutenant governor in 2020 is a shadow in a city where less than 10% of voters voted for Donald Trump on the same ballot. State Democratic Party leader Tina Podlodowski called her candidacy alongside Trump an “unreasonable cause for a caring person”.

But Davison insists that her story is a Democrat and that her decision to run for Republican was to keep lines of communication open and not to close off possible solutions. It’s unclear how well the argument will go down with Seattle voters, but it has won over the state’s two former Democratic governors, Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke, both moderately.

“It’s true I can’t remember ever supporting a Republican in a race like this, but this is a unique situation,” said Gregoire.

‘Fairly clear’ choice

Davison has the support of Seattle and Washington’s old guard, including Gregoire, Locke, former Governor Dan Evans, former Seattle Mayor Charlie Royer, and a number of retired judges. Thomas-Kennedy, meanwhile, is supported by numerous unions, progressive organizations and local democratic legislative districts.

But many who currently work directly in the criminal justice system are reluctant to say publicly who they will support between the two, fearing that doing so could harm their future work.

King County Attorney Dan Satterberg called the decisions “pretty straightforward,” but said he would not support the general either. “Remember, I supported Tom Carr when he beat Pete Carr, so my support is less than valuable,” he added.

What people like Stephan Thomas offer is advice. “It’s important to understand the movement and understand that other people have worked on it, other people have done this before,” he said. “So I want to know who has this knowledge under control. Who do you speak to, who do you advise? I want to know who is in your ear. “

Kelly Harris headed the prosecution’s crime department until a week ago. He said both candidates will find that things are more complicated than they imagined.

“If you expect [attorneys] to suddenly report cases on a large scale is unrealistic with the resources we have and I don’t see the city council giving them more, ”he said of Davison.

At the same time, Harris has concerns about Thomas-Kennedy’s plans to pull back on the prosecution. “People who commit crimes still need services and mental health care – things that unfortunately they can only get through our offices,” he said.

There is a consensus on the limits of the criminal system to address deeper problems such as homelessness, housing and mental illness.

“There is really going to be limited power that the criminal justice system has to provide in those cases that really need more investment in housing and the kind of road aid programs the city has,” Satterberg said.

The success or failure of the candidate platforms appears to lie in the success or failure of the programs that are either ready to greet people on their way out of the criminal system or prevent a vacuum in the alienation of traditional law enforcement programs.

“You can’t necessarily put someone in jail and then expect them not to come back,” said Serrano, the former city court prosecutor. “You can’t expect change unless you are also dealing with that person’s mental illness or drug addiction or that person’s homelessness.”