Seattle's Repression Is Being Used to Save Downtown

Photo: John Moore Getty Images via Agence France-Presse Police officers stopped a man who had smoked fentanyl in downtown Seattle.

Anna Edgerton – Bloomberg

Published at 12:00 am

• United States

The streets at the heart of Seattle's drug crisis are surrounded by everything that should be driving the city's economic recovery.

Just west of the fishmongers at Pike Public Market and the tourists lining up at the first Starbucks, the streets have been marked for years by squalor. Boarded-up doors. Trash-strewn sidewalks. Open drug use.

But in recent weeks, there has been a palpable shift.

The stoops where people once hunkered down behind peeling fences are mostly empty, guarded by police officers on bicycles. Rows of Lime scooters have replaced the piles of stolen toilet paper and packaged candy that was sold or traded for fentanyl. Alleyways where contracted companies cleaned up drug debris and human excrement each morning were blocked with No Trespassing signs.

Seattle is joining liberal strongholds like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, in cracking down on drug-ridden neighborhoods to stem the spiraling crisis of fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid. Police are arresting more users, with special arrest rules for the downtown area. And under a new loitering ordinance passed by the City Council last week, judges will be able to bar people arrested for drug use or related offenses from certain areas, including the five blocks around Third Avenue and Pike Street in the heart of downtown.

The most repeated word by Seattle leaders over the summer has been “disruption.” They hope the raft of new measures will break up the entrenched drug market to save lives — and spare the city the brunt of crime, blight and business closures.

“I’ve made a philosophical shift in telling my officers not to leave people on the streets,” said Sue Rahr, Seattle’s interim police chief. “Our failure to remove people from these places has contributed to the problem getting worse. I could be wrong, but we’re going to find out in the coming weeks.”

Across the West Coast, authorities are trying to balance compassion for people suffering from fentanyl addiction with very real concerns about public safety, leading them to adopt tougher tactics to combat the epidemic. San Francisco has stepped up deportations of people involved in the drug trade. Oregon lawmakers voted this year to recriminalize public drug use after Portland County saw one of the nation’s largest increases in synthetic opioid overdose deaths between 2022 and 2023. British Columbia followed suit.

Photo: John Moore Getty Images via Agence France-Presse A man holds a piece of aluminum foil he used to smoke fentanyl.

In Seattle, the adoption of “Stay Out of Drug Area” zones (“Stay Out of Drug Area“, or SODA) is the city's latest attempt to reverse its persistent perception of bad streets. It comes four years after racial justice protesters declared a police-free autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood during unrest following the killing of George Floyd. More than 700 Seattle police officers have retired or resigned in the process, and the force remains understaffed by more than 300 officers.

The new loitering measure is another tool for overworked police, Rahr said, allowing them to stop some repeat offenders in a notorious drug market without a warrant. Opponents say it infringes on the civil liberties of users who have only been charged, rather than convicted, with drug offenses and makes it harder for them to access services.

Curing the crisis is critical to the city’s economic recovery, where the flow of workers downtown is still less than 60 percent of what it was before the pandemic, according to data from the Seattle Downtown Association. Business leaders say filling vacant storefronts and offices requires people to feel safe walking the city’s streets.

Last week, Amazon.com Inc., whose Seattle campus is north of downtown’s SODA zone, announced that its employees would have to be in the office five days a week starting next year. At least one of the company’s locations has been affected by security concerns: The tech giant pulled its staff from 300 Pine St., a building near the drug-hit area, after a string of shootings and stabbings in 2022. More than 15 acres of space have been left virtually empty.

Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said the company was considering how to use the space and hoped that the city’s increased enforcement would improve public safety in the area.

Pat Callahan, chief executive of Urban Renaissance Group, which owns 300 Pine, said downtown revitalization is critical because tenants have so many other options. His company also owns a building on Pike Square, next to what was once one of the city’s most infamous alleys. It’s hard to find ground-floor tenants when the security situation is so precarious, he said.

“The market is there in Seattle, especially with all the tourists walking around, but not if there’s a sense of insecurity,” Callahan said. “There was a real confidence in downtown Seattle and that we were collectively creating a great city, and we could lose that permanently if we don’t address this crisis.” »

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A Huge Problem

Fentanyl came late to Seattle, years after it had swept the East Coast. By 2015, San Francisco was already blaming the drug for a spike in overdoses, but it wasn’t until 2019 that Vince Lombardi, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, began to notice fentanyl at his latitude.

“I remember not too long ago when I first started hearing about the fentanyl problem, we were like, ‘Oh, we don’t really see that,’” Lombardi says. “Fentanyl came here a little later than it did on the East Coast or other parts of the country. But it’s here today, and it’s a huge problem.”

The number of fentanyl deaths in the United States declined last year, largely due to declines on the East Coast and in the Midwest, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the crisis remains particularly severe in the West. In Washington state, estimated deaths from synthetic opioids increased 20% in the 12 months through April, compared with a 12% decline nationwide.

Last year, King County, home to Seattle, saw a 52% increase in overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, according to CDC data. The county attributed more than 1,085 deaths last year to fentanyl. So far this year, 566 people have died.

Photo: David Ryder Bloomberg Fentanyl is a latecomer to Seattle, years after it first hit the East Coast.

Fentanyl is cheaper and more deadly than the substances that caused previous drug crises, requiring a different policy response to save lives, says Amy Barden, head of Seattle’s new Department of Public Safety. She is among those advocating for tougher enforcement, including the possibility of involuntary treatment for people arrested for drug use.

“It shouldn’t be controversial to say there’s an urgent need for action, because you can see how many people we’re losing,” Barden says.

The challenge is convincing people — many of whom also struggle with homelessness and mental health issues — to seek treatment, especially for a drug that can have terrible withdrawal effects.

Devin Moore, now 32, was homeless in the inner city for seven years, initially addicted to heroin until it was laced with fentanyl. He was arrested nearly 20 times for crimes mostly related to theft. He remembers entering prison and bracing himself for the withdrawal symptoms he knew were imminent — writhing on a mat on the floor of the medical unit, vomiting, going days without sleep.

Now working in a drug rehabilitation program, he says that every time he got out of jail, he could go back to the corner of Third Avenue and Pike Street, “where you can get drugs and sell your stuff” stolen from nearby stores and cars. It was sheer exhaustion that finally pushed him to continue the treatment he had started and stopped so many times before.

“I felt really broken. I couldn’t accept it, you know? So I started accepting the options that were available to me.”

Ensuring Public Safety

Even before the new loitering law passed, Seattle was exploring other options to revive its downtown. A pop-up program for small businesses aims to temporarily fill empty storefronts. Last year, the city rezoned the three most dilapidated blocks of Third Avenue to encourage taller, mixed-use residential towers and even a public school.

There are signs that the city is on the right track. Hotel bookings hit a record high in June, and foot traffic is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, according to the downtown association. The return of Amazon, downtown’s largest employer, to its office will likely provide a boost to local businesses. But for many companies, safety remains the biggest issue in keeping workers coming back, says Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson.

“We need to create a downtown where businesses want to locate and workers want to come back to the office,” she said in an interview. “And the city’s responsibility is to create the conditions for people to feel safe.”

Seattle has tried measures similar to SODA before. A loitering law last amended in the early 1990s was repealed by the City Council in 2020, after Floyd’s killing drew attention to racial disparities in enforcement across the country.

Those who spoke out against SODA’s new proposal in public comments to the City Council warned that it would shut down entire swaths of the city for some of its most vulnerable citizens.

We need to create a downtown where businesses want to locate and workers want to come back to the office.

— Sara Nelson

“These policies expand the power of police to harass individuals based on their perceived status, disrupting essential services for people in need rather than addressing the root causes of their problems,” said Caedmon Magboo Cahill, director of policy advocacy at the American Union for Washington Civil Liberties.

Police were already arresting more people simply for using drugs. So far this year, there have been 224 arrests for public drug use in the district that encompasses downtown, up from 94 during the same period last year. Seattle Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess says more of those arrests are being made proactively by officers.

A pilot program for incarcerations also designates much of the downtown area as an “area of ​​special importance.” Public drug use is a serious offense under city and state law, but understaffed jails meant incarceration was not always possible. Officers now have the option of sending people arrested downtown to the King County Jail or referring them to treatment programs. Mayor Bruce Harrell also proposed tripling funding for substance use disorder treatment in his recent city budget.

Photo: David Ryder Bloomberg Acting Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr

The question for a city that is increasingly arresting people for drug use is how to better integrate medically assisted treatment for addiction — and to what extent that service should be optional.

Compared with other opioids, fentanyl lingers in body fat longer, making it harder to take medical synthetic opioids used to ease withdrawal symptoms once the drug is no longer in the body. So treatment requires cooperation and courage from the patient, says Callan Fockele, a Seattle physician and assistant professor at the University of Washington who specializes in addiction services.

“The risk is that you can take away people’s autonomy and do them harm,” she says.

Police Chief Rahr says the ideal would be to integrate drug treatment into the arrest process so people can be helped at the same time. Without that, emptying five blocks of Seattle might make downtown seem safer, but it risks pushing suffering people to a less visible part of the city.

“It’s not compassionate to let someone die on the street,” Rahr says. But with the current options of hospital or prison, “there’s no clear line on what’s the right thing to do either.”

With the collaboration of Tanaz Meghjani and Jason Kao.