Last week, Seattle and King County law enforcement officials tried something new, not arresting drug dealers:
More than a dozen black binders, each with at least two inches of criminal evidence, were atop tables on the stage. Names were in bold and underlined on the front.
In the first three rows of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, the suspected drug dealers named in those binders filled the red seats next to family and friends in what felt like an intervention.
“If this was an ordinary day, I would be your prosecutor,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg told the men and women Thursday. Some could get 20 months in prison or even more, he said.
But Satterberg wanted them to walk away.
He announced an opportunity police and prosecutors in Seattle had never given in a community meeting: Stop dealing drugs and you won’t get prosecuted.
Interim Seattle Police Chief John Diaz, had written a letter last week to the dealers. He promised that if they showed at the Central District meeting they would not be arrested and repeated that promise again Thursday.
The idea is taken from a successful program in High Point, NC, where using interventions like this – rather than prison – to deal with drug dealing, worked to reduce crime in the community. The idea is an effective one because it targets one aspect of the drug war that tends to have some nasty downstream repercussions. In low-income communities where a lot of drug dealing occurs, young people who don’t see a lot of opportunities for themselves often choose to become drug dealers for either money or status. But as soon as they end up behind bars for that choice, it becomes significantly harder for them to put that choice behind them. Instead of reforming people in that situation, jail often does the opposite, and cements their lifelong participation in criminal activity.
This program works to break that cycle. By working to keep young people from making the choice to participate in drug markets, the demand for those drugs can be met elsewhere. In High Point, a medium sized town that sits inbetween the larger towns of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, any unmet demand likely just shifted to those larger communities. As a result, residents in High Point have seen former open air drug markets become safer places.
But will it happen here? At Saturday’s event in Shoreline, Diaz said that it wouldn’t be a city-wide effort, and as Philip Dawdy points out, this approach isn’t likely to work in the high-volume drug markets like Belltown anyway, where the dealers aren’t part of the community. In fact, this approach will likely make those groups (arguably the most dangerous) even wealthier.
Also, one of the dealers who was offered the deal had already been re-arrested by the weekend. He was a 39-year-old with a history of drug addiction problems. And he wasn’t arrested for dealing, but for using a crack pipe. This makes me wonder whether or not much thought was put into trying to separate people with actual drug problems from the people who enter the drug trade to make money. Treating both groups the same way doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
That’s not to say that this effort is pointless. It’s far better than sending as many young people to jail as possible, but what happened in High Point simply can’t be achieved here (or in any other large city) on a large scale. As has been pointed out ad nauseam for years, the only way to eliminate black market drug dealing is to treat addicts in a health care setting and to provide safe and legal outlets for recreational drugs that large numbers of adults use responsibly. Until that day, programs like these that divert some people from our prisons might improve a neighborhood (and that’s definitely a good thing), but will ultimately fail to do anything about the overall amount of illegal drug dealing in the city. To some extent, I have sympathy towards the officials who end up in this no-win situation, but that sympathy tends to wane when I hear so few of them willing to challenge the faulty underpinnings of the status quo.
UPDATE: For anyone heading to Netroots Nation this weekend, there will be a panel about the High Point drug diversion program.
“… young people who don’t see a lot of opportunities for themselves often choose to …”
I’m calling bullshit on that statement. I’ve worked in the hood so I know how good percentage of African Americans view working in fast food establishments in distain … hold up … Why am I calling them African Americans? It’s presumptuous of me to assume any black person I see is an American. Maybe they are a black Canadian who is visiting a relative, in which case, they wouldn’t be an African American, they would be African Canadian.
Now, back to my point … okay, I actually forgot what I was going to say, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Look, Lee. You just don’t get it. The sole function of the state is protection. Anything else is superfluous and unecessary. The state arrests, tries, and convicts. The miscreants are thrown in jail. The demand for arrests, trials, and jails drives government spending ever upward, providing fodder for wingnut outrage at “big government control over our lives” and demands to get rid of trials, or at least lawyers. This inflames the mob, and secures votes for promises to “run government like a business” and more of the same. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
It has ever been thus. When Rome took up bread and circuses, it was the beginning of the end.
Troll: “I’ll just leave it at that.”
Promises. Promises.
Oh, I know what I was going to say. Ok, when I go into a fast food place, usually most of the workers are Mexicans. Now, I like Mexican people. They are hard workers and fairly nice, even though I’m sure they are calling me names in Spanish. So yeah, they are hard workers and stuff, and I can respect that, even though I think our borders should be tightened up. I think illegal immigration is wrong, and it’s unfair to people who are trying to immigrate here legally. It’s like they are cutting in line. But once they are here, they seem like ok people. Ok, so let’s say I go into Chipotle restaurant. Now, Chipotle isn’t “authentic” Mexican food, but it’s so good! That reminds me, just because a restaurant is “authentic,” doesn’t mean it’s good. A place can be … ok, I forgot my original point again. Sorry.
@4 “I forgot my original point again.”
Let me help you. You probably were about to say something racist about African-Americans …
@1
I’ve worked in the hood so I know how good percentage of African Americans view working in fast food establishments in distain
I know a lot of whites who feel the same way. Do you have a point?
Lee says, “the only way to eliminate black market drug dealing is to … provide legal outlets for recreational drugs.”
Okay, and what will that do? There will still be drug dealing, only it will be legal. There will still be drug addicts. And there will still be drug addicts who can’t afford the drugs, and who will commit crimes to get the money to buy them.
@7
Okay, and what will that do? There will still be drug dealing, only it will be legal.
Yes. Is our society suffering because the convenience store clerks who sell alcohol and tobacco to people don’t get thrown in jail all the time?
There will still be drug addicts.
Of course.
And there will still be drug addicts who can’t afford the drugs, and who will commit crimes to get the money to buy them.
And those people will still go to jail, but without the money we waste on enforcing prohibition (which sends tons of non-addicts to jail too), we’ll have enough money to fund more effective treatment centers for those who need it.
I’m with Lee on this one: the drug laws don’t do much other than encourage illegal activity.
Alcohol prohibition failed completely. The ‘white people’ didn’t obey that one either. Free market economy baby!! If the population WANTS something, the government can try to deny it for whatever reason they feel, but if enough people want it (like 42% of Americans trying pot) it will fail.
Drug use as a % of population doesn’t change significantly. The DARE program for example hasn’t change the % of young people who try marijuana. Total failure. Why not just TRY something else? Maybe legalizing pot wouldn’t fix everything. But my PROBLEM with you idiots is just saying KEEP doing what we’re doing. It’s failing, and doesn’t work, but same with our Cuba policy. HEY!!!! If something doesn’t work for 40 years, try something else! You want to eliminate drug use or at least abuse? What we’re doing doesn’t work. Try something else. Want to kick Castro out of power? 50 F**KING years of our policy totally failed to do that…he’s going to die an old man without our ever kicking him out.
Insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.
I guess no one should be shocked at Troll’s racism.
Hey Troll, are you aware that there is an entire continent, and a chunk of another that is filled with brown-skinned people who are NOT Mexicans? That Salvadoran sous chef who fled the right-wing death squads in 1985 is probably calling you “cracker.”
Do you look at any asian person and call them Chinese?
@4 Stop it, Troll….You’re making me hungry!
Dealer amnesty. You must be so relieved to have dodged another bullet.