Good morning, everybody.
I want to thank everyone for being here today.
We are now going to take another much needed step for equity in our criminal justice system.
We want to make sure that Seattle is as just a place as possible and address the inequities that exist in our criminal justice system, particularly for families and individuals of color.
Today, City Attorney Pete Holmes, Chief Best, Council Member Gonzalez and I will walk across the street to the Seattle Municipal Court and request that the court quash outstanding warrants for more than 200 people charged or convicted of low-level, non-violent misdemeanor offenses that occurred between 5 and 22 years ago.
offenses like prostitution and driving without a suspended license.
Our system has not been prepared to purge old warrants, so people live sometimes fearful that if they're pulled over, an old warrant will be used to detain them.
We're doing this because we recognize that our criminal justice system has disproportionately impacted people of color, and we want to ensure that our officers can focus on the most violent offenders and protect public safety.
I have some experience with this firsthand.
In law school at the University of Washington, I was really lucky to have the experience to participate in the first criminal defense clinic and practice a criminal defense lawyer for many years.
I worked side by side with public defenders and saw firsthand in that initial war on drugs, how it was impacting community of colors.
So as an attorney and advocate, I've tried to do everything I could to lower those impacts.
I worked on the Criminal Sentencing Guidelines Review Board to reduce the sentencing guidelines for people convicted of low-level drug offenses, usually those people whose crime was that they were addicted to drugs.
They were not selling, they were not profiting, they were simply trying to feed a public health issue.
We were unsexful in reducing those sentences.
So I worked with Norm Maling to create the area's first drug court.
It's been a success, and because of that, thousands of people literally got treatment instead of jail.
Treatment instead of jail.
As President Obama's U.S. Attorney, we were able to create here one of the first drug courts in the country in federal court to do the same things, to divert people away from the criminal justice system and to get them treatment where that would be the better outcome for society.
And obviously working with Attorney General Holder at the end of the administration, we looked carefully about what were the impacts of our sentencing regime.
And tried to reduce those mandatory minimums that were impacting communities of color more than other communities.
And also vacating the sentences of another people who had been in jail way too long.
Once I became mayor, I was really lucky to have a team of people here in City Hall and across the street that are committed to as much equity in the city we can, including the criminal justice system.
I want to give great credit for this, what we're announcing today to Chief Best herself and to the Seattle Police Department, who are the ones who said we need to quash these old warrants.
They are not making the city safer, and they're disproportionately impacting communities of color.
I really want to thank also Pete Holmes, who as soon as he heard the idea, it turned out he had the same idea and was working to do it.
And of course, Council Member Gonzalez has been working systematically, both before she got here, but then since she's been a council member, to look through every place we can to see how we can reduce those impacts.
I was really, really proud to stand with these same people when we quashed and vacated the old marijuana convictions.
That has made a difference in the lives of hundreds of people who had those convictions removed from their record.
I also really want to thank two people who worked very, very hard on this in both the city attorney's office and in the police department.
Assistant Chief Mark Garth Green and Kelly Harris in the city attorney's office themselves made sure they went through.
all the records and all the old warrants and said, how do we make sure that we are really vacating the right ones, that we don't vacate those that are people who have violent criminal past or are a danger to the community, but really get at what we want to do.
This was a very time consuming process, but one that we know will make the difference in lives of people.
It's a hard truth.
We know that throughout the history of our country and in this city, that our criminal justice system has disproportionately affected communities of color, and that it reflects the institutional racism and bias that is present in America.
Of the 208 warrants we're asking to be quashed, more than 40% of them are people of color.
35% of them are African Americans, even though they just make up 7% of our city.
Driving while license suspended often was a crime prosecuted because people did not have the money to pay previous court requirements like speeding tickets or impound fees.
How long should these people have to continue to look over their shoulder when they walk down the street, ride a bus, or drive a car?
This makes our community safer by letting police officers focus on those things we need most for public safety, and that's those people that are committing the crimes that are affecting our community.
Again, this does not affect any warrants issued in cases involving domestic violence, driving under the influence of alcohol, sexually motivated crimes, firearm crimes or harassment crimes.
We've really carefully focused that we made sure that we did not affect those categories of people because the chief and all of us up here understand the importance of public safety.
We know that the criminal justice system is too often the holding cell for society's failures to provide real opportunity.
And as a result, it has played an outsized role in carving and crafting our communities.
It is part of the reason we have a homeless problem in this city.
There is an endless cycle of people who end up in the jail and then back out on our streets.
Addressing the wrongs that were caused by the failures of the previous criminal justice system won't happen overnight.
We have to focus both on what we've done before and moving forward, we have to ensure that we're doing things more fair, more justly, and more equitably.
We have to continue to challenge ourselves to do this.
But it goes beyond the criminal justice system.
It will require us to make our city more affordable, close the opportunity gap in schools, build true economic opportunity for all of our community, and continue to build the work of continuing to build the trust between community and the Seattle Police Department.
I'll just say on a closing note, this city is fortunate.
We could not have a better police chief who not only knows every corner of the city and what the men and women of law enforcement do every day, but who is so personally committed to making sure that it is a just police department and one truly committed to community service.
So now I'd like to hand it over to our city attorney, Pete Holmes, who will also give us a few words.
Thank you, Pete.
Thank you, Mayor.
Thank you all for being here.
I do want to just echo a few comments very briefly that the mayor said.
First, that this is yet another example of a collaboration between my mayor, Jenny Durkan, now celebrating her one-year anniversary.
Like the marijuana vacation motion, this is an example of how the executive in my office can reach across and better this city in so many respects.
I also have to call out Chief Best.
This is again an example, too, of how this chief and I are working together to make sure that the city of Seattle is safe.
What I want to emphasize is the public safety aspect.
We have dedicated prosecutors who took the time to go through these warrants and will continue to do so.
Understand this is just one installment.
We're going to do this on a regular basis.
But at the same time, our prosecutors who are dedicated to both public safety and social justice want to make sure we understand this is what we're trying to balance.
They are at the same time processing some 14,000 arrest reports annually from SPD while taking out time to look at these older cases that are simply hanging over the heads of far too many of our citizens.
By taking these warrants that have no impact on public safety, We are going to be able to help our community members emerge from the shadows, not be living their day-to-day lives in fear of having some ancient warrant come back and haunt them and trigger an arrest and a disruption in their lives that ultimately costs all of us far too much.
So I support this effort.
This is an outstanding step forward, and it's – stay tuned.
We're going to be doing more of these.
As we – as we're able, with the resources we have, to make sure that the public can understand we are balancing public safety and advancing the cause of social and racial justice in this city.
Thank you very much.
And at this point, I want to call on Councilmember Gonzalez.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Well, good morning, everyone.
I also want to echo a lot of...
I'm going to put that down.
A lot of gratitude and thanks to the mayor and to our city attorney and to Chief Best for moving forward in this way.
I think it's a common sense policy.
We've heard a lot about a lot of the public safety motivations for wanting to do something like this and really I just want to focus on the fact that there are 200 people today who hopefully will be hearing loudly and clearly from the city a continuing commitment to work on really important criminal justice reforms.
Warrants don't keep us safe in many instances, particularly when they're related to these nonviolent criminal offenses.
It's our officers that help to keep us safe.
It's our own social cohesion as communities that help keep us safe.
And so getting rid of these warrants actually will promote public safety within our communities because it's going to bring folks out who have felt that they have been isolated, living in fear that someday they're going to get caught and there's going to be this warrant on their record.
Warrants are also a major inhibitor for people to be able to get housing, and jobs and just function in day-to-day society like the rest of us who may not have a warrant.
And I recall one of my very first felony cases as an attorney out in Okanagan County.
I had an opportunity to sit in here, the docket, one morning as a judge called out name after name and name after name of each individual who had an outstanding warrant or who had a ticket that needed to be paid.
Almost every single person who was there was a person of color.
This is an unfair system that we have an obligation to correct across the state.
And here at the city of Seattle, we're leading on these efforts and showing other jurisdictions that this is something you can do that will improve efficiency of our judicial system, of our criminal system, and really free up a lot of resources from our police department to focus on the work that they need to be able to do.
Next year, I'm excited to be leading an effort with the city council to look at how we can further align our criminal legal system here at the Seattle Municipal Court.
I'll be working with the city attorney, with the chief, with the mayor, with our judges, and with public defenders and other folks to make sure that we have a strong legal system alignment here.
This is the first step.
There's much more to come, and I'm really excited about working on those issues.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce Chief Best.
Wonderful, thank you.
I feel so honored to be up here to talk about this wonderful program with the mayor, our city attorney, and Council Member Gonzalez, all of whom are attorneys, so I'm the only one who doesn't have a law background.
But you're safe.
But I'm safe.
I am safe in that regard.
So very honored to stand with them.
I believe it's our moral obligation to constantly examine every aspect of what we do, every aspect of our work that impacts people, and to be looking at the race and social justice impacts of the work that we're doing.
The mayor already mentioned it, but I certainly want to make sure that I extend, you know, thank you to Kelly Harris, who's here today, who worked with my Deputy Chief Garth Green, who had this idea, who did all of the legwork to put this together to make sure that we could stand here today, that those 208 people who have these low-level misdemeanor warrants can, as Pete Holmes has said, they can come out of the shadows and live their life.
That they don't have to worry about being stopped on this warrant.
They can possibly get housing or employment or any of the other things that they might have been prohibited from having because of these warrants.
You know, it is our obligation, it's our responsibility to make sure that we are providing safety and social justice to everyone and serving the entire community to the best of our ability.
I could not be more proud than to be a part of this with my people who are up here today.
You know, again, the Mayor, City Attorney Chief Holmes and Council Member Gonzalez, they have been incredibly supportive.
We all, from our heart of hearts, really, truly want to make sure that everybody in the city has equity and fairness and justice.
So thank you.
Thank you.
So we'll take some questions but I think that we said it well, but maybe sometimes it's lost.
These are real people.
These are people in our community who are working every day.
And I had the really great experience as a young lawyer and even before I was a lawyer.
The first dozen cases I tried, I tried in Seattle Municipal Court.
I had a whole caseload with the Public Defender's Office and saw time and time again the same people appearing.
not because they really were conducting any criminal conduct that threatened our society, but usually because they were too poor to pay their fines.
They were too poor to get to court.
And so this is a start.
It's not the end.
We will continue to hold people accountable.
We will continue to make sure communities are safe.
But doing this actually makes our community safer.
So any questions?
Mayor or perhaps Attorney Holmes, what physically happens to these warrants?
Are they wiped out as though they never happened or are they flagged as do not enforce or what physically happens here?
I'm going to let him answer fully, but the next step we're doing is we're going to walk across the street to file a motion with the court that will actually vacate them so that they will be, they will no longer exist.
But Pete, do you want to add to that?
The term is this is a motion to quash the warrants, that is to destroy them, to wipe them out.
It is a good question because we need to emphasize that the municipal court will now have the discretion to decide how to act on these warrants, much the same as they had the discretion on whether to vacate those misdemeanor convictions or not.
So we must remember that it's now going to shortly be in the court's court and we'll see how they resolve these.
But again, the warrants will go away.
They will no longer, if someone is pulled over, pop up as an outstanding warrant that then subjects someone to an arrest.
It may not have happened just because of a chance encounter with a law enforcement officer on the street.
outstanding warrants are there?
You know, we probably have in excess of 10,000 warrants.
I must point that out.
Some of them are quite serious.
There are warrants for violent crimes and the like.
And so you need to understand that that's what that's what we're faced with.
We're trying to sort the ones that are serious public safety concerns from those that are simply impairing the ability of people to get on with their lives.
Do we know those that are dealing with prostitution offenses?
Are those people who have not re-offended and who are off the streets now?
Are they someone who maybe needs help?
In all of these cases there's been no re-offense in the last five years at least because that would have triggered yet another legal proceeding and would have disqualified them.
So yes, these are people that have been offense-free since their warrants were issued for at least the last five years.
They don't constitute a public safety problem as a result.
And yes, you're right, prostitution is one of the crimes that we have focused on in seeking relief in this batch, if you will, of warrants to be quashed.
Uh, there are other minor crimes.
I would like to see this expanded to trespass and the like.
So we're gonna try and make sure that again, keeping public safety first and foremost, that we expand and try to give the maximum relief possible to members of our community.
Will there be any notification?
It's correct.
It's not all misdemeanor warrants.
You have a specific list of crimes that have been committed.
Correct.
That's right.
That's right.
Will there be any notification process to the people?
Much like the misdemeanor, excuse me, the marijuana convictions, there is no action, affirmative action, needs to be undertaken by anyone that's subject to one of these warrants.
Once they're quashed, you mentioned that you want people to be able to come out from the open from hiding.
How do they find out?
In our press release, there is a portal at the municipal court website where you can check to see whether or not there are warrants that are outstanding and they will be removed from that website.
So this is another service that the media can serve here is to allow people a way of finding out what is their status.
Do they have warrants that are pending on them?
And it's a good idea for people to check.
And we're looking about individual notification.
You have to realize a number of these people have moved many times.
And so one reason that a warrant is issued because they failed to appear, and often they failed to appear because they didn't get notice of what the court hearing was.
And so we're working with the court to find ways to see what is the way we can maximize so people know that these warrants have been quashed.
It's a complicated process and the court ultimately has the authority.
But this court has indicated before and has shown that it has a commitment to making sure that we are using our finite resources to actually go after the people that are the greatest threat to our communities.
What would you say to those critics who say that Seattle is already soft on crime and that we're in the position that we are today because of that?
What would you say to those critics?
I think, you know, you might address that to the chief, but I think that's not true.
We are focused on those crimes that impact our society the most.
And if you look at the crime rates themselves in any neighborhood or community around the city, we're seeing violent crime is at sometimes its lowest rates.
What we're seeing is we're seeing in every big city a raise in property crimes.
And the chief and I literally every week are assessing the data on where we are in the city and what strategies we can use to make sure that we're addressing crime and disorder for every part of the city.
We want everyone to know the public safety is top priority for everybody standing up here today for the city council, for the city attorney, for the chief of police and for the mayor.
And we will continue to focus on that and make sure that we make Seattle not just the best place to live, but continue to be the safest place to live.
One more question.
I have a question for Chief Best, if that's okay.
Absolutely.
What does this exactly do to law enforcement?
It talks about these warrants taking up a lot of time for police officers.
You know, they spend a lot of time running, going through them.
What would this do for the job of a police officer?
Well, one, we think it's our responsibility to not have to, for people to be able to come out of the woodwork.
Folks who have been in hiding, so to speak, because they think they may have an outstanding warrant, you know, they're often engaged.
They're not living the high quality life that they possibly can.
They're engaged in other type of activity where we might connect with them in a different way.
So this allows people to be productive, allows our officers to focus on serious felonies and serious crimes.
And that's what we're here for, right?
And maybe just to address that is anytime there's a whole range of police encounters where police will do a background check.
And so if they do a background check and a warrant gets flagged, then they have the obligation to take that person into custody.
which disrupts that person's life, costs money to take him to jail, it's very expensive, have to show up in court.
And I mean, I'd encourage everyone, think about where were you five and 20 years ago.
Some of these warrants, people literally don't know the warrants were issued.
Other people, they were issued for things that literally were crimes of poverty.
We made very clear and were very careful to make sure that public safety was protected.
So violent criminals, repeat offenders, Those that are a threat to community, we made sure that those warrants stayed in effect because we know that we want police to be able to get those people and hold them accountable.
But for these other people, it makes us safer.
Essex, I'll give you the last question.
Madam Mayor, if I might just change the subject briefly, would you just reflect briefly on Council Member Bagshaw's retirement and what she's meant to you in this city hall?
You know, I think Sally Bagshaw has served this city so long, and not just in this building as a council member, always fighting to make us a better city, but before that as a prosecutor in the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, really devoted to community.
One thing people may not know about her, she's an experienced pilot, so hopefully she'll get a little more practice now.
But we're gonna miss her.
She's been a great partner and colleague.
Sally Bagshaw is someone that if she gave you her word, you knew she was good for it.
And even when she disagreed with you, she would try to find common ground.
So she has really been a great public servant to Seattle for decades, and I think she'll miss here, but I don't think she'll go quietly into the night.
I think we're going to see her continue to work on a whole range of issues.
Thank you.
Yeah, I mean I would echo those sentiments.
I think it's I've had an opportunity to work with Councilmember Baxter for the last three years and you know, I think she is really strongly rooted in developing relationships with people and and is really challenging us all the time to continue that bridge building and that relationship work as not just a City Council, but as a city and as a region and I think that aspect is one that is really greatly needed right now, given how heated political rhetoric can be.
It's nice to hear thank yous and you're welcome and please.
And I think I will certainly miss that aspect of Council Member Bagshot, but I will also miss her really strong commitment to livable cities.
She's one of the greatest advocates on the council for increased green spaces, parks, and just really making Seattle feel alive.
And her legacy is gonna live on through her Parks District work and through so many other livability projects that she's really led on.
For example, the waterfront is a clear example of that.
So we're really gonna miss her and we know that we will see her around because if there's one thing I know about her is like she loves to stay busy and she loves to stay engaged.
So looking forward to seeing what she does next after the end of her term.
All right, thanks much, guys.