Dori: City getting rid of select warrants for social justice PR moment

Every single day I see what gifts this region is giving us, and by golly, the City of Seattle has done it once again. The City of Seattle’s latest brainwave is to forgive about 200 outstanding warrants as part of their social justice and equity program. The city sent out a press release on Tuesday morning detailing its plan:

Today Mayor Jenny A. Durkan, City Attorney Pete Holmes, Councilmember M. Lorena González, and Chief Carmen Best filed a motion at Seattle Municipal Court asking the Court to consider quashing over 200 outstanding warrants for people charged or convicted of low-level non-violent misdemeanor offenses that occurred 5 to 22 years ago.  The City is taking these steps to help address inequities in Seattle’s criminal justice system and to protect public safety by ensuring that law enforcement can focus on more serious, violent offenses.

Let’s dive into this. Most of these warrants are for prostitution (107) and driving with a suspended license (73), the latter of which the city says is “commonly known as ‘driving while poor.'”

You know what? Having been poor for my entire childhood and early adulthood, and having known a lot of people who are poor, I can tell you that 1. being poor doesn’t give you free reign to break the law, and 2. if you are poor, you don’t have to break the law.

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I hate to tell you this, but poor people are disproportionately affected by everything in terms of finance. When they go to the grocery store, they’re disproportionately affected. When they have to pay Sound Transit’s illegally-calculated car tabs, they’re disproportionately affected. But we don’t let them get away with not paying their car tabs, because government has a strong profit motive there. Let’s all stop paying our car tabs and see if government will forgive that.

Jenny Durkan said at a press conference Tuesday morning that the city’s criminal justice system has “disproportionately impacted people of color.” Is there any evidence at all that any of these tickets were written or charges filed because of somebody’s race? That would be a big deal, if this was done on the basis of race.

But my guess is that the people with a suspended license who were given citations for driving with a suspended license were probably ticketed, not because of their income status or race, but because … they were driving with a suspended license. I think that would be the commonality for all of this.

So the city is essentially saying that there is no public safety risk from all of these offenders. This either shows that Jenny Durkan has no clue about any of the stats, or that she is intentionally lying so that she can be seen as some great champion of social justice.

People who drive with a suspended license have a far greater rate of getting into accidents than people who drive with a valid license. The stats on that are clear. I know people personally who have had life-impacting injuries because their car was plowed into by someone with a suspended license.

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For these Seattle liberals to say that because someone is a minority or is poor, they are more likely to commit a crime, and therefore should be forgiven of their crimes, is ludicrous. And for Jenny Durkan to say that we’ll forgive crimes because our criminal justice system is inequitable — that would suggest that the cops, judges, and prosecutors are all giving tickets and serving warrants for reasons other than the actions of the individual.

Oh, and one more thing — if the city thought that the people who have these warrants were likely to ever pay the fine attached, no way would the city try to forgive them. If there was a revenue component to all of this, they would never toss out the warrants. But the city knows that the criminals will never repay them, so they are going to use this as a publicity scheme to look good, complete with all the buzzwords like “social justice” and “equity.”

The idea that if you’re poor or a minority, you’re somehow compelled to break the law, is insane. As I said, I was poor for my early life, and I know many people who grew up poor, and they never committed crimes because of it.

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