More ‘treatment options available at the felony level,’ city attorney says of repeat offenders

A focal point of Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s recently announced High Utilizer Initiative will be an attempt to merge repeat offenders’ misdemeanor charges into a felony. The potential effectiveness of that strategy is far from clear.

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The process generally involves lumping similar offenses into a single case until they meet thresholds to be considered felony charges. Multiple counts of shoplifting until the total amount stolen meets the legal definition of grand larceny is an example of the strategy in practice.

Davison clarifies that the strategy is intended to improve access to treatment options.

“What I’m anticipating is there’s going to be some treatment options that are just not available at the misdemeanor level that are available at the felony level,” Davison told KTTH’s Jason Rantz Show.

The implementational success of the strategy is not a foregone conclusion: The city attorney’s office traditionally handles misdemeanor charges and cannot simultaneously file alongside superior court; Seattle Municipal Court is dis-incentivized from levying bail restrictions for a number of reasons, including the cost of incarceration when juxtaposed with cost associated with incarceration and pre-trial rule which presumes release; criminal defense is likely to challenge the strategy.

The idea that improved treatment options become available for a felony charge is predicated on the idea of “competency restoration,” which typically applies in the detention of a felony suspect until they are deemed legally able to understand the charges filed against them. That route is unavailable to misdemeanor suspects: If a suspect has severe mental illness and cannot proceed with a court case, their charges are eventually dismissed.

Lisa Daugaard, director with the Public Defender Association, disputes the idea that competency restoration constitutes a greater level of treatment. Daugaard tells MyNorthwest that “competency restoration is geared to allowing an individual to be prosecuted,” and that the goal is simply to recall facts about an alleged incident, identify witnesses, and assist their lawyer.

“Once this has been achieved, the person is ‘competent,’” Daugaard continues. “This has little or nothing to do with someone being stabilized, treated, and equipped to manage independently in the community, and to reduce problematic future behavior.”

“Creating greater obstacles for someone in order for them to get help is one of the central distortions that the legal system interposes into the realm of health care and recovery,” Daugaard said. “This is not to say that people who commit harmful felonies should not be charged with felonies to achieve temporary interruption/incapacitation, or accountability. But this should not be rationalized in terms of access to different or better ‘treatment.’”

King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg is of the mind that neither felony nor misdemeanor courts have the resources to adequately integrate mentally ill persons, such that they are on a path to housing and behavioral health treatment.

“The irony here is that you have more control over somebody in a misdemeanor court than you do in the felony court, because a felony court, as long as if the person is not going to prison [and is] remaining in the community, then they’re supervised by a state department corrections officer, but with limited resources, and with really low expectations that anything is going to change in that person’s life,” Satterberg told KIRO Newsradio’s Hanna Scott.

“The big picture is that Seattle’s coming out of the pandemic, and we need to work to make our city attractive, livable, and the great city that we know. … If there are people who are committing crimes every single day, even though they’re considered low-level crimes, we still have a responsibility to respond and to try to make that response as positive as we can for that individual. But we can’t just walk away from people who are doing daily harm to the community either.”

Ultimately, Satterberg marked as effective the component of Davison’s plan that highlights the “whole public safety circle,” as Davison described to KTTH.

“Sometimes the police will send us a case dressed up as a felony that really should be a misdemeanor,” Satterberg said. “Sometimes misdemeanors get sent to the city attorney that really shouldn’t be felonies. We just need to coordinate at the operational level to make sure that we can focus on the people who are causing the most harm to the community, and make sure those cases get filed and get in front of a judge.”

Davison further elaborated on the High Utilizer Initiative with KTTH.

“Misdemeanor crime is our opportunity to really intervene with someone so that it does not increase in frequency and severity. I think in the past, people might have talked about it, but now we’re actually connecting with other public safety partners to make sure that the work is done. We really do disrupt that cycle of crime and intervene with the individual.”

The city attorney suggested that idea of disruption and intervention can be produced with custody.

“We make the recommendations based upon what the case is,” Davison added. “It needs to be appropriate. And so that’s what I’m saying is sometimes that reset time is going to have to be in custody.”

Ultimately, booking restrictions are less prohibitive with felony cases than misdemeanors. The outstanding question is to what extent the city attorney and municipal court will be able to pursue that as a strategy. King County Public Defense and Daugaard are disinterested in the idea of leveraging custody as a means for improved treatment.

“When we provide scarce resources only once people are pushed deep into the legal system, we’ve created an expensive self-justifying rationale for a lot of lawyers to have jobs, when we know that it is housing, case management, and trauma-informed care that does the work of supporting recovery,” Daugaard points out.

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Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz views the initiative as added leverage for producing incarceration.

“When we come in contact, very routinely, with these individuals for a variety of criminal offenses, such as theft, trespassing, sometimes property damage, weapon violations, many of these were not necessarily bookable offenses,” Diaz told KIRO Newsradio’s Hanna Scott. “While we might end up having a criminal charge, we weren’t able to book them into the jail. This will allow us to, if they’re committing that criminal act, such as theft or trespassing, this will allow us to actually book them into King County Jail.”

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