Marysville mayor touts crime strategy that has put ‘characters’ in jail

Marysville is doubling down on the city’s strategy to fight drug offenses by expanding Stay Out of Drug Areas, otherwise known as SODAs.

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In a vote last week, the city council gave judges the power to ban drug offenders from returning to certain parts of the city for two years.

“What we’ve found is the drug-related problem is really the source of most of the property crimes in our community,” Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring told 770 KTTH’s Jason Rantz. “If somebody is convicted of a drug-related crime a judge can now slap a SODA order on them, which means they can no longer be in that area.”

Once a SODA order is in place, it becomes easier for police to make arrests.

“Our officers wouldn’t have to witness a drug deal or witness any of this,” Nehring said. “They could just arrest them for simply being in the area.”

Seattle, Everett, and Arlington have all instituted SODAs as well, and Nehring said this strategy has even worked well for Marysville in the past.

A SODA ordinance was introduced in 2014. Nehring says the city has seen crime drop by about 17 percent since.

“It has been successful putting some of these characters in jail,” he said.

Critics of the ordinance argue they do nothing to stop the crime, they merely push it into other areas. Nehring said they haven’t heard any complaints from the surrounding area.

“We’re getting very tough on this issue in our community,” Nehring said. “I’ve had it, our citizens are fed up with it, our businesses are. We’re just trying to give our police every available tool to catch these folks in the act.”

No one has attempted to challenge the legal authority of the city to implement this ordinance. Nehring believes it’s because they’ve been very specific in how they apply it.

“For instance, in our downtown one, we could show that it was one-twentieth of the city but represented one-fifth of the crime in the city,” Nehring said. “If it was an area where you couldn’t show those kind of crime stats, then you might have some trouble, I think.”

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