‘Empathy gone wrong’: Former city attorney says Seattle should follow San Francisco’s tougher approach to drug use

San Francisco’s mayor signed legislation to arrest drug users and put them in the city’s Rapid Enforcement, Support, Evaluation, and Triage (RESET) Center, ABC 7 reported Tuesday.

Former Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison told “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio that she liked the idea and urged lawmakers in Seattle to use police power to clean up the streets.

“It isn’t arresting your way out of it, but you have to say accountability is a different form of compassion,” she said. “When someone is not able to be their own guardrails for their own behavior, what they’re doing to themselves, to the public, in our shared resources, when they cannot be that for themselves, we should give a damn.”

Davison reiterated that city leaders should act now instead of waiting until what they deem is the right time.

“We will not just say ‘We feel bad about doing that, so we’re just not going to do it, and we’ll just watch them deteriorate instead.’ I don’t really care if you feel bad while you do it, because we’re looking at, we need to help them get out of that situation,” she said.

But Davison cautioned that Seattle’s situation is more complex. She said she stopped to help a man out in the cold Friday, offering him a warm place, but he refused. The man told Davison he preferred to stay in his car. Even after she pressed, he declined and said he drank a lot, though he thanked her for talking to him.

“There’s this place where it’s like, OK, what’s best for that man? I mean, he’s probably late 60s. It’s not sleeping outside tonight. It’s really cold. And so what are we doing when we just say, ‘Well, we’re going to wait until he’s now somehow ill, and an ambulance comes, and we take him to the ER,'” she said.

“We all take that cost on, and so I think it’s just a lack of connection with understanding — when you don’t let systems work, because you think that you feel bad when the systems work, you actually make the dysfunction go into other systems as well, and clog up so much. Some of it’s a lack of political courage, frankly, which is what I felt like we had, and some of it is empathy gone wrong,” she continued.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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