Harger: 3 months ago, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson promised to clean up 12th and Jackson. I went back Monday

It’s human suffering on full display.

The parks of North Beacon Hill, stretching down to 12th and Jackson. People struggling with addiction and mental illness, clearly in need of help, clearly in danger. Preyed upon by dealers whose whole job is to keep them sick. Some, not all, turning to crime and violence to feed the addiction. Homeowners feeling threatened on their own blocks. Neighbors afraid to walk into their own parks, the ones taken over by open-air drug use and dealing. Business owners paying for private security. People sleeping in the elements with no sanitation. And winter is coming.

Three months ago, Mayor Katie Wilson said enough is enough. She promised police, money, and a hard line. I went down Monday to see what that promise bought, and the answer is: not much. 12th and Jackson is as bad as I’ve ever seen it. And every day the city keeps tolerating it is one more day it breaks a promise it put in writing to the people who live there.

What Katie Wilson promised North Beacon Hill and Little Saigon

Neighbors have been writing me to say things are still bad down there, so after the show Monday, I swung by to see it with my own eyes.

12th and Jackson is as bad as I’ve ever seen it. Dr. Jose Rizal Park is overrun with tarps, tents, and people in crisis.

Some of it has moved; credit where it’s due. Lewis Park has been cleaned up. The pagoda at Daejon Park looks better. Sturgus Park had a couple of tents, not the dozens it had before. Which tells you what actually happened: a few parks got swept, and instead of people finding shelter or services, they just walked down the street and set up at Rizal.

Back on June 17, Wilson wrote that the city “must disrupt the drug dealing, public disorder, and other illegal activity that has destabilized this community.” She said, plainly, “We will no longer tolerate open-air drug sale and use and vending stolen goods.”

She promised police would engage. If people persisted, she wrote, “they will either be booked into jail or enrolled in the LEAD diversion program.” And she promised money, $1.1 million in one-time funding for neighborhood outreach, mobile overdose treatment teams, and service navigation.

And that “booked into jail or enrolled in LEAD” part sounds compassionate right up until you watch it work. LEAD is the diversion program. Instead of jail, an officer can hand you off to a caseworker who is supposed to help you get into treatment, into housing, into a life. Good idea. I mean that. But a diversion program only means something if there’s somewhere to divert people to, and a reason for them to go. Down here, there mostly isn’t. The city can tell you the new patrol made more than 100 arrests since June, and maybe it did. But you can arrest the same man on Tuesday that you arrested on Friday, and if nothing in between actually changed his life, all you’ve done is spin him through the turnstile one more time. That’s what I watched Monday. Same corner. Same crisis. Just three months older.

And it turns out nobody’s really checking whether LEAD works. The Washington Policy Center, a free-market group, went looking this summer and found that after 11 years, the city still doesn’t make LEAD report the simple stuff. How many people got a job. How many got housed. How many died. Eleven years, and we still don’t ask. LEAD’s own founders named the thing they were trying to fix a “revolving door,” and without any teeth on the back end, that’s exactly what a diversion program turns into: picked up, let go, back on the corner, picked up again. And the people living it aren’t dumb. They know the system won’t ask much of them, so they don’t give it much back.

Three months later, and I’ve been through that area plenty over the past year, I can tell you 12th and Jackson looks the same or worse. Rizal Park is worse.

This didn’t start with Wilson, and that’s the problem

This didn’t start on Katie Wilson’s watch. A whole parade of one-term mayors has vowed to fix it and then watched it get worse. Bruce Harrell famously launched Operation New Day in 2022, with 12th and Jackson as the very first target. It might have been better named Operation Groundhog Day, because the same cycle of addiction, crime, and homelessness just kept repeating. The corner is as bad now as it was then. Harrell, of course, rightly blamed his predecessors, who had also vowed to take action.

That’s the pattern. New mayor, new press conference, same corner. And while the announcements cycle through, we let human beings rot in the filth. Letting them keep using next to a de facto open-air drug market isn’t compassion. It doesn’t help a single one of them get their life back. These are people who deserve healthy, full lives, people with real potential still in them.

Three months later, the promise is just words

Wilson made a direct, clear promise to the people of North Beacon Hill and Little Saigon. Help was on the way. The crisis was being taken seriously.

“We will no longer tolerate open-air drug sales and use and vending stolen goods,” she said. “Changing conditions here will take time, but I believe these steps will finally start moving us in the right direction.”

It’s been three months. Open-air drug sales and use were being tolerated late Monday morning, while I stood there watching. The vending of stolen goods was being tolerated. The people who live and work there have no choice but to tolerate it. The mayor chose to.

Katie Wilson is still very new at this job. New mayors make mistakes. New mayors are learning. I get that. But we only get one mayor at a time, and the people of this city need to know that when their mayor gives her word that something will no longer be tolerated, she follows through. It can’t be an afterthought. A word was given, in writing, to a neighborhood that has heard a lot of words.

If it stays just words, Wilson risks looking a lot like the parade of mayors who came before her.

The one-term kind.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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