A new Seattle drug ordinance could be on the horizon in wake of policy “failure.”
When Seattle’s latest drug ordinance was being debated in 2023, opponents claimed the law would further criminalize drug use, especially for unhoused people, and launch a new ‘War on Drugs.’ Its supporters, on the other hand, said that the law prioritized diversion away from jails, using that alternate pathway whenever possible to boost the number of people getting help through treatment or other stabilizing services.
Two and a half years after its passage, more data is in, and early results indicate that opponents were right to be concerned. A recent presentation at the Seattle City Council’s Public Safety Committee showed a 47% increase in drug crime arrests and a 30% decrease in referrals to the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program between 2024 and 2025.
After the ordinance went into effect, 48% of the drug arrests made by the Seattle Police Department (SPD) were solely for either public drug use or simple possession, the two charges impacted by the ordinance.
This increase in drug arrests and simultaneous decrease in diversion referrals happened the same year current SPD Chief Shon Barnes took over the police department, hired by former Mayor Bruce Harrell following a national search.
In an executive order issued soon after the drug ordinance was passed by city council, Harrell wrote that SPD arrest guidance would emphasize diversion.
“The policy will state that the lack of diversion opportunities itself shall not be a reason for jail booking and referral for prosecution,” the executive order says.
Reporting at the time from Cascade PBS laid out the intention behind the ordinance: that SPD should usually divert people with substance-use disorder, only arresting them when they posed a threat of harm to other people.
To that end, the law recommended – but did not require, due to an amendment from then-Councilmember Sara Nelson – that SPD officers perform a “threat of harm assessment,” both to the person themselves and to the public, to determine whether arrest or diversion was the more appropriate response.
Ultimately, the ordinance gave full discretion of when to arrest people to SPD officers.
In spite of the stated intention that most low-level drug cases be diverted to LEAD, the data tells a different story. Of the 1,218 drug-related diversions and arrests made by SPD in 2025, only 22.6% of them led to diversion, which doesn’t illustrate the ordinance working as its creators said they intended.
Problems with the drug ordinance in practice
Police accountability advocate Howard Gale summed up the problems with the ordinance in his public comment.
“September 2023’s drug ordinance, which you'll be discussing, had a stunning five and a half pages of whereas’s all created to wave off the concerns of the hundreds that testified in opposition to that ordinance, centered around the concerns that police cannot be trusted to use discretion in assessing when possession or public drug use presents a serious threat, concerns that the city would fail to provide proper resources for diversion and treatment, and concerns that racial disparity and arrest would increase,” Gale said. “All of these fears came true.”
Chair of the Public Safety committee Bob Kettle said he agreed with Gale and that the drug ordinance has been “a failure.”
Rob Brown, SPD’s Acting Assistant Chief of Patrol Operations, shared the low bar for officers to find a threat of harm against the public from public drug users.
“The threshold is fairly low when we're applying it in these areas, because, like Councilmember Saka pointed out, these are transit corridors,” Brown said. “It's easy to demonstrate that when somebody is along the sidewalk, even underneath an umbrella, but you have fentanyl fumes out in the general air, that's a harm present to the community. So we've been able to apply this. It's a fairly low bar for the officers to be able to illustrate harm to others.”
The Office of the Inspector General contracted with the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug, & Alcohol Institute to release an evaluation mandated by the ordinance at the end of last year. The evaluation was stymied by a lack of relevant SPD data and delays caused by officials from both SPD and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG).
Out of eight questions to be addressed by the evaluation, the research team reported that five questions “could not be answered,” with an additional sixth question impeded “due to delays in gaining access to the SPD data system,” meaning the researchers only reviewed a random 10% of the relevant arrest reports to determine if threat assessments were being conducted.
Not only was the evaluation of the use of threat assessments incomplete, but in the 10% of arrest reports reviewed, none of them referenced a “threat of harm assessment” and only 48% used similar language to the related policy to suggest such an assessment might have been conducted.
While Barnes said he supported the LEAD program, he followed this assertion by calling into question what LEAD can accomplish.
“Diversion is part of the solution, but it cannot be the only solution,” Barnes said. “This program should be a supplement to the fundamental need for clear standards of behavior, clear standards of behavior in public spaces consistent with enforcement. As previously stated, since my arrival, arrest for drug use and possession has increased by 47% and a police department with the staffing necessary to meet the demand of community-based policing. I look forward to discussing how we can align our policies or realign our policies, our program, and our resources to ensure that Seattle remains a safe and welcoming, thriving community for everyone.”
Independent researchers have found that LEAD reduced recidivism by 58% and participants’ odds of becoming housed increased by 89%. LEAD undergoes annual audits via the City’s Human Services Department.
When the drug ordinance was passed in September of 2023, councilmembers in favor of the bill said they were reassured that Harrell’s 2024 budget – that no one had yet seen – would include increased investments in diversion services to meet the additional demand generated by the bill. But PubliCola reported that those investments were not included in Harrell’s proposed budget, in spite of testimony during the bill’s passage that underlined how necessary they would be for the policy to succeed.
Lisa Daugaard, who began the LEAD program in 2011, cited this lack of investment in her remarks at the meeting, explaining the numbers of both drug arrests and diversions as related to the changing capacities of both SPD and LEAD. Daugaard said LEAD took a dramatic reduction in City funding “that happened at the very same time that the ordinance put LEAD in a central role to take a significant volume of the newly prioritized enforcement activity around drug use and possession.”
Because LEAD was over their caseload limits in 2025, they stopped training new SPD officers in how to use LEAD referrals.
However, framing the cause of these numbers as only about capacity might be an oversimplification. When Mike Solan was still the president of SPOG in January, he claimed that most cops didn’t want to refer cases to LEAD because they think it’s a waste of time.
Daugaard says LEAD is on track to receive more SPD referrals in 2026 than in 2024. However, LEAD prioritizes police referrals, which means community referrals can get short-changed to the point that LEAD doesn’t bother to run community awareness campaigns of LEAD as a resource.
“I think this is just a reminder that this ordinance provides for the role of law enforcement, the appropriate, legitimate role of law enforcement, and it is not the only way that we can find and solve these problems If we wanted to bulk up these strategies to match the ability of community partners to identify them.” Daugaard said.
Councilmember Maritza Rivera questioned the reality of LEAD’s capacity issues.
“I don't mean any disrespect by this, but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different,” Rivera said. “But I actually don't think more money in and of itself – you know, we have thrown a lot, I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the City.”
Rivera said the City has a deficit, and she asked if there was anything that could be done to address the opioid crisis without spending more money. Unfortunately, the only sure way to increase LEAD’s capacity would be to increase public investment.
In another illustration of the policy’s failure, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) released a report last October using the nearly two years of data since the ordinance passed. The report showed that the ordinance is disproportionately criminalizing Black people, with a Black person being four times more likely to be charged under the ordinance than a White person.
In response to the DPD report, now-Seattle City Attorney Erica Evans strongly criticized the outcome of Seattle’s drug ordinance, likening it to “a war on drugs” while on the campaign trail.
The new data presented last week was old news to the DPD.
“This data is not surprising given the trend of rising prosecutions for low-level drug possessions from 2024 to 2025 we observed when we examined these prosecutions last fall,” said Katie Hurley, DPD’s Special Counsel for Criminal Policy and Practice. “Our study revealed that prosecutions for public drug use disproportionately targeted Black Seattleites and failed to deliver the treatment City leaders promised in more than 97% of cases.”
The data also showed a very low rate of referrals to LEAD from the South Precinct, which serves District 2 and adjacent areas. District 2 is the only majority-minority district in Seattle. District 2 Councilmember Eddie Lin called out this discrepancy during his comments.
“CM Lin is committed to supporting and fully funding LEAD,” a spokesperson from Lin’s office told The Urbanist. “We hope to learn more soon about what can be done to increase LEAD referrals across D2 (both West and South Precincts).”
What next?
Discussion at the Council meeting signaled the possibility that a new drug ordinance could be in the works. Councilmember Rivera asked Barnes directly about changes he might recommend.
“I do believe that a very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can on-view people using drugs, and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist, and whether or not we will send them to LEAD then or we would send them to the courts,” Barnes answered.
Barnes referenced Evans’ announcement at the beginning of her term in office that all arrests for drug use and possession would be referred for a review to a team in the City Attorney’s Office to determine which cases might be suitable for LEAD referral.
Up for potential change is the suggestion that SPD officers make a threat of harm assessment, which doesn’t seem to be happening much of the time.
Another big question is the primary mechanism for diversions to LEAD. For example, the Mayor’s Office and councilmembers could choose to center the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team in making LEAD referrals. For now, because the most recent SPOG contract forbids the CARE team from going by themselves to calls where any drug paraphernalia is present (along with a host of other restrictions), the CARE team would have to be accompanied by police officers in order to take over the main responsibility of LEAD referrals.
The Seattle Fire Department’s Health One and Health 99 (the post overdose response team) could also take a more primary role in making LEAD referrals.
Alternatively, as Barnes seemed to suggest, the council could choose to have most LEAD referrals happen after arrest, decided by the City Attorney’s Office. However, arrest and booking tend to be more disruptive and potentially harmful, particularly if involving a jail stay, and such an approach could also cost more.
“Any shift in City policy on public drug use should further prioritize deflection, instead of reliance on a criminal legal system proven to be an ineffective and harmful response to this public health crisis,” DPD’s Hurley said. “Seattle must also eliminate the racial disparities our study documented in the prior administration’s public drug use prosecutions."
Amy Sundberg
Amy Sundberg
