A city held hostage by laissez-faire legal system

In his Sunday column, Danny Westneat diagnosed the contradictions that plague Seattle’s attempts to deal with our city’s most prolific criminals.

As Westneat pointed out, those malefactors are no strangers to the police; they are arrested repeatedly. Yet, divergent concepts of justice among the various actors in the city’s political and legal system have repeatedly undermined attempts to put an end to these people’s careers in crime.

There are 118 offenders who have been identified by Seattle and King County as being responsible for 2,400 crimes. Among them are gun-toting dealers of deadly drugs, as well as professional thieves who steal from beleaguered downtown stores and private cars and homes in the neighborhoods. Simple logic would suggest that taking these individuals off the streets would be the smart thing to do, but that is not happening.  

Advocates for better drug and mental-health treatment programs and activists pushing against institutional racism and inequities in the legal system are rightly arguing that locking people up and throwing away the key is no long-term solution to crime. Unfortunately, this sound argument is often twisted to suggest that any effective effort to stop persistent criminals must be deferred until perfect justice has been achieved.

That approach leaves the vast majority of the city’s residents – especially those living in predominantly non-white communities who are disproportionately the victims of crime – with their own rights abused and justice denied. So, city leaders, get your act together. Get the persistent perpetrators into drug rehab or a mental-health program or into a prison cell, whatever approach makes sense, but get them out of the revolving door at the courthouse where they are repeatedly set loose to degrade our city again and again.

See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey

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