Amy Barden, director of the city's Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department.

Barden has been on the job for just over two years, running the city's 911 operations while also setting up an unarmed team of social workers who respond to emergency calls that don't require police—the CARE Team.

The CARE Team is expanding to 48 members this year, and their size will no longer be capped under the city's contract with the Seattle Police Officers' Guild (SPOG), which has historically resisted reducing the duties that legally have to be performed by police, like directing traffic and responding to 911 calls.

But the contract also includes new constraints on CARE that limit where the team is allowed to go and when they have to back off and call police. CARE can't help people if there are signs that they've recently used drugs, for instance, and they aren't allowed to go inside most buildings or respond to people inside cars.

We asked Barden about these constraints, along with the requirement that SPD sergeants decide who to send out on crisis calls that come in to 911—police, CARE, or community service officers, civilian SPD staffers who respond to minor issues but lack the mental health and crisis response training of the social workers who make up the CARE team.

We also talked about how CARE has evolved in its first 28 months, what happens when people call 911 for a person in crisis, and Barden's hopes for the team under new mayor Katie Wilson and a more progressive City Council.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

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This week, we spoke to former deputy city attorney Scott Lindsay. Voters soundly rejected Lindsay's former boss, Republican Ann Davison, last November, but Lindsay argues that many of her prescriptions for addressing crime and disorder were sound—including "stay out" zones for people accused of using or possessing drugs in public, extra penalties for people who commit misdemeanors like shoplifting over and over, and the elimination of community court, which Lindsay called "a complete disaster and shame and stain on the record of city attorney [Pete] Holmes."

Although the city has arguably been ruled by a moderate-to-conservative supermajority for at least the last four years, Lindsay says they failed to accomplish all their goals, in part, because former mayor Bruce Harrell wouldn't always get with the program. Seattle, Lindsay argues, still has "radically too few police officers," "no consensus about what to do about our most pressing public disorder problems," and neighborhoods that have been "destroyed" by people using and selling drugs in public.

PubliCola has frequently pushed back on the notion that cracking down on so-called "prolific offenders"—the subject of a report Lindsay wrote for the Downtown Seattle Association in 2019—is a solution to the problems facing neighborhoods like Little Saigon that have faced decades of neglect and disinvestment. Lindsay agreed—and said that isn't the point.

"More people will die every year of fentanyl and meth overdose than will be successful in getting out of the life and getting into treatment and turning their lives around," Lindsay said.

"I'm not saying give up, but I'm saying we need to balance our treatment approach with, how do we stop the havoc that these folks create? And one effective way at stopping the havoc that they create is to constantly disrupt. Use legal tools to disrupt their behavior. Convince them that being on the streets at 12th and Jackson smoking fentanyl is going to get you incarcerated. Even if that's for eight or 12 hours that is in effect, can be an effective tool at disrupting the problem behavior and saving neighborhoods. Little Saigon is gone, but others are on the brink."

Listeners will probably have strong feelings about this conversation, which also includes a discussion of Police Chief Shon Barnes, community court, and the "radical abolitionists," in Lindsay's words, at King County's Department of Public Defense, which provides attorneys for indigent defendants.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Ann Davison's 2025 annual report, referenced in the show, is here.

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We sat down with new Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion founder Lisa Daugaard this week to talk about changes Evans is making to the way the city handles low-level drug cases.

Under Evans' Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, people arrested for simple drug possession or using in public were either jailed and prosecuted or sent to a "drug prosecution alternative" where they have to get an assessment to confirm they have an addiction and stay out of trouble for six month.

Evans directed her prosecutors to go back to the pre-Davison policy of reviewing people's cases to see if they're eligible for LEAD, the city's pre-filing diversion program. In response to this reasonable directive, Police Chief Shon Barnes told his officers that going forward, officers had to refer every drug case to LEAD—an overstatement that led to a right-wing media freakout when police guild director Mike Solan claimed Mayor Katie Wilson had ordered an end to all drug arrests.

Evans and Daugaard set the record straight, explaining what LEAD does, who it's for, and how they believe this policy shift will actually help people addicted to fentanyl who use in public—which, they both reminded is, is encoded in the 2023 "Blake fix" law that empowered the city attorney to prosecute minor drug cases in the first place.

"What we're doing is not anything inconsistent with what the law has already recommended for our office to be doing," Evans told us. "But nothing's off the table. If someone is not making meaningful progress with LEAD or in diversion, then we do reserve the right to do traditional prosecution."

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

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