System Failure

Part 2

Contents

the suspect is not in custody. .................................................................. 10

3. Dismissals: Four-in-ten non-traffic-related misdemeanor cases filed by the City

Attorney’s Office achieve no meaningful resolution. ...................................... 22

4. Consequences: The dysfunction of Seattle’s criminal justice system has real

impacts on victims, policing and defendants. ............................................... 28

A. Impacts on Victims ......................................................................... 28

B. Impacts on Policing ......................................................................... 31

C. Impacts on Vulnerable Defendants ....................................................... 36

Conclusion ........................................................................................ 39

Appendix: Methodology ......................................................................... 40

Police investigate and refer thousands of cases every year that see no resolution.

Repeat offenders appear emboldened to commit crimes in plain sight. Victims of

chronic criminal activity see very few resolutions of their cases and report only a

fraction of the crimes they experience every day.

According to new data obtained from the City of Seattle, the City Attorney’s Office

declines to file almost half of all misdemeanor non-traffic cases that Seattle police

refer every year. It takes on average six months for prosecutors to file cases in which

the defendant is not in custody. And only one-in-three cases referred by Seattle

police ever reach any meaningful resolution.

first System Failure report and acknowledged by the efforts of the inter-governmental

High Barrier Individual Working Group, currently very few of the prolific offenders

who are struggling with mental illness, substance use disorders or homelessness

receive any alternative interventions that might address those issues. Instead,

defendants are trapped in a cycle of arrest, incarceration (for failing to appear at

hearings for criminal incidents that happened a year or more before), and release.

This report examines why so few misdemeanor cases reach a meaningful resolution

and the consequences this dysfunction creates for people who depend on this system

to work effectively. The findings in this report fall into four areas: Declines, Delays,

Dismissals, and Consequences.

terminology used in this report. The concept of a “meaningful resolution” is more clearly defined in

Chapter 3: Delays.

In 2017 (the most recent year for which data is available), the City Attorney’s Office

filed only 54 percent of all non-traffic criminal cases referred by police. According to

data from the City Attorney’s Office, the rate at which misdemeanor prosecutors

declined cases increased dramatically over the past decade from 17 percent in 2007

to 46 percent in 2017. Most of that change is driven by the City Attorney’s Office not

filing 65 percent of out-of-custody cases (when the suspect is not in jail) that Seattle

police refer for prosecution.

2. Delays: The City Attorney’s Office takes on average 6 months to

months or more to file charges on even serious misdemeanor crimes like assault,

harassment, sexual exploitation, property destruction and reckless endangerment. In

many instances, these delays allow repeat offenders to commit multiple new crimes

while older cases stack up without prosecution.

3. Dismissals: Four-in-ten non-traffic-related misdemeanor cases

For the 7,081 non-traffic criminal misdemeanor cases that the City Attorney’s Office

filed in Seattle Municipal Court in 2017, 42 percent had no meaningful resolution as of

August 2019. These cases were dismissed with proof issues, remained pending with

The systemic dysfunction of Seattle’s criminal justice system has real consequences.

Prolific offenders commit daily crimes in plain sight and cycle through the criminal

justice system with no meaningful intervention. Police spend tens-of-thousands of

hours developing misdemeanor cases that either never get filed or the cases sit at the

City Attorney’s Office for such a long time that they eventually get dismissed. And

many businesses that face major issues with crime under-report it because doing so

public shopping areas and hotels) found that they report on average less than 5

percent of the daily crime they experience. Ultimately, the dysfunction of Seattle’s

criminal justice system supports an ecosystem of criminal activity that is taking a toll

on Seattle.

For defendants who are struggling with homelessness or behavioral health issues,

significant case filing delays and long periods to resolution set up a trap of recurring

failure to appear warrants followed by brief incarceration and release. According to

King County Jail Health, 45 percent of bookings into King County Jail in 2017 were of

under what circumstances they will or will not file cases. In turn, the Police

Department instructs its officers to minimize the cases that will not produce

meaningful results. When police and prosecutors encounter chronic criminal

challenges ill-suited for traditional policing practices like arrest and booking, those

are elevated to policy leaders to come up with alternative solutions to keep the

public safe.

That is not the way it works in Seattle.

Instead, data from Seattle’s misdemeanor criminal justice system shows that there is

actors on how Seattle’s laws should be enforced. The result is that Seattle police

crimes that by law can receive a maximum of up to one year in jail. Misdemeanors

represent approximately 75 percent of all crimes in the city of Seattle and are

prosecuted by the Seattle City Attorney’s Office in Seattle Municipal Court. Felonies

are all crimes subject to a penalty of more than one year in prison, including assaults

Seattle police officers investigate only a fraction of all misdemeanor crimes. If there

is no reliable suspect or substantial evidence to collect (i.e., for a typical car prowl),

the police may create a brief report recording the crime or may ask the victim to

Once the City Attorney’s Office has received a completed misdemeanor general

offense report from Seattle police, assistant City Attorneys review the case and

determine whether to file charges – also known as a criminal complaint – against the

suspect in Seattle Municipal Court. The criminal complaint is a straightforward form

campus or on Metro buses) are prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor in King County District Court.

release from jail (e.g., bail, personal recognizance, weekly reporting to the probation

office) or other pre-trial obligations.

the court at a first appearance hearing date (usually 2-3 weeks out).

For any case in which a defendant pleads guilty (pursuant to a negotiated plea) or is

found guilty at trial, Seattle Municipal Court judges issue a “sentence.” Judges will

typically follow the prosecutor’s recommended sentence in a negotiated plea

agreement but are not required to do so. A judicial sentence can include: jail time; a

suspended sentence (days in jail that the defendant does not serve immediately but

can be imposed if the defendant violates conditions of the sentence); and/or

The key condition of the dispositional continuance was that the defendant have no

new law violations. In effect, that provision is a chance to show the prosecutor and

court that the charged crime was an aberration and, if the defendant can stay out of

trouble for six months, help him avoid a conviction.

Attorney’s Office, the suspect was arrested again for multiple car prowls in Queen

Anne. He admitted to those crimes, was booked into jail, and released the next day.

Charges for the Queen Anne car prowls have still not been filed in that case almost a

year later.

At the October 2018 hearing to evaluate Douglas’s compliance with the court order in

2018.

An individual with a history of violent assaults attacked a couple on their way to the

Pioneer Square Sound Transit station in September 2017. (See excerpt of police report

below.) The case was referred to the City Attorney’s Office for misdemeanor assault,

but no charges were filed until January 2019.

While the suspect was out-of-custody on the 2017 assault charges, the same officer

below.)

This is one of many examples where delayed filing for out-of-custody suspects fails to

Chinatown-International District, causing small business owners hundreds of thousands

of dollars in damage. Her crime spree over a two-month period hit almost every

prominent restaurant and retailer in the neighborhood and was featured in extensive

local news coverage.

her drug habit and that she had been living in an encampment in the neighborhood.

have one timely filed case in Seattle Municipal Court: she was arrested for a midnight

break-in at Goodwill in 2017 after she hopped over the fence and had to be located by

a K-9 unit. She was sentenced to two days in jail.

Matthew L. is a 31-year-old white male who moved to Seattle from Florida sometime

in the fall of 2017. When Matthew arrived in Seattle, he was homeless and

unemployed and immediately began a major crime spree. According to the King

County Prosecutor’s Office, Matthew had multiple convictions in Florida, including

felony drug possession, theft, trespassing and disorderly conduct. He was booked into

jail nine times in the first nine months he was in Seattle.

employees or security on the way out. During one three-month period in 2018, Seattle

police sent seven theft cases to the City Attorney’s Office for thefts at Banana

Republic, Gap, J. Crew and Nordstrom. Loss prevention personnel told officers that

Matthew was a near-daily presence in their stores.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/chinatowninternationaldistrictburglaryspreeleavesbuisnessesheartbrok

en

through the Retail Theft Program. (See excerpt of security report given to SPD,

below.) The City Attorney’s Office did not file charges until four months later.

The woman did not appear for her court hearing and remains at large in the

community. A bench warrant was issued, and the charges remain outstanding.

to SPD, below.) The case was filed four months later. The defendant did not

appear, and a bench warrant was issued. The case is still pending.

security that he planned to sell the stolen jeans for cash. Seattle police arrived

and released him at the scene. (See excerpt of security report below.) The City

Attorney’s Office did not file the case for five months.

As we have seen in the above examples, the time it takes to file and process a case

the public, typically within 72 hours of dismissal, without receiving additional treatment or services for

their underlying mental health issues.

outcomes for cases. That can make it hard to assess the overall performance of the

system. To better track outcomes and performance, this report focuses on the most

common possible outcomes and sorts them into two categories: ‘meaningful

resolution’ or ‘no meaningful resolution.’ These categories are intended to capture

whether the case provides some semblance of closure for the underlying incident,

regardless of whether either the victim or defendant feel that it is the right result.

These categories are not meant to assess whether a particular outcome was the right

outcome; that effort would require an individual analysis of thousands of cases.

Instead, the purpose of this categorization is to better understand the overall

efficiency and effectiveness of the system. A well-functioning criminal justice system

Deferred sentence

Dispositional continuance

Dismissed pursuant to negotiated plea

Pre-trial diversion

Dismissed for felony filing

According to Seattle Municipal Court and King County Behavioral Health, almost no defendants whose

misdemeanor cases are dismissed for incompetency receive meaningful mental health intervention.

Looking at the system as a whole, for every 100 non-traffic misdemeanor cases that

Seattle Police send to the City Attorney’s Office, only 54 are filed. Of those 54 cases,

only 58 percent end in any kind of meaningful resolution such as a finding of guilty or

not guilty, a deferred sentence, or a pre-trial diversion (see categorization of

meaningful resolution in Section 3, below). In other words, for every 100 cases that

Seattle police refer to the City Attorney’s Office, only 31 – less than one-third –

conclude with a meaningful resolution.

cases filed in 2017; Report of the Seattle Municipal Court to the High-Barrier Individual Working Group

The overall low rate of resolution is particularly acute for theft cases. For the 18-

month period from November 2018 through April 2019, Seattle Police referred 1,806

cases to the City Attorney’s Office through the Retail Theft Program, a program in

which larger retailers with their own security forces direct-file misdemeanor case

reports with the Seattle Police Department which then reviews them and forwards

them to the City Attorney’s Office for prosecution. Of those cases, only 202 (11

percent) had achieved a meaningful resolution with accountability for the suspect.

Almost half of the cases were not filed and almost half of the cases that were filed

remained pending (most with outstanding bench warrants because the defendant

In September 2018, Uwajimaya virtually stopped reporting any theft cases through the

Retail Theft Program for nine months.

Meanwhile, for Downtown Seattle, organizations from the public safety survey

reported that crime has gotten significantly worse for them in the past three years.

Indeed, person-crime numbers (robbery, assault, etc.) increased 43 percent from 2016

to 2018. But theft reports (principally driven by retail reporting through the Retail

Theft Program) showed only a one percent increase over the same period. As a result,

The bulk of daily police work is responding to calls for service from the public or

proactively “on-viewing” criminal activity, investigating those incidents, and then

writing police incident reports for misdemeanor crimes.

involved, the police will often take

between 1-3 hours interviewing witnesses,

collecting evidence (e.g., video of the

incident, weapons used or merchandise

In total, officers complete approximately 12,000 misdemeanor non-traffic police

reports per year, but less than one-third (~4,000) of those ever result in a meaningful

Officers are well-aware of the extreme impact of some prolific offenders, but also

know that the criminal justice system will do little to support them if they make an

arrest.

an armful of stolen goods, the officer also dealt with a woman in crisis yelling threats

at people walking by and then got called to break up a nearby fight.

would have precluded booking at

King County Jail.

Back at the West Precinct, the

officer completed a multi-page

departments in the Seattle area.

“crisis” and stated: “Officers need to hear that the work they do is valued. We are

https://durkan.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2019/09/SPDRecrRetain_Report_vFinal.pdf

Interview on King 5 News, August 2019.

Filing delays and slow case speeds mean individuals struggling with homelessness and

behavioral health issues are often trapped in a repeat cycle in the criminal justice

system. According to King County Jail Health, 45 percent of all bookings into King

County Jail in 2017 were of homeless individuals.

In total, homeless individuals were

booked into the jail 16,173 times that year. The great majority of those bookings

were of individuals who were booked multiple times during the year. Of the

approximately 12,000 homeless individuals in King County, two-thirds live in Seattle,

so it is probable that significantly more than 50 percent of all Seattle police jail

individuals with serious behavioral health issues.

According to the Seattle Municipal Court, there are approximately 7,500 failure-to-

appear bench warrants outstanding for criminal non-traffic cases. In fact, 65 percent

of individuals fail to appear at their initial court intake hearing, triggering warrants.

There is no breakout of the “failure to appear rate” for vulnerable individuals

County Jail data and estimating that roughly half of Seattle Municipal Court warrants

relate to individuals suffering from homelessness and/or behavioral health issues,

would lead to a rough estimate of 3,750 warrants outstanding for this population. The

Seattle Municipal Court did conduct an analysis of 168 prolific offenders in the

misdemeanor criminal justice system—most of whom did fit the

homelessness/behavioral health profile. For that sample population, 76 percent

“Estimates of Homeless Individuals Served by Public Health’s Jail Health Services and Health Care for

“Approaches to Addressing Needs of High Barrier Individuals at Seattle Municipal Court,” SMC Report

to the High-Barrier Individual Working Group, May 2019.

not actively search for persons with low-level warrants, they do run warrant checks

when they encounter individuals on other matters.

For example, in July 2017, Brian M., a homeless man with mental health issues was

transported to Harborview after being assaulted. After being treated by doctors

Brian had no further jail bookings or misdemeanor cases in Seattle over the next 18

months. Eighteen months later, in January 2019, the City Attorney’s Office filed an

assault charge against him for the Harborview incident. A summons was issued to an

address where he does not live or receive mail. He did not show for his court

appearance, and Seattle Municipal Court issued a “no PR” (no personal recognizance)

bench warrant. That means the next time Brian encounters Seattle Police and they

Another example is the case of Robert L., who stole Star Wars and Pokemon action-

figures from a drug store on August 18, 2017. Robert was identified as homeless and

his medical condition suggested

a substance-use disorder.

Seattle police told him they

would request charges but were

releasing him at the scene

the report and transmitted it to

the City Attorney’s Office the

same day. (See excerpt of

police report at right.)

For Robert and Brian and other

individuals struggling with homelessness

and behavioral health issues, responding

to cases from criminal incidents that

occurred a year or more earlier is

impossible for all practical purposes.

That means they are more likely to get

In short, vulnerable individuals who are involved in misdemeanor criminal activities

are plainly unable to navigate Seattle’s criminal justice system. This leads to results

that compound the troubles in their lives – cycles of arrest-incarceration-release with

obligations that they cannot manage.

The System Failure reports are an attempt to force a conversation about the

undeclared crisis in Seattle’s criminal justice system. Data from the principal

participants in that system show that it churns through thousands of non-traffic

misdemeanor cases every year but produces few meaningful resolutions and even

fewer successful behavioral interventions.

It bears repeating: in many instances the criminal justice system may not be the

appropriate place to resolve underlying issues that are often the root causes of

criminal activity. Seattle is a national leader when it comes to developing innovative

approaches for people struggling with behavioral health disorders. These approaches

should complement and be integrated into a functioning criminal justice system.

Seattle can and must do better.

disclosure requests. Because Seattle’s municipal criminal justice system relies on

three separate arms of government, all with their own data sets, it has historically

been difficult to understand how the system is performing.

Indeed, this is the first

report in Seattle that attempts to analyze large sets of criminal cases from incidents

Some of the data sets used in the report cover different time periods. In order to

examine the dispositions of cases filed by the City Attorney’s Office, I principally

examined data reports from 2017 in order to allow time for those cases to reach

resolution. In order to get a timely sense of incident reporting trends, I looked at data

Lack of transparency within municipal criminal justice systems is a widespread problem that has

garnered increased national attention in the past five years. See

The only other report to conduct a large-scale data examination of misdemeanor cases was issued in

delays. See Jackie Helfgott, et. al. Trends in Misdemeanors Arrests, Referrals, & Charges in Seattle

(Oct. 2018).