I moved from a small town in Kansas to Seattle when I was 18, right after I graduated high school. I was shocked by a lot of things, like the hills, but one of the most surprising things was learning the Seattle Police Department’s approach to handling drug dealers.
The police identified drug dealers in the Central District of Seattle in undercover operations and placed them into two different categories: high-risk offenders with a violent history, weapon offenses, or high-volume deals and then low-risk offenders with no violent criminal history. More from The Seattle PI:
[King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg] announced an opportunity police and prosecutors in Seattle had never given in a community meeting: Stop dealing drugs and you won’t get prosecuted. Interim Seattle Police Chief John Diaz, had written a letter last week to the dealers. He promised that if they showed at the Central District meeting they would not be arrested and repeated that promise again Thursday.
“We want to see something different happen, and I hope this will be a chance for you to take a different path,” Diaz told the suspected dealers. “This is not a joke, and it’s not a threat. You’re here because people really care about you.”
But authorities were clear: If the dealers didn’t immediately stop all criminal activity, the binders would become evidence for the state and the drug dealers could go to prison. Police talked to family members or friends of the low-risk offenders to help. They were also offered community support and social services after police collected evidence of their suspected drug activity. Police said some of the 16 candidates may know gang members, but have no gang affiliation.
It would be really easy to look at it and say, fuck those no good drug dealers, but we’ve done that for decades and look where it has gotten us. The police could just keep locking the dealers up and sending them through the cycle again and again and there wouldn’t be any skin off of their back, but the progressive thinking by the police is beautiful to see.
It’s like when your kids ask you about drugs. If you lie and say weed is going to kill you and make you crazy and then your kid uses it and finds out you lied to them, they might assume to lied to them about heroin too. You shouldn’t smoke weed when you’re a kid for the same reason you shouldn’t drink: because you’re not ready to make that decision. But if you don’t give the reasons why and act closed door and black and white about everything you end up with your education coming from a scummy friend you meet in high school or college.
As the video above showed, the approach by the SPD is one that the people close to drug addicts have been asking for. Sure the addicts made a mistake, but who doesn’t make mistakes? Just because you haven’t made that mistake doesn’t mean you wouldn’t if you had lived their life.
The experiment is called LEAD- Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion. More details from PBS:
Launched in 2011, LEAD gives police officers the discretion to either arrest low-level drug offenders, or divert them to counseling, social services or treatment.
“We could not incarcerate people or arrest our way out of the problem,” Mills tells FRONTLINE.
Obviously, the initial approach to the drug war has failed miserably, so what does the SPD have to lose with this approach? Nothing! If it does fail at least they treated the addicts they would want to be treated if they were in their shoes.