SEATTLE'S WAR ON DRUGS HAS PRIORITIES MIXED UP

ALL across this city, from the University District to West Seattle, there
are homeowners pleading with police to clean up local drug hot spots in
their neighborhoods. Young families feel like hostages in their own homes.
Parents forbid their children from playing in their own yards.

Despite glowing rhetoric about the success of community policing, top
law-enforcement officials have proved unable or unwilling to combat
drug-dealing in an efficient manner. The apparent drug-related shooting at
Cowen Park last week underscored an embarrassing failure of city government
to respond to our communities' basic public-safety needs. One police officer
told The Times, "The kind of crimes that occur in Cowen Park just aren't
high on our priority list." Others blamed a lack of resources.

Sound familiar?

Those were the same lame excuses tavern owners Oscar and Barbara McCoy heard
when they called police to report suspected criminal activity in their
Central District neighborhood. When the McCoys complained that the Seattle
Police Department didn't respond quickly enough, Seattle drug-abatement
officer Linda Diaz retorted that they were "not as big a priority" and that
there weren't "enough resources to go around to baby-sit places."

Every resident of Seattle deserves to be free and safe from destructive and
disruptive illegal drug crime. But is the city waging a cost-effective war
on drugs? Or is it presiding over a gross misallocation of public funds that
cheats beleaguered citizens in all corners of the city?

Instead of arresting drug dealers in public parks and streets, City Attorney
Mark Sidran and the Seattle Police Department have focused their energies on
taking away private property from people like the McCoys. As Sidran
explained in a recent deposition: "When you're confronting a recurring,
repetitive, long-standing problem, at some point . . . you begin to think
about draining the swamp instead of constantly chasing the alligators down
one by one."

The city's favorite "swamp"-draining tool is the 1988 drug-nuisance
abatement law. The measure was passed to make it easier for law enforcement
to clear out drug dens. In some areas of Washington, the law is being used
as intended. A model example was the February 1990 closure of a crack house
operated by a Cuban gang in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood. The closure
resulted in the arrest of 28 members of the infamous Marielitos crime ring.
Another model case, filed by King County, involved a home located north of
Seattle whose owners operated a drug ring; they were arrested for multiple
heroin sales.

Here in Seattle, by contrast, the law appears to be used primarily against
law-abiding citizens. Of approximately 100 total cases brought by Sidran
since 1990, roughly two-thirds are inaccessible because of open-records
rules or administrative reasons. Of 36 cases open to the public, 8 are
archived and could not be obtained in time for this column. The remaining 28
raise troubling questions about the city's energetic application of the law:
Is the drug-abatement law working as intended in the city of Seattle? Is it
reducing drug crime? And is the law being applied in a race-neutral manner?

Most of the 28 drug-abatement cases I reviewed have been filed against
people never charged, accused, suspected of, or arrested for any criminal
activity. None were brought to clean up such conspicuous, publicly owned
drug magnets as Cowen Park, Freeway Park, or the streets outside the King
County Courthouse. Only one was filed against a white person. Twenty-three
were filed against blacks, and four were filed against Asians or Hispanics.
In other words, Sidran lodged 96 percent of these drug-abatement cases
against minorities in a city where minorities comprise 25 percent of the
population.

Nearly 90 percent of these 28 cases were located in just two neighborhoods:
the Central District and Rainier Valley. The city might reasonably argue
that there are a high number of drug-abatement cases concentrated in these
areas, where most of Seattle's black residents live, because that is where
most drug crimes occur. SPD does not currently provide narcotics arrest data
broken down by geographic area or precinct. However, a comparison of other
law-enforcement statistics in the East and West Precincts in 1997 shows that
the Central District, which is in the East Precinct, is not responsible for
most of the city's other major crimes.

In fact, the West Precinct reported twice as many thefts as the East
Precinct and substantially more robberies, assaults and auto thefts. All are
crimes associated with drug activity. Given that data, it's reasonable to
expect a far more even distribution of drug-abatement cases between the two
precincts than the disturbing pattern that seems to be emerging.

Can the city claim that its efforts are at least reducing organized
drug-crime rings in those areas? No. The number of gang-related narcotics
arrests in the city skyrocketed from 168 in 1992 to 397 last year.

The city's law-enforcement strategies are out of whack. Spending huge sums
to push the city's drug problems from one "swamp" to another is
ineffective - and fraught with dangers to both civil and property rights.

Take it from Lindsay Thompson, a Seattle attorney who served as deputy
prosecuting attorney for Cowlitz County and handled 300 drug felony cases.
"Sidran's swamp analogy is faulty," says Thompson, who happens to live just
a few blocks from Oscar's II.

"The last thing we as servants in law enforcement should be doing is
destroying the village to save it."

Checked-by: Don Beck