This is the first of a two-part review of 2024. This article looks at citizen efforts to correct the mistakes made by politicians on crime and drug issues. Next week we will post our thoughts on why our region continues to lose the battle on the homeless crisis.

As we look back on 2024, Washington residents at the state and local levels, continue to correct the mistakes politicians and activists pushed through during the 2020-2021 Covid lockdown. These measures caused record-breaking violent crime incidents, and deadly drug overdoses.

Since the passage of anti-police measures by the 2021 Washington State Legislature, local officials expressed deep concerns over restrictions placed on police pursuits of suspected criminals. Democrat Senator Manka Dhingra used her power as the Chair of the Law & Justice Committee during both the 2022 and 2023 legislative sessions to stop efforts to overturn the law that allowed suspects to drive away from crime scenes.

Exasperated by politicians’ inability to pass corrective legislation, citizen-led efforts enacted a few commonsense solutions to slightly alleviate the state’s public safety and drug crises.

More than 430,000 frustrated Washington voters signed Initiative 2113 (one of six Let’s Go Washington initiatives, which collected enough signatures to be sent to the state legislature as we started 2024), which removed many of the restrictions preventing police officers from detaining and questioning potential criminals. To the relief of law enforcement and anti-crime activists, the legislature decided to pass this citizens’ initiative, which allowed police officers to again do their job.

2024 brought six new members to the Seattle City Council after voters clearly rejected failed progressive policies in the November 2023 elections. Voters instead supported the new members who favored a more moderate approach to solving the city’s many problems.

While the current Seattle City Council still remains on the far Left on the national political scale, the current members have demonstrated they are less likely to cave into radical protestors’ demands than their Kshama Sawant-led predecessors. Outgoing councilmember Tammy Morales remains the only extremist from the previous council (she announced her resignation in early December complaining the new council won’t let her pass her extremist laws).

As result of this philosophical change, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison finally has a city council willing to make tough decisions to fight crime. She successfully passed two key pieces of legislation that sought to combat drugs (“Stay Out of Drug Areas” — known as SODA zones) and prostitution/sex trafficking (“Stay Out of Area of Prostitution” or SOAP). While Davison admits that neither will permanently solve the issues, their passage reveals a significant change from the previous council, which nearly always sought relief for those committing crimes.

While the council, led by Council President Sara Nelson, has made some progress on a few public safety issues, Mayor Bruce Harrell has been very slow to act.  After being in office for over two years, he finally held his first public safety forum last spring, where the mayor spent much of the limited time talking about playing football for the Washington Huskies and his granddaughters, instead of staying focused on crime issues.

Next week we will conclude our 2024 review by looking at efforts to reduce homelessness and a brief look forward at the 2025 political calendar.