Seizure disorder: Seattle's "drug nuisance abatement" program is a menace to law-abiding property owners - Column

Reason, March, 1999 by Michelle Malkin

Wesley: "It may well be that one can't run that business in that location. Maybe that's the answer.... Pig farms make a good living for people, but in our community we don't let there be a pig farm."

Pig farms may be illegal in Seattle, but licensed, taxpaying, family-owned taverns such as Uncle John's and Oscar's II are not. These businesses have employed dozens of people, served hundreds of loyal customers, contributed to cultural diversity, generated property tax revenue, put kids through college, and provided retirement nest eggs. Clayton's entire savings were invested in his tavern. Now the 64-year-old former businessman works as a janitor at the Kingdome to make ends meet.

Attorney Richard Shepard of the Tacoma-based Northwest Legal Foundation, a property rights advocacy group, wonders "if the Seattle Parks Department was unable to control drug trafficking in Freeway Park, whether the city would sue the Parks Department for abatement." No such cases against publicly owned drug hotspots such as Freeway Park, Cowen Park, the Kingdome, or the King County Courthouse have been filed by Sidran to date.

Etta Mae Franklin, Rose Ervin, Mae Fosha, Preston Scott Sr., Westerton Currie, Dean Falls, Oscar McCoy, and John Clayton have two things in common: They were all targets of drug abatement by City Attorney Mark Sidran, and they all happen to be black. Sidran emphasizes that his aggressive abatement campaign "is not about race" but about reducing crime. Yet the Seattle Police Department reported in August that the number of gang-related drug arrests in the city skyrocketed from 168 in 1992 to 397 in 1997.

Sidran dismisses community concerns about racism as "too fantastic." Yet of the 28 cases I was able to review through public records requests or through the King County Courthouse, all but five involved black homeowners or black small-business owners. Only one out of the 28 involved a white property owner. In other words, Sidran lodged 96 percent of these drug abatement cases against minorities in a city where minorities make up roughly 25 percent of the population.

Moreover, of the cases I reviewed and mapped out, nearly 90 percent were located in the Central District and Rainier Valley areas. The city might reasonably argue that drug abatement cases are concentrated in these neighborhoods, where most of Seattle's black residents live, because that is where most drug crimes occur. The data that would be needed to back up that explanation - drug arrest figures broken down by neighborhood or precinct - are not available from the Seattle Police Department.

But a comparison of other law enforcement statistics for 1997 shows that black neighborhoods do not account for a disproportionate share of the city's other major crimes. In fact, the predominantly white West Precinct reported twice as many thefts as the predominantly black East Precinct and substantially more robberies, assaults, and auto thefts. All are crimes associated with drug activity. Given these data, it's reasonable to expect a far more even distribution of drug abatements between the two precincts than the pattern that seems to be emerging. Questioned on this point, the Seattle Police Department does not have an explanation for the discrepancy.