The City Attorney’s Office has published a report for its criminal division Q2/2022 activities, as required by the Seattle City Council. It contains a wealth of information about cases, referrals, decisions as to whether to file charges, use of alternative programs, and demographic profiles. The City Attorney’s Office has also reconstructed historical data for many of these statistics, casting new light on the work of some of her predecessors.
City Attorney Davison has instituted a policy where case filing decisions are to be made quickly. Apparently this has had interesting downstream repercussions, as many victims and witnesses are lose interest in seeing the case go forward if a long period of time passes between the incident and prosecution of the case. Davison connects this with a rise in the percentage of cases that are filed — simply because they have the testimony they need to move the cases forward.
The City Attorney’s Office has dramatically increased the use of community court and mental health court, though it has not increased pre-file and pre-trial diversion.
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