Council Can't Wait to Vote "Hell Yes" on Bills Cracking Down on Graffiti and "Nuisance" Bars and Clubs

It all feels very familiar.

Graffiti in Belltown

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council discussed two new laws this week that will, if passed, give the city new powers to crack down on nightclubs and graffiti—although the impact of the latter is very much in question, given that the police department currently refers only a few dozen cases to the City Attorney's Office for prosecution every year.

The graffiti proposal, which PubliCola reported on when it was introduced, would fine taggers $1,000 per “graffiti violation,” defined in the proposal as “a single piece of graffiti, including but not limited to a graffiti tagger name or design, in a single location."

Under state law, graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail, or (if the graffiti causes more than $750 in damage) a felony, so the new local law would add an additional penalty. The new fines would be cumulative, so the cost to prolific taggers could add up quickly.

The city already spends several million dollars a year on graffiti abatement. The money, part of Mayor Bruce Harrell's "One Seattle Graffiti Plan," pays for 11 full-time city staffers (including two new positions added last year), including seven "Graffiti Rangers," and a contract with Uplift Northwest to remove graffiti.

Previewing the legislation at a meeting of the council's public safety committee this week, City Attorney Ann Davison said fining prolific taggers would serve as a deterrent and help ensure "that our city is known as a place of order," particularly in preparation for next year's FIFA World Cup games, when people driving through Seattle might be endangered by graffiti along I-5, "where you maybe can't read the exits that you're trying to safely take."

The taggers whose cases SPD has referred to her office, Davison continued, aren't "lost young people" but "fully functioning, employed adults, oftentimes," most of them white men. "Oftentimes, these are people that have strategically engaged in this activity for a long time, and again, looking to increase their social reputation and notoriety by damaging our property and costing us millions of dollars," Davison said.

Davison declined to say how much, if anything, the city expects to take in from fining taggers $1,000 per tag. (The legislation would also allow people to do graffiti abatement work for the city in lieu of fines). But her deputy, Scott Lindsay, said the city attorney's office has already identified 20 or so people it plans to pursue based on their social media posts, and believes they'll have more success imposing fines because civil cases have a lower standard of proof than criminal cases.

"The initial goal really is focused on those top 20 or so graffiti taggers ... most of whom have already been identified" and bringing cases against them, Lindsay said, in order to "create the deterrence effect at the top and let that filter down."

The proposed legislation would also allow the city attorney's office to bring civil cases, and impose fines, on anyone who "assists or encourages" another person who violates graffiti laws. According to council staff analysis, the point of this provision is to empower Davison's office to ”seek restitution and penalties from on-line graffiti promoters, who incentivize tagging and publish graffiti on Instagram."

Council President Sara Nelson, who said she's eager to vote "hell yes" on the legislation, said she expected the potential for fines to deter taggers from doing so in the future. After all, she said, "how many of us don't speed because of the ticket we might get?"

Nelson was also enthusiastic about another bill the public safety committee discussed this week—an amendment to the city's existing "chronic nuisance property" ordinance that would dramatically expand the city's power to fine or shut down businesses by holding them responsible for activity that takes place "in proximity" to the business (a term that is undefined), and adding alcohol violations in or around a business to the list of activities that could enable the city to shut a business down.

Could the legislation be used, Nelson asked Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to target businesses like the McDonald's at Third and Pine, where people have historically congregated to buy and sell drugs?

Yes, Burgess responded, the new law would allow police to target people using or buying drugs near any property, as long as the Seattle Police Department could demonstrate that the people were "associated with" the property (a term that the bill analysis interprets to mean customers or patrons) and that there was some "nexus" between the property and the drug activity (a term that is not defined).

Burgess—who as a city councilmember, fought fiercely for a bill that would have criminalized "aggressive panhandling" by people he characterized as "street thugs"—assured the council that the city would use their new powers judiciously. "We answered [stakeholders'] concerns about enforcement by pointing to the history of the [nuisance] ordinance being used only 17 times in 16 years," Burgess said.

But by expanding the ordinance to hold businesses liable for what happens on other people's properties, or on nearbt streets and sidewalks, the ordinance is explicitly designed to increase that number.

The expansion to offsite does represent a significant expansion of the city's authority," the council's central staff director, Ben Noble, told the committee. "I think there's there's no question about that, and there really is a question of whether the due process measures that are in place are sufficient to balance the interest of the property owners and the interest of the public."

Committee chair Bob Kettle said the ordinance is necessary to reduce gun violence outside nightclubs. Committee vice chairman Rob Saka said he had been working on similar legislation on his own but Mayor Bruce Harrell beat him to it, and asked to be added as a cosponsor until Kettle reminded him that he was already cosponsoring the bill.