PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Attorney Candidate Rory O'Sullivan

O'Sullivan is challenging one-term City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle's Republican city attorney, Ann Davison, ran unsuccessfully for state and local office twice before defeating abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy in 2021. Davison said she became a Republican in 2020, during the first Trump administration. Now, she wants to continue directing the city's legal branch during Trump's second term.

The city attorney's office will decide whether, and how hard, to fight federal efforts to track down undocumented immigrants and their families, and weigh those decisions against the potential loss of federal funds that help pay for things like housing, transportation, and human services. Whoever wins the position will also have to advise a very green city council on legislation, defend the city in police misconduct lawsuits, and decide how and whether to prosecute a maze of new laws designed to crack down on drug users, sex workers, and people living.

Election reform and tenant advocate Rory O'Sullivan says he's the best fit to lead the city attorney's office through these uncertain times. A former managing director at the Housing Justice Project, democracy voucher enthusiast, and onetime candidate for state senate, O'Sullivan now runs his own law firm helping primarily low-income people get the unemployment benefits they're owed. He also helped create the city's public election funding program and served on the commission that redrew Seattle's city council districts.

I sat down with O'Sullivan in Columbia City last month. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola [ECB]: We haven't talked in a long time—maybe since you were seeking the 37th District seat. So tell me a bit about why you’re interested in this position.

Rory O'Sullivan [RO]: I think the city attorney's office has an opportunity to do a lot of good things, and I've been really disappointed in the direction that that current city attorney is taking things. The office has an opportunity to work with the Seattle Municipal Court on therapeutic court options instead of closing down community court, as Ann Davison has done. They have an opportunity to negotiate contracts with the jails to ensure that jails are providing appropriate services so that when somebody is released, they're going to be in a better position to succeed.

The city attorney's office also has an opportunity to do really good enforcement of some of Seattle's wage ordinances. The way Seattle's labor laws are enforced is that we have the Office of Labor Standards, and they do the investigation, and they have an enforcement opportunity. But when an employer is resistant, the case gets referred to the city attorney's office for litigation.

I think that Office of Labor Standards just doesn't want to refer cases over, because they're worried that the city attorney is not going to handle it properly, because Ann Davison has questioned the those attorneys on the positions that they've taken against employers. [I would make] sure that the folks at the Office of Labor Standards have confidence that the city attorney is going to take these cases seriously. I think just an immediate change of philosophy at the top is going to change a lot of things pretty quickly.

ECB: What are some of the policies that Ann Davison has put into place in her time at the city attorney’s office that you would want to reverse?

RO: Ann Davison closed down community court. I would want to reinstate therapeutic court options to ensure that we're giving folks the services that they need to avoid interacting with criminal legal system in the future and reduce recidivism.

ECB: Community court is very easy to end. You just refuse to send cases there. It doesn't have any cases. It shuts down. It seems harder to reopen and fund again from scratch.

RO: What Judge [Damon] Shadid and [former city attorney] Pete Holmes set up before is, they had gotten grant funding. They had partnerships with Seattle-King County Public Health. All of that infrastructure is there and there are still grants that you can apply for. Obviously, it would be a lot better if you had partners in the city council and the mayoral administration who were on board with it as well. And yes, it'll absolutely take time. It's not something that you can just snap your fingers and make happen. But I think there are opportunities there.

ECB: What’s the next item on your list?

RO: Ensuring that the office is appropriately spending resources on things like DUI and DV prosecution. Right now, the office is way behind on DUI prosecutions. There are multiple cases where somebody has been arrested for DUI, the case has been referred to the city attorney's office, the city attorney's office sits on it, and then the person reoffends. So we are being put in danger, our public safety is worse off, because the current city attorney is prosecuting protesters and spending resources on other things that don't improve public safety.

ECB: A lot of Ann Davison's priorities are law now, like the “stay out” areas for drugs and prostitution and the law allowing police to arrest people for using drugs in public How will you unwind those priorities, given that those laws are on the books?

RO: One of the things that makes the city attorney position a powerful position is you have prosecutorial discretion. When Pete Holmes came into office, he immediately dismissed every single marijuana possession case that the city had, and he did not file any new ones. So as the city attorney, you can decide what you're going to prosecute and where you're not going to prosecute. If there are statutes that you think are not a good use of the city's resources, you do not have to pursue those cases.

ECB: Can you talk a little bit about which kind of cases you wouldn't pursue?

RO: This is something that I need to learn about a lot more. I'm not going to say that I'm definitely going to dismiss all of “X” kind of case. What I can say is that I would want to take a much, much more measured approach. I wouldn't have spent a lot of time and effort on the Stay Out of [Areas of] Prostitution [law]. And particularly if you have somebody who lives in the [SOAP] area, or who receives services in the area, there is absolutely no way I would prosecute, because that's where the services that they need are located. I'm not going to say that I would never use these laws, but it would be something that would have to be examined a lot more closely than just “let’s use these laws to get rid of people.”

ECB: Is there any legislation that you would want to be proactive on supporting or proposing to the city council?

RO: There’s definitely legislation at the state level. Getting accountability measures out of the police contracts is really important. I don't have a list of [local] bills that I know that I would want to jump into. One thing that I can say is that the current city attorney has been really active in proposing legislation and policy, way more so than the previous city attorney. And I would love for the city attorney's office to be proactively helping progressive members of the city council move legislation forward.

ECB: City Attorney Davison took action early on to prosecute so-called “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system, on the theory that dealing with the people who commit the most street-level crimes, like shoplifting and trespassing, will make a huge dent in overall crime and disorder. What’s your take on that approach?

RO: One of the main problems is what we mean by “deal with people,” right? So, sure, you arrest, prosecute, and they're in jail for maybe 90 days, and you have not solved the problem at all At the King County Prosecutor's Office, they're using a therapeutic court-type philosophy in terms of trying to understand the circumstance of each of those individuals and what they need to not be [stuck in] the cycle. So just negotiating bed space at the jail is not an effective way of trying to clean up downtown. We need to be figuring out what resources are needed for the people who are cycling through the criminal legal system.

ECB: The things you’re talking about involve creating new programs or adding funds for existing ones, like the LEAD diversion program, which isn’t necessarily a top priority of the current city council and mayor. How are you going to approach the challenge of convincing the mayor and council that some of the things that you want to do are good ideas that need funding?

RO: As the city attorney, I have the opportunity to say, here's a program that could really improve the city, here's the funding that's necessary, and to put it in front of the council by having the progressive members of the council introduce it. [That would] put the more moderate members of the City Council in a position where they have to vote against something that's really popular and is evidence based. It’s building the support for it, building the constituency for it, and then putting it in front of the council members and saying, Okay, go ahead and vote it down. But you see the support that this program has. You see the good that it can do. I think it's a matter of putting them in that position.

ECB: Ann Davison has advocated for opening more jail beds for people who commit misdemeanors like drug use and shoplifting, and her efforts have been successful—the city now has access to more beds at the downtown county jail and at SCORE. Do you support this approach?

RO: I'm a lot more concerned about what the conditions are like at the jail itself. I think that's an opportunity to say, what if we have fewer beds, but we ensure that there are better services for the people who are there? And then the other piece of it is making sure that we're using every other option that's available first. So whether it's at-home monitoring for DUIs, whether it's interlock devices—when somebody is going through the criminal legal system, we have a range of options other than jail that are often much more effective and less likely to put the person in a worse position.

ECB: People are being arrested right now for buying and using drugs in public, and they just end up moving around from place to place. There’s a lot of support for that approach from the mayor and city council. Will you be able to change those priorities or alter how the city deals with people using and selling drugs in public?

RO: There’s many cities that have had to deal with so-called open-air drug markets, and in the times and places where those situations have been dealt with effectively, it's been a situation that has required the entire community. So it's identifying who the sellers are. It's identifying who influences those people. It's identifying what are their needs, what are the local businesses’ needs? What are the other community partners and service providers who are working in that physical space?

RO: I mean, I do think it's important to disrupt the market. I don't think it's okay to have an open air drug market on Third and Pine. But I also don't think that Stay Out of Drug Areas is going to be an effective policy, other than just moving it to somewhere else. What I think is going to be an effective policy is really doing the multi-agency, in-depth investigation and community work to try to disrupt the markets, but also to ensure that the market creators have other opportunities before you arrest. Yes, arresting might be required at some point, but arresting is the option that you hold in case the other strategies aren't working. So it's not never arresting, but it's using all the strategies that you have available.

ECB: Ann Davison is a Republican. What concerns should people have about reelecting her during the second Trump administration?

RO: Trump has been crystal clear, many times, over what he plans to do, which is mass deportation. And I have no doubt that he's going to use whatever tools he has. and he's going to try to get state and local governments to use their resources to help him. Fortunately, we have a governor and an attorney general and a state legislature who have started preparing to make sure that doesn't happen. But when we have a Republican sitting in the city attorney's office, who ran as Republican when Trump was in office, I am really worried that this is somebody who's not going to stand up and fight against the use of city resources to enact Trump's policies.

ECB: So if you’re elected, what are you going to do to help resist those policies, particularly deportations?

RO: The first thing is going to be doing everything within your legal capacity to ensure that city resources are not used for this, that the city is not cooperating with this. Having a legal team that's ready to take him on when he does something like that is going to be really important But until we see exactly how it plays out, it's difficult to know.

ECB: If you’re elected, you’ll have to defend the city on policies you may disagree with. How are you going to handle that?

RO: It's something that's absolutely required of the position. Now, there are certain circumstances in which you do have discretion. So for instance, when Pete Holmes was city attorney, he was like, if you have an issue with the city, let's work on it. And then there's other situations in which you might negotiate a settlement. I mean, there's just all kind of different ways to handle a given issue. But when somebody sues the city, it's the city attorney's obligation to defend that.

The city attorney also has an opportunity to put into practice policies to try to prevent harm from occurring and prevent those lawsuits from happening in the future, [like] negotiating a better contract with police officers guild to ensure that there's accountability measures and that those accountability measures are enforced, so that we don’t have so many lawsuits against the police. But when misconduct occurs, it is absolutely the obligation of the city attorney's office to defend those suits, and as the attorney, I would do that.