Tacoma’s mayor agrees with the county prosecutor about crime — but it’s not that simple
There are the disagreements we have, and then there are the ways we find to fight about them.
There are the real issues at the root of our oft-noted and increasing polarization, and then there are the manufactured broad-stroke battles we’re drawn into waging because of them, which are almost always dumbed-down conflicts that end up tearing us further apart.
These observations aren’t mine, it should be noted. Instead, they’re a lay columnist’s takeaways from a recent Washington Post opinion piece by Amanda Ripley, a podcast host and author who’s written about the ways we get trapped in conflict. News Tribune editor Adam Lynn shared Ripley’s column on Twitter the other day, calling the piece “insightful.” While I shudder at the prospect of inflating his ego, he had a point.
Relying on a newly published report from the nonprofit More in Common — Defusing the History Wars: Finding Common Ground in Teaching America’s National Story — one of the conclusions in Ripley’s column as straightforward as they come: “Right now, American parents, politicians and educators are having the wrong fights with the wrong people about the wrong things.”
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that for most reasonable people alive in the year 2022 — particularly if they’re online — the assessment likely feels at least vaguely familiar. While Ripley’s column dissects the heated debate over the teaching of U.S. history in our schools, the analysis could be applied to any number of current partisan fractures. Immigration. Inflation. Climate change and abortion. There are the disagreements the majority of us actually have on these issues — the kinds of nuanced differences that sometimes emerge around family dinner tables or among friends with contrasting views — and then the ways those disagreements manifest into something completely different and useless in the collective civic dialogue: tribal political warfare.
This tension — between the arguments we have and the arguments we should be having — was on my mind this week during a conversation with Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards. Recently, Pierce County Prosecutor Mary Robnett and a host of area mayors, 15 in total, sent a strongly worded letter to our local legislative delegation regarding two much-discussed issues: police pursuits and the de facto legalization of hard drugs that resulted from the state Supreme Court’s Blake decision (and the Legislature’s response to the ruling). The letter calls for a repeal of the 2021 state law that prohibits many police pursuits and the re-criminalization of drugs. Both are familiar refrains; last summer, a group of south King County mayors made a similar plea.
In Pierce County’s version of the letter, Woodards’ signature was absent. According to a spokesperson for her office, Tacoma’s mayor was made aware of the letter and afforded the opportunity to sign on to the effort, but she declined, at least in part because the council she leads has not taken a formal position on either issue. I was curious to hear more about the mayor’s thinking. I also knew a good number of people would be instantly upset by her decision.
While it will surely come as a surprise to some of her most fevered critics, Woodards said she agrees with Robnett — but it’s not that simple. She supports the prosecutor’s call to allow for more police pursuits, at least in certain cases, and believes the state’s current drug possession laws need to be revisited.
“I would have liked to have made some minor changes (to the letter), but because I was kind of the last one to get back to (Robnett), it was too late to make any edits. So I just didn’t sign on,” Woodards said. “Sometimes when you’re trying to fix a lot of issues, you can go too far. Or you can think one thing will work and it doesn’t. I think that’s what happened here.”
Let me stop here to explain a little bit more about why I was interested in talking to Woodards about all of this: As a progressive mayor in a city with a firm liberal base, she’s twice been elected by comfortable margins. Woodards enjoys broad political support in Tacoma, but it’s also not hard to find detractors. Often, criticisms of Woodards — at least from more conservative constituents — center on a belief that she’s soft on crime and nonchalant about criminal activity. In other words, she’s just like all those other liberals, putting the concerns of criminals above law-abiding people. Whether it has anything to do with it or not, she’s also a powerful Black woman.
At the same time, both of the issues referenced in Robnett’s letter — police pursuits and the decriminalization of drugs — have come to embody a much deeper and more complicated civic debate over what law enforcement currently looks like and what we want it to be, particularly as it relates to the policing of communities of color. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the country was forced to grapple with a big question: How do we acknowledge and address the history of racial bias in law enforcement and transform an entrenched system without jeopardizing public safety? We were right to engage in this work, but as is so often the case, we’ve allowed ourselves to be drawn into shouting matches, distractions and mischaracterizations of “the other side” in the process.
The statewide debate over police pursuits and the criminalization of drugs are perfect examples of these tendencies. There’s little doubt both issues deserve our attention, and Robnett’s letter was justified. Still, the litmus test quality we’ve ascribed to them in public discourse, beyond the policy makers — you’re either with us or against us — is toxic and destructive. What if I told you it’s possible to land somewhere in the middle, and that’s OK? What if I told you we’ve allowed an important societal reckoning to get hijacked by hot-button, politically motivated distractions that feel like what we should be arguing about, but really aren’t?
As it turns out, this gray area — the squishy space between knowing things have to change and acknowledging that it won’t be easy or perfect — is where Woodards actually lands, not that being wishy-washy is always an advantageous territory for a politician to inhabit, at least when it comes to crime. Asked about police pursuits, Woodards noted that Tacoma police have long had a policy similar to the current state law limiting pursuit, and she believes the policy has been effective and helped keep the community safe. But she also said the situation in other places is different, and that a well-meaning law has clearly had unintended negative consequences.
Woodards’ stance on the criminalization of drugs walks a similar line, which she readily admitted is likely unsatisfying to those looking for easy, clear-cut solutions to a complex problem. She believes addiction is a public health problem that shouldn’t be addressed through the criminal justice system, and that arresting and charging people for possession does more harm than good. But at the same time, she can look at the situation on our streets — where the blatant use of drugs appears more prevalent than ever and cops feel helpless to do anything other than issue weak referrals to social services providers — and see that what we’re currently doing isn’t the answer.
Most of all, Woodards reflected on how much is lost when our public debates turn black and white.
“I think we’re wrong to point all of our current issues around policing just to those two state laws. When we do, we’re not talking about the mental health of our community coming through COVID. We’re not talking about the depths of desperation, the loss of hope, and all of those other things that COVID has put on people. We’re not talking about the national movement and the national recognition of what has been happening to people of color, as far as their interactions with police,” Woodards said. “So it’s kind of like all of these things have come to a head at once, and people are pointing at these couple of changes in state laws as the answer, but I don’t believe that to be true.”
So what is the answer?
One thing seems certain: It almost certainly involves diving into the meat of our disagreements — and seeking to understand the root causes that motivate us — while also remembering that very little is as simple as our partisan wrestling matches make things out to be.
“As elected leaders and as policymakers, when we try something, and we see that it’s not working, then we have to have the forethought to change to make it better. That’s how this all works. That’s how it has to work,” Woodards said.
“People will be frustrated, but I think people would be more frustrated if we did absolutely nothing.”
