Making Seattle a Little Safer than It Was the Day Before

Seattle Chief of Police Adrian Diaz talks about Seattle's crime problem, the explosive rise of fentanyl use, and how the department is protecting at-risk communities.

I met Adrian Diaz when I was barely two years into running Jewish in Seattle magazine. On a whim, I asked the Seattle Police Department to participate in our Hanukkah issue by tasting doughnuts (as close as we get in America to sufganiyot). They thought the idea was hilarious, and I had instant buy-in. In a blind taste test, Diaz voted for the General Porpoise vanilla custard doughnut. “The custard, oh, the custard,” he said. “This is really good.”

Adrian Diaz, second from the right

Little did we know that six years later the custard-loving sergeant would be the chief of police following the retirement of Carmen Best, the Chop/Chaz debacle, and a mass exodus of officers. After serving as interim police chief and now official police chief during a tumultuous time in Seattle, I was excited to talk again to the man who once humbled himself to rating the city’s best doughnuts for a little Jewish magazine.

The Cholent: It’s been a crazy few years. Seattle is in the news for being a hellscape with no police officers and rampant crime. Do you try to tune it out, or do you lean into it and say, how can we work with this?

Chief Diaz: Part of it is I have to tune it out at the end of the day. I know what crime I’ve gotta deal with. I know what changes we’re making as far as reform. I need to address crime disorder. I need to make sure that we do it in a compassionate and empathetic way and make sure that our officers are accountable and they provide equitable services. And so you keep with that same mantra of, okay, officers are going out, they’re responding to 911 calls. They’re handling them so professionally. They're having to save a lot of lives, because we've had a lot of shootings. While our homicide rate has gone up, while the violent crime rate has gone up, officers are still continuing to do amazing, amazing work. And so you just have to really focus on what your mission is and what you’re driving toward.

What is that vision? What are your main goals and and how are you going to measure them?

First and foremost, it’s addressing crime disorder. When people walk out their door and they see graffiti, they see trash, they see litter, they think that the crime is running rampant. They create this level of fear of crime. We actually measure it with our public safety survey that Seattle University is currently doing. It gives us a good assessment of just how people are feeling when they step out of that door. We look at areas like social disorganization. We look at informal social control, we look at social cohesion, and we also look at legitimacy. Most police departments don’t measure these areas. I find value, because number one, if a community feels connected with each other, you’re more likely to have community come together to actually address a lot of crime issues. It also might look like there’s a whole lot more crime, but really, it might be actually pretty low. These are markers that we want to measure so we can at least be able to see, are we missing something when it comes to our crime stats?

The second thing is I need enough officers to help me fulfill that mission and fulfill that goal. Our officers are doing fantastic work to make a dent in the increasing crime, but I also have to think about their wellness. So then the third thing is wellness of our officers. A healthy officer is going to have a healthy outcome in the community. When officers are working double shifts and they’re working to make sure that they handle every aspect of this, I’ve really gotta think and focus our efforts on making sure that I take care of them, from a personal level, because they’re seeing so much trauma in the community. When an officer’s literally spending 70 percent of their time going from call to call to call, and the calls are aggravated assault, shooting, shots fired, somebody wounded, a sexual assault, robbery, a homicide — that could literally be in a daily shift. It’s going to be almost impossible for anybody to say, “I’ve got the resiliency to deal with these challenges.”

What do you think the main drivers are in the uptick in crime in Seattle?

We were actually at a 25 year low of crime. We were feeling really good in Seattle. Our homicide was around 26-28 homicides a year. For a major city that’s 700-plus thousand people, we felt we were doing an addressing crime really well. But we started to see an uptick around 2018 to 2019. We really saw this huge uptick from 2019 to 2020. Some people would say that could be related to Covid. Some people could relate to the stress and anxiety of everything that people were experiencing. We also saw an uptick in the amount of the unsheltered population. We also saw an uptick in the amount of people experiencing behavioral crisis and mental health issues.

One of the things that I really saw a huge, massive uptick in is the use of fentanyl. So around 2018, 2019, we’d recover just a couple hundred pills, nothing that was extraordinary. And now we’re recovering close to a million pills a year. That is extraordinary. We all know that one pill can actually have the lethal dose enough to kill somebody. In King County, we’ve seen fentanyl deaths, overdose deaths, massively increase, where we’re actually at an all-time high of overdose deaths. Even this year, we will exceed last year’s overdose deaths. That is a huge concern, because it used to be a pill could cost up to 15 bucks. Now it’s like $1 to $2 a pill. So when they sustain a habit like that, they’ve gotta be able to steal. Many times, people need 30 to 60 pills a day just to maintain their habit.

There are people taking 30 to 60 pills a day?

You could. Some of those pills are only lasting anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes of a high. And so, depending on people’s habits, depending on what people are ingesting, you’ve gotta be able to sustain your habit, so you’re stealing. And when you’re stealing, it’s the car prowls, it’s the burglaries. People are feeling that impact. Small businesses are feeling that impact. And then when people are using, and people are in crisis and the unsheltered population, you’ve also seen a lot of services that have gone to teleservices. If you think about mental health services, a lot of people went to to literally having a conversation over the phone or on the computer, but our unsheltered population doesn’t have access to that kind of stuff. It’s unfortunate that we’re a big product of service when it comes to mental health, but it’s also a product of the increase in the amount of use of methamphetamine and fentanyl.

How can we possibly get this under control?

We did a partnership with the feds, where we did a large-scale drug cartel operation that recovered hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills, 110 guns and pounds and pounds of methamphetamine. Some would say, “Well, gosh, this is just a small snippet of what comes in.” You’re right, it is a small snippet, but when you’re looking at overdose deaths that are increasing every single day and every single year, taking off hundreds of thousands of pills and pounds and pounds of methamphetamine, that’s a huge impact. It’s a massive impact. It’s trying to make sure that we have those types of investigations that continue on to make sure that our community is just a little bit safer than it was the day before.

I saw a clip of your press conference about this on KOMO. I was shocked, also because I don’t think the Seattle Times covered this at all. How is your relationship with the press?

I would love to have everyone cover our stories and everyone realize the type of things that our city is facing. I want everybody to cover it. I want everybody to know the hard work that everybody’s doing. I talk to families that have literally had a son or daughter who’s taken one pill and they’ve died over an overdose. I can’t speak to the media and what they cover or what they don’t cover, but I would love for the people just to really understand that we’re a major city and we have major city problems and we need to have a lot of solutions. I know I’m doing everything I can to making sure that we are making the city stay as safe as it can be. I need more people. I want to hire more people. I need to recruit more people. But I also need to make sure that we value the hard work that we’re doing as well.

The past few years have been interesting for the Jewish community. We depend on the police for safety and partnership — which was not an option for us for most of history — so supporting other at-risk communities who are calling for defunding the police was challenging. I’d love to hear your take on how you protect our community as well as others that are targets of crime and potential terrorism.

We’ve actually done a lot of outreach. We’ve done some discussions with communities of color that have been impacted by violence. We’ve done a lot of outreach and and we continue to do that outreach throughout the whole community. I’ve been meeting with mothers that have lost their loved ones to gun violence to get a different perspective.

I think that there’s a lot of great work that’s being done when it comes to the Jewish community. We have worked with ADL, we have a class that we put on that all of our officers have gone through with the Holocaust museum in Seattle. And we are doing a lot of training when it comes to bias policing and trying to make sure that our officers are in tune with how they treat people and how they’re responsive to community issues. We are just launching the Before the Badge program, which is a program where we bring in all new recruits, prior to the academy, and it focuses on social emotional learning. Brain development gives them more of a trauma-informed approach to how we police. We do listening sessions with communities that are impacted that have been traumatized by police violence and just violence in general. It’s taught by community members. We have a partnership with the Northwest African American Museum, very similar to what we do with Lessons Learned from the Holocaust, but it’s learning about local African American history in the Central District. And so we’re trying to make sure that we’re training our officers and we're giving our officers the right skill set to police better. That's kind of that compassionate, empathetic approach.

I think a lot of good work is happening in the community. Obviously, you know, you could always do more, but I think for right now with the amount of staffing, we’re trying to make sure that we’re pushing the department to really be a learning department.

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Community Announcements

Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar and the virtual calendar.

This week’s parasha is Lech Lecha

Candlelighting in Seattle is at 5:28 p.m.

The Jewish Addiction Awareness Network’s first Serenity Shabbat service will be at Temple Beth Am on November 11, 2022. Details can be found here. 

Jeff Album, a member of the Seward Park Jewish Community has just released his first two singles, which are available on all music streaming platforms or through jeffalbum.com. Jeff composes modern romantic/cinematic music for piano and orchestra. Check it out!

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Shoutouts

Mazel Tov from the JCRC to Max Patashnik and family on the birth of their second child, Elias. Wishing happiness to Max, Tyler, and Edie as they welcome a new member to the family!

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