King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn gave his annual State of the County address to the Enumclaw City Council last week.
During the Nov. 14 meeting, Dunn shared some bleak information in regard to substance use and violent crime, but also highlighted some recent successes in those areas and others that he believes helps make King County a safer place to live.
He began by thanking the city council — and making a dig at King County — before getting into the meat and potatoes of his presentation.
“[Enumclaw] is a wonderful city. You have a wonderful courthouse,” he said. “It’s beautiful and, unlike mine, you don’t have to wade through tents to get into it.”
With that, Dunn went straight into the growing substance use problem in King County, especially regarding fentanyl.
According to Dunn, overall overdoses have increased more than 200% since 2019, from 426 overdose-related deaths to 1,339 last year.
“… [A]nd while Public Health was focusing on other public health crises like racism and other things, this was killing people at a rate three times as much as gun violence,” he said.
Fentanyl-related deaths also increased nearly 900%, from 111 in 2019 to 1,085 last year.
So far this year, 867 overdoses have been recorded, which includes 624 fentanyl-related deaths — which he hopes is the start of a decreasing rate.
“We’ve seen, the last few months of this year, maybe we’re… turning the corner, I hope,” he said. “Some have suggested that public efforts are making the difference; some are suggesting that simply the individuals with the highest propensity of overdose have already overdosed and died, and therefore the probability of deaths is now lower, which is terrible.”
VIOLENT CRIME
Moving on to violent crime statistics, Reagan had little positive to note.
“Washington had a record murder rate, tied for a year back in the ’80s. Not going in the right direction,” he said, adding that the number of homicides have risen from 91 to 158 in five years, and shootings have doubled from 858 to 1,701 in the same time period. “There’s a lot of reasons for it. I will just tell you, and you don’t have to agree with me… but the defund, disarm, and disparage the police movement really hurt our ability to attack crime in a lot of different ways, in my view.”
He also said that there was a small dip last year in the number of criminal case backlogs from 2022, but it rose again this year.
“It was looking like it was turning in the right direction but now it’s back up again,” he continued. “There’s an intense funding of the criminal defense attorneys which is slowing the system down. That’s an issue. There is a lack of judges in place to handle all kinds of cases” mentioning that KC funding two more judge positions this year.”
JUVIE CRIME
While Reagan touched on the 57% increase in juvenile crime from 2022 to 2023 he said his push to keep the King County Juvenile Detention Center open was a “victory”.
King County Executive Dow Constantine schedule the detention center to close in 2025, but a unanimous vote by the King County Council moved the potential closure date to 2028.
“There’s a gymnasium in there, there’s a library there, there are classrooms there. It’s a state of the art facility, it was a $200 million project that just got done four years ago,” he said. “You don’t close that down. It’s the best place for young people who are having trouble to triage with experts and mental health professionals.”
According to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office, 25 of the 48 currently-detained youth were arrested on violent crimes (murder, vehicular homicide, first and second degree assault, rape, and rape/assault of a child), coming out to 52%. Nine juveniles are currently on rape and other sexual crimes.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
Reagan had better news when it came to how the King County Sheriff’s office is slowly coming back to being sully staffed by filling 42 positions last year (though there’s still 72 more to go).
“Sheriff Patty Cole-Tindall… is working very hard to hire and retain, but we have a sales job to do,” he said, noting that the KCSO is competing with the Seattle Police Department’s generous $50,000 signing bonus.
Reagan said he was able to vie for keeping the open deputy positions funded instead of cut and that he supported efforts to boost KCSO’s firefighting ability with a $6.5 million helicopter and better fund various other programs and services.
“We’re starting to finally make the reinvestment within our Sheriff’s Office and support staff that need to be made,” he said. “I wish all of that was double, but I can’t get everything I want in the same budget.
NEW PROPERTY TAX
While Reagan touched a little bit on the council’s budget deficit and $35 million in budget cuts, he specifically called out a new proposed property tax so King County can better monetarily support UW Medicine and its public health clinics.
“There’s been no effort to try and reduce and improve the efficiency of the public health clinics by Public Health,” he said. “They just want to go get a new tax source… I’m not going to support it.”
