PubliCola Questions: City Attorney Candidate Nathan Rouse

By Erica C. Barnett with Publicola

Nathan Rouse, a public defense attorney who works on felony cases for King County, is challenging City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican, from the left, saying he’ll use his background in public  to refocus the city attorney’s office on victim restitution, fighting companies that bilk renters and workers out of their money, and routing misdemeanor defendants into evidence-based alternatives to jail, like the STAR Center for unhoused people with high service needs that’s opening near the King County Courthouse later this year.

Rouse grew up in a Quaker family in Philadelphia, and says that background led him to public defense—eventually. Before becoming a lawyer, Rouse spent a year juggling college and a brief career as a professional cyclist (his grades suffered, so he decided to focus on school), then worked at private law firms and as a judicial clerk before joining King County Public Defense in 2021.

Rouse is the third person running against Davison, who is in her first term. We spoke last week.

PubliCola (ECB): Tell me a little about your background as a public defender and how you believe that experience prepares you for this role.

Nathan Rouse (NR): As a public defender you see, directly and daily, the failed approaches to criminal justice in the criminal legal system. You see clients being cycled in and out of court and in and out of jail. You see the impact of that on your clients, and you see the failures of those approaches to actually provide any meaningful public safety to the community or provide any meaningful support to victims of crime.

I love being a public defender, but one of the things that’s really hard is that the deck is stacked against you, and you end up feeling pretty powerless a lot of the time. So I was really motivated to run in order to pursue meaningful reform of the system that actually accomplishes things like public safety and support for victims and sets people up for evidence-based treatment and recovery. It’s not like I have a silver bullet for any of this, but I can absolutely see clear examples of where the current approach is failing, and there’s a much better way to go about it.

ECB: What are some of the policies Ann Davison has implemented that you’ll focus on reversing or improving if you’re elected?

NR: I would not prioritize filing cases over getting results in those cases. And I think that’s what you really see right now. In the current city attorney’s office, you see a lot of filings, but if you look at their data, the results are not great. They’re not even getting good results in the most serious threats to public safety, like [domestic violence] or DUI cases, there’s a really, really high rate of dismissal of jury trial sets that are just dismissed by the city attorney’s office. They’re also declining an even higher rate of DV referrals than Pete Holmes’ administration did.

I think getting rid of community court was a disaster. Say what you will about community court, in terms of the way it was being used previously, but the problem with just getting rid of it and not replacing it with anything is then you’re just relying of jail and the diversionary programs that are available out there to solve all the problems that we all see on a daily basis.

Especially when we have really good new treatment options that are coming online through places like King County and at the state level, there’s a real opportunity for a place like the city attorney’s office to partner with these new evidence-based programs. There’s the STAR Center that’s opening on Third Avenue, the medication-assisted treatment that’s happening, the new facility that’s right across from the King County courthouse on Third Avenue as well. The Kirkland Crisis Connections Center that just opened—there’s just a lot of really promising stuff that’s coming out and being opened. There’s an opportunity to partner with these organizations and apply for grant funding, and really use community court as something that could be a connection point for services.

It’s a total myth that people just\ want to be addicted to drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine and don’t want any help, and they’re just taking advantage of everybody. That’s just not true. People really, really want support and they really want help. But if you don’t have meaningful support that extends beyond, say, a couple-week program at the beginning, it’s not going to work. It’s a recipe for relapse and basically continuing down the same path. So at the city attorney’s office, you can’t just think about filing cases. You have to think about, what’s the purpose of filing this case and what’s the outcome going to be? And you have to look at the data and the evidence that tells you about that.

ECB: So are you saying that you would file fewer of the types of cases the current city attorney has emphasized—like trespassing and shoplifting cases?

NR: I’m not going to say I wouldn’t file any of those cases, but I do think that I would file fewer of them and explore other opportunities to divert them to programs like LEAD. It’s a really popular, effective program that should be fully funded. Obviously, I can’t fund it as a city attorney, but I can be a liaison and advocate for it at the City Council.

Erica Barnett  Has the high utilizers initiative caused harm, and it something that you would eliminate if you’re elected?

NR: Yeah, I would eliminate it. I don’t think it’s effective, for a few reasons. Number one, I think more than half of the folks that were on that list were not competent to stand trial. That means that folks are being prosecuted and the cases are just being dismissed. And then another case comes up, and the same thing happens, and that’s a waste of resources. So that’s one issue.

Another is the idea of disqualifying them from community court. You can’t just give up on people. You need to continue offering the resources. Because the reality in a misdemeanor prosecution system, which is what the Seattle City Attorney’s Office engages in, is that everybody is going to be back in the community relatively soon. What are we doing to actually interrupt the cycle of crime and addiction and mental health issues that are that’s occurring over and over again?

Another thing that’s true about the high-utilizer initiative is that well over 50 percent of the folks on that list had housing instability issues. So I think it’s just another example of promoting rhetoric over results.

ECB: You’ve said that the city attorney’s office needs to proactively work to protect workers and tenants from things like wage theft and rent gouging. What can the city attorney’s office do on those two issues specifically?

NR: I think one good example of a place where the city attorney’s office could advocate for legislation is in the area of algorithmic rent price fixing, like the RealPage company that is using algorithms to set rent and causing rent inflation. San Francisco and Philadelphia have basically created legislation banning that type of price fixing in the rental markets. So I think that’s a good example of where you can use advocacy for legislation to protect tenants.

ECB: And wage theft?

NR: Millions and millions of dollars are stolen each year from hard-working people and the Office of Labor Standards in Seattle does a great job investigating these complaints. And when OLS refers an investigation to the city attorney’s office for prosecution, the city attorney’s office has to be ready and willing to pursue those cases. My understanding is there hasn’t been a robust appetite for prosecuting those cases as there could be, and the city attorney’s office should absolutely be messaging and broadcasting their willingness to prosecute those cases and go after folks that are stealing money from hard-working people.

ECB:  We all tend to focus on the criminal side of the city attorney’s office. But are there issues on the civil side that you’re going to want to prioritize, or other kinds of less headline-grabbing issues that the city attorney actually spends a lot of time dealing with that you would want to focus on?

NR: The city has an opportunity to file lawsuits. Pete Holmes did that with Monsanto, and Davison’s office settled it for, like, $160 million for the city. So going back to RealPage—is there an opportunity for the city to be suing a company like that to protect residents of our city and seeking a settlement or some kind of judgment in that case?

I’d also be interested in setting up a more robust victims’ compensation fund on the criminal side. And that could be something that’s explored as a legislative opportunity, if there’s a way to work with the City Council on something like that. I think that would be popular, because businesses and small business owners that are victims of crimes—they’re not getting restitution from the people that are being prosecuted, because the folks that are being prosecuted don’t have the means to pay restitution. They can’t even afford an attorney, for the most part. So why isn’t there a way to reallocate funds from excessive prosecution to setting up a more robust victims’ compensation fund?

There’s an ordinance that requires the property owner to clean up graffiti within 10 days, or something like that, or else they get penalized by the city. Why are we shifting those costs to private businesses? I mean, I don’t really think that graffiti prosecution is worthwhile in any sense. But I think that we need to look at the ways that the city shifts costs to private business owners, and are there ways to make people whole when they’re victims of property crimes.

ECB: Ann Davison is a Republican, which is not a great place to be politically in Seattle right now. In what ways do you think her party affiliation should alarm Seattle residents voting in this nonpartisan race?

NR: I’ll start with the premise of leaving the Democratic Party in 2020 to become a Republican, when Trump was in his first term. That choice right there is pretty concerning to me, because the Republican Party is the is the party of Project 2025, and all of the various attacks on individual liberties that have occurred since.

Now we have Trump back again, is this the right leader to defend the city of Seattle against attacks from the Trump administration? You know, Pete Holmes was one of the first to file a sanctuary cities lawsuit against the Trump administration. And Davison, some time after it was actually filed, joined the lawsuit that was filed by King County and San Francisco and Portland and some other cities. But there was hesitation there. The hesitation, plus the explanation for doing it, was concerning to me, because it wasn’t phrased in terms of, we need to protect the residents of Seattle. It was phrased in terms of, we need to protect our local police resources so they can be used to solve local crimes, [rather than] we need to fight back against racism and racist attacks on immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers. So that concerns me.

I also think that the decision to join that lawsuit was motivated by the fact that it’s an election year, and I think the same is true of the announcement the other day that they’re ramping up efforts to hire more people to join the city attorney’s office to work against the Trump administration, or whatever those positions were characterized as. So I don’t think that she’s the right person to be in charge of that office at this time.