Addressing urban disorder without police: How Seattle's LEAD program responds to behavioral‐health‐related disruptions, resolves business complaints, and reconfigures the field of public safety

• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Forrest Stuart,Katherine Beckett
• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12178

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Addressing urban disorder without police: How

Seattle’s LEAD program responds to behavioral-

health-related disruptions, resolves business

complaints, and reconfigures the field of public safety

Forrest Stuart

1

| Katherine Beckett

2

1

Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford,

California, USA

2

Law, Societies & Justice and Sociology,

University of Washington, Seattle,

Washington, USA

Correspondence

Forrest Stuart, Department of Sociology,

Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way,

Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

Email: fstuart@stanford.edu

Funding information

This research was conducted pursuant to an

agreement with the Public Defender

Association (PDA) to conduct independent

research assessing, contextualizing, and

proposing adjustments to LEAD and models

LEAD has generated to provide community-

based care to people exposed to the criminal

legal system. Those funds were provided to

PDA by Blue Meridian Partners. Other funders

include the University of Washington’s West

Coast Poverty Center, the S. Frank Miyamoto

Endowed Professorship at the University of

Washington, and a generous gift from Laurie

Black and Stafford Mays.

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, as part of a broad

effort to maximize the profitability of commercial

spaces and address the complaints of business interests,

cities have increasingly criminalized the presence and

behavior of populations perceived as disorderly. The

resulting police interactions produce a range of deleteri-

ous outcomes, particularly for individuals contending

with mental health and substance use disorders, home-

lessness, and other behavioral health concerns. Against

this backdrop, we provide a case study of Let Everyone

Advance with Dignity (LEAD), a novel public safety

intervention developed in Seattle, Washington. LEAD

diverts businesses’disorder complaints from police and

911 toward program personnel who provide long-term

harm reduction services and resources. LEAD’s non-

punitive approach has demonstrated success in reduc-

ing the harms of criminalization, improving individual

outcomes, satisfying business grievances, and, more

broadly, disrupting the defining logic and practices of

neoliberal urbanism. LEAD’s successes carry theoreti-

cal implications, demonstrating the need for nonpolice

alternatives to reconfigure the organizational field of

public safety by intervening into the longstanding coali-

tion between businesses and police. The LEAD model

also offers insights about the concrete steps necessary

to ensure public safety and community vitality without

police involvement.

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12178

©2021 University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

390 Law & Policy. 2021;43:390–414.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo

1|INTRODUCTION

Since the late twentieth century, policing in the United States has undergone a historic

expansion in scale, intensity, and punitiveness. According to scholars, this development forms a

cornerstone of “neoliberal urbanism”—a broad set of postindustrial urban policies designed to

“mobilize city spaces as an arena for both market-oriented economic growth and for elite con-

sumption practices, while at the same time securing order and control against marginalized

populations”(Peck et al., 2009, p. 58). In efforts to redevelop distressed neighborhoods, maxi-

mize the profitability of retail spaces, and boost the tourism and convention industries, munici-

pal governments are deploying “order maintenance,”“quality of life,”and other low-level

policing strategies that specifically criminalize the presence and behavior of so-called disorderly

populations (C. R. Collins et al., 2021). Given the ongoing retrenchment, privatization, and

devolution of the social safety net, these strategies disproportionately target and harm individ-

uals contending with behavioral health issues. As defined by researchers and practitioners,

behavioral health “encompasses traditional mental health and substance use disorders, as well

as overall psychological well-being”(Evans & Bufka, 2020). Serious behavioral health disorders

routinely manifest under conditions of economic precarity and, particularly, homelessness,

which is consistently found to trigger or exacerbate poor behavioral health. This relationship

stems in part from repeated interactions with police, which can produce a range of deleterious

outcomes, such as elevated morbidity and mortality rates, increased social isolation, risk of sex-

ual and gender violence, participation in risky behaviors, decreased involvement in medical,

financial, and economic institutions, and diminished trust in police and government more

broadly (Bell, 2016; Brayne, 2014; Rios, 2011; Abigail A. Sewell et al., 2016; Alyasah Ali Sewell

et al., 2020; Stuart et al., 2015).

Despite growing political pressure and public outcry—including daily protests by millions

across the globe throughout 2020—these policing practices have proven difficult to transform.

In fact, some of the most well-intended reforms have counterintuitively exacerbated the crimi-

nalization of behavioral health while intensifying policing’s related harms (see Beckett &

Herbert, 2010; Stuart, 2016). Against this backdrop, we provide a case study of Let Everyone

Advance with Dignity (LEAD), a novel public safety intervention developed in Seattle,

Washington.

1

LEAD seeks to replace calls for police assistance that are related to behavioral

health with intensive harm-reduction-oriented outreach and services. LEAD accomplishes this

task by strategically forming partnerships with one of the most powerful (although surprisingly

unaddressed) groups of social actors responsible for driving neoliberal urbanism and its related

criminalization—namely, business owners, merchant associations, and residential associations

in gentrifying neighborhoods that otherwise rely on local police departments to regulate the

“disorderly individuals”perceived to interfere with local commerce. By diverting business and

resident complaints away from 911 and instead toward harm-reduction-oriented case managers,

LEAD has produced notable improvements for individual participant outcomes. These include

decreases in incarceration and increases in housing, employment, income, medical care, and

addiction treatment (Clifasefi et al., 2017; Clifasefi & Collins, 2016; S. E. Collins

et al., 2017, 2019).

Our case study of LEAD yields key theoretical advances for current scholarship on

neoliberal urbanism, criminalization, and behavioral health. First, LEAD’s design and success

demonstrate the importance of reducing the “policeability”of behavioral health in any effort to

devise non-punitive public safety regimes. By prioritizing disorder complaints—particularly

those made by local business interests and powerful residential groups—as a key moment of

intervention, and by rechanneling subsequent complaints to nonpolice actors, LEAD provides

a model for proactively disrupting the broader cultural frames through which urban stake-

holders otherwise designate and reify the police as the most appropriate and effective institution

for addressing substance use, mental health issues, homelessness, and other forms of perceived

STUART AND BECKETT 391