Rather than symbolic punitive measures, Rouse wants to deliver public safety via holistic fixes.
Public defender Nathan Rouse has joined this year’s race for Seattle City Attorney, touting his direct experience working within the criminal legal system as both a civil and a criminal litigator. Rouse said he decided to run because he wants to play a role in defending Seattle from the Trump administration and because he disagrees with the policies of the current Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, including what he says is its failure to address the most serious public safety threats in the city.
“I, as a public defender, am so frustrated by the sort of day-to-day powerlessness to make broad change. Public defenders do such critical work… and it’s the greatest honor to be able to serve my clients,” Rouse said. “But you just see so much injustice happening on a daily basis, and you also just see so many broken aspects of the system… My motivation is I want to do work that is able to affect a broader change.”
Voters appear to want a change from Davison as well. A poll commissioned by the Northwest Progressive Institute at the beginning of the month showed that 46% of Seattle voters favor a Democratic challenger to Davison, versus 32% who said they would vote to reelect Davison.
Thus far Davison has two challengers to her left: Rouse and legal aid attorney Rory O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan announced last week that he is the first Seattle candidate this election cycle to qualify for Democracy Vouchers, a program for which he originally wrote the language. But Rouse is hot on his heels with the announcement that he has collected enough donations and vouchers to qualify.
Disagreements with current City Attorney Ann Davison
Rouse cited his objections to Davison’s policies as one of his primary motivations for running.
“Davison was elected by claiming that her predecessor, Pete Holmes, hadn’t effectively addressed misdemeanor crimes in Seattle. But the dismissal and backlog rates are really not that much different,” Rouse said. “The dismissal rate is still extraordinarily high. There’s been a huge emphasis on just filing cases, but not a huge emphasis on getting results in those cases. And I think the data bears that out.”
Davison’s tenure has been marked by so-called “tough on crime” policies, including the High Utilizers Initiative, the Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) and Stay Out of Area of Prostitution (SOAP) zones, and unilaterally ending Seattle Municipal Court’s community court program. She also filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the Grants Pass case in favor of making homelessness illegal, which Rouse said he wouldn’t have done.
Rouse doesn’t think these policies have been effective at improving public safety in Seattle.
“Resurrecting the SOAP and SODA zones are just fundamentally kind of backwards-looking policies that [Davison]’s not even enforcing,” Rouse said. “The idea of moving backwards on criminal justice issues is quite frustrating to see in a place like Seattle.”
Rouse wouldn’t enforce the SOAP and SODA zones, saying that shifting people around is not a strategy that works.
“Another frustration I have with the City Attorney’s office…is this emphasis on sort of scoring political points and sort of performative policies that don’t actually get us anywhere,” Rouse said. “Again, they’re not evidence-based, they’re not data-driven, they’re not results-oriented.”
He’s also critical of the High Utilizers Initiative.
“It’s just an unbelievable waste of resources to repeatedly file charges against folks that are not competent to stand trial and then dismiss their claim. That’s really ineffective,” Rouse said. “I just don’t think it’s borne out by the evidence or the data. The results are not there. So I don’t think it’s an effective policy.”
He said he’d do “everything I could not to have people sent to SCORE,” the jail in Des Moines with which Seattle signed a contract last year. PubliCola recently reported that 11 people have died at the SCORE jail over the past two years, a shockingly high rate.
Rouse would also advocate for reforms to the King County Jail, including potentially partnering with services like Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD) to provide better release planning. “I do think that jail has to be a last resort for Seattle Municipal Court institutions,” Rouse said, “because it is in deplorable condition, it’s understaffed, and medical services are lacking.”
While Davison declined to join the lawsuit against the Trump administration to stop cuts to the National Institute of Health funding, Rouse said he would have if leading the office.
While Davison’s team filed a blanket affidavit of prejudice against Judge Pooja Vaddadi for all criminal cases, Rouse’s stance is clearly against the unprecedented move.
“I think it’s undemocratic to file a blanket affidavit against an elected official like Judge Vaddadi,” Rouse said. “I think it was a big waste of time.”
Davison’s punitive “tough on crime” approach hasn’t worked, he argued.
“The city attorney’s office, their dismissal rate is extraordinarily high, and that includes serious crimes that need to be addressed like repeat DUIs, any DUIs really, domestic violence,” Rouse said. “And so you see not only this revolving door effect, but just a failure to address the most serious public safety threats, and then also doing away with community court.”
Rouse says Davison’s office is failing to make sure DUI and domestic violence cases are resulting in convictions. Domestic violence cases are important to win in order to maintain any no contact orders attached to them. And while Davison has claimed she can’t proceed with DUI cases due to a backlog at the state’s toxicology lab, Rouse said a toxicology report isn’t always necessary to prove a DUI case. Instead police officers can testify that a driver was “affected by” alcohol, causing the dangerous driving behavior they witnessed.
Domestic violence and DUI cases would be a higher priority for Rouse, while working with diversion services such as LEAD and bringing back community court to enable accountability of other, less serious misdemeanors.
“Filing cases without getting any results doesn’t actually address the very legitimate complaints that our community has about all kinds of crimes at the misdemeanor level,” Rouse said.
Rouse’s legal background
Rouse has been interested in public service and the criminal legal space since he attended law school at Seattle University. He has amassed a wide array of civil litigation experience in both federal and state courts working at two large law firms, preparing him to be in charge of defending Seattle from civil lawsuits, a large part of the job of the City Attorney.
He has clerked for federal judges, experience that will help him if, as City Attorney, he should decide to sue the Trump administration. “I was there when Judge Robart issued the temporary restraining order stopping the Muslim ban that Trump placed back in his first term in 2017,” Rouse said.
In 2021, Rouse left private law to become a King County public defender, where he has developed his abilities as a criminal litigator. “As a public defender, you are in there on the ground level every single day, meeting with client after client, [developing] the skills it takes to manage a caseload and understand the pressures that are put, not only on public defenders, but prosecutors who are trying to win cases,” Rouse said.
Last year Rouse won an award from the Washington Defenders Association for identifying, litigating, and winning a motion against administrative booking, a policy practiced in King County for the last 20 years. In administrative booking, out-of-custody defendants appear in court for an arraignment and are then arrested and jailed in order to get their fingerprints and photographs taken, a practice Rouse argued was an unconstitutional search and seizure. The King County Prosecutor’s Office has appealed the decision, and Rouse will defend the case at the state Supreme Court level in May.
Rouse’s vision for the City Attorney’s office
Rouse intends to be an active City Attorney, both through civil and criminal litigation and through policy recommendations.
When defending the City against lawsuits, Rouse emphasized the importance of knowing when to settle versus when to fight in order to minimize the cost to Seattle taxpayers and businesses. He’s interested in suing big companies when it makes sense to do so, mentioning as an example the Monsanto case that resulted in a $160 million payout to Seattle over toxic chemical PCB pollution.
“There’s so much that can be done in the [civil] space that transfers to the kind of public safety issues using the civil enforcement powers of the city attorney’s office to pursue things like economic justice by going strong after wage theft, making sure there’s fair labor practices,” Rouse said. He referenced the Department of Justice’s current lawsuit against RealPage for engaging in algorithmic rent price-setting as another potential opportunity.
Rouse shared concerns that the federal government isn’t going to be offering strong protections to workers in the current political climate, so he plans to be particularly aggressive going after violations of wage theft. “The city attorney’s office needs to make sure that we’re using every tool in the toolbox to go after that type of behavior,” Rouse said.
“It’s so common that folks are trapped in this cycle of poverty and desperation and crime, but they’re also victims of things like wage theft, unfair housing practices, etcetera,” Rouse continued. “And pursuing economic justice is another way of getting at the root causes of some of the public safety issues we have.”
Rouse is a big proponent of diversion programs and evidence-based treatment programs, including medication-assisted treatment, saying he’s seen their impact firsthand as a public defender. He sees Seattle Municipal Court, and particularly a reinstated community court, as playing a key role as a connection point for services. He is particularly interested in making more investments in building out LEAD.
He says he’ll actively advocate with the City Council for particular programs and pieces of legislation that are evidence-based, whether that’s investing more in LEAD or appropriate treatment programs.
“I think people really are going to want to see meaningful results,” Rouse said. “It’s really about being an advocate for these types of evidence-based policies, you know, really looking at the data that is available at the City Attorney’s Office and showing the city council members why we do need change and why we do need to fund different programs.”
He is fully in support of building out the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) alternative response program, even against the resistance of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), and says as City Attorney, he would vigorously defend the City against any legal action brought by SPOG about the CARE program expansion. He also expressed disappointment that the most recent SPOG contract failed to make meaningful advancement in terms of police accountability measures.
“It’s a contract that needs to be aggressively bargained and holding the line on things like the accountability measures, especially when the starting salaries are getting so high,” Rouse said. “I do think that it’s a worthy goal to keep SPD staffed fully and to investigate crimes and have our community feel like they’re being listened to and responded to when they call the police. I think that’s super important. But I don’t think that we should be holding to SPOG in reform efforts like the CARE program, and [we should be] holding strong on accountability measures.”
He is also interested in developing a victims compensation fund to better help victims of property crime.
When it comes to the consent decree, which the City will most likely be exiting soon, he said it has achieved meaningful reform efforts. However, he doesn’t agree with the city council’s recent decision regarding the use of less lethal weapons, including blast balls, in a protest climate he expects to become more active soon. He wants to keep a close eye on police accountability measures going forward to ensure the City maintains the progress they’ve made thus far.
“I think there are a lot of things that we made progress on that are starting to unwind,” Rouse said.
The state of the Seattle City Attorney race
With Trump continuing to take illegal actions eviscerating federal funding, threatening civil rights, and sowing chaos at the federal level, responding to federal threats could become a big issue in this race.
Davison, who left the Democratic party in 2020 to become a Republican and was active in the WalkAway campaign, announced last month that she’ll be running for reelection for the City Attorney position. She now claims to be an independent. For the most part, she has not been speaking out against the recent actions of the Trump administration, and she isn’t participating in the lawsuit to stop cuts to the National Institute of Health funding.
She did, however, join a lawsuit led by other sanctuary jurisdictions alleging the Trump administration is illegally threatening to cut off federal funds and receive help from local law enforcement to increase deportations. Whether that’s enough to insulate her from attacks of being a Trump sympathizer remains to be seen. It could be enough to spell doom for the recently Republican incumbent, but which Democrat would captivate voters in that scenario?
Rouse and O’Sullivan espouse similar progressive values and opposition to many of Davison’s decisions while in office. They both want to more aggressively prosecute domestic violence and DUI cases, they both strongly support diversion programs, alternative response, and the reconstitution of community court, and they both oppose legislation like the SOAP and SODA zones and using the SCORE jail. They are also both interested in more aggressively protecting Seattle’s residents from both the fallout of the Trump administration and from predatory practices like wage theft.
What perhaps differentiates them the most is their experience. Rouse has more criminal litigation experience and experience working on complicated civil litigation cases. O’Sullivan, on the other hand, has more public service experience, working on the Democracy Vouchers program and serving on the board of FairVote Washington, on Seattle’s redistricting committee, and as chair of the 37th District Democrats.
Rouse is clear on what he hopes to achieve as an evidence-based, outcome-driven City Attorney for Seattle.
“I want to get the best results possible for not just defendants, but the victims of crimes. I want to get the best results possible for our city,” Rouse said. “I don’t think it’s okay that we have a lot of the current theft and property destruction that we do. I think we should never accept that that’s the status quo. We should do everything we can to change it. And so you look at the city attorney’s office, what resources do they have to make a difference, and figure out the best way to use those limited resources to make that difference.”
Amy Sundberg is the publisher of Notes from the Emerald City, a weekly newsletter on Seattle politics and policy with a particular focus on public safety, police accountability, and the criminal legal system. She also writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. She is particularly fond of Seattle’s parks, where she can often be found walking her little dog.
