(Image: Jim Ferrell for King County Prosecutor)
By Elizabeth Turnbull
For the past eight years residents of Federal Way have known King County Prosecutor candidate, Jim Ferrell as mayor. Soon, Ferrell hopes to change hats to lead the county prosecutor’s office to focus on community safety, youth in the system, and improving office management.
His is a throwback, “tough on crime” approach.
“With crime and violence skyrocketing, the people of King County demand accountability, not deceptive rhetoric and empty promises,” Ferrell said this week in a statement on Seattle’s renewed hot spot policing approach criticizing fellow challenger Leesa Manion, the longtime chief of staff at the prosecutor’s office.
This will be the second time Ferrell has vied for the prosecutor position, after falling to Dan Satterberg in 2007. Before becoming a mayor in 2014, Ferrell worked as a prosecutor for the City of Renton and began working at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in 1998, until 2013.
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With Satterberg now retiring and the race for the position wide open, Ferrell has received criticism for his crackdown agenda but he looks at his years in the prosecutor’s office as character-building and as a time he prioritized showing respect.
He is also a white male in a race featuring two candidates of color as efforts to reform the justice system and address inequity in arrests and prosecution continue.
“Nineteen years of being a prosecutor I think helped me understand the human condition more and actually made me more compassionate,” Ferrell told CHS. “When I treated [a defendant] with respect and tried to figure out what actually occurred, you can see him almost stand up a little bit taller, and start to engage on, ‘Okay, what can I do to make sure that I don’t come back?’”
Meanwhile, another possible challenger for the prosecutor’s office is out of the race. King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski has told CHS he has decided not to run for the office.
Ferrell has served several roles in the office from the supervisor at King County’s Domestic Violence Court, starting in 2000, to ultimately working as King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor before he left the office to become mayor. Ferrell received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington and his law degree from Gonzaga University.
His main points of emphasis for his campaign are addressing levels of violent crime, helping youth impacted by the system get “back on track,” and ensuring strong management in the office itself.
Ferrell’s main competitor Manion strongly supports pre-filing diversion programs which means that young people can participate in a workshop and will not have criminal charges filed.
Ferrell believes specifically that pre-filing diversions should be limited to misdemeanors and low level felonies, with the exceptions of crimes such as residential burglaries, second-degree robberies, felony harassment and others.
He also highlighted changes he wants to make to the Restorative Community Pathways (RCP) program, a diversion program that was implemented in November of last year which puts a small number first-time criminal offenders in front of a nonprofit community panel instead of a court.
Ferrell wants to remove some of the crimes that are eligible for the program as well as to ensure a check in with a judicial officer in the beginning to make sure that nothing is lost in the system.
“I think RCP is eminently fixable, I could fix it in a day,” Ferrell said. “There needs to be an accountability element, there needs to be essentially a check in and check back to make sure that whatever was promised to be done, has been done.”
While his competitors are finding the most support from Seattle, Ferrell has received early endorsements from outside the city including the Federal Way Police Officer’s Guild, State Representative Amy Walen, and Kent Mayor Dana Ralph.
Ferrell said he believes the answer to better prosecuting crimes in the county is to preserve hope in defendants that they can change, but to also make sure people feel the repercussions for their crimes. Crimes that are not committed out of necessity, to Ferrell, need to be felt by those who commit them.
“I don’t think that we’re doing people favors by showing so much mercy that we’re figuratively looking the other way,” Ferrell said. “When people do hit incarceration they’ve got to be in a situation in which they learn from this.”
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Seems like an intriguing candidate who might shift the debate about who and how people are prosecuted for felony offenses in our area. I am all for having that discussion and look forward to these candidates having some spirited discussions prior to the primary.
Sounds great to me. It’s telling how far we’ve devolved when CHS equates the mere prosecution of crimes with “tough on crime” policies of yore.
I will support whichever candidate has the most strident “tough on crime” policies.
We’ve reached the point where the mental/psychological battle of order vs. criminality needs to be won. When criminals “go to work” every day, we need to make them genuinely worried that this is the day they will be arrested and ultimately incarcerated for a lengthy sentence.
We need genuine disincentives – outcomes that will make the criminals who aren’t caught reconsider their predatory behavior.
“Tough on Crime” people have been around since at least Nixon. All they’ve resulted in is 1% of our country’s population in jail (by far the record; next is Russia with 0.6% where a large number are political prisoners) and higher crime than most other first world countries.
So thanks but no thanks. We don’t need crime to get any worse. The sooner the “Tough on Crime” people move on or die off, our country can get better.
A reasonable person rather than an activist blinded by ideology trying to dismantle the criminal justice system. He has my vote!
These “tough on crime” losers keep making problems worse. Jailing every poor person you don’t like is not how you fix social inequality.
“Jailing every poor person you don’t like”
Nobody is proposing this.
Jailing people that are committing major crimes (over and over) and putting the public at risk and addressing root causes.
Thanks for insulting the candidate and those who don’t share your views, as well as mischaracterizing everything that was said in the article. And just for the record, a prosecutor’s job is not to fix social inequality. It is to ensure that victims of crime receive the justice they deserve, and to protect society from those who would perpetrate crimes upon them.
The goal of a prosecuter is not to “fix social inequality”. It’s to prosecute crimes. Hence the title of the job, Jones.
Another retrograde dipshit from 1987. Hard Pass.
Thanks for your learned and enlightened commentary. The words so carefully chosen, the thoughts so wonderfully crafted. Beats me why the publisher bothers to allow comments like yours which possess absolutely no intellectual or social value.
Thanks for covering this candidate! From what I read here, he has my vote. I will vote for anyone who promises to prosecute people who commit crimes. Somehow Seattle and King county lost the plot on that basic function of government.