(The Center Square) – The Seattle City Attorney’s Office reports it has made a 98% reduction in criminal case filing time.
Prior to City Attorney Ann Davison taking over the position this year, from 2017-2021, it took an average of 129 days for the City Attorney’s Office to make a filing decision, according to Davison.
It now takes the office an average of three days.
“Since taking office, I have been committed to re-centering victims in the public safety system in Seattle and the data in this report proves that we are making significant progress in delivering on this promise,” Davison said in a statement.
Davison attributes the “close in time filing deadline” she set in February of this year for the drastic drop in filing time. The deadline establishes a filing decision to be made in all incoming cases within five business days.
This deadline was created to help with one of Davison’s first initiatives as the city attorney, which was to tackle a 5,000 case backlog that her office inherited at the start of this year.
The backlog shrank by 20% in the first quarter of this year. The latest report from the city attorney’s office saw a “significant reduction after the implementation of the Close-in-Time filing policy.”
According to the city attorney’s latest report, in this year’s second quarter, the office filed 1,708 cases, a 124% increase from that quarter in the previous year.
At the same time, it declined 1,754, which is a 46% rate increase from the same period last year.
The report noted many of the declined cases in this year’s second quarter came from the 5,000 case backlog built up from the prior regime.
