San Francisco built a humane alternative between jail and walking away. Seattle already has many of the pieces to do the same.
Part Three of a four-part series on what Seattle can learn from San Francisco
Some of our most compassionate public policies are written as limits on government power.
Do not criminalize addiction. Do not use jail as treatment. Do not send an armed officer when a health professional can respond safely. Each restraint reflects a hard-earned lesson about the harm government can cause.
But a list of things government should not do isn’t a strategic plan.
A person can be too impaired to remain safely on the street yet not require an emergency room. They may need intervention without belonging in jail. They may repeatedly refuse voluntary services while continuing to endanger themselves and disrupt the community around them.
When every available response is considered inappropriate, government leaves people to suffer in public and calls that compassion.
In Part Two, I wrote about how San Francisco transformed the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center from an anemic workgroup into a command center. One of the first problems it confronted was remarkably specific.
When police encounter someone using drugs in public, where should they take them?
For years, San Francisco had two inadequate answers. Officers could leave the person on the street. Or they could pursue a jail booking that consumed hours and did little to address the addiction driving the behavior.
The RESET Center offers a third option.
Eligible people arrested for public intoxication can be taken to a stabilization center instead of jail. They receive medical screening and a place to recover from acute intoxication. Staff can connect them with treatment, housing, and other services. Officers told us the transfer takes roughly 15 minutes.
If an eligible person accepts placement at RESET, they are not booked into jail and no criminal charge is filed for the public-intoxication incident. They receive an intervention without being sent into a criminal legal system that is already fractured and slow.
The central idea is not complicated. When dangerous public drug use is occurring, the city should do something.
RESET interrupts the immediate behavior. It removes someone from an unsafe public setting and provides supervision. It then creates an opportunity for treatment or another service.
It does not solve addiction. It solves one recurring failure in the system.
RESET is deliberately limited to less than a day. A person may remain only until sober, with a maximum stay of 23 hours. It is not a shelter, treatment bed or long-term detention facility. A longer stay would bring different legal, clinical and staffing obligations. Its current reach is also limited. Although the center can accept eligible referrals from law enforcement agencies across San Francisco, pickups are presently confined to the SoMa area. District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey became one of RESET’s strongest champions and helped advance the legislation authorizing it. He has resisted expanding the pickup area because the center was created to address conditions in SoMa and because longer transports could undermine its operational value.
That narrow scope is a strength. RESET addresses acute intoxication, public disorder and the absence of a safe destination. It does not pretend to provide the sustained recovery support that must follow.
The center opened within ten months of the decision to proceed. Officials told us this was not a normal timeline for a public program of this complexity. It moved quickly because Mayor Lurie made it a priority and pushed through the liability, contracting and operational questions that might otherwise have delayed it for years.
The idea itself was not new. We were told it had been sitting on a shelf.
The breakthrough was deciding to proceed.
RESET operates in a difficult space between voluntary care and government custody. Civil liberties advocates have raised legitimate questions about whether someone who cannot freely leave is being detained without sufficient due process. San Francisco responded with defined eligibility, clinical supervision and a short maximum stay.
The city chose to manage the risks of an imperfect intervention instead of preserving a plainly inadequate status quo.
Officials told us that roughly 27 percent of people brought to RESET voluntarily used services offered through the center. That is an early figure, not proof of long-term recovery. Still, more than one in four accepted assistance after an encounter that might otherwise have ended on the street, in jail or at an emergency department.
The appropriate comparison is not RESET against a perfect treatment system. No such system exists. The comparison is RESET against the choices San Francisco actually had.
Before going further, it is important to acknowledge that Seattle cannot simply replicate RESET.
California law makes it a misdemeanor to be intoxicated in public when a person cannot care for their own safety or obstructs the use of a street or sidewalk. That gives San Francisco an arrest pathway before officers offer RESET as an alternative to booking and prosecution.
Washington does not have the same public-intoxication offense.
But Seattle is not without legal authority. Washington law makes public drug use and possession gross misdemeanors that can be prosecuted locally. When an officer has reason to believe a crime has been committed and knows through the person’s history or consultation with a provider that they have a substance-use disorder, state law authorizes alternatives to jail. The officer may take the person to a crisis stabilization unit or 23-hour crisis relief center. The facility may hold them for up to 12 hours and must provide a professional evaluation within three. Officers may also call a mobile crisis team or refer the person to a recovery navigator.
Involuntary detention is available under a separate law, but only when someone presents an imminent likelihood of serious harm or faces imminent danger because they are gravely disabled.
Courts can also issue Stay Out of Drug Area orders, commonly known as SODA orders. These restrictions may disrupt activity in one area, but they can also move the problem elsewhere. They tell people where they cannot go without providing somewhere better to take them.
The problem is not the complete absence of legal tools. It is that those tools do not lead to a dependable place willing and able to accept the person.
Each tool has a role, but none replicate RESET. Most require a crime, voluntary participation or the high threshold for involuntary detention. Even when authority exists, it accomplishes little, if no appropriate facility is open and willing to accept the person.
Those authorities are not the same as California’s. They generally depend on a separate criminal offense, a court order, or a much higher threshold of imminent harm. They do not create the same middle path for a person whose severe intoxication and conduct require intervention but may not meet the standard for involuntary treatment.
As you may have gathered, none of this is simple. If it were, Seattle would have solved it during one of the many workgroups convened to study it. The task now is to determine what authority we already have, what remains missing, and where state law must change to allow brief stabilization without creating a criminal record.
A Seattle model may require action from the county or Legislature. As Parts One and Two of this series argued, crossing jurisdictions should expand the table, not excuse anyone from acting.
Any Seattle proposal would need clear eligibility standards, medical supervision, due-process protections and a strict time limit. The debate would be difficult, but that is an invitation to lead, not a reason to give up.
Mayor Lurie encountered a similar barrier when California’s Housing First rules created uncertainty about whether state homelessness funding could support drug and alcohol-free recovery housing. Rather than accept the ambiguity, he co-sponsored legislation to resolve it. California Assemblymember Matt Haney authored the bill after seeing the gap firsthand during his time on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. On September 29, 2026, Lurie joined Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed AB 1556 into law. The measure clarifies that public funding can support voluntary recovery housing while protecting residents who relapse.
If our city leaders believe these tools are necessary, they should define the gap and make the state-law change a priority. Leadership means seeking the authority needed to solve a problem rather than citing its absence as the reason nothing can be done.
Seattle’s challenge is especially frustrating because we already have much of the infrastructure.
Seattle and King County have already built much of the behavioral-health and diversion continuum. Seattle’s 2026 budget directs at least $38 million to programs adjacent to RESET. That investment includes LEAD and CoLEAD, CARE crisis responders, We Deliver Care, DESC’s ORCA programs, dedicated detox and inpatient-treatment beds at Valley Cities Recovery Place, and Seattle Fire’s mobile Health 99 team for post-overdose care and treatment connections.
King County separately funds DESC’s Crisis Diversion Facility and Sobering Center, along with mobile crisis teams, designated crisis responders and recovery navigators. Voters also approved a $1.25 billion levy to build five Crisis Care Centers and expand treatment capacity.
This is not an apples-to-apples comparison or a claim that Seattle outspends San Francisco overall. San Francisco also invests heavily in homelessness, public health and street services, including operations run by organizations such as Urban Alchemy.
Still, the basic math is instructive. San Francisco’s RESET contract averages about $6.7 million a year. Seattle’s 2026 budget directs at least $38 million to adjacent programs, nearly six times as much. Those programs are not identical, but many serve the same population and respond to the same underlying crisis.
The persistence of this gap cannot be explained by insufficient investment. What Seattle lacks is not another isolated program. It lacks a reliable pathway connecting the programs we already fund.
We are not being outspent. We are being out-operated.
The problem is that our investments do not yet function as a dependable system. A collection of expensive services is not a continuum of care if responders still have nowhere appropriate to take someone.
Seattle has built many of the necessary pieces. Now, we must connect them, measure whether people receive care, and hold the system accountable for conditions on the ground. That is harder than it sounds. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority was created for good reasons, yet its governance failures show how quickly coordination can become its own bureaucracy while outcomes remain elusive.
The individual services follow different hours, transportation rules, and eligibility standards. Some require voluntary participation or a basic level of behavioral control. Each restriction may be defensible on its own. Together, they can leave responders with no workable destination.
That is how a region can spend heavily on services while people still feel that help does not exist. Every program can perform its assigned role while the system fails the person on the sidewalk.
Seattle’s jail-booking process also helps explain why law enforcement often appears unable to respond to persistent, disruptive behavior. At an August 2026 City Council hearing, police officials described what happens when the King County Jail issues a medical decline. In plain terms, the jail refuses to accept an arrestee until a hospital clears them for booking.
The safeguards exist for legitimate reasons, but the process can consume six to ten hours and is vulnerable to exploitation. In lower-level cases, SPD acknowledged that officers may abandon the booking rather than remove a patrol unit from service for most of a shift.
That creates a predictable deterrent. When addressing disorder may tie up an officer for hours and still end without a booking, fewer officers remain available for other calls and the conduct may go unanswered. This is one reason residents see repeated misconduct and wonder why no one responds.
The result serves no one well. Emergency departments absorb cases that may not require emergency care. Officers disappear from the street. The person receives little meaningful treatment, and the community is left with the same problem.
RESET was built for this kind of failure. It gives officers somewhere to take people who need supervision but not hospitalization. The quick handoff preserves patrol capacity and creates an opportunity for care.
Seattle may not need an exact replica. Existing facilities could fill much of the same role, but it will also require difficult conversations about whether the organizations paid to do this work are delivering results.
San Francisco is now applying that discipline to more than $500 million in annual homelessness contracts. The Lurie administration has begun re-competing the full portfolio. Contracts will be tied more directly to measurable outcomes. Officials have discussed consolidating overlapping programs and shifting resources toward providers that perform better.
A civil grand jury found that San Francisco was not consistently measuring providers based on client safety, successful exits or meaningful performance. It could not identify a single instance in which a contract was not awarded or renewed after corrective action.
A system in which every contract survives is not necessarily compassionate. It may simply be incapable of making judgments.
Seattle will need the same conversation. Are our contracts paying for activity or results? Do they reward completed handoffs and successful connections to treatment? Are programs available when responders need them? Does funding change when an approach repeatedly fails?
As a former state agency director who oversaw funding for programs like these, I know how much political discomfort those questions can create. Many providers do difficult work with limited resources, and their experience deserves respect.
But respect cannot become an exemption from accountability.
The challenge is not only operational. It is also political. Service providers, advocates, and elected officials often work within the same civic coalitions. Those relationships can build trust and advance important causes, but they can also make accountability more difficult. Questions about performance may feel personal, and contract oversight can be mistaken for disloyalty rather than understood as responsible governance.
As Upton Sinclair observed, it is difficult to persuade someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it. That does not mean providers are acting in bad faith. It means we should be honest about the incentives surrounding public spending.
Asking whether a program works is often treated as an attack on its mission. Changing a contract can be portrayed as abandoning the people it was meant to serve. That is precisely why leadership is necessary.
It is easy to announce another investment. It is harder to tell an organization doing honorable work that its outcomes are not good enough. It is harder still to move public money when that organization disagrees.
Yet public funding carries a public obligation. Compassion should be measured by whether lives improve, not by whether a contract remains undisturbed.
Seattle has crisis facilities, diversion programs, sobering services and experienced providers. We should be better positioned to succeed.
The fact that we are not succeeding consistently should force a harder question.
Do we need another program, or do we need leaders willing to make the programs we already fund work together?
RESET offers no sweeping solution to addiction or homelessness. Its legal framework will continue to be tested. Its results may change.
But San Francisco identified a recurring failure and put a practical response into operation in less than a year. It did not wait to repair the entire continuum of care. It did not allow unresolved questions to become a justification for paralysis.
It acted.
Walking away is not treatment. Jail is not recovery. A referral that cannot be completed is not a service. Neither is a contract that can describe its activities but cannot show that conditions improved.
Seattle has many of the resources. What we need now is leadership willing to connect them, measure them and seek new authority when the law leaves a gap.
Compassion needs an address. Leadership must make sure the door opens.