ACTIVISTS ACCUSE CITY ATTORNEY OVER POT INITIATIVE

The case of the missing pot arrests has led to a spat between City
Attorney Tom Carr and activists who claim Carr is using his office to
play down the benefits of voter-approved Initiative 75.

"He has made generalized statements that do not correlate to the data
at hand," said Dominic Holden, a leader of the 2003 ballot measure
that made small marijuana arrests the lowest priority for Seattle
police. "It undercuts the focus of voters in a democracy."

Carr defended himself, saying he made a mistake last month when
citing arrest statistics but that the error doesn't change his belief
that the initiative has had only a nominal effect -- if any.

The dispute arose after a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article Nov. 23
on the effect of the measure. In the story, Carr said pot arrests had
declined before the initiative and after its approval by voters, but
not by much. In other words, the initiative didn't make much difference.

To prove his point, he claimed 74 people were arrested in 2002,
before the measure was in effect, and then 59 the following year
under the new law, a slight decrease.

Seeing the published figure, Holden countered that Carr's number was
incorrect, that the actual number of arrests in 2002 was 160 --
validating his point that the initiative has more dramatically
changed the Police Department's priorities, as intended.

Twice, Carr stuck by his figure when asked about Holden's contention.
But when pressed on the matter again Monday by an ACLU representative
who was involved in the I-75 campaign and by a reporter with The
Stranger, Carr said he made a mistake in the 2002 figure.

"I should have checked my figures," he said.

Even so, Carr maintained, his larger contention that the initiative
was insignificant remains unchanged. Pot arrests, already low in a
city the size of Seattle, dropped from 307 to 160 between 1998 and
2002 before I-75's passage and then to 59 cases the year after it passed.

"The arrests already were dropping," Carr said. "The initiative
didn't do anything."

People who claim a statistically significant drop as a result of the
measure are "out of their minds," he said. "They want to prove
something that does not exist."

Holden, who wants drug laws reformed, disagrees with Carr's claim. He
wonders why Carr waited so long to correct the data.

"I don't know Tom Carr to intentionally give inaccurate information,"
Holden said. "However, it should be of concern to the public when an
elected official fails to set the record straight.

"I'm happy that he has now."