It’s not illegal to be poor in Seattle. Well, actually, yes, it is. Sometimes.

The impound law that, at the behest of City Attorney Mark Sidran, led to confiscating the cars of drivers with suspended licenses beginning January 1, 1999, has been a largely invisible issue outside of communities of color and among the poor. That’s because the majority of those having their cars impounded are poor and/or people of color.

During the first six months of the program about 53 percent of the drivers of impounded vehicles were nonwhite, compared to about 20 percent for all traffic citations and despite nonwhites making up only about 10 percent of Seattle’s population. And common sense suggests that poverty is a major factor in nonpayment of traffic tickets—particularly the hefty $480 fine for not having liability insurance, itself often a function of poverty.

What we’re left with is a downward spiral for folks who are desperately trying to make ends meet and who get caught up in the court system: unable to buy insurance, then doubly unable to pay the ticket they get while driving to the job they need in order to buy the insurance, then further stuck as they must choose between driving on a suspended license and foregoing job, school, day care, medical appointments, or other destinations not served by the city’s less-than-comprehensive bus system.

While Seattle’s Municipal Court embarked on a pilot program of payment plans to enable the poor to try to comply with the system—dropping the license suspension in exchange for a good-faith agreement to pay over time—Darth Sidran went the other way. Don’t pay, lose your car.

Poor parts of Seattle are up in arms. Last month, some 150 people crowded into the basement of New Hope Baptist Church in Seattle’s Central District to voice their outrage. City Attorney Mark Sidran and nearly a dozen present and prospective members of the City Council were in attendance. After a mostly black lineup of witnesses testified to their difficulty in complying with the law, the sponsoring group, Drive to Survive, offered a 10-point program to “end the license suspension crisis.”

Some of the points, like community education on the availability of payment plans through the courts, aren’t particularly controversial; Sidran himself says he supports “the opportunity piece” of the 10 steps. But Drive to Survive also wants the impound ordinance repealed for nondangerous drivers—class 3 DWLS (Driving While License Suspended) as opposed to classes 1 and 2, which deal with drunk driving, reckless driving, and other more serious offenses. And it wants class 3 DWLS decriminalized, calling instead for municipalities to pursue civil remedies against unpaid traffic tickets.

To Sidran, a different crisis is at stake. “I [was] looking at a system that sent my caseload ballistic,” Sidran says. A 1993 change in state law gave the City Attorney’s office 10,000 criminal prosecutions for DWLS and subsequent failure to appear, “the great majority of which were people who didn’t pay their tickets.” To Sidran, that represents a crisis in court costs, in jail costs, and in city time spent on cases that could be fixed relatively easily—by impounding cars.

“We’ve been jailing people for five years with no hue and cry, but take their cars [and] everybody goes nuts,” Sidran says. “I would much rather lock up cars than people.”

It’s true, as Sidran says, that the impound law has gotten peoples’ attention, in part because it relies not on a scheduled date and an appearance before a judge, but the randomness of a traffic stop. People who may not even know their license is suspended (if they’ve moved, for example) may suddenly find themselves without a car and having to appeal to SPD—not a court—to get their car back.

From the city’s perspective, “Operation Impound” has worked marvelously; collections are up. An average of 250 people per week are approaching Seattle Municipal Court to pay overdue tickets, as opposed to 10 per week before the impounds started. In the first six months the program claims over $600,000 in revenues, though half that was during the “grace” period in December and January.

However, the city has values other than how much it collects from what almost by definition are its poorer people. It seems typical of Sidran’s approach that the efforts by local courts to work out payment plans weren’t given a chance to work by themselves; they were accompanied by a crackdown that many associate with “Driving While Black” traffic stops. Drivers with bench warrants for failure to appear still go to jail; the impound is an additional, not merely a different, penalty.

Advocates with community groups like the Central Area Motivation Program claim that Sidran has obstructed, not helped, their efforts to put a more constructive approach in place. The net result is a classic dilemma. To advocates, it’s more important to help the people who can’t comply; to Sidran, it’s more important to punish those who willfully won’t comply, and too bad about the others. In a culture where dependence on cars is unfortunately widespread, Drive to Survive is on the money in its insistence that requirements for responsible driving shouldn’t disqualify the poor.

Too visible, too homeless

Another case when it’s illegal to be poor: being homeless in Seattle during highly visible national and international events. A letter is being circulated among social service agencies imploring Mayor Schell and others to not allow SPD to engage in the “sweeps” jailing homeless people to keep them off Seattle streets and out of sight—as has happened before during big sporting events, Clinton visits, APEC, and so on—during November’s World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. These days, just about every major freeway on-ramp in town has some poor wretch holding a sign. That’s tragic, but it’s not illegal. Watch where they go in late November.