Murders like those of 80-year-old dog-walker Ruth Dalton are unacceptable. They’re also preventable. To achieve lasting public safety, we need much larger investments in public health. by Justin Ward When a judge recently ruled that the man accused of killing 80-year-old dog-walker Ruth Dalton was unfit to stand trial, the right started howling with indignation. In August, the man allegedly pulled Dalton from her car, which struck and killed her as her assailant drove away. Like similar high-profile violent crimes in the past, conservatives turned her murder into a cause célèbre, treating the tragedy as a symptom of an epidemic of lawlessness that only more cops and prison cells can cure.   Right now, Dalton’s alleged killer, Jahmed Haynes, is in the hospital to restore his competency to stand trial. After that, if he’s found guilty, then he will almost certainly go to prison for life. But Republican gubernatorial candidate and former King County Sheriff Dave Reichert turned the story into red meat for his base, erroneously posting that the incompetency finding meant Haynes would get “a 90-day stay at the hospital instead of prison.” Only slightly more honest, internet personality Brandi Kruse acknowledged on her podcast that Haynes would get competency restoration and that “we have these protections for a reason.” Still, she expressed doubt that the state hospital would succeed (competency restoration has an 80 percent success rate) and opined that Haynes would get “a free murder.” Their implication is that—rather than addressing Haynes’s crimes—the bleeding-heart, murder-loving liberal judges will soon send him back to the streets on a technicality, ready to kill again. They argue that Dalton would still be alive today if Haynes had only stayed locked up for life. However, a review of Haynes’s interactions with the criminal justice system for the last 30 years suggests an alternative timeline where this murder never happened. We can envision better ways to intervene in the lives of potential Jahmed Hayneses to prevent future Ruth Daltons from being killed.  Haynes’s Mental Health History Is Revealing Like so many unprovoked stranger homicides and assaults, this one was clearly rooted in severe, untreated mental illness. Haynes was recorded on surveillance video pacing frantically on the street before attempting to enter the car. When detectives searched his place, they put on hazmat gear because of the accumulated mess inside, a telltale sign of schizophrenic decompensation.  Haynes’s condition was severe but treatable. Records from his previous evaluation at Washington State Hospital show that Haynes responded well to medication and remained asymptomatic during his treatment there. Doctors thought that he posed only a moderate risk if he continued taking his medication, but they noted that his lack of insight into his condition, which is common in schizophrenic patients, presented the biggest risk factor. Haynes did not believe he had a mental illness or needed medication. His doctors regarded that risk factor as “changeable.” While we don’t know much about the time between his release from prison in 2017 and Dalton’s murder this year, we can say that Haynes had no contact with the criminal legal system for seven years. By all accounts, he remained stable and housed until he decompensated.  The impulse to look at incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution for all crime and disorder overlooks alternative approaches that yield better results. Timely and sustained intervention in the lives of people with mental illness before and after imprisonment improves public safety. Clinicians did not diagnose Haynes with schizophrenia until 2005, when he was finally referred to the state hospital after an escape attempt. Before then, he had already cycled in and out of the criminal legal system for more than a decade. After his release, the Department of Corrections supervised him for a year until he completed a life-skills course in 2018. When Haynes was first convicted in 1991 at age 15 for stealing a car, “tough on crime” was the order of the day, even as crime was rapidly declining. Three years later, Washington State passed the nation’s first “three strikes” law, and the federal government enacted the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which provided almost $10 billion in funding for the prison system. Judges at the time were less likely to show leniency, and diversion options were limited, but early diagnosis and treatment as a teenager could’ve set Haynes on a different path.  The Limitations of the Tough-on-Crime Approach  A knee-jerk response to violent crimes is to call for stricter punishment, but that response ignores the fact that the criminal legal system is a massive, costly machine that, despite massive investments into it, is already reaching its limits. We would get a better return on public safety by investing in caring for the mental health of Washington’s residents.  Though it’s blessed with a booming economy, Washington consistently ranks among the worst states for mental health due to its high numbers of people with mental illness and its middling access to psychiatric services. According to one estimate, 1.5 million adults in Washington experience mental illness, and half of them don’t get treatment annually, often due to expense or lack of access to resources. The picture is worse for the 212,000 with severe mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Only 40 percent get help each year. They’re twice as likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to land in a hospital. Despite making up around 3 percent of the population, people with diagnosed severe mental illnesses comprise 15 percent of the state’s incarcerated population.  Washington employs a neoliberal mental health model in which nonprofit contractors and private providers primarily serve patients. There’s a dire psychiatrist shortage statewide, and costs are skyrocketing due to increased demand for psychiatric services. Meanwhile, state-run hospitals are chronically at capacity. The system’s limitations are, ultimately, a policy choice. A surge in misdemeanor referrals for competency restoration, particularly from King County, is one reason state hospitals are overwhelmed. They account for nearly 60 percent of treatment beds statewide. When voters elected Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison to office on a tough-on-crime platform, there was a notable spike in referrals as the Republican ramped up prosecution of so-called high-utilizers, unilaterally shuttered the therapeutic court, and barred the city’s most progressive judge from working on criminal prosecution cases. Prosecuting high-utilizers—a group of people who frequently appear in the Seattle Municipal Court on misdemeanor charges—is a quixotic endeavor. Most are members of the Trueblood class, meaning they’ve repeatedly been found incompetent to stand trial, but Davison continues referring them to the state for competency evaluation and restoration. More often than not, it’s determined that their competency can’t be restored within the time window for misdemeanors, so charges are dismissed.  In her zeal to criminalize the homeless and the mentally ill, Davison is cramming another thousand or so people into the caseload of a state mental health system that’s already bursting at the seams. Last year, a judge fined the state $100 million for contempt of court regarding the strict timelines for beginning and completing competency restoration. The state is scrambling to increase the number of beds in response, adding nearly a billion dollars to the next budget to build a 350-bed forensic hospital solely to treat competency restoration patients.  At the county level, governments are starting to scale up diversion programs and therapeutic courts, which have better outcomes than jail in terms of future arrests, treatment participation, future hospitalizations, and other key programs. But it’s still not enough, as these programs are underfunded to meet the demand. King County’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency Fund, which funds diversion programs, accounts for about 8 percent of the county budget’s general fund expenditures. It’s a tiny subset of total spending on cops, courts, and jails that eats up nearly three-quarters of the county’s discretionary budget.   The Path to Lasting Public Safety  On top of more diversion programs, we need greater public investment in mental health beyond the criminal legal system. There’s a growing body of research that shows expanding access to mental health care and adolescent intervention through treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy significantly reduce crime. The success of this approach is also borne out by national-level comparisons. Nations with the lowest crime rates are those with the strongest social safety nets, not those with the strictest punishments. Rather than realizing that punishment isn’t effective, the takeaway for conservatives was that Haynes, an “eight-time felon” who spent most of his life in prison, simply wasn’t punished enough. But he might have thrived under a system of outpatient monitoring of the kind offered in Sweden, where a psychiatric nurse supervises treatment and other aspects of post-incarceration care like housing and meeting daily needs.  Norway, a nation of 5.4 million, had 38 homicides in 2023, which is fewer than Seattle had so far this year. This outcome is in no small part due to the country’s sizeable investment in mental health, which accounts for 20 percent of health care spending. The Seattle Metro Area has an economy roughly as large as Norway’s, but with 1.5 million fewer people. However, instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis, area leaders are doubling down on the failed strategy of criminalization. On top of pointless prosecutions of the mentally ill that waste money and that are frequently dismissed, city officials are escalating sweeps, scaling up surveillance, implementing banishment areas, and raiding housing funds to pay for police raises. If we want to prevent murders like that of Ruth Dalton, we must get serious about treating mental health problems before they become public safety emergencies.