Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster announced a proposal to put additional one-time money into the city's 2027 budget to chip away at a criminal case backlog that has swelled past 5,000 cases in the City Attorney's Office, including roughly 1,700 domestic-violence cases still waiting for prosecutors to act.
A Backlog Years in the Making
In announcing the plan, Foster said the funding would target delays that have left thousands of victims waiting for resolution. “That's why I'm proposing additional one-time resources in the 2027 budget to help address this backlog and accelerate case reviews,” Foster said, according to the Seattle City Council. A separate council announcement published Monday described the backlog as roughly 5,000 criminal cases and said the amendment would direct a $1 million one-time allocation toward resolving them, per the Seattle City Council
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The size of the backlog has shifted depending on who's counting. Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans has said the real total is higher than first reported, telling The Stranger, “The backlog is actually 5,100 cases,” compared with roughly 1,300 cases her office had initially been told about. Of those, The Stranger's report notes that 1,700 are domestic-violence cases, and most of the backlog dates to 2024 and 2025.
Oldest Cases Stretch Back to 2022
The oldest case still sitting in the backlog dates to 2022, according to reporting from the same outlet about the office's internal accounting. The Urbanist also reports that roughly 1,000 of the backlogged cases don't yet have an assigned crime category, meaning the totals for specific offense types — including domestic violence — could still climb once those cases are sorted. The Evans administration defines a backlogged case as one in which a prosecutor has not yet filed charges or formally declined to pursue it, the outlet reports.
The Stranger report points to outdated case-management software, a difficult system transition, and related data and reporting problems as factors behind the pileup. That strain shows up in the office's overall workload: the City Attorney's Office handles between 10,000 and 11,000 cases every year, according to The Stranger, a volume that has made it difficult to keep pace with new referrals while also working through older, unresolved files. A 2025 annual report from the office notes that the Criminal Division cleared a backlog.
A Plan to Prioritize and Reorganize
Evans's office has said it intends to prioritize the most serious crimes within the backlog first, but not ahead of newly filed cases, The Stranger reports. The office's filing priorities are expected to center on violent misdemeanors — domestic violence, DUI and assault among them — according to The Urbanist. Part of that effort includes reorganizing the Criminal Division around a vertical-prosecution model, in which a single prosecutor owns a case from start to finish rather than handing it off between staff, per The Stranger's reporting.
Foster's proposal lands amid a broader budget push at City Hall around domestic-violence and gender-based-violence services. Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck has proposed $8 million in investments for survivors of gender-based violence in the 2027-2028 biennial budget, according to The Urbanist, and plans to introduce a Statement of Legislative Intent requiring city departments to provide progress reports to the HSLED Committee. PubliCola reported that Rinck said she would propose adding $8 million to the budget to restore services for domestic-violence and sex-trafficking survivors, while Foster told the outlet she would propose a one-time add to next year's budget to help close the case backlog.
Washington law includes a section on victims' rights, RCW 7.69.030, according to the Washington State Legislature. It remains unclear how many of the thousands of backlogged cases would be resolved under Foster's proposed funding or how quickly reviews would move once the money is in place.
