In April, Spokane police arrested a man for grabbing a woman by the neck and pushing her to the ground. A neighbor had called 911 worried that the yelling next door was a domestic violence situation, and the woman told an officer through tears that she was sick of her boyfriend putting his hands on her, according to the police report.
The next day, Spokane County prosecutors sent an email to police. There was probable cause that the man had committed a felony-level assault, since he had prior domestic violence convictions for assaulting and strangling other women he was dating. But the prosecutor’s office decided to decline the case because the victim didn’t want to pursue charges.
It used to be rare that prosecutors declined to bring such charges, said Sgt. Dave Adams, who has worked at the Spokane Police Department for over three decades and has led its domestic violence unit since August 2024. But starting last summer, Adams said that similar emails started trickling into his inbox, until October, when it was like a spigot had opened. The Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office went from declining one or two felony domestic violence cases referred by law enforcement per month to declining over a dozen, peaking in March at 25 declined cases, according to the prosecutor’s office’s data. People who were arrested for crimes like strangulation, assault and no-contact order violations were being released within days, with no new criminal charges on their record…