by David Mendez

Lauren Davis is used to being the last line of defense. At 12 years old, she accidentally won the starting goalie job on her Issaquah soccer team, as her good hands and instincts made her the team’s best backstop. She’s stayed in goal ever since, literally (she still plays rec league matches!) and metaphorically.

Her career representing the 32nd District from its second seat in the state legislature — and in advocacy before that — has also been highlighted by providing a backstop for Washingtonians.

It’s impossible to look at Davis’s legislative accomplishments without mentioning Ricky’s Law. The law, named for her late friend Ricky Klausmeyer-Garcia, creates a pathway to involuntary commitment for people dealing with severe addiction, as well as an imminent risk to harming one’s self or those around them.

Involuntary commitment is a controversial topic among behavioral health experts. A March essay by University of Washington professor Susan E. Collins argues that involuntary treatment is “necessary in extreme cases, but it does not outperform voluntary care and raises serious concerns about patient safety.”

Davis reached a similar conclusion herself.

“Somebody asked me once, ‘why is involuntary treatment the best answer’? I was like, it’s absolutely not. It’s the worst answer. But sometimes it’s the only answer,” she told The Osprey.

Behavioral health and public safety are two of Davis’s top issues in the legislature, where she’s worked to strengthen the state’s safety nets.

She’s proud of the state’s Recovery Navigator Program, which took effect in 2021, and is meant to create a “credible alternative” to legal penalties like jail, and researchers have found that the program is helpful. Davis said that the program has found success even along Aurora Avenue, which has been a hotbed of sex work, drug use and gun violence.

“The Recovery Navigator Program has gone down there and has had actually a lot of success getting people out of there and into treatment,” Davis said. “I think you need to beef up outreach and services, which is really basic, for the willing,” Davis said. Yet for its success, funding is remarkably tight.

“We’ve been trying to rectify that. I literally have spent the last couple months trying to make sure that I was able to duct tape together enough funding for King County, so we wouldn't see a cut or a reduction in funds,” Davis said.

Davis was elected to the legislature in 2018 after a career that took her from Ghana — where as a Fulbright Scholar she founded a job training program for young girls — to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to her current position as the Strategy Director of the Washington Recovery Alliance advocacy organization.

Davis told The Osprey that she derives “sincere, profound joy and meaning from service,” such as constituent casework.

“The main type of constituent casework that my office fields, and it’s from around the state, not just our district, is two things: behavioral health crises and domestic violence — I personally handle those myself…by the time people get to me, they’re pretty desperate,” Davis said.

She had just gotten an email from a woman asking for help. Her son was in jail, he’s been in the throes of addiction, his legs were covered in open wounds and he’s locked up in another county. Davis pledged to coordinate services for the son, hoping to help him find his path, which is where she finds satisfaction — “these little gems,” she called them.

While at conference in Kennewick, Davis was invited to attend a graduation from a pretrial diversion program, which offers criminal defendants the opportunity to dismiss or reduce a charge in exchange for completing terms ordered by the court. She watched as people, who were previously incarcerated for crimes they committed because of their untreated addictions, received their recovery certificates.

“I don’t need to thump my chest and say, I built that. But seeing them up there, their families were there, they were reunited with their kids — can you think of something that’s more rewarding than that?”