Seattle City Council Public Safety and Human Services Committee 8922

Good morning.

The August 9th, 2022 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.33 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair Herbold.

Here.

Thank you.

On today's agenda, we'll be hearing nine reappointments and two appointments to the Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board.

We'll be receiving an introductory presentation for Geno Betz as the proposed permanent director of the Office of Police Accountability.

We'll also be receiving an update from the Human Services Department on financial strengthening measures they have been implementing over the last year.

We'll be hearing a second quarter presentation from Council Central staff on the Seattle Police Department staffing budget and 911 response.

And then lastly, we will be discussing and potentially voting on Council Bill 120389. regarding incentives for hiring police officers, as well as authorizing new positions in the Seattle Department of Human Resources to support recruitment and assist the administration of police and fire exams, which can speed up the hiring process.

It's listed for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

With that, we will now move to approve our agenda for our committee meeting today.

If there is no objection, today's committee agenda will be adopted.

Seeing and hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this time, we'll move into public comment.

I'll moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will alternate between virtual and in-person public commenters.

I will call on each speaker by name and in the order in which they registered on the council's website and the sign-in form.

If you've not registered to speak yet, but you would still like to do so, you can sign up before the end of today's public comment session.

When I call a speaker's name, if you are using the virtual option, you will hear a prompt, and once you hear that prompt, you will need to press star six to unmute yourself.

We ask that you please begin speaking by stating your name and the item on the agenda which you are addressing.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

And once the speaker hears the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments.

The speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided.

The speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, please disconnect from the line, and we encourage you to continue following the meeting, and you can do so via the Seattle Channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

We have seven people signed up for public comment.

And I will read in two speakers on the list of remote public commenters.

And clerk, do I have the list of the folks who signed in in person?

Thank you.

So our first speaker is Reza Maharashi, followed by Karen Gielin.

Reza?

Yeah, hi.

My name is Reza Murashi and I'm Director of Government Affairs for Kilroy Realty Corporation.

And I'm here today to support Mayor Harrell's recruitment and retention package that will help the Seattle Police Department increase its staffing levels by nearly 500 officers.

This plan will make Seattle more competitive and allow us to attract additional trained officers that reflect the value and expectations of our community.

Our city is grappling with a severe shortage of police officers that exacerbates issues that have undermined our sense of safety in recent years.

We currently have fewer than 940 patrol officers in a city with more than 800,000 residents, and this is the lowest number in over 30 years.

And according to the Seattle Police Department's own crime data, Incidents of violent crime downtown have increased by 55% in the first three months of 2022 compared to the same period last year.

And property crime has increased by more than 50%.

We think that support for a properly staffed police department would be an important signal that our city leadership is committed to public safety in Seattle.

And we urge the committee to act with urgency to pass this legislation and send it for full council consideration.

We appreciate your consideration of our request.

Thank you for your time today.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Karen Gillan.

Karen?

Hello, my name is Karen Gillan.

I'm speaking about Council Bill 120389. I am a lifelong resident of Seattle and have lived downtown for the past 10 years.

During that 10 years, public safety has deteriorated to an unthinkable level.

The previous council made it clear to our public safety personnel that they were not valued nor supported, making a bad situation even worse.

In 1980, Seattle's population was about 494,000 people.

Now we're at over 760,000, but have the same number of officers as 1980. In the last year alone, we lost more than 300 officers while adding roughly 20,000 residents.

It is imperative that the current Council give resounding support to the mayor's plan for recruitment and retention of police officers in order to send a strong message to residents that public safety is a priority and send the message to criminals that they will be held accountable and to the police that we value their important contribution.

Criminals are aware that the low level of police staffing means that they have little likelihood of being apprehended.

Residents know that there is little point in even reporting crime because there aren't enough officers to respond.

Please vote soon and positively regarding the mayor's plan.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Marguerite Richard, followed by Carol Malone.

Good day, everyone.

My name is Marguerite Richard.

resident of Seattle, Washington, what my major concern is, is the whole agenda because you're dealing with law enforcement here.

And I attended one of the meetings.

And I didn't like the way they said after we get through talking in a room, that they will be able to pick a chief after they have these little small meetings.

And I just don't like that it seemed like we were being introduced to things that we've already discussed and we've been through.

And I don't understand how you put in all these people.

or you got somebody that you're appointing for accountability.

Have you ever been accountable to me?

I can sit right downstairs and have a security guard tell me to get up, okay?

And you talking about we gonna move forward?

No, what we gonna do, like I said, we're gonna back that thing up.

We're gonna go right back to the year where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

let's just deal with that because I'm thinking about my age, what I was when he was killed up until now.

And I can come here where I was born and sit down in this lobby that's supposed to be for everybody and be maliciously harassed with sitting there.

You think I got time to be worried about who the next chief is when I'm sitting up here trying to protect my life?

You're wrong.

And you're going to be dealt with just like this prophet right here on this fan.

He said, fan the word.

and the victory is ours, and we believe God, and we yet believe God, and we still believe God.

And then this right here is anointed oil for anybody that needs it, because we need a healing in the land, and we need a healing in this city, and I will be back.

I will.

Thank you, Ms. Bouchard.

Next is Carolyn Malone.

college.

I'm not a nervous person, but certain people in the room sometimes cause my stomach to quiver.

But I'm Carolyn Malone, and I'm here because of police continuous, police brutality.

Police are not Seattle police.

White males and females are not in compliance with the federal decree because daily I'm harassed for standing on street corners with signs like this.

I'm one of 32%.

of the blacks, a person of color, harassed and caged by Seattle police.

I'm regularly locked out of my apartment.

Seattle police in collusion with the managers at Chancery Place apartment locked me out of my farm apartment in retaliation.

My stomach is quivering now.

locked me out of my apartment in retaliation for my street corner protests.

Seattle police act against, retaliate against anyone, especially an outspoken black woman or anyone with the audacity to speak out against their crimes.

This is the manager's statement in trying to extort money from me for no valid reason.

I paid my rent.

I've been in the apartment for three and a half years, never missed a payment.

yet this statement claims I owe $1,830.

And when I ask about it, it's a glitch.

This is a concerted effort with cops and managers to evict me eventually.

And I'm not going to stand for it.

I'm going right back out took forth and James with my signs and protest against these rabid cops who are not in compliance.

They just find clever ways to obey the law and break the law.

Thank you, Ms. Malone.

Our next speaker is Kylie Rolfe followed by Howard Gale.

Good morning, council members.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this morning.

My name is Kylie Rolf, and I'm here to speak on behalf of the Downtown Seattle Association and our over 1,000 business, nonprofit, and resident members.

In service to our mission of creating a healthy, vibrant downtown for all, we provide vision, leadership, and influence on a range of issues impacting downtown.

I'm here to speak in support of Council Bill 120389, related to recruitment and retention of police officers in the Seattle Police Department.

It is no secret that we're experiencing what can only be described as a staffing crisis within SPD.

And downtown residents, visitors, workers, and businesses have most definitely felt the effects.

Incidents of violent crime downtown increased by 55% in the first three months of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. And property crime increased by more than 50%.

Organized retail crime is costing both small and large retailers millions of dollars and lost merchandise and businesses, property owners, and arts and cultural venues have been forced to hire private security at a significant cost to them in attempts to keep their workers, patrons, and customers safe.

This is not a sustainable solution.

We believe that the mayor's SPD recruitment and retention package is a thoughtful approach to right-sizing our police department, and we commend it for not only setting an ambitious goal of hiring 500 officers in five years, but doing so in a way that ensures our city attracts the right type of officers that reflect the values and expectations of our community.

As downtown continues to grow its resident population, welcome more visitors, host major events, and open world-class venues and public spaces, it is imperative we have a police department that is able to keep pace.

We thank you for the speed with which the committee has taken up this important piece of legislation and urge you to act swiftly to approve this plan, thus sending an important signal to the public that our city leadership is committed to public safety in Seattle.

Thank you for the time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Howard Gale.

Good morning.

Howard Gale with seattlestop.org commenting on our failed police accountability system.

Exactly one year ago today, Carolyn Bick at the South Seattle Emerald revealed the malfeasance and corruption at Seattle's Office of the Inspector General with her story about a whistleblower who had resigned just days earlier.

Instead of this committee or the council exercising oversight of the OIG, it allowed the OIG to contract with an outside entity for a carefully curated audit that would not be made public until nearly one year later.

Despite the limited nature of this audit, it substantiated the claims made one year ago by the whistleblower.

Many of these claims had been noted two years earlier by a different whistleblower and by other OIG workers.

This morning I am publishing my analysis at seattlestop.org indicating that despite this outside audit having been completed and printed 53 days ago it was kept under wraps and then leaked two weeks ago before being made publicly available to journalist Erica C. Barnett almost certainly by Council Member Herbold or her office in a clumsy and transparent attempt to provide spin to the story by underplaying distorting and obscuring the audit's findings.

Wrongful acts of commission have now become wrongful acts of, wrongful acts of commission have become, of omission have become acts of commission.

This morning, I will also be making a formal complaint to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission regarding this breach of oversight, trust, and transparency by Council Member Herbold for an agency that spends over $3.6 million of our money and is entrusted with ensuring the accuracy and fairness of the investigations of police misconduct, a role that the OIG has clearly failed at.

as is evident from the complete lack of accountability for the police abuse of 2020 and the repeated failures of the OIG to find fault with OPA investigations that determine each and every SBD killing to be lawful and proper.

You can read more about this at South Seattle Emerald and at seattlestop.org.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is the Honorable Michael J. Fuller, followed by Lisa Nitze.

Andrew J. Lewis, Black Lives Matter, but this is not the changes or the dream Black Lives Matter can believe in.

You don't look like me, but it's a conflict with state constitution and statutes versus federal constitution and statutes.

And when it's a conflict, in state constitution and statute of state must yield to federal constitution and statute.

Lisa Herbold, United States v. Lee, 1882, and Bevin v. Six Unknown Agents, 1971. In response to the Seattle Finance Administrative Service to Margaret Lloyd-Richards in regard of this foreigner putting us out from speaking to y'all about the corruption.

Jim Hill state he won't be pardoned.

So now I'm giving my rebuttal to him maliciously harassing me and Margaret Lloyd-Richards when we were coming to exercise our First Amendment right.

Now, I stated violation of a fraudulent act conducted involving bad faith, dishonesty, a lack of integrity, or moral turpitude.

also turns a dishonest act.

Now, you must be mindful, I've been here 65 years, and I have never been through what I'm going through now.

And you're openly violating your own oath to all that matter.

Thank you so much, Honorable Fuller.

When you're in violation,

Your time is up.

Thank you.

We want to move on to the next speaker.

You got to go to federal penitentiary.

I'm not playing with you.

OK, let's wrap up your remarks and we'll have to meet.

L-O-Y, period.

L, period.

A, period.

L, period.

R-E-V, period.

977.

1996 and 1997. Thank you, Honorable Fuller.

No one is above the law when it comes to the ADA and the rehabilitation act.

Thank you.

Our last speaker is Lisa Nitze.

Hi, this is Lisa Nitze with Nitze Stegen.

Thank you very much.

for the opportunity to speak to you.

And I'm speaking in favor of the SPD recruitment and retention efforts to meet community needs and of funding those.

I'm with a real estate developer and management company that builds and manages multifamily housing in opportunity zones primarily in many parts of the city.

Pioneer Square, CID, Soto, downtown, Rainier Valley, Othello, And in each of these areas, I've started public-private partnership efforts or have worked with them to address the tremendous safety and security issues affecting the neighborhoods going unaddressed.

Retailers are suffering from significant and frequent theft, employers worried about safety of employees, pedestrians facing access issues and threatening or violent behavior, residents worried about going to and from their homes, for their and their family's safety.

City government agencies needing SPD backup often in the work that they're doing and not being able to have it.

All of these issues are arising from either no response or very delayed response from the SPD.

And SPD reports simply not having the staffing to be able to meet incoming requests.

So please support measures to help the SPD rebuild its numbers and rebuild their ability to respond to community needs as they arrive.

Thank you.

That will move into the items on today's agenda and conclude public comment.

Will the clerk please read in agenda items.

I'm sorry, clerk.

There's a lot of them.

One through 11.

Committee agenda item number one, appointment 02321, reappointment of Charlene M. Comrie as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to May 14, 2023. Agenda item number two, appointment 02322, reappointment of Kevin Morris, member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to August 14, 2023. Agenda item number three is appointment 02323, reappointment of Chris Todd as member of Seattle Advisory Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to August 14th, 2023, agenda item number four, appointment 02324, re-appointment of Tara L. Henriksen as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board.

for a term to August 31, 2024. Item number five, appointment 02325, reappointment of Amy Lara as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to September 23, 2024. Agenda number six is appointment 02326, reappointment of Raeanne Rushing as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to March 31, 2024. Agenda item number seven, appointment 02327, reappointment of Fitch Chess as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to May 31, 2025. Agenda item number eight, appointment 02328, reappointment of Kurt Howell Westing as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to May 31, 2025. Agenda item number nine, appointment 02329, reappointment of Hugo Stiletto as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term to May 31, 2025. Agenda item number 10 is appointment 02330, appointment of Ricky Campbell as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term of three years from council confirmation.

Agenda item number 11, appointment 02331, appointment of Sean Wood as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for a term of three years from council confirmation.

Thank you so much, well done.

So just a little bit of background on our typical process.

When we have reappointments, we don't require their attendance, although of course they're always welcome.

For new appointments, we do ask that they attend, and I think that's what our participation looks like today.

from the Seattle Fire Department who's presenting the appointments.

And Ken, maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background about the board itself, its duties and responsibilities, and a few words about the two new appointments, Mr. Campbell and Mr. Wood.

And then after you do, the introduction of the advisory board and the candidates.

I'll turn it over to them to let us know why they're interested in serving.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, and good morning, everybody.

My name is Ken Brouillette, and I am the Technical Code Development Coordinator for the Seattle Fire Department, and I work directly for Fire Marshal's Assistant Chief Tim Muniz, who unfortunately is out ill today, or he would be with us.

The Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board consists of 15 members.

They are mayor appointed, and they are confirmed by city council.

These board positions are filled by representatives from organized labor, local business, industry, and technical trades, along with interested public members.

Members on the board serve three-year terms, as you know.

We currently have four vacancies.

Two of them are for the public positions, one's for the architect position, and one's for our insurance industry representative.

We continually continue to recruit to fill those vacancies.

So the Fire Code Advisory Board serves as a critical role by reviewing all of the changes to the current Seattle Fire Code and any administrative rules that are developed through the Seattle Fire Marshal's Office.

They provide input and propose changes during their review process.

And today we are requesting the following current board of members be reconfirmed for another three years.

And again, they are called a Carlene Comrie, who represents our service industry.

Kevin Marr, our fire protection industry, Chris Todd, the Port of Seattle, Tara Hendrickson, chemical engineers, Amy Liu, the marine industry.

Rahan Rushing, Mechanical Engineers for CHESS, for Manufacturing Warehouse, Kurt Lessig for Research, and Hugo Sotelo representing the major institutions.

All of them have done a great job helping put together the 2015 and the 2018 Seattle Fire Code, and they will help us with the 2021 Seattle Fire Code, which we're working on currently.

And also we are requesting that Ricky Campbell and Sean would be confirmed as new members of the Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board begin their three-year terms.

So first a little bit about Ricky.

Ricky Campbell, he's been recommended by the Martin Luther King Jr.

County Labor Council to represent them on the Fire Code Advisory Board as a replacement for Scott Peterson and Sprinkler Fitters Local 699. Ricky has an extensive background in fire sprinklers to include projects as high-rises, stadiums, apartment complexes, and single-family homes.

He also has a background in fire code development with his most recent experience working on the Washington State Building Code Council Fire Code Technical Advisory Group during the development of the amendments to the 2021 Washington State Fire Code.

Sean Wood.

Sean has been recommended by BOMA, the Building Owners and Management Association, to represent them on the Fire Code Advisory Board as a replacement for retired member Brad Middleton.

Sean was selected by BOMA because of his expansive knowledge as a commercial building engineer.

His experience includes some of the most complex types of fire life safety systems are installed in buildings.

And he currently works for Urban Renaissance Group as the Senior Chief Engineer at the Columbia Center.

He's developed a network of industry colleagues through BOMA and he'll be a great asset to BOMA as well as our Fire Code Advisory Board.

Both individuals will fill an important role in the development of our next Seattle Fire Code, along with our existing members.

And the Seattle Fire Department, we bring them forward to you today for consideration to become new members of the Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board, along with their confirmation of the existing board members.

Ricky Campbell and Sean Wood are here today, if you have any questions for them or for me.

And I thank you very much for your time.

Thank you so much, Ken.

With that, I think I'll just turn it over to Mr. Campbell and Mr. Wood to say a few words about why they're interested in serving in this capacity.

Mr. Campbell.

Thank you, council members.

For me, I went through our apprenticeship program through South Seattle Community College.

It's UA Local 699 Sprinkler Fitters.

I've been a licensed sprinkler fitter since 06. I teach part-time currently for our apprenticeship program.

I've been doing that for eight years now.

I do hold a accreditation through NYSET level two for inspection and testing water-based fire protection systems, as well as ASSE fire protection field technician.

I am passionate about fire and life safety.

This is my career, and I am passionate about it.

Any questions?

Let's just see whether or not folks have any questions.

I'm not seeing any, and I believe, as I understand, the fire code board is constructed or comprised, it has different, the mayor, it makes the nominations, the appointments, but they, each of you represent a different part of the sector.

And Mr. Campbell, I believe you are representing the MLK Labor Council, is that correct?

That is correct.

Thank you.

And Mr. Wood, I think you're representing BOMA, and if you as well could say a few words about your interest in serving.

Yeah, I appreciate your guys's time.

Um, yeah, I've been a commercial building engineer for the last 20 years working from healthcare to the downtown high rise building sector.

So yeah, I've been In this industry, learning, working right along with the Ricky Campbell's the world, working and maintaining the systems.

My predecessor, Mr. Brad Milton and I had talked about this for a couple of years trying to impasse and on information I've been.

working with him on some of the stuff that he's worked on previously in the committee here.

I have multiple different licenses in the industry that are related to the commercial building operations.

But yeah, this is really exciting.

I've got the endorsement of the Beaumont Building Owners and Managers Association to take and fill Brad Middleton's role as retiring.

So yeah, very excited.

I've been a resident of City of Seattle for the last 22 years.

An avid bicycle commuter too as well.

And I'm just really excited to serve and help out here with this.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate both of your willingness to serve the city of Seattle in this capacity.

There are no further questions.

We'll move forward with the vote.

I'll move agenda items one through 11 as presented on the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Aye.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Four in favor, none opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion carries.

The committee recommends the appointments.

They'll be forwarded to the August 16th full council meeting.

Again, congratulations and thank you for your service in helping make Seattle a safer and more secure place.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item number 12.

Committee Agenda Item Number 12, Appointment 02332, Appointment of Geno Butch Jr. as Director of the Office of Police Accountability for a term to December 31, 2022.

Thank you so much.

So today we're joined by Jeremy Rocca, the Legal Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer of the Mayor's Office, and Gino Betz, the Mayor's Selection for the Permanent Director for the Office of Police Accountability.

Thank you both so much for being here with us today.

This is the first of two appearances for Mr. Betz before the committee.

This appearance today is designed for the Mayor's Office to present Mr. Betz and for him to briefly present his interest in this position.

Mr. Betz will appear before the committee again on September 13th with questions and answers and a committee vote.

My office circulated a draft list of questions to council members and requested input to those questions by August 10th.

after which those council questions will be sent to Mr. Betz in advance of the September 13th meeting.

I wanna note just for the record, the sort of the status of this particular term as it relates to the next.

This particular appointment will fill the remainder of the first term of former Director Meyerberg, which goes through the end of 2022. If the council approves the appointment, the mayor will then send a reappointment package that will go directly to full council with no separate reconfirmation process because of the short, only a couple months amount of time.

Mr. Betz will all be appearing at the Community Police Commission virtual community engagement meeting this evening, beginning at 6 p.m.

Before I start, I wanna thank you, Mr. Betz, for your willingness to engage.

with the Community Police Commission this way.

I really appreciate it.

And with that, Jeremy, welcome back to these rooms and take it away.

And please do introduce yourself and your nomination.

Sure.

Thanks so much, Councilmember.

Jeremy Rocca, Mayor's Legal Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer.

Councilmember Herbal and members of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee, it's my honor to be before you today to introduce Mayor Harrell's nominee for the Director of Seattle's Office of Police Accountability, Gino Betz.

Normally it would be Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell providing this introduction, but she's taking her first well-earned vacation of the administration, and her office leadership team insisted that she not call in from her time off.

Although that was quite the struggle to get her to agree, she has agreed.

Council Members, Mayor Harrell believes accountability must be a core principle for an effective Seattle Police Department.

Further, he wants to see SPD earn a full and effective compliance with the Federal Consent Decree, and the only way to get there is with tested and trusted accountability systems.

That accountability structure must be guided by independent and principled leadership.

And after a robust national search, Mayor Harrell is confident that Mr. Betts is the right choice to lead the Office of Police Accountability.

Gino brings his impressive experience from Chicago's South Side Community Justice Center and Civilian Office of Police Accountability, where he operated with integrity and commitment to public good.

He cares about earning public trust in our public safety systems, and he intends to operate with transparency and be visible in the community.

We cannot have safety without accountability, and Gino is exactly the person Seattleites need to bolster public faith in our institutions.

The mayor ultimately selected Chino thanks to the comprehensive vetting by an incredible selection committee who helped guide and shape the search process.

More information about the selection process is included in the mayor's cover letter to you, but we wanted to acknowledge and thank search committee members who included Douglas Wagner, co-chair of the Community Police Commission, Reverend Patricia Hunter, also with the Community Police Commission.

Senator Maka Dhingra.

Brian Maxey, the COO of SPD.

Nina Martinez, with the Latino Civil Alliance.

Davida Briscoe, with the Mayor's Office, who is our Gun Violence Prevention Liaison.

Myra Sievers, with the Anti-Defamation League.

And of course, Council Member Lisa Herbal.

Thank you, Council Member.

As the mayor noted in his letter, stakeholders found that Gino holds a commitment to fairness and justice, has a belief in continuous learning and improvement, and has proven experience driving real progress.

We're very fortunate that Gino is willing to serve our city, and we thank you for your consideration of his nomination today.

As you have the opportunity to meet with him, we think you'll be just as impressed as the mayor and the community was.

With that, I'll turn things over to Gino to offer his introductory remarks.

And again, thanks Council Member Hurdle.

Absolutely.

Welcome, Mr. Betts.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you so much.

Good morning.

My name is Geno Betts, Jr.

Jeremy, thank you for that introduction.

Council members, thank you so much for this opportunity and your consideration of me for the Director of the Office of Police Accountability.

I've spent my entire career in public service.

I grew up and worked in Chicago's inner cities, which shaped my view of police oversight.

On one hand, like many black and brown boys in urban areas across the country, I've experienced unwarranted stops and frisks, aggressive reprimands, and other encounters that undermine the tenets of community-based and constitutional policing.

But on the other hand, as a prosecutor, I work with some of the most decent, hardworking, and professional officers anyone could imagine.

To be honest, it was a culture shock.

It made me uncomfortable.

I knew that my position as a prosecutor should not be what entitled me to civil and constitutional police encounters.

It was my role as a citizen, as a human, that should afford not only me, but everyone that same experience.

So that insight sparked my interest in police accountability.

but it was the national spread of misconduct captured on video that pushed me to actually do the work.

We saw Eric Gardner in New York, Philando Castile in Minnesota, and Laquan McDonald right here in Chicago in my hometown, and so many others that led me to serve as an attorney at Chicago's Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

So why police accountability in Seattle?

On the surface, Seattle and Chicago may appear to be worlds apart, but at their core, both are hardworking cities with really good people who care deeply about meaningful fairness, transparency, and progress.

There's a palpable energy in Seattle, an energy evidenced by mass public engagement, demonstration, and demand for reform, and the same energy that we saw this morning with the public comments.

which we all appreciate.

And energy also evidenced by the Seattle Police Department's significant progress in trainings, policy reforms, and technology, as acknowledged by the Independent Monitor.

but there's more work to do.

If confirmed, I commit to doing that work.

I commit to engaging the community for meaningful and valued input.

I commit to transparent, complete, and independent police misconduct investigations.

I commit to working with all stakeholders toward building community trust in the police oversight process.

Lastly, I look forward and commit to reaching out to each of you individually to further discuss my qualifications and vision for OPA.

Again, I thank you for this opportunity and I thank you for your time.

Thank you so much, Mr. Betz.

I really have had the pleasure of meeting you and I'm so impressed and optimistic for your vision of police oversight for Seattle and really appreciate your willingness to take on this incredibly important role for our city.

questions or comments?

Seeing none, we look forward to having you back after the council recess for our committee meeting on September 13th for a questionnaire with council members and a vote on your permanent appointment.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item 13. committee agenda item number 13, information, human services department of financial improvement plan.

Thank you so much.

So today we're joined by representatives from the human services department and the city budget office, who will share a presentation on work that the human services department has been undertaking to strengthen its financial management controls and practices.

This is a follow-up briefing to a briefing that this committee had in December.

And I think we'll start just with some quick, a round of introductions.

Please introduce yourself briefly and your affiliation, and I'll share some quick opening remarks.

Great.

Thank you.

Tanya Kim, Acting Director of the Human Services Department.

And I'm Joe Kaspersky.

I'm the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer for the Human Services Department.

And I believe that Julie is, Director Dingley is waiting to be let in.

Right, I'm sure we can facilitate that.

Thank you.

I see nodding heads over at our clerk station.

There we go.

Sorry about that, Director Dingley.

No problem at all.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, everyone.

Julie Dingley, Director of the City Budget Office.

All right, so just as an additional small amount of background, as I mentioned, this is a follow-up from a presentation that this committee received last December.

You may recall that former Budget Director Noble alerted several of us in August 2021 via memo to difficulties that the department had been experiencing in managing finances connected with the department's rapid growth over several years.

We asked for a briefing at that time, and Human Services Department shared that they had retained a consultant, Alvarez and Marcel, who was working with Human Services Department very assertively, and they had completed a preliminary assessment and was in the process of identifying some immediate to-do tasks.

Director Noble followed up with a memo in October providing an update and identifying the need for additional FTE, full-time employees at the Human Services Department.

And this was aligned with the recommendations of Alvarez and Marcelle.

And then during the budget process, the council added eight positions to the Human Services Department for exactly this purpose and appropriated $600,000 then Director Noble had set aside to partially pay for these positions.

The positions were added on an emergency basis by Director Noble and Council's action made them permanent.

During the budget process, an additional $400,000 was appropriated through 2022 in the carry forward ordinance.

And then sort of rounding things out for where we are today, Late in that budget process, the Human Services Department identified a need for still additional FTE based on the additional funds that the council was considering adding to its budget to deliver programs and services.

Again, there's a relationship between the dollars that we allocate for programs and services and the staff that the Human Services Department needs to administer those funds.

So we, created and funded three additional positions to support the investments, the new investments in the 2022 budget.

And those FTE were just a portion of the recommendations in the financial improvement plan.

The mid-year supplemental budget legislation also included funding for additional work from the consultant, including finalization of activities such as procedure documents, oversight of the transition of grant revenue and billing preparation, a reconciliation of general ledger accounts, and the provision of training to newly established procurement program.

So I'm really pleased that our partners from the Human Services Department are here today to share with us their progress working through some of these elements in the financial improvement plan.

Again, thank you everyone for joining us this morning, and I turn it over to you to get started on your presentation.

Great, thank you.

And Director Dingley, did you want to say a couple opening remarks?

I would.

Thank you so much, Acting Director Kim.

Good morning everyone again, and thank you for the great summary, Chair Herbold.

That was really wonderful, so I will not rehash any of that.

Just to say that I have work very closely with the human services department for my entire tenure with the city.

And I can tell you in no uncertain terms that acting director Kim is the right person for this, uh, this point in time for this department.

She has shown incredible leadership and determination and, um, accountability through this process.

And so it has been a pleasure to work with her and her team.

I want to thank Joe Kaspersky also for his service to the city in this role.

And I think what you're going to hear today is an update that includes considerable progress that I am encouraged by.

And so look forward to hearing from Acting Director Kim.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And also want to start with additional gratitude.

Thank you Chair Herbold and committee members for the opportunity to update you.

It's very important that we're transparent about the work ahead.

Next slide please.

So, as mentioned by Director Dingley and Chair Herbold so beautifully outlined, we're giving an update, including a background for the viewing public, an overview of the project timeline, updates on the progress and summary of key successes, and highlights on the remaining actions.

Next slide.

As mentioned, HSD's financial issues has been ongoing at least since 2016. There are two underlying challenges.

Just want to note in greater detail that our finance team has been understaffed.

Chair Herbold has articulated the increase in some of our staffing, but also the poor adoption of the city's new financial system known as PeopleSoft 9.2, and that was in 2018. Specifically regarding the staffing capacity, I just want to illustrate that in 2016, the Human Services Department's budget was $142 million.

So in 2016, we were at $142 million.

Fast forward to 2022, we're at $403 million.

So it's already fragile accounting processes that relied on manual corrections by staff was really being challenged by the significant increase, especially given the important work that HSD is charged to do.

Regarding the PeopleSoft software, HSD has an overly complex financial structure that did not fully utilize the features of the new financial system.

I think people don't realize that we have many different fund sources and ways in which that we bill and really articulate this in our financial systems.

So it is just simply complex.

In turn, we have a very high volume of manual corrections, and we just needed to strengthen our business practices.

So the challenges were evident by, we knew this because we were seeing low cash balances, Some missed payments to agencies, inaccurate recording of financial transactions, just to name a few.

Factors led us to launching the financial improvement plan.

Next slide, please.

As discussed, in August of 2021, the City Budget Office and Citywide Accounting partnered with HSD to contract with Alvarez and Marcell to address the longstanding issues.

And as Director Dingley said, through even leadership transitions, we have stayed in partnership and really grateful for Director Dingley and CBO in general as well, and Citywide Accounting.

We have all been partnering extensively.

So this is ongoing, active work.

This effort focused on restoring and stabilizing cash balances, becoming current on billing for federal and state funding, simplifying HSD's financial structure, and eliminating late or missed payments to our agencies, also by our agencies.

There's a relationship there in optimizing our budget management structure.

Next slide, please.

Please don't be overwhelmed with this.

This is just for illustrative purposes and I'll provide an overview of this slide.

And so since August of last year, we have several blue lines representing the completed activities and the green lines represent some planned activities.

So it's just to show throughout the course of what we've been doing multitasking for sure to make some significant changes.

The green line represents the planned activities for this 2022 into 2024. This is not a one and done.

We are fully committed to the ongoing efforts of this work and the implementation.

On the left, just to orient you further on this slide, we have four major buckets of work.

The financial and operating assessment, procure to pay process improvements, budget and financial reporting, and accounting and reconciliation.

But just in general, for you to know, there are 25 total actions here that we're kind of a bigger picture looking at.

There are things such as, if you could read some of the details, like we've developed an improvement plan, that we have a new operating model.

We talked about the need for staff, but are the staff structured appropriately?

Is there, for example, you know, a good segregation of duties?

We hired staff.

All these things take time, and we've been successful at implementing many of these items.

Of total, there are eight remaining actions in green.

The most complex action is reconciling our 12 ledger accounts.

This effort is ongoing, so we're actively engaging in some of these.

And so in this case, we're reviewing financial transactions dating back to 2017. So again, predating the work that even CFO Kaspersky and I have been doing.

That said, our 2022 accounts are accurate and balanced.

And so even though we're kind of going back and that's taking more work, we're also in a good place right now moving forward.

The pending two items that I want to note.

is that we do need to, and this is in the weeds, but just for you to know some of the business activities that we're doing is that we're still transitioning to a new citywide contracting system with the goal of having our fiscal year 2024 contracts managed in the system.

It's technical, but it's important because we are a funder and we have contracts with many important community partners.

And then secondly, next spring, we will be working with our partners, specifically City Budget Office, to determine if our new accounting methodology is warranted for our general overhead costs in fiscal year 2024. Again, really technical, but important.

These are the things that we just want to make sure that our business operations are strong and our financials are sound.

Next slide, please.

I'm sorry.

Can we just pause?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Um...

The section financial operating assessment on the hiring of positions, there's a reference that you've hired seven of eight new positions, and my opening remarks reflected, I think, one action of adding eight, and then a second council action of adding an additional, I believe, three positions.

So I'm, Wondering from HSD's perspective, what the item on the PowerPoint slide, higher remaining positions in 2024, how does that relate to what the council thought we were funding?

Great question.

And so I can tell you that the eight were directly tied to A&M's recommendations.

As we receive more funding through other fund sources or as we're doing additional work, that the additional staff is to implement those programmatic pieces.

And so even in future as we're entering into budget season, We may see additional staffing come online should HSD receive more funds, but the eight specific were to the A&M recommendations.

I'm sorry, maybe I am.

My understanding is we funded 11 positions, and if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but my notes say that after we discussed adding the eight, HSD identified a need for additional FTE because we were adding more funds for programs in the budget, and we created and funded those positions, I understand, in the 2022 budget.

I believe it was two senior contracts and grant specialists and a strategic advisor.

That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

So there's separate where one is specific for finance and the capacity just to offer the financial structures that are, you know, like management oversight within the budget team.

And the other was due to additional funds for programs and services.

There are admin costs associated with administering contracts, for example, as you had named.

So ads, yes, but for different purposes, if that makes sense.

Sure, but I guess my question though is why does this chart not show hiring remaining positions until 2024 when the council's provided the funding for 2022?

Got it.

So here we're talking about the positions, the eight that were specific to the finance improvement, but we are actively hiring for the other positions to do the work.

Perfect, thank you so much.

Sorry, it took me a minute to get there.

I probably was as clear as mud.

You're great, thank you.

And then, because this is very in the weeds, you may have thoroughly explained it and it may have just gone over my head, but can you just talk a little bit what you are referring to when you're talking about a strategy for the CCMS application?

So I'm looking to my colleague, Joe Kaspersky, to give a brief response.

Joe?

Good morning, Council Member.

Yes, when we looked at adopting the CCMS, which is our contracting system, we mirrored that for the life cycle of the contract.

And when we looked at the legacy system and implementing the new system, it would be the a more of a seamless approach if we start, we're adopting it, we're starting going through the gap analysis now, but with the vision of instituting, adopting it for the fiscal year 24 contracts.

So we can manage the contracts completely under the new system instead of trying to manage existing contracts under an existing legacy system and a new system.

So that was essentially the cleanest break point.

Super helpful, thank you.

and the revised electronic procurement authorization process.

Can you talk just a little bit about that as well?

Yes.

That's coming up.

Director Kim, I'll take this.

One of the adoptions of the EPA form was with the new CCMS system, our new contracting system, there is a workflow module.

So we're evaluating and adopting the, EPA form into that work module.

Currently, there is an existing method of establishing that we have for establishing purchase orders.

So we're delaying that also with the evaluation and adoption of the new contracting system.

I stumbled through that, so hopefully that makes sense a little bit.

I sometimes I need to hear it a couple times, but I think I've got it.

Thank you.

We can, if there are no further questions on this side, we can move forward.

Okay, great.

So we're going to say it a little bit differently now.

And so So where are we incorporating our financial improvement plan objectives based on the high level action items I just reviewed in that complicated Gantt chart?

So here's a different way of looking at the achievements.

We have achieved most of the objectives as outlined on this slide.

I won't read through it, but it's stated a little bit more plainly here.

These achievements are notable and I do want to thank our dedicated team at the Human Services Department.

It is the finance team but it actually are folks across the department because certainly grants and contract specialists and others, you know, touch this space.

The team has worked diligently to make these sweeping improvements, and it hasn't always been easy, but people are committed and stuck with it, especially around bringing solutions to the table, so really appreciate them.

But there is some remaining work that needs to occur.

Notable is at the state level, they are currently reviewing 12 million in billings that we submitted this past month.

And we have some more to submit as well.

That's going to help our bottom line and our cash flow too.

And we expect that this will be completed by September.

We are also continuing to work with citywide accounting CWA and the city budget office on balancing prior year accounts.

I had mentioned that we're going years back and this should be completed by October.

Next slide.

So we're doing all this great work, and I just wanted to outline some of the impacts, the positive impacts that are occurring as a result.

And so we're streamlining processes to make payments within 30 days of agency invoice that we're, as I mentioned, which is really important, so we're going to keep underscoring it, is billing to state and federal granting agencies.

that are going to be timely and audible.

And then workforce is sized appropriately with defined roles for all positions with a separation between funding acceptance and payment responsibilities.

So these are important and just kind of simply stated.

Remaining actions.

Next slide please.

As mentioned, you know, this is not a one and done.

We're remaining focused as a department on not only the remaining but the maintenance of the improvements.

So we're going to be evaluating, as I had mentioned, the different methodology for budgeting of general overhead costs.

And this is definitely more of our CFO and Director Dingley's smart team to understand how overhead is determined.

But it's really important that these are predictable and it's something that we're looking at per A&M's suggestion.

We're going to be finalizing our cash forecasting approach, which is really critical as well, and then implementing that citywide contracting management system.

So some large projects to come as well.

Next slide.

We do have time for some questions, but I do want to, as the acting director, thank again CBO, CWA, A&M, and the finance team at HSD.

It seems like a simplified presentation, but there's so much sweat and tears behind this work.

Folks really leaned in to ensure that HSD is set up for success.

Moving forward and these long standing issues are not going to change overnight and folks did this across all the different departments and offices, while maintaining their day to day work and so want to acknowledge.

that this was labor intensive and folks really leaned into this space.

I also need to thank CFO Joe Kaspersky for his leadership throughout not only this, but managing COVID and the influx of dollars that I described.

And so it's really important to acknowledge his leadership.

And so with that, I will open it back up to you Chair Herbold for questions.

Thank you so much.

Council members, do you have any questions about HSD's presentation?

Bye-bye.

And my main questions were asked during the presentation.

I really appreciate your willingness to come and share with us all of this good work.

I recognize that this work is challenging and it's challenging at a very challenging time.

I appreciate everybody at HSD and the city budget office for pulling together and identifying actions and creating a timeline for accomplishing those actions and holding yourself accountable for the remaining corrective actions yet to come.

Know that this council will be an ally and supportive of your efforts.

And Director Kim, it was, wonderful to hear Dr. Dingley say how much she believes that you are the person for the job at this particular time in this particular job and also want to thank CFO Kaspersky for coming in and rolling up his sleeves and lending a hand and leadership and direction to do do this work and I know that the folks who will most benefit are the people of Seattle that our programs and services assist.

So again, really I'm grateful for your willingness to share the work as well as do the work.

Thank you.

All right.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item 14.

Committee agenda item 14, Seattle Police Department staffing update.

Thank you so much.

We are joined by Greg Doss of Council Central Staff for the first quarter update on Seattle Police Department staffing, finances, response times, and staffing updates.

As background, you may recall that the council has requested quarterly updates on each of these areas of data, again, staffing, finances, response times, and staffing updates.

This item will be followed by a discussion and hopefully a vote of the SPD incentives bill and the mayor's staffing and retention plan.

And so with that, I hand it over to you, Greg, to proceed with your presentation.

And Madam Chair, sorry to interrupt.

This is Council Member Mosquade.

I just wanted to apologize for being late.

I am on and I appreciate jumping in.

I'm sorry to have not made roll call.

I appreciate you letting me know that you're here and thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

Greg Doss Council Central staff as you mentioned here to present SPD quarterly report on staffing finances and response times per slide SPD 001. And I am honored to be here with the chief and CEO Brian Maxey and the budget director whom I work closely with, Angela Sochi.

Couldn't do this work without them and their deep involvement in managing the agency and keeping it on track.

So I want to thank them right up front.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

Make sure that everyone can see this.

I'm looking at the chief.

Chief, can you nod if you can see this?

Thank you.

All right.

All right.

So going to go ahead and launch into this.

We're going to talk first about sworn staffing, then about finances, and then about performance metrics.

Talk first about staffing.

Unfortunately, the big story here is that there have been 109 separations in the first six months of 2022. That's about twice as much as the department originally expected and significantly more than the council expected.

As you can see on this slide, the council had expected and projected about 125, SPD had thought there'd be about 94, and that was for the whole year.

And SPD has already reached 109 just in six months.

And so that is obviously a rather down milestone.

In terms of hires, also not great, only 30 so far in the first six months.

And so for those reasons, SPD has revised both its hiring projections and its separation projections.

As you can see below, or actually to the right, the original projections for SPD at 125 hires, and that's been revised to 84. The original separation projection was 94, and that's been revised to 48. And so what this chart shows us is how that will pan out at the end of the year with fully trained officers and deployable officers.

If you take those projections out through the end of the year, what you'll find is that there will be 100 or 1,062 fully trained officers in the department at the end of the year.

And there will be 962 deployable officers at the end of the year.

And so one thing I guess I would point out is the reason that the deployable officer number is, is not is actually it's going up a little bit as you see, is because of a positive trend in SPD and that is that.

The number of folks that are out on extended leave is going down.

At the beginning of the year there were 170 officers out on extended leave and that number has dropped to 109, and so that's making more officers that available for deployment, and that's bringing up that deployable number.

However, if you look at the fully trained officers, that number is obviously is obviously going down that number going down to 1062. And it was at the beginning of the year, obviously much higher.

At the beginning of the year, it was closer to 1121.

Greg, my recollection of the sort of typical number of officers out on leave is that this is still higher than what we would consider sort of the natural state of things.

I seem to remember normally it's around 70.

Yeah, I think that's true.

And that's of a much larger force in past years.

Yeah, I think if you go way back, like 7 or 10 years, you see 30 or 40. And then if you go back, oh, say, five years, you see more of that number you're talking about, 70. And you would expect to see more as the city put in child care leaves, things like that.

But obviously, 170 was a large number.

And it is a good thing that it's getting down to 109.

It's trending in the right direction, for sure.

And Chief Diaz and CAO Maxey, I'm sorry for not recognizing you at the top.

I thought you were here for the next item, but I'm so glad that you are here.

Appreciate your partnership and your work.

And it's great that you are here for this item, because I think I have a question that you might be best suited to answer.

30 hires that we've seen so far.

Ballpark, how many applications results in 30 hires?

And can you kind of speak to how the number of applicants who pass the exam gets winnowed down?

That I actually can't speak to the actual number of people that actually took the test.

I know we're considerably down from previous years, Typically, if we hire 30 people, you're looking at probably four to five times more people applying for the job than we have the actual hire.

So it could be, I just don't know the exact number if we're- That's okay, four or five times as many people applying than hiring is, I think gives us a good sense of the scale.

Yeah.

Appreciate that.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Anything else, Madam Chair?

No, I was saying we could move on to the next slide.

All right.

So all of the measures you see here, annual average FTE, fully trained officers and deployable officers are obviously down from the 2022 adopted budget.

I want to give you the big picture, too, in terms of hiring and and separations.

The big picture for SPD is that since 2020, January of 2020, there is a net separation or a net loss of 304 officers.

And so that big picture is a total of 466 separations, less 162 hires.

And so that that's sort of the big picture over the last year and a half.

And then this picture here is obviously just in the year of 2022 you can see that that there's a big portion of separations here.

When looking just at this year and just at this adopted budget, these separations will translate into a significant amount of salary savings.

The amount of salary savings we can expect to see this year will be about $8.6 million.

And that is something that the department is has a plan to spend and as we get further into the financial presentations, you'll see, you'll see what that plan is.

And part of that plan is going to include the bill that is up next, that will be discussed for recruitment and retention.

and that bill will cost approximately $1.8 million and will include an expenditure of $289,000 in 2022 for recruitment bonuses.

So some of the salary savings will go towards the recruitment bonuses.

Questions here?

Precinct staffing is pretty similar to where it was before.

I provided this in the presentation by precinct so that you could look it up.

The bigger picture is on this slide, basically shows that there's about six officers difference in patrol, not a huge difference about nine officers difference in 911 response, sort of spread out through the city.

not a big difference, but still coming down.

Moving to account monitoring or finances.

The big picture here is that, well, start back out and say what we're going to start with is the the largest expenditures.

These are the big three of salary and benefits, overtime, and allocated costs.

Just to give the general introduction that I always give, this is 95 percent of the department's budget.

A lot of folks talk about what the heck are they doing with $350 million.

These three things primarily are what they're doing with $350 million.

You can see that we've got two pie charts here, one from 2022 and one from 2021, each representing the first six months of the period.

And this shows how the department spent those spend in those three categories.

The big difference in terms of percentage in these three categories is that the overtime spending this year is higher than it was last year.

That is a function of really the trade-off between staffing hours and overtime hours.

The allocated costs is more of a, a function of the math here.

But as we get into the overtime, you'll begin to understand that relationship between overtime and salary and how the department is needing to use the overtime to backfill for officer loss.

But I'll point it out that you can see it here.

Also worth pointing out is just that the department is spending less money, $159 million versus $167 million last year.

So in looking at those big three expenses and how they're comparing against budgets, when you look at salary and benefits, the first thing to note is that this is not exactly through 50% of the year.

I'm using payroll data that's only through June 21st.

So we wouldn't expect to see exactly 50% of the salary budget spent.

We expect to see 48. But you can see 46 and of course this is because of the increased separations that we're seeing.

Why not more.

A lot of those separations those hundred and nine separations have come in the last two months.

28 officers left in June and double-digit officers, I can't remember the exact amount, left in May.

Because those officers just left in May and June, the salary savings hasn't accrued yet, but it will accrue through the rest of the year and that will contribute to that $8.6 million.

In terms of overtime spending, you can see that in absolute dollars and in a percentage of the budgets, It's up.

You'll see here that through June 21st, it's at 53%.

If you were to carry this out through June 30th, I know that that's only like another nine days.

But if you were to carry it out, it would be at 57%, and that is way, way too high.

This is a seasonal expenditure, and most of these expenditures are going to come in the summer months of July and August and September.

to have 57% expended through June is just way too high.

Yeah.

We get a we get a specific overtime report.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

Is it possible to take a sort of a deeper dive, or maybe this is covered in the presentation, but a deeper dive on the uses of overtime and what proportion is for events, what proportion is for emphasis patrols, what proportion is to augment 911 response, so we can get a better sense of the drivers of the overtime budget?

Yeah, and we will get into that in just a minute.

And in a more detailed dive is certainly possible because the department keeps that data but at a high level I'll present that to you in a minute.

The last point I'd make on this is that last year, the department didn't have quite enough money for overtime, especially related to events.

And so the department requested more money and got more appropriation authority for events and used it.

This year they have about 1 million more than last year.

And obviously in budget authority, that's probably not, well, it's not gonna be enough given the current spending.

The current spending, we'll see here in a minute, they're estimated to go about two to three million over budget for overtime.

Going to some of the smaller categories here, and I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but the big change here is that, and just again, really quick overview, five percent of expenditures, very small amount, Overall down again a little over a million dollars, 8.5 million compared to 9.6 last year.

In terms of the ratio of spending up much more in services and consultants and that has to do with technology expenditures that the department is making this year, that the council invested in and the mayor proposed in the 2022 proposed budget and 2022 adopted budget.

In terms of shifting between last year and this year, the biggest change is really in the services consultants.

Because of that, a little bit of a change in separation pay as a percentage down.

Again, because what we're looking at is the data for the first six months and a lot of those separations came at the very end of those first six months.

So the payouts for those officers are coming later, like in July or August.

Haven't hit the books yet.

And I just want to pause on that point.

I think the assumption is often salary savings associated with not meeting recruitment targets or greater than anticipated separations means more more flexibility in the city budgeting process to use those funds for other purposes.

But we have to remember the cost of separation pay in that equation.

And separation pay is something that we need to plan for when when the reality ends up being as has happened in prior projections, and hopefully will not continue, but yet it has been happening that the number of officers separating exceeds what we project.

So we need to actually plan for that in our financial responsibility and make sure that there are funds available to do that.

Thank you.

So just hitting on the smaller expenditures in SPD's budget, separation pay already over at 66% of spending so far this year.

And again, that does not include the payouts for the officers that separated in June.

So that's obviously going to be a problem.

And we're going to talk about that a little bit at the end when we talk about the overall financial picture.

When you look at services consultant, legal and other, the technology expenditures, when you look at discretionary purchases and other charges, those percent of budget for the first six months of 2022 seem kind of low.

But what's missing here is that the department has encumbered, they've contracted with the technology companies, they've contracted on the discretionary purchases for purchases of uniforms and body armor and ammunition.

And so those contracts come in the form of encumbrances.

They don't show up in the expenditures yet, but if you were to put them into the expenditures then you would see these numbers change, and you would see that the services and consultants category would go to about 100%, 110% expended, and the discretionary purchases would go to about 86% expended.

So I guess the bigger story here is there's not the money here that there appears to be.

It's locked up in contracts and is expected to be spent.

in 2022. If there's not any questions, I'll move along to overtime.

And so what you see here are about six or seven categories of, or six categories of the smaller overtime expenditures.

And I put it in hours because dollars fluctuate from year to year depending on salary expenses, COLAs, contract settlements, things like that.

But hours are constant, so a better measure.

And what you can see here right away are the big change, probably the biggest one that draws your eyes is all the way to the right, miscellaneous in Q1 of 2022. And actually, I mislabeled this.

The chart says Jan to June overtime hours.

That is correct.

It should say Q2 2021, 2022, and 2020. I apologize for that.

But if you look at the miscellaneous, you'll see that that's extremely high, both in 2020 and in 2022. In 2020, it was because of that shooting that happened downtown and the need to have some emphasis patrols in Pike Pine area and on First Avenue.

In 2022, it's 78% of that category is, again, Pike Pine, Shots Fired, Nightlife, and 12 and Jackson, all emphasis patrols.

The other area that's significantly higher in 2022 is criminal investigations, criminal investigations up in almost every single category, homicide, assault, robbery.

Evidence is up and this is due, evidence overtime is up and that is due to an audit report that said that SPDD needed to do better organization of its warehouse and so it's been spending some overtime on organizing its warehouse.

Council Member Nelson.

Yeah, I just had a question.

You said that criminal investigations is up, but it's it's actually down from twenty twenty.

My understanding wrong.

No, you're not.

When I say when I say up, I mean over the last year.

But thank you.

You're correct.

It is it is down from twenty twenty.

And can we talk a little bit about why we're choosing the category miscellaneous to describe overtime spending in emphasis patrols.

It seems like it would be good to break that out and have something.

I mean, there may be a need for miscellaneous category.

I'm just not quite sure that emphasis patrol should be subsumed in that broad category.

Emphasis patrols, or I'm sorry, miscellaneous contains a lot of subcategories, everything from, if I remember correct, the chief's security to the emphasis patrols.

Emphasis patrols in and of itself, It has not historically been its own category.

If it did it, it would obviously show up in terms of the data here.

But, you know, also worth noting is that in in 2021, it was not significant, but outside of it's sort of where the remaining stuff goes.

And Angela Sochi from the department is here.

She can probably tell us what else is there.

But I remember it's the chief security and I think late night expended or overtime used for late night officer interactions and community centers, just sort of everything else is in that category.

Greg, I can add it's court events.

Unusual occurrences, emphasis, sporting events, school activities.

So right, the ones that you've also mentioned as well.

And I, for the purposes of this presentation, I break out from the data events and sporting events so that the council can see those separately, because those are usually topics of interest.

Angela?

Hi, Angela Sose, SPD budget director.

So, we organize in these buckets due to the chain of command Bureau.

Category, so you'll see with chief of police and criminal investigations.

Each of those categories roll up and are contained within a bureau and are overseen by an individual assistant chief or chief, whereas miscellaneous in that category, that's going to include items that are department wide and roll up not just to a singular chief, but to the agency as a whole.

And so we we allocate budget a little bit differently for those.

because they're a little bit harder to, they don't require a singular person to authorize, instead it's much more, it's much more expansive.

Thank you, appreciate the methodology that goes into how you report the hours.

But I do think when we have central staff crunching the numbers, it might be useful in the future to have a separate breakout for emphasis patrols because they're very, they're high profile exercises of the department.

I think it's really, People are interested in that work and how it gets done.

And the council is certainly interested as well.

So I think that would be useful information, assuming that it's possible to break those numbers out.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you so much, Chair Herbold.

Can someone on the panel indicate where on this chart things like special events staffing and traffic direction would be?

It's on this next one.

Yeah, Greg Greg mentioned that he brings that was just my elegant transition actually nice segue to the next page.

Yeah.

And, and yes Madam Chair I can, I, I, as the chief mentioned.

sporting events and events, including Seattle Center, technically part of the miscellaneous category.

I break these things out so that you can see them.

I can also break out the emphasis patrols.

And so I'll do that.

And so, yes, moving along patrol operations events, including Seattle center and sporting events, patrol operations, high over 2021 and over 2020. Most of this category almost all of this category.

If you look at it is. hours of overtime that are used for staffing backfill for officers that call in sick or for filling in for 911 responders for what the department feels that needs to deploy to meet response time goals.

And so due to the staffing issues that the department has, they are, all the folks that have separated, they are shifting what would otherwise be hours that would be worked by folks on regular time on to folks that would work overtime.

And so that's why you're seeing the large increase here in patrol operations hours.

With events including Seattle Center, And this is probably another area where you're the council may be interested in having me do a little more work events also include demonstrations and protests.

And so that's why the 2020 bar is so high because that included the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd marches.

And so that is something that would would be broken out to maybe better represent events, community events, and large citywide events separately and differently.

Not as many of those things going on this year.

This year, it is mostly actually just citywide events and events at Climate Pledge Arena that are up.

When I say up, I mean there's more of them And the number of hours that are being spent on them is greater.

Just to clarify from the last time I did this presentation events at climate pledge arena are 100% reimbursed to the city.

It is the case that as I mentioned earlier, SPD only has about a million dollars more in overtime budget for this year.

SPD is likely to exceed its overtime budget regardless of the fact that the city is receiving reimbursement for the Climate Pledge Arena events.

I'm pausing for hints that I see that the chair may not see.

Member Lewis.

Thank you for that overview, Greg, and for pointing out that this isn't so much a question of money with the event staffing and the traffic direction.

It's more of a question of the assignment and allocation of sworn officers and the use of time of a limited number of sworn officers.

And so this might be a question better for Chief Diaz, but to what extent would there be more flexibility in the department if, police officers were not spending 20,000 hours on sporting events, looks like 35,000 or so on the event staffing.

And of course, not all of the event staffing would be reassignable, but a significant number of hours between those categories that represent tens of thousands of service hours for a limited number of sworn officers.

that potentially is having an impact on the patrol augmentation numbers.

Every officer doing something is an opportunity cost for that officer doing something else.

So I think part of the question is what are the implications of the uptick in sporting events, traffic direction that we can anticipate coming out of COVID and how that's gonna compound what I think is a united priority between council and the department and the mayor on patrol operations and how can we make some fundamental cultural changes and the choices we're making on how sworn officers spend their time.

So I'll, I'll take a little bit of that question, you know, right now, when it comes to a lot of our events that are, you know, we are drafting for a lot of the traffic and special events that are going on throughout the city.

Um, it makes our officers tired and we know that it has impact all across the whole, uh, department from our detective units to, uh, our special operations, et cetera.

And, uh, you know, right now we have been focused our efforts on augmentation and that is literally just to get up to minimum staffing levels.

And, um, and when we actually look at, at not only the patrol augmentation, but provide an emphasis with areas like 12th and Jackson and third and pine and other areas throughout the city.

Um, we, that is a priority for us and really trying to make sure that we have enough staffing.

We've had to say no to many, uh, special events, um, that have requested our assistance.

And in the previous years, we've had the ability to do that, but we've also this year have had to also tell people, no, we cannot.

Because we don't have that level of staffing or what is also requiring us is it requires us to literally be so tired, uh, because we're drafting all of our personnel.

From this point on, as we get into, and there are some legal requirements that we have to be involved with, like the Seahawks, there are requirements with the Department of Homeland Security for certain radiuses to be secure.

When we start to look at Huskies, Seahawks, Mariners, and all the other different events, it does require us to have more officers being drafted, and that is where I would like to reduce that footprint, especially when you start to look at Husky games.

Is there other agencies that also can take up some of that work?

Right, and I appreciate that the department is looking at those opportunities.

Even within those categories, there's some triaging though, because I mean, the Homeland Security requirements don't apply to traffic direction.

They do have some because you have to look at potential areas of blast radius.

If there was, you know, different requirements around the facility.

So you do, there are certain requirements that are going to be related to having some level of traffic around a stadium.

Right, but it could be mitigated significantly from the level it's currently at.

We've done a really good job of mitigating a lot of posts and trying to use barriers and different other objects to be able to help reduce that level of personnel.

But yeah, those are things that we're constantly looking at right now.

Yeah, appreciate it, Chief Diaz.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief.

Council Member Muscat, did I see your hand up?

Oh, sorry.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I just want to repeat what I think I heard you say, Chief Diaz, which is that your perspective aligns with what the council has been saying, which is that we need to, if not eliminate, severely reduce to the minimum requirement that Homeland Security might require for these sporting events so that we can remove officers from needing to do things like show up at sporting events just to shake people's hand.

or to manage traffic.

I know it probably makes people feel good to be in that position, you know, greeting people at an event that's a happy occasion.

But I think that I agree with what you said.

Reducing it to the bare minimum, if required, by Homeland Security is a good goal that we can share together.

The second thing is I'd love to know, Greg, related to the sporting events, if there's 100 percent reimbursement from the Climate Pledge Arena.

And thank you very much for the follow up and the follow up we got from the Climate Pledge as well.

I'm wondering if for Climate Pledge Arena and for the two stadiums in Soto, if there's any way for contracts to be amended so that 100% of the cost can actually be recouped.

So if officers are being deployed on overtime, we can bake that into the contract so that full reimbursement to the city is actually provided.

And that can be a stipulation.

Is that something that theoretically could be amended and adjusted in a contract?

Council member for most of the stadium contracts.

Those are full reimbursement to the city, like the Seahawks or the Mariners.

That is the case.

events are the ones that go through the city permit structure, through the SMC permitting, where they apply for a special events permit and they receive police services through the permitting process.

There they're paying a fixed amount for police services that is less than the full cost.

But for the sports contracts, they are at full cost.

Including if an officer is deployed on overtime?

That's what I thought.

I heard you say that the costs were up for overtime personnel that were deployed and that perhaps we saw an increase in the amount that the city had to pay because we didn't have reimbursement for the overtime costs.

The city is being reimbursed for the time costs and, and in the case of plant climate arena, the city receiving revenue for the climate pledge arena overtime that SPD is worth.

However, and he's budget was only based about a million dollars over last year so.

in terms of its authority to spend money it only has a million dollars of new authority but it has a lot more expenditure that it's having to make on events and on um augmentation so that's what disconnect is the city receiving the money but spd doesn't have enough budget that would be um a great

follow up to get a little bit more detail.

What I hear you saying, Greg, is for those particular contracts where there's a 100% reimbursable obligation for SPD resources, that the city is taking in more revenue than the department is authorized to spend.

Yeah, so for example, the, the crack and events have totaled about $615,000 so far this year.

And with that that's just the crack and events that that does not include all the concerts that have happened at climate pledge arena.

And so, as I've said, SPD only has about a million dollars more in budget authority.

So right just with the Kraken events, you're already at 60% of the new budget authority that SPD has this year.

So again, that's the disconnect.

And that's something that could be explored further in the upcoming budget session for 2023. Thank you, Greg.

Did someone else?

Thank you.

So I think I just understand you have said that if we keep using overtime, as we have so far, we're likely to be two to $3 million over budget in overtime in general.

And I know, and so I need to understand better how is is overtime allocated only by certain by patrol by events by sporting events, or does it all go into the same pot to be used, because here you just said that we got that there is a is a million new.

dollars in budget authority, but in your memo dated August 4th, I believe, yes, which is SPD budget update August 4th, which is attached to your central staff memo for the next item.

You note that in the mayor's proposed 2022 budget, there was $6.4 million for overtime and council cut that by half leaving $3.2 million in overtime.

And so it seems as though that was where the budget that could be.

Does that have something to do with what we're doing now?

And how does that relate to the 1 million additional dollars that you just mentioned.

So the numbers that you're mentioning are from the department's memo that's attached to my memo.

Angela Sochi wrote that memo.

The numbers that you're mentioning, the $6.4 million, that was the amount of money that SPD thought it would need more.

That was an incremental.

That was an additional amount that SPD requested that it would need to add to its overtime budget for this year.

That was the request that SPD made for overtime in more dollars for this year.

The council did not add that much.

Actually, since it's Angela's memo, I'm going to let her explain that.

I see her pop on the screen here, if that's okay with the chair.

Sure.

Thanks, Craig.

So the $6.4 million request in the 2022 proposed budget was the restoration of overtime budget that was cut in connection with the COVID revenue issues and just anticipation of a lesser need for SPD to work events during the pandemic.

We knew in both 2020 and 2021 that Most events were canceled and that we weren't going to need that overtime budget for 2022 we knew that there was going to be the return of events likely in a phased or kind of a.

An increasing need for overtime over the course of the year, maybe not all events would be.

restored, but at least some, and then based on our staffing levels, there were going to be some limitations on how much we could actually work.

The restoration accounted for the crack-in.

So had that $6.4 million been restored, we could likely absorb that $615,000 expense.

Without the full restoration of the budget, it did create essentially a $3.2 million gap into what we were projecting for this year.

Madam Chair, thank you.

Yep.

Thank you.

We can move forward.

Madam Chair.

Oh, I'm sorry, Councilmember Mosqueda.

Thanks.

I'm struggling to reconcile these numbers and I do appreciate Angela, the honest answer that you just gave to really set the record straight about the why over time was so much lower in 2021. and 2022 with the anticipation that it was going to ramp back up.

Obviously, the Kraken increased it.

But I think as well, there was a ton of overtime that Greg mentioned as well that was used in 2020 for, I think, over-policing of the response to George Floyd's murder, over-policing to the Black Lives Matter protests, and a number of other protests during that time.

That said, related to the sporting events, we did know in 2021, for example, It'd be a lot less sporting events.

2022, we still anticipated fewer sporting events, but I could use some help, Greg, in remembering the actual numbers because my notes say something different than a million.

My notes say that while there was a $6.4 million request, what the city council did was we added $4.6 million in overtime, bringing the total for overtime to $26.4 million.

Is that your recollection as well in terms of the total number of dollars that went into overtime?

Because it makes it sound like it's a lot less when we just deduce it to what the requested additional versus the added additional of 4.6 was.

So the best if you go back to slide number nine, you can see here that I have put in the amount of budget that SPD has for for overtime the 2022 overtime budget is 26.4 million.

It was okay that's the number I had to thank you.

Okay, so that's the point that you're looking for.

SPD had requested more than that $26.4 million.

Angela had talked about a restoration of budget that SPD had had prior to COVID.

Prior to COVID, SPD had a much higher budget than $26.4 million.

And that budget got cut down because of events that went on on hold because of covert.

And as that budget was cut down, you can see that in 2021 the original budget was cut down to 21.8 million.

As events started to come back, the council had to add a bit more money.

They added money last year up to $25.4 million.

And so the executive had thought events were going to come back at a much higher rate.

And so they requested more than $26.4 million last year.

And the council said, no, you're not going to get 26 point.

You're not going to get more than twenty six point four million.

You're only going to get twenty six point four million.

And so they provided twenty six point four million.

The executive would have had more than twenty six point four four million.

Is that helpful?

Yeah, and I think it notes that we still move forward with an increase over the previous years of 4.6 million to bring the total up to 26.4 in the final budget that was passed.

Yeah, if you look, if you look just at last year, last year originally was 21.8 million.

Then the council had to add money to make it whole, SPD whole to 25.4 at the end of the year.

Then the question was, well, how much do they need to add this year for 2022?

In the end, the council decided that they needed to add about $1 million to the total of 26.4.

But as I said, the executive had asked for a lot more than that.

I think that makes things pretty clear.

I still have a question though.

Council Member Nelson.

Yeah.

So back to my question, is the overtime budget allocated by subcategory sporting events?

patrols, et cetera.

It is allocated that way for SPD's.

Well, let me be clear.

No, it is it is it is not.

SPD receives appropriations at the at the bureau level.

So in this particular case, it's appropriation is it is it is not at the levels that you're talking about.

Events, it is not managed at criminal investigations events, those kinds of categories that we've been talking about.

It's not appropriated by the council at those levels.

SPD manages it within those categories so that they can do the best that they can to manage their budget to their bottom line.

But the council does not appropriate at those levels.

So this focus on sporting events is basically 78% of miscellaneous category spending is on emphasis patrol.

And so a lot of the miscellaneous is for events, et cetera, which is broken out on the following page.

And so even though there are more events than anticipated or less, that is not accounting for the budget shortfall.

The budget shortfall in overtime spread out over all these categories of how overtime is used is 3.2 and so there's sporting events and general events, including the Seattle Center events.

So you're, I think you're looking at the small on the far right but there's also the middle column.

But in any event, I think the council's interest in having the department do less overtime with events is not...

about the budget impacts.

I think it's really important to say here publicly that our interest in having folks who are not sworn officers, staff, events to the greatest level possible is about public safety.

It's about having the overtime hours to devote to the law enforcement mission that only police officers can do.

I totally understand that.

And previous to this conversation about events, I'm not questioning the value of what you just said.

But until we bring staffing up, it's likely that we'll have more overtime.

And so it seems as though that's what we have to pay attention to.

Agreed.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Chair.

Can we go back to the slide, the overtime side we're talking about?

Council Member Nelson's line of questioning, I think is actually a good segue to this, because clearly the biggest category that we're facing this year, and I would anticipate going forward, we're gonna face is this overtime to augment patrol operations.

And part of my question to Chief Diaz is, you know, we're not the only department that are facing these challenges around augmenting patrol due to a high rate of attritional loss of officers.

Other departments across the country have moved to develop civilian-based response alternatives separate from the police department.

capable of mitigating the impacts on patrol.

And I just wanted to ask what component of the department's strategic plan going forward to reduce response times and mitigate the overtime impacts of patrol operations is going to be invested in partnering with other departments to stand up those alternative responses to impact this bottom line in a beneficial way.

So first, I think we've developed the risk matrix to, you know, assess calls for service and the risk that if an alternative response was to be able to respond to what that risk might be.

We've been committed to, you know, working with a variety of different partners.

We've also set up our co-responder model with our mental health professionals, bringing in mental health professionals to work with our officers as well.

So we've been really trying to figure out how to support the city in alternative response.

So that isn't changed.

And I believe that the mayor's office is also exploring what that looks like as they develop a public safety plan.

And so we've been working with them on that public safety plan.

I think for us, some of these programs that could potentially respond to say dealing with people in crisis, Right now, the infrastructure to set them up and be operational isn't happening anytime soon or isn't something that is right now within the next couple of months.

And so this is where our officers are really having to make sure that they're doing everything they can to reduce those confrontations and being able to create an environment where we're supportive and being able to offer services.

Right.

And I appreciate that response.

I guess I just want to put an emphasis on that in this session, because while you correctly state we don't have the capacity or the infrastructure to stand up these alternative responses in a few months, that sort of puts the question forward about how we should have taken the actions other cities took two years ago that do now have those kinds of response systems.

I'm not blaming the police department to be completely clear, but I think it is helpful in this public session to have the public support of the police chief to move toward that kind of response alternative model that can help our bottom line on patrol, not just in terms of mitigating potential overtime costs going forward, but just the very real reality that there just aren't enough bodies to respond to some of these calls and indeed the growing evidence and research that a lot of these calls are best responded to by somebody else.

So I just wanted to highlight that given the context of our ongoing planning regarding the maintenance and expansion of patrol operations and appreciate your partnership on that.

Thank you.

And we have a whole section on response time where we can talk about this again.

Let's move forward.

Okay, moving along to the section on response times.

Table 1, citywide response times, you can see are in average minutes and median minutes.

Average, of course, being all of the numbers divided by themselves.

Median meaning half below and half above.

So your average is going to be dragged up those calls that take longer to respond to.

It is my memory that SPD has a methodology that if an officer forgets to log out of a call and something goes on for five or six hours, then they throw those outliers out.

But extremely long calls will still skew that average as opposed to a median, which is a different measure of central tendency.

So that's why you have two different kinds of measures looking different there.

SPD's goal, as they have acknowledged, is the seven minute median.

That has changed a little bit over the years, probably worth noting.

They did have an average time as a goal.

For a number of years during the neighborhood police planning deployment project, and then moved to the median time because at the time that they moved to the micro policing plan, they became.

convinced that the median was a better measure, that the calls that were potentially logged into for too long were not as good of, were skewing that average, were skewing that measure and that median was maybe better at the time.

That's what their representative at the time, Dr. Chris Fisher had said.

And Greg.

Yeah.

Your bullet there, SPD's response time goal is a seven minute median time.

That is specifically for the priority one calls.

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you for clarifying that.

That is when you look at priority two and priority three.

Um, if, if, if you believe that the goal is seven minutes for priority two and three, it tells, it tells one story, but if you're looking at the priority one calls and the median time as compared to the, to the goal, it certainly tells another.

And another measure, one that I know you're specifically interested in, Madam Chair, is the number of calls that are being responded to within seven minutes.

For this last period, Jan to June 22, that was 48% of calls.

For the prior period, that was 52% of calls.

And the chief can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but I remember that that was a statistic that he mentioned.

I'm seeing him nod, so that's good.

And then the other measure that we're tracking now is the Z disposition calls.

And as a reminder, those are calls that are passed on from the dispatch center, from dispatchers to SPD supervisors.

And later, if need be, due to workload, SPD supervisors may abandon those calls due to their low priority nature.

And if a callback has been requested by the folks, the 911 callers who made those calls, the SPD supervisors will make an attempt to call back on those.

I'm told that a number of those calls are folks that are calling from their cars.

They see an accident.

They say, hey, I just want to report an accident.

And so in many of those instances, they don't require a call back.

This is the first, probably the first report where we are tracking the Z disposition calls.

As you can see, it was half a percent, 755% of the calls that were taken in the period.

So I'll attempt to answer any questions and I'm glad I have the chief here to help.

Thank you, and just to clarify, the calls that are eligible for Z disposition, I think are priority three and four calls, is that correct?

Yes, low priority.

Thank you.

And Chief Diaz, before I hand it over to my colleagues, I just want to confirm what I recall you and I discussed, that you're working with a potential vendor to, even though we're working to call folks back when they specifically ask for it, that takes time and diverts officers from addressing new calls.

So I understand that you're working with a vendor who would have calls back to people who aren't receiving a quick response to sort of keep them in the loop.

Am I more or less remembering correctly?

No, that is correct.

So we are working with the vendor to do two things.

One is for calls that are taking longer periods of time for them to receive a call.

and notification that the call is taking longer for us to respond and eventually to sometimes not respond.

The second part of that vendor is also when a person gets a case number and their case gets assigned to a detective, we actually are gonna call people back and let them know that their case was assigned to a detective and have information.

Really it's focused on a quality of service aspect.

And so there'll be two different variables with this vendor.

Thank you.

Council Member Nelson.

Council Member Lewis had his hand up first.

Okay, Council Member Lewis.

Wow, thank you so much.

I try to go back and forth about who I call on first as opposed to the order.

It's easy to coordinate when we're all clustered down here on this end of the dais.

Hi, Council Member Peterson.

So to dig into this a little bit more, first, just as a reminder, for setting up my question and I'll ask Greg this.

Would it be an example of a tier three call for a circumstance where the assailant is long gone that 911 is being called for broken window on a car in the morning for a car prowl or a package theft that maybe occurred the night before?

Is that an example of a tier three call or is that a tier four call?

Maybe Chief D has to be better for that.

So, yes, I so I'll answer.

So priority three is, yes, it has already occurred.

It's usually what we call cold in the sense of if somebody called nine one one after they were gone for the weekend, they return home from their weekend and realize their house might be burglarized or their car was prowled overnight.

They don't know when it happened or a time.

And that would be what we refer to as a paper call.

Priority four is typically a parking complaint.

And so so if you look at what we identify, like priority one is typically a violent crime in progress.

So you have a shooting or a robbery in progress.

And then a priority two is typically a lesser of a violent crime.

And but it's still in progress.

So you have a burglary in progress or a theft in progress, depending on the situation, it could actually be a priority two.

If you have a burglary in progress that somebody's armed, it would be moved up to a priority one because of the nature of the case.

So these are all variables that we use to determine, you know, some level of what type of response and risk.

Thank you for that clarification and that helps to set up my question.

In addition to the work that this council wants to do in partnership with the executive and the police department around low acuity and public health based first response.

I think there's also a significant amount of scope at least as pertains to tier three and tier four cold case or paper call investigations to be completed by personnel other than gun and badge officers if the underlying crime is a misdemeanor.

And I think we have ample examples of current arrangements where we do work like that with the retail theft program where loss prevention officers fill out mark to police reports and send them for review by a single detective.

We honestly have a significant amount of precedent now in outsourcing that work to the general public when they experience a call like that to go online and fill out a police report and send it for review by a reviewing detective.

So I would just encourage us to maybe look at opportunities as we look at these response times to look at other employees within the city of Seattle to emulate some of that work we've already done in crafting something like the Retail Theft Program.

where you have people like, and I'm not saying it would be, but people like the community service officers or the parking enforcement officers to be able to complete reports, get evidence from residents of the city in the field, submit that evidence and submit a report and you can replace the work of the burden that's now on overstaffed patrol officers going from call to call to the reviewing detectives that can go through to make sure the reports are satisfactory.

Again, like we do with the retail theft program.

and forward them on for consideration by the city attorney.

So I would just encourage us to look at that as another potential innovation here, especially when we see from the Z protocol numbers, a significant amount of these calls are getting no attention whatsoever.

So I just wanted to flag that as another potential area of innovation that honestly builds on things we already do and would appreciate to work with the department on ways that we can collaborate on that.

Yeah.

And those are things that we're already looking at trying to move a lot of the priority three calls to either some sort of online reporting or even by the phone, which is our iTrue system as well.

and or, you know, a different other response.

My only caution is, you know, completely moving all priority three would be that right now, if you were to during your patrol shift, if you're only responding to priority one and two calls, typically in progress, high levels of sometimes intensity, adrenaline, et cetera, the officers will not have any downtime during their shift.

to just be able to take that break and take that separation time, because if they're only responding to high levels of priority calls, it's something to just be mindful of that as I think about wellness, they need that a little bit of a down call that's just a little bit different.

So I do think that we can move and look at some of the priority threes due into that alternative response or due into that online reporting or iTRUE system, but also keeping a couple items that it also does have the ability for officers to just take a little bit step back and have a different approach.

Yeah, well, I would think that would get factored in with going to the tier three calls that are felonies, right?

I mean, like certainly I would want a sworn officer to respond to take the initial report on a, you know, a res bird commercial bird where the person's long gone, lower stress call, but a felony, and you'd want a trained investigator to complete that report.

And, you know, I mean, I personally wouldn't have objections to officers legitimately taking downtime in part of their shift that doesn't involve us factoring in their downtime as conducting a criminal investigation.

So, I mean, I think there could be ways to work around that.

still maintain a level of customer service people are expecting in sending somebody to resolve and mitigate their call and not sort of expect the people of Seattle to fill these reports out online unless what they have is an exigent felony that they're facing.

Perfect.

Thank you.

I just want to mention here, because obviously we talk a lot about the development of an alternate response program, an additional alternate response program in addition to HealthONE and the crisis response unit.

And I have expressed some frustration in prior committee meetings about the exercise of doing a full risk analysis on all 270 some odd calls, but I haven't had the opportunity to, and I'm gonna take it now because we're talking about the conversation, to talk about some movement from the mayor's office towards our goal, our shared goal of developing a pilot The mayor's office and our city council central staff had a work group meeting kicked off last week, follow up tomorrow.

And we don't have a timeline and necessarily the work product agreed on, but We're moving forward with momentum and we memorialize this commitment in our most recent consent decree filing, which I think is really important to recognize.

And the language in the consent decree makes clear that the council and the mayor are simultaneous to the more comprehensive risk analysis that the work group convened by the mayor's office will recommend approaches that increase SPD or alternative response to priority three and four calls in the near term through an alternate response pilot and evaluation of existing resources that could be deployed or more effectively deployed on projects like special events.

And in another section of the consent decree filing, It references in the short term, the city will explore and execute potential pilot programs for diversified 911 response systems, as well as evaluate whether existing resources can be redeployed or more effectively deployed on staffing projects like special events to increase SPD or alternative response to priority three and four calls in the near term.

So just wanna recognize we've got some forward momentum.

Council Member Nelson.

Yeah, Greg, I need help understanding table two, this Z disposition calls.

Priority call handling is 0.5% of the call volume, but I thought that priority calls, I understood those to be priority one and two, were responded to and by definition didn't end up being Z disposition.

So can you explain that line right there?

Yeah, thank you.

It's extremely misleading, actually.

It is a department way of labeling.

They're labeling their system as they are handling the priority calls and not those 755. It would be much better just to say Z disposition calls.

And I think I'm just going to do that going forward.

I didn't want to do that here because it's their system.

But with the chief listening right now and me saying I'm going to do it going forward, we'll do that.

Thank you.

I think another way to say it is there is a priority call handling policy that is triggered at certain times.

the Z disposition is an outcome, a new approach for an outcome when the department is in priority call handling, sort of that period of time that's been triggered.

Is that more or less correct?

The priority call handling policy still exists.

What is new is the D disposition for the calls during that time.

Just so happens that they have a that that's their label, but I will stop using it.

It's confusing.

Shall I move on?

All right.

Yes, please.

Let's move on.

All right.

So this is the detailed detailed by precinct that I know a lot of members are concerned with.

I went a little bit out of the way earlier to talk a little bit about the difference between the average and the median.

Did so because, as you look through this table, what you will see is the averages have increased across all precincts except for north, whereas the median values are the same or better everywhere except southwest.

And so it's like it kind of depends on what what measure you look at and if you ask the chief and the CEO maxi I think what they would tell you is that these measures are important, and they are important to the people of Seattle, certainly to.

to folks everywhere, but not always the best measure of police services.

And it's something they look at as a guide, but not always a pass or a fail measure per se.

I'd leave it to the chief to expand on that.

And before the chief does, I wanna just get in a question that maybe the chief can address when he addresses your point, Greg.

The Southwest median response times reflected here.

I'd like to know for what period of time we're looking at that is through, is that that's through June?

That's January through June, the six months, that period.

And the decision to add officers that we saw in the previous screen to the Southwest Precinct, appreciate that.

Is there a relationship there in recognizing these response times?

perhaps necessitated, we always talk about the department being data driven.

And I'm just wondering, is there a relationship between the response times going up in the Southwest precinct and the decision to move more patrol officers into the precinct?

Yeah, and just to jog the chief's memory in case he wasn't tracking the data, there's six more officers in Southwest now.

So a couple of reasons what we look at is number one, we look at call loads, we look at response times, we look at a variety of different things in a precinct to determine what is a good staffing level.

Right now, all the precincts are down.

But actually putting more officers in a precinct, we hope that our response times does get better.

When it comes to priority one response times, it really is a crucial number for us because that's typically when a high priority violent type of event is occurring.

So a shooting or somebody that has been injured significantly.

And so when it comes to time, it's really gonna matter.

So getting to a scene that is safe and officers sometimes putting on tourniquets or chest seals to help save a life.

And we have to clear and make a scene safe before fire comes in and does their thing as well.

So when it comes to that priority one response time, Those numbers are so crucial.

And when we look at the seven minute response times, we're also looking at it from the medical side.

Once you delay somebody that has been injured significantly, seconds are going to be crucial in this.

So that's the reason why we also look at a good amount of, or a very fast response on priority ones.

And if there's nothing else, I'll go ahead and move to the sort of the big picture here for the end.

So you'll recall that I said that SPD had $8.6 million of salary savings that they expected in their budget.

And the other themes that I've had in this presentation so far are that they are incurring additional costs in the area of separation pay and overtime.

So I'm going to talk a little bit with this table about how all that comes together in the big picture and how it will drive their end of year balancing.

And so this table is one that SPD produced and it can be found in Director Sochi's memo that's attached to my staff report for the next item.

And what you will see here is a balancing effort, where.

She shows the $8.6 million down at the second to the last line, and then all of the costs that would be met by that $8.6 million.

I'm going to remind the council that one of the things that is being paid for by those salary savings is the cost of the SPMA contract.

The back pay for SPMA wages and overtime for prior to 2022 and going forward from 2022. For 2022 is being paid for out of those salary savings.

Also paid for out of the salary savings is the estimate of 1.8 million for the recruitment and retention package for the bill that you're going to hear about next Council Bill, 120389. Also paid for or estimated to be paid for out of the salary savings are separation pay and benefits, specifically workers comp which which SPD had a.

extraordinarily large workers' comp settlement that they made this year.

And so the workers' comp and separations pay, as estimated in this table, at $2 million.

SPD's memo establishes a range between $2 and $3 million, because it's difficult to predict for sure.

As you'll see in this table, overtime is a TBD.

When you add all those things up and you put it against the salary savings item, it would show that you have about 1.4 million at the end of the year.

But if you take that 1.4 million and you compare it against the overtime need of somewhere between two and three million, it would show that the department is in trouble and would potentially overspend its budget.

However, the thing to note is that this these projections do not take into account.

the fact that there may be additional separations that SPD could see in its staffing plan.

Recall that I said that originally the council only thought that there were going to be 125 separations this year, and already there's 109 through June.

Additional separations would bring additional salary savings.

Along with Council Bill 120389, The 1.8 million that's projected for spending there is based on a spending plan that makes certain assumptions around how much is needed for bonuses on on hiring, and if the department does not hire all of the folks that they're projecting that they will then there won't be as much needed for their hiring bonuses.

So this is somewhat of a dynamic situation.

And to say right here and right now that the department won't go, that they will go over their budget is probably not accurate.

I think the message here is that it's going to be close and that the salary savings are probably spoken for in terms of the department needing every dime to balance their own budget.

Also, what's important here is that the salary savings are locked up by a council proviso that says that they can only be spent when that proviso is released by the council on other things and that would include the overtime.

And so, one of the things that the council should note is that at the end of the year.

If SPD is in a situation where it needs to use some of these salary savings to pay for its overtime over budget situations, the council will have to come back and release some of that proviso funding to be able to help SPD pay for its over budget situation in other accounts.

That's something that is important to note at this point in time.

Greg, on the, column or the row about Council Bill 120389, the recruitment and retention dollar amount.

I thought it was more like 1.6.

It is, there are 1.6, I'd have to go back.

It's 1,571,000.

100,000 and some change, right?

Yeah, the hard costs that have been estimated for that bill are lower than 1.8.

There's some unprogrammed funds in there that the council would release via that bill for SPD to use for recruitment and retention initiative activities.

up to $1.8 million, but the hard costs that have been identified to date are only $1.5 million.

That's correct, Council Member.

$1.57.

No.

I have to go back to my staff.

Any additional questions, Council Member Nelson?

Yeah, I appreciate the words of caution and in thinking about future needs that you're issuing, Greg.

But on July 28th, the mayor issued Executive Order 2022-05 and directing the Seattle Police Department to assess policies, protocols and practices.

And, and so it seems as though I don't know if this has been accounted for but one.

significant item is that no later than August 31st, 2022, SPD will ensure that every reported felony crime of violence with sufficient evidence allowing for a follow-up investigation, including any backlogged sexual assault cases, is assigned a case detective in sexual assault.

And then there's a lot more to this body of work detailed in this executive order.

So is that taken into account when we're talking about uh, salary savings and, um, the end of your budget for SPD.

I think in terms of where that would be accounted for would be the, um, overtime two to 3 million.

Um, if, if SPD needs to put additional resources into making sure that those cases are handled, um, more quickly than they have been, um, In the short term, they may need to use more overtime.

In the longer term, they can probably handle it through reassignments.

But I would say in the shorter term, it's probably in the overtime line of $2 to $3 million.

Thanks.

All right.

Do we have more on this item?

And I would just say I don't have right in front of me the hard costs for Council Bill 120389 they are in my staff report.

So maybe when we get to that next item I can I can break that down.

But as I said, that 1.8 is a mixture of hard costs that the mayor has identified that they will spend.

And then there's also, I believe it's about $300,000 of unprogrammed funds that could be used towards things like moving expense reimbursements or other unprogrammed recruitment and retention activities.

And if none of those are spent, then those funds would help with this bottom line too.

And that's again, all in my staff.

Yeah, thank you.

We'll be moving on to that.

I was just confused because we were amending the lifting of a $1.15 million proviso, which we did a couple months ago and sort of lifting it by another, I think about $260,000 to a $1.57 million proviso.

So I didn't understand where the 1.8 million was coming from.

So, but we'll be getting into that next.

So I think I've hit all of these points on the takeaway so far.

So I'm done.

Excellent.

I know this has been so much work, Greg, and I really appreciate your pulling this together on this presentation, as well as the incentives legislation as well.

I know this is, again, been a lot of work and a lot of effort, and I really appreciate you digging in and giving us the information that we need, answering our questions, and working with the department to do so.

So with that, will the clerk please read in agenda item 15?

committee agenda item 15 Council Bill 12389 ordinance relating to recruitment and retention of police officers in the Seattle Police Department modifying a proviso in the 2022 budget amending ordinance 126589 creating positions in the Seattle Department of Human Resource to assist with the criminal Seattle Police Department modifying appropriations in the 2022 budget by amending ordinance 126490, authorizing hiring incentive program in the Seattle Police Department and ratifying and confirming certain bar acts.

Briefing discussion, possible vote.

Thank you so much, Alex.

As with the previous item, we are joined by Greg Doss of Council Central staff.

Interim Chief Diaz, Chief Operating Officer Maxey, and Angela Sochi of the Seattle Police Department Finance Division.

As we all know, this legislation has strong public interest.

Some of my colleagues, as well as members of the public, as noted in public comment, have requested quick action.

Normally bills of this nature and importance would have at least two committee meetings with a first meeting for a presentation and a second for consideration of amendments.

Again, due to the level of interest in quick action, this legislation is listed for briefing discussion and possible vote today in the first meeting.

That could mean that there may be additional amendments at full council when those normally would be heard in committee.

Just as a bit of additional background, the Council in late May adopted Resolution 32050, sponsored by Councilmember Nelson, stating support to the development of a staffing incentives program and that the Council would consider an ordinance, which is what is before us today, along with some additional items included in the proposal.

As a note for the viewing public, there's a central staff memo for this legislation from Greg Doss linked to the meeting agenda and as well as the Seattle Police Department recruitment and retention plan also linked to the agenda.

Greg, do you wanna make some introductory remarks about the legislation before handing it off to SPD to go over the SPD recruitment and retention plan?

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair.

I think as most folks are familiar with, this legislation would lift a proviso to allow SPD to spend some of its salary savings on recruitment bonuses, incentives that would be offered to laterals and to recruits in the amount of $7,500 per recruit and $30,000 per lateral hire.

broken into two payments.

It would also allow the department to spend some of its salary savings on additional marketing, on additional branding, backgrounding services, and also on some retention activities that were identified as part of the 2019 recruitment and retention report.

And they are going to go into an overview of all of those different activities that would be funded.

With the chair's permission, I can share my screen with a table that shows how the money will be spent and would probably provide an explanation for the discussion that we were just having a moment ago.

Thank you.

Yes.

All right.

Okay, so can everyone see this, see this table.

Yes.

All right.

So, as you can see at this table the bottom line is 1.8 million and this is the amount that will come out of SPD is budget.

And so, or will be spent from SPD's budget is a better way to say it.

And so this is being divided in several different ways.

You have 229,000 that will come out of the budget and be transferred from SPD to SDHR for four positions.

That's going to be three recruit positions and one testing position.

And so that money is actually cut out of SPD and moved to SDHR.

Then you have 1.57 in proviso modification that would allow them to spend their salary savings that they couldn't otherwise spend.

And that's that area in blue that you were talking about, Madam Chair, the 1.57.

Got it.

And then if you look at the line items in there, you'll see that you've got the hiring incentive for $289,000.

You've got the SPD costs for marketing, testing, backgrounding, and retention initiatives.

There's the chief of police search costs.

And then there's that 300,000 unprogrammed piece that I talked about.

And so if SPD were to spend all of that money that the proviso modification allows, and have the 229,000 transferred out by this bill, then it comes to a total of 1.8 million that I was showing you a few moments ago in the balancing table.

That's how that all works.

There's 300,000 in there that's unprogrammed and the rest of it is all programmed according to the mayor's plan for this bill.

With that, I would just turn it over for the department to describe how the mayor would spend the money.

And before we do that, Greg, I just wanna again, clarify, we already lifted a proviso in the amount of $100.15 million.

This just amends the action that we already took and lifts the proviso instead of by 1.15 million by 1.57 million, is that correct?

That's correct.

So that's basically about 420. Sorry, I'm doing math on the fly here.

420,000 more than we already did.

That's correct.

Thank you.

We'll hand it over to you, Chief Diaz.

Thank you.

OK, well, thank you.

Thank you for having us.

And thank you, Greg, for providing some insight to this.

You know, we've been at a really crucial time in our department's history of just our staffing level.

We right now have at about 351 people that could retire at this time.

And so making sure that we have adequate staffing, that we are not, you know, working our officers, you know, that are working sometimes two shifts a day to augment and to provide a variety of different services is always a struggle.

So first and foremost, it's important that we retain our officers because in order for us to build up to this, it is gonna take some time to really get new hires coming in.

The good thing is, is that when we are hiring, 50% of our hires this year have been people of color or female.

And so that is some of the highest numbers that we've seen.

So there is huge interest in our population in our community to really come in and want to serve the department.

I've been talking with chiefs across the country.

We know that there's a staffing issue that affects policing right now throughout the country.

I have been in communication with even the chief from Portland that actually saw that they've actually offered hiring incentives as well.

And in the next several months, they're actually hiring a considerable amount just in a very, very short period of time.

we are seeing where those incentives can be really positive outcomes for their hiring level.

So first and foremost, as I mentioned, we wanna retain our officers.

We've been working with the executive on developing a comprehensive economic package.

But as we start to really focus on our recruiting and hiring, we want another one, make the system more efficient.

So when people hire, we've been testing four times a year.

And that right now does slow down a process.

So if somebody does test and we pull the test in say December, but a new person, a new applicant tests in January, they have to wait for us to pull that test in a couple months.

And so right now we want to make sure that we are pulling that every single month and that, you know, when an applicant actually goes through the system that we're processing people very, very quickly.

And right now, because of all the agencies that are hiring, Um, the person that the agency that has a quick system is going to typically get, uh, more hires.

And so that's one of the things that making sure that our, our hiring is effective and efficient.

We also want to make sure that we're hiring the right people.

So, you know, we have, you know, uh, pushed out the ability to make sure that we have civilian recruiters and a recruiting team and a branding and really trying to make sure that, um, we are letting people know what Seattle police department is all about.

So that is some of the expenditures that are going on to this.

We're also wanting to create competitive compensation package.

That's where the incentives are coming into to be able to support our officers and our support new hires coming into the system.

It is cost of living in Seattle is much higher than many, many different other areas.

And so as we look at laterals coming over to the department or we look at brand new applicants There are expenditures that most of our recruits are having to buy.

Typically, we supply a vest and we supply our gun, but when it comes to their duty belt, their uniforms, these are all costs that the applicant or recruit takes on.

And so some of these costs, they don't get reimbursed for.

When you look at a jacket and everything else, roughly a new recruit has to spend about $1,500 and just buying some of the equipment to outfit themselves to start patrol on day one.

The other component is that we want to make sure that we're developing innovative ways of how we're communicating this job opportunity.

You know, we have done some geofencing around, you know, different schools and different other things to really try to get people, you know, enthusiastic about hiring, but we wanna make sure we boost up those communications.

So we're reaching out, you know, hire more population throughout the community.

We're also looking at a potential pipeline of recruits through college or university-based programs.

Many years ago, I had started out an introduction to community policing class that was free of charge and actually gave all students five college credits to actually generate interest in it.

And from that program, we hired actually, I think about 60 people went through it and we hired about 10 people.

So we wanna generate a pipeline to be able to get applicants in.

Right now, none of the community colleges in the city of Seattle actually have a law and justice program.

And so we wanna make sure that we're working with people to be able to generate that interest and create that pipeline for a future career path.

So these are some of the things that we're looking at when it comes to the hiring process and also trying to make sure that we're bringing in the right applicants.

And COO Maxey, is there anything to add?

I think that was an excellent recitation of their efforts.

I would want to just emphasize your program of the before the badge.

So when we are bringing these recruits in, we are immediately integrating them with the rest of the city of Seattle, with our community, exposing them to wellness concepts and outward mindset so that we are prior to them going to the academy, really indoctrinating them into Seattle values and ensuring that they're on the right path from the start, which I think is a critical component of all of this.

Thank you.

Council Member Peterson, we have your hand up.

Council Member Peterson, yes.

Chair, I just wanted to make sure we could start addressing the bill or make comments on the bill now.

Well, I want to wait to see if there's any questions first on the presentation from Chief Diaz and CAO Maxey on the plans for the retention and recruitment efforts.

Any questions about the proposed uses of the funds?

Colleagues?

Not seeing any.

Well, I have one.

So when we're talking about some of the wellness, those are some of the really important retention measures.

And based on the The report, the SPD recruitment and retention work group final report from August 30th, 2019. The three, well, there are several programs that I believe that are mentioned in amendment one.

So I was about to ask a question, but then I think I'll stop and we can move that and then I'll go forward.

That would be great.

I appreciate that.

Just waiting to make sure.

My colleagues don't have questions about the proposal from SPD before we moved on to the bill itself.

I would love, I know Greg has done some research on the sort of the logic behind the proposed bonus.

amounts that are in the department's plan, both for laterals and for new recruits.

And I'm wondering, I think Greg's research might mirror the research that SPD has done.

I'm happy for either folk representing either central staff or the department to go over that.

I did give Greg sort of a warning that I was going to ask him to share some of that information, but I think whoever wants to do it, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the salaries of area law enforcement agencies and the agencies with bonuses and how this proposal matches up with other departments.

I'm happy to do that to start with council member and I can I can share data and then turn it over to the chief and CEO maxi to to elaborate more on the qualitative part.

Happy to share a table or just talk through the data with whatever your preferences table and talking sounds good to me.

All right.

One second, please.

And why you're pulling that up.

Councilmember herbal for the earlier question of how many applicants it took to get 30 hires.

is roughly about 350 people that are applied for the job and then to get to 30 applicants.

So it's about a 10, it's about 10 fold rather than five to six that I mentioned.

So 10 times as many people actually submit applications.

Correct.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief for stalling for me.

So this is data that the department supplied me with last April when I produced a staff report on Councilmember Nelson's hiring incentive resolution.

And as you can see, there are about 14 competing agencies here with hiring or that the department has identified as competitors in the market for police officers.

And about nine of them here, of the 14, have different kinds of lateral and recruitment bonuses, as you can see in the first column.

What the chair has asked me to point out is, on the recruitment side, that with the $7,500 bonus added in, Seattle would be at the top shortly followed by Kent and then by Everett.

I'm sorry let me let me rephrase.

Everett I think is ahead of us.

Everett and Kent would be higher.

Everett and Kent would be higher than Seattle even with the 7,500 but Seattle would be higher than all the rest.

So If Seattle added the 7,500, Seattle would be higher than everybody except for Kent and Everett, which would be still higher with what they're offering.

And then in terms of laterals, if the $30,000 were added in, then there would be one city that would be higher and that would be Kent.

The two that would be coming up close would be Everett and Tacoma.

And I think this is a useful exercise to demonstrate we're not just pulling these numbers out of the air.

There's been an effort to actually identify a bonus size that is based in policy and based on making the department a more attractive place to work as compared to other jurisdictions.

really appreciate the learning that I've had through getting this information to support Council Member Nelson's earlier resolution.

All right, that's the main question I had about the plan itself.

Not seeing any others.

Council Member, I'm sorry, Council Member Peterson, before we move on to questions about the bill, Greg, is there anything more as far as the overview for the bill that we should cover before we open it up for questions?

A couple of other things to note are that if an officer takes the hiring incentive and does not stay with the department for five years, the bill would require the incentive to be paid back.

It currently right now limits the incentive to laterals and to recruits.

There's some question about whether or not rehires would receive that incentive and that's something that staff is working on to figure out.

There is a reporting requirement that the department provide the number of recruits and laterals that have received the hiring incentive, but only that data.

And that's all that's coming to mind right off.

Okay, thanks.

I want to just flag a couple things one.

For folks following along, the probationary period is one year.

And so I think that's an important data point to realize as it relates to the bonuses.

And then I do wanna call out two of your recommendations, Greg.

One that we might wanna consider adding requirements for a more thorough evaluation.

There was a partial evaluation done of the 2019 program.

and again, an even more abbreviated evaluation of the four month program that we had at the end of 2021 and early 2022. So just lifting this recommendation and want to say, I'm interested in talking to my colleagues about the development of an amendment like that for full council.

And then you also note that the plan is for incentives to be offered for three years, but there's no sunset on the program, unlike the 2019 program, which had a one year sunset.

So just flagging my interest in talking about that between now and Monday as well.

I look forward to that conversation.

Thank you.

So moving on to questions about the bill before we begin discussion of amendments.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Thank you.

I want to speak in support of the bill.

Colleagues, as we know, Seattle police staffing is low based on the presentation we just had.

I believe it's dangerously low and crime is unacceptably high.

Our new mayor has a plan, so let's get it done.

Mayor Harrell announced his recruitment plan on July 13, and this legislation is obviously needed to implement that plan, so I'm eager to pass the council bill today.

On September 10th of last year, nearly one year ago, I introduced two budget amendments to fund between $1 million and $3 million for SPD recruitment and retention, but unfortunately it did not pass at that time.

Since that time, we've received more recent data, including the data today showing unacceptably high 911 response times in several precincts and unacceptable increases in crime rates.

I get emails from constituents every day expressing their concerns about public safety.

I believe we need to restore the detectives we lost so that we can solve crimes.

And we need to restore the community policing officers we lost so that we can prevent crimes.

As we continue to deepen accountability reforms and craft alternatives to respond to some behavioral health emergencies, I support the mayor's SPD recruitment plan, and I look forward to supporting more efforts to retain the highly qualified officers already here who continue to serve our city admirably.

We know it takes a long time to train and deploy new recruits, so retention is also vital.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Peterson.

I know there'll be interest in speaking about folks' positions on the bill.

I'm wondering if it would be okay if we get the bill before us, move the amendments, and then before we take a final vote, I think that's a great time for everybody to let us know why they're voting the way they're voting on the bill.

Is that okay, so we can just get moving?

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

So I'm turning it back over to you, Greg.

Can you please describe amendment number one?

Sure.

Would you like me to share those, Greg, on the screen?

I'm going to describe the amendment first, and then we'll work on moving it.

OK.

So what amendment one does is for the purpose of the ordinance, it says that costs related to retention of officers and SPD mean expenditures that do not need to be bargained and are associated with.

My on.

I'm sorry I thought I was on mute.

No, gotcha.

Okay, then I go back to my reading associated with leave no candidate behind creation of the Bureau advisory councils the creation and support of the develop our people Leadership Academy and the implementation of voluntary wellness for 10 schedules and the implementation of the wellness first schedules does not need to be bargained because it's a voluntary program with individual participation at officer's discretion.

That would be language added to the bill.

Thank you Greg.

Can you please describe amendment number two?

Amendment number two would add language to the bill that would request that the executive, if legally necessary, at the September 21, 2022 meeting, or as soon as possible thereafter, submit to the Public Safety Civil Service Account Commission a draft rule that would allow for moving expense reimbursements for police and fire public employees consistent with SMC 4.14.140 as modified by Ordinance 126.615 and Ordinance 126.625.

I'm sorry, 120389, this bill that is now before you that allows for moving expense reimbursements.

So in short, this would put into the PSCSE rules, the personnel rules that are being modified to allow for moving expense reimbursement.

Thank you, Greg.

Do council members have questions about either Amendment 1 or Amendment 2?

All right, so just, I'll, again, make, I've asked Greg to go through the amendments first before we make the motion.

I do wanna flag that there is a draft amendment, Greg alluded to it, that I'm working on with central staff, the city attorney's office, and the Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

The amendment would provide clarity about the groups of officer candidates that are eligible for incenting, hiring incentives.

per the classification rubric of the Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

Under Public Safety Civil Service Commission rules, officers may request and receive reinstatement.

And then there's another technical issue that my office is working on with central staff and the city attorney that might require a second amendment for full council.

So just wanting to flag that for transparency sake for folks between now and full council.

And with that, I'd like to move the bill so we can consider voting on amendments one and two.

I move council bill 120389. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

The main bill is now before the committee.

Now I move amendment one to council bill 120389. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

Just again, clarifying that amendment one makes it very clear that we have separation from the ongoing negotiations with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, and that this action today does not overlap with those negotiations.

And this is consistent with practices when the council votes on legislation that has overlap with.

labor negotiations.

Madam Chair.

Yes.

My hand was up before the bill and the amendment were in front of us but is since it's been moved in second and is this the appropriate time to offer some comments before the committee votes on this amendment.

Are your comments related to the amendment or to the bill itself?

To the amendment.

Oh, then absolutely.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So this will be a preview of some of my concerns with the overall bill.

I am going to be a no on this amendment here today.

I understand the intent behind it and agree with the intent.

But I think that this is a tactical error overall for the mayor and the team to be sending us a piece of legislation while we are in the midst of bargaining.

I do appreciate that this attempts to try to segregate or separate what we are doing at the bargaining table versus what's happening in this legislation, but this is a huge tactical error from my perspective to be offering additional dollars, incentives, changing work conditions or recruitment retention strategies in the midst of bargaining where there is going to be overlap.

I think that offering money, putting money on the table while we're in the midst of bargaining other types of workload and approaches to what the current SPD portfolio has is a misstep.

And I do not believe that this piece of legislation overall is necessary.

I understand the intent behind this amendment.

I wish I could vote for it, in that I think that it's being offered in the same vein of the concerns that I have, but I am very concerned that what we're doing here is going to be a disincentive to trying to ensure greater compliance with the things that I know management, us, the city council, the executive, and what I've heard the chief say today.

We are in harmony in wanting certain things, and I think that this could be an interruption to that process at the negotiating table.

without divulging any more, I will be just saying no.

I just want to, I think I've done a bad job of explaining the amendment.

What this amendment says is that the things that are called retention in this bill do not need to be bargained.

So for purpose of this ordinance, costs related to retention of officers and SPD mean expenditures that do not need to be bargained and that are associated with the Leave No Candidate Behind Program, the creation and support of the Bureau Advisory Councils, the creation and support of the Develop Our People Leadership Academy, the implementation of Voluntary Wellness First 410 Schedules, and on that last item, the implementation of the Wellness First Schedules does not need to be bargained at this point, because right now it is a voluntary program.

So we are just, with this amendment, publicly stating that these items are not items that need to be bargained.

Madam Chair, with that explanation, I'm going to abstain on this.

But I think overall, I'm still concerned that this does add additional items to what could have been at the bargaining table, and they are not.

So appreciate what you're suggesting here, that all of the things here don't need to be bargained.

I agree, frankly, that when things like us trying to move officers, for example, away from things that we know are actively harmful like having officers be managing traffic with a badge and a gun.

There's not a situation that calls for that.

We want to be able to bargain some of these things that we've been talking about for years now.

I don't think that it makes sense overall to put money on the table in the midst of bargaining.

But in alignment with what you just noted and recognizing that you're trying to say that these items shouldn't be bargained, I'll abstain.

I think overall, I still think this is a tactical error to be moving this legislation on behalf of the executive team.

I think in partnership with the council, we should be holding back on some of these things and negotiating for the bigger picture.

I'll abstain on this today, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

Are there any additional questions about the amendment?

Yeah.

Yes, Council Member Nelson.

I fully support the amendment.

I think that we need to do whatever we can right now to retain the officers that we've got, and I'm impatient to be able to put real retention bonuses on the table.

But in the meantime, these programs, and this gets to the point I was, or to the question that I had before, these programs would total, according to the report that was done in 2019, $870,000, so is that figured into this overall package?

So you're asking the value of the retention items in the package?

Right.

And I think there's a chart that Greg had, or maybe he can just tell us.

These programs are some of the programs in that report, but I don't think the dollar amount aligns.

Yes, that's correct, Madam Chair.

The dollars that would be spent in 2022 for the programs are $10,000 for the Leave No Candidate Behind, $150,000 for the Develop Our People Leadership Academy, and $10,000 for the Wellness First Schedules.

So a total of about $170,000 in 2022. then there would be additional funding that would be paid in 2023. And all of these costs are in attachment to in my staff report.

Thank you, Greg.

All right.

All right.

Cash on the table for this.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Will the clerk please call the roll on amendment one?

Council Member Mosqueda.

Abstain.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Four in favor.

Thank you.

Now moving on to Amendment 2 to just remind folks what Amendment 2 does.

It is Simply, let me see, let me get up to it.

It is, again, simply replicating what we did in an earlier bill related to the development of a rule to allow the Seattle Police Department to pay relocation costs associated with recruits.

There are, I'll move amendment number two to council bill 120389. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

Are there any comments or questions on this rather technical amendment?

All right, great, thank you.

The clerk, please call the roll.

Council Member Mosqueda.

I'll stand.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Four in favor.

All right, thank you so much.

Um, so that motion carries and amendment to is adopted.

Before voting on the bill as amendment amended.

Do council members have comments on the bill as did

Thank you so much, Chair Herbold, for the opportunity for us to weigh in on this bill before the final committee vote.

Appreciate Mayor Harrell submitting his long-awaited recruitment incentive package.

As we saw from the chart earlier, this package brings Seattle in line to be more competitive with cities in our region, but also more competitive nationally with cities facing similar recruitment crunches.

And it is a necessary step toward comprehensive public safety in the city of Seattle.

I do just wanna state that in addition to the recruitment and retention of police, we did have a really good discussion today about some of the other strategies that have to be part of that comprehensive public safety strategy, including response alternatives and appreciate the renewed partnership focus and energy that the Harold administration is bringing to this.

very much appreciate candidate Harrell's emphasis on alternative response like programs, like CAHOOTS and that he has continued to have those strongly held views as a elected official and is looking toward partnering with us to make those things a reality.

I wanna also lift up the conversation that we had around continuing our work to engage more city employees and more visible and on the ground public safety work around the city to be making a tangible effort.

But we know that a critical component of this has to be continuing to work on being competitive on recruitment and retention of police.

And that's what this measure does.

But it's only going to be, you know, if we're also working on those other components for comprehensive public safety in the city of Seattle.

So I look forward to this initial step and many more discussions to come on the other components of our public safety strategy that we are putting together in partnership as a mayor and a council.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I've been waiting for this vote.

So on March, and thank you very much for alluding to this, but on March 23rd, 2022, I put forward resolution 32050, calling for a staffing incentives program to accelerate the hiring of new police officers, stating council's intent to pass by separate ordinance, the lifting of the council imposed restriction on the use of SPD's 2022 salary savings to pay for them and stating council's intent to pass by separate ordinance, a staffing incentives plan.

And my intention was to begin the policy conversation about the urgent need to do something, anything to address our public safety crisis.

And I wanted to provide maximum flexibility to the executive to design the most competitive staffing incentives program as possible.

and resolution 32050 passed full council on May 24th and succeeded in setting the stage for the legislation we're about to vote on today.

So between the introduction of that resolution and today, salary savings increased from 4.1 million to 8.6 million.

Council's projected 125 separations in 2022 has been surpassed by 23. in SPD's revised projection of 148 separations.

By the end of quarter two, there have been only 30 hires, so it's hard to fathom how we'll hit the projected 125 hires this year.

And as Greg noted, we've got a net loss of officers quarter over quarter.

And so, Within that context, meanwhile, people are dying.

And according to the August 4th homicide and shots fired report, year-to-date homicides events are up 19% with 31 incidents.

And of those 31 incidents, there were 33 homicide victims.

40, 30% were black or African American, 9% were Asian Pacific Islander, and 6% were American Indian, Alaskan Native, and the rest were white or unknown.

Year-to-date shootings and shots fired events are up 39%, and shootings are up 40% with 123 events year-to-date, compared to only 88 last year.

So, and then, since that report was released on August 4, a man died from a brutal downtown assault that has taken that took place on eight on August 2, a man was wounded in the shooting in West Seattle on Saturday morning, a man was found shot dead on Saturday morning in Mount Baker a man was shot dead on Saturday morning in the university district.

So this is what we're dealing with when we talk about a public safety crisis.

So it should come as no surprise that I strongly support Council Bill 120389. I thank Mayor Harrell for bringing this forward and to Council Member Herbold for sponsoring it.

And I request to be added as a co-sponsor and we'll vote in favor.

Thank you.

Just a few words of my own.

I just want to sum up what the bill does.

It authorizes spending for the estimated cost of $289,000 in hiring incentives during 2022 from existing funds already included in SPD's 2022 budget.

It transfers $228,000 out of SPD's budget to the Seattle Department of Human Resources for positions to enhance recruiting and the ability to administer tests which can speed up the hiring process.

This is in addition to the funds that the council approved for SPD to hire consultants outside of the department to accelerate background checks.

The figures in the Council Central Staff Memo from the April 26th meeting notes the lateral incentive of $30,000 offered is as high as any other local department.

We discussed that data earlier.

In the 2022 budget, the Council adopted funding for the Seattle Police Department's hiring payment to hire 125 officers.

Hiring has been slower than anticipated.

So this uses existing funds for the hiring of those 125 officers in support of the hiring plan that we voted for and funded.

I appreciate the mayor and SPD bringing this forward and agree with previous comments about the need for the development of alternatives.

Developing a new 911 alternative call response program is an recruitment and retention strategy.

It's been nearly two years since the council requested analysis of what types of 911 calls could be responded to without police involvement.

I'm concerned that we have been falling behind in our commitments to create policing alternatives.

I am encouraged by the recent agreement of the administration to work with Council to develop a pilot.

Seattle's not unique.

Cities across the country are facing police officers shortages and a critical part of our long term solution is to lessen the load on officers and create new and more effective ways of responding to calls that do not require an armed police response.

In closing, I want to again thank the mayor and SPD for being collaborative in developing this bill.

And with that, if there are no further comments.

Oh, geez, I keep forgetting to switch back to the other screen.

I'm sorry.

Well, I'm sorry, too, Madam Chair, because I know that you probably want to have the last word on this.

And thanks for your leadership and shepherding this effort.

So I'm happy to offer my comments and then turn it back over to you.

Apologies for not speaking up when I heard you making some comments.

So, um, I do want to note that, um, I share those comments, the chair's concern that she just ended with the concern that we have not seen alternatives to the policing strategy that we currently have implemented as the council passed in 2020 and 2021. The concern that the chair raised that we funded these strategies in the past and we haven't seen them fully implemented by the previous administration is really hampering our efforts collectively to see alternatives to policing go into effect and I stand with her and this council.

who had called for those efforts as codified in the budget law to be truly implemented and look forward to working with this current administration to make that actually happen.

I will not be able to support this legislation today.

I want to tell you why.

In the conversations that I've had directly with officers who have been engaged with human service providers, human service providers who are the folks who care for our most vulnerable folks who are experiencing homelessness, people who are having crises in our street, they have regular communication with officers and roundtable discussions about how to improve services and communication.

And what the frontline officers have told our human service providers is that there is no place for them to bring people.

And they feel demoralized because they can't do anything for person down calls, for mental health calls.

The officers have told them there is no amount of money to compensate for them to have nowhere to bring people.

I wanna repeat that.

The officers themselves have told human service providers, there is no amount of money that can compensate for them having nowhere to bring people.

Not enough landing zones for people in distress, not enough shelter, not enough housing, not enough mental health treatment facilities, not enough substance treatment facilities.

And they're not going to keep bringing people to Harborview, which is a revolving door when hospitals are already at capacity because of COVID.

From the officers' own mouths, what they said is that what they need is not additional money, but a place to bring people.

A PR firm for SPD won't help that.

A hiring incentive approach won't help that.

Marketing won't help that.

$150,000 for a police chief search won't help that.

What we can continue to do is to try to move funding into housing and shelter mental health substance abuse high needs acute care services, which I know many folks on this council have supported and will continue to support even folks who will be voting for this legislation today, but I can't do that when I see that the officers themselves are saying that the money is not what And I have to repeat that our own city's recruitment and retention work group final report last year said that, which I will note SPD was a part of, they did not identify incentive pay as a barrier to those hiring or retaining their term at SPD.

The final report did not identify a hiring incentive program as a recommendation.

Additionally, our own city analysis of the hiring incentives used in the late 2021 quarter showed that, and I quote, SPD communicated the department did not experience an increase in hiring since implementing that hiring incentive in October 2021. Also mentioned in the previous central staff memo, the research director for the Police Executive Research Foundation and the executive director of the International Association of Police Chiefs to determine if there are any specific evaluations or research on the effectiveness of hiring cash incentives in policing, said that, and I quote, there is not yet a body of research to support this practice.

The City of Seattle's Human Resource Department also summarized, offering a hiring incentive is a short-term strategy meant to induce a prospect to accept a job.

But once an employee is on board, even a structured sign-on bonus with additional payout tied to time served has limited impact on retention, the most important thing that we all want to work on.

They went on to say the money is one time quick fix that may not compensate for uncompetitive wages or difficult or unsupportive working conditions, lack of opportunity to develop career relevant experience and skills limited and when there's limited promotion opportunities.

And importantly, signing bonuses, for example, for newly hired external personnel can negatively impact employee morale, if that's what we're concerned with.

hiring bonuses negatively impact existing employee morale.

Employees promoted internally or already working on a job can feel undervalued and unappreciated when their financial package does not match what the external recruits receive.

There's potential for breaking trust.

And I would suggest that as we look across the departments, which I know Council Member Herbold has been a strong proponent of, we have a huge opportunity this upcoming budget to look at what labor relations and our city unions have been asking for for a very long time across departments, and that is to figure out retention strategies across all departments.

There is an equally important a gap in the needed personnel, in human services, in Seattle Fire Department, in a number of other areas that our city provides critical services.

And I think that we are missing an opportunity to have this discussion across our city and not to listen to what the frontline officers have said that they wanted, and that is a place for people to be referred to.

Every other department has been asked to prepare a budget analysis or a budget proposal that goes up to a 6% budget cut.

And just yesterday in our Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, which was projected on Seattle Channel, public to everyone, more bad news was shared.

We will not know the gap in existing revenue and existing expenditures until the August 17th meeting in Finance and Housing.

So until we know what gap we're facing, I think that every dollar that we have available, as we've asked every other department to do should continue to be held so that we can look at how we address the critical needs across the city and across every department in this upcoming budget, I understand we've already Council has already given.

spending authority.

This slightly makes an amendment to that amount.

But overall, I still have concerns with the policy approach.

And I have concerns that this is not aligning with what I've heard from the human service providers is the direct need from our officers.

So today, again, I will be voting no on this legislation.

And I look forward to standing with the chair and others who have been calling for those alternatives to policing to actually be implemented as passed by Council.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Councillor Mosqueda.

Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda.

No.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Four in favor, one opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion carries.

The bill is adopted as amended and the committee recommends that the council bill as amended, move to a full council on August 16th.

Normally under the council rules, the split vote, this bill would be forwarded to the second city council meeting, which would be in two weeks, but because of the August council break, The second meeting is on September 6th.

The council rules allow for a vote in one week with the agreement of the committee chair and the council president.

So I will be consulting with the council president about holding the full council vote at the meeting on August 16th.

The next Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for September 13th, 2022. Do any committee members anticipate being absent from that meeting on September 13th?

Can always tell me later, just if there are any known absences, love to know them earlier.

And before we adjourn, are there any other comments from my colleagues?

Seeing none, the time is 1258. Thank you everybody for staying late and we are adjourned.