Public Safety Committee 492024

Good morning.

The Public Safety Committee will come to order.

It is 9.31 a.m.

April 9th, 2024. I'm Robert Cattle, Chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Will the Committee Clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Present.

Council Member Moore.

Present.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Saka.

Here.

Chair Kettle.

Here.

Chair, there are five members present.

Thank you.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection or seeing, the agenda is adopted.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

The public comment should relate to items on today's agenda or within the purview of this committee.

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up for today?

Currently, we have zero in-person speakers and zero remote speakers.

Well, in that case, we'll have zero minutes this morning, and we'll skip over the next piece, so I will not have you read the public comment instructions.

We will now move on to our first item of business.

Hold on.

Before I say that, I want to welcome both participants for today's committee meeting.

First, on line over Zoom, we have Director Currie-Meyer, who I see there on Zoom, and also from OIG, Inspector General Judge.

Thank you very much for coming.

Before starting, the first point I just wanted to note, emergency management is a key function of government and a central mission of public safety with emergency preparedness and of this committee.

It's one of the three major mission sets for this committee, crime and security being one, fire rescue and alternative response being the second.

emergency preparedness being the third.

Emergency preparedness is important to the different public safety pieces but also to other areas like the Seattle Transportation Plan and the Comprehensive Plan that we're in right now.

It's a main focus and one reason why we've asked for in terms of policy elements of the Comprehensive Plan to include public safety because clearly emergency management, emergency preparedness along with fire and the like are important.

Emergency preparedness cannot be solely top-down and or government-only effort.

It's essential to have a neighborhood community actively involved.

And so I say with that, not only as a block watch captain, but I'm also a SNAP, Seattle Neighborhoods, actively prepared captain for my neighborhood.

So with that, I warmly welcome the Director Meyer from the Office of Emergency Management.

Director Meyer, welcome.

Yes, good morning.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Kettle.

I appreciate that introduction.

Good morning, Council President Nelson and committee members.

I am really thankful to be able to spend some time with you today and talk about what the good work that my team does.

Before I get started, do you want me to share my screen or...

before we start my clerk has reminded me that he needs to uh read you into the um record so okay hold on first uh office of emergency management briefing and discussion with director curry mayor okay and how would you like to do it yeah you're welcome to share your screen and advance the slides okay also can do it if you need okay

Great.

Just give me a minute here and we'll get started.

Move to presentation mode.

Hopefully it'll work.

There we go.

Can you all see that?

Yes, thank you.

Go ahead.

Okay, great.

And thank you for allowing me to present to you remotely.

I would have rather been with you in person.

I'm recovering from an injury and have very limited mobility for a short period of time, but hope to be back soon.

The Office of Emergency Management, as you mentioned, is part of public safety.

Our mission supports public safety in a number of areas.

Planning operations, grants, mitigation, community engagement and hazard analysis.

I wanted to spend some time with you and talk about the programs that we do every day on blue sky days that support our response mission and.

many people are still not clear on what emergency management does but there's a lot of work that actually makes response work which is only about a quarter of of the work that we do here's the team um 15 of us a small but Mighty group and we work with all city departments on a regular basis I like to say that emergency management is a team sport and doesn't work well unless uh all of those depart operational departments who have people equipment expertise to share when anything impacts the city either our ability to do the good work we do every day to help those who live and work and go to school here to something more uh catastrophic like an earthquake so in order for us to do response well All of these things need to occur.

We have a number of ways that we engage with other city departments.

So none of this work that we do is in isolation.

This is never just my team, but really the programs that we administer, the citywide emergency management strategic plan, the citywide emergency management plan, All of that is done with the other operational departments.

We also design and conduct exercises and do training on a regular basis in order for us to all be prepared should something occur that impacts the City of Seattle.

And when I say when something occurs, it can be anything from Too much snow and ice and which makes it difficult to get around the city to something more catastrophic like the flooding that we experienced in South park just a little over a year ago or something more catastrophic like an earthquake, we also have a staff duty officer, who is on call 24 seven.

So that rotates from each of my staff is trained as a staff duty officer.

And we work with those departments who may experience having to work emergencies.

So police and fire, for example, work on emergencies all the time.

Where we come to play is if there is something outside of their expertise and they need other departments to come and help them, transportation, for example, possibly city light.

But this duty officer is on all the time and is in contact with those other departments should they need something or to coordinate in ways that they don't do on a regular basis.

When I said we are a small office with big impact, I think this is a great example.

We represent only .17% of the overall city budget for 2024. You see the budget number there.

But we are what's called the applicant agent for federal reimbursement from FEMA.

So what that means is all of the projects for which we might get reimbursed for something that impacts the city, have to go through and are coordinated by our office, which means we are the facilitator.

We coordinate with the state and then for FEMA.

So in 2023, We brought in $9,189,297 back to the city.

And in 24, it was $8,385,254.

And since 1993, we have brought Back to the city over 84Million dollars in recovery and mitigation means that some of that money was dedicated to mitigation projects again, that all those other operational departments are engaged in.

And I'll show you some examples of those in just a minute.

So it was not just recovery, meaning money that we had already spent, but also for these mitigation projects.

Just a note here, we do have one of the grants that comes into my office is the Emergency Management Performance Grant, and that funds three of those 15 OEM positions.

So grants and mitigation is really our favorite because it does so much for the city and allows us to work on projects that we wouldn't be able to fund otherwise.

We always like to remind people that for every dollar spent on mitigation, we save at least six dollars on future disaster losses.

So that includes response and recovery.

but some examples of money of projects that came in this year we were awarded a planning grant for the lower duwamish sea level rise scoping project which includes the neighborhood of south park that tends to flood very frequently We also have money for library cooling centers, so putting in air conditioning in libraries so that they can serve as cooling centers when we have extreme heat.

One of the other projects for that is a university library branch.

Not only did we get mitigation money for it to become a cooling center, but also a seismic retrofit for that particular location.

We also got money this year so far for the citywide climate change and sea level rise mitigation.

So looking at how will sea level rise impact the coast all along the waterfront in Seattle and what are those things that we need to do to ensure that people are safe.

So our priorities for this year include upgrading or excuse me, updating the citywide emergency management program strategic plan.

And as I mentioned, It's a citywide effort.

So we have a committee called the Disaster Management Committee, which has representatives from all of those operational departments I mentioned.

So transportation, city light, fire, police, human services, OIRA.

We all come together and write goals and objectives for what we want to accomplish to make sure that the citywide emergency management program works.

We just finished that.

It has gone through almost all the approvals.

It'll go to department directors next.

Also this year, we're updating the Seattle Hazard Identification and Vulnerability Analysis, or also called the SHIVA, which is kind of a mouthful, but I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about that momentarily, because it's quite impressive in terms of how deep we dive into not only the hazards in Seattle, but who's vulnerable and what do we need to do to keep people safe prior to one of those hazards impacting the city.

We also this year are increasing tsunami preparedness.

I'm sure you've heard a lot about the Cascadia fault.

There also is a Seattle fault that runs perpendicular.

Cascadia runs north-south down the coast, and the Seattle fault is perpendicular to that.

And for the city, the Seattle fault is more impactful.

It would be especially difficult for downtown Seattle.

So tsunami preparedness is is on our, our plan this year for making sure all the businesses that might be impacted and residents know what they can do.

So a large portion of that will be in community engagement.

We also have increased the number of emergency operations center training, all the training that we do for departments across the city that helps us engage with each other during emergencies.

We've increased the number of trainings that we do for that.

We also are looking at increasing private sector engagement, both with big and small cities.

Big city or excuse me, big businesses and small businesses need different things.

They also need to be engaged and know how to what they can do to make sure their businesses are still operational post event.

So that's an initiative this year as well.

I wanted to show you this list of hazards, which is part of that Seattle hazard identification and vulnerability analysis that I mentioned, because there's quite a few that we look at on a regular basis here you see 18. And these are the ones that carry the greatest risk to the city that doesn't mean that nothing else can happen, but these are the ones that would be the most impactful and the first five are the ones that we.

pay the most attention to meaning do either response that more frequently.

Respond to these types of events, or we do include in our training and exercises that doesn't mean that other ones can't occur.

But when you have limited resources, you have to pick the ones that you, you are pretty sure.

Will happen on a regular basis, or are the most disruptive like earthquakes and then focus your efforts on that.

uh earthquakes while they are the least frequent are the most impactful snow and ice wind storms power outages and then i would add extreme heat are the ones that we experience most frequently in the city i mentioned the hazard identification and vulnerability analysis and i wanted to give you just a snapshot of the things that we look at because it's um quite detailed takes a lot of research a lot of interaction not only with our regional partners but also our federal partners like the national weather service the united states geological society So just first of all, identifying what are those hazards for Seattle?

What is their magnitude, their frequency and the impact?

And you can see the categories here.

Then we do a deep dive into community profiles.

So that also includes, does a particular neighborhood or a portion of Seattle, what is the geography and how does that affect access to transportation?

emergency services, economy, how does that impact the economy, healthcare, utilities, and the media.

It's really interesting that the majority of the utilities run down the middle of the city and health care tends is also clustered through the middle of the city and what that means is if there's something that impacts that corridor then that has a huger impact on the city at large some of the vulnerabilities that we look at with relation to community profiles are what does the social network look like there how it how connected are people to each other Do they have access to services?

And what is the urban concentration?

What are the city capabilities and how quickly can we respond?

What is the likely impact of an earthquake, for example, on those city capabilities and how will we ensure that people have quick access to services even if roadways are blocked or bridges are down?

How do we get things to people in a hurry?

As I mentioned, this takes extensive research and coordination, and it's updated every three years.

Most cities have some kind of hazard identification and vulnerability analysis, but in the long time that I've been in emergency management, I have not seen one this detailed that's updated on this frequent of a rotation.

So I'm really proud that we do this because I think it allows us to help those most vulnerable and know what are the biggest impacts from the hazards that we face.

our emergency operations center is where we coordinate with all city departments or most city departments should there be something that impacts the city we also activate the EOC for planned events we have a lot of events in Seattle and so anytime you bring large groups of people together you have the possibility that someone could be hurt or public safety becomes an issue so we activate for the pride parade we activated for the mlb all-star week um that was a big one for us uh We will be activating, of course, for FIFA when that comes in a couple of years.

So we get a lot of practice for those planned events.

And again, we have those EOC representatives from different departments come together so that we make sure that should something arise, then we're ready to help people.

The disaster event that we activate for most frequently are winter storms.

As you well know, it impacts people's ability to get around the city.

It can also impact our ability to provide services to folks depending on how severe the storms are.

And we also want to make sure that people experiencing homelessness Migrant populations, all of those people who are here in the city and impacted by.

1 of the hazards that we met that I mentioned, or severe weather are able to get the help that they need.

You may remember the duck bus crash that was several years ago.

We responded to that that 1 was particularly challenging because it involved.

a number of people from other countries and so a lot of those embassies were involved and we were coordinating through the Emergency Operations Center with governments of other countries to make sure that they could find the folks from their country that were impacted.

The core functions in the EOC are one, to provide this overall situational awareness.

So when a department, transportation for example, responds to something that's within their area of responsibility, they do that on a regular basis.

But when something more impactful happens and you have multiple departments, you need one place that can say, give you the overall operational picture and say all of these departments are coming together and these are the things that are happening one so that we can help each other two we don't duplicate effort and also oftentimes with a big event different departments need to support each other For example, transportation and a snow event would be helping clear the roads that emergency vehicles can get through and can also get to hospitals.

We also activated for the South Park flooding.

Again, very complicated multi-day event with complicated needs from that particular community.

So this is where that situational awareness happened.

with multiple departments.

We could look at also at a plan of action.

The center would also be where we would coordinate with neighboring jurisdictions.

King County, for example, should we need outside assistance or the federal government.

And also it's a place where their policy decisions can be made.

So in summary, we do have a public safety mission and we support those traditional first responders.

We bring together all city departments that might have resources or people or expertise.

So we're working constantly on blue sky days so that the gray sky days are easier and more effective.

And as I mentioned, response is just a small part of our overall mission.

We have a number of relationships that are really important, both inside and outside the city.

I've talked a lot about working with other city departments, but no city, regardless of how large they are, how big their budget is, or how many resources they have, can respond to everything that would impact a city on their own.

And really our success depends on us making those relationships prior to an event happening.

So we work with universities, colleges, both local and international.

We have some relationships with universities in Japan because they have a similar earthquake and tsunami threat, just like we do.

We work with the private sector.

The Gates Foundation has given us space to serve as an alternate emergency operations center should the operations center near Fire Station 10 is where the EOC is becomes inoperable for some reason, then we have space both at the Gates Foundation and at the University of Washington.

Big City Emergency Managers is a group of big cities who have established emergency management programs.

So Seattle is one where we're well known for how for our program here in Seattle.

And we are often asked by federal agencies and federal departments to give opinions on what's happening in emergency management and how we can do things better.

So that's why the big city emergency managers are called out there.

And then, as I mentioned, the mitigation and disaster recovery reimbursement, we're really proud of that.

It's happening all the time.

And the best part is not only do we get reimbursed for a lot of the disaster money that we spend but also we're allowed we are also given money to do these mitigation projects so working with those other city departments on what is it that would further their department mission that also is also helping keep people safe so that's that mitigation piece so that is the end of my formal presentation and i'm happy to answer questions

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Really appreciate the briefing.

And I always go to my vice chair first to see if he has any questions and then to the other members of the committee.

Vice Chair Saka, do you have anything?

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And first off, thank you, Mr. Chair, for the grace and patience.

I was a few moments late in person and I let you know in advance.

But as as Working parents across the city very well know this week is spring break.

And as a working parent of three elementary school age kids, you know, with the kiddo camp, spring break camp logistics this morning were particularly rough.

So for all the working parents out there in the city struggling and trying to figure out how you're going to navigate and not be late to your morning meetings.

I hear you.

Exhibit A here right this morning, but in any event.

So thank you, Director Mayer, for this really insightful presentation on emergency management.

It's a topic that's...

Somewhat under looked in my view in terms of the broader the overall significance importance in terms of the broader public safety picture But it is a topic that I know and I'm familiar with firsthand When I was in the reserves in my old military unit, I was the anti-terrorism force protection officer And emergency management representative for my unit.

So I appreciate this work and fun fact I I was my When I was an undergrad, I had an internship with Seattle Public Utilities and their emergency management department.

So this is really, really, really, really important work.

I know it firsthand and I'm excited.

I geek out about this stuff and anything transportation.

So you're speaking my language here.

Yeah, another reason why you're our vice chair.

But I'd just be...

I'd just be curious to better understand, Director Mayer, on that slide, I forget which one, but it was a slide that you listed basically like the 18 categories of events that the city actively plans for on a regular basis.

And you astutely noted that, unfortunately, you know, you can't plan and, you know, regularly anticipate and plan for every single potential conceivable scenario.

But in two short years, we have a huge event coming up, the 2026 World Cup.

And a million plus people.

can be expected to visit Seattle.

And with an additional, I think, four billion eyes watching the various matches that are going to take place here in Seattle.

And so a huge, huge event.

Great for our city from an economic development standpoint, from a tourism standpoint, from so many fronts.

But we'd just love to learn how you and your office are planning for that huge event.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm so glad you brought that up.

We always have these, what we sometimes refer to as emerging threats or these other events, other things that were not planned for.

But we're doing a number of things.

As you know, the city of Seattle is involved with the local organizing committee to look at what are all of the activities that are going to be happening for the FIFA World Cup.

And the committees are in different categories.

So there's ones for transportation, which I'm sure you're aware of, and you probably have staff connected to that effort.

There's a public safety one.

There's one that's just focused on fan activities.

So I have staff that are on each of those committees that are looking at what is the planning that needs to happen for the World Cup right now.

Then there are a couple other efforts, the big city emergency managers, as I mentioned, a number of us.

So Los Angeles, I believe a city in Texas, those that are having FIFA, we're also getting together on a regular basis.

And we are also connected with Department of Homeland Security to look at how they can support what we're doing, both from a public safety standpoint and then also just the things that would happen with having lots of events in one particular area.

As you know, or may have heard, that there are over 400 fan events that will be from Victoria or British Columbia all the way to our border with Oregon.

So up and down the I-5 corridor, people will be traveling and moving around for that period of time.

So from my standpoint, it's a little terrifying, actually.

I'm just kidding.

But so public safety will be number one and and we'll have not only do we have two years to do that planning.

We're also looking, we will activate for those events, meaning we'll have people in the Emergency Operations Center from those different departments to ensure that should there be something that we need to respond to immediately, we can do so.

Also, I meant to mention earlier that Councilmember Kettle and I recently were talking about doing some kind of tabletop exercise, possibly around active shooter or mass shooting, and also in conjunction with the mayor's office.

So my team is working on that right now, and we'll have something to share fairly soon on to make sure that we hit all the marks of how you want to manage that exercise.

But I'm super excited to engage with all of you on what your role is, what we're doing, and also what the responsibilities of the mayor's office is for some type of event like that.

So hopefully I answered your question.

Yeah, no, thank you.

And love the table stop exercise from our esteemed chair here.

That will that idea rather.

And so I would I would encourage glad to hear that your staff is already engaged in some of these planning conversations.

I would encourage you to do two things.

And by the way, this is coming from someone who, you know, I was, me and my wife were at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, one block away, the family meetup location, the finish line, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when both of those devices went off.

And so, You know, I'm coming at it not only in my legislative oversight committee perspective, but also as someone who has witnessed firsthand what a mass event.

It's a target of opportunity for people who want to, for domestic terror, for international terror.

And so we need to be very prepared.

So I'd encourage you to do two things as we're two years away now from this big event.

You know, like...

Get more closely involved and connected yourself as a leader of this great organization as the day draws nearer.

And then secondly, lean heavily on our federal partners who have, as you very well know, a lot more robust capability and resources and know-how.

So lean on those folks.

And our peer and partner agencies and organizations at the state level and the county level as well but uh but yeah because that's a huge event and it's a huge opportunity and unfortunately also creates huge vulnerability as well so thank you yes absolutely thank you appreciate that thank you uh vice chair um council president

Thank you very much.

I sometimes think about emergency management like housework that no one notices until it's not done, right?

So thank you very much for keeping us safe ahead of time.

I have a question about the Emergency Operations Center.

Sometimes it's talked about in the news when it says, you know, there's a line saying, Emergency Operations Center was activated as if that's a trigger for the ability for city officials to take extra steps.

So I wanted to know, what are the criteria that are are emergency first responders and everybody in this sphere and the mayor take into consideration when you decide to open the EOC?

And then what does it mean what you do in terms of executive power or what?

Sure.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you.

Good question.

So first of all, kind of going backwards, what I would say is prior to the EOC being activated, First responder departments like the fire department and SPD do emergencies as part of their regular way of doing work.

So they do that every day and they don't need outside help.

So the EOC is activated.

First of all, that decision would be me in conjunction with the mayor's office deciding whether or not to activate.

um and any city department director can request an activation but the first thing we look at is what is the problem that you're trying to solve and would that problem benefit by having expertise from different departments come together to work on whatever the problem is The other reason people would come together are for those planned events, as I mentioned.

So we would automatically have transportation, city light, fire, PD, human services come together for a planned event because we're doing that proactively.

Not that something has already happened, but we're looking at could something happen.

But let's say...

or south park for example for a long time city departments did the work that they needed to do and it was almost at the point of looking at how are we going to manage recovery there were a lot of things that particular neighborhood needed that needed a lot of expertise from different departments that was outside of the type of responsibilities that they do on a daily basis So it then benefited us to be together in one room to make decisions and do that kind of problem solving for those impacted by the disaster together.

So that's really the benefit of the EOC, kind of convening, collaborating, mediating.

Our job as emergency managers is to know a little bit about those different departments so that we can say these are the departments that we think should come together to do that problem solving.

so then you asked about authority so um by default um anything that impacts the city is the overall responsibility for that is the mayor um if we if the mayor decides to proclaim a local emergency then um and he would do that in his office would do that in conjunction with all of you um And there are limited powers with a local emergency proclamation.

For example, it gives the power to have a curfew.

or to block off certain streets or to prohibit the sale of alcohol or guns.

Very limited extra powers that the mayor has.

If you have a local proclamation, it can be the gateway or the connection to a bigger proclamation, either at the county level or the state level, but that is not automatic.

It basically says, to the next level of government the city of seattle is overwhelmed in some way it doesn't mean the entire city is overwhelmed but that the event that we're proclaiming as an emergency has overwhelmed the city in some way so that one we need these other executive powers and we may need outside help It does also give the mayor the ability to move funds from one city function to another for purposes of the emergency.

So if you needed to do that for life safety, for example, you could make that transfer.

However, FAS has some emergency powers that don't require a proclamation.

So they can do emergency purchasing or emergency contracting without there being a proclamation.

But I'm also really glad you brought that up because one of the things that we all are going to do together, so all of you or you, Some of you and your senior staff and some members of the mayor's office are going to go through a drill called the joint protocol drill.

I have we're engaging with your office Council President Nelson to look at some dates to do that and we'll go over.

exactly what is the protocol for putting an emergency proclamation in place what does it do what does it not do and then your and the mayor's office responsibilities for that So hopefully that was a good summary.

If you have more questions, let me know.

But they'll look forward to that more formal on the legal department as well.

So that's a formality that we do, making sure when there are new council members that you all are familiar with those procedures.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate the detail.

And that was in the back of my mind when I was listening to your presentation.

So thank you very much.

Yes.

Great.

Yeah, great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Okay.

As it turns out, my staff is very interested in emergency preparedness, possibly reflecting their boss, and a lot of questions and, you know, different points being made, including referencing books like The Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, which is a plug for the training pieces that you do.

And I definitely encourage my colleagues on the council to promote all those classes that conducted under OEM.

I've done many myself, Stop the Bleed, and tonight there's a disaster preparedness one being where one member of my staff is going to participate.

I'd like to highlight that.

Separately, in terms of some questions, regarding OEMs looking to update its emergency management plan, the Shiva, as you mentioned, what does the city of Seattle need to be doing to prepare for the next big incident that it is not doing?

Is there something out there that we need to be doing that you've been thinking about that's not part of the standard protocol that we need to be aware of and trying to contemplate and how to fold in ahead of time?

Yeah, great question.

I think expanding in two particular areas that we're always looking to expand, but particularly so when we look at what are the kind of new and emerging threats and that is increasing our outreach.

Outreach and education, which, of course, would require that we have additional additional people.

We have a really great program called the community safety ambassadors where we have under contract.

People.

in various community organizations that help us teach emergency management disasters or disaster skills primarily um to community members currently they are t we have um 13 and they speak 16 different languages so that provides that link with people who one may not trust government but they trust this this uh the community safety ambassador is is a member usually of a community organization or has ties to a particular community so that they're a trusted person and can help teach those disaster skills.

And as you know, just having people aware of what are the disasters that might occur puts them in a better place than if they did not know the hazards that might impact them.

So we pay the community safety ambassadors to do that work for us.

Currently the community safety ambassador program is funded by a grant and that grant is ending next year.

They are adjuncts, if you will.

We have three community engagement.

I have a team of community engagement, two coordinators and a community engagement manager.

So the CSAs supplement that work.

But as you might imagine, that's super impactful because of the different languages they speak and the different neighborhoods and community organizations that they're connected to.

So that's one.

The other is continued and new engagement with the private sector.

Also, you've probably heard or read that the most critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, a little bit different in different places depending on where you live.

But so that constant engagement with the private sector, again, takes additional people to be able to go out and do that.

But so that we're all working together and have those linkages when something occurs or something might occur.

Um, cyber security, you know, also is a, is a, um, a big topic of concern.

Uh, we are the, so the emergency executive board, which are department directors from operational departments, there's about, um, 30 of them meet with me every other month.

And in April, we're doing a cybersecurity exercise that is been put together by the information technology department.

So.

that also our linkages with private sector organizations would be particularly helpful for cyber security as well thank you i appreciate that i find the community safety ambassadors very key um

very, very important.

And we'll have to invite you to our future district seven neighborhood council.

So to ensure that district seven is well covered on that front and your point about private sector.

Thank you.

Private sector is important too, which reminds me of something that's not mentioned in the briefing, but it's very important for a community's resiliency and ability to respond to a major incident like a earthquake and the like is insurance as seen like in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And so that's another area that I don't think gets enough attention is insurance, the various aspects of that, the coverage, the levels of coverage, the percentage of the community that's covered, and the ability for the community to bounce back is tied to insurance.

And that was triggered by your point about private sector.

TONS OF QUESTIONS I COULD ASK, BUT, YOU KNOW, I'M GOING TO SKIP OVER THOSE BECAUSE I THINK YOU HIT THEM PRETTY MUCH IN THE BRIEFING.

BUT I DO WANT TO GO DOWN TO ONE THAT I HAVE HERE REGARDING, AND IT GOES OFF TO YOUR POINT ABOUT COMMUNITY SAFETY AMBASSADORS, IS, YOU KNOW, WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITIES AS, YOU KNOW, AS REPRESENTED BY THE ORANGE AND RED OF YOUR SHIVA MAP, AND THAT'S SO IMPORTANT.

And this is a thing that I've mentioned to the mayor's team in earlier briefings, is the importance of public safety as a policy element of something like the comprehensive plan.

So my question or my ask, if you will, particularly because when these things happen, it's those communities that hurt most.

I have in my mind right now Katrina and how the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans were severely impacted when others weren't.

And so this is so important and it goes to the future planning piece to this.

So it's a bit of a question and a bit of an ask is, you know, your engagement from OEM with the mayor's team regarding the comprehensive plan to ensure that as we grow as a city, we grow smartly as respect to emergency preparedness.

Yeah, so I'm glad you asked that as well.

We are engaged with that effort with the Comprehensive Emergency Plan.

So a number of my staff that have different types of expertise are looking at that and making sure that if some of the hazards are not taken into account when we're looking at planning efforts, that that is included.

So we are asked on a regular basis when that plan is updated what is from our perspective fortunately a lot of the the department the departments that we deal with on a regular basis have an emergency management person or sometimes they have several like SPU has several that work in their emergency management department a division of that department so they're looking at that as well but i'm but i'm also really glad that you brought that up because part of the part of the um beauty of having the the shiva that i mentioned is that we can do that really deep dive and look at what is it that is going to be most impactful in terms of a hazard We also have a really interesting project that I'm particularly proud of right now, a mitigation grant from the federal government.

We're looking at something called resilience hubs.

So there's a couple of efforts.

OSCE is doing resilience hubs in city facilities.

What would that look like?

And those are places that people can go post-disaster.

where they can get resources communication and things like that but the the program that the resilience hub program that's coming out of my office is looking at resilience hubs for catastrophic events and looking at them with community input so the other thing that i think is really impactful for emergency management is that none of the plans that we do um is not it is with is done, none of the plans are done without community input, which is also pretty new for the profession.

Not here, we've been doing it pretty consistently for quite some time, but that's not true everywhere.

So for example, when we put, you mentioned Katrina, one of the terrible things about that was that the evacuation plan had not been vetted.

And so the way that they had asked people to evacuate was not possible for certain communities there.

They either didn't have transportation or didn't know what the evacuation plan was.

So anytime we do a plan here, whether it's resilience hubs, meaning where should they be and what should be in them, where all of that planning effort is focused on community input.

What does the community think?

What makes sense for them?

What will work for them?

So it's never government telling communities, you should do this and don't do that.

We put together something we have focus groups, and we get as much and surveys as much community input as we can.

So the evacuation plan, for example, we would provide the structure and then work with the community to say, what works best for them.

It takes longer but is definitely more successful and more effective when you're able to have that community input.

So I'm proud of us that we do that as well.

Something else to mention is if there were a catastrophic earthquake, there would be neighborhoods that would be isolated or portions of the city that would be naturally isolated post a catastrophic event based on how roads are blocked and bridges are down.

So what do those look like as best as we can estimate knowing where the bridges and what are the freeway overpasses and whatnot that might collapse.

and how can we position city resources and either resilience hubs or supplies and whatnot in those areas so that people are safe and can be okay for a while on their own.

We have a volunteer effort with something called emergency hubs.

not resilience hubs but emergency hubs which just rely on or provide community communication those are all run by volunteers but also it provides communication and the way to connect with either the city or other other people who might be able to help in a disaster so we we sponsor we teach people how to do an emergency hub and then those are run by volunteers

Thank you.

Yes, I'm well aware of that.

Mequa in District 7. Yes.

Yeah, thank you.

You know, the point, and just to close, thank you very much for joining us today.

And this is so important.

Oh, sorry.

Council Member Moore.

I didn't see the hand.

No worries.

No worries.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Director Mayer.

I appreciate this.

Two things.

I wanted to compliment you on your org chart, which was very clear and had photographs.

That's the first time I've seen that.

Very, very cool.

Thank you.

And I would strongly encourage all other departments to follow your lead.

The other more serious question relates to what you were just talking about, having met with some of the emergency hub volunteers in District 5. The question being really how long is, what is the length of time that it's realistic to expect that we are in fact going to get a more centralized response?

because I don't think people realize that we really are looking at being on our own for a pretty significant period of time.

So could you just kind of give us that time frame?

So how long that people should be on their own?

Well, how long should we realistically expect before the city is able to get out to the neighborhoods that have been isolated?

So, I mean, that's one of the things the emergency hubs are talking about is you need to be truly prepared to be on your own in your neighborhood for two to three days, if not longer.

Right.

So, yes, thank you for that question.

I appreciate that.

We actually when we do disaster skills training, we tell people that realistically you could be on your own for two weeks, which is a long period of time.

However, we have some really great things in place that are germane, just as Seattle, which would be super helpful.

So we have an auxiliary communications system that is a network of, they're all volunteers.

It used to be that auxiliary communication was mostly people who could do ham radios who had retired and were not in the business anymore.

The Seattle Auxiliary Communication Service is made up of people that are both retired and still working for technology companies.

And why that matters is it gives us access to the most up-to-date communication services.

They provide backup communication for city departments, including fire and law enforcement, and they can place repeaters in different parts of the city and those members are in different parts of the city so they can stand up those communication little towers, hubs, if you will, pretty quickly post disaster.

So in answer to your question, that would give us a better idea of who is most impacted and who needs help first.

So the fire department in particular would use that so that and as you know their fire departments all over the city so that we can get to people sooner than like that two week window we tell people though if you're okay and your house is in good shape and you can shelter in place Then do so, and then through those communication networks, either the auxiliary service that I mentioned, or the emergency hubs that we can get an assessment of the damage and who really needs help and get to those people more quickly.

But we say two weeks so that people are, you know, not without some supplies, which sounds like a long time.

It sounds like a long time.

But also, hence, those other projects like the resilience hubs and some of the other things we're doing so that we, the city, in concert with community, can have resources and things stored in other places so that people can get what they need.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

And again, thank you, Director Meyer.

You know, this is a very important topic, you know, as we just saw with Key Bridge and Baltimore Harbor, a bridge that I've been over many times.

or the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis.

I have a friend who lives in Magnolia that went over that bridge 20 minutes before it fell.

And every time there's concern that when she drives over Magnolia Bridge, which highlights how important this work is, the Magnolia Bridge, along with the other bridges are so important to District 7, but our city overall to include District 1. And so this shows how important this work is.

It shows how important its tie-ins with the Seattle Transportation Plan, the move levy, plus the comprehensive plan it is.

And a key word that I take out of this is mitigation and having that in the front of mind in terms of preparing and actively prepare.

And I also want to note, you know, it's important to look at the Office of Emergency Management as part of the public safety ecosystem.

And this completes the, you know, the set of organizations that fall under our committee to have in front to show their organization, their great org chart or, you know, some of the budget issues.

And, you know, so it's great to have OEM to complete that set because I think it's important for this community to give all nine entities, the departments, offices, and commission an opportunity to do so.

And on the budget process and on the point of being a public safety ecosystem, OEM and all nine of them should be in the public safety band as we look to do budget deficit exercises.

And it's really important to...

PROTECTED THE BUDGET AS WE SAW LAST MEETING WITH THE SEATTLE MUNICIPAL COURT AND CITY ATTORNEY'S OFFICE BUT ALSO WITH THE OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, PARTICULARLY WHEN A GOOD PORTION OF YOUR POSITIONS ARE FILLED BY GRANTS AND THE FACT THAT YOU PUNCH ABOVE YOUR WEIGHT FROM A BUDGET PERSPECTIVE GIVEN THE FACT THAT YOU BRING IN you know, those grants.

So these are important pieces that we need to look out as a committee.

So thank you very much.

And I suspect that we'll be back with you at some point as you work through the emergency management program, strategic plan and the Shiva and vice chair Saka and I will, two big soccer football guys, we'll be following, you know, the movement towards the FIFA World Cup.

And so thank you very much.

Oh, you're most welcome.

I really appreciate your time today and interest in what we do.

So thank you very much for having me.

I appreciate the opportunity.

I will see all of you very soon for the joint protocol drill and then also hopefully for the tabletop as well.

So thank you very much for having me.

Thank you.

Okay, Clark, we will now move on to our second item of business.

Will you please read item two into the record?

Office of the Inspector General Use of Force Assessment Briefing and Discussion with Inspector General Lisa Judge, Standards and Compliance Supervisor Christine Berbilis, Seattle Police Department Chief of Operations Brian Maxey.

Welcome back, Inspector General Judge and the team here.

As you know, with our community, accountability is a cornerstone of our committee's effort.

We partner with our accountability partners to include OIG, OPA, and CPC.

Obviously, use of force is a very important issue from our community perspective, and a good opportunity to see the work of the OIG and what it does And as a quick plug, I understand that OIG has recently received an award or a shout-out, if you will, for an audit report on SPD compliance with youth access to legal counsel requirements.

So that's congratulations, and it highlights, you know, how the accountability partners working together and, you know, working with SPD along with the committee can, you know, really move forward on the issues that are of concern or of interest.

So thank you and welcome and over to you for your briefing.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, Madam President, Mr. Chair, committee members.

It's a pleasure to be here with you this morning.

We have a bit of a team effort here.

I know that the names were read into the record.

I'm Lisa Judge, Inspector General for Public Safety.

I'll let my teammates here introduce themselves and then we'll get started.

Good morning, thank you for having us.

Christine Berbalis, I am the Standards and Compliance Supervisor at the Office of Inspector General.

And good morning, I'm Brian Maxey, Seattle Police Department Chief Operating Officer.

Good morning.

So I just want to give a little context about this report out.

This is our first really substantive product in the transition of oversight from the federal court, the federal monitor to the OIG.

And so I think this is the point at which we as a city and the Office of Inspector General demonstrate that we have the capabilities we have the expertise we have the wherewithal to take over oversight from the our federal partners and have a robust and comprehensive system of oversight with the city of seattle so in 2023 we onboarded a team that is largely charged with doing assessments and making sure that the gains that the seattle police department have achieved under the consent decree are maintained and that we you know work to innovate and partner just moving forward.

So in 2023, we filed a work plan and methodologies with the federal court.

One of the first products that we were required to produce for the federal court was this report on use of force.

So we're here to just talk that through with you today.

And I'm gonna turn it over to Christine Berbalis, who's gonna talk through the data piece of it first.

So before I get into the data, I just wanted to give a continuation of what Inspector Judge just said.

So the Federal Monitor submitted a comprehensive assessment to the court in 2022, and that assessment focused, among other things, on use of force between 2019 and 2021. And so our report is providing an update to that assessment, and we included data and information from 2021 to provide consistency in and ability to compare along with 2022 and 2023. In order to offer consistency in that transition, the assessment replicates the monitor's previous quantitative use of force assessment methods, while also including additional methods that we have incorporated for ongoing oversight and engagement with SPD.

You'll see the methodology that we use focused on in this report and outlining the new metrics that we're also using for emerging issues.

I think it's important here on that third bullet is that we are prioritizing ongoing collaboration with SPD.

We collaborated extensively with them in the development of the methodology as well as in the actual collection of data.

and our engagement with the other aspects of the report as well.

So a few of the things we'll talk about today is the use of force data, which I'll get into very quickly, and then our work that we did regarding the force review board and our observations and assessment of that, as well as the crowd management component and how SPD's giving an update on SPD crowd management policies as they relate to force.

And you'll see there the assessment goals that we will get into right now.

So in terms of the main use of force data findings that you'll see on the slide, I think it's really important to start by providing definitions for some of the terms that are not only in the report, but will be in the presentation that we're I'll also note that the definitions and examples come directly from SBD policy.

And so just starting off, use of force.

That is referring to physical force, which is any act reasonably likely to cause physical pain or injury, and any other act exerted upon a person's body to compel, constrain, or restrain the person's movement.

Physical force does not include pat-downs, incidental touching, verbal commands, or compliant handcuffing where there's no physical action.

pain or injury.

You're gonna hear us use the terms type one, type two, and type three uses of force, so I think it's important to tell you what those mean.

Type one is force that causes transitory pain or the complaint of transitory pain.

This also includes pointing a firearm at a subject.

Type two force is force that causes or is reasonably expected to cause physical injury greater than transitory pain but less than great or substantial bodily harm.

Use of a taser or OC spray is considered a type two use of force.

Other examples include abrasions, bruising, or lacerations.

Type three force is force that causes or is reasonably expected to cause great bodily harm, substantial bodily harm, loss of consciousness or death.

Discharging of a firearm at a person and deadly force are included in Type 3 uses of force.

Examples include officer-involved shootings, broken bones, and incidents where the subject is admitted to the hospital as a result of force.

Another important thing to note is how SPD records and calculates force data for situations where there are multiple involved officers, multiple applications of force, and multiple subjects.

So SPD counts force statistics based on individual officer use of force reports with each use of force constituting a combination of unique officer, unique subject, and unique incident.

I think it's helpful to have an example here to conceptualize that.

So if three officers use varying applications of force against one single subject during one single event, that could count as at least three uses of force, one per officer reported.

This distinction will come up again when we talk about officer-involved shootings.

Just to highlight, I know you've looked at the slide for a bit, but some main findings.

So overall use of force has decreased during the reporting period of 2021 to 2023. And the three years that are included in our report have had the lowest records of use of force since consistent data collection began in 2015. This is especially true for type three officer involved shootings where there were only two in 2023. In 2022 and in 2023, there were no Type 3 and no Type 3 officer-involved shootings with use of force for subjects in crisis.

Since that consistent data has began in 2015, this is the first time that there have not been any Type 3 uses of force for subjects in crisis.

So here, this figure is showing a breakdown of use of force for each year, 2020 to 2020, sorry, 2021 through 2023. While there's an increase in the use of force between 2021 and 2023, this is mostly due to a steady increase in the count and percentage of incidents involving type one force.

And as you'll recall from earlier, this is the lowest level of reportable force.

2021 had the lowest record of uses of force, 1,116 since 2015. And in 2022 and 2023, there were the second and third lowest uses of force respectively.

2021 had the lowest, sorry, uses of force for type one and type two.

And then again, in 2023, there was the lowest use of force an officer involved shooting since 2015 when consistent data collection began.

So you'll remember the way that SPD counts force statistics based on individual officer use of force reports.

So as I mentioned, this is particularly important when we're looking at officer-involved shooting reports.

For example, if two officers use force against one single subject in an officer-involved shooting, the officer-involved shooting count would be two, despite there only being one subject.

Because OIG sees the value in both of these counting methods, we felt it necessary to include the use of force incident counts and the use of force counts by subject in our report and on the slide here.

That is explaining the different counts that you see for Type 3 officer-involved shootings.

One is for incidents and one is subjects.

This distinction.

I just wanted to chime in.

I think this can be particularly confusing for community members who are looking at this because I think in lay terms, you think of an incident as one thing.

And so SPD counts incidents by specific officer uses of force.

So one of the things that we are working with SPD in recommending is that they have on their website available for the average community person who wants to go and look, especially to see how many officer-involved shootings have occurred in a given year, that it is put in common lay parlance so that folks looking for a specific incident or occurrence of something will be able to figure it out.

And I think that the terminology is just a bit confusing to the lay person.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

And the other matter that we suggested is to include whether the shooting resulted in a fatality.

Again, just providing more transparency and clarity for people just reviewing this information.

So this figure shows use of force with injury or complaint of pain by a subject's race.

During the reporting period, a higher percentage of white subjects were reported to be injured or complained of pain during force encountered, followed by black subjects.

For white, Native American, and other Pacific Islander, as well as two or more races, there was a decrease in injury or complaint of pain.

And for black subjects, there was an increase over the reporting period.

And between 2021 and 2023, individuals with a recorded unknown race had the third highest rate of injury or complaints of pain.

And the rate also increased over the period.

This figure visualizes changes between 2021 and 2023 in racial classifications of use of force for type one and type two combined.

Counts for type one and type two remain steady for force against white and Asian populations while calculation, sorry, while counts and percentages for force against black, Hispanic, Latino, and other minorities increased.

This slide shows pointing of a firearm categorized by a subject's race.

Pointing of a firearm has reduced between 2021 and 2023, as well as over the course of the consent decree.

Black subjects are still most likely to be subject to pointing of a firearm despite being the subject of force less frequently as white subjects.

And then in 2021, the four subjects were reported as unknown race at 11.48%.

And this percentage did increase in 2023 to 28.28%.

Yeah, and I just wanna add in at this point, and I'm not sure Mr. Maxey, if you wanna add anything here or if you wanna wait till the discussion, but you'll recall Christine was talking about the framework and the methodology for this particular report.

sought to replicate methodologies used by previous monitoring teams throughout the course of the consent decree.

So we wanted to be able to replicate what they did, but we also believe that there are additional metrics that will give us greater insight into what is actually occurring here, what, if any, issues exist, and that will, I think, give us a better idea of what we need to address.

And so I think what you see here is the same way of looking at this problem with an overlay of demographics that has been historically used, not necessarily the most nuanced or I think, instructive way to look at it.

So future work with OIG will be trying to figure out what creates a clearer, more complete picture of this data and what that means for us.

Yeah, I'll just jump in briefly on this topic, because I know, I mean, I'm already seeing articles that are coming out in the media today attempting to interpret this, and I think one takeaway I hope the committee is really recognizing is the sophistication of the OIG analysis.

We worked collaboratively.

They took the time to understand our data.

They've dug very deeply into it.

When we find that, you know, SPD and OIG do not agree on numbers, we sit down at the table, we hash through that, and we figure out why.

Because usually there's some methodological question or, as Christine was describing, you know, how do we actually count use of force?

And from the Seattle Police Department perspective, we do it primarily for accountability purposes.

We need to know what every officer is doing and doing it to whom and why.

And every use of force that is behind this data was reviewed by a supervisor, then by the force review unit, and depending on severity, would go up into the force review board for a much greater qualitative and substantive understanding about whether this was within our policy or not.

but specifically regarding what's typically referred to as the disproportionality analysis of racial manifestation in our data.

The idea that we would simply take officer activity and throw this over population demographics based on census information assumes that all people are very strict in their criminal activities to adhere to the quotas we want them to adhere to and that they respect jurisdictional boundaries.

both of which we know are not true.

So when a rate changes, um, you know, we watch that carefully, but that does not necessarily mean that rate is driven by either the perceptions of police officers, by anything the department's doing in terms of deployment strategies.

We don't.

We have to dig deeper.

And as Inspector General Judge said, we are working very hard to come up with better, more nuanced, more targeted methodologies because changes in rate, they do not tell us where to lean into.

How do we fix this as management if there's anything to be fixed or is this something that is simply surfacing in our interactions with the criminogenic environment?

We'll talk more about this, but I'm happy to answer any questions about this.

Thank you for the opportunity.

So our last slide that focuses on the data component is the type of force that is used on individuals that are in a behavioral crisis.

And these rates are determined by the type of force that is used.

and the number of crisis contacts where the force was used.

So the lowest percentage of type two force in behavioral crisis was reported in 2021 and no type three uses of force were reported in a behavioral crisis in 2022 and 2023. This marks the first years with no type three force and crisis incidents since consistent data collection began in 2015.

Okay, so we're gonna transition to the second part of the report, which focused on a qualitative analysis of the Force Review Board.

The Force Review Board is part of a comprehensive set of programs that SPD has to investigate and review uses of force, significant uses of force.

You keep hearing the date since 2015 floating around quite a bit today, and I think And Mr. Maxey, correct me if I'm wrong, but that is really when the reforms that SPD had implemented under the consent decree, which started in 2012, really took hold.

And that's when they started a much more robust collection of force data, started their force investigation teamwork, force review unit, and the force review board.

So the Force Review Board now looks at all Type 3 uses of force, and they do a very comprehensive breakdown and discussion of a variety of things that would impact the legitimacy of that force, like was the decision-making sound, were the tactics sound, was training appropriate, supervision, things like that.

So it's a very comprehensive process.

What we looked at mainly was how facilitation occurred, whether it was appropriate, comprehensive, how the case was presented, the robustness of board discussion, board processes.

And I think I'll turn it over to Christine so she can really talk about it.

But I want to say that this has been a national model for quite some time.

When I was general counsel with the Tucson Police Department in 2017, I believe we came up with a delegation of folks working in internal affairs and force review there.

We came up and met with and talked with everybody involved in Seattle's process, watched the force review board, and then took lessons from that back to the Tucson Police Department where we built what was eventually a critical incident review board there.

They've been doing really good work in this area for a long time.

Christine, do you want to walk through the report?

Sure.

Our office attends the force review board meetings.

They happen at least weekly, sometimes twice a week.

Inspector General Judge is there as well as a couple of our staff members.

We spent quite a bit of time observing how the meetings are going, as well as we interviewed the members from the board as well as other stakeholders within SPD to see if our observations were aligning with theirs.

And this was a newer component to the report that didn't mirror exactly what the monitor, federal monitor had done previously.

So overall, we did find that the force review board does a great job of reviewing these force incidents.

And I think a lot of our feedback were fine tuning and just areas where there could be improvement based on our observations.

There is a board chair that facilitates these, and we have noted the benefit of not asking leading questions, of not presenting their opinion before they let the board speak about it and seeing how robust those discussions are, as well as presenting the case in a way that is detailed and thorough so that the board members can discuss it in a meaningful way.

Some of the areas that we focused on primarily were de-escalation and how and whether officers were doing that as well as particularly in those crisis situations.

So we have had ongoing communication with the assistant chief of that bureau, as well as the chairs that chair the conversations.

That was something that we added where we meet sometimes right after or the next day, and we give that feedback in real time so that we're not sitting on the information and suggestions for months at a time.

So that has been really useful for us.

Again, a lot of the things that we saw, we also heard from the stakeholder interviews.

Oh, the one thing I think is really important is some of the feedback that we gave both in real time and in the report, we're already seeing SPD be responsive to those in those particular things.

And so I think that's important to highlight how that communication and ongoing collaboration can be seen in outcomes already.

Yeah, I will just highlight one of the issues that has been historically difficult for the board to tease out and discuss is de-escalation.

Because it sometimes crosses over into, is it a tactic?

Is it something different than a tactic?

Is it a standalone concept?

And so I think we've been sort of envisioning a different framework to break down de-escalation and talk about it.

It seems to be a fruitful path for the FRB to really talk about de-escalation, what it is, did it work?

If not, why not?

If it did, what lessons can we learn from that?

So that's just one example of how those conversations and feedback are having a real impact on the board's discussions.

And the last piece in the report was a bit on crowd management, because that remains an issue of concern for Judge Robart under the consent decree.

So I'll just start out by talking about the years-long work that we did in the Sentinel event review process with community members and SPD persons.

140 recommendations over the course of two years and four reports, most of those have been either accepted and implemented or in process right now.

So that particular effort had a large impact, I think, on SPD's responses to people engaging in First Amendment activity.

Christine's going to talk about the particulars here, and then I would ask Mr. Maxey to talk about work that we have been doing with SPD around What do we do if we get into a situation again where there are mass uses of force and the system, both SPD system and the oversight systems are just overwhelmed with the numbers of uses of force?

How do we get those appropriately reported?

Who's looking at them?

How are they being investigated?

How is that being reviewed?

So that'll be something he talks about.

Yeah, so I think just something to also note is that SPD did issue a formal response to the SARE recommendations in July of 2023. If that is something...

The issues of communication, community legitimacy are, I think, the next areas that we'll look at here.

So LRAD is now used as a loudspeaker to ensure clear and audible communications during large-scale events.

And POET was initiated in 2020. It's based in principles of crowd psychology and supports engagement with community before, during, and after crowd events.

Poet officers wear special, more dressed-down uniforms and are strategically stationed among protesters to facilitate communication between organizers and members, operational commanders, and frontline officers.

With community legitimacy, the outward mindset, it teaches to employ tactics that support more equitable interactions with community members.

And then before the badge began...

2022, sorry, okay, yeah, 2022, Community-Centered Dialogue, and it's a learning module.

It's based in the principles of relational policing.

It teaches recruits to prioritize transparency, honesty, and trust, and building interactions with community.

And the Public Safety 360 module provides officers with basic understanding of the role of police and community in a community-centric model for public safety.

That's it.

Thank you.

Mr. Maxey, would you like to add anything?

Sure.

Just addressing the issue that's been highlighted by the federal court by and the monitoring team around use of force reporting requirements during long sustained crowd management events, certainly as we saw in 2020. Despite best efforts, when you keep officers for 100 days on the line working 16 hours a day, it doesn't leave a lot of time to do the necessary paperwork that's required by policy.

So we ended up kind of with a best efforts approach with that, and there was coordination with OIG and OPA on how to gather the information, but there was a lot of work to recreate this after the fact.

That was also exacerbated by the fact that at that time, we did not have body-worn cameras on during crowd management events.

And that was something that was developed out of the community engagement when we originally developed our body-worn camera program.

I know there's a lot of historical information that sort of gets lost in the mix, but when we tried to create body-worn cameras, there was strong opposition, and it was actually led by the Community Police Commission, that they did not want us to even have body-worn cameras.

That was not an option.

We had to have them.

And so we spent many, many months over engaging with a wide variety of community groups to find out what the concerns were.

And they surfaced in areas that you'd expect in terms of immigration status, in terms of domestic violence incidents, in terms of religious in-home concerns.

And one of them was around crowd management and at that time our policy said you will not have cameras on that got reversed during 2020 because of the you know critical and sustained nature of those demonstrations we were ordered through executive order to turn them on and have them on and that led to better reporting and the ability to recreate these events after the fact What we've done with our policy is we are putting, we're going to embed someone from the force investigations team or an administrative lieutenant that regularly reviews force into the Seattle Police Operations Center to keep a force log right up against the Ongoing logs that are already kept by the Seattle Police Operations Center.

This will allow us to reference body worn camera from certain time periods figure out what happened and when and then we continue to require Incident commanders if they order force.

They're the ones that are going to primarily document it and If officers have individual uses of force that was not ordered but was simply, you know, came out of the moment, they do their best to record that.

We've also been working in training to have officers actually dictate what is happening and why they're doing it on the body-worn camera in real time, because that's the fastest and easiest way to capture that information and the reasons behind the use of force, which is always, you know, after a long, chaotic shift, can be very, very difficult to figure out.

The last thing I would say in this space is I think it is very notable that SPD pivoted and the SCR process validated a lot of the changes.

We've worked with the OIG to get training off and out of Europe on some of their crowd management tactics.

And between the fall of 2020 and the present, we've only had one use of force that I'm aware of in any crowd management context.

And that includes some pretty, you know, volatile demonstrations that are occurring around Ukraine and Russia, around, you know, Israel and Palestine, around the Dobbs decision when that came down, around abortion.

This, you know, these are important, critical, and people are expressing their viewpoints on that sometimes in a profound physical way.

But we have really deemphasized the use of force in crowd management.

I think we've gotten away from a lot of the then best practices that led us into 2020. And as an industry, we've led the way in refining our approach to that.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That concludes the presentation.

Well, I really appreciate that.

Obviously, a very important topic.

I'm looking up and down the line here in the dais.

Vice Chair?

I have a couple of questions, but I actually want to yield to our colleagues here first.

Well, in this case, I'll start this time.

And one of the things that's interesting to me, first, thank you very much for the report.

I think it's very important to have, particularly have OIG and SPD represented at one table and speak to the brief, which also highlights, by the way, the interaction, the work that you're doing together, which is also very important to note.

So thank you for that.

And I should add to the other accountability partners, OPA and CPC as well.

One thing that it was, you know, I'm going to piggyback off the Office of Emergency Management briefing and their efforts.

And, you know, when they were talking about community safety ambassadors, public education I think is a very important topic.

You know, before the badge is a way for the, for example, inbound officers to learn about the community, but is there a way to use maybe before the badge or some version of the community safety ambassadors, the community policing team, you know, the crime prevention program to educate from a public education point of view?

the use of force pieces, like, you know, level one, two, and three.

You know, if an officer is in this situation, you know, likelihood of type one or two or three, you know, to kind of have that kind of baseline of knowledge throughout the community.

And so there's an understanding, and then, you know, maybe somebody could, you know, adjust or, you know, or engage in a different way to avoid, you know, obviously two or particularly three.

You know, and I was curious if there's anything from a public education point of view related to public use of force, kind of highlighting that point about, as you mentioned, transparency and clarity.

And I just think that that could be an avenue that we could pursue to reduce the numbers even more.

And I was just curious on your reaction to that, both SBD and OIG.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of facets to that question and the comments that you had.

One aspect of OIG work is that whenever we undertake something like this, we also try to explain the universe in which this is occurring.

And so in the use of force report, there is a map of how uses of force, like from the time force is used all the way through the investigation and review process through to potential allegations of misconduct or whatever.

There's kind of like a subway map of that.

And so I think one of the things that we could do is break that down.

We have a new comms person, engagement person.

So we're going to work on creating some videos and some short ways to put snippets on our website so that if people want to learn about this, they can go there.

I think we will be working to figure out how we make that a little bit more widespread.

I think the other thing I wanna say before I turn it over to Christine and Brian is that as FIFA approaches, I think it's gonna be really important for the city to come up with strategies around transportation, around keeping soccer teams that have historical conflict, like really significant conflict with each other, apart, giving them perhaps separate ingress-egress routes for these events.

And this is work that we've been talking about and doing with some folks Brian mentioned from Europe, Professor Clifford Stott, who's an expert in crowd psychology and especially around the world of soccer or football, as they call it there.

And so I'm happy to come back and talk later about some of those things that we're delving into.

But those are just two aspects that occur to me.

And Chair, I would be very happy to engage in intellectually honest conversations in this space.

Those have proven difficult in the past few years, but with the assistance of OIG and CPC, I think there's plenty of opportunity to really lean into this and actually try to do that education piece.

We also do, we just restarted our community police academy.

which actually is full, I'm pleased to say.

So this is a five-week course where we break down for community members that are interested in learning more about what we do and why and bring them in and have an opportunity to talk through some of these things.

But absolutely, we would like to talk about this because I think there's a lot of misconceptions.

I think there's a lot of strongly held beliefs.

And if we can really talk through some of this, I think we'll all come out stronger for it.

To that point, I think it's well worth the investment on the public education piece.

And I recognize there's a lot of different angles to this.

But the plus on the backside of that effort could be very, very important and very big.

Because each, obviously each type three, particularly the death was so important.

So we could really benefit on the back end with the public education on the front end.

So, thank you.

So, as that's kicking off the questions, I'll turn to Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for this presentation.

One of the things that jumped out to me and I would love for SPD to kind of, I'm glad that Council Member Kettle brought up that question about like education piece, just because the one thing that strikes out to me obviously is the disproportionate impact of like blacks, you know, with the use of force or the, injury, the lethal force, all those pieces, and just wondering specifically talking SPD in regards to what programs are being utilized to connect with communities before they're in crisis.

And so, like, you know, being able to neutralize and humanize a lot of the communities that are being impacted, you know, with our officers and our communities as well.

Just like, you know, maybe just a little bit of detail about some of the programs that SPD is currently doing and then, you know, looking forward to.

You know Council member, I really appreciate this question, and I will tell you right now that I'm not even going to be able to do justice to all of the efforts we are making, because the you know I when I get the reports internally about our community engagement efforts, it is. it is somewhat overwhelming, despite the fact that we had to collapse our Collaborative Policing Bureau in order to, you know, reallocate our very precious resources.

But we do continue to maintain these efforts around, you know, CPAL engaging with youth, our community, our Police Explorer Program, which we do have 12 youth participating in that.

Currently, we have the We regularly attend meetings and events.

I was impressed at the last community police commission presentation when they outlined their community engagement efforts.

We were at all of them.

So we're right there alongside of them doing our best to talk with community.

We've been working very hard on our dashboards, our public presentations.

We have a grant to overhaul that to address some of uh, the, you know, the nuances of our data that don't resound well with community when, you know, the counts don't add up and there are reasons for it that, you know, it, it does not help with trust, um, in, in what we're doing.

The Before the Badge is sort of the centerpiece of, uh, bringing in the new recruits and getting them connected to the community.

Uh, perhaps, uh, many of you have been invited to come down and talk with that program.

The intent there is to build resiliency, look at outward mindset, look at direct personal connections with community.

Chief Diaz has been a strong proponent of that.

He says the success in his career is based on the people he's met along the way that he has helped and that have helped him and having those strong relationships make it very makes policing and legitimacy much better.

We also find that that's when the public, when they trust the police department, they provide information that's necessary for us to do our work.

So that's the best hand in glove approach we can have.

We have hired a relational policing coordinator, Dr. Jamila Cage, who we are working with her to expand the before the badge throughout the departments that it touches all of our training.

And we're toying around with the before the brass as you transition from the officer-sergeant level into management.

Again, you know, reinvigorating those relationships.

But there's a lot more than that, but off the cuff, Councilmember, that's what I have.

Thank you.

I mean to put you on the spot.

Thank you so much for that.

Next up, I believe, Councilmember Moore.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for this.

I appreciate the briefing, and I would also just note that you have put out on your website the Seattle Police Department Use of Force Assessment, which is a very thorough report, and I appreciate that that's there for public review.

I guess I'll just start with the good news, which seems to me the...

One of the major takeaways that I take from this presentation today, and evidence of great progress, is the use of force in behavioral crisis.

I think that is the fact that we've gone to zero since 2015, which was, as I understand it, the killing of De Carver.

Carter, you know, led to the consent degree piece, and somebody clearly in behavioral health crisis.

And we have only seen the increase of people in behavioral health crisis in our community, so I want to commend SPD in bringing these statistics down to zero.

This is quite phenomenal.

And I guess I'm partly curious as to why you believe that we've been able to do that.

Yeah, I'd be happy to talk a little bit about that, just my own opinions.

And I've been, you know, I was general counsel for the Tucson Police Department for almost 24 years before I came here.

So I've watched that phenomenon of officer-involved shootings for almost three decades.

Now, I think that the SPD has really embraced police deescalation as a concept and also has worked hard to develop training and strategies for what that really means for a person in crisis.

And I have sat through almost every force review board every week since I came here six years ago.

And there has been an evolution watching how officers interact with, communicate with people in crisis, communicate with each other, and come up with plans and tactics to take them safely into custody so that they can get help.

I've seen the evolution there.

And I think there was a turning point in, I believe it was 2021, we had two officer-involved shootings fairly close in 2020. time to each other, one down on the waterfront.

And, you know, we, OIG wrote a letter to the chief.

We started working closely with SPD and they put together a very comprehensive training program for the department that they walked all officers through about how to use time, distance and shielding, how to strategize deescalation.

And I think that really paid off.

And what you're seeing is that here.

And now when I sit in force review boards, I can't tell you how many situations that are type three uses of force or sometimes samplings of type two uses of force where I think in most other departments in the city that it would have had a much worse and probably fatal outcome.

But I watch SPD officers communicate, give folks space, distance, and really try to resolve Sometimes even putting themselves in situations that look pretty dangerous so that they can get the person safely into a situation where they can get treatment.

So that's just my own personal observations of this, but I think it's really about SPD embracing de-escalation as a philosophy and having officers really putting it into practice out there.

I think that's all pretty accurate.

I don't have that much to add there, except to say that we are very, very pleased to see how our officers are managing these very complex, dangerous situations.

We are very pleased, and I always knock on wood when I say this, that we've not had a fatal officer-involved shooting in almost two years.

That is remarkable for a major city.

And I think the de-escalation piece here is critical, that many in our community believe that de-escalation is solely communication, talking someone down, somehow building rapport, and that's all in there.

But it's also time, distance, and shielding.

If you don't have to move in quickly, close the distance to increase the risk.

If you can create that time and space, you have better outcomes overall, and I think our officers have really embraced that.

Thank you.

If I may, Chair, ask a few more questions.

So again, and I wanted to get John T. Williams' name correct on the record, but moving to looking at the pointing of a weapon and complaints about, you know, use of force, pointing of lethal firearms.

Those figures clearly show that there is increased use against black individuals, Latino individuals, and other members in the BIPOC community.

And I know that in your report, you say that the information in this table is not sufficient to draw conclusions of bias.

And I'm just curious as to why you're saying that.

Yeah, and I think we've alluded to it earlier in the presentation that simply overlaying uses of force on population demographics, census information, gives you a picture.

And certainly that picture is problematic.

We want to...

we want to do a deeper dive to really understand what those numbers are and to figure out what is driving that particular snapshot of force.

And so I think I'll let Mr. Maxey and Ms. Berbalis talk about this a little bit more.

But I think there are many things at play, both upstream and in the interactions themselves, that have an impact on those numbers.

that you see, we want to understand that.

So then we can figure out what appropriate fixes might be for those things.

But having a true understanding of what is creating that picture is, I think, a primary goal for OIG.

And just to go off of that, we did, I think we mentioned one of us at the beginning that we used the metrics that the monitor had used.

And we knew going into this that there were, that wasn't the most nuanced way to look at things, but we wanted to provide a more consistent picture of the data.

So that's why we stuck with that approach.

But throughout the entire writing of this report and our assessment period, we were talking with SPD about different ways that we could look at that.

And I think we name a couple of them in the report, but one of the things that we think will provide a more nuanced way to analyze this is looking at how similar cases in similar areas are treated based on the subject's race.

So if the same type of call, the same type of situation, if it's treated similarly or differently based on the subject's race, those again, will take a little more time and effort for us to figure out that methodology and how to look at that.

But that is something we're very much interested in among other approaches, but that's one example that I think is helpful.

I'll add something to that, but I'll let Mr. Maxey go first.

This is where use of force review becomes as much art as science, is that you actually need to read it.

you need to read what the totality of the circumstances were to know what was going on in any moment.

And, for example, we know we have an increasing level of youth violence in the city of Seattle, which we did not have before.

That is manifesting.

We also know that the victimization rates and the suspect demographics, both of those fall predominantly, not predominantly, wrong word, but disproportionately on communities of color.

This violence is borne out in those communities far more than they are in some other communities within our city.

As such, when we look at how do we provide policing services, if we did this according to demographics in the city, we would have a huge underservice to our communities of color.

And we know from all of the research and studies that have been done either by Seattle University or looking at our own data sets that the same communities that complain about over-policing complain about under-policing.

So our read on that is we need to get to what's called Goldilocks policing, which is the right type of policing for the communities that we serve, and that's a very nuanced undertaking.

In terms of the pointing of lethal firearms that are raised by subject, You know, I look at this chart and I see changes, but I don't know the why behind any of those changes.

I don't know whether we simply have a different presentation.

I don't know whether, well, I do know that all of those uses of force, and we consider appointing of a firearm as a use of force, has been reviewed by the supervisors and by the force review unit.

And if there were any problems with that, it would have been flagged.

I also look at the very low sustained rate for use of force complaints at the Office of Police Accountability.

All the metrics we have says we have eyes on this, and ideally, we would like to be able to answer all questions.

When the OIG filed this with the court, SPD also had an obligation to update its reporting to the federal court, and we responded to a lot of this.

And we outlined in great detail all of the efforts we're talking to ensure equitable policing.

And I think one of the things that we're beginning to look at as a methodology, and we'll continue to talk with the OIG about, is what's called risk-adjusted disparity.

which is where you look at how you are policing and you look at the victimization rates in terms of these are the people that need your policing services and then look at the outcomes of police activity based on the need rather than census, which really doesn't tell you anything.

Thank you.

And do you keep figures for the number of individual officers and their use of force so you can identify individual officers who are having more use of force issues?

We certainly have data on every officer's use of force.

In terms of the word issue in the question, that's where it becomes difficult, because just because an officer has more uses of force, that doesn't mean that those were unwarranted.

It is part of the job, and it can vary based on assignment.

For example, if you're assigned to SWAT, it's far more likely you're going to exhibit a higher rate of force than an officer that's assigned to community policing.

So we'd have to take into account, and we do this, the assignment and what the context of their activities is.

And as I say, every use of force is reviewed at multiple levels, and that scrutiny increases with the severity of the force that was used.

So you're keeping track, though, within the context.

So if there's a pattern that seems to fall outside the norm of what you would expect, you can identify that?

Yes, absolutely.

And that is a fantastic question because what we often look at is changes in officers' behavior.

So if this is their baseline and then they deviate from that, we want to know why and what's going on.

And certainly, you know, critical events receive a lot of scrutiny.

Thank you.

One last question relating to crowd control policies.

So, I know that that remains an issue, and I guess in looking at the report itself that came out, it seemed that there were certain recommendations that were declined relating to targeting individuals who were causing immediate or imminent harm.

rather than sort of arresting people more generally, and also looking at not necessarily arresting people who had perhaps committed prior crime, unless it was clear that that could be done without escalating the crowd.

And it seems that those recommendations were not adopted.

I'm just curious, because that does remain, to me, an area where there's still significant need for work in crowd management techniques.

I agree.

I think that's probably an SPD question because they had declined those recommendations, but I agree with you.

They're not in the briefing you presented to us.

They're in the actual report.

So maybe that's something you could just report back to the committee on is really looking at increasing.

I mean, I think the intent, there's language here in the report about closing the gap between structural and perceived legitimacy by emphasizing normative compliance over instrumental compliance.

I have no idea what that means.

I would be happy.

I think that's a cornerstone of our approach.

So I would love to take 30 seconds to explain that for you.

One of the main themes in the Sentinel event review discussions and what emerged was that often what police can do because the rules say they can or the law says they can, that structural legitimacy differs greatly from perceive legitimacy, which is what the community thinks they should do or maybe what community expectations are.

And so one of our big recommendations to SPD was doing what it could to close that gap between having officers just do what they can because they can and trying to have more of an emphasis on, I'm going to act because this is something that is legitimate for community.

And I think the programs of Before the Badge, And the outward mindset training are programs that are, you know, in some ways designed to get at that.

So I hope that explains that phenomenon for you.

And taking that philosophy and applying it to crowd management.

Correct.

Yes.

Great.

Thank you very much.

And Council Member, I will dig deeper into that.

I wasn't prepared with that question today.

As reading these recommendations, this sounds very consistent with our policy.

So I want to figure out where those deviations are and what the specific language we objected to.

So I'll follow up with you and this committee if requested.

Great, thank you.

Yeah, and we are doing a comprehensive recommendation follow-up project this year.

So that will probably take a more formal, you know, it'll appear somewhere more formally with OIG as well.

Great, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

Council Member Saka.

All right.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you, Inspector General Judge, Chief Operating Officer Maxie for this presentation here.

And I'm glad I waited towards near the end to ask my questions because thanks to our colleagues, I had four, now I've been whittled down to one, maybe two.

But quickly on the point that I heard a moment ago, or the comments that the same communities that are complaining about over-policing are complaining about the impacts of under-policing, which, true, in many material respects, I think it's really important to understand and realize that communities are not monoliths.

And they individually and collectively highly complex, nuanced constructs full of people who are equally or more complex and nuanced and have varying points of view.

So I think it's important to listen to all points of view from a particular community and make decisions that are transparent and do so in a way where at least voices feel heard.

And then also on the policy front, making sure that we understand why there's disparate impacts in the case of the use of or pointing guns at disproportionately black and brown people in our city, and then doing the hard work to minimize that over time.

So, My question, I would love to just better understand, and you aptly called out at the beginning how there's so many unique sets of circumstances underlying every single use of force.

The city of Seattle is the largest city in our state.

Largest city, I think you have to go, travels over 600 miles to get to a larger city, maybe.

Bay Area, I think that's the next largest city after Seattle.

And so we have one of the, despite our low deployable officer headcount today, I think we still have one of the highest number of police officers on the force.

We have obviously the highest population Many people come to our city.

So there's any number of factors that could potentially lead to uses of force.

But how would you assess, Inspector General Judge, our use of force data, and how would you compare it relative to neighboring jurisdictions?

Well, I mean, the way I would assess ours is, I'm not sure what you're asking there, but I don't think we've really done a comparative analysis with other like cities.

Maybe, you know, with the West Coast 7, we could do some sort of comparison.

But if you look at numbers or the data around use of force against people in crisis, I think against use of force generally, SPD is, they are incredibly low in terms of using force against people in the community.

If you look at it, I think their use of force in people against crisis before the two years where there was nothing is like under 2%.

And so, you know, I think I try to shy away from those kinds of comparisons because every use of force impacts somebody saying, oh, we only had two officer-involved shootings.

That's still probably two more than we would want to have.

One of those was a canine, by the way.

But I think that if you look at them in comparison to cities, especially on the West Coast, their use of force is incredibly low.

So I don't know if that answers your question, but we could do some comparative analysis if you would find that helpful.

I would find that helpful, yes.

And adjust it for the various factors In nuances, I would find a comparison, high level, of where we stack up against other jurisdictions helpful and insightful for me personally.

And my sense is other council members.

Yes.

I think Mr. Maxine.

I mean, I'd be very interested to see that information.

One of the challenges we've had in trying to make similar assessments is that people define force differently and what they count and choose to report on and then investigate.

I mean, we in the pointing of a firearm, many jurisdictions do not see that as a use of force.

We do because Ninth Circuit has told us that is a use of force.

It is a seizure of the person under the Fourth Amendment.

Similar things like, you know, the low threshold of pain, of handcuffing pain, or the use of a hobble to restrain someone's legs.

We all want that, we want that reported, but most jurisdictions would not count that as use of force.

So down in that type one, you will see that we have probably a higher count there than many jurisdictions, but that's because we are requiring our officers to document more so that we have eyes on it.

It's hard.

I get it, it's hard.

Yeah, you're all in these roles to help us collectively solve these hard problems.

So using reasonable assumptions and using your great own independent judgments and expertise, I think it would be helpful to go through that exercise and find and help us compare our use of force rates.

The second, question I had is on these various force review boards, does that monitor, does the force review boards, does that more monitor and track like individual, like incidents of force, like uses of force, or does that also simultaneously kind of capture and assess trends that happen?

at the force review board level?

It certainly addresses individual cases.

Each individual case of a type three use of force is very thoroughly discussed.

The force review unit, which is a whole unit that SPD has, does analytics like that.

I believe they do trend analysis.

They individually assess and review type two use of force cases.

So there's a supportive unit behind the force review board that is doing that kind of work.

And I'll let Mr. Maxey add anything he would like to that.

Yeah, so the Forest Review Board is primarily directed at the qualitative assessment of each case that comes before it.

Those cases are either mandated by our policy, these will be seen by the Forest Review Board and considered, They can be flagged by the force review unit for something that wouldn't normally be categorically reviewed, but there's something there the force review unit wants the board to consider so that they would escalate it up there.

The more quantitative systemic analyses, that really comes out of the work of performance analytics using our data analytics platform, which looks at a whole host of trends and does pretty sophisticated analyses.

This is something the city's made an over $30 million investment into developing over the last decade, and we are absolutely the most sophisticated department in the United States at analyzing and managing such data.

And I say that proudly as the person that does not do that work, but because I know the people we have that do it are so extraordinary that we're very privileged to have that.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

We are coming, well, actually, we just passed our meeting time limit.

Our goal is always to keep it under two hours, but when a subject is so important, it's vitally important to have this discussion.

And instead of asking a question, I would just note, you know, related to the pointing of the lethal firearms, I find that very interesting, you know, from a disparate impact point of view, as mentioned.

you know, particularly with the black community, but also with the Hispanic, Latino, the Asian, and the other communities, too.

Conversely, you know, it's interesting to work on this.

And I see this as, you know, part of this is like before the badge program.

It goes to my question on public education and really engagement.

And I think it's important for...

SPD to do so, like as you're doing, and then with CPC and the other accountability partners to do that as well.

And I'd like to see us do this additionally like i've had conversations with council member wu about going to the cid to talk public safety from my perspective i think that'd be very beneficial council member hollingsworth and i have already been to the east precinct on that side but i'd be happy to make it a little bit of a road show into you know the cd and other parts of the city as well to kind of speak to these things to kind of bring some awareness to highlight it because i think it's important to you know this communication because i think it will go to and really look to get those disparate impacts lessened.

And so I think that's very important.

I also like the points about de-escalation in terms of taking it on as a mission set, basically.

From a policy perspective, I'm always saying, hey, we need to lead with compassion, but then also have wisdom from a policy perspective.

But I can see the same pieces at work in terms of hearing the briefing on on that very on the ground point of view with SPD.

Yeah, you lead with compassion, but then have the wisdom, this goes with the experience, And unfortunately for the SPD, that wisdom piece may be activated way more quicker than from a policy perspective.

But I appreciate the idea of leading with compassion, but then understanding with experience and wisdom that you may have to take action.

And so I really appreciate that.

One thing that came up in conversations I've had with different people, and this goes to the crowd management piece.

And in 2020, when I was a community person, we did a lot of police and public safety reform discussions.

And we have, you know, we've, you know, we had our proposals, none of which were taken up by the then community city council members or the mayor, but that's another subject.

Um, But I think another piece of this that's not really spoken to, and I bring it up because it came up in the HR recruiting discussion too, is how does the force present itself in terms of uniforms and the like, and this overall image and the engagement piece.

And as a former military officer, I'd note, particularly after Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was definitely a shift from blue to black.

And I wonder in terms of how Groups respond.

There's a delicate balancing act here because there's reasons to have more black and blue sometimes.

But can we do something along those lines in terms of how we're presenting as a force to the community?

And maybe that will have some positive pieces.

So I just bring that up as a topic that should be at least considered.

And I bring it up because it was, you know, part of the discussion in 2020. And I think, and it came up last week in our HR recruitment piece.

And so, you know, there's different ways that, you know, we can tackle this problem, you know, as I discussed just, but this could be an additional piece that we can add on.

And to close, I just wanted to reiterate that, A, thank you very much.

I really enjoy the briefing discussion.

I can always trust on council member Moore to have the report annotated and with some sharp questions along with those questions coming from council member Vice Chair Saka and Council Member Hollingsworth and also the Council President.

And it goes to the point that we as a committee are, you know, we're part of this process.

We're part of the accountability partner process, the oversight responsibilities that we have.

And it's very important as we move forward to continue this and to engage and provide a opportunity to, you know, to present this data and, you know, and the rationales behind it.

So I really, again, appreciate OIG and SBD coming.

And with that, I will turn over to my clerk and ask if there's any other issues before the committee.

Any questions?

Hearing none.

Thank you very much for the opportunity.

I appreciate it.

All right.

I declare the committee meeting concluded.