Seattle City Council Public Safety and Human Services Committee 12522

Good morning, and thank you.

The January 25th, 2022 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It's 9.30 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Councilmember Mosqueda's staff let me know that she won't be able to make today's meeting and she is excused.

With that, will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Lewis?

Present.

Councilmember Nelson?

Present.

Councilmember Peterson?

Present.

Chair Herbold?

here or present.

Thank you so much.

So on today's agenda we'll hear an update on the consent decree and outreach meetings.

We'll be hearing directly from the monitor for the consent decree, Antonio Aftali.

Then we will hear from the Office of the Inspector General, Inspector General Judge, and her staff on audit of the disciplinary system for SPDs, Seattle Police Department's sworn personnel, and some really, I think, helpful recommendations coming out of the audit.

And then finally, we'll be hearing from HSD the Human Services Department on its 2022 notice of funding opportunities.

With that, we'll now approve our agenda for our committee meeting.

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

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

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

I will moderate the public comment in the following manner.

Each speaker is given two minutes to speak.

We'll call on each speaker by name and in the order which they registered on the council's website.

If you have not yet registered to speak but would like to speak, you can sign up before the end of the public hearing by going to the council's website.

The link is also listed on today's agenda.

When I call a speaker's name, you'll hear a prompt.

And once you've heard that prompt, need to hit star 6 to unmute yourself.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item you are addressing.

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

Once the speaker hears that time, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments.

If speakers don't end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

Once you have completed your public comment, please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following the meeting, we encourage that you do so via the Seattle Channel or the listening options that are listed on the agenda.

There are three people signed up for public comment today.

And we'll just move right into that.

Again, I will call the speaker's name.

And with that, we'll begin.

First, we have Howard Gale, followed by Bill Sanders.

Howard?

Good morning.

Howard Gale, District 7. This morning, you will discuss the federal court monitor's report on SBD crisis intervention, a report based wholly on the flawed and self-serving statistics provided by the SBD.

I have sent all members of this committee a detailed listing of these flaws, so I can only highlight in two minutes the most serious flaw and hope the committee members will take a more active role in questioning the data presented.

The Monitor's report on crisis intervention, claiming to show success, was presented to the public on January 11th, barely six days after the SPD murdered another person in mental health crisis.

The 19th such killing, 19th.

since the fpd murder john p williams a decade ago all these killings deemed lawful improper or not investigated by our accountability system the most serious for the fpd's data before you today but the monitor simply repackages without any audit or interrogation all of those killed by the fpd while in mental health crisis are missing simply absent from the data set along with possibly other instances of the serious use of force the monitor has accepted the self-serving fpd data as is For this agenda item today, the presentation from council staff in their very first slide states that, quote, the SPD's pattern of excessive force has been eliminated, citing the January 10th, 2018 ruling from Judge Robart.

This statement is false, as Judge Robart noted an overall reduction in the SPD's use of force, not an elimination of any pattern.

In fact, the Seattle Times revealed just six months ago that an SPD commissioned independent audit reveals continuing racial disparity in both sbd stops and in that speedy use of force with the use of force against black people seven point one four times per capita the rate compared to white people additionally this report revealed that some of the most deadly uses of force strike correct reporting a firearm are more commonly used against black people to parents whites these facts along with recent reports of corruption failed investigations by hope you know i g demonstrate we clearly need to go

Thank you so much.

Our next speaker is listed as not present, that's Bill Sanders, calling for Bill Sanders.

Still seeing Bill as not present, we'll move down to David Haynes.

David?

Hi, good morning, thank you.

Part of the definition of addressing something is to bring attention to it.

It's evident from the actions that the Human Services Department is being used to raise money in the name of addressing the never-ending homeless crisis.

And excuse me, give me a second.

Wait, don't not do not hang up, please.

I know.

We can hear you.

Anyway, the homeless crisis, the never ending homeless crisis is a being further because the human services department is redirecting the money and applying a racist lens where the government interim director is judging people based on their skin color and purposely discriminating against innocent homeless citizens while prioritizing criminals for a motel room instead of the jailhouse and buying off special privileged class of non-profit workers and certain house poor who get everything delivered to them while innocent homeless suffer a third winter of COVID with absolutely no shelter or help from the Racist and Human Services Department.

It's obvious the number one reason we never solved the homeless crisis is the Human Services Department has been tainted and permeated with scorned racist, woke, miseducations of hate, and ignoble ingrates, turning against innocent local homeless citizens, while proving Seattle creates the most racist city hall in 21st century America, justifying a boycott of all the businesses.

And secondly, the police consent decree is unconstitutional when you exempt crack meth and heroin pushers from jail who destroy lives daily and get listed by city council as non-violent misdemeanor based on the dollar amount imploding society.

It's telling that the public safety committee goes out of their way to undermine the police reform while doing the bidding of devil's advocates who organize and intimidate and pretty much scare council into capitulating to the activist demands of exempting from jail black and brown drug pushers with less than three grams, allowed to continue destroying lives daily, strung out and...

Our next speaker is Alexander Lomas.

Alexander is also showing as not present.

Going back up to Bill Sanders, also showing as not present.

Can Son, can you confirm these two individuals signed up?

Alexander just signed up a moment ago.

But yet it's still showing us not present.

There are no other public comment registrants in the queue.

Hopefully, if Sanders and Alexander Lomas have comment for us, they can send it on via email.

Lisa.Herbold at Seattle.gov.

Moving on to today's agenda.

We'll start with the first item in the agenda.

Will the clerk please read in Agenda Item 1 please.

Agenda Item Number 1. Consent Decree Update Outreach Meetings for Briefing and Discussion.

Great, thank you so much.

We're joined this morning by Consent Decree Monitor Antonio Oftali for an update on the work that he is doing in his role as monitor for the Consent Decree.

I very, very much appreciate Monitor Oftali joining the committee today.

Before we hand it over to Monitor Oftali, we are going to first a quick overview to provide some background about the consent decree, which has been in effect in Seattle since the summer of 2012, and what has taken place during recent years.

Greg, could you provide your presentation with the overview of the consent decree?

Yes, thank you, Council Member Herbold, Madam Chair, and members of the committee.

Good morning.

Alex, if you wouldn't mind putting my presentation up, thank you very much.

Just to go through this really quickly to tee up the monitor's presentation.

I think you're all fairly familiar with the consent decree.

As a little bit of background, though, in 2011, the City of Seattle and the Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement that required SPD to work with a federally appointed monitor to reform its policies and retrain its officers in an effort to address a pattern and practice of excessive force.

In January of 2018, the court found that SPD had reduced its use of serious force, reduced the instances of unconstitutional and unnecessary force, and therefore had achieved compliance with the consent decree.

And that means, as a legal matter only, that SPD had eliminated the pattern or practice of unconstitutional force.

Uh, staff makes this observation as a purely legal point and in no way means to diminish, um, the, uh, the studies that have been, um, noted in the last couple years that have found racial disparities, uh, in, um, say, stops and detention one particular in 2019. But as a purely legal matter, the the court found that SPD had was in compliance with the consent decree in 2018. So after achieving compliance, the consent decree requires the city sustained compliance for a period of two years.

and that period was expected to run from 2018 to 2020. And at that point, the consent decree would have, in theory, been terminated.

However, it was not terminated because of two significant events.

And the first was a new police union contract that was finalized in November of 2018. of the court found that the contract had caused the city to fall out of compliance in the area of accountability.

Um, the court expressed concerns about discipline area appeals, specifically an arbiter's ruling that a reinstated officer that had been fired for excessive force was reinstated.

I think members are familiar with the details of the Adlai Shepherd case, so I'm not going to go into them here.

The judge had said that he wasn't necessarily deciding whether the decision in the case was right or wrong, but that the arbitration process that the department had used had weakened the system to the point of violating the consent decree.

And also that there were limits on OIG and OPA's authority.

And in that area specifically, subpoena authority was one that was cited.

Since then, the city has made some changes in the area of accountability in an effort to address the court's concerns and come back to subpoena authority.

The city has passed an ordinance on subpoena authority that would allow for those who are being subpoenaed to be aware of their rights.

And the city has also made other efforts in the area of accountability regarding transparency and OPA publishing their case statuses.

And so the city is making efforts where they can without having to negotiate further steps.

The city is in the process of negotiating further steps that would include the ability to serve subpoenas.

And then the second event was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which inspired the nationwide demonstrations against police brutality in the summer of 2020. City leaders and the public raised concerns about the tactics that SPUs used in response to the protests.

Prior to those protests, the city and DOJ had filed a motion to terminate the consent decree.

Days into the protest, the city withdrew that motion to allow for an examination of SPD's use of force during the protests.

After the events of 2020, the court approved a new monitoring plan to reassess SPD's compliance in all areas of the consent decree, including crowd management, and to build the capacity of the police accountability system.

And so with that as a high-level overview, I'll ask if there are any questions before this gets passed over to the monitor.

Thank you, Greg.

Colleagues, before we move to monitor of Tali's presentation, do any of you have questions for Greg on the background of the consent decree?

Seeing none, I do have one quick question.

Greg, I recall that when we passed the last contract, we also passed a resolution that highlighted.

three issues that the council felt was important to raise within the context of the court's consideration of the consent decree.

Is that recollection correct?

And did you cover those areas in your presentation, the areas that were specifically called out in the resolution?

You are correct.

The council did do that and I did not cover it.

And off the top of my head, I don't remember what those three were.

Okay, well, maybe we can come back to it.

With that, I think that's a great segue into a little monitor presentation.

We'll pass the baton to you.

Thank you.

Thank you Chairperson Herbold and Council Members.

It's great to be with you today.

I think this year is going to be a very pivotal year for compliance and work on the consent decree.

So really looking forward to a robust and rigorous partnership with all of you to better chart a course for the future.

So with that, I will share, I have a brief presentation that I will share with you all.

Pull this up.

Okay, can you see that, Chairperson?

All right, great.

Just one point of note there, there's a seattlepolicemonitor.org website.

On that website, you can find the current in-process initial preliminary assessments that we'll be talking about.

as well as there's areas there for public feedback.

So you can find that directly on the seattlepolicemonitor.org website.

This morning we thought what we could do is just provide an overview of monitoring activities, particularly what we'll be working on this year early in 2022. and the community engagement sessions, which I'll discuss.

We can touch base on some high level action items for 2022 and what this year may look like as far as deliverables, and then address any discussion items or questions.

We did do a public community engagement session that was mentioned earlier around the first preliminary assessment on crisis intervention.

On this session, we were not setting this up to talk only about crisis intervention, but to provide a broader overview of the monitoring activities.

But that being said, we can at the chairperson's discretion, you know, talk about crisis intervention if that is needed.

Some overview of the monitoring activities.

So the role of the monitor, as you likely know, is to be an advisor to the courts, the federal courts on compliance with the consent decree.

So in many ways, my role is to act as a person who can come in and work with all the parties to get alignments, to figure out what we're all working on.

uh, to convey that progress, uh, via reports to the court in order to determine compliance and potential closure downstream of the consent decree.

So, so all of the work of the monitor and the monitoring team is geared towards collaboratively working with all the parties, um, on this.

And so the, um, um, you can disregard that very top line.

They're based in this preliminary assessment that's carry over from another presentation, There are four areas there that we, myself and the monitoring team are working on.

One is evaluating the status of compliance.

So essentially looking broadly at the consent decree to measure progress on that.

To do that, we develop a methodology, meaning a set of measures, both quantitative and qualitative, to understand progress of SPD and the city.

And we do an assessment of that.

So we collect that data, we look at measures, we patch that up, we produce that in the form of assessments that you have access to.

The second major area or work stream that we have is around accountability.

Um, so there in the monitoring plan, the work we do year over year is looking at accountability from the perspective of both front end accountability, meaning things that the city and SPD can do to prevent, uh, bad things from happening in the field, uh, as well as back end accountability.

So if there is something that an officer does that may break a rule or a policy, or there's an action that takes place unwarranted, what happens with that accountability as far as discipline and remediation and learning that takes place going forward.

So taking a direct look at accountability in many facets is a big part of the overall work.

The third major component is third and fourth really are more technical assistance.

So it's advising on innovation and risk management.

So looking at things that help the city and SPD become have more capabilities around things like analytics to help improve officer wellness to look at areas around data and insights and the tools and technologies for that.

So advising the city on how that can work relative to the consent decree is one component, as well as advising on re-imagining public safety.

So the previous mayoral administration there and with the city council looking at how public safety can be redesigned in the future, the role of the monitoring team is not to govern that or to put limits on it, but in order to help the city and Seattle Police Department to figure out how can that come forward in ways that are productive and that might not run counter to the consent decree and build up those overall capabilities in time.

So those are the four major components of what we do through the course of the year, we being my role as well as the associate monitors that work with me.

So that forms the, the baseline of our work.

And of course, there may be line items underneath each one of those four that you can see in the monitoring plan.

The Around compliance, which is the biggest thing we're all looking at, of course, is when will the consent decree, you know, what kind of progress has been happening?

How do we look at that progress and measure it?

So that compliance, of course, is driven by this methodology we talked about, which was established through the course of last year.

So I'm the second monitor for the consent decree, as you know.

And so one of the first things we did coming in, in the late 2019, excuse me, late 2020, is working with all the parties in early 2021 to develop a methodology.

So there we worked with the city attorney's office, OPA and OIG and DOJ and all the parties, CPC, et cetera, to establish that.

And we were looking at four major areas.

to assess compliance, to do a comprehensive assessment.

One is around crisis intervention.

The second is around stops and detentions.

So looking at how SPD performs there.

And that will include extensive measures around bias and disparate impact.

The third area is around use of force.

And that will include a deep dive, a look into use of force under crowd management settings.

And the fourth area is around supervision.

So looking at the management processes and operations of SPD.

As we build out these four assessments, we'll actually have three major documents because supervision will be embedded in each one.

So as we look at crisis intervention and stops and detentions and use of force, we'll also take a look at those relative to how did supervision work within those.

So these four areas will form really the basis, so to say, of constitutional policing around the pattern and practice of this type of work.

And as we finish these, we'll be putting them out to the community, of course.

We'll have a session for each one of these community engagement sessions.

We'll have one, which we had in January on crisis, a few weeks ago, on crisis intervention.

We'll have one coming up in February and stops detentions.

And the third one, use of force in March.

and which will engage the community on dialogue.

For all those, we release a preliminary assessment first publicly and have that available to everyone to read before they come into those meetings.

So if they have questions or comments, they can be fully up to speed on that.

And then what we'll do is we'll take those meetings and that work and we'll be looking at three major questions for community.

So as we get into each one of those assessment areas, we'll ask the community and all of you, of course, as well.

Are there specific ideas based on this, these findings in these assessments?

where we can see improvements.

So for example, in crisis intervention in Seattle, that are just city specific that the city can do on its own.

So are there any big ideas, innovations, changes that can take place based on those findings?

The second question would be, is there any research or advocacy on crisis intervention, for example, and as we get to the future on stops, detentions, and use of force that the Seattle Community Policing Commission should pursue in 2022. So we're taking a very intentional look to say Are there things that the city can be doing, the public can be doing, community can be doing on its own as well, based on this research and these findings?

And then the third, we'll ask, based on these findings, is there anything, are there certain items, if any, that the federal monitors should continue to oversee in 2022 and work on with all the parties?

So we're going through a pretty rigorous process here.

We'll bring these measures forward, talk with community, talk with city council and all the parties on the progress, try and gain as many ideas as possible so that we can move forward in a way for the city to have more compliance, better compliance and effective closure of some of these categories as we move forward.

All of these, of course, too, are we really need the city council's input and ideas and engagement on this to not only to reach out to community, but also to, of course, have your ideas on how we move forward with these areas.

So that is a broad strokes overview of what we're working on this year, the process we're putting in place.

I should mention as well that one of the things we're doing with the with these action steps in 2022 is we'll be finalizing the community feedback and the ideas from all the parties in filing those assessments with the court.

Working on right now, thinking a bit through how we do that, if we do that sequentially, so meaning we file crisis intervention and then stops detentions and use of force individually as we finish them and as we work with community, or we do them all at once.

And so I think there's still a little bit of deliberation on that.

on that particular item and your feedback there would be important as well.

From that, we'll also be developing the monitoring plan for 2022. So there will be some carryover items that are part of that monitoring plan.

For example, the monitoring team works on the central event review process that is ongoing.

There are other areas like that.

We'll also have ongoing technical assistance and things around accountability that we're currently working on.

But from the community and that community feedback, we'll also pull in ideas potentially for either the city or CPC or the monitoring team to be working on this year.

So in total, I think we have a really good plan for how to not only assess compliance and the status of that for SPD, but to engage community on what comes next.

We are, I think, at a critical time with the consent decree, or maybe you could say an inflection point, in that it has been roughly 10 years.

Since 2020, particularly, there have been a lot of people who have come into this arena, so to say, their interest in policing has been peaked.

And so there are a lot of new people that are engaged in this process as well, and that's a good thing.

We want community to be engaged.

And we need this year to be one of somewhat of a level set of where are we at with this, where are we going next going to have legitimacy in that process, transparency in that process so that we can all collectively say.

you know, here's where we are, here's where we need to go, and here's where the finish line is.

So with that, I guess we can go, Chairperson Herbold, to Q&A, if you would like, or we can go talk a bit more on some of the questions that came up earlier, or on crisis intervention questions.

Sure, I think I'll follow that.

I'll watch, actually, could you keep the slides up?

Thank you.

Sure, yep, okay.

Appreciate that.

On page, sorry, slide four, I have a few questions and I'll be watching for questions from my colleagues in the queue as well.

I wanna just get a little bit of a sense first, You explained sort of the role of the preliminary assessment.

I do, I am, well first, I should probably let folks know that that is out now, the preliminary assessment for crisis intervention.

So as I understand it, that means that you are, you know, part of the process is soliciting comment on that preliminary assessment.

And you'd mentioned that you, encourage comment from the public, from folks in your meetings, and from the council as well.

I'm wondering, is there a timeline that you're considering for accepting comment on that preliminary assessment on the crisis intervention, which, again, it's out, and I think it's on your website, correct, your new launched website?

Yes, it is on seattlepolicemonitor.org.

We do not have a deadline as of yet for that.

We want to try and keep it open as much as possible.

Partly that will be driven, the timing of that will be driven by when we file these with the court.

So right now we're in a process of trying to gain feedback from community, getting feedback from the parties, the city as a whole, to ask certain questions, to maybe we need to refine certain things, if there's new measures we may need to take a look at, etc.

And then once we collect all that input, then we'll package this up and submit to the court.

Again, it kind of depends if we file these sequentially or all at once.

If we file them all at once, we're probably looking at a filing with the court sometime in early April or so would be kind of a broad target.

If we do it sequentially, the crisis intervention will be much sooner than that.

But we can definitely relay timing on that if we feel like we need to close out timing for comments.

Thank you.

And as it relates to the preliminary assessment report, it does say and appreciate that this is this is highlighted.

and that there's some sunshine on this issue.

It says that both the monitoring team and the Seattle Police Department have identified some instances where a use of force may not have been properly documented as a crisis contact.

And we have – Council has received a constituent email that raises three questions.

One, has data been excluded where people were killed in crisis instances?

Have police contacts been improperly cataloged as a crisis contact?

And is there a clear definition for what constitutes a crisis contact?

Yes, starting with the with the latter one there is there is clear definition on what a crisis contact means and that's been standardized in policy in practice.

The I should mention as well to those questions that one of the public comments raised the question of, you know, Is the monitor just essentially, you know, kind of using SPD data and repackaging it and whatnot.

And the answer to this.

It's a fascinating question because I think if you look at the you know, or how independent is a monitor, I guess, is another way to be looking at that.

And this is designed to be an independent evaluation.

The past really six, seven years or so of the monitoring of the consent decree, the monitor, the previous monitor as well, has built, has worked with the city to develop one of the nation's leading analytics capabilities in policing, right?

And so the city of Seattle, the city council and whatnot has put a lot of time and energy into developing the data, the analytics capacity of the Seattle Police Department, right?

Much of that, pretty much all of it is transparent, right?

So it's on the public dashboards for Seattle Police Department, et cetera.

And so we do use that data and we look at it through our own lens and evaluate it.

Some people raise the question of, well, should we, you know, have a completely independent look at the data, right?

This is an independent look.

If you're saying we need new data, that's, you know, that's saying that we should stand up an entirely new data architecture around this, which we spent a lot of time building already.

So, the accuracy of the data is really solid there.

Um, the, as far as anyone in crisis, that was where there was a level of force that is documented.

There was no one excluded from that.

Um, yeah, and there's some rare instances where there was a use of force use.

And initially that, uh, wasn't classified as a crisis.

Uh, call in as that work through the system, you can retroactively put that on a certain call, right?

So sometimes if, uh, and these are very rare circumstances where There is a use of force where it goes directly into investigation and the paperwork is such where there's a little bit of a lag and saying, hey, yes, as we look at this situation, that person was in a crisis situation.

So that's definitely something we've seen and looked at and have cataloged in all of this data.

So, and I want to move to Council Member Nelson in one second.

I just want to follow up though.

So the statement that the monitoring team and SPD have identified some instances where a use of force may not have been properly documented as a crisis contact.

Are you saying that initially it was not properly documented as a crisis contact and then at a later time was properly documented?

That's that is correct.

So it was it was documented right what they were looking at it.

It's almost like a qualitative type of review there right so it didn't impact.

the data or the numbers, right?

But what we're saying is we want to make sure that the process is sound, where if there's a crisis contact that's documented at the appropriate time.

There are a few very rare examples where just in the nature of policing, you know, the speed of work and things happening, that crisis contact form wasn't completed at the very beginning, right?

And so making sure that that process is sound.

But that's kind of a qualitative finding, you could say, that is something that is being addressed.

Thank you so much.

Senator Nielsen.

My question was answered, but you just said something that raises another point.

When you're talking about qualitative assessment, could it be because use of force, or is it because it was unclear, or what?

Uh, maybe can you try that one more time?

Um, when the contact I think that what was being asked was if these cases were, um, the crisis form wasn't filled out.

Um, was did that have anything to do with understanding of, um, changing of laws or anything like that?

No, no.

These were purely, you know, again, I often, I can come back with the exact number, but a very small, very small number of instances where, um, not based on any changes in policy, but just in, in the process that played out in that particular day, in that particular incident that an officer may have forgotten or waited for a while, or as they look backwards, potentially at, at a situation.

So you actually, that person, was in crisis and we should document it as that.

Thank you.

I do have another question about the stops and detentions bullet.

I appreciate that you're including under this bullet bias and disparate impact, even though my recollection is that the court stopped short of doing a finding for bias policing.

But nevertheless, it is an area of great concern for the residents of the city, considering that even in instances where we've seen a reduction in use of force generally and a reduction of, I should say, a reduction in instances of use of force and a reduction of instances of use of force against people in crisis, the disparity, the racial disparity in policing continues and over some periods of years has actually increased.

So I'm just given that this is was not a technical finding of the court, and we are under a consent decree for that issue.

One, I really appreciate that the city attorney in cities filings, even as we report on reductions of use of force, We are still identifying proactively, even though we may not legally have to, but I think it's the right thing to do to identify and call out the continued disparity in policing.

I'm just interested to know from your perspective how you will consider that information as part of your assessment of the city's compliance.

Right.

Thank you for that question.

And yeah, and first, you're correct that Department of Justice and their initial pattern of practice investigation flagged this area.

Right.

So, but they did not include it in in the settlement agreement as a core area for monitoring and for the consent decree.

That being said, it's so embedded within these areas, particularly stops and detentions, that when you do the assessment, you find insights that highlight areas around bias and disparate impact, if any.

And so they kind of, the rationale for including it within the methodology is not to say that the monitoring team is going to directly work on this issue, but to say, okay, let's learn here as a city, what the state of this is so that we can, and going back to some of those initial questions I had on the slides of what is it that the city can do broadly going forward to work on this?

How do we, in particular, how do we look across across agencies and across disciplines to really get to the root cause of disparity and disparate impact.

Are there new things the city could be doing across human services and housing and mental health and policing and all these other services that create an environment that lead on the front lines to disparity and disparate impact?

But also, are there certain practices or policies that are in place at SPD that should be changed?

in order to reduce any bias and disparity, training, policy shifts, practice changes, in order to reduce that as much as possible.

So really the findings there in that assessment are to help the city, to help CPC, for example, they can take on some of this going forward.

And if there is something that the city says, hey, we really need federal oversight here to make sure that something sticks, that we can work with you on that.

Thank you.

I want to flag as it relates to specifically the data collection piece, the data that we're working with right now, both that SPD has done under its own analysis and that was sort of truth tested by the Center for Policing Equity.

My recollection is that covered a period between around 2014 to 2019. Whereas, you know, it's 2022, and as, you know, we're trying, the whole, the consent decree process is a process that's moving through time and measuring improvement, hopefully, over a period of time.

There's going to be, I think, an interest in collecting new data, but I am, you know, really concerned that the data collected over, particularly in 2021, may not be a good measure of police interactions because of COVID and the reduced police contact during 2021. And so I'm just that there's a sort of a tension there of wanting to collect new data in order to look to see whether or not there have been improvements or not, and a recognition that we have very different set of circumstances in in 2021 than, you know, compared to 2020 when, you know, there's a use of force anomaly associated with the crowd control activities of the police department in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

So I'm just wondering, like, how do we walk that line while being able to try to demonstrate sort of rigorous analysis of the data while recognizing that there are anomalies?

Yeah, I think it's an important question, I think, for all of us to be thinking about as far as compliance and enclosure of the consent decree.

And when is it legitimate to, you know, what does success look like really, right?

And over what period of time and when is it legitimate to say, okay, we've accomplished what the initial consent decree set out for.

And so I think one way to look at that is to go back and there are other preliminary, there are other assessments from previous years, right?

Which we build on and that's what we looked at first compliance in 2016 and 2019, et cetera.

And the review that we've done encompasses a couple of years here worth of data.

then we need to look at, is that, you know, I guess it's a big question for city council and for the city, is that enough, right?

We do have a methodology in place so we could rerun data later on this year, if that's a direction the city wanted to go, the monitoring team could, or the city could itself as well.

As I mentioned, most all of this data is on the dashboard, it's accessible.

And so there's a lot of different ways that people can can analyze it and bring forward insights.

And so I would look to you and your guidance and some, you know, to have some dialogue this year on where you want the monitoring team to weigh in there, if we should do these assessments another time, you know, additional time this year or a portion of it to get to that, you know, to feel comfortable with where SPD is.

Thank you so much.

Any other questions from council members before we close out?

Going once, going twice, all right.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

For the public, there is a stops and detention community engagement meeting on February 8th, 2022. If you want information about that, you can either contact my office, contact the CPC, excuse me, the CPC is doing these meetings in collaboration with the monitor, that's the Community Police Commission, or you can contact the monitor at his website.

Really appreciate your time.

All right, thank you, everyone.

Bye-bye.

All right, will the clerk please read in agenda item two?

Committee agenda item number two, audit of disciplinary system for Seattle Police Department sworn personnel for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much, Alex.

So thank you for joining us.

We're joined by the Office of the Inspector General for the presentation on the audit of the disciplinary system for Seattle Police Department sworn personnel.

Could presenters with us today please start off with a quick round of introductions and then we'll proceed with the presentation.

Good morning, Chair Herbold, council members.

It's our pleasure to be with you today to talk about this work.

My name is Lisa Judge.

I'm the Inspector General for Public Safety, and I will let my auditor introduce himself.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

My name is Dan Pitts, and I'm the lead auditor on the project.

I'll be running through most of the presentation today.

Great.

Thank you so much, both Inspector General Judge and Dan.

Dan, I really appreciated you spending some time with me when this audit was sort of hot off the presses.

I was very, very impressed with the level of analysis and, you know, I think some very significant recommendations that you're making with this audit.

And so with that, I hand it over to you.

Sorry, Dan, I was just going to take two seconds.

I know you're very short on time, and this is really packed full of information.

So I just want to highlight that this is a body of ongoing work.

OIG first started with a project to understand the discipline system.

That was a fairly extensive subway map with an accompanying process map.

So this then builds on that initial work of trying to understand the discipline system with really our first foray into analysis.

And with that, I will let Dan take it away to describe his excellent work.

Thank you.

Okay, let me share the screen here.

Okay.

So yes, thanks again for giving us the opportunity to come and present our work.

This is a, this was a very large audit and covered a lot of ground, a lot of, a lot of wide variety of findings and matters for consideration.

So we're going to do our best to Pack as much detail in as quick as we can in the time that we have.

We're going to cover not necessarily all of the findings in the audit, but some of the ones that we feel are key.

We'll hopefully have time.

Council members can feel free to stop me at any point if you need to ask a question about something that we're on, or otherwise we'll hopefully have some time at the end to ask questions.

Without further delay.

Okay, so let's first talk about what the audit was.

We were looking at assessing the timeliness, fairness, consistency, and transparency of the disciplinary system for SPD's foreign personnel.

These four adjectives are used in the accountability order to describe what the disciplinary system should be.

The scope of our audit was from disciplinary actions that took place in January 1st, 2018 March 24 of 2021. And that date is just the date that we started field work.

So that was kind of the cutoff for most of our data.

The focus of our audit was on the last half of the disciplinary process.

So what happens after the OPA director recommends a sustained finding through the formation of discipline, the chief's determination of discipline.

Then we also took a look at the enforcement of the discipline, recording of it, communication with complainants, and any relevant appeals that happened afterwards.

So the audit broke into five or six categories.

And each one of those will have a slide in this presentation that we'll talk about.

The chart here on the right represents all of the disciplinary actions that happened within the scope of our audit.

And I have a brief summary here, the executive summary of what we came up with was we noted that there wasn't these really adverse circumstances that I think are of the greatest concern to the community, such as a pattern of arbitrators overturning the chief's disciplinary findings.

And part of that is owed to, as is represented in the chart here on the right, a lot of cases are, some cases are being filed for arbitration, but not many are being actually heard by the arbitrator.

or by arbitrators.

So there's a little bit of a backlog that's growing, so it's a little bit inconclusive on the impact there.

The other part that we note in the audit is that there isn't a pattern of repeat offenders of misconduct.

Essentially, the chief is able to escalate discipline and apply progressive discipline in most cases if there is a repeat misconduct.

That said, our audit did find that current processes and practices along with some of the contract provisions do create some gaps in the disciplinary system.

Like I said, there's a wide variety of findings.

Any one of them on their own don't necessarily break the system, but I think taken collectively do kind of create a picture of a system that is in need of some improvement or has a lot of room for improvement and may not necessarily live up to the timeliness, fairness, consistency, and transparency that's envisioned in the accountability ordinance.

So now we'll get into the actual findings.

So first, we start with the proposal and determination of discipline.

For those who may not be familiar with how the process works, the basic run of it is that if the OPA director recommends a sustained finding or a set of sustained findings, that is then put forth to the disciplinary committee which is comprised of the OPA Director, SPD Employment Council, and the chain of command for the relevant employee.

They come to consensus, the vast majority of the time they do wind up coming to a consensus on whether it should stay as sustained or be reverted back to a not sustained.

And there's a process if they don't agree, but it's seldom used and it seems to work.

If it does wind up as a sustained finding, Then there's a conversation about what the recommended level of discipline should be.

Sometimes it winds up as just a direct recommendation, like a reprimand or termination.

Sometimes there's a range, and that's often the case with suspensions.

It would be, say, a one-to-five-day suspension range, or it could be a range of 30-day suspension or termination.

What we have on, what we show on this graph on the right is that where there is a range presented to the chief, there is more often than not a preference for the minimum of the range.

It's about half the time it winds up the minimum of the range.

So if it's a one to five day suspension proposed, it'll be a one day suspension.

Or if it's between a suspension or termination, very rarely has the chief ever chosen termination in that case within the data that we have.

Now, that said, the data that we had was predominantly those disciplinary actions were signed off by Chief Best.

So that's one caveat to it.

However, the other acting chiefs haven't necessarily bucked the trend, as you can see from the chart.

As far as what goes into this, I think it's difficult to say.

I think it's a fair question.

It's a fair assessment that louder mill meetings probably have some role in it.

It's where employees have the opportunity to meet with the chief before discipline is decided and either refute any allegations against them or acknowledge and admit blame and apologize in some cases and that can work to lower the disciplinary penalty as well.

We don't have a comment to make on the ladder mill meetings themselves, those are guaranteed through labor law.

However, where we do make a point in the audit is that complainants are not given the same opportunity.

And that may lead to some of this kind of this tilt towards the bottom of the range.

There is a provision in the accountability ordinance in which the OPA director may make a recommendation that the chief meet with complainants to either assess the credibility of of the allegation or to hear just a victim impact statement, assess the severity of the potential misconduct.

However, this mechanism hasn't been applied in the scope of our audit.

This is primarily because the OPA director had a fairly narrow interpretation of when that would be applicable and useful.

In talking with the OPA director, I think we reached an understanding that this could be more broadly applied than it has been.

And so we made a recommendation that the OPA director work with the chief to come up with criteria.

Not every complainant is going to be able to meet with the chief.

Just logistically, that would be impossible.

But there are certainly instances out there where it could be useful for the chief to meet with complainants and hear about the impact that misconduct has had on them.

And I recall the report said that that was the chief and OPA were going to meet before the end of 2021 to develop criteria to consistently identify opportunities for complainants to speak with the chief as provided in the accountability ordinance.

I'm just wondering, do we know if that's happened yet?

I do not know if that's happened yet.

I also haven't checked on it yet.

So we haven't gone through, for all of our recommendations generally, we haven't gone through a formal check-in on any of them yet.

And then just a quick question about the number of disciplinary actions represented by this particular analysis is 49 disciplinary actions.

I thought I remember seeing on the previous page that you were looking at about upwards of 200 disciplinary actions.

And maybe I misread that number, but if not, I'm wondering why for this exercise, you've only done a subset.

Yeah.

So the 200, I think it's 268 was the total population.

We did testing on, I think, we did a statistically valid sample of, I think, 159 of those cases for actual testing through the multiple different facets of the audit.

Now, within that 159, there were 49 in which there were a recommended range.

Now, that means that the rest of them came as just straightforward recommendations.

A lot of times those were reprimands.

And reprimands don't usually come as ranges.

So these were instances when the sheep was presented with a range.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

part that we talk about in the audit is the role of promotional considerations on the formation of discipline.

In some cases, we observe that the folks who were coming up with a disciplinary recommendation would give some consideration to whether, if they sustain on an allegation of misconduct, would this impact the officer's future promotion potential?

And so I'm not talking about serious misconduct.

Obviously, that would affect somebody's promotion potential and should.

However, this is more for things that were straddling the line of whether it was going to be sustained or not sustained.

And there was sometimes this consideration, if we give this person a reprimand, is this going to derail their future promotion potential?

Is it worth doing that to them?

So we took that concern and we looked back at promotional rosters going from 2017 forward and found that there really wasn't any evidence that that employees with minor misconduct, reprimands, or even minor suspensions were being passed over on the promotional roster.

So that's not something that we're making a judgment on to what level prior discipline should be considered in the chief's promotional considerations.

That was outside of what our audit is, what our kind of ballpark is.

What we did want to do is note that for the benefit of those who are performing the disciplinary recommendation that there's this consideration for the potential impact it might have when really it doesn't manifest so much for the minor misconduct.

And how might you take a look at that question?

I appreciate that that was out of the scope of this audit.

A community-based organization has done a pretty deep dive into the the disciplinary history, complaint history of 101 police officers in the police department that have a history of multiple complaints.

And just wondering, how might we take a look at that question of whether or not prior discipline should be a factor in promotions?

Lisa, do you have any thoughts?

Yeah, I'd be happy to weigh in.

As I mentioned, this is really our first attempt to go into SPD discipline systems and start turning rocks over.

And Council Member, I think what you're identifying is that this is not the end of this work.

And this work does necessarily raise additional questions that need to be looked at.

And I think that's the one that you're raising is probably really Well, it is important to community and something that is on our radar as well.

So the question that you're asking is one that we need to sit down and talk about how we would approach that problem, how we would scope it out.

And so I think what you're identifying is near future work for OIG.

I hope that helps you.

It does.

Thanks.

Thanks.

And then the last part in this slide is what I alluded to at the start in our summary of findings, that the department does generally account for repeat misconduct for individual officers.

Where there's repeated misconduct, the department will typically note that the prior misconduct as an aggravating factor on the disciplinary action report and escalate the disciplinary penalty to some degree.

Now, we do also note that limitations exist in this, primarily because OPA investigations can take so long, and the follow-on disciplinary process can take some time, too.

So if you have an instance where the first misconduct happens, and discipline in that case is not awarded at the time that the second misconduct happens, there's a little bit of overlap there.

And there can be...

Essentially, it winds up being a judgment call by the chief on whether or not to raise the disciplinary penalty at that point, even though discipline in the first case hasn't been formally awarded, that has some hazard when it comes to appeals.

It isn't a hard and fast rule that they can't do it.

We have seen instances where the second instance of misconduct was egregious enough that the chief did elevate the discipline, even though discipline in the first case hadn't yet been awarded.

So that was just one limitation that we wanted to note that popped up with some frequency.

Next up is, the next area of our audit is accountability for minor violations.

And this is essentially the use of not sustained training referrals and the prevalence of those.

There were more not sustained training referrals within our audit than there were sustained findings.

and are within the scope of our audit.

And these training referrals are typically minor technical violations.

And oftentimes they're things that are either undisputed that they happened or that they, OPA found by a preponderance of evidence that they did happen.

And the chart represents kind of where these come from.

Oftentimes it's professionalism.

In-car body-worn video is also a common one where like the, The officer forgets to activate their body-worn video, and then maybe they even note it themselves and self-report and try to remedy it.

Things that don't necessarily, in OPA's eyes, rise to the level of needing a disciplinary penalty, but that need to be addressed in some way.

So we felt that this was confusing in some regard, to have a large collection of violations of policy that are proven to or found to have happened, but you're calling them not sustained.

And typically, sustained means that you've proved that it happened, and not sustained means that you, to varying degrees, could not prove that it happened.

So we took a look at other agencies.

We did a small survey of eight other law enforcement agencies and found that they all to some extent had a, for these kind of minor violations of policy, had a categorization that was sustained, sustained no discipline, sustained training referrals, sustained admonishment.

It had a lot of different names.

They were all sustained.

So SPD and OPA used to use that kind of a designation up until about 2018. And then, according to the OPA director and the employment council, they received a series of grievances from SPOG.

Essentially, in their accounting of it, it was on principle of not wanting this particular rung of the disciplinary ladder to be used.

said, OK, we'll stop using that.

And instead, we'll either make these minor violations of policy a sustained reprimand or drop it down into a not sustained training referral.

So that creates the issue that I just said about confusion of if it happened, you're calling it not sustained.

However, another way that we took this that we also had concern with was the recording of those violations.

By virtue of being not sustained, they are recorded differently than a sustained finding.

Due to a provision in the CBA, the not sustained findings and the training referrals that follow off of those can't be put in the employee's performance appraisal.

It can't be stored in PAS as the system that rolls up into the year-end performance appraisal.

And that's where all of the other coaching conversations that happen with supervisors by and large are stored.

Instead, these conversations are recorded in IAPRO, the case management system, which is fine for the routing of these training referrals and ensuring their completion.

However, it's kind of a black box as it concerns future discipline and the visibility of future supervisors who might need to know if there's a pattern of this minor misconduct.

And just generally, there was inconsistent recording practices that we noted as well with these training referrals.

That said, we did note recently there was a sustained finding with no discipline.

I think in November it was issued.

It was the first one we've seen since 2018. So that may signal a change in posture that these may be back in use again.

But I don't have a conclusion on that.

So on this item, it looks like you are identifying it as a matter for consideration but don't have a specific recommendation on it.

But I thought I remembered hearing either from Inspector General Judge or from outgoing OPA Director Meyerberg that there has been an acknowledgement of this issue and intention to make a change, but I might be remembering incorrectly.

Even if I am, I would like to understand what your expectations are when you identify something, for remedial action, when you identify something as a matter for consideration.

Yeah, so in making something a matter for consideration, generally, we have a decent amount of those in the report.

And typically, those are things that may be matters that are subject to collective bargaining or matters for which there has to be a decision by a policymaker that isn't something that we necessarily feel comfortable in proposing our recommendation on how to fix it now.

Where we do make a recommendation on this group, it is kind of a collection of findings, is in the recording of the training referrals, that they need to be brought into the same place as all the other coaching conversations in a matter that's transparent and viewable to everybody who needs to see it.

They're kind of segmented for no good reason right now.

So in that area where there's an operational recommendation we can make that makes sense and is supported by our findings in the audit, we'll make a recommendation.

However, where there's an area such as how do you best address these minor violations of policy that are kind of dropping down the ladder right now and not being held accountable through either discipline or performance appraisals, I think that's a matter of a question for the city and for OPA and possibly collective bargaining, depending on how they want to handle the grievances that may follow from it.

And I thought I remembered hearing some speculation as well that the use of the sustained, I'm sorry, not sustained training referral finding in instances where there is evidence that the violation actually occurred, that the use of that finding, either through intent or by accident, results in what you mentioned earlier, Dan, results in a pattern of reduced arbitrations because it's not something that can be appealed.

And we have seen, I think, a reduced number of things being appealed.

since the use of this finding as compared to under, I think, previous OPA directors who might have been more willing to make disciplinary findings that were appealed.

And so I'm just sort of flagging that as another potential consequence of the use of the finding.

And just lastly, The reason why I'm asking what the significance is or what the expectation is of the OIG when they identify something as a matter of consideration is I'm wondering how you treat it in your tracker.

for your, you know, looking back to see whether or not there's been action.

Can somebody, can the department or OPA just say, oh, we considered it and decided to do nothing?

Yeah, Lisa can, or do you want to take that one, Lisa?

I tell you what, why don't you start and then I will fill in any gaps there.

So typically, matters for consideration are not something that have the same follow-up as a recommendation does.

I'm not certain with our office if we are, I'm not certain if we have an established practice for tracking the matters for consideration.

I think this audit is a little bit novel in the volume of matters for consideration that we do have in it.

But typically there isn't the same follow-up and validation testing.

That's really the key for the recommendations is that we go back and we validate that, you know, what actions you said you took, you actually took.

So there wouldn't be that piece at the very least.

Thanks.

And I think I would just add to that that, you know, we're new and some of these are, as Dan said, a little bit novel for us.

So we're still establishing, you know, how we will do follow-up on things that aren't hard audit recommendations.

And this also highlights a little bit of a challenge of having a hybrid office that uses, for some of its work, the GAGIS standards, which that's a capital R recommendation that's supported by quality controlled data that is something that is within our realm of authority to make recommendations on.

And these issues that we think are potentially significant, some that we know are significant, but that are really kind of outside of that scope of our authority.

So we're highlighting these four policy makers.

I think Dan had alluded to that.

No, there is not follow-up in the hard government yellow book sense, but there is an accountability tracker that is maintained by the partners.

It's maintained by CPC.

We also maintain a list of all of the things that we do.

So there can be follow-up, but the follow-up that we would do on this, as Dan mentioned, some of it is largely related to some bargaining issues, some policy issues that may need to be made on the part of council or other department directors.

So we can follow up, but the magnitude of these kinds of things or the import of these matters for consideration is really to put a flag on them for policymakers.

And I hope that helps.

Very much.

Thank you.

OK.

Thank you.

The next area is the enforcement of discipline.

We found that suspensions were not served timely or consistently.

So I think in most workplaces, if you have a suspension, say, for 30 days, then you are just out the next 30 workdays.

However, it's not so simple with SPD due to some practical considerations such as, you know, there's minimum staffing levels, but then there's also a clause in the CBA that essentially says you can't drop somebody below half time in a given pay period or in a month because of their healthcare and pension benefits, because those would be negatively affected.

Because of those, there's this need to chunk up suspensions, some longer suspensions sometimes.

Now, the department has a control on that, where they say on suspension orders, you have to serve a suspension within two pay periods from the time it's ordered.

And that's kind of their, if you have to chunk it up, just make it within two pay periods.

Otherwise, it needs to be authorized by the director of HR.

We found in our audit that that authorization was not happening, and the controls generally around the assignment of suspension dates was fairly lax.

This led to some suspensions being extended far beyond that two pay period threshold, where we found a few suspensions that were spread up to as much as 10 pay periods.

There was a couple that were 30-day suspensions, so that would equal out to like three days served every two weeks.

So this creates a consideration about the timeliness of the service of suspensions, as well as what is the accountability if you're able to spread out the penalty of that suspension.

Adding on to that, and this is what's demonstrated by the chart in the PowerPoint, is that while employees are not allowed to work overtime or take like voluntary overtime shifts, on the days when they are suspended, there's nothing stopping them from taking overtime shifts on all the other days of the pay period.

So if you're suspended three days in a pay period, you can find overtime shifts on the other seven days and, to some extent, offset that penalty.

Now, if you have a two-day suspension, then it's one thing.

You could probably pick up overtime shifts in your next pay period, even if not in that pay period, and offset it to some extent.

However, when you wind up with these 30-day suspensions that are spread over 10 pay periods, you wind up really, it's a lot easier to offset those suspension days with overtime the further that you extend it out.

And that's kind of demonstrated by, these are all individual suspension on this chart.

So like H and J and K, I think, kind of pop up as instances where, in those same pay periods where the suspension was served, factored at an overtime rate, they were able to pretty much make up the hours, the hours lost to suspension.

So this had a, you know, I don't think this is quite what you might imagine that the accountability might look like with a suspension.

That might not meet the public's expectation of what a suspension should look like and would be in most other professions, I believe.

So we made recommendations that the department tighten up their controls related to the authorization of these suspensions so you don't have these suspensions that are extended far beyond what it needs to be.

And then we also recommended that they prohibit the accrual of overtime until a suspension is completed.

However, the department felt that that latter recommendation was something that would be subject to collective bargaining.

The next area that we looked at was disciplinary records.

In short, there were 23% of disciplinary action reports in the scope of our audit were not in personnel files.

And this was most pronounced with the group of employees who resigned or retired prior to discipline.

And that's unfortunate because those were also probably the group where you're most likely to have an employment check if they went to another department.

This has a negative impact on employment checks or anybody who's seeking information on disciplinary actions in a personnel file where you might expect to see disciplinary actions.

And in fact, you should see all of the disciplinary history of a person in their personnel file.

This also has an impact on public disclosure requests as well.

If somebody isn't seeking this information through OPA, then it could potentially be missing in their personnel file.

It is important to note that OPA does have the records of these disciplinary actions that were missing.

It's just, we're just talking about the personnel file.

This was a process lapse from as far as we could tell, and we recommended that the department go back and do a more comprehensive audit of all disciplinary actions that happened from 2018 forward.

I saw you unmuted, Chair Hoover.

Do you have a question?

And in the recommendation to address this finding, can this be done after the fact?

Can they go back and put things in the disciplinary files of people who have already left if they identify that being missing?

I'm not aware of any reason why they wouldn't be able to go back in and insert the files.

In speaking with the HR director, it seemed like they were already going back and remedying the files that we found as missing.

It should be in there, it's just it wasn't filed in the folder for unknown reasons.

Thank you.

And is it, would it be reasonable to expect the department to contact individuals who had sought personnel evaluations or recommendations in a hiring process to let them know that there's additional information that wasn't provided when asked?

or would that be a cumbersome task for an HR person at SPD to undertake?

I was going to say, I think that's probably a question for SPD to answer about what that looks like, what kind of record keeping they have of agencies that have come in and done those sorts of checks.

So we could certainly find out for you.

Thank you.

Um, the other piece on this slide is, um, there was, there was a gap in and somewhat to, well, yeah, there was a gap in, um, the department submitting, uh, notifications of disqualifying conduct to the CJTC, uh, from 2015 to 2020, they, uh, did not notify the CJTC of, uh, usually it was dishonesty, but, uh, potentially disqualifying, uh, behavior.

Um, To the department's credit, they did find that this gap existed in 2020 before the start of our audit and refiled, revised notifications to the CJTC in all of those cases.

And going forward into late 2020 and 2021, it seems that the process is working initially as it should.

For the folks who were not initially, these kind of delayed notifications were sent, we checked with CJTC.

They were all still pending review.

And none of them had, according to CJTC records, none of them were employed as police officers in Washington State at the time we checked.

Very helpful.

Thank you.

Communication with complainants was another big area that we looked at.

So for those unfamiliar with whose role it is, it's OPA has the responsibility of communicating with complainants throughout the disciplinary process, letting them know the case status, resolution, any appeals action that happens with cases.

It was, I think, due to some process lapses and maybe a lack of emphasis when OPA started to get overloaded.

with some cases that there was a few, they didn't quite meet expectations on a lot of this.

First off, they were not letting complainants know about case resolution until, on average, two or three months after the case was finalized, after the chief had issued discipline.

They were not notifying complainants From 2016 to 2020, they were not notifying complainants of appeals action on cases.

And they also did not have a process for identifying individuals who were the subject of police misconduct, but who were themselves not complainants.

So this might look like a supervisor or the force review board seeing an instance of misconduct, forwarding it on to OPA.

OPA would then code those entities as the complainant, And the person who actually was subject to the misconduct would not be classified as a complainant in most cases and would not receive the resulting communications that complainants usually do.

In some cases, they might not even be aware that the case involving them existed at all.

So we made recommendations to OPA on all three of these counts.

And they were very receptive and are hopefully going to remedy all those in fairly short order.

And then the last area that we get into with the audit is arbitration and appeals.

So as we said at the start and as was shown by that diagram, there hasn't been a lot of appeals action.

Almost no cases have gone to arbitration in the last few years.

This is due to a couple of legitimate reasons.

It took some time of the changeover of the CBA.

The cases had to be reassigned to new arbitrators.

And then COVID, I think arbitrators and both the city and SPOG didn't necessarily feel that some of the cases were conducive to virtual hearings.

So there's been some delays on that end.

However, what we discussed in the audit as kind of underlying it all is that there isn't the controls for timeliness of the hearing of these appeals has a gap in it.

wherein there's a timeline for when the arbitrator must be selected, and there's a timeline for when after the arbitrator is notified that they have been selected, they must schedule and hear the case.

However, in between there, you can have cases sit for an indeterminate amount of time, where the arbitrator has been selected, but not notified of their selection, and they have no idea that they've been selected.

This describes almost all of the cases that are on the backlog cases waiting for arbitration.

And there's about 80 some cases, upwards of 80 disciplinary actions that are currently pending.

Both the city and SPOG are capable of reaching out to the arbitrators to kick off the scheduling.

However, the city sees it as SPOG's responsibility because the grievances are owned by SPOG and the discipline has already been enforced.

The city, in most cases, doesn't really have a reason to initiate these arbitration hearings.

And we did speak with some SPOG representatives, and they didn't articulate any real reason why these arbitrators might not have been contacted.

However, they did express that their members do ask them sometimes, what is happening with my case?

Can we get this cleared?

So I think there's a fairness and timeliness issue at play here for both complainants and employees, that they shouldn't necessarily have these cases languishing for years before they're resolved.

I think it's in everybody's interest to have a timely resolution to these.

So that's something that we're flagging.

Again, not making a recommendation on it because it's subject to a collective bargaining, but we're flagging for negotiations and hopefully it can be tighter in the future contract.

Another issue that we're flagging is the arbitrator selection process isn't necessarily as robust, especially in the SPOG agreement, as we might have hoped to see.

I'll be careful in saying that this is not, we did not observe any kind of manipulation of the roster or specific gaming of it.

Indeed, there hasn't been enough cases that have gone through the standard selection process to really draw that conclusion.

However, in looking at the process itself, our main issue with it is that there is not a re-randomization of the arbitrator roster after each selection.

So because there's a limited striking process and cases are heard on a first-in, first-out basis, you can, to a limited extent, make selections in one case with an eye towards which arbitrator will hear the next case.

So that's something that we would hope would also be tightened up in the next contract.

And then the last piece that we have here is we took a look at the Public Civil Safety Service Commission, the PSSC.

In the accountability ordinance, they were specified as the sole route of appeal for disciplinary, the sole route of disciplinary appeal for SPD employees.

And that was, of course, rolled back after collective bargaining.

We wanted to point out that while the PSCSC is maybe preferable to labor arbitration for transparency and perhaps even timeliness and maybe even democratic accountability, they do not, there's nothing in the rules that necessarily makes them give a different standard of review from an arbitrator selected through the SPOG process.

concluded that the three commissioners that make up the PSCSC are equally capable, maybe not as likely, but equally capable of applying their own interpretation and predilections on the reviews that they conduct as an individual arbitrator could do themselves.

And that's burden of proof is ambiguous in both sides.

What evidence can be heard?

during those hearings and the level of deference to the chief.

There may be some light practice of giving deference to the chief on the PSCSC side, but there isn't really anything that locks them into, say, not being able to look at the chief's discipline and say, we feel that was too strict and we would like to roll that back in the same way that you saw happen with the Adly-Shepard case.

And then there's also issues with capacity with the DSCSC.

If they were ever to hear all of the backlog of appeals, they would have issues with their capacity to do that.

And so that concludes the main findings that we were going to discuss.

And then this slide just lists other findings that were in the report that I didn't feel that we had time for today.

If the council members have reviewed the materials beforehand or see anything on this, list here that is of interest, I'm happy to talk about them as well.

Or we can, of course, double back to anything that we mentioned in the presentation.

Just in looking to see whether or not there are any questions from council colleagues, I am recognizing that Madam President Juarez has joined us for this presentation.

Really appreciate your being with us, Council President Juarez.

I am not seeing any additional raised hands for questions.

I do wanna pull back on one of, oh, Council Member Peterson.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Herbold, and thank you, Inspector General Judge and Dan Pitts for your audit report.

This is very important work, and looking at the data, you have done is really important to support your conclusions.

I think that You know, for the public that's listening to this, you do have a 47-page report.

And your conclusion, I just want to read a little bit from that, because I think it's really important, where you say, this audit found that current processes and practices alongside SPOG and SPMA, CBA, collective bargaining agreement provisions, have created gaps in the discipline system.

These collectively impact the timeliness, fairness, consistency, and transparency of discipline for individual officers and diminish transparency and fairness for community members affected by police misconduct.

And I think that, you know, I support hiring more community policing officers.

I think the department's understaffed.

At the same time, I've been consistent the past 18 months in my calls for a stronger collective bargaining agreement.

that implements the 2017 accountability ordinance.

I feel that some of the findings that you made could be implemented by SPD management right away.

I think there's good information in here that management could use to enhance how they work with employees who are subject to misconduct.

And I hope that they use this as a guidebook immediately.

The collective bargaining agreement expired a year and a half ago.

The Labor Relations Policy Committee, the newly formed one, has not met yet.

I was recently appointed to that, so I look forward to being on the inside of those negotiations so that we can get a product that is timely, fair, consistent, and transparent.

When we talk about reimagining public safety, the heart of it really lies in the contract.

So I'm looking forward to that work, and I appreciate these audit findings to help guide that work.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Peterson.

Sort of ripping off of that point, I want to just say two things.

One, as it relates, looping back on this question of matters for consideration versus a finding, I think I heard you say, Inspector General Judge, that this is something that might be a topic of ongoing conversation about how you classify these things.

That's a conversation I would like to have.

I don't know that the fact that something has to be bargained or the fact that it's up to policymakers to make a policy change would necessitate not issuing a finding.

If you look at, for instance, The city auditor's website, there are plenty of findings that are findings for council to act on, and they track them.

So, I think we all want to be held accountable as well to acting on things that are recommendations for policy changes.

And as it relates specifically to the bargaining process, I know the public wants the folks who are involved in the bargaining process to be held accountable for addressing items not just in the 2017 Accountability Ordinance, but things that are coming up through ongoing analysis and review, like your audits.

And for the viewing public, Council Member Peterson mentioned the role of the LRPC, which is made up of five council members and the executive.

But we also have a role carved out as advisors for each the OIG, the OPA, and the CPC to help us make sure that we are bringing these very items to the table.

So just want to make sure that we are creating all of these mechanisms for accountability.

There's a very, very, very large menu of items, both legislative items as well as bargaining items, that I think are really, really important to keep track of.

I think this is a really fantastic body of work here, and I don't want to lose track of the important recommendations, regardless of the venue or method that it takes to implement the recommendations.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

Thank you, committee members.

Thank you, Council President, for being here for this.

Those are all points well taken.

Some of the matters for consideration, the basis for designating it that is that there's not necessarily a factual basis to support a belief that there's a deficiency or a problem in fact, but we're flagging that there is a fairly high potential for an issue there.

And so there are various reasons that we do these, but I totally am in complete agreement with your concerns and with making sure that we track these in some way where there's meaningful accountability as we move forward.

Dan, I don't know if you want to say anything in sort of just to fill in some information for Councilmember Peterson and the public and the committee on SPD's responses to these because I think they have been, you know, they submit responses to our audit findings and it would be interesting for the committee and the public to hear a little bit about that if we have time.

Yeah, the direct responses to the recommendations from SPD were, they concurred with all of the recommendations that we made to them, except for the one about over time, they neither concurred nor non-concurred because they felt it was a matter for collective bargaining.

However, on all of the other counts, they concurred and provided an implementation plan with dates that they would have to target dates for the completion of that implementation.

And once we reach those dates, we don't have quite enough time at this point after the conclusion of the audited holidays.

I think maybe slowed things down a little bit in terms of wanting to give people a chance to breathe.

early in this year, probably in quarter one, we'll do formal follow-up, or we'll intend to do formal follow-up with SPD and OPA, and there's also recommendations for BSCSC, with all of those entities to try and understand if their plans have gone as they had expected them to, and if so, we will conduct validation testing on them.

Um, and if not, then we can discuss further, um, you know, cause sometimes with recommendations there can be, um, they can not be taken the way that they were exactly intended.

Um, and so you try to be very prescriptive in, in the way that you write a recommendation, but, um, it always helps to have that kind of followup conversation, which hasn't really been had yet, um, to, to make sure that we're all on the same page and that, that we're, that we're achieving what, what we set out to.

Thank you full background as well on moving forward.

All right, looking to see if there are any thoughts or questions.

And not seeing any.

Really again.

very grateful and appreciative of your work, and look forward to our ongoing conversations about this ongoing body of work.

Thanks again for being with us.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Dan, for the great work.

Stay well, everyone.

You too.

Clerk, please read in agenda item three.

Committee agenda item number three, HSD's 2022 Notice of Funding Availability for Briefing and Discussion.

Thank you so much.

Before we do a quick round of introductions, I want to just say a couple opening words.

Many of the investments that HSD has announced for 2022 are specific to address the impacts of the pandemic on our mental health, what I've often referred to as the shadow pandemic.

that the unprecedented fear, pain, and isolation of the COVID pandemic are leading to negative mental health impacts for many of us.

All data points to the pandemic having a significant impact on our behavioral health and anecdotally erupting into gender-based violence, self-harm, abuse, assault, and fire, and other forms of violence.

Although primary support for behavioral health services rest with the county and state.

HSD's notice of funding opportunities contains significant investments that will help residents with these shadow pandemic issues, including support for survivors of gender-based violence, behavioral support for young people, really appreciate HSD's ongoing work and leadership in these areas.

With that, I'll hand it over to our friends from HSD to do some introductions.

Thank you.

For the record, I'm Tanya Kim, Acting Director of the Seattle Human Services Department.

And I am Natalie Thompson.

I'm the Planning Manager for the Youth and Family Empowerment Division of the Human Services Department.

Good morning, Lan Pham, Manager of the Mayor's Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

Excellent.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

So today, first, and of course, good morning.

And thank you, Chair Hurbold, for having us here and for the opening remarks.

Good morning, Council Members.

Today we are here to talk about the Human Services Department, and we're going to do an overview of our investments, do some level setting, remind the public what we invest in.

We're going to discuss at a very high level our notice of funding availability, our NOFA overview, and how we share that information, what information is available.

And then we're going to get to the gold of the presentation, and that's where Natalie and Lon Our subject matter experts and leaders are going to really do a little bit of a deeper dive within our 15 minutes.

Next slide, please.

HSD's investments.

For folks to become familiar with our department, the Human Services Department connects people with resources and solutions during times of need.

And we're one of the largest contributors to the Seattle safety net.

Each year, HSD invests hundreds of millions of dollars in the community through our organizational partners.

And we serve current and emerging human service needs as Council Member Herbold, Chair Herbold just mentioned.

Just, you know, to demonstrate this, HSD's total 2021 budget was $393 million and the contracts alone made up 76% of that total.

So just wanted you to know of the true investment area.

So we have contracts that go out for requests for proposals.

We're going to discuss the NOFA right now.

And while we do NOFAs every year, they're on typically a four-year cycle if they're ongoing funds.

And so today we'll talk about those RFPs for 2022, but just know that we have all these other contracts that are in motion.

Next slide, please.

We serve the range, we serve the community.

And so you could see that these are investment areas and some outcomes that we're striving for everything from youth success, to promoting healthy aging and in between.

And today, we'll do a deeper dive on those investments in our youth and family empowerment division, as well as our mayor's office on domestic violence and sexual assault.

Next slide.

With our NOFA, so in December, usually at the end of the year, every year, we post our NOFA.

So December 2nd of last year, HSD issued our 2022 Notice of Funding Availability.

Think of it as like this is a heads up of what's to come the following year to queue organizations up.

I do want to add there's a caveat here.

When we receive ads or additional dollars throughout the year, we sometimes adjust the NOFA and add additional competitive funding processes.

And so here we're going to talk about the ones that are planned at this point in time.

But things have been shifting as they have the past couple years.

course because of the pandemic or responding to emerging issues.

This year we have about $13.8 million that we are planning for and again could be more.

Wanted to note that the NOFA itself is very high level and we're going to offer some links you can go to our website.

It is again a preview of what's to come.

It talks about the service area, the budget amount, and dates, key dates to consider.

And so when the actual request for proposal or qualifications is released with the full detail, application and guidelines, as well as the anticipated contract start dates.

And those are really important for, of course, planning purposes.

Next slide, please.

A lot of folks are looking for this information and we're getting better at it, but certainly we're improving each year.

I just wanted to highlight the various ways in which we want the general public as well as our community based providers and funders, frankly, to watch and know how we're allocating our funds and when those funds are available.

And so here is a listing of various sources.

We've got listservs and blogs and newsletters and we are indeed on social media.

And so you can find us there.

We encourage folks to sign up and we are committed to including our community-based organizations that are currently contracted with us to receive that notification, too.

So we're going to make sure that we're crosswalking our database a couple times a year to make sure we catch folks.

But there's transitions, so we encourage our providers to please also update their contact information as well.

So lots of information on our website.

Next slide.

The other is that's really important.

And I encourage our community based partners to take a look at our website, even in advance of a request for proposal being posted.

We share a lot of resources and we have a library of information.

We even have information from the previous request for proposals.

And so I think, you know, we always encourage our providers to go to our website and look at all of these resources that are available.

If you have any questions to what's really important and Natalie and lawn will get into this, but You know, which with each RFP or opportunity, we do these info sessions and we walk through a lot of these too and offer technical assistance.

And we've been improving our technical assistance throughout the years as well.

Next slide, please.

So what are we talking about today?

Natalie and Lon are going to go upstream.

We just heard some presentations about our police department and things happening there.

The Human Services Department is investing typically in our community-based organizations to offer prevention and intervention services.

Natalie will start us off with some food opportunity, as well as the behavioral health.

And then Lon will finish us off with three different investment areas around battery intervention and other two gender-based violence services.

And there we go.

Natalie, you're up next.

Thank you so much, Tanya.

So good morning.

The Farm-to-Table Support Services Request for Proposals is one of our investment processes that's fully funded by Seattle's Sweetened Beverage Tax.

It is part of our robust food portfolio.

I'll provide a brief overview of this investment.

We have roughly $840,000, 839,815 to be exact available for funding.

This investment is the nexus of the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Boards priorities of food access and early childhood education.

The HHSD partners with the Department of Education and Early Learning and community based partners to provide nutrition education farm to family food bags and prior to COVID farm field trips in Seattle preschool program and early childhood education and assistance programs or ECAP programs.

Since COVID, nutrition education has pivoted to online learning.

Farm to family food bags continue to be delivered even during COVID and actually increased.

The bags were delivered bi-weekly to Seattle preschool programs where sites Work closed, programs got creative, and had families pick up food bags on staggered schedule.

Sourcing from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, or BIPOC, and immigrant and refugee farmers remain priorities and are contracted deliverables.

The Support Services RFP, this RFP is coupled with the Farm to Table Procurement RFP, which funds and supports preschool kitchens to purchase local food from farmers.

These RFPs will be combined in the next cycle.

And I couldn't help but notice council member Peterson's quality Seattle preschool sign.

So I'm very happy to note that the three components of the RFP, the two support services components, which is nutrition education and family support, as well as the Institutional Food Procurement RFP do follow National Best Practice Farm to Early Childhood Education guidelines.

So HSD has partnered with the University of Washington School of Public Health to conduct community research and program evaluation of this program.

So this RFP is expected to be released on March 28. Next slide, please.

So next we have the 2022 youth and young adult behavioral health requests for proposals.

This RFP will focus on behavioral health services for black indigenous and people of color youth and young adults.

And as chair Herbold mentioned earlier, the need for behavioral health is acute and increasing as a result of COVID.

We know that this funding level is not nearly enough to fill the gap in services.

So we are partnering with DEEL, Public Health Seattle and King County, King County Behavioral Health and Recovery Division, and Washington State Department of Health to align funding efforts and to really prioritize filling the gap that general fund dollars can fill in the behavioral health system of support for young people.

Three provider stakeholder events were held in December and January to inform this request for proposals.

The first was with existing providers and the latter two were with providers at large.

We heard much feedback and very many emerging themes, including the acute needs for younger and younger people.

So youth focus groups will be convened starting in January.

Together, all of these stakeholder events will inform this request for proposals, which will be released on April 11th, 2022. So now I will hand it over to Lon.

Thanks, Natalie.

Good morning.

I'm excited to share that HSD and ModBSA will be releasing close to $12 million in funding for gender-based violence in one RFP and two RFQs.

$10.8 million will be released specifically focused on gender-based violence victim services, including mobile advocacy with flexible client assistance, shelter and housing, therapeutic services, prevention, outreach and education, and other wraparound response services.

The combination of these strategies is to operationalize our vision of a no-wrong-door approach to victim services and response and support cross-collaboration and partnership among victim service providers.

Next slide, please.

We will also be releasing over 230,000 for better intervention RFQ, a core component of the domestic violence intervention project.

A little bit about the project is that it is a collaborative among systems and community partners aimed at increasing victim safety through the implementation of a national best practice model for court mandated veteran intervention.

A side note about this funding is that most recently HSD was awarded $1.5 million for four years for this particular project.

So the total amount for this funding annually is $147,229.

which will come from general fund, but the remainder will come from the federal OVW funding.

Next slide, please.

Last but not least is our gender-based violence legal services.

We are releasing 976,149 in legal services.

This funding will focus on increasing access for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and commercial sexual exploitation.

Key services under this RFQ includes legal representation, legal consultation, legal clinics, and legal systems navigation.

So while the prior RFP and RFQ that I just mentioned are focused on services provided by social workers and therapists, this particular RFQ is geared towards attorneys working with nonprofit legal programs and organizations.

So that is pretty much that we have in terms of rolling out gender-based violence for 2023.

Back to you, Tanya.

One quick question before we move on on this slide, please.

Total funding available is for about $967,000 according to this slide.

And I'm guessing from the scope as described here, this is and the amount, this does not include the 1.5 million for mobile advocacy services for survivors of gender-based violence the council added.

So how and when can we expect those dollars to get out the door?

Yes, that's correct.

The 1.5 is actually in slide number one, the victim services, because that includes MFA or mobile flexible advocacy.

We are in the process of doing contract amendments for 2022. And in 2023, it will be part of this RFP that's going out.

So you're not going to spend the full amount in 2022?

Is that what you're saying?

We hope to spend it out.

We are in the process of drafting amendments right now for 2022.

For contracts that are in place for services to be provided in 2022?

That's correct.

Okay, I'm just, I was confused by your reference to 2023.

In 2022, they will be renewal contracts, so we're adding to existing contracts.

But most of our providers, if not all of them, will be, this funding is going to be released in 2022 for 2023. So the RFP and the RFQs that are going to be released in May, they are for 2023 contracts.

I'm sorry if this is

including the 1.5 million that the council allocated for mobile advocacy services, they're not going to be available until 2023?

So that amount is available in 2022 in the form of contract amendments and all of our funding, pretty much all of them with the exception of one strategy will be re-released in 2022 for 2023. So it will be part of this packet of 10.8 million that will be released in 2023.

Might I say it in a different way?

And so sometimes, and Lon, correct me if I'm wrong, but just in general, when we receive council ads that are ongoing and it doesn't neatly line up with an RFQ or an RFP, what we'll do to make sure that we get the funds at the door quickly is we'll do a direct add to existing investments and then line it up to the RFP.

So it could be competitively bid.

And then as a result of that will result in contracts.

And so what we typically do, and there are exceptions, we'll have an RFP in one year, but it impacts the contracts for the following year.

And so in order to utilize the ads that are given in 2022, what I think I'm hearing Lon say is, to address the 22 needs and available funding, we're going to do the contract ads through the existing contracts.

And then we'll also line it up within this RFP that we're about to release, which will then impact a new slate of contracts, which may or may not include some of the same providers that will begin in 2023. Is that right, Lon?

That's correct.

Thank you.

That's consistent with, I think, council's expectation.

Appreciate that.

Thank you so much.

We are not waiting.

We're not waiting.

I know the community is interested and there is a need to get the money out the door.

Thank you.

And the reason why it's in a form of amendment, because we really do want to take the time to look at the performance of contracts in 2020. And if folks are ready and are in this capacity, have the capacity to utilize that fund in 2022, but that is in process.

Yeah, so I'm just, this is a process question.

So basically when council passes the budget and if there are ads, they are somehow reflected in the NOFA, right, that we're looking at right here.

And so are you saying that if there's not a new note or a new RFP, somehow that work that has been funded has been stuck onto some other, a provider who's already doing existing work.

there is work that cannot be done, then that would be a separate contract and it would be reflected here, right?

So I guess the bigger question is, you have to scramble between budget and the letting of the posting of the NOFA to make sure that council's priorities are reflected in the following year's NOFA, right?

Is that pretty much the?

Yeah.

So yes and no.

Council ads are really important to us.

And sometimes, as you probably know, the ads are very specific.

And so if when they're specific, we have an idea of whether or not it is for an existing program and it really is more about doing an amendment and not for a request for proposal.

Generally, the best practices for us to have a request for proposals or qualifications so that we're allowing organizations to compete, especially when we know that it's not so specialized that there's only one entity who is qualified to provide that service.

If we know that there are two or more, ideally we are doing a competitive process.

There are times where we have ads and it's not Again, it doesn't align with our scheduled RFPs that we need to review and see how we're going to implement.

And so our processes, we get the ads, it's approved, it's in the budget, we internally will assess Can we, is this a direct ad, which it rarely is?

Do we fold it into an RFP and does it line up neatly?

And so we're going to mitigate the year one so it can neatly tie into an RFP that was planned.

Because we don't want to overburden organizations to write multiple RFPs for the same service area.

But sometimes we have new sources of funds that don't line up that requires another request for proposal or qualifications.

And that's the caveat that I gave earlier, which is right now what we're presenting to you were the ones that we had planned in our base budget, but it's possible that we have some ads after further analysis.

Like, for example, I'll throw out one.

We have a wage study.

It's a pretty significant dollar amount.

And so we'll need to do a competitive, some kind of bidding process for that.

That's not noted here because Natalie and her team are likely to take that on after some planning work.

they'll determine what is the appropriate path forward, and then we'll add it to the NOFA, then we'll rediscuss the appropriate way in which we do the bids, and then that'll be in its own.

That contract will likely start this year and not wait until the following year.

So sometimes it's just yes and no, it depends.

Okay, and then I have just a follow-up.

You mentioned at the beginning that this can change over the year if if there are new funds that could become available.

And it seems like, you know, all the ARPA funding was new funding right away.

And if Build Back Better passes and we, you know, then we know our chunk in Seattle, then there will be a lot of other work for you to do and you will assign that across your service areas.

So do you have enough people to be, how do you keep up with these surges?

I mean, and that's just, do you anticipate that being an issue or are you planning for a big chunk of work in anticipation for these external sources of funding becoming available?

Well, I do, thank you for that question.

That couldn't have been a better time.

So if, and what we've learned throughout COVID and just in years past when there are emerging issues, We want, we are the department to really support and provide these opportunities.

But as we know, we're also an organization that are a lot, frankly, community, you know, organizers, social workers, people have been doing this work in the human services field.

And we are also an organization that needs to have the capacity in order to do this well.

And so what we appreciate in partnership with not only CBO and council is being able to prudently identify what the administrative costs are.

That also includes our financial operations systems.

And so it is, what does it take for Natalie to, and Lon to do an RFP?

What does it take for us to provide technical assistance and really support organizations?

encourage a lot of also emerging organizations and, you know, some that have wonderful infrastructure and some that doesn't.

So we need to provide that technical assistance with our grants and contract specialists.

And so we're pretty conservative.

I'll say we have kind of, cause many of us are from nonprofit, but we need to shift getting out of this really super lean where we're not offering the best services.

And so we're coming up with the right, I think, formula and discussion to say, what does it take in order to responsibly be good stewards of public dollars and how much can we pass through to the community because we want to make sure that the money is out the door where it belongs.

And so we have negotiated that for some administrative costs and really thank you for that question.

So the last slide.

Thank you, Kevin, for reminding me that also on the NOFA is In in the top we really describe what the funding opportunities are.

We're giving folks notice that the request for proposal, the full on application and guidelines will be published by certain dates.

And we do also offer a preview of the next year.

And so, of course, we're in communication with our providers, as well as the general public about what's to come so organizations can prepare.

And so we've got these queued up in 2023. And again, this is our base budget, what we know today.

So our senior centers, our registered dietician services for older adults, congregate meals for older adults, home delivered meals for older adults and family support back in youth and family empowerment.

And so those are being queued up for the following year.

I just want to flag a couple things and to highlight here that I believe HSD is still conducting an analysis of the behavioral health needs and services available to LGBTQ young people, and it's possible that funding may be available sometime this year for that purpose, depending on the results of the analysis.

So it would be helpful to understand what the expected timeline is for that work.

And then also on the food programs funding, I know that many of the expected 2023 investments are in the area of food programs.

I want to also note that as part of the 2022 budget, council requested report from HSD on the availability of additional funding for food and nutrition programs that's expected from the State Department of Agriculture this year, including a proposal for how these funds will be spent.

The report is requested to be presented in committee by June 1st.

or before the transmittal of the mid-year supplemental budget legislation, whichever occurs first.

We did increase funding in the 2022 budget for food programs because we wanted to avoid a cliff associated with anticipated reduction in funding and in avoiding a cliff that started in January.

We might be looking at one that starts in mid-year, but it would be important and helpful to know what to expect in that area.

Thank you.

And we're prepared to respond in writing, of course.

But Natalie, I see you're off mute.

Anything to share?

Yes, absolutely.

So both of the analyses work both for the LGBTQ youth landscape analysis, as well as the food cliff analysis is in our shop, Youth and Family Empowerment.

So we are prepared to have a written response on or before June 4th, June 1st for the food response.

For the LGBTQ youth analysis, we'll be done with that before quarter one.

We've done a national best practice analysis.

We've talked to local providers.

We've done a pretty in-depth scan of our current LGBTQ youth contracts.

We will provide a report in writing, but just an early sneak peek, we're seeing some real high needs in the areas of youth, aging out of foster care, youth behavioral health, again, not a surprise, LGBTQ youth behavioral health, as well as specific needs for our trans youth.

So we're pretty excited to provide the results of that analysis which we are vetting internally and with a few key subject matter experts in the community before we present it to council.

Thank you so much and really appreciate your initiation of the identification of additional funds to potentially support this well-documented, but also emerging greater need that we're seeing in the community.

Just looking to see questions or comments.

And while I'm scrolling here, I'm going to filibuster with going back to slide 12, which we went over quickly.

Not, yes, thank you so much.

I wanna just note the viewing public program is run through the Seattle Municipal Court.

It's a really unique client-centered approach.

It provides treatment, defendants facing domestic violence charges, and it's one of only three programs like it in the county.

country.

I understand that this RFP through HSD will expand the number of providers who are associated with the program, which will then allow them to serve more people.

I want to flag also there is really strong community interest in ensuring that this program is not focused on gendered couples, that it also includes a service component where same-gendered couples are eligible.

I know that's something that we're looking at in the future.

It may not be something that we can do immediately, but I do want to sort of lift the community interest in doing so.

And also, I believe there were some There was a council action associated with this funding as well, but I'm not remembering what it was.

Was there a statement of legislative intent associated with this funding?

There was not.

It was just flagged that it was something that council would be watching, but there was no dollar involved.

A statement of legislative intent is not additional funding.

It's asking the department to do some work, whether or not it's a producer report or do an engagement.

I thought there was a request to work with the Office of Civil Rights in doing a community-based engagement around this program.

I'll check my records.

If it's not ringing any bells, I don't want to put anybody in the spot here.

Well, we've noted it and we'll follow up.

I remember reading about it.

I don't recall an ask, and so that's where my brain is.

So we'll follow up.

Thank you.

Understood.

Thank you so much.

All right, any other comments or questions from council colleagues?

All right, well, thank you so much for helping me. highlight the really important work that the Human Services Department is doing to assist members of our community who are, I think, faced with really unique challenges and really appreciate that the department is doing that work.

in the midst of a lot of change within the department and also some of the same types of challenges that we're talking about these services funding.

I know that our individual city workers, our public servants are also experiencing these same challenges.

So I'm really humbled and honored to have you come and talk to us about how despite all of that, you are still getting these dollars out the door to serve the public.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Right.

Thank you.

And with that, there are any other comments from colleagues?

The next Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for Tuesday, February 8, 2022 at 9.30 a.m.

And seeing no additional comments or questions, it is 11.45 a.m.

and we are adjourned.