Seattle City Council Public Safety & Human Services Committee 4/27/21

Good morning.

Thank you.

The April 27, 2021 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.31 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Gonzalez?

Present.

Council Member Lewis?

Present.

Council Member Morales?

Here.

Council Member Sawant?

Present.

And Chair Herbold?

Present.

Five present.

So on today's agenda, we will have a presentation from the executives, specifically the executive members of the interdepartmental team on policing and community safety.

We do have good council representation on that interdepartmental team as well.

but the presentation is going to be led by members from executive departments who are participating.

We also will be having a presentation from central staff on the Seattle Police Department quarterly finance and staffing report.

And then finally, a presentation by the Human Services Department updating us on the development of its new Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

and the transfer of victim advocates from Seattle Police Department to HSD.

So two of the items on this agenda today are focused on, I think, some of the really important work that the city, the council, and the executive together are doing towards rightsizing the functions of the Seattle Police Department.

So really, really appreciate getting this status report today.

And if there are no comments, I will approve our agenda for our committee meeting today.

Hearing no comments nor objections, today's agenda is adopted.

And at this time, we'll transition into public comment.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

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

If you've not yet registered to speak, but you would like to do so, 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.

Once I call a speaker's name, you will hear a prompt, and once you've heard that prompt, you will need to press star six to unmute yourself.

Again, when you hear the prompt, please remember to press star six to unmute yourself.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item which you're addressing.

And the speakers will hear a chime when you have 10 seconds left of your allotted time.

Once you hear that chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments.

If you do not wrap up your comments at the end of the allotted time period, the speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

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

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

There are 20 people signed up for public comment.

I mentioned that each speaker is allotted two minutes.

We do, we are aware of a group.

today who will be presenting together, and groups of five get five minutes to speak.

So just letting folks know in advance that we do have that expectation.

So with that, again, if there's no questions or comments, we'll move into public comment.

The first person signed up to speak is Howard Gale.

Howard, good morning.

You with us, Howard?

I don't see that you're muted, but we also can't hear you.

Now I see you're muted.

Star six, please.

Not hearing you, Howard.

I think we'll need to move on.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

We got my bad.

My bad.

My fault.

Sorry.

OK.

Good morning.

Howard Gale commenting on continuing police abuse and failed accountability.

Last week's verdict in the George Floyd trial was, if not justice, some small measure of accountability.

But if that accountability is to have any meaning beyond the events of one day in one city, that we must all demand accountability for police killings that happened on other days in other cities, and demand that systems of accountability that don't rely on a police murder becoming a national celeb cause celeb in order to achieve accountability.

The other days in our city resulted in the SBD murders of Jack Kiewit-Tinawin, Cody Spafford, Larry Flynn, Sam Tashira-Smith, Shun Ma, Jay Taylor, Michael Taylor, Charlene Alliles, Ayose Ofalatogo, Danny Rodriguez, Ryan Smith, Sean Lee Furr, Terry Kaver, and Derek Hayden.

These were mostly people of color killed by the SPD under conditions where they had only a knife, a bottle, or no weapon at all in their hand.

And most were experiencing a severe mental health crisis.

Every one of these murders was deemed justified.

Wouldn't the absolute minimal level of accountability cause us to reconsider a police accountability system that simply rubber stamps all these murders as justified and quote, within policy?

Is your unquestioned belief that our police accountability system works resulting in an even deeper level of unaccountability?

We need a full civilian control of police oversight moving beyond Seattle's current system of police investigating police.

It's happening in other cities in Nashville, Oakland, Portland, Oregon.

Why not here?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker includes the individuals who are part of a group.

The first person's name is Woody Zalewski.

And then we also have Dale Bright.

And let me see here.

Trying to get to the names.

Dale, let's see.

And I'm not, Alex, you want to help me out here?

I'm not seeing the five names.

We also have Tatiana Quintana and Ben Sarkom and lastly, Jackson Holder.

Thank you, Alex.

And so, we have set the timer for five minutes for this group.

Hello, can you hear me?

Would you like me to begin?

Yes, please.

Thank you.

Oh, OK.

Great.

Well, my name is Cody Zaleski.

I'm a resident of District 4 and a medical researcher from Seattle.

I'm here representing the organization Decriminalize Nature Seattle, and our group seeks to have entheogenic plant medicine be listed as the lowest law enforcement priority with protections for medical practitioners.

In the wake of the Blake decision, many lawmakers on the state level are wary of pursuing more progressive drug law reform.

The bill recently passed by the Senate, SB 5476, is another regressive continuation of the drug law.

If the City of Seattle acts now and passes a resolution decriminalizing entheogens and protecting medical practitioners who prescribe them, it can demonstrate that there's public appetite for change in the status quo.

Our organization has won the endorsement of dozens of local medical practitioners, drug law reform groups, indigenous healers, and all of the local legislative district Democratic parties within the City of Seattle that we have spoken with.

Personally, I think the efficacy of these plant medicines in treating substance abuse, depression, PTSD, amongst others, is unparalleled, even relative to modern pharmaceutical medicine.

The city of Seattle should join almost a dozen other municipal bodies such as Washington, D.C., Oakland, and Denver in passing these reforms.

And I will pass this on to the next speaker.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I guess that's me.

I motion that we just extend this a little bit.

We were under the impression that it was two minutes each.

Sorry for the confusion.

Hey, my name is Ben Zerkam, and I live in District 3, and I'm a union organizer.

I'm speaking to you all today as part of DecrimNature Seattle in the hopes that you will adopt our resolution to decriminalize psychedelics in Seattle.

My own experience with psilocybin is why I'm here today.

Psilocybin shuts off the default mode of your brain that houses your ego.

This is important because the negative voice that tells you you can't, you're not worthy, and you'll never overcome this quiets or disappears entirely.

When I take small amounts of psilocybin, it makes me feel like my brain is finally in alignment.

I'm able to think clearly about the obstacles in front of me without any distraction or self-doubt.

I have been able to work through depression and even eliminate workplace anxiety, which has allowed me to excel in my career.

When you want the ability to open your consciousness and have a healthy relationship with championing your insecurities, I'm not saying psilocybin will cure all your problems, but it sure helped me work through mine.

The point is that not only are we prohibited to study and make use of entheogens for health purposes, but they're criminalized in the same classification as drugs like heroin and methamphetamine.

Don't we owe it to ourselves to learn and grow from the failed drug war?

There are now five other studies in one state that decriminalize the use of psychedelics.

Isn't Seattle a progressive and innovative city?

Why haven't we moved forward in abandoning the archaic and outdated drug laws that only serve to fill prisons and ruin lives?

Seattle can do better, and that's what I'm asking you to do today.

I yield my time.

Next speaker in the group, please.

I believe that's me, Tatiana.

So yes, my name is Tatiana Quintana, and I'm a resident of District 2. And basically, one of the comments that I wanted to make on what it is we're trying to do is that we're looking to decriminalize psychedelics, particularly because of the benefits that they offer for human health and wellness.

If we don't take action to decriminalize growing, gathering, and gifting within our communities, then the same status quo is going to be perpetuated if we do absolutely nothing, which is health care that is only available to people who can afford it, opportunities that are mostly available to people who can afford it.

And for folks who can't, they suffer for longer and with greater disparity.

Overdose deaths suicides and depression and anxiety are all skyrocketing and especially exacerbated by COVID.

Our communities deserve safe affordable and reliable treatments and plant medicine is is one of the most accessible forms of medicine because people can literally grow their medicine.

Just like Seattle pioneers away with LEAD to divert our citizens struggling with substance use disorders and other related offenses from the criminal justice system our city and our representatives have an opportunity to be proactive and to try something different.

and to stand with the other communities across the nation who are trying something different.

The evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, are all supportive of this.

And I'm going to yield the rest of my time so that the other folks in my group can speak.

Thank you.

We've got either Dale.

Dale, are you with us?

If not, then perhaps Jackson Holder.

Yeah, I can speak to him.

Yeah.

Many years ago, I had a personal transfigurative experience with psilocybin mushrooms that relieved a period of severe depression.

I remember getting on the phone with my mother a couple of days after my experience and having her demand to know what had happened to me.

You sound different, she said.

You sound better.

She'd been worried about me, and frankly, those worries had been justified.

I hadn't had anything positive to say for months.

I couldn't appreciate the world around me.

I couldn't appreciate myself.

I couldn't see a future.

My psychological trajectory was bleak.

And then one autumn evening, I ate a small handful of dried mushrooms and had an experience

Thank you, Jackson, for those comments.

And if there are other comments from this group, please do send them on.

Our next speaker is BJ Lass.

BJ?

Hello, my name is BJ Last.

I'm a Ballard resident and a small business owner.

I'm calling to ask City Council to immediately follow through on Council President Gonzalez's budget proviso to transfer SPD's 2021 salary savings to participatory budgeting.

The Q1 SPD budget and staffing report shows SPD will have between $11.5 million and $13 million of salary savings this year, which is more than enough to cover both the proviso and the $5.4 million of overtime overruns that Council pledged to take from SPD's 2021 budget.

Now is the time to take action.

Council can't continue to sit around and wait for the monitor to weigh in.

We're already a third of the way through the year with no action being taken on this.

Budget oversight is the council's role.

And participatory budgeting is the best way to create public safety.

The police don't create public safety.

It's why no one moves to a neighborhood because it has a high police presence.

And it's the areas that with the most police presence aren't considered the safest.

So participatory budgeting is the best way to do that.

And also a few questions on the overtime categorizations in that Q1 staffing and budget report.

So what's the split between the overtime for protest response and events?

Q1 2020 was mostly pre-COVID and had a pretty normal event schedule.

with New Year's and other events while there haven't been any special events this year.

So it seems like lumping those two things together is an attempt by SPD to really try to minimize the amount of spending on overtime just to respond to protests.

And also, what falls under miscellaneous?

That's the biggest bucket without saying.

So it seems like a way for SPD to hide what it's been spending all of its overtime hours on.

So transfer SPD's 2021 salary savings participatory budgeting to create real public safety.

So thank you, and I yield my time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Danny Aruz.

He is showing as not present, though, so we're going to move on to the next speaker, and if Danny comes back, we'll go back to Danny.

Our next speaker is...

Hello.

Oh, Danny?

This is Danny Aruz.

This is Trey.

It's been a while.

You just told me to unmute.

I'm sorry?

Hello, my name is Trevona.

Trevona, yes.

I was just about to announce your name.

Yes, go ahead, Trevona.

Hey, I'm Trevona.

I'm a resident of District 5 and a member of Black Action Coalition.

I noticed that Council Member Hobal has a Black Lives Matter sign on her property.

Can Black Lives Matter prove it?

Divest from an institution that has historically brutalized and oppressed the black community and the city.

I'm a third generation black woman here.

I'm calling to ask City Council to pass the original version of CD 119981 without amendment and reduce SPD's budget by the full $5.4 million that was overspent in 2020. These funds should be allocated to participatory budgeting.

SPD's overtime was used to engage in responding to protesters marching in defense of black lives, a response that is now infamous for its violence.

They should not have been awarded violent waste of resources.

We need budget police accountability.

SPD has a long history of overspending and overtime.

SPD has a history of overtime fraud.

And so continuing to facilitate growth in its overtime budget is fiscally irresponsible in showing the black community that you simply do not care.

Last year, city council made a commitment to shift resources from SPD to community solutions.

Part of this commitment was resolution 31962, which stated City Council would not grant SPD additional funding to cover excess overtime.

SPD defied this resolution by overspending overtime and asking City Council for more money.

When City Council granted SPD the additional funds via Ordinance 126257, it expressed its intent to reduce SPD's 2021 budget by at least $5.2 million.

City Council needs to honor its commitment to the people of Seattle and hold SPD accountable by rejecting the amendment of the CB 119981 and reducing STD's 2021 budget by the full $5.4 million and transferring that to PD.

We need police budget accountability now.

Anything less than $5.4 million is a slap to the black community's face and showing black lives don't matter to you.

If they do, prove it.

Thank you, Trevona.

Our next speaker is Jackson Holder.

Jackson?

objection spoke with the group.

Sure enough.

Thank you for the reminder.

Let's see.

Next speaker listed is Dan Otter, but I do not see Dan present.

If Dan becomes present, we'll go back to Dan Otter to speak.

But next we have Peter Vanderbilt.

Peter?

Hello.

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning.

My name is Peter.

I live in District 6 and I'm a health care provider.

I've grappled with depression for my entire life and spent 30 years in and out of therapy and on medications.

Therapy kept me from suicide but I'm still depressed.

My adult children also suffer from anxiety and depression and have not benefited much from conventional talk therapy and medications.

I believe they and many like them should have full access to new treatments that utilize psychedelic substances.

Indeed one of my sons worked with an underground therapist last year using MDMA and really benefited from it.

He was able to find an inner part of himself that he had no clue existed and used that in his regular therapy to make gains in the past year advancing in his job and personal life.

If the roadblocks to this type of therapy were removed more people would benefit.

without risking a prison sentence.

Professionally I often see patients whose success in managing chronic pain is impeded by anxiety depression and PTSD.

It's hard to witness their suffering and sometimes very hard to help them.

I would love to be able to refer them to a qualified therapist who could offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy as one of their treatment options.

Decriminalizing these substances in Seattle would be an important step in this direction.

Humans have used mind-altering substances for millennia.

Only in the last 50 years have we been forbidden access to things that nature provides and that can benefit us psychologically and spiritually.

Before they were outlawed research showed that these substances can provide a path for healing pain distress and addiction.

It's time to end this senseless denial.

I urge the Seattle City Council to pass a resolution to decriminalize nature in our great city.

Thank you.

Thank you, Peter.

We now have Dan Otter present.

Dan?

Hi.

My name's Dan Otter.

I'm a resident of District 6. I'm speaking as a member of Decriminalize Nature Seattle to advocate that city council adopt our resolution to decriminalize psychedelics in Seattle.

So I am a public health nurse, and my master's research centered around harm reduction and safer use of substances.

Through that research, it became quite clear that whatever potential harms any substance can cause to an individual, those harms are dramatically magnified by the policies that criminalize the possession and use of that substance.

So our policies that criminalize drug possession and use are much more harmful than the drugs themselves.

And this is particularly the case with psychedelics, which pose minimal health risks.

They have a pretty good safety profile compared to other illicit drugs, even legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine.

Not only are psychedelics relatively safe, but the potential they hold for the treatment of mental illness is immense.

And simply the improvement of people's quality of life is great, but criminalization really inhibits that potential and we don't even know what that potential is because of criminalization.

So in closing, I'd like, I'd invite all of you council members to just think about why psychedelics are criminalized.

What's the rationale behind that?

And whether those policies have achieved their goals and whether they've improved our society.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Graham Schulman.

Graham?

Are you with us, Graham?

If you haven't already, can you hit star six?

You're still on mute.

Graham, yes, there you are.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Oh, sorry about that.

Okay.

No problem.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Graham Shulman and I live in District 3 here in Seattle.

I am here today to advocate for the decriminalization of psychedelic substances.

All laws are made for a reason.

Generally, good laws are made to benefit the lives of the citizens under the rule.

The criminalization of drugs was not made to benefit the lives of its citizens, nor did it do so.

These laws were enacted out of fear and used to oppress and criminalize specific groups of people.

These substances have been more or less slandered into being considered something for delusional psychotic hippies to get high rather than substances helping functioning citizens make their lives more pleasant.

My life has been more pleasant because of psychedelic substances.

I've struggled with self-acceptance my whole life.

As a masculine gay man growing up in today's society, I was taught to hate myself.

When I first did psychedelic substances, I felt like I could admit who I was to myself for the first time.

The mental blocks I had that would convince myself I wasn't who I was no longer existed, and a week after my experience, I came out as gay.

On the other hand, my life has been astronomically worse because of the war on drugs.

If you research the Jamie Daniels Foundation, you will find a fund for a successful man who died due to the criminalization and systemic issues around the war on drugs.

Jamie was a friend of mine.

Had he had access to clean, tested substances, he would likely still be with us today.

The same goes for another friend of mine, Khalid, who overdosed due to cut substances as well.

These losses I experience are part of a much bigger picture in America.

Almost everyone knows someone who struggles with addiction.

Ask yourself, do these fellow citizens deserve to be put behind bars?

Should they be scared to go to the hospital when they overdose?

Should they not have access to pure substances or score smack off the street that ends up killing them?

Seattle can do better.

I yield my time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Des Chalfant.

Des?

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes, thank you.

Hi, I'm Des Chalfant.

I'm from the Hilltop District of Tacoma.

I am helping decriminalize Nature Seattle.

in hopes of decriminalizing plant medicine and making it an equal, equitable, and accessible option to all.

When I was young, I was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, and it affects my leg muscles.

It causes painful muscle spasms, and consuming cannabis helps alleviate the pain.

But I also live comorbidly with depression and general anxiety disorder because of the complications that arise with Cerebral Palsy.

Consuming entheogens, psychedelics, although I am still new, have showed tremendous progress in my self-worth and my confidence.

I have rekindled a passion for poetry without a critical voice, and it helped make my thoughts more loving towards myself and towards others.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Julia Buck.

Julia?

Good morning, Council.

Thank you for the opportunity to address you today.

My name is Julia Buck.

I'm a resident of District 6. I am calling to urge the Council to practice fiscal responsibility with regards to the Seattle Police Department's budget.

There is a positive correlation studied and put forth by King County that additional police overtime leads to a higher rate of incidents of police brutality The Seattle Police Department's overtime has been a source of unaccountable spending.

There have been far fewer events in the first quarter of the year, and so the department's overtime spending should be able to be reduced by the $5.4 million, and that should go to participatory budgeting.

If police presence were correlated with safety, Everyone in Seattle would want to live in the areas with the highest police presence.

Instead the areas with the highest police presence are considered the most dangerous.

And that has been a consistent a consistent state of affairs.

So please reduce the SPD budget by 5.4 million and send that money to participatory budgeting.

Thank you so much and I yield my time.

Thank you, Julia.

Our next speaker is Peter Condit.

Peter?

Good morning.

My name is Peter Condit.

I use he him pronouns.

I'm a scientist, small business owner, and abolitionist living in District 4. I'm calling to remind the Public Safety and Human Services Committee that SPD brutalized protesters last year and has perpetrated decades of violence disproportionately against our black and brown neighbors, including Charlene Lyles and Sean Fier.

The amended version of Council Bill 119981 gives SPD over $8 million for new expenditures.

Those are overtime dollars and salary savings that City Council promised to community by a participatory budgeting last year.

Giving SPD the money back would reward them for their violent 2020 tactics and encourage more of it in the future.

It is clear from central staff's presentation today that SPD does not need the money.

They are projected to have over $11.5 million in 2021 salary savings.

This means you can and should defund SPD by that amount and they would not even feel the cut.

Council should immediately move to transfer these savings to participatory budgeting where they stand the best chance of being used to create true public safety.

Council cannot sit on the sidelines and wait endlessly for the consent decree monitor to weigh in.

Budget oversight is your role, and you are well within your power to transfer budget savings from SBD to participatory budgeting.

Do the right thing.

Black lives matter.

I yield my time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Peter.

Our next speaker is David Haynes.

David.

Thank you.

Timothy Harris, or excuse me, Timothy Leary was wrong and so is drug advocates.

Public safety doesn't exist anymore in Seattle.

Sexual assault has become number one crisis for homeless women being predatorized by meth, crack and heroin pushers.

destroying lives daily, exempted from jail by council, mayor, the police chief, and prosecutors' offices.

The only effort we see with council's public safety is running interference for criminals, making sure it's safe for them to make their money, as if as long as they pay the rent, it's all good, with bank donors owning run-down real estate and Democrats.

You need a weapon or two to survive anywhere near Third Ave and the bus stops throughout the city.

Yet we have 9-1-1 dispatch used by police chief as a propaganda tool to demand more money from taxpayers when they call about an emergency crisis.

Then 9-1-1 dispatch refuses to send cops, instead starts finding excuses as if they're a criminal defense lawyer who took a racist professor's criminal justice class.

Yesterday, a fight broke out between two competing drug-pushing prostitutes spraying large canisters of bear spray in between Pine and Pike on 3rd Ave at the bus stop, resulting in over 20 people on the sidewalk throwing up, blinded, and gagging for air.

This is the same bus stop council and staff spent a million dollars breaking up one bus stop to make three bus stops, bragging they quelled activity, criminal activity.

Please resign from the council and the Public Safety Committee.

You're imploding the first world.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Elana Lessing.

Elana?

Hello, my name is Elana Lessing, and I'm calling in support of passing CB 1119981 without amendments.

I am here to demand accountability for victims of police accountability, not just for people in places like Minneapolis and other parts of the country, but for people like Charlene O'Leil, Greg Leterre, Gregory Taylor, Derek Hayden, and countless others from Seattle.

When we talk about defunding the police and the promises that were made over the summer, those promises now have to be followed through in a sense.

Move the money for the $5.4 million to participate.

Participatory budgeting as opposed to funding their overtime and to keep your promises.

in terms of how they're, as opposed to giving them an unlimited budget or an unlimited overtime budget.

I am also here to advocate for the legalization of psychedelics.

Thank you very much.

I yield my time.

Thank you, Alana.

Our last speaker that's signed up to speak is Bill Smith, but Bill is showing as not present.

So I'm going to just give one more shout out for the two speakers listed as not present.

One is Danny Aruz and the other is Bill Smith.

Either one of those folks here, and if not, then we will adjourn public comment and move on to the next item on the agenda.

Will the clerk please read the item into the record, please?

I'm sorry, one moment here.

agenda item number one, interdepartmental team on policing and community safety.

Thank you so much.

So I just want to start off with, again, my thanks and gratitude for everyone gathered and the work that has been done thus far.

I invited the executive to brief the committee about the progress of the work to implement the mayor's I'm excited to have a status update from the executive on the for the council representation on an interdepartmental team.

And my colleagues on the council who many of the reports that we identified that we'll learn more about as necessary as part of the budget process are helping to inform the work plan for that interdepartmental team.

And before we dive into the presentation itself.

If we could just do a quick go around, so many people can just give their name and their affiliation, whether or not a department or an organization, and then we can go back and start the presentation.

That'd be great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Julie Klein here from the mayor's office and Dr. Chris Fisher from the Seattle Police Department.

I'll kick it over to him.

He and I will be kicking off the presentation.

Dr. Fisher, if you want to intro yourself and then maybe pass it to Director Lombard.

Hi, Chris Fisher, Executive Director Strategic Initiatives at the Seattle Police Department, and I will kick it over to Director Lombard.

Good morning, Chair Herbold and other members of the Council.

Chris Lombard, the Interim Director of the new Community Safety and Communications Center.

Back to you, Julie.

Thank you, Director Lombard.

We also have Sunny Nguyen on the line from the Mayor's Office.

Sunny?

Hello, my name is Sunny Nguyen.

I use they and them pronouns and I am in the Mayor's Office External Affairs Team and I'll be speaking to some of the community engagement that we've done.

And then finally, we have Dr. Helfgott from the Seattle University.

I think she was unavailable until 1030, so she'll be probably logging on momentarily.

And she can give a quick intro when we get to her portion of the presentation, if that's all right.

Great, thank you so much.

And the presentation is a lengthy and dense presentation.

And so what would be helpful, I think, because we do want to take appropriate pauses to check to see whether or not council members have questions, but don't want to do that for every slide.

So if you could signal when a section is over.

before we move on to the next section.

And that, I think, will be the appropriate time for me to check with my colleagues on the committee to see whether or not they have questions about that particular section before we move on.

Absolutely.

All right.

I'll go ahead and share my screen.

Hopefully.

Whoops.

There we go.

Is that working for everyone?

Perfect.

Oh, great.

All right.

Well, thank you, council member for having us on today.

We wanted to start off.

by giving a brief overview of what we are.

And I agree, it's a bit of an ambitious agenda, but the things that we wanted to cover this morning.

So we'll be going over the community safety reimagining work, a brief overview or reminder of what that looks like and what all that entails.

We will briefly touch on reinvesting in community safety services.

We'll give the council some updates on the unit transfers from the Seattle Police Department.

We'll do a brief summary overview of the Seattle University Public Safety Survey with Dr. Helfgott, do a recap of the community outreach and engagement that's gone on so far in connection with this work, and then do some discussion of new models of community safety, including a very brief overview of the What Works City Sprint that the City of Seattle is engaging in with a large cohort of folks from all over the city.

I'll kick it off here by a quick reminder of the reimagining community safety executive order that was entered in the fall and the timeline envisioned with that.

So we are there, where the red arrow is, towards the end of April here.

And below, it kind of lists all of the different things that are going on right now.

I know you're getting a presentation from HSD later this afternoon to talk about some of the changes over there.

Um, and, uh, so you can see, um, our.

Our goal is to have some good recommendations and directions by the time the 2022 budget process is underway.

Um, and so, uh, we are, um.

We are behind in getting our final report done.

I think we were aiming in the EO, the mayor's EO had asked that it be completed by March.

Several pieces of that that are needed to finalize the report from outside expert partners are still missing.

We haven't gotten those from our partners yet.

As soon as we get those, we anticipate being able to finalize that report and publish that and share that with council.

We'd be happy to come back, Council Member Herbold, to your committee and go over that in a little bit more detail once that's wrapped up.

So these are the different areas that the EO had asked us, the executive order asked the community safety work group and also the reimagining SPD IDT, which is the more immediate work that we'll be talking about today.

These are all the different areas that the EO asked us to take a look at and touch on.

So reforms, functional transformation, community investments, and that largely lives with HSD and participatory budgeting.

And then fiscal transparency, that includes fiscal analysis, minimum staffing analysis, and overtime rebounds.

All right.

So here's kind of a list of the different items from the executive order and then related council reports that were requested through the 2021 budget process.

You can see we've got monthly status report memos that sort of corresponded with monthly staffing, overtime and pay reports that were requested by council.

An SPD fiscal analysis, again, there's monthly reporting that happens on that to Council as a result of the 2021 budget.

The 911 call analysis, we've engaged the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform.

to give us outside expert analysis on that.

That is one of the items that we are awaiting in order to finalize the report called for in the executive order.

We also have a preliminary SPD functional assessment, although that is sort of a little bit of a moving target, considering the dust hasn't quite settled yet on SPD attrition rates.

And so, We are going to probably have to do a little bit of an update on that in advance of releasing our final report.

SPD workforce assessment, that is also including some of the requirements by the consent decree.

That will be, and all of those things will be folded in essentially to the final report, which we're hoping now, assuming that we get our outside expert analysis final reports soon.

By the end of May 2021, we hope to have that final report with all of these different aspects folded into it from the interdepartmental team.

This I believe may be a graph that the council has already seen.

So this demonstrates the percent change from previous years.

Budgetarily speaking, you can see a huge increase in the HSD community safety investments and a decrease in the SPD budget overall.

This is just to give you a flavor of the net changes from really 2019 as 2020 was an odd year with the changes halfway through, but to give sort of an idea for the changes that have happened between 2019 and this year's budget.

All right, I know that HSD is going to be giving a far more detailed presentation to council on all of these transfers, but just wanted to recap them here.

We've got the transfer of the victim advocate team from SPD to over to human services division, the transfer budget and full time employees from the navigation team to safe communities and transfer budget for The Youth for Success safety contracts to safe communities, all of those have been transferred out of the Seattle Police Department as well.

And as I indicated, for more details on how those transfers are going and what that looks like, we rely on our friends in the Human Services Division and their presentation that they'll be giving this afternoon to fill counsel in on that.

So now I would love to turn it over to Director Lombard.

As Council knows, there were three primary, there were three main civilian units or larger civilian units that were removed from the Seattle Police Department as a part of the 2021 budget.

Those were parking enforcement officers, the 911 communication center, and the Office of Emergency Management.

The Office of Emergency Management was already sort of functionally a standalone unit.

Not a whole lot changed there.

The 911 Communication Center, the CSCC as we call it now, has done a lot of work since the beginning of the year.

And I would love to turn it over to Interim Director Chris Lombard to walk Council through how that's going.

Thank you, Julie.

So excited to be giving Council this update on kind of where we are.

Quick little snapshot.

Dr. Lombard, can we just take a pause here?

I think this counts as moving on to a different section of the presentation, so I just want to pause, see if any of my colleagues have questions about the first section of the presentation.

I don't see any raised hands in the participant panel.

Please speak up if I'm missing you, Council colleagues.

I do have one question related to the Civilianization Report, and I apologize if you covered this already.

Do you have an estimated timeline for the Civilianization Report?

Yeah, I think we're hoping all of the reports called for by the IDT, from the IDT, from the EO, I think those will all be rolled into the final report, which we're hoping to have done by the end of May.

So you're making a distinction, it sounds like to me, between a report requested by the IDT versus are you making a distinction, I should say?

The council also asked for a civilianization report.

I'm sorry.

I'm conflating those two council member.

I'm sorry.

I misunderstood your question.

I believe that Director Noble has a number of provisos and slides and reports that he may be seeking extensions on.

I don't know if that's one of them or not.

But I know that there are a number of extensions for different reports and requests by council that will be made soon.

But I don't know if that's one of them.

Okay, thanks.

We'll have to follow up separately.

Appreciate that.

Okay, let's move on.

Much appreciated.

All right.

Thank you, Councilmember.

So just a quick update for everybody.

We continue to work on our initial size up of the operations and assessing our immediate needs.

So things included in this category would be looking at policies, dispatch type codes, call processing protocols, what questions are being asked, why we're doing it, and what is sent.

So we're trying to continue to understand the picture as it is now so that we can start looking with the direction for the future as far as how we can modify or what we can modify and I'll talk a little bit about kind of that direction towards the end here.

Yesterday we received great news.

We were able to get our ORI number.

The Ori number is the number that is given to us by the Department of Justice and the FBI that allows us to dispatch for police agencies, Seattle Police Department specifically.

So now we have our own independent Ori number and are getting ready to transfer all of our accounting stuff.

So that was a big, big success for us.

We are continuing to identify and hire temporary staff to help with the transition.

We have an interim deputy director helping me out to strategic advisor, and I think the last position that we're kind of looking for is some work to help us with strategic planning beyond just the initial transfer.

We continue to work on transferring the back end office support.

So this is moving a lot of the payroll, purchasing, finance, and whatnot to other city departments, moving it out of police department, trying to find new homes within the city to help support the new department with all of those important features.

We've started to work with the Seattle Police Officers, I'm sorry, with the Dispatchers Union, looking at the modifications that will need to be made to their current contract.

Even though it expires at the end of this year, with the separation from police, there will be some modifications that need to be had.

So we're starting to kind of ramp up negotiations and looking at MOU, MOA language, kind of out of sequence to help facilitate that relationship with the Dispatchers Guild.

Some upcoming items that we're continuing to work on.

We continue to analyze the staffing, our budget needs to continue the successful transition to an independent organization.

Again, continuing that work with Seattle Police Department as far as pulling the strings apart between the two departments.

on the finance and the budget.

As Julie mentioned, we're continuing to work on a What Works Cities Sprint.

This is kind of a quick size up to see what other cities around the nation are doing in regards to alternatives to policing, trying to gather up best practices around the country as far as how others have already gone before us in finding different ways to meet citizen needs.

that don't necessarily involve the response of a police officer, yet still meet citizens' needs.

So, so far, some good sessions, getting some good feedback on just alternatives or what's available out there to, you know, to kind of build the roadblocks to see what might work here in Seattle.

And then the last item that we have is last week, of course, Mayor's Office submitted legislation to Council on the parking enforcement transfer legislation.

So awaiting to see council's action on that.

And that's all I have for updates from the CSCC for right now.

Thank you so much.

And I just want to also really say that I appreciate your coming on, Interim Director Lombard, to do this really important work.

As it relates specifically to the participation of the Community Safety Communication Center in the What Works Cities Sprint, what is the vision that you have and the executive has for the role that your department will have in the development and potential, the potential implementation of an alternative to police dispatch.

At this point, council member, what we're trying to do is we're still kind of working on our size up, you know, so that we're not reinventing the wheel.

We're still trying to do size up as far as what are some best practices out there.

So we've been in the sprint.

We've been looking some of the key cities, Portland, Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, Denver, Colorado.

were three that came to mind as far as different types of response units, different types of networks that they have available.

So we're trying to find out, you know, just what works for them, pros, cons, if they had to do it over, what they would what they would do differently, trying to get budgeting numbers and to see kind of success rates.

So at this point, we're really still just what is out there and what are people doing and how successful is it right now to help us put together that plan.

Thank you.

And just one other question.

The slide says that the – it reads as if the securing of an OIRI number is pending, but I thought I heard you say that you had secured it.

Is that correct?

Just yesterday, so we were putting the slides together earlier this week and we found out just yesterday afternoon.

So that's an update from the slide.

Yes, we do the number yesterday.

That's that's fantastic news.

Any other any other questions from council members here?

Not seeing any.

Oh yes.

Yes, please.

I did.

Sorry for some reason.

Sometimes I have the raise the hand feature on zoom and sometimes I don't, so I apologize.

I know it's a little hard to see.

Yeah, share screen perfectly.

I don't have a question, I just I just wanna I just I just wanna encourage.

Some sort of more inclusive language as we're talking about.

these efforts.

And again, you know, this comes from my perspective of being somebody who came up through the immigrant rights movement and who is part of the immigrant and refugee community in our city.

I would really like to discourage sort of the use of the terminology citizen as we are talking about who we are delivering services to.

It really isn't just about I think it's really important for us to make sure that we're not just talking about people born in this country, but about everybody who resides, lives, and works in the City of Seattle is deserving of these public safety services.

And I realize that Director Lombardi didn't intend to use language that would exclude segments of our population, but I just think it's really important for us to make sure that we're using the most inclusive term.

our ordinances accordingly to strike the word citizens from many of our laws and replace those words with resident to be more reflective of the realities of our population here in the city.

Sure, thanks.

Good reminder.

Thank you.

One other point I would love to just flag, and Director Lombard, you and I have just discussed this.

I've discussed it with the mayor, but I do, as it relates to the work of the Community Safety and Communications Center, I I'm so excited that HealthONE has expanded to a second unit very recently.

It has been flagged for me by members of the public, as well as Seattle Fire Department and some of my colleagues on the council, that there's more work to be done as it relates specifically to dispatching health – mental health, behavioral health calls to Health One and Health Two.

And just want to say affirmatively for the public record that I'm really hopeful that we can find ways to expedite that work.

I know that the number of mental health calls, behavioral health calls that 911 takes far exceeds even the additional capacity of Health 1 and 2, and it will exceed the capacity of Health 3 when that other expansion occurs in August.

But we, I think, need to begin to have a conversation about which calls to divert from 911 with the understanding that we can't at this stage, divert them all.

Noted, yes.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just jumping in to riff a little bit off of your last comment, I do want to ask, as we're looking into these new response systems, one of the things in my personal research in this and talking to stakeholders in those other cities, like Eugene and Denver, is the back-end resource.

It's not so much the on-the-ground responder that we dispatch for the mental health call, for the intravenous drug use in the doorway, that has a different responder that's more suited to that public health.

It's having sufficient places where that person can then be diverted to to meet the underlying need.

And a lot of those systems are integrated into some kind of clinic, right?

Like the STAR program in Denver is integrated into, you know, sort of a version of the Downtown Emergency Service Center that they have.

And of course, CAHOOTS is integrated into the Whitebird Clinic.

So I sort of wonder as we're looking into this, are we identifying what the, uh, the backend resource, uh, would be required to make the first response effective?

Because I think we've spent a lot of time talking about these different responses, you know, like how the, how the teams are made up.

what the background and training will be, what their approach is to engaging with folks.

But I feel like we need to also be really intensely looking at our provider capacity, the institutions that we currently have to support those folks, how those response services will be integrated into a system like that, and have that really be a bigger part of the conversation.

Because I think we focus a lot on sort of the vehicle and the team that shows up and a little less on you know, how we're going to build the capacity for those other systems, which is, I think, frankly, our biggest deficiency.

We noticed that too, actually, Council Member, early in the sprint and in conversations with John Ehrenfeld with Seattle Fire and Julie, the three of us reached out and recognized, reached out to the hospital systems as well.

So we brought on representatives from the Swedish network and we've actually brought on Harborview as the local trauma center and access to some of the psychological help as well.

So yes, we actually noticed that too and brought on some of those entities into the sprint.

Great, but I look forward to the report back on that.

Thank you.

Yeah, Council Member, we've gotten a really warm reception from some of our health care partners, private and public health care partners, and wanting to collaborate in solutions here.

So we're pretty excited about that.

All right.

Great, let's move on, thank you.

Okay, I'll kick it over to Dr. Fisher here as just a quick overview of SPD's public safety obligations and to introduce Dr. Helfgott.

Thanks, Julie.

Thanks, Madam Chair.

So as Julie said, this just I'm not going to go through the slide, but just put it up there as a reminder of the overall charter obligation to provide adequate police services in every district of the city.

I don't think anyone needs a reminder, including with recent media coverage.

We continue to be working through how do we manage against an ever-increasing number of folks leaving the department and how we continue to provide all of these services people expect from us while we also do this work of thinking through what other resources could handle some of those asks from the community and also trying to make sure as we continue In these budget discussions that we are keeping our spending in line, but also making sure that we are able to support activities, especially as the city continues to reopen with us.

I think the great news from the CDC today that vaccinated individuals can be a little bit more.

free outside.

So just anticipating that to continue to speed up.

But I will I do think Dr. Helfkot is on and I believe Julie that her she is the next slide.

So we she was going to do a brief overview of the 2020 Seattle University Public Safety Survey.

Thank you Dr. Fisher.

So so you want me to just get started.

It sounds great.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate you being here with us.

Thanks for having me.

So as you know, we've been doing the Seattle Public Safety Survey every year since 2015. So Julie, are you just going to do the slides for me?

So yeah, you can go to the next slide and I'll just.

So I think probably most people know about this survey, but it's part of the micro community policing initiative.

We've done it since 2015. In between the surveys, we have been doing focus groups this year.

We're going to do community police dialogues from May through August.

And SPD has been Improving the public facing website ever since 2015 and the data driven unit now has a interactive public facing website where you can compare the survey findings from year to year.

So we can go to the, oh, and I should mention that the survey is focused on the geographical, the neighborhoods.

And so, and I don't know of any other survey of its kind that collects data at the micro-community level.

So it collects data within all 55 Seattle neighborhoods based on the idea that every neighborhood is unique in terms of their concerns about public safety.

So yeah, we can go to the next.

So we've been administering this survey in 11 languages every year.

You can see here the responses that we've had every year.

This year, we had the highest number of responses.

We actually had over 14,000 responses this year.

We only used the responses that identified the neighborhoods because it's focused on neighborhoods.

So this year, there are about 3,000 that we did not use because they didn't identify their neighborhoods, but we had 11,410.

This year also every year about 50% usually people offer narrative comments on our open ended question that we have at the end of the survey and this year over 60% provided the narrative comments.

So we have 6,000 over 6,000 narrative comments.

This slide you probably can't see, but in the reports, we have all the demographics and I will mention here that this is a the survey is a non probability survey.

So it's not a randomly sampled, but to deal with that, we statistically weight the responses.

So we always every year have more, say, white women in a certain mid range, middle age, age range.

But say if someone who is in the 20-something age range, who's a black male, participates in the survey, will statistically weight based on the demographics of the city.

And so that 20-year-old black male will have, his response will be weighted, whatever, three times or four times the people who we have way too many of.

we statistically weight based on all the different demographic variables.

So we feel very confident about the results of the survey in terms of being representative of the city given the large numbers of people that we have to respond in comparison to probability surveys that we've done that have been done in Seattle that usually have six to nine hundred or so people participating.

So we can go to the next slide.

So these are the top concerns.

And we have questions in this survey that ask people on dropdowns to identify their top concerns.

So these are the top public safety concerns.

divided up into the nine indices based on those concerns.

So for each year, we have the top concerns, which the data is quantitative in terms of they're just checking the top concerns.

And then we have the top themes, which you can go to the next slide.

So these are the top themes, and these are based on the narrative comments.

And we always have, in some cases, very long narrative comments.

And so our research assistants, our research analysts, our Seattle University students plow through all of the qualitative comments and identify themes.

So this year, we had 45 themes that were grouped into 15. theme indices and every year we look to the comments and so some years there might be new themes.

I think last year there were 42 themes, this year there are 45 themes.

So we can go to the next slide.

So these are the top concerns and top themes this year.

So the top five public safety concerns this year were police capacity, property crime, homelessness, drugs and alcohol, and community and public safety capacity.

And we did shorten the last few years, we used the term lack of police capacity, but we just shortened it to police capacity this year.

And the community and public safety capacity had to do with people saying things like, or identifying more social services where needed or more mental health services beyond law enforcement.

And then the I think the top most prominent themes in the narrative comments were city politics, public order crime, property crime, police capacity, and homelessness.

And so police capacity has been consistent over the last five years, been in the top two.

Public safety concerns about homelessness has been rising up.

I don't believe it was in the last or in the top public safety concerns in the past five years.

We've never had city politics in the top five narrative themes.

Of course, this year it rose to the top.

If you look at the scale responses, one of the other unique things about this survey is that we have the scales in the survey that measure aspects of quality of life in neighborhoods.

So we ask people to rate on a zero to 100 point scale.

on their sets of questions that are measuring these concepts of police legitimacy, social cohesion, informal social control, social disorganization, and fear of crime.

So this shows that the police legitimacy rating was 58.4 this year.

It was very, very slightly down from last year.

Informal social control was down from last year and social disorganization was a little bit up from last year, but otherwise they're relatively stable from last year.

And you can see the mean scale responses over time on the graph to the right.

We also ask about people's views of policing Seattle police and also the police in the United States generally.

And every year, Seattle police are rated a little bit higher than police in the United States.

So you can see the rating 53 in Seattle versus 50 on the 100 point scale in the United States generally.

So I can go to the next slide.

And if you have questions as I go, feel free to ask questions.

I just, this slide just shows citywide in comparison to the different precincts.

So of course, every year, different precincts have had different, slightly different concerns.

You know, if you look, say, at the East Precinct, police legitimacy was the top theme in the East Precinct, which was different than Seattle citywide.

If you look at the North Precinct, homelessness rose to the top of the top public safety concerns.

And homelessness was also one of the themes, as was city politics.

If you look at the South precinct, city politics was at the top, but violent crime was also one of the themes, which we didn't see in the top five in some of the other precincts.

We always, every year, traffic safety is in the top, usually in the top five in Southwest.

It continued to be in the top five this year.

And you can see in the west precinct homelessness was at the top.

So just shows some of the differences in the different precincts.

Can you just remind me, what is the difference between police capacity and community and public safety capacity?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So police capacity has to do with people saying, there's a number of dropdowns that people can select, like I want more police in the neighborhood or slow police response, want police to come faster.

So those would be the police capacity ones.

The community public safety capacity have to do with wanting more social, we need more social services in the neighborhoods, need more mental health services in the neighborhoods.

So not police, other social services in the city.

Thank you.

So we can go to the next slide.

I know I only have 10 minutes, so I'm going fast.

So this just shows that the different scale responses citywide.

So let me see what's the most notable here to mention.

I guess one of the most notable things to mention is the difference in the police legitimacy rating.

So, for example, if you look at East Precinct police legitimacy ratings, it was fifty point four on a Um, so the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the 100 point scale, if you look at West precinct, um, it's 64.7 on the, uh, Let's see.

So the other thing you might look at is just the social disorganization ratings, which range from the low of, what, 36 in the Southwest to the high of 51 in the West.

So it just gives you a way to look at these different scales with respect to different aspects of public safety across the city.

I don't see any other questions.

It looks like Councilmember Lewis may have a question.

There's some interesting things we saw based on demographics.

We are actually planning to do an academic article on the more deeper dive of these findings.

But we did find a linear relationship between age and ratings of police legitimacy.

If you take out the 90 plus, we only had about nine people in the 90 plus group.

But if you look between 20 to 89, that as a person gets older, the higher the ratings of police legitimacy.

So the people in the lower under 20 age category had the lowest rating of police legitimacy.

And we have the weighted and unweighted here.

But if you use the weighted, it's twenty three on a hundred point scale for people age.

under 20 as compared to the 80 to 89 group was 78.5.

So that's quite a big span of ratings of police legitimacy.

The other interesting finding here is that the BIPOC groups in the respondents in the survey rated police legitimacy higher than the white respondents.

And the range is the 57.5 for white respondents and if you look at black respondents African American black was 61.3.

And similar to the other BIPOC groups.

And then if you look at gender, the males rated police legitimacy higher, 63.2, as compared to females, 57.2.

And then the lowest was the transgender and people who didn't identify a gender, which was 36.2 and 40.9.

So you can go to the next.

So yeah, this just shows the different scale ratings over time.

So just a different way of looking at the different scale ratings by precincts.

And I don't need to go into this, but just this just gives an example of how the survey findings can be used.

So if you want, if the police department or any city official wanted to go into the survey and look at what's the difference between different neighborhoods in a precinct in terms of.

their perceptions of quality of life, their perceptions of top concerns.

So this shows two neighborhoods in the South Precinct, Hillman City and Soto, that had the lowest and the highest police legitimacy rating citywide in one precinct.

So Hillman City had the lowest rating of police legitimacy at 36.2.

And Soto had the highest at 77.8.

So it's just interesting to see just the differences across the different neighborhoods within one precinct.

And similarly, they have differences in terms of the top concerns and the prominent themes.

So you can go to the next one.

I don't know if you want me to go into this, the differences.

Do we have time?

We can stop here if you do want me to keep going.

If you've got another slide.

Yeah, I have a few more slides.

These are just examples.

So this is an example of social disorganization ratings, which gives a good idea about how people feel about their surroundings and graffiti and open-air drug activity.

So the social, the lowest social disorganization rating in the city was Sandpoint.

And the highest social disorganization in the city was Pioneer Square.

And so you can look at that in relation also to the top concerns and themes, which in Sandpoint was of top concern, police capacity, property crime in Pioneer Square.

talk concerns, homelessness, and public order crime.

And then, so yeah, you can go to the next slide.

So this is the informal social control.

Informal social control has to do with the degree to which people are willing to call the police or join a block watch, you know, be a block watch captain and, you know, take responsibility for what's going on in their neighborhood.

So these are the lowest and highest ratings of social, informal social control.

So Pioneer Square, 27.6 as compared to Magnolia, which is 57.3.

And again, you can look at that in relation to the top concerns and the top themes where again, homelessness, public order, crime associated with sort of an unwillingness or maybe a feeling of helplessness of not, you know, doing anything, taking ownership to do anything about it as compared to.

In a community like our neighborhood, like Magnolia, where their top concerns are police capacity and city politics.

Okay, we can go to the next one.

Social cohesion has to do with the degree to which people feel they know their neighbors and they have a tight community.

The lowest ratings of social cohesion were in Soto at 39, highest was in Um, so that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's Oh, so I did want to highlight.

So we're doing this year something different than we've done before.

As I said before, we've done focus groups every year in between the administration of the survey.

We've done the focus groups just so we have a more real time way of collecting information about people's concerns.

But this year we wanted to do dialogues.

We've had people in the community ask in the past, can we have police at these meetings?

to talk about the, you know, the survey results and to talk about our concerns.

So this year we're doing a reach out for the community and a reach out internally to SPD for volunteers to participate in these community police dialogues.

And the idea is to do them with a restorative framework where there can be dialogue regarding the findings in the survey specifically, but also if other people have, if people have real time issues that they want to discuss with the police.

So, so yeah, and then I just wanted to do a shout out to all the research assistants.

You know, we have every year this five, six graduate and undergraduate research analysts who work on this project.

We've had 29 research analysts to date who have participated as you know doing the research on this project and most of them and now that they when they graduate they've gone into law enforcement with SPD, FBI, other agencies locally so I just wanted to thank them for all their work And this year we had Caitlin Yip, Alex Dvorsky, Sarah Loveness, Rachel Deckard, and Jane Park.

So yeah, that's it.

And if you have any questions, I think the next slide has my contact information and also my colleague, Dr. Will Parkin, he and I do the survey together every year with the research analysts.

So yeah, if there are any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Perfect.

Thank you so much for this overview and I really appreciate your the presentation.

Councilmember Lewis?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to ask a clarification.

If we go back and look at the themes, like the themes people were responding to, if you can go back in the slide deck, go back.

I should remember what slide it was on.

Yeah, I guess here.

So the city politics theme, like, what does that exactly entail?

Is that sort of just like a narrative of like, you know, we can't get along as a council and a mayor or is that like, you know, like, what does that mean when people are saying that when it comes up in here?

Is it just like a general perception of dysfunction or?

It's actually did ratings drill down.

We had, um, sub sub theme subcodes where we had, um, like, for example, I mean, people called out City Council.

People call out people by name, and we don't, of course, have any of that deep dive in this, but we code.

We actually had City Council positive, City Council negative.

It was overwhelmingly negative on this, and we just put anybody that said anything about city politics were obstructing public safety.

And we have gotten that every year, some of that, but this year it was a lot.

more than we've seen before and some people you know had very long responses.

So it was anything where whether they said the city council or they said other city politicians or if they generally said politics and we're getting in the way of public safety.

All right thanks for clarifying that.

On that note, sir, I remember that there was a mention that, and I might be wrong, so correct me if I am, that you saw more evidence of the survey being shared on social media this year than in past years.

Is that true?

And are there any outcomes that you speculate might have resulted from that?

No, I don't think it was any more than, I don't know that I said that we've done the same outreach every year where our RA's do administration, survey administration through all the precincts, including social media, Facebook, but the one thing that's different this year is I was actually I'm not good at the Twitter, but I have Twitter and I was tagged and contacted directly by, actually called and tagged and contacted directly by some people involved in the protest, you know, pro-defunding.

And we're spreading the survey around on social media.

So that was, and there was nothing different on our end.

We always try to improve our outreach through all different social media.

but there was active, you know, was, is it tagging?

Is it adding me?

I don't know what it's, but there was people that were, you know, actively talking about it in social media.

So that's helpful to understand.

Thank you.

And I'd say on both sides, it wasn't, you know, it was on both sides.

Right.

Right.

And that was that was my my question is whether or not the distribution of the survey on social media, not by yourselves, but by other actors, whether or not there was any attempt to evaluate the impact of that on the the the outcomes of the survey.

We were concerned that somebody would want to try to bot the survey, have a whole bunch of people take it.

And so we are able to go in and we can see if the same person.

So we did a lot of cross-checking on that.

And because of the number and the nature of the narrative comments, we can have a high degree of confidence in the people that we kept in, in the responses that are kept in and the ones that were kicked out.

So if the same person with the same number responded to the survey and they didn't have any comments, we can see when someone tries to take it over and over again, I guess is what I'm saying.

So yes, the answer to your question was yes, we're able to see that.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales, I see you raise your hand.

Yeah, I'm interested in learning a little bit more about your engagement process.

You mentioned a couple of times that you consistently have more white women taking the survey, which seems to me a reason to change up the way you do outreach.

If you're not, if you're not, you know, getting a more more representative or more diverse response.

So can you, you mentioned social media, but can you talk about other ways in which you are trying to get folks to engage with this survey?

Yeah, sure.

And we do change it every year.

I mean, we try to improve it every year.

And we've done everything from, you know, reaching out to, we didn't this year, we did that a little bit differently.

But we've even done paper flyers out to the Seattle Public Schools that go out to all the parents.

We do the survey administration.

We couldn't this year because of COVID, but we did contact the Downtown Emergency Service Center and ask them to get the word out through the unhoused persons.

But we've actually administered the survey in Downtown Emergency Service Center in Southwest Precinct and downtown.

We plaster the flyers citywide.

We have little business cards and flyers and we're out at dog parks, Starbucks, the Seattle Public Library.

But given with COVID this year, we did plaster the flyers.

Uh, we, we had even a more elaborate reach out plan on the email list.

So we, uh, nursing homes, the shag homes, we all the different community organization, uh, uh, community, um, uh, centers.

And so we, it's a, it's a very elaborate reach out, um, email list and, uh, social media lists for each.

precinct.

So, you know, one of the issues with the white, more white women, I mean, I think more white women completes, I mean, in a middle age range, complete surveys in general.

It's not just our survey.

And we've done everything we possibly can to do that outreach, including the languages.

And so, yeah, I mean, I agree.

We would love to continue to improve on the outreach.

Um, we also the, of course, the, our areas go to the different, you know, the African American advisory councils, the different community council meetings.

So we've gone before to the not this time group to reach out and.

And so we try, that's the responsibility of the RA in each precinct to identify community groups from all different communities within each community to try to get the word out on the survey.

The RAs will go, and I've many times gone to speak in groups.

We try to get the word out through the media, different media outlets.

So that's, yeah.

And you mentioned as well that you will be doing a paper on one of my questions was on how disaggregated by race and age.

These results are so will you can you talk about when you will be making that available.

Well, you know, takes quite a while to get from start to finish to get the article published.

But yeah, we're working right now to try.

I think that's we have several articles that get to a deeper dive on the, you know, the findings that we were also thinking of doing an article on the.

responses on the protest versus the defunding issue just because that really rose to the top this year and all the comments but probably from I don't know when it will be published but we're working on it right now and we should have the actual article done over the next few months but then the publication process will probably take a few months.

Thank you.

I mentioned that this is an annual survey and appreciate the work that goes into this every year.

I have in past years and will likely do so again this year, promote the outcomes.

I also let readers of my newsletter know about the survey tool as you're doing the work out in the field.

But I'm just interested to understand, again, given that this is an annual survey and that this has been identified for us today as an input to the city's work around identifying functions for non-uniformed policing as part of this sort of the broader reducing the footprint of the police department and the other tasks in the interdepartmental team executive order.

How does this information fit into that?

And maybe that's a question for Julie.

Yeah, I think that's a question for myself, potentially, or Dr. Fisher.

And I think it all feeds into our sort of basic understanding that public opinion is not a monolith.

It does vary by neighborhood.

It varies within neighborhoods.

I think we are probably not formal, well, We obviously this survey has significant value, but it's only one piece of the community engagement that we're doing.

And next up will be Sunny who will walk us through other aspects of community engagement surrounding this work.

But I think the longevity of this survey and the number of years they've been doing it and its reach is super helpful for us in understanding you know, what different aspects of the neighborhood perceive as primary issues.

That will be important in our analysis of, you know, ultimately, you know, what types of alternate response models we should be exploring.

So I think and where they should be placed or where they should be concentrated.

Thank you.

I'm not seeing any further questions from council members, so yes, let's move on to Sunny.

Okay, Sunny, let me get to your slide here.

Awesome, all right.

So I'll start by agreeing with what Julie just said, that we have all of this great sources of data that are coming in, including some of the neighborhood public safety surveys, like the CID, Ballard, Soto have their own annual public safety surveys that we're also considering in this engagement work.

But the main goals of our engagement for this specific IDT process was one, to demystify SPD's budget, and I won't just read the slides to you, you have that information there, but also to really talk specifically about SPD, because there's already a lot of great work going on about what to stand up outside of SPD and how do we expand our community safety network.

So we wanted to make sure that we weren't undermining that research and that work and really focusing in on the department itself.

So we'll move to the next slide.

And so we're doing that in a few different ways.

So the first thing that we started doing was reaching out to our city boards and commissions.

These are folks that council and the exec have worked to put into our city system to give us this exact kind of feedback, right?

So we met with the 10 boards and commissions.

And the major themes that we got from those conversations are that, well, first one was, that as we move things out of SPD, we really need to make sure that they are being set up for success and that we're not just doing budget magic, right?

We're not just saying, we're taking the dollars from SPD's dysfunction to put somewhere else, but that we're actually re-imagining them as we do that to make sure that we are creating deep change.

And that several commissions mentioned that they wanted officers trained further in cultural competency and humility, disabilities, and non-violent tactics of de-escalation, and that they wanted to see the types of training that they're receiving shift, that they want to see like community-led training as well as that like professional training that SPD already receives.

And finally, remove SPD's presence in the navigation team, which the council did great work on already.

Next slide.

We've also been conducting a lot of listening sessions and focus groups.

So some of the ones that we've done are listed on the left, but I want to name that this work is not done yet, and I don't think there is a point where we can say, like, we've done enough outreach on a conversation like this, right?

So we're going to keep doing listening sessions and focus groups and communication up until we submit that final report.

And even after that, we're going to need, as a city, to keep those conversations moving as well, of course.

But our major themes from the different community listening sessions that we've had so far is that folks are concerned about, again, that the transfer of civilian units and making sure that we're not building additional bureaucracy that damages the efficacy, but that we're really setting them up for success again, and that they wanted to see opportunities for those new entries into the community safety system to collaborate with SPD's current system and how they choose, so that we're really building integrative community safety networks and not distinctly parallel, like this is the SPD track and this is the social work track, but that these systems are working together to really build up a true community safety system.

And just to finish off, like I said, we have to keep continuing this work beyond the final report, of course, but we're going to keep doing some more listening sessions, particularly with some of our labor partners, And as you know, we're waiting on some expert reports to come through, and we really want to make sure that we're bringing that to the community as well, right?

Part of the RSGI principles that we're incorporating into our work is that we're coming back to the conversation over and over again with our community partners as new information comes to light for us.

So that's a quick down and dirty on the community engagement that we've been doing so far.

Thank you, Sunny.

I'm looking to see whether or not I have any virtual hands or real hands raised here.

Not seeing any.

So this is, again, this is really, really helpful.

Do we have a wrap up here?

Let me unmute myself.

We do.

And I know that council has seen this as well.

Already, but just a reminder, these are some of the national partners we're working with when it comes to functional analysis and looking at new models of community safety.

And then we included a few slides just for awareness.

I know Council is well aware, as many Councilors are involved, in the What Works City Sprint that we're participating in, which is an eight-week program where it sort of walks us through and helps to facilitate the City in exploring alternate emergency response models and what might work for Seattle using lessons learned and information from other cities.

We have a very broad cohort in the city of Seattle.

A lot of people interested in being involved in this conversation.

This is a non-exhaustive list.

We have added additional members to the Seattle cohort, meaning the folks that call in for each of these sessions.

And this is a sort of a, just a general overview of what all the different sessions are.

Um, and, and that's the wrap up.

So, uh, I will stop there and we're available to answer any questions pertaining to anything on here.

Great, thank you.

I just want to thank you for making it possible for so many of not just internal stakeholders to participate in the What Works City Sprint, but also our external partners.

I'm finding as a participant that it is, that there are a lot of, for the other cities, There are a lot of voices external to government that are participating, and it's really important that we hear their perspectives in other cities and in our own as well.

So I think that was, you know, going broad is super useful to, I think, our end product.

Just looking to see whether or not there are any other questions.

I see none.

So again, thank you so much.

Thank you for having us, Council Member Herbold.

And let us, once our IDT report is finalized, we'll be happy to come back and walk through that with you.

Look forward to it.

Thank you.

Will the clerk please read agenda item number two into the record?

Agenda item number two, Seattle Police Department quarterly finance and staffing reports.

Thank you very much.

So we have with us Greg Doss and Allie Panucci of Council Central Staff.

The Council has made ongoing budget requests to SPD, and after consulting with Central Staff quarterly reports, to be the most productive approach for updating council members.

Many of these reports are reports that we receive monthly, and so really appreciate the work of Greg Doss and Ellie Panucci in finding a way to transmit that information to us in a way that is efficient and hopefully will be effective to our efforts to scrutinize the Seattle Police Department budget.

So before I turn it over, I just want to, again, opening remark that the 2021 Seattle Police Department hiring plan is fully funded in the budget that is adopted by the council in November.

Just, again, as this discussion is, I think, I think it's really important as a level setting effort that again, Turn it over to Greg.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning and good morning committee members.

As our chair just said, I will be presenting to you the quarter one SPD budget and staffing report.

And there is a lot of information.

We've got about 25 slides.

I'm going to try to go through it as quickly as I can, but it's in some ways kind of data intensive.

And so I'd ask that you jump up and either virtually or just verbally, let me know if you have a question because I may not be able to see it.

And so, Ali, would you mind flipping to the first slide?

So we're gonna cover four areas today.

Each one of these areas is guided by a council statement of legislative intent.

I'm gonna go over them quickly here.

The first one, SPD-001A-003 is on financial reporting.

The council had requested monthly financial reports that were quite extensive, went over various budget categories and also on excess pay.

Excess pay, meaning pay that is received over $150,000 and a request for pretty much every single expenditure that SPD makes.

And we're going to go into a number of these data today.

We will not be going into excess pay reporting because we're mostly focusing on the first quarter.

We're not getting to the point where many folks in SPD will be approaching $150,000 in compensation.

With the exception of command staff and some civilians, it's the case where overtime plays into compensation for officers.

And we're awfully early in the year to be able to tell how that's progressing.

So that one we're not going to touch on today.

We're not going to touch too deeply on every single financial expenditure.

There are well over a thousand.

in the first quarter.

What I would mention is that council members have voiced some interest in expenditures that are being made around, I will say, body armor, weapons, things that might be classified as militarization.

There is a demilitarization slide response that the department will be sending in the next month, and hopefully that will cover many of the questions about SPD's expenditures in those areas.

And if it does not, then that's something that the committee can dive into later.

But given all the things we have to cover today, we're not going to move into that area.

The second thing we will cover will be use of overtime.

And the third thing we will cover will be staffing.

And when we go into staffing, we're going to go all the way down into the precinct staffing and 911 response.

And then the fourth thing we're going to cover is going to be response time.

And as well as response time, we're going to be looking at priority call responses.

way that SPD is trying to triage, if you will, its 911 responses so that they can, as best as they can, maintain quality 911 response times.

So if there are any questions on that slide and what we'll be covering, please shout out.

Otherwise, I will move in to the presentation.

Okay.

So we're going to start out with finance monitoring.

And we'll start out with the biggest expenditures.

Council members are probably used to hearing me talk about how the budget is pretty much all salary benefits, overtime, and allocated costs.

And so here again is a reminder that that is pretty much the case.

What this slide is showing is the largest expenditures, those three.

And then it is showing the difference between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. And as you can see at sort of a high level, spending has gone down by about 11% from last year, which is fairly significant.

The other big picture takeaway from this slide is that overtime has halved.

It was about 8% of expenditures this time last year, and this year it is 4%.

There is, of course, a pandemic going on now that was not going on in January and February of last year.

And so that is some of the reason that that piece has gone down, but it's not the only reason.

And so as we dive a little deeper into overtime later on, you'll see that.

So we'll go ahead and move on to the next slide.

So the next slide is basically the larger expenditures and how they are looking against budget.

So what you're seeing here is on this left-hand side of the screen, the 2020 adopted budget at Q1.

And on the right-hand side of the screen, you're seeing 2021. And so this gives you a picture of what the department is spending in these areas, and then also how that's measuring up against the budget.

And what I would note is that It would be really easy to say, well, this is a quarterly budget.

Therefore, everything that the department is spending right now should be about 25% of their total budgets.

Not necessarily true with SPD for two reasons.

The first is that a lot of SPD's work is seasonal.

And so when we talk about overtime, Overtime is not something that they should really be at 25% of at this point in time of the year, because that's something that really bulks up over the summertime.

And then even something as similar or as simple as salary and benefits, you would think salary and benefits would be something that would be easily divisible by four for 25%.

But in this case, not true.

The city's pay cycles are such that through March, actually, we would expect that SPD would have spent about 27% of its budget on salary and benefits.

And so why is that important?

Because the fact that they've only spent 25% of their budget on salary and benefits shows that there is salary savings.

And as we get further into the, into the presentation, we're going to be talking about that salary savings.

And so, as I said earlier, just the last thing on this slide is that, as you can see, that overtime is about half of what it was last year.

And if there are no questions on this slide, I will keep motoring through.

Okay.

So the next slide shows, at a high level, all of the other expenditures that SPD is making throughout the year.

And here again, we're talking about a very low percentage of the budgets.

The big three categories making up 96% or 97% of expenditures.

Here we're talking about everything else being a whopping 3% or 4% of expenditures.

Here we have a variety of categories that I think the council is mostly familiar with from the budget exercises last summer, but I'll hit them at a high level.

What you see before you is services, consultant, legal, and other is the second category.

Well, I'll go ahead and start with separation pay.

Separation pay is exactly what you think it is.

It is the pay that the department provides to officers who have separated or are leaving service.

This is compensation that the officers are owed when their vacation is paid out or comp time is paid out.

And as I think most folks are aware, there have been a large number of officers that have left the department recently.

And that's why you can see the difference between Q1 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021. Separation pay is a significant expenditure for the department at this point in time.

So, and we will be diving into that as well.

But really quickly on the other categories, just to refresh everyone's memory, the services consultant legal and other category, that orange category, Those are mostly contracts for service that SPD has, the largest one being the city's red light cameras, and that's well over half of that entire category.

The other charges, which is the one at the very bottom, that's the green category, that pays for things like building rentals, such as the OPA office or evidence warehouse.

It also pays for things like fuel.

The entire budget for other charges, not very big.

It's about 1.2% of the entire adopted budget.

So again, not a large area.

Discretionary purchases is that light blue area.

Discretionary purchases is pretty much everything else.

Discretionary purchase is used to buy uniforms, guns, office supplies.

Even water that is supplied to officers when they're working special events.

Here again, that particular slice of the entire budget is really small.

It's a little over a percent.

And then travel and training is pretty much just what it sounds like.

That one is budgeted at about $900,000 for the entire year, so less than 1%.

So if there are any questions on that, please let me know.

And I will move on to the next slide.

OK, let's move on to the next slide.

So what you're seeing here is a breakdown of how those expenditures look against the budget.

Again, on the left-hand side, you see Q1 of 2020. And the right is Q1 of 2021. Separation pay, not so good.

Separation pay was budgeted this year at $898,000.

And as you can see, the separation pay through the first quarter is already up to 1.5 million.

That's the only area that is running over budget.

Everything else is relatively under budget.

Capital is a bit of an anomaly.

Capital is expenditures.

around things like IT, you would think an agency like SPD doesn't have any capital, and that's largely true.

We're talking about $6,000 of things that just get categorized as IT or other things that might fall into a capital description but aren't, you know, brick and mortar.

But as you see the other areas, discretionary purchases, other charges, pretty much everything is down compared to 2020. One of the reasons that that's significant, not just is it down numerically, as you can see, say discretionary purchases is is down eight hundred and seventy six.

It's at eight hundred seventy six thousand.

Last year it was nine hundred and eighty one thousand.

So it's down numerically.

You know, what's important to note here is that these categories received many of them reductions in the adopted budget.

So the fact that SPD is running under budgets, they're running under a budget that was reduced.

And so that is their attempt to be good fiscal stewards.

So if there are no questions on that one, I'm going a lot faster than I thought I was going to.

Let's move to overtime.

All right, so as I discussed a moment ago, overtime spending is down considerably in 2021. It's about half of what it was last year.

In this chart, what you can see is the first quarter of 2021 compared with the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020. And these are the smaller overtime expenditure areas.

And here we're measuring in hours, not in dollars.

And what you can see is that, once again, overtime is down, as you would expect, in just about every single area.

It is disproportionately down in some areas like criminal investigations.

You can see when comparing against 2019 or 2020, it's like half, a little more than half way down.

You can see that against the miscellaneous category in 2021 and 2020, it is tiny.

I think there was a question during public testimony about what's in that miscellaneous category.

And what's in the miscellaneous category here in the presentation, not a lot.

There are emphasis patrols, which the city had funded at a higher level in 2020. And the department used a lot of emphasis hours in 2020 in the first quarter because that's when the shooting happened on Pike and Pine in the Pike and Pine area.

And so that's why that green 2020 bar is so high.

And this year in the 2021 budget, Emphasis patrols were largely defunded and so there's not really any spending or use of hours there.

Other categories in miscellaneous are, say, mayor security and then court.

And both of those are relatively small categories compared to all the other overtime categories.

So, hopefully, that demystifies a bit what's in that miscellaneous category.

Thank you.

I do have one other question that was prompted from public comment to get you anticipating the question about the miscellaneous category.

There was a comment about the SPD overtime during the first quarter of 2021 compared to 2020 and 2019 in the chart regarding the categories that are lower, specifically events, which includes demonstrations.

And the public comment noted that the first quarter of 2020 was before large-scale protests.

Can you provide a little context for this and what we can expect to see in future quarterly reports?

Yeah.

So, let's go ahead and move to that slide then.

That's the next one.

And so what you're seeing here is overtime hours broken down by or three categories that are actually typically larger, but these are particularly interesting because these are areas that are affected by the pandemic.

These are areas that are of council interest, as you mentioned.

of spending or of use of hours around demonstrations.

And so I think what you're talking about, Council Member Herbold, is the middle area that says events, including Seattle Center.

And what's notable about this is that the department classifies these hours as events, but they include demonstration expenditures.

And so what you're seeing here is that in 2021, there were hours used for demonstrations and not for events.

There were obviously in 2021 no events that SPD had to staff because of the pandemic.

But that gray bar pretty much exclusively represents represents demonstrations.

There were, I think, $17,000 or so was spent for a snow event.

But all in all, that area was for demonstrations.

And it adds up to, I believe, about $345,000, that gray bar.

Is that getting at your question?

Absolutely is.

Thank you.

Okay.

So the other thing that I would point out about overtime hours in these three areas is that patrol operations is up in 2021. That is the only area of overtime spending or overtime use, in this case hours, that is up anywhere in the department.

It was also quite high last year.

As it turns out, 911 response across these three years, 2019, 2020, and 2021, the number of officers doesn't change a lot.

And we're going to get into that a little bit later.

But deployable staff, meaning the number of folks that show up and can be deployed, Um, that is something that is a little different these days than, than in prior years.

And so that may be partially what's driving that, that overtime use there.

And it may also be other factors, um, that, uh, standards that there is that the department is putting into place.

That's, uh, something we'll get into a little bit later.

So I move on please.

All right.

So SPD staffing.

Okay.

So, um, SPD does not provide projections anymore in its staffing reports.

Historically, SPD has provided staffing reports that show actuals to date, and then they project anywhere between one to two years out.

And historically, it's been pretty predictable about how many folks would come into SPD, be hired in, and how many folks would separate.

That is not at all predictable now.

It is something that the department feels very uncomfortable about projecting.

And so they are at this point sending to the council only actuals.

Greg, is that for both new hires and separations that they're not doing projections?

It is.

It is for both.

Can you remind me that if they're not projecting separations upon what is the separation pay budget based on?

I would have to answer that for you later.

My speculation, and I'll reserve the right for the department to correct me, is that it's based on historical levels of separation.

But that's something that I will get back to you on.

Thank you.

Without the department providing any projections, it's difficult to know how the staffing picture will look throughout the year.

In the past, the council has asked central staff to do its best job to do some predicting about how staffing will look, and that is what I have done again.

I have put together a staffing plan that assumes Actuals, or it doesn't assume it, it reflects actuals from January through March, the first quarter.

And then going forward from April to December, I make assumptions about hires and separations.

Specifically, I'm assuming that there are going to be about eight hires per month.

That is consistent with some of the higher levels of staffing hiring that we've seen in the last couple of years, particularly 2019 comes to mind, eight hires per month would be originally consistent with what the department thought it was going to be able to do this year.

get into a little bit more detail on that later.

The forecast that I'm putting out there also assumes that there are going to be an average of about nine separations per month.

That is a little bit higher than what we have seen in SPD in the past.

When I say in the past, I mean pre-summer 2020. Usually officers left somewhere around the pace of about seven per month.

Of course now, as we know, in the fall and as you'll see continuing into the first quarter, they're leaving it well more than twice that rate.

And so we'll get into that a little bit later, but the average of nine separations per month that was picked and the average of eight hires per month that was picked for my assumptions reflect the council's staffing plan, which council member Herbold said is fully funded.

That is described in SPD 025B002.

their hiring plan completely funded.

And so I just took the completely funded hiring plan and I subbed in the actuals for the first three months and made projections from there.

Hopefully that makes sense.

So move on to the next slide.

So looking at the first quarter, what it means that I took actuals and I sub that in is that there were 52 trained officers that left in the first quarter and there were 58 total separations.

The difference between the 58 and the 52 are that some officers that were in training or some recruits dropped out.

And so that's that's why we see some difference there.

But we're seeing a total separations of 58. So when we talk about seven per month or nine per month, obviously, you can see in the big picture context, when we're talking about 58 in three months, obviously nine is low and seven is very low in terms of historic averages.

On the hiring side, you can see that there were 30 hires made in the first quarter.

That is because there were a number of folks that were either hired or in the hiring process.

And last year in the fall when the academy shut down due to the pandemic or over the summer and SPD stopped hiring, they sort of banked a number of those recruits.

And by doing so, in January, when they started hiring again and sending to the academy, they had a bit of a backlog.

And there were 21 folks that were ready to go.

They organized with the Washington State Training Academy a Seattle-only class and sent all 21. At the time that the forecast was being put together, the council forecast and the forecast that central staff did, we knew that those 21 were going to happen in January.

And so they were assumed in the hiring plan.

Nothing significant there.

And as you can see in the lines, I think you've seen this graph before.

The top one is fully trained officers, and there you're seeing the number of officers that could be deployed because they have exited the student officer ranks and can answer 911 calls on their own.

The second line you're seeing is officers in service.

Those are the number of officers that can be deployed, and the difference are able to be deployed.

And the difference between the two is that there were about 118 on average over the first quarter officers that were out on long-term leave, either a disability leave, an administrative leave, a family leave.

And so those 110 officers that were out are not deployable.

And so when the department is looking to figure out what its street strength is, if you will, it's going to look more to that gray line than it is to the blue line.

So I'll ask if there's any questions on that before I move on.

Okay, so I'll go ahead.

That number of officers is decreasing.

the number of officers who are fully trained but not in service?

It went from 1094 to 1090, so it got a little worse in Q1, but the department, this is an area that the department is giving us projections on, and so they are- Oh, I see.

That's projected out to the fourth quarter.

Yeah, so as we move from the first quarter all the way into the fourth quarter, you'll see that that number will get a little better.

There will be fewer officers out on disability leave or administrative leave.

That is the department's belief.

And that projection is based on their knowledge of the amount of time officers are out?

Yeah, pretty much.

OK.

Yes, that's it.

So they know officer A is going to be out for a month and officer B is going to be out for three months.

And so they are able to provide this projection based on some actual information about the individual instances of officers taking leave.

Yeah.

And they provide some of that data to us.

We know that there are about 30 percent, 29 percent that are out on workers comp issues.

There's about 45% that are out on sort of a general category of a sick or accrued benefits, and there's about 18% that are out on administrative leave.

So to the extent that they know when those particular kinds of leaves will end, that they can predict or project how that in-service line is going to look.

Thank you.

All right, moving along.

Go to the next slide on SPD staffing and so what does all this mean from a money perspective.

Obviously, it is probably big news that 58 officers left in the first quarter.

It does have quite the financial impact on the departments.

What it means is that at the very highest level, the average annual FTE, which is the funding for officers, student officers, recruits, every sworn or near term sworn, soon to be sworn officer is in that line.

It was originally funded at 1343 in the adopted budget.

It is, if you look at the central staff estimate, again, assuming about nine folks will leave per month for the rest of the year, and assuming that there will be about eight hires for the rest of the year per month, then we would expect that the FTE, average annual FTE is going to get down to about 1251. So that is about 92 positions fewer than are funded in the adopted budget.

When I say positions, I say FTE.

It's about 92 FTE fewer than are funded in the adopted budget.

So what that means is that if the projections that I've made are accurate, at the end of the year, the department will have about $13 million in salary savings.

If you wanted to take a really conservative look and you go back to historical separations and you say, okay, maybe it's going to be seven per month instead of the nine average that I'm projecting, then you can lower that salary savings down to about $11.5 million.

I thought I would provide a range to give folks.

an idea about how the money would work between assuming seven separations or nine separations as the analysis assumes.

If we wind up in this situation, the city, then at the end of the year, you'll find fully trained officers at 1,176.

Officers in service will be at 1,110.

Both those numbers are on that graph you just saw.

And as projected out, the hiring will wind up being 102 officers, not 114. The department was only able to hire four officers in each of the last two months in terms of new recruits.

So they're running behind.

I'm probably not going to make the 114, unless they exceed my projection of eight per month and they might.

There's a possibility they could bring in a lot of laterals and and do that.

But it would be.

It wouldn't be something that the department had done before.

Their highest level of recruitment was 105 in 2019. So it would be difficult for them to exceed that without really changing the way that they're doing hiring.

And then my assumed separations, given the 58 that are showing in Q1 and the nine that I assume on average throughout the rest of the year, we could see 142 separations by the end of the year.

So I'll ask if there's any questions on that.

And of course, here again, I want to emphasize that the council funded 114 hires.

And so if the agency is able to do that, the money is there.

In fact, the money is more than there, given the number of separations that they have seen in the first quarter.

All right.

Chair Herbold, I think Council Member Morales may have a question.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ali.

So I just want to reiterate what I think you said, Greg, which is that while this slide at first glance looks like there's $13 million in salary savings due to separations, That's assuming that the rate of separations and new hires continues through the year.

So that's what would accrue by year end.

That's not available right now.

That is correct.

That is what would accrue by year end.

That is not available right now.

And I think what we would have to see is that the separations would have to really go down.

To reach nine per month, because as I say, there were 58 in total, um, 52 fully trained officers, 58 in total for the first, um, three months.

So it's gotta go down, um, you know, from almost 20 down to nine, um, to be able to, uh, and if it doesn't, if it stays at the levels it's at now, then, um, you're going to see more than 13 million, uh, by the end of the year.

Okay.

So move along and show what this might mean on the ground.

So now we'll talk a little bit about precinct staffing.

And you've seen this table many times.

This is basically 911 officers broken down by the various precincts.

Citywide is a category that the department is using to sort of fill in where additional officers are needed in these various precincts.

What's important about this particular slide, and I'll get into this a little bit more in a moment, is that you really only see 911 officers here.

You can see that there are three other categories, BEAT, Seattle Center, and Station Master.

Seattle Center and Station Master, I would consider more security or support roles.

Beats, you've got 11 officers here.

What you're not seeing here is the anti-crime team or the community police team.

Historically, there were in this table 34 anti-crime team officers, 28 community police team officers, And that beat number was at about 51. And when I say historically, I mean, if you look back at the beginning of 2020, you'd see those officers.

And of course, what happened is as officers started separating, the chief had to move folks from those specialty sort of proactive positions into 911 response to be able to keep 911 response times down.

So go ahead and flip to the next slide.

This gives you some perspective for what I'm talking about.

What you see here is on the left-hand side, the dates.

These are point in time, August 2020. September 2020, December and March over basically the last six months or so.

And the next column, total precinct staffing, this is a column that represents what was there, everything in terms of 911 officers, precincts, support, CPT, ACT, everything is in that number.

So if you're looking at the first column here, which you can see is that the total precinct staffing was 677. And of that number, there were 495 officers that were responding to 911 calls.

And there were 68 sergeants that were supervising those officers that were responding to 911 calls.

And so what you see as we start to move through time into September, December and March, is that the precinct staffing number is is going down, the 9-1-1 officer number is generally holding fairly constant.

There was a massive bump between August and September, and that is when the chief transferred in all of those CPT act and support officers into 9-1-1 response.

And some about 17 officers from outside of precinct support.

And so that beefed up that number to 591, which is the highest that 9-1-1 response has been in a long time.

It has, for the last year and a half, been more at the 495. In fact, it goes back down to 466. if you look at 2019 when we're talking about officers for 911 response.

So the chief bumped it up to 591. And what that had the effect of doing was to provide more resource for 911 calls.

But then as the attrition started happening from September moving forward, officers started leaving the department and that started to affect recent staffing.

So as that happened, you can see the precinct number starts going down.

The chief is doing his best to hold 9-1-1 response officers at about the 500 level.

And as we reach March 2021, you can see that pretty much the only thing that's left of total precinct staffing is the 9-1-1 response.

So I know that's a lot of information.

I'm going to stop and ask for questions.

I have a question here.

Is there a correlation or do we know if there's a correlation?

Is it possible to know whether or not the attrition since September is attributable to the transfer from specialty units into 9-1-1?

Is there a higher percentage, for instance, of officers that have left that are officers that have been transferred?

That isn't something I know.

It's something I'll ask the department and get back to you on.

They have been keeping track of some of that information, so I'll get back to you and let you know.

My recollection is that it was a mix of older and newer officers, that it wasn't necessarily all experienced officers that were leaving.

And so it is likely that some of the folks that left were actually in 911 response or non-specialty patrol.

But I will let you know more later.

Any other questions on that?

Okay.

So how is this translating into service?

Priority call responses.

Priority call handling, I think you've heard a little bit about from the department.

This is a situation where SPD believes that it is, it doesn't have sufficient staffing levels to be able to answer all 911 calls, and so a commander makes the decision that they're going to prioritize or to emphasize calls and to tell some folks that they're not going to come out, that they're going to come out at a later time, or that callers, more specifically, callers should call back at a later time.

And so, you know, what I would highlight here is if you look at the description on the right-hand side, starting at about number three, communications will not dispatch to narcotic activity, burglar alarms, priority three or priority four calls, or calls that require only an officer to show up for a report.

If someone calls 911 for those things, then they'll be under number four, they'll be told to call back at another time when staffing can be present.

And so, the, the department keeps track of the number of times that these things happen.

And the graph on the left shows that the number of times that they've had to go to priority response has been increasing.

One thing I should note is that the 2021 number is a year to date number.

It is not first quarter.

It is through April 22nd.

The other thing I would note is that it would not be accurate to take that number and just do a straight line projection with it throughout the year.

and try to estimate what would happen at the end of 2021. And that's because 911 calls and a lot of the work that SPD does is seasonal.

And obviously we're at their quieter time of the year, if you will.

Quietest probably being through the holidays, I'd have to ask Dr. Fisher, but anyways, point being, you can't take the 84 and just figure out what remaining days are and do the math and find the number there.

Okay, move on.

And what you're seeing here is the 911 response times that the department has provided.

As you can see, it went up by, all response times have gone up since 2019, with the exception, I believe, of South, and that went slightly down.

from 2020 to 2021 in the first quarter.

This is apples to apples, so we're only looking at Q1 of this year compared with Q1 of 2020 and 2019. But other than that, these calls have generally gone up across the board and everything is up on priority two.

context, the goal for priority one is seven minutes, and I believe for priority two, is it 15?

Priority two is totally escaping me.

I'm going to have to get back to you on that one.

I believe you're correct on, it had been seven minutes, yes, on priority one.

I will get back to you on both of those.

Thank you.

So the next thing I want to cover now that we're through most of the reports that SPD sent is the provisos that the council has enacted on SPD.

The reason this being important is because this affects SPD's finances and their ability to use their budgets as the council provisos restrict.

The budget for a number of different purposes and I'm just going to remind the committee of what those restrictions are.

Start with slide number 20. As you can see, the first proviso here is the out of order layoff proviso.

This particular proviso is $2.5 million.

And the idea here was that this money is being held out of SPD's budget.

They cannot spend the appropriation until authorized by a future ordinance.

And the idea being that the city is pursuing a potential of having officers who have been accused of misconduct and found sustained misconduct, potentially having those officers be prioritized for a layoff.

That is something that is, if it ultimately doesn't come to fruition, will be something that the council could consider restoring that $2.5 million.

The second one is a salary savings proviso.

The council rightly anticipated that due to the number of folks that were separating from SPD that there would be salary savings.

And so there is a proviso that holds $5 million that says that that money can't be spent until future ordinance.

And that the council established an intent in that proviso to transfer some funding to finance general so that it could be used for participatory budgeting.

You'll see the last line of that proviso says, as any such transfer or transfers are made, the council will adjust accordingly the spending restriction imposed by that proviso.

and so that's another five million dollars that the department has to not plan on having.

And then switch to the number three which is a harbor patrol proviso.

This was just holding 550,000 aside.

The council prioritized a report on what harbor functions might be transferable either to the fire department or the new community safety and communication center.

As long as that report is submitted to the council, hopefully by the due date of May 24th, then the council could consider restoring that money into SPD's budget.

The last one is the travel and training provisional, and that one holds up about 700,000 of funding for travel and training.

What's notable there is that the entire travel and training budget is only about 900,000 so that's holding a large chunk of the travel and training budget.

When I say travel and training, I should note this isn't training for de-escalation or officer skills.

That kind of training is in professional standards.

This is more professional or certification kind of training, including the kinds of things that civilians might go to or certification things that officers might go to, but not the kind of training that is mandated by the consent decree.

That stuff is all in a different area.

And so as long as the department submits the report on travel and training, then this one will self-release.

The council will not have to act again.

Hopefully that happens soon.

The report was supposed to be due on March 31st.

I think that the mayor's office in the last presentation said that that was coming soon.

So, the Travel Training Proviso self-releases, but the Harbor Patrol Proviso requires action by the council?

Correct.

And the Salary Savings Proviso, the $5 million Salary Savings Proviso, can you remind me how we propose to address that in the budget reduction bill that we've been discussing in committee?

In the amendment that you proposed, Chair, and that the committee voted to replace the original bill, I should note that that amendment hasn't been voted out yet, but that amendment would essentially release the salary savings proviso It does require that the department send, continue to send staffing reports, but it would essentially release the $5 million hold, as long as the department sent staffing reports.

Pending the continuation of the sending of the staffing reports.

That's correct.

Okay, thank you.

And so, summarize, key takeaways.

The first one seems obvious.

Staffing is a challenge.

I went into a bit of detail with the precincts because I wanted to point out that the biggest change there has been that SPD has lost its proactive patrol positions.

9-1-1 response has not changed a lot, as you can see in the data, but ACT and CPT have been pretty much eliminated.

Beat officers that were at about 51 are now down to 11. The department would say that the staffing challenges are contributing to priority call handling occurrences, those being trending upwards, and as we know, the higher separations continue.

Nearly every category of overtime and discretionary spending is down compared to 2020. I think we know that the exceptions are patrol augmentation and separation pay.

What's notable, I think, is that everything else is down in many cases numerically, meaning spending was less than fewer dollars than last year.

I think as the council knows, the budget was also lower.

And so in many instances, the percentage spending as a percentage of budget is also down.

So this is the department is doing what they can to be good fiscal stewards and adhere to the council's budget.

Number three, salary savings may reach $13 million.

We talked fairly extensively about the assumptions that central staff have made that would require getting to or would would have to come to fruition to be able to get to $13 million in 2021. I would note that the department has said that the salary savings is something that they would like to rely on for fixing the separation pay budget issue, some new civilian positions that they're interested in and in technology investments, all of which are recognized and would be funded with salary savings under the amendment that the Public Safety Committee has chosen to substitute for Council Bill 119981. and the city council has also indicated an interest in recouping some of those salary savings for participatory budgeting, that also would happen under that amendment that I just spoke to.

And then lastly, the provisos that I went through are holding about 8.5 million of expenditure authority that the department would ultimately need to have restored if they were to be able to use their entire budget.

So I have covered a lot.

With that, I'll ask if there are any questions.

I am not seeing virtual hands or real hands.

This is very helpful and timely as context, I think, for considering the SPD budget reduction bill that aims to both align with our commitment to reducing 2021 dollars to address the overspend of overtime in 2020, but also working to fund the shared priorities that council has with SPD for some of these salary savings.

And so I think this is, even though we had to pause in the deliberations of that bill because of the need to allow the monitor to receive responses, to the questions it had asked of SPD.

The use of this analysis during the time of that pause I think is going to serve us well when we take that bill back up again.

So with that, I say thanks again.

Thank you.

And I really appreciate it.

Clerk, can you please read the final item into the agenda?

Next, agenda item number three, Human Services Department update on Safe and Thriving Communities and Victim Advocate Transfer.

Thank you so much, Alex.

I really appreciate being joined here by the Human Services Department.

I want to maybe ask Amy, did you want to do a quick intro to orient us to the presentation?

Absolutely.

Good afternoon, Council Members.

My name is Amy Gore from Council's Central Staff.

The final item on the agenda is a presentation on the Safe and Thriving Communities Division at the Human Services Department.

You'll recall that this is a new division that was established in the 2021 budget.

As mentioned earlier today, this division includes community safety programs and the Mayor's Office on Domestic Violence.

which have been traditionally housed in the Human Services Department, as well as the Crime Victims Advocates and Victim Support Team, which were transferred to HSD from Seattle Police.

Today, the HSD is going to speak to the new division and the status of those transfers.

And with that, I will transfer, or sorry, I will turn it over to Tanya Kim.

Thank you.

And I'm assuming that Lily is going to pull up the slide deck.

Great, and so I'm Tonya Kim, Interim Deputy Director of the Human Services Department.

Hi, and I'm Dana Lockhart, Manager of the Crime Survivor Services Unit in the Human Services Department.

Great, thank you.

So I'm going to, I know that we are short on time, and so forgive me if I'm rushing through some items.

Always happy to come back.

Today we are going to provide an overview of HSD's Safe and Thriving Communities Division and then Dana, my colleague you just met, will do a deeper dive on the Crime Survivor Services Unit that was transferred over to us from the Seattle Police Department.

Next.

And one more.

Okay, HSD has four divisions.

We have our Leadership and Administration, Aging and Disability Services, Youth and Family Empowerment, and Homelessness Strategy and Investments, of course, which is transitioning over to the Regional Homelessness Authority.

The new Safe and Thriving Communities Division consolidates HSD's existing safety efforts and includes the Crime Survivor Services Unit.

There'll be approximately 30 staff And like other divisions within HSD, it'll function as a funder, a direct service provider, and a convener.

We're in the process of standing at the division.

And one of the first orders of business is hiring our division director.

And that posting is live.

And we hope to have the position, the person, in place at the end of May, if not June.

Next.

There are three distinct units.

Within the safety division and the first being community safety investments, which is responsible for the request for proposals and contracts with community based organizations.

Who support youth adults and families harmed by the criminal legal system.

And so you'll see our community safety investments in that unit.

We have our mayor's office on domestic violence and sexual assault, who serves as a funder and a convener.

They focus on gender-based violence services and support survivors who are at risk of gender-based violence with community-based services to support and maintain their safety.

And MODVSA also leads the coordination of the city's response to gender-based violence.

And then finally, we have the crime survivor services Unit, which my colleague Dana will describe later on in this presentation.

briefly wanted to highlight the contracts that we will have in the division.

Oh, yes.

I'm sorry, I just had a question.

As it relates to your description of the community safety investments, it says that they support youth, adults, and families harmed by the criminal legal system through various supports and services.

And we've talked about these investments.

This is an area where we've, the council together with the executive have worked to increase these investments.

But doesn't this category also include investments meant to create safety before exposure to the criminal legal system as well?

Yes, if the outcomes of the performance measures are tied to community safety, yes.

But, you know, with the Human Services Department, we also have the Youth and Family Empowerment Division, and that's really going upstream and creating those conditions of well-being.

And so, you know, youth development and, you know, food, food and nutrition, et cetera, that's in that division.

And so, it just depends on what you mean by before.

And so, moving to the next slide, I did want to give a quick preview of The contracts that do exist, and this might help articulate it a little bit with a finer point too, is that in the community safety, it's in that unit that you're pointing out to a council member is about $22 million of investments.

And that does include the recent council ads.

And it also includes the active community safety capacity building RFP that's in progress.

And we'll circle back.

and give a presentation on that once that RFP is done.

And there is about $9.4 million in gender-based violence there.

And so together, those will be the investments that we have within the division.

And so with that, we want to do a deeper dive on the Crime Survivor Services Unit.

And I'm going to reintroduce Dana to take over.

I lost my mute button.

Thank you.

And now I've lost my notes.

Oh, darn it.

Too many.

Too many screens.

Too many screens.

Too many screens.

And now it's locked behind my notes.

I apologize.

I'm going to look up one more thing.

Here we go.

Thank you, Tanya.

So the creation of the Crime Survivors crime survivor services unit does align with the city of Seattle's commitment to reimagine public safety.

As you know, council passed legislation in August of last year that transferred all of the victim advocacy services out of the Seattle Police Department.

Our unit serves crime survivors of 11 different person to person crime types.

That is domestic violence, elder abuse, sexual assault, child abuse, internet crimes against children, commercial sexual exploitation of children, human trafficking, robbery, hate crimes, assault, and homicide.

And while we are creating a singular unit for all victim advocacy services, it is our intent to continue to maintain specialized professional expertise in the specific complex trauma needs of each crime type.

Crime victim advocates will remain co-located within the investigative units within the Seattle Police Department, and they will also be working closely with the King County Prosecutor's Office.

And this co-location is important to ensure that survivors of crime are met with a trauma-informed, survivor-centered response early on in the criminal investigation process.

Their voices and their wishes are heard at all stages of the investigation and the criminal proceedings and their rights as crime survivors are protected.

Next slide.

As previously mentioned, Crime Survivor Services is really two programs.

So the first program is the Victim Support Team.

This is made up of roughly 60 community volunteers that provides a mobile trauma response.

advocacy and crisis intervention.

The BST volunteer teams respond primarily on the weekends to domestic violence calls and sexual assault crime scenes, and this is at the request of patrol officers.

They provide a response that meets the emergency needs of these crime survivors following the traumatic event.

BST was designed to address this gap in services that occur primarily on the weekends when domestic violence calls are happening the most frequently.

And then also community services are hardest to access during that time as well.

What they provide is transportation.

They help locate emergency shelters.

They can provide some emergency services such as food and baby needs and clothing.

and they do extensive community resource referral, really providing that bridge to more sustainable community services.

They also spend quite a bit of time answering questions and helping to navigate the criminal justice system and offer extensive safety planning as well.

And then we have a staff advocate during the week who provides case management to address the survivor's basic needs, as well as coordination across multiple systems.

Next slide.

And then our second program are the Crime Victim Advocates, and we have nine staff who have come over from SPD.

They are responsible for ensuring that the Washington State statutory obligations are met related to timely notifications to crime victims and also upholding the Crime Victims Bill of Rights.

All of the advocates are responsible for providing the required services to crime survivors, ensuring that the statutory obligations are met, as I said.

And they accompany victims to defense interviews and court hearings and speak on behalf of the victims when asked to do so.

So they are often the ones that are reading the victim impact statement on behalf of that victim while in court.

These advocates provide ongoing safety planning for survivors of coercive control through the length of the trial process.

which, as most of you know, are quite extensive, especially this past year with the courts being closed.

They also assist with mitigating the impact of the crime, such as helping to file crime victims' compensation forms and claims and assisting with bereavement arrangements with family members of homicide victims.

They also advocate on behalf of the survivors for workplace and tenants' rights.

and assisting with securing alternate care for providers of elder abuse survivors, as well as connecting crime survivors with restorative healing services and or counseling.

That is it for me.

Any questions?

I have a question about the volunteer program of the volunteers.

Has there been an assessment of whether or not that number of volunteers has the capacity to meet the need, just as numbers of people, and then also an assessment of whether or not The cohort of volunteers, given its demographic makeup, is capable of delivering culturally relevant survivor services.

I'm concerned about relying on a volunteer cohort.

And I know because in instances where the city wants a different representation, typically this is for community engagement processes, not not working to volunteer in this fashion, but we've provided stipends out of recognition that you get a different population of people to participate because not everybody that you want to participate can afford to volunteer.

And so I'm just wondering if that sort of analysis has been done with this particular volunteer cohort.

I just want to make sure that the people who, I mean, I obviously value everybody's service, their public service as a volunteer, but I also want to make sure that the demographic composition of that volunteer cohort is able to deliver culturally relevant services.

Sure, thank you.

You asked a couple of questions and I want to make sure that I answer all of them.

The first one was whether we are really meeting the needs during that window of time.

I will say that our efforts are, as I stated earlier, really trying to bridge the gap in services.

And that can't be done with just our program.

It really can't.

We are partnering with community programs that do serve specific populations.

We are really trying to connect them to services that are more sustainable.

It is that emergency response.

And then it also is by nature at the discretion of the patrol officers to utilize our services.

And so the quick answer is yes, The quick answer is no.

We probably are not meeting the needs of everyone who could utilize those services on the weekends.

And so we're always trying to increase our utilization by going to roll call trainings to promote the use of the program with patrol officers, because it is that discretion.

And so we're working to increase that.

And I will say, too, over the last year, the volunteers have been furloughed.

because of the restrictions, the public health restrictions.

So we haven't been able to get the volunteers in the field.

So there's been huge gaps in services there that we're really trying to figure out how to bring them back quickly and be more responsive.

The other part you mentioned is just what are we doing to make sure that we are representational in the communities that we're serving.

And, you know, that is always something that we're working towards.

I can recognize that we, we are not currently representational as a volunteer pool of about 60 community volunteers.

but that is a priority of ours.

We are using the RSGI toolkits that the city provides to ensure that we are working with the different community groups that we're referring to, as well as the communities that we're serving to identify how we can provide additional diversity and representation on our volunteer team.

But that said, we are just one one really point in a much broader network of service providers, and so they can't do it all.

It is really, really important that we do continue to collaborate and partner with those community programs, and that I do support those community programs receiving funding.

I think you bring up an interesting point, though.

We'll take it back to our department.

I think with the transfer over of this unit into HSD.

And you know, HSD, Race and Social Justice Initiative is very much at the forefront of the work that we're doing.

And our staff are extremely diverse.

And we do have direct services throughout the whole department as well.

And so, you know, process improvement, especially making sure that we're grounded in community and lifting You know, our representation is really important to us, and so we'll definitely take your feedback into our work.

Thank you.

And then one other question that, you know, your answer to my first question jogged for me.

How would we, if we wanted to, analyze SPD's voluntary use of the victim advocates?

If there is a feeling that perhaps they're not being deployed as often as they can be, and that's anecdotal, is there data that we could seek to either confirm or dispute that?

I think that the utilization of our program is something that I've worked on for many years.

will say that where we are possibly seeing a reduction in use of calling us out on scene, We're trying to close gaps in other ways.

So the benefit of having this partnership and access to Seattle Police Department and their records is that we can do a deeper dive on calls that we're not getting called to on scene.

And for instance, like out of custody cases where we're gonna see that they're not gonna get assigned a detective or that they're not gonna get assigned a system-based advocate.

We're gonna try to fill that gap later on, maybe even just the next day by reaching out to that survivor of that crime and providing those services otherwise.

So we're really trying to get more creative about how we can reach out to folks who need our services that are not being called out to the scene with the volunteers on the weekend.

And that's where our staff advocate really comes in.

Thank you, so we could request information from HSD about the number of times that you went out, both with the officer and times that you didn't go out with, but you followed up the next day.

And we could, that is a report that we could fill?

Yes, I do keep that information, yeah.

Okay, all right, thank you.

I'm not seeing any other questions or hands.

Is that the conclusion of the report?

It is.

Great.

I guess just one other question, Tanya.

We had talked about the fact that you are working on finalizing an MOU with the Seattle Police Department.

Can you, just so folks understand the complexity associated with this transfer, can you talk a little bit about the areas that this MOU is going to cover?

Yes, Dana can speak to that.

I can definitely.

So with this transition, an interdepartmental agreement was created, and this defines the coordination and also outlines matters related to business requirements and specific job duties of each employee.

So it establishes a plan for ongoing case assignments for the staff, the use of equipment, the continued access to secure law enforcement facilities, secure databases and police records.

So this is currently now being routed for signatures.

Great.

All right.

That's great news.

I've been checking in on the status of that a little bit here and there.

And last time, I did not know that you were at the stage.

So that's good news to receive in a committee briefing.

So thank you again.

I'm not hearing or seeing any other questions or comments.

No virtual raised hands.

I know actual raised hands.

So really appreciate your flexibility with our long agenda.

Appreciate all the work that you're doing.

And Council President Gonzales, I'm seeing you're coming on screen.

Are you coming on screen to say hello and goodbye, or do you have a question?

No, I was just I also wanted to express my my deep appreciation and gratitude to the team for a good presentation.

I was taking lots of notes and really appreciate again all of the hard work.

This is a difficult space to work within and I really appreciate the tenacity and the thoroughness of the team.

So thank you all for that work.

Alright.

Fantastic, well again, appreciate your time, your work, and your flexibility with our length of our agenda today.

And the next Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for May 11th.

Before we adjourn, if there are any comments from my colleagues or closing remarks, this is the time to make them.

And if not, we are adjourned.

Thank you.

It is 1227.