Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee Session I 7/8/20

Councilmember Gonzales?

Here.

Councilmember Herbold?

Here.

Councilmember Juarez?

Here.

Councilmember Lewis?

Present.

Councilmember Morales?

Here.

Councilmember Peterson?

Here.

Councilmember Sawant?

Here.

Councilmember Strauss?

Present.

Chair Mosqueda?

Here.

That's nine present.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Well, good morning, everybody.

Thank you again for tuning in to the Select Budget Committee.

Today, again, we have a morning session and an afternoon session.

Our morning session is going to be focused on the SPD budget inquest that we launched a few weeks ago.

The second session at 2 p.m.

this afternoon will focus on the CBO or the city budget's office presentation of the mayor's proposed 2020 rebalancing package.

At 4 p.m.

we will have a public hearing.

This will allow for folks to have ample time to participate in our public process who might not be able to participate during the day time due to schedules and conflicts.

We are going to have public comment right now at 10 a.m.

And then we will not have a 2 p.m.

public comment because we will have a 4 p.m.

public hearing.

For our council colleagues, if you're able to participate in that public hearing, that's great.

We also understand that as it gets into the evening hours, many people also have conflicts as well.

So we welcome anybody who's able to join us.

And if you're not able to, again, it will be recorded on TVW.

Again, that public hearing starts at 4 p.m.

today.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

At this time, we will open remote public comment period, and I ask that everyone be patient as we continue to operate with the new system in real time.

We're continuously looking for ways to fine tune the process, and in doing so, we are adjusting times.

Today, we will have one minute for individuals to speak, and I believe in looking at the list of folks who are signed up to speak, we should be able to get through everyone this morning within about a half an hour time period.

The public comment today was going to be divided into two parts, as I mentioned, again, 10 a.m.

right now, and those who would like to participate in the public hearing will participate at 4 p.m.

The online registration for the 4 p.m.

public hearing opens at 2 p.m.

At this time, we are going to have public comment for the next half an hour, and again, one minute to speak.

I will call on three speakers at a time in the order in which they have signed up with preference given to Seattle residents, and then if time permits, the remaining speakers.

If you have not yet registered to speak, but you'd like to, you are still welcome to do so by going to Seattle.gov backslash council.

The council link is also published on today's agenda.

Once I call the speaker's name, the staff will unmute the appropriate microphone and an automatic prompt if you have been unmuted will be your cue to begin speaking.

After you've begun speaking, you will hear 10 seconds when you have additional, that means that you only have 10 seconds additional time.

Please wrap up your comments and make sure that you get your last word in so that your comments are not cut off.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you disconnect from the line and if you plan to continue watching, you can do so via Seattle Channel or the other options listed on the agenda.

The public comment period is now open, it is 10.05, and we will go to 10.35.

The first three people that we have listed are Josh Castle, Derek Bonifield.

Josh, welcome.

Thank you, council members for your vote on progressive revenue, and special thanks to council members Sawant, Morales, and Mosqueda on your leadership, especially to move this past the finish line.

and to the many hundreds of community advocates and organizations who testified, rallied, and marched to make this happen.

This is a monumental achievement and will make a huge difference in many lives.

In your discussions today, I urge you to reject austerity and non-SBD budget cuts.

We have the ability as a city to pay for the things we need to if the political will is there, which it was in that big vote on Monday.

With similar bold action by council to reallocate at least half of the massive SBD budget, we can avoid cuts in other areas, and actually increase investment in programs that help communities thrive.

Progressive revenue and redirecting many millions from the SPD can then be invested into black and brown communities and the community-based investment called for in the Central Area Housing Plan to combat racism, displacement, and gentrification.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Josh.

The next three speakers are Derek Bonnefile, Teresa Homan, and Anonymous, who works with the homeless.

Derek, welcome.

Seattle.

I'm calling today.

Hi, my name is Derek Bonifilia and I'm a resident of Green Lake in District 6 and a member of Sunrise Movement Seattle.

I'm calling today in support of the demands from the local uprising and from decriminalized Seattle.

The first demand is defund SPD by at least 50%.

On this note, even if you've been using your position as a council member to praise protesters or criticize SPD, if you haven't yet committed yourself to defunding SPD by at least 50%, You're not supporting the movement, you're obstructing it.

People aren't out on the streets demanding platitudes.

People are demanding commitment, accountability, and most importantly, action.

The second demand is invest that money into Black communities, decriminalize Seattle and King County equity now.

But for the plan to do this, and I urge you all to commit to making this plan a reality, the investments they've laid out include One, replace current 9-1-1 operations with a civilian-controlled system.

Two, scale up community-led solutions.

Three, fund a community-created roadmap to life without policing.

And four, invest in housing for all.

And the third demand is to drop all charges against all protesters.

No one should be criminalized for standing up to injustice.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next, we have Teresa.

Good morning, Teresa.

We're asking that you, oh, my name is Teresa Homan.

We thank you for the progressive tax and for your support of our tiny house villages.

We're asking that you use some of the COVID-19 relief funding to build more tiny house villages.

As you know, they are an immediate solution to homelessness.

We can build them quickly and they give people a place to pause, breathe, heal, and begin taking steps toward a better life and permanent housing.

Thank you.

Thank you, Teresa.

Anonymous?

Folks from IT, we still have Teresa live.

If we can go to anonymous.

OK, the next three people are going to be anonymous, then Jim Krieger, and then Real Be Free.

Anonymous?

Good morning.

I am speaking anonymously because I don't expect my employer to understand the position.

I support the call to immediately defund SPD by 50 percent and reinvest in real community health and safety because I work with the homeless.

And my work calls the police for certain levels of conflict.

Once there was an incident my boss called about but the person didn't stay for them to show up.

When the police arrived, they questioned someone else saying he fit the description and even though multiple people said he wasn't involved, they ran his info and took him in on a couple warrants.

What was his crime?

Standing in the wrong window?

It didn't undo what he had warrants for.

All it did was interrupt his new job, jail him during the time he was supposed to get the keys to his new apartment and force him into rehab despite not being an active user before sending him back onto the streets.

I wish we didn't call the cops in the first place because it doesn't actually solve conflict between the participants.

I think peer mediators would be a better choice.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for your time.

Jim, welcome.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Good morning and thank you.

I'm Jim Krieger, clinical professor of public health and medicine at University of Washington.

First, I want to thank the council for its recent progressive actions, specifically passing the Jumpstart Tax.

Now the budget provides an opportunity to address a fundamental issue affecting our communities, police violence.

Police violence is a health inequity.

We need to get the police off the streets unless they're absolutely needed so they can do no harm, and replace them with skilled and trained community members in community-based organizations.

Common sense, community wisdom, and public health evidence all show that putting community health workers, peacekeepers, mental health counselors, and others is an effective way to address the immediate needs of people and connect people to longer-term support.

Therefore, I hope the council will defund the police by 50%, demilitarize the police, and use this to increase funding for community-led efforts for community safety and health, invest in affordable housing, and replace the current 911 operations with a civilian-run system.

Thank you very much for considering these comments, and good luck with your work.

Hey, thank you so much.

A real welcome.

Hello.

You can call me Mr. Befree like the protesters should be.

And I want to encourage council to vote for the participatory budget process proposed by Decriminalize Seattle to defund the police and invest in and bolster community-owned built-based and centered solutions.

I have an example of a time where as an educator in Rainier Beach I called the we had someone call 911 for a medical support request.

But because of the neighborhood, instead of sending medical support, they sent seven armed cops.

My community does not feel safe with police.

We do not want more police.

And as Ella Baker said, in order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, The system under which we now exist has to be radically changed.

And it means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs by devising means which you change that system.

If the city pretends to care about racial equity, be radical, defund police, free all the protesters and all political prisoners.

Thank you, Mr. Befree.

The next three people are Enrique Comfey, Laura Kramer, and Alain Musse.

Enrique, good morning.

Thank you for having me in this meeting.

Regardless of where we stand about how much the police need to be defunded, I think we all agree that any defunding efforts primarily need to target the officers who have been found to engage in misconduct.

The good officers who have a clean record should be the ones who suffer least from any defunding efforts.

What I mean by this is that the best way of saving money and doing so in a just fashion is by levying financial penalties for officer misconduct.

For example, officers should get a 15% pay cut for the year if they violate a policy.

Violations that result in firing or if they are convicted of a violent criminal offense should result in the loss of an officer's pension.

In addition to saving the city money, this strategy will make the bad officers take the current disciplinary process more seriously.

Currently, the police do not take the disciplinary process seriously because their contracts make it difficult to levy any effective punishment for misconduct.

Thank you very much.

If you'd like to send the rest of your comments, we'd welcome that.

Thank you, Enrique.

Laura, welcome.

Hello.

Thank you for taking my comments.

As evidenced by others that have shared, countless incidents of escalation of violence have happened when police are called to intervene.

and we know that incremental police reform has failed.

We know a better solution would be to more effectively address underlying factors that create dis-ease in our communities, such as poverty, mental health injury, intimate partner violence, addiction, and houselessness.

We can envision a city where there is a holistic model of public health and safety that actually keeps citizens safe and promotes healing.

As a trauma therapist, it's clear to me that asking police officers without sufficient training to respond to high-intensity situations puts unmanageable stress on them and puts them to respond reactively which contributes to escalation criminalization of mental injury and poverty and as we know exacerbates the likelihood that implicit and explicitly held racism and biases will come through their actions.

Diversity training and de-escalation training are to undo the centuries of white supremacy that live in all of us.

Under stress our nervous system kicks into reactivity and we will come through our most primitive and unconsciously held beliefs.

We can do better.

We can equip responders with instead.

Laura thank you so much.

If you would like to send in the rest of your comments that'd be welcome as well.

Yen Bryans Alina Musse and then Evelyn Chow.

Yen welcome.

Thank you.

I am calling because I believe that this 5 percent defunding was not enough.

City needs to defund SPD by 50%.

It receives a lot more, you know, like more than 25 of its lowest funded departments combined.

So I think that the money that we defund should go to social services and more community-led ways of approaching violence and the disparate ways that, you know, threatening our Black and Brown communities.

That's all I have to say.

We appreciate your time this morning.

Thank you.

Ayan Musse.

Good morning.

It's Ayan Musse.

And I'll I'm going to make it real short and sweet.

I stand with Dee Crim.

I really truly truly do not believe change will happen.

unless we take away 50 percent of police money and reinvest it in community.

This is not a punishment.

This is the reality of where we are at.

This should have happened decades ago.

Unfortunately, it did not.

So, taking away law enforcement's retirement fund, this, that and the other, is not the answer.

It is taking away 50% of that money and reinvesting it right back in our communities.

There are community solutions.

People have to be open to it.

We have to start imagining the world without law enforcement.

I will respectfully respect the time and give it on to the next person.

Thank you very much.

Evelyn, welcome.

Hi, good morning.

Hi, good morning, Council.

My name is Evelyn Chow, and I'm testifying on behalf of Real Change as an organizer in the Advocacy Department.

I'd like to voice our strong support for the community-led participatory budget proposal that's going to be put forth by the Decriminalize Seattle Coalition.

Of the four parts, I'll focus on the last, which is using part of the money from defunding SPD to invest in sustainable housing solutions.

This should include the creation of individual housing units, as well as tiny house villages and public housing, and emergency rental assistance.

Black Lives Matter must mean investing in the well-being of Black folks and their right to housing.

We've been in a state of emergency with regard to housing in the City of Seattle for over five years and we just saw a 5 percent increase in this year's one night count.

It's time for Seattle City Council to prioritize true public safety and start decriminalizing poverty and I hope that our council members will support the decrim Seattle demands and community-based budget proposal.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Devon.

O'Donnell.

Abolinis, and Miranda Vargas.

Devin, welcome.

Hello, my name is Devin O'Donnell.

I'm from District 5. I stand with King County Equity now in Deacon, Seattle.

The reality is in June, overtime for police was paid out at $6.2 million.

That includes overtime for the 50 cops that went to a suite.

This shouldn't have happened because these people are being hurt.

Like, homeless folks do not deserve to have to deal with police brutality in the middle of a pandemic trying to survive.

Number two, their community attorneys are locking people up with felony charges that they drop at the last possible second.

This prevents people from bailing them out.

This holds people for as long as possible.

This is criminal.

This is fucked up.

They're just trying to keep people jailed until the moment where they have their court case and then it's dropped.

Number three, seven weeks ago, SPD murdered a black person and no information has been dropped.

No, like completely dropped.

They have not followed up with any sort of like information requests, any sort of reporting, any sort of filing.

And it's been seven weeks.

Defunding should fire all police with brutality charges, including seniority.

This is the problem.

If you just defund police without a targeted means to stop the brutality, it fails.

We must...

Thank you very much.

Thales, welcome.

Hello.

Thank you for your time.

And I want to thank the council for focusing on the important issues confronting our city and our nation with regard to police brutality.

I would ask that you please move deliberately, but also very thoughtfully.

These are very important issues that involve public safety.

And as we rush to look at ways to defund the police, we must also look at ways to make our police stronger and more community oriented.

And this would include some issues that might not necessarily be supported by 50% cuts.

policy analyses take time and we should listen to black law enforcement entities and agencies and experts who might have ways that we can build our police into a more community-oriented force focused on community policing.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Miranda, welcome.

Hi, I'm Miranda Vargas.

I'm a public health service provider in Seattle and supporter of Decrim Seattle and King County Equity Now Coalition and their demands to divest from Seattle Police Department by 50% and reinvest in community solutions.

As a public health professional, there is substantial evidence that shows police harm public health.

They don't help it.

and what increases public health is social connection and community-driven initiatives.

Right now, you have the opportunity to be a part of this visionary future, and I urge you to do so today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Howard, Gail?

Hi, this is Howard Gale from Queen Anne.

Fundamental to re-evaluating the police is re-evaluating and defunding our police accountability agencies.

The CPC, the OPA, and the OIG, these accountability agencies have completely failed to provide accountability or even to ask critical questions.

For example, about the most recent SPD murders of Ryan Smith on Queen Anne and the unnamed African American killed by the SPD in May.

Further, none of these police accountability agencies have held public forums.

Most notably, the CPC has avoided any public meeting for over five years.

Having half of an abusive police force is not the answer we need.

We need full accountability in addition to cutting the police budget.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The next three are Andy Nguyen, Marcia, sorry, Mariah Marshall and Robert Gretsch.

Andy, welcome.

Hi, my name is Andy Nguyen.

I'm a resident of District 2, a medical student and graduate of the Masters of Public Health program at UW, in support of the demands brought forth by Decriminalize Seattle.

Common response to defunding the police is, what do we do with the rapists and the murderers?

I've come to see these issues as fundamentally problems of relationships.

The police don't just literally kill people.

They destroy trusting relationships in society.

Through my training, I completed a policy analysis on sexual violence prevention.

and the effect of mandatory reporting, which heavily links the health care system to policing in the cultural system.

Evidence shows that about 65 percent of women noted mandatory reporting makes them less likely to disclose abuse to a doctor or nurse.

Eighty-two percent of women said reports made the situation worse or had no impact.

Incarceration and isolation of people who sexually abuse is a major factor in reoffending, and then exposes those people to custody, in custody, to violence, rape and death.

Mandatory reporting reproduces a fundamental harm of abuse, the loss of autonomy.

I can't help my patients if they're afraid to be honest with me, and that's because the police are looming over us.

We have to invest in preventative services, not...

Thank you very much.

Folks, I am really going to try to get us through everybody today.

We have about 10 more minutes in public testimony.

I'm going to go to 45 seconds to try to get as many people in as possible.

Just wanted to make sure folks knew that.

Mariah, thank you in advance.

Please go ahead.

Is this for me, Maria Marco?

So sorry Maria.

Yes.

Go ahead.

My apologies.

No worries.

I strongly thank you.

I strongly support the aims and efforts of decriminalize Seattle.

I'd like to draw attention to the murder murder of Charlene Charlene Lyles and the generational trauma that can be caused by police by police brutality.

This this situation exemplifies the need for for city-funded community responses to the needs of community members.

I'm a mother of three Black male children.

My youngest son has not received any after-school tutoring.

I wonder about the children of Charlene Lyles Charlene Lyles and how we can take the money from the police and instead fund things like after-school programs for youth especially youth who have experienced trauma at the hands of the police.

Thank you.

Thank you Maria.

Robert welcome.

Thank you.

I'm Robert Getsch.

I'm chair of Beacon Hill Safe Streets and a resident of District 2 here in Seattle.

I was calling to express my support to defund SPD, to replace the current 911 operations with a civilian-controlled system, to scale up community-led solutions, to fund a community-created roadmap to life without policing, and to invest in housing for all.

I encourage council to be bold and push.

We will hear lots about what people fear can go wrong with this path.

without regard to what works, excuse me, what goes wrong today.

We won't know the outcome until we try, but we know what isn't working and we can hear from the community that a change is needed.

So let's get to work.

I thank Black Lives Matter, Seattle, King County, DCRIM Seattle, and King County Equity Now for referring me to this meeting.

And I thank you, council, for listening.

I hope you have a great day.

I hope you have a great day, too.

Thank you.

Chrissy Hsu, Ashton O'Brien, and Liberty Harrington.

Chrissy, welcome.

Hi, I support the call to immediately defund SPD by 50% and reinvest in community health and safety alternatives and emergency responses that do not divert people into the criminal legal system.

It should not be a crime to be poor or have a mental health crisis in our streets or to be black, in particular, a black trans woman.

And none of these things should be a death sentence in our city, but they are because of interactions with policing.

Defund SPD and invest in community alternatives, for instance, immediately defunding the city's cops on the navigation team and investing in case management and long-term solutions to housing.

This was their inhumane, racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous policy that criminalized poverty.

I'm a second-generation Seattleite with family roots in Japantown.

In Chinatown, I see the impact that poverty and homelessness has in our neighborhood, but cops don't provide us safety.

They do not provide long-term solutions to end poverty.

We need to stop valuing businesses and property over people.

Excellent.

Thank you so much.

Hi, my name's Aislinn.

I live in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle.

I'm calling today to express my support of the demands coming out of decriminalized Seattle and Equity Now.

In my neighborhood, what I see the police doing is protecting folks who are gentrifying the neighborhood and harassing homeless folks, harassing houseless folks who are getting pushed out of their homes.

And I don't think that this is something that can be trained away.

I don't think diversity trainings or raising cop salaries have fixed this.

I don't think police accountability has fixed this.

I think we need to move away from policing as an approach to violence and recognize that a lot of the things police do are not actually about violence.

They're about protecting rich people and white people.

Thank you very much, Ashlyn.

Liberty, welcome.

Hi, my name is Liberty.

I'm a resident of Beacon Hill and a tech worker.

I grew up poor and working class, and I've experienced policing directly.

I know that police don't keep poor and working class people safe, white or black.

I hope that you will vote to defund SPD by at least 50% and invest in community, particularly in communities that are being displaced by tech workers in the city.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sheree, welcome.

Thank you for having my comment today.

I just wanted to say that just in realization of how close we are, if we don't all come together to actually support the demands of how DCRM and the rest of the community have spoken very widely on divesting directly from SPD, reinvesting those same exact dollars into community solutions that we have put forward, and then also freeing all the protesters in order to create the holistic 360 community-driven solutions to the issues that we are now facing.

We are doing a disservice to the community.

Thank you.

Thanks, Sheree.

The next three people are Juliana Allison, Elizabeth Lasser, and Matthew Obey-Sommer.

Juliana, welcome.

Hi my name's Juliana Olsen.

I'm a resident of District 3 and a public health professional at the University of Washington.

I'd like to thank those council members who are already supporting a 50 percent cut to the Seattle Police Department and I support the plan that will be laid out today by the decriminalize Seattle campaign King County Equity Now.

I'd like to encourage the council to vote in alignment.

As a public health professional I understand that policing is a system of control that upholds racism and classism and is a direct threat to health, especially for our Black and Indigenous communities.

We know that policing is not effective to promote public health, and so policing should not be deployed to address social issues.

Funding affordable housing, mental health care, and community-led efforts for safety is the way it is supported by National Public Health Association.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Elizabeth Lasser, welcome.

Hello and good morning.

I'm a constituent of District 4. I'm calling because I want to reach out to my council member Alex Peterson.

I call on you to commit to defunding SPD by 50 percent and using these funds as outlined by decriminalize Seattle which is replace current 9-1-1 operations with a civilian-controlled system.

Scale up community-led solutions.

Fund a community-created roadmap to life without policing.

Invest in housing for all.

Free protesters.

Council Member Peterson listen to your district and be humane.

Back up your words of Black Lives Matter with actions.

Show us you want District 4 to advocate for people who don't look like you.

Thank you for your time and have a nice day.

Thank you.

Matthew.

in the North Seattle, oh, I'm sorry.

So my name is Matt Obisumner, and I live and work up in the North Seattle precinct.

And one of the things that I've noticed is where I work is at a mental health facility, and a lot of times when the police are here to respond to things, they usually exacerbate stuff.

So I would like to say that I support the immediate defunding of the Seattle PD's budget of at least 50% to reinvest into civilian support systems, including mental health support, substance counseling, family mediation, and of course, urgent care as well.

Our communities already know what help they need.

Please give them the money to get it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That was very fast.

Thank you Donald.

Flender Amy Areno and Alex Haverfield.

Donald welcome.

Good morning.

My name is Donald Felder.

A proud resident of Seattle for the past 70 years and a few days of course.

The underside members of the Our Best Community Council would like to express our support and commitment to working with Director Chappelle and the Department of Education and Early Learning to ensure that the proposed $5 million in Deal Identify Savings and in the Mayor's Rebalance Budget is directed to those students from the furthest educational justice with a target focus on Black males.

This process should be community-led, and I'm hoping that you direct these funds.

Well, let me say I'm proud that you're allowing that these funds be directed to OBAC.

Thank you, and I'm sorry you got cut off.

If you'd like to send the rest of your comments, that would be great.

Amy, welcome.

Hi, thank you for having me.

I think that the silent majority in the community do support police, but are too afraid to speak up.

Defunding will actually impact essential resources the SPD already has to help the community, like the crisis response team, which goes out to help mental health crisis, the mobile crisis team, and the victim support team, which helps victims and families of domestic violence.

By defunding, we're going to get rid of all the de-escalation training they have, bias training, mental health training and even body cams which help keep police accountable for their actions.

I do think that we need a rethink of what 9-1-1 calls they go to.

What 9-1-1 calls they go to.

Like we don't need police going to medical calls.

That's something the fire department should be going first to.

Police don't need to go there.

That is just going to make things worse.

Thank you so much.

Council colleagues, it's been 30 minutes.

We only have a handful more of folks.

I'd like to extend public testimony for another five minutes and we will do 30 seconds each so that each person still gets a chance to speak.

Hearing no objections.

Okay.

Hearing no objections, the public testimony will continue to be expanded.

The next three people that we have are Marina Muhammad, Christopher Hoffman, and Hannah Seven.

Munira.

Welcome.

Hey this is Munira Mohammed.

I am calling to support defunding Seattle Police Department by at least 50 percent and put that money back into our community.

I am an executive director of one of the non-profits here in Seattle that's doing the work and I know what our community can do together.

We don't need the police on our streets scaring our community and putting fears in our youth and our members.

We're I'm asking the council to really vote on this project and I'm standing with the decriminalized in Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you and great example of a 30 second that was very powerful testimony in a short period of time.

Thank you.

Christopher welcome.

Hello.

I would like to thank all the council members for their commitment to reforming the police.

It is clear by the actions and the words of the chief of police and the mayor that a really change in our police force is not going to happen without you.

So I hope that you all commit to defunding the police.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hannah, welcome.

Good morning.

Good morning.

My name is Tana Steven.

I'm a resident of Green Lake neighborhood.

I'm calling today to ask that you immediately defund SPD by 50 percent.

I'm a grad student at the UW and I'm asking this because my peers many of whom are Black and Brown feel unsafe in our communities.

Students of color are unable to be successful in their learning process when they fear and experience police violence.

This has been particularly obvious as many UW students struggle through the end of the spring quarter.

I ask that these funds are redirected to Black and Brown communities.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The next three are Brendan Wallace Charlotte Campbell and Jacqueline Burwell.

Brendan welcome.

Hi good morning Council.

My name is Brendan Wallace and I live in Greenwood in District 6. I'm calling in support of defunding the SPD by 50 percent as a step towards abolishing the SPD.

I know that downsizing or abolishing the police sounds radical, but I want to point out that affluent white neighborhoods exist just fine without a heavy police presence, and it's because their housing is affordable to them, because they have enough resources to invest in their schools and their mental health, and because they've effectively decriminalized drug offenses and minor infections by teens and young adults.

Our society would be healthier if we took that approach in every neighborhood.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Charlotte, welcome.

Hi, my name is Charlotte Campbell.

I live in District 3, and I am extremely thankful for council members to want strong support for defunding SPD.

I'm a tenant organizer, and I support total abolition of the carceral state.

In my 15 years living in Seattle, I've seen SPD terrorize Black and Brown communities, brutalize protesters, and fight all efforts toward police accountability.

Recently, I've seen them be willfully negligent of the safety of protesters, leading to several instances of car attacks, including the murder of a friend of mine.

It is imperative that we defund SPD by a bare minimum of 50 percent.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Jacqueline.

Welcome.

Hello my name is Jacqueline.

I live in District 4 and have been a Seattle resident for 4 years and I'm a former tech worker.

I support the proposals put forth by Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now and I believe that the issues of systemic racism and police brutality with long documented histories of murder and abuse of marginalized black and brown communities in this nation and in this city require drastic changes to heal and transform our society.

Climate change is only an issue of the last 50 years yet many of us understand the complete reimagination required to address our addictions to oil and energy consumption, waste and consumerism.

We need to imagine the same scale changes required to heal our collective society.

Thank you, Jacqueline.

Please do send the rest of your comments.

I appreciate it.

Tay Phoenix, Heather McTernan, and Candace Luth.

Tay, welcome.

Hi.

My name is Tay Phoenix.

I have lived in Seattle my whole life.

I support defunding SPD, and I want to see that 50% cut start with the salaries of Jason Anderson and Steve McNew.

Those are the cops who murdered Charlena Lyles.

Collectively, they make about $183,000, and that's a great savings to get us started.

If you listen to the dash cam audio from the day she died, you can hear them reviewing the information they had about her mental health and laughing about it.

They could have used that time to come up with a de-escalation plan.

That's what that info was there for.

And instead they had a laugh and then killed her.

Their lack of professionalism should have cost them their jobs years ago, but better late.

Thank you.

And please do send your comments as well.

Heather McTernan.

Hi my name is Heather.

I live in District 3. To be brief our current system is keeping disadvantaged communities in a cycle of violence and inequity.

Defunding the SPD by at least 50 percent can easily fund the gap in our Seattle budget and I urge you to do so.

I am hoping you'll reinvest it in community oriented care specifically sustainable housing for all education affordable and effective health care resources and accessible and useful transportation systems.

That's the rest of my time.

Please have it back.

Thank you.

Hey, thank you so much.

The last four speakers are Candace Luth, Darnell Hibbler, Alexia D'Oriano, and we also have someone who called Lynn after I hadn't skipped your name.

Thank you, Rachel Roark, for waiting.

We will end with you.

The next person is Candace.

Welcome, Candace.

Good morning, Council.

My name is Candace Luth, and I'm a renter in District 5. I want to start by thanking Council for their progressive tax reform earlier this week.

The countless examples of police brutality in our city have been appalling.

I urge Council to defund SPD by at least 50%, demilitarize police, and invest these funds into our Black and Brown communities.

I also call for greater police accountability.

There are community solutions if we listen to our Black and Brown community members that will better serve our city.

I also call for all charges against protesters to be dropped.

Thank you for your time, and have a great day.

Thank you for your time.

Darnell, welcome.

Sorry, Darnell.

Go ahead.

Looks like Darnell dropped off.

OK.

No problem.

Darnell, apologies for that.

If you want to email us, that'd be great.

Alexia, welcome.

Thank you for taking my call.

I support the call to immediately defund SPD by 50% and reinvest in real community health and safety.

We have a long history of racism in this city, and the time to address that is right now.

We should be funding services that the community needs, and these are the changes that our Seattle community is calling for.

I hope that the City Council will do the right thing.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And then the last person today is Rachel.

Rachel Roark, thanks for waiting.

Hello my name is Rachel Rourke and I.

Can you all hear me.

I work.

Yes.

Good.

In Seattle at a local agency and I see how police interaction negatively affects people especially people of color on a regular basis.

Recently I had a client who had been assaulted.

Need to be to refer her to REACH And they were unable to help because she is terrified to report the crime.

And rarely do I see a situation where police are called, but they don't actually make the situation worse.

Thank you so very much for waiting and for that public testimony for folks who may have not got all their comments and we encourage you to.

email us your comments, and also recognize that at 2 p.m.

today, you can sign up for the public hearing.

We'd welcome anybody who'd like to speak then as well.

Council colleagues, moving on, I'd ask the clerk to read into the record item number one.

Agenda item one, roadmap to defunding the police and investing in community for briefing and discussion.

Well, thank you all for your participation in today's session one.

This is really an opportunity for us to hear from folks on the ground who've been doing the work in Black and Brown communities and led by Black and Brown-led organizations to think about what it looks like to have a re-envisioned, re-imagined way of us protecting the public and defunding police departments across the country.

They've looked at other examples.

And right here in Seattle, looked at our budget that we had begun an inquest into about a month ago now and tried to really get some ideas from community organizations, working with folks who've been working on decriminalizing and restructuring police efforts over the last few years.

And some of them have had the chance to really put together a comprehensive proposal and outline for you here today.

We have Angelica Chassaro from the University of Washington, law professor and decriminalized Seattle organizer, Jackie Vagan, executive director of Surge Reproductive Justice and decriminalized Seattle organizer, and Christina DeLeon, participatory budgeting project.

They will be going over a community roadmap to defund SPD by 50% and invest in community-based health and safety alternatives through a participatory budgeting process.

This momentum has been building over the last few years and especially over the last few weeks and I want to thank the organizers from across the city and our region for their work to make this conversation possible and to make sure that they bring this to the elected level for our consideration.

I'm really looking forward to following your lead.

We have heard community demands over and over again, asking us and calling on us to make real action and create real structural changes and to be thoughtful, intentional, and to move with speed, but also to build trust.

This means honoring the harm that has been done and rooting our response and the experiences of those who've been most impacted by police violence.

The world we are building towards has really never existed.

Even in some of the cities that we have looked at, for example, We're talking about dramatically changing what it means to create a public safety network.

We know that this world that we are currently working within is not actually creating the health and safety that's been promised, as we've heard testimony or after testimony of people saying that they're scared to call officers and they're scared of the officer's response, both to protest and to calls, for example, for violence in their own neighborhood.

So we are really looking forward to today's presentation.

I'll have a few more comments before we turn it over to the panelists.

But just in terms of framing, what I've asked for this morning before we turn it over to the panelists is for quick revision on what participatory budgeting has meant to Seattle City Council in the past.

I don't want folks to think that this is a totally new concept.

In fact, Councilmember Herbold has been on Council in various roles over the years and has participated in participatory budgeting in the past.

So in an effort to make sure that we don't have historic amnesia here, let's turn it over very quickly to Councilmember Herbold so that she can give us a quick flavor of how the Council has used participatory budgeting in the past just to make sure that we have a framework for understanding how these recommendations can be used as they have been used in the past so that folks have this grounding.

Council Member Herbold, do you mind speaking to how you've participated in participatory budgeting in the past before our presenters?

Sure, I don't actually have, other than just being a resident in the city, experience participating in participatory budgeting.

But what I wanted to talk about was the creation of a participatory budgeting program here in Seattle.

So back in 2015, The councilmember Nick Licata started work with the participatory budgeting project, the folks that we have with us here today.

And the goal was to follow the lead of other cities across the world.

Participatory budgeting was first developed in Brazil in 1989 and is now practiced in over 3,000 cities across the world, including Chicago, Boston, New York, and San Francisco.

The approach focuses on engaging people who have not historically been involved in government or budget processes and lets community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget and be involved throughout the process of idea collection, project development, votes, and project development.

So, as we know, and as we're going to hear more, the leading proponent in this country of participatory budgeting is the organization called the Participatory Budgeting Project, based out of Oakland.

And this organization provides assistance with launching and implementing the participatory budgeting processes.

Councilmember Licata contracted with the participatory budgeting project back in 2015 when he was budget chair, and he worked with the organization for nine months to pilot participatory budgeting here in Seattle.

After that, in 2016, the Department of Neighborhoods then sort of took on the project with Youth Voice Youth Choice that engaged 3,000 people in deciding how to spend $700,000 in the city's budget.

The folks who participated in deciding how to spend the money, as I mentioned, were youth, ages 11 through 25. and there was a strong focus on outreach and participation with youth of color.

The awards range from safe routes to schools and public parks, bathroom upgrades in specific locations, Wi-Fi, hot spot programs and libraries, youth homeless services, and youth job readiness programs.

The choices, I think, were well considered, and there was a strong emphasis and embracing of the decision to trust young people with voting for budgeting.

And then in 2017, the Department of Neighborhoods shifted what had been the traditional approach of having district neighborhood councils, that neighborhood matching fund projects, and they shifted that approach that they had been using for years to be, again, a participatory budgeting process.

And that's been very, very controversial because people were used to having the district councils be the entities that rate these projects.

the neighborhood parks and street fund and calling it the your voice, your choice, parks and streets program.

This has been used since then for over $2 million in grants.

As we'll hear more about, projects are selected by public votes.

In 2019, over 6,500 community members participated, and 22 projects were selected in 2019. One third of the funding is reserved specifically for equity considerations in the equity and environment initiative focus area.

Geographic areas where communities of color, immigrants, refugees, people with low incomes, native people, and limited English proficiency individuals in the areas where they tend to live.

But like much of public policy, we're always trying to evolve and improve on what we do, and I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned about what we've done well in Seattle and where there's additional work to ensure that we have more involvement by communities who haven't historically participated at all stages in the process.

Everything from suggestions for proposals, development of proposals, and voting for proposals, and the awarding of proposals.

And so I think I'm really glad that we have the participatory budget.

I want to say thank you to the department of neighborhoods for bringing this project here with us today because I think they can tell us, help us learn how to evolve our program to be a truly new program that has deeper community engagement at all of these levels.

I think one of the challenges that we have is our participatory budgeting process.

and I think it'll be really great to hear from the participatory budgeting process about how this can be more of a community-driven process to get, again, greater engagement.

So thanks for letting me talk a little bit about our history in Seattle of participatory budgeting.

I thank you, Council Member Herbold.

I just thought that perspective was very important, having led the budgeting process in the past.

as an elected but also in the role that you had in previous offices when participatory budgeting was happening.

Jackie, Angelica, Christina, this I think helps us frame that this is not only a theoretical concept of how we bring in community voice to direct what budgeting means, it's an opportunity for us to say it can be done, it has been done in other cities, In fact, we have some dabbled in it, some here in the city of Seattle.

But let's hear what some of those lessons learned are.

Let's break those barriers.

Let's get rid of the gatekeeping that occurred.

And let's hear directly from the community about where we should be investing those dollars.

It is a process that has worked in other cities.

It can work better here.

And I think through your work and your directive to this council, We want to uplift what you have to recommend to us and to show, without having historic amnesia, that we can move forward and we can use this process.

So I'm excited about the panel here today.

I know you've been working on this for a very long time, and we are now at the point of wanting to have discussion based on your work.

Thank you for your patience with us and for your participation in this political process.

Looking forward to really walking us through what community safety looks like in the city of Seattle.

and how we can work to address criminal justice reform, investments in true community equity, and upstream solutions in community-based safety to bring about the long-term change that you all have been advocating for so long.

So I will turn it over to you three, Angelica, Jackie, Christina.

Again, welcome, and thank you for your participation.

We have ample amount of time today.

So please feel free to share whatever screens you may have and to walk us through.

I believe, Angelica, you are off mute, so I'll turn it over to you first.

Thank you so much, Council Member Musqueda.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so that folks can see the slides.

Thank you.

Okay.

Again, thank you for having us here today.

My name is Angelica Chazaro, and I am here today in my capacity as a member of Decriminalize Seattle.

Decriminalize Seattle is a grassroots coalition building power in Seattle to invest in pro-community initiatives and divest from policing in the criminal legal system.

I want to introduce us, as well as King County Equity Now, and Council Member Herbold has done a good job introducing already the participatory budgeting project.

King County Equity Now, who is partnering with us on this proposal, is a coalition of accountable, black-led, community-based organizations fighting to achieve equity across meaningful metrics, including land ownership, and mortality rates.

And as you heard, Participatory Budgeting Project, or PVP, is North America's leading organization on participatory budgeting.

Before jumping into the presentation, I just want to give you all an outline of where we're headed with this.

First, we'll talk a little bit about the need for these immediate cuts from SPD.

Then we'll talk about where we propose the cuts should come from.

Then we'll talk about what investments we are proposing.

And finally, we'll hear from PVP on the role that participatory budgeting can play in this transition away from policing.

Today, we're focusing specifically on the 2020 rebalancing, which is happening now.

And we also want to recognize this is the first phase of what will be a long-term project to divest from policing and invest in real community health and safety.

And PVP will talk about how this work feeds into the 2021 budget.

And then after Chris from PVP is finished, we'll answer council members' questions about any and all of this.

I do want to start by acknowledging why we're here at all today.

All of us at DCRM and King County Equity Now are very aware that the only reason we have this opening to speak to you all is because of the uprising that's been happening on the streets in defense of Black lives.

This opening was created by social movement pressure and has to be accountable to the demands made by that movement.

from the Movement for Black Lives to organizers in Minneapolis where this began, the call to defund policing is clearly here to stay.

We want to start by acknowledging all the work that has been done in the past to try to keep police accountable, to try different reforms, and also acknowledge that the time for reforms is past.

It's clear to us now that more training, more accountability measures are not going to cut it.

we need to move away from an armed response to social problems.

We can't train our way out of the problem of police violence.

We know that the decades of police practices and police reform efforts have failed to reduce racist police violence and anti-Black racism, both in Seattle and across the country.

In fact, we know that the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd had received implicit bias training.

We know that the police officer who murdered Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta had just been trained in de-escalation.

And turning to our own city, over 60 years before SPD killed Charlene Lyles, a 1955 mayor's advisory committee on police practice found that the city's police officers demonstrated patterns of racist policing against black Seattleites and offered sensitivity training and intercultural workshops.

So we've been here before.

Seattle has been down the reform and training road, and that road has not produced the results that Black communities deserve.

We don't know what the next 150 years of Seattle history will bring, but I suspect that the global pandemic that has kicked off 2020, at least here in the U.S., we're experiencing now just a taste of the coming difficulties we'll face, many of which will be exacerbated by climate change.

As decriminalized Seattle and King County Equity Now, we're inviting you as our elected leaders to face the future in a city full of people who have built up the practices and the institutions to deal with each other without racist, violent policing.

This is a moment to begin divesting from an institution that has never defended black lives in Seattle and that has resisted a century or more of reform efforts.

So just to set the stage, we feel that both the uprising in defense of Black lives and combined with the COVID pandemic has created this opening to immediately implement what was previously thought of as politically impossible, or at the very least, very, very difficult.

We see that with the moratorium on evictions that was put in place.

We see that with the historic passage of the payroll tax just earlier this week.

The 2020 rebalancing that's happening now creates that opening to act immediately on the demands to defund SPD.

Nearly 45,000 people and over 300 organizations have signed on to the demand to cut SPD by 50%, to reinvest in community, and to free all protesters, as you heard from many of the folks who called in during the period of questions that preceded this.

We're here today to ask that the council cut 50% now, cut 50% of SPD's remaining 2020 budget, and reinvest that money in real community health and safety.

I want to be clear that we're not asking you to cut this money and use it to plug other holes in the city budget.

We see this money as a debt owed to black communities and other communities of color who have suffered police violence, along with mass disinvestments in their well-being over many, many decades.

This is a debt owed to protesters who have suffered and even died in past weeks to see these changes.

It needs to be re-appropriated from SPD and reinvested in building the world that generations of people who have died at the hands of police violence deserved.

We're asking you to help us build the world that Charlene Lyles deserved.

We're asking you to help us build the world that John T. Williams deserved.

We're asking you to help us build the world that protester Summer Taylor died for this past weekend.

So I'll take a moment there and move on to talk about where the cuts should actually come from.

We welcome any cuts to the SPD's budget, but here are some priorities that we have.

We know that in order to actually transform the way the city does public safety, we need to shrink the current police force.

In order to move towards changing how we approach our public safety, we need to stop the growth of SPD.

As you all have heard over the past weeks with the budget inquest, even accounting for inflation, SPD's budget has grown 43% since 2010, from 243 million then to 409 million today.

That budget would be 285 million rather than the 409 that was allotted for 2020 if it had simply kept track with inflation.

We're asking for council to halt this momentum of growth and actually pull money away from bloated police budgets and towards supporting our communities and defending black lives.

Some ways to do that are listed here.

And again, we're open to any and other creative ways, but these are some of our priorities.

One is freezing hiring for this and any coming years.

Second, reduction in sworn armed officers.

There's really no way around this if we want to significantly cut SPD's budget, given that most of the police budget goes to police salaries.

This has to be accompanied, any cut to sworn armed officers with a corresponding reduction in administrative staffing.

We're also calling to cut recruitment and retention budgets.

We realize that this call to cut police jobs can feel like a shock to some.

But again, when you think about how SPD's budget has grown by 43% in the past 10 years, it becomes a little bit less shocking.

When you think about the ease with which the city has disinvested in other public goods, or never invested in them at all, it is less shocking.

We're used to seeing the city cut jobs, just not police jobs.

In fact, many child care workers employed through Parks and Rec have been seeing layoffs since March, but we haven't seen public hearings or outcry about that.

For real change to happen now, we need to see those cuts to armed sworn officers.

We're also calling for an end to investment in failed, harmful models.

We want to see the removal of the entire Office of Collaborative Policing.

And for us, an example of how that has failed is the navigation team.

We need to see the entire navigation team defunded.

We need to see the end of violent sweeps of homeless encampments.

We know that this would immediately open up direct access to shelter beds, hundreds of which are currently restricted to referrals from the navigation team.

This current approach is flawed, it's ineffective, it's wasteful, and it's disrespectful to the lives and dignity of houseless people.

We'd also like to see cuts to the public relation budget, cuts to training budgets, because we don't know now that training doesn't have the impacts that we all wish that it had.

We wanna see cuts to spending on things like homeland security, which a previous hearing revealed that the city spends 13 million on each year.

Finally, we want to see an end of overtime pay for police officers.

This currently seems to be somewhat of a blank check written to the police department.

For this year, we know $30 million was budgeted, but SPD goes over this allotment every year, and the city until now has footed the bill.

SPD expects you to foot the bill for the more than $6 million in overtime used to terrorize protesters over the past few weeks, the same protests that are the very reason that we are here before you today.

We believe this needs to stop.

As cuts are made, we're also recommending that officers with the highest number of complaints are the first to go so that we can keep community safe even as we begin to dismantle and defund SPD.

In terms of where reinvestments should be made, we believe that we need to invest immediately in four different categories.

Investing in these categories now with 2020 dollars will set us up for the 2021 budget cycle, including the participatory budgeting process you'll hear about.

We need to start scaling up investments if we want to see this experiment succeed.

We also need to note that we've had over 150 years of failed violent policing against communities of color in Seattle, and community members should not be expected to solve violence in one presentation, in one funding cycle, in one budget cycle.

We see 2020 rebalancing again as phase one of a multi-phase plan.

The four categories we'll be going into a bit more detail are one, replacing current 911 operations with a civilian controlled system.

Two, scaling up community-led solutions.

Three, investing in housing for all.

And four, funding a community-led process to create a roadmap to life without policing, which will then feed into the 2021 participatory budgeting process.

In terms of the first bucket, so replacing current 911 operations with a civilian-controlled system, we believe that 911 dispatch should be removed from SBD control and become fully civilianized.

We know that there already have been steps in this direction and that current dispatchers are civilian employees, but they remain under SBD supervision and chain of command.

The New York Times has reported that only around 1% of calls for service for SPD have to do with violent crimes.

We can't justify building a 9-1-1 system around this 1%, particularly when we know that defaulting to armed police response often leads to fatal police violence against Black community members.

Apart from removing 9-1-1 from SPD control, We also believe that 911 calls should be referred, wherever appropriate, to non-police responders.

This includes community-based workers who can provide mental health support, family and community mediation, drug user health services from a harm reduction framework, and other crisis services.

We've been investigating, as Councilmember Mosqueda said, models all over the country, including CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon.

This is one possible model that involves a crisis worker and a medic being dispatched as a team when community is in crisis.

And, you know, there are very, very few calls where they've had to call in police officers as backup, and in the over 30 years that the program has existed, they've never had a staff member seriously injured.

We are intrigued by that model, but we would need to make sure that we design our model in Seattle, because we have the opportunity to start from scratch, so that not only the responders are civilian, but also the dispatchers who are deciding whom to send to a crisis call are civilians, which is currently not the case in Oregon, and which limits the impact that the CAHOOTS model can have.

I'm going to hand this over to my colleague, Jackie, to talk about the other buckets before we hear from Christiania from PVP.

Thank you, Angelica, for providing that background information of where the cuts are going to come from and transitioning us into what we want to see for investment.

So in addition to what Angelica said before regarding the very small amount of calls that actually police respond to that are around violence.

We also know that police do not stop or prevent crimes from happening.

Rather, they respond to issues after something happens.

With the civilianizing of the 911 system, we also pair this with investment in community-based organizations that provide mental health services, mediation, drug user health, and social workers to respond to calls and issues.

We are investing in developing a pathway to move from armed responses to mental health and distress calls to responses that are community-based solutions and led by community-based organizations.

We need people and responders who have not been trained or indoctrinated by police.

We need community-based organizations that care for community in a way that addresses the root causes of situations.

With these funds, we would repurpose SPD dollars to violence prevention and restorative justice organizations so that we can reduce the future amount of 911 calls.

Our focus and strategy for this transition is preventative measures and responses that build skills and address the internal and external pressures that lead to these situations.

What this looks like is equipping our families and communities to create healthy and safe responses with trained and fully equipped mental health therapists, mediators, and social workers.

In addition to building these skills for when problems arise, supporting those in our community to learn how to prevent these issues before they happen is equally important to the success of this transition.

So this means immediate funding for groups who are, one, already developing community-led alternatives to policing, including groups involved in violence interruption and prevention and restorative and transformative justice approaches to harm.

Earlier in the public comment period, you heard from individuals who are already doing this work Organizations who are already building a world that is alternatives to policing.

What we need is for those organizations to be scaled up and to invest in those organizations with this repurposed money from Seattle Police Department.

We need to recognize that historically social services organizations such as these have been underinvested and with recent cuts that have happened to COVID because of COVID-19 and the economic situation that we've had.

We've seen those organizations and those efforts be the first at the chopping block when it comes to addressing the gaps in our budget.

And so now is the time to reverse that type of thinking and that type of investment and truly invest in those organizations.

and we have those already in our community.

The second area of investment for this would be groups led by and based in communities that have suffered the bulk of police presence, surveillance and violence.

And these funds will be prioritized for those organizations.

These funds would also go towards incubating new projects and organizations in police impacted communities.

So to put this in perspective of a timeline is that in 2020, we would start the first phase of investments in scaling up existing organizations to prepare them to respond to the calls we know should not be met with an armed response.

In addition to scaling up organizations that do to reduce the potential incidents that could require calls for intervention.

And lastly, we invest in incubating new organizations that will be set up to do the work explained above as we continue to divest from police and shift this work in community.

In 2021, we will continue to support these organizations and we'll have further investments and funds after a citywide participatory budget process that will be explained later in this presentation.

And lastly, with this bucket of funding, we would also invest in technical assistance and capacity building dollars to support the organizations mentioned above and set them up for success.

So truly, this is a multi-approach strategy where we look at how we're responding to current situations and also developing the skills in our communities so that we can actually prevent these situations from happening.

And I want to just reiterate that we do have these organizations currently working in our communities.

It's about scaling them up and incubating more to do this work as we go through this transition.

And Helica, if you could move to the next slide, that would be greatly appreciated.

Jackie, I'm just going to pause real quick.

I know that there's some folks who do have questions.

They have, um, I have their names in the queue, but I think it would make a lot of sense to go through your entire presentation and then have people ask questions if that sounds okay to the presenters.

Yeah, that works for us.

Okay, great.

And Christiana, I want to apologize.

I mispronounced your first name earlier, so I apologize for that.

Thank you for correcting me again.

Okay, Jackie, take it away.

And folks, again, if you have questions, I will be queuing people up.

So do Send me a quick email or raise your hand.

Perfect.

So the next bucket of investments would be going towards housing for all.

In addition to what we mentioned earlier, we can also reduce the need for police and patrol officers by investing in immediate survival needs and housing.

By ensuring that everyone who wants to be housed has access to housing, we can reduce the amount of crimes and calls that have in the past and currently are going towards situations that are a reflection of social issues and lack of access to basic resources, not issues that require response that is rooted in violence.

Investing in housing to meet immediate needs is essential to this multi-approach proposal.

Funding from this investment bucket would go towards a combination of emergency rent assistant grants and money towards additional public housing assistance through the Department of Housing.

People currently in-house should be prioritized for receipt of any assistance with no barriers based on income, criminal records, and records of addiction, et cetera.

All options for using empty housing stock in the city should be used until any unhoused person who wants a place to live has one.

We truly believe that significant investments in housing for all will really lead to the pathway for the reason why we don't need as many police and patrol cops.

So what this also looks like in a timeline is that by starting the major investments in housing during 2020, this gives us an advantage to cutting down the number of police calls and responses that are associated with people not having their basic needs and survival met as we move into 2021, which would be the next phase in ramping up community-based organizations who will be responding to these type of social issues.

Next slide, please.

So our next bucket of investments from these dollars would go to investing in a community-led summer 2020 process to define community safety and creating a roadmap for our council members and community on what this transition looks like.

So while we have identified initial investments for the first phase of transitioning from the current process.

We also have developed a plan to create a summer outreach program that would be implemented by youth and community-based organizations that have been historically over-policed and over-surveillance.

We propose citywide dialogues about expanding notions of community safety that will inform the roadmap city leaders need to move forward with further cuts to the SPD's budget.

This research would engage community to generate ideas and express the needs they identify to create true community-led safety.

This is being modeled after a similar program that is being currently implemented in New York.

We want to dedicate real dollars to this program to ensure equity, robust participation, and support youth who are currently being impacted by the financial situation and the lack of youth programming that is being caused by COVID-19.

bringing community into the process of developing our alternatives to policing and needs for true community safety will shape and will transition into a 2020 participatory budgeting process for the public safety parts of the city budget next year.

And with that, I would like to hand it off to our partners at the Participatory Budget Project, who can go into more detail around what this participatory budgeting process looks like for the 2021 budget.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Let me just go ahead and share my screen.

Give me one moment.

Okay, hopefully you can see it.

So good morning, council members, city staff, guests and partners.

I'm very grateful to be joining you this morning.

My name is Kristania De Leon, I use she, her pronouns, and I work with the Participatory Budgeting Project, supporting awareness and impact of participatory budgeting, or PB, across the U.S. and Canada, including here in Seattle, when PB was first introduced, as noted by Council Member Herbold.

Thank you so much for that context.

I'm here to support this rebalancing proposal and explore how we can lay the foundation for a robust community-controlled PB process next year and hopefully for many years to come.

We recognize and honor that the transformative power of this discussion is building off of years of advocacy and allyship from a range of partners and are hopeful to see an opportunity for deep collaboration to redefine community safety and community control across the city of Seattle.

Quickly, just about the Participatory Budgeting Project.

At PBP, we believe in the power of community-led, collaborative decision-making that fundamentally changes how we allocate public resources.

We were founded in 2009 to support the first-ever participatory budgeting process in the United States, in Chicago, and have led research, supported every process in the U.S. and Canada since.

And our mission is most simply to empower and support people in deciding together how to spend public money.

So what is participatory budgeting?

PB is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget.

PB is about making real decisions about real money.

It is not a community consultation, and it is not a one-time event.

It is an annual cycle of engagement that gets incorporated into an annual budget process.

The steps are simple, but need to be implemented intentionally and with specific focus on equity and community leadership with elected officials support for greatest success.

PB is a tried and tested and proven process that deepens democracy, and it's been endorsed by a range of partners, including the Obama White House, Black Lives Matter, New Economy Coalition, Local Progress, and other pro-democracy and pro-justice organizations.

Additionally, PB is supported by communities across the US and Canada that are using PB to broaden civic participation, strengthen community cohesion, cultivate more transparent and inclusive decision-making, and facilitate more equitable and effective spending.

PBP is a growing global practice and has been expanding across the United States.

With the uprisings to address anti-Black racism and increased calls to divest from law enforcement and invest in community-identified priorities, PBP has been in conversation with partners in 17 cities across 10 states and counting, including partners here in Seattle to explore how transformative democratic processes like PB can facilitate investments that uphold community safety and center the needs of Black, Indigenous, and POC leadership, both formal and informal.

As we reimagine community safety, PB can be adopted to include broad cross-section of community members that are impacted by law enforcement and the carceral system.

I would lift up that PPP has a range of resources to support and understanding the process and elements of success.

And this is one I will just lift up that features elected officials and their experiences with PB that I can happily share after the meeting.

I won't share it or play it right now in the interest of time, but want to lift it up as something that can be really useful in further understanding and thinking about participatory budgeting.

So how does PB work?

Participatory budgeting is comprised of five key phases that can be adapted to the specific needs of a given community, and these phases are as follows.

First, after setting aside a dedicated portion of the budget, a steering committee that is reflective of the community is convened to design the process.

They create the rules and the engagement plan, including how to facilitate robust community engagement, who will be eligible to vote, et cetera.

It's important to note that when designed for equity, PB can include participation of many who are unable to vote in traditional elections, and can also lift up that one of the most essential parts of the process really is in this phase, is in designing the process.

And in honoring the request put forward today, including the youth-led participatory action research process, technical assistance, and capacity building for essential stakeholders, Seattle is primed to be set up for success in ensuring that this critical phase of the process is well-informed and inclusive at the start.

Then, the next phase, through meetings, assemblies, digital tools, and other methods, residents can share and discuss ideas for projects for how the designated resources should be spent that aligns with funding and community priorities.

Third, community budget delegates help sharpen and develop the ideas to create concrete proposals, working in partnership with government representatives that can support implementation and assessing together the need, feasibility, and impact of each project, and offer technical vetting and cost estimates.

Then proposals go on to a ballot, and the entire community is invited to vote on their top proposals that most meet the community's needs.

Events can be held to allow committee members to educate each other about each proposal as they vote.

And due to the rigorous proposal development process, each project on the ballot can really be implemented.

Finally, winning ideas are funded and implemented until the pot of resources runs out.

But we don't stop there.

The process has been evaluated, improved upon, and begins again on an annual basis and becomes a new way of making budget decisions alongside members of the community.

Most PD processes run on the annual cycle.

We always say that no two PD processes are the same because no two communities are the same.

So the timeline is also informed by community engagement and what precedent there is for doing that robustly in the community.

But typically, we recommend an 8 to 12 month process for preparation and planning time allocated on both ends.

I also just want to lift up that investing in participatory budgeting done with fidelity and alongside the complementary elements of this rebalancing proposal can ensure an intentional and impactful process.

PB takes time and it requires full community engagement to center the needs of those that have been most disenfranchised and historically impacted by inequitable policies to imagine together what comes next.

expanding dialogue about community safety, offering financial stability to residents, researching key opportunities and needs now will ensure that an inclusive process like PB can be successful and that when the city can experience through a PB process, the full range of returns on this type of investment.

We support, we understand that community members bring robust and essential expertise to transform our systems and ensure just and impactful policymaking alongside elected officials.

I want to lift up a couple of key considerations and elements that seem really relevant to this conversation today.

And we see PB as needing, at all steps of the process, to really center equity, because transformational change should reverse power imbalances, not reinforce them.

We have some key recommendations for how this can be implemented, but I want to lift up a couple key considerations.

First, it's critical that we start with money that matters.

This is relevant in two key ways.

First, we need to think about how the intended resources impact the communities we most seek to engage.

In this case, we need to consider what divestment from SPD specifically can offer for community members that are experiencing harm from over-policing, criminalization, and related harm in their communities.

In addition to other resources that can be invested in key areas where communities have identified the most need.

Second, we need to think about the amount of funding allocated through the process.

When we talk about PV with partners across the US, we emphasize the need to think big and start big.

We want community control to mean just that, a process of allowing for significant impact of community-led decision making and money that will really matter.

We want community time.

engagement and voice to really make a difference.

Not only does this deepen PB outcomes, but also allows the process to scale more efficiently and allows for a full range of transformative interventions.

In Paris, for example, between 2014 and 2020, the city committed to reserving 500 million euro to be spent through PB.

In 2016 alone, Parisians considered 37 citywide projects, 587 district projects, and 20 school projects submitted for ballots.

The scale of this investment in PB allowed for over 200 projects to be implemented alongside community members.

What we've noticed is that the process of this scale and scope is that larger budgets, increased community participation, allow for deeply impactful investments because the budget allows for big ideas to surface that are not only creative, but deeply feasible as well, and broke down political divisions and skepticism among community members and between community and government.

These impacts have been borne out across the U.S. as well, and we see incredible potential to replicate these benefits with a robust transformative process in the city of Seattle.

Many other equity considerations revolve around how impacted frontline committee members are specifically included in the process.

We need to name and build the capacity of those that most stand to benefit from PB and that are most impacted or harmed by the status quo.

This rebalancing proposal invests in the technical assistance and capacity building needed to ensure that partners that are most impacted can authentically and equitably engage in this transformative change.

And finally, I'll just lift up what kinds of budgets can this work for and how do we make this concrete?

PB has been used to effectively support investments the range of budget types, and I'll note that this is not an exhaustive list, but I want to lift up a couple key examples and opportunities to illustrate what this can look like.

And the first is the use of discretionary or council member health funds, not only to lift this up as a piece of a budgetary benefit, but also to highlight the importance of the role the city council members can play in supporting PB and these rebalancing recommendations.

We've seen incredible success in using these types of resources to grow PB in places like New York City.

Growth of the process in New York City has been very, in large part, council member driven.

And that's led to expansion of participatory budgeting not only across the city, but across public schools, where young leaders now can invest in their school communities and redefine school safety and initiate a lifelong commitment to civic engagement.

And this highlights the unique role at city council member collaboration through how we elect what resources can be allocated, as well as how we partner for deep impact can create a really big difference.

Of course, there's a growing movement across cities in the United States to seek to use participatory budgeting as part of a divest-invest process focused on justice transformation, looking at law enforcement spending, and investing these resources in more community-led, just, trauma-informed, equitable, and humane systems and practices.

Seattle has the opportunity to join residents in this city and communities across the country in committing to investments that center greater transparency, accountability, equity, and restorative healing across our systems.

This is an opportunity to commit to a new vision of community partnership in this process.

And lastly, as mentioned before, PB is not new to the city of Seattle.

I'm sure there are many here who are familiar with Youth Choice, Youth Voice, and Your Voice, Your Choice processes as a precedent for PB in the city.

And I will note that investments like those presented in this proposal allow Seattle residents to expand their practice of PB and broaden the impact possible by including budgets that are less restricted in how they can be allocated.

and lean into the full potential of this process where people can experience expanded power over budget decisions.

So with that, I will thank you for your time.

I'm happy to answer any questions about PB today or as follow-up to this meeting.

And I look forward to exploring how elements of this proposal can create the conditions for impactful community control and lasting change across the city of Seattle.

So thank you.

Thank you very much.

We really appreciate the entire presentation.

Colleagues, we will open it up to questions about participatory budgeting and the presentation from Angelica and Jackie.

All of these presentations were emailed to council colleagues and are linked on today's agenda as well.

I believe, and so I have a few folks that are signed up for questions.

First, we have Council Member Lewis, and then we have Council Member Morales.

And if you have a question, please raise your hand or shoot me a quick email.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I want to thank all of our presenters.

This is really great information today.

Really appreciate all of the ideas that Angelica and Jackie threw out there during their extensive presentation.

I want to ask, if Greg is on the line, Greg Doss, a couple of questions, because I'm curious, based on some of the requests from the presentation, that I think are eminently reasonable, and I just want to to clarify a couple of things.

Greg, can you confirm?

Councilmember Lewis, I may ask for us to hold the questions for Greg since he's on the next panel.

I'm totally fine with doing it that way.

Yeah, because I think that that would make sense for us to include, give Greg a chance to hear all the questions and then he might have some additional comments on the next panel, if that makes sense.

No, that's absolutely, yeah, perfect.

Perfect.

Thank you.

But Council Member Lewis, I didn't mean to cut you off.

If you want to ask your questions, then maybe the panelists as well could potentially respond, and then Greg could have time to think through the question you might be percolating on.

No, I might have had follow-up questions if I could clarify a few things with Greg, but I can totally follow up.

I've been talking to Jackie and Angelica offline, so if I do have follow-up questions after Greg's presentation, I can just reach out.

Okay, sorry.

And we can circle, maybe we can circle back to that if there's not additional questions before we get to Greg as well.

Apologies, Council Member Lewis, I didn't mean to interrupt your questioning.

No, it was perfectly fine.

Okay.

Council Member Morales, please go ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you everyone for a great presentation.

I think probably most of us have been in conversation with Jackie and Angelica, so I really appreciate Hearing from you again this morning, I think we've been talking about the need not just to dismantle the police department and the kind of structure that we have there that we know is inherently racist, but also spending time rebuilding and investing in the kind of organizations, the kind of community-based work that can really build community wealth build community health and safety and build something that doesn't center police when we're talking about community safety.

So I think this is all a really important first step in beginning to make that transition.

And I do want to reiterate how important it is to center equity in these conversations.

We really need to think about that in everything we do.

And I know I kind of a broken record on this, but in all of our processes need to be asking ourselves, you know, who benefits from the decisions that we're making, who is burdened by these decisions, and who's missing from these conversations.

And I think that the people that we're hearing from today, are offering a really important reminder of why we have to be asking these questions from the beginning of this budget process to the end.

So that said, I do have questions about participatory budgeting in particular.

Christiana, you talked about this being sort of a, it sounds like an ongoing annual process.

So this isn't just a one-time deal if we're talking about, you know, investing in community so that we can build community wealth.

It is a long process and a, you said eight month process.

Um, and then next year we do it again for, for the same budget or maybe for a different pot of money.

So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what it means to really embrace this as a, as an ongoing strategy.

Um, and then I also have questions about how much this costs.

Um, you know, we want to make sure that whatever the mechanism is that we might consider for, institutionalizing this in our budget process, that we're intentional and thoughtful about making sure that there is a structure in place that we can resource in order to be able to do this well.

So I'm wondering if you can address those questions for us.

Yeah, absolutely and thank you for your questions.

The first in terms of the framing of this being an annual cycle and something that is recurring is sort of baked into the philosophy of participatory budgeting and I think is also baked into the approaches to community engagement.

So it's recognizing that this isn't just sort of a practice that we try once and then we see how it goes.

It becomes a different way of doing business and it starts to recognize that Cities are spending money all the time.

We're making budget allocations constantly, and we don't necessarily need new money to do PB.

All we need is to identify spaces where community can join us and share decision-making.

And that's something that any city of any budget can do because it's work that's happening all the way in any ways.

And so, you know, PB then becomes a new way to not just add on a new process, but to really say where can we invite community sort of leadership and decision-making and decisions that have to be made, and how can this happen in a recurring way so that it isn't something that we try but is a sustained commitment to that community decision-making with support from elected officials.

So it's very much a piece of the intention of the work and will help to ensure that the investments that are made are continuously supported and that it's well worth the investment in time that you put into a process like this.

In terms of cost, it really ranges and what I will say is, is a lot of the costs depend on what precedes participatory budgeting, if there already is robust staff dedicated to community engagement, if there's community trust, if the right people are already kind of in coalition and working together.

And so we do, we have some resources that lay out sort of things that we say you really want to invest time and resources around and then others that you might want to consider and think about how to make a process more robust, I'd be happy to share because it really does range on based on what exists.

But what I will say is that the cost of running a PB process will be almost equivalent, whether or not you're running a PB process to allocate $10,000 or $10 million or much larger funds than that.

That the function of the process will relatively be the same depending on your particular case.

And I'd be happy to share a breakdown of what those costs look like in cities that we've worked with.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales, any additional questions from you?

I'm good right now.

Thank you.

I have Councilmember Herbold and Councilmember Sawant in the queue.

I did want to take a quick second to ask Angelica and Jackie for a clarification as well on, I believe it was item number two, the slide that went into detail.

The two biggest questions that I've received so far from folks are, number one, if funding was redirected to community organizations, do we have community capacity existing?

Jackie, you said there are community organizations out there and trying to scale them up.

if you can elaborate on that.

And then number two, I believe it would be helpful to get additional clarification as we think about what 50% means in the near term.

I know we're talking about 50% of the remaining budget.

Was the recommendation 50% in the next two to three weeks here, or was it 50% over the next few months here so that we get to that 50% total by the end of the year?

If you could clarify on those two points, that for me, that would be helpful.

I'll turn it over to you two.

Jackie, do you want to take the first one?

Yeah, so we've definitely been doing outreach to organizations like we mentioned that are doing this work currently.

And I think when it comes to capacity, that it's really looking at the amount of calls that we're getting in on these type of issues and then working with community based organizations to set realistic expectations of what that scale up looks like.

I think also that we have outlined that this is a transition period.

So we do see that this scale down of police will happen in a phased way.

And so then that corresponding scale up of community-based organizations would happen at the same time.

So it's not, we're not really envisioning this being like starting August 10th, like a complete, like, you know, scale up of these organizations but we see it happening in a phased way starting this year though to prepare us for 2021. Would you like to add to that Angelica?

Sure I think the only thing I would add is also looking forward to 2021 we're thinking about investments not only in in the organizations that would respond to 9-1-1 crisis not only in organizations that would build up community resilience so that questions of For example, interpersonal violence could be dealt with outside the criminal legal system, because people would be so resourced that we would be able to even cut short the possibility of a 911 call, but also investments in things like universal childcare, which I know would cut down on the calls to CPS, especially now that every child is home.

with us, things like universal mental health care available to everyone, accessible drug treatment beds, low barrier shelter that people could actually get into.

So it's a combination.

We want a world where we have less 911 calls.

And that world will require these kinds of investments, not only in the alternatives, but also building community supports that will mean that people are walking around better resourced.

So I'll say that on that question.

On your other question.

in cutting 50% of the remaining budget, yes, we do imagine that in the same way that Jack is talking about scaling up in 2020, it would be over a series of months.

So my understanding is that the budget will be voted on on August 1st.

And so we'd ask for those cuts to come, you know, basically split up that 50% each month between August and December.

Okay, that's helpful clarification on both of those fronts.

Thank you so much.

We may have additional follow up questions on the how-to on the scaling down, and look forward to that discussion.

I have Councilmember Herbold and then Councilmember Solano.

Councilmember Herbold?

Thank you.

My first question relates to my eagerness to hear your perspective on our investments in coming into compliance with the consent decree.

As I think everybody understands, that has been very costly over the years.

And we're moving from a narrative of focusing on reform and the cost of reform to reimagining what public safety looks like.

So would love to get your feedback on the proposed future investments associated with the consent decree.

Then the other question I had is when we spoke, I had talked about my interest as part of this capacity question.

I had spoke to my interest in working with decriminalize Seattle to sort of begin a mapping exercise of mapping the number of calls that would move away from 9-1-1 and to dispatch to other types of organizations and determining sort of the number of staff and resources each of those organizations would need.

I think that helps us visualize what's necessary, but it also helps us understand the willingness of the community to take on this role.

And in particular, I had a meeting with the mayor yesterday and I was talking through your proposal and the concepts, and she expressed some skepticism that we would be able to guarantee 24 hours a day response across the different types of needs, whether or not it's mental health or violence interruption or, you know, non-criminal filing of paperwork associated with with thefts, homelessness response, you know, the types of things that 911 responds to 24 hours a day, I think it would be helpful to get some assurances that our community-based organizations that we're looking to fulfill some of these roles can do that and are willing to do that.

The other point I wanted to make, I really appreciate your clarification that the 50% cut that you're seeking of the remaining 2020 budget, that you envision it being phased over the last four months.

of 2020, so that a portion of the cut would be phased in in September, a portion in October, a portion in November, and a portion in December.

Because what that allows us to do, it allows us to maybe make some of the non-staff related cuts in those in that first month or two because there's a lot of work that we're going to have to do behind the scenes related to the staff cuts and and and not not not to diminish the work that also has to be done in front of the scenes, which is standing up a new response system.

So there's both the need to stand up a new response system, but then there are the obligations that we have as a city as it relates to considering layoffs within the context of the budget.

So that scaling, I think, allows us to work in our respective roles on accomplishing that.

And then the last question I had is, I just want to sort of go back to the strengths and weaknesses.

of various participatory budgeting models.

Our Your Voice, Your Choice is an annual program.

So we can check that box.

It is done every year.

But relative to what you've explained of other cities, it's pretty small, right?

around 500, $700,000 a year.

So I would self identify the size of the annual investment to be one of those weaknesses.

But I'm wondering, I've heard without really understanding that another weakness is that it is a process, although community is engaged in designing it, it is driven by a city department.

And I'm just wondering, are there lessons to be learned about sort of outsourcing the running of a participatory budgeting process to a community-based group that we should be considering here.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for those questions.

I will try to hit some of them and then pass the PB1 on to Chris and then Jackie, please back me up.

So your first question was, you know, about investment in compliant with the consent decree.

I think the reason that we haven't spoken about the consent decree is because what we see is, you know, before this uprising, the city trying to pull out of the consent decree, and then in the moment the uprising happens, kind of rushing back in and being like, just kidding, we're back in the consent decree.

And our read on that is that the reason they're doing that is because it's a lot easier to continue with what we know are difficult to implement accountability and reform practices than to do what we're asking, which is to actually defund SPD.

And so I think it's not that we don't think that what the consent decree has done is useful.

It's just that at that political moment when that came into being, that was the only possibility.

We're now seeing ourselves in a different era.

And I did a similar presentation that I'm doing for you all to the CPC.

And they voted as a value statement to back the call to defund SPD by 50%.

So even the folks who were charged with keeping an eye on the police are also supportive of this move.

And so that's what I would say in terms of that investment, but I don't want it to become a distraction from the real work, which I think is the work of defunding and rebuilding.

if that makes sense.

In terms of the mayor's skepticism, which I guess is to be expected, the idea that there has been in the wings this fully funded and developed civilian non-SPD arm just waiting for this political moment is bogus, of course.

That is a setup for community to say, well, if you can't prove that you're ready tomorrow, then this is a non-starter.

We know, which is why Jackie, went in on these need to be scaled investments.

We need to start the investments now so that we can start taking over that response.

And I also know, you know, from talking to folks who work in Cahoots in Oregon, that they do, in fact, have overnight shifts, and they do, in fact, respond 24 hours a day for the past 30 years.

And so this is something that's actually possible.

And I'd also point out that it's not like having the 24-hour SPD response has actually led to the kinds of community safety that we need.

And in fact, it often leads to more violence.

So going back down to the path that we're on is no longer an option, we think.

I don't know if you have anything to add on that, Jackie.

Yeah, I would just, the only thing that I would add to that is that, you know, commitment to, um, of funding from council and from the executive's office for these requests that we have for community is equally as important that like the amount of funding that we attach to this is going to show our level of commitment to really building a successful transition.

So that's my thoughts on that.

And I think before passing it out to Chris, I think you'd mentioned the scaling down over the last month of the year.

And yes, that is also what we envision for everyone's capacity to do this.

Thank you.

And I will support the point that Jackie made, which relates to PB around the importance of looking at significant investments that really reflect the, not only the possibility, but the incredible need and the commitment to doing this work.

And that is one opportunity to think about how to improve on existing PB and really open up new resources to create robust and broad reaching opportunities for change.

and transformation.

I did lift up in terms of the question related to, you know, should city government hold this?

Should a community-based organization hold this?

I think that it will really need to depend on what feels most appropriate for the city and really what feels most appropriate for community and who is best in a position to do that.

I will say that PB is pretty resource heavy.

It's pretty resource intensive.

And so should a process be held outside of a formal government institution, that space needs to be invested in resource in a way that allows the dedicated staff time and the community engagement work to really occur in a robust way.

And it will require a really significant commitment from formal leadership to honor and support implementation of whatever is put forward and voted into practice.

And so typically what we've seen is that the process tends to be held within institutions because not only do those individuals see themselves as having an obligation to look at like holding some of these resources and with a number of different kinds of funding streams that tends to be how people understand those requirements.

Yet, it does not have to be the case.

And what I will say is that whatever works for the city of Seattle, it will require a commitment from formal institutions and from the city to support this work.

It should be community-led no matter who holds it, but it needs to be supported by those who have positions of power to not only ensure the resources make it into communities, that the investments that are requested are actually funded, but also to consider if there are specific that are currently held by other city departments or other city agencies, that they need to have a commitment to actually seeing those through and really honoring community control in that process.

And so if the accountability is there and the support is there and there is a trusted partnership, I don't see why that's something that shouldn't or couldn't be considered, but it would take a lot of will and it wouldn't absolve the city of needing to really support this process and making sure it runs sort of with fidelity and seamlessly.

and recognizing that there is a role for elected officials to play in supporting those community decisions as opposed to letting them sit elsewhere and not really own, co-own the need to prioritize community leadership.

Thank you, Christiana.

Christiania, sorry.

Thank you.

Council Member Swan is next.

I just have a clarifying question, Council Member Swan, just real quick.

Can you guys be a little bit more pointed to Seattle's specific concerns, the lessons learned, the barriers that you're experiencing?

Because for folks who've been engaged in Seattle's process, just tell it to us directly what is not working if you want to be so direct.

You can take a pass if you want.

Do you mean for participatory budgeting?

Yeah.

Yes, we might take a pass for now, but we're very happy to follow up on that with folks.

Welcome to take a pass.

We will take your feedback anytime.

Council Member Sawant, please go ahead.

Thank you.

And just on that, yeah, my office and I would also like to have that conversation.

And if you want to have that offline, that's totally fine.

Thank you for the excellent presentation.

It was very rich with information and insight.

Angelica, Jackie, Kristania.

All the presentations were extremely beneficial, I think.

And needless to say, I'm completely committed to supporting these demands, both in this year's, in the summer budget, in the fall decisions that the council will make.

And in as an ongoing process you have outlined.

Please know that my office is in complete solidarity with all of those.

I mean, the overall idea, but also the specific proposals that you have incorporated today in your presentation.

I think those are very.

And I'm glad you also confirmed, I think, through the Q&A process more so that the that there should be.

a concrete cutting of the budget as far as this year is concerned as a starting point to carry out the 50% defund because right now we have this real momentum and I think we should get that process started rather than just have the council say we are going to do it.

So I really appreciate that.

And on the specific points that you brought up, I mean, you brought up a lot of points.

I won't take up too much time repeating them.

I really agree with many of them.

But specifically, the moving from the non-criminal emergency to trained social workers, that is very important because that's a big portion of what we're talking about.

And I really thought Jackie made an important point that – sorry, first the point about – that was important also was that we – if there's not a civilian workforce, as Anelika was saying, that's 100 percent ready to take over, then it's a nonstarter.

We don't accept those points.

Obviously, it's going to be a work in progress, you know, because we don't have that civilian workforce that is doing it, because right now the police is doing it.

That's unreasonable if the mayor or anybody is bringing that point forward.

Of course, I wanted to just say that I totally disagree with that.

We have to make that transition possible.

And then I also strongly agree with the point that Jackie was making, which is that part of making that possible is committing and offering the, you know, actually allocating the funding that we will need to make that transition possible.

And we have really powerful community support to make that happen.

And we need to continue to harness that.

Just very quickly, just back of the envelope calculations, August to December is five months.

If we take the five-month equivalent of the $409 million budget, then it comes to $170 million.

50% of that is $85 million.

And so I think just again, just roughly speaking, obviously I'm not making a concrete proposal here, but it's just to put some numbers on what commitments we want the city council to make.

Cutting $85 million this year would be like 50% of the remaining budget.

And again, that would be a straightforward question.

Is the council going to support that or not?

And to that point, I thought Christania made an important point that we need support from the people who have the power to make those decisions.

And those decisions should be community led and community has to have the power ultimately to make those decisions.

to make sure that these funds are going in the right direction.

So on all of that, I agree that reductions in patrol staffing, navigation team, of course, we have to stop the sweeps entirely of our homeless neighbors.

Just one question I would add is on the question of capping police officer salaries.

I'm sure you all have had the conversation about it, but just wanted to also hear your thoughts on it, because when you look at the data it's quite dramatic like when you look at the Seattle City of Seattle employees data from open the books.com.

I think 119 of the top 200 salaries in the city of Seattle are police officers.

I mean, that is a huge number.

So most of the police, high police officer salaries, and we're talking about $250,000, $290,000, $350,000.

We are talking in that range.

So the vast majority of the overpaid staff are police officers in the Seattle Police Department.

So I was just hoping you could also talk about that and also how that needs to figure in specifically as part of the defunding proposal.

So I'll stop there.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Council Member Sawant.

We really appreciate your support to this proposal.

And yes, to your final question, capping officer salaries.

Yes, you know, part of what has grown, bloated the police budget so much is those salaries.

We know that the current police contract ends at the end of this year.

And so I imagine that those discussions, we will also need to maintain and need your support to make sure that the new contract actually helps reflect this new reality we're all working towards because that will also be a fight.

We also think about, well, what are the things that actually support our well-being?

You know, it's investments in the organizations that we're talking about.

and it's also investments in city jobs like those parks and rec childcare workers who make nowhere near, you know, maybe altogether, maybe they make the equivalent of one officer's salary.

And so when we're thinking about what essentially keeps us safe, who are the essential workers, then thinking about transferring that money to people who actually keep us safe is very important to us.

Thank you.

Any additional comments on Council Member Sawant's comments or questions?

Thank you, Council Member Sawant.

And before we end this panel, I'll circle back on the $85 million and would love to hear more as you all are thinking about it, whether that's $17 million that's additive over the next five months, that would be helpful to hear more about.

Council Member Lewis, you are next up in the queue.

I appreciate the discussion about the cahoots model.

As I announced on Monday at briefing I intend to put I want to ask a couple of questions now.

And then, of course, I wanted to offer, as I have offline, to folks that I really would like to bake into that proviso a process that centers community in shaping what our version of a CAHOOTS template would look like.

So the first question, I want to ask you guys about HealthONE.

One of the things that has kind of come forward since Monday and people kind of reaching out is there's been a lot of folks reaching out that HealthONE could be a promising template to provide some of the kinds of services that Kahootz makes.

I know there are a lot of similarities between HealthONE and Kahootz, but there's also a lot of big differences.

So first, I wanted to maybe get your take.

I think it'd be good for the public tuning in today to hear.

your guys's take on some of those differences and what we need to really do to make sure we have something truly responsive.

And then I also just wanted to say, you know, Denver kind of went through a fairly recent community visioning process to create their STAR program based on the CAHOOTS template.

I think that offers a good roadmap of how, you know, cahoots, you know, in Portland and Oakland and Denver, every city that adopts it, you know, kind of makes it their own, adapts it to the needs of their, of the specific communities of those cities, and just, you know, how that visioning process in Denver or other I think it is important for us to be able to have a community outreach model.

I'm signaling my intention to really center community and community feedback in making a program like that truly our own.

We would like to hear your responses to those two.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Yes, HealthONE is definitely a step in the right direction, but I think that what we are thinking about when we think about modeling ourselves on CAHOOTS is that CAHOOTS is actually based in the White Bird Clinic, which is a community-based organization that has been around for many, many years.

and has built community trust as being separate from law enforcement.

And so I think, I know that HealthONE, you know, it's folks who are based, who are city employees, and again, who do tremendous work in diverting people away from police responses.

But I think the model that we're talking about is really about having folks from the communities that are impacted be the ones who are doing the response.

And so I think that the investments that we want to see are not necessarily in expanding existing city programs for city employees who are, you know, maybe not grounded in the communities that they're responding to.

And so that would be one difference.

You know, I don't necessarily think that we would need just one agency to respond to be our, you know, our cahoots responder.

It could be multiple agencies, depending on the area of the city that you're talking about.

So that might be one distinction where HealthONE is sort of a sort of across the board, a one size fits all solution, you know.

I think we're going to see a lot of different solutions being put forward, and that's what should be happening.

And in terms of the community process to build cahoots, absolutely.

In fact, I think that what you're talking about actually would fold in beautifully with our summer process of having folks rethink, what is it that actually keeps you safe?

If you were to have to call 911 because of a mental health crisis, who would you want to show up?

And what qualifications would you want that person to have?

What skills would you want that person to have?

Who would you want that person to be?

And so that, I think what you're talking about in terms of designing our cahoots is another reason why we need to invest in the summer process of redefining public safety by the people who have been most over-policed and most impacted by policing in Seattle.

And Jackie, I don't know if you have anything to add.

Yeah, the only thing that I would add is to the first question that you had, that one of the things that we know about some of these community-based organizations who are really rooted in a harm reduction framework is that their strength of their programs comes from being peer-led efforts.

And so just circling back to what Angelica said about being from those communities that you're trying to serve, that in addition to that, looking at some of these organizations who have these peer-led models is going to be so important for this transition as well.

So thank you.

Any additional follow-up questions or comments?

One area that I'd love to explore with you all is maybe how we get more, how we use the power of the council through either the power of the purse or through funding priorities to get more folks who are from historically disenfranchised or disinvested in communities into some of these jobs and positions that we would like them to have in the city of Seattle.

And I think the question around health one model is a really good one because this is opportunity for us to have good union wage jobs, to make sure that folks who are mental health providers, hopefully from communities of color, who are able to provide care to people in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way.

If we can get more folks into services like that from communities that are historically marginalized by traditional budgeting processes, then I think we also create a pipeline into good living wage jobs and a city that is more reflective of the community that we're intending to serve.

I would love to talk with you all about that because I know that from, you know, the past work that we've done on trying to lift up more investments into HealthONE and other models, that is one sliver.

What I hear you also saying is we want dollars to go into communities that have not had investments historically.

So doing that is the priority.

And then potentially balancing it by having kind of a pipeline into some of those good jobs, maybe that's a balance.

Is that fair to?

Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization.

And also just thinking about what does it mean to sort of like de, you know, at the same time that defund SPD is working, defund for the police is trending.

So is like social work.

So white, you know, there's this like realization that that we need to think differently about how we serve communities who are marginalized.

And so I we've already been talking to folks here.

And I know cahoots also has this model, where there's almost like an apprenticeship, we're often like people who previously received services are able to basically do ride-alongs with cahoots for a year or two, and then are trained to take on those same positions that they originally received services from.

And so I think we're thinking about similar things here, like how to actually build that pipeline in a sort of like apprenticeship model similar to what's happening in the trades.

There's no reason that shouldn't be happening here, and that there should be any requirements other than the lived experience, which actually probably is the best requirement, plus the on-the-job training.

Great.

Great, that's a great example.

And if we think about the apprenticeship or the pre-apprenticeship model and how we get folks in some of these good living wage and union jobs and have it be a more diverse and reflective body that then serves a diverse community, I think we would love to pull in, working with the Coalition of City Unions, and specifically Sean Van Eyck and Kenny Stewart, as we think about pulling in their union membership as well as we're looking to diversify.

both the services that are provided and also who's offering those services.

So I think it could be a good win-win, but more follow-up to happen there.

We have a follow-up question.

We have a question from Councilmember Strauss.

Thank you, Councilmember Strauss.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Thank you, Jackie, Angelica, Christiana.

This presentation has been very helpful for me framing what specific requests we as a council can meet for community.

What I've heard here, I'm not sure that I have a question because all my colleagues have asked really great questions.

I'm here to let you know what I've heard and share back with the points that I'm in specific agreement with you on, which is that we absolutely need a roadmap to be successful so that we can scale down the use of our police response and so that we can be strategic and successful as we scale up the appropriate first responders.

As you said, just because we're not ready to hit the ground running tomorrow with 24-7 response does not mean that we can't be successful in this effort.

As we build to a different public safety model, people are still going to need immediate assistance.

And how do we ensure that there is still a quick response time of first responders throughout the city in an appropriate fashion?

I know in District 6, we already don't feel that there is appropriate response time with first responders.

And so I'm really looking forward to how this conversation can improve the response time in my district because we don't always need a police officer to be the first one on scene.

Some of the quick wins that I've heard from you, so I box my understanding of how do we approach this work into quick wins and long-term strategies.

The quick wins that I see that need to be addressed first and foremost is 9-1-1 dispatch and how we how we take and put these other first responders into the queue to be the first ones on scene.

We need to expand the low acuity programs that we already have in place.

I was an honor to get to work with council member Bagshaw on the health one pilot proposal.

We have a crisis intervention team having studied public policy and Eugene and being, and having called cahoots myself At times, I know that we have the ability to have 24-7 response for these types of low acuity or peer-to-peer programs.

And this is, again, a specific reason we need to change how our 911 centers operate.

CAHOOTS has such success because they are hardwired into that response.

You also brought up housing and shelter.

It has long been known that when we address the root issues people are experiencing, we save money, time, and trauma as compared to continually returning to addressing the symptoms of a crisis.

And so I think that the outline that you have created for us is really spot on.

Christiana, when you're talking about participatory budgeting, you're absolutely correct.

This can't be a one-year experiment.

We know that it takes four years of implementation to demonstrate how a policy is actually going to be effective or ineffective.

And to Councilmember Herbold's point, we have this process in place.

that we need to expand the use of this process.

Again, I just really appreciate the specific asks that everyone has provided here at this committee meeting, because understanding what defund 50% means, as we are already 50% of the way through the year, if we just defunded 50% right now, we would be at zero for the rest of the year.

And how we can specifically meet your needs for the rest of this year and going into 2021. So just really wanted to say thank you.

You've put some really great parameters in place and any further thoughts about how we can expand low acuity programs, change the 9-1-1 dispatch, focus on housing and shelter, any further thoughts, I would love to hear anything that you have to say.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you Council Member Strauss.

I guess one thing I'd touch on is what you talked about at the beginning of your comments, you know, about the people will need immediate assistance as we have this transition.

I think, you know, one thing we're hearing is people saying, well, are you saying that we're cutting SPD, so if someone's breaking into my house, I can't call SPD.

Right now, you know, our analysis is that police actually doesn't do anything to prevent break-ins.

In fact, they usually show up too late to prevent any harm and damage.

We know the average response time in Seattle is 15 minutes for police calls and that people can actually wait hours, particularly in marginalized communities.

We also know that most, you know, this like property crime or home invasion is on people's minds because it is what we have been sort of trained into culturally by like hours and hours of law and order, you know, playing on repeat forever.

But addressing this kind of crime is not the bulk of what police do, you know, which I know you and the other council members know, you know, mostly they're responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations and dealing with other non-criminal issues.

And so, you know, and in addition to that, in some neighborhoods, like in the case of Charlene Lyles, it is the police who are breaking into people's homes.

We know that right now policing diverts hundreds of millions of dollars away from things that actually prevent property crime, and that most people who are property crime are doing so because their basic needs are not met.

And so we very strongly believe that's not just about 911 replacement, but about spending the money that's currently on police, on things like free and universal housing, healthcare, food, childcare.

And that would prevent property crime more than anything else.

So, you know, just wanted to sort of give that perspective because I do think that that sort of like gut fear of like, what will I do?

Well, what's happening now also isn't working.

And so we need to be investing in a program that will work to actually bring down those calls altogether.

Yeah, and if it's all right, I'll also just add generally that a lot of the points that you hit on and that have been mentioned here as well in the capacity that's being built in this interim period and the direct needs of community that can be met with immediate disbursement of resources can further position, for example, a CBO or a community-oriented group to really hold a PB process.

It's a part of that capacity building to really go towards resourcing and supporting the opportunity for what that can really look like.

And can really deepen not only engagement of a PB process and building one out, but deep understanding of transformational change that will only make the resources that are invested in something like PB.

all the more impactful because it's supported by, you know, community needs that are being met, as well as capacity building, technical assistance, and other resources that are really needed right now during COVID and during this transition to make sure that if you're investing time and resources into something like PV, that it's as impactful and meaningful as possible.

And all of this is deeply complimentary.

Thank you.

That's very helpful.

So the next step of this conversation, and this is where I have more questions for you and we can follow up offline.

So I have been able to break down how we regiment policing in our city into a different number of different silos and having feedback from you of if I've understood these silos correctly, and if I need to take deeper understanding in these silos.

So I see when we have 911 calls, there's work for notarization.

The state has legal requirements of who can sign reports, much like a notary demonstrates that this is an official document.

So this is writing reports, reviewing traffic cameras.

Washington state code has police officers as the legal language required to make to sign off on reports.

We also have low acuity, which we've already talked about.

We have traffic enforcement.

investigating crimes and criminal behavior, and then securing a space for safety.

And I understand that securing a space for safety looks very different to different communities.

If there are other tranches of work that I am not understanding, I would love to hear more.

And then also, how do we break out these different requirements that we're placing on the police, how do we break these into different first responders in a very specific fashion so that we're set up for success?

Because when I hear defund 50%, what I don't understand is what exactly are we changing?

I'm not committed to a percentage.

I am committed to defunding what is not working and funding what we need to be investing in so that we have communities that are safe, that have public safety and have fast response times.

So that could be more or less than 50%.

I have an inkling that it might be more.

And I really want to make sure that we are data driven in ensuring that we are, and that's why your roadmap at the beginning of this is just so important.

I really see a pathway forward to creating a community that has immense public safety and that we don't rely on the police always being the first responders on scene.

So any additional thoughts to those tranches of work, I would love to hear your thoughts.

And maybe that is for a follow up.

I don't see anybody taking themselves off mute, but I would suggest this because I'm the chair and I get to invite anybody we want to you are all welcome to stay on the next panel presentation where central staff will be going through.

the 9-1-1 calls, and that, I think, specifically dovetails into what Councilmember Strauss and other Councilmembers were asking.

You're welcome to stay on there, and we would, you know, encourage your participation just as much as Councilmembers.

If you're interested in staying, you're welcome to.

That is item number one on your four-point plan, so it is perfect timing that you have presented us with this roadmap.

I also know that there's a narrative that you're working on to complement the slides that were shared today and potentially including dollar amounts that could help us get to I think the $85 million that we were doing as the back of the envelope.

If that's not the number, please feel free to tell us if you have done other math.

But as we think about how we get there in this budget, and then also preparing for the 2021-2022 budget, we will be working.

to make sure that folks both get feedback on the proposal for this year and that where there is this more participatory budgeting process for the upcoming year, sorry, the upcoming biennial budget as participatory budgeting has advised.

So with that, you are welcome to stay on.

I wanna say thank you.

Thank you for walking us through this roadmap.

Thank you for the PowerPoint presentation.

Thank you for the narrative that you're working on that we'll have dollars assigned to it as well.

Thank you for taking our questions, but most importantly, thank you for lifting up the recommendations that have been brewing in the community for years.

And I think at this point, given the call for action, are ripe for us to implement.

So much more to come, but welcome to stay on, and I know there will be many more questions to come.

With that, Madam Clerk, will you please read into the record item number two?

Agenda item two, Seattle Police Department 911 call analysis, a briefing and discussion.

Wonderful, thank you.

And I believe we are going to be joined by Greg Doss from central staff and Christopher Fisher and Angela Sochi from SPD.

We have about 45 minutes for this presentation.

There was a number of questions that were asked in our previous meetings and I believe that central staff is prepared to walk through some of those questions with us.

And I will also note that we have a few, one second Council Member Swann, we have a few folks that are lined up to present.

So I'm gonna have you introduce yourself if I did not read your name into the record.

And Greg, I know that we had this meeting held I just wanted to share with you and the members of the public who are watching this that I may need to leave this presentation early.

Well, thank you for the heads up and do take care of yourself.

I appreciate the notification.

Thanks for letting us know.

Greg, I see you are off mute.

Would you like to orient us to this presentation in front of us?

And then we'll have folks introduce themselves.

Sure, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Greg Doss, Council Central staff.

Sorry, you're not seeing me today.

I'm having some technical problems.

And so I'm calling in instead of using video.

So I apologize for that.

To orientate you to the presentation as you opened with, we're joined today by Dr. Chris Fisher, Dr. Karamane Hester, and Director Angela Sochi.

And we're going to hear today from Dr. Fisher on how SPD responds to 911 calls, as well as other work that the department does to interact with the public and just in general.

That is sort of the broader scope for this conversation that you talked about last week when you mentioned that this was going to be on July 8th in this session.

And so Dr. Fisher is prepared to go into more depth here about what SPD does and hopefully provide some context, especially relating to the presentation that you just had.

Actually, I will not be going over responses to the questions from the last session.

We just got those yesterday.

I did, however, send them out to council members this morning.

And so you should have, as of about 8 o'clock this morning, written responses to all the questions in the last budget presentation.

This presentation is mostly going to be Dr. Fisher's show from SPD, and he'll be available to talk with you mostly about the work that SPD does.

If there are budget related questions, Angela and I are on the line or Kara to address those.

But with that, I would just say that you're free to turn it over to Dr. Fisher anytime.

Okay, great.

And Dr. Fisher, if you want to queue up your presentation, I believe that there was one linked in the agenda for today.

And colleagues, if you have questions on those items that were emailed to you as a follow up to our budget deliberations last meeting.

Please note as well that we will have a 2 p.m.

presentation from the CBO, the city budget's office, and if there are additional questions, we can also try to interject those into this afternoon's presentation.

But for now, let's go through the 9-1-1 call analysis presentation, and again, Jackie, Angelica, Christiane, You are welcome to also ask questions.

Just please raise your hand so that I can call on folks.

Dr. Fisher, thanks for queuing up the slides here.

So, you can see it, council member?

Yes, we can.

Okay, great.

I can't tell on my view if it's displayed, but there it is.

All right.

So, good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you, Chairwoman Mosqueda and all the other council members for inviting us here today.

And thanks to Greg Doss and Cara for helping us prepare for this.

So just to set some brief context for this, we were asked to prepare an analysis of our 911 calls.

I think the assumption of this was to inform conversations around what work that SPD is called to respond to could be sort of best delivered potentially by other responders.

And so that was the approach we took.

as sort of the context for what is here and what isn't here, knowing that I know there'll be questions and we'll have follow-up analyses, which we're more than happy to deliver and explain either in, you know, directly or in another meeting is that call takers at 9-1-1 receive about 800,000 calls a year.

Officers respond to about 400,000 unique events each year.

And so the data that we're using here from the 9-1-1 CAD, the computer-aided dispatch system, is the aggregation of that data.

It's the best way that we can, at a high level, understand what's happening, what are the trends.

So it does show us some stuff, but a lot of the information is then within what happens in the life of each one of those calls.

We know from the data in the system, things like when it's, what it came in as, what the call taker classified it as.

We know how long it took for them to get it to an officer, how long it took the officer to get there.

That's our response time.

We know how long the officer was on the call.

And we know how many officers responded.

We know how they closed out the call.

But we don't know in each of these calls really what happened.

So I think that's just important to keep in our heads that this is sort of high-level aggregate data.

And if we see areas where we want to know more, happy to do that.

But that would have been a monumental presentation that I don't think would have fit in this time.

And so the other context is this first slide is just also we're talking about 9-1-1 response.

So our 9-1-1 responders as you see on this slide are about 48% of our sworn FTE workforce.

So there's a whole other component of sworn members of the Seattle Police Department who are not responding to 9-1-1 calls.

And you can see sort of the breakdowns there.

I won't go in the interest of time through each one.

If there are specific questions at the end, happy to address those.

But that's just give you that sense of we're talking about a little bit less than what half of the department is focused on doing.

And then there are all the other responsibilities.

So this next slide, again, is just a little bit more context before we dive in.

These are the trends in calls for service.

And so what you see here, the blue are those dispatch calls that a call taker has received a call from the community, assessed it, and then a dispatcher has sent it out on the air for a specific officer or for sort of any officer.

to respond to.

And you see the trend there.

I think it makes sense that as the community has grown, we've seen that that volume has grown.

And the orange are those officer on views or what's sometimes called proactive activity, where the officer logs to something in the 911 system, the CAD system, saying they're about to do something.

That could be anything from an administrative code of getting gas or filling out a report to they see an assault happening to they're doing a directed patrol on a street where there's been an increase in car prowls.

They log to their activity both to document their work and for safety reasons so people know where they are and know what they're doing in case anything happens.

And you can generally that ranges from 30 to 40 percent of their dispatches is that on view activity and generally anywhere from 60 to 70 percent depending on the year is community-directed work that the officers are responding to.

Something is not showing correctly here.

Sorry for that.

There's supposed to be...

I'm sure what's happening there, but I can walk through what the slide is supposed to say.

And I don't know if you have it in the what was posted online, but half of this slide is missing.

But this is showing you our 2019 dispatch call types.

And so in 2019, there were approximately 274,000 911 dispatch events that includes those.

community-generated and priority one on views.

There are only about 2,500 priority one on views, and we'll talk about what different priority types are in a second.

But we didn't include all the other priority types because those become a little bit more objective in terms of whether it needs to happen right then and So we focused on what the community calls for response for and if officers come upon a priority one type event.

And what we see that's not showing on my slide, but maybe it's showing on others, is that about of these events, about 56% of them have a classification type that the call taker notes I think that a regular person on the street would assume that's a non-criminal call.

Anything from a disturbance to a welfare check to a noise complaint, something where, you know, by name and categorization level, it doesn't appear that you would necessarily need to have somebody who had arrest powers present to deal with that issue.

And the other 44% are sort of clearly criminal, an assault, a sexual assault, a homicide, shots fired, a variety of different sort of violent crime types and property crime types where, you know, as the system is currently formulated, an officer responds to those.

But what's not showing here, and if this is not showing for other people, we'll fix this up and send it back out.

When you look at how much time officers spend on those calls, the criminal calls take longer.

There's more to document.

There might be an arrest.

They have to assess what happened.

And if it's criminal, that means someone was there, a victim or a complainant or a caller was there to talk to.

So those calls take twice as long as a non-criminal call.

And so while a majority of the call types could be classified as non-criminal, about 60% of officer service time is spent on those criminal calls.

So I think here is where we first see that at this high level, There is some need to focus on the time spent, not just on the call types or the call counts, rather, because different calls take different amounts of time to respond to and are resolved differently.

And so that's why we start to bring up here the focus on how much time officers are spending on call types and not just the count of calls.

Two other quick points to note here, also to keep in our heads throughout this discussion, is that calls start as one thing and end as another.

And they don't always stay the same.

And we could get really granular and see if they start it as one type of non-criminal and change to another type of non-criminal.

And that's going to be a lot of different variations and permutations.

But if you bring that up a level and look at what percent of calls started out as potentially clearly non-criminal but are resolved where that, okay, what either was said on the phone or what the call taker heard and documented was not necessarily the case of what was happening when they got there, we see that 16% of calls start out in that non-criminal area and shift to be resolved as a criminal incident or a criminal-type call.

It may or may not have been documented, there may not have been an arrest, but the call type changes from something that's clearly non-criminal to something that is, on face value, clearly criminal.

And then on the reverse side, 34% of calls that the call taker, based on what the 911 caller said, labels it as one of these call types that might be conceived to be criminal shift to non-criminal.

And a chunk of those, about 14%, are the officer gets there and there's no one there willing to speak.

So it's sort of hard for them, you know, someone left, maybe that's a case where there was a delayed response.

Maybe the person didn't want to interact with the officer.

Maybe they gave, you know, the address was slightly wrong and the officer can't find the person.

But when they get there, there's no one to talk to to find out really what was happening and what they need to investigate.

So some of those calls that may have started out as criminal become non-criminal.

A sub-body of those, because when they get there, there's no one there.

I'm going to ask folks to keep holding their questions.

And we'll do questions at the end.

I would also request, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to review this in advance.

OK, there we go.

I see a slide number.

So that was slide number three that we were just looking at.

That was council member.

OK, thank you.

So here on site number four, just another sort of high level aggregation before we dive into some specific types.

Another important way that we conceptualize our data and really is how the call takers, dispatchers and officers sort of know how to prioritize is we group things by priority type.

And I'll go into what some of the examples are in each one briefly on some other slides.

But we thought it was important to look at what percent of calls are in these different priorities and what percent of officer service time is in these priorities.

And so just to give you about going into all the specific details that are in the next slides, priority one, that's those in progress, life threatening, you know, get there now lights and sirens sort of calls.

And so that's 17% of the calls that officers are dispatched to.

But as you see in the gray bar, that's 36% of their service hours, sort of on average, is responding to these in-progress emergency calls.

Priority two calls, there are more of those.

That's urgent.

Timely response is important, but it might not be apparently worth potentially putting their life as the officer in the car.

or pedestrians or drivers by, you know, going through stoplights and going above the speed limit, it might not be worth that.

So it's a slightly lower priority, but getting there fast is still important.

That's 36% of our call types and 35% of the time that officers spend sort of doing their work.

And then priority three, it's, you know, it's important to get there.

It's not urgent.

It's not life threatening.

A response is, valuable, and that's the thing they try to get to when there's no other priority ones or twos holding.

And that's the biggest chunk, that's 40% of their call types and 26% of their service time.

One note here is, you know, this is an area we've really been pushing on, especially during COVID, to decrease the risk to officers and the community.

where possible, we've been pushing these to online and telephone reporting.

What that does mean is, as I think it was Council Member Strauss who may have mentioned it, is by a lot of RCW and other and labor contingencies and other issues, Those reports do, even if they come in online or by telephone, do need to be approved by a sworn officer.

And so we have had to make sure we had the right staffing in those online reporting units to make sure we don't have a backlog as we've pushed more and more activity there just to decrease interaction between officers and the public where it may not be necessary and worth the risk of COVID exposure.

And then the other priority four and five are Lower priorities, we get into those types.

They take up very little of our call types and very little of our time.

And then priority 6, 7, and 9, those are administrative call types.

It's not engaging with the public.

It's them logging, filling out reports, getting gas, doing sort of other work that they have to do that they log to.

And we don't have a priority 8. We're not currently using it.

But in general, those first priority one and two, that's about 71% of their service time is on those emergency and urgent calls.

And then when you add in three, you get up to about 96, 97% of their time is taken up in those three types of priority calls.

So that's the other sort of high-level overview of what the call distribution looks like.

So then I'll be quick on these.

This is just and people can review.

I won't read through these, but you see priority one, as I mentioned, what those look like.

I think important to note that hearing the conversation from the previous presentation and from the council members.

sort of the idea of like where are some places we can potentially look to quickly versus that might take longer to stand up on some alternate responses.

Are those medical emergency calls and responses with fire?

Officers do go to a lot of those.

A lot of those, you know, there's work done in where fire asks us to go with them for safety.

There's one where sometimes the nature of policing and the distribution of the patrol cars They're able to get to some of this stuff faster because they're not having to dispatch out of a fire station.

And they're in one small car versus a rig.

So they go to a lot of these because they can get there first.

But I think that's an important place to look about, does that continue to make sense?

But then you see sort of the other types.

There are 63 different priority one call types, which is 25% of our call types.

And as we mentioned on the prior slide, 36% of officer 911 service time.

We see priority two.

of our call types and 35% of service time.

This is where those in-progress property crimes happen.

So if someone calls in and says, you know, someone is, you know, stealing car, prowling my car, or I got there and I got home and it looks like someone might be in my house, that's a priority two.

But it could be a priority one based on the nature of the, that's what's so important about what the work that the dispatchers and call takers do is really listening to what's happening and making sure the right priority gets assigned based on what they're hearing and their experience doing this work.

Priority three, again, as I said, that's the prompt.

Getting there fast might not be critical, but there is someone waiting that wants to speak with an officer.

This is another area where I think is right for a sort of quick discussion is how the city wants to respond to alarms.

It's a little complicated because it is possible when you got there, there could be a burglar in the building.

Or it could be a false alarm.

And currently, for the city to charge the alarm companies the false alarm fee, as it currently stands, a sworn officer needs to confirm that it was a false alarm.

But this sort of how to respond to property alarms, I think, is a quick area to look at.

And also, the continuing work around it.

We've been pushing this and the state pushes it.

But I think sort of a cultural change is accidents and people not wanting to move their car because they think they have to have everything documented right then.

We still have those.

There's a lot of effort pushed to tell people, you know, move it over.

If no one's hurt and your car can move, move it over.

But officers still get called out to a lot of that.

And also the parking complaints.

If a parking enforcement officer is not available, which they're not 24-7, seven days a week, patrol does get dispatched to those.

Sometimes those can lead to conflict if residents are mad at each other for a consistent parking issue.

So we do try to get to those, but those are priority three.

And then you see the example of priority four, that's as available.

Sometimes dispatch does what they call, they broadcast these over the air.

They don't assign it to a specific officer, but if any officer in that area, it has free time, they can then log to that call and handle it.

But this is sort of the, if it's busy, these may not get immediately responded to.

It's if someone has free time, these are the ones to go to.

And these are, I think are another area should police be responding.

to any of these at all, I think, is a question that it's not as complicated.

You know, some of these noise complaints or nuisance calls might escalate depending on what the history of the relationship between the people involved.

But there's, I think, a little bit less stress here around what happens in the pendency of that call as some of the other priority types.

So then to dig into the specific types, we looked at this two ways is that these are our initial call classifications.

So there are 255 of these, as I mentioned at the outset.

And so the call takers, they hear what they're hearing and they decide based on what they're being told how to classify the call.

And they continue to listen.

A call can be updated as they're continuing.

If they're waiting for an officer to be free and they get more information, they can update this so the officer knows what they're going to.

What you see is these are the top 15. The highest one is 8% of our initial call types.

But I think the important point here is these top 15, 15 out of 255. account for 49% of all of our calls.

So those other 240 are the 51%.

And then we really string out, as we do here, to 1%, 1%, 1%, and less.

These are the ones where most of our initial call types come in.

And you see here was a start of trying to highlight the things that are clearly non-criminal.

That's the blue parking violation, a welfare check, a request for detox.

The mixed is the and we'll speak to this in a slide or two, are the things where it may come out as that initially, but a decent amount of those calls become something else.

And so it may not be safe to just say writ large, a disturbance is never a criminal event.

Something could be happening.

It could be called in as disturbance and the officer gets there and it's You know, a pretty intense DB situation.

It could be something horrible has happened.

There are those call types.

And then also this whole issue, as I mentioned before, about alarms.

And is that a crime potentially happening, or is it a technical glitch?

So you see the breakdown here.

Of note here, just 75% of our parking violation calls are responded to by a PEO.

So that is their bread and butter.

But there are times when patrol officers do respond to those if PEOs are not available and the patrol officer has the free time.

And then just to look at it from the flip side, we have 178 ways to finalize a call.

And so these top 15 final call types account for 68%.

So things really do start to coalesce when the officer gets there and can really understand what happened.

A lot easier for them to capture that information than just someone listening to a quick phone call where the person is probably highly stressed, especially if it's something on the more severe end.

So the officer can get there and really ascertain what happened.

And you see the breakdown here of what those major call types are.

And it stays generally the same.

Parking, disturbance, suspicious circumstance, those are some of the broader, larger groups of what officers are classifying as what they went to.

And a similar trend to what you see what they were dispatched to.

So there's some shifting, but the general group stays the same.

The ordering changes a little bit.

And that's here, we looked at those call types that are non-criminal or mixed, and what percent of them during the course of the call change to end with a call classification that would generally been seen to be a criminal.

And what you see here is that disturbance category.

That's probably the most tricky one.

You see 17% of disturbance calls end up being cleared by a MER, what we call, it's the final call classification.

that is a criminal murder type.

And so it's not a small number.

It's about 5,000.

So there is a chunk happening there where it starts out as this may not be anything, but it turns into something.

The why that happens, I think, is a very nuanced conversation that's probably event by event, not something I can do statistically, but just an important note to keep in our heads.

And then this final part was just looking at, so we know how they got classified, but what happened?

How did the call get resolved?

So you see here the top 15 dispositions of the call.

So you see the number one, just to explain this, and I won't go through each one, assistance rendered.

So that's a very common one.

35% of our dispatches are resolved by the officer saying they rendered assistance.

That can be anything from them showing up and just talking it out with people.

Mollify the situation, people went back to what they were doing and nothing had to be reported, no one had to be arrested, there's no paperwork, there's no anything, situation has been resolved.

That could be assistance rendered, it could be someone's vehicle was broke down and they helped get it off the road.

There's a wide variety of how assistance could be rendered, but that's the biggest way that calls are closed out.

And you see the difference, we've looked at what's the difference between calls that start out as criminal and calls that start out as that non-criminal mixed.

And you can see sort of a lot of these make logical sense, like a report written where it's been documented that an officer had an interaction with people and something happened that didn't lead to an arrest, but something still happened that needed to be documented.

Most of that happens on the criminal side, but there are some ones where the call started out as non-criminal, but it was still necessary to write a report that could have been a crisis contact report.

This could be any type of report.

And then you see the other ones.

I think you see – it was mentioned in some of the articles in the press, about 3 percent of calls end in an arrest being made.

We don't make, in reality, that many arrests.

I think officers try to use that enforcement tool and their discretion to where they feel it's most effective.

It's a small number of our call dispatches where they are making an arrest.

And then you see the other sort of call types, call disposition types, and how they differentiate between initial criminal, initial mixed.

The other one just that I find interesting is that oral warning.

A lot of that might be on traffic stops.

They may decide not to issue a ticket.

You know, don't roll through that stop sign again.

You know, your light's out or something.

Oral warning, you know, that's a big one.

happens a lot in those initial non-criminal, but it also happens in those ones where the call initially sounds like it may have been criminal in nature, and the officer gets there and just realizes they can resolve it by telling the person to not do it again.

So that does happen a fair number of times.

But of all of our dispatches, that's 1%.

So that is it.

I'm happy to take questions and go back to specific slides, and also happy to have follow-up.

Okay, great.

We appreciate the presentation, and I know you took a little bit more time to give us some details that maybe weren't there previously, given the earlier line of questioning that we have for folks.

So, appreciate you helping to break down the data here.

So, what stood out, folks?

Please feel free to chime in.

The first person that I have to speak, signed up, is Council Member Lewis, and then I saw Council Member Strauss.

If there's anybody who would like to speak, please raise your hand, and then I see Angelica.

Wonderful.

Council Member Lewis, please go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First, I want to ask, and I don't know if this would be for Dr. Fisher or if this would be for Greg on the line, but I'm going to throw it out there.

I think I'll throw it to Greg first, just because we've been doing deep dives into the budget with Greg.

And my first question would be, and this harkens back a little to the first presentation, do we know about what the budget is for the 9-1-1 dispatch as a portion of the SPD budget, just for clarification?

Councilmember, yes, I think you're talking about the communication center.

And let me grab that here.

That was one that you and I talked about yesterday that I had handy.

Yes, here it is.

Communications, the total for the communications section is 36 million and has 152 FTEs.

And Greg, how many of those FTEs are civilian and how many are sworn?

Well, that's a good question.

I don't have that breakout, but I think that A vast majority of them are going to be civilian.

Dr. Fisher or Angela might be able to elaborate.

Yeah, I can field that one.

We have 140 civilian FTE and 12 sworn.

The majority of the sworn are actually part of our telephone reporting unit.

They are able to take reports online.

that reporting function is required to be performed by sworn personnel.

Right.

But that's separate from dispatch, right?

We don't have sworn officers sending dispatching calls?

That's correct.

Yeah.

No, we do not have any sworn dispatchers.

Okay.

But those 12 sworn are included in the 36 million, is that right?

Correct.

Okay.

Um, all right.

Well, I mean, I, I think as a, if it's overwhelmingly 140, um, uh, civilian FTEs, I mean, I'll just signal, I guess, right now for central staff and my colleagues.

Um, I think that's a, that should be a fairly easy institution to separate out from SPD's chain of command and put into an independent I just wanted to make sure I had those numbers correct and I just want to signal my very strong support for that request from community and willingness to work with central staff and my colleagues to get that done having clarified those questions.

and ask Dr. Fisher a few questions.

And Dr. Fisher, thank you for that very thorough presentation.

That was a really great deep dive into our 911 response.

Related to that previous inquiry of mine, I want to ask, when we talk about the 48% of the budget that includes 911 response, are we including 911 dispatch in that 48% or is that housed somewhere else?

And Angela can confirm for me, but that's officers and they're sergeants.

And I think they're lieutenants, the folks who are in 9-1-1, the patrol cars you see.

Right.

On that graph, there's the other group that's your patrol.

Let me go back to it just to make sure we're all on the same thing.

So patrol support, that 8%, that's folks who don't go to 911 routinely, ACT, bikes, CPT, but that big blue 48 are the folks in patrol cars and their chain of command in the precinct.

Right, Angela?

That's correct.

Yeah, this is a breakout of the sworn workforce specifically, so it's not going to include any of the civilian dispatchers.

Great.

Thank you for clarifying that.

I want to ask you just a few more follow up questions about the shift to non-criminal and just procedurally what happens.

And if we could look at that slide again, Dr. Fisher, where like some calls over the over the a period of the call shifting on criminal, I just want to kind of ask, what are some of the current things that patrol officers are doing when there is the shift in on criminal in terms of some of the other resources to respond to that call like is there.

Like, does lead get involved?

Like, is there a health one involvement?

Do community service officers respond to the call?

I'm just curious, like, you know, or in some cases, does nothing happen?

But I'm just curious, once there's been that determination, if there's still some sort of underlying need, you know, in what kind of percentage of those cases are patrol officers summoning a different first response?

Yeah, no, I thank you for the question, Councilmember.

I think I understand it.

I think there's a variety of things that happen when they get there and they notice something else is happening.

I think a lot there are a lot of times where they are first to get to going back to one of the earlier comments, a medical emergency or something, and they then call for fire.

Maybe fire didn't go initially, but then police went instead and police realized, oh, this is a medical emergency and they call for fire.

I think as the CSOs get more established, that's definitely what the model, I think, intention was from, you know, Angela did so much of that work engaging community with lots of others around what they wanted to see the CSOs do.

And I think a lot of it was that an officer gets there, realizes there's no need for law enforcement, but there's a need, and that's when they dispatch the CSO to that call, and they take over.

And I think there's been conversations around, are they system navigators?

Are they connecting people to services?

Like, what do you want to phrase it as?

But that's the role that people see for the CSOs.

And now that they're really coming on board, they were helping a lot under COVID.

with that response, but I think as we move forward, hopefully into a more connected world again, I think that's a key role of the CSOs.

It's a little hard for us to pull that out data-wise.

There aren't specific codes in the CAD system that says, I called this other unit.

We can mine the narrative comments, but that starts to get a little messy, but if that's something you're really interested in, we can attempt to get some concept on those calls that become non-criminal.

What did the officer do, and who did they call?

Yeah, I think just to follow up briefly, and then I, you know, I'm done with my line of questioning.

I would appreciate that, Dr. Fisher, because I do think that even as we transition to a new system that is going to have a lot of additional first response services and kind of reprioritize how a lot of calls are distributed, you know, I mean, there is still going to be a function for armed patrol.

There is still going to be a need for armed patrol.

And making sure that we also have some way to be responsive when there is that response.

And as you say, it does transition into the non-criminal and making sure we still have a seamless way.

I think that part of the way we want to start that would be to develop out Um, uh, methods to sort of, uh, to track, um, and retain that data, um, and make sure that that is, that is resolutely a part of the doctrine to making sure that, uh, that when there is that shift, there is some kind of service that is, um, uh, and other responder that they could be distributed and that we are tracking that.

So I appreciate that.

And as you're well aware, certainly very much appreciate the work of our community service officers that have been deployed this year and the great work they're doing.

And just want to make sure that we're working on how to protect, expand, and enhance the service they're providing and filling in in those roles.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you Council Member Lewis.

Next we have Council Member Strauss and then Angelica.

Also just a quick heads up for folks who are managing the Zoom and meeting.

We will have a hard stop at 1.30 to make sure that folks get a full half hour break.

and our IT folks need a little bit of time to set up for the next meeting as well.

My intent was to give this an hour presentation, so that would bring us to 1.15, but we'll definitely have a hard stop if we go a little bit past that.

So just giving folks a heads up in the viewing audience out there so that we can get teed up for our 2 p.m.

meeting.

Council Member Strauss, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair, and if Angelica would like to go before me, I'm happy to wait.

That's a kind offer.

Angelica, did you want to take up Council Member Strauss on that offer?

Thank you, Councilmember Strauss.

So I had a couple questions.

I, you know, I'm hearing that there are calls where the officers respond because they can get there faster, like possible emergency medical, medical emergency calls or response to Seattle fire.

I'm wondering, are there any kinds of calls where officers are required to show it up rather than showing up because they are the fastest ones who can arrive?

So that's one question.

I'm also wondering if there's a further breakdown of priority one, because that does seem to be a a big range of calls in terms of what percentage of serious assaults versus things like a medical emergency.

And finally, similar to Council Member Lewis's question, I think we're very curious about what the pipeline is from rapid response to service provision, to referrals to housing, to referrals to is there any infrastructure, or when people are receiving you know, there is 911 calls where people are actually receiving help because that, you know, that total number of dispatches of assistance rendered, that 35%, isn't clear to us whether that means that someone actually gets the help they need so that another 911 call doesn't happen again.

Thank you, Angelica.

Thank you, Angelica.

So, The calls required, I think we're actually working on that work as we sort of think through as a department, what are some of these calls that we don't necessarily have to go to?

Some of it is required in some of the RCW and local ordinances.

Specific to dispatching with the medical emergencies and fire, we'll have to get back to you and to the council.

I know, you know, specifically there's been a pilot in the Pioneer Square area where fire had asked that SPD dispatch officers with them when they're going into some of the service providers and shelters in the area because of some aggression that the firefighters had been victims of, and they were not comfortable going in alone anymore.

And so we had had to stand up a co-response model in those.

I know last year, I think we went about 760 times with fire in the Pioneer Square area during that pilot.

And, you know, we go with other agencies about 6,500 times a year.

We lose the ability with that assist other agency to always know who exactly we're going with without reading the narrative.

But we can look into are there, I don't know off the top, not being a dispatcher or officer, if there's specific types of medical emergency and fire call types where it's just policy or required that we go versus where it's been an agreement between the departments.

Priority one breakdown, I think we're happy to share that.

I'll have to check and make sure there's nothing that anybody has any sort of concerns over being shared.

But I mean, when looking at the list, it's stuff that I think, you know, abduction, bank alarms, fights, explosions, missing persons, kidnapping, prowler, rape, shots fired, a hazard in progress, like a mudslide or a line down, suicide.

I think one of the big ones is when someone calls 911 and they leave the line open or they hang up.

But without answering, that can be the sign of someone in distress.

And so often, that is a priority one.

And so they try to get there.

So there are a good number of them.

I think on face value, most of them, I think, make sense as priority one.

Another one that I think is a priority one, and I know we've had internal conversations, not just as part of this now very broad and energized conversation, but even before that about man down calls where someone is sick or injured.

And because of our ability to perhaps get there faster, we're dispatched to that instead of fire, I think, or some other apparatus in the future.

I think those are ones where I think just talking to officers, they sort of wonder why they're going.

to that if they get there and the person's sick, there's nothing they can do.

And they can, you know, they can call fire.

They can, you know, if it's really bad, they'll probably throw them in the back of the car and try to get them to the hospital if they're sure they're not going to hurt them more by doing that.

But so those are the call times.

But I will verify, I think we, it probably would make sense from my perspective to share the classifications, but there might be some security concerns about people gaming the system.

I know we've had a lot of swatting issues, but yeah.

And then the pipeline from you, Angelica, and Council Member Lewis, we'll look into what that process specifically looks like.

Any additional follow-up questions, Angelica?

Okay.

Thank you, Dr. Fisher, for those answers, and Angelica, for those questions.

Council Member Strauss?

Yeah, thank you, Chair.

And thank you, Dr. Fisher, Angela, Kara.

The immense amount of questions that I have asked of you offline, you have been so responsive and helpful in this presentation today, helped clarify a lot of the thoughts that I've been having.

I've got four questions, and I'll I don't know if this is for Greg, but I want to walk through them.

Dr. Fisher, and maybe this is also for Greg as well.

What legally needs to occur for the notarization aspect of policing to be completed?

Do we need to have another form of notary?

Do we need to change an SMC, an RCW?

Do we need to legally swear someone who is not in SPD?

Councilmember, this is Greg Goss.

Unless Dr. Fisher knows, I think that's probably something that we'll need to get to the law department and get back to you.

Okay.

Yeah, I want to confirm, I'm pretty sure it's in the RCW, the specific language, but I would rather a lawyer, not one who plays one on TV, answer that question.

I mean, your bow tie is better than many lawyers bow ties I've ever seen in my life.

You're doing well.

And really the root of this question is how do we assure that we are signing off on reports?

Because I look at traffic cameras, the traffic camera tickets and citations need to be signed off by a sworn officer.

It is also my understanding that somebody can be maybe we can swear someone in SDOT to be able to, you know, in the notarization aspect of them to be able to understand if that was a traffic infraction or not.

So my next question is, what do we need to keep in mind generally as we are looking to change how our 911 center is operated?

There was a request in the previous panel to have a civilian-led 911 center, and I've heard that request many times over, and I'd like to understand this more.

I think from my perspective and the conversations I've heard, I mean, in essence, it sort of is at the moment, but I think where my head goes, you know, as Angela walked through the staffing, and that was a big, the department undertook that with some outside expert help about, and a lot of negotiation and give back from their union to civilianize that process.

But I think right now we have two, I wouldn't say competing, but there are two You know, there's a fire and a police.

I think what we see is a model where we probably need a unified – there are a lot of jurisdictions around the country who have a sort of regional or unified PSAP, as they call them, where it's up to them to make the correct dispatch.

And, you know, they're the experts.

They hear hundreds of thousands, as we mentioned, calls a year.

They start to know, and they have the processes and the training to determine what's really happening.

If they know what the other tools are, they can get to, I think, be pretty good.

I think an important part of that conversation is the technology.

I do think we have some concerns about, does the current dispatch system really support dispatching outside of the fire or SPD?

And we currently use two different systems anyway.

And there are other systems that are built from the ground up to really do this multi-responder model.

I think that's something we need to key in on is that, We can have it sit wherever it sits and train the people the right way and give them the right tools.

But they also have to have the technology and the hardware to do that dispatch.

You know, cell phones don't always work in buildings.

The radios tend to be a little better.

Do we want everyone on our radio?

That gets into a whole operational discussion that I'm not an expert to talk to.

That's where my head goes when I think about a centralized, standalone dispatch center that is dispatching for a variety of things and is not specifically under one fire police or something else.

It's when people call when they have an urgent need and those people decide who's best to go.

That's very helpful.

I think I might add one thing to that, if that's all right, is that in terms of a more efficient approach like that, one thing to note is that the fire alarm center is staffed by sworn firefighters.

So there's a little bit of a different approach with the fire side than there is with dispatch of 911 calls on the criminal side.

And I think the council is probably aware that there might be labor issues with civilianization of firefighter positions, but that's something that you all could be briefed about by the law department later.

Excellent.

Thank you both, Greg and Dr. Fisher.

I'll actually just save one of my questions for offline and get to my last question, which is it looks like there's about 65% of calls which are non-priority one or two.

Can you help me understand which of these could be responded to by non-SWARM employees?

Sure.

So when we get into the priority three, this is where you're looking at stuff that's stale, so to speak.

It's not in progress.

It didn't just occur.

There's not someone that, you know, an officer getting there somewhat quickly isn't going to come upon the potential subject and be able to figure out what happened.

And so some some examples of ones, you know, there are, you know, littering is a priority.

I don't think we go to that very much, but there are the requests for detox property damage.

auto recovery, auto theft loss.

We've had that conversation a lot about should people just be able to report their stolen automobile online.

You know, you get there, the officer sees, oh, there's no car here.

Okay, you could have done that online.

But there's been some discussion around people have to attest for a lot of safety reasons that the car really is stolen and that it's not lent to someone because For safety reasons, if there's a traffic stop later and that car flag is stolen, that heightens everyone's sort of, oh, this might be a stolen vehicle.

So we always want to make sure in those auto theft cases that a car really has been stolen and also know when it's been recovered so that that flag isn't there, that that's a stolen vehicle.

But you see other things around.

There's a lot of traffic in priority three.

But I think primarily when you think about what most people are probably calling the police department four, that's a priority three.

It is things that happened, but they happened a while ago.

You were on vacation.

You came home a week later, and it's obvious someone's been in your house.

They're probably not going to find evidence.

It's safe to go in.

You might want them there to make sure it's safe to go in if you can't tell for certain, but there's nothing they're going to do there that you couldn't do online or that potentially, you know, someone else couldn't come and document it if you really need, if you didn't have an ability to take pictures and stuff, whatever might be needed for the report, maybe the city could send someone else there.

I think those are discussions that are easier to be had with those things that aren't in progress or didn't just happen or had happened a few days ago, potentially.

That's very helpful, and recognizing that we only have 22 minutes until we have to pause, I will save my questions for offline.

Thank you very much to everyone on the panel.

Council Member Strauss, if you have one or two other questions, you're welcome to chime in now if you'd like.

I'll pass the mic, and if there's still time, then I'll come back.

OK, sounds good.

I don't see any other hands.

Council Member Herbold?

OK, great.

I was wondering, as Chair of Public Safety, if you had a few follow-up.

Thank you.

I just want to highlight some research that I may have mentioned before.

A recent New York Times article compared three cities found that the amount of time that officers spent on violent crime was relatively low.

For Seattle, using a narrow definition of violent crime, the study found that 1.3% of calls were for violent crime and about 15% were for traffic accidents and enforcement.

And further data for Seattle wasn't listed, but for other cities, the combined rates of calls for responding to non-criminal calls and traffic was at about 50%.

So it's really worth noting that these percentage may not correlate with how much time is dedicated to each type of call.

So I really appreciate Dr. Fisher that you have done that, that extra work, not just looking at numbers of calls, but the amount of time that is dedicated to the calls.

We requested, the council requested this report on categories of work involved in SPD several weeks ago to begin this process of identifying what work currently done by police officers could be done by other either city responders or CBOs.

And again, it's really appreciated that you are approaching this exercise, Dr. Fisher, with an open mind and curiosity and I think an understanding of the importance of this moment that we're in right now to really think about how we can reimagine public safety in our city.

I do want to highlight that The last time we met in the Select Budget Committee of the Whole, we had requested sort of a, I think Council President Gonzalez made the request that we do this similar type of analysis for specialized units of the police department.

So I'm just wanting to put a pin in that.

So there are specialized units of the police department that potentially some of the work of those units could be done by other non-police officer departments.

So just again, wanting to highlight our interest in that additional level of analysis.

And yeah, I just want to say I'm looking forward to getting more of an understanding of which responses of even the non non-criminal responses, if there are responses that there is some sort of a requirement, whether or not it's policy or state RCW, that they do respond to those non-criminal type of instances.

So appreciate as well that we are going to be having ongoing conversations with the law department.

And as it relates specifically to slide three, and I think we're on slide three, yes.

Just wanting to know, for these pie charts, did we include a breakdown of the percentages that are community generated calls versus officer generated calls?

So this one right here, Council Member Herbold, is just the community-generated and the small number of priority ones.

There are about 2,500 priority one calls a year, with the vast majority, the 270-some thousand, being community-generated calls that are dispatched.

I could break that out, but the priority ones is just a small amount.

All right, that's helpful.

And then, On slide eight, if we could go to that.

Yeah, I can get it to go there.

There we go.

Thank you.

This is the top 15 calls by final disposition.

The two non-criminal items, assist public and traffic motor vehicle collisions are around 6% for final call classification.

But I don't see them as a category on the initial call list on the previous slide.

Just wondering why that is.

Right.

Um, I'd have to check what those, what these started out as, because it's a, one of the complications here is it's a different set of classification types.

So the two there's 255 initial call types and 178 final call types, and they use completely different language.

Um, just the way I think the system was set up, but we can see why I can look down the list.

Maybe assist public just didn't come across as the initial, maybe it's not an initial call type.

I'm not familiar with all 255. So we can figure that out for you.

Thank you.

And then my last question is, and I'm sorry if this was answered, there was a West Seattle Bridge Task Force meeting that I was trying to do double time on.

It's actually still going.

But I came back to this meeting as it relates specifically to the question of the largely civilianized 9-1-1 dispatch function.

One of the concerns or issues raised by decriminalized Seattle is what role does the SPD chain of command have for that civilianized 9-1-1 function.

And I'm just wondering if you could speak to that and how that chain of command either does or doesn't influence the decision-making that is made by the civilianized dispatch officers, whether or not there's like an approval required of folks within the chain of command or what that looks like.

Thank you, Council Member Inouye.

I get your question.

So I think on the highest level, the easiest way to answer that is they ultimately those sworn and the civilians report up to our chief operating officer, who is a civilian, you know, the equivalent number two in the department.

And so in some essence, you know, while there are lieutenants and captains and Angela, we know the full breakdown in there.

Most of that decision making is on the civilian side.

We have a civilian manager of and Angela can correct me here when I get this structure wrong and I see Kara shaking her head, of the dispatchers and call takers.

And they're doing that best practice work about how are we supposed to be doing this.

But there are still, I think, because it is directing the resources of sworn individuals, I think that's why, probably from a labor perspective, there is a sworn component there and sort of so they know what might be happening.

But primarily, a decision making, from my understanding, is done through a civilian chain with from the sworn, but Angela or Kara can correct me if I misspoke there.

No, that's correct.

Because of the existence of sworn personnel in that group, we do have, and it's a longstanding practice there that we've largely moved away from in response to a communications center consultant study that took place In recent years, we've completely restructured the communications center.

There are operations managers who are responsible for the day-to-day dispatch operations.

While there is a lieutenant and captain in the communications center, a sergeant overseeing the telephone reporting unit, officers, the operation itself is largely civilianized, leadership included.

Thanks, Angela.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

And I believe to close this out with our questioning, Council Member Morales.

Thank you, I you know, this is really just really a comment more than a question, I just, you know, after reviewing these charts and graphs, just really brings into relief why this is so important.

Why it's so important for us to look at this and understand really clearly how these calls come in and what happens to send folks out.

The prioritization of the calls relative to the number of calls that actually come in is troubling to me when we think that most of them are non-criminal or mixed disturbances, suspicious people, nuisance calls, even shoplifting, I will say.

Some of the experiences that we have had here in the South End with young people shoplifting food, So much of this is really about crimes of poverty.

And so this data doesn't reflect that.

I would be interested to see a little bit more granular information about, you know, if people are being arrested or calls are being made because people are sleeping in cars or sleeping in dumpsters or, you know, shoplifting food.

real people's lives being affected and too often that ends in arrest or worse.

And so I just want to remind us that that is why we're having this conversation because, you know, we could make the data say just about anything we want, but the reality is that there are people whose lives are really impacted by the calls that are made, whether they're community generated or officer generated.

And we need to make sure that we are protecting our neighbors.

And so I just, I appreciate this presentation and having this information.

And I want to say that it doesn't do anything for me to help me feel better about the way that this particular operation is happening.

And I hope that we can move towards something that is more just and more protective of our neighbors.

Thanks.

Thank you for those closing comments, Council Member Morales.

I'll also note as we're looking at this slide as a good example of that, you know, I think that there is information that just jumps out on the page.

And if I were to look at the first, you know, I think it's important to make sure that when you look at the five or six bar charts here on where the calls are coming from or what the response, what the police response is responding to, many of these items immediately jump out to make it seem like a different type of response is possible, especially when you think about parking violations and the issues that I know people have The second item there, you know, we've just, as one example, having a different number to call for traffic violations or parking violations is, I think, a good example of where we could see reductions.

The other thing that I think is interesting to note is you know, suspicious vehicle or a suspicious person.

We've heard report after report, even just in the last month here of people who were sleeping in their cars and the cops called on those individuals and people losing their lives for sleeping in a car as either a suspicious person or a suspicious vehicle being there.

So I think that there's a lot of interesting data here.

Thanks, Den, for her questions on the previous panel as well.

I think we'll be looking forward to working with all of you to see how we can but basically alleviate some of our officers from having to respond to some of these issues, as Council Member Morales pointed out, which in many cases are being in situations caused possibly by poverty, having theft called out as one, which I think is an important one related to, you know, I know that there was a presentation last year that we heard from SPD on the number of people who are potentially getting caught up in the criminal legal system because they were stealing food because they could not afford to feed themselves.

The other question that I would have as a follow-up is when we look at the trespass columns, both in these slides that you were dispatched to and then the final call classification, how many of those trespass cases were due to people who were I will stop there and see if there is any final closing researcher looking into this.

If you have any final observations, you're welcome to chime in on there as well.

Okay, seeing none.

I don't see any other council members with their hand up.

I will thank you, Dr. Fisher.

Thank you for this incredibly detailed presentation and thank you for being willingness to for your willingness to get into more details with us as we think about how we can reclassify some of these calls and free up folks to focus on some of the more urgent issues.

I really appreciate your time.

You're welcome, thank you.

Okay, not seeing any additional comments.

Folks, we are going to reconvene at 2 p.m.

for the second session here, and if there's no objection, session one of this budget committee We'll be at recess until 2 PM.

Enjoy your lunch break, and we will see you all again at 2.