Public Safety Committee 5/28/2024

will come to order.

It's 9.35 a.m., May 28th, 2024. I'm Robert Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Here.

Councilmember Saka.

Here.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Councilmember Moore.

Present.

Chair Kettle.

Here.

Chair, there are five members present.

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

Seeing and hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning to those on checking in via Seattle Channel.

It's an important meeting today.

First, we have reappointments to the Community Police Commission.

Reverend Hunter, who's a co-chair, along with Reverend Walden and Mr. Merkel.

and also Ms. Wilson, a member of the civil rights legal community.

Just of note too, we are seeking an appointment from the native community to the Community Police Commission, and we're working with the Indigenous Advisory Council, the Department of Neighborhoods, and Office of Intergovernmental Relations on filling that position too on the Community Police Commission.

Second, today we have a briefing on police recruitment and retention by Mr. Doss of the central staff.

We made some major moves recently with the new interim SPA contract, plus our recruitment and retention legislation, very important.

It also included a 30 by 30 element to that bill.

And that leads into the fact that the main briefing today No disrespect to Mr. Doss, will be the 30 by 30 report, an important piece in achieving our recruitment and retention goals.

I wanted to make one note.

I understand that there's allegations against Chief Diaz and that there's an investigation ongoing, but there's also litigation ongoing.

And because of that, it's prudent, particularly in our roles as official physicians, to let those pieces run their course and have their chance to do their work.

But at the same time, it's very important to speak to the broader 30 for 30 goals and what's happening regarding advancing women in policing.

And on that point too, you know, in a previous meeting I spoke regarding SPD staffing, you know, the fact that we needed to draw a line under the old council.

And I think we also have to do this with respect to, and this goes to 30 by 30, I believe, because it shows in terms of what happened with Chief Bess.

Carmen Bess, I believe the old council was poor in its decisions related to her and her position as chief and the actions that led to you know, her leaving her position.

And so I think that's something that's important for us to acknowledge.

It's kind of like the 30 for 30 report.

You know, I read the report.

Strikes is true.

Same thing with Carmen Best.

Strikes is true.

It's really important to note that.

And we shouldn't try to explain it away.

Some may try to explain it away.

Oh, we had this happening at a time or this or that.

We're, you know, trying to, you know, yeah, but, you know, kind of those kinds of approaches.

We can't do it and we should not do it.

with the previous point that I made, but also with 30 by 30, but also with the situation that occurred with Chief Carmen Best.

And then we need to build on it.

We need to move forward and learn the lessons of that period and with Chief Best and what happened to her.

and what kind of example that set, because I do believe that comes back to the broader 30 for 30 effort that we're looking to promote here on the city council.

So with that said, with that kind of baseline for today's meeting, I would like to now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda or within the purview of the committee.

Clerk, how many people do we have signed up today?

How many speakers?

Currently, we have five signed up and two present, all remote.

Okay, thank you.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

We will start, you said all were online?

All remote.

Okay, so I will skip the in-speaker part of my script and go straight to remote speakers.

Can you please read the public comment instructions, sir?

Thank you.

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called on the order in which they registered.

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

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comment within the allotted time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open, and we'll begin with the first speaker on the list.

The first remote speaker is Rebecca Brenneman.

Please press star six when you hear the prompt, you have been unmuted.

Hello, good morning.

I am Rebecca Brennaman, a Seattle Police Department supporter.

I thank you for this opportunity to comment on SPD's 30 by 30 effort to increase female presence on the force.

I laud the department's stated commitment to this undertaking and am encouraged by this committee's active interest in it.

Part of the 30 by 30 mission statement calls for creating, quote, a healthy, safe, respectful, and equitable environment in which all members of SPD can grow and thrive.

As you will see in the upcoming presentation, in 2023, the department hired Dr. Lois James to conduct focus groups for the 30 by 30 initiative, assessing the existing work environment for SPD women.

The report listed five emergent themes and three key recommendations.

While the 30 by 30 plan presented today addresses childcare and mentorship needs, I am concerned that it does not address the significant issues raised about the existing workplace environment.

Issues such as expectations for women, double standards, exclusion, pigeonholing among others.

Along with impacts on personnel and not just women, and department service levels.

This working environment affects the department's ability to retain personnel.

Retention is critical to achieving the department's force level goals.

Highlighting these difficult issues creates a timely opportunity for SPD to find and implement solutions.

Good.

The department has tackled many problem areas, creating innovations that are emulated nationwide and have improved the department's service to the community.

My hope is that improvement of the existing workplace environment to reflect the mission goal of a healthy, safe, respectful, and equitable environment also will be a 30 by 30 priority.

Thank you.

The next remote speaker is BJ Last.

Please press star six when you hear the prompt.

Hi, my name is BJ Last.

I'm a Ballard resident.

Looking at the SPD Q1 staffing and metrics report, I want to point out SPD is on pace to overspend its $37.7 million overtime budget this year.

That overspending is even with the budget that overtime piece being up 43% since 2022 and higher than the total budget of multiple city departments.

This is a large issue, especially given the massive general fund deficit that is coming up and SPD's massive portion of the general fund that the department needs up.

So something that council should really be looking into in its fiduciary responsibility to the city.

Also, special events are up 23% in Q1.

This is despite last year's memorandum of understanding with Spog.

That Spog, the mayor and council claimed, was designed to shift special event staffing from non-sworn officers to, I'm sorry, to non-sworn officers from sworn SPD.

This memorandum of understanding was billed as special event events costs and staffing hours by sworn officers.

This is clearly not happening.

There's even a call out that PEOs are doing fewer hours for special events than previously, which is, again, a big question when that memorandum of understanding was theoretically just or specifically to increase special events staffing by non-sworn officers.

And Q1 2023 being higher than, I'm sorry, Q1 this year being higher than last year is really disappointing.

Concerning, since last year's Q1 was abnormally high, as Greg Doss notes, that special events for Q1 last year were much higher due to what was described as the Memphis incident, which I assume was the police murder of Tyree Nichols, and also Q1 last year had the SPD murder of Janavi Kandula.

So the fact that this year's special events are already higher than that is deeply disconcerting.

In response to call 911 responses, call volume was down So I'm not sure why any numbers are going up.

That looks more like it has to do with what SPD feels like actually doing and responding to, like when they waited 21 minutes to respond to a call for an active shooter.

Which not only do those officers never face any serious discipline, the council gave the three officers over $261,000.

Thank you.

There are no additional registered speakers.

OK.

Okay, thank you.

Yes, after no additional speakers, so we'll now proceed to our first item of business.

Clerk, we now move on to our first two items of business.

Will the clerk please read items one and two into the record?

Agenda items one and two, appointments 2851 and 2852, the reappointments of Reverend Patricia L. Hunter and Lynn Wilson as members of the Community Police Commission to terms of December 31, 2027.

Thank you, Clerk.

We don't have a presentation on this this morning.

These are two reappointments.

I have worked with Reverend Hunter, who is a co-chair of the commission, along with Reverend Walden and Mr. Merkel.

She's part of the leadership of the commission.

And Ms. Lynn is part of the civil rights legal community and has been for many years seen in the packet.

I'M NOT SURE IF THERE'S ANYTHING SPECIFIC, ANYTHING ELSE TO ADD, ANY COMMENTS?

COUNCIL PRESIDENT?

I JUST WANTED TO SAY THAT I APPRECIATE THEIR CONTINUED SERVICE.

THIS IS A VOLUNTEER POSITION, AND THIS IS DEALING WITH EXTREMELY WEIGHTY MATTERS IN OUR CITY, AND WE RELY ON THE CPC TO RECOMMEND POLICY CHANGES BASED ON THE COMMUNITY.

My experience with these two individuals has been nothing but positive, and I would like to see them continue to serve.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

And yes, to echo the council president's comments, like other boards, volunteering and serving our community on these commissions and boards and the like is very important, so thank Reverend Hunter and Ms. Wilson, but then the entire community police commission for their work and support of the community.

I move that the committee recommend confirmation of appointments 2851 and 2852. Is there a second?

Second.

It is moved and seconded to recommend confirmation of the appointments.

Are there any final comments?

Seeing, hearing none.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the recommendation to confirm the appointments.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Yes.

Council Member Moore.

Yes.

Council President Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Saka.

Aye.

Chair Kettle.

Aye.

Chair, there are five for and zero against.

Thank you, Clerk.

Appreciate that.

And again, thank you to the Police Commission and particularly Reverend Hunter and Ms. Wilson.

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

Will the Clerk please read item three into the record?

Seattle Police Department 2024 Staffing and Performance Metrics Briefing and Discussion with Greg Doss, Central Staff.

Welcome, Mr. Doss.

Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

Greg Doss, Council Central staff, here to give the Q1 update on SPD's staffing, overtime, and performance metrics.

Okay, go ahead.

If you'd like, I'll launch right into it.

Ask Mr. Clark if he has the presentation.

And I should say, most importantly with me today is Carrie Jones.

She's the acting budget director for SPD.

While I put together these presentations based on a whole lot of data that they send, it takes a lot of time to put that data together, and it also helps me immensely that they double-check everything I do.

So, really, the department is walking hand-in-hand with me on these.

And so I want to thank Carrie and Brian Maxey and others who helped me, and Jordan Mack, who helped me along with these presentations.

Well, thank you, Ms. Jones, for joining us.

It's always good to have some back, some support.

Not that Mr. Doss needs it.

No, no, I appreciate the backup, to use SPD terms.

So just by way of background, these are reports that generally central staff give in the first quarter and the second quarter of each year.

The third quarter data that is sent to central staff is used in the budget development process.

So all these same metrics will appear in my budget issue paper when you're reviewing the annual budget.

And then the fourth quarter, the data wouldn't come until next year.

And so that's typically not done because In January, members are getting settled and there's not committee meetings that are available.

So this is done twice a year.

It probably shouldn't be called quarterly, maybe semi-annually, but Q1 and Q2.

So with that, I guess I'll go ahead and get into it.

Flip the side.

So the first thing I'm going to talk about is staffing.

Go ahead, one more.

And so with this chart, before I get into it, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the staffing numbers.

And so I'm gonna point your attention to the column on the right that says 2024 Q1 SPD actuals.

As you can see that the original staffing plan which accompanied the budget last fall and which the budget is based on, assumed that the department was going to hire 31 police officers or police recruits in 2024, the first quarter.

They actually hired 11, so that's 20 short of the projection.

And of course, we're going to get into later that those vacant positions that are still vacant, the 20, are going to create some salary savings.

On the other side of the equation on separations, they had planned for 27 and had 22. This is the first time since I think 2020 that I have seen it that the actuals are lower than the projections.

This is a very good sign in terms of retention.

I'll take a moment just to digest that.

So thank you.

I appreciate that.

Hopefully this is a step that is a positive kind of indication in terms of where we're going.

So thank you.

Yes.

Yes.

And then on the annual projections, which is down below, you can see that originally the department had planned on hiring 2020 and separating 105 or I'm sorry, 120 and separating 105. What you'll see instead is that on the right is that the projections have been revised.

They're now hoping to hire 100 and separate 100. And I would point out that this is The projections here, these updated projections, are really just a mathematical result.

They take the hires that didn't happen and the separations that were realized and then add that into their projections for the rest of the year.

So it's not like they look at it and say, okay, Q1 was bad, therefore we're going to predict Q3, Q4.

it's just strictly a mathematical exercise where they take the 15, 20 that were not hired, five that retained, that net of 15, and then you see that there in the revised projections.

All right, so moving to the next slide.

Oh, wait, I'm sorry.

I'm going to stay here.

The next thing I need to talk about is the chart.

So what you'll see is the first line is fully trained officers.

And as of Q1 2024, there are 994 fully trained officers and 924 officers in service.

Explain really quickly what the difference is.

A fully trained officer is an officer who has been through the academy phase one and phase two of field officer training, and that's where they're accompanied by another officer in the car.

A fully trained officer is an officer who has completed all of that, and now they're in phase three and can be deployed alone.

And that matters because now this officer can log into the 911 system and answer 911 calls, and they're sort of an available resource, if you will, whereas prior they weren't.

deployable officers or officers in service, which is that lower line, 924, it's lower because we take the number of fully trained officers and then subtract out those officers that are out on long-term leave.

And so this is like military service or, other kinds of leaves, maternity leaves, disability leaves.

If they're going to be out for a long period of time, multiple months, that's when they get put into that leave category and subtracted out.

That lower one is typically called deployable officers.

The difference between those two numbers, there are 70 officers that are currently out on long-term leaves.

That is pretty good.

That's actually the best metric on that particular measure for a while now.

As you can look back in this chart, you can see that back in 2021, there's a wide gap there.

At that time, we had between 140 and 180 officers out on long-term leave.

So the fact that this is getting down to 70 is, again, another very good sign in terms of retention and making sure that officers are available for deployment.

Okay, Mr. Doss.

Yeah.

Hold on.

Let me digest that point, too.

I like that's two.

Okay, let's keep them going, please.

All right.

So go ahead and flip to the next slide, please.

So this next slide is...

I'm gonna start with the top line.

There's a lot here.

What this is saying on the top line is that in the original budget, the 2024 adopted budget, and actually I think this is an earlier version, that should say 2024 adopted budget on that first column.

There were 1,074 funded positions, FTE to be specific.

And then after this first quarter has happened, Incorporating all of the changes that have happened both in this quarter and last fall since the budget was written, there are now 1,053 FTE that are employed in the department.

And so the difference is 21 FTE vacant FTE that are going to create salary savings at the end of the year.

And the way that works is it's an annualized number, FTE.

The 21 fewer FTE will translate into about $3 million throughout the year.

So that's not just for the first quarter, but throughout the year.

If SPD can maintain its current staffing plan, which as you can see, and 100 separations, if they realize both those metrics, then the agency will see $3 million of savings in 2024. If however, either one of those numbers changes, like say there's fewer hires than 100, then there'll be more salary savings than the 3 million.

Stop and ask if there's any questions there.

Any questions?

Just to show that we do value public comment, and the one public commenter was talking about overtime, which is a big issue for many people.

Sometimes I don't think it accounts for the fact that we've had a massive loss of officers, and so the overtime is basically compensating for the loss of officers.

Does the overtime pay eat away at that $3 million?

You know, so is the net gain

We're going to talk about that a little bit later, but yes, the lack of hires will allow for salary savings to be applied towards that overtime overage.

But at this point, it's probably too early to say whether those two things are going to equal.

We're going to have enough salary savings.

Hopefully, there wouldn't be many salary savings available, but it's kind of too early to know if it's going to enough to pay for an overtime overage or not but as i said we'll get into that a little later okay i understand so flip to the next slide please did you have a question i did thank you oh i'm sorry any questions thank you chair um i'm just curious why they are planning for 20 fewer hires you have any idea yeah again that's just really a mathematical function um It's the case that they had planned for 120. There were 20 fewer in Q1, and so they just take the rest of the months will be 100.

And have they adjusted that since the SPOG contract passed and since Council President's bill passed to make the testing easier and more uniform?

No, that's why I was trying to point that out.

It's just strictly a mathematical function.

It's not that major events or things that happen mid-year cause the agencies to do a correction.

It is really just a function of how many did or did not appear in the first quarter and what the budget changes are for that.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Moore.

And I do believe it's going to make a difference.

I understand your point.

That, in combination with the leadership point, these are the reasons why we're doing this.

So hopefully over the course of the year, those two positives that you noted, which are kind of negatives but positives in terms of direction, that we can build on those.

So thank you.

Do you have a question?

Nope.

Okay.

Not in agreement.

Okay, so next slide.

So this next slide is one that I show as part of these presentations just typically because I get asked this question from those of you who represent specific districts.

You have in this chart each of the precincts and their number of officers and sergeants.

At a high level, this has not changed much since the last report.

The last report a quarter ago said that there would be 500 officers in total assigned to precincts, and now there's 490, so 10 fewer.

Those 10 fewer are pretty evenly distributed among the precincts, so sort of nothing to see there.

In the past, sometimes based on crime issues in one particular precinct versus another, the chief may shift officers around, but in this case, the reductions are pretty proportional.

Wait, so just so I'm clear, the numbers on the bottom represent reductions or just actual numbers?

They're just actual numbers.

They're 10 fewer.

If you looked at this exact chart three months ago, they would all add up to 500, and here it's 490.

And the citywide five sergeants and 19 officers, can you please explain what that is?

They're roving or, I mean?

Sure, they're a citywide response group.

I think it's called the Citywide Response Unit, CRU, or CRG.

And they're not necessarily roving.

They do have assignments at the precinct, but they're flexible resources that can be used for proactive time and proactive deployment.

Thank you.

Mr. Chair.

Vice Chair.

So these citywide folks, they can be used for proactive deployment.

Would that include emphasis patrols?

It typically...

That's a really good question, and that's something I'm going to have to get into a little bit later, but it could include emphasis patrol work now that the department has sort of reorganized the way that they do emphasis patrols, and I'll talk about that, but...

The one thing I should have said about this citywide folks is not only do they, I mean, they're there for proactive policing.

They're typically officers that are more senior.

Maybe they came out of a detective unit or out of a specialty unit back to patrol and So they have a little bit more skill to do investigations than some of the newer officers.

But they are also not logged into the 911 system.

So it is the case that they answer 911 calls as well, in addition to the proactive duties.

So I need to mention that.

And then we'll get into the emphasis patrols in just a minute.

Thank you.

Okay, next slide.

So this slide I include to show you the history of patrol.

You'll see the last two bars or columns to the right, 911 response only officers and sergeants.

And those are again, only folks that respond to 911 calls.

And then you'll see on the left, all of patrol including Seattle Center and bike squads.

We have one bike squad now, the department does, and they have a total of 11 non-assigned resources for 911 calls.

That's very different than if you look back to, say, September of 2020, In September of 2020, you had about 24 to 27 folks that were available, not either in that officer column or that sergeant column, that were available to do proactive work on anti-crime teams, on community police teams, on bikes, on foot beats.

And those officers are now pretty much all gone, with the exception of one bike squad.

Pretty much all patrol is answering 911 calls.

I really want to reinforce the implications of what this slide is communicating.

The bottom line that says Interim Chief Diaz moves 100 officers into 911 response and reduces patrol beats, CPT, ACT, and support.

This is important because when we talk about tackling the big public safety challenges, guns on the street, proliferation of drugs in our community, and so many other.

If we have removed the investigators from the units and put them in patrol, then that means we cannot do proactive policing, investigation to prevent additional crimes down the way.

We're only responding to emergencies, which is...

absolutely important.

I'm not criticizing this decision to move.

So on the one hand, our ability to fight crime, the big things that we need to put a lot of investigative resources into, our ability to do that is drastically diminished.

And at the same time, the reduction of patrol beats results in um in less trust between the police force and the community this is what i hear all the time from small business owners in in in neighborhood business districts is that they miss the patrol uh the the beat cop who knows business owners who knows people um you know the residents and who kind of keeps a daily eye on things and kind of checks in that function is in extremely important not just for public safety but also for community building to build between the department and the people of Seattle.

And so this is something that is very concerning to me.

And my hope is that when we can build back staffing levels, that this will be corrected.

Council Member Moore.

Thank you, and I appreciate that, Council President.

But this also, because I think we are going to have a difficult time actually getting back to the numbers that we really need to have.

This, to me, argues for really looking to expand our community service officer program, which is, to some extent, an alternative response.

But they can really fulfill that role of being eyes on the street and knowing individuals and being able to report back to to leadership about what's happening out there.

And so I would really, really, that's something I talked about a lot on the campaign trail, and there was a lot of public interest.

And I know Chief Diaz has been a supporter of bringing back the community service officer program.

So I'm just putting a plug in there for SPD and the mayor's office to really move that forward.

It is not about reducing the ability of police to police, but really expanding the ability to respond and have a broader public safety network.

Thank you.

THANK YOU, COUNCILMEMBER MOORE AND COUNCIL PRESIDENT AND FAIR POINTS AND CPT, FOR EXAMPLE.

I USED TO WORK CLOSELY WITH CPT ON A REGULAR BASIS.

THAT'S A LOSS.

NOT LISTED HERE AS TRAFFIC ENFORCEMENT.

SO THE IMPACTS OF THESE NUMBERS DROPS ARE FELT FAR AND WIDE.

I APPRECIATE WHAT CRG DOES IN TERMS OF BEING A FLEX FORCE AND SPECIAL MISSION, IF YOU WILL, BUT, YEAH, THE IMPACTS ARE HUGE AND THESE Graphs really show that, so thank you.

So back to you, Mr. Doss.

Thanks.

And one other point I might make to follow up on what Council Member Moore was saying is that the last SPOG agreement, the interim agreement that was passed a few weeks ago, did provide the authority for CSOs to answer some calls with the direction of a sergeant.

So conceivably that will help.

Okay, so next slide.

So now I'm going to shift and go into overtime monitoring, and we'll talk a little bit about emphasis patrols here as well.

All right, so let's start with a high-level snapshot of where overtime is at.

As you can see in this table, there have been increases to the annual budget each year.

I will say that the annual budget is trying to sort of catch up to what SPD spends in the last couple years anyways.

Well, going on for quite a while, SPD has spent more than its budget in overtime.

You can see that there was a 43, percent increase in its budget over the last couple three years and that last year SPD spent thirty nine point six million when its budget was thirty one million so It's not uncommon for the department to go over budget.

One of the things that it's helpful at this point in time of the year is to see how they're tracking against the budget.

Here you'll see that on that lowest row, 2024, They are tracking about 24% of their budget right now in spending, which if you think about it from just a proportional standpoint, a quarterly report, 25% each quarter, that would be good.

But there's very much seasonality here.

It's the event season and the summer season where crime has an uptick where they really use a lot of overtime.

So the fact that it's 24% now is probably more indicative of the fact that they're running over their budget on a on a longer term basis, but that's something we'll have to kind of wait and see.

Let's see if there's any questions on this one.

Okay, so go ahead and flip to the next one, please.

So now we're gonna dive into the detail a little bit on how the overtime is being spent.

What I do, I take data from the department and I crunch it down.

There's sort of a natural threshold on the spending of data where there's a number of, been fewer than 7,000 hours and then some that's been more than 7,000 hours.

So that's kind of how I divide these charts.

Since you all are primarily new, with the exception of the council president, I'll really high clip hit what these categories are.

So the chief of police includes public affairs, data-driven policing.

It includes the OPA and the chief legal officer.

Special operations is typically, as it sounds, groups like the bomb squad or the canine squad or the SWAT patrol or harbor patrol.

The chief operating officer, primarily administrative units.

There you've got the budget shop, human resources, those that you might expect that run it.

Collaborative policing is, and it's a very small amount there, that's the community-driven organization.

That unit is the community service, not community service, I'm sorry, the sworn community service officers, not the civilian service officers, actually.

CFOs are there.

Yep.

Thank you to Carrie.

CSOs are there as well.

The civilian service officers are there as well.

Metropolitan is a group that contains traffic enforcement, parking enforcement, event planning, and the crisis intervention unit.

Technical services is everything from forensic support to digital imaging and technology.

And then the miscellaneous, sort of everything else, that's like everything from the executive security court appearances, other things that officers do that don't fall into these categories.

And so at a high level, what you're seeing here pretty much is that all the civilian units, like technical services and the chief operating officer and the chief of police, are all showing decreases on their overtime use.

And that's something I think the department cares about overtime, and I think they're trying to RATION THEIR USE OF IT, AND YOU CAN SEE IT THERE.

YOU DON'T SEE IT AS MUCH.

IN FACT, YOU MOSTLY SEE INCREASES ON THE SWORN SIDE.

AND HERE, AGAIN, AS MR. CHAIR, YOU POINTED OUT, THAT MAY BE DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE STAFFING ISSUES.

Not much to say here other than I'll point out that, as the public testimony showed, that the PEOs are receiving less overtime now for events.

There are more officers now working events subsequent to the passing of the MOU that happened last year.

That is something that the department predicts will not stay in special events season as special events pick up.

The department believes that PEOs will take on more work there, too.

It also could reflect that there's still, out of 105 positions, only 90 are filled for the PEOs.

So the department is still working to fill PEO positions.

Vice Chair?

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Quick question on the executive security and whether there is a breakdown or not for mayoral-provided executive security versus chief-provided executive security.

And just as background, as I understand it, You know, at local policing levels, it is common, primarily in the East Coast, for chiefs of police to have executive security, protection detail, and less common on the West Coast, for whatever reason.

You know, I don't mean to sort of make this a conversation about executive security, but it is important to better understand, you know, which of that funding and services is for mayoral provided versus chief of police And also, as I understand it, since Chief O'Toole was here from Boston originally, again, East Coast, common to have chief of police, executive-provided security.

Ever since that, even when we've had local chiefs of police, they've chosen to carry that sort of forward and maintain the executive-provided security at the local level.

probably outside of the scope of this conversation and whether that's truly needed, but I think it is important for the public to understand what's the breakdown versus things that we would expect ordinarily, mayor, executive, the CEO, the president of our local government to have versus chiefs of police without a response to a specific threat.

Uh, thank you, Councilmember Sacco.

Um, I'm not sure if the department tracks at that level.

Uh, it's gonna take a little research.

We'll see if we can figure it out and get back to you.

Curious to better understand that.

So, yeah, thank you.

Councilmember Moore.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, so I noticed the special operations you said is up due to arson, bomb, and SWAT trainings.

Is that because of the 4-10 schedule that you mentioned, or...?

That is more related to special trainings that I believe they were doing this year, specific tactical trainings on specific subjects.

There will be later on some training-related increases that are more related to the 410s, but I think that with BOM and ARSEN and SWAT, it's more the specialty trainings.

And I don't believe it's 410.

Not in that case.

Carrie's saying no.

Like I said, she carries me on a lot of these.

And those trainings are having to occur in off hours because of the need for full staff during on hours, or is that?

Yeah, or they run over the number of hours that a 40-hour week, whatever they normally work.

Great, thank you.

36.

Take the next slide, if there's no more questions.

Okay, so then, as I said, there's sort of two thresholds when you're diving into the overtime data, which geeks like me love to do.

And the other threshold is the one over 7,000 hours.

Normally, I handle this chart with just one slide.

I'm going to have a couple here today.

The chart is not going to change, just what I have to say about it will.

What I want to start with here is the obvious changes.

As you can see, emphasis patrols on the far right is gone, and patrol operations in the middle is double.

And what this is, is this is a reflection of a change that SPD made last fall in the way that they record overtimes.

In the past, SPD has had dedicated overtime squads that would work emphasis patrols.

These are areas that I think you're all familiar with, 3rd Pike and Pine, 12th and Jackson.

A group of, a squad of folks would go out and work a specific shift or time amount in those areas.

And when they recorded their overtime, it was easy to see how many hours were worked at these various locations.

Like, for instance, I could tell Councilmember Saka this summer exactly how many times, how many hours were being used on the summer Alki emphasis patrols.

It has changed now so that due to some operational changes I'll get to in a second, such that the emphasis patrols are no longer recorded as emphasis patrols.

Officers are instead recording those as minimum staffing hours for the precincts.

So jumping to patrol operations, patrol operations, those bars represent only the minimum staffing hours for the precincts.

pretty much all of the overtime that's worked in the precincts is for what they call minimum staffing, which is coverage of sick leave, augmentation to make sure there's enough officers to answer 911 calls.

So prior to this year, when you looked at that green bar there and you saw about 26,000 hours, you knew that that was the amount of overtime hours that the department needed to make sure it could adequately field a patrol force that could respond to 911 calls.

And then the emphasis patrols, again, sort of proactive policing.

Now that the department is logging all of those hours under minimum staffing in the patrol operations, it's impossible to tell how much is used for minimum staffing and how much is used for specific proactive policing.

The department will tell you that there are good operational reasons that that change was made.

What I have been told is that the old model of deploying a dedicated team to a certain area isn't as effective from a policing standpoint as having a larger group of folks available in the precincts that can be deployed as needed, maybe on an hourly basis during bad hours or not so much during good hours.

The flexibility and deployment plans of doing it this way are better for policing.

Unfortunately, what that leaves us with is no way to make a distinction for how much of those hours are really needed for 911 calls versus proactive policing, if you will.

Vice Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yeah, I can understand why that might make sense from an operational perspective.

I guess it doesn't lend itself well to transparency about So Elk High, you mentioned Elk High.

Let's talk about Elk High.

Elk High is well known, well documented, widely reported, and for people that don't even live in that community, that they generally have, it's a premier destination facility, or beach, not just in Seattle, but I think the entire Pacific Northwest, And, you know, they have a lot of people come, visit, which is generally a good thing.

Helps stimulate the local economy.

Like, it's a beautiful place for all to enjoy.

But, you know, it's not without challenges as well.

And I witnessed, for example, recently, a couple cars speeding along Elk High, flipping over into the water.

A woman was in a coma last year for an extended period of time.

There was a gentleman who tragically lost his life at the sandbox a few blocks away at Whaletail Park, where kids play, including my own.

So there's a lot of challenges, you know, public safety challenges in that particular area, primarily in the summertime, because again, premier destination beach area, people flock to it, we want people to enjoy it, but also we want to keep that community safe.

and welcoming for all.

So I'm a little concerned about how is the public able to tell?

How is this body and being able to exercise this legislative oversight authority able to tell what kind of staffing and decisions are made to provide proactive policing to address a very specific concern, public safety challenge and threat versus kind of obfuscating or like obscuring what's going on.

Is there a way to like, based off of current reporting for us to double-click on that and better understand deployment of resources?

That's a good question.

And I want to first start by emphasizing that it's not necessarily that those overtime hours went away.

It is, you know, the services at 3rd and Pike and Pine or at 12th and Jackson or on Alki, They're still happening, and they still will happen.

What we saw last September when this switch was made is literally 2,000 hours of overtime immediately switched from emphasis patrols to patrol operations.

So it's very clear in the data that the overtime hours are still being used.

It's just a matter of the recording and the transparency.

Councilmember Psaki, you bring some really great points.

I am working with the department now to try to figure out what systems we might use to be able to provide you that information.

Obviously, they track that information.

The data-driven policing section tracks that information.

So maybe not at the overtime hours, but the number of hours spent in general at these hotspot locations.

And so that's something that I'm looking into with the department that hopefully in the future, since I can't show it to you here, I can give you some other metric, the number of hours spent at each area, something along those lines.

I think you're going to have to use new terms because I understand the Vice Chair's point, but if we're fully manned, we could do proactive policing.

So there's a disconnect.

So in some ways, it's accurately highlighting the loss of officers because if you're fully staffed, we're doing proactive policing.

We can't do that because we're under.

So we need a different kind of, it's almost like a CRG, like you're a special push, a project, if you will, related to Alki or any other location in the city, you know, the gardens up north, same issues.

So it's a matter of nomenclature, I think, in part, but, you know, in part understanding precinct operations that may need to be augmented by, you know, a more citywide approach, but...

Proactive policing.

If we were fully staffed, we would have proactive policing.

So we have to be careful in terms of the terms we're using.

But we should also have an appreciation of hot spots or surges, if you will, that need to happen to address any situation like overcrowding on Al-Qaeda, which then sometimes is accompanied by criminal and or poor behavior in addition to other parts of the city.

You make a very good point, Mr. Chair.

Prior to the pandemic, every year in the budget conversations, the council would ask how much time a 911 officer has, just a regular deployed 911 officer, not on overtime.

to do proactive policing.

And there was a certain amount of time, somewhere around 20 to 30%, that they were not answering calls that they could do proactive policing.

I think as most folks are familiar, the call response times have gone up.

They're going from call to call, and that time that they can do proactive policing has really gone down.

And so the special emphasis with overtime in particular hotspots has been one of the department's main approaches.

And as I say, we'll work on the data to see if we can provide more detail for you there.

Thank you.

And obviously, it's very complex because obviously, Councilmember Moore's point about CSOs, the things that have come out of the recent interim agreement, there's a whole bunch of factors that play into this.

Thank you.

Good points all.

So flip to the next one, please.

Thank you.

So hitting some of these other topics, talk about sporting events.

Sporting events in general is up by about 20, or I'm sorry, not sporting events, events, including Seattle Center.

Those events are up by about 23%.

And if...

If you look at the individual events, if you sort of spot check, you can see the Hot Cocoa Run or the St. Patrick's Day parade or any of the events that typically happen in the first quarter, there was a bump in the hours that were used for overtime to staff those events.

And this is primarily due to the fact that under the MOU that got passed last fall, officers are receiving a voucher for volunteering for events.

It essentially means they get double overtime instead of time and a half.

The purpose of that was, as the caller said, partially to allow for the offset of using civilians or PEOs.

As I said, there's some staffing issues right there with PEOs, so that's not something that is...

fully being resourced right now, may happen later in the summer.

But the other reason that the double overtime was provided is because many of these events that happen, they require a certain staffing level.

And so officers, if there aren't enough officers volunteering, then the department starts making it mandatory and assigning officers.

And typically those officers that are assigned are lower ranked, they're newer officers, they're folks that are doing 911. And so by using the double overtime, the hope, one of the hopes was that you would get veteran officers, folks that aren't just doing patrol, volunteering for these events.

I'm told that that is what's happening, and that's why we're seeing the increase in staffing.

It is possible that if that trend continues, then overtime will be up quite a bit in that particular category.

I would also lastly point out that the department says that these are the staffing levels that they want and they feel are necessary for these events.

They would say that the 21, 22 staffing levels for these events were not sufficient.

And this more reflects what they need to staff these events.

And they're doing it now in a way that is not so hard on newer officers.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yeah, so the sporting events or special events category, you mentioned the Hot Cocoa Run, the St. Patrick's Day Run, the Seafair Torchlight Parade, any number, insert your event.

One, it strikes me as a real...

optimal area to explore a more creative deployment of some of these community service officers versus, you know, like deployable officers and, you know, an area ripe for, again, Iteration experimentation with what is the best balance?

I don't know what that would look like so I Would personally look to the executive and the chief on What's the optimal maybe it's two to one for example split, but definitely an area worth exploring to help drive some cost savings And the second thing is so that's a comment and then I have a question is isn't aren't those special event things that require police staffing of some sort, aren't the event organizers on the hook financially to cover those costs, including overtime?

Is that true or not true?

That is a complicated answer, as most things are.

I can't say true or not true.

What I can say is that...

sporting events that you see the column next that are actually down a little bit in overtime spending.

In that area, we're talking about staffing of the arenas, T-Mobile, CenturyLink, or Lumen, sorry.

In those areas, there's almost 100% cost reimbursement for police and PEOs that work those events.

There are contracts with those organizations, such as Climate Pledge, and for every hour that's worked, an hour back, the city does in full compensation.

The other events, the events that include Seattle Center, No, it is kind of all over the board.

What I would say is that there is a special events ordinance in the SMC that provides $67 an hour reimbursement for police services that are assigned to events.

That is much lower than the actual cost of assigning an officer.

It is a number that hasn't been changed in a number of years.

And the purpose for that is, as it's been described by prior councils, to keep event costs low for organizers.

And then there are some events, like the citywide events, say CFARE or others, that have specific contracts that have specific amounts that are reimbursed to police services.

And those cost recovery rates vary even more.

So it's kind of all over the board.

What I can say is that with the exception of sporting events, there's almost nowhere that the department recovers its actual costs.

So a couple other things to point out on this slide, if there's no more questions.

Councilmember Moore, to your question earlier about training that's required outside of the 410, that's what we're seeing in professional standards.

Professional standards is the training unit because there are fewer days now on an officer's schedule with longer shifts.

when they have to come in for training.

We're finding that the trainers are coming in on their days off sometimes.

So that's why that's up.

And then violent crimes in general is due to an increase in shootings and homicides.

With that, I'll move on.

So the last thing we're going to talk about is response time and call triage.

And so hitting at a high clip, what you will see in this first table is response calls to priority calls, priority one, priority two, and priority three.

It is the case that over the last several years, the department has been using both averages and medians.

They're both useful depending on what you're trying to look at.

Normally, the seven-minute medium time is the goal, and as you can see up there in Q1 of 2024, Priority One calls had a 7.9 median response time, so over a little.

But in terms of averages, it averages 11.4.

And the variance there, if an officer is logged into a call for a long, long time, maybe forgets to log out, you can see some outliers where there are very long calls.

And so that's why the median may be a better measure there.

Provide both of those to you.

The other measure that council has cared about in the past is how many exactly of those priority calls, priority one calls, does the department get to in fewer than seven minutes?

And it is the case that 44% of the priority one calls are getting there in seven minutes or fewer.

And that's a reduction from last time.

Last time it was 48% that were getting there.

And this is a trend you're going to see in the next slide as well.

Response times are generally going up across the board.

They have been for now for a couple of years.

This last table, Z disposition calls.

There are times that callers call in and maybe they just note that something has happened.

A car accident, I'm passing it.

I'm calling call 911 on the cell phone and say there's a car accident at 12th and Pine or so, and then no need for an officer to necessarily follow up with me individually.

Many of those don't receive the response, and so we track The number of times that responses aren't happening, there were out of 78,000 calls in Q1, 208 times that a response didn't happen.

I should also mention that in those cases, if it's a situation that's a little more complex, a sergeant will call to see if there's a response needed, and if there is, then they come out, and if not, then not.

So generally, these are the high-level measures, and in a minute, I'll get down into the precinct-level measures.

Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Chair.

I'm not really understanding these.

When you say calls that received no in-person response, call volume 208. So there were a total of 208 calls to 911 in quarter one that received no in-person response?

Yes, that's exactly right.

Okay.

Do we have the data that shows the calls where the type of call that's coming in where there's no in-person response?

And the reason I ask is because I hear weekly, daily, from constituents that they are calling in about...

you know, active crime that is happening to them, and the response is, is there a weapon?

And the answer is no, and then they'll say, well, they're not going to be a police response.

So I would really like to have that kind of granular data to where, what are the types of calls in which people are being told there's not a response going to be made, or no response actually shows up, or a response shows up four, five, six hours later.

Okay, we'll work with data-driven policing and get you that information.

Thank you.

Next slide.

So there's a lot of numbers here.

I don't expect that you would be able to see them right now, but I assume that you maybe took a look at it before we started talking here today, or maybe you'll take a look at it after.

This is a breakdown by precinct and by year of the response times so that you can see that your particular district or citywide, how the call response times have been changing.

As I said, generally the trend is they have been going up.

They went up with priority one and priority three calls pretty much across the board.

Priority two calls saw increases in all the precincts except Southwest.

And then the last thing I guess I would point out is one that obvious to probably most folks.

The North Precinct has the Longest response times, just due to the geography, it sometimes takes a car longer to get to a response.

So I provide this just as information for you all to see how the metrics are changing within your area.

Council President?

So a couple questions.

First of all, is the non-emergency line being staffed 24-7?

That was an issue last year and the year before, I believe.

We'll have to get back to you.

Okay.

And looking at these numbers, is it possible that...

Is it anticipated that these numbers could...

And I know that it's just math and reporting, but is it anticipated that the development of...

The care department is going to reduce response times because some calls will be directed just at that care team.

Is that going to be a positive impact on these numbers here that we're seeing in front of us?

That's another question.

I've noticed reports talking about officers providing Narcan to resuscitate people who have overdosed on fentanyl or whatever.

And are we tracking how much time those very important responses that of course we have to do are impacting some of these response times?

In other words, how much are life-saving calls impacting the response times?

Okay, let me get to the civilian response first.

It is the case now that the civilian response out of the care department, they go to primarily two calls, person down and wellness check.

And in those cases, it is a dual dispatch.

So the police officer is dispatched at the exact same time as the care representative.

So in the short term, while that pilot is running, I wouldn't think that it would greatly affect response times.

I understand.

Unless the officer were to, over the radio, say this is a known subject and call themselves off, which they can do under the MOU.

Over time, as the alternative response program develops and if we move past the dual dispatch phase to the sole responder phase where a civilian is only responding, then it would definitely have an impact on these times because you wouldn't have as many officers going to as many calls.

And that's just plain math.

On the other question...

Do we know when that might happen?

It would take a revision of the MOU.

The MOU with Spog right now mandates that the care department can only go if mutually dispatched with an officer, and then the officer has to clear the scene for safety reasons before the alternate responder can get on scene.

So it's a matter of the MOU being changed once the pilot...

Yeah, the pilot will end at the end of 2025. And so at that time, it'll be up to the city and SPOG to renegotiate.

And I know that one of the things that the city is looking at is expanding the type of calls that care responders can go to and potentially expanding the way that they could be deployed, maybe not all mutual dispatch, depending on the experience of the pilot.

Great, thank you.

And then, sorry to interrupt.

No, and to your second question, the department used to say that priority one calls response times, whether it's median or an average, indicates the median or the average.

But if it's life-saving, then they try to get there, and their record of getting there is a lot faster.

And so I would need to, we would need to do some digging to get you that.

I wasn't meaning respond to those life, those imminent death situations or those priority one calls.

I was actually asking if the fact that they are responding to those calls is impacting overall response time.

Is there a correlation that is seen?

Yeah.

On the average, it's going to affect the average because it's going to be, but on the median, I would say a little, not as much as the average.

Okay, thank you.

Anything else?

I'll move on to the last slide.

And so in summary, the good news, to highlight the Chair's points again, are that the retention is completely shifting.

It used to be the last few years that retention was the problem with the Seattle Police Department.

It's not so much the case anymore.

We're seeing separations at lower than projected rates.

And for that matter, I took a look at the pre-pandemic, 2017 through 2019, and they're really in line with where we were pre-pandemic.

So that's the good news.

The bad news is that, as you know, we're on track for hiring quite a few fewer recruits than planned.

Last year, we planned that the city did to hire 120 and came in with 61. This year, again, 120. At this pace, probably we won't even reach 61. So the hope is that some of the changes that the council has made in the city, the new spa contract, increasing pay rates by 23% and the impact of Council Bill 120776 on recruiting and on the PSCSE customer service issues will have an impact and start getting more folks into the door.

The challenge will, of course, be that because it takes a year to get an officer fully on the street through all the training, through the academy, through the student officer training, these things are still going to happen slowly, and those lines on that chart are not going to move as quickly as we'd like.

The last point that I would make would be that, as I said before, 24% of the overtime spending right now is not really an ideal place to be.

It is the case that that overtime spending will pick up over the year through the special events season.

It's also important to know when we're talking about salary savings to cover those overtime excesses, in the past few years, those salary savings coming from separations have provided more money because a fully trained officer who's been on the force for 25 years or 20 years, when they separate, they're making a rather high salary as compared with a recruit that doesn't get hired.

So it will be more and more challenging now that the staffing equation has shifted it'll be more and more challenging to cover overtime overspending with salary savings because the recruits just aren't worth as much as a fully trained officer that's separating.

And that is about it.

To ask if there's any questions on all that.

Well, I would say a recruit is worth very much, and I would say, you know, equal.

And in the case of, you know, the recruitment piece, you know, in some ways, in terms of the length of moving forward, even more important in some respects.

Any last questions?

Oh, Vice Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

So I think the...

I'd love to work with folks to see this through, but I think the city, there is an opportunity for the city to have a more coherent strategy and plan to attract lateral officers specifically that are more experienced versus, you know, the new kind of rookie recruits.

We need a mixture of both, but now more than ever to fill our staffing needs and ideally restore our staffing levels.

I think it is prudent to focus as much as possible on recruiting laterals from other agencies.

So again, looking forward to partnering folks to bring that to life.

But can you help me better understand the...

So it takes...

over a year, it sounds like, right, for a new recruit to make it through the training, the academy, the on-the-field training, to become ultimately self-sufficient.

How much does it take for...

How long does it take for a lateral recruit

Well, they don't go to the academy.

I think they have to go through some sort of revised field training to train them in the Seattle processes and ways to respond to calls, but it's obviously a lot shorter.

I'd have to get you the exact amount.

No, thank you.

Yeah.

And that, and that's, that was my theory as well.

And that's why, you know, I think it is important that we, we focus, uh, we have a blended strategy, um, that, that focuses heavily on going after, uh, experienced lateral officers.

Um, that would be a good fit here in Seattle.

So in any event, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Doss.

It's a very important briefing.

It's very important to highlight these pieces, but also kind of reiterate some of the points I've made previously on the council, starting with the fact, as I said at the very beginning, I asked the men and women of the Seattle Police Department to give us one year if they're looking to retire or transfer to another jurisdiction.

And thus far, we have made progress with the council bill that you just mentioned, also the SPA contract, but also the broader leadership pieces, which I think are very important.

And so on that point, by the way, as presented, I definitely recommend going to an officer, thank them for the service, engage with them, ask them questions, And as the Seattle Police Department knows, I do this all the time.

And so I was just, you know, we need, I want to continue to make that ask in terms of, you know, give us one year.

But I also want to make a special ask, particularly with the SPA contract interim, that I know that there's a lot of officers who are senior, close or based pretty much at retirement eligible.

And with the bump up from the contract, they may be tempted to jump at this point, even though they may have the ability to still give and provide that public service to our community.

And so I wanted to make a special ask to those officers who may be looking to retire to, again, not do so immediately to continue their public service, because that's important.

As we look to make this transition, to make this bridge, we've got positives regarding retention, but obviously recruitment is still not there.

So in this transition period, having their expertise and, frankly, their numbers, would be very beneficial.

So that was going to be a special ask from what I've done already.

Now, I was going to conclude, but all of a sudden I've got hands raised.

I thought I was concluding the section.

Council President, Council Member Hollingsworth.

Sure, so thank you very much, Chair, for ensuring that we slowed down and took in the positive news that Greg and central staff related to us.

And I will cling to that as well.

You know, 70 people out on long-term leave, which is the lowest in years.

That's good news.

The fact that we had five less separations in 2024 than anticipated, that is also good news.

But also, I must note, Greg, that I've heard you give this presentation almost in some of the same words for two years, especially when it comes to overtime, which is a function of staffing.

You talk about, okay, Q, in the first part of the year, we're Approaching, it looks like if the trend continues, we might be over budget, and that's because of low staffing levels.

So I just have to make the point that what really matters is what our constituents are experiencing on a day-to-day basis, be that our residents or small businesses.

It's not encouraging to me yet, so I will say that I do hope that the SPOG contract and the legislation that we just passed does have a meaningful difference.

As you said, it will take some time for that to actually be reflected in numbers that will actually make people's lives better, but no time to pat ourselves on the back or it all take our foot off the pedal of anything we can possibly do to recruit and also both laterals and entry levels and improve the force we have.

So thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for the presentation.

It was really super helpful.

One of the things I wanted to draw people's attention to, and I think regarding the recruiting piece, I've looked on three websites, join VPWA, which is Vancouver, It's called reflectandprotect.org for Tacoma Police Department and join Bellevue PD.

I can't begin to tell you how aesthetics mean stuff to people.

I know we have some SPD, but just in part of recruiting piece for our Seattle Police Department, I see these three websites and it just invites you to come.

It is very motivating.

It's aesthetically appeasing.

It has video, it's graphics.

It makes it really easy to navigate.

And I think in Seattle, we have been very, what's the word, complacent with feeling like, hey, everyone wants to come to Seattle to be a police officer.

When I can just look over in Bellevue and just look at how easy it is to navigate, to apply, or to understand.

And it really targets millennials, who we're gonna have to be able to recruit better.

We saw that with, back in 2016, I always talk about enterprise rental car.

They did a phenomenal job of recruiting millennials because every time I'm talking to a city department, they're like, our employees were getting older.

The average age is 50. We're seeing this transition of people getting older.

And I'm pretty sure a lot of people that retired from the police department during that big drop that we saw were probably around the age of retirement and losing folks.

And we need...

we need younger folks.

And I think, um, us being complacent with just, you know, the same old website and, you know, recruiting tactics, I think we're going to have to really change some stuff up to recruit, uh, younger folks to inspire them, motivate them, connect with them, really build relationships.

I just, I would encourage some of my colleagues, uh, to look on some of the websites.

Um, this is sucking me in right here.

Just looking at the looking at the videos from Tacoma.

These are neighboring cities.

I can see why, you know, it's anyways, my whole point is I know that needs to be within the process for our recruiting is some type of visual thing that sells our city of Seattle and tells a better story than what we're currently doing right now to recruit folks.

So just wanted to point that out.

So thank you.

Thank you for the presentation.

It was great.

Thank you, Mr. Doss.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chair.

Vice Chair.

One final thing.

Love that comment, Councilmember Hollingsworth, on the need to look closely at the overall look and feel of our recruitment websites and how we're attracting, or in some cases not, you know, potential candidates and recruits.

As someone who used to advise teams that in part focused heavily and invested heavily in tech on the overall user experience, user interface.

I can tell you that that functionality can be a game changer for determining the success or failure for a particular product.

And it's more than just marketing.

And I would encourage the department, you know, to look very carefully at the design.

If we have a clunky, awkward interface, UI, UX, that's not going to engender the kind of talent, you know, that we want, that we need.

So again, I want to emphasize that's more than just a marketing piece.

There are consultants and experts that help advise and can improve our own websites.

And so we need to look carefully at that because that is very, very, very important.

I've seen it firsthand, seen it play out firsthand and seen it be a game changer firsthand.

So thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Doss.

Thank you.

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

Will the clerk please read item number four into the record?

Seattle Police Department 30 by 30 Initiative Briefing and Discussion with Rebecca Boatwright, General Counsel, and Beth Waring, Detective, Seattle Police Department, as well as Tanya Meisenholder, 30 by 30 Steering...

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome.

Thank you, Ms. Boatwright, Ms. Waring, and Meisenholder.

I really appreciate you joining us this morning to give this presentation on the 30 for 30 report.

Given the time constraints, I'll ask my colleagues on the dais to hold questions till the end, and then probably your best-of questions at that point.

They're all the best.

Clerk Wilson.

So again, welcome.

Thank you very much.

Over to you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for having us here to present today on the department's work around the 30 by 30 initiative and what the department is doing to advance recruitment and retention of women in the department.

As noted, I'm Rebecca Boatwright.

I'm the general counsel and executive director of research and analytics for the department.

And I'll ask my colleagues to introduce themselves.

Good morning, everyone.

Is this on?

Closer and, yes.

How's that?

Better?

Is it on?

Better?

A little bit better.

I'm Tanya Meisenhofer.

I'm the director of gender, nope.

A little bit closer.

Better?

Here we go.

See, it wasn't user error.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Tanya Meisenholder.

I'm the Director of Gender Equity at New York University School of Law, where I oversee the 30 by 30 initiative to advance the representation of women in policing.

Prior to that, I spent close to 20 years in the New York City Police Department in a variety of roles, including Deputy Commissioner of Equity and Inclusion, Assistant Commissioner of Strategic Initiatives, and I was the Chief of Staff to the first Deputy Commissioner.

I have a PhD in criminal justice, and I'm certified in EEO investigations, as well as chief diversity officer.

In addition, my primary areas of focus center around employee lifecycle, recruitment, hiring, training, retention, and many of the things that you were just speaking about, organizational change, research and evaluation, and training and development.

And I'm really happy to be here today.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you for making the trip, too.

Good morning.

I'm Detective Beth Waring.

I am currently assigned as the Bias Crimes Coordinator for the Seattle Police Department, working out of the Homicide and Assault Unit.

I've been a police officer for 27 years.

The bulk of that time, about 22 years of that, has been spent as a violent crimes investigator and SWAT hostage negotiator.

I have a master's degree in counseling psychology and have practiced as a master's level counselor.

I am an instructor for the Auschwitz in police legitimacy and trauma-informed policing.

I am preparing currently to transition to our Employee Support Services Bureau, which is new, and I will be beginning my PhD in leadership and change at Antioch University in July.

Congratulations.

If it pleases the committee, we'll start with Dr. Meisenholder giving an overview of the national 30 by 30 initiative.

We'll transition into me discussing the work that SPD has done under 30 by 30 since 2021 and then move to Detective Waring for the next steps the department is taking.

Thank you.

So I want to start by giving you a bit of the history of the 30 by 30 initiative to advance women in policing.

So it started around 2015 when our two co-founders, retired chief of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey Police Department, Yvonne Roman, came to meet with Maureen, we call her Mo, McGaw, who was currently working at the Department of Justice at the time.

When Yvonne was the chief, she had noticed that there was significant issues with respect to women getting through the police academy.

And what she discovered was that New Jersey had changed the rules where the timing of the physical examination test was given earlier in the academy, and that was resulting in a large number of females not making it through the academy.

She then teamed up with Mo, who, as I mentioned, was the Department of Justice, and they started talking about all of the challenges that we see that face women in policing.

In 2018, they had an event sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, which brought together a large number of stakeholders, academics, police leaders, to talk through what a number of these issues were.

You'll see in the corner that report women in policing breaking barriers was the result of that.

They then formed a steering committee with a number of stakeholders across the country.

I was part of that as a representative from the NYPD, and we formally launched 30 by 30 in March of 2021. So we are a grassroots coalition of researchers, police leaders, and professional organizations.

And our goal is to increase the number of women in all police recruit classes to 30% by the year 2030. Why 30%?

We get asked that quite often.

The theory of representative bureaucracy indicates that it is not until a group reaches 30% that they can really start to see change and make an impact in an organization.

So what is the current representation of sworn women in U.S. law enforcement and in positions of leadership?

Currently, women make up about 13% of sworn officers, and they are approximately 3% of leadership.

And by leadership, I'm referring to police chiefs.

Now, what I will say about that is that number has remained relatively stagnant over the past three decades.

And then you also have to take into account differences by type of agency.

So, for instance, in the federal government, it's around 15%.

It's a bit higher.

Locals, around 13. And the state police tend to be the lowest number, which is around 6%.

And there's decades of research that show that women often produce better safety outcomes in many of the areas that we all care about, both on the policing, those that are in policing, and those in the communities that we serve.

So I'll go over some of the research that has really formed how we think about our initiative and that the work that we do.

I think we can all agree that one of the things that we would like to see in policing is less use of force and better relationships with our communities.

So some of the research that we have indicates that women use force less often, and they use less excessive force.

They use their discretion to make fewer arrests for nonviolent, low-level offenses.

They see better outcomes for crime victims, especially of sexual assault.

They conduct fewer searches during traffic stops, but are more likely to find contraband when they do.

They're perceived as being more honest and compassionate.

They're named less often in complaints and lawsuits, which may end up being a cost savings for a city.

And they fire their weapon less often.

So when we talk about training, one of the things that we often say is if we had a training that did this, all of the agencies across the country would be signing up for it.

But that's not what we have.

The other thing that I would note about the data around the 13% is there's close to 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

We're the most disaggregated system in the world.

40% of those agencies have no women at all in their forces.

So it was really important for us to have a solid understanding of the academic empirical research on women in policing and what it says about how women police differently than men.

And one thing I will say, it's not to say that men don't do some of those things well.

It's just that research indicates that women bring a unique value in that space.

We hosted a series of national listening sessions because we felt like it was really important to add to that empirical base and hear from all the women that were involved in policing.

So we had around six sessions.

They were geographically dispersed across the nation, and we listened to hundreds of female police officers.

What I'll start with is the point that there's no universal experience of being a woman in law enforcement.

We often hesitate to talk about some of the specific issues around intersectionality and we treat women as if it's a monolith and they're all one together in policing.

So when we think about that, we think about all the different experiences.

That's some of what we bring to the table.

some of the themes, the top lines that came up from these listening sessions was that there was not enough support for parents and caregivers.

That affected the reason why women not only chose not to join policing, they chose not to promote, and some of them left sooner.

there was issues around the training that women might receive, equipment, and uniforms.

And if any of you saw the Washington Post this morning, you will notice that there was an article about the federal government and some issues that they're having with improperly fitting ballistic vests for women.

So imagine you're a police officer, you're a female police officer, and your vest is not going to work in the same way it's going to work for a male officer.

It's a safety issue.

They talked a lot about preconceived notions, about what type of person, what type of female would join policing.

Many of them, it was framed in terms of being a tomboy or LGBTQ, what type of women would actually choose to make a career in policing.

They also talked about what it took to conform in an agency where it is male dominated and the culture is driving that.

Some women, you have to assimilate into that environment and sometimes that doesn't allow you to be your true self.

in many ways.

They talked about the sacrifices that they must make.

They talked about scarcity and competition.

Because there are so few females in law enforcement, you will sometimes see competition for particular promotion spots or special assignments and the impact that that can have on women and how, unfortunately, they may sometimes treat each other as a result of that scarcity.

They talked about that they are held to a higher standard.

There's not as much latitude for making a mistake.

And if they make a mistake, it's because they are female, not for any other reason.

They talked about that they're really tired of advocating for themselves.

It's often the underrepresented group that is the one that is making the most advocacy for their own group, and they're not putting the onus on other folks to do that.

Talked about a culture of disrespect in law enforcement, as well as harassment and abuse.

discrimination and a lack of accountability for all of those things that happen in the police workplace.

The last thing they noticed was isolation, feeling like they had no support and that they were not part of the good old boys club, that they were excluded.

They weren't invited or included in many of the things that a lot of the men were.

And that went all the way from the top of the apartment to the locker room where sometimes these women were the only person in the locker room, assuming they even had one for them.

So we learned a lot from those listening sessions.

We're taking that information and really thinking about how best to build on it and use it for making change in policing.

So what are we about?

There's three primary things that we talked about.

Policy, so really thinking about policies in an agency, removing the bias from assessments, and ensuring specific women's needs are met.

We talk often about physical fitness standards for women, and I will make it clear that we are not about lowering standards for police officers.

What we are about is making sure that the standards are valid for the job of a police agency.

So we encourage agencies to look at their policies, to look at their data, and see what needs to be changed for the entire department, what implications it might have on underrepresented groups more broadly, and then are there specific needs that women have that are not being met?

And that could be in terms of maternity leave, childcare, equipments, are women being pushed into roles just because they're female, for example, taking care of the children, those sort of ideas that really are part of the patriarchal views of many in policing.

We also talk about culture.

How do you transform your agency culture?

to support the underrepresented groups that make up policing.

I would say that culture is the biggest thing to change in policing.

Policy is easy to change in many ways, but culture is much more difficult.

And then our goal is to increase the number of women police recruits.

Now, one thing I will say about that is we love our brand, and we think it's a fantastic tagline, and we absolutely want to increase that number.

But we also recognize that it's not enough just to get women in the door.

We have to make it a place where they want to work.

And so it is truly about changing your strategy, changing the culture, changing your policies.

Some agencies, it would be much easier to get to 30%.

Some will never get there.

And that's OK.

Because what we want you to do is make policing better for women.

and for everyone that's involved in this as a career choice.

So what we're not about.

We are not asking for women to have special treatment.

We are not asking for any woman to get special treatment in any way, shape, or form with respect to our efforts.

And the women that we work with, they don't want that either.

They don't want to be viewed as being singled out because they are female.

We are not about gender stereotypes.

As I mentioned, we're not about lowering standards.

There are no standards across the United States with respect to policing.

in terms of hiring standards or training.

So of the 18,000 police departments, you could do it 18,000 ways.

And some don't have any of the physical fitness standards, for instance, at all.

We're not about removing men from policing.

Nowhere do we say that we want to hire women at the expense of women.

What we are saying is that women are 50% of the United States, and you have a pool of people here that may not be aware of the opportunities in policing that might help the entire field with the staffing challenges that we are facing.

And we're also not about only engaging women in creating change.

We have a number of men and agencies that are led by men that frankly sometimes do a better job than some of the women-led agencies with respect to moving this work forward.

We need their support.

We need everyone at the table.

This is not a women's initiative led just by women.

So what it comes down to is that qualified women deserve equitable access to the job and the ability to thrive within it.

We recognize policing is a very difficult job, but it should be no more difficult for an officer just because they are a woman.

So why is the representation of women so low?

A few points I'll make.

although there's many others I could also make.

And I will say there's been many attempts over the years really trying to improve that.

So when y'all were talking a little bit earlier about recruitment content, so thinking about who is represented, what they're represented doing, and who is targeted.

Are your recruitment teams only going to the military or folks that are looking to have a criminal justice degree?

We're not saying not to do that, but we're saying there's other places that you should think about it.

Are your recruitment ads all full of hypermasculine figures of men coming down out of a helicopter?

Are they showing the realistic aspects of policing?

And I think we're getting better with some of this, but we still have a long way to go.

And you also have to consider that recruitment is not going to reach everyone, right?

My view is that everyone in the agency should be a recruiting ambassador and that you have a team that's centralized, but it is everyone's job.

But if you're police officers, are going through trauma and stress and a lot of other fatigue that we've had over the past couple of years, it's really hard to advocate for someone else to come in on this job.

And we have seen some research, especially around women, when you ask them what advice would you give to a woman that's looking to come in to this job.

So that's something to think about.

One other note that I'll make on recruitment is oftentimes in cities recruitment is not only under the police department.

There are other city entities that are involved in it which may have implications for your ability to recruit.

I don't know what it's like in Seattle.

I can speak on New York if you're interested in that later.

I spoke a little bit about hiring assessments and processes.

So we talked about lack of validation.

EEO law, a lot of state laws encourage agencies to really look at the disparate impact of all of the different hiring stages and the estimates, whether it's the background, the psych, the medical, the psychological.

The reality is that a lot of agencies do not have the resources, the personnel the time to really look and see where are women or other groups falling out in the process.

It takes a lot of effort in order to dig that deep and determine where those areas are.

We also talk about subjectivity in the hiring process, especially around promotions.

Are your promotion panels full of you know, six white males, then you really need to think about who's on those panels, what training did they receive in order to be on those panels, and what is the accountability mechanism for that.

And then, as we mentioned, are there other unnecessary barriers to entry?

The status quo is male-oriented.

We all know that.

Policing was created by men for men.

I don't say that to be critical.

It's the reality of the history of policing.

And oftentimes, women's specific needs are not met.

There's two ways to think about that.

Either the police chief knows about those needs, and he's not, he or she is not taking the time to address those, or they're unaware because they've never had a female, this is the first female, or they're just not thinking about those specific issues.

I prefer to think it's the latter, although I can't commit to that, of course.

And then, as we mentioned, culture.

The culture of policing, in many ways, is still very much hyper-masculine, and that plays out in terms of how people work together.

So just a bit about where we are now.

As I mentioned, we started in 2021. We have 370 agencies thus far that have signed on to our pledge.

They range from really small agencies, 10 police officers, to major areas.

We have a number of partnerships with police professional organizations, and the federal government has been heavily supporting us for the past two years.

What we've seen thus far, establishment of childcare centers for sworn officers, San Diego, Minneapolis, a few others are really thinking about this.

We know from our conversations and the research that childcare is one of the primary issues that keep people from joining policing, especially women who still take on the majority of that work.

We've seen a number of revised recruitment strategies to reach underrepresented groups.

And we've also heard from agents who have said, we've made progress not only with women, but with other groups, whether that's people of color, LGBTQ, and they credit that to initiatives like this who are really advancing for a better quality of life within police organizations.

We've seen improved data collection that allows people to diagnose these disparities.

And we've seen improved assessment processes to increase accuracy and decrease subjectivity.

We've also seen establishment of mentoring and networking partnerships.

Women often say that one of their biggest challenges is not having the support.

and the encouragement to join the police profession, but also once they get in there, they don't have people to connect to to help guide them with respect to their choice.

One other note that I'll make on recruitment Outreach is really important too.

It's great to have a female represented in your ads and some people will see that and they will recognize that representation, but having females also speak to their experience on the job and meet with young people, whether that's at college or whatever the case may be, I don't know enough about your recruiting here, really makes a difference than beyond just those ads that we see.

And we already have a number of agencies that are reporting 30% women in their recruit classes.

So where are we going now?

We recognize that individual agencies, individual interventions will only get us so far.

We've done a lot of great work.

We're proud of that.

We're gonna continue to do that.

We're also thinking about state level legislation in particular.

You probably know that Washington state recently passed a job sharing and flexible work option.

So it's the first state that I'm aware of that will allow police officers to retain their certification as well as in the pension system.

This was intended to help with the staffing crisis, but it will certainly help with women in policing.

So we're hoping that other states will follow with respect to that.

There is legislation pending on providing childcare for Police Act.

And then what's not on this slide is that Hawaii was actually the first state that just passed legislation.

encouraging their police officers to sign up specifically for the 30 by 30 initiative to advance women in policing.

And then working with our state and federal partners on ensuring that there's validated standards on their assessments and what does it take with respect to knowledge, skills, and abilities to actually be a good police officer.

And then how long does it take to get hired?

So streamlining the application process.

I'll just quickly mention that we don't do this work alone.

We have several agencies, but then we also work with a number of other professional organizations, women-centered organizations, and academic entities and think tanks to move forward with our work.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention all of the people that it takes to keep this initiative moving forward and really trying to change policing more broadly, as I mentioned, but specifically for women.

Now I'm going to turn it over.

But thank you so much for your time.

I look forward to the discussion.

Thank you.

So I'm going to talk briefly about SPD's history with 30 by 30 and the work that has been done to date on this.

So SPD joined the...

SPD joined the 30 by 30 initiative on March 25th, 2021. Chief Diaz was among the first of the large city police departments to pledge SPD's commitment to this.

The work under 30 by 30 for SPD comprises three distinct phases, very much committed to an evidence-based policing strategy and ensuring that our work is grounded in good empirical science.

The first phase was a quantitative snapshot.

This was provided based on data as of October 1st, 2022. In large part, these were data points that were submitted by the 30 by 30 initiative out of NYU.

And so this gives us a baseline of where we were with respect to that.

So as of October 1st, 2022, 156 out of then 1,073 sworn personnel identified as female.

Five of 52 successful recruits between October 2021 and October 2022 identified as female.

And SPD was compliant with all phase one immediate actions recommended by the 30 by 30 initiative, including strategic priorities around gender diversity, zero tolerance, EEO practices, nursing accommodations, including space and time off commitments for that, and appropriate equipment.

I will note that Chief Best was very focused on making sure that women had vests that fit based on her own experience.

The phase two part of this, many of you are familiar with from a draft that was released publicly a few months ago.

This was our qualitative survey.

So we followed up the quantitative snapshot with digging in to really get the perspectives to hold those same listening sessions within the department that Dr. Meisenholder talked about with respect to the national initiative.

So in full, 97 of 143 female personnel completed this report.

These comprised women of various ranks within the department, both sworn in civilian and with varying tenures within the department.

And I won't go through all of the statistics here, but these are the mean and median responses on a scale of 1 to 100. This phase two qualitative draft report was completed in September 23 and comprised not only the survey that went out seeking the empirical response to the specific questions, but also focus groups.

We contracted with Dr. Lois James out of Washington State University to complete this work for us for the specific purpose that we wanted an outside researcher.

We did not want this to be driven by anyone in the department specifically.

The emergent themes are much as what Dr. Meisenholder discussed nationally.

I refer to these as the push-pull.

We know from not only the 30 by 30 work, but from research around women in the workplace generally, that there are those factors, those external factors, that pull women out of the workplace.

And then there are those internal I'll call it cultural factors that push women out of the workplace.

These very much followed that theme.

Women highlighted the masculine culture, higher expectations for women, double standards.

Among these also were concerns about women in some respects holding each other back.

that limited opportunity growth that Dr. Meisenholder discussed earlier.

They noted a generational distinction, which I think is really worth noting.

And we see this when we look at sort of national attitudes towards women's scales generally.

The younger generations that have grown up with mothers who work and have spouses who work and who participate equally in the household responsibilities are generally much more accepting of women in the workplace and are much more mindful of their interactions with women.

There's a great study that was done a while ago that talked about how boomer parents did a fantastic job of teaching their daughters that they could be anything they wanted to be, but they did a terrible job of teaching their sons that they also needed to step up and help out with the work.

And in the research that's now currently emerging, that also does seem to be shifting.

Mothers who are in the workplace who are raising sons are very much focused on teaching their sons to be the partners and fathers that they need to be in order to support women.

in the workplace.

We talked about pregnancy.

The women talked about pregnancy and childcare.

That was a big issue for them, both in terms of decision to stay with the department, but also decisions on whether to promote within the department.

And then talked about exclusion and pigeonholing of certain jobs that are specifically focused towards women or that they feel they are excluded from.

From these emergent things came key recommendations.

One is awareness.

How do you build a culture of respect through the department?

The Coast Guard has done some fantastic work on this.

And so we're fortunate not to be reinventing the wheel here, but leaning into the work that's been done by other departments around the country, state, local and federal.

We are working towards putting together a proposal for department child care options.

I would submit that certainly SPD officers are not the only 24-7, 365-day shift workers in the city.

So the challenges that face SPD, they're not unique just to SPD.

And then critically, also mentorship opportunities for women.

I am going to turn it over to Beth to talk about what we're doing now and next steps.

Thank you.

Are you going to control the slides for me?

Okay, so I'm going to be speaking about our next steps and ongoing work.

Our internal 30 by 30 work group was established in 2024. It's employee-led, interest-based, non-exclusive, cross-ranking position.

And our mission is to advocate for and implement measures to mitigate the documented external challenges that pull women out of the workplace, internal challenges that push women out of the workplace, and to create a healthy, safe, respectful, and equitable environment in which all members of SPD grow and thrive.

I'm happy to say on June 3rd, 2024, we'll be welcoming Dr. Emily Hu as the Executive Director of Employee Support Services.

She is not of the military, but has a history of serving the Navy as a clinical psychologist.

I want to be talking just briefly about some of the following programs that we're working on.

Childcare, mentorship, benefits programs and training, and recruiting and direct outreach.

And I'm gonna speak briefly on mentorship.

Mentorship is something that we're speaking a lot about amongst our group, really talking about how we link women together to mentor each other, what is the role of male mentors, et cetera.

But I'm gonna talk briefly about a pilot program in development that is being spearheaded by Lieutenant Gretchen Hughes of the HR section.

It utilizes the city of Seattle's existing CareerQuest flash mentorship program solution.

We are working on customizations to that platform for the needs of SPD employees, such as adding additional categories that are germane to police, police employees specifically, providing guidance to assist mentors and providing the most effective mentorship.

These are quick mentorships.

Coaching mentees on...

good questions and what to ask and what to plumb during their session, and doing outreach to increase our mentor-mentee base.

I will say I personally was an early adopter of this as soon as I knew about it.

It's a great platform.

I have my first mentor meeting with a library employee coming up.

And my research analyst in the Bias Crimes Unit back there, Tori White, also signed up and had an amazing mentorship.

with someone in city IT that she just raved about.

Next slide, thank you.

So next, I'm going to speak about the child care project.

That is something that I am personally working on in conjunction with Detective An Official in our policy unit.

We know, both of us firsthand, as mothers of small children, the challenges that working parents have at SPD and other agencies, finding safe child care that covers all the hours that a police officer may work.

Uh, some of the things that we've discovered in our research, uh, with the assistance, uh, of some of the, uh, organizations we've been consulting with, who I'll speak about in a little bit, um, has really highlighted, I think, shortages not just for police, but for everyone.

Uh, the licensed childcare infrastructure in Washington states and the Puget Sound area specifically meets only 28% of childcare needs.

According to Marie Keller, who I'll speak about, there are nearly no licensed childcare facility options for parents who work non-standard hours.

Obviously, a lot of our employees are working non-standard hours.

And just for context, standard hours are from from 6 a.m.

to 6 p.m.

in general.

We know that women bear the greatest burden of childcare duties, and sometimes these challenges force women out of the workplace entirely or into part-time or a standard hour's job.

Importantly, and this is something that I've observed quite a bit, this may limit options for promotion or transfer to another watch or a different unit to gain valuable experience because they are unable to change work hours and forego promotion or enriching transfers.

I will tell you, I was speaking recently with a detective who did test for Sargent, but will have to forego the promotion depending on where she would be working.

So it's a very salient concern that's real.

Staffing issues do exacerbate the problem.

Increased overtime demands may push parents into non-standard working hours much longer than normal shifts or weekends.

SPD has many two-officer households, and this pressure may push officers toward police agencies closer to home or with less overtime.

So what are we doing?

We are consulting with the Imagine Institute, specifically Marie Keller.

It is a local nonprofit organization that works to build childcare systems that work for families and childcare workers both, and the National Law Enforcement Foundation, the organization which has assisted the San Diego Police Department with their solution.

So in learning the landscape, I'm just gonna do a quick overview of the challenges we are finding.

Childcare needs vary by the age of the child.

Parents of babies and toddlers may be best served by an in-city childcare facility.

Parents of school-aged children need solutions closer to their home and schools attended by their children.

And childcare needs change during school breaks, such as summertime or Christmas break, where we simply can't have every parent gone from duty on vacation.

We've also analyzed where SPD families live.

Frankly, I was gobsmacked when I saw the map.

The highest concentrations of SPD families are in North Snohomish County.

and in Pierce County, meaning many of these officers are driving probably an hour and a half to and from work each.

This is likely due to the increased cost of housing closer to the metropolitan area.

So we are preparing to roll out a survey that will assess current and future needs, specifically the next three to five years by surveying SPD employees.

And we are looking at existing systems such as the childcare solution at the San Diego Police Department, the Boeing Machinist Union, and the Port of Seattle.

So one more little point on that.

Just to speak about the solutions we suspect will emerge, it's likely a childcare facility within the city, a business incubation model that helps develop in-home childcare centers near where families reside.

Specifically, we are actually populating our survey with a question about any family members in current SPD families who might be willing to start an in-home childcare business that they could be assisted in starting that.

and partnerships with existing facilities in those areas where families reside.

And in those systems, typically employers buy spaces in existing childcare businesses and assist with cost.

Those tend to be standard hours solutions only, however.

Okay, so benefits programs and training.

Our HR unit or section is working to ensure that employees are aware of existing opportunities, such as the part-time program for patrol officers.

It is a program that enables officers to work part-time for up to two years.

It is most often utilized by new mothers, and up to 20 officers at once across the city can engage in that program.

It allows officers to maintain their health benefits, contribute to deferred compensation, maintain their patrol-related skills while still allowing them to have more personal time, and reduces the loss of their service credits.

That's kind of a demerit for women who are mothers that really don't befall men as much.

We have a paid parental leave benefit that allows parents to take time to bond with their baby or new family member that is 12 weeks.

paid family leave to care for a qualifying family member, which is four weeks, military spouse leave of absence, which is 15 days, sabbatical leave, which can be up to a year, sick leave donation programs, and education benefits from City University for first responders, as well as our mentorship program.

So with regard to recruiting, I wanted to actually give a little update on some numbers that were provided to me by Seattle HR about the change in the number of applications since the SPOG contract was passed.

For perspective, this time last year, SPD was receiving an average of 5.63 applications per day.

Before the new contract was signed in the run-up, there was an increase in applications of nine to 10 applications per day.

And currently SPD is receiving an average of 15.29 applications per day for our current exam cycle.

Based on over 10 years of data, maintaining about 14 applications per day over the course of a year would produce approximately 125 new hires.

Obviously, there's some limitations to keep in mind.

We don't know if that's a temporary surge or something that will be sustained, and of course, it will take some time for the upper trend in applications to translate into increased hires.

So as far as recruiting is concerned, focused advertisement and recruitment to historically underrepresented groups remains a top priority and part of the overall recruitment strategy, as well as female-focused recruiting efforts.

In addition, there is recent state legislation that will allow DREAMers to apply for law enforcement careers.

There's marketing policy and procedure under development for this launch.

So these next slides, I think, demonstrate the wide net that we are working to cast for applicants.

So direct outreach events include the Washington Women in Trades Fair, recruiting at military bases, doing in-person recruitment, as well as participation in the Skill Bridge program.

SPD is poised to participate in that program.

Service members will be able to participate in work experience here during their last 180 days of service.

In addition, our recruiting team has planned visits to historically black colleges and universities in fall 2024. We are also recruiting at our local advisory councils.

We have an African American Advisory Council, an East African Advisory Council, a Filipino Community Advisory Council, Korean, Latino, LGBTQ, Middle Eastern, Native American, Southeast Asian, and citywide advisory councils, as well as recruitment at community events, such as the Juneteenth celebration, the Rainier Beach back-to-school event, Ethiopian Independence Day, and a Filipino cultural event called Pista Sanayan.

I probably butchered that.

I apologize.

and the diversity in women in law enforcement at the Puyallup Fair, the Women in Law and Justice Panel at Central Washington University, and the Northwest Women's Show.

Additional direct outreach includes outreach to BIPOC media outlets, community centers, colleges and universities, high schools, military bases, and other female-focused events.

Thanks, Beth.

So I want to close by just talking about some larger sort of systemic work that we're doing.

I want to circle back to the hiring of Dr. Emily Hu.

We are thrilled to death she's coming on board.

This is a position that we have laid the foundation for and fought for since 2016. We are one of the few departments of our size in the department that does not have a dedicated employee wellness director who serves as a licensed clinical psychologist with all of the ethical boundaries that come with that licensure to lead up the organizational wellness.

And I would submit that SPD is still a very traumatized work environment.

We are seeing the strain of our employees across the board, and this is a significant step.

So I want to thank council for providing the funding for this position and the support for this work.

We have retained Dr. Lois James, who did the phase two qualitative work to lead up a sort of corollary to that and really looking at a systemic assessment of gender disparity in promotions and assignments.

And by that, I mean, How do we create programs, policies, et cetera, to ensure that policies around promotions and assignments, that neither race nor gender is a factor in that?

So this is using some advanced analytics that we use with many of our disparity reports, propensity score weighting.

to really try to isolate, to the extent we can, the impact of race or gender on an executive decision around transfers and promotions to ensure that we are being very mindful of any bias that may creep in at that stage.

We're taking a deep look at mitigating the impact of civil service strictures around promotion.

By that, what I mean is promotion within any civil service organization is a function of taking the promotional test.

You land where you land on the list based upon that.

and typically you're assigned out depending on where you rank on the list and need.

What we learned from our phase two study is that the factors that hold women back from promotion are to some extent dictated by the reality of not having control over where you go after promotion.

But there's also the very real impact of a female employee's willingness to test.

We're all familiar with the imposter syndrome that I think anyone who is high achieving necessarily labors under.

And what we find is that for men, men tend to be much more willing to say, I've got X number of years on the job.

I'm ready to go.

This is the next step.

And they're ready to throw themselves in there for promotion.

Whereas with many women, women will say, I've only got X number of years on the job.

I've still got so much to learn.

I'm not nearly ready enough to take this exam.

So that is something that we can address.

We are looking to address that through a women's leadership mentoring program.

I want to emphasize that this is by no means exclusive to women, but it is to ensure that all employees, but particularly women who can see themselves represented in higher levels of leadership, are given the support, the urging, and the mentorship and training to take the exam and do well on that exam.

This will also factor into how it is that we look in terms of assignments of people post-promotion to ensure that what we are assigning somebody to is not creating an undue hardship on them or a disinclination to that service.

Finally, in the spirit of continual assessment and reporting, we are in the final phases of putting together a DEI dashboard, which will allow us to monitor in real time where we are relative to our goals.

Thank you very much for your time.

If you have any questions, we're happy to take them.

Well, first, thank you very much for a fantastic briefing covering, you know, the bigger picture, 30 by 30 effort, and then also the various pieces related to here locally in Seattle.

So thank you for your briefing.

I'd like to start, and I recognize we've gone over time, but this is a very important topic.

And so I'd like to recognize Council Member Moore.

Question?

Great.

Thank you very much, Chair.

And I'll be brief because I do have to leave.

But I wanted to first thank Chair Kettle for actually having this briefing.

We touched upon this at our very, I think, our very first public safety meeting in March.

And It's been, so I appreciate you being mindful and proactive on bringing this, continuing to bring this before the committee.

I also just wanna say thank you very much to Dr. Meisenholder for the work that you've done.

It's really pioneering and appreciate that you're coming from an experience of having been in law enforcement and bring that expertise and personal experience, which is very important, and also to the work that both Council Boatwright and Ms. Waring are doing.

And I did send a letter to Chief Diaz end of April asking really for this kind of specific update.

So I appreciate receiving the information today, but I am also noting to Chief Diaz that I would also appreciate a response to my letter with this particular information in it.

And I want to just offer my continued support in the work that you're doing and the fact that you are identifying particular obstacles that the council can help remove through legislation.

I appreciate that and please come to my office.

I want to help move that forward and also continue to be a very vocal voice in support of this.

We need to change the culture from warrior to guardian.

and we need to make it representative of our population and bring the skills that women possess to make it a much better place for all of us.

So it's tough work, and I appreciate your commitment and your passion, and I am very much an ally in this.

So thank you for being here today and the work that you're doing.

Thank you, Chair.

Okay, Vice Chair Saka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and look...

plus one to council member Moore's effusive praise and expressions of gratitude.

I guess, first and foremost to you, Mr. Chair, you know, again, for putting this important item on the agenda.

We talked obliquely about it in various forums in the past, but this is definitely worthy of a standalone agenda item and briefing and warrants further action and involvement from this body, so really appreciate your leadership being proactive here.

Also, to the presenters, really insightful presentation from my perspective.

Dr. Meisenholder, General Counsel Boatwright, and Detective Waring, really appreciate your insights that you shared here.

Really, really important presentation.

Two questions.

So I guess, Dr. Meisenholder, you mentioned that there's no national or sort of universal standards with respect to recruitment and training.

And so that potentially means there's 18,000 ways of doing one of those things, which I support execution flexibility and the ability to implement to meet local needs.

But it does strike me as something that seemed to make sense to have some sort of national or universal standards or guidelines to help guide.

So you mentioned the implementation challenges of lesser resource departments and agencies and how that may or may not impact their ability to operationalize certain of these best practices.

But if they don't even know what, like, There's limited granularity around what are some of these principles and best practices are.

Like, that's the biggest, most immediate challenge, at least in my mind.

So, you know, what's the path or plan to creating some just high-level guidance or implementing guidelines that...

for all 18,000, really for here, can follow.

And I don't know if that would be the 30 by 30 initiative organizers or Congress or some, I don't know who would be involved in that, but what's the path?

Thank you for that question, sir.

I'll make three points.

There have been movements, national and at the state level, to standardize certain aspects of law enforcement.

Unfortunately, it's kind of been ebbs and weaves over the course of time, and we don't have a lot of traction.

However, there's a renewed focus on standards, standardizing certain things in law enforcement There are a number of professional organizations, major city chiefs, International Association of Chiefs of Police, you know, go down the list, that are investing a lot of time and effort in really pushing forward promising practices around employee lifecycle issues.

And they're focusing on types of agencies, whether it's local, sheriff, et cetera.

But also, there's one particular effort that comes to mind that's focused on rural agencies.

And how do you address some of those challenges there?

From a 30 by 30 perspective, one of our goals this year is really to put forth resources for our agencies.

We have a great website, in my opinion, that offers a lot of resources for agencies to look at.

I think we can do a little bit better job of putting that together.

so agencies actually have an opportunity to think through some of these issues and are pointed to other agencies that we think might be doing it well or that might be a good fit with respect to those things.

I think the standards issue is one that has really been problematic in the United States for many years, especially when you compare it to other sites.

If you think of, I think it's the UK, Several other ones I can't think of right now, Sweden, Norway, their percentage of women is all between 25 and 30%, and most of them have more standards with respect to law enforcement.

I think it's a missed opportunity, and it's also a risk for agencies.

Thank you.

And the final question is, so you mentioned that culture is the most challenging thing to improve and, you know, can't really come out, approach that from an outsider, outside in perspective.

It has to kind of have an organic, like inside out.

And, um, So that all makes sense and is definitely consistent with my own personal experiences in many organizations and varying cultures.

But are there any kind of nationally accepted best practices for, in your view, for improving culture in policing?

A lot of it is with respect to first trying to understand what your culture is.

We use that word quite loosely, but there's various cultures in police department.

There's the profession as a whole, and then you might have variants of that in any unit or bureau that you're in.

The point that I would make is it's about role modeling.

It's about messaging from the top.

It's what you allowed to fester and be tolerated in your organization.

And how are you holding officers accountable for their actions?

So understanding what that is, engaging with your employees as well, and then thinking about what you can do to make changes in the culture.

And sometimes we talk about culture as it's only negative.

There are some remarkable things about the policing culture that are positive.

However, there are many things that are not.

So really having a broad understanding of that.

In terms of best practices, I haven't seen anything, I will certainly go look for it now because you've intrigued me, that really speaks to how we can change culture in organizations and how you can sustain that change over time.

I will say one of the biggest challenges that we have with change in policing, when you think about the various drivers, whether it's generational, crime types, politics, whatever the case may be, is the administrative changes that take place in an agency.

Because when you have a new team come in, then that has the opportunity to really improve things, but it also has the opportunity to perhaps take away some things that were in the prior administration that were working well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Thank you, Chair Kettle.

I'll be super quick.

Thank you all for the presentation.

Super helpful.

I just wanted to echo the words of my colleague, Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Moore.

I'm forgetting Council Member Moore.

I needed to see her face.

Council Member Moore.

and her face is on my screen, Council Member Moore, supporting whatever efforts the 30 for 30 has.

I worked at an afterschool program and we had the former Chief Best come and talk to our girls in middle school.

I can't begin to tell you, them seeing an officer that looked like them, every single girl in the class wanted to be with the police department and just thought it was the coolest thing ever to see someone who looks like them.

Shout out to Detective Cookie as well, who every time someone sees her in the community, they're always like, hey, especially a young kid, they always want to be in that position.

So whatever it takes, I'm here, available.

I know I had told the mayor's office that more than happy to connect our police department with some people from the Final Four and athletics, because I'm a big proponent of women who are in athletics how great they are in a team environment for the seattle police department and i also love to see that y'all are going to hbcus in 2024 i think it's an untapped resource a lot of people don't know about in our country about all the hbcus that provide great great students and people that you know can see themselves in a career in law enforcement so thank you

Thank you, Councilmember Hollingsworth, and thank you, Doctor, all of you.

Thank you so much for coming.

You weren't here at the beginning with my opening remarks.

I just wanted to say again, the council has a role here too, and it needs to show leadership.

And respect to former Chief Carmen Best, we have to acknowledge what we did as a council with respect to her tenure and what was done to her.

And so I just wanted to say again, thank you again.

Chief Bess, Carmen Bess, for her service to the community and for, you know, the challenges that she faced to include from this very council.

And as I said with the defund pledge earlier in this year, we have to draw a line onto that.

We have to acknowledge it, draw a line on it, and move forward.

And I think the 30 for 30 work that we're doing is a great way to do that.

So again, thank you, Chief Best, for your service to our Seattle community.

On your briefing, notice policy and culture, so important, and so is leadership.

It is so key to have that leadership piece to push and to identify and move forward, and that includes the City Council, and the City Council will do its part, trust me.

And I noted your point about number, Someone said, you know, 3%, it was like chiefs.

You know, what I really care about, and this is what I'm pushing on the committee, and I do it in my discussions with SBD, is sergeants.

We need to be building sergeants.

If we want to do accountability and all the rest, but to include on this subject matter, 30 for 30, We really need to be working, you know, the leadership piece at the start and particularly with the sergeants.

And I think that is the number that I really care about because it really shows where we're moving in the future.

I mean, you can import, as Vice Chair talked about, an officer from outside, but to grow and to build that leadership within is so key.

And where we are with sergeants is a great indicator of that.

Everything you've seen that you pointed out just lands with me because this is the experience that I had in the Navy.

I came in in the old Navy.

My generation, my Gen X generation, we just went from war to war to war, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and other places around the world.

And we saw that, you know, and, you know, with the operations that we had, phase four, which is the point after the main part of the operation, you know, is basically occupation force.

And we learned these lessons.

Like, you know, the one slide talking about the different listening session points.

Everything rang true.

And so that's...

I've seen that again and again.

And so we learned, like in Iraq and Afghanistan, the importance of having female service members to serve and to bring that peace, which is so important.

And that is important for us here in Seattle as well.

And to parlay that to the last point that I wanted to make is related to the phase two report that was done.

I read it, and there's three pieces to this as I see it.

One is it rang true.

just from my experience in terms of not just military, but working with police and just, you know, from, you know, being in those hyper-masculine organizations.

And so it's really important for us to acknowledge it.

I think I've said this to GFDS, to everybody in between, so that's point one.

Point two is that we, as a city, we cannot be explaining this away.

We cannot be saying, well, you know, this happened and so this explains that or whatever no uh we just have to accept the report and the points that were made i think it's really important because uh dare i say the last thing we need regarding is mansplaining you know trying to explain what happened and why we are where we are and and the last point that i said again i said this to chief diaz as well and others is that okay We acknowledge it, we accept it, now just get to it.

Get to work and address it.

And this is where the leadership piece comes in again.

And so I think with those three points, and we will do our part here in the committee and the council, but we will be looking to SPD and the mayor's office, the executive overall, to press forward, because it's so important to the other initiatives that we're doing, like in recruitment and retention, And so I see positive steps forward, particularly with the examples that we have here on our city council that will be fantastic as we move forward.

So again, thank you very much for joining us.

And I would like to ask if there's any other issues for the committee.

None, none, none, hearing none.

Hearing no further business for this committee.

We are adjourned.