Seattle City Council Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans & Education Committee 5/8/19

Good morning.

Today is Wednesday, May 8, 2019. It is 9.01 a.m.

This is a special meeting of the Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans in Education Committee.

I'm Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez, and I am the chair of this committee.

I expect that other Councilmembers will be joining me throughout the morning.

There are three items on today's agenda.

We had to significantly shorten it up given the amount of interest that we expect in both of the two first items.

And of course, that is not to neglect our third item, which is about paid family leave.

So the first item will be to consider and take a vote on ordinance 119509, which relates to the mobile integrated health pilot program by the Seattle Fire Department.

And the second item will be a briefing and discussion from a variety of departments including the Seattle Police Department, Department of Neighborhoods, Seattle Public Utilities, and the Seattle Department of Transportation regarding the recently announced Emphasis Patrols program in seven different neighborhoods throughout the city.

Lastly, we will get a briefing and overview of Washington's Paid Family and Medical Leave Program from the Washington State Employee Security Department.

Very excited about hosting folks from Washington State in committee today to talk to us about the implementation plans for the brand new Paid Family and Medical Leave Program.

Many employees should have noticed.

that they're receiving pay deductions and their payroll checks starting January 1st, 2019, and beginning January 1st, 2020, people will be able to begin the process of making claims with the state for purposes of receiving this wonderful benefit.

So I'm very excited about hearing more about that, given that we are a major employer in the entire state and employ the most number of employees across the state.

This is particularly relevant to our workforce here in the city of Seattle, regardless of whether these workers live here or not.

So very excited about hearing from the state on that particular topic as well.

I'd like to welcome Council Member Bagshaw to the committee.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here.

We will go ahead and begin our agenda.

So as usual, we will begin with public comment.

So each individual will have up to two minutes to provide us with their public testimony.

We have 23 individuals signed up for public comment at two minutes each.

So I will call the names of three individuals.

So for those of you who haven't been here, you'll hear your name called.

Both of these microphones work up here.

So as you hear your name called, in order to reduce the amount of time that we take for shuffling, I would ask that as you hear your name called, you come up to one of the two microphones and begin the process of queuing up.

At that point, once your two minutes starts, you can provide us your name just to remind us who you are.

If you have an affiliation, we'd be happy to know that as well.

And then we would request that you speak to an item on today's agenda.

So there's only three items.

And then at the end of your two minutes, if you're still going, I will ask you to please wrap up.

And if you don't wrap up, then, well, unfortunately, I have to nudge you a little bit more strongly to end your comments.

Unfortunately, public testimony is not the most, you know, natural way to engage with each other, but it is designed to provide members of the public an opportunity to tell us, members of the committee, what they think about some of the issues we're going to be discussing or taking action on now or in the near future.

So we certainly welcome all of you who are here.

We look forward to having a really productive, briefing and committee hearing and we really do take seriously all of the public testimony that is provided to us during this period of time.

So really, really grateful that we have a full house today and really excited about hearing people's thoughts about the various items on the agenda.

So once again, I don't intend to be rude if I ask you to please wrap up your comments at the end of the two minutes.

It's simply for purposes of efficiency and making sure that everybody who signed up has an opportunity to also share two minutes of their thoughts with us.

And you'll see there's timers all throughout the front of chambers here that give you a good indication of where you're at.

So with that being said, I will go ahead and begin the process of calling out people's names.

Again, you'll have two minutes, and we ask that you start by saying your name and then providing us your testimony on an item on the agenda.

The first three individuals who have signed up are Karen Gielan, followed by Heather Carney, And then we will hear from Martin Cortez.

I'm Karen Gillen.

Is this the best?

I'm Karen Gillen.

I'm a resident of downtown Seattle.

I'm testifying in response to your letter to the mayor on the increased emphasis patrol strategy.

I believe the questions that you've asked the mayor are a waste of time and the wrong questions.

and they're going to take both her office time and the police department's time to answer, which is a waste of our limited resources in the city.

I believe that the implication of the questions are that enforcing our laws requires special justification or that our police department does not know how to do their jobs.

The question you should be asking, rather, is how can we expand this approach to additional problem spots in the city and extend the time period in which we do this emphasis.

It's always better when we have more police, more people on the streets to keep things in check.

It might even actually stop some of the things from happening that happen now.

So that really is the true question.

I would ask that you please attempt to put yourself in the shoes of the vast majority of your constituents who are fed up with feeling unsafe on our streets, even during the middle of the day, or walking through one of our parks and running into all kinds of unsavory things happening.

Thank you.

Thank you, Karen.

Our next individual is Heather, followed by Martin Cortez, and then Jean, I believe it's either Burns or Burris.

Burris.

Hi, my name's Heather Carney.

I'm sorry, Heather, can you just lower it just a little bit?

There you go.

Sure.

My name's Heather Carney, and I'm a resident in Georgetown, and I am actually on the board of the Georgetown Community Council.

I'm kind of representing our neighborhood since I actually had this week off, and we don't have a paid representative, but I just wanted to share that we saw the letter that Council Member Gonzalez had sent, I wanted to let you know that I actually really appreciate the questions that were asked.

I think that that's good to know what the background is.

I do want to let you know that The concerns of the community, I want to make sure that that's heard too.

So we have seen the positive effects already of the Emphasis Patrol.

Myself, I walk my dogs every day, several times a day.

I drive downtown all the time.

I work downtown and I've seen the homeless, the unsanctioned homeless encampment recently cleaned up that I never thought would be cleaned up.

But I want to make sure that the, new element that's being introduced into our neighborhood is understood which is King County is bringing in a relocating a sobering center that's currently downtown in South Lake Union.

So I just want to make sure that that with the police emphasis that that will continue at least in our neighborhood to make sure that they're prepared to handle any additional needs in that neighborhood.

We've spoken to King County, to Leo Flores.

We've talked to people at the Sobering Center.

We've requested 911 transcripts and we've discovered that there's over 200 extra calls just from that area.

So we just want to make sure for a small little Georgetown with no resources, nothing really there, but some amazing restaurants and bars, will that Sobering Center be able to Will the police be able to handle additional calls from the sobering center?

And so I just want to make sure that we do appreciate this.

We just want to make sure it's done the right way, but please don't lose focus that our neighborhood is one of the higher crimes per resident in the city when you look at the stats by neighborhood.

Thank you, Heather.

Thank you so much.

Next up is Martin Cortez, followed by Gene, and then we will hear from Karen Philomen.

Hello.

Good morning.

Thank you.

Can you hear me all right?

Yes, we can.

Thank you so much for hosting this and for allowing public comment.

Thank you very much.

I'm here to comment on item number two, just a little bit about myself.

My name is Marty.

I was born and raised on the inner city of Chicago.

And one thing is that growing up, we were taught to be, we're not just taught, we just learned to be really afraid of police and them in our neighborhood.

And living in Georgetown now, and reading the news last week, for the first time, I felt really happy that there's more police in my neighborhood.

And I'm really grateful to the mayor and to the police chief for doing this.

It's just interesting how that came full circle.

So thank you for the letter.

It's pretty good.

I like the question about how do we measure success at the end?

What are the metrics?

If I could add to the letter, I might say, what about this sobering center that Heather mentioned?

What about that that's coming?

We only got one month of additional support.

If this sobering center is coming, that's 200 plus additional police 911 calls into our tiny neighborhood.

They're gonna outnumber, there's 1,700 people coming in and out, and there's only 1,500 people in Georgetown.

So we're gonna be outnumbered.

We need help.

We need help to prevent the sobering center.

But I think the, The emphasis patrols are a good first step.

And again, thank you for hosting this and for allowing public comment and for hearing me.

I feel heard.

So thank you.

Thank you, Martin.

We will now hear from Jean and then Karen and then Harvig Allison or Harvey.

It's probably Harvey.

Hi.

Thanks for hosting this and giving us the time to speak about this.

My name is Gene Burrus.

I'm a resident downtown in the Pike Pine 3rd Avenue area and just want to express a lot of support for this initiative, for the special emphasis.

My only question is why this has to be a special emphasis and not an everyday, all the time kind of thing.

For a long time, we've kind of been expected to accept as a fact of life in our neighborhood that our neighborhood is an open-air drug market and a haven for illegal drug use and all of the violent crime that comes along with the activities around an open-air drug market.

For too long we've been asked to accept as a fact of life that our neighborhood is an open air sewer and that we get to know when we're close to home by the smell of the urine and stepping over feces.

And we've been asked to accept that our neighborhood, the fact of life in our neighborhood is that our homes and our cars and our bicycles and our property are not worthy of protection.

So if this is signaling a change to that attitude and that we don't no longer have to accept that as a fact of life, I'm fully in support of it.

And I just want to express my support for this and hope that it's an ongoing thing, not just a special emphasis.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Gene.

We're now going to hear from Karen and then Harvey and Lou.

Hi, my name is Karen Philomen.

I lived all over the world.

I lived on the East Coast, New York and DC.

And I never saw a place so sad like this place.

And beside the sadness, I figured out that I'm in danger just recently.

I had spinal surgery and I was really not in the best stage of my life.

And I was circled by somebody and somebody tried to get money from me and didn't let me go.

It was broad daylight.

And people couldn't help me out, of course.

So I think this initiative is really very important because Seattle is a very nice place.

And I think it will get worse when we don't do anything.

Thank you.

And Karen, can you tell me where you live in the city?

Right at Pike Market.

And I love it.

Thank you so much.

All right, next we will hear from Harvey Allison, then Lou Bond, and then Chelsea Nelson.

My name is Harvey Allison.

I live downtown.

I support the mayor's initiative to reduce crime.

Women, protected minorities, and the poor are everywhere and always disproportionately victims of crime.

Any and every part of Seattle's city government that prevents crime enforcement intentionally targets women, protected minorities, and its poor.

This has to stop.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

We will now hear from Lou Bond, then Chelsea Nelson, and Ali...

I can't make out your last name.

Gambari.

What is it?

Gambari.

Gambari.

Thank you.

Okay.

Good morning, my name is Lou Bond.

I'm the property manager of the Melbourne Tower right on the northwest corner of Third and Pike.

I've been there for 32 years.

I'm also here to speak regarding the special emphasis that the Mayor and Chief Best have submitted.

I'm all in favor of it.

Seems like every summer about tourist time, that's when the city actually brings more special emphasis, more police on the street.

It does seem to help.

I agree with an earlier comment.

I'm not sure why this has to be only a seasonal type of an attitude or an adjustment.

I think we need them on a regular basis.

My lobby attendants are dealing with feces and urine and needles every single day.

Councilmember Bagshaw, we walked the alley with you one day and we really appreciate you coming out and seeing it firsthand with us.

It's just not acceptable, this kind of negative bad behavior.

Walgreens is our retailer.

They're losing thousands of dollars a week.

in stolen merchandise that's then peddled on the sidewalks, the very sidewalks for pennies on the dollar.

That's with them paying for thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of security for their stores and areas.

So we have got to stop that.

I implore the city council and all of you to do everything in your power that we are going to say no to negative behavior, that we're going to enforce our existing laws.

that we're going to help those that can't help themselves.

And it doesn't mean helping them with a needle exchange or some other kind of program of letting them live on our sidewalks in our public spaces.

That's not acceptable.

That's not helping them.

We've got to do more.

So I implore you to do all that you can to work collaboratively with the mayor, with Chief Best and all agencies to be able to solve these problems.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Lou.

We will now hear from Chelsea.

Hi, Chelsea.

Hello, good morning.

And then Ali, and then Mike Stewart.

Good morning.

My name is Chelsea Nelson.

I work on the advocacy team at Downtown Seattle Association.

Downtown Seattle Association, we have more than 2,000 members, corporate members, small business members, service providers, and residents along with others.

People who want to live, work, and play downtown and all throughout Seattle.

And at DSA, we believe and we strongly believe that Seattle is a great place.

And we have some serious concerns.

and some issues that we need to work on together.

And we think that public safety throughout this city is one of those issues that we need to work together.

And so we strongly support the emphasis patrols and support Mayor Murray in this effort.

We think that this can help.

It can help.

It can help.

What's the...

Our people just want to do what they do.

They just want to work.

They want to get there safely.

They want to take their kids to the park.

And this could help us do that, feel more safe.

And so we are fully behind the mayor in this effort.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chelsea.

We will now hear from Ali.

Welcome, sir.

And then Mike Stewart and then Maddie Brindle.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you for putting this program together.

I'm here to stand with the mayor and emphasizing more police officer.

during the tourist season and hopefully beyond.

I measure every person's character by what they do for their community.

That's why I can stand here because I've been doing this since 1985, doing a business from Capitol Hill to downtown in Pioneer Square.

And I'm not planning to leave.

We want to be part of the solution.

But one of the problem I have today, last year I have to call my banker twice to defer my principal on the loan that I took to create this beautiful space for all of you and my community to come and relax and enjoy the community and love that makes community meaningful.

And I shouldn't be doing that.

And another thing is, besides doing that, I feel that One of the biggest challenges I have today, I usually could handle all the problem around my store, but these days it's not possible.

I have to call 911 and get someone to take care of people that they come in my store.

At the end of the day, if I have kid in my house that is a problem, I get it out of the house.

Our happy community is happy family.

Our community is not happy.

We're going to do our best.

We're going to be part of the solution.

We're going to help you guys.

And I want to thank you for what you do, and hopefully we can get something done.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ali.

We will now hear from Mike Stewart, and then Mike will be followed by Maddie, and then Michael Troyer.

All right, well, good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you, Council Member Gonzalez and committee members, for the opportunity to speak today.

My name is Mike Stewart.

I'm Executive Director of the Ballard Alliance.

We are an organization that represents more than 500 businesses and thousands of residents in Ballard.

The Alliance strongly supports Mayor Durkan and Chief Spess' increased emphasis patrols in neighborhoods across the city, including Ballard.

This is a much-needed first step to begin addressing the criminal activity that is experienced by business owners and residents alike.

It's a very challenging environment right now to own and operate a business.

We didn't see this three or four years ago.

With this step and additional attention in the future, we hope that businesses will have to worry less about safety for themselves, safety for their customers, and safety for their employees.

I urge this committee to support the emphasis program.

Further, I encourage this committee to start examining ways to fund a more sustained police presence for our neighborhoods and make good on the promise of more police officers, which was funded by the city council in 2016 through an increase to the city B&O tax and the business license tax certificate fee.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mike, for being with us this morning.

Mattie, followed by Michael Troyer, and then Lauren Ross.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you, City Council, for allowing us to make ourselves heard this morning.

I first want to say that I fully endorse the Mayor's proposal, her increased emphasis, patrols to do something about crime in our neighborhoods.

The enabling stance taken to date by the city council, city attorney, and King County prosecutors has certainly done nothing to deter, let alone rehabilitate, the drug and alcohol addicted offenders who are fueling the crime surge in our communities.

And it certainly has done nothing to reward the hardworking, law-abiding taxpayers who are footing the bill and who vote you into and, in fact, out of office and do pay your salaries.

The city council and the mayor are the elected governing body of this city.

For God's sake, start governing.

If it is necessary to affect changes in laws and regulations to empower law enforcement and to get criminals off our streets once and for all, then get on with it.

That is your job.

And bear in mind that while activism is commendable when common sense is applied, it is no way to govern a major city.

And finally, please stop insulting our intelligence with your tortured statistics on crime.

We all know the statistics game.

We live here and we see what is happening with our very own eyes.

And please let us not hear one more time, we can do better.

We know you can do better.

The question is, will you do better?

And if you won't, we're on the cusp of a golden opportunity to look for people who will do better.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Brindle.

Our next public commenter is Michael Troyer, followed by Lauren Ross, and then Dave, I believe it's Cuthill.

Please.

Thank you.

My name is Michael Troyer, and thank you for the time to give some testimony to the emphasis patrols that are proposed by the mayor.

CEO of the Rainier Club for 30 some years and been part of the downtown core for more than 40. And my public comment to the council is something must be done now about enforcing the law in our city and prosecute those that break the law.

So as you consider the gender equity and the safe communities agenda today, I urge you to support the mayor's approach to deploy these resources.

As other commenters have said today, it does make a difference and annually it would be so helpful to have that continue.

The people working downtown can no longer wait for the council to take decisive action to eliminate the crime that occurs without consequence because our city laws are unenforced.

So I represent a number of my constituents who live downtown, some of them here today.

And that's truly the big difference.

Businesses had to deal with a variety of things over the years, but this is unprecedented.

And I remember walking down from O'Day High School wondering what that building was that I was going to work in for the rest of my life, standing in front of Zales, which now has more crime there than when there was a jewelry store.

And so with this theft and shoplifting and fencing and drug dealing, These people with addiction and mental illness need something more than just being ignored.

So as I represent my constituents downtown and we're voters, we want to help resolve this and we really urge you to continue to support rule of law.

And thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Thank you so much, Mr. Troyer.

We will now hear from Lauren Ross, followed by Dave Cuthill, and then Greg Smith.

Good morning.

Good morning.

I am Lauren Ross with the Soto Business Improvement Area, and I am here today in support of Mayor Durkin's Pre-Summer Emphasis Program to deploy additional resources to improve public safety in many neighborhoods, including Soto.

In Soto, our businesses, employees, visitors are dealing with constant criminal activity.

Some businesses are getting broken into multiple times a week, often by the same offender.

others are having to pay thousands of dollars in repairs due to vandalism and property damage.

We have businesses leaving Soto not because they're closing shop but due to the fear over the safety for their employees and customers.

We need help and the census program is a necessary first step to provide some measure of relief for crime victims and neighborhoods like Soto that have seen drastic increases in criminal activity.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lauren.

And then just before we proceed, wanted to acknowledge that we've been joined by some additional council members.

So I want to acknowledge council members Herbold, Pacheco, and Council President Harrell, who have joined us at the table this morning.

I've actually been sitting here for at least 10 or 15 minutes, so I apologize for not recognizing that you joined us at the table.

Thank you for being here this morning.

We will go ahead now and proceed with Dave and then we will hear from Greg Smith and then Jill Donnelly.

Good morning.

I'm Dave Cuthill with Kleiss Properties.

And for those of you who don't know Kleiss, Kleiss has been in downtown Seattle for over 130 years and is part of the fabric of this city.

We're here primarily today to address security and crime issues.

We've had numerous incidents in our buildings that have caused us to reinvest hundreds and thousands of dollars in security measures to protect our tenants.

and our customers.

So we support the mayor's proposal for emphasis patrols in the seven neighborhoods that have been identified.

We would support ongoing emphasis patrols in the entire city.

Matters of crime prevention, public safety, and public health are of paramount concern.

Pieces like System Failure by Scott Lindsay clearly identify acute issues that should spur all of you into action.

Not a conversation, not a task force, not a deflection with a description of systemic issues, but rather we can no longer sit on the sidelines and allow this to happen and devolve our fine city into further dismay.

Again, this is a call for action and we support the emphasis patrols in the entire city.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dave.

We will now hear from Greg, then Jill Donnelly, and Wendy Norman.

Hi, my name is Greg Smith, and I'm CEO of Urban Visions.

It's a real estate company in downtown Seattle.

We own property in Pioneer Square and in the Pike Pine Corridor.

I'm a resident in downtown Seattle, have been for the last 15 years.

I'm a partner with Oligon Marie and Cherry Street Coffee, small business, as well as artists down in Good Arts.

And I have to say, I'm very supportive of the mayor's plan.

doesn't go far enough.

As resident, as employees, our employees, our tourists should not feel unsafe.

Our children should not feel unsafe.

Women should not be concerned about getting thrown off bridges in the city.

The idea that we're Considering not doing more police right now just blows my mind.

It's a problem that's spread throughout the city of Seattle, not just downtown.

Ballard, Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and we have a serious problem going on here.

We as a community can address the homelessness issue.

This is not a homelessness problem we're dealing with right now.

It's crime and drugs and drug addicts.

And that's what we need to focus on.

And so I hope that you'll support the mayor and this police effort.

Thanks.

Thank you, Greg.

Next up is Jill Donnelly followed by Wendy Norman and then Jeff Gao.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Jill Donley and I've been before this panel several times.

I started my first time in 2010, 2014 when there was a crack problem.

I have a store which has been in the downtown corridor since 1976 on the corner of 1st and Virginia.

How is this for a PR headline for one of the most promising cities in the country and maybe the world?

All eyes are on us.

Instead of the Emerald City where Seattle is dying, that any one of you panelists can sit there and be proud that this label has been attached to our city because in the ineptitude of our council, of our governance, to manage a problem that has been scaling out of control for a decade.

This is not new.

We had opportunities to do something about this 10 years ago, and now we're just looking and we're hanging our hopes on a 30-day program.

to help us put shine light on something that should have been amended and dealt with.

This is a systemic problem, not just in Seattle, but every city.

And I just can't understand how each one of you and this mayor, I've been through three police chiefs.

I've been hanging my hopes on now this fourth mayor.

to do something to stop this, to take that creative effort that has made Seattle one of the most spectacular cities in this country, a leader in doing something about mental illness, about drug addiction, and about systemic crime that comes from that.

We hope that this 30-day program will at least open our eyes and just start a dialogue.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up is Wendy Norman, followed by Jeff Gao, and then we will hear from Rob Nichols.

Good morning.

Good morning.

My name is Wendy Norman, and I have lived and worked and played and shopped around Seattle my entire life.

I'm a Northwest native.

I currently live at Fourth and Union in Seattle.

I'm here because I echo the statements and made by this gentleman that it was a very exciting news to see the announcement of the seasonal emphasis.

It was disappointing that that was just a seasonal emphasis as I feel like as a resident, a taxpayer, it would be nice to see those efforts more representing myself and not just tourists over a time of year where we know the city is obviously busier.

I wanted to come this morning because I wanted to ask you to allow us to be part of programs and this conversation to continue, potentially not in this forum, but in other forums where we're allowed to be part of the solution.

I think, again, the seasonal emphasis is great.

It's wonderful to see that the safety concerns, the concerns around crime are going to be addressed.

But we want to be a part of it, and we want to be a part of the solution.

And as our representatives, I'm asking you to come up with the ideas, with the programs that we can support.

So when I invite friends to come visit me, they don't say to me, will it be safe?

Where should I park?

Where will I be safe?

Every June, I have a luncheon for friends of mine, and three of them have said they're not coming because they're concerned about safety in Seattle.

That's a sad statement.

And we all know about the crime, but what I wanted to ask you today is let us be a part of it.

The seasonal emphasis again, I fully support.

I think it's a wonderful program.

What are the other programs that we can support and be part of curing Seattle?

Thank you.

Thank you, Wendy.

Next up is Jeff, followed by Rob Nichols, and then Natalie Beiner.

Morning.

Morning.

My name is Jeff Gow.

I'm a resident of Seattle.

In the spirit of being brief, I just want to echo everyone else that has already said before me the points that I think need to be reiterated to the council.

It's time for action, period.

Thank you.

You were really true to your word about being brief there, Jeff.

Thank you.

Okay, next up is Rob Nichols and then Natalie Beiner, followed by Don Ayers.

Good morning, greetings.

I'm Rob Nichols.

I represent the State Hotel.

I'm the general manager there of the newly opened State Hotel and Ben Paris Restaurant right there at the corner of 2nd and Pike.

I have the privilege of leading this 91 room hotel and building that for most people know it's been vacant for the better part of 37 years.

Our investors committed over 40 plus million dollars renovating this building and bringing new life to this wonderful neighborhood.

I've been in the hospitality business for over 17 years across several cities in other states.

I'm new to Seattle for a little over three years now, but I'll tell you what, in the short time that I've been here and the cities I've worked in, I've never seen crime the way I do outside our front doors.

whether it's daytime or whether it's nighttime.

Doesn't matter.

It's right there.

We see it.

We are concerned.

And that's why we applaud the efforts of the focused police presence in the city, as well as, you know, hoping that this is an ongoing solution to the problem.

I'm here representing our investors, Columbia Hospitality.

We're present in 24 cities here in Seattle, and we hope that this is, again, not the end of it, but only the beginning of solving the problem once and for all.

Thank you.

Thank you, Rob.

And then next up is Natalia.

I'm sorry, I was saying Natalie, but it's Natalia.

Followed by Don Ayers, and then Jenny Kowalczyk.

And I want to thank Jenny for actually giving me the phonetic way to pronounce her last name.

It's really helpful.

Please.

Thank you, Lorena.

My name is Natalia Beiner-Wittke.

I own a business in Belltown.

I've owned my business for seven years, and I came here from Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm very proud to be a Seattleite and a business owner and a resident here in Seattle.

I've seen a lot of changes in those seven years, and I no longer feel safe in my neighborhood.

I rely on tourism to keep my business thriving as well as local business.

My customers have stated many times that they prefer me to go to their house and pick up their clothing.

I own a consignment store rather than come downtown.

We see a lot of families coming through.

They come from Pike's Place Market and go down First Avenue.

And there are countless heroin needles that I found.

I have pictures on my phone.

right outside of our neighborhood.

I pull out of my garage in the evening and people are shooting up outside of my garage.

Several times I've called the police.

It feels like they're unable to do anything.

We pay so much money, not only as taxpayers, as residents, but also as business owners.

Myself and some of the business owners around me We all feel that our taxpaying dollars should provide security of police and public safety and clean streets.

And that laws in this city should be enforced.

So I'm here in support of both initiatives.

Echoing the words of all of the people that have spoken so far, this shouldn't be temporary.

This should be permanent until this problem is resolved.

This is a beautiful city and people come from all over the world to come and visit us and they should not have to feel unsafe.

They should not have to step over feces.

They should not have to find heroin needles and explain to their children why they need to stay away from this area.

This is shameful and I'm urging you to support both initiatives and take the emphasis out and make it permanent and empower our police to actually get Crime off the streets.

Thank you Natalia.

Thank you.

Thank you so much Don is next Is next and then Don will be followed by Jenny and then David Haynes Good morning council members.

Thanks for hearing out We at American life where I work strongly support the mayor and the police chiefs initiative, but I have a few comments I'm the property manager at American life.

We have some 60 acres here in Soto some 200 tenants and We are all being impacted as everybody else's discussed this morning by same issues We are community partners with Seattle.

We serve on the SPD board and the SFD board.

I'm a founding member of the Soto BIA.

We're philanthropic to those organizations, so we partner with you and the city in every way that we possibly can.

But I want to tell you we're being overrun.

I think you know that, and it's a hard job.

It's a societal problem, not just yours, not just ours.

And so we recognize that.

One of the things that you need to know is this city has been very impactful, both economically and for the well-being and safety of our tenants and their guests.

Number one, we have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars on security measures.

We've hired emphasis patrols.

We've worked with SFD at the BIA to provide visual deterrence.

We are still being overrun and despite our efforts.

So one of the things is that we obviously know that we need to do something.

I know that you need to do something and we want to be community partners in that respect and we strongly support the mayor's initiative, but we need to go further.

It may say we've been playing defense for a long time.

It's now time to go on offense.

We need to strongly support the laws that are in force and stop the criminal behavior and get the criminals off the street.

Once that's done, I think we can then begin to work with the people that are there by chance.

We're compassionate.

We have compassion for them, but we need to figure out a way to separate the two.

So we strongly support the initiative.

We need to go a little farther.

I implore you to adopt the policy of the mayor and move ahead.

Let's get these people off the street.

Thank you, Don, for being with us this morning.

And then I would just want to acknowledge that we have now been joined by Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you for being with us this morning.

And then we will go ahead now and proceed with Jenny, and then we will hear from David Haynes and then Brittany Bollet.

Good morning.

You were very close and I hope my phonetic helped you there.

I'm here today representing the Alliance for Pioneer Square.

We represent 800 businesses in our district and help construct the prolific offenders report on their behalf.

I want to thank many of our stakeholders who are here today in support of the mayor's emphasis.

Pioneer Square is home to a very diverse group of stakeholders, retails, restaurants, startups, sports fans, and art galleries, human services.

In fact, we have one of the highest concentration of human services in the state.

Our stakeholders want to be safe, whether it's getting into their office in the morning, serving guests, strolling through one of our parks or public spaces, or standing in line for a shelter bed.

We look to you to help find solutions to keep everyone safe and to create an environment where people are not victimized as they go about their daily business.

We appreciate the mayor's office moving forward with the plan for a neighborhood emphasis and ask that you work together to solve some of the very real, very challenging issues we face as a city today.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jenny.

David Haynes is next, followed by Brittany Bollet.

Most of the crime increases are from drug pusher exemptions.

And if you notice, the police department doesn't list drug pushers as a crime.

The mayor, when she was the Attorney General, sabotaged the integrity of police reform by slipping a sentence into the 2012 reform that exempted drug pushers.

Seattle is a societal implosion, a wicked corrosion derailed by liberal policies that exempt low-level drug pushers, destroying lives daily.

While cops are getting rich, moonlighting as security guards protecting bartenders, over-serving drunks driving home, while cops show up to their real job too tired to fight crime.

Emphasis patrols are designed to show force and falsely assure law-abiding citizens they're safe because cops are around.

Yet cops are tasked with coffee outreach, hanging out at Starbucks for an hour, has resulted in corrupt leaders at the police department creating more excuses for money with another ridiculous request by cops for another new police station as if that will improve their response times when the real problem is the cops refuse to even bother responding to low-level drug pushers who are destroying people's lives daily and work in the street and controlling everything.

Seattle's affirmative action and fractions are evident in the police leadership at the department.

It trips progress and implodes society over the last seven years.

Starting with, I hate to say it, black cops are hired specifically to patrol black communities.

And then they rotate out of that division and start conducting speed traps on the white community driving through.

While the crack operations of Belltown implode, they act like they don't see it.

Don't be deceived by a police department loaded with statistical distraction to justify the rich salaries when they hide the fact the root cause of Seattle's problem is the exemptions of crack, meth, and heroin, low-level drug pushers, and the sex crime exemptions.

David, your time is up.

David, your time is up.

The next speaker is Brittany followed by Marguerite Richard.

Good morning, Councilmembers.

My name is Brittany Pollet.

I live in North Queen Anne and spend much of my time in Ballard and Fremont.

My child goes to school in Ballard.

I am here today to express my concerns over the newly announced emphasis patrols.

As announced, this program is based not on actual crime increases but on the fear of crime, and the increased policing appears to be intended to target the unhoused population.

There is no question that we have a crisis in our city of people who need homes and they need the stability that provides however Sorry, my phone turned off.

Over 80% of unhoused people have already experienced or witnessed police harassment.

If these interactions go beyond harassment into citations or arrests, people in already vulnerable situations can see their finances stretch thinner, their job prospects further reduced, and their chances for finding housing in the future further in decline.

Furthermore, any interaction with the police does carry the risk of violence.

But the risk is far higher for those who are homeless, people of color, and or experiencing mental illness.

And increased police patrols actively make these people less safe.

As far as I can tell, what we're doing here is taking an undisclosed amount of public money, which could be used to house these people to get them into the programs where their lives can actually change and find stability.

Directly use it to make the people in Seattle who already are the safest feel safer.

I think everyone needs to feel safe, including those who are on the streets, not in homes.

Thank you.

Thank you, Brittany.

Our next speaker is Marguerite.

And Marguerite is the last person signed up for public testimony, so I will do a last call before we close out public comment.

Yes, good day everyone.

Yeah, public safety is always a concern of mine.

First of all, because I'm black.

And I noticed that Sandra Bland is back in the news again.

So when you say safety, are you saying that the behavior of the words that I heard coming before me, that other people have priorities over us?

I don't even have to mention their name.

They're always in the news.

Either a black person is getting killed or the police is getting killed.

like none other I've ever seen in my lifetime.

And I thank God, you know, that I don't have to fear any evil because he's with me and his rod and his staff comforts me, not you, because when I come down here, a black woman seems to always be denigrated.

Is that a good term for the number of times that I've been thrown out just for free speech?

And I know it's free speech because God gave me my speech.

You didn't tell me what to say.

I don't get my instruction.

He said, I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go.

And it's going to be that from now on.

And it always has been.

So anything outside of that, it's the perpetrator coming against us as a black community of people and disrupting everything.

Even the good, they call an evil good.

and good evil.

And I have a concern about that because the number of times that I've come down here, it's like a repeated thing.

So okay, you know, I can't kill them like that because I can't kill them like that.

So I just try to denigrate them, make them look bad.

And if you don't do what they say, then they call these folk on the walls up in here.

And then if you don't do what they say, then they give you a little old, Pink slip kind of like when they gave you in grade school when you act it up So it's some something really wrong up in here.

Thank you.

Mr. Shard.

Your time is up Is so that is the last person signed up on the sheets for public comment?

Is there anybody in the audience who didn't have an opportunity to sign up who'd like to offer us some public testimony?

Come on up Gretchen So, good morning.

So, for this part of the public testimony, we do require that folks sign in.

So, you don't have to do it right now, Gretchen, but after you give your public testimony, if you can, again, start with your name so we know who you are, and then immediately after you're done giving your public testimony, if you could just jot your name down for us on the list so we can have that as part of the public record, would greatly appreciate that.

So, please, Gretchen.

Thank you, and good morning.

I'm Gretchen Taylor.

with the Neighborhood Safety Alliance of Seattle.

And I'm sitting here in the audience.

I really wasn't going to say anything today.

However, I'm listening to all these heartfelt comments.

And it makes me realize, heartfelt versus the statistics that we're getting from the city.

There's a mismatch going on here.

And we've been speaking The Neighborhood Safety Alliance of Seattle has spoken here over four and a half years.

And crime and safety is what we talk about.

And here we are again.

We're still talking about it.

And so police emphasis, all for it.

Actually, the Neighborhood Safety Alliance is in favor of any bold leadership that will put a stop to the crime and give safety, the feelings of safety to the community members all over Seattle.

The impact, that's what I question.

If the statistics are telling us that crime is down 18%, how is it that we're going to get statistics that we can believe from an emphasis?

And my question is, is this lipstick on a pig?

I'm in support of this.

Don't hear me that I'm not.

I am.

But I'm wondering, in emphasis during tourist season, are we trying to make it look good so we look good?

That's what it feels like because we are doing the same thing over and over and over.

We can't trust the statistics, that's just the bottom line.

The community, all communities of Seattle need relief.

We need to know that somebody is taking a leadership role and they've got our back, because I don't know that I feel that way, the alliance members don't feel that way, my own community doesn't feel that way.

So do we support this?

Yes, we do.

But what we're looking for is that word transparency.

We want statistics that are actually showing us the impact of what an emphasis would do.

And if in fact there's an impact, let's do it again and again and keep it going.

Thank you.

Thank you, Gretchen.

Okay, next person, please join us.

Start with your name.

My name is Kurt Sorensen.

I live in the University District, and I believe that the statistics for crime have increased, but I do not, I believe it's far beyond what is reported.

In my neighborhood, the crime is so rampant that people stopped reporting it.

People stop making reports on it.

It is a feeling that it is our own fault if we leave our bicycle unchecked for five minutes or drop our backpack for a minute and turn around and it's gone.

The children actually feel like it's their own fault that they lost their backpack.

It is heroin is the problem.

Heroin, we allow heroin addicts to live on our streets without intervention.

A heroin addict is sort of like saying to an eight-year-old, do you need a babysitter?

An eight-year-old will tell you they do not need a babysitter, but they cannot sustain themselves.

A heroin addict cannot sustain himself.

He needs intervention and help.

The crime will stop when the heroin goes away.

And we have allowed the decriminalization of heroin dealing in our streets.

And this is a crime in itself.

Thank you.

Thank you, Kurt.

Next up.

And Kurt, don't forget to sign that sheet.

Don't forget to sign that sheet.

Hi, my name is Mark Gerhart.

I work for a real estate developer called Ryan Companies.

We acquired a property in Soto January 8th to take advantage of the Opportunity Zone investment opportunities in Soto.

And since we've acquired the building, It's been eye-opening to see what's happening down there.

We've had multiple break-ins.

A person cut a live service feed from the City of Seattle's power grid and steal copper out of the building.

Significant public safety things occurring in the building.

The reason I came here this morning is we have a several other properties under contract in the city.

And what I can tell you is folks who will help Soto stay industrial, redevelop those buildings so that industrial businesses can stay in South Seattle, the investors who will come to do that for the city, which should happen and can't happen right now, specifically based on what's going on with Opportunity Zone, it will not happen unless the perception is it's safe.

And I can tell you for a fact, I drive around with those folks all the time.

The perception is it's not safe.

This is not a good place to go place our capital, which is really unfortunate for the city because there's a very unique opportunity right now for investors to change the functionally obsolete real estate in Soto into something that would be another generation-long investment and keep the businesses that have been in Soto in Soto.

So I would encourage you, while this is a great first step, the BIA funds the bulk of what really makes a difference there.

The city should be in the front of the line trying to make a difference permanently.

So I appreciate your time and thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you, Mark, for being with us.

Next up, come on up.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Juergen Oswald.

I'm the general manager at the Hilton here in Seattle.

And I know I'm not a popular guy because I represent business to a certain degree, but I'm also just a person who lives here.

But the story is really about one of my employees.

My name is Sandra, and I just happened to talk to her on Monday during lunch.

And she's one of those vocal interest groups that you on the council are typically very drawn to, and rightfully so.

So she's in her 60s, you know, she's of Chinese background, she's a member of the local hospitality union.

And so she lives in Beacon Hill and she used to take the light rail to work and she no longer does that because she doesn't feel safe taking the light rail in the light rail itself and then the three blocks to the hotel from the light rail station either.

So then she started taking the bus, it was a direct bus, it only took her about half an hour, but it was also three blocks away, so she didn't feel safe to do that either.

So then she took a different bus that took her two hours to come to work, and that was only a block from the hotel, but she stopped taking that bus.

too, because she doesn't feel safe.

So now she comes by car, which costs her more money, and parks in the garage that's attached to the hotel, because she feels safer in a parking garage that's on the street.

What's scarier than a parking garage?

Everybody hates parking garages, yeah?

But she feels safer in our parking garage than on the streets.

And just one block from the hotel, it's too much for her.

So that's kind of a story that, you know, our employees have to deal with.

It's not about, you know, business is focusing on putting more police on the streets.

You know, I'm not a police guy myself, you know, but if it's necessary to secure public safety a little bit more, then it needs to be done.

It may need to be done permanently.

The other day I walked by the hotel and there was a gentleman, he was urinating against the building.

So I did this.

I didn't say anything, and I may have looked displeased.

So he charges me.

Fortunately, there was another pedestrian that kind of got in the middle of it, so he didn't punch me.

But I wouldn't have been happy if he had punched me.

And it would have been nice if there was somebody around of authority that could have assisted in a case like that.

And we are not a dangerous neighborhood, but it certainly feels that way.

So these things that we're doing, it may be necessary to do them permanently and to increase our public safety.

It's not fun, nobody wants to do it, but I think we're at that stage.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Oswald.

Appreciate it.

Okay, we have another person who's in the queue.

And then Mr. Oswald, please remember to sign the sheet.

Please remember to sign the sheet.

That's all right.

Hi, good morning.

Hi, good morning.

My name is Julia Beabout.

I live in the Fisher Studio building, and I'm a downtown business owner as well.

I'm usually reluctant to kind of share anecdotal stories, but I think this one is really illustrative of a lot of what's been said here this morning.

So, you know, we, as residents on the 3rd Avenue between Pike and Pine, we're unfortunately very, used to the drug traffic and crime that's occurring and are very cognizant of that and needing to deal with that on a regular basis.

However, this has started to come into our building in a new and different way.

Recently, we've had things stolen out of our building as high as the 6th and 7th floor.

Our residents have now started finding drug-addicted people in our stairwells shooting up inside the building.

We are now having to train our facilities person in hazardous waste disposal because of the needles we're finding in our stairwells.

We're also having to upgrade our security system.

So we're going to a video system, having to install security cameras.

This is already expenses on top of having to care for a landmark building and the lid tax.

So again, this is just kind of escalating.

Our protection is being put more and more on us as opposed to the financial burden is being put more and more on us as opposed to the police force and prosecution system as it should be, so.

Thank you, Julia.

Okay.

Oh, and thanks for remembering to sign that sheet.

Appreciate it.

Is there anyone else who wanted to offer us public testimony before I go ahead and close out the public testimony period?

Okay, I am seeing no one so we will go ahead and close out the period for public comment and before I have Roxanna read the first agenda item into the record.

I just wanted to give a few remarks about the item that folks spoke to the most this morning.

And really just also express my thanks and gratitude to each of you for being here.

I know that there's a lot more folks in the audience who are here listening with interest but didn't offer us public testimony.

And I just really want to thank you all for your interest in attending committee today and being with us and in just generally continuing to be engaged and wanting to be involved in helping the city council identify solutions and helping the entire city find solutions to addressing those livability and public safety concerns that are reasonable and legitimate within various neighborhoods across the city.

I know today I've been taking notes of everybody's public comment and we have a strong contingent from downtown residents and business owners.

We have some representatives from the Soto neighborhood, and we had a few folks from Georgetown also joining us, and Pioneer Square as well, as well as some neighborhoods that are outside of the seven neighborhoods that have been designated for additional law enforcement resources in this pre-summer emphasis that will occur over a period of 30 days.

I just wanted to acknowledge that the common themes that I have heard are an overwhelming number of people who are in the audience support the I want to acknowledge that we are in the middle of a deployment of law enforcement services as described by the mayor's office and chief best last week.

I also want to acknowledge that what I have heard from folks is that even though this might be a good certainly perceived as a first step and there is strong interest in identifying long-term sustainable ways to address the livability and safety concerns that I know I receive in my inbox and hear from community members as I move about the city.

And so I just want to acknowledge that we hear those concerns and those comments, not just in chambers today, but I think as we move around the city as council members.

And we want to, I think, work collaboratively, not just with the executive branch, but also with community members as your representatives to ensure that we can identify some solutions that will actually be, again, long-term solutions, effective, show measurable success, not just in the crime statistics, but in the feeling of being safe as you move around the city and as the chair of the Public Safety Committee, it's certainly my commitment to have those tough conversations and to really allow us a safe and respectable environment and venue and opportunity to be able to struggle together as a community with some of the concerns that we heard today in public testimony, which certainly are reflective of some of the comments that I think a lot of us have been hearing over the last several years.

So I really want to, again, thank you all for joining us and for your interest.

And I hope that you will see the letter that I sent and the opportunity to have a briefing here today.

as sort of a welcoming to the conversation in the city council to have an opportunity for us to figure out what that collaboration looks like so that we can address many of the concerns that were expressed during public testimony this morning.

And then before we go ahead and read the first item into the record, just wanted to see if my colleagues who sat through public testimony wanted to make any initial comments or reflections as to some of the testimony that we heard from folks in the audience.

I know that folks might need to leave and can't sit through the entire briefing, so I wanted to provide council members an opportunity to react to public testimony.

No pressure, but if you wish, you may.

Council Member Bagshaw.

And I really want to recognize so many of you that came today, and also acknowledge the fact that many are from downtown, from Pioneer Square, from Belltown.

This is my district, and I'm proud that most of you I have contacted and had conversations with.

But what I really want to reflect on is something I heard a number of you say, and that is, it's time for action.

These conversations have been going on not just recently, but for all the 10 years that I've been sitting at this council table.

And I want to appreciate the community work, Ali, that you have done.

Greg, the work that you have done here downtown.

I mean, we can just go row by row in what DSA has done for us.

I also want to recognize what we are all seeing is that intersection of the need to invest more for mental health and behavioral health.

Of course, we continue to strive to expand our shelters to 24-7 and more housing, housing, housing.

We know that we need to do this.

I talked with Chief Scoggins this morning about some other options that we know to get people inside.

and get the behavioral health services that they need.

But I also want to say that I completely concur and appreciate what the mayor is doing with having police action to arrest people who are damaging, breaking in, causing trouble for the community, that that is something, when laws are broken, we need to act.

And I think for too long that we have decided that there's some, There's not a lot to be done if somebody goes to jail and then is released back on the street without a plan to actually help that person get better.

That's a problem that we all recognize, but at the same time, we can't shrug our shoulders and say, oh, it's too bad because people are just breaking in.

and we don't have a solution to that problem.

The person-centered approach to get somebody inside, to get them the support, and to say it is not okay to be breaking into cars, to be breaking into businesses, to leave human feces on the business's doorstep and residents in the morning, that has got to stop.

I really appreciate and support where the mayor is going, want to say thank you.

that this committee has been opened up today, and we were able to hear from you.

So please know that, at least for the last seven months, that I'm going to be the District 7 representative.

I'm happy to work with you.

And as one of you had acknowledged, saying you want to be part of the solution, I appreciate that very much, and we'll be very much available and in your community to talk about what that looks like.

Thank you, Council Member Bagshaw.

And I do think that that raises a couple of other thoughts in my head.

One is that, you know, there was some public testimony and I've received some correspondence about this in my email about sort of this belief that as council members, we don't move around the city and that we don't, that we might not see some of the issues that people are concerned about.

And I really wanna, reiterate that as a council member who uses public transit and walking around the downtown core, I see many of the things that people are talking about in public testimony here today.

I catch a bus over on 3rd Avenue between Pike and Pine in front of the Walgreens, I walk across the bridge on Marion after I get off the water taxi.

I spend a lot of time in Pioneer Square.

I've done walking tours in Soto with the BIA.

I've done a walking tour in Ballard with the Ballard Alliance folks.

And I spend a lot of time in the U District as well.

So I can appreciate the perspective of individuals who see the condition of neighborhoods deteriorating And I can understand the frustration of not seeing fast and expedient action to address those deteriorating circumstances.

I myself live in a condo in the junction.

I have woken up to piles of syringes in and near the dumpster right in the alley next to my condo.

So I am not immune from these situations just because I'm a council member.

And it's part and parcel of the reason why I felt it was important to send the letter because I want to make sure that whatever it is we're doing is sustainable long-term action and that we are actually going to see a measurable positive impact as a result of limited police resources that we have in this area of public safety and increasing livability for neighborhoods.

So that is my motivation for wanting to queue up this conversation and looking forward to leading us not just in conversation, but hopefully in action.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you so much.

I just want to first say that I'm a strong supporter of using law enforcement visibility tactics to deter crime and do proactive policing.

I've been working to try to get more police resources for my neighborhood, the neighborhood in my district most in need, South Park, from 2006 working to get bike patrols, to a mobile police precinct down in South Park, to working with Council Member Gonzalez on a public safety plan with the community, and then funding and implementing it over the last several years.

I think really doing some game-changing work for that community.

But again, visibility as it relates to our officers being seen is a really welcome addition.

I also want to make note that I have been working with the BIA directors who have commissioned the systems failure report to bring them in.

to these council chambers together with some of my colleagues on the council who have, I think, agreed to participate and hear from them a presentation on that report.

And I'm going to be really eager to see how the efforts of the executive will align with the Problems that were identified in that report just some high-level points from the report over a year's time the hundred offenders in the report were charged with a total of 3,500 criminal offenses, 1,600 misdemeanor cases, and they were responsible for 636 total bookings into King County Jail.

So that's evidence that law enforcement is taking action as it relates to this population.

It's a lot of the issue that we have to deal with is what happens after.

I learned yesterday that since that report was issued in February, nearly 80% of the population has been arrested again.

So I think that's really important for us to consider as we figure out how to respond to these issues because, again, as it relates to this particular population of people, the problem isn't simply that law enforcement isn't taking action.

100% of that population was homeless, and 40% of them have severe mental health conditions.

And 41% of the bookings were for noncompliance, not for a new crime, meaning they didn't show up to court.

Just overall, this particular population aside, 45% of total annual bookings, according to a 2017 King County Jail Health Services Report, are people that are homeless.

So this is a really multifaceted issue that we really, I think it's important to have all the stakeholders at the table.

I'm really excited to look at what the other jurisdiction, King County, is doing as it relates to their Familiar Faces program and seeing what sort of things that we can replicate there.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Are there any other council members who'd like to give some reactionary or reflective, not reactionary, reflective, gosh, English is sometimes extraordinarily hard for me, some reflective comments about public testimony before we dig into the items of business.

Yeah, Council President Harrell.

First, I want to thank all of you for coming out.

I know you're busy folks.

I think I heard from a few of my colleagues They're shared, I don't say disgust, but they're shared concern for the same issues that you're having to deal with.

I almost take personal offense to the fact that people don't assume we feel the same way as having a wife and a daughter and grandchildren that play in parks and sing syringes.

my approach has been, and I think some of my colleagues share it, is to, first of all, figure out what best strategy you're working in this country.

I gotta tell you, this is not unique to Seattle, and I don't know if anyone realizes that, because I don't hear that part of the conversation, that there is, I think, a created new subclass of poverty, and people that are slipping into the cracks of both crime and poverty.

And so there was one book I read called When Brute Force Fails, written by a professor, a Harvard-trained professor, Mark Kleiman.

And what he talked about are some of the best strategies in this country that works.

And in the last several years, we've been trying to do that.

Now, I'm not going to get up here and tell you all of the great things we're doing because it will not change many of your perceptions.

But I will say that we have some pretty committed council members and executives that have really dug deep on this issue.

It is a huge issue.

And while we are a large target because we are the policy leaders of the Seattle, I did not hear one of you advance a new strategy or a new policy or a new law change.

What I'm hearing you saying is enforce the laws.

Quite candidly, that's on the other side of the house.

That's on the executive side.

And so this proposal, and I don't think I think I heard one person testify that we are trying to get in the way of the proposal.

Councilmember Gonzalez, as Chair of Public Safety, asked some very intelligent questions.

The simplest question is, will this work?

Will this change anything?

How are we to measure its success?

I'm very pleased at the conversation.

I'm glad to see such an engagement and to hear from all of you.

I went to a SOTO meeting, I think it was a few months ago, and I think that was a meeting where we were just supposed to prove to many of you that are living with this problem every single day and explain to you all the great work we're doing.

I didn't say a lot because I'm not going to do that.

I will say that, again, this is one of many conversations, and you have to have these conversations.

And so we begin here, we haven't, we didn't just, well I shouldn't say we begin, we've been having this conversation and we will continue to have these conversations.

But the problem is very huge and I have to tell folks, I travel, I talk to other council members, I talk to other mayors across the city grappling with these same issues.

We are in this together.

I look forward to this discussion under my colleagues, under Council Member Gonzalez's leadership and my colleagues' cooperation and with the executive.

And last, I want to say that I would defend both our chiefs of public safety, both our fire chief and our police chief.

They are some of the best in the country.

And the men and women that served in those groups are some of the best in the country.

And so as we move forward, this denigration of city employees on looking at this approach, I don't think there's a lot of room for that.

Can we do better?

Of course.

Can we be more effective?

Of course.

But that's why we have these kinds of conversations, this baseless denigration.

I don't think that moves us along.

We sign up for it, by the way, so I don't take any of that stuff personally.

It's part of the job we sign up for.

But again, we are looking at best practices, best strategies, what works in other cities in the context of many cities are dealing with the same issue.

So thank you for being here, and I look forward to this discussion.

Thank you, Council President.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

You know, what I heard was a theme of public health.

There's a public health crisis in our community, and I want to first start with the fact that it's a public health crisis to the individuals who are sleeping outside.

It is both traumatic and bad for the health of individuals to be sleeping outside, just as much as it is a public health crisis for those of us who are living and seeing the consequences of people unsheltered in our communities.

When people are sleeping in our streets, in our parks, when they're having to use the bathroom outside, that is a public health crisis in its definition.

The Public Health Board brought up conversations around treating homelessness and the lack of affordable housing as a public health crisis.

And it's a public health crisis to the health and the psyche of this community when we see every day on our commute, either walking with our kids to school or coming in on the bus to work or going to the senior center, when we see people who are outside, living unsheltered.

It is a crisis of consciousness and a crisis to our health of our community.

But I think the solution is to look at data-driven solutions.

I want to reinforce something that Carmen Best, our Chief Best, has said to us time and time again.

It is not a crime to be homeless.

And many of the individuals that are experiencing crises in our street and are creating additional health crises for the broader community are out there because we have not offered the health services that we need.

I know that our firefighter friends are in the audience, and much of their time is taken up with having to respond to much of these health crises.

Part of the solution is what we'll talk about later today in your committee, the mobile medical unit, or Medic One, which is patrolling around.

When I went on that tour with the firefighters, the only five calls we got were responding to people who were dealing with the crisis of being homeless, consequences of being homeless, and lack of access to healthcare.

This is a health issue, and I think it deserves a health-related response.

Absolutely, there should be additional support.

Absolutely, we should be making sure that there is additional patrols for those who need additional medical assistance to make sure that crimes are not actually being committed, but it is not a crime to be unsheltered.

In fact, we need to make sure that we are not having policy solutions that are driven by perception.

We absolutely, just like in the public health field where I came from, we have to look at the public health, we have to look at the data and create public policies that are based in sound data that drives what we should do, not on the perception that crime is increasing in certain areas.

I really appreciate the questions that you submitted in response to this announcement because we have to make sure that the data bears out the policy solutions.

We cannot just have a call for action and just rush to put more people on the streets and act as if this is a criminal issue when it is truly an issue that requires, as Councilmember Bagshaw said, additional medical support, mental health counseling, as one individual mentioned, access to opioid treatments, but also recognizing that many individuals are out there because they do not have a place to live and they do not have a place to take a shower and do not have a place to go to the bathroom.

We are creating additional crises that many in the community have commented on.

What we need to do is be responsible.

And I think much of what we are talking about doing today, what I've talked about last year with the large tents that would have partitions between beds that would allow for more people to come in quickly to be stood up, those are good for folks who don't have a car to sleep in or don't have an enhanced shelter to be in.

who are quite literally sleeping in our streets.

When I talked about creating the stand-up tiny casitas, the little houses that could be stood up in 20 minutes with heat and electricity that have a door and a window and two beds and a desk, this is a responsible way to respond to get more people inside.

But we have to act responsibly as we are being responsive.

We cannot just jump to the quickest solution, which is to give the perception that we're further criminalizing homelessness.

I think it's really important to make sure that people understand the reason that we continue to see more people sleeping outside is because we do not have the shelters and we do not have the housing to exit people from the shelters.

Our shelters are at capacity.

In November we heard that there were three enhanced shelter beds open per night.

Three enhanced shelter beds open on average per night in this city in November.

Last month, we heard that there was four enhanced shelter beds open per night on average in the city.

The United Nations says that for every 20 people, we should have a toilet like they do in much of Europe, a public toilet so that people can use.

Guess how many we have here in the city of Seattle?

We have six public toilets.

Only two of them are in good condition.

Four of them are not functioning well, and not all of them have a sharps container.

In order for our city to truly be responsive to the actual public health needs for there to be public facilities, we should have 224 toilets in the city, not to mention the type of enhanced shelter beds so that individuals can sleep inside and not sleep on the streets, not sleep in their cars.

Yes, there is a crisis.

There's a crisis of consciousness that we're not acting quick enough.

There are some things that I've been very interested in advancing with this council, one of which is the mobile medical unit, which we'll talk about a little bit later, which I was very proud to co-sponsor last year.

And yes, we need to act quickly to get folks inside.

The solution to homelessness is additional homes and shelters.

The solution to people defecating outside is additional toilets.

The ability to make sure that people can keep their job, which our surveys say 20 to 40% have some form of employment, legal employment that is.

The solution to have them keep their jobs is an access to an actual shower.

We need to make sure that we're actually creating the evidence-based solutions to treat this public health crisis as the true crisis that it really is.

And that requires data-driven solutions.

I do hope we get a chance.

in further conversations, to have a conversation about the medical needs, the mental health needs, the shelter needs, and the housing needs, and not just this perception that crime is, and a solution to the crime is the only thing.

Yes, we have to respond to those criminal issues, but we also have to make sure that we're getting at the root of the problem, and that is that people are living in crisis and in poverty.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Vizquez.

Council Member Pacheco.

Just a friendly amendment to your remarks Councilmember Gonzalez, I also heard that you district someone speak from the district and I've also received outreach about the new district as well Want to acknowledge this the public health crisis that councilmember Mosqueda has spoken about but also what I heard from the from members of the audience just the desire, and I think from the collective body, which is the desire for safe communities for families and individuals to thrive.

But I also want to caution not to applaud when remarks are made by individuals.

regarding issues of making racist remarks.

In these conversations, as we have these conversations, not to demonize or to fall to, I think, what are some of our worst instincts.

Thank you.

Because those remarks hurt.

I know we all sign up for this job with regards to the difficulties and the remarks that we have to take, but also understand that that's not appealing to the best of any one of us.

So, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Pacheco.

So I want to thank all of my colleagues for indulging my request to share reflections with the audience immediately after public testimony.

That's not something that we ordinarily do and just want to recognize that I appreciate your all's willingness to listen in the audience and to my colleagues for your willingness to share your initial reflections.

I do think it's important for members of the viewing audience, both who are here in person who might be watching from home or who might watch this video later, for them to hear at the top of the agenda a reaction or sort of initial thoughts that we have about this overall issue.

And I just want to acknowledge as well that I agree with many of the remarks made by my colleagues at the table here today.

I think it's pretty clear from both the public testimony and from the remarks made by colleagues at the table that when we are addressing public safety and public health issues, it is incredibly complex and multifaceted and there is no a silver bullet or one singular answer to addressing livability and safety concerns that might be reasonable.

Yes, we have an obligation as the City of Seattle to deliver effective constitutional law enforcement policing services to our neighborhoods.

That is a core function of what we do as a city.

And the City Council has taken many steps to actually support that, including passing many budget actions to increase the amount of dollars available to the police department so that they can hire and retain officers.

Just recently, we all collectively passed a bonus, hiring bonus, not just for laterals as proposed by the mayor, but I passed an amendment to also allow new hires to be allowed to be provided a bonus.

And in fact, that's where we're seeing a lot of the a success in the hiring now is around that new recruitment of police officers who are brand new to the department.

We've also passed the new collective bargaining agreement with our Seattle Police Officers Guild and our Seattle Police Management Association, not without controversy, but it was, if I recall correctly, an eight to one vote by the city council to support that as another gesture of our support for those public employees that provide law enforcement services to our neighborhoods.

And I think we are going to continue to see more.

And, in fact, the first agenda item on today's agenda is an item that was primarily sponsored by Councilmember Bagshaw that, again, is a piece of the overall multifaceted set of solutions that this city needs to be promoting in order to address those individuals who may be experiencing crisis on our streets as described by Councilmember Mosqueda, but that doesn't excuse our duty and obligation to also address some of the legitimate crime and disorder issues that we hear from community members both in chambers and and as we move around our neighborhood.

So without further ado, we heard public testimony for almost an hour and we've had an opportunity to have reflections for about 20 minutes.

So we are gonna go ahead and move into our first agenda item, which is related to one of the strategies related to addressing people in crisis on the street, which many of the public testifiers describe seen in their day-to-day movements around the city.

So, Roxanna, if you can read the first agenda item into the record, that'd be great.

Agenda item one, Council Bill 119509, an ordinance relating to a mobile integrated health pilot for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Thank you.

Okay, we will go ahead and do a round of introductions.

So just tell us your name and who you're with, and then we will go ahead and begin the presentation.

Craig Doss, Council Central Staff.

Harold Scoggins, Fire Chief.

John Ironfeld, Seattle Fire Low Acuity Program.

Leslie Brinson, Mayor's Office.

Jeff Sakuma, Human Services Department.

Thank you all so much for being with us this morning.

I think the executive is going to lead us through their presentation.

Council Member Bagshaw, did you want to give any introductory remarks to queue us up before we get started?

Thank you.

Briefly, I want to acknowledge and thank Chief Scoggins.

Also, I think Lieutenant Kenny Stewart is back there, head of our Firefighters Union.

And also, to the Mayor's Office, Leslie, I am so thankful for this report.

And John Ehrenfeld, you have been so helpful to us and identifying what the problem is we're trying to solve and to get that clearly identified.

And the goal here is to be able to have a unit that is comprised with our first responders, maybe behavioral health, possibly in the future a nurse, but somebody who is a group that is out there.

For those with low acuity problems and that generally reflects with people with addictions or problems that they're having Behaviorally or mentally rather than having our firefighters who are trained for high acuity responses out on the street every day So I know you'll bring us some statistics, but I do want to acknowledge how hard you've all worked It's been something that I have put a lot of pressure on I know there's smiles, but thank you for that.

And also just to once again acknowledge our first responders and our firefighters who are helping us every day.

Great.

And then Leslie, are you going to kick us off?

I will kick us off, but actually it would be helpful to know how much time we have based on sort of And we can scale appropriately based on.

30 minutes.

30 minutes.

Got it.

Great.

I want to echo Council Member Bagshaw's comments about working with the fire department on this.

It has been an amazing opportunity.

I think I will talk a little bit in a moment about how we brought together several departments to work on this, which for the first time in my five years here was really a great conversation about not only sort of the medical response, but how we integrate that into our response to homelessness.

So it's been really great.

John, I'm going to let you kick it off, and then we'll move into the IDT.

Thank you, and I'm actually going to defer to Chief Scoggins.

Just down the line.

We'll just pass it off.

How about this?

We're going to have John get through the presentation because there's a lot of great information in there, but I do want to make some closing comments.

Great.

Thank you, Chief.

John.

Okay.

Thank you all.

Allow me to open just with a few brief remarks of thanks.

I'd like to thank Chief Scoggins, of course, for his support and advocacy of this program and this initiative.

I want to say a special thank you to the fire department.

We really appreciate it.

To our partners on the interdepartmental team, Leslie, Jeff, and everyone else who joined us, and to IFF local 27 and President Stewart for their support.

So thank you all.

And then as well, of course, to our operations members for helping us.

We at the fire department are You know, historically, fire has been a little bit more of a reactive branch than our partners with the police, who are more proactive, typically.

Usually, you know, we have waited for calls to come in.

We go out, we respond, and we mitigate the emergency.

And I think in the big picture, that picture is starting to slowly but surely change.

And we want to align our fire department.

with some of these national trends.

We need to start getting out ahead a little bit of some of the public health issues and crises that the council members brought up and figure out how we as the fire department break out of some of our silos.

and really integrate ourselves more thoroughly into the public health infrastructure of our city and our communities.

And so our proposal looks at one particular facet of that, which is calls for service that don't provide a life-threatening emergency to life, health, or property.

We have defined those as lower acuity responses where the patient does not need immediate hospitalization.

And so I want to talk a little bit about the presentation about R.

our proposal for this issue, which is our mobile integrated health response unit.

And I'm going to come back to the slide in just a moment, but really what we're looking at here is several significant inefficiencies within the fire service that we think we are very well addressed, well positioned to address.

So essentially what we are seeing is that a certain subset of our calls for service within the medical realm are medium or high acuity calls, and we are very well positioned to take care of those right now.

Where we want to improve and where we want to move the ball forward is in the lower acuity end of that spectrum.

And so, as part of the interdepartmental team, we looked at where are we responding frequently for these lower acuity alarms throughout the city of Seattle.

And what we see is that the preponderance of these locations are very highly correlated with provision of public health or homelessness services.

And they particularly cluster in the downtown core of the city.

So what we see is homelessness services, shelters, and permanent supportive housing.

We see public locations.

We see law enforcement and corrections.

And then the other places that we go to frequently for these are long-term care facilities, which is a little bit of a separate conversation.

And what we found as well working with our partners at SPD is that there's a fair amount of overlap in these.

You know, these locations that we're responding to frequently for these alarms are also frequented by SPD.

So the green sheet really gave us an opportunity to bring together not only sort of looking at this through the lens of the fire department, but also through the lens of the human services department, both their homeless strategy staff and their aging and disability staff, as well as a very intentional partnership with public health and the police department.

So these conversations were really about not only how might SFD respond better to low acuity calls and more appropriately, and how might we better serve folks, but how might we reduce those calls on the front end?

How might we work with our relationships with both homeless service providers and providers of housing to better support them as we move forward?

And so in doing that, we had a lot of very intentional conversations with permanent supportive housing providers, emergency shelter providers, and the Healthcare for the Homeless Network.

And this shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us as we've been having this conversation, but I think that first and foremost, highlighting the fact that our adult homeless population is aging, as is our residents who are housed in permanent supportive housing.

And because of that increasing age and increasing acuity and medical issues, we are seeing the results of that, or the fire department is seeing the results of that.

Another piece that has happened here is that over the last several years, permanent coordinated entry has been implemented, and that is a very positive and important policy.

As such, we are prioritizing people who are the most vulnerable getting access to permanent supportive housing.

That is amazing, and we need to do that, but we haven't necessarily changed the staffing model or the staffing support for permanent supportive housing as we have done that.

So we are seeing increasing concentration of highly vulnerable folks in our housing, in our permanent supportive housing.

We also are dealing with the fact that we have a number of staffing challenges with both staffing and keeping staff retention and turnover with regards to the lower wages that folks are making.

So together that's creating this compounding issue of our permanent supportive housing providers and our homeless service providers of emergency shelter not having staff on site who can address the needs of their residents or clients.

And thus calling 911 becomes the default.

We also, in looking at the healthcare system, we're looking and creating an intentional conversation between homeless service providers, our homeless services that we fund, and healthcare is not necessarily how we have thought about it.

We've thought housing, housing, housing, which of course is important.

But figuring out how we build those partnerships to get the health care services into those shelter and housing services is also really important.

So looking at our downtown core, where we see the majority of these calls coming from, and the fact that we don't have a lot of appropriate low barrier walk-in care for folks, we don't have much urgent care downtown at all.

There aren't alternatives for folks who, for service providers to transport people to anywhere but the emergency department.

And then there are sort of bigger systemic gaps around what should permanent supportive housing be the only option for folks who have significant medical needs who are exiting homelessness.

So we looked a little bit.

Yeah.

Leslie, before you move on, on this particular, on slide five, both in the memo that responds to the slide and on this presentation, you identify healthcare system gaps.

What is not identified in the report is who are the owners of those systems.

So, yes.

Seattle, Public Health of Seattle King County owns a portion of this.

They have funding for healthcare for the homeless network.

And I'm not saying that they are the reason for our gap.

I'm just saying that they are actually a filler of that gap in a lot of ways.

They provide funding for onsite medical care in permanent supportive housing and emergency shelters.

The healthcare system as a whole, I mean, Jeff, if you wanna.

Yeah, so the first bullet, for instance, the urgent walk-in piece of it, obviously we know that we have a lot of hospital systems in the core area that have emergency rooms.

Some of them do urgent care as well, but the big growth in urgent care, if you notice, are sort of the these Zoom care, I don't want to point out anyone specifically, but these large entities.

And oftentimes, they only take commercial insurance and don't take Medicaid.

Obviously, there have been a couple that have been opened up to other systems that will take Medicaid.

But what we're finding is, again, a bit of a bifurcation in who can access certain types of services.

And just to make a comment on that, the system gaps aren't all tied to funding.

Some of them are tied to connectivity.

So we have a great system that we built, the 911 system, and when someone needs help, they know the number to call and we show up to help them.

But what we have not connected very well is our first responders on the street to other options.

That's one of the gaps.

In my mind, that's actually the biggest gaps.

Our firefighters do an amazing job each and every day responding to many emergencies around the city.

But we are built on a turnover system.

We need to get there, solve the problem, get them somewhere, and we need to be available to do it again, whether it's a fire or a medical.

And there's very important reasons for that.

If you're having a cardiac event, a stroke, everything is built on time.

If you're having a fire in your home, there's a time temperature curve that our response times are built after.

These calls take more time.

They aren't the critical ALS type calls, but they still need more time to solve the problem.

Otherwise, we are going to get called out and we're going to do it again.

We're going to do it again.

We're going to do it again.

Many times, our resources are called back to Harborview after someone's been released because it's not a true emergency, and they're at the bus stop right outside of Harborview, and we respond back to the bus stop, and they have the same bracelet on.

A part of that is a connectivity issue.

We don't have that resource to get them to where they need to be, which is why this is so exciting.

And when John gets there, you'll see all of the new options that we're going to have.

but it's going to take time to get them there.

But what we see, that's a part of prevention.

If we get them to where they need to be, it's going to save us time, but it's going to get them the help they actually need to have a better life and a better experience.

Thank you, Chief, and I appreciate that perspective, and I think it highlights why I was going down this line of inquiry, is that I don't want the general public to walk away with the impression that we somehow can fix the healthcare system gaps that have been identified in the response to the statement of legislative intent.

The reality is that even though I'm a strong believer in this program in terms of meeting the urgent needs of people who might be in crisis who don't have immediate access to other types of primary medical care, that we are doing so within the context of a broken for-profit healthcare system that is really designed to deliver healthcare services to those who have the privilege of being able to afford it.

And so I just want to really acknowledge that without sort of an overarching systemic transformation of how we deliver health care to our most vulnerable, we will continue to be put in a position as a city and as a partner in our public health system, our county public health system, we'll continue to be put in the position of having to sort of bite around the edges, again, in an important way, but it is still biting around the edges of addressing the fundamental healthcare needs of the most vulnerable people in our population, which are not just people experiencing homelessness.

It also includes elderly and aging and isolated people living in homes and in multifamily housing.

So I just wanted to lift up the fact that you all did I think an outstanding job of identifying what the overall healthcare system gaps are with the acknowledgement and I suppose the footnote that we're left unsatisfied because we have very little mechanisms by which we can fundamentally transform the gaps that you've identified in the healthcare system.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you so much.

As it relates to those gaps and specifically to the bullet related to the lack of respite beds, specifically their lack of respite beds for, again, an aging population, and specifically in the instance that I would like to share, an aging population that is is homeless and I recently received correspondence from staff at St. Martin to pour and Lazarus Center and They exerted for me one one day's worth of their daily log and And over the course of just one day, 12 of their homeless residents who sleep on mats in their shelters had to go back and forth from the shelter.

to the hospital because of medical conditions, 12 separate people.

They also recently shared with me an experience that they had with a governmental entity that is part of our response system asking them why it was that they would not accept an elderly man with active fluenza in the hospital.

influenza in their shelter.

Again, this is a shelter with mats on the floor, people sleeping six inches away from one another.

And they were criticized, basically, for not accepting that individual into the shelter.

So just want to share that as an illustrative example of how the lack of respite beds affects not just the system, but people and organizations that are trying to help folks.

Thank you.

Appreciating both of those points.

I think Council Member Gonzalez, you sort of, as I move to the next slide, these are not solutions to those gaps that I've just identified.

These are really things that I want to let the fire department focus on the things we're actually doing because there was budget allocated to it.

The things that are on this list are not necessarily things with budget.

So we are thinking about different ways that we might support moving forward.

But sort of the Medicaid transformation is an important piece of this.

Sort of accessing additional resources for folks who are not part of our, you know, who might not have the kind of insurance that many places will accept.

Thinking about how we better help our service providers and housing providers to address these needs from a staffing perspective.

Making intentional connections between The Office of Housing, as they fund a permanent supportive housing project, and the fire department.

So the fire department knows when housing projects are coming online.

Making intentional connections between the public health department, who has funding for on-site medical care, and the fire department sort of data to make sure that we're locating those services in places that are having impacts on our systems.

Those are the kind of connectivity pieces we can do without additional funding.

And then I think, you know, we will look to figure out pieces of this over time.

I'm going to let John take it away because it's the most exciting part of this.

You go back to that last slide.

On the last bullet point, Medicaid transformation efforts.

That's actually happening right now at CMS, and that's very important that that's taking place.

So they just made some changes in what they're calling ET3, Emergency Triage Transport and Treatment.

And this is a big deal, because what they're going to start doing is allowing payments for other than an emergency room if a patient is transported to an urgent care, to a crisis center, or even left in place.

In June, what's gonna happen is they're gonna start accepting applications nationally, and they're gonna award 40 pilots around the country to study this.

So they are paying attention to this.

The Fire Service nationally has been very active in moving this forward, and this is one of the changes that's actually gonna be moving forward.

So that's important.

There's no guarantee that we're going to get that city of Seattle, but it's a grant for which you're applying.

Right.

Yeah, there's no guarantee that we're going to get that, but we're advocating that a city in Washington, if not Seattle, gets that so we can be a part of the pilot.

So in terms of our status quo system right now, essentially what we've done is identified a number of inefficiencies.

So very briefly, the way that 911 works in Seattle is the call goes to the police first.

If it is an obvious police issue or an obvious psychiatric issue, they send police only.

If it is anything else than that, they send it to our 911 center.

For immediately identified extremely low acuity complaints, say toe pain, we will refer it directly to AMR for ED transport only.

Sometimes for a person down on the street or subsequently identified psychiatric calls, we send it back to police.

But everything else we dispatch on.

And so that is approximately 77,000 medical responses per year.

And the way that breaks down is about half of them, give or take, are ultimately a medium to high acuity patient, someone who really needs to be in an emergency department.

And again, our system is very well configured to provide the best possible treatment for those.

Where the inefficiencies come in, however, is the remainder of the patients, where typically they're going to receive one of two dispositions.

One is transport to the emergency department.

So these are identified low acuity conditions for which we have no other recourse but to send them to Harborview or another hospital.

And then the others are the folks who we do not remove, who we leave on the scene.

And really essentially what we're doing there is ruling out major medical illnesses, providing some reassurance, but really no other treatment or connections at that moment.

And then, you know, at the bottom you have our alternative transport and referrals.

And this is, I think, this is the growth area.

This is where we really want to improve going forward.

So in terms of the patient dispositions, just to kind of put some numbers on it, right now every year we send about 9,000 patients to a hospital emergency department who we have already identified as having a lower acuity complaint.

So that's more than once an hour every year we are sending to the ED someone who really could be better served somewhere else.

And then, you know, a very staggeringly large number of patients where, again, we're not removing them, we're leaving them at the scene regardless of their complaint if it's not a medical emergency.

But again, really not doing anything subsequent with them.

In terms of the typification of these patients, there are a couple, there's a couple commonalities.

So the most common primary impression that our responders note is no complaints or illness or injury noted.

And that's really a catch-all for, really anything that's non-medical in nature.

It could be a social condition.

Someone is just cold.

Someone is anxious or nervous.

But that is the most common one.

And then you see some clustering as well around substance abuse, of course.

You know, alcohol by far leads the way in terms of the patients we're seeing with more low acuity medical complaints.

And then around behavioral emergencies as well.

And that's your altered mental status, mental disorder, behavioral episode.

And then a lot of these overlap as well.

You know, the patient assist only, that's typically when we're helping people off the floor for non-medical calls.

And I just want to briefly note in our earlier discussion regarding permanent supportive housing, last year our top individual who accessed 911 for EMS in Seattle, There's a woman about 65 years old, resides in a Capitol Hill assisted, excuse me, permanent supportive housing location.

We saw her about 90 times last year.

80 of those times, the only service we provided was checking her for injuries, finding none, returning her to her wheelchair from which she had fallen out.

I think it need not be said that this is not an ideal match of our core services.

And that's Station 25, Engine 25, 825, and Ladder 10. It's one of our busier companies in the city of Seattle.

want to pause there really quickly.

Thank you, John, for sharing that particular example, and I think it's a perfect example of why this program is so critically important, and certainly want to extend my gratitude to that company for the work that they have been doing diligently and faithfully in the absence of a program like this.

So I really want to acknowledge the work that they've been doing in the absence of this, and looking forward to being able to deploy these resources to get them back to doing their core services.

Thank you.

So our proposal around a mobile integrated health vehicle, we really started by doing a lot of research around what are similar models around the region, around the state, and nationally.

We're really trying to build on best practices, not reinvent the wheel, and see what's working well for other providers nationally.

And really what we think is that Mobile integrated health capitalizes on what we as a fire department already do well.

Immediate response we're good at.

We're flexible.

We're adaptable.

We're used to problem solving and working in teams.

And one additional element that I left off this slide is that we enjoy the trust of the community.

When we knock on the door, people tend to open it.

They invite us into their homes.

And I think that that's an opportunity for us.

I just wanted to offer you a reframe on the first comment that you made because yes, I do think that you looked at your local, state, and national partners, but really this is coming straight from the folks in your unit within IAFF 27, within the conversations we've had from you.

This is not something that you started as soon as the statement of legislative intent was passed.

This came directly from your members and your incredible research.

your education of us over the years, because this comes directly from your lived experience of seeing how resources are inadequately or inappropriately used.

You all have done a tremendous job with, I think, a decreasing budget over time.

We should also acknowledge that we still need to increase the overall firefighter budget, and I think you have a lot of champions on council who want to do that.

But I just wanted to note that, you know, this is really thanks to you and your incredible research, the members of the firefighters and leadership for helping to identify the existing models that were out there.

Yes, we put it in the budget last year, but thank you for prompting us to do that, for taking us on the ride-alongs, for your members for showing us what is actually happening on a daily basis, and thank you for exposing that many other cities in our region already have this, and you helped bring it to light, so thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

On that note, some of the work that was piloted several years ago, I remember being so excited to see you, Chief Scoggins, speak at downtown emergency service center breakfast about the initiative you were taking around low acuity calls, again, working and identifying solutions based on what you and firefighters were seeing on the ground.

And that specifically there, what happened as I understand it is that King County EMS and SFD piloted with DESC a nurse triage line.

And it was 24-7, and so rather than 911 handling those calls and them being referred to you, some of them were sent to the DES.

see nurse.

I'm really interested to find out what you learned about that.

I don't see that as part of the response before us today as an element of this new system, I was under the impression it was working really well.

I don't know if it was just funding that resulted in its ending, but if you could just share a little bit about what the lessons learned and why we're not incorporating it now in this response.

So I'll cover a few different things that we've done over the last few years because we have made some very intentional steps.

And I think they have shown some very positive outcomes.

So since John's come on board, we've done a few things.

We brought on a social worker.

And John can talk briefly about the work that Ashley does, and well, I guess I can.

I know a little bit about it.

So what she does is she goes through all our ESO reports, which are our electronic medical reports, and what she does is identify our high utilizers.

And she circles back around with our high utilizers and touches base with them to find out what they need.

And then when she finds out what they need, she connects them up with services.

What we have found is that starts to decrease that population of calls, but we only have one.

And she does an amazing job.

So that's one thing that we did.

We did partner with King County EMS, and they gave us some funding.

for a nurse line.

And what John did, and he did the heavy lift on this, he designed a training program.

He went around to all of the DESC facilities, and not just DESC, other facilities, trained them up on how to use that 9-1-1, that nurse line.

So before they called 9-1-1 for certain protocols, they would actually call the nurse line.

And that was very important, and we have the information, and we showed that that was effective.

And when they actually called that nurse line, it decreased our responses for those types of calls by, what, 80% or so?

Yeah, it was a little over 80%.

So that was a big deal.

And that showed positive outcomes.

Another thing that we piloted over the last couple of years was taxi voucher programs.

We get on scene.

We did this at several stations.

And if a person did not need an ambulance ride to the hospital but still needed to go, We had a taxi voucher program, and John built a relationship with 31s and Meridian in trying to work through that, and we had some turbulence along the way.

So all of those things have happened.

The nurse piece, in particular, it was on one of the bullets of potential things that we can do in the future.

it became a funding issue.

King County EMS only had so much funding each call.

There was a dollar value to that.

What we did out of our budget is we funded it for a while longer, and as things got tighter, we had to end it.

But what we saw was positive outcomes.

But we can actually do more than that, because what you saw on the slide was a nurse in our dispatch center.

That becomes the interception point.

Not going to a nurse line, not having to retrain, staff to use this nurse line.

But if we had a nurse in our dispatch center, we can do an interception, sports analogy there, right at the dispatch center.

Our dispatchers are amazing.

They do a great job fielding so many calls.

They would go through the protocols.

And if this just did not seem like that 911 response, we give it to the nurse.

The nurse now goes through their checks and balances.

If they need an urgent care, if they need a caseworker, if they need all of those things, or if they need to call HealthONE, that now becomes a better resource.

So that's one of the future opportunities for us.

We see that as it could be effective in the future.

Did that answer your question?

It did, absolutely.

Just to follow up, though, are you saying that the function of having the nurse on staff at dispatch is serving the exact same function as the nurse triage line did

It would be a greater impact because it would be for all the 911 calls.

The nurse line was very specific for DESC.

We trained their staff, we gave them the number, and it was very intentional.

Now, that's a population that needs a lot of services, so it made a lot of sense.

But if we wanted to have a greater impact, you want to put that resource in the place where the call actually comes in.

Thank you.

So the goals of the Mobile Integrated Health Unit are really twofold.

One is to our clients and to our residents here in Seattle, providing better patient experience of care and better outcomes for when they call.

And then the other sort of more internally is to reduce the impact of these responses on our operations units.

So this is really kind of the crux of where we think that we can innovate and where we can take advantage of some inefficiencies.

So the idea now is that the mobile integrated health unit will either be directly dispatched from our 901 center, avoiding a call entirely to operations, or if our operations unit are already on the scene and identify the need for it, they can call.

And fundamentally, what this unit is about is providing a real-time connection with existing services.

So we are not proposing to become a fundamentally new line of service in terms of providing our own health care, our own in-depth case management, et cetera.

That is very difficult to do on sort of an ad hoc, episodic basis.

And frankly, there are resources to do that.

Really, what we want to do is connect patients in a real-time, immediate moment with some of those existing services out there.

I really want to echo what Leslie and Jeff spoke about, about the critical need for low-barrier, all-payer primary care.

community health centers and urgent care in the downtown.

I think it's a huge gap right now.

That being said, I think that there are enough services that we can start providing this to our patients who we encounter.

And so fundamentally, I think what this unit is going to do is it's going to connect people with a destination.

So primary care, urgent care, crisis solutions, sobering, shelter, housing.

In the immediate time frame or without that providing a connection with a case manager with a telephone nurse with a referral with the next day appointment or with one of the specialty teams that already exists throughout the city of Seattle.

Because we're going to have our firefighters on this unit if they do encounter someone with a medical need They'll be able to mitigate that to handle that and then facilitate transportation to an ED So again, this is a it is a connector unit It is sort of a force multiplier for a lot of the services that are already being provided by City of Seattle King County nonprofit partners in the healthcare sector Thank you Yeah, I just want to note that we're also at 1101 we have to be out of here by noon so

So feel free to ask your question, but if we can keep it sure like really short very briefly So in that referral process have we assured?

have we guaranteed that there is going to be somebody there for that warm handoff for that next day appointment for the I think it's a great question.

I think it's important for case managers to be on the line when we have 30 to 40% turnover rates and vacancy rates at places like DESC and youth care and our other human service provider organizations.

It seems like a really great model.

How do we make sure that there's somebody there to answer the phone and provide that case funding the wages and stability for those organizations.

I think, one, and I'm looking at Council Member Bagshaw, because the funding that went into the budget for 2019 for Crisis Connections for the One Call program is a really essential part of this.

On the previous slide, it was the little telephone.

They weren't called out by name.

But the idea is that Crisis Connections, as the HealthONE workers, firefighters, can call and get that person, that patient that they're working with, connected to the existing infrastructure, right?

Somebody might already have a case manager.

The fire department doesn't know that.

The folks at OneCall can help make that connection, maintain HIPAA privacy, and get their already sort of connected services to them and dispatched.

So that is the idea.

I believe that this will be an iterative process, both as we learn on the ground, but also as we build capacity in the infrastructure.

So it's a yes, and there will need to be additional connections made.

I think the other element to your question is we're going to start small with a small cadre of trusted partners where we have agreements worked out with them, where we've built those relationships.

Because fundamentally this unit is really going to be all about relationships and the staff on that rig being able to pick up their cell phones.

and call a provider they know or call a resource that they know and be able to get that in.

And so, you know, we're going to try to build that out over time, but really start on day one with some very firm relationships built where we know that they have the capacity and the workflow to accept these patients.

Council Member Pacheco.

The third slide showed that King County Jail was the seventh most visited place.

I'm just curious, Expansion of the program specifically at the jail, would that be something to explore down the road?

I'm not sure.

Sorry, just for expansion of the program in future years, just having it onsite at the jail, would that be potentially something worth exploring down the road?

Well, in the future, so we're starting with one unit.

In the future, that could be a part of the conversation, but we're also having additional conversations with the jail.

So the jail has a physician on staff, they have nurses on staff.

So we're trying to work with them to better use their resources to get their patients to where they need to be without calling 911. If you have a physician on staff and nurses on staff, you may want to use those resources before you use an I-1-1 system, which are for critical ALS events.

To be frank, we've identified some workflow problems with jail health and DAJD, which I think would be appropriate for a separate update.

But I think there's some opportunities there to lessen that load.

And so very briefly in terms of the operational profile of this unit, we are going to have a multidisciplinary team, which again our research has shown over and over has the most effectiveness doing this outreach.

So we're going to have two of our firefighters who receive special training and then a non-firefighter position, likely a social worker or similar level of certification.

someone with extensive experience working with this anticipated population, perhaps lived experience, someone who's really adept at communicating with them and figuring out what the needs are and has a very good understanding of the systems in play.

We're going to cover off the bat the downtown core and we really want to provide service as well to some of the adjoining residential neighborhoods, whether that's Capitol Hill or somewhere similar, to look to see how this program functions both in sort of a more dense urban area as well as a little bit more of a residential area.

The hours, I'm going to walk back that Monday through Friday a little bit.

We're still figuring that out.

But it'll be roughly that.

And we want to provide service at peak hours.

So when businesses are open, when urgent cares and primary care are open, when case managers are picking up the phone, that's when we want to provide that service.

And we're going to start off primarily, as I mentioned, with a response-based model, so directly dispatched from 911, requested by operations on the scene.

I think perhaps in the future there's some opportunity to do a little bit more proactive outreach and work with some of our community partners as well.

And again, we have budgeted to run this for a minimum of one year, and we are looking for some alternative funding sources as well to boost that out as well.

And the expectation is that late in 2019 we will get rolling.

Let me just, I think we've mostly covered this, frankly, but, you know, the patients we are primarily expecting to serve really fall into three categories.

One is lower acuity medical conditions, so those are chronic complaints or acute flare-ups of chronic complaints where they don't need immediate hospitalization.

One is behavioral health emergencies and substance abuse, and one is social service needs, and that would be things like shelter and warming.

We, I would direct the committee for a more in-depth list of our partners to the written slide, but I really see us interacting quite a bit with SPD, particularly the navigation team and crisis intervention team, crisis response unit, with the countywide mobile crisis team.

with primary care, the community health centers, and with our healthcare facilities.

But again, this is really going to be about, it's going to be about relationships and partnerships.

And so looking just at our second battalion, which is, you know, downtown Cora plus Capitol Hill out to the water, the need is clearly there, I think, is the bottom line for us.

And then, of course, the crisis of people who are living unsheltered, which overlap with all the above categories, is primarily felt in the downtown core.

So I think that that is really the target of opportunity for us.

And it's going to be an iterative program.

We're going to see what works, where we get the most you know, where we have the comparative advantage, if there are specific subcategories or cohorts of this patient population, we will identify that and adapt the team accordingly.

And then we are going to, we're promising a very robust evaluation on this.

We're trying to get a a grant to do a PhD level evaluation, but regardless, we're going to do a very significant internal evaluation about basically everything that we see, the metrics, patient contacts, patient outcomes, subjective measures like experience of care, et cetera, and then with recommendations back to this committee of how we think that it should go forward in the future.

Thank you.

Is that our last line?

Okay, great.

So thank you so much for the presentation and for taking the time to respond to some of the council member questions around this.

And at this point, I'm gonna hand it over to Greg Doss from Council Central staff, who is going to, I think, walk us through an amendment that I'm proposing be made before we consider the council bill that will ultimately lift a proviso allowing the funding for this program to be utilized by the fire department.

But before we do that, I think one thing that I've noticed is that in the slide it indicates that the cost of the program would be $500,000.

The proviso is on $475,000.

So explain to us where the $25,000 delta is coming from.

I think we just rounded up.

Unless there's The expectation is the the low acuity program within fire has some discretionary funds So we're going to use that to make up that $25,000 to round it up to 500 So there's an additional $25,000 available through the low acuity program that'll roll over into this program, right?

Okay great any other questions for the Executive before I hand it over to Greg Nope.

Okay, Greg, take it off.

And I'm handing out the amendment that I had Greg work on for me.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

As you mentioned, the bill that is before you today is 119509, and it does two things.

It releases the proviso on the $475,000 that required this report from the fire department, and it also moves into the fire department $475,000 that you mentioned.

That money had been held in finance general pending this report and the pilot proposal from the fire department.

The amendment that you asked me to prepare at a very high level has to do with the evaluation that the fire department and executive are going to conduct on this pilot proposal.

As you see up here on the slide, they're going to perform a very robust evaluation.

This particular amendment asks them to look at whether the team or the public would benefit from the services of an advanced provider on that team.

So that would be someone who might be a nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant or a nurse.

someone who is capable of helping with infield treatment.

The chief talked about how one of the strategies for this pilot might be to bring folks who don't need an emergency room to an urgent care clinic.

This would be sort of the opposite.

If there was an advanced provider on the team, they could sort of bring the urgent care to the person.

And whether it's something minor like being stitched up or if a patient has back pain, the advanced provider might be able to provide them with pain relief, an injection of Toradol, so to say.

So, the idea here is some medical treatment in the field and whether or not that would have been beneficial, so then the council will know in a year whether or not they might consider addering an advanced provider to this team.

Thank you, Greg.

So I also want to extend my gratitude to the fire department for review of the amendment.

And my understanding, based on my conversation with Greg this morning, is that we've gotten to a place where there's consensus here with this amendment.

And I appreciate the opportunity to be able to just acknowledge that this is a pilot program.

So there is an opportunity for us to deploy this program in a way that is small enough for us to feel confident that we've gotten the model correctly designed.

But also my hope and intent with this amendment is that it'll be important for us to understand how we can make the model more robust if we determine to take the program to scale once we see the initial data.

I'm leveraging the opportunity that you have all presented with the robust evaluation and metrics analysis that will already be occurring with the underlying pilot program to also create an opportunity for us to evaluate how many people might have benefited from these types of advanced medical treatment services on site if they were or had been made available during the pilot phase.

So I think this is a middle ground way at getting the information that we need for future budgetary actions and for future opportunities for the department to look at how to tweak the model as it goes from pilot to something that hopefully will be much more sustainable because I'm really hopeful that this will actually be really successful for a lot of reasons.

So this is my proposed amendment.

I'm happy to answer any additional questions or have Greg do the same.

Council Member Beckshaw.

Again, thank you so much everybody for your thoughtful work.

I think we're moving in a direction I like what you're proposing here.

Councilmember Gonzalez, I just have one quick question.

We're not at this point putting a nurse practitioner or somebody that can do health care kinds of things like At this point, we are not doing that in this proposal.

So what we are asking for here, and this is my question, is that should we decide to do it in a year, it will only be based upon solid data and evaluation and a recommendation that you would bring forward based upon this year.

So am I correct on that?

That is how we understood what that to mean.

call this entity, and I love the HealthONE name, and that the relationships are built and that people will go and get the services that they need, that this is not just an on-site, on-the-street, I'm going to do wound care, and then that's the end of it.

So I'm just hearing from some of our first responders who want to make sure that that doesn't become what they are doing or expected to do.

Right, that's not the intent.

So as long as we've got some time to look at that and consider it and be working with our first responders this year, I'm going to be supportive of your amendment.

So the amendment isn't going to modify the proposed model as we heard in the presentation today.

That's not what this amendment does.

This amendment essentially asks the folks who are going to be staffing the HealthONE mobile bus to track additional information in their contacts with individuals through the existing model of the program.

The purpose and the intent of that is to allow the fire department to collect additional data that may allow us an opportunity to, in the future, revisit the pilot version of the design of this model to really ask the question of, is there an opportunity for us to better serve this client base by having somebody who can provide advanced medical treatment?

on board as part of the multidisciplinary team.

So that's a question that will need to be answered by a future city council and a future budget deliberation process that isn't going to be this fall.

And we certainly want to have the fire department have an opportunity to collect the data that we'll need to be able to adequately analyze the information necessary to be able to make that policy determination.

And obviously it will be done Similarly to the process we pursued here, which is making sure that the fire department is engaging with relevant stakeholders, including our first responders, to make sure that the model is still going to fulfill its intended purpose of not just being a connector to services, but also of meeting the sort of basic I think there are a lot of people that are coming into contact with low acuity needs of people that they are coming into contact with, which could include things like suturing, pain relief, et cetera, on-site.

Councilmember Hubbard.

Thank you.

I'm struggling to understand what is funded and what is aspirational for the future.

wasn't being used and one of the things that you learn from that is that having a nurse in dispatch will actually have even better results than the triage line.

I thought I heard the tense being used as the conditional tense, the future, this would be good.

So it's not clear to me whether or not there is funding for us, a nurse, to be located in dispatch as part of this proposal?

Sure.

Let me try to provide clarity.

There was one of the slides early on that had future opportunities.

And on the future opportunities slide, it had a potential for a triage nurse on future opportunities.

What actually is funded is two firefighters' position with a social worker, for lack of a better term right now.

That's what we're asking for funding for, those positions.

And so since we saw such a huge 80% of people diverted with the old DESC line.

Why is that not a priority for this new system?

Chief Skagans, I can take that.

I would say there is some policy work that needs to be done.

There was a question of Would it be better or more impactful to have a nurse line separate and distinct from 911, which is a lower cost intervention but creates a two pathway situation?

Or does it make more sense to think about funding a nurse position at the dispatch center?

I would say those two things in a conversation, that policy work is underway.

In addition, how do we best leverage this new system of one call who have right now behavioral health specialists But could we also think about how they might more intentionally partnership in this way?

So there's just some policy work that's underway.

And as we look to move forward, we will bring it back.

Great.

So we are running the clock here.

So I'm going to move us along.

Is it related to the amendment?

Yeah, I want to give you a heads up.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I know we're running late.

I appreciate everything that we're doing here because we are moving forward.

That's really exciting.

Madam Chair, I appreciate your amendment.

I do have some questions and concerns.

I did have a chance just this morning to touch base with some of the firefighter local members and leadership.

And I think there's just a little bit of concern, question marks about how this does affect the current budget that's allocated.

I'm concerned that I don't yet know how this would affect the on-the-ground experience of those who are seeking medical care, what additional questions would be asked, what does that look like in terms of interaction.

having seen someone who had a huge abscess on First Avenue when we went in our tour, I can imagine that it's really tough to think about what are the additional questions that we have to answer as we're trying to get this person into medical care.

So asking those questions is good.

I think at this point, Madam Chair, given I have these lingering questions about the impact on the delivery on site in the existing pilot, I'm gonna abstain from the amendment at this point and look forward to future conversations with you all and members of IAFF 27.

And just to provide some clarity, all of the calls that come in to 911 can still, a resource can still be dispatched to deal with all of those things you're talking about.

If it's wound care and we need to wrap them up and get them to the ER, we do that today.

We do that all day, every day.

This is just a little different path.

So all of those things are still in play.

If HealthONE got on scene and it was more than they can handle, They can get on the radio and they can call for that resource to come and support it, whether it's an aid response or a medic response.

All those things are still in play.

This is an additional resource to deal with a lower level type of a call.

But all those other resources we have every day are still in play all day.

This does not remove that.

And Chief Scoggins, in terms of the concern about the, you know, sort of making my amendment operational, my understanding is that the systems are already in place to be able to do this.

This is not gonna create some incredible encumbrance or deterrence or inability to actually deliver the core functions of Health One in the field.

No, this would not.

Your amendment would not do that.

What I think I received from you is you asked us to evaluate whether those additional resources could be helpful in the future.

And we can do that during the course of the pilot.

Right.

It's certainly not my intent to impact the operational deployment of HealthONE as you all proposed it.

So I don't actually perceive my amendment as creating some sort of difficulty in being able to deliver the core services that HealthONE is intended to deliver.

These are just in the course of the work of first responders making observations and requiring the department as part of its intended evaluation and metrics at the end of the pilot to consider this as one of the things that you're evaluating as opposed to creating another layer of bureaucracy or reporting or recording on the, you know, three individuals who will be on the HealthONE bus.

And if I may say, we are already intending to do a very robust data collection suite considerably far beyond what we already do for our EMS contacts.

And so I think that this amendment would be able to be derived from that data collection that we're already planning to do.

So I don't think it is an additional burden.

Thank you.

Appreciate that.

Okay, is there any further questions here?

Okay, so I am going to move to amend Council Bill 119509 as described in Amendment 1. Any further discussion?

All those in favor say aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Okay, so there's one abstention.

Okay, so the motion carries and the bill has been amended.

And I will now move that the committee recommend that the City Council pass Council Bill 119509 as amended.

Any further comments?

Council Member Herbold.

I just want to really thank Council Member Bagshaw for her passion for this work and her leadership over the last several years, of course with the assistance of the department helping drive us forward towards some solutions.

Thank you so much.

I would also like to echo the thanks of Councilmember Bagshaw who has been championing this item for the fire department and the boots on the ground firefighter and also I would like to thank Mayor Durkin for her leadership and guidance and her continued support on this and And our partnerships, as John mentioned, this is all about relationships.

We wouldn't be here if we didn't have a strong relationship with the local in order to create something new and do something different to better serve the community.

And that's why this is so important.

In the fire service, we have truly become a part of the American health care system.

When you look at the entry point to health care, most fire departments around this country are directly tied into it.

This is another step in that direction to help people.

So thank you.

Certainly want to echo those thanks and also want to thank you, Chief Scoggins, because I think since you've got sworn in to be the new chief for the fire department, I've been hearing you talk about this particular issue over and over and over again.

So certainly want to thank you for your leadership here in conjunction with the locals.

So really appreciate all the work that you all have been doing here.

So those in favor of the committee recommending passage of the bill as amended vote aye.

Any opposed?

No abstentions?

Okay.

The motion carries, and the committee will recommend that the City Council pass Council Bill 119509 as amended, and we hope to consider that at full council this Monday.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for your patience.

Okay, I am now going to invite those individuals who are here to testify as to agenda item two to join us at the table while Roxanna reads this item into the record.

Agenda item two, Seattle Police Department emphasis patrols for briefing and discussion.

Thank you, Roxanna.

And then just for purposes of the viewing public and my colleagues at the table, given the delay in our committee presentations today, we have decided to allow the folks from Washington State to go ahead and leave.

So we have tabled that discussion on the implementation of paid family medical leave.

So we'll go ahead and welcome them back, hopefully sometime later on this year, I want to be respectful of everybody's time, including theirs.

So I apologize that we are going to have to table that last agenda item.

But it was important, I think, for us to spend extra time on that public testimony portion.

And I want to make sure that I don't rush the executive through this presentation either.

Okay, thank you so much for joining us.

I will go ahead and ask each of you to introduce yourselves to us and for the record, and then we will go ahead and kick it off.

Good morning.

Eric Greening, Assistant Chief, Patrol Operations Bureau, Seattle Police.

Chris Fisher, Executive Director, Strategic Initiative, Seattle Police.

Andres Mantilla, Director, Department of Neighborhoods.

Ken Snipes, Chief Administrative Officer and Solid Waste Director for Seattle Public Utilities.

Genesee Adkins, Chief of Staff, Seattle Department of Transportation.

Well, thank you all so much for being with us this morning.

I think many of you, if not all of you, were sitting through the public testimony period and through some of the reflections that council members made in response to that public testimony and really appreciate your all's willingness to Be really responsive to my request to be with us in a committee shortly so quickly after the announcement was made about the pre-summer emphasis program and really look forward to having a good conversation with you all and to learn more about the details of the proposal and the program that's now in being actually utilized within the seven neighborhoods.

Want to really clarify for the viewing public that the fact that we're having a committee doesn't deter or prevent or prohibit the Seattle Police Department and the other related agencies from actually deploying the pre-summer emphasis.

The executive and the police department do not need legislative authority to pursue this strategy and this program.

And we're not here to consider any legislation One way or the other we are here to simply have a briefing and discussion about the proposal around having a 30-day period of Enhanced proactive policing in seven discrete neighborhoods throughout the city of Seattle so I know there's been some confusion about what the committee hearing means and what our power and authority is over the kingdom maybe, and I just want to be really honest with folks that we're here to have a briefing and a discussion.

The department does not need our legislative authority to pursue this proposal, nor did it ask for it.

And in fact, in my moving about in these seven different neighborhoods, I have indeed seen increased presence by officers within the Seattle Police Department.

I just want to make sure that folks understand that that is the purpose of today's meeting and really appreciate you all being with us.

So, Council Member Herbold.

Real quick, and you may have already said this, but for the viewing public, in the charter, the Chief of Police is granted deployment authority for the City of Seattle.

The City Council has no role in that deployment authority in those decisions.

And that's for good reason, because we are not law enforcement officials.

We are policy makers, and we certainly welcome the opportunity to be able to ask questions on behalf of our constituents to get a better understanding of exactly how this is going to help neighborhoods and to also fulfill our oversight role as a city council to make sure that the program isn't going to have harmful unintended consequences both either in the short term or the long term, really look forward to continuing to collaboratively work with all of the agencies at the table today and the mayor's office to continue to, again, work together to resolve the need and the desire for for increased law enforcement services across the city, not just these seven neighborhoods.

So with that being said, I'm gonna hand it over, and Assistant Chief, are you gonna kick us off, or?

So how we're gonna divide this up, Dr. Fisher's gonna talk about the numbers, and I'll explain and set the context for how the operations will actually be executed.

Great, thank you so much.

Thank you, Chief.

So again, just to begin, thank you, Madam Chair and fellow other council members for having us here today to talk about the way we're executing this strategy of a comprehensive city approach in these neighborhoods.

I think where we wanted to start off from was that overall, when you look at our reported crime statistics across the city year to date, so through May 6, We are right now in the midst of a transition to our new records management system.

It went live yesterday.

So we're in a little bit of a pause on data, but this is through May 6. Crime is down overall 12%.

The only category that is up is aggravated assault.

But the real message here and how it relates to what we're going to talk about today is across the city in various neighborhoods, something is up in some in each of them.

While overall things are down and it's a very good picture, there are pockets of issues that we are aware of.

We meet every two weeks as a full command staff with all precinct captains and investigations captains and other support folks from the department, including our external partners, including public health and fire and the city attorney and county attorney to go over sort of what are we seeing, what are we hearing.

So we're constantly assessing what's happening across the city.

But overall, the story is good on crime.

But there are issues always to address.

We can, as President Harrell mentioned, we can always do better, I think, in all the work that we all do.

So the other point there is, so that was year-to-date, 2019 through 2018. When we look at full complete years, 2018 versus 2017, 2018, there was a 2.3% increase in overall crime.

Generally across the board, the major crime types were up except for arson, and larceny, theft, the general category was down slightly.

But generally, everything was up a little bit last year.

We dug into that throughout the year.

We put out an end-of-year crime report on our public dashboard that sort of got into more detail on each of these and leveraged the information that our Investigations Bureau had that provided context to the numbers.

But then we also think about the fact that in that same time period, population grew 2.3%.

So on that 2018 year-end report that we sort of did as a dashboard, we also provided the crime rate, which shows an interesting picture of, over the past few years, property crime especially, the rate of property crime has gone down.

Person-related crime sort of goes up and down, but it's generally stayed in a pretty stable bandwidth.

As the city has continued to grow, the rate of crime has stayed fairly consistent.

But generally, the story is, city fairly stable over the past two years looking good the beginning of this year but there are concerns in certain neighborhoods and that really drove a lot of the conversation that we're going to have today both historically some neighborhoods if you go back even further than 17 you see neighborhoods ramping up and we've continued to hear from the neighborhoods, through community groups, through advisory groups, from your offices about concerns in those neighborhoods.

And so that also played into a lot of what we're going to talk about today.

It wasn't just how are we looking this year, it's are we continuously hearing these issues from some of these places.

So I'm going to stop you right there really quickly, but the one of the things that we heard during public testimony is that these, you know, a lot of people basically saying these statistics can't be trusted and that it's, you know, sort of, you know, they're calling bullocks basically on, these statistics saying that these statistics don't square with what I feel when I am moving about my own neighborhood or a different neighborhood.

How does the police department handle that criticism and concern?

And how does this emphasis patrol in particular address that or not?

So I'll start with the issue.

I think we hear that.

We're very aware that perception is different than numbers.

Those are reported crimes where there was a 911 call or an officer on view, an officer arrived, the victim or complainant was there and was willing to talk and there was enough evidence to write a report.

And that led to these official reported crime numbers.

So that's why we look at other things too.

We look at our 911 calls.

So even if something doesn't raise up to be an issue that becomes an official offense report that gets counted in these numbers, we also look at the trends and who's calling for, not who, where people are calling, for what, you know, what time of day, what neighborhoods, what day of the week.

We look at those trends too.

We have a lot of the CSAT discussions are around our repeat locations, much like fire.

I think together we've really had a really good conversation about how can we work on those repeat locations.

And then we also have supported for the past, I think now the fifth year, the public safety survey with Seattle University doing that and the analysis and the outreach and a lot of the community meetings where they, They pull folks together to get them more qualitative.

In the 57 micro-community policing neighborhoods, what are people feeling on the ground?

We've talked about this before in briefings.

There are whole formal scales about social cohesion and neighborhood disorganization and a whole variety of factors that theoretically play into the likelihood of crime, including fear of crime and feelings of safety.

We have a customer satisfaction survey that happens when people call 911. We have a random callback four times a year that we've been doing since 2006 that includes both how satisfied are they with the department and the response they got overall and with the specific officer, but we also look at how safe do you feel at day and night in your neighborhood, in the city at large.

And we constantly are looking at how those numbers are trending.

And right now, we're discussing trying to figure out a way to do a more expansive version of that.

That is a very intensive, that random digit callback of a person on a phone answering a survey takes a lot of resources and time.

And there's a lot of interesting technologies out there that other departments are using to be able to sort of let the community tell you how are they feeling, what are their issues, where they volunteer to do it.

This isn't, you know, going out and asking questions.

Finding a way to let the police department know how are they doing?

What are their issues?

So I think that's how we handle this issue of, well, the numbers don't tell the whole story.

They're never going to tell the whole story.

I mean, I can get into all the research around certain things like motor vehicle theft and residential burglary and homicide.

If you look at those trends, there's a whole lot of stats you can do about how that supports other trends.

Those are things that almost universally always get reported.

You want to do your insurance report for your car being stolen.

If someone is killed, someone's aware of it, and most of the time people report if someone broke into their house.

So I mean there are things we can look at in terms of numerical trends that let us know.

The numbers are probably pretty on point.

Yeah, most crime is underreported.

Certain crimes are more consistently reported.

But overall, I feel fairly confident that the trend, the story of the numbers is right.

The scale is probably lower, but that's the case in every city.

About 50% of crime, depending on the category, doesn't get reported.

So we know that too, which is also just hearing from the public through those other avenues is how we deal with that.

Can I come in on that?

Sure.

The Seattle Youth Study, going back several years now, has some consistent themes that have been bubbling to the top.

And number one theme in last year's report was lack of police presence.

The second issue...

In every neighborhood.

In every neighborhood.

And the second issue was the issue of homelessness.

And then another thing that popped up last year was they want to see better coordination between city agencies.

So I think that's going to be relevant to where we go soon.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you, and Dr. Fisher, you may have made this distinction, and if you did, I apologize for repeating it, but I think it merits elevation.

Although the overall city-wide crime increase was 2.3%, by my math, the person crime increase was about 9%.

Correct.

And so I think that is significant and I think we should recognize that because when the community is saying that they don't believe that these stats reflect what they believe, their perceptions, bearing that very real increase into a larger overall crime increase, I think further accelerates sort of the mistrust of the data.

So I think it's really important to highlight that that is a significant increase.

Social media platforms spread bad news very quickly.

So one person can have a car prowled and they'll post that on a social media platform and it gets people spun up, so to speak.

So we hear about it face to face, we get the input via email or through 911 about various issues.

that also helps kind of get people upset.

Right, and I think that there's, I mean, I think that there are a couple of different schools of thought.

One will be very quick to dismiss perceptions as just being perceptions, and if it's not supported by real data and real crime statistics, then we should just move along and deal with the real crime data.

Then there's the opposite perspective of my perception is reflective of an experience that I may have recently personally had where I was the victim of a crime or the witness of a crime or where I know somebody who's very close to me who was also a victim of a person crime or a property crime and so for me, the perception is actually all the data and the statistics I need to be able to understand that this is an issue in our city because it may not be something that had impacted me five years ago or four years ago or three years ago, but now it is.

And so I just want to be really cognizant of the fact that those are, I would say, two different spectrums.

And I think it's important for us to not be immediately dismissive of one perspective over the other in terms of how people experience issues related to crime and disorder within our city.

And so I think that while I understand people have skepticism about the data, I also wanna make sure that I signal and say that the data is actually authentic and validated and statistically representative of those crimes that are reported.

And we should have trust and faith in the police department who is actually receiving this data and information and processing it, that they are accurately reporting out those crimes and trends that are reported for purposes of shepherding certain law enforcement resources in a certain manner to address some of those trends and concerns.

But that doesn't mean that we do that at the expense of appreciating that there are neighborhoods, and in my experience, I have worked a lot with members in the South Park community who continue to say that the numbers don't reflect what they're experiencing every day, and that's an extremely diverse community in a community that experiences a lot of poverty and lack of access to opportunity.

And so I appreciate sort of that there can be a disconnect of that and that one doesn't trump the other.

Councilmember Herbold?

I'm sorry.

I just want to, what I'm saying is something slightly different, although I definitely appreciate that distinction.

I wasn't trying to build on what you were saying or

I was making my own independent comments.

I just don't want to lose the thread that I think as it relates to person crime, the perceptions actually match the data.

Absolutely.

People are walking around saying, I feel less safe.

A 9% increase in person crime supports that.

Absolutely.

And I feel like if we bury that 9% number in a high level number that says 2.3%, we're actually encouraging members of the public to mistrust our data.

So I think we need to acknowledge where there have been significant increases and do it publicly.

Not all crimes are the same.

And I certainly wasn't making remarks to discount the highlight that you were making.

I think that's absolutely true.

In some categories that we see in this presentation, and that I'm sure that the department is happy to come back and talk to us more about, we have seen an increase.

And that has contributed to not a perception, but a reality of an increase of particular types of crimes.

Thank you so much.

So if we're going to look at the sub layers here and appreciate you providing this data as we talked about before, data-driven solutions are desired for crafting public policy.

If you look at the property crime, which we've seen a lot of coverage lately of, you know, incidents of arson and theft, arsons have decreased from 2017 to 2018. Help me, someone.

Larceny.

Larceny theft has also decreased from 2017 to 2018. The overall property crime bucket, if we're looking at this subdivision, has increased by 1.57%.

So I think it is important for us to recognize, yes, there has been an overall increase in crime.

And that is no doubt something that I know you and Chief Best have been absolutely looking into.

I want to reiterate something I said earlier today, that is, in my three conversations with Chief Best over the last month and a half or so, part of what she has continued to reiterate is that every officer absolutely has the tools and the authority to pursue crimes.

And that includes theft and larceny and burglary.

But it does not mean that you are going to arrest someone or pursue someone simply for sleeping outside.

To reiterate, issues of selling drugs, stealing, lighting dumpsters or RVs on fire, all of these are things that you're officers still have the ability to go after.

But it is, I think, important for us to note that in the property crime section, which has gotten a lot of attention, it's 1.5% increase.

I wanted to follow up on one additional comment that you made to just double check how these numbers overlap with where we're going to see increased patrol presence and potentially arrests.

If this data is not the only data that you're looking at, and as you mentioned, you're looking at trends for who calls or where people are calling from.

Then I think we also have another analysis that needs to be done.

Who is most comfortable calling the police?

Where are those situations and in what situations are individuals calling for if the individual that they're calling about is not actually committing a crime?

How has that affected Whether or not you're increasing patrols in that area because I know that there are certain neighborhoods that are in certain Calls are coming in but they're not actually crime related calls.

And so are your Neighborhoods aligning with where you're getting the most calls or are your neighborhood patrols now aligning with where we're actually seeing overall crime.

I

We'll go into more detail Councilmember, but the this was a combination of a whole lot of this isn't this wasn't just a police identified neighborhoods It was also as we'll see in here there there are other things that we're hearing from some of these communities about other issues that aren't criminal in nature.

So it wasn't just police data.

We wanted to start this out from the chair's questions and some other issues with sort of this high level.

This is where the city stands on crime.

We'll dig into what we saw in the neighborhoods that were selected.

But we look at a wide variety of things.

And I attempted to clean it up in my comment, but I will do it again.

For a variety of reasons.

We don't have the who calls I think I'm not gonna quote the statistics.

I don't remember it off my head But it's a very low percent where we have any demographics on who the caller is We know the where the call came from but sort of that who's calling that that we don't have But yeah, this is a combination we started out with the crime just because I think people focus that this was a policing thing because a lot we have a lot of the resources but this is a Comprehensive and so other information was factored in which we'll get into

Great.

Okay, I'll talk about emphasis patrols in general.

So I've been with the department almost 25 years, and even before I came on the department, emphasis patrols are one of the strategies that we use to go directly at crime spikes or problem locations.

Emphasis patrols can be comprised of on-duty resources, being directed to spend more time in a particular problem location.

So you could say we take away some of the officer's discretion to randomly patrol and we say, here, we want you in this block or these blocks because the data is saying we have a problem here.

Or we can do a combination like this effort will be between on-duty resources being redirected to certain areas, and the emphasis being supplemented with officers on overtime.

So it's a combination of both.

It's not all overtime and it's not all on duty.

The on duty folks will be directed to patrol in those areas between calls for service.

The overtime officers will also be patrolling those areas, but they will be a little more, they'll have a little more leeway to stay put, be out on foot, connect with folks on the street and business owners and community members.

What I wanted to add to is emphasis patrols aren't new.

We have CSTAT every two weeks.

And in CSTAT, we have a multitude of partners at the table from different city departments as well as service providers and other people in the audience from our oversight, partners here with the Seattle Police Department, and we talk about emphasis patrols.

We talk about the fact if you implement an emphasis patrol and it's successful, you might want to do more.

If it's not successful, end it and do something else.

So I encourage my precinct commanders to try to be innovative and adjust when needed.

One of the things I wanted to point out to the council is, and I just kind of get right to the point here, is what's different about this is Chief Bess has always said a lot of what's happened now, we're asking our young officers to do so much more.

It's a multidisciplinary approach to a lot of the problems.

Our officers many times go to calls, and I know you get these calls sometimes from constituents that say, the officer said their hands were tied.

When I took over patrol, I made it very clear, your hands are not tied, but we need to do a better job of educating you about what's not under our purview and direct the person to the right department.

This emphasis program, what's different here is we're marrying up other city help with police in these neighborhoods.

We actually have other emphasis patrols active right now in other parts of the city.

Southeast Seattle, there's a street robbery emphasis that's been going for quite some time.

And actually, since the first of the year, we've had emphasis going in Soto, in Pioneer Square, in Fremont.

There's also ramping up.

We're going into Alki with the warmer weather, and then also we're starting one in Golden Garden.

So emphasis patrols are nothing new.

The only thing here, we're taking a multidisciplinary approach in these particular neighborhoods, because a lot of times when we go out, the police department being the most visible arm of the government, people come to us to talk about streetlights, potholes, and things that are not under our purview.

Council Member Herbold?

Thank you.

I just want to take this very quick opportunity.

You provided a great segue, although the Alki Summer Emphasis Patrol is not part of this discussion.

I really appreciate you highlighting the direction that you give to officers to not continue this narrative that somehow the council has tied hands.

Yesterday, I spoke to a constituent in the Alki neighborhood who's been working the issue of noise enforcement for many, many years, worked with me to help the council change the law.

And this constituent just spoke to an officer about how noisy it was last weekend.

And that officer told her it's the City Council's fault that SPD doesn't enforce the noise ordinance, despite the fact that we made changes to the ordinance specifically to respond to your feedback to us about how to improve the law so that you could better enforce it.

So that officers are still giving members of the public that message.

And I'd be happy to follow up on that if you have more specific information online.

It's definitely an education piece and I think during this this program not to get off too far in a rabbit hole here, is what I would like to see as we're out, the officers, we're going to teach our officers what department handles which issue.

And also, we can still act as ambassadors while we're out on footbeats to try to direct folks to the Find It Fix It app.

Officers also have cell phones.

Maybe we can enter the information for a community member if they don't have that technology available.

And we'll make those referrals to the other departments.

So, go ahead, go ahead.

Sorry.

Thank you.

I am so grateful that you brought this up, Council Member Herbold.

The number of times I hear from constituents downtown that they talk to officers and the officers say our hands are tied.

If we can do away with that, that would be the single most important thing we could do at this table.

Let our officers know that they do have the authority to make decisions and to be responsive.

And I really appreciate what you're saying about I think it's a big deal.

I don't want to underplay it and I definitely don't want us to dismiss it.

People are frustrated that they think their officers are like just not visible or they don't feel like they do have the power or the backing from you.

They have the backing from us.

We want them to do their jobs.

And if there's a problem, I wish you'd come and tell me specifically.

I have also had multiple conversations with the chief about this subject and with precinct captains around this issue as well and with constituents.

I also want to really be clear that it is not just something I want officers to do.

It is my expectation as a council member that officers, when they show up to work every day, showed up to do the thing that they said that they wanted to do when they went to academy, which is enforce the laws of the state of Washington and the city of Seattle.

I also expect them to do that in a way that is constitutional and fair and equitable to the people that they're coming into contact with.

So we're not just going to do dragnet sweeps of people into our criminal justice system for the sake of satisfying individuals who feel like that's the only tool left.

in our toolbox to address some of the livability concerns that are being identified.

But I do want to echo my expectation that officers will continue to do the jobs that they were hired to do.

And I believe that the city council has taken many steps in the last three years to advance, in some instances, legislation without controversy, Fair amount of controversy.

We've advanced legislation because we believe in the ability of providing rank-and-file police officers and their supervisors the ability to fulfill their mandate of delivering law enforcement, public safety services to neighborhoods across the city of Seattle.

And I believe that we continue to work together on sort of what does that look like and how can we continue to work together to make sure that those services are delivered in the fair, equitable way, not just for the people living in communities, but also for the officers who were asking to step into sometimes dangerous situations.

So I appreciate Council Member Herbold bringing that point up.

Again, I know she and I have a lot of conversations about this as well and our ongoing concern about wanting to correct the record on our behalf that that is not what our intent is.

And in fact, that's exactly part of what is motivating me to have this briefing today is wanting to have that transparent sharing of information so you can hear directly from us.

And thank you for that and I heard the term used earlier core service.

What is our core deliverable and it's law enforcement for us and I think this plan helps take some of the pressure off our young officers in these neighborhoods because often we are called to situations that aren't quite an enforcement situation.

It could be social service or some other department that could actually help with that situation.

And I think that's where some of this frustration is with the officers.

They just want to do their jobs, but it's on me and the rest of the command staff to educate them and give them the tools they need to be successful and direct whatever else to the other departments that needs to be handled.

Thank you.

That's great.

Okay.

Okay.

Part of the deployment will be increased bicycle presence.

So we will redistribute our bicycle officers in particular neighborhoods that are listed here to be more visible.

We want foot beat officers out, the community police team officers to really make a difference with their presence.

We're not looking to have a drag net.

We will address any crime that we see.

We're not looking for any quotas.

There's no stipulation on a particular type of arrest to be made.

We want to just be present, be on scene to prevent.

that crime from occurring and also be more accessible to the communities so we can have more conversations about what they think will help.

But it's been proven in the past.

Once you increase visibility, those numbers will start to move downward in our experience.

So with regard to the comment you just made that if you see crime, your officers are going to take action.

We want voluntary compliance first.

They have discretion.

I appreciate the desire to have voluntary compliance.

That's always good.

So what are, can you just talk a little bit more about the type of activities that we can see our officers will be engaged in?

I mean, are they going to be doing, social contacts, i.e.

Terry stops, are they going to be, you know, sort of just walk us through sort of, you know, if we're an officer and we are out on 3rd Avenue between Pike and Pine, what am I actually being trained to and instructed to do as part of this program?

It's interesting you say that.

So, our deployment has kind of changed.

When I came on, it was all about, Get out there, make a lot of contacts, bring back proof you enforce some kind of law.

That's not the deployment model we're going into.

We want officers to be on the street, to be eyes and ears of the community.

We also want to make contact with folks before there is an enforcement.

So that means, actually I'll bring up LEAD, our social contact referrals far outnumber our arrest diversion referrals.

So these are officers that are in their neighborhoods and they're coming across folks that might be in a situation, they've been in trouble before, they're vulnerable, and officers that make those referrals.

So if we can do that, there's also the mobile crisis team, We have our own unit where the officer and a mental health professional ride together.

So if we can see somebody on the corner that's in crisis or might not be a threat to themselves or someone else yet, make contact, try to direct them to some type of services.

I appreciate that, and I think it's still, the question still remains in my mind, and I'd like to hear you address it, is whether you expect that there will be some arrests as a result of these emphasis patrols.

Anytime you increase police presence in a particular neighborhood, that possibility also increases.

We have a lot of folks out there that officers know on site.

who maybe be on probation, and if they're in a certain area, they're violating that probation.

Officers know folks that are aware, even before they make contact with them, they know a person, they can check their name and know whether or not they have a warrant.

We are definitely gonna take action on any predatory drug dealing, assaults or violent behavior.

Just so I can try to bring the angst down, Your accountability legislation is pretty robust.

The settlement agreement is pretty robust.

We track everything.

If you're not having a conversation about the Seahawks and it's an enforcement or Terry Stopp or anything, we track it.

As you know, we audit the Terry stops.

The bias reviews come directly to me, and then I'm audited by Andrew Meyerberg, and he's audited by the Office of Inspector General.

So we are constantly monitoring any abnormalities that might be occurring in any neighborhood.

Not just these.

So we want to make sure that we will be reporting up through the executive on a weekly basis what kind of activity we have out there.

We want to address low level.

violations with warnings and document those.

But also we will, in the areas that there's drug issues, we want to make referrals first of all.

And if we find out there's something going on, like a prolific dealer in an area, we're going to go after that person.

And as it relates to any arrests that might be made in these geographic areas, one of the concerns that we hear from multiple different sources is that there are, including the police department, that there's work done to undergo an arrest, a criminal investigation, and then a referral to a prosecuting authority, either the city attorney's office or the King County prosecuting attorney's office, depending on the class of crime that the individual has been arrested for, and sort of a general concern that there is a lack of follow through in some instances for some of those referrals that are made by the Seattle Police Department by those prosecuting authorities.

Has the department, coordinated and had conversations with the City Attorney's Office and our King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office related to referrals made by this program in particular, and by referrals I mean arrests, that have been made in conjunction with the increased emphasis in this particular period of time?

I'm glad you asked that question.

I met with King County Prosecuting Attorney Supervisor for Filing Unit about two weeks ago.

I have an appointment today with Kelly Harris in the Seattle City Attorney's Office.

I met with them to give them a heads up.

You might see an increase in cases.

Also, there's been a lot of discussions around chronic offenders.

And it's quite clear, and we have the opinion that there's no hardcore blanket, we're just gonna scoop everyone up.

If we have a chronic offender, who is causing a problem in the community, we will call ahead and say, we have this person, this is the situation.

So it's on a case-by-case basis to bring attention to someone that's a chronic offender.

They are aware that we're gonna have this emphasis going and there'll be constant dialogue back and forth if there's any problems.

Great.

Council Member Pacheco.

I just want to applaud your work on this.

A couple weeks ago, we heard from representatives from LEAD regarding just the expansion of LEAD in the U District.

We know from data with regard to crimes in the U District that it's higher than two of the neighborhoods in North Seattle that were selected.

So I'm curious to know why just from if the expansion of LEAD is being included to include the U District, why the U District itself was not included in the emphasis patrols?

So right now, there was a decision made for a number of factors based upon data and community input to go with a limited number of neighborhoods to involve the other city departments right away.

Historically, for the police department, we have done emphasis on UA, and I'm not saying we won't.

is probably likely with the warmer weather.

But in this program, we're going with these seven neighborhoods first because we have only so much bandwidth with our partners.

And I know some of our other city departments don't operate 24-7, 365 like we do.

So we're a little more agile, but we want to start with seven neighborhoods with the other departments.

Great.

Okay, and then before we move out this slide, because you are the last couple of bullet points, you're connecting people with services, so you specifically named reach and lead here, and I appreciate Council Member Pacheco bringing up lead in the U District context in particular.

One of the questions that I asked in my letter was to not just, to also, help us understand what kind of efforts are being made in these seven different neighborhoods, what kind of efforts are going to be made by the police department and others to coordinate referrals to lead Because I'm hearing from you, Chief, that the first priority or sort of the first course of action is to identify those who may be appropriate for diversion and want to be cognizant of the fact that LEAD has limited capacity as well.

And so would like to hear a little bit more from you about that coordination.

So the good news is our officers have completely bought into the program and referrals have exploded over the years.

However, I don't want to speak for Ms. Dugard and Tara Moss, but we have asked that They prioritize the arrest diversions, of course.

And then the social contacts will come after that.

And then there's also the weekly work group meetings that our officers participate in.

And those discussions are had there on how to prioritize the referrals.

I've sat in those.

They're very thoughtful.

And they go through the list of individuals to try to prioritize.

And some are kind of put on the back burner if their issues aren't as acute.

Oh, and I don't want to speak for, Andres, he has some input here on outreach.

Great.

Yeah, and we're, if we can go into the next slide, there's a portion of this that starts to talk about some of the other efforts.

I think we heard in both the public comment and then some of your comments, council members, around a lot of specific feedback that DON staff is hearing day after day around coordination of city investments and services.

And so although we've talked a lot about SPD here, there are constant comments around SDOT, SPU, City Light, HSD of how they're coming together and working across kind of silos as we know.

And how do we really take a look at the neighborhood or the community-based approach to leverage and coordinate investments?

So for D.O.N. here, there's really an opportunity to take that, to scale in these seven areas that we've identified here.

It's also a great opportunity and you've noted here some of the work that we've been doing in South Park in leveraging both in South Park and Georgetown some of the public safety task forces and some of those issues and how do we take it to the next step there to show implementation.

So I want to turn it over to SDOT and SPU to talk about some of their investments and then kind of come back around some of the ongoing community engagement aspects if that's okay.

Yes, but I believe Councilmember Herbold has a question that might have been related to the last slide.

We don't have to go back to the last slide, but it is a police-related question.

Before I ask the question, I do want to thank Department of Neighborhoods for the coordination role that they have been doing over the last couple years in South Park in order to implement The community recommendations and the council and executive funding for those recommendations across a whole line of things.

The funding for the crime prevention coordinator, the funding for a huge number of lighting improvements that are just so, so valuable.

for that community, funding for pedestrian safety improvements.

The South Park community has been very, very thoughtful about their vision for public safety to include these other elements.

And the role that the Department of Neighborhoods has played to coordinate all of that has been completely invaluable.

So if we're going to see that replicate in some of the other neighborhoods, that's going to be fantastic.

As it relates specifically to the policing question, again, for South Park, I am a huge fan of bike patrols, always have been.

Again, I think it's just a really effective way to be present in the community, not in a car, but out there, but covering a lot of ground.

and I think visibility is a really, really useful tool for prevention, right?

I do have some experience with how bike patrols have worked in South Park in the past, and I'm just wondering how operationally that's going to work, given that South Park is so removed from the Southwest Precinct.

There's a huge challenge for the officers to get from Southwest Precinct down to South Park.

They put their cars, I mean their bikes in the cars and they drive them down the hill and they drive them back up the hill.

And then the result is there's not that much time spent doing the bike patrol in the neighborhood.

I'm just wondering how we're going to learn from our use of bike patrols in the past to make sure that your officers do have more time in that.

That's a challenge.

It's also the same over with the South Precinct, trying to get the bikes over into Soto and Georgetown, but we have to load the bikes up and get them down.

That's the expectation to make it happen.

We'll be supplementing services down there with the regular bike patrol and the community police team, anti-crime team, and some of the officers are cross-trained.

Even if they're not in the bike team, they can get suited up in bike gear and get a bike and go down.

So we'll make sure we'll have a constant presence there.

It might not.

So one thing I need to clarify about the emphasis patrols, they are not 24-7, 365. They're based upon time of day, day a week when we see the most complaints or issues.

And so there'll be some play in there when you'll see the officers upstaffed in certain areas.

So I just want to make that clear.

Just back of the envelope guess, what number of hours in a day do you think that officers will be deployed for an emphasis patrol in these individual neighborhoods?

Obviously, specifically interested in South Park.

It will vary.

South Park, I believe, and I have the plan for mail, I can answer you offline also.

It's not as many hours as some of the bigger areas due to the fact that we look at the data.

Some of the areas are very active at night.

Pioneer Square is active 24-7, so there'll be a lot of hours put in there.

Most of the neighborhoods, it'll mostly be early morning into the evening, just generally.

That's helpful, thank you.

I do think that as a follow-up, some of the questions I asked in my letter were related to overtime in particular, and that is not covered in the slide deck as I see it, but I have been doing a lot of work on the council since I was elected in 2015 around the issues of overtime and continue to want to see the information specific to the overtime associated with this this particular strategy.

I recognize that their emphasis patrol is something that the police department uses in a variety of different circumstances throughout the year, depending on the needs.

But I am particularly interested in understanding what the fiscal impact is of this particular 30-day program in these seven neighborhoods.

in addition to the information about the number of hours that were dedicated to the various neighborhoods to address these particular concerns that you all have described.

I just continue to think that that's a really important part of transparency and accountability to taxpayers who not only want us to give these services, but have an expectation that we are also keeping a close eye on how those resources are being deployed, and making sure that those resources are used in an equitable and fair way across the city.

Understood.

So if I can, we can continue to turn it over to SDOT and SPU.

We were in two walks yesterday, one in South Ballard, one in Fremont, and one this morning, and one a little bit later today.

And there's already some cross-departmental improvements that are taking place.

Thanks, Andres.

Council members, ESSAT, as one of our service and capital agencies, is pleased to be able to participate in this coordinated effort with the other city departments.

As you know, ESSAT plays a key role in the public right-of-way and what our residents see every day as their public spaces, which they want to feel safe in and feel are well-maintained.

Some of the basic functions that we provide are pothole repair, vegetation maintenance, alley flushing, in street sweeping, which is a very successful partnership with Seattle Public Utilities.

As I heard on one of the walks yesterday in the community, residents are concerned about feeling safe when they're walking, biking, and driving.

in very congested streets and in tight intersections.

We also depend on residents and businesses to let us know where there are service needs, either through Find-It-Fix-It or through 684 Road.

We're out in the community constantly, but we can't be everywhere every minute.

Just yesterday, on one of the walks, we saw an alley with a very deteriorated condition, and we were able right then to dispatch some of our crews out to quickly fill some potholes around a storm drain.

As part of this pre-summer emphasis, we're coordinating some of the work that we do throughout the year, like repainting crosswalks, trimming back overgrown trees to make signs more visible, and doing key sidewalk repairs in conjunction with our partner agencies and targeted areas.

The city's various agencies, we work regularly together in this manner on projects in the right of way, and we're really hopeful that this coordination effort will really be helpful before we get into the warmer months of summer.

Thanks.

So I think for SPU, we have a number of programs already at play in many of these neighborhoods.

And we had a conversation, Chief Green and I, yesterday about the fact that what's different about this action is that we'll be able to align those services so that his officers do have someone to turn to when they're asked questions about Litter for example or blight or illegal dumping and those kinds of things that fall under our purview We do know that litter has plays a major part in how people feel about their community And so we are very mindful of that and you know, we've established quite a few programs here recently to help combat some of that a couple that I would mention are We have an encampment trash pilot.

I think you guys are familiar with that.

That's been a very successful program.

We established a needles and sharps collection program as well, which is also an extremely successful program.

It's actually become a benchmark program.

We've consulted recently for the city of New York.

Phoenix and a couple other cities as well on how we've run and managed that program to very successful levels.

So those are the kinds of things that we'll bring during this effort.

I really appreciate the work that you've done as it relates specifically to the trash pilot.

I have made inquiries with HSD as it relates to their navigation teamwork and whether or not there are barriers from an operational side on the HSD side.

It's another conversation I know with SPU to expanding that pilot beyond the nine locations Currently, what I would like to see is I would like to see navigation team members actually delivering those bags to more locations, encouraging people to use the bags so that you guys can pick them up.

And I want to find out more from, again, from the HSD side if there are operational barriers to doing that because I think I think picking up the garbage is incredibly important to mitigate some of the public health threats that Councilmember Mosqueda was talking about earlier.

In the Times today, they talked a little bit about the collection of garbage by SPU and based on information that they say they received from SPU, the encampment cleanups are resulting in a much smaller amount of garbage being picked up, going from 6.4 million pounds in 2017 to, even though we're only a little ways into the year, compared to full year last year, let's say, 2.23 million pounds.

I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about the huge disparity there because, again, the thing I hear most about is less about the presence of people in tents and more about the garbage.

So, yes, the answer to that is, as you remember, early on when we really started this effort in earnest with the encampment work, we were dealing with encampments with really large structures, sometimes two-story wooden structures, garbage that had been stockpiled over time.

A lot of the encampments were in Difficult to access areas and so those areas hadn't been cleaned and so the volumes that the in those encampments at that time was just Significant and in contrast to what we see today largely in part, you know to the success again of the Encampment trash pilot which you know, we saw improved by 106%.

So in 2017 with that pilot, we went from about 240,000 pounds of garbage removed.

And last year was 490,000 pounds of garbage removed through that.

And that's specifically for the bag pilot?

Correct.

That's right.

That's good to hear.

And it's right there.

Thank you.

But it looks like, given that in 2017 you removed 6.4 million pounds of garbage, and there's less work to be done in these very, very large encampments, but yet we know that at any given time, there's about 400 distinct, unique encampment locations in the complaint database.

It looks to me like, given the ability to address the operational questions I have with the navigation team, you have the capacity to do more, because you've done more in the past.

We have, and I think, I can't answer that question fully today, but I think we could do more.

It's just a matter of, you know, the tenor and the encampments have changed from a garbage perspective.

It just, you know, over time, there's just less garbage there now compared to what we saw before.

And again, a lot of those were because we were dealing with structures, oftentimes bringing in heavy equipment to remove a lot of that material, and we're not seeing those types of activities right now.

As it relates, just to put a bow on this line of questioning, at least I think it's a bow.

I think as it relates to this particular program in particular, because it is a multidisciplinary team approach, I think it would be important for SPU and SDOT to identify what are the things that that you two as agencies have done in the context of this multidisciplinary team effort.

So I don't want to lose sight of the details of the work that you're actually going to accomplish as a result of this multidisciplinary emphasis strategy.

And so would request that you document exactly the things that you are accomplishing as part and parcel of this effort.

And so, D.O.N. is going to help in working with the mayor's office to help track that with the departments as we look at kind of the comprehensive need of communities and neighborhoods.

And even though we know this is an intensive 30-day effort and, you know, as it says up here, may continue dependent on operational needs, for us, it's a really great opportunity to really take a look at the the city community feedback loop in terms of what we're hearing from community and how we're addressing, how we're communicating back in terms of the scale of what we are doing.

And so we're going to use this as an opportunity to kind of re-solidify in some cases, in some cases expand that communication with community.

We're working in the audience here is Katherine Schubert-Knapp with FAS and CSB.

with find it fix it specifically and with CSB to see how do we take what we're doing and then kind of take it to scale a little bit.

Great.

Oh, Council Member Herbold.

Sorry, this is like, that's for you, it's my area, so I have a question, sorry.

We're not going to, we're not going to, certainly not going to turn this committee hearing into a utilities committee hearing, but I do think that, you know, this program that we're talking about has been characterized in many ways.

And one of the ways that it has been characterized is that we're going to clean up some of these neighborhoods as sort of a additional layer response to the feeling that members in these neighborhoods have about the lack of safety in those neighborhoods.

And so I do think it's important to focus on some of these more granular details around the amount of trash that we see in a lot of these neighborhoods.

Thank you.

Just one other question I have as it relates to the work that SPU has been doing with SPD.

Really, I think, helpful program, the RV remediation program.

I appreciate the approach.

Again, you're focusing on addressing the public health impacts wherein RVs are located in the same place for a very, very long period of time.

It's less of an emphasis on you know, impounding people's RVs, more an emphasis on remediating, again, the health impacts around the area.

But as we know, we're only doing seven locations a month.

We were doing only six.

The council passed a little bit of additional money in the budget to get you up to seven.

And I'm just wondering, are we gonna see those seven focused, exclusively in these seven neighborhoods or are we going to, because what you're doing now is right, is you're assessing the RV locations throughout the city.

And so, and your focus is doing those, the work for those seven remediations that you do every month on the areas that most desperately need the help.

And so I'm just, In our emphasis, I don't want other neighborhoods who might have big problems with RVs to kind of lose out if we're still only doing seven and now we're focusing on doing seven in the seven neighborhoods that we've identified.

No, the RV program, and we haven't discussed it outside of here, but it's supposed to, you know, stay as is.

So that program flexes, as you know, because RVs do move.

And so the design of that program was to meet the need wherever it is.

We could have an overlap with the communities in this effort, but the intent is not to remove the efforts that are ongoing with the RV pilot to move them over to this effort, although they could overlap.

Can I come in on this?

So I got to say I've been so impressed by SPU's RV pilot.

It is They are so organized and they collect data that informs kind of what we're doing.

The data that I see that's coming from SPU says most of their cleanups have been in the Soto neighborhood, which is one of the identified neighborhoods.

There is a protocol, a scoring protocol that's involved there where they get input from the police department, parking enforcement, other agencies that bump a site up or down on that list.

It's the same thing with HSD's navigation team.

So I think I've said before, we have not made any requests to rewire those protocols because I think those protocols were put in place for fairness and equity for everyone across the city.

So I don't think it would be to our benefit to kind of rewire that just for this program.

Okay, so next in the presentation agenda was to sort of go through the neighborhoods.

We did just want to start off with one of the key messaging points here to make sure everyone understands sort of how this is going to play out, is while the selection was based on, as we mentioned earlier, a collection of information.

Where is the police department hearing from the community?

What are we hearing from our officers?

What are other city departments hearing?

What are we hearing in neighborhood walks, both before and as part of this?

Where this goes the rest of the month is going to be a lot neighborhood-driven.

as Agenacy mentioned yesterday, they saw something right on the walk, and that's the idea here.

We use the data and the information, the feedback we had from official sort of administrative data and other interactions with the community, but a lot of the what happens and how it happens and where work is prioritized is going to be driven by what's heard in these walks and just continued engagement as Chief Green mentioned as officers are walking down the street shaking hands with business owners they're going to hear what the issues are so you know a lot of this is not coming in with a we're fixing that that and that we're you know looking for the community to help do that feedback of what are their priorities And how can we all work together to do that?

And so yesterday was the South Ballard.

And just to sort of tell the story, this displays nicely on the computer, a little blurry up top.

So South Ballard is one of our micro-community policing plans.

The map is that boundary.

The hotspots, the colors are just police department data showing where the concentration of reported crime is within that neighborhood.

Sort of just where the most busy locations if you could see as you could see on this map These are a long thoroughfares a lot of time.

These are associated with shopping center areas where there might be Elevated rates of car prowl or other sort of shoplift and other information and so generally what we saw when we were starting to figure out a Well, when we were hearing both in CSTAT and in neighborhood walks and emails the chief receives and things we hear from Council Member O'Brien's office, South Ballard was continuing to feel that there was a lot going on.

When we look at the data, 2018 saw an increase over 2017. So far in 2019, we've made some good progress, but knowing that this is definitely a neighborhood that as the weather gets nicer, people are out, it's very active.

Very you know great for walking the street having lunch out of one of the restaurants hanging out in the park But we know that increases activity so we really wanted that was how from the police department perspective it made sense for this is a place where we wanted to sort of hold the ground we were winning and It made sense then also looking at the CSB information and talking with our partners.

They get a lot of complaints and ask for assistance through the various community systems for finding a fix at NCSB in this area.

And so that was sort of the story with South Ballard and why that's one of the focus areas.

Council Member Bagshaw.

Thank you.

Chris, I'm a little astonished here when we focus on South Ballard, 11% increase in crime, and earlier we were talking about statistics and people sort of disbelieving them.

11% is a pretty big jump, and we've been hearing from Mike Stewart and others.

One thing I don't see here is your discussion about shoplifting.

Businesses have said to us just repeatedly that they see some smash and grabs, jumping in, stealing whatever, running outside with it, turning around the corner, selling it for cents on the dollar.

Can you talk a little bit to me about what's going on with shoplifting not included here, is that part of the 11%?

What are you thinking?

Because obviously, if larceny theft is going up here in Ballard, but it overall and citywide is coming down, that means that Ballard's taking a pretty big hit.

So it is included in that 11%.

That's overall crime.

I could get the specific.

We didn't want to make this a huge data presentation, so we could have done the call out for every neighborhood.

But we do know there are specific locations, there are specific stores that come up when we talk about repeat locations in Seastead.

that people are frequently walking out with stuff, whether it's a shoplift or a commercial robbery if store security has physical interaction with the person who then successfully steals the item.

So that's where we've seen an increase in a lot of these commercial density areas where we are seeing either the shoplift or it becomes a commercial robbery because security intervenes trying to prevent the shoplift.

We have seen some of those increases, which is a lot of Chief Greening's folks working with those store owners and security teams about how to do this.

CEPTED, you know, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, maybe don't have the highly desirable item right next to the door.

Just ways you can do store design and other tactics so that you can decrease the likelihood of someone stealing from your store.

That's one of the responses.

And a lot of that is the education, is knowing the folks to talk to, knowing the security officers, because the officers walk the sidewalk and say, hey, we're here every day.

I would just say that I think that's a great point, Council Member Bagshaw, that you're bringing up and highlighting.

I think that's been the, while I appreciate understanding as a citywide representative, the citywide, state of affairs as it relates to crime rates.

The danger of just looking at it from a citywide perspective is that there are certainly neighborhoods throughout the city that have very, very, very low crime rates that impact those numbers because of sort of the lopsidedness, right?

Certain neighborhoods have much more.

crime, other neighborhoods have almost none, and so the citywide statistics give us a sense of how we're doing citywide, but it isn't a good lens to use as we think about specific hotspots within specific neighborhoods, because it's not a completely accurate reflection of what's happening in discrete parts of the city.

And that's exactly why we have the micro-community plans, because I think a lot of jurisdictions around the country primarily may focus on their precinct, and just because the nature of our city, our precincts, even our smallest one, is pretty large, and it'd be hard to operationally deploy that way.

You know, we have functional geographic organization below that, our sectors and our beats, but addressing it through a neighborhood perspective, I think has really been a huge asset for the department and understanding and being able to work with other city departments who weren't aligned to our beats and our sectors.

It allows for this collaboration for when we talk about, you know, South Ballard, we all are sort of talking about the same thing and we know what the issues are.

So I think we're totally aware of, we got to be aware of what's going on in every neighborhood in the city and we routinely look at it that way.

And if I can just quick follow up, Chief Greening, what you mentioned earlier about having the officers visible on the street, whether they're on bikes or whether they're on foot patrol, that matters so much to all of us.

But businesses tell me having your visible officers come in and say hello and shake hands with the manager and People recognize that we're out there and doing what we can.

And what you were saying, Andres, about the neighborhood outreach as well, this is making such a huge difference.

And Ken, cleaning up the garbage, what I hear from friends in Ballard in particular is that they just so respect the fact that we're there, visible, cleaning it up, making it feel better, even if it's going up 11%.

It is the fact that it looks better that matters a lot.

And of course, with SDOT, the work you're doing about tree bush trimming on sidewalks and getting neighbors to do that, that's making a difference too.

So I'm very appreciative of the efforts and know we need to do more, of course, but I think we're on the right track that's making people feel we're responding, we're listening and responding.

Okay, I know we've got several more slides to go through and I just want to acknowledge that these slides are designed to respond to one of my questions around sort of how are these neighborhoods chosen.

So I appreciate the additional data around the why.

So let's go ahead and go through these as quickly as we can because I'm cognizant of the fact that Council Member Baggio and I are supposed to be in a Labor Relations Policy Committee meeting right now, that we are seven minutes late for, so maybe if we can wrap up in about ten minutes, that would be helpful.

Yes, Madam Chair.

Thank you all.

So next was Fremont.

These are in no particular order.

They may actually sort of be geographical from top to bottom.

I think that's how it plays out.

But Fremont last from 18 to 17 had a 52% increase in their overall crime.

This was something the department was acutely aware of.

There was a surge in activity around the patrols, the Aurora Bridge Park right there.

As I constantly remind Chief Best, correlation is not causation.

There was a large encampment of many, many, many tents in that area, just an elevated number of people and activity in the neighborhood.

And so we worked throughout the year.

to address some of the issues and have, again, much like Ballard, the start of 19, we're seeing the numbers go in the right direction.

But again, especially lower Fremont, in the commercial district, again, where you see some of these, the red spots, the density, are, again, those commercial areas.

We have a lot of restaurants and bars and shopping centers where there is a lot of activity.

And we just want to make sure that we, again, hold the progress we've made so far in 2019. And we also saw, in talking with our city partners, It has one of, Fremont has, I think, if not the highest, the highest number of graffiti reports in the CSB system.

And so a lot of work sort of to be done environmentally and from a policing perspective of just outreach.

You know, a lot of this is based on the, we're very aware of the research that having officers, especially soft, quote unquote, not doing enforcement, just doing exactly what this is designed to do, being out there, shaking hands, being present, communicating with folks does have a significant effect on crime and specifically on disorder street level crime.

It doesn't have to result in enforcement to have that effect.

There's a significant body of research that talks to that.

So it's exactly what the issues we're seeing and how it ties into the issues that the other departments are seeing.

It makes sense in these neighborhoods and Fremont is one of those.

Pioneer Square, now that Council Member Baxhaw has left.

Again, a neighborhood that has consistently, you know, it's a center of a lot of activity.

We've had both excellent and not so excellent years in the past probably five years of different sort of changes have happened in the neighborhood.

Last year there was a 28% increase compared to 2017. This year there's also been an uptick in some shots fired.

So it's a very busy neighborhood.

It's always one of those where if we're going to be deploying extra resources, It's hard for Pioneer Square to not be in that conversation.

It's important for the city.

It's important for tourism industry, the business owners, the people who live there and work there.

And so it inevitably is one of our busier communities and gets a lot of attention.

And it just made sense in looking at this and the trends we were seeing.

And also a lot of, I don't know if any of the partners want to talk about what they hear from Pioneer Square beyond the CSB stuff.

But I know there's a lot of sort of infrastructure work constantly going on in one of our oldest neighborhoods as well.

Yeah, I think in conversations with Council Member Baxhaw around some of the even vacant buildings and some of the activity that happens there in Pioneer Square, we're acutely aware.

In conversations with the Alliance for Pioneer Square, the Residence Council, and other partners.

And can I just quickly add, so for Pioneer Square and Ballard, we were there last year, and we've been emphasizing in those two areas since the first of the year.

So the budget breakdown that you'll get from our staff to central staff, it'll have the breakdown of where we've been prior to this, but the difference is after May 2nd, we have the other departments.

I do want to give a shout out to SDOT as an example, last year, In front of the Chief Sealth Club, Chief Sealth Club, there were some planners there.

And we got numerous complaints of drug dealing, fights, people standing in the bike lane.

So I reached out to Ms. Atkins.

They figured out another option, removed the planners, and the situation disappeared.

I think that was much more effective and simple than doing undercover buy bust or other large operations that will net what.

So that's just an example of how we can work together.

Yeah, I appreciate you highlighting that as an example of how we can modify the built environment as a longer term strategy to really disrupt negative behavior that is place-based, that is geographic in nature.

I certainly have a lot of interest as we talk about Third Avenue in particular about how we can radically transform the environment there with some hopefully additional investments that will actually create that same level of opportunity to invite more positive behavior on those four corners.

And happy to talk to you all about that offline.

And speaking of, Madam Chair.

There we go.

Perfect segue.

So we have downtown commercial is the whole neighborhood.

The focus in this particular pilot program is really the Pike Pine Third Avenue core where you see most of those red spots.

I think if any folks, if you asked any folks generally aware of the neighborhood, especially the bike officers or any officer, they would know without even having to zoom into the street what those spots are.

It's the larger commercial establishments, again, where there's a lot of theft or theft that turns into commercial robbery.

Overall, actually, crime is down.

In the downtown commercial corridor including if you drill down even further into the Pike Pine area But we have been seeing an uptick in some aggravated assaults probably Generally around sort of more of the nightlife activity and some individuals in crisis.

So And it's also just it's a busy area.

It's again much like Pioneer Square downtown commercial and If you zoomed out on where all of our hotspots are and made it citywide, it would be in downtown commercial.

It's the concentration of individuals, especially during the daytime.

A lot of interaction amongst people, a lot of commercial establishments and restaurants.

There's just a lot of activity.

Again, a place where, especially in this corridor, if we're going to look to address the the crime numbers, perception of fear of crime, and just general experience of the populace with the city.

It's hard not to put resources here.

And we do see a lot of also downtown area CSB complaints.

So that's the pipe pine that you want to talk more.

So in this particular area, we have tried emphasis patrols in the past.

The version of that was referred to as the nine and a half block strategy.

And while I can appreciate that there was a different flavor to that one, because it was coordination with federal agencies, specifically related to particular type of crime, I still want to have an opportunity to hear from you, Chief, or anyone else, sort of why and how this is different than the nine and a half block strategy that was utilized and I think it was 2016. And I'm primarily, my questioning around that is primarily motivated by the fact that, you know, we did that strategy in 2016 and I think it's fair to say that the public safety issues in that particular footprint have not improved.

And so, although I think there was some temporary short-term relief related to the nine and a half block strategy enforcement aspects, you know, it certainly is just that.

It's a short-term solution, not a long-term solution.

And I, again, am really interested and motivated to making sure that we are creating pathways to not just meet short-term, immediate public safety needs, but that we're creating a pathway to more sustainable, long-term strategies that are going to prevent it, you know, environments like Third Avenue between Pike and Pine to get to the point that there are, that it's currently at again.

I'll just speak to, I predated my time in this role.

My perception of what's going on now is I think Westlake pretty much has been a success by activating that.

It's a good example of a long-term strategy.

However, now with the buses out of the tunnel, 3rd Avenue has always been a challenge because you have people, a cross-section of people that come together to use public transit, and they have to wait for the buses, so they come together.

And there's that opportunity for friction, so to speak.

That's a challenge.

And going forward, I would love to get input from various folks on how we can kind of Look for long-term solutions there with so many people traversing that corridor.

And then we have the tourist industry that's coming back and forth on Pike Pine.

That mix, it's hard.

We have to up the presence there with officers.

It would be great if we have a storefront there.

I understand real estate is expensive.

But.

We should we should talk about that.

Yeah.

I mean another idea just for like this emphasis you're talking about cross department.

I know SDOT has vision.

So to raise officer presence, we have the buses on 3rd Avenue.

We're going to raise officer presence by enforcing the bus lane, having traffic officers out there.

That's a more visible presence.

So you're taking care of traffic safety with block the box, the bus lane enforcement.

You have more officers in the area.

to deter crime.

We can still do our undercover narcotics enforcement, but I would love to get suggestions and help on 3rd Avenue.

It's been a challenge since I've lived here.

And you know during the last budget cycle we had an opportunity as a City Council to support an effort that was advanced by Councilmember Johnson and Councilmember O'Brien around some initial investments to support work around reimagining Third Avenue.

I know that the that I believe it's OPCD has been doing some community robust community engagement around identifying how to really transform 3rd Avenue to take head on some of the issues that, some of the observations you've just shared with us, Chief.

And I know that the Downtown Seattle Association has been a good partner to the city in that regard and has recently released a very thick report of their ideas and suggestions around how we can change the environment and the mobility on 3rd Avenue that would, I believe, have significant impacts to improving public safety issues, similarly to what we did in Westlake.

And the activation of public spaces is a key portion of that, ongoing activation of public spaces.

Yeah.

Council Member Pacheco.

Just again, I appreciate the work and the difficult job SPD does and the collaborative effort to the strategy.

I think when I heard through public comment was just really talking to the in-person or the person crime, which was a 8% increase.

It was presented in slide three and not to skip ahead, but also to reflect on Councilmember Gonzalez's letter about how the neighborhoods were selected.

When I look at the data from a Seattle Times article that was on the 28th of June last year, the fear of crime in North Seattle was highest in the University District, which is higher than Ballard and higher than Fremont.

The crimes per thousand was also higher in the U District than it was in Fremont.

I just say this because I think it's the demand and my longer term concern is obviously with the U District and the perception of the U District with the light rail station that's going to open up in a couple of years.

all throughout the district, what I hear is the U District's unsafe, the U District's unsafe, I'm not gonna go there.

I don't go there for commerce, I don't go there, I'm just not gonna go there.

For the young people that are there, they experience it every day, but, you know, and I mention this because I think that there's, a need to change the perception for the U-District with regards to the safety of the people there, the businesses there, so that more people feel safe to utilize the U-District or the University U-District light rail station when it comes online.

But I also encourage it to If there's an opportunity to revisit which neighborhoods are selected or which neighborhoods to include, that the U District is included.

Because I think it's an opportunity for us to really, kind of like as you stated earlier, Westlake has been a success.

And as was said earlier, given the data, it's hard to not put the resources there.

And just to pile on to District 4, my office did a little bit of digging into number of calls and what the calls were received for, which again, setting aside whether or not there were charges or prosecutions as a result, there were still calls related to public safety received.

And in Roosevelt, in Ravenna neighborhood, there's some significant increases.

as well.

So when we look at, for example, calls related to narcotics, calls went from 54 to 76, 54 in 2017, and up to 76 in 2018. Robbery calls in 2017 were 35. In 2018, they were 52. Shots fired in 2017 was 15. It went up to 22 in 2018. And reports of threats and harassment went from 14 in 2017 to 24 in 2018. And, you know, again, part, I think the line of questioning by Council Member Pacheco is part and parcel of some of the other comments that we've heard from.

folks in different neighborhoods about feeling like they were left out of the opportunity to also receive additional law enforcement services to address their public safety concerns, which have been going on for years and years and years and years.

I appreciate the line of questioning of Council Member Pacheco, and maybe you can talk a little bit more in the context of the selection of the neighborhoods, you know, sort of what you are saying to other neighborhoods who are saying, why were we left out of the equation?

So I'll start off with that.

So just specifically for the U District, UW PD command staff, Usually, most CSTATs attend our CSTATs every two weeks.

We have a lot of coordination.

We just went to a meeting a few months ago with their entire executive staff there at the school, the president, to talk about crime issues around the school.

It's an open campus.

Another challenge that they've had is there's a number of shelters just on the other side of 15th Northeast.

And people that are homeless are, Back and forth, there's predatory drug dealing on the ave, and we are familiar with the challenges there.

We've been there.

Our bicycle team in North Precinct rotates through there quite often.

The nightlife is a challenge.

We want to get our staffing up to a point where we don't have to emphasize all the areas.

But I just want to mention, last year, We did do a university district emphasis and I, regardless of the program the mayor's office has started, I can't speak for the other departments, but history and my experience tells me we will be back in the U District in 2019. And as far as other- I'm sure that Council Member Pacheco will assure that that's the case.

And just to cover when people- Appreciate the love.

Yeah.

When you get the budget breakout from our staff, you will see, I won't give you numbers, but the biggest expenditure of overtime hours was actually nightlife in the East Precinct, robbery emphasis in the South Precinct, Aurora North, Northgate, We were there in Alki, so these neighborhoods are all in the top 10 for last year where we were.

I think, again, let me reiterate that what's specific about this plan is that we'll be in the U District, but we have to reassess and the executive will make a decision as whether or not the other departments will come.

Does that make sense?

Yep.

Yep.

Great.

Thank you.

Next up was Soto.

So it was busy last year.

It has continued to be busy this year.

I think Chief Green can talk to the resources.

The South Precinct has poured into Soto.

And a lot of, also as was mentioned earlier with SDOT, a lot of the RV remediation pilot work is in Soto.

So it is hitting on a lot of sort of the city metrics, hearing from the BIAs, hearing from business owners, hearing from all sorts of individuals.

about need for more presence and activity in Soto.

So, you know, Soto I think was an easy selection as a location just given how it hits sort of on everything from every aspect of the team.

I don't know if anybody wants to speak about.

Yeah, I think that's accurate.

Georgetown, again, they had an increase in crime.

They've been having also a lot of the RV issues do sometimes spill down into Georgetown, a lot of illegal dumping reports.

And I think there was some purposeful, sort of speaking to the earlier question, if we had just done a straight ranking, because we can't do it like this sort of thing all at once in all 57 neighborhoods.

If we had done a straight ranking by percent change, it likely would have been all small neighborhoods with small numbers because it would have been easier to have a large percent change just mathematically.

If we had done it by volume of change, it would have been all the big neighborhoods.

So some of this is the SPD data.

Some of it is other department data.

Some of it is feedback from the community.

Some of it is feedback from the BIAs.

It's the collaboration of that information.

And then also not just picking the large neighborhoods.

I think part of that Georgetown makes sense on the numbers, but it also, it's a smaller neighborhood that often doesn't stand out.

So I think that was part of the selection of the Georgetown.

Yeah, and I'll just add that in this one in South Park.

are good examples of many years of kind of organizing and coordination amongst multiple departments that resulted in both public safety task forces, action plans that we saw as an opportunity to say, okay, we have this intent coming around, yes, emphasis, but how do we leverage other investments that have been happening over the last couple years?

And also, how do we continue the momentum in these two efforts?

And then the same issue, and we talked already a lot about this with Council Member Herbold about South Park.

There has been continued work there.

It goes up and down in terms of the crime that we're responding to.

heard directly from community members who have reached out to the department before about a sense of things were scaling up.

So we wanted to short circuit that, because it can become very busy while small in number and size.

For the size of the community, they can have an elevated amount of activity.

And there were some folks telling us they saw the signs they had seen before.

And so that was part of that decision.

So South Park, unlike some of the other neighborhoods, has a pretty significant density of vacant or abandoned buildings.

And so when you travel on Cloverdale, you'll see a bunch of houses that are boarded up.

And I think Council Member Herbold has done excellent and a lot of work around monitoring of those vacant buildings.

And I noticed that part of the multidisciplinary team doesn't include Anybody from SDCI with experience around vacant buildings, can you talk a little bit about why they weren't included?

So we're in active conversations with SDCI, with SPD, through some of these other initiatives that I've talked about, either the Public Safety Task Force or in some cases the Duwamish Valley Action Report.

But in very ongoing and active conversations around vacant buildings, as you know, there is quite the language barrier in South Park.

And so we are active in the use of our community liaisons in partnering with SDCI and SBD to kind of have conversations with those property owners that are sometimes not in English.

And I'm looking at the specific South Park plan from the southwest precinct.

It calls out that our city attorney liaison for the precinct will be responsible for monitoring.

those vacant properties and whether or not they turn into nuisance properties.

And I think he's been pretty effective in the past at bringing the appropriate folks to the table to handle those issues.

Okay, great.

I would just keep asking that we keep a close connection to that, because I know that that, particularly for South Park, has been a top concern for members of the community and really appreciate that intersection an opportunity to collaborate a little bit further as well.

So I think that brings us to the end of the presentation.

Is there anything you want to say about next steps?

So we are in these walks through Thursday.

And then at that point, we are assessing the feedback that we're getting.

We're doing that now, but working with staff to make sure how are we addressing it.

And then in constant conversation with community about this is what we heard.

Is this what you kind of meant to tell us?

Is there anything else?

And then starting to this be an action-driven approach.

From DON's perspective and kind of working with across the team, Again use this as a launchpad of better kind of community collaboration around some of these improvements So that this isn't necessarily just where the conversation stops, but how we kind of continue to improve the feedback loop We're gonna be working with departments working with the mayor's office around metrics of implementation.

I know that was part of what Your letter council member said and so we are happy to come and be in conversation with you around that.

I

Great.

That's a good transition to what I was going to do next, which was I was going to go through my little checkmark list on my letter to see what was answered and what wasn't answered.

You all knew that was coming.

You know me well enough to know that I keep my receipts.

So what I haven't heard yet discussed here today is really sort of the fundamental question about what the theory of change is here in terms of like what are we trying to accomplish and how are we measuring whether we rose to the occasion in terms of meeting that desired outcome.

And so we spent a lot of time talking about some of the basic concepts around the reality of crime and how crime has increased in these seven neighborhoods that you all have that the executive has identified as initial focus.

What I still haven't heard yet, and Andres, you just mentioned this, is that you all are still working on identifying what the metrics will be in order to determine what success is.

And what I would ask as part of that is that you all also consider clearly articulating what you hope to be out, sort of what the theory of change is as a result of doing this multidisciplinary approach.

Again, the bedrock and the foundation to me seems to be the concept of the emphasis patrol, which is led and ordinarily utilized by the Seattle Police Department.

And the addition of other agencies on top of that in a coordinated fashion is a build upon sort of that bedrock.

And so I wanna get an understanding of What is the theory of change here as it relates to public safety and how we are meeting the needs of public safety within these neighborhoods?

And I want to get an understanding of whether or not we were actually successful in developing that.

And we'd like to get a sense from you, anybody at the table, about when you anticipate having that available for us.

So I will acknowledge that and then add one other thing here is that, as was mentioned, these walks and issues have been community-led.

And so one of the reasons why it's kind of like we have to see what is identified is because as we go through the walks, different neighborhoods and communities will identify different things.

You know, as I mentioned, Thursday is the last walk.

We're going to meet as a staff to kind of determine and see what the list of requests are.

And then we can be in conversations with council about kind of what next steps are in timelines.

But again, as we have said, our intent here is to be action driven and collaborative.

So that will be reflected in our action plan.

Great.

And I'm happy to sort of make some additional time in committee to sort of hear how that plan has come to fruition and what the feedback loop has been so that we have a better understanding of what's going to happen on day 31 when this particular approach runs its course.

So the next thing that I heard a commitment to give us information about overtime and other resources that are going to be used, and so I just want to reiterate that while I don't yet have an answer at the table about how much overtime is estimated to be spent on this particular program, I'm asking that that information be provided to Council central staff Greg Doss can be the recipient of that information and he will share it with our office and Would like to get that information Sooner rather than later.

So chief.

Do you have a sense of when you can provide that?

Oh, I touch base with our budget people Mark Baird just today and those reports are pretty easy to run.

We have specific tracking numbers for each Neighborhood.

Yeah, I appreciate I appreciate knowing that there's specific numbers attached to each of the neighborhoods that we can sort of So I'm going to bookend temporally here and look forward to getting that information from you soon.

And we'll follow up accordingly.

Thank you.

You know, I think the last thing that we didn't directly touch on but I understand is sort of happening as we speak is the community engagement.

I'd just like to get a better sense of who is being engaged in community and whether the three walks or I think four walks that you're doing in some of these neighborhoods are the extent of the community engagement.

Yeah, this is where it builds off a lot of the conversations that DON and other departments are having day after day.

Some of the concern that we've heard from community is that, and why I think this is such a beneficial, different type of way of looking at community follow through is, you know, each of our departments might be coming in, do the project, do the fix, and then go away until kind of the next fix.

This is an opportunity to really have that kind of continuity of service and communication.

And so as we are engaging throughout the city with neighborhood groups, community groups, advocacy groups, or CBO organizations, I see this as an ongoing conversation in terms of how we just, shift the way that we do community engagement holistically as a city.

Okay.

And I think, you know, what I would ask is that we keep track of who we're engaging within community.

Again, you know, the city is vast and diverse in its opinions and its constituencies, and I want to make sure that the community engagement that your department is leading, Andres, is reflective of that.

that variation within different perspectives as it relates to this particular issue.

I just think it's really important to make sure to elevate the voices that aren't ordinarily allowed to be elevated, particularly in the context of public safety.

And I think there are certain neighborhoods that I'm hearing from, people within certain neighborhoods that I'm hearing from that are feeling really concerned about how their neighborhoods weren't And I want to make sure that they are included in this when they are neighborhoods who have had chronic issues with gun violence, for example, and other types of really violent crime that they feel that they were also deserving of this attention.

of those concerns are addressed as well.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Any other comments or questions, Customer Pacheco?

Anything else from good folks at the table here?

I just want to respond to some of the concerns that folks have had.

We have a nightlife emphasis going on right now in the East Precinct.

Also, we've had a number of shots fired in the East Precinct.

There's a limited emphasis going on there.

As I said before, there's emphasis ongoing in Southeast Seattle, in Rainier Valley, in Rainier Beach.

on the street robberies where we've had patterns year after year of vulnerable victims, usually senior Asian folks who are just trying to get to where they're trying to go and they're being robbed on the street.

So we still have that going.

We're still working those cases.

We have not backed off of those cases.

And also, as far as West Seattle, Alki is getting warmer.

We'll be out there.

We'll be in Golden Gardens.

So that's all ongoing.

And as far as outreach, I think you know we have Chief Diaz and his bureau, and they're always making contacts with folks.

Also, my precinct captains attend the precinct advisory council meetings.

We also attend the demographic advisory council meetings.

And so we'll get that feedback, and we'll channel it.

where it needs to go and also from week to week we will be monitoring our arrests and tracking everything we do and we'll look at CSTAT and see where we're moving and we'll get all that information together at the end and deliver it to the executive.

That's great.

And I look forward to having that information eventually shared with us as well.

And then the last thing I will just say before closing us out is that there has been a temptation to tie this body of work with the prolific offenders report or with the repeat offenders issue within our criminal justice system.

And what I have heard very clearly clearly at the table today is that this is not a strategy to address those issues.

This is a strategy designed to take a much more multidisciplinary approach to addressing some more lower level types of criminal activity occurring within these seven neighborhoods.

And so I don't want folks to walk away with the impression that this is the city's answer to the reality of the issues related to repeat offenders and wanted to give you, Chief, an opportunity to just maybe say a few words about why this is not necessarily a strategy to address the repeat offender question.

No, it's not a rebuttal to those complaints.

As I said before, we've always We will make sure that we're tracking folks that we come in contact with.

And if it's a particular individual that is considered a chronic offender, we'll have conversations with Mr. Holmes' office or Mr. Satterberg's office, just like we always have.

That's great.

And, you know, as this meeting was happening down here, upstairs on the seventh floor, there was a meeting happening with the work group who's actually focusing on the repeat offenders issue.

My office and council has representation in that work group as well and really appreciate the opportunity to be able to collaborate in yet another space related to public safety to really address some of those issues.

certainly appreciate all of the work that you all are doing.

Again, appreciate you being patient with my office as we went through today's agenda.

And really wanted to thank you for your willingness to share information in a very timely, responsive way.

And I'm sure that we will stay in touch and continue to engage with each other to make sure that this program does what we hope it will do.

So thank you all so much for your work and your service, and I hope that you will send a gratitude on behalf of the City Council to all of your respective department employees.

Really appreciate all of your effort.

This is the last item on the agenda.

We are adjourned.