Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee 10/21/19

Good afternoon, everyone.

It's October 21st, 2019. This is the Budget Committee meeting.

Again, it will come to order.

The time is 326. I want to say thank you to Councilmember Gonzalez, Councilmember Sawant, Councilmember Pacheco for being here.

I'm Sally Bagshaw.

I chair this committee.

It's been a real pleasure to get us this far.

We still have about four weeks to go, but I think that things are coming together nicely.

Today, the committee is going to continue with its budget issue identification.

These are deliberations where we discuss what we call Form A's, which we have put forward.

And the Council Central staff, again, I want to say big thanks to you.

I know how much work this takes for you.

In fact, maybe I don't know how much it takes, but I know it takes a lot and really appreciate all the good work that you've been doing.

The last three days of last week, we covered a lot of ground.

We heard presentations from transportation last week or last Friday.

We also have heard from our office of housing, from our human services, for things that we know have taken a lot of time and interest up here on council.

But today we're gonna dive into the LEAD program and specifically some budgeted items for the Seattle Police Department.

So what's important to know here is that you all at the table have looked very deeply at the mayor's budget, are looking at possible opportunities for modifications or additions that our council up here wants to make.

We haven't even begun to get to the point of how we're going to pay for everything that everybody wants.

but we do want to acknowledge the fact that ideas have come forward and that you are helping us sort that out.

So, colleagues, just as a reminder, again, this is at least the 14th announcement, I think, but tomorrow night, October 22nd at 530, we're going to have another public hearing.

Everyone is invited.

We will have two minutes each for the speakers.

A group can come up for five minutes.

I will and have pledged to be here until the last person is left standing and wants to speak to us and I hope that some or all of you can join me throughout the evening.

So our first presentation today will cover the budget issues around our criminal justice system.

I want to recognize our Municipal Court Judge Shadeed.

Thank you for being here with us.

And after our presentations, then I will ask you if you would like to speak and address us.

So then we're going to hit the LEAD program, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion.

I know that there is a lot of support on this council to move forward with fully supporting the LEAD program.

And I also know that we have a limited budget and we're looking for private partners as well.

I don't know whether Lisa Dugard's going to be joining us today, but Lisa from the Public Defender's Office and Dan Satterberg, our King County Prosecuting Attorney were here last week and the week before, urging us to fully fund LEAD and just recognizing the success that it has had as part of the system-wide criminal justice reform.

So with that, if we can just dive in, I'm going to ask you, in fact, why don't we start, Allison, if you'll just start with introductions, we'll go around the table.

Allison McClain, Council Member Begshaw's office.

Thank you.

Lisa Kay, Central Staff.

Greg Doss, Council Central Staff.

Carlos Lugo, Council Central Staff.

Asha Venkatraman, Council Central staff.

Excellent.

So who's kicking us off today?

I will.

Okay, thank you.

Asha, good to see you and thanks for all your work on this.

Absolutely.

So this, as you mentioned, Chair Bagshaw, we are talking about criminal justice today and some of the reason you have all of us at the table here in a coordinated effort is because of the work that we have been doing along criminal legal system alignment.

So we're trying to do that in a more coordinated way and to break down silos, which is why you have this syzygy of staff here aligned for you.

So I'll be discussing two issues today.

Initial identification, we'll be talking about the non-shelter related pilots related to high barrier, the high barrier individuals work group as well as LEAD.

But to start us off, you'll see on page one of your memo, and as shown on the table up on the screen, we've taken a select number of the criminal justice related additions in the Mayor's 2020 proposed budget.

Most of these are provided for context, so you can see the sort of breadth of what we're doing upstream and downstream.

Each of these are described in a little more detail on pages two and three of your memo, but I'll just run down them very quickly.

In the city attorney's office, we're looking at $100,000 to add to their current base budget to expand pre-filing diversion contract that we have with Choose 180. That will allow the city attorney's office to contract for 12 rather than 6 of the workshops that they do.

The next item is in the Human Services Department.

It's ramped down funding for the safety RFP.

I believe this was discussed during the HSD session.

It's just one-time funds to support those organizations that did not receive awards through the 2020 RFP process.

The next item is on-site nurses, also an HSD issue.

This would place four nurses at five emergency shelters and permanent supportive housing facilities.

There is $40,000 for earners call line through HSD as well.

This would develop and operate the call line for homeless services agencies.

There is $400,000 related to Enhance Health One at the fire department, which enhances the Health One mobile integrated health service.

There is $310,000 to fund additional contracted mental health professionals for the police department's crisis response unit.

The next item you'll see is $2.9 million for the high barrier pilot programs.

$2.4 million of that is for the enhanced shelter in King County's jail, West Wing.

The remaining $533,000 is divided between three proposed pilots, a case conferencing pilot, a rapid reentry connector in the King County Jail, and a high barrier probation program through Seattle Municipal Courts.

If you'll turn to page four, you'll see what's reflected on the screen.

I'm gonna turn it over to Carlos to talk through what this is.

Thank you.

The 2020 proposed budget additions are depicted in the graphic that's on the screen.

It's the sequential intercept model, or SIM, and this model was developed to provide a conceptual visualization when considering the interface between the criminal legal system and the mental health system.

But it's useful beyond its original intent since it maps out how the city is investing its resources upstream of involvement in the system, as well as further downstream within the system itself.

The SIM was also the general framework that the high barrier individual work group used in its deliberations.

So the SIM maps out the criminal legal system by breaking it into six intercepts, which correspond to key points within the legal system where interventions can prevent individuals from entering or penetrating deeper into the system.

So for example, LEAD is an intercept one where law enforcement officers can either arrest or divert individuals away from processing through the traditional criminal legal system.

If there aren't any questions at this stage, we'll move into issue identification.

Before you move, I'm just trying to find this overview.

Hold on just a sec.

I'm on your...

Thank you.

It just popped up on my...

So we don't have it in the paper product in front of us, but we do have it here on the screen now.

Thank you.

It's on page four of the memo, this particular diagram, if that's helpful.

Not on my page four, so...

It's on my page.

I think mine is.

So you have two handouts.

You have one which are the agenda memos, and then you have copies of the slides.

Oh, great.

Four of 13. Thank you.

All right, so can you just walk us through this briefly?

Through this diagram?

Yeah.

We don't need a deep dive, but just talk about the continuum, because this is what I've been asking for, is to make sure that our money is being spent in a systematic, thoughtful way, and that we've got the results identified of what we're trying to accomplish by these expenditures.

So this is, I think, one of the better models that I've seen, so maybe you could just spend a moment looking at it, talking about it.

So in intercept zero, it's community services.

Essentially, that's the intercept where community involvement, community-based programming would come into play.

that would hopefully preempt an individual from becoming involved in the formal criminal legal system.

So in today's presentation, that includes the safety RFP ramp down funding, it includes the onsite nurses, it includes the nurse call line, and then the health one.

And intercept one is when individuals start becoming involved with the system.

And so that would be, for instance, at the point of arrest, decisions that would be made.

Here it includes the crisis response team at the Seattle Police Department, the case conferencing pilot, as well as lead diversion.

In intercept two, it's initial detention, initial court hearings, that also includes pre-filing diversion programs such as the one that- Carl, excuse me for a second.

Before you move on into two, where is our crisis solutions connection that we've been talking about for several, several meetings now.

This is Allie Franklin.

We funded her to a tune of, I think, $400,000, $450,000 last year.

So, it should be in the community service piece.

I'm not seeing it unless you're thinking of crisis care continuum as being that.

And that's a significant piece of this.

Jeff, our very helpful central staffer who is here, says there's not additional funding for that in this current proposed budget, which is why it's not portrayed here.

It's just the addition, it's just the changes.

Yeah, my understanding is that this figure that we're looking at are just ads as proposed by the mayor in her 2020 proposed budget.

Only those items are appearing on this figure, this diagram, is that correct?

Yes, that's correct.

Thank you for that.

Other things that we have funded that might ostensibly be able to be shuffled and organized into this figure, that exercise has not been done.

Yes, this particular presentation is focused very narrowly on the proposed ads.

Thank you for that.

Now, has there been or will there be a model that includes all of our investments, the ones that are current, the ones that we have an opportunity to deal with?

Because this is exactly what we need for the systems approach that we've been talking about, that we've got the community services, the upstream investments.

And we've talked about nurse family partnership as being one of the most important things that we can do to support families.

I would just love to be able to see that all of it is pulled in one place.

So I have a sense that my buddy Jeff has already done some of this, but it would be great if we could get the team to make sure that we've got a real view.

Yeah.

Can I chime in?

This is a body of work that I've been leading in my committee and sort of a follow-up to the statement of legislative intent that the council supported during last budget process around overall alignment of the criminal justice system.

So I had an opportunity to meet with Carlos, who was hired specifically to help the city council look at all of these bodies of work to help us get a better understanding of where we're spending our dollars, how we're spending our dollars, and whether it's being effective in terms of restorative justice goals and ultimately reducing the negative impact on communities of color who are being disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.

Just had a really good opportunity to talk to Carlos about his work plan between now and the end of next year effectively to really take a look at a couple different phases of work.

One is to make sure that we have an identified set of principles and values that everybody can live with, if not agree to, but live with.

And the second part of that work, will be to do this type of intercept evaluation to identify in which buckets along the spectrum do our current investments fall into to give us as policymakers and as the ultimate budget authority for the city a better sense of where we're investing our dollars and what kind of outcomes we can expect to see from those investments.

I think it'll give us a really clear and important opportunity to meaningfully evaluate whether we are staying true to our commitment to get further upstream to i.e. in this case to the left of the continuum or if we are continuing to double down on the back end of the of the continuum which is really you know focused on corrections and in jail.

Great.

Well, thank you for doing that.

Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

I'm actually interested in intercept zero and what's, you know, where the investments, what we call upstream.

And I know that our human services department has given us something like this in the past, but I really would like to see it laid out so we can see where those connections are.

And then if Councilmember Gonzales is going to go forward with intercept one and two,

Next year we will have we will begin to have the frame that we really need so if I can just ask I just want to flag that I'm not sure that we have the capacity to do that in the Construct of this budget season and that's what I was trying to flag for you chair Bagshaw is that?

That that is that is That is phased work that needs to occur.

The first phase needs to be an exercise around defining what the principles and values are that this city is committed to as it relates to our criminal justice system, and then beginning the process of evaluating the city's investments from that, using that same language.

in order to be able to file our investments accordingly from intercept zero to intercept five.

And so I'm not sure if you're suggesting that there be a council central staff analysis of intercept zero.

I'm suggesting that that may be premature given that we haven't gone through phase one of the work around making sure that we have collective agreed upon language that allows us an opportunity to understand exactly how we are collectively defining things that should appropriately be considered intercept zero versus somewhere else on this continuum.

Thank you for that clarification.

Councilmember Herbold has done quite a bit of work around this with theory of change.

I just don't want to lose that.

So if we could make sure that we're all, we understand what we're investing in now and I know that the Human Services Department, we've asked for this every single year.

So I just, let's just see what we can get and have a good look at this as we're making some decisions here in the next few weeks.

Councilmember Herbold.

I just have a question about how we're defining intercept zero.

If this is, if this approach, and I understand we're, it's ongoing and it's going to be phased work and there'll be continued development probably of not only the number of dollars in the bucket, but how we're defining the definitions.

But the concept of intercept zero seems to, I'm just concerned that we are characterizing those dollars as dollars that, if spent, will have the impact of reducing criminal justice-involved individuals.

I think the recipients of these particular services, I don't want to, by merit of this exercise, be assuming that the recipient of the services under Intercept Zero are people who have the potential to be criminally justice-involved individuals.

So I'd like to really understand a little bit more, not now necessarily, but more about how we're defining that particular category.

Why don't you please proceed because there's a lot here for us to go through and we can continue to talk about this.

Absolutely.

So that actually leads directly into the conversation about this first issue, which is the non-shelter related high barrier individuals pilot programs.

As you'll see up on the screen, we've categorized those at the moment.

The case conferencing is the second item down under intercept one.

The rapid re-entry connector pilot is under intercept four and the high barrier, excuse me, probation pilot is under intercept five.

And we've listed enhanced shelter at the bottom as not intercept specific, but just as a, where it would land if we were to put that in the chart.

And so, as you'll see on, this is page three of the memo, what's up on the table, excuse me, what's up on the screen right now.

As I mentioned before, there's $150,000 allocated for the case conferencing, $213,000 for the rapid reentry connector, and $170,000 on the hybrid probation piece.

And so in conducting just a preliminary analysis of how these pilots were developed and the actual proposal of the pilots at their current level of detail, the assessment at this point, which gives rise to the options that are listed on page five of your memo, is that the actual funding that's set aside in the reserves for the recommendations makes sense at this time.

It's not entirely clear that these are the appropriate recommendations with which to move forward and that these recommendations are the ones upon which that funding should be spent.

Depending on what level of detail you'd like me to get into, I'm happy to talk about why that's the case.

There's essentially three things.

The first is that the pilots were developed in a process that was separate from the alignment work that Council Member Gonzalez mentioned.

Those were not done in the same...

process moving forward.

And so there are differences between the drivers that Council identified last year and the ways in which this pilot, excuse me, the ways in which this working group conducted that work.

Secondly, it's not clear whether and to what extent this pilot, any of the pilots align with Council policy and intent.

One, because details of the pilot development are still in process, but also because the alignment system work is still moving.

And lastly, it's not entirely clear how these pilots align with the reentry works, excuse me, reentry work groups recommendations.

And that report came out in October of 2018 and contributed to the work that the council again did around alignment.

And so the options that are laid out here are option A, which is to cut or reprogram some or all of the proposed ads for the pilots for other council priorities.

B would be to add a proviso restricting spending, excuse me, until additional information has been provided.

I note because these funds are currently in finance general reserves that legislation would be needed to move them out as well.

That would be an additional step at which Council could review the details of the proposals, or C, which is to adopt the 2020 proposed budget as proposed.

These are obviously not in any way exclusive options, but just ones that we've identified at this time that Council could take moving forward.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you.

So really appreciate the analysis on this, Asha.

I just wanted to also flag that there is another potential option here that I'm not sure we've had an opportunity to have a conversation about, but it could also be an option to do sort of a mix of A and B.

So in other words, proviso or restrict spending on some of these proposals that we just simply don't have details on and then cut or reprogram other dollars.

Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct.

I continue to have concerns about the mayor's proposal to continue to double down on probation, particularly for this population.

continue to believe that it is not the best use of our dollars, nor that it will actually address the needs of individuals who have many complex comorbidities that are unfortunately finding themselves at the intersection with the criminal justice system.

$170,000 is what the amount there is proposed.

It's a modest amount, but I continue to have concerns about whether it makes sense to invest in something that is being characterized as new, but really is more of probation and supervision.

and whether it makes more sense to utilize those dollars as identified revenue for other programs that we know work for this particular population that needs additional case management, that needs additional hands-on services to be able to successfully re-enter into society and stop offending.

As it relates to the case conferencing and the Rapid Reentry Connector Program, I have concerns about those, but not to the level of wanting to suggest that we cut that programming.

I think that, excuse me, not cut the programming because it hasn't been implemented, but cut the concept around advancing that programming.

I do think that those would potentially merit and benefit from having a proviso until we've heard additional details and have had an opportunity to get a better understanding of how those programs will be co-designed in a way that gives us confidence that they're actually going to deliver on the intended policy goals for both of those programs.

So I'm interested in exploring the combination of A and B to find that better mix.

And I'd just like to add one thing in response to that.

I spent some time with Judge Shadeed and with Judge Eisenberg, as well as with Tara, who is still here, and with Lisa Dugard.

in the last couple of weeks.

And I was very impressed, and this is something that I hope that all of us will take the chance to learn a little bit more about, is that what I'm hearing from Judge Shadid about probation is not in any sense the probation of old.

That what I understand, when we call you up to talk about this, it's really an opportunity as something other than going to jail, something other than trying to chase people around, but rather to provide you, the judges, with an alternative that is a diversion strategy other than making sure that people are going back to jail or following the same old habits.

So I hope that when we get there that we can hear again from you about what it is you're looking for and what you're needing.

and that this is not just to chase the person around with, you know, an ankle bracelet or put them back in jail if you find them, that they failed to appear.

So, when we get to the opportunity, I hope that you will have another chance to speak to that.

Chair Baxter?

Yes, please, Council Member Sawant.

I, um, just to, um, add some of the points that were made earlier by Council Member Gonzalez.

I think we should be wary of any type of probation proposals because in the mayor's budget because we have heard repeatedly and decisively from restorative justice advocates that probation very often does more harm than good.

It keeps people in the criminal justice system, regardless of what the advocates of probation are saying, often longer than needed, and it disproportionately affects people of color.

And so I do have a budget proposal.

to cut funding from, cut the money that is spent for probation enforcement towards restorative justice programs.

And I won't jump to that because I know that we're coming to that budget item, but I just wanted to add that point and also just to let you know, Chair Baxter, that I have to leave at five o'clock, so hopefully we'll come to that point by then, but we hope.

And then, of course, we have multiple things today.

that we're going to get through, and then we will probably have public comment as well.

So, I'm sorry you have to leave at five, but okay.

So, maybe just a few of us up here, but we'll get through it.

Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

Just reviewing the actions that we took in last year's budget cycle, I would love to get an update on our efforts to develop a strategic plan to implement recommendations already provided to the city about the criminal justice system.

As you mentioned earlier, the reentry work groups, task force recommendations were from 2018. Those folks have reached out to me asking where we're at in implementing these.

And I point to the work that we did during budget saying we have a process.

It's not very satisfying to folks who participated in that work group.

Also, other items were reimagining the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council and working with the Criminal Justice Equity Team or a similar working group to align current and future policy investments outcomes regarding the criminal legal system.

So, just in general, we identified sort of what our approach was going to be to be making these investments in last year's budget process.

The executive has made some proposals that might not align with what we were envisioning that we would do through this development of a strategy, but yet it doesn't appear that we have developed a strategy, so it's kind of a little bit of a chicken or the egg thing.

Would love to know a little bit more.

So, I think I heard two questions, which is how the actual work is going and then the proposals and their relation to the work.

So, Carlos can speak to the project itself and then I can talk about the consistency piece.

Sure, question, sure.

Yeah, please, Council President.

First of all, I really appreciate all of the comments I'm hearing from the dais, so it gets us a feel for what people are thinking during this budget process.

That's very helpful for at least me when I start thinking about what I support and what I don't support.

I don't know enough about the enhanced shelter, $2.4 million in capital cost improvements, to speak intelligently about it.

But I just have a question on that, and I want to talk about the probation piece.

On that one, on the enhanced shelter, is that people that are, I don't know how to say it, convicted of crimes that that are also experiencing homelessness?

Is that a special West Wing, if you will, for people that have...

been charged and convicted, or what is this facility?

Another homeless shelter, or what are we doing here?

It's just a homeless shelter.

Yeah, essentially at this point, all we understand is that it would be an additional shelter.

It would be an enhanced shelter.

The location would be, as you'll recall, recently there was opened in the west wing of the King County Correctional Facility, an enhanced shelter there already.

And on the second floor, there'd be additional space where this could be expanded to.

The reason these funds have been placed in finance general is because at this point there's not further clarification there on how this would uniquely target these high barrier individuals versus what our other enhanced shelters would do.

Okay.

So just the fact that it's hired, it's positioned in the jail, that's just coincidental.

That has nothing to do with someone going through the prosecutorial process.

This is just...

It has been described as something that would especially target these kind of individuals that are considered classified as high barrier individuals in this proposal, but we don't have details yet on how that would happen.

Okay.

On the probation piece, I agree with the comments I'm hearing from my colleagues on how probation has been historically used in this country, in the state, and in many cities as a, you talk about a weaponizing tool of prosecution to oppress many communities.

I would disagree that our municipal courts are handling it in such a way from my experience.

I've met with Judge Willie Gregory and Fay Chess And many of the judges who happen to be defense attorneys, public defenders, who understand very fully, I wish we could call it something else because I think they are trying to be in line with restorative justice efforts and the kinds of things that the city council has been really committed to.

And so I think there's sort of a a little bit of a disconnect or miscommunication on what they're trying to do and what we're sort of phrasing as probation.

That's what I believe, and I think that I'm correct on that.

So I think that story needs to be told a little better.

The $170,000 for high barrier probation, and I guess I'll ask to share, the central staff, what's already in the budget for what I'm calling probation, for lack of a better description, this is just an additional $170,000.

portion of money in there with the counselor, counselor's information department that's not cut.

This is just $170,000 in addition of that on this new pilot for high barrier, correct?

Yes, the $170,000 is new general funds.

The existing, I believe it's $120,000 is trial court improvement account funds, and that's already existing and appropriated.

So 120 is?

I believe that's 120,000.

So that's why some of my colleagues would be somewhat critical of we're doubling down on probation is sort of how it looks.

Right?

I mean, if you say this, right?

So, what these funds do, sorry, go ahead.

Go ahead.

So, essentially, the entire package for high barrier probation would be this $170,000 plus an existing $120,000.

I believe the intent for the existing funds is to go towards an additional probation counselor that would have this enhanced caseload.

And this $170,000 is split between a position to add a social worker to the Court Resource Center and for operational funds for that program to move forward.

So, again, on the meetings that I've gone to in terms of our restorative justice efforts and our reentry efforts, And what I'm hearing from the judges on how they are looking and treating this, both the 170 edition and the base budget, is in alignment with restorative justice, not a very penalizing probation system.

But I think there might be a miscommunication.

That's my understanding.

So I think that the definition of restorative justice may differ based on how different parties use it.

I think it's becoming a more common term.

It's used more often now in relation to things like supportive services as opposed to that being a separate category of the way in which the court handles or the entire system handles criminal justice.

So it's less of a punitive approach and I'd agree with that characterization as far as probation goes.

I think the details of this particular piece is if it wasn't connected to probation, it would be services.

It would be somebody that was going along with this person to help them get more services.

But given that it is a program and service that is run by a probation counselor that is actually probation, regardless of the probation counselor's discretion to do, to graduate sanctions or to move to the judge, all of that is discretionary.

And so the intent absolutely may be to make this very highly supportive, and that may actually bear out in some cases.

But there's no way of guaranteeing that this kind of probation won't increase further involvement in criminal justice.

That's helpful, Asher.

So I would rather than, in my personal opinion, rather than cutting it.

I'd rather try to see how we can come up with language to guarantee that it's being used more for supportive services than punitive services.

Council Member Herbold.

I had a couple questions on the table that central staff were prepared to answer, I think.

Can we go back to those?

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Do you want me to ask again or you got it?

So one of the questions you mentioned was the strategic plan to implement previously made recommendations to the city.

regarding the criminal legal system.

What I can tell you is I've been working on putting that together.

It's in the final editing phases, but essentially what it will lay out is going through the reentry work groups, final recommendations, and looking at what are actions that the council can unilaterally take to begin furthering those.

Second category would be what are issue areas that would require either funding, a proviso, or coordination with the executive And then the third grouping is essentially recommendations that may require further study.

And so that's, that is a body of work that the council is driving, is that correct?

That's correct.

The other two were reimagining the criminal justice coordinating council and working with the criminal justice equity team or similar work group to align current and future policy investments and outcomes.

And so those two items are addressed in the work plan that Council Member Gonzales was mentioning.

I'm happy to provide you with a copy offline.

get you any other information that you need.

But basically that work is going to be ongoing through three phases.

The first, which Council Member Gonzalez described, was working with community and stakeholders in order to come up with guiding principles that would then lead the alignment work.

In conjunction with that, it would also be working with our institutional stakeholders in the court, in the city attorney's office, to look at essentially what had happened with the previous iteration of the coordinating council to try to get a better sense of what worked and what didn't and begin planning through that as well as research into other states, other jurisdictions that have coordinating councils that are still in effect to see what best practices are in order to be able to reconstitute it.

And so, again, my point is that we identified this work as a priority last budget cycle as a sort of a prerequisite to ourselves for how we were going to move forward on criminal justice reform work.

And so I think it's it's difficult to have recommendations from the executive when this work hasn't happened because it makes, for me as a policymaker, it makes it really difficult to determine whether or not those recommendations align with the work that I think we had planned to do all of this year.

And are these three items, we need the cooperation of the executive on those, pieces of work that we identified during the budget last year.

Is that not correct?

I think we're hoping for alignment from the executive.

But we can't just reimagine the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council ourselves.

That's something that we have to do together with the executive departments.

Yeah, assuming that they would want to participate in that effort, then we would certainly initiate that and then work with the executive to move forward in what that development looks like.

But to your point about not being able to compare the proposals to a yet-to-be-developed piece of work, what we've done is instead of assuming that there are principles and values against which to compare these pilots, instead the comparison has been to the the drivers that initiated this work in last budget cycle.

So as Council Member Gonzalez had mentioned, centering the community in developing these principles and values.

And so some of that is centered around racial equity and centering the communities that are most impacted, whether and how we should be realigning investment from into the system to restorative justice options.

And so, It's not necessarily that these pilots are not in alignment with those things.

It's just that looking at the development of the pilots and then the initial proposal of the pilots themselves may not be in alignment.

So if it would be helpful, I can go through a couple examples.

And so one of the things that we thought was really important during last year's budget cycle was the racial equity piece.

So making sure that everything is examined with a racial equity lens is driven by racial equity.

So in looking at the progress report from the working group, there is a sentiment in there about making sure the solutions are understood through a lens of race and social justice.

making sure that the pilots are not perpetuating and furthering institutionalized racism.

The issue is not so much whether these pilots will or will not do that.

It's that there wasn't any racial equity analysis done.

There wasn't any analysis conducted.

There's no outcome of racial equity toolkit to show what the impacts are on communities of color who are the people that are most impacted.

It's just sort of general inconsistency with one of the drivers of the work.

One of the other...

And Asha, on that point, those members of the work group...

who participated in those discussions as part of the work group who ostensibly represent some of the more racially diverse groups have either come out publicly saying that they oppose portions of this mayor's proposal, specifically the probation piece, or have otherwise refused to speak publicly about these recommendations.

Is that accurate from the progress report as well?

I believe that's true, not so much from the progress report of the press afterwards, but it was clear that the pilot programs were not a matter of consensus.

They were discussed amongst the group, but not everybody agreed that these were the pilots that should move forward.

And so the proposal is from the executive, not necessarily from the entire group's consensus.

as developed.

I just know one other thing.

Again, it's not that these pilots do or do not align with any principles, but in looking to see whether there should be new funds allocated to these proposals as opposed to existing funds, For example, the reentry connector.

In some ways that makes a lot of sense to provide services for people that are in custody for under 72 hours.

But there's no analysis in the group as to why people are being detained for under 72 hours.

And so why are people in there and just being released again?

Sure, it may absolutely be true that those services, excuse me, those individuals require reentry services.

But if there is, for example, an analysis of how to decrease the number of people in jail for under 72 hours, the funds that you might save from that booking from that jail stay could be reprogrammed into what a reentry connector was.

So just sort of seeing how these proposals stand up in comparison to the sort of basic principles and drivers behind which this alignment system work was proposed, that's sort of where the comparison is.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Can I just ask the two of you, you've both brought up remarkably poignant points today, and I appreciate that very much.

Do you think that we're going to need to have more time just on this issue publicly?

Would you like to do that, to have a special meeting just on this?

on what is being proposed here.

Would that be useful to you?

I mean, I know where I stand on this issue, so I don't feel like I'm probably the right person to ask that question of.

I've been part of the high barrier individual elected leadership group.

My staff has been participating in the work group as well, and I feel like I have the information I need to know that I'm not totally on board with these investments.

So for me, it really is about on particularly on the case conferencing and the rapid reentry connector, making sure that we have a good sense, as Asha has just outlined, what the concepts and the actual details of this proposed programming are in order to give us a high level of confidence that it really is going to be reaching deeply into helping the community members identified as being high barrier individuals.

On the high barrier probation, I've read through the literature, I have a meeting set up with some of the Seattle Municipal Court judges next week.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about probation and I think the question really comes down to whether or not we believe that there is a version of probation that doesn't cause for their harm.

And I think that we're going to have to agree to disagree on that up on the dais.

I'm hearing from you and Council President Harrell that you believe there is a version of probation that isn't harmful.

I don't believe that.

I believe that any time we put particularly black and brown people under supervision of corrections, that there is potential for harm to be caused to them and their families and in our community overall, because the ultimate consequence of not complying with those requirements is jail.

That's where you end up if you do not comply with the terms of your release under probation.

So we can call it enhanced probation, we can call it basic probation, we can call it somewhere in the middle probation, but at the end of the day, it is supervision of people in our community who are expected to, under a carrot stick approach, to comply with terms of release, and if they do not, they will end up back in jail.

So, I'm just calling to question from my perspective as a policymaker, I believe that investing further in a probation model that ultimately leads to a result of going to jail if you do not comply is not the wisest investment for us in this space.

I think there are other programs available to us like LEAD and VITAL and other, you know, truly invest, true investments in case management, not in probation officers that can potentially lead and we have seen do lead to more successful outcomes for this particular population.

So I'm not proposing that we completely abolish the probation department.

I'm asking and I'm gonna advocate for a reasonable approach of not adding additional dollars in this bucket based on my belief that I think probation as a tool for compliance is and will continue to cause harm.

So I really appreciate in all seriousness what you just said, and it's my goal to end up where you're talking as well, that we're not chasing people around and increasing the harm.

What I'm hearing from our municipal court judges is that they're looking for those tools that you were speaking to, Council Member Gonzalez, that lead and vital are not available to them after somebody comes back into court and is in front of them having created another situation or committed another gross misdemeanor.

And in those circumstances, they're looking for tools, at least this is my understanding, that doesn't put them back into jail or back at risk, but provides something else that the judges can use to provide some alternatives.

That's what I'm hearing.

And so when I asked if you would like to have more time on this topic, since we find ourselves struggling with OPMA issues, I would love to be able to fully understand what the options are and for the judges to be able to provide their input as well before I make a final decision on this.

I mean, I appreciate you saying that maybe we should hear more, and I would be happy to, and I would not object to having a discussion on it in any way, but I also, like Council Member Gonzalez said, my office doesn't need to be convinced about where to go.

In fact, working with many community groups, and this is where the the budget demand that we have coming up in this discussion is not only saying, what we're saying not only do not increase funds for probation, we're talking about a 25% reduction in the funds for money for probation.

And that is not, that didn't come from nowhere.

It came from having had repeated discussions with many experts in the advocacy sector, in the public defender's office, people who have worked on many programs and found that this probation ultimately creates a problematic situation.

It creates a situation where young people end up in the jail system.

And to what President Harrell said, that maybe probation It doesn't work in general, but in the Seattle Municipal Code, it doesn't, it's not problematic.

That's not my understanding at all.

And I would support such a discussion, and I welcome the judges to speak as well in a discussion, but if we are going to have such a discussion publicly, then I think the community advocates who think probation is problematic should also be at the table, and then we should hear from both sides if we're going to hear, and as you said, you haven't made up your mind.

And I would be happy for us to have the discussion to help you make up your mind.

But I don't think we should have just one side.

We should have those who don't agree that probation is working.

And I don't just mean the Public Defender's Office.

I mean the advocates who are running programs like Community Passageways, Youth Consortium, Creative Justice, you know, the programs that I'm proposing we fund instead of increasing funds for probation.

I think they should be at the table as well.

And I think that would be a very fruitful discussion.

Great.

Council Member Morris.

I'll be brief, Madam Chair.

I agree with you, Chairman Bagshaw and Councilmember Gonzalez, and we have met with the judges as well on the whole issue of probation, and my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of this is dedicated to defendants who have been are on probation for domestic violence and DUIs, in which probation is mandatory.

It's a criminal side of that.

As a former public defender and a former judge, let me tell you what I honestly think about probation.

It has a long, convoluted history where, for me, the focus should have and should continue to be on rehabilitation, not just punitive.

And that's not what we've seen.

We've seen it starting to change.

We saw that difference when we instituted in the late 80s, or I'm sorry, late 90s drug court, where people didn't think drug court would work.

And we had to convince people that relapse is part of healing, so you can't just put people in jail when they relapse, because that's not a crime.

It's a medical condition.

It was an addiction that we had to look at as a human being.

So I really like what Councilmember Gonzales said, and I certainly agree with the Chair that this deserves some more conversation, particularly after our discussions with the judges and what their concerns are and how probation is used as a tool.

And I should add as just a historical note, criminal law from a long time ago is really based upon the behavior of poor people.

That's how criminal law came to be.

Stealing food, I mean, debtors, jail, all that stuff.

It's an evolution of that.

So I want to see that kind of vestige and I'm, again, I agree with Council Member Gonzalez that we have to recalibrate how we look at probation.

It can't be the probation that I had to deal with years ago, that this is a new way of looking at criminal law, and we have that rehabilitative, and what the chairwoman said, we certainly don't want people with angled bracelets and people that are just running around, chasing people around to do a gotcha.

So that's where I'm at on this conversation, and I'm still learning more, so thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

Please, go ahead, Council President Harrell.

I should start off by saying, I won't be brief, because everyone's always...

I'll be brief.

I'm not going to be the defender of probation here.

Let me tell you, you're talking about someone who defended folks that were charged unlawfully, is my opinion, for a probation violation.

So I don't have to be told the unfairness of the system.

I did that for many years.

And so I'm just saying that based on my discussions with these really well-intended judges, I'd love to hear from What was that one organization you just mentioned?

Many of the organizations that are on the streets helping these people that are being unlawfully, and I think unfairly, accused of probation violations.

And again, it being used as a weapon.

But I just think we're all trying to get to the same place quite candidly.

I'm not hearing really disagreement where we're trying to get to.

But we may have a misunderstanding of what's actually happening out there.

And it's always helpful to get information from the community as well.

Sorry, I know you're trying to close this out, and it's 4.20.

And we've only gotten to the first item.

Go ahead.

Because, Council President, you've said that there's been a miscommunication a couple times.

I want to be real clear that nobody has miscommunicated to me anything.

I understand what the goal is here, and it's to provide $170,000 to Seattle Municipal Court to buy additional probation services that will be catered specifically to this population.

Beyond that, we have no details.

We have no details whatsoever about how this probation program will be set up other than the adjective being added in front of probation that is the word enhanced.

I have no idea what that means.

I don't know what it means.

I don't think that the judges know what it means.

I don't think that the mayor knows what it means.

It has not been clearly defined.

We have no performance metrics.

We have no measurements to define it by.

And I get it, we have a disagreement.

around how the city should or should not utilize probation services.

And I am not assigning any nefarious intent to our judges or those institutional players.

They have a role to play, and I believe that they believe very strongly in the role that they have to play.

But I continue to have a lot of concerns about Basically turning a 180 from having a conversation last year where we were talking about potentially defunding probation to now being here a year later in this budget conversation talking about providing an additional $170,000 to the very thing we were having a conversation about.

that led to a body of work around realigning the criminal justice system and taking seriously our obligation to reform the system.

Just because the court system, through its existing probation services, is causing less harm than it would otherwise be causing in 1982, doesn't mean that probation is is fundamentally a good, positive, productive, restorative justice tool.

I don't know of anybody who would describe probation as being a restorative justice tool, and I just feel very strongly that as we continue to have this conversation, that it is a two-sided conversation, that we aren't just hearing from people who own the system, and that we are hearing from people who are impacted from the system, and that we are hearing from people who we have invested dollars in, meaningful dollars in, who have really helped us turn the corner on diverting, effectively diverting people from the criminal justice system.

So that includes Community Passageways, Choose 180 has been getting a lot of attention as well.

And I just feel really strongly that we need to make sure that we're not just giving, and I know that we're about to, just give the institution an opportunity to defend the institution.

I think it's really important for us to challenge ourselves and to really accept the reality that probation as a tool still causes harm.

It may not be the same version of harm that we had in the past because we've adopted different practices now, but I cannot sit here with a high level of confidence and say that that under no circumstances will probation cause harm.

Judge Hadid.

And for all the council members who have been willing to talk to the judges and talk about this very important issue, uh, Let me just start my comments by saying something and acknowledging something.

The criminal justice system has institutional and structural racism that has run through it for all of history.

And for a judge to get up here and say anything different is just wrong.

And we acknowledge that.

I began my career as a criminal defense attorney, specializing in the defense of non-immigrant or non-citizen immigrants who were involved in the criminal justice system, and making sure that they could get a fair shake.

Many of our judges came from the same types of places.

We came to the bench with the knowledge that the criminal justice system had serious flaws, serious racism, and we came to try to change that.

We consider ourselves reformers.

First and foremost, the entire municipal court bench has turned over in the last eight years.

You have a completely new bench.

You also, I have been there for five years, I'm the third most senior judge there.

So when you look at the historical problems that you might have had with the court on probation, you're not dealing with the present court.

Now, the important thing here is Is probation part of a restorative justice plan?

Is probation causing more harm than good?

And I do think we have an honest disagreement on that, but I think it's something that we can have very valid conversations about.

But let's talk about what's happened just in the last year.

In the past year, we have had unparalleled collaboration between the different players in the criminal justice system.

Our programs and services department, which we are trying to change our name of probation to programs and services because it more accurately reflects who we are and what we're doing, is the forward-facing entity we have to interact with the community.

And it has two goals.

The first goal, reduce crime and increase public safety.

The second goal is to connect people long-term with the community where they can get the help they need.

This is a goal we share with other programs like LEAD and VITAL and REACH.

These are programs that we work with in the court in order to try to do this.

What have you gotten for the money that you've already spent?

For the past year, we've worked with our criminal justice partners to start a new community court, a community court that fixes structural flaws from past community courts in which somebody had the so-called plea to play.

Now they won't be giving up any rights.

It'll be all about connecting them to service.

You've got a court resource center that connects hundreds of people, regardless of their contact with the criminal justice system.

You have our mental health court, which is newly revitalized, that we have people begging to get into the court in order to receive the services that we're able to give them.

We have our veterans treatment court, helping the people who served our country have a voice in their own rehabilitation.

We have our domestic violence court and the Domestic Violence Intervention Project, which we have been national leaders on, in creating a new treatment program to make sure that domestic abuse stops.

It hurts me to hear that we are lumped in with the probation departments of other cities, of the Department of Corrections.

This is simply not accurate.

In some of those institutions, they are revoking 30, 45 days for abstained violations.

This is something that would never happen in my court.

In my court, we address it positively.

If somebody stays abstinent, they get a prize in mental health court.

We try to connect them with service, we try to encourage them.

We're taking harm reduction principles and trying to address them.

I understand that there are a lot of historical problems with probation, or as I like to call it, programs and services, but these are things we're trying to change.

And I think that the essential thing here is trust.

If we have trust, then we can talk about programs like this.

If we don't have trust, then that's something we need to build with each other and create that trust so that when things like this come along, we can say, yes, we trust you in order to do that program in a way that we think will be well spent.

If that trust hasn't been built yet, I would like to strive to build that trust over the next year.

But please understand that our judges are working every day to reform the system.

And if you would like to help us with that reform work, please take the hand that's being offered and work with us.

Thank you.

I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Judge Shadeed.

Thanks for coming, and I'll just ask my colleagues to connect with you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

I'd like to move on, if we can.

Chair Baxhaw, just for the record, I want to say it's quite problematic in my view that you gave special time to a judge, and that's fine.

I mean, I'm always up for a debate, and I think all sides should be heard thoroughly.

And you did this right after I proposed that we should hear all sides together.

And I would, again, I just wanted to restate for the record that I think if we're going to hear from one side, we should hear from the other side too.

And the budget committee should schedule time to hear from.

advocates in the community who have very strong views based on their experience that probation is not restorative justice and it should not be considered restorative justice in any way.

And as far as my office is concerned, yes, we will be meeting with one of your colleagues.

We will be meeting with a judge.

As I said, we are totally open to hearing from all sides, but I do think it's problematic that in a public discussion we have given special time to just one side and not the other.

Thank you for those remarks.

I would like this to continue, please.

So before we get into issue identification for LEAD, just in this section, there are numbers one and two.

You'll see our budget actions proposed that are not related to LEAD.

So the first one is to cut $1.5 million from Seattle Municipal Court funding that's used for probation enforcement.

That's Council Member Sawant.

Would you like to speak to it, Council Member Sawant?

Yes, I mean this is what we've been talking about and as I said before, my office has been discussing with many, many organizations on the impact of probation as opposed to other programs and I really appreciated Asha describing just in a very sort of a basic layout of what does probation mean and how it's not, it's not like they're just equivalent options.

You know, you do probation or you do this service and either could result in a restorative pathway.

It doesn't work that way.

Probation is fundamentally a different kind of approach than other programs and so Having discussed with many community organizers, we are hoping that the council will support this, not only to not add new monies to probation, but cutting probation by 25% to fund restorative justice for all the reasons that I've already said, and I won't repeat that probation often does more harm than good.

And it disproportionately affects people of color and sends them on sort of a pipeline to mass incarceration system rather than bringing them towards socially better outcomes.

And restorative justice has been proven to have far better outcomes.

And specifically, we are working with community organizers to put together a Form B, as we say in city council lingo, for the budget.

to fund the community and restorative justice programs that provide a positive alternative to incarceration and probation.

And the proposal that we have right now, it's still a work in progress because we're still discussing with the groups.

But what we have so far is funding community passageways and youth consortium to the tune of $300,000, creative justice to the tune of $122,600, and the idea of corner greeters, which we haven't attached a dollar amount.

And I wanted to just mention quickly that in doing the discussion of the form A's, my office put forward the funds for, I mean, the proposal for funds for Freedom School for the, you know, which is a youth of color summer program.

that actually has had a successful track record.

The students through this program in Rainier Beach High School advocated successfully for ORCA cards funding, but we are proposing that that funding that has fallen through the cracks be restored and then also extended to Emerson Elementary School.

And then, so what we want to do is add, put that Freedom School funding in the Form Bs, add this to the other programs like Community Passageways and Creative Justice that I've just mentioned, that together into a unified Form B to support youth of color in supportive programs other than the school to prison pipeline.

So as I said, this budget amendment would reduce probation from the Seattle Municipal Court by 25%, and this whole program would be consistent with the budget for justice demand that was put forward by the Public Defenders Association and other allied groups.

Councillor Herbold, did you have a response?

I'm confused about the proposal to cut probation as it's been explained because I don't have a very good sense of how it would impact the current probation services that are required by law to be provided.

So DUIs and domestic violence, which I think makes up 61 percent.

Just to clarify, sorry, thank you for pointing that out, and I may not know the full answer to what you're saying, and I would welcome experts on all sides, no matter what your opinion is, to weigh in on this, but I just wanted to clarify that in our discussions with the groups there, with the Public Defenders Association, they've made it very clear that this would not affect those funds, essential funds for DB and DUI in any way.

So we know from the number of dollars that your proposal proposes to cut.

that it is not, I mean, we're looking at over half of the services being provided, being provided for mandated, state mandated probation services.

And so your cut would leave that 60 some odd percent intact.

I mean, all the essential aspects like DV and DUI, in my view, in my understanding, are going to be left intact, but I'm happy to have the groups clarify more and see if...

Well, I think our budget office, I mean, I don't know that that's something that external to the city groups will know.

I mean, I think our budget office will have to confirm with the court how many dollars are being spent.

Sure, that's fine, but I do think that the groups do know what they're talking about.

I may not, I may not have all the details, but I'm sure they do.

So, happy to raise those questions and get back to you.

Thank you.

I think it's a good point that you raised, Council Member Herbold.

The high community safety risk, the percentage that's required by law is 72%, is my understanding from this.

So, let's make sure that we've got our numbers right.

I'm sure that Asha, Greg can help us as well, Carlos.

We can get that.

Did you have something, Council Member Gonzalez?

No.

Okay.

Good.

Please continue.

Yeah, we'd be happy to follow up with the court on that piece.

The second proposed budget action is to add funding for community-based responses to hate violence.

This is Council Member Herbold.

Council Member Herbold.

Okay, switch gears here.

So, the Mayor's Office has convened discussions with stakeholders around hate crimes coming out of a series of audits done by the City Auditor, both requested by myself of the city auditor as well as previous councils.

There's a clear desire from groups for additional support for some community-based responses, including better coordination of reporting.

This is something we've heard both from affected groups as well as the city auditor, is that hate crimes are going unreported.

But we also have identified a need as it relates to our hate crimes legislation that has moved out of committee but that we have not yet been able to bring forward to full council yet because of concerns around disproportionate impacts of new hate crimes charges.

on people being charged for underlying crimes.

And so there is interest in identifying sanctions that are restorative justice sanctions instead of punitive sanctions like healing circles for offenders and survivors of hate crimes.

And so there may be a possible approach moving forward using some existing funds to address one or more of these objectives.

Greg Dawes, Council Central staff, here to talk to you about LEAD.

Given the hour, I, at the Chair's discretion, can sort of skip to the meat of the issue, if you like, and go ahead and start with this issue identification slide that's before you.

What you see here is a proposed expansion of the LEAD program.

This is a result of the staff's look at the last year in which the caseload for LEET has doubled.

It has gone from somewhere in the high 300s to, as you can see on the chart on the right, 754 cases.

This happened as the program expanded in 2018 into the North Precinct, and in this year, into the Soto area.

And that can be seen in the chart to the left.

The sort of yellow bars there represent LEAD coming into the north precinct and the others into the other precincts.

Obviously, the demand was a lot higher than anyone in the program thought it would be.

And as such, as they moved into the Soto area, they had to ask the police department to prioritize the referrals.

And that's why you see two lines here on the chart to the right.

And I'm just going to take the first number, September of 19. The 754 is the number of lead clients that have had an intake.

Then there are a few hundred more.

that are sort of, for lack of a better way to say, on a waiting list.

They've been identified as high priority intakes, potential intakes, with the Soto area and North Precinct.

But just put simply, the LEAD program doesn't have the case managers to be able to get to those folks.

So if the LEAD program did have enough case managers, right away they would have a potential to have 1,051 cases.

So I'll ask you.

to change that over.

So what I'm going to talk about now is funding.

And what you can see to the left is the funding that the LEAD program currently has for Seattle services.

You can see that there's 718 in Trueblood funding, and that's The court case that I'm not going to go into too much detail but it had to do with imprisoning folks who were yet to stand competency trials or competency hearings, sorry.

There is Seattle funding in the amount of $2.55 million and then there is the King County funding of $1.6 million.

I'll note here that the King County funding is a much smaller picture than what you saw on October 2nd when the program presented, and that is because this is the amount of funding that King County provides that can go to Seattle clients.

So LEAD is offered elsewhere in the county in Burien and they're spreading into the south area of the county like White Center.

But the money that they receive from King County there are Seattle specific dollars and that's the 1.6 million.

And so what you see here is that next year the program is going to have 4.87 million in revenues that they can use to provide services in Seattle.

So going back really quickly to that line chart, what they're projecting is that by the end of December, they're going to have, the LEAD program will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400 cases.

And this is a projection that is coming from the LEAD staff.

It is one that SPD is still thinking about and doesn't necessarily agree with the linear nature of what's being proposed here.

SPD has said that as LEAD comes into precincts, there tends to be an initial bump of clients and then it levels out.

And I think while that is likely the case, you can see the bump in North Precinct was pretty high, and knowing that there's 300 folks on the waiting list right now, it certainly seems that expansion into the South Precinct, an untapped area or an unserviced area, and the Southwest Precinct, an unserviced area, and then removing all, allowing any referrals from SOTO, it's pretty easy to see how they can get up to 1,400 by the end of next year.

So I ask Asha to switch back.

So if that is indeed the case, LEAD is going to need a lot more support.

And what they've done is to envision what a budget would look like if they were to provide support to 1,400 active clients.

The very first budget line item that you can see under direct program is case management services, and that's Evergreen Treatment Services.

Those are the outreach coordinators that are employed by reach and contracted to lead.

And as you can see, the 2019 projected expenditure there is 3.4 million.

And as of right now, there are about 19 case managers.

What you can see in 2020 is that if you were to go to the maximum cases that the staff is projecting, you would reach a need for 73 case managers and 7.9 million.

As you see, there are some other increases, increases for after-hours coverage, increases for legal services, and I think Ms. Dugard in her presentation on October 2nd talked a bit about the need for raises which are fairly minimal for the outreach personnel.

And so what this comes down to then is a need for 4.72 million dollars and that is the gap between what we expect on the left, the 4.87 million dollars in revenue that's going to come in and what we see in the lowest right-hand corner, the 9.5 In order to fully fund the budget on the right that would be needed to provide service to 1,400 clients, there would need to be an add of $4.7 million.

So I'll stop and ask if there's any questions there.

Great.

Before we dive in, my sense is that there's unanimity up here in terms of supporting LEAD.

I just want to add that number four is a proposed $3.5 million that I have proposed to LEAD.

I don't think there's anything different between three and four other than the reduced number.

And I was relying upon what I had heard from Lisa Dugard and Dan Satterberg.

about the availability of some private funds if we put in a 3.5 number as a baseline.

So for my colleagues, in no way am I trying to reduce the efficacy of LEAD.

I'm gonna let you duke it out up here.

And then whatever the budget number is is going to be dependent, frankly, upon other things that we are looking to fund over the next few weeks.

So with that, Council Member O'Brien, would you like to weigh in on this?

Just a couple questions to help me understand the numbers here.

So the chart, that chart, is what I think I'm looking at in the memo, compares 19 projected to the 2020 would be the 1,400 active clients.

Yes.

What is the 2020 endorsed?

Is that?

The 2020 endorsed is the same level as the left here.

It is 2.55 million.

And then in that chart before that we discussed at the beginning of the presentation, proposed budget ads by intercept, there was a lead diversion $2.5 million line item there.

Yeah, and so that is all of the LEAD program funding for 2020. That takes into account the funding that the program has already received for East Precinct, West Precinct, North Precinct, all the funding to date.

If the council did nothing else, the LEAD program would have the $2.5 million.

So that's not just the ads for 2020, which really don't exist.

But we were discussing that earlier.

A lot of the things on that chart we thought were just ads.

But for LEAD, it's actually the base funding.

That's correct.

OK.

We're talking about the intercept chart?

Yeah.

I was wondering about that.

Why was that shown as an ad in that chart?

I think there may have been a little of apples and a little of oranges in there or something.

Good catch.

Some apples and some oranges.

Got a fruit salad going on right now?

The discussion we had earlier, which is a different set of folks, was that everything on there was just the marginal increase to 2020, but that is not the case for LEED.

We're not adding, the mayor's budget does not propose to add 2.5 million in funding for LEED this next year.

No, no, you're right, council member.

It's, and that is just staff putting together a chart way too fast.

I apologize for that.

No problem.

2.5 is the amount that LEED has now, and the ask, so to speak, would be 4.72 million.

It would have been great if our solution was mostly there, but that's not the case, so.

Council Member Bagshaw, I could speak at length to my support for the funding here, and I have in the past, but for the sake of late in the day, I just want to let folks know that I am We'll do whatever calisthenics necessary to get something close to full funding for the 1400. I do, like you said, Councilmember Bagshot, I think there's, I want to believe there's opportunities that if the city comes in with a strong commitment, that we can find some outside sources to help.

Maybe they're public, maybe they're private.

And so I want to collaborate with the folks that will be doing those asks and how we can best support that.

I don't know that it needs to be the city getting us 100% of the way there, but we'll have to do something bold.

Thank you.

Any more comments down here?

All I see is calisthenics.

It ain't pretty.

All right, well, I can't believe it, but let's continue.

Actually, that's all I had.

I think Councilmembers have addressed their actions.

4.72 million is Councilmember Gonzales, O'Brien, Mosqueda, and Sawant.

I ask if those Councilmembers wanted to besides Council Member O'Brien, Council Member Gonzalez or so on, wanted to say anything about the proposal.

My understanding is what you said, Madam Chair, that all the proposals are alike in the sense that they would fully fund the LEAD program and that yours is different only in the hopes that there would be private sector funding.

I know that Lisa Dugard right now is on the East Coast trying to secure that funding and she believes that she'll have an answer to that question in the next couple weeks.

Right.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

So, anything to add down here?

Okay.

Well, I think that's pretty impressive that there's no doubt in my mind that this is going to be one of the council's top priority.

We will continue to work with Ms. Dugard when she returns so we have a better sense of how much money she has.

But based upon what we heard last week, but also from Dan Satterberg when he was here, just the real belief that this is This is the wave of the future.

This is what is showing success.

And as long as we have opportunities and places to put people so that they have housing over their heads, that is going to be the first step that's really going to make a difference here.

So thank you for your good work on this.

Thank you.

I should also mention that I'll keep the council informed as I get new information from Ms. Dugard.

The budget that you saw, $4.7 million, of course, this is phasing in when you're talking about 53 case managers being added.

So, there will be an ongoing effect and we can talk about that in the budget deliberations.

No, that's great because that's one of my concerns too when she talks about needing 53 case managers.

Those are 53 qualified case managers with experience and not just somebody who's new and fresh into this.

We may have that as well, but it's going to take some time to find the individuals who can really do this work.

I'm delighted to be part of this and seeing that a package goes forward.

Okay, well, if that's it, we've got the next items are in the Seattle Police Department.

So I suspect we've got, what's that?

Yeah, that's right.

It's a good thing we haven't been in council meetings all day.

All right.

We like that.

Okay.

Very good.

Yeah, by myself.

Everybody else left me.

All right.

Well, thank you for being here.

Thanks to my colleagues for hanging in.

As Councilmember Gonzalez just said, this is one of the lighter subjects that we have.

So please go ahead.

Yeah, and I'm sorry.

I'm not going to be able to be as fast as I was in the last presentation.

There's a lot going on with SPD.

I'll try to go quickly, but I don't want to miss anything either.

So by way of background, SPD, as you know, is a $410 million agency.

And with over 2,000 employees, they're the largest workforce of any city department.

About two-thirds of their personnel are sworn officers.

The remaining are civilians.

And because they are so staff intensive, about 80% of their budget is staffing costs.

It's personnel costs.

And so you'll find in my central staff memo that you've been issued that there is a lot of information.

And I'm not going to go over all that information today.

But you'll find that in the appendices, there are answers to a number of questions that council members usually have about patrol staffing, There's an appendix that addresses the mix of sworn officers throughout the department.

There's one on 9-1-1 response times.

One on proactive calls and the amount of time that police officers have for community policing.

And then finally, an appendix that is on the number of trained officers in crisis response tactics.

And so that's all there for you.

And if you have any questions on that, let me know.

So I'm gonna jump right in.

and compare the 2020 endorsed to the 2020 proposed.

And the first thing that is going on is a bit of a reorg.

And so what you see in the 2020 proposed column is some places where there are blanks.

And I'm going to go over that one pretty quickly.

There's a new bureau that is created, the Collaborative Policing Bureau, and that is going to house the crime prevention coordinators and the community service officers when they come on board at the end of this year.

and then a number of other sort of customer-facing organizations within SPD.

Then there is a redistribution or I should say a consolidation of the various precincts.

As you can see, Southwest, North, et cetera, are all brought into the Patrol Ops BCL.

And then likewise with criminal investigations, there's a number of specialty units that are being assumed by the criminal investigations BSL.

So it's a skinning down of the department in terms of the number of BCLs that council will be working with.

If there's not any questions, I'll just keep going.

And Council Member Gonzalez, I know this is your whole area, one of your many areas of expertise, so I'll just let you jump in.

Thanks.

Whenever you want.

Just a couple of questions on this chart, Greg.

Under the, something you didn't talk about, is that a decrease of 4.4% in the Chief of Police BSL?

Am I reading that correctly?

Yes.

Okay, and what, and this is in thousands, so.

Yeah, it's 10.7 million down to 10.2 million.

Okay, what is this?

I believe that some of the collaborative policing, I believe that some of the functions are going into collaborative policing, and I can get you a list of that.

Okay, and so we're giving the chief of police a line item of $10.3 million, why?

There's a lot housed there.

That's where the grants are typically located.

That's where various kinds of travel monies for the chief to do and the command staff to go out and get training.

There's a lot there.

I'd have to give you a list later on.

I can't recall all of it off the top of my head.

If you could do that, I would appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Leadership and administration, I'm also noticing that there's a 0.6% reduction from the endorsed and proposed.

How is that different than the chief of police line you just described?

I'm gonna have to get you that too.

Okay, so that's another question.

And then special operations, again, we're seeing a decrease in the budget of 1.4%, so it's gonna go, proposed to go from, the mayor has proposed to take it from 58.4 million to 57.6 million.

I'm just not tracking what the special operations does.

Special operations typically does things like event planning, event management planning.

The 1.4% could be a very small adjustment and I honestly didn't pay that close attention to those so I'm going to have to.

Well I'm paying attention to it because sometimes those numbers add up to more than.

a few dollars in the piggy bank, and I'd like to know where those dollars are going if there is a reduction here and how the mayor has proposed appropriating those dollars, because just in that special operations line, it's going from 58 to 57. That's not insignificant in terms of dollars that might be available for city council priorities if there's already a proposed cut being made

OK, I will get you a crosswalk on this RE-ORG.

Thank you.

It's got more detail.

I think the points are right on, and I'm very interested if there's money that is there, can it be used in ways that we all are interested in using them?

Thank you for sharing that with all of us.

And that's probably a good segue to my next topic, which is to talk about what is in the 2020 proposed budget.

This, of course, is in front of you really just a reorg of programs, but we're going to go now into what is in the budget.

First, there's a $6.2 million technical adjustment that aligns the SPD salary and benefit budget with actual costs.

This reduction is made to reflect net loss of officers in 2018 as well an adjustment to the staffing plan.

in 2019 and 2020. The first issue I'm going to discuss today is going to be staffing.

And then as part of that, I'm going to talk a little bit about the salary savings items.

But there is a $6.2 million cut, as I mentioned.

And then that results in a general fund resource.

And there is a $6.4 million add of new things in the budget that I'm going to go through right now.

And so the first one is mental health professionals.

You heard a little bit about this in the last presentation.

Right now the crisis response team has one contracted mental health professional and it is expanding so that there will be five, one for a crisis response team in each precinct of the city.

And that's 310,000.

The next item, there is an investment of $1.6 million in the mayor's recruitment and retention initiative.

The mayor had a report that had 12 recommendations that would affect recruitment and retention, and I'll be discussing that later as well.

Moving along, there's a $100,000 ad for implicit bias training.

And this is a situation where the $100,000 is paying for the trainer, and there is already money in the training budget to pay for officers on overtime to receive the training.

So this is significantly bigger than the $100,000, just to point that out.

But the $100,000 is just the incremental piece.

The money that's used to train officers is already in their base budget.

There's a sworn officer hiring incentive.

As you know, the council passed ordinance 125-784 last year that, I'm sorry, this year, that authorized the police department to provide hiring bonuses of up to 15,000 for experienced officers and up to 7,500 for new recruits.

This item would carry that through 2020 for all recruits and laterals that are hired.

There is an ad of 840, and please stop me, I know I'm rattling these off, but I'll talk about some of these in detail, but please do stop me if you have any questions.

There's an ad of $848,000.

In 2019, the department launched over the summer multi-department emphasis patrols that engaged with community members in about eight different neighborhoods.

I think this has been referred to in a couple different ways, the pre-summer emphasis patrol, It got extended throughout the entire summer.

The seven neighborhood emphasis patrol, they added a neighborhood, and so I'm going to be calling it the eight neighborhood emphasis patrol today.

So the add of 848,000 would allow the department to continue that next year at their at the same level of effort that they provided this year.

There is a proposal to expand the community service officer program.

Right now there are funded in the 2019 budget 12 community service officers, that's 10 officers and two supervisors.

Those folks are scheduled to come on board later this year, probably closer to December.

And then this ad would add six more to bring the total to 18. And again, I'm going to discuss that later, too.

There is the add of an FTE and some money identified in the base budget for a Native American liaison.

This would allow the Collaborative Policing Bureau to provide culturally responsive services to indigenous communities and help navigate the criminal legal system.

There is a $150,000 add of a civilian investigator to the Office of Police Accountability.

The last SPOG contract negotiated a place where SPD could hire three civilians to do investigations, and this is the third.

The other two have already been added.

The rest of the office is still sworn doing the investigations.

There is a school zone camera expansion of $171,000.

And this is because SDOT has proposed to add five new locations.

Every time there is a new school zone camera location, it requires officers to work on overtime to review the citations.

cameras actually send a video to a web page and officers review it to make sure there was actually an infraction there.

If there is, then they issue the ticket.

And so this is to fund that piece.

And then lastly, there's a $2.6 million investment to replace the CAD system that is currently outdated and near end of life.

It was implemented in 2008, and it can't take advantage of many of the newest features like enhanced 911 and location info.

So that is a quick rundown of the ads in the mayor's budget.

As I said, they add up to 6.4 million in new general funds.

And with that, I am ready to go into issue number one, which is staffing, if there aren't any questions.

Council Member Gonzalez?

Let's go.

Okay, going into staffing.

Wow, I should just give you a rundown of my issues.

The first one is police staffing.

The second one is going to be the recruitment and retention initiative.

The third one is emphasis patrols.

And the fourth one is the expanded community service officer program.

So start a little bit with staffing.

So what I'm going to do here is to provide you with an update on the staffing picture in 2019. My hope is that I can give you some context for the salary savings cuts that are made both in the 19 budget and in the 20 budget.

And I'll start by pointing to the table to my left, the SPD net hires 2012 to 2018. And what you'll see there is a story I think that you're pretty familiar with.

Last year there were some retention and recruitment issues that resulted in a net negative 41 officers leaving the department.

And that was quite a departure from from prior years, as Councilmember Gonzalez has noted in other presentations, one of the biggest reasons is the separation rate increased dramatically from, as you can see, 79 in 2017 to 109 in 2018. And it's for that reason that the future hiring plans, the ones for this year and for next year, assume a total of 90 and 91 separations.

Again, quite high when compared with the historical separations that you can see on the left.

So now I'm going to talk a little bit about where they are this year, and that is the chart on the right.

And the first column, original projection through August, we have information on hiring through August, and that is the actuals there in the middle column, and then, of course, the difference.

And so the first thing that I'd highlight that you can see is that the good news is that they are, the department is keeping up with its targets on recruits.

They had hoped to have 50 recruits through August, or 56 recruits through August, and they have 56 recruits.

And so that is, that is extremely positive, especially when you, when you look at 2018 and the entire year, they had 59. The laterals, not quite as well.

They had hoped to have 15 by this time in the year, or by August, I should say.

They had eight, and so they're seven behind.

And then, fortunately, they got a couple rehires.

And when you factor in separations and everything else, you'll see at the bottom, bottom line, the net change is that through August, against the projections or against the plan, We are one officer down, and Council Member Gonzalez I know has mentioned that in other presentations.

I just want to take a quick pause here if we can.

Chair Begshaw, if you allow me to just make a few brief comments.

I just wanted to commend the police department's efforts in this space to really focus on some strategies that could help in hiring new officers.

I believe that the action that the city council took to not just focus on lateral hires through the hiring incentive, but to add a program, a bonus program specifically for new hires as well has really helped us turn this trend around in a way that is very positive.

And so just want to thank the council members who supported.

that hiring bonus program to not just include laterals, but to also include new hires, I think it's making a big difference.

You know, they're still evaluating the reasons why we're experiencing positive numbers in the new hires column, but I'm hopeful that that was one of the things that helped.

And I think, you know, Greg's gonna get to the part where we're still facing some challenges, and that is in the in the retention category.

How do we how do we keep officers from going to other departments?

I think that that is still on trend, unfortunately, with what we're seeing nationally.

So the Seattle Police Department is not an outlier with regard to the numbers and the data that we're going through right now.

Thanks to Greg's analysis and the cooperation of the police department.

But just really want to commend the folks who focus on this work day in and day out to make sure that we are able to position the department in the best position possible to hire some some good people to come in and be part of the police department.

And I'm hopeful that we will continue to see trends moving in the in the right direction.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.

I know we talked about it before.

I will confess that I had a bit of skepticism that it would do the trick, but it seems to have helped.

So that was a, you know, it's a good strategy.

So by way of good things, I should also mention the impacts on patrol staffing have been relatively good.

One of the things that the department tries to do when they're confronted with staffing challenges is to keep the number of 911 responders the same if possible so they're not degrading response times or service, and they have done that.

At the end of last year, they were able to hold 911 responders at 538. And so there should be no degradation in response time and service to the public.

There is a cut to other patrol officers, not a cut, but they are down by about 17 officers when it comes to foot beats and crime prevention team officers.

It is the case where we're going to talk a little bit about the overtime emphasis patrol that was done over the summer.

It is likely the case that the overtime emphasis patrols are backfilling for the loss of officers when we talk about having 17 fewer in foot beats and community police teams.

And so that is a strategic use of overtime to make sure that there's not a loss of street strength.

So the department has obviously kept a priority to make sure that both its 911 responders and its street strength, the folks that engage with the public, they still have a capacity there.

Any questions?

Okay.

Council Member O'Brien.

I know that trying to make the math all reconcile may not work exactly because of it flows, but I just want to ask the question.

So if the previous chart showed that net change to date was down six, And 9-1-1 response has been held, but we've lost 17. Does that mean we're plus 11 somewhere, or is the reality that some of these folks, while the numbers are whole, are still in multi-year training programs and aren't counted here?

Well, just to clarify on the chart, we're actually down only one.

We had projected and hoped, the SPD had projected and hoped that they would get, they would be five ahead by this time of the year.

And they are not.

But the one is the difference between the folks that are leaving and the folks that they're hiring.

So if it were perfect, that would be a zero.

If we were doing better, then you'd have a positive number there.

But in terms of, are you asking where the other reductions are besides the 17?

Correct, if we're essentially just down one, but we've had 17 reductions here, does that mean there's an increase somewhere else?

Yeah, there are going to be reductions that are going to be held outside of patrol.

There are going to be some that are in the investigative units, the specialty units.

The 41 officers net from last year, those vacancies are going to be held in other places.

Okay.

So speaking of vacancies, I will go into the vacancy cuts if that's all right.

All right, so The best way that I can describe this is that in 2018 when the the negative 41 officers was happening of course that happened throughout the year and At the summer forecast and when the department was looking forward, they knew at that point in time that there was a downturn and that they were going to have net separation, a negative net separation.

And the council knew it too.

And so the council and the mayor together in the adopted budget took a salary savings cut of about 1.3 million.

What happened is things kept getting worse.

And as more officers left through the fall and into the winter, there was more salary savings that became available.

And what you're seeing now in the 2019 third quarter supplemental is an attempt to grab that last bit of salary savings in 2019 that won't be needed because those officers last year had vacated their positions and those positions are still vacant.

As you can see from our staffing discussion earlier, the department hasn't caught up yet.

So that $6.2 million for vacancy savings in the 2020 proposed, what's happening with that $6.2 million?

Well, part of that, I was going to get to in a second.

Not that I want it.

Part of that is still the 2018 positions are still vacant and they assume that they will still be vacant in 2020 because the department will not catch up fast enough.

And then part of it is if you go back to...

If I go back here to the performance so far this year, and I'll go back to that lateral line and use this as an example, the department actually had money to hire 15 laterals.

And they didn't make it, as we've discussed.

They are seven down.

And so what the mayor's proposed budget does is it takes the salary for those seven and It captures that salary as part of the 2019 third quarter supplemental adjustment.

And then, of course, since we're still catching up, the department's still catching up, they know that the salary for those seven won't be needed in 2020 either.

And so that's what they're capturing with the $6.2 million for vacancy savings.

So I know that we're hiring community service officers, and the mayor has recommended expanding that, which I think is terrific, because it seems that that's something that every neighborhood wants.

They like to have a face, a familiar and a friendly face.

Is there any thought about doing more of that to fill some of the kind of the empty street, empty beat officers.

I know they can't do the same kinds of things, but we do see that there is a sense of safety and community engagement when we have these types of officers outside and available for people to talk to.

Absolutely, and I think that's what the chief is trying to do by spending additional funding on emphasis patrols, is to have the visibility of officers working with the public.

CSOs also will be working with officers and with service providers, just in a different way.

If I can I think I think your question around how are we spending the salary savings is a is a very good one And we've been spending some time Digging into that as well and my understanding of how those dollars have been reappropriate or proposed to be reappropriated is in several ways one is to support an additional expansion of the community service officer program, which Greg already highlighted as part of the, you know, proposed changes between the endorsed and what we have before us.

So, that's $1.2 million to go from the original 12 to 18 community service officers.

So, that is part of the reappropriation.

The other part would be to continue to support the emphasis patrols.

That's a $848,000 ticket item.

And then additionally to that would be to support the recruitment and retention initiatives as proposed by the recruitment and retention report to the tune of about $1.7 million.

And then on top of that, supporting the nurse helplines, the nurse helpline, and then there are five I believe five nurses that are going to be available at five different precincts.

That's also being funded by the 6.2 million dollar salary savings.

So there's a variety of things across the spectrum that the mayor has proposed in her budget be funded through that 6.2 million dollar salary savings.

But I think it's a it's a it's a it's not all gone because it hasn't all been spent.

But the mayor has proposed to us her ideas of how to spend the 6.2 million dollars, of course, because those programs haven't been set up yet, we have the discretion under your leadership, Chair, to make decisions about whether we agree with the proposed expenditures or whether we have other priorities, or we want to shift those dollars around to tip the balance towards some of those programs more than others.

But my understanding is that sort of represents in a very a rough cut way as I've described it, all of the other things that would be funded through this budget.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Back to you.

All right.

So, as Councilmember Gonzalez mentioned, there are a lot of big ticket items that are funded in the SPD budget.

It comes up to about $6.4 million.

One of the biggest ones is the recruitment and retention initiative, and there are a number of different initiatives within this program, and I can I'm going to briefly summarize that what you'll see before you is that there is about 120, or 102,000 devoted to recruitment, which is that first tier there.

There is about 196 that is dedicated towards hiring improvements, and that's a process of making the hiring process more efficient and faster.

So that the department doesn't lose candidates as they're trying to get them in the door.

There is a $843,000 investment in retention.

And that is sort of the third tier there.

And then the fourth tier is...

Can I just ask you a quick question?

Sorry.

Tell me what clear my card and step into our shoes is.

And these are the names of the various initiatives, and I am happy to go through them briefly, or...

Just a couple of sentences.

Let's clear my card.

Okay, I'll just do a couple sentences.

I want to start at the top.

Civilian Disworn Pathway is about...

No, I'm good.

I'm good on that.

Oh, just that one?

Just start on Clear My Card and step into our shoes.

Just, what is that?

Okay, so on the retention initiatives, Clear My Card is, there is a, a card or a report of bias, excessive force, various charges that have been brought against officers.

And in several instances, well, in quite a few instances, those are unsubstantiated.

And when they are through the investigation process, through OPA, if they are found to be unsubstantiated, then what the department is saying is that they should be taken out of your file, so to speak.

And this would be an effort to do just that.

The $10,000 is simply a software that would make sure that when there was an unsubstantiated complaint in an officer's file, that it got taken out.

And then, Greg, it would still be subject to our records retention requirements under the police accountability ordinance, right?

In other words, it's not purged forever.

It just goes away from this part of the officer's file that is oftentimes relied upon for purposes of making decisions about performance and promotions.

I would guess that's true, yes.

Let's confirm that.

My understanding the way that it was described in committee was that this was really focused on a very narrow area and that there would still be records retention requirements both under the Public Disclosure Act but certainly under our accountability ordinance.

So I would want to make sure that this isn't budding up against that, in addition to the fact that there has been agreement between the city and the police unions on records retention issues as it relates to these types of complaints, whether they're substantiated or not.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

I got the idea.

Let's keep moving on.

Thank you.

Okay, do you want me to hit any of the big ones, or do you just move on to the next issue?

Next issue, please.

Okay.

The next issue is emphasis patrols, and what you see before you...

Hang on, because I don't think you queued up the options for this one.

Oh, I'm going to do options at the end, but...

Oh, okay.

I can do that now.

But I didn't mean to throw you off your presentation, Greg.

I thought, I just thought, I was following the memo and the options was next, so I was thinking that's why.

Thank you.

No, I appreciate that.

So option number one would be to request some kind of an implementation report.

I had thought that maybe a June 1st deadline would be good because there's a lot of information that will be coming from the executive on the recruitment bonuses.

And it might also be a good time to hear whether or not the initiatives before you are having any success.

Another option is to not fund one or more of these potential initiatives.

Council Member Sawant had that as one of her budget actions.

And a third option might be to do nothing.

Okay.

I think asking for an implementation report would be good.

When we heard this issue in my committee, one of the things that I appreciated was that the overall recruitment and retention strategies report actually had some deliverables quarter by quarter.

And so I'm not sure if that completely aligns with the June 1st proposal, but I do think that conceptually an implementation report to provide the city council some additional insight in how the department intends to implement some of these proposals is important.

And I understand that on some of these, we have scant details about the actual particulars of some of these proposals.

And I would hope that an implementation report can give us those additional details as well.

So I would.

I would support a variation of option A.

So you want an option A1?

Yeah.

I mean, I just, I'm not sure that the June 1st, 2019 works for all of these because I think they have them on a phased schedule in terms of some of these initiatives.

So I would want to be sensitive to what we've heard in terms of how they intend to phase the work in.

That's it.

We can ask the department what they would think would be an effective date.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, so the emphasis patrols, I'm calling it the eight neighborhood emphasis patrols, and those neighborhoods are Alki, Pioneer Square, Soto, Georgetown, South Park, Fremont, and Ballard, and finally the Pike Pine Corridor.

And those were emphasis that started pre-summer in May of this year, and the mayor continued throughout the summer.

And the emphasis patrols have been coupled with other work by other Seattle departments, around infrastructure to address maintenance needs and finally to provide outreach and human services to various communities.

And as you can see in Table 5, this is a table that shows all of the overtime that was used in all of the emphasis patrols.

through the summer and the eight neighborhood patrol that I've been talking about is the largest component.

That is the 1.6 million dollars and that's what the department has spent this year on that service.

Other emphasis patrols around Capitol Hill, around nightlife, around the Central District, anti-violence, Those are all lumped into the second line, which is the $290,000 for a total of $1.9 million that the department has spent on emphasis patrols this year.

Great.

As we go through this and look at options, I really want, as I've raised this multiple times, My constituents in Pioneer Square and in the Pike Pine Corridor could say nothing but good things about the officers, where they were, how they were responding and caring for people.

And the only thing I've heard is that more of this would be appreciated by folks that live and work in this area.

So I don't know how we're going to pay for it going forward, but I just want to put a bookmark in here that I think has been pretty positive.

Yeah, Council Member Pacheco.

Chair Baxter, I just wanted to add additionally that this is a point that I made earlier in the summer during the Council Member Gonzales' committee, which was that in North Seattle, the number one real crime rate and perceived crime rate was highest in the U District.

Additionally, the third largest hate crime rate was also in the U District.

And that given that the city, as well as the region's multi-billion dollar investment in light rail, what I had heard consistently with constituents was that they had real anxieties and fears about going to the U District to catch the light rail.

And so I flagged that as an area of interest during committee, and I continue to flag that as an area of interest because I think not only is a good public policy for us or policy for us to focus in helping to address what I think are some of the necessary infrastructure investments in the U District, but also just in terms of what I had said during committee and also to share with all of you as well.

Great.

Thank you.

I appreciate you.

Go ahead.

So what I wanted to point out is that this is the spending in 2019. The 1.6 million that you see for the neighborhood emphasis patrols, if that were to be continued in 2020 at that same level, 1.6 million, the department would need the add of 848,000.

If the council decided not to make that add of 848,000, that would reduce by approximately half the funding that would be available for the Neighborhood Emphasis Patrol or other patrols.

I should note that this is, you know, fungible over time.

It can be used for the neighborhood patrols or if something happens next year that the chief urgently needs to attend to, she can redirect that to other neighborhoods or to other activities.

But if the council doesn't fund the 848,000, that will reduce the capacity here.

And so just so I've got clarity here, option B, that's by Council Member Sawant's proposal.

Would that eliminate money for the emphasis patrols entirely?

That would not fund the 848,000, and it would take the 1.6 number up there down by approximately half in terms of ability to spend.

Greg, can you walk me through how that works?

Because emphasis patrols is just, you know, a term of art for overtime.

So I don't, I mean, is the proposal to reduce, is Council Member Sawant's proposal to effectively reduce the Seattle Police Department's overtime budget by this amount?

Not exactly.

I think I can answer your question in the next slide.

So if I might, I'll go for this.

I'm going to hold you to that, Greg.

I'm sorry?

I said I was going to hold you to that.

Okay.

So what you're seeing here, and I'm going to step back and do a little education, I apologize, but what you're seeing here is an overtime actual hours to budgeted hours.

And the budget is the gray line that's lower, and the actual is the line that is red that is higher.

And what you can see, let's see if this works here.

No, oh yeah, here we go.

What you can see is that in the prior years, in the summer times, June and July in each of the last two years, the expenditures have gone in excess of the budget for overtime.

And what you're seeing there is the department is using salary savings that it has from vacant positions to be able to fund the overtime for those activities.

The same thing happened this year here where they got to the summertime and they needed to fund the emphasis patrols, didn't quite have enough funding to be able to do that.

And therefore, they got the difference between the gray line and the red line from salary savings.

The adjustments that you have seen to the salary savings earlier today is going to impact their ability to do that.

So they've cut their salary savings kind of down to the bone.

And what that means is if they're going to provide the service next year at that $1.6 million level, they're going to have to have an add of $848,000.

I understand that part, Greg.

I guess I'm just saying if there's a proposal to cut $848,000 for emphasis patrols in particular, I mean, really, at the end of the day, what we're talking about is reducing the appropriated overtime budget by $848,000.

Because that's where the money comes from.

I think the money came last year from salary savings.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

And that salary savings is now taken.

And so they would need an add of $848,000 to be able to deliver the same service.

And Council Member Sawant's proposal would be to not give them that add.

And in that case, they would only be able to do $760,000, $800,000.

Okay, so then, because I thought that $848,000 was effectively maintaining the status quo.

Am I hearing you say that the additional $848,000 would actually expand the emphasis patrol program?

The $848,000 is needed to maintain the status quo.

The status quo last year was gotten by use of salary savings.

Since those salary savings are now gone, the only way to maintain the status quo is to add overtime funding.

from the general fund?

That's correct.

Got it.

Okay.

There's a sort of synergy between the general fund and salary or between overtime and salary savings insofar as when there's salary savings, it's useful to use the salary savings for overtime to backfill for patrol and other foot beats that we've talked about and just general emphasis.

Okay.

So I'll move on to the last issue, which is the community service officers.

And what you see before you is a very complicated table that I'm not going to go into.

I put it here to make the point that it has been a long road to get the community service officers to the point where they are getting close to being hired and could be on board by the end of December.

And that would be the 12 community service officers that were funded.

Really, the seeds for funding went all the way back to 2017. And over the last several years, there have been a series of reappropriations.

And there's been a series of slides or provisos asking the department for more information.

They launched a really pretty expansive effort with community to try and help define everything from what the community service officers would wear to where they would be stationed, what kind of hours they would work.

And so it's really been a deliberative process and intentional process over the last several years to figure out how those folks would work.

And now that that's done and the councils receive that information, they're ready to pull the trigger.

We don't like to use that phrase.

Do you want to talk about that anymore?

Yeah, I would just, again, I just really, this has been a very long effort.

I want to thank Councilmember O'Brien for his ongoing dedication to championing this work and to, you know, really making sure that as the development of the program was occurring that we were including important stakeholders, both historically speaking, those who had engaged with the CSO program in the past, and then also current stakeholders who are probably newer to this conversation around CSOs.

And really, really thankful to the police department and all of those who engaged in that stakeholder process for coming up with a program that I think we can all be very proud of.

If I had one thing to complain about, it's that they aren't hired and already out in the field.

You know, it's taken us an extraordinarily long time.

to get this just going.

And so I am eager to see these folks actually be hired and trained and in the field.

I think it's going to be a potential game changer in terms of how we approach our public safety and lead to many more positive opportunities.

So agree.

So agree.

And I just want to make sure that this is adequately funded.

So thanks for bringing this forward.

And so I would say that the main difference between the 12 that are coming on board at the end of the year is their deployment.

If the 12 come on by themselves and the mayor's add of six more doesn't happen, if it's just the 12, they're going to work two different ships, one Monday through Friday and a second Tuesday through Saturday.

And they're going to be housed downtown across the street and respond citywide.

When you say downtown across the street, what do you mean?

Seattle Police Department headquarters.

Oh, okay.

If there were six more added, if the mayor's proposal were adopted, then they would do the configuration a little bit differently.

They would assign the CSOs to the precincts and they would be dedicated and housed in the different precincts.

So that's the main difference.

Yeah.

So you're talking about adding six more so we'd have 18?

Right.

Divided by the five precincts so we'll get close to, you know, three in each precinct plus a few spares?

Roughly, there's a few of the positions that are considered supervisors, so they would probably still be at headquarters, I would imagine.

and sort of doing traffic control, not in the...

Not literally.

Sorry, I just need to move away from these idioms.

They would be making sure that the work assignments are happening according to precinct need.

But I think Greg's point is an important one because the scaling up before we've even scaled, I think it is important to understand that the construct is real here, and so we certainly don't want to do anything to create further delay in terms of standing up the program.

makes a lot of sense.

Those individuals will then start to really deeply understand the issues that are important to those particular precinct footprints and really, I think, yield to better results as opposed to having roving folks across the city.

But I think everything we can do, I feel like we have done what we can do from a city council perspective to encourage a quick implementation of the program, even if it's 18 versus 12. And if I'm wrong on that, Greg will point out if there are other things we can do to facilitate the process of implementation.

I think there's been a lot of process.

More than we'd like.

I think we're here at this point, finally.

And so now I'm about to recommend more process.

It may be that the council wants to request a midyear report on the 12 CSOs and how they're working with the community since they're going to be out there first.

Although, the department has said that if they got the additional six, they could get them on board pretty quickly too.

They have one really big batch of resumes that came in and they've conducted a holistic review and could get all of them potentially on quickly.

They are holding back on the 6 to see what the council chooses to do.

But either way, it may be that you want to ask for a report next year to hear how things are going.

Yeah, I think that's very likely.

Yeah.

And one thing I just want to congratulate and say thank you on is that as we're struggling to get police officers hired and to retain, do I have the numbers right that 700 applicants came in for these CSO positions?

That's 1,000.

Yeah, at least.

So, we know that there are people interested in going to work in these positions, and I think that that should be underscored.

There are people that want to do this work, and the community really wants them there.

So, I frankly will be, if there's money to be had, going full bore on 18 would be my preference.

I'm doing calisthenics, that's right.

Well, good news, you don't have to, because the mayor's proposed budget includes the expansion from 12 to 18?

As long as certain proposals and actions from the council members don't cut it out, so.

Oh, right, there's that.

So with that, I'll conclude and go to the budget actions that are proposed by council members.

The first one is by Council Member Sawant, a cut of $3.3 million.

And what she is proposing there is a cut of three of the ads that we've been talking about today.

One would be the $1.6 million in retention and recruitment, the initiatives there.

One would be the $848,000 in money that is needed to or proposed to keep emphasis patrols at the same level.

And then the final one is $814,000, which is to maintain the hiring bonuses for laterals and recruits that come on board.

And the rationale there is just to make the $3.3 million available to other council priorities.

The second one is to adopt a statement of legislative intent that would require SPD to undergo training related to sex workers.

And that is similar in both two and three.

I think the intention there is similar.

And I'll ask Council Member Gonzalez to, I guess, go ahead and speak to her proposal.

Great.

So this would be a statement of legislative intent to request that the Seattle Police Department undergo training related to sex workers.

So we have been hearing a lot about what appears to have been a change in policy from the Seattle Police Department in terms of arrest versus diversion of sex workers in our city.

I noticed that on one of the previous charts that Greg, you showed us, you know, in those summer months, Particularly from the North Precinct, we saw a massive uptick of referrals to lead, for example.

It's unclear to me whether that is associated with a commensurate increase in the arrest of sex workers or interaction with sex workers, or if it has something more to do with the emphasis patrols that were also coming out of the North Precinct that were leading to referrals to lead.

would like to get a better understanding of what was pushing those numbers kind of off the chart, if you will, in terms of the previous chart that you were showing us.

But back to this particular issue, I think it's really important for us to continue to provide the police department with the tools that they need to really understand and take a victim-centered approach.

I'm concerned that currently we don't have perhaps the most robust training in this particular space to allow for for officers who interact with sex workers to actually be adopting, implementing, and deploying victim-centered approaches in the sex worker space.

And setting aside victim-centered approaches, we oftentimes, I think, get in the trap of talking about sex workers only in that one-dimensional sense of being victims, and that's not always the case.

Sometimes it's just about harm reduction as opposed to talking about sex workers from a victim perspective only.

And so I think it's really important for us to make sure that we as city stakeholders are appropriately trained in the nuances in that industry and making sure that we are providing our officers who may come into interaction with sex workers with the appropriate tools to be able to identify who needs to be diverted, who is truly a victim, and any other shades of gray that may exist within that spectrum.

I see Councilmember Mosqueda's proviso of $200,000 as being actually complementary to the statement of legislative intent that I've advanced.

Because SPD doesn't currently undergo this training, I think it's important for us to have some work being done to really co-design and develop what that training program would be.

My vision and hope would be that it would be done in conjunction with community-based organizations that do organizing and outreach work to sex workers.

across the city and to really work together to come up with a good training program that could be implemented amongst the police department, both on the command staff level, but also on the patrol officer level or detective level where there's interaction between officers and sex workers to really make this a win-win proposition for the department and for the sex workers that they come into interaction with whatever their circumstances might be.

Obviously, Council Member Mosqueda's proviso is complementary because it's sort of thinking forward about once we have that design in place, how do we fund the training?

I'll be submitting a Form B that I think is likely a little bit bigger than the $200,000, but we're working with community-based organizations to make sure we have an appropriate estimate, and we're also talking to the police department to make sure that we have a good sense of the scope of who would need to do the training to help fine-tune what the cost for this item would be.

But I do think it's an important investment, and I hope that we can prioritize it in this cycle.

Very good.

Thanks.

And I appreciate it that you and Council Member Mosqueda are working collaboratively with this and with her office while in her absence.

So thanks for doing that.

Maybe just an opportunity for us to combine them to reduce paper in the future.

And we're happy to have those conversations.

Super.

And the last one is Council Member Herbold adopting a sly that would request SPD to report to the council on compliance with copper wire sales transactions and record keeping requirements.

The stolen copper wire you're talking about?

Yes.

Council Member O'Brien, you were reaching for the microphone.

Just to support Council Member Gonzales and Council Member Mosqueda's ads and if there's anything I can do to help on there, but it's based on that last conversation we had here a few weeks ago, I think that some funding for some training and It doesn't doesn't seem that the city is aligned around what I thought our vision was based on some of the comments the other day So, thanks.

Okay.

Are you going through any of the appendices?

No, I'm done.

I'm really sorry.

I thought we were gonna go through them line by line Are you regretting that now?

Anything else?

Anything else, colleagues?

Well done, Greg.

This is a very meaty presentation.

We will move into public comment.

David's coming.

He wants to speak to us.

Okay, thank you very much.

We've got four people.

The first one, Lisa Taylor Lopez and Chelsea Nelson, David Haynes.

So, if the three of you would get close.

And then our last speaker who just signed up, what's your name?

Savannah?

Oh, good.

Thank you very much.

So you'll be fourth.

Please, go ahead.

Nice to see you, Lisa.

Hi.

Hello, city council members.

My name is Lisa Taylor Lopez, and I speak as a former president of San Francisco chapter of the Bipolar Support Alliance and as the current lead core organizer of the Seattle chapter of the Sex Worker Rights Project, or SWAP Seattle.

Thank you for recognizing the need for awareness of the suffering of sex workers on North Aurora and for the awareness of the need for the city budget to include monies to help these human beings.

North Aurora residents have been concerned about the increase of criminalized activity in their neighborhood due to the SESTA-FOSTA legislation President Trump signed in April 2018. We advise that these concerned citizens learn more about the sex trade and listen to what Swap Seattle, victims, and sex workers of all kinds, trafficked, circumstantial, and consenting, are saying about sex work, especially those of color and trans sex workers.

This will help the North Aurora community to learn about the environment and generally how it is in the sex trade world.

These community members would then know how to better help.

Thank you for choosing to listen to the experience of SWAP.

We hope that with the passing of this budget decision, the citizens of the North Aurora neighborhood will take your lead and do what they can to help these marginalized sex workers, especially sex workers of color and trans sex workers.

Sex workers aren't some unimportant group over there with our little problems.

We are everywhere, and we are deserving of human rights, human rights that are promised to everyone.

We are your sister, your nephew, your employee, your daughter.

The reason that you don't know us is due to the shame and stigma of sex work.

We must eradicate the shame in sex work, the shame of sex in general, and we must be politically active about supporting victims and consenting sex workers alike.

In order to help trafficked victims, we must teach them how to not feel shame about having done sex work, regardless whether they are trafficked or consenting, regardless of their involvement in sex work.

Learn about the various aspects of the sex trade and try not to be stigmatizing or judgmental.

It is helpful to think of coercion and trafficking within the industry as a form of domestic violence.

It is also important to recognize that the sex work industry consists of three general categories of workers, as I said, those who are coerced and trafficked, those who do sex work because of their dire economic circumstances, and those that consent to do the work fully, consent fully.

Law enforcement, I'm almost done.

Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion is a good program.

I think a better alternative than sending the police to help would be to send trained social service workers, such as POC Swap, People of Color Swaps, Green Light Project on North Aurora, and Swap Seattle's Eileen's Outreach Center on South Pack Highway.

As a private citizen, I speak as a Seattle native, a disabled resident of Seattle, and as a formerly coerced, trafficked, and circumstantial victim, and now a consenting sex worker.

Again, I urge you to allow yourselves to be informed by sex workers of all kinds.

Thank you.

Thanks for coming, Lisa.

Chelsea, David, Savannah.

Hi.

Hi, how are you?

Couldn't be better.

Love to see you.

Thank you for being here.

So my name's Chelsea.

I'm from Downtown Seattle Association, and I lead the advocacy work involving public safety, homelessness, and other things, too.

And just a personal note, before I was at DSA, I worked in the labor movement.

I worked a lot in criminal justice reform, have visited prisons and jails all throughout Washington and the country.

I was a little bit worried that when I got involved in this work that it would provide some internal conflict because of my previous work and it hasn't.

The work with the high barrier individuals has given me a broader perspective and so I'm here representing DSA to urge you to fund the mayor's proposals DSA and partners, we wanted to learn more about the criminal justice system because our members kept telling us that it's hard to do business in Seattle.

So as you know, we worked with Scott Lindsey.

We commissioned two reports that gave us a deeper dive.

And what we learned is the system as it stands now isn't working.

It's not working for people who are cycling through the system, and it's not working for our members.

It's not working for the general public.

Oftentimes, women and low-wage workers are the ones being victimized.

So all of that to say, we did some learning.

We visited different cities across the country, Minneapolis being one of them.

Last week, Minneapolis was here.

And a lot of what cities who we think are making progress with this population, the investments that the mayor has proposed mirror, mimic what we think is working in other cities.

So we urge you to support and to fund the mayor's proposals and we look forward to working with you all moving forward.

Thank you.

Thank you very much David and then Savannah.

Savannah do you want to come on up so you're here?

City Council should stop proving so aloof and out of touch and simply delete one out of the four exemptions for LEAD and not allow the evil drug pushers who destroy lives daily to be exempted from jail.

Because it's not a low-level crime.

A low-level crime is stealing an apple from the grocery store.

But high-level and low-level drug pushers are the same evil pieces of you-know-what.

It's obvious we have the most racist leaders in the police department, ill-trained and cowardice, refusing to go after the bad guys because our racist city council and mayor is financing a biased, unconstitutional police state of conducting war on the poor, claiming the war on drugs failed because The wrong cops were hired and ill-trained and ignoble activists ill-advised City Council into believing it's progressive to, I dare say, implode society keeping drug pushers out of jail while supporting the most racist biased budget the 21st century has seen in the first world.

Shame on City Council for such blatant violations.

What does it take to convince you Lisa Dugard filled in the blanks of marijuana with crack, meth, and heroin Think about your own family's futures when they mistakenly befriend a lowlife who brings drugs and pushes and tricks them and ruins their life.

Will you exempt the pushers from jail then?

Criminal justice reform should be about improving the jail punishments, not discounting the victims while embracing evil because they have radical, drinking and thinking lawyers looking to get rich, keeping them out of jail, using more unqualified case managers who work banker's hours, cheerleading and encouraging evil pushers to be better people.

Make no mistake, Seattle imploded because drug pushers know they ain't going to jail, especially if they use their own product.

When is the City Council going to demand this, the same amount of effort and investment to help the innocent, sober, drug-free, civilized, upstanding homeless?

You're discriminating against innocents for evil destroyers of life.

Giving pushers a home allows them to become more sophisticated in abusing others.

Thank you, David.

Savannah?

Thank you for coming.

Hello, council members.

Thank you so much for your time.

My name is Savannah Sly, and I am a sex worker, and I am the former president of the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA.

I'm a member of Swap Seattle, and I'm also an active member in the Coalition for the Rights and Safety of People in the Sex Trade.

And I really appreciate all the thought and attention that's been brought to the issue of the sex trade in the past couple of weeks.

I want to speak to two things, actually three things, real quick.

The funding for SPD, we applaud this and we appreciate this and we hope that you reach out to a wide range of organizations.

Something that's unfortunate that's happened amongst individuals and advocates in the sex trade is through the The past initiatives over the past few years around trying to end demand for prostitution and eradicate the sex trade, a big division has been created between people who identify as survivors and people who identify as sex workers.

We're all people in the sex trade, and we hope that a training like this could be a collaboration between people.

because we all have very similar experiences.

Also, LEAD is doing some great work.

It's definitely better than just arresting everybody.

But LEAD isn't necessarily equipped to help people in the sex trade who might be there if they're not being totally coerced.

There's a lot of people working on the streets who have very, very bad situations.

And things that could help them would be, as Lisa said, assistance around domestic violence, housing, job training, things like that.

And those aren't necessarily things that LEAD is fully equipped to help with.

So we might want to consider having more social workers out on the street to build relationships with people.

And there's an inherently antagonistic relationship with police because people in the sex trade are criminalized.

And it's just not always the best first point of help.

We like to say help doesn't begin with handcuffs.

And we might look up to our neighbors up north in Vancouver.

Canada has a very different prostitution model.

But they have a police community liaison who has no power to arrest.

And she's mostly there to help people file police reports if they need to and things of that nature.

So thanks for thinking about this issue.

We really appreciate it.

Savannah, do you have a contact?

I do.

Could I ask you to put that on there?

I'd like to follow up with you.

Okay, anybody else like to speak?

Mr. Crovin, anything to say?

No, I'm just kidding.

Chair Baxter, I just wanted, well, I have Savannah and I missed your name.

Lisa, Savannah and Lisa here.

We did get, from at least a survivor perspective, we did receive a request, my office received a request to advance another budget ad that would create a diversion program for sex workers who may come into contact with the criminal legal system.

And that does have a stronger focus on funneling resources over to community-based organizations of all variety that work across the spectrum within the sex trade.

So would be really happy to also stay in contact with you all to make sure that we have the benefit of your input and your perspective as we advance this particular budget item.

That's something that'll come up in the form Bs.

Chair Bagshaw, I just wanted to let you all know since I had you here.

Yeah, thank you.

If the two of you would be interested or willing to talk with me offline, I'd love to have a chance to pursue some of your suggestions further.

Absolutely and thank you and just one quick thing there was a recently a work group on studying re-entry that I think that Mr. Harrell I think you helped commission that with Herbold and one of their recommendations was decriminalization of prostitution and drug loitering.

I'm not sure where those recommendations are going but we like to bring them up just so they don't get buried.

Okay, thank you so much.

Yeah, if you'll just give me your contact information, I'll follow up.

Thank you so much, both of you.

Okay, well, appreciate everybody.

Thank you so much for staying here throughout the entire afternoon.

The meeting's adjourned, and we will start again tomorrow morning at 930.