Public Safety & Human Services Committee 9/24/21

September 24th, 2021 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.36 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Gonzalez?

Here.

Council Member Lewis?

Present.

Council Member Morales?

Here.

Council Member Sawant?

Chair Herbold?

Here.

We have four present.

Thank you so much.

So on today's agenda, we'll be hearing from the Office of Civil Rights Community Task Force, and they will present recommendations on the proposed realignment of the criminal legal system.

We'll also be hearing from LEAD, REACH, and the Public Defenders Association and their presentation on the LEAD Scale Study Report.

This background this report is in response to a sly a statement of legislative intent Council passed last fall Requesting that the Human Services Department and lead reports to council on the funding required to meet the city's commitment in Resolution three one nine one six to support pre-arrest diversion services for all priority quality qualifying referrals at scale by 2023 And finally, we're going to have a work session on a proposed resolution that affirms Seattle's commitment to decriminalization of athenogens.

With that, we'll move to approval of today's agenda.

There is no objection.

Today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, this agenda is adopted.

And at this time, we'll move into the public comment period.

I want to thank everybody on the line for public comment for your patience this morning as we all work together to iron out some technical difficulties.

Happy to have you all with us today.

I'll moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

The speaker will begin minutes to speak.

I will call on each speaker by name in the order in which they registered on the Council's website.

If you've not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of the public hearing by going to the Council's website.

This link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call the speaker's name, you will hear a prompt.

Once you've heard that prompt, Please press 6, I'm sorry, star 6 to unmute yourself.

And in order, after you hear the prompt, in order for us to hear you speaking, you need to hit star 6 to unmute yourself.

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

speakers will hear time when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

Once the speaker hears that time, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments and speakers who do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided will have their speaker mic muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, please disconnect from the line and you can keep following the meeting via the Seattle channel or the listening options that are listed on the agenda.

There are seven people signed up for public comment, so no need to extend the public comment period.

So that's news to hear from everybody and the full two minutes of time allotted for each speaker.

So with that, I will call the speakers in the order that they're listed here in the sign-up sheet.

I'll call two at a time.

First, we have Howard Gale, followed by Trevona Thompson-Wiley.

Howard?

I don't believe Howard's present yet.

All right.

Howard is noted as not present.

We'll move down.

Stand by.

We got Howard.

Hang on.

I got to let him in.

Sorry about that.

All good.

Thank you.

He's coming in shortly.

Here we go.

OK.

Howard is on.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Howard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You gave everybody the wrong ID, so that's why no one's here.

Good morning, Howard Gale.

Last Saturday, the Seattle Times covered the story of Howard McKay, a retired longshoreman who was brutally assaulted in his own home by Seattle police two years ago.

The city has now given McKay $250,000 of our tax money to settle the lawsuit that resulted from this abuse of an elderly white Seattle homeowner.

But the city has not given Mr. McKay any amount of police accountability.

In fact, When OPA Director Andrew Meyerberg investigated the case assault, he deemed it, quote, lawful and proper after doing an OIG-approved expedited investigation without even bothering to interview the SPD officers involved.

This event further highlights the recently revealed scandal by Carolyn Bick in the South Seattle Emerald last month concerning the willingness of the OIG to support OPA Director Meyerberg's failed investigations that deem, quote, lawful and proper all manner of SPD abuse and killings.

If that exposé wasn't sufficient to move you to action, the OPA recently announced that the horrific SBD murder of Terry Kaber last year was also, quote, lawful and proper.

In the coming weeks, I promise, you will learn of more scandals embroiling the OIG and the OPA.

The council has been willing to ignore the abuse of protesters and the killings of people of color, where people suffering a mental health crisis fall in service to a mythical belief that Seattle has a functioning police accountability system.

Maybe now you feel you've struck a blow for equity when you can also turn a blind eye to the abuse of a white, middle-class Seattle homeowner of 48 years.

Council members Herbold Gonzalez, Lewis Morales, and so on, for God's sake, when will you take seriously your oversight responsibilities?

This makes dramatically clear the urgent need for us to have full civilian community control over police policy, misconduct investigations, and discipline.

Go to seattlestop.org to find out how.

That's seattlestop.org.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Trayvonna Thompson-Wiley followed by Red Red.

Trayvonna?

Make sure your phone is unmuted itself too.

Hi.

Hi, my name is Trayvon and I'm a resident of District 2. I'm calling in support of the criminal legal system task force presentation.

This report is a reminder that the city needs to divest from the harmful criminal legal system.

The report reveals that 90% of people who go through SMC are indignant and qualify for public defenders.

The misdemeanor court is primarily a court of the poor.

There are many more option ways to address poverty and housing crisis beyond criminalization of poor people.

Finalizing poor folks ain't the way.

This is another reminder that the communities on all sides are asking you to divest from the criminal legal system and really creatively and critically invest in community members and organizations.

A budget is a moral document of the city government.

This report asks for you all to consider the ways in which criminal legal reforms cannot be separated from housing, healthcare, and other policies.

We ask you to take a holistic approach in addressing harm in the city that is reflected in the city's budget.

This community is asking for a new normal.

Stop the criminalization of poor folks.

Actually show compassion and support all of our community members.

And I really push the rest of my time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Red Red, followed by Lisa Taylor.

Hello and good morning.

I would like to raise the accessibility concerns that happened this morning.

There was a need to actually require to go and respond back to and get corrected information was a hindrance for a lot of people in being able to be on time and also be in the space.

So I wanted to really highlight that as well.

That's my first thing, but hello and good morning, Council and the general public.

I'm here to talk and speak truth to power and institutional power who's leading this task force.

The task force was convened from September 2020 to May 2021 under the Office of Civil Rights.

The director is Mariko Lockhart.

Community members have reached out to Mariko in regard to the 2021 Community Alternatives to Incarceration and Policing RFP.

This RFP is 17 pages long.

with the first two pages filled with accolades on how the Office of Civil Rights is engaging with community for this grant and its funding history.

This RFP is specifically for providing resources for Black people and Black transgender people of Seattle.

The downloadable RFP packet shows a due date of October 4th 2021 for this RFP.

The landing page for this RFP which by the way isn't even highlighted on the main Civil Rights page at all.

You scroll down, see a small fine print under a graphic that says this RFP is actually due September 27th.

How is this accessible to the communities who it proposes to try to help and provide resources for?

How do we trust anything presented and put forth by a department who can't even be responsive for a community resource, let alone be led by an alternative to community safety?

Actions show that the words are hollow and the strategic use of popular social justice jargon like harm reduction, accountability, and transparency.

How is this office being accountable?

I invite counsel and the public to hold institutions and those who run them accountable for their actions.

Thank you so much for that information.

Our next speaker is Lisa Taylor.

Lisa will be followed by Nikita Oliver.

Hello, my name is Lisa Taylor, and I am addressing Agenda Item Criminal Criminal System Task Force Recommendations.

I want to first acknowledge that I occupy the ancestral land of the Coast Salish peoples.

I respect their right to sovereignty and self-determination.

I want to acknowledge secondly as a white person that the racial justice movement must be led by people of color.

I commit myself to continuously move from the status of actor to ally to accomplice in the fight for racial justice.

Thirdly I am speaking here because I am a disabled person from Seattle who has suffered in health care institutions and at the hands of law enforcement nonetheless despite the fact that I have experienced oppression as a person with disabilities.

I acknowledge that the privilege begat by my whiteness is undoubtedly why I'm able to be present here today with all of my medical needs met and my heart still alive and pounding in my chest.

I want to thank everyone on the task force for the work you did.

I particularly agree with recommendation number 6 and the practice of coercive mental health treatment and the criminalization of people with disabilities.

With this recommendation we honor the young woman I used to be a woman with a mental illness who was repeatedly harassed and unlawfully detained by the Seattle Police Department.

A woman who was tortured on many occasions by five-point restraints and violently ejected with unwanted psych medication when I was visibly compliant.

A woman who, against her will, was repeatedly hospitalized as the underlying issues that plagued her were never and could never be resolved by the existing status quo.

A woman with a disability who eventually succumbed to sex traffickers.

Due to the poverty I experienced as a disabled person, in the last few years I engaged in consensual sex work.

I have now exited the sex trade and I work instead as a community resource specialist for the Sex Workers Outreach Project behind bars.

providing assistance to those engaged in the sex trade, our allies, and other interested members of the public in educating all about the critical need to decriminalize sex work now.

In particular, I want to thank the task force member, Emmy Koyama, the incredible work she does as coordinator of the Coalition of the Rights and Safety of People in the Sex Trade has saved my life and the lives of many others in the sex trade.

We are all very lucky to be able to work with her and benefit from her work.

Again, I thank you all for the work you put into this report, and I look forward to a better Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Nikita Oliver.

Nikita will be followed by both hands.

Good morning Seattle City Council.

My name is Nikita Oliver.

I use they them pronouns and I am a member of decriminalize Seattle, the Solidarity Budget Coalition and Executive Director of Creative Justice.

I'm calling this morning because I want to voice support for the Criminal Legal Systems Task Force recommendations, and I deeply want to thank those community members, many of whom are some of the most impacted in our most marginalized communities for their time, their energy, and their effort to share from the front lines of the crisis of the criminal punishment system what they know will change the material conditions of our communities.

In the past year and a half, We have seen an uprising around the issue and role of policing in our city.

We have heard lots of important data around the criminal legal system, one of which is that 90 percent of people who are pushed through municipal court qualify for a public defender, which means they are found indigent, which means that as a city we are often criminalizing and prosecuting people for being poor.

And so I ask that as you hear from this community-led task force today, that you take seriously their recommendations as you move through the 2022 budget.

We need to make serious changes to the way in which we meet people's basic needs, understanding that housing and healthcare are two major determinants for whether or not people are pushed into the criminal legal system, and continue our efforts to shrink a failed system of public safety that is not able to deliver on its promise, and actually build a system of public health and public safety that not only meets people needs but helps us move beyond prisons and police as our primary method of achieving community health because it doesn't work.

It does not deliver on that promise.

I hope that you will take seriously the lived experience that will be brought in front of you today as both professional and important experience for determining what a thriving healthy Seattle looks like especially for our Black Native and Brown community members who are most

Our next speaker, Bill Jenkins, is showing is not present.

Changes will return to Bill Jenkins.

Next, we have Angelica, or I should know by now, Angelica Cesaro.

Angelica?

Hi, good morning.

My name is Angelica Cesaro.

I'm a member of the Criminalize Seattle and the Solidarity Budget Coalition.

I'm calling this morning to voice my full support for the criminal legal system taskforce recommendation.

But as you know, we're put forward by community members with direct experience with our punishment system.

In the past year and a half, we've had a reckoning with the role of policing in our city.

And it's past time to extend that reckoning to other parts of the criminal legal system.

At this point, our misdemeanor punishment system, as you've already heard this morning, the municipal court is primarily a system for punishing poor people, with 90% of people cycling through Muni court qualifying for public offenders because they are poor.

As you move into considering the 2022 budget I ask that you take seriously the recommendations of this report to prioritize meeting basic universal needs like housing and health care as central to the task of shrinking policing and punishment in Seattle.

We cannot keep trying to tweak the criminal legal system with more trainings and more reform to make it friendlier for the poor people who it targets.

We need to address root causes and the 2022 budget needs to center divestment from policing and punishment and investment in community.

with a focus on Black and Indigenous communities.

I thank the task force for their work, and I look forward to seeing these recommendations implemented.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That is our last speaker that is showing up as present this morning.

We have Bill Jenkins, who's still listed as not present.

And we'll just change the filibuster here a little bit to see if that changes.

It doesn't seem to be changing.

That being the case, we will end public comment and we'll move into the first item on today's agenda.

Please read into the agenda the first item.

Committee agenda item number one, criminal legal system task force recommendations for briefing and discussion.

Great, thank you so much.

I'm wondering if first, we have a lot of folks who are joining us today to participate in the presentation.

I think what we'll do is if we could just do a really quick round of introductions, just your name and affiliation, and then I'm going to have just a few opening remarks just to provide some background to this work.

And then we'll turn it over to you, and you will have the floor to lead us through your recommendations.

And so, with that, Asha, do you mind starting off the introductions?

Sure, no problem.

I'm Asha Venkatraman with Council Central Staff.

I'll pass it over to David.

Thank you, Asha.

I appreciate that.

My name is David Hippard.

He and him are my pronouns.

And I do my community work through the Freedom Project.

Emi?

Thank you, David.

My name is Emi Koyama, and people usually call me she.

And the people may have seen me from my work with the Coalition for Rights and Safety for People on the Sex Trade.

And pass it on to Selah.

Hello, Selah Mafi, she, her pronouns, with FITE, formerly incarcerated group Healing Together, rooted re-entry and community member.

And I'll send it on to Andy Pacificar.

Well, K.L., Andy, you're muted.

My next.

Yeah.

Okay.

No worries.

Good morning.

My name is KL Shannon.

And I go by she her and I'm a community organizer.

I will pass it on to Andy Dorian.

Well, the scene is Oh, yeah.

My name is Andy Pacificar.

And I also represent the Freedom Project, but I'm also affiliated with FITE, the formerly incarcerated group, Healing Together.

I'm a fierce community advocate, and thank you for inviting us into this space today.

Absolutely.

And Dorian, how you doing, bro?

Hello, my name is Dorian Taylor.

My pronouns are they and he, and I'm here today as a community member and an advocate.

Ms. Letha, I'll pass it to Ms. Letha.

Letha, you're muted.

You're muted.

Good morning.

My name is Lalitha Williams.

They call me Ms. Letha.

I do a lot of community work, but today I'm here as a task force member and I will pass it to, has everybody gone?

I think so.

Yes, everybody.

Well, except for Jarrell isn't here.

Right.

But we want to make space for his contributions, his voice, and his perspectives do live in this presentation.

And so we want to really make space and acknowledge that, well, that he was able to contribute.

And all the power in the room.

I really want to appreciate all the folks who was able to show up.

It's brilliant.

Thank you.

really appreciate everybody joining us today.

Just a little bit of background, and like I said, I'll turn it over to you.

This is your time to present to us and the listening public just the background for the past year.

Individuals impacted by the criminal legal system have been meeting as a task force convened by the Seattle Office of civil rights to develop recommendations for policy changes to the criminal legal system that will, as their goal one, reduce as much harm as possible, two, prevent people from ending up in the system to begin with.

The result is a report entitled Centering Impacted Voices, Community Task Force Recommendation on the Criminal Legal System, which is linked on today's agenda.

This morning, task force members are here to present their recommendations.

As a reminder, this task force recommendation is part of a broader work plan that the council sought, and we heard the first part of that work plan in – or work product in July of this year, where the council committee heard a presentation on the criminal legal system realignment strategic plan from former central staff member Carlos Lugo.

The presentation resulted from the funding in the 2019 budget when Council by Council President González funded a term limited position in the Legislative Department to write a strategic plan.

Funding also provided resources for a position in the Office of Civil Rights to coordinate stakeholder engagement around the development of the strategic plan and goals of realigning the criminal legal system.

That strategic plan was titled realigning Seattle's criminal legal system through a public health approach.

the intersection between community wisdom and evidence-based practices.

And that was an outcome of previous rounds of stakeholder engagement to identify, first, some community-guiding principles, which served as a foundation for research and theories on the causes of crime.

And, again, I want to really lift up the element that we're here to hear about today, which was also a required element of the strategic plan, was a separate stand-alone report from the task force on recommendations for realignment of the traditional criminal legal system.

And so with that, I just want to pause real quickly to see if Asha has any opening remarks to add to that background.

We'll hand it over to the presenters after that.

And for committee members, before we get started, I just want to make a request that if we could, for this presentation, hold questions until the end, at which point we'll have time for questions and discussions.

Asha?

anything to add?

Sure.

You covered most of what I would have said.

I'll just add a couple things.

You had mentioned that this project started back in 2018 during discussions of the 2019 budget, and a lot of the impetus for moving forward with figuring out how to realign the system is because so many asks are coming in from the executive, from council members, from the community.

And it wasn't really clear that all of those asks were going in the same direction, that some of them could have been working at cross purposes.

And it was a matter of trying to get everybody on the same page and become really clear about what we were trying to do in terms of the criminal legal system.

So over the past couple years, the task force has been meeting and both building capacity, learning about the institutional side of the system to add to their already lived experience of the system and coming up with these recommendations as a way to move forward on getting everybody on the same page.

So I just add that piece.

All right, so who from the task force would like to begin?

Excuse me, excuse me.

I'm sorry for interrupting.

I was handing it over to you.

You're not interrupting.

Go for it.

Thank you.

Can JM introduce herself?

She's part of our team, and we didn't, and we forgot to introduce her.

So if she could introduce herself, we would appreciate that.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm J.M. Wong.

I'm here as part of SOCR.

I'm a policy analyst and here to support the task force.

I'll be sharing the slides, so I'll do that right now.

Thank you.

So we're going to begin by saying thank you council members and community for creating space for this task force presentation.

My name is Lalitha Williams and I'm here as a member of the community task force.

We've met together for a year now and we are here to present the recommendations to the city.

This presentation is accompanied by a report Centering Impacted Voices, which summarizes our recommendations and perspectives.

We hope you have had the chance to read it.

And you can also find this report on the SOCR website.

This is a roadmap for our presentation today.

We will start by beginning about who we are, our acknowledgements, and who we are calling into the space.

Next, we will share the principles of community-led solutions that ground our recommendations, and that we ask you to center in any efforts to reduce the harm of the criminal legal system.

We will then give you an overview of eight recommendations and highlight a few to discuss in depth.

I'm going to hand it off now to KL to introduce the task force again.

Good morning.

Um, our work group started off with nine people impacted by the various aspects of the criminal legal system in Seattle and King County.

We have each experienced the trauma of incarceration, either through confinement or through the emotional, financial, mental, and physical toll it takes on us as we journey with our loved ones who are locked up and also as we support them through their reentry.

The trauma of incarceration and the way it impacts our communities is often minimized.

We come to this work with the urgency of black, indigenous, people of color, and poor people who are directly impacted.

Our experiences and histories inform our principles.

We do not separate criminal legal system recommendations and reforms from policies around housing, health care, education, and drugs.

We certainly know that the housing crisis, gentrification, and displacement of our communities are one of the major causes of interactions with the police and the criminal legal system.

Accountability means we don't leave each other behind.

Our queer, trans communities, our disability community, our black and native communities, whose livelihoods and survival are always criminalized.

We center anti-racism, disability justice, and gender justice in our recommendations.

We do not speak for all communities.

We speak for ourselves and the communities that we come from.

These are our task force members.

I'm now going to pass it on to Celie to offer a land acknowledgement and introduce our principles of community led solutions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This is Celia.

Before we move into the content of our presentation, we would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people past and present.

We honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish tribe.

We understand that our collective liberation, including the dismantling of the prison industrial complex, cannot happen without the sovereignty and resistance of our indigenous relatives.

We also acknowledge the suffering of our loved ones who are currently incarcerated.

Those who survive the trauma of incarceration and their loved ones and family members, those who lost their lives to state violence.

We come to this work with a lot of personal investment and experience, and we offer these recommendations with a deep sense of urgency.

We start off by highlighting the principles of community-led solutions to give council members guidance on how to move through this budget cycle.

When you are making budgetary decisions in the future, we ask you we ask you to follow these principles.

One of our principles is to reclaim the use of definitions of key terms that are used in the criminal legal system.

Superficial changes and ongoing harm in our communities by the criminal legal system is justified by these distortion of these terminologies.

We want to highlight our definitions of these terms, public safety, harm reduction, trauma informed approach, accountability for harm.

I will pass it on to Dorian to share more.

Thank you, Sela.

This is our definition of public safety, a state of physical, emotional, economic, and mental well-being, and freedom from threat, coercion, and state violence.

A definition of safety prioritizes safety.

Our definition of safety prioritizes safety of people over property.

We ask what safety means for black, indigenous, people of color, and poor people who are often targets of violence, especially by state institutions.

We emphasize the need for safety for people with disabilities and people experiencing mental health crisis.

For people who are houseless, for people who use drugs, for people who engage in sex work, the lack of a sense of safety for these communities are normalized.

And safety of these communities is often an afterthought.

We emphasize the need for safety for youth, especially youth of color, who are impacted by the foster care system, CPS, Seattle Public Schools, the Seattle Police Department, and the court systems.

Jails are incredibly unsafe places where our communities experience violence and premature death.

The level of police killings against black and brown people and people experiencing mental health crisis are known facts at this point.

We do not believe institutions can protect us.

I'll pass it to Amy.

Thank you, Dorian.

So one of the terms that we see is the harm reduction.

It's something that it's really talked about, but without much analysis into what it actually means and how that needs to focus on individual autonomy, justice, and human rights.

So harm reduction is a set of practices and policies that reduce negative health and social legal impact of drug use and other socially stigmatized behaviors and criminalized behaviors.

must be rooted in autonomy, justice, and human rights.

It has to focus on the goals and priorities as determined by the impacted individuals.

If the goal is imposed on individuals, such as stopping substance use, sex trade, and other criminal behavior, as in many of the programs that the city has offered, it is not harm reduction.

It needs to support people without judgment, caution, discrimination, stigma, or the requirement that individuals commit to making specific changes as a precondition for support.

Harm reduction is not simply replacing incarceration with other forms of state surveillance and coercive control over people's lives, such as involuntary services under the threat of criminal punishment.

Harm reduction also is proactively supporting and building up community infrastructure based on safety, relationship, and trust, and must be guided by the principles and standards established by the community.

Next slide.

And another buzzword related to that is trauma-informed approach.

Again, people talk about it without addressing how that critically impacts our analysis.

So trauma-informed approach assumes that nobody is inherently violent, abusive.

We have all been traumatized by our surroundings, our communities, society, and learned to cope in whatever ways we could.

Some of these trauma responses have developed into patterns of behavior that are no longer helpful or may cause further harm to ourselves and others around us.

But being trauma-informed means that we look at each person's struggles through a trauma lens, which asks, what has happened to you instead of what is wrong with you?

It is contrasted with a judgmental and punitive model that considers harmful actions of individuals as the failures of their character that needs to be corrected with punishment.

Now, understanding each other's trauma does not mean that our actions are excused.

Individuals are still responsible for mending and redressing any harms we have caused and addressing the harms, but we can do so without assigning judgment or moral blame, and also while recognizing roles our society has played in not protecting and meeting the needs of the person who have caused harm.

And I send it off to David next.

Thank you, Emily.

I really appreciate that.

And the need for accountability is often used to justify the existence of the criminal legal system.

We discuss accountability in a different way, though.

We view accountability for behaviors that cause harm for three different levels, with all of them sharing the goal of humanizing all parties involved and addressing harm.

We support accountability based on relationships and communities that promote positive change and responsibility, not those based on punishment and retribution.

We believe in the need to create spaces and conditions for meaningful accountability to take place.

On an individual level, we support community-based solutions that develop an individual's capacity to recognize and take responsibility for harm they cause.

On a community level, we look at the role that the surrounding community may have played to ignore, minimize, and sometimes encourage harmful behaviors.

On a societal level, we recognize the need to address root causes of harmful behaviors, systemic oppression, intergenerational trauma and poverty.

All these levels must be addressed simultaneously while also attending to the wellbeing and safety for survivors and people who have been on the receiving end of harm.

When it's all said and done, we really believe that accountability without relationship feels like abuse and accountability with relationship feels like love.

Andy.

Thank you, Dave.

Appreciate that.

So the criminal legal system, on the other hand, does not foster accountability, but in fact, it creates more harmful conditions, such as the criminal legal system disproportionately targets black and brown communities and poor people.

It does not address the root causes, including mental health crisis, unsafe conditions for people who use drugs or poverty crimes.

Instead, people are housed in jails and then released to their previous condition.

It re-traumatizes and causes more harm to people who are already in difficult circumstances through jail stay, legal fines and fees, police violence and harassment, and conviction histories.

With this reframing of key terms, we identify the following principles for developing community-led solutions to increase safety and reduce harm.

Number one, divest the criminal legal system and invest in our communities.

Number two, support community capacity to respond to harms independent of the criminal legal system and city role.

Number three, provide resources and funding to community organizations to do preventative work.

Four, prioritize survivor support services and resources.

I'm now gonna pass it back to my good friend, Lalitha, to introduce our policy recommendations.

Are you on mute?

Ms. Lalitha.

Yes, I believe Ms. Lalitha is on mute.

I can't hear you, sir.

There you go.

Sorry about that.

There are eight recommendations that we discussed in our report.

In recommendations one and two, we are calling on the city and institutional players to take accountability for the ways they create the conditions and context where harm takes place.

In recommendations three, four, and eight, we address specific trends within the criminal legal system, which are couched as reforms, such as the use of diversion programs, the use of electronic home monitoring, and the use of risk assessments.

We point out that their limitations show how these approaches continue to survey, punish, and control our communities in other ways.

We continue to call for a shrinking of the criminal legal system and believe that care support should replace incarceration and control.

Bear with me here.

In recommendations five, six and seven, we discuss ways in which the city can invest resources and spaces and organizations that foster accountability and are life affirming.

We're now going to discuss recommendations three and six in more detail, and let me pass it on to Emi to share more about recommendation three.

Emi.

Next slide.

Okay, great.

So, diversion is often talked about as an alternative to criminal legal system.

The recent racial equity toolkit did.

But diversion is part of the criminal legal system.

It's not an alternative to it.

It relies on the increased discretionary power of the law enforcement and the threat of punishment for it to function.

The goal of diversion is reducing crimes, which is fine on its own right, but it is incompatible with harm reduction approach, which prioritize individual's needs and their entitlement to dignity.

Criminal legal system is not a good way to deliver services to our community needs.

People have been harmed by the large nonprofit service providers that avail themselves to the criminal legal system by providing involuntary or mandated treatment and monitoring reporting participation and progress to the criminal legal system, including the CPS.

So that said, and we know that diversion still happens, so we want to make suggestions to make it better or make it less harmful.

And so the funding for diversion program should not be new money.

It should be reallocated from existing funding for criminal legal infrastructure to diversion so that we're not growing the criminal legal system or widening its net.

And it must minimize coercion to keep it voluntary as much as possible.

It needs to reduce the law enforcement discretion and monitor the use of that power.

It must guarantee the participants' constitutional trial rights so that whether you succeed or not succeed in the diversion program would not have any impact on the right to receive fair trial.

And it should take place early in the stage, in the pre-filing, pre-arrest, or earlier, and also prevention, because prevention is always better.

And divergent service providers must have a genuine relationship with the community and be controlled by the communities they serve.

And it should never be a primary way to deliver service and support the people who need them.

And now I'd like to pass on to Dorian to talk about recommendation number six.

Thank you, Emmy.

So people with disabilities have consistently fought against the ways in which people, the medical system in conjunction with the criminal legal system have erased our bodily autonomy and subjected us to medical, physical, sexual, and other forms of violence.

In the criminal legal system, this includes the use of medical treatment as a prerequisite for release or criteria to mitigate a sentence.

We call on the city to learn from the disability justice movement, its history, and its organizing demands.

These are some of the ways in which the city can support the well-being of people with disabilities.

Acknowledge that coercive mental health treatment through the criminal legal system causes stigma and traumatizes people with disabilities.

This makes seeking care further down the road further traumatizing and fearsome.

Advocate for, resource, and support community care options that uphold the autonomy of people with disabilities and or harm reduction.

Work with unions and healthcare workers to ensure good working conditions of community and mental health facilities in part because the staffing ratio of these facilities have impact on the quality of care that people with disabilities experience.

I'll pass it to David.

I appreciate that.

And we are community members who are deeply engaged in organizing for change within our community.

We come together here so institutional stakeholders can understand what is common knowledge in our space Thank you for allocating the resources.

You can access our full report at the link, with the link.

While community engagement efforts spearheaded by institutional stakeholders and policy makers have historically been transactional, tokenizing, ineffective and or exploitive, we hope to shift out of those harmful patterns with the work of our task force and we hope you will support this.

We urge you to consider our principles and values as you move forward in this budget season.

And we look forward to working with our community partners as well that share the same vision and practice.

Thank you for your time.

And I really appreciate you for making space for our voices.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

That was a very powerful presentation.

I really appreciate the time and effort and energy and love that went in to the development of these recommendations.

I want to see whether or not my colleagues have any questions or comments.

So I'm looking to see if there's any hands raised from council members.

either virtually or in real life.

I've got Council Member Morales.

Yes.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

First, I do want to give all of you my appreciation for being here.

I think it's really important work that you're engaging in.

It's crucial for us as policymakers to be hearing directly from folks who are most impacted by the policies that we're considering, by the budgets that we're considering.

And so I just want to honor all of the work that you've been doing.

Honestly, as a representative of the city that has, for generations, contributed to causing this harm in our black and brown communities, just want to say I'm sorry and really am eager to work with you to move us in the right direction.

I do have a question about one of your recommendations.

Recommendation number eight, talks about not relying on data-driven solutions and, you know, not kind of centering that in the ways that we make decisions.

And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, because very often in this institution especially, we do talk about how we are going to measure the success of a program, measure the effectiveness of the dollars that we spend.

And so I would love to hear a little bit from you all about what you think is the problem with that and what you think an appropriate alternative would be.

Can I go, David?

So I think in the report, what we're talking about is mainly the data that's being used to assess people, individuals in the criminal legal system.

So we're not talking about the data for evaluating the overall program success, right?

So we're focusing on ways that I think that the data is being introduced to make things more efficient.

And also make it more fair, because individual police, judges, prosecutors may have biases.

And then if you use data to decide who to prosecute, who to offer diversion to, who to release to the public, et cetera, the idea is that it will make them failer.

But then those data is based on the data that's already tainted by the biases.

So if you base somebody's possibility, somebody might re-offend as a basis for determining probation conditions or who to release or who to give lighter sentences to.

And that data is already tainted because that's based on who got arrested and prosecuted in the past.

And that is already reflective of racial and other biases.

And even though we're trying to remove the element of bias, the bias is actually built into those assessment tools and how we're just making it more invisible, like, you know, before individuals can be held accountable when they do something like egregious, and yet now it's like you know it's an impartial algorithm that is not has nothing, you know, I wasn't doesn't have data by bias, but it actually does because of the data that goes into creating those.

At the minimum, there has to be transparency about what algorithms are being used, and that rules out most of the commercial algorithm providers because their process is not transparent.

They don't tell you.

They don't tell our elected leaders what it's actually doing, right?

And then, like, really, you know, when we have transparency, then we need to monitor it to make sure that it's not, you know, reintroducing bias into the evaluation.

So that's the – largely, that's what we're looking at and not necessarily, like, looking at the data for overall, you know, the systems, right?

That's very helpful.

Thank you so much, Emi.

Yeah, thank you so much, Emi.

That was very, I think, illuminating of some of the very robust discussion prior to Carlos's report focused on the reliance on the The risk model, it's RRM, I'm forgetting the other word, responsivity model, risk responsivity model, and the reliance on that to identify who should have access to services rather than really focusing on what people's strengths are and how to support folks in addressing threats to people's strengths.

and really appreciate lifting that up as we look at the design of programs that we are creating to reduce harm.

Appreciate also the reminder of the fact that that is a term that is sometimes misused, as well as really programs that are truly according to the actual principles of trauma-informed care, really meeting those high standards of where we want to go in our program development.

Looking to see if we have other comments or questions.

and not seeing any other hands up.

This is, there's no accident that this is a presentation that we're hearing before we enter the budget process, talking about, the next steps.

I think it's going to be really important for council to consider and apply task force recommendations to the programs that we consider funding as we work to, again, reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system on the lives of impacted community members and increase funding for programs and structures that work to, again, amplify and help people act on the strengths that they have and support them in doing so.

I really want to lift up some of the words of thanks and acknowledgement from the task force full report and appreciate the work of the New Youth Jail Movement, La Resistenza, Bonker, and others that preceded this work.

Those words are, we acknowledge and honor the incredible courage, labor, and contributions of our committee members and movement builders who paved the way make the particular work within the task force possible through various campaigns and initiatives over the years.

And in fact, it is the work of those groups that led to funding and support from the council, led by Council President Gonzalez, that is bringing us to this place that we are in today.

And I know these voices will continue to drive us to a better place that more reflects the kind of city that I know I want to live in and I know others need to be able to live in.

So with that, again, thank you so much for being with us here today and all of your work.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item number two?

Committee Agenda Item Number Two, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, Scale Study for Briefing and Discussion.

Thank you so much.

Let's do a quick round of introductions, just name and affiliation.

Then I will do some real quick round points, and we'll hand it over to you after that.

I'm happy to.

Jeff Sims on city council central staff, and I'll popcorn over to Lisa Dugard.

Lisa Dugard, I am director and incoming co-director of the Public Defender Association, soon to be renamed Purpose Dignity Action.

And I'll hand it to Tara Moss.

Tara Moss, Seattle King County Lead Project Director, PDA.

I will hand it off to Tiara Dearbone.

Hi, my name is Tiara Dearbone.

I am Senior Lead Project Manager at PDA.

Passed to Devin.

Good morning.

My name is Devin Miket.

I use she, her pronouns.

And I'm the Program Manager for the LEAD Program, Let Everyone Advance with Dignity at REACH, the clinical service provider.

Great.

Thank you.

Is that everybody with us this morning?

All right.

So again, just a little bit of background.

I touched about on this ahead of the agenda.

Back in 2019, the council passed Resolution 31916. In that resolution, we acknowledge the city's responsibility to reduce unnecessary criminal legal system involvement and declared our commitment to ensuring that law enforcement pre-arrest diversion programs, such as LEAD, receive public funding sufficient to accept all priority referrals by 2023. Today, representatives from LEAD, Human Services Department, and Council Central staff are here to present on the number of referrals that might be expected and the funding that would be required to expand pre-arrest diversion to accept those referrals.

This analysis was required by a statement of legislative intent that I sponsored and was unanimously adopted by the Council last fall.

And it's a- Recording stopped.

Oh, is that a pause?

Sun, are you listening in?

Recording in progress.

All right, fantastic.

Thank you.

So the analysis is especially important for Council to have as we move into the budget season and consider how best to allocate resources to secure our community safety.

You know, again, I think one important points to make, especially in light of hearing from our previous presenters, is that there was change recently as it relates to the police department's involvement or necessary involvement in In doing community referrals, there's been sort of a de-linking of that as being a component of the LEAD program.

And I'm sure at some point, we don't need to address that at the top, but it'd be great if that is woven into the presentation.

I believe it's, I saw it mentioned.

in the central staff memo, but it would be good to address that a little bit as we get into the presentation.

With that, I will kick it off to our presenters.

I think, Jess, you're going to start us off?

If you're with us?

Yes.

Fantastic.

Good morning, Councilmember.

All right, you didn't get popcorn, too.

Oh, don't worry about it.

I knew I'd get to get a chance to introduce myself.

No biggie.

So thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and give me an opportunity to speak today.

My remarks will be very brief because really the PDA is the subject matter expert at the table today.

Again, as you mentioned, the 2021 budget included the statement of legislative intent, and that requested that HSD provide a report to council to determine the amount of funding necessary to allow law enforcement pre-arrest diversion programs to accept all priority qualifying referrals citywide.

HSI staff worked with the PDA and LEAD to prepare the report this summer.

As directed in the slide, HSD coordinated that work and then upon receipt of the report, we submitted it to the Public Safety and Human Services Committee and the central staff on August 4th of this year.

The substance and the analysis included in the slide response reflects the work of the LEAD policy coordinating group.

And just a touch on the current and past, well, the current budget for LEAD and the PDA in general for its programs.

The 2021 budget invested $6.2 million in LEAD.

In June 2021, Ordinance 126298, led by the Council, appropriated an additional $3 million to LEAD.

And then recently also through that same ordinance, Council also appropriated funding for non-congregate shelter.

Of those funds, $5.5 million is being funded to another PDA program, Just Care, for 89 hotel-based shelter units.

Finally, I want to note that HSD is transferring the management of the LEED contract from the Homelessness Division, which we know is sunsetting at the end of 2021, and it's going to the new Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

It is a better match because the mission of LEED is aligned with the goal of increasing community safety.

So one thing that we would suggest is that discussions related to evaluation and cost analysis, impact analysis of LEAD be conducted in 2022, because that would then allow the Safe and Thriving Communities Division to really ensure alignment of LEAD and other of the systemic responses to criminal justice that they are working on.

So with that, As I mentioned, very short period of time, very short presentation, and that concludes it.

Thank you, Tess.

So I don't know who's leading the discussions, so I just hand it over to you, and you can organize yourself to speak up according to who is going to speak first.

Yes, again, Tara Moss.

I just first want to really thank the chair of this committee and the council members in general for this entire session today.

As me and especially my fellow thought partner in this who could not be here today, Brandy Flood, have been really concerned as there have been conversations around and really important conversations around crisis, alternative responses, alternatives to 911, non-criminal police responses, and solutions for that, that black and brown folks would be left out as a result and further impacted by the criminal legal system.

And that is a result that we know that black and brown folks are going to be seen as committing crime, seen less as in crisis, and more as a public threat and a public danger.

still committing crimes or allegedly seen as committing crimes.

So I really appreciate the presentation that was said before as we think about people perceived as committing crimes or actually committing crimes.

And our goal in this program has been and will always be focusing on public health and public safety for our members of our community, which includes our clients and people who own businesses and who are housed.

So thanks again for this panel and thinking about this so thoroughly as we think about better ways to do things moving forward and take lessons learned from how we've done things in the past.

So with that, I'm going to throw up the slide deck here.

So give me one second.

So this is me and Brandy Flood who I said cannot be here, but we have the honor of Devin joining us and we'll be speaking on behalf of REACH.

Since it's been a while since LEAD has presented to this council, I thought it'd be good for us to kind of ground and touch base.

LEAD at this point has let everyone advance with dignity.

It provides community-based care for people who commit law violations related to behavioral health issues or extreme poverty as an alternative to punitive enforcement-based responses.

What we're really focusing on is reducing the police ability of these individuals.

We've always had a core value of stop the harm that is being caused by these individuals and to these individuals, but we don't just leave folks out there.

We want us to do wraparound, supportive, individual-based care for those individuals.

This case management follows the harm reduction principle as well, and Devin will talk later around that.

Councilmember, you did ask, and this, I think, bar chart really explains the evolution of LEAD as we have really moved from law enforcement-based diversion and social contacts.

And as you will see through the past year, since community requested and council responded to allowing to lift the gatekeeping of law enforcement and have community-based referrals, those are referrals where we know that there is concern or actual public health, public safety concerns with individuals.

And we, through PDA, not through law enforcement, are approving those individuals with deep consultation with REACH.

And we will talk about that a little later.

But as you can see, in 2019, the red is arrest diversions, gray is social contact referrals, referrals that law enforcement had to approve.

And starting in July through September of 2020, community referrals came online.

And as you move to 2021, you can really see that that is the majority of the referrals that we get to this day.

And it has impacted our program as a whole and how we enter the work in supporting the community as a whole in terms of their concerns of public health and public safety.

With that, and just really detailing how community referrals come in, how conversations within community around public safety and public health needs occur, I really want to pass it over to Tiara, who's been doing a lot of incredible work on this in this past year.

Thank you.

Since the council passed our ability to receive an internally vet community-based referrals We have spent time engaging with community members who come in contact with the individuals we serve and who experience situations for which LEAD is an appropriate response.

This has included local businesses, organizations, first responders, social service providers, public health, and community members.

These referrals are vetted internally in collaboration with our project management team and service provider.

including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color with lived experience similar to that of those who are served in the LEAD bundle of care.

Many of those who are referred to us are individuals engaging in low-level law violations that are driven by poverty, substance use, and behavioral health needs.

When vetting individuals for LEAD, we prioritize referrals utilizing a racial equity lens, looking for individuals who have been impacted by the criminal legal system, oftentimes long history of being impacted by the war on drugs, individuals who have been left out of other services and who continue to face high barriers to accessing other services within the community.

We also prioritize those who are impactful to the surrounding community and who are at risk of coming in contact with law enforcement.

Just a couple of examples of situations we've been asked to respond to.

There is a man of color living in Chinatown International District who experiences very high behavioral health needs.

He has a history of being arrested and jailed only to continue to be found not competent in court.

This is also someone who is disrupting those trying to live in Chinatown International District.

Our team is actively working to engage with him, address his unmet needs and continue to provide services that can reduce his impact on the community and the police ability of him.

Jail has not worked to address this need and will not work.

We received a call about a woman continuing to disrupt Sean O'Donnell's Pub and Grill in Pioneer Square.

We responded, continued to engage with her, and developed a plan that would address her unmet need and relieve the impact to the business, patrons, and those living outside near the business.

We continue to receive requests to respond to public safety needs.

We have been asked to respond to a Queen Anne motel and have begun that outreach.

We've been in long-time contact with the Mount Baker community that has an unmet need for these services.

However, we are facing serious capacity issues at this time and cannot keep up with the increasing requests.

I wanna pass along to Devin from REACH who can talk about some of the work that we're doing and some of the work that they've recently done.

Thank you.

As I said earlier, my name is Devon Miket, I use she, her pronouns, and I'm the program manager for the LEAD program at REACH, the clinical service arm of LEAD.

And I have been on the team at REACH for seven years, and I'm really proud to see how this program has changed over time to continue to meet the needs of the community.

As you can see here, we have a graph around our approved community referrals by racial demographic, and we're happy to answer more questions about that.

The community referral process has been a really incredible opportunity for us to prioritize people who we see really at the most margins of what's considered safe and unsafe in our community and our city at this time.

We prioritize individuals who have failed out of our traditional behavioral health system, our traditional substance use system, who have experienced significant harm from years of involvement in our criminal justice system.

We prioritize people who have been impacted by intergenerational trauma of the war on drugs, war on communities of color in this city and county, and on profoundly low income communities.

LEAD prioritizes those individuals who our carceral system has seen as violent.

This is of particular importance when we look at just the embedded racism in folks' history within the criminal justice system.

So when we do the community referral process, one of the things we look at is we prioritize individuals with extensive criminal histories, including violent criminal histories that would preclude them from accessing other programs.

So that's just something I really want to be transparent about, is like that is who we want to serve, is folks who have been perceived as criminal, perceived as violent, because of their unmet behavioral health needs and the ways in which our traditional system has failed them.

Okay, let's talk, oh sorry, go for it Tara.

No, I was going to say thank you, Devin.

And before we can talk about that, that paints a really good picture of who clients are.

So when we're doing the community referral process, we are combining the priorities that Devin has named there with our high impact, high priority individuals that community members are concerned about in terms of that public health, public safety realm, that feedback that Tira is also getting.

With that, Devin, I'm going to hand it back to you so you could talk about what these clients services look like?

Absolutely.

So we do provide a long-term intensive individualized service package at the REACH program.

Our work is all client-centered.

There's no compliance or abstinence-based aspect of our work.

and our work is designed between the relationship of a case manager and that assigned participant.

So here we have one of our case managers, Kimberly, featured here in this image, and then our Director of Outreach, Karen Salinas, featured in this image.

This image was taken at the Everspring Hotel.

We were the primary service provider to respond to the Everspring Hotel population.

at the time of closure last summer and have continued to work with that community very closely for the last year.

It's one thing, one example that I would share of kind of who is a lead client is an individual who came from profound intergenerational trauma.

grew up in the foster care system, black woman, 50 years old, gender nonconforming, and always perceived as causing a problem or causing a risk to public safety, always perceived as criminal, really, really long history with the criminal justice system.

This individual was not referred to LEAD until she was in her 50s, meaning that she faced many prison sentences for nonviolent crimes in our state, many jail stays and was referred through our drug court program over 10 times and was not successful.

So these are the kind of folks that LEAD is designed to serve.

This is the kind of person we specialize in, particularly reflecting on many of the individuals we encountered at the Everspring Hotel.

I'm thinking about lots and lots of older single black men who have spent much of their life in our criminal justice system.

They are perceived as part of like criminal involvement, perceived as too high functioning to access our traditional behavioral health services.

And so have never been offered anything by our homeless service system or our behavioral health system.

and are really struggling to meet unmet behavioral health needs while living in extreme poverty.

So these are just some of the examples of folks that we're encountering through our work.

Here we have some images of some of our case managers and supervisors who are really the heart of our team.

We are an outreach-based model.

So we do not spend our days in an office.

You can see here some of everyone in this image still works at the REACH program, and I'm so proud to have them on our team and working in the community.

Thank you so much.

Before you move on to this slide, can you touch upon the information in the box?

I think it's important to lift up.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks Council Member Herbold.

So one of the pieces of our model at the LEAD program that we feel is super special is we keep caseloads small so that we can get to know folks really well and build an individualized service plan with them.

So we did in 2019 work with the City Council to establish a requirement that average caseloads be no more than 20 cases with a maximum of 25 active clients so that we can provide that really intensive case management.

This is in comparison to thinking about like a traditional Medicaid funded behavioral health program.

caseloads would be somewhere between 100 and 150 individuals per counselor.

So just really noting that this is part of our service package and part of the reason why we're able to work with people, you know, for an upwards of like 15, 20, 30 hours a month sometimes for those clients that we're working closely with.

And the other thing I would add is just that one thing about the REACH program and our hiring practices that's important for me to note is that we have a focus on hiring individuals with lived experience.

And we do not require advanced degrees in order to be able to serve on our team at LEADS.

So many of our case managers come with profound lived experience in the legal system.

lived experience of substance use and sex trade, lived experience of profound generational poverty.

And it's part of what motivates them to come to this work.

So it's really an honor to work with this team and to not see a lot of those traditional barriers of requiring lots of advanced degrees to work with this community.

Thanks, Devin.

And I just would add when council hears us talk about and others hear us talk about at capacity, what we're talking about is we're not able to honor those caseloads that we're trying to have here.

often moving to 30, 35 cases.

As a result, even in the community referrals, one of the agreements was we will do community referrals as capacity allows, and right now capacity does not allow that.

So the majority of our referrals, even if it meets all the criteria that we have described and focusing on high priority, high needs, BIPOC individuals, true blood individuals.

We are still denying those because our caseloads are too high.

And as a result, our case managers we know won't be able to go outreach individuals until they find them.

They will only pick up the phone.

They won't be able to go and advocate for different criminal legal system results for that client, giving them the full options of that.

So there's just so much that harms the client and the case manager's ability to be successful if our caseloads get too high.

And for the commitments that we already have to those individuals and the community as a whole, we stop accepting referrals, even if we do think that they could benefit from our work.

So again, when we say at capacity, we are talking about our caseloads are being too high.

And that's part of the reason why I wanted to focus on our case manager structure and who our clients are, because when we're talking about bringing LEAD to scale, what you're really talking about further funding for case managers to keep appropriate caseloads and for us to be responsive to all the LEAD, high priority LEAD eligible individuals that are out there that are looking for this type of support.

So I will quickly run down the current numbers of our funding, which you can see here with the City of Seattle funding.

Tess Colby already went through this.

HSD funding, King County MID funding, and a little bit of True Blood funding.

It will be noted that Tess is right that $3 million was allocated, but we have yet to receive that funding.

But hopefully that's coming through soon.

When we're talking about, as I just said, funding for LEAD, as you will see, the two green pies are really the direct service programming and the client-based costs.

The other things are really pulled out here as well.

My team, the LEAD project management team within PVA is that 4% red slice that you see right there to do the community coordination and partner coordination around all the different elements that we're managing.

When we were thinking about bringing LEAD to scale and trying to help support answering that question, we really were trying to determine how many LEAD-eligible individuals are there in the community.

And we kind of went through this a few different ways.

My team did extensive conversations with, I would say, high-level referrers from the community themselves.

If LEAD could take everyone that What's a public health, public safety concern?

How many people do you estimate that you would have?

We did that also with the criminal legal system.

We did that in a few different ways.

And then we really want to make sure that we were conservative in our estimates.

So we reduced our numbers based on duplication, not good match, people who by experience in the past may not complete their intake or not assigned a case manager.

So really just trying to be as thorough with the partners relationships and community that we could in terms of determining how many people would be referred to lead because one thing that I did not point out a few slides ago, I'll just go back very quickly.

Is when you look at our slides in January through March, that number is much higher.

And that was when we were approving all high priority referrals very early on this year.

We realized we were going to be quickly overloading our case managers and started aggressively saying now, even to eligible people.

So when you see April and June.

in July and August, that is my attempt to say no to individuals, which I'm trying to get a better job at.

But as someone who's been doing harm reduction, public safety, homeless services work for the past 20 years, it breaks my heart to not be able to provide these services for people who are really interested in doing so.

So I'm going to hand this slide over to Lisa to kind of talk about where we were in the past and where we're moving in the future.

Very quickly, just to acknowledge that.

Lead was born a decade ago and in planning over a decade ago out of a widely felt hope that.

a belief felt by many that it could and should be possible to respond to many, if not most, community safety and public order issues through community-based care rather than the criminal legal system.

And that was an idea that had wide authorship and has had a lot of proponents over the years, some of whom are still on this team here with you today.

and others who are doing amazing work elsewhere.

But the thing is, that idea worked.

That idea proved to be true.

There has been, you know, the community of Seattle from early days has proven that it is willing to support and accept these kinds of responses in lieu of arrest, jail, prosecution, and punishment, but the ability to provide them has rarely, if ever, kept up with demand.

And so this growth arc reflects just, and many of you have been witnesses to this over the years, and a sort of repeated iteration of when people who in the past might have thought that what they wanted was enforcement, when they learned that there was this alternative, they asked for it, and that pushed expansion, or calls for expansion geographically, but also just in terms of the volumes of individuals whom people in the community started to think, oh, maybe a better response would be LEAD, And the resources available to provide that case management response in lieu of punishment have almost never kept up with that demand.

This arc of growth shows that you have responded to repeated illustration and, you know, just by people asking your offices for this kind of response with a fairly steady growth arc in, And yet we are clearly not at scale, and that's where the 2019 resolution came from, was sort of really grappling with at the level of policy, the need to figure out if this is popular, widely supported, and the right thing to do.

Essentially, what is the scale of resources that would be needed to meet that demand in all priority cases?

And this led to this slide and this current conversation.

We have projected here, you can see the sort of 2021, 2022, 2023. This is an exercise that we've done based on a number of hypotheses.

And I will, they have been really thoughtfully, I think, analyzed by Jeff Sims from your staff.

So I'll defer discussion of that to Jeff.

comments.

I'm muted.

Okay, thank you so much.

So just this is another way of breaking down and looking behind that line a little bit to know to see what I had stated before that when this increase in costs are really focused on direct programming and client services with administrative impact as well.

So, with that, I do want to make sure that Jeff has time.

So, if there are any questions, we can take them now, or we can wait until after Jeff's presentation.

Just a reminder, I think just because so much of Jeff's memo relates directly to some of the information that we've heard, if we could just continue to hold questions.

Excellent.

Thank you so much.

Jeff, let's turn it over to you.

Good, Mr. Clark, do you want to put up my couple of slides or would you prefer that I do that?

I think I have the ability to, so let me try that.

Madam Chair, are you able to do the slide okay?

Great.

Um, so, as you are just noted, I broadly spent some had a lot of collaboration with both with both her and Sarah Moss for PDA over the last week or two and trying to analyze a lot of the assumptions.

There's a tremendous number of them as.

They go into estimating in accordance with what the slide asks for, what the caseload for LEED would look like if it were to be serving citywide all of the qualified priority referrals and then the associated cost with that.

So what I have for you is basically a slightly different way of looking at what was already in some of the slides that we presented.

The solid blue line that often gets covered up by a green one is what is presented in the SLI response.

So it's from, throughout 2022, the caseload is projected to increase if more funding were provided for LEAD to move to a scale citywide.

And that largely was identified through a survey with partners, as PDA already mentioned, that discussed if we had the capacity to serve your clients, how many people would you be sending to us?

And so you see that that kind of continually rises until at the end of December 2022, that level is basically being met and assumed coming in.

At that point, there's a couple of assumptions that are really difficult to determine.

There's not a good data source.

We don't have historical experience that can really well inform them.

And so that was where I thought some further consideration would be beneficial.

And though I grabbed all the credit by calling it central staff projection, it's really something that was really collaborative with Lisa and Tara as well to look at a variety of data sources.

I want to highlight that that solid blue line, you'll see that it starts to level out, but that's based on two big assumptions.

One is an exit rate that we really have trouble estimating what it would be.

It's not clear when that many clients are coming in, how many should be coming in.

And more importantly, the belief that we as a system and as a community, we are investing in other programs that also can be alternatives to criminal legal system involvement and provide supports that people need.

And there's a belief that by January of 2023, many of those programs would be online and individuals that might otherwise in the past have been referred to LEAD would be identified as more appropriately referred to some of those other programs.

So that would change what you see as the number of referrals coming in.

There's a risk there, though.

It's possible those programs aren't up and running by that time, or a lot of environmental factors could happen.

So the dotted line that you see is, if that wasn't true, if those programs didn't come online, what the caseload arc might look like.

Then the green line is, like I said, what I worked with PDA to develop, where instead of using some of those assumptions about what might change in the community and what we think might happen, and looking at some historical data that we did have, does have on hand.

in terms of how long clients are in the three broad stages that you go through, an outreach period that not everyone obviously goes through where there's maybe less engagement from a client, a more active case management period where there can be very intense engagement, and then an alumni stage where an individual may have stabilized but isn't necessarily without need for further support.

There could be emergencies or crises that come up that require that kind of re-engagement.

Looking at the rates that people on average are in those various stages is what the green line represents as kind of an estimate of as referrals just continue based off of the partner survey, what might happen if those links stay continued?

I think the important thing, there's a few big things to know.

First, you'll notice that none of these get to equilibrium.

We never get to a point where the number of exits from the program would seem to match the number of referrals.

I think that's problematic for a few different reasons.

First of all, it's probably unrealistic.

I don't think there's an infinite number of people that would be eligible for LEAD and that would be appropriate to put into the program.

And more importantly, and second, there is a lot of policy implications that if we were at that point, we might need to think about.

Exceeding the ability to having more referrals than is possible to serve, we could return to a situation like what was just described, where there's been a pause in accepting those new referrals.

So that might warrant policy decisions on who is an appropriate referral to the LEAD program, or what are some changes in how the services should be delivered to change that exit rate.

But last, and I think most importantly, and you alluded to this, Madam Chair, in your remarks, there is a lot of assumptions that are underlying all of these, as I think I probably just conveyed just in describing how these lines were formulated.

And I think most significantly, this kind of highlights that we need to be carefully monitoring various metrics in an environment where the LEAD program is being expanded to scale or at any level of increased funding to know what is happening with referrals, for example, as perhaps existing partners are able to refer the number of people they expect, would we see an emergence of other community sources that are referring new people?

Or would there be a change in attitudes about referring people to lead based off of that ability to serve them?

Those are things that are not really knowable at this point.

We don't know if prior experience with how long an individual has served would hold up over time, things like that.

So I think the carefully monitoring all those assumptions and what is actually occurring in the environment where any additional funding was provided would be exceptionally important.

Next I'll move to what would be the second major request in the slide response.

Again, the information the council was seeking.

This is what if you take those caseload assumptions, and really I'm just adding up some numbers that you saw on a previous slide here and not giving the underlying details.

But if those caseload projections that I just showed you were to bear out, and utilizing the staffing and service model that LEAD has put together where you, like a small portion of individuals, around 15% might receive some type of hotel sheltering support, where you would assume a 1 to 20 ratio for case management when someone's an active, for active clients.

Things along those lines that we know about ideal program situations.

You can see that approximately, well, 2021, let me first orient you to what's on the bar here.

The blue bar is what was already presented by LEAD and is what is in the response to the slide that has been submitted.

The red bar, maybe I should have chosen a different color, like a shaded blue or a hashed blue or something, is kind of what happens in this dotted line that I showed earlier.

If it turns out that some things we think, like some other programs coming online, didn't occur, would we potentially in 2023 see higher funding than we're projecting right now?

And then the green bar corresponds with the green line on the prior slide.

If we use some different assumptions to try to, again, make guesses.

And I think it's intriguing that we're largely coalescing in 2022 based off of information that PDA already got from partner institutions around an estimate of what it might take to take lead to scale.

But again, and I don't think I can emphasize this enough, the carefully monitoring data as any expansion was implemented would be really important.

It would help to understand if some kind of equilibrium is being reached, if proper policies have been established for who should be put into lead and how long they should be served for, or even things like You know, what we see, and there's assumptions that are made here about how often a person would be recommended by three different sources, that there'd be duplication in referrals, and the rate that that might go up as you saw expansion continue, which could, all of these things could dramatically affect these cost estimates and might actually result in us being at some kind of an equilibrium point that it wasn't possible to project at this stage.

So I hope that is somewhat useful, and as a further detail numerically behind what was already presented, and I will turn it back over to the committee.

Thank you so much, Jeff.

This level of analysis and collaboration is incredibly helpful and exactly, from my perspective, what I was hoping for when authoring and sponsoring the Statement of Legislative Intent and just really appreciate the guidance that this is going to, I believe, provide to us as we move into the budget process.

I want to just give folks on the committee an opportunity to ask questions, make comments.

I do have a couple myself, but I'm going to hold mine and hear from my colleagues on the committee.

Commissioner Morales.

Thank you.

I really appreciate this, the work that you've done with our central staff, the work that you've done to help us understand this better.

It was Tiara who said, you know, jail hasn't worked to address the needs of this population, of the folks who are struggling.

And I think that's important.

You know, even at the state level, the legislature passed this year the 988 hotline for folks who are experiencing mental health challenges.

I know for me, when I go out to different parts of my district and talk to constituents who are concerned about the folks who they see struggling on the street, the thing I consistently hear is that they want to be able to call for somebody to help, but they don't want to call the police.

So I think this is an important program.

There's lots of programs that are working hard to provide a response to public safety.

The LEAD program shifted its own orientation away from working with the police because, as the previous presentation acknowledged, that just ends up causing more harm.

So I think it's important that we support this work in the way we should, that we support the various programs.

I know HealthONE is an alternative as well, but I think we can make a really important and significant impact on the folks who are experiencing behavioral health challenges.

If we listen to the previous panel and listen to the folks who are actually on the street here and really start to think about ways to invest in community-based solutions that don't involve the police, So I just want to thank everybody for this work, and I look forward to working with my colleagues through the budget process to see that we are investing in a way that leads towards the kind of outcomes that we're hoping for.

Councilmember Lewis, I see your hand up.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I want to really thank the panel.

I talked to this great panel of stakeholders on probably a weekly basis about various things that are going on in District 7. And I just want to take a second to really acknowledge that through a really difficult year and a half, where District 7 has had a colossal amount of really big systemic challenges in terms of having a high concentration of individuals with very significant unmet public health needs that in some cases are leading to significant public safety challenges.

The people around this virtual Zoom table have really been One of the biggest success stories in terms of providing real help, dignity, support to all of the different stakeholders involved in that process, people experiencing trauma who need some kind of assistance in case management.

business owners who feel like no one in the city cares or is listening to them needing to assume a role of trying to be an expert in outreach and de-escalation and trauma because they can't get any other city service to come and assist with that challenge that they face.

And I just want to really center that just the vision of everybody here in setting an expectation that we develop city services that really do respond and center that response.

You know, I talk to a lot of business owners in my district who always get nervous about a lot of our conversations around reform of the criminal legal system.

reform of the public safety system because they fear that it's just a process of getting rid of existing services and not something about adding some new responsive system that's going to solve their core problems.

And the work that lead and just care and the defender association has done in really showing people how it can work as one converts to changing the system it's shown business owners uh...

who have had long systemic problems of police showing up arresting a person that's causing some issue in the business, that person going to jail for a few months, going back on the street, going back to the business and repeating that thing for several years.

And then finally having someone from LEAD come by, put that person onto their casework.

load, develop a relationship with that person, and solve that issue for everyone involved.

Solve the underlying trauma of the individual who has been on the street in a cycle of trauma and violence for years.

Solve the issue of the small business owner who wants a professional to deal with this competently instead of be in a position where they have to try to assume that themselves.

And it's really, really been great to have all of you here as a resource to do that work.

So this idea that we take what's been developed over the course of the last decade plus and take it citywide makes a lot of sense to me.

I just want to put my stake in the ground that I would love to lead on this budget cycle in taking the next step to realize the programmatic goals in response to Chair Herbold's sly and look forward to supporting that.

But I do, in the more immediate term, I do have a question for Tess.

I think Tess is still on the panel.

I do want to talk a little bit about the $3 million that the council authorized to try to provide immediate support and relief to the LEAD program during this year so they can continue to do the work that they're doing in District 7, continue to do the impactful work that is, you know, and other districts in the city too, but the work that is lifting up a lot of small businesses in Pioneer Square, that is helping all the residents of Pioneer Square, housed and unhoused, And that $3 million, my understanding, could be taken in by the PDA.

My understanding is they have the capacity to accept that investment.

My understanding is that it's critical for the viability of related programs like Just Care.

And I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to publicly ask for a status on that investment, given the exigency and the public safety crisis that we face in the street today.

So can we maybe just have a brief conversation about the hurdles there, how we can troubleshoot it, and what you might need to ask from the council to realize that investment and get it out to the people who need it.

And before we hand it over to Tess, thank you so much for the question.

I just want to make sure that we don't get those – I've been making this inquiry as well in my regular meetings with HSD.

I just want to make sure we don't get sort of the same status as I received a couple weeks ago in my last meeting.

What I heard It was, I think, more than two weeks ago now, was that their HSD is looking at a contract expansion and it was in the works.

And so just in line with the spirit of Council Member Lewis's questions, if we could just get a little bit more granular on what the barriers are and if whether or not there's anything we can do to help.

Thank you.

Hi.

Thank you very much for the question.

And unfortunately, I can't get too granular.

I would need to go back to the contracting team that's working on this with LEAD, as I mentioned.

This has moved out of the homelessness division, so I can't really speak for others.

I will say, though, that I know it's actively being worked on.

I think that there is ongoing conversations with the PDA, and I believe that they are close to being at the end stage of this, but we can certainly get back to you with a more concrete answer.

Really, really appreciate it.

Thank you.

so much.

I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask.

First, you know, I have, even though she's not here with us today, I have Brandy's voice in my head from the many weeks of participation that many of us did in the the Bloomberg series conversations about creating a community response model.

And one of the things that Brandy was always great at reminding us about is that in utilizing the 911 response system, even in creating a community response model, there is a danger that traditional, given a menu of options, there is this a danger that traditional police response will be the option chosen when responding to calls that are originating with complaints about BIPOC individuals and that there is a, and so I appreciate that much of your work is sort of triggered by the community referral model and relies on you're using the priority referral policies in order to identify who to assist with your services, folks who may not otherwise get help if it was a result of a 9-1-1 call, right?

A result of a 9-1-1 call, the response may often be a police officer.

But within the context of the council's efforts around 9-1-1, I'd be interested to know, because you currently, I know, lead does – you don't necessarily get direct referrals from 911, but you do get calls from HealthONE, for instance, for your assistance.

So I'm just wondering if there is – if you envision a place sort of in that 911 crisis system for LEAD to receive referrals from the 9-1-1 dispatch as we're working on increasing the options.

Obviously, we have the police department, we have HealthONE, they're looking at TriageONE, but we're also pushing 9-1-1 and they're open to it to also including referrals to community-based referrals.

And so just interested to know, how you see or if you see lead fitting into that continuum of crisis response.

I mean, you're already in the continuum of crisis response, but the continuum of crisis response that's triggered with a call to 911.

I always pivot on that question, Councilmember, because what I'm really focused on is the perceived or actual crime.

And that's where LEAD does their best work and where diversion could be happening more than even it is right now.

If you remember on my 12 months looking back, we've had maybe one or two arrest diversions.

So because my belief is It's going to be really hard to determine if something when it's on that line is a crime or a crisis situation.

And often there may be criminal activity that's associated with it.

But as your previous panel said, putting them in the criminal legal system isn't the best way to go.

So I really would focus on for us, how can we divert whenever possible and keep members in the community, give them supports that that allow for behavior change, but also has a response that is felt for communities as a whole who may be felt that they need to call 911 and they need a response in that moment.

The thing that has been really concerning for those of us who work with people who are alleged to have committed crimes, and that's the source of the call for city response, is that the focus on 9-1-1 alternatives is always framed in terms of people who are not committing crimes.

And there's an assumption that police would of course come when people are suspected of committing crimes, but there are other people for whom there should be an alternative.

That line is being drawn in the wrong place.

And it's being drawn in a way that is very likely to, if not inevitably going to generate pretty profound racial inequities.

there can be alternatives for people who are both suspected of and are actually committing crimes.

And that's the population that we focus on at the point of 911 call.

there should be an alternative response to those people.

And yes, this, you know, this network could be part of that.

But also importantly, a goal should be to reduce the incidence of 911 calls because community has an alternative way to reach out for response to chronic situations.

And that is already starting to come into being and it could really already be there if we didn't have these capacity limitations.

Thank you.

I think one thing to keep in our heads though, I totally agree that we want to reduce the number of calls that are coming into 9-1-1, but I just want to note that it is not true that every 9-1-1 call is originated because somebody thinks that somebody is creating a crime.

through call analysis, a relatively small number of 911 calls.

And so my question is really about 911 is receiving calls that it's not a call, it's identified right at the beginning as a call that is not related to a crime, or through the dispatch protocol screening of calls, it is determined that it's not related to a crime.

that I think the council has expressed in the past, and I know that the executive has as well, as having a place to send those calls that is not police and is not fire.

And so I'm just interested to know if LEAD fits into that continuum.

It sounds like it would be good to have additional conversations about that.

and totally also recognize that there is always that vulnerability of even if you have a community responder in that 911 continuum, who's going to get that non-police response?

And that's really what I want to make sure If we add a community responder into that continuum, I want to make sure that we are not adding to the racial disparities that already exist in crisis response.

I mean, I add that we are speaking also from experiences that are occurring.

We are getting HealthONE referrals right now.

We are even getting, I am approving for the community process, SPD referrals where people were in crisis and they don't know where to refer them to.

So we are getting those individuals and I think part of what Lisa was saying before is there is a lot beneficial to the long-term case management, which is kind of what Jeff was alluding to earlier about trying to figure out what is the right dosage for long-term case management to stabilize individuals and really help them thrive and not be calling on crisis, not be calling due to crime, not be calling for people being concerned in general, maybe not even in those two categories.

So we definitely want to be collaborative and smart about how we utilize our program and partner with others, and even refer out when we deem individuals not a best fit for us.

And the other question I had, again, as we go into the budget process, just thinking about how our analysis during budget might be more illuminating than the fantastic work that has already been done.

Just wondering, is there information that you feel is missing that you weren't able to access or that would help refine or bring more certainty to the actions that we have?

I guess the only thing that I would say is we think that the individuals that we're estimating are pretty constant, but we have to be aware that those individuals in the world that they are existing in could greatly change in the next year.

And how we receive those referrals and how we respond to those individuals on that front end may and can shift based on what we've been doing in the past year and what we have done in the past 10 years.

I mean, we can't, we're going to have a new city prosecutor.

We don't know what that's going to look like for how the city responds to misdemeanors and things like that.

We're going to have a new mayor and potentially a new police chief.

We don't know how they're going to lead those departments in terms of how they respond.

to public safety, public health concerns.

But those individuals who have fallen through the gaps that Devin described so well are still there.

There's a need, there's support, and there's a way to respond.

and address the public safety concerns, whether people are not calling the police or they are calling the police, that I think we're pretty well set up to do.

We always are open to and have been involving since the inception of this program and definitely have been involving since the past year and a half.

So we have lots of lessons learned and to be learned moving forward to do the best work we can.

Thank you.

Any other questions from council members?

Comments?

All right, great.

Just in closing, I appreciated Council Member Lewis's points about winning converts away from traditional criminal legal system involvement to these alternatives.

LEAD has been in the business of creating converts since before LEAD existed.

I remember probably 20 years ago when the PDA convened a meeting of residents of a downtown, I think the Newmark maybe, a downtown condo who was very upset about the ongoing cycle through the police departments by bust of folks who were dealing outside that building and lead and even even members of the police department at that time were arguing that that was creating a cycle that did not really meet anybody's needs regardless of where you're coming from in this on this issue for addressing the impacts of folks involved in on-street activity that, you know, whether or not you wanted to focus on helping the folks and addressing their underlying conditions, or you wanted to reduce the impacts on the livability of the community, that approach was not working.

And much of those those discussions with those downtown residents is really what led to the development of something called Clean Dreams.

Clean Dreams evolved into LEED and this is where this is two decades in and I'm just so honored and privileged to have been able to work with some of you for many, many years and just so in awe of the work that you do in building broad-based community support for these alternatives and getting us to change the way we think about the criminal legal system.

So really, so grateful for all that you do.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

All right.

So final item on our agenda.

Will the clerk please read in item number three.

Committee item number three, work session on resolution affirming Seattle's commitment to the decriminalization of ethnogens.

Great, thank you.

I'm just gonna turn this right over to Council Member Lewis to introduce since this is, this draft resolution that we're gonna be talking about today is the product of his leadership and his engagement.

I've been kind of on the sidelines here, but wanna hand it over to you.

Thank you, Councilmember Herbold.

I appreciate that.

And thanks for carving out a little bit of time here prior to going into budget deliberations to talk about some substantive moves the council can make this fall in order to really set the stage for broader policy conversations that hopefully will be in front of the state legislature.

and hopefully the city, as tends to be the case on many impactful progressive issues in the state of Washington, can lead the way in setting the table for an important conversation many communities around the country are having, and indeed many substantive policies that have passed as a result of those deliberations.

Many of us have had very impactful conversations with representatives from Decriminalize Nature, who have been really assertive and dedicated over the course of the spring and into the summer in moving forward an important conversation about how we as a society treat entheogens, and particularly the substances that have mostly been in the news, psilocybin and ayahuasca.

This has been a very instructive process for my own education on these substances.

I admit before this process, I was not terribly well versed in the science or the research that's been going on in these substances.

And my office was very proud to convene a symposium with people with lived experience, academics, and legal experts a couple of weeks ago.

And that symposium can be found on my website, highly recommended for people who want to learn more about this area.

that really detailed a lot of the public policy benefits to pursuing a process that decriminalizes and increases the clinical use of a lot of these substances, as well as the cultural, spiritual uses historically of these substances and how they have been limited by the criminal legal system in the United States.

So the next step I wanted to take is convening this conversation on a resolution.

Some variation of this resolution will be on introduction and referral today for consideration, hopefully in our full council sessions over the next couple of weeks.

But really wanted to start by having a conversation with central staff and advocates while we can still have a committee session, to really talk about some of the themes for the symposium and some of what this resolution aims to cue up.

We are joined today by Dr. Ruminier from the University of Washington, who is going to talk a little bit about these substances and about this movement around decriminalizing and therapeutic use of these substances.

We also have Tatiana Quintana from Decriminalize Nature, who has been a really great advocate throughout this process and engaged in the symposium a couple of weeks ago.

And of course, Anne Gorman, who has taken this on as an early project of her tenure here, and it's been very great to work with Anne.

So she is also here to answer any questions folks might have Just to cue up the general idea of the resolution, I thought it was important that we take stock of the policies that have been promulgated in the wake of the Blake decision by the Seattle Police Department in regards to how they are conducting enforcement around possession of controlled substances, including antheogens.

It is a policy that has been publicly promulgated and made clear that is largely in keeping with a stance of not criminalizing possession of small quantities of these substances.

And I think it's important that we take stock of that, recognize it in a resolution, but then also chart a path toward what would be a more permanent policy that the city could explore and look into, and also setting up a strong posture from the city about action from the state, which is the only entity with the power to follow the lead of our neighbor to the South Oregon, to decriminalize these substances and also create a regime where they can be prescribed for therapeutic use in small doses to treat a variety of different conditions where they have been shown by study to be promising as possible treatments.

So with that, I would like to open it up to the panel to talk a little bit more about this.

And I think it'd be best if we maybe start with Anne to go over some of the details of the resolution and then open it up to Tatiana and Dr. Ruminier to get a little bit more of a stakeholder discussion.

So, Anne, why don't you kick it off?

Thank you very much, Council Member Lewis.

This draft resolution concerns entheogens, which it defines as any living, fresh, dried, or processed plant or fungal material, including peas or powders, may contain currently scheduled or analog psychoactive indolamines, tryptamines, or phenylethylamines.

The resolution also acknowledges, as Councilmember Lewis described, that some people use these substances in religious, spiritual, healing, or personal growth contexts.

It requires that investigation, arrest, and prosecution for antigen-related activities be among the City's lowest law enforcement priorities.

And it states the Council's support for full decriminalization of these activities.

With respect to the Seattle Police Department, the resolution affirms SPD's current practice, neither to detain nor arrest people for simple possession of amputations.

It also requests SPD formally codify the current practice of policy, and additionally, to develop and adopt policies that would protect people who cultivate and or share in the agents for religious, spiritual, healing, or personal growth purposes.

The resolution asks SPD to update the council on the steps it is taking to do these bodies of work and to provide a timeline for their completion.

The resolution also states the council's intent at a later date and following the requisite analytical work to advance legislation that codifies these protections and Entheagen's lowest enforcement priority in the Seattle Municipal Code.

And finally, it requests that the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs add to its agenda for the 2022 legislative session full support at the state level for decriminalization of Entheagen.

answer any questions.

If there's no initial questions for Ann, why don't we just go ahead and put put the agenda toward the panel presentation, and then maybe that will spur a few process-related legislative questions for Anne.

And then we can also open it up for the panel.

And why don't we start with Tatiana, and then we'll hear from Dr. Ruminier.

Okay, and Dr. Ruminier is on the panel now.

Great, excellent.

Okay, Tatiana, why don't you take it away?

Actually, so Dr. Ruminier is on a time crunch.

So if he could present first, that would be ideal.

Oh, yeah.

Perfect.

Of course.

Thank you.

Hello.

Hi, everyone.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis, Chair Herbold, and the other council members.

Thank you for this opportunity today.

So I'm a psychologist in Seattle, and I just want to clarify, I'm clinical faculty at the University of Washington, which means I supervise psychiatry residents at the University of Washington, but I don't represent the University of Washington, and so I'm speaking today from my personal capacity.

I recently wrote a open letter to the Seattle City Council regarding psychedelic medicines, and 40 Health care professionals, almost all of which are in Seattle, are licensed health care professionals in Seattle, have signed this letter.

And so I'd like to start, if I may, just by reading the letter aloud.

Would that be OK?

Certainly.

Please.

Dear members of the Seattle City Council, we are health care professionals who urge the Seattle City Council to pass an ordinance to decriminalize the use of psychedelic medicines.

Washington, one second.

Washington State is in a mental health and addiction crisis.

The nonprofit Mental Health America ranks Washington State as having the sixth highest rate of mental illness in America based on CDC data.

COVID-19 has increased rates of addiction, depression, anxiety, and other illnesses with an estimated one in three people now facing mental health challenges.

Alarmingly, suicidality is rising sharply.

As healthcare professionals, we're acutely aware of the urgent need for more treatment methods for mental illness and addiction.

While psychotherapy is helpful for many people, it is not effective for everyone.

Likewise, studies have shown that pharmaceutical treatments such as SSRIs have limited effectiveness, especially for addiction, PTSD, and other debilitating illnesses.

A large body of peer-reviewed research suggests that psychedelic medicines can be very effective and safe.

Based on the results of randomized controlled trials, the FDA has designated psilocybin and MDMA as breakthrough therapies indicating that they may represent significant improvement over existing therapies.

Initial research suggests that psychedelic medicines may be safe and efficacious in treating addictions and PTSD.

Across studies, psilocybin has been found to increase well-being, and study participants commonly rate their psychedelic healing experiences as some of the most profoundly important experiences in their lives.

We urgently want to use psychedelic medicines in our work with Washington residents.

Many of us have lost clients friends or family to addiction or suicide and we believe these deaths may have been preventable with access to psychedelic medicines.

It is heartbreaking and frustrating to not have access to life saving medicines.

Incredibly electroshock therapy is a legal treatment available in Seattle while psychedelic medicines are not.

While an underground network of dedicated practitioners use psychedelic medicines to heal their clients, the war on drugs keeps these providers in the shadows and out of reach to most Washington State residents.

BIPOC, low-income, and other marginalized communities have particular challenges accessing psychedelic treatments.

If the Seattle City Council decriminalizes psychedelic medicines, it will make a significant improvement in the equitable access to these life-saving treatments.

Board thinking cities across the U.S. have decriminalized psychedelic medicines, including Oakland, Denver, Washington, D.C., Cambridge, and Ann Arbor.

We urge the Seattle City Council to take a courageous stand for the health of Seattle residents and pass an ordinance decriminalizing psychedelic medicines.

I would like to add to that letter just three points from recent research highlighting how effective these medicines can be.

First, a recent rigorous randomized clinical trial found two-thirds of patients healing their PTSD, which is twice the positive effects of talk therapy.

So double.

This is a rigorous randomized controlled trial.

These are the kind of trials that have made the FDA designate psilocybin to be a breakthrough medicine.

In a different recent study, they found that adding two sessions of psychedelics into addictions treatment reduced the relapse rate from 80% to 20%.

And then third, a recent study from John Hopkins on smoking cessation found that two thirds of participants were abstinent from smoking a year after the study, and 86% rated their psychedelic experiences among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

Now, something I'd also like to address very briefly is there's kind of widespread kind of concerns about the safety of psychedelics and psychedelic medicines.

And unfortunately, a lot of that is based on misinformation over the decades of the war on drugs propaganda that's been going on.

David Nutt, a psychiatrist at the Imperial College of London, who served on the British Committee on Safety of Medicines, did a study comparing the dangers of a broad range of drugs and found psychedelics to be, quote, among the safest drugs we know of.

with the risk of addiction and overdose being significantly lower than caffeine, alcohol, and cigarettes.

And this speaks to my work as a psychologist.

A recent study of 10,000 therapy patients found that complications from using psychedelics in therapy has, quote, comparable to the rate of complications during conventional psychotherapy treatment.

So I'd like to wrap up there in the interest of time, but I am available to answer any questions the council might have.

Thank you very much.

Dr. Ruminer, thank you very much.

Given your time crunch, if there's any questions for Dr. Ruminer, we should probably take them now.

Do any council members have questions for Dr. Ruminer?

Seeing none, thank you.

And Doctor, that is a testament to the thoroughness of your presentation, that there's no follow-up questions.

So thank you so much for coming by and appreciate you.

We were able to get you fit in given your other time constraints.

And thank you for your service at the University of Washington.

Thank you for having us here today.

All right, so our final panelist here is Tatiana Quintana.

And I will turn it over to Tatiana.

Tatiana, go ahead.

Thank you, and it's my honor to be here today.

I'm so grateful for this opportunity to share more information and to advocate on behalf of this important policy reform.

So psychedelic plant and fungi medicine has been utilized for thousands of years in the context of ritual and ceremony.

And then as Tony shared earlier today, empirical research is confirming that psychedelic medicines are an effective and safe treatment for many issues, including, you know, depression, anxiety, traumatic brain injuries, and PTSD.

These medicines have been unjustly and wrongly labeled as dangerous and without any actual scientific evidence to back that up.

And it wasn't until after I had my own experiences with these kinds of plant medicine that I became skeptical of my indoctrination and realized that these mythologies perpetuated by our government about drugs are almost all completely false.

I was gifted with the opportunity to have my first psychedelic experience a few years ago, and I had no idea how profoundly this would impact my life.

The depth of emotions I was able to access and embody on that day helped me to understand on a visceral level that trauma is truly stored in our bodies, and that unresolved trauma can look an awful lot like someone's personality.

And that was true for me.

And I was awakened then to how much potential I truly have.

And then I was being weighed down by the unresolved issues from my past.

And with the help of an experienced therapist, I have been able to move through a lot of my trauma on my healing journey.

I believe that healing and restoration of the mind, body, and spirit is best done within the context of healthy and robust relationships and in community.

When those basic needs are met, then medicines can be a powerful adjunct to that, but not necessarily a standalone solution.

We have an opportunity before us to decriminalize alternative medicines that people have been utilizing for millennia, not only for human health, but also to promote community unity and to strengthen social bonds.

Access to these medicines should be as equitable as possible and not only be by happenstance or as a factor of your socioeconomic privilege.

So for over the past two years, DecrimNature Seattle has been advocating for decriminalization so that our communities of healers in our area can come out of the underground.

The implication of this policy would be multifaceted and is very much following in the footsteps of cannabis decriminalization.

After these reforms are passed, therapists, doctors, and other healers who are already using psychedelics in the underground, at great risk of their livelihoods, in addition to the people who seek out these treatments, will all be more free to offer their services and build relationships openly in our community without the fear of prosecution.

Decriminalization will also promote a consciousness shift in the public, increasing exposure to conversations and educational opportunities around entheogens or psychedelics, the word is interchangeable, helping to break down stigmas and allow time for our communities to integrate these substances into our culture and allow space for dialogue to establish best practices, safety standards, guidelines, and educational resources long before any kind of commodification can take hold.

Many organizations have already started this work over the past few years to meet these needs.

And this is a direct result of the city after city before us enacting this same kind of policy reform as we continue to dismantle the systems that uphold the war on drugs.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, these are amongst the unalienable rights promised to every American in our Declaration of Independence.

If I am truly promised these rights, then I must have the right to have sovereignty over my wellness.

Psychedelic plants and fungi can be utilized responsibly and sustainably by adults and in community whether that be for wellness spiritual exploration or other personal reasons.

As long as your choice does not infringe on someone else's freedom and causes them no harm no one should be arrested nor their livelihoods jeopardized for what they choose to do or put into their own bodies.

At Decriminator Seattle we are working every day to ensure that there is not only safe access but also equity in access.

Through our proposed legislation which includes protecting our rights to cultivate, sustainably collect, and share these resources within our communities.

I just want to thank you again so much for your support and for your consideration.

Thank you.

Tatyana, thank you so much, and it's been so great to work with you and everybody else that's over at Deep Room Nature throughout this process.

It's been a long journey from our initial meetings in the spring and then to crafting the letter for the OEIR task force, your service on the OEIR task force, our symposium, convening together here to discuss this initial resolution.

And then today, introduction and referral of that resolution as the first formal legislative step.

And I point that out for two reasons.

One, to show the strength and power of citizen activists.

And two, to just show for the general public how much process we have had and critical analysis we have had around this policy and whether the city pursues this route.

It's really been very deliberative and that's due in no small part to the resource leadership and diligence of DPRM nature.

So thank you so much.

Are there any questions now that we've concluded the presentations from council members?

I'm going to take it back over.

I could.

Very good.

Back to the chair.

There we go.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I just want to highlight, and the resolution absolutely recognizes this.

I did reach out to SBD to ask sort of, you know, what their current policy is, and I was reminded of the the guidance that the chief sent in the wake of the Blake decision that is still in place now.

Guidance was effective immediately.

Officers were no longer detained nor arrest individuals under RCW 59.54013 alone.

Officers will no longer confiscate drugs from an individual based on a violation of RCW 6950-4013, they go on to say the ruling does not impact other charges that may be evident to officers during an encounter, and it does not limit officers' ability to conduct investigations involving other illegal drug activity aside from possession.

The statement, the policy does go on to say that Officers must have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to investigate those other crimes.

And, and I underscore this, those other crimes cannot rely upon nor be based upon RCW 595413 as the underlying crime.

And when I asked SPD sort of what does this all mean, the response was that SPD officers in most circumstances would not have probable cause to detain a person on the belief that they possessed such substances in an amount for personal use.

And so just want to highlight and recognize that the resolution asks for further engagement with SPD on this direction and further sort of enshrining of this policy and its policy and procedures.

Again, thank you all for the many months of engagement through the task force on this issue.

Thank you for giving us an opportunity to also work as the state legislative session opens up.

to ensure statewide consistency around the goals that we're considering putting into this resolution, hopefully soon.

And just appreciate not only the efforts of the task force members, but also Council Member Lewis in leading this work.

Looking to see if there are, Councilmembers who have other questions, task force members who have additional comments.

Excellent.

Again, as Councilmember Lewis said, a testament to the thoroughness of the presentation here today and look forward to Thank you for bringing forward this policy to the full council.

I appreciate getting this on my agenda, my last committee agenda before we go into budget.

And with that, if there are no further comments or questions, I just want to say that the next Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for December 14th.

Again, it's the last committee meeting before budget.

And the time is 11.59 a.m.

and we are adjourned.