Seattle City Council Public Safety & Human Services Committee 6/8/21

June 8, 2021 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.32 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Gonzalez?

Here.

Council Member Lewis?

Here.

Council Member Morales?

Here.

Council Member Sawant?

Present.

Chair Herbold?

Here.

Five present.

Thank you so much.

So on today's agenda, we will be hearing three items.

The first is a roundtable with city and community partners to discuss this response continuum that is currently operating in Seattle with an emphasis on those that respond to low-level crimes and behavioral health crisis.

This is part of the council's work to reimagine community safety and better understand the possibilities of non-armed responses.

We have participants from each the Downtown Emergency Services Mobile Crisis Team, LEAD, the Seattle Police Department's Crisis Response Unit, the Fire Department's HealthONE, and Crisis Connections.

For that, we'll hear a presentation from the Office of Emergency Management on the All Hazards Mitigation Plan update.

And then finally, we'll hear a presentation from the Council's own Council Central Staff, Carlos Lugo, on the criminal legal system realignment work that he's been pursuing.

So we'll now move into approval of the agenda.

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

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this point, we'll be moving into public comment.

I will moderate the public comment period so that each speaker is given two minutes to speak.

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

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

The link is also listed on today's agenda.

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

And once you've heard that prompt, you'll need to press star six to unmute yourself.

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

Because we'll hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

And once the speaker hears the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your comments Speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time period.

The speaker's mic will be 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.

If you plan to continue following the meeting, you can do so via the Seattle Channel or the listening options that are listed on the agenda.

There are 15 people signed up for public comment.

In order to allow as many speakers as possible to speak, there are no objections.

I will suspend the rules to allow an additional 10 minutes for a total of 30 minutes of public comment.

Hearing no objections, public comment has been extended.

So, we will move right into speakers.

We will start with Howard Gale, followed by Des Chaffin.

Howard.

Howard, if you've not hit star six right now.

No, the prompt was late.

Good morning.

Howard Gale District 7. First agenda item this morning involves a presentation from SBD's crisis response unit.

Their first PowerPoint states that the crisis response unit's mission is, quote, to be regarded as an invaluable department resource which safely and appropriately addresses individuals experiencing a present or recent behavioral health crisis, and proficiently navigates the corresponding systems of care to reduce the likelihood of harm," unquote. How did this reduction of harm work for Mike Kuan Yew Chen, Jack Sun Kiwatinawin, Cody Willis-Spafford, Larry Andrew Flynn, Sam Tashiro-Smith, Shun Ma, Michael L. Taylor, Charlene Lyles, Danny Rodriguez, Ryan Smith, Terry Kaver, and then just four months ago, Derek Hayden. They were all suffering a behavioral health crisis while holding a knife or a piece of metal or a broken bottle. All of these people were killed in Seattle by the SPD since the federal oversight of police reform in less than nine years. Friends of these people had to suffer not just their loved one's murder, but additionally suffer from the fact that they were killed in Seattle where independent investigations have been and remain impossible. Seattle's police accountability system has deemed all of these killings either lawful and proper or has not even completed or attempted an investigation into these killings. Two weeks ago, State Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced that three Tacoma police officers had been charged in last year's murder of Manny Ellis, charges that were only possible because officials paid attention, they cared, and they performed an independent investigation. These are exactly the things that are not happening in Seattle and appear impossible, given the embrace of the delusion that Seattle has the best accountability system in the country. And today you will discuss another delusion that SPD's crisis response unit actually works. I invite everyone to join Seattle Lights in the city initiative to finally create 100% civilian oversight and investigation of Seattle police by going to seattlestop.org. That is seattlestop.org.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Dez Chalfant, followed by Julie Buahana.

Hello, City Council.

I am Dez Chalfant and I'm speaking on decriminalized nature Seattle.

I have been working with them as an avid supporter of antigen decriminalization set on changing Washington State and United States drug policies, which have been set in place by the war on drugs.

Our carceral systems continue to imprison people suffering from a variety of mental health issues and denies access to food, shelter, and health care, leading to self-sues with substance abuse and they are criminalized for it.

This vicious cycle continues and our society no longer has a place for prohibited prohibitionary laws.

I urge you council members to adopt decriminalized nature Seattle's resolution swiftly to bring healing to the hearts and minds of Seattle's citizens.

And when the momentum moves forward, I hope decriminalization is available across the state of Washington.

Some things cannot change, but until you try, you'll never know.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Julie Buana, followed by Shamir Tana.

Julie.

Hello, my name is Julie Guana and I am addressing the Crisis Response Unit and General Public Safety.

I am here at the Public Safety Committee because I, along with the thousands of other protesters that have been protesting police violence in the past year, feel unsafe.

Our BIPOC community members feel unsafe.

Our houseless community members feel unsafe.

Community members and the LGBTQIA plus community feel unsafe.

And community members with disabilities who may suffer mental health crises feel extremely unsafe.

Seattle community members feel unsafe because the Seattle Police Department as a whole, the people who are supposed to protect and serve us, actually target and brutalize us.

Protesters are sprayed with chemical weapons.

BIPOC folk are profiled, harassed, and murdered.

Houseless folk are cruelly and inhumanely targeted during sweeps.

And folks in the LGBTQIA plus community are targeted and harassed by SPD.

And people with disabilities suffering mental health crises are routinely brutalized, harassed, and killed by SPD.

All of this has happened for decades with impunity because the accountability system in Seattle does not work for the community.

And these atrocities will continue to happen if we allow the current accountability system to continue.

As community members, we must create an accountability system that helps us feel safe.

and accountability system that is accountable to us.

Please go to seattlestop.org to find out how we can create a fully civilianized police oversight board with investigative power and disciplinary authority that helps keep us safe.

Again, that's seattlestop.org.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Tamir Tunnel followed by Trevona Thompson-Wiley.

Tamir?

Hi, my name is Shamir Tan.

I'm a resident of District 7. I'm calling in response to the criminal legal systems chief plan being presented today.

I want to focus on three points.

First, is we need to reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system and the way it harmfully impacts people's lives, disproportionately Black, Indigenous, persons of color.

For example, we need to stop diverting money from defunding SPD towards an expansion of the city's attorney's office.

it violates the spirit of the defund movement.

Number two, our misdemeanor offenses need to focus on increasing access to basic human rights and livelihood, not more interaction with the criminal legal system.

Number three, at a meta level, this intervention is guided by a criminal legal systems framework that prioritizes system need, not the need of community members.

services should be made accessible because they are needed for people to survive, heal, and thrive, not because we need to surveil or monitor people.

That means upstream solutions for the well-being of poor and vulnerable communities, and not ones that require contact with the criminal legal system.

Thank you for the time.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Trevona Thompson-Wiley, followed by Maddie Bartholomew.

Trevona?

Hello my name is Trayvonna.

I'm a resident of District 2. I'm calling in today in response to the criminal legal system strategic plan.

I'm urging you to reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system and the ways that it harmfully impacts people's lives more disproportionately.

Black indigenous people of color trans non-binary and disabled.

As a Black woman I have had to deal with the oppressive criminal legal system and the effects are long lasting.

The criminal legal system includes the city attorney's office.

Diverting money from defunding SPD toward an expansion of the city attorney's office to conduct risk assessments violates the spirit of the defund movement.

Shrinking the criminal legal system is the goal in building up community capacity for responding to crisis human needs as the alternative.

The nature of the misdemeanor offenses are that they are majority crimes of poverty, such as theft, poverty, and arise from unmet needs.

As a young black woman living in Seattle, I have consistently seen poor BIPOC folks jailed for crimes of poverty.

I have seen a young black mother jailed for selling food for her children because she was poor and helpless.

Instead of incarceration, that mother needed services.

She needed a system that relies on services over incarceration.

The solution is to increase access to basic human rights and livelihoods, not to reinforce the same systems that make people vulnerable to begin with.

90% of the misdemeanor population are considered indignant and utilize public defense.

It's time to change who we take care of in our community, especially poor BIPOC communities.

We have to value, we have to know that all members of our community are valuable.

I've seen fathers jailed for driving with a suspended license because they weren't able to pay court fees and were the sole breadwinner for their family.

The father again needed services over incarceration.

I will end by saying that all members of our community should be valued.

We need to invest in community-led alternatives that are based on harm reduction and not being thrown in cages.

Our investment...

Thank you, Trevona.

You can send in your comments if we didn't get all of them.

Our next speaker is Maddie Bartholomew, followed by Ben Sircombe.

Maddie?

Hi my name is Maddie Bartholomew.

I'm a resident in District 6 here in Seattle.

As a concerned constituent of the mental health crisis in the city I'm asking you all today to enact the decriminalize nature Seattle ordinance to decriminalize psychedelics in Seattle.

I myself have a history with addiction.

In my late teens I was pained from childhood trauma that I developed addictive behaviors as coping mechanisms.

I was chain-smoking cigarettes, I had formed an alcohol dependency, and I had also formed an eating disorder.

In my early 20s, I experienced multiple psychedelic therapy sessions where I cultivated the tools to heal from my trauma.

Those sessions, along with integration work, has allowed me to overcome most of my addiction.

My existence is living proof that psychedelics can be used as tools for healing and self-improvement.

Now more than ever, the citizens of this city deserve the opportunity to have access to these tools.

Walking in the streets of Seattle, it's clear that mental health and addiction is an issue, and society needs to do better at helping all the people who live here, regardless of income or identity.

Please enact this ordinance and allow these alternative solutions to become an accessible reality for those who need it most.

Thank you for your time today.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Ben Sircombe, followed by Jodi Thomas.

Ben?

My name is Ben Sircum, and I'm a union organizer and a resident of District 3. I'm speaking today on behalf of DecrimNature Seattle in the hopes that you will adopt our ordinance and decriminalize psychedelics.

Decriminalization means that veterans coming home with crippling PTSD can seek therapies that have proven to be effective at treating the disorder.

Decriminalization means that opioid addicts can seek an effective means of overcoming their addiction when other methods have failed them.

Decriminalization means getting rid of outdated drug laws that have only proven to fill jails and ruin lives.

Not decriminalizing is telling veterans we're not interested in exploring options and treating their pain and instead would prefer to throw them in jail.

Not decriminalizing means that folks with terminal illnesses that want to soothe their pain to make peace with their death have to risk their safety by buying drugs off the street and risking arrest.

Not decriminalizing means we can't provide educational resources and community outreach to folks who have been failed by antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals who want to better themselves.

You've heard me speak for several months urging you to decriminalize because psychedelics have healed my anxiety and depression.

I would not know where I'd be without that medicine.

Let others have that opportunity.

We can do better, Seattle.

I yield my time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Jody Connis, followed by Penny O'Grady.

Jody?

Good morning.

My name is Jody Connis.

I'm 56 and the CEO of a small startup.

I'm reaching out in support of decriminalizing psychedelics.

As a survivor of childhood and domestic violence, I struggled with debilitating fibromyalgia, anxiety, addiction to prescribed meds, and binge alcoholism throughout my adult life.

Despite the years of therapy, the pandemic intensified my struggles.

Overwhelmed and heading for divorce, I just couldn't go on.

Convincing research led me to seek psychedelics.

Within two ayahuasca ceremonies, serenity, self-love, and security replaced anxiety.

Fibromyalgia, alcohol cravings, and meds are now gone.

In six months, I healed a lifetime of wounds, repaired my marriage, and I now live a life of joy and gratitude.

medicines can heal humanity.

Just imagine what a healed emotionally intelligent community can do to solve society's problems.

It starts here with us.

I urge you to take the lead for Washington state by supporting this movement.

The gather gift and grow model is the surest way to reach the masses.

Many of us are capable of helping our friends and families through their journeys using learned harm reduction methods.

Please consider this as you proceed.

And thank you so much for your time today.

about that.

Our next speaker is Penny O'Grady, followed by Nikita Oliver.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Penny O'Grady.

I'm a white homeowner in District 6. I'm calling in response to the criminal legal system strategic plan being presented today.

I stand with the goal of shrinking the criminal legal system and building up community capacity for responding to crisis and human needs as the alternative.

I am concerned about the expansion of the city attorney's office to conduct risk assessments.

Money diverted from policing to the office of the city attorney keeps us invested in the huge footprint of the criminal legal system.

I appreciate the direction of Intercept Zero with its support of participatory budgeting as one example of an alternative that doesn't require contact with the criminal legal system.

But unfortunately the CLS framework overall still prioritizes a system's need rather than the needs of community members.

I speak for keeping this emphasis on basic human needs and human dignity.

Using terms like crime reduction and preventing recidivism to easily slide into the thinking that these are the primary motives for offering services to community members rather than centering the basic dignity of human beings and the need for a thriving community.

This replicates the logic of the system to criminalize and pathologize impacted individuals before they are deemed deserving of services.

Services should be made accessible simply because they are needed for people to survive, heal, and thrive, not out of a need to surveil and monitor.

We need far more upstream solutions that reflect the city's responsibility in caring for the well-being of poor and vulnerable communities.

I urge you to keep working to further reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system in all its forms and the ways that it harmfully impacts people's lives who are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

Thank you.

Next speaker is Nikita Oliver, followed by LaKanya Sevier.

Nikita?

Good morning Seattle City Council.

My name is Nikita Oliver.

I use they them pronouns and I'm calling about the criminal legal systems alignment work.

I want to first start by saying there are some recommendations in the report that you all will review today that I think are good and are in alignment with the community that a few years ago advocated to divest from one of the city's jail contracts.

That being said part of our advocacy was to see the footprint of the criminal legal system be shrunk, and to be able to address the ways in which that system harms and impacts lives, especially Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer and trans and disabled community members.

The legal system, the criminal legal system, includes the city attorney's office, and diverting money from defund SPD toward an expansion of the city attorney's office to conduct risk assessments violates the spirit of our movement.

we're strongly advocating that actually you shrink the size of the criminal legal system.

The nature of misdemeanor offenses are that they're majority crimes of poverty.

And the solution is to increase access to basic human rights and livelihoods, not to reinforce the same system that's made people vulnerable.

According to Seattle Municipal Court data, 90% of misdemeanors, folks who are being criminalized as misdemeanors are considered indigent.

So the real need here is to increase access to basic needs support and that really will decrease the number of people in the criminal legal system.

I hope that at some point we get to hear from the community members that were a part of the CLS Task Force, because I know that they have their own recommendations, and hope that they have the opportunity in this same public format to share their thoughts and their wisdom with the council.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

The next speaker is LaTanya Sevier, followed by Connor Waters.

LaTanya?

Good morning.

My name is Latanya Sevier.

I'm a 39-year-old black, queer, non-binary person renting in D2.

I'm also the co-lead of the Black Brilliance Research Project, which worked with over 100 community researchers who were primarily black and brown.

This research included the voices of thousands of community members to design a black and community-led participatory budgeting process.

I'm calling in to respond to the criminal legal system strategic plan being presented today.

While I appreciate seeing the Black Brilliance Research Project and participatory budgeting mentioned in this report, investing more money into the city attorney's office is at odds with the recommendations coming out of the research.

City council should be reducing the footprint of the criminal punishment system and the ways that it is harmfully impacting people's lives disproportionately by POC folks.

Deficit-based models lack a trauma-informed lens.

We need genuine trauma-informed interventions that support our communities to thrive.

Trauma-informed approach assumes that nobody is inherently violent or abusive.

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

Some of these trauma responses have developed into patterns of behavior that may cause further harm to others around us.

Being trauma-informed means we look at each other's, at each other, each person's struggles through a trauma lens which is distinct from judgmental punitive models that considers harmful actions of individuals at the failures of their character that need to be corrected with punishment.

From a public health perspective, the metrics that are utilized by the risk-needs-responsivity model are deficit-based.

They are called criminogenic risk factors.

Focusing on participants' prior interactions with the system to define their ability to access needs.

It lacks a trauma-informed lens.

They are not strength or asset-based criteria, which recognize, draw from, and strengthen an individual's resources and capacity.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Connor Waters, followed by Valerie Schulrett.

Connor?

Good morning.

My name is Connor Waters and I live in District 6. I'll be commenting on the resolution to decriminalize entheogens in Seattle and I'm speaking as a naturopathic medical student and a soon-to-be naturopathic doctor.

I also have a training as an EMT and have worked 9-1-1 in Seattle as well as training in medical applications of psychedelic therapies.

As part of the decriminalized nature Seattle group I'm hoping that you will sign the letter to the OIER task force in support of our ordinance to decriminalize psychedelics in Seattle.

I frequently work with patients who have anxiety and depression and I have experienced both conditions myself.

I know anecdotally from my patients and from my own life experience that psychedelic therapies can help to produce a lift in mood when used in a reasonable manner and in a safe environment.

These effects can have a duration of weeks to months.

I know from my medical training that this has grounding in the research that has been performed by Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Royal College of London around both anxiety and depression as well as end of life care.

A notable study by Johns Hopkins in 2019 found that two dosing sessions of psilocybin paired with a series of psychotherapy improved significant measures in depression scores.

I also know from my experience in health care and emergency medicine that Seattle suffers from suicide rates far and above other major metropolitan centers in the USA.

Seasonal affective disorder contributes significantly to a sense of gloom in many Seattle residents.

I speculate that access to psychedelic medicines Without fear of legal repercussions could empower citizens to be proactive in their health care.

An increasing number of clinicians are becoming trained in how to guide their patients in safe use and this could revolutionize outcomes in mental health care.

So I'm asking the Seattle City Council to make a bold and affirming statement for the health of its constituents by supporting decriminalization of psychedelics in Seattle.

It is time for reason and science to guide our drug policy in a manner that reduces harm and opens up new options for health care.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Valerie Chlorette, followed by Bill Roberts.

Valerie?

Hi.

Hi.

Good morning, council members.

I'm Valerie Chlorette from District 2. I'll be very interested to hear the discussion about SPD and crisis response today, but I suspect it will omit mention of the many people in mental health crisis that were killed by SPD.

The shooting of Derek Hayden on the waterfront in February is one example of a crisis incident that could have been handled very differently.

And if it had been, it would have saved a life.

The PowerPoint attached to today's agenda, the PowerPoint that will accompany today's presentation seems very aspirational and not at all based on the reality of what is happening when police are called to respond to people in crisis.

To be honest, that disconnect makes me feel a bit physically sick.

I know from experience that our current system of crisis response to people in mental health crisis is woefully inadequate and increases harm.

That's my family experience and thinking about it this morning has really made me feel quite ill.

To understand what has been happening when SPD encounters people in mental health crisis, we need a system of real police accountability to shine a light on that pattern and practice.

Go to seattlestop.org for more information about how we can make that happen.

Thank you.

Our next speaker, Bill Roberts, is showing as not present.

So we'll go down to Alayna Lessing.

Alayna?

Hello.

My name is Alayna Lessing and I am calling both to address the presentation about the crisis response, but also specifically to address the Seattle Fire Department police chief.

I would like to know, where are your text messages?

You were one of the several including the Seattle Police Chief and the Mayor Durkin who deleted your text.

How can we trust anything you say in a meeting like this when you've so repeatedly and consistently shown to delete text during some of the most critical moments in our last year.

In addition I would also like to say that the Seattle Seattle Fire Department is incredibly complicit with Seattle Police Department's bad response for mental health issues.

The amount of times that fire has declined to respond to someone experiencing, someone unconscious or someone experiencing a drug issue has directly led to part of the reason people don't trust calling 911. It's really critical and that it leads to the death of people, the death of people like Derrick.

Finally, I would like to stand in solidarity for everyone calling in about the critical criminal legal system plan and transfer money to the Seattle city attorney's office and with decrim seattle.

Thank you.

And I'm calling today to urge you to reduce the footprint of SPD, not only in our city in general, but specifically when approaching community members in crisis.

The PowerPoint that is currently listed on the agenda is great in nature.

That will never, ever, ever happen.

We need to focus on community resources when we're approaching mental health concerns.

And it should absolutely not be going through a violent and racist police department.

There are an absurd amount of documented cases and through the OPA, through just general population, where we are well aware that the Seattle Police Department is not able to handle these situations.

Not even three months ago, they murdered Derek Hayden, experiencing a mental health crisis.

Our officers are not trained.

They are not the ones who should be responding to these crises.

Additionally, we do have the fire chief on the agenda today and would love to know what happened to those text messages.

No one in this county trusts you anymore.

Hold yourself accountable.

Tell the truth.

Abolish SPD.

I yield the rest of my time.

Okay, with that, we conclude today's public comment, and we will move into the items on the agenda.

As mentioned, the first item on the agenda is a crisis response continuum roundtable.

We are joined by Fire Chief Harold Scoggins and John Ehrenfeld from the Fire Department's HealthONE.

We are also joined by Lieutenant Eric with the Seattle Police Department, heading up the Crisis Response Unit of the Police Department.

This is a separate unit from the rest of SPD.

We'll hear more about that.

We'll hear from each, Neil Olson, Nicole Davis, and Michelle McDaniel from Crisis Connections.

Sarah Dearborn with the Public Defender Association.

Brandy Flood with REACH, and Maggie Hosnick with the Downtown Emergency Service Center's mobile response team.

And we're also joined, of course, by Amy Gore with our council central staff.

I'm just going to make a few opening remarks, and then I'm going to hand it over to central staff.

So folks understand the viewing public.

Everybody who is part of the existing crisis response continuum, as we're hearing about today, this is our existing continuum, has been asked to answer a couple questions.

One, what do you do best and who do you serve best?

What we are seeking to do is we're seeking to have a discussion about our current crisis continuum so we can learn more about the gaps within that continuum and continue the council's work to address those gaps.

I'm going to, in my opening remarks, draw liberally from a October 20th article from the Center for American Progress on the community responder model.

This article explains that in cities all over the U.S., police have been made responsible for much more than simply enforcing the law.

Increasingly, they're expected to solve every problem that crops up in the community, from resolving noise complaints and reversing overdoses, disciplining school children, and de-escalating behavioral health crises.

Yet these calls from services Forced services can result in unnecessary uses of force, justice system involvement, and other adverse outcomes for civilians, as well as put a strain on public safety resources.

The harmful effects from these interactions have not been felt equally by all.

Communities of color have disproportionately experienced heavy police presence, high rates of arrest, and harsh enforcement.

The growth of policing has also negatively affected people with behavioral health disorders and disabilities whose medical conditions are too often treated like a crime.

According to the International Associations of Chiefs of Police, they say the mere presence of a law enforcement vehicle, an officer in uniform, and or a weapon has the potential to escalate a situation when a person is in crisis.

This ever-expanding role of the police has had a negative impact on officers themselves, many of whom have attested to having too much on their plate.

A quote from retired Major Neil Franklin, who served as the head of training for Baltimore Police Department, is like quotes that I've offered from other police officers in the past.

This one says, every time 911 receives a call, it's currently the job of police to respond.

But many calls don't involve a crime, and when they do, many of those crimes are minor and related to quality of life issues, such as homelessness, mental health disorders, or substance misuse.

We need to stop expecting police to do social work and start sending the right trained professionals to address low-level crimes and non-criminal calls for service.

The Vera Institute of Justice conducted an in-depth analysis of 911 data from five cities, including Seattle, and found that non-emergency incidents nationwide were the most frequent type of call for service to 911. The share of low-priority, non-urgent calls was 45% in Seattle.

Meanwhile, median priority non-life threatening incidents comprised 26% in Seattle.

Top priority life-threatening emergencies made up the smallest portion of 911 calls in Seattle, only 18%.

But relying on police to handle low-level calls for service not only has the consequences that I named earlier, but it also can result in negative police interactions that not only affect residents' health and well-being, but can also erode public trust in policing.

Loss of trust can have serious ramifications for public safety.

including a reduction in the likelihood residents will report crime to law enforcement, making it harder for officers to prevent and solve crimes.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Council Central staff, who can talk a little bit about the council actions that we've taken thus far that have sort of created the foundation for this discussion, as well as some other work that the council's been doing.

Thank you.

Good morning, council members, and thank you, Chair Herbold, for that introduction.

My name is Amy Gore from Council Central Staff.

My colleague, Greg Doss, is also with us this morning.

We have a brief presentation to provide background and context for the roundtable today.

I know that council members are eager to hear from the panelists, so I'm going to go through these slides very quickly, but we are happy to answer any questions that you have.

Next slide, please, Greg.

We thought it would be helpful to ground today's discussion in some of the recent actions council has taken related to scaling up alternatives to armed police response.

As you recall, in August of 2020, council passed resolution 31962, which was based on the 2020 blueprint for police divestment and community reinvestment from decriminalized Seattle and King County Equity Now.

The resolution outlined several actions that council intended to pursue, including creating a new civilian-led department with a broader approach to public safety, requesting that the chief of police undertake a 911 call analysis, working to determine enforcement practices that should be deprioritized based on their disproportionate impacts on BIPOC communities.

Shortly thereafter, the mayor issued Executive Order 2020-10, which included additional steps to analyze and develop alternatives to our current police response system.

Next slide, please, Greg.

In addition to the resolution, council has taken a number of budgetary actions recently to expand the city's non-SPD response.

For example, as part of the 2020 budget revisions, council authorized non-SPD referrals to lead, funded a visioning process for community-based organizations involved in non-SPD response, requested a SPD civilianization report, and also funded the Seattle Community Safety Initiative with $4 million and dollars and an additional $12 million for capacity building for community organizations focused on alternative approaches to public safety.

In the 2021 budget, council provided funding for the expansion of Health One, made investments in crisis connections and critical incident community responders, as well as an expansion of the DESC mobile crisis team.

The budget also created the new Safe and Thriving Communities division at HSD, and included over $28 million for participatory budgeting and $29.9 million for investments recommended by the Equitable Communities Initiative Task Force, which we've just started hearing about at the end of last week, I believe.

Next slide, please, Greg.

There are several efforts underway at the city to build off of these actions and investments and prepare for the next steps.

For example, the Seattle Police Department, the Office of Inspector General, and the Seattle Fire Department are all working on analyzing 911 call data to better understand the demand for services to determine what types of responses are needed and at what scale.

In addition, Council has undertaken the Criminal Legal System Realignment Project, which you will hear more about later in this meeting.

The Council continues to work with stakeholders, particularly community partners, through the Criminal Legal Realignment Task Force and through the What Works Cities Alternative Emergency Response Sprint which as you are aware, was an opportunity for many folks, both city staff and community partners to learn more about non-police response models being used in communities around the country.

And also we've been working on debriefing from the sprint meetings through debriefs from council members Herbold and Lewis.

In addition, there's an executive working group which meets weekly to discuss these various initiatives and provide coordination and data support Next slide, please, Greg.

As these efforts conclude, the next steps are to review and examine the 911 call analyses that are currently underway.

The second, to determine demand for calls that could be diverted to an unarmed response, to identify gaps within the current service continuum, and examine potential labor implications of alternative responsives.

All of this will hopefully lead to coordinated investments in alternatives, and the development of operational protocols needed to support the continuum of services.

Next slide, please.

More specifically, next steps for council include a presentation from the executive work group on the data analysis currently underway and recommendations made pursuant to executive order 2020-10.

Greg and I are also preparing a memo on these various components, including the data analysis, the gaps analysis, and potential investments for council to consider.

Our goal is that this be presented to the committee later in the summer so that council members will have this information as they are preparing to make investment decisions as part of the 2022 budget.

That concludes our brief overview, but we're happy to answer any questions from the committee.

Thank you so much, Amy.

I'm going to pause here to see if council members have any questions.

And if not, We'll move into the discussion.

We're going to hear first from Lee, I'm sorry, first from DESC, then we'll hear from LEAD, then we'll hear from the Crisis Response Unit and HealthONE, and then we'll wrap up with Crisis Connections.

At the beginning, I mentioned what the questions are that we've been asking folks to focus on.

What gaps do you see in the, sorry, what is your role in the crisis response continuum?

What do you do best?

And who do you serve best?

And then from your perspective, what gaps do you see in the crisis response continuum?

We'll hear a go-around on the first question, what is your role in the crisis response continuum, what do you do best, and who do you serve best, and then we'll go around again and we'll answer the second question.

I want to just say that for my participation in the What Works Sprint, effort that many folks from the council and the executive and community members have been participating in.

An issue that really comes to fore for me that our friends at REACH and LEAD have been really doing a good job of bringing to the forefront.

is the concern that a 911 triggered system that has some armed response and some non-armed response, concern that even that type of a system, that an armed response will still be sent disproportionately to people of color.

Similarly, there's the concern that if we have a system outside of 9-1-1, that people will call for the non-armed response for people in mental health crisis or other non-criminal needs, disproportionately benefiting people who are not people of color.

And so that is really, for me, a question that we need to have another conversation about, but I know is going to come up in the thread through presentations today.

So let's kick it off.

And when you answer sort of that first question, if you can just be sure that you state your name and your organization, that would be great.

So question number one, what is your role in the crisis response continuum?

What do you do best?

And who do you serve best?

Hand it off to Maggie.

Thanks, Lisa.

Who do we serve?

We serve folks that are in crisis.

I think it's important to define what crisis is versus behavioral health emergency.

So behavioral health crisis is a turning point of a condition or a situation somebody is in, a time when a different or important decision must be made.

So we serve everybody in King County through the mobile crisis team.

And we work in coordination with law enforcement as our referents, FIRE, Designated Crisis Responders, which are folks that can take people's rights away and put them in the hospital.

And then also our crisis connections.

get referrals from individuals in the community.

Thank you, Maggie.

Moving on to the second center for asking, answering that first question, we'll have Dearborn and Brandy Flood from LEAD Energy.

Good morning, and thank you.

My name is Tiara Dearbone, and I'm a lead project manager with Public Defender Association.

There's a couple points I'd like to make here about our role in this.

Since the proviso being passed for community referrals, we have been the response for many of these low-level law violation concerns, and so we really have been putting in the effort to work collaboratively with businesses, with other social service providers, with community members to make referrals directly to the program for things like substance use, sex work, low-level theft, those sorts of things, definitely poverty crimes that should have an alternative response.

We would love to continue doing this work if capacity allows.

It has been extremely important and connecting people to those resources prevents people from eventually entering crisis.

If they have somebody who is supportive of them, they're receiving the services needed to meet their basic needs and preventing the need to engage in law violations in order to survive.

Another important role here is the collaboration with all the other agencies here.

It's important that we really see ourselves in the pre and post-crisis.

It's also extremely important that people are connected immediately into long-term care that will follow an individual, providing the care that they actually need to meet basic needs.

and to address that sort of behavior without using the criminal legal system.

And I will, I'm gonna pass it to Brandy to talk about what we do best and who we serve, because really that is the role that, as the service provider for the individuals we serve, that is the role that she's in charge of.

Thanks, Sierra.

My name is Brandy Flood, I'm the Director of Community Justice for REACH, and we manage clinical side of the lead contract, working with the case managers, providing long term intensive case management to the clients we serve.

And so when I think about my role, my role is to show up for individuals with the right range of behavioral health issues that are an intersection of crime there for those folks.

And so what we do best is we serve people with significant trauma, people of color, particularly black folks, unhoused people, people using substances and people who just because of their trauma and making crimes of poverty and substance use, we show up at that intersection for them because even with the alternative line, police will still be called on for these people just by the point of view and the bias of the caller and the fact that a crime is happening.

I think Ms. Trevona Thompson said it best, when the woman who showed up stealing for food, Although it's a crime of poverty and it shouldn't even be a crime, it's still a crime.

So police are going to show up in that incident.

What we do best is show up for those folks and serve them long term.

And so everything from connecting people back to family, helping people navigate through the criminal legal system.

You know, I know that we shouldn't even have the criminal legal system, but at the same time, I can't leave those people behind.

as you're trying to remove that barrier, which can be very difficult to do when you have significant trauma, diagnosed mental health, you know, you're living outside, it's hard to navigate through that.

We're helping connect people through housing.

Our housing system in King County, it's not great.

There are really no options, but we work hard to make those connections and work through those internal systems to get people housed, people who've never had housing before, connect to treatment, connect to more robust services, because if we had robust services to meet the needs of folks, we might have less incidents of crime in our communities, and we would have less police surveillance and police power in our communities if we could provide robust services to our community.

Thank you so much.

Next in our lineup, we're going to hear from Lieutenant Eric Biskonski with the Seattle Police Department K-Crisis Response Unit.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think when you talk about what is what is our role in the crisis continuum.

I think all three that spoke previously kind of defined what our role is right we are.

We are the safety net the catch all the there aren't those resources that people can directly connect with.

And so the default becomes 911. And that is that is kind of our role and as 911 we don't have the option to not go.

When someone calls 911, we have to respond, even if at the heart of the matter, it's something where we inherently know, hey, this is not a police engagement response.

This is not a crime where it's such a low level or, as has been pointed out, it's a crime of poverty.

What is the action that we're going to take?

And we have to respond regardless.

Our role is certainly within the crisis response unit and Council Member, as you had pointed out, we are a specialty unit within the police department.

So there's kind of two different conversations there of what is the overall 911 response.

You know, when someone calls and patrol officers are going to respond to a call versus the crisis response unit specifically in our role, in our capacity, it is really to try and take that holistic approach, try and come in, stabilize, you know, an acute situation and then make those referrals to our community partners and stakeholders.

for the most appropriate services and follow up, not looking for, you know, necessarily a criminal approach to it or a law enforcement approach to it, but really redirecting folks back to the more appropriate community based services that are out there.

That's definitely our role and our mission as a unit broader within the police department.

And we try and base all of our training that we've done over the past few years of really amplifying what the community resources are that are out there and understanding what our role is of, you know, again, kind of that default people call 911, but We are not case managers.

We are not long-term care providers.

We are not acute care providers for some of the individuals that are experiencing a variety of those behavioral health issues, which could be mental health or substance abuse or anything along that spectrum.

And really trying to leverage these services that are in the community, whether they're city-based or county-based, and go from there.

So that's kind of our role and what we're looking at, I guess, What do we do best and who do we serve best?

Again, as the crisis response unit, our goal is really to focus on those individuals that are maybe the disproportionate utilizers of those 911 services to again, see if we can redirect them back to the most appropriate services and more importantly, reduce the number of patrol responses.

That might be going out right so if that 911 call comes in if we can, if we can reduce the number of 911 calls that are associated with an individual.

doesn't matter why they came in.

But if we can reduce those, the patrol is not responding out to those, and those individuals are better engaged with those services, that's our number one priority, along with those that are presenting an imminent likelihood of harm.

And that's really our focus, especially as the crisis response unit is, if you have that individual that is actively suicidal that is, you know, actively putting themselves in a state of harm?

How can we interdict that, try and stabilize that situation, and then again, connect that individual back to the most appropriate resources?

Lieutenant, can you just talk a little bit about how and I apologize the way we've laid out these two questions.

It may not feel conducive to showing your slides.

I know, Maggie, you had a slide and Lieutenant, you had some slides as well.

But I know there's for a couple programs for both the crisis response unit as well as the mobile crisis team.

The department pairs with mental health providers from DESC in the instance of the crisis response unit, I believe.

And then there's also a requirement currently for the mobile crisis teams to be dispatched through law enforcement.

So if you could maybe just touch a little bit on that, that would be really helpful.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for the opportunity.

We are very unique here and in Seattle and with our unit, our crisis response unit, we follow what's referred to as a co-responder model.

And that's how we deploy.

So that is taking a mental health professional and putting them in a car with a trained, a specially trained police officer.

And we're able to respond out to both in progress calls to, again, be a patrol resource and support of that because the volume of crisis calls, if you will, that come through the city of Seattle and come through the department are around about 10,000 a year.

And so our small niche group cannot possibly respond to every single one of those calls.

But we go out and we try and respond to assist patrol with a mental health professional and a police officer.

And then the other side of that would be all of those reports that get written come through our unit.

And then we do the triage in conjunction with those MHPs to be able to determine, is there some value added?

Is there some additional follow up that we might be able to provide?

Reaching out to case managers or service providers and making a warm handoff of, you know, hey, one of your clients had some interactions over the weekend or over the last week.

You might want to see if we can get them back in, maybe reengage them with those services.

So we're We're trying to handle both ends of that equation within our unit.

And then, yes, with the ability of mobile crisis team, it is a tremendous resource that we have at our disposal.

It's countywide.

but we're also spoiled with Seattle being the seat of King County, that they are based just down the street and they're right here local for us.

So we have had a very strong relationship with Maggie and her group and DESC in general, who oversees the crisis response, or I mean, I'm sorry, the mobile crisis team and the Crisis Solution Center and the Crisis Diversion Facility, that we were able to make those direct referrals in the field, any officer, can make a direct referral in the field to the mobile crisis team and have them respond out to a call that an officer does not need to actually wait around for.

So if an officer responds to a situation, determines there's some type of Again, broad term crisis issue that's going on.

There's no real law enforcement role here.

Officers can make that call directly from the field to mobile crisis team to the tune of, you know, we're in the five, six hundred a year that officers are making those direct referrals to mobile crisis team and then folks from Maggie's team can respond out directly to the field and then connect them with a whole plethora of services that that are available and we completely remove the law enforcement aspect of it, which is. which is a great option.

So and in addition, with those five MHPs, we have five mental health professionals and five full time officers, and then a sergeant that oversees that group.

Those mental health professionals are currently contracted through DESC.

And that contract is actually managed by human services division.

So they're there's a firewalling there between the police department and our MHPs so that they have their own reporting, they are employees of DESC, and that's just a contracted spot, which again, thank you to the city council for approving that funding a couple of years ago now, a year and a half ago now, so that expanded us up to those five MHPs.

Thank you.

Before we move on, Maggie, did you have anything that you wanted to add here?

Yeah, thank you for the second opportunity here.

So our mobile crisis team, like Eric said, are comprised of mental health professionals.

And once we get that phone call from a fire, police, DCRs, or crisis connections, we send out these mental health professionals to assess for risk.

And risk is what we consider emergency where somebody is not able to care for themselves or make decisions or are a threat to themselves or the community.

Often in these cases, we will refer, we will work in coordination with the police and get them to the hospital where they can be assessed by our designated crisis responders.

But often when mobile crisis team does respond, we are seeing folks that, you know, are in the crisis, are needing to make a different decision in that moment.

And these mental health professionals are able to provide resources, talk with people, get them to a higher level of care if needed, which Eric had referred to the crisis diversion facility, which is a 72 hour stabilization program.

But mostly what the mobile crisis team does is move the individual away from the formal institution of policing and fire, DCRs, and into the hands over time to other outreach agencies or agencies that can provide that long-term case management connection back to community, family, et cetera.

Thank you, Maggie.

And before I move on, I just want to make a finer point and add on it, and correct me if I'm wrong.

The DESC mobile response team is focused on a law enforcement referral where there is not a need for a law enforcement response, whereas the crisis response unit is focused on bringing behavioral health experts to instances where there is a perceived threat to self or others.

And we heard folks in public comment refer to the unfortunate death of Derek Hayden at the hands of police officers.

That was not a crisis response unit response.

Some of those officers may have crisis response training.

SPD works hard to ensure that its officers have crisis training, but that was not a crisis response unit training.

And if we had, again, this exercise today is about our continuum and where there are gaps.

And I know that there are folks in the community, we recently heard from Mothers for Police Accountability who have a lot of concern that our crisis response unit run out of SPD to respond to people in mental health crisis with behavioral health expertise, that that unit is not functioning in the way envisioned because of the staffing shortfalls that SPD is experiencing right now.

So just want to highlight that when we talk about a continuum, we're talking about a continuum that responds to people across a number of different needs and our efforts to try to get that right.

So needs do not go unmet or are not met with the wrong response.

And just looking to see if there are any questions from my colleagues.

If not, we'll move on to HealthONE.

Ms. Goggins and John Ehrenfeld.

Good morning, Council Member.

Thank you very much for inviting us and for the opportunity to be here.

My name is John Ehrenfeld.

I'm the Program Manager for Mobile Integrated Health within the Seattle Fire Department, which is a partnership also with the Human Services Department.

Here in Seattle, and so I oversee our NIH program which includes our health one team health one is a multidisciplinary team that we field based out of the fire department staffs to day units with a specially trained firefighters and human services department case managers.

We take responses in a number of ways.

We are directly dispatched by the 9-1-1 center, primarily on minor injury, falls, lift assist, and welfare checks, so more medical in those nature.

We respond to requests from our operations in the field when they identify the need for an alternative response that's not a traditional police or fire disposition.

And then we also do quite a bit of proactive outreach and follow-up with established clients.

There's sort of three general categories that our clients fall into in health.

One is people who are aging in place.

The other is people in some manner of behavioral health or substance abuse crisis.

And the third is people suffering from the social consequences of homelessness or extreme poverty.

And obviously, these are all very much overlapping categories.

We are, as far as behavioral crisis response we primarily focus on sort of the lower to mid tier of these crises so we're not able by virtue of our staffing to intervene into people who are violent or potentially violent, psychotic or unable to engage, typically those we would let one of the police units take the lead.

But we do see a huge amount of sort of lower level behavioral crisis, substance abuse and intoxication, general suicidality, depression, anxiety, and sort of everything on that continuum.

And really, I think what we do well is act sort of like the Tenepas-Kasiket as referrers and connectors with other resources.

One of the things that we try to emphasize is that, you know, When people are encountered with crisis in the field, these are extremely complex cases, and it's exceedingly rare for these instances to be resolved, for lack of a better word, via a single encounter, whether that's with police, fire, or a community group.

These individuals typically need a fair amount of follow-up and ongoing referral, and so we were able to do short-term case management and make referrals to community partners, such as Crisis Connections, LEAD, REACH, the Washington State Long-Term Care System, DESC's host team, supportive housing, homelessness services, et cetera.

So we act as a sort of a bridge and a facilitator.

We are nominally citywide, but we have a particular emphasis on communities that have a particular need by virtue of being under-resourced, under-represented, or having a very high call volume and respond to all of our clients in the field with a compassionate, non-judgmental, and particularly trauma-informed lens.

And we really see ourselves, I think, as, again, sort of that bridge between that initial moment of crisis that often begins with a 9-1-1 call and a bridge to other services.

Unlike traditional EMS, we are extremely open-ended in our capacities.

So, you know, we don't have to take people to the hospital.

We don't have to take them to particular clinics.

And at each and every call, our crew is able to talk to the client and sort of collaboratively come up with the best solution, whether that's taking them to the crisis solution center, or back home, or to a clinic, or referring them to the LEAD program.

So the crew is really capacitated to do a lot of very open-ended problem solving each time.

So with that, I'll turn it over for any questions that you might have, and thank you again.

Thank you, John.

Much like the focus of HealthONE, not just on crisis response, but also in follow-up, I want to flag that ESC also has a program that has been funded by the council.

I believe it's a pilot at this point.

It's a behavioral response team that has both a triage and a hot line number.

And they work on not just responding to crisis, but doing the post-crisis work to create linkages in the community, build long-term relationships to get housing, behavioral health treatment, and patient assistance and case management.

So just wanting to flag as well that we have in the continuum, a city response that is focused on crisis response and follow-up as well as an external to the city response as well.

I believe, Brandy, you had a question or a comment?

I just have one comment.

I just wanted to definitely state that we have the same concerns the community has about crisis response.

And so for us this year, more than 80% of our referrals came from the community and community members who said, You know, these people are committing crimes, but we don't want to call the police.

We don't know what's going to happen.

And so we've had a lot of communities across the city that have called us in to do our own going and serve people before police are contacted because they have those same concerns.

And so the whole year we really haven't gotten maybe two police referrals in a year.

But majority of our referrals come from communities and we don't go into the community to serve the folks with law enforcement.

We just go with our outreach workers to do the work is a lot of times we already know the people do our homeless services work anyway.

Thank you, Brandy, so much.

As a council member, I'm also receiving a lot of inquiries from people who don't want to call 911 and they want an alternative.

And I am increasingly referring people to Crisis Connections.

And so with that, we'll turn over to our team at Crisis Connections.

to talk a little bit about the question of what your role is and what you do best and who you serve best.

Thank you.

I'm Samuel Olson, the Senior Director of Clinical Operations for Crisis Connections.

Crisis Connections does quite a bit in relation to crisis.

We operate at a state level.

We have lines and services that are across Washington State s for folks who are lonely, our team link line is sta who are in crisis or who support that operates wit to text.

It operates with you know, staffed by teen experience or teens who We also offer the Washington State Recovery Helpline, which is for folks with, you know, addictions who are looking for resources for detox.

They're having trouble with problem gambling.

But as far as crisis-specific intervention, for the purpose of this conversation, we have been in operation since 1964 as the Regional Crisis Helpline.

Crisis Connections is kind of operates like the center of the crisis web.

We get calls from law enforcement looking for information.

We get calls from community members, you know, concerned about their brother, their sister, their loved one.

We get calls from folks who are, you know, wanting to speak to a trained volunteer.

We get calls from professionals in the field, from hospitals, from ERs, just anyone and everyone.

We get contacts from kind of the entire continuum of care.

We operate that can, you know, that hub model with a really robust volunteer model.

So crisis connections right now has about 330 trained volunteers who are community members who, you know, live and work and eat and sleep in the city of Seattle, and they come in and they volunteer their time on the crisis line and that's under the supervision of a master's level clinician.

Our goal is always to resolve crisis at the lowest level possible.

We don't want people to have to have negative interactions with law enforcement.

We don't also wanna clog up the law enforcement system.

The vast majority of our calls are handled on the phone with a trained volunteer.

There's no police dispatch, there's no mobile crisis team dispatch.

We're handling those calls with compassion and emotional support.

So I looked at the data this morning, last month alone for the King County line, we handled nearly 8,000 calls.

Our average response time for that was about eight seconds.

You know, we have a 0% abandonment rate.

We are here, we are here 24-7.

We want those calls.

We want to speak to those folks.

We are the alternative to, you know, a police response.

We are the alternative to an armed response.

And we also have the ability to triage these calls to the appropriate level of care.

Whether that is, you know, let's get this person to the ER.

Let's get an ambulance out there.

Let's get a mobile crisis team out there.

Let's get a law enforcement co-response out there.

Hey, let's get this person a next day appointment.

Let's get this person a safety plan that involves their friends, their family members.

So we operate up and down that response system.

We take a prevention approach.

We do quite a bit of prevention work at Crisis Connections so that folks don't end up in crisis.

We do postvention as well.

We do survivors of suicide support groups.

We do grief and loss boxes for folks who've survived suicide.

We're knee deep in crisis and we wanna serve these folks.

Please divert them to us.

We want them, we wanna talk to them and we wanna help them.

And I'll let Nicole maybe speak a little bit deeper into the crisis services department.

She does a lot more of the day-to-day operations.

So I'm Nicole Davis.

I'm the director of crisis services.

So I run the crisis lines.

We really are a hub of information for providers and linkage.

And we have connections into the system to understand more of what's going on with our community members if they have a history of behavioral health treatment in King County.

And we can, if somebody's enrolled, we get them connected to their current providers.

We can have, you know, connect police and mobile crisis team to their current providers for for more continuation of care, a better response by people who know them.

So we have strong relationships with the designated crisis responders and the mobile crisis team.

We manage linkage for them across the state and strongly in King County for many, many years.

So we also have had the opportunity to, over the last year and a half, have a pilot project called One Call, which is for first responders to be able to call and get that direct access to the relevant information if somebody's been in the mental health system before.

It's also answered 24 hours a day by a mental health clinician.

So we also offer consultation and problem solving and suggestions on how first responders could potentially have additional information as they are facing somebody in the community who's experiencing a behavioral health crisis.

So, yeah, it's a really great system with our volunteers who come in just energized and ready to offer our callers emotional support and and closely monitored and managed by a set of really committed staff to making sure that everybody gets linked and connected to the services that they are needing.

Thank you, Nicole.

So let's do another round of discussion around the second question we have here.

Just opening it up to ask what gaps you see in the crisis response continuum, whether or not there are populations that are not well served, what racial equity concerns folks have, gaps in scale.

communication issues that need to be resolved, coordination, dispatch, or anything else that I may not have flagged here as a gap that we need to work together to address.

We can start again with Maggie.

Thank you.

So in our continuum, we see people on their worst day of their lives.

and get them to where they need to go.

And we move them down the continuum of crisis into outreach.

And one of the major gaps is coordination between this system, making sure that we're all coordinating our services and we're doing soft handoffs, that kind of thing.

So that is a great need.

The other is making sure that individuals, BIPOC individuals in particular, are getting to their communities, that they're being served by people that look like them, that value their culture and their beliefs.

And we certainly do not have enough programs to serve everybody that hits the crisis system.

between the mobile crisis team and crisis diversion facility, we see about 4,000 calls a year.

And since starting, we have seen 28,000 people that we've made contact with.

Some of these folks are coming through the system time and time again, which speaks to part of it is relationship and part of it is somebody needs to have a couple of hitting the crisis system a couple of times, but being able to hand them off to agency partners that are culturally competent, that, you know, honor somebody's recovery through harm reduction, trauma-informed care, and strength-based.

Thank you, Maggie.

Lead and reach.

Karen Brandy.

Thank you.

I know it may look like there are a lot of service providers and a lot of alternatives to law enforcement.

I just wanted to emphasize that there is a lot of focus on trying to get somebody else to respond for things that are not crime that law enforcement has been responding to, which is great.

But we, the people that we serve are at the intersection of crime and behavioral health or poverty.

And so we, our focus really is on individuals who are impacting the community because of engaging in law violations.

a group of people who are invisiblized or pushed into the margins, individuals who are not connected typically to services, individuals who are continually criminalized over and over and over because of experiencing poverty.

And, you know, the long-term case management really is important here because You know, we can, we definitely need to build what happens up front and like what is the response but like how is that person taken care of in the future, how's the person's real needs addressed, how is, how are their chronic conditions addressed some people have been experiencing.

incarceration over and over for 20, 30, 40 years.

Some of the people we work with have been experiencing homelessness for decades, experiencing substance use disorder or unmet behavioral health needs for decades and need intensive wraparound long-term care in order to try to prevent crises from coming up again for the same individual and in order to prevent people from calling 911 on these individuals.

We finally also have a community that has an increased desire in an alternative response to crime.

Like we have businesses, we have organizations, we have individuals who are trying to ask us to respond for crime.

They're talking specifically about criminal activity.

finally want an alternative response and finally want to lean towards those sort of responses.

And we just don't have the capacity to do it.

Like LEAD has never been to scale the way it needs to be.

And now we have exponential growth in the desire for a LEAD response.

and LEAD has not been able to expand like that.

And so it is, you know, it's sad to be in this work and like seeing that people finally wanna believe in a response that we have believed in for so long and people finally wanna use it and we are starting to turn people away or starting to have to say no or having to really, really prioritize accepting only a small number of individuals.

It's sad and it's extremely difficult work.

And this is even after the council's 2019 slide to bring LEAD to scale by 2023, we don't.

We don't even know exactly what that looks like now after the past year, right?

Bringing lean to scale, but there's an extremely increased demand and not enough resources to meet that demand.

I'm gonna pass it to Brandy to continue.

Council Member Holbrook, when we talk about the gaps that exist, you know, we know for sure, you know, in America that the war on drugs is a vicious, vicious, vicious thing that has impacted many people.

Me, myself, and my own lived experience have been impacted by that with direct hits to my family and loved ones.

And so when you think about how that attacks people, we are dealing with that aftermath.

You know, people who've been dealing with that for 20 years.

And so you can't have a one-time crisis stop with people.

It has to be long-term case management.

We know these people are not prioritized for housing in the right way, health care, even with navigating their legal system stuff.

We know they're not prioritized at the right rate.

with really getting services.

And so we're at the intersection with those folks have been hit by this war on drugs.

And I'm particularly talking about black folks right now, because they don't even fit into the gaps of other homeless service systems and healthcare systems that get help.

The only way they've been able to get help, unfortunately, is through the intersection where crime is happening, but it's racist in itself.

And so you're having people, we're with them for that long-term piece.

And so we need to be taking a scale to be in more communities, especially now that we're able to do this community referral in a real way for these people who have been impacted.

So we have to do this.

Even though as a country we recognize how the war on drugs has been racist, we haven't been able to rectify that with giving those folks robust services to be sustainable and reintegrate back into communities.

And so when I see that gap, you have to have that overlay of having a racial equity analysis, long-term services, and services that connect them to sustainable things like housing, mental health, health care, and their legal assistance.

So that has to be beyond just a crisis response.

Thank you, Brandy.

Lieutenant Piskonski?

Yeah, you know a lot of really, really poignant things brought up there by by the previous three.

And you know, we see a lot of those same those same issues right that we're encountering.

Scale is certainly an issue.

You know, as I had mentioned.

You know, at the current rate, Seattle Police Department has about 10,000 crisis calls a year that we're responding to, and you know that the math works out to about 26 a day.

You know, again, we have five teams.

There's just no way to appropriately respond with that capacity to be able to be out there and be effective on a 24-7 basis.

We're really, you know, kind of managing that with a lot of smoke and mirrors with a lot of, you know, just doing the best we can with the resources that we've got.

We are also experiencing even with those five we are also experiencing some short staffing issues right now as well so we're not even if we were we're not even in our full capacity of what that looks like so.

definitely some gaps there, if there wants to be some some growth, you know, in applying that stuff.

One of the things a couple of things that got brought up, I was just jotting some some notes down with the you know, with the alternatives and having non-police responses to a lot of these types of calls, we actually see a really high percentage of those crisis calls that get generated for the department that become 911 calls are actually coming from the service providers themselves, whether they're supportive housing facilities, whether they're, you know, various case managers, you know, facilities that might be offering services, stuff like that.

We have an extremely large percentage of those crisis calls that are being generated by those service providers.

And that really kind of puts things in a quandary because, you know, if the question is, okay, well, how do we not have police respond?

And instead we have alternative social service providers giving that response, but they're the ones that are calling 911 now.

to come and connect with their, excuse me, with their clientele.

So we kind of get into a circular conversation there a little bit, excuse me, of what that response is going to look like as a whole from a law enforcement standpoint.

As a department, as some of you are aware, some of you might not be aware, we actually track, excuse me there, I had to try and clear my throat.

We actually track every one of those crisis interactions.

And in there, we have a lot of checkboxes that are related to, you know, everything from the observable words, actions and behaviors of the individual.

So what what an officer might be encountering and then to the closing end of what those dispositions are.

So was it a referral to services?

Was it a involuntary or voluntary trip to the hospital?

Was it an arrest?

What are all those possible dispositions there?

And now over, let's see, we're six plus years into tracking that.

So we're somewhere in the closing in on 60,000 crisis templates.

that we have data associated with, and we track at a less than 10% arrest rate.

So for all of those crisis calls that are occurring, we're in the nine-ish percentile, nine-ish percentage of those encounters that end up in an arrest.

We're really looking for the alternatives, you know, and not taking a traditional law enforcement response to individuals that are experiencing those behavioral health issues, but trying to reconnect them to those other services.

Additional resources, additional accesses.

Again, I can't say enough thank you to our partners, to the stakeholders that are out there because You know, it doesn't matter the amount of training or bodies that we get if we don't have those partners to be able to connect folks back to.

You get the traditional law enforcement response of we either take someone to the hospital, we take them to jail, or we walk away.

And that's not good for the client.

That's not good for the individual of being able to connect them back to services.

So we can't have success unless we have the tremendous partners that are, many of them here joining us today.

Thank you.

And then folks from from health one on and seconds.

Sure, um, yeah, I mean, I really want to emphasize and reiterate what Tiara and Randy.

Lieutenant Piskonski said.

I think I would probably just focus on two right now.

There are quite a few.

The first is, you know, like the Lieutenant was saying, is resource connections, particularly what my team in the field calls landing zones, which are brick and mortar locations that can take clients.

Again, you know, where can we take someone that is not an ED, that's not in a jail or not leaving them?

And, you know, first and foremost, what comes to mind for us is, you know, the DDSC Crisis Solution Center, but obviously their capacity is limited.

We would like to see more resources like that, and particularly more walk-in primary care and urgent care clinics that operate on the FQHC model, the Federally Qualified Healthcare Settle model, where they will take any patient regardless of ability to pay.

It's very difficult for us right now often to connect people with timely medical resources in town.

you know, a lot of the community health centers have essentially no availability on an ongoing basis.

We're sort of cautiously optimistic for DESC's new clinic that they're opening in partnership with Harborview at the Hubsan Clinic, but we really, I think, need to see more of that, you know, day centers, you know, psychiatric urgent care facilities, really any place where we can get sort of wrap around holistic care, and again, have those service provider connections.

And then the other one, I think this has been mentioned already, is starting to think about what would potentially be a 9-1-1 or next year a 9-8-8 dispatchable civilian community-led resource for quality of life issues, for lower level behavioral crisis, for things where, again, you don't necessarily need an SPD patrol unit, where you don't need an SFD fire truck to come.

I think that we've seen pretty clearly around the country that this model is doable.

I don't think that it's really theoretical.

I think that it can be done safely and effectively.

And then you get sort of a continuum of care, basically starting with your community partners all the way up through fire, police, and co-responder models.

I think that from what we have heard on our end, there's quite a bit of interest in that in the community.

I think a lot of really exciting opportunities there to embed resources such as lead and DESC and REACH and perhaps even more sort of more local geographic resources before you even get to the uniforms of police and fire.

So I think that that is certainly aspirational, but I would certainly like to see that at some point.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I think that's a good segue over to crisis connections.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about the future of 9-8-8.

I just want to, again, for the viewing public, because of the gaps that we're talking about right now, if somebody in the public wants to call somebody and wants to know for certain that a uniformed police officer is not going to come because there's no guarantee that HealthONE is going to be able to go unless it is flagged in a particular way that results in 911 sending HealthONE.

There's no guarantee that a crisis response unit with mental health professionals is going to go because of the capacity issues that we've heard from Lieutenant Pisconsi.

So for folks who want to call somebody and be guaranteed that they're not going to get a response of of police officers.

Right now, crisis connections is what we have to offer.

And so that's why I'm also excited to hear a little bit more about how the system is going to grow with 988. And I also just want to, because I really don't want to give the impression that because we're talking about all of these different crisis response systems that I mean, the foundation of this conversation is about the gaps, what's missing.

And the article that I read from earlier said that in their analysis, in this instance of 911 calls, it doesn't count the instances where 911 isn't called, but in their analysis of 911 calls, 38% of 911 calls could benefit from an alternative community response.

So, again, that says to me that there's a lot of growing that needs to be done in the system.

Well, 988 is a very large topic.

So if you don't mind, I'm going to answer your first question first, which is, you know, where do we see the gaps?

You know, one of the things that the one called pilot has taught us is that there's room for, you know, crisis connection working close with law enforcement.

We found that relationship to be effective.

We think we can do more.

We are worried about the funding for that program running out this year and making sure that law enforcement has us as a resource, making sure that law enforcement knows how to get in touch with us and how to interact with folks who are having a mental health or behavioral health crisis.

We want to make sure that those folks are getting a kind, compassionate, and accurate response.

expect cops to be social workers and we don't, you know, as social workers expect to be cops.

I think there's a bridge there where we can help each other, you know, navigate those situations better.

And I think one calls a good opportunity for that.

In relation to 988, one of the things that Crisis Connections does that I didn't touch on earlier is that we are a lifeline center.

So there's a National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

That's a number, it's a 1-800 number.

And that comes down to local contact centers.

Crisis Connections is one of those.

There's two others currently in Washington State.

And we anticipate that we will continue to be in that network of providers long term.

And 988 is this transition from that 1-800 number to a three digit number.

It's a federal law, and it's going to be coming out in July of 2022. So, about 400 days until this thing goes live, we're anticipating just a really drastic ramp up in call volume as people get used to this three digit number.

The legislature also passed a bill, 1477, that put some funding into the system.

Thank you to anyone who advocated on that, great job.

It'll help with increasing the community response side of things with the mobile crisis teams.

It'll also put more funding into the system for the contacts in our hubs, one of those will likely be crisis connections.

It will enable us to do bed tracking.

It'll enable us to do tracking live of mobile crisis teams out in the community so we can get them dispatched to the most appropriate and local crisis team out there.

It's going to require just a lot of system upgrades, a lot of upgrades to our technology, increases to our staff, you know, trying to build a system that is designed in a way to get people out of the 911 system into the behavioral health crisis response system.

Historically, our Lifeline contract has been funded at about $1,500 a year, which is just You can't operate on that and that's that's not a lifeline fault there just wasn't any funding in the system so this has been long overdue and we're looking forward to that scope of work so that we can respond, you know, to anyone who needs it.

Thank you, Neil.

So, just looking at the participants panel, including council members, are there questions that we want to ask of our panelists?

Are there closing thoughts that panelists want to make sure that we touch upon?

This is, again, this is a really, really good conversation.

I'm really appreciative that we take some time today to take a bite of it, but I think it's one in many conversations that we need to continue having before we get some recommendations resulting from the executive IDP work.

Council Member Herbert, I did have one thing to just add to that that I can't emphasize enough, that in creating this alternative line, if we don't think about that new one, of crime and behavioral health.

It could be detrimental to communities of color, in particular black communities.

I just want to, if I don't lay anything else down for people to really pay attention to how we are going to serve that population that we serve, that are committing crime, that do have significant trauma and behavioral health, we don't want them to be met with a heavy hand.

We want them to be met.

Thank you, Brandy.

Well, let's see.

Councilor Morales.

Yeah, thank you.

I want to thank everybody for sharing this information with us.

I don't think any of this is a surprise.

We know that across the city, we've got a lot of need.

And I just want to respond to what Tiara and Brandy were saying.

I have called LEAD often to come to different neighborhoods in my district.

Constituents across South Seattle have been asking for support.

They don't want to call the police, but there are more and more people who are, you know, engaging in drugs.

We find bullets under the Mount Baker light rail station.

We know that there are lots of challenges that our community members have.

And the reality is that these providers are tapped out.

And so, you know, Tiara was kind enough to come and meet with some of the constituents in the Mount Baker area, but she also had to say, you know, we just can't come back to provide the kind of service that we would like to be able to do.

I think it's really important that we acknowledge this, as somebody was saying, continuum of care is really important.

We know we need to get more housing in place, but we also know that people need help desperately.

And I think as a city, it is our obligation to provide the resources that we need so that our neighbors are cared for, whether it is from their own private medical provider, or from emergency response providers like you folks.

So thank you for what you do and I just want to say we hear you and know that you need more support in order to do your work better.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And I really appreciate having this conversation that's this really prescient, regardless of where we're having it, be it in the Public Safety Committee, be it in the Select Committee on Homelessness, all roads lead to some of these same systems, analyses and questions.

And I just want to want to flag, you know, it's not a question, but just a comment on our conversation today for strategic planning going forward and how we build and design a new system to accommodate the need that we see when we're out in the city and from the constituents that we all hear from as council members that We need to think of the proactive community building work that lead has been doing as a leg of the stool of our overall system of public safety.

And I think that historically there's been this tendency.

to really sort of limit it to kind of, you know, there's the fire department, there's the police, you know, there's hospitals.

And then things like LEAD are sort of these peripheral sort of niche plans to respond to discrete things on the sidelines of some of these other systems.

I think what's clear here to build on the work that this council's already charted out is Lead should be resourced and planned around as a full leg of our public safety chair, stool, whatever analogy you want to use.

I mean, it's an indispensable, independent, and proactive component of this work that causes a lot of downstream benefits when it is adequately scaled and resourced.

So I think we need to really look into making that or continuing our work as a council to build that out as a standing budget priority, because from what I have heard from our provider partners, That is something that will be outcome determinative for future capacity building and for getting through this constant refrain that we've heard, which is, you know, if we have to scramble for our money every single budget cycle, every single year, we can't focus on the work and focus on building capacity.

And that is something that we really need to be investing in to make sure that that leg of the stool isn't wobbly, that it's strong, that we can depend on it, and that it'll have benefits for all of these other actors that are doing the emergency response because they're just responding to less need in the community because we've dealt with it upstream in a proactive way.

and culturally competent way.

So I really appreciate what everyone shared here today and look forward to continuing that work to make sure folks have the support that they need to be successful.

So yes, this is part of an ongoing discussion.

I think foundational to that discussion, as Council Member Lewis said, is to consider the folks that we have here as part of our continuum, as part of a continuum that we need to adequately resource in order to address the needs, but also inadequately resourcing, looking at ways to operationalize what we're resourcing in a way that addresses the greatest needs of those who have been poorly served by the current system.

So really appreciate everybody being here with us today, as well as your important work on behalf of on behalf of people who need your help.

So thank you so much.

All right, so moving on to the next item on the agenda.

Clerk, can you please read the item into the agenda?

Agenda item number two, 2021 Seattle All Hazards Mitigation Plan.

Thank you, Alex.

So we are joined today by the Office of Emergency Management.

We are going to do a light touch on this because this plan will be back before this committee, I believe, at the next meeting.

So we're going to hear from Kareem Mayer, the Director of the Office of Emergency Management, to do a quick briefing of what is in the plan and what we can expect coming back to us in a subsequent meeting.

Director Mayer.

Okay, so thank you.

So thank you, Committee Chair and Councilperson Herbold for having me and also to the rest of the committee members for your interest in the Hazard Mitigation Plan.

I'm about to share my screen here.

I just have a few slides to share with you today.

So I will bring that up.

But I wanted to say in the meantime also that the development of this plan is really due to my team members and most especially Erica Lund who is really the expert on this plan and she's here today.

So I wanted to give a shout out and kudos and congratulations to Erica Lund.

This is a really important plan and we are very proud of that work.

So hopefully you can see my screen.

Yes, yes, we can.

Okay, good.

All right.

So the hazard mitigation plan is a very large comprehensive document that gives all kinds of detailed information.

First of all, about the types of hazards that we face in.

in Seattle.

So we have something called the Hazard Impact and Vulnerability Assessment or SHIVA for short.

So it looks at all of those types of hazards we might face and then what are the actions that we can take to mitigate those.

And it's shown time and time again that the more you invest in mitigation in terms of action, the more money you save in response or when there is some kind of incident impact.

So we're always We're always looking for what are those things that we can do up front, in addition to making the community safer.

So there were many departments engaged in this work.

It also coordinates with a number of other citywide plans, also codes and funding levies.

It's also, there's evolving information on community-led investments in this update.

And we have also adjusted the criteria to reflect the values for the RSJI initiatives, collaboration with the community, what resonates best with them, and also some other benefits that I'll highlight for you here.

It's also important to note that kind of the process for this is that once we get community input and look at how we're best serving and actually mitigating the hazards in Seattle to the best of our ability, Then it goes to the mayor and she has reviewed and approved it.

And then here to all of you council, it will soon be uploaded into the legislative database and then it will go to the state and ultimately to FEMA.

It's important that it go to FEMA because we are eligible as a city to apply for additional grants and we'll actually receive more money if we have an approved hazard mitigation plan.

So what do we plan to do in the future?

Well, there are 47 mitigation projects in this updated version of the plan.

We're also looking at implementing recommendations from past studies, especially more seismic retrofitting of all kinds of structures here in Seattle, bridges, dams, reservoirs, retaining walls, some historic libraries.

And then we're also, as I mentioned, integrating the hazard mitigation policies into our next comprehensive plan update, which has roles and responsibilities for all of the departments here within the city.

We're also looking at designing some infrastructure to protect South Park from sea level rise and also engaging that community.

And what does that look like?

And how can we best safeguard their community?

We're looking at replacing a retaining wall on North Gateway.

And as I mentioned, seismic upgrades are always a big topic, as you might have met, that I know you're all very aware of.

We also it's important to get community input on the plan and we're still doing some of that now as we speak, but some of the results that we got back showed that earthquakes are the hazard of greatest concern.

which is not a surprise to anyone.

And one of the things that we always look at when we're doing our planning and exercising and training with earthquakes is that there's always a cascade of other types of events that occur because of the earthquake.

So when you talk about an earthquake, you're not really just looking at that one hazard, but all of those other things that happen as a result of the earthquake.

So power outages, fires, you know, blocked roadways, which impacts response vehicles, all those kinds of things will come out when we start doing planning and looking at what happens after earthquakes.

So, but also the community was most concerned with how are we protecting critical facilities.

And so those facilities that support health and mental health in particular, homeless shelters and emergency shelters for everybody, food bank, food banks, and also, of course, affordable housing and which of those housing units are more vulnerable to disasters.

We take a look at that as well.

So, to date, I know this is a little hard to see, but you will get a copy of all this, so you'll have all the details in front of you.

These are the projects that we have already engaged in.

The lead department for each of those projects and the principal beneficiaries in terms of either organizations or departments in the city of Seattle.

But we have been awarded from the federal government in excess of $23 million in federal funding for projects and planning.

We have three applications pending that are related to seismic retrofitting and that will total another $21 million.

So as you can imagine, we're very proud of this effort and it really makes a difference for a lot of segments of our community.

So the next steps, as I mentioned, is for you all to approve the council to have their approval.

Once you've had a chance to look at it, in addition to my briefing here, and then it will go to the State Emergency Management Division, and then, of course, on to FEMA for that official approval.

And then I just wanted to give you a brief idea of how many of the different departments across the city have been involved in this effort.

It really is a citywide effort.

And as you can see here, all of the different groups and departments that were involved in this work, that also helps us make sure that we reach community members in different areas and with different needs across the city.

So we do the best job of really making a comprehensive plan that will do the most good for the most people.

Okay.

So that is the end of my overview.

So I'm happy to take questions.

And then also, as I mentioned, Erica is also here.

And if you have more specific.

Thank you.

Councilman Morales.

Thank you.

I'm interested in the earthquake slide.

As a city surrounded by water and bridges that would very likely collapse.

And knowing that in any given grocery store, you know, there might be three days worth of food.

Can you tell us what the plan is?

We've all been told that preparing for three days on your own is not nearly sufficient.

We should really be planning to be on our own for two weeks in the event of an earthquake because our crisis response folks will be dealing with the crisis.

So we need to have food and water and all of that for two weeks.

And grocery stores don't carry that much food.

So what's the plan?

Hey, so I can highlight a couple of things.

First, I want to say kudos to you for knowing that you appreciate that.

That's great.

Because also, you can help us with, you know, making sure the community knows that three days is not enough.

So the good news about us being close to the water is that unlike if we were at the open ocean where there would be a tsunami, because we're a little bit protected by the sound, we will have some water damage and high waves and whatnot, but we will not have a tsunami that directly impacts the city of Seattle.

So that's good.

So one of the things really recent things that we're doing to look at what do we, how do we help people with areas of the city that are cut off from one another.

And we're looking at this concept called islanding or island kind of natural because of the natural disaster of the earthquake, the kind of ways that that damage cuts off Sections of the city, right?

Because the freeway collapsed here.

You can't go over this bridge.

So there'll be individual islands, not islands surrounded by water, but cut off from other areas of the city.

So we're looking at a number of things and this is brand new.

So we're still in the early planning stages.

But one, helping the community understand what does that look like?

Of course, we can't say exactly how the damage will be, but we can have a pretty good idea.

We know where the freeway overpasses and whatnot are.

So looking at how can we strategically preposition resources, city resources, so that they can help in those places that you may not be able to drive to another section of the city.

So that's one part.

So we're doing that with city departments and then also helping the community understand and and connecting with those community efforts that are already working on either preparedness or communications.

So that we can say if you're this is you're likely to be your new neighborhood based on the damage of the earthquake.

What are those things that you as a community can do to help each other while you're while you're still disconnected.

So, so we're just starting to look at that.

We're talking with the other office of emergency management is talking with other department heads about what are the best ways that we can mitigate this knowing where the fire departments are so that they can act as many hubs.

not fire departments, where the fire stations are.

So if those could be mini hubs, what other types of resources are already in those areas and what do we need to store up?

Either supplies, shelter capacity, shelter supplies, those kinds of things.

So that effort is underway right now.

The other thing that we're doing is helping First City Departments and their teams understand is if you had to respond after an earthquake or help the city in some way, based on your job, how would you get here without crossing a bridge or without crossing a body of water, which is.

Not impossible.

It will take people longer, but it's not impossible.

We're also looking at what are the ways that we're going to communicate post-earthquake so that we make sure we get that situational awareness and make sure that we can get help to the most people as quickly as possible.

A number of those efforts in the earthquake planning area are underway right now.

It's been really exciting, I'll just say it like that, for me to now pivot and focus on earthquakes instead of just talking about COVID.

So we're very engaged in that work.

And if you have other suggestions or want to help with community outreach and getting the community to understand what are the things we're doing, I would really appreciate that.

And Director Merritt, can you at this very high level explain the difference between the All Hazards Mitigation Plan and our Earthquake Preparedness Plan?

Yes, sure.

So the all hazards mitigation plan looks at all of those hazards that Seattle may be vulnerable to.

And we rank them so that earthquake shortly the short the earthquake plan is all about earthquakes.

Um, and there are other hazard while other hazards may also happen as a result of the earthquake.

There's some peculiarities for other types of hazards that may not be included in the earthquake annex, which focuses on that.

So this is more comprehensive.

It ranks the hazards and then ties actions to those particular hazards.

Thank you for that.

Appreciate that.

Other hands raised.

Mayor, can you let us know when we can expect to receive the resolution and the draft plan?

Really appreciate you being here to give us a preview.

Yeah, you bet.

Of course.

Yeah, it should be shortly.

And I don't know, Erica, if you have a better idea of the time frame.

It was approved by the mayor a little while ago, so it should be.

My understanding is it's with the city attorney's office right now, is that correct?

Yeah, that's my understanding too.

We did draft the resolution and sent that on, so I think it's just still in process.

Great.

Thank you so much.

And I just want to flag here that as part of the adoption of the All Hazards Mitigation Plan, I really appreciate, Director Mayer, your willingness to speak to a group of Georgetown residents who are really interested in ensuring that there's engagement with that community around potential hazards associated with potential airplane crashes, jet crashes, and just maybe looking for some way to lift up their aspirations that OEM do some work with that community in an effort to work to mitigate their concerns and potential impacts of hazards that that community experiences.

Yeah, I'm happy to do that.

I'm meeting with the King County International Airport Division Director today to talk more about what are some things we could do to specifically help Georgetown.

Really appreciate that.

Yeah, you bet.

I'm not seeing any questions, but we'll see you again soon for the council's action or this committee's action on the plan.

Really appreciate your time giving us a preview.

Yeah, you bet.

Thank you so much for having me.

And also, kudos to all of you for looking at mental health issues.

That's admirable.

I have some of that in my own family, and so I really appreciate that you're taking a look at that.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

A lot of people are looking for alternatives to 911 response for those issues.

People who have loved ones and friends in the community.

So I appreciate that perspective from you as well.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Can we read the final item into the agenda, please?

Agenda item number three, criminal legal system strategic plan.

Thank you for reading the final item on the agenda into the record.

All right, so with that, we're going to hand it over to Carlos Lugo with Council Central staff.

Just as some opening remarks, this item is a presentation on the criminal legal system alignment as part of the 2019 budget.

Under the leadership of Council President Gonzalez, the council adopted a couple of budget actions to fund a term limited position.

in our department and also to fund a permanent position in the Office of Civil Rights so that we could coordinate stakeholder engagement around our efforts to realign the criminal legal system.

The action requested a strategic plan, implement recommendations that have already been provided to the city about the criminal legal system in order to reduce the harm caused by the criminal legal system to the people and communities who interact with it.

The strategic plan is one of two work products that we expect from this body of work.

The second is a report containing recommendations from the Community Task Force for Criminal Legal System Alignment, and that is a work group comprised of nine community members who have been impacted by the city's criminal legal system.

Over the last year, they've met regularly, convened by council central staff and the Office for Civil Rights.

provide recommendations for criminal legal system alignment.

We are in communication with the Office of Civil Rights and members of the work group about their report, and we understand that the task force is in the process of finalizing their report.

It is not yet ready, but when it is ready, I hope that we can have them presented in council as well.

And with that, we'll hand it over to Carlos.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the committee.

Let me just start off by saying I'm very excited to be presenting.

This is the culmination of two years of work, so thank you for the opportunity.

And for the record, my name is Carlos Lugo with your Council Central staff.

Let me just share my screen so we can get started here.

So I'm presenting on realigning Seattle's criminal legal system through a public health approach.

As I mentioned, this is the culmination of two years of work.

which comprised Council Member Herbold, as you said, a mixture of not only the academic analysis and academic deep dive, which I'm presenting today, but also partnership with the Office of Civil Rights to engage community members that have been impacted by the system.

This report, however, what I'm presenting today focuses more on that academic piece.

And as you mentioned, the work group itself will be presenting their own recommendations once that report is ready.

Just to give you a little background as to my approach, I really started off with the idea of making sure that I was not only responsive to what council had asked in the council budget actions that created this position in terms of looking at previously made recommendations that hadn't been given to the city concerning the criminal legal system, but also with the idea that We have had engagements with community members for the past eight to 10 years, specifically looking at different aspects of the criminal legal system.

And so this project really started off with looking at what has been told to us as the city over the past, again, eight to 10 years by community members.

And so starting that, I started really looking at specific questions that I wanted answered related to this realignment project.

And so going through a review of those eight to 10 years criminal legal system engagement reports, King County reports, community produced documents as well concerning criminal legal system realignment.

I was able to then go through all that and find the answers that were responsive to the starting questions that I had.

And so being able to then group those questions into one document really gave us a clear picture of what were the themes, the recurring themes that community has told us as the city, as the county over and over again over the past eight to 10 years.

And so pulling those out then and being able to compile them I created what I called the community's guiding principles.

And so these guiding principles really were that.

They were the guardrails to the rest of the research that I did, really the guiding star, if you will, as this realignment project developed and evolved.

Also, as you mentioned, Council Member Herbold, the Community Task Force on Criminal Legal System Realignment will also be presenting their findings.

So I won't touch upon this too much because, of course, their report is going to have more information and have a lot more detail as to the process as well as the outcomes.

So I'll just go right into the academic analysis part.

As I mentioned, I had these guiding principles as the starting point.

And so what I did then was using those guiding principles, I went in and did a lot of research as to best practices, talked to criminal legal experts across the country, really tried to figure out what were models, what were theories and criminal justice that were responsive to what community has told us through these community guiding principles.

And so what I ended up coming up with was really centering on the risk needs responsivity model.

and really taking the risk-needs-responsivity model, or R&R as it's called for short, from ideas that inform specific programs that are used in the criminal legal system and really expanded that to reorient the system around these evidence-based ideas that were in line with what community has asked us.

And so what I'm presenting today is a new way of using the research and really expanding that from the limited capacity where it's been used before to, again, reorienting the entire system around something that is not based on punitive measures, and is backed by evidence-based practices and research, and again, involves what community has told us, really centers that in this work.

And so the risk-need-responsivity model, in short, is rooted in behavioral psychology, and it's concerned with addressing the causes of crime through reduction of what they call, the researchers call criminogenic needs.

which are unmet needs that can increase a person's propensity to engage in criminal behavior.

And this model has been extensively studied in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and entities such as the Department of Justice, the National Center for State Courts, and the Crime and Justice Center have highlighted R&R principles within the recommendations for implementing evidence-based practices to reduce recidivism.

And so going into what this is, the risk principle states that services and interventions should be matched to an individual's risk to re-offend, and that intensive services should be reserved for individuals who are at the highest risk of recidivating.

And this is really for two reasons.

One, providing services is expensive.

It's resource intensive.

And so ensuring that we are targeting our limited resources in a way that's going to make the most sense is going to give us the best bang for the buck, so to speak.

But I would say even more importantly, the research also tells us that when we're looking at applying interventions, if we end up mixing folks from different risk levels, so someone that is, for example, has a high risk of becoming involved in the criminal legal system repeatedly, and we mix them in programming with folks that are low risk, it's actually criminogenic.

and can negatively impact low risk folks and make it more likely that they will cycle through the system as well.

And so a lot of this is really looking at how do we reduce the harm that the system causes while being effective, more effective than what we are right now in ensuring public safety.

The need principle states that intervention should focus on addressing criminogenic needs because those are the major causes of crime.

And I'll go through those criminogenic needs in the next slide.

And lastly, the responsivity principle, which states that intervention should employ behavioral, social learning and cognitive behavioral influence and skill building strategies.

And then the specific responsivity principle, which as R&R has progressed and evolved, I think really reflects a lot of the values that we've talked about in the city of Seattle concerning criminal legal system realignment over the past few years.

And that is that services should be delivered in a way that's responsive to clients' individual learning styles, which would include building on strengths, reducing personal and situational barriers to full participation and treatment, establishing high-quality relationships, delivering early and often on matters of personal interest, and starting where the person is at.

So these are the misdemeanor risk need factors that have been identified as to what increases an individual's propensity to engage in criminal behavior.

And when this model was originally created, it really focused on the felony system.

But the Center for Court Innovation in New York ended up doing an analysis and a study of the misdemeanor needs in their misdemeanor population.

And so what they found was that there was a large overlap between the two, with one exception, and that is the bottom one, homelessness or housing insecurity.

That was found to be very relevant to folks that are going into the misdemeanor system, not so much the felony system.

But most of these needs, except for the first one, which is previous criminal history, are dynamic.

That first one is static, but the rest of them, because they are dynamic, means that we as government, as a city, can apply interventions and have responses that alternatively could make things better and reduce these criminogenic needs, leading to folks being less likely to be involved in the legal system, A lot of the times, the actions that we take in our legal system can actually negatively impact these criminogenic needs and make it more likely that folks recidivate and cycle through the system and get caught into this revolving door, as we've seen, particularly with a lot of what was coming out with the high barrier individual workgroup meetings that the mayor had put into place a few years back.

But as an example, I'm just gonna leave this quote here.

I don't need to read it, but this is an example of how the actions that the city takes, or really any city that's working on criminal legal system issues, it shows that the actions that we take can negatively impact so many different aspects of a person's life as they're going through the system.

And so this is a quote from a previous work, the reentry work group that was published back in 2018. But I think it does a really good job of encapsulating how it is that even three days of jail can impact so many different aspects of this individual's life.

And you can see the ties between increased criminogenic needs right there when they're talking about homelessness, about jobs, about relationships, and potentially losing custody of their children.

So how is R&R different from traditional criminal legal system responses?

Well, what's interesting to me, as I mentioned, is that R&R has primarily been used in prisons to look at prison type of programming for individuals that are sentenced.

That said, there are a lot of things that this, I would say and argue, falls short of in terms of what the research actually tells us.

When we're taking someone away from their family, for instance, and putting them in a situation where they're in prison or in jail, when they're away from pro-social connections, As I mentioned, we're making things worse.

And more importantly, when you actually look at what the research says and go into the source material of what the authors that created the risk-needs-responsivity model have said, they've highlighted that cognitive behavioral therapy and human services are more effective than correctional sanctions at reducing recidivism, and that it's through human, clinical, and social services that the major causes of crime can be addressed.

And lastly, that treatment is more effective in a community setting than in a carceral one.

So the argument that I'm making is that R&R is a viable model to realign our criminal legal system around.

It just hasn't been used appropriately in a way that has the greatest amount of impact.

And so the other thing that looking at the risk needs responsivity model allows us to do is we can shift our criminal legal system into one that's no longer punitive, but really is based on a public health model.

And so this right here is recommendations or at least the process that the World Health Organization has used.

in their campaign for violence prevention.

And so we'll go through these really briefly, but you can see defining the problem through information collection analysis.

I would argue that we've largely done that at this point in the city, looking at what do we need to do?

Where are we in terms of criminal legal system solutions and responses?

What are some of the problems and the shortfalls?

And I would certainly argue that the presentations earlier this morning, I think did a wonderful job of touching on some of those those issues that need to be addressed.

Secondly, establishing why violence and the WHO's case occurs, in our case misdemeanor violence occurs, using research to determine the causes, the factors that increase or decrease the risk of violence, and the factors that could be modified through interventions.

And so to me, this is really where the heart of the R&R model comes into play, precisely because it tells us just what those factors are, and it gives us a guide, it gives us a plan that we can use to really look at the interventions that we have to determine whether they are addressing criminogenic needs in a positive way or alternatively in a negative way.

So right now where I see us being is really step three.

So finding out what works to prevent violence or misdemeanor crime by designing, implementing and evaluating interventions.

And that's what I'm attempting to do with this presentation as well as the larger written work.

And then lastly, implementing interventions through different points in the system and monitoring and evaluating the impact on those risk factors.

And as we are shifting to a public health model, there are other public health tools that we can use to design these interventions and make sure that they are appropriately targeting individuals at appropriate places in the criminal legal system.

So what I'm showing up here at the top of the screen, this is the sequential intercept model, which was originally created to look at the points of interception.

That's why it's intercept model.

The points of interception that folks that are suffering from mental health or substance use disorder have as they go through the criminal legal system.

And so each one of these points of interception, the idea is that they are opportunities to create off-ramps so that we can have people exit from the more punitive system and to actually address what are the causes that brought them into the system to begin with in a non-punitive type of way.

And so in this report, what I really focus on is intercept one, which is initial interaction with law enforcement or the 911 system.

Intercept 2, which is initial detention or initial court hearings.

And then I conclude talking about Intercept 0. And there's a reason for that, and I'll get to it a little later in the presentation.

But in terms of Intercept 1 recommendations, what I'm looking at then is increasing investments in non-police 9-1-1 alternatives, such as Health 1, And certainly there are more that the city council has invested in over the course of the past few years.

And again, this morning, I think we heard about some fantastic programming.

But the other portion of that is making sure that we're also updating our emergency dispatch protocol so that we can expand the use of those alternative responses.

As it currently stands, the Seattle Police Department, through the Seattle Police Officers Guild Collective Bargain Agreement with the city, quote unquote, owns the body of work that's related to behavioral health crises.

And so what this means is that generally if someone calls 911 and requests assistance for someone suffering from a behavioral health episode, Because the Seattle Police Department owns that body of work, they are likely to be the first responders there, which we know can lead to unfortunate incidences and even the death of folks that are experiencing those behavioral health crises.

And so being able to expand the use of these alternatives would really allow the city to be able to make the best use of the investments that they've made.

Secondly, is looking at policing practices.

And so this really addresses recommendations that have been made not only by the city's reentry work group.

This is one of their top recommendations.

But also, as I mentioned, the guiding principles talks about this a lot.

And this is also in line with President Obama's Commission on 21st Century Policing, which also recommended that we look at employing alternatives such as summons for arrests for misdemeanor crimes.

And so as an example, what I can highlight is that the city of New Orleans back in 2008 actually passed an ordinance through their city council which essentially mandates that officers use arrest alternatives for most cases, except where there's a situation where the officer feels that it is absolutely necessary to ensure public safety to conduct that arrest.

But in those circumstances, the officer would need to be able to list the reasons and really enunciate why it is that they believe that that circumstance warranted an arrest versus an alternative.

And so again, like this really looks at, in intercept one, what we can do to reduce the harm that the system causes by not negatively impacting these criminogenic needs that we've talked about.

In intercept to the recommendations that I put forward in my report are really focused on two different aspects.

One is pretrial detention and the second one is in diversion.

And so the first one with pretrial detention.

We know that pretrial detention through the use of the cash bail system not only disproportionately impacts individuals from our BIPOC communities, but also has a lot of unfairness in it because bail isn't cash bail.

It relies on a person's ability to pay to be able to be released.

So this would really, again, go to the heart of how do we reduce the harm that the system causes through punitive measures.

And so the recommendations on this part are to promote community-based pre-trial release.

This is actually something that was previously recommended by the Bail Reform Work Group, which Council Member Herbold, I believe that was one of your initiatives.

And the Seattle Municipal Court in that report was open to that idea.

And essentially the way that that would work would be to have a community-based group be able to provide services to help that individual stay out of trouble and ensure that they get to their hearings so that they don't miss it, they don't have a warrant out for their arrest, which then could lead to incarceration.

And so what these community-based groups would do with proper funding, or could do, would be to be able to offer services such as child care, if needed, for a working parent that needed to get to court.

Alternatively, it could be looking at transportation, if that's one of the impediments to making sure that they can arrive for their hearing.

But it could easily be as simple as making sure that they're in touch with that individual through phone, through email, through those types of mediums.

just to be able to build that connection and remind that individual about their upcoming court date.

And again, just make sure that they have whatever they need to be able to get there and avoid the negative consequences that could come.

The other alternative that we could also look at is just eliminating the burden of cash bail by creating or funding a community bail fund.

And this is something that the city of New York through their city council was able to do a few years back.

They actually created what they called Liberty Fund, precisely to bail folks out of jail for these misdemeanor offenses.

But more locally, since we're here in King County, King County put out an RFP a couple of years back to contract with a community bail fund exactly for that express purpose.

But moving beyond bail, The other recommendation is to look at really expanding diversion alternatives, particularly at the pre-filing stage or even further upstream where possible at the arrest stage so that we could reduce the costs and then also eliminate the creation of harmful criminal records while still having accountability and addressing criminal violations.

And so we can do this by expanding not only the alternatives that we have now and certainly when we look at programs such as the LEAD program, the Familiar Faces initiatives that we have in partnership with King County, they address these criminogenic needs in a way that has shown a lot of success.

But what we could do is to make sure that we are using validated risk needs assessments so that we could match individuals with the appropriate level and type of support that they need to make sure that they stay out of the system.

And so the recommendation on this portion would be to do this validated risk needs assessment at the prosecutor stage, but really preferably through a community-based partner that would be able to administer these assessments in a community setting.

And then in conjunction with the city attorney's office, be able to determine the most appropriate diversion program for these individuals with really with the idea of going away from prosecution and harmful incarceration.

But in order to do that, again, echoing what some of the presentations this morning said, we really do need to look at increasing funding for social services and for things like permanent supportive housing, which has a lot of evidence based research showing that it does decrease.

recidivism, particularly in the folks that are most likely to cycle in and out of the misdemeanor system.

So what I'll say with this is that, again, we have wonderful diversion programs in the city and in King County, but one of the biggest issues that I've seen over the course of research, and I think we heard this this morning as well, is that there's capacity limitations for a lot of the support services that they work to have people that they could enroll in or that they could recommend for folks that are going through these.

And so we do have a shortage of spaces, for example, for not only affordable housing, but also for substance use disorder treatment.

And so absent the capacity to enroll folks in those needed treatment programs, we're really limited in what we can do in terms of diversion and be able to address these criminogenic needs in a way that's humane, that's in line with guiding principles, and that ultimately is gonna be more effective from the punitive system that we have now.

Carlos, I just want to take a quick pause here.

I want to flag that as it relates to diversion, particularly pre-filing diversion, particularly pre-filing diversion that actually does not, no longer requires any interaction with the police department in order to facilitate the diversion.

The folks who do that work, you mentioned LEAD, don't consider themselves in an Intercept 1 program, they consider themselves in an Intercept 0 program.

So I just want to want to flag that.

Thank you.

No, thank you.

And certainly There's more detail in the written report, so I appreciate you pointing that out.

This is really just a general overview, but yes, you're absolutely right.

What LEAD has done is really expanded to the Intercept Zero focus, which goes into what we're talking about here, that as we are planning the system and looking at how we can be most effective, create the least amount of harm, Intercept Zero is really where we need to look at.

I ended up putting Intercept Zero last because that mirrors the development of the sequential intercept model.

When it was first created, it really looked at intercepts one through five.

And so it really focused on what we can do through these different stages to address folks that are going through the system.

But later on, as the researchers looked at the work and as the idea evolved, they created Intercept Zero, which they called really the ultimate intercept because this is an opportunity to address needs before folks get involved in the system.

And so this is really when we're talking about prevention and making sure that we're taking steps to reduce the need or the use of the criminal legal system.

Intercept Zero is really the hero in this, so to speak.

And so as we look at, or if the city starts implementing some of these recommendations, and of course we do have a jail contract with King County, but if it would be possible to continue these negotiations and to reduce the spending on the jail contract, which at this point is, I believe, around $18 to $20 million a year, That then would allow us to be able to use the savings from that to be able to put into other programming.

So we would see a reduction in arrests and obviously the costs associated with that, pretrial detention, punitive post-trial incarceration.

And so the idea really is to then be able to reinvest those savings from the reduced jail and court use to historically under-resourced communities where we do see the most need because of deprivation.

The certainly the Black Brilliance Project, I think, laid out a vision for how participatory budgeting could work.

But the idea here would be to look at what are investments in programming that could reduce criminogenic needs to reduce the use of the system.

And really, if we're looking at even more upstream solutions, what we really have to look at are adverse childhood experiences.

And these are really important because the research shows us that ACEs, as they're called for short, are traumatic experiences which can cause toxic stress in children and repeated exposure to toxic stress through multiple ACEs as they grow can affect their brain development.

It can actually harm their nervous, endocrine, and immune systems, and even the physical structure of their DNA.

And so as they experience higher levels of ACEs, what we've seen is that children struggle to learn, they struggle to complete schooling, and they're also at a higher risk for engaging in violent behavior and becoming involved in the juvenile criminal legal system.

And as we looked at these criminogenic needs, previous criminal history is one of the factors that we can use to predict propensity for criminal legal system involvement.

But further than that, we also see that the Centers for Disease Control, for example, have noted that adults who experience higher levels of ACEs may face increased employment instability, leading to struggles with finances, jobs, and families, and that these can then have a cyclical intergenerational impact on children who, because of that, could then experience their own ACEs as a result.

And so this is really a way to stop the intergenerational trauma and what we see with a lot of this being folks that have this deprivation and how that's passed to their children.

And we really do see this, what we talk about the school to prison pipeline.

But talking about how these ACEs can also impact, There have been studies that look at the number of ACEs that folks that have been convicted of a crime have relative to folks that have not.

And what we do see again in the research is that folks that are adults, particularly adult males that are convicted of a crime, reported having nearly four times as many adverse childhood events as adult males in the normative sample.

And so really, again, going back to prevention and making sure that we're addressing the causes of these criminogenic needs as early as possible is going to be the way to reduce the use of the system.

And so what this would look at is, for example, child care, health and mental health services, employment services, early education programs, and then affordable housing as well.

And then my last slide here, I won't go into this in too much detail because it is included in the report, but one of the final pieces that council asked me to look at as I was engaging in this criminal legal system realignment work was to make recommendations on reimagining the criminal justice coordinating council.

And if the city moves forward with implementing some of these recommendations, keeping in mind the guiding principles, one of the main ones was ensuring that Any type of work such as this is involving community members from communities that have been most impacted by the system and ensuring that we're taking their considerations.

into the planning and into the execution.

And so these are just the recommendations that I would have on recreating the CJCC.

But again, this is a brief overview, because I know we have limited time.

But the report itself goes into a lot more detail as to the research, the methods, the recommendations, and the supporting evidence.

And before I close, the last thing that I'll say is that as I engaged in this work, one of the things that I made sure to do, apart from having the fidelity to what community has told us in the past, was also reaching out to folks from different national level institutions that are working on this type of research and these types of developments.

And so one thing I just wanted to highlight, for example, is that I did speak with subject matter experts at organizations such as the Center for Court Innovation, and they've commended this plan as reflective of not only current research, but also of inclusive leading approaches to justice system reform and realignment.

And so with that, I'll open it up to questions.

Thank you, Carlos.

Just looking to see if there are any raised hands here.

Really appreciate the work that you've done, Carlos.

Councillor Morales?

Sorry, yeah, thank you.

So Carlos, thank you for this.

I appreciate, I know you've been working on this for a long time and really appreciate the work that you're doing here.

And I know you've been doing a lot of work with community and with the community task force as well.

You mentioned possibly using, if we're able to reduce the spending on the jail contract, using it to support some of the investment that we need in the intercept zero kinds of activities.

I would be interested to know your thoughts about why not also diverting funds, using funds that we're diverting from SPD rather than into the city attorney's office.

If we're really trying to kind of shrink the whole criminal legal system, using those resources as well into investing in this intercept zero type of alternatives.

Yeah, so thank you for your question, Councilman Morales.

And honestly, I mean, my answer is we absolutely should do that.

In terms of looking at spending, my recommendation would be to make sure that we are looking at not only what can we do upstream, but also how can we use funds to make sure that the system that we have now is also addressing these needs, is not punitive.

And so as we see a move away from funding some of these services that we currently fund, such as, I would say, the police at the level that we are, particularly when we're talking about overtime spending, we're talking about.

behavioral health crises, for instance, and that there would be budget savings from that.

And in fact, one of the other things I'll say is that when we look at alternatives to arrest, that is also one of the big selling points that the International Association of Police Chiefs put out as a potential cost saving measure is if we do employ these alternatives to arrest, the officer's time is reduced in terms of how long they are at that stop.

or engaging with that individual versus obviously what would happen if we're taking him to jail and the booking process.

And so that could see an additional cost savings.

And so the recommendation here isn't to just look at intercept zero, but to look at how we can use those savings to not bring new money into the criminal legal system, but to really take from one part and put it into something that we know is going to be more effective and less harmful.

And Krauss, just to respond to some of the public comment that I thought I heard around the recommendations.

The recommendations I saw about funding for the city attorney's office was, I only saw CHOOSE 180 and that sort of a diversion program highlighted.

Are there other investments that this report recommends?

There is.

Right now, the way that we have our system set up and largely talking to our city attorney's office and looking at research or putting, looking at what they have put out, one of the impediments that we would have is that it currently takes the city attorney's office about 187 days to make filing decisions.

And so the problem with this is that research also tells us that the greater amount of time that lapses between that initial interaction with a police officer, and especially if we're talking about not taking folks to jail, but using alternatives to arrest, the more time that lapses between that interaction and that first court date increases the likelihood that folks are going to have a failure to appear for court.

And so part of what I'd mentioned in the report, which would be the one aspect where we could increase the system would be looking at taking some of the funds that are saved from potentially the police department, putting those into the city attorney's office to expand the number of prosecutors that they have for the explicit purpose of making charging decisions at a faster rate.

And that can be provisional so that it's not used for prosecution, that it's only used for the diversion.

within the criminal division of the CAO.

So really limiting the use of those funds in a way that's not punitive, but that increases the likelihood that folks aren't going to get those FTAs and then have the punitive responses that come with having those warrants out.

Thank you, that's super helpful.

So it looks like we may have just lost our quorum.

But I think we got to the end here.

Really appreciate all of your work, Carlos, and the work of folks at SOCR.

And of course, the many, many years and hours put in by community members who participated in the work group.

as well as their lived experience.

And I think the title of your report, remind me what it is, Carlos, because I think it really, I think does a nice job of honoring that.

Go ahead.

So the title is Realigning Seattle's Criminal Legal System Through a Public Health Approach, The Intersection Between Community Wisdom and Evidence-Based Practices.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Thanks for the opportunity, Council Member.

All right.

Be well.

You too.

Okay.

So the next Safety and Human Services Committee meeting is scheduled for June 22nd.

And before we adjourn, are there any comments from my remaining committee members?

All right, great.

Then it is 12, 11 p.m., and we are adjourned.

Thanks so much.

Appreciate it.

you