Public Safety Committee 2/27/2024

The Public Safety Committee will come to order.

It's 9-31, February 27th, 2024. I'm Robert Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Present.

Councilmember Moore.

Present.

Council President Nelson.

We'll be arriving shortly.

Councilmember Saka.

Here.

Chair Kettle.

Here.

Chair, there are four members present.

In addition, I'd like to welcome Councilmember Tonya Wu for joining us this morning.

Appreciate you being here.

And of course, welcome anytime and afforded most rights and privileges except for the ability to vote in the committee.

So thank you.

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

Okay, hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us, particularly the members of the three organizations presenting today, in addition to the central staff.

In our first meeting, we discussed our primary mission areas and our strategic framework to address the permissive environment underlying our public safety challenges.

We discussed its six pillars, and like all the buildings around us, these pillars are all equally important and are not in ranked order.

We also talked about our primary mission areas, crime and security, fire rescue and alternative response, and third one, emergency preparedness.

We also have our secondary mission areas, such as traffic, pedestrian safety, where we partner with our transportation committee, park safety, also technology, and the committee lovingly referred to as PUT by its chair, the parks committee.

And finally, youth and young adult violence, which is in some ways the seventh pillar, the extra point that we work with our housing and human services committee on.

But foundationally, we look at the law, first the city attorney's office, but also the Seattle Municipal Court, and importantly, oversight to include accountability and transparency.

And we do that in collaboration with the chair of that committee, the Governance Accountability and Economic Development Committee, Council President Nelson.

We, too, are part of the police accountability system, responsive to community needs and concerns, and are seeking to enhance a positive culture of police accountability.

Essentially, this committee and our council is looking to provide a room, that atmosphere, a positive atmosphere for accountability and transparency for, as it's affectionately called, the three-legged stool to reside in.

And...

One thing I've noted from my trip to a...

fire station grand opening, not grand opening for the start, was when the battalion chief said, you know, one Seattle requires us to work with one another.

And I think this is really important for us to, you know, to really gain that one Seattle for us to work with one another, one another in terms of the three entities, but also with the council and importantly, in this case with the Seattle Police Department.

So with that, clerk, We'll now open up the hybrid public comment period.

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

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

Chair, we have one in-person speaker signed up and one remote speaker.

Okay, two minutes each.

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

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

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

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

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

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

The first in-person speaker is Kevin Perry.

And I would like to say I'm sorry for being late, and I am present.

Thank you.

Thank you for that reminder.

So, yes, all present.

Good morning, Chair Kettle.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Kettle, chair members.

Is that close enough?

Sure.

Good morning, Chair Kettle and committee members.

Thank you for letting me speak today.

I briefly reviewed the presentations for today, and I'm looking forward to hearing from everybody.

And I noticed there's a lot of outcomes.

There's a lot of expectations.

But I thought I could potentially offer some ideas on some actions.

And so my background is I live in District 7, by the way.

My background is even- I'm sorry, sir.

Could you speak into the microphone?

I'm having a hard time hearing you.

Maybe that one?

That microphone?

Try it.

Sure.

How's that?

A little better?

That's better.

Thank you.

Okay.

Again, my name is Kevin Perry.

I live in District 7. My background is in aviation and- we've already learned a lot of these lessons about safety management and risk management.

And so I'd like to offer up the idea of a safety management system for the oversight that will soon be delegated to the city after the consent decree is lifted.

So safety management systems emphasize safety management as a fundamental business process to be considered in the same manner as other aspects of business management.

Safety management systems for product and service providers.

This is in an aviation context, but it can also be adopted to police and safety services.

Safety management systems for product service providers and regulators will integrate modern safety risk management and safety assurance concepts into repeatable proactive systems.

So Chief Diaz mentioned fatigue management in the last public safety committee meeting.

And human factors is a big part of managing risk in aviation.

fatigue management refers to the methods by which operators, in this case the police department, So I didn't get to get through my entire idea list here, but safety management systems, it would be really cool to have a public safety management system as a concept for oversight.

And so I'll follow up with an email on some of the links.

Yes, please.

You can check with our clerks and you can email your notes.

You know, that would be fine.

Okay.

Thank you.

And I do have experience with naval aviation, so I know what you're talking about.

So yes, please email.

The first remote speaker is David Haynes.

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

Hi, David Haynes.

What's up with the title of the first page?

It says History of the Triad.

That seems a little sarcastic and unprofessional.

Maybe you need to use a better choice of words.

And I'm wondering, how many people within all these civilian oversight advisory committees believe evil, excuse me, low-level drug pushers and repeat offenders should be exempted from jail?

The only thing Seattle has managed to do with the consent decree is capitulate to the devil's advocates and make it safe for repeat offending criminals.

Where is the accountability for the police chief who's failed on all levels of public safety and seems more focused on blaming the homeless, polytricking propaganda outreach while prioritizing overtime at law abiding events.

He even used his badge to get into the Taylor Swift show.

We need a law that requires cops to trespass all these drug addicts and question them to find out where they keep getting the drugs to go shut it down.

Instead, cops are not training properly and strategically to question these repeat offenders.

as if they really don't want to pursue the bad guys supplying them.

And lately, I'm concerned about how the police and these detectives are doing business outreach favors specifically for the business community, where in my personal experience, I work for these two fishing companies in the Bering Sea.

One of them stole 60% of all the seafood.

The other one stole 70% of all the seafood.

And they lied and coerced the cops to the point where the detective would give them a special phone number.

And every time that I showed up with a sign that said back pay still load, or I called them every day for like six months, asking them if they had my paycheck, they had the cops in their office, answering the phone, sarcastically telling me to come on down to the office so they could.

Anyway, we need a law that literally starts trespassing all the junkies on third app and

There are no additional registered speakers.

Thank you.

We will now move on to our first item of business with the clerk.

Please read item one into the record.

Accountability overview briefing and discussion with Greg Doss from central staff.

Welcome, Greg.

Really appreciate the central staff attending, and notwithstanding public comment, I welcome you and your briefing.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.

This is nice to be before you today, the first meeting of 2024, and also my first chance to be in front of a new council.

excited about that opportunity.

As you said, Mr. Chair, I'm going to provide a brief history, an overview, if you will, of Seattle's police accountability system, and then turn it over to the agency directors to give more specificity to their mission and goals and their function within the system.

So, slide.

And start out.

One more back, Brent, please.

There we go.

Just a high-level overview.

The accountability triad is how the system is referred to by the Seattle Police Monitor in their latest report.

I've also heard it referred to as the three-legged stool.

I think there's lots of potential ways to refer to these agencies, but the fact is that they all work together in a system to provide police accountability for the city.

In terms of a high-level overview, I'll touch a bit on the history of these agencies and how they came into being.

Then lastly, I'll talk about how the agencies fit within the framework of Seattle's accountability ordinance.

and further the goals of a robust, independent civilian accountability system.

So I'm going to start with the OPA on the right, individual investigations.

The City of Seattle created the Office of Police Accountability in 2002 in Ordinance 120728. The 2017 Accountability Ordinance clarified OPA's role and responsibilities in the SPD discipline system The OPA is currently led by a civilian director, civilian investigators, and nine sworn sergeants that do investigations.

They have a budget of approximately $5.5 million and have a total FTE count of about 31 employees.

The accountability ordinance identifies OPA's primary responsibility as establishing and managing processes to initiate, receive, classify, and investigate allegations of misconduct against employees of a police department.

And so, again, as it says on the slide, individual investigations.

I'll flip now real quick to the CPC.

The Community Police Commission was initially created in 2013 as a requirement of the consent decree between the city and the court, and the DOJ, sorry.

It was made permanent in the 2017 Accountability Ordinance.

It is made up of 15 commissioners, budgeted for a staff of 10 FTE, and has an annual appropriation of about 2.2 million.

Per the Accountability Ordinance, the purpose of the CPC is to provide community input to ensure that the police services in the city are delivered in a lawful and non-discriminatory manner and aligned with community values and expectations.

So the community voice.

The OIG, switching lastly, was created by the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

It is currently staffed with about 22 and a half FTE and has an annual budget of $4.7 million.

Again, per the accountability ordinance, the role of the OIG is to help ensure the fairness and the integrity of the police systems and its delivery of law enforcement services by providing civilian auditing of the management and practices and policies of SPD and OPA.

Recently, the OPA has also assumed some of the monitors, reporting and auditing functions and Inspector General Judge will be going into that in her presentation a little later.

I flipped aside.

All right.

So now I'm going to provide a brief history of the accountability agencies and how they were created in Seattle.

As I mentioned earlier, the OPA was created in 2002 in ordinance 120728. That same ordinance also created two other oversight bodies, the OPA auditor and the OPA review board.

At a very high level, these agencies perform some but not all of the same functions that are performed by today's accountability agencies.

In 2014 and 2015, the CPC, the OPA auditor, and members of the city came together to identify a series of reforms that would improve Seattle's accountability system.

These efforts ultimately came to the attention of the court in 2015. Shortly thereafter, the judge ordered the city to create a working group that would in time submit the first draft of what is now the accountability ordinance.

And then in early 2017, the court implemented initial review of that draft and green lighted the city to go ahead and start the legislative process on the accountability ordinance, which was adopted later that year in 2017. The accountability ordinance at its basic level reorganized the city's accountability system into what we see today.

It also adopted a series of SPD discipline reforms that were recommended by both the city work group and the court.

And you can see in the last column to the right, OPA, down at the bottom, where it talks about the police investigation timeline, standard of proof, disciplinary appeals, and grievance processes.

Well, that's just one bullet on this slide.

That is a significant portion of what the accountability ordinance does.

So this slide also shows the functions of the OPA auditor and the OPA review board as they were distributed or absorbed into our current system.

I believe that the agency directors behind me are going to give you a lot more on the mission and functions of the organization.

Go ahead and flip the slide.

Okay, so this last slide shows how the system was reformed and highlights some of the powers of the new accountability agencies.

As you can see in the very middle box of the table, the OPA replaced the duties that were held by the OPA auditor, or I'm sorry, the OIG replaced the duties held by the OPA auditor.

The duties of the OPA review board were split amongst the CPC and the OIG.

The CPC was made permanent.

OPA supervisors and some investigators are now civilians.

There are two civilian investigators and nine sworn sergeant investigators.

And that happened through contract negotiations and further civilianization of the investigative group can only happen through contract negotiations.

This table also shows how the Accountability Ordinance broadened the audit responsibilities of the EOIG and CPC.

It conferred to those groups the authority to subpoena witnesses and records related to misconduct investigations, Like many of those SPD discipline reforms, the subpoena authority also requires an update to the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract.

The Seattle Police Management Association contract does allow for subpoena authority to be used with lieutenants and captains.

Finally, I'll note that the accountability ordinance requires the agencies to meet on a regular basis, to work together, to promote challenges to SPD policies and practices, collective bargaining agreements, make recommendations regarding those agreements, make recommendations on city ordinances and state laws in order to support systemic improvements in our city accountability system.

And that is a high-level overview of how these agencies came into being and their history.

And as I said, the mission, functions, duties, and statutory responsibilities of these agencies are going to be covered by the folks that follow me.

But with that, I'll ask if there's any questions on the history that I can answer.

Committee members, any questions?

Okay, I want one.

Mr. Chair, and thank you, Greg, for a rather insightful overview presentation of our accountability system at a high level here in Seattle.

We have, that exists today, three separate independent oversight bodies that perform, that purport to perform separate, but in some cases, related functions.

And first off, let me start by saying, like, Effective civilian oversight of law enforcement, I think, is the hallmark of a strong democracy.

And the same principle applies to the military as well.

That's why it's enshrined in our Constitution.

We have civilians in charge of uniformed people that have weapons.

So it's really important that we have effective civilian oversight of law enforcement.

But we have today that exists in Seattle a system that has three, again, separate but related, and indeed overlapping, are able to perform overlapping functions and, for example, have subpoena power that, as we learned, need to be negotiated, but today.

Just curious how this triad structure, how that compares to, and I'll be honest, I think from many members of the public's perspective, that's a somewhat confusing structure.

Who's on first?

Like, yeah, I don't know if the public has a strong sense of that.

How does the accountability triad structure that we have in place today in Seattle compare against what's in place in other jurisdictions?

Thank you, Councilmember.

What I can say is that the last report that was done on or audit that was done on the accountability system was done by the Federal Monitor.

And the conclusions there were that we have one of the strongest accountability civilian oversight systems in the nation, in that we have three different agencies serving three distinct roles that provide a complete picture of accountability.

There are similar functions that are served by civilian organizations in other jurisdictions.

According to the report, not as strong as ours.

Mr. So I understand the strength, and I support we need a strong civilian oversight function.

But what I'm asking is, how does the triad structure Like, pulling aside, like, how many other peer jurisdictions across the country have three separate but equal independent standalone accountability agencies, if you will, as opposed to one or two?

Right.

As opposed to one or two, I'd have to get back to you on that.

I have the information but don't have it handy here.

Three, I think, is the most that, as I said before.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair Saka.

Council Member Moore is next, and then Council President.

Thank you very much.

I had two questions.

One is relating to, could you put the accountability structure into the context of the consent decree a little bit more?

Yeah, thank you.

So back in 2014 and 2015, when the OPA auditor and the city officials and the CPC were looking at potential accountability reforms, they submitted the draft to the court, as I mentioned earlier.

The court looked at the draft to see that the recommended reforms were consistent with the purpose of the consent decree and not outside the purpose of the consent decree.

It came back, the court, with some recommendations of reforms that could be made, a series of four recommendations, I believe, and then also endorsing the system that was proposed by the city to create or change these three agencies into independent structures.

Then the accountability ordinance, as it passed through legislative review, was once again submitted to the court, but the court has not yet ruled in final on that ordinance.

Since this time, I think as you'll probably hear from I believe the CPC, the city was found out of compliance with the consent decree relative to accountability.

And some of that roots back to those four recommendations that the judge made back in 2016.

Okay.

Thank you.

And then you mentioned in your slide the subpoena power, and I'm just wondering sort of what are the parameters, the current parameters of that subpoena power, and where might there be additional areas for expanding subpoena power?

And I understand you have to navigate this a little bit carefully.

The current parameters of the subpoena authority were clarified in an ordinance that was passed year before last, which required due process and notification, according to Washington state law, that any member who would receive a subpoena must be informed of their rights to challenge the subpoena and their rights on process going forward.

I can get you more information about that.

later online.

But as I mentioned, the accountability ordinance in many of the discipline reform systems therein require collective bargaining, and that is one of them.

So in order for a SPOG member, Seattle Police Officer Guild member, to be subpoenaed by either the OIG or the OPA, that would have to be authorized in their contract as State law governs labor law as it relates to city ordinances, and state law indicates that the contract will trump city ordinances.

So thus, we have to negotiate it.

Could you repeat that last line, please?

Yeah, thanks.

So state labor law requires negotiation with unions, and that negotiation is such that it trumps city ordinances.

Therefore, any of the reforms, many of the reforms that were in the accountability ordinance can only be implemented under state law through negotiations.

The city does not have the power to uniformly implement those reforms.

And has that been one of the issues that the court has been confronting?

Subpoena authority is one that has been mentioned by the judge.

Thank you.

Council President.

This is in line with that thinking, but I wanted to ask this anyway.

Let's see.

Subchapter 4 of Council Bill 1186, 969, which was the council bill that then became the accountability ordinance.

Section 329.500 says, under mechanisms to support accountability, construction provisions subject to collective bargaining shall not be effective until the city completes its collective bargaining obligation.

Then it goes on with timely and comprehensive implementation supports constitutional policing.

It goes on, but what I wanted to know is what does that mean?

What does that mean?

And we're not going to talk about current negotiations, but I was just wondering if this means that the accountability ordinance supersedes...

whatever comes out of bargaining, or is it the reverse?

Or is that section that I just read germane to what you were just saying in response to Councilmember Moore's questions about subpoena power and other provisions?

Mr. Yeah, it is, Jermaine.

That's the section that reflects that many of the reforms in the accountability ordinance can't be implemented until negotiation happens.

And so it's simply saying in that section that those reforms that can be implemented should be implemented.

And the construction of the accountability system, the accountability triad, obviously effective now, but many of the discipline reforms not effective until after negotiation.

But that was regarding just the, that was the first negotiation after this was voted on, right?

I mean, or is that intended to mean that every time there's a negotiation, those provisions within the accountability are now up for grabs again?

Is that what you're saying?

Until such time as there's agreement that those provisions can be implemented, they likely would become subject of future negotiations.

Okay.

And I feel like I'm not getting it here.

No, you're getting it.

Thank you.

I believe Vice Chair Saka, you have another question?

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

So I want to double-click on this notion about implementation and some of the potential barriers or challenges to implementation of many of these accountability mechanisms and best practices, including subpoena power.

So, you know, we've learned today that we can pass all the ordinances at the council level And we can even up level through a voter adopted charter amendment and add to the to the charter like we did in the King County Constitution or charter subpoena power for whatever civilian offices of law enforcement oversight.

But implementation is a challenge because it's still under current.

state law is considered a quote unquote term and condition of employment subject to collective bargaining.

And therefore, uh, you know, like the, the, the parties would have to collectively agree to that.

So that's the city's limitation.

Is it true or not?

Um, that the state could, the state legislature could unilaterally act and go ahead and exclude from the ability, because this is principally a province of state law, I'm hearing, isn't it true that the state legislature could go ahead and act and exclude disciplinary matters and misconduct matters and even specifically call out subpoena power, if they so choose, from the terms and conditions of employment in the law enforcement context?

Yes.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you, Mr. Das.

As I've learned as becoming chair from the clerks, it's always best to let your fellow committee members go first, but they've asked a lot of great questions, so I will not add to that.

And so thank you very much for joining us this morning, just basically giving us this primer as we step into the next section of the meeting.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.

Thank you.

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

Will the clerk please read item two into the record?

Community Police Commission Briefing and Discussion with Executive Director Ellis and Co-Chair Merkel.

Thank you, Executive Director Ellis and Commission Co-Chair Merkel.

I would like to ask, could Inspector General Judge and Director Betz, could you also join the table too?

That way we have the team here.

Is this on?

Hello?

Okay, great.

Again, welcome.

Thank you.

Welcome all, actually, but specifically Executive Director Ellis and Commission Co-Chair Merkel.

Thank you very much for joining us this morning and kicking us off in terms of the triad, the three-legged stool, the Community Police Commission.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, I'm excited to be here.

So thank you Chair Kettle and Vice Chair Saka, Council President Nelson, Council Member Moore, Council Member Hollingsworth and welcome Council Member Wu.

All the members of the Public Safety Committee and everyone who has joined us today online and in person.

My name is Collie Ellis and I'm the Executive Director of the Community Police Commission.

I came to this work because I've been living in Seattle for about six and a half years, and I used to be a college professor.

I used to teach down in Olympia for MPA students in the Evergreen program, but I was living in Seattle the entire time.

And while I was here, I saw many, many changes in policing, many challenges in policing over time, and that's why I wanted to come and leave academia and bring my skills to the Community Police Commission.

And good morning councilmember Kettle and members of the committee.

My name is Joel Merkel.

I'm a co-chair of the volunteer commission governed Seattle Community Police Commission.

I also want to introduce my two other volunteer commissioner co-chairs Reverend Patricia Hunter and Reverend Harriet Walden who are in attendance today.

And we are a team working together to govern the police commission.

And I joined the CPC as a commissioner nearly two years ago after spending all of my legal career in policy oversight and criminal prosecution.

And I started my legal career as a counsel to a United States Senator and then spent the last 12 years in the King County Prosecutor's Office and now the Attorney General's Office.

where I've worked closely with nearly every law enforcement agency in King County, but primarily the Seattle Police Department.

And I came to police accountability work because as a prosecutor, I take law enforcement's responsibility for following the rules very seriously.

When our community's safety and constitutional rights are at stake, accountability is paramount.

and the credibility of the criminal legal system depends upon it.

So that's why I'm very grateful that you are holding this hearing today, elevating the critical work and function of Seattle's accountability system.

Again, thank you for coming.

And since you mentioned, I feel I should also offer a committee warm welcome to your co-chairs, Reverend Hunter, and especially Reverend Walden, who I've had the privilege of meeting many times at the African American Communities Advisory Council meetings.

So welcome to you both as well.

Okay, please continue.

Thank you.

It's important to start with the history of the CPC, some of which Greg Das covered.

But we really started because of the 2010 shooting of First Nations woodcarver John T. Williams.

This is the totem pole that's at the Seattle Center that was raised in his memory.

He was shot and killed by a Seattle police officer.

But it wasn't the only serious incident involving police and Seattle community members that ignited a public concern about bias and the use of excessive force in the Seattle Police Department.

In 2010, after 2010, 35 civil rights and community-based organizations requested the Department of Justice to investigate whether SPD had engaged in a pattern or practice of violations of civil rights.

And following the Department's justice investigation, the Community Police Commission was established on October 29, 2012. At that time, the important role of community was recognized.

The agreement in 2012 stated that effective and constitutional policing requires a partnership between the police department, its officers, community members, and public officials like yourselves, and that the commission creates an important opportunity for Seattle's diverse communities to participate in the implementation of this, as well as certain aspects of the settlement agreement, and to promote greater transparency and public understanding of the Seattle Police Department.

And this commitment to accountability was made permanent as part of the landmark 2017 police accountability ordinance.

Our charge is given in the accountability ordinance is to engage the diverse communities of Seattle by developing recommendations and providing a community perspective on law enforcement practices affecting public trust.

To bring community voice to constitutional accountable and effective policing.

We have 15 volunteer commissioners appointed by the mayor, city council, and the CPC itself.

The CPC is not an advisory board.

This was set up to be a working board to leverage the ideas, talent, experience, and expertise of the community.

Our commissioners have community connections and expertise in multiple areas of importance to the city.

For example, community organizing, labor, and public defense.

And I just wanted to point out here that in terms of staff that supports the city council, or I'm sorry, that supports the Community Police Commission, we are independent.

This is something that's a really key point to know about us.

In other jurisdictions, the person in my seat, the executive director, could be appointed by the mayor or by city council.

I was appointed and selected by the commissioners themselves.

So that really speaks to the independence of the Community Police Commission, which is one of the core parts of what we do.

Supported by city staff like myself, the commissioners represent diverse Seattle communities, including two Seattle police officers from police unions, from SPOG and SPMA.

It was recognized when the CPC was established in 2012 that police officers also bring an important voice to the reform process.

The CPC is most effective when we can bring the diverse experiences and expertise of our commissioners to bear on this important work.

So we are the smallest of the accountability partners, as you'll see.

To meet the expectations of the police accountability ordinance, we have both community engagement staff and policy staff, which leverages the strength of both to connect community to policy outcomes.

These are some of CPC's authorities and responsibilities from the accountability ordinance, including monitoring implementation of accountability recommendations by oversight partners, reviewing closed OPA investigations for systemic improvement, and providing input into SBD practices, including hiring, retention, and promotional practices.

Collaboration of our partners at OIG, OPA, and the Seattle Police Department is fundamental to our work, ensuring that community concerns are heard and addressed effectively.

We all have a shared commitment to common goals and priorities, and these are just a few ways that we work together as leadership and staff to leverage the strengths of each partner.

Since 2017, the CPC has achieved numerous milestones, including providing community input on SPD policy changes, contributing recommendations on the use of force, and advocating for changes to strengthen the accountability system.

However, our greatest achievement lies in our ability to spotlight areas of concern, keeping community voices at the forefront of the forum process.

Again, this importance was recognized all the way back in 2012 with significant community interest and reform effort.

They acknowledged that the community is a critical resource and that certain aspects of the reform effort are best developed by dialogue and widespread input.

Ongoing community input into the development of reforms, the establishment of police priorities and mechanisms to promote community confidence in SPD will strengthen SPD and facilitate police community relations that are necessary to promote public safety.

These are some of our organizational priorities for 2024 to encompass increasing responsiveness to community concerns through robust engagement efforts, collecting data and feedback from the community.

We also plan to implement a comprehensive restructuring plan aligned with best practices in civilian oversight nationwide.

Systemically, we aim to enhance public trust, promote transparency and strengthen community input in shaping SPD policy.

And this work is ongoing and responsive to community concerns.

One of the CPC's core functions is amplifying the voice of the community.

CPC commissioners and co-chairs to ensure that community concerns about policing are heard by our accountability partners, leadership, and the general public.

The co-chairs and our volunteer commissioners can sometimes bring community concerns to light when others cannot.

By design, the CPC is a critical connection to community and their concerns.

Community is central to what we do, and we want to listen to the range of community concerns regarding policing.

Sometimes it is about use of force by police, sometimes it is about lack of police, but we go out and listen to community concerns and try to bring that and elevate their voices.

These are some of our accomplishments on community engagement, focusing on 2023. In the past year, our community engagement staff attended over 100 events, fostering dialogue with diverse community members.

From precinct advisory council meetings, like you see here, to cultural festivals, each interaction is an opportunity to share information about the CPC's work and gain insights into community policing priorities.

And although the numbers are important, it does not tell the whole story.

We are intentionally reaching out to disenfranchised communities and people who have been affected by policing.

This may not be the largest number of people, may not be the largest number of constituents, but it is our mandate in the ordinance to make sure we reach out to them.

So this is important and ongoing work.

So our ordinance mandates responsiveness to community concerns through outreach, connections with disenfranchised communities, and providing feedback to SPD, OPA, and OIG.

This ensures that community perspectives are integral to the oversight process.

Through public outreach, the CPC gathers community input on SPD policies and practices.

For example, community members recently shared concerns about SPD's emergency vehicle operations policy following the death of Janabi Kandula in January 2023. What you see here is a community engagement meeting that was held as part of the CPC meeting on January 7th of 2024. Community members from the Indian American Community Services joined with commissioners to share their concerns and provide feedback on that specific policy right there.

We are still working with them to provide that feedback to SPD and make sure the policy addresses community concerns and promotes public safety.

And touching on some of the CPC's policy priorities this year and over the years, I do want to elevate the SPOG collective bargaining agreement as a top priority since 2012, since our incarnation and today.

And that is because, as Mr. Doss mentioned earlier, under state law, SPOG has the right to collectively bargain for an accountability procedures that govern its members' conduct.

And to the extent there is conflict between the SPOG CBA and the accountability system, the SPOG CBA wins.

And this is why the SPOG CBA has such a huge impact on the accountability system as a whole.

In 2017, the city adopted the landmark police accountability ordinance.

We've talked about it a bunch today already.

It is a model accountability ordinance for the nation and one of Council Member Saka's unique features is that it makes the entities independent.

Not every city has independent accountability entities.

However, many very important accountability provisions in the accountability ordinance are not operable today because of the SPOG CBA that was last approved in 2018. And while the bargaining table in the 2018 SPOG CBA was set prior to the adoption of the 2017 Accountability Ordinance, there was a strong community reaction to the City Council's adoption of the 2018 SPOG contract that many saw as undermining the Accountability Ordinance.

And for a brief background on that, I want to turn back over to Director Ellis.

Sure.

It's very important to understand, and I'm glad you already raised this up, what happened in 2018 after the accountability ordinance was passed in 2017 and the SPOG contract was signed.

The tentative agreement was proposed in October 2018, and there were immediate reactions of concern from community members and advocates.

The contract's unveiling prompted concerns from multiple community organizations regarding the negotiation process's lack of transparency, lack of inclusivity.

These groups stressed the importance of community involvement in shaping policing practices, advocating for greater accountability measures, as I mentioned before.

Throughout October and November of 2018, community groups, including the CPC, intensified their efforts to voice objections to certain provisions in this contract.

We emphasize the need for robust civilian oversight mechanisms and raise doubts about the contract's effectiveness in addressing systemic issues related to officer discipline and accountability.

The CPC held community member meetings in October and November with other community groups to highlight the importance of this, and people were very, very involved.

This photo right here in this room was taken, and it doesn't even capture how much standing room only there was.

There was significant community concern about this.

On November 8th, 2018, community members issued a joint letter urging Seattle City Council to reject the contract, citing concerns about the potential impact on police community relations and accountability measures.

The letter was signed by organizations such as NAACP Seattle King County and ACLU of Washington, highlighting specific provisions in the contract that were deemed problematic.

But on November 14th, 2018, despite community pushback and advocacy efforts, the Seattle City Council approved the contract, prompting further questions at that time about the city's commitment to soliciting diverse perspectives and addressing community concerns in the negotiation process.

And so the community's reaction in 2018 shows how important strong accountability provisions in the next SPOG CBA is to building community trust and confidence in not just the police department, but the criminal legal system.

But it is also relevant to the consent decree, because one reason Judge Robart, who is the federal judge overseeing the consent decree, found the city partially out of compliance in 2019 and extended the consent decree was in part because, in his view, the 2018 SPOG CBA undermined the accountability ordinance.

which brings us to the consent decree today.

Last year, the city asked Judge Robart to end the consent decree and allow it to continue working on accountability and the use of force and crowd control outside of the consent decree.

And while Judge Robart denied the city's request to end the consent decree, he did agree to end it for everything else except in the areas of accountability regarding officer conduct and the use of force and crowd control.

And this set up the process whereby Judge Robart will review the next SPOG CBA that is currently being negotiated.

And to this end, Judge Robart spoke specifically about the SPOG CBA during the federal court hearing last September on the consent decree.

And while Judge Robart acknowledged that it is not his role to negotiate the CBA, he did say that under the consent decree, it is his role to ensure constitutional policing.

And to the extent the CBA, in his words, is used to lock in procedures which foster unacceptable police behavior or avoid accountability for improper actions, he viewed this as his role, that he did have a role in that.

And he specifically called out the accountability ordinance in Seattle when he said that the CBA should not shelter officers from city ordinances.

The community and the CPC strongly agree with this view, and we will continue to prioritize transparent and robust accountability.

So in conclusion, effective accountability is foundational to building community trust in law enforcement.

The police accountability ordinance sets clear expectations for constitutional policing and a department trusted by the community.

So ongoing community input, transparent reforms and accountability mechanisms to strengthen SPD and nurture vital police community relationships remain important.

So as we navigate a path forward, the CPC is steadfast in our commitment to accountability, transparency, and community engagement.

And so together, we hope to build a safer, more equitable Seattle for all.

We're happy to take any questions.

Thank you so much, Director Ellis and Commissioner Co-Chair Merkel.

Thank you very much.

And again, as I learned from my city clerks here, I'll look to my colleagues on the committee first before asking any questions.

Any questions?

Thank you very much for that presentation.

So, to the ultimate question, since the accountability provisions are really subject to the collective bargaining agreement and those parameters are controlling.

What, and to date, the community was upset with the contract that came out that did not incorporate many of the provisions in the accountability ordinance.

So what role do you see for CPC and the other accountability structure when we are in this fundamental tension between the power of the council and the state law relating to collective bargaining, particularly when it relates to police and law enforcement.

Well, as it relates to the CPC's role, one of our core functions, as Director Ellis outlined, is to elevate the community's voice with respect to policing in Seattle.

And the community has strongly supported transparent and robust accountability it's one of the reasons the city council adopted the accountability ordinance and also one of the reasons the city the community was frustrated that the last cba did not include many of the provisions in the accountability ordinance so the cpc will continue to uplift and elevate the community's voice so that that's the role that we play and we will continue to play did i answer your question or is there more i can help

Sort of.

As to the CPC, I think you did.

Thank you.

Okay.

Okay, thank you, Council Member Moore.

Vice Chair Sacco?

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you for a really terrific presentation.

Just curious to hear kind of from your perspective.

So you mentioned some of the challenges with respect to implementation of many of these accountability provisions and mechanisms, including the accountability or those set forth in the accountability ordinance.

So yeah, we have, obviously we have multiple labor unions or labor organizations involved in the Seattle Police Department.

And so we have SPOG.

We also have the Seattle Police Management Association, separate contracts, separate terms and conditions of employment, separate set it.

So be curious to hear kind of from your perspective, can you compare and contrast what has been agreed to by SPMA with respect to accountability against the opportunity we have to align on some stronger accountability mechanisms with SPOG.

So, thank you for bringing that up.

The SPMA contract is very important to look at because it shows that you can incorporate accountability measures into police contracts.

They have had multiple versions, multiple iterations since 2018 of the contract, and if you look at what happened Reverend Hunter presented to City Council last year about this.

If you look at what happened, they are specifically bringing in more and more accountability provisions into each contract.

It's not perfect, but it's significantly better.

And so that's a really good example if you're looking for a model of how police officers can use accountability, can bring accountability to their contract, SPMA is an excellent model.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And can you clarify for the public, like, which organization, SPMA and SPOG, and how they work together and the general membership of each?

Sure.

SPMA represents lieutenants and captains and leadership, and SPOG represents line officers up to sergeants.

And it's a very good point to note.

I was talking to someone from another jurisdiction from Cleveland, which has a very strong police oversight system, not quite the same as ours, but they have just one contract.

And so that's something to keep in mind about a difference that Seattle faces versus other jurisdictions.

Thank you, Vice Chair Saka.

Council President Nelson.

Thank you very much, and thank you very much for your presentation.

So I always think of the CPC as the community voice.

You have community in the name of your organization.

But I've never really looked at...

OPA, OIG, and CPC all together and try to really understand at a finer level how you all work together.

So I appreciate this opportunity.

In the sections in the council bill that ended up in the police accountability ordinance, they each start with OPA or CPC or OIG shall be responsive to community needs and concerns through means including but not limited to the following.

And then there's a whole list of different functions.

But yours seems to be the convening of stakeholder input, although I do see outreach to community in the other organizations, but that's primarily my understanding to inform the community about what they're doing or what you're doing.

So it's informing, but how is, in the past when you were, In the previous Public Safety Committee, you explained some of your functions.

How does working with community inform your policy work, and how is that different from the other two parts of the triad?

Yeah, obviously, community is important to all parts of the triad.

And my partners will talk about the importance of community work and what they do.

It's slightly different.

But we do have a specific mandate to maintain connections with representatives of disenfranchised groups.

to maintain connections with people citywide, all districts in the city, and to collect community feedback from people that you might not necessarily always hear from.

That is definitely the challenge.

And the feedback that we collect, for example, from the January 17th meeting, that was from a community group that had significant effects from police practices, something that had happened in the police department, and they are not necessarily residents of Seattle.

They are part of the community of Seattle, and they were certainly affected by policing.

However, they're not necessarily residents, so we bring them to our meeting and had other ways of doing community outreach to capture those community concerns.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, my question wasn't related to the previous questions.

I was just wanting to understand more how your community work differs from the two other organizations.

And when it comes to policy, because my understanding, as I said before, is that your job is to make policy recommendations based on community input.

Yes.

That's an example of what that looks like, is collecting community feedback, and then it is going into a policy recommendation to SPD on the emergency vehicle operations policy.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

But we collect it in a variety of ways.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Another question, Council Member Moore?

Yes, thank you.

Just one more question.

So in looking over your slide deck, I'm not sure what number it is, it's the CPC Authority and Responsibility, and there's a section there on input where you talk about reviewing and providing input into SPD recruiting.

hiring and promotional practices.

So since this is a topic of most urgency, has there, and I'm unaware, has there been official input made on those topics and where would we access that?

And secondly, what would you say is the most important piece from CPC's perspective in the city's ability to recruit and retain

high quality officers Well answer the second part of your question first, which is gets back to what I said at the beginning Recruiting retention effective policing with the trust of the community will not work without a strong commitment to accountability Community members need to know that they can rely on a system, including all of us, that means that their concerns will be heard, that when there is officer discipline, it is carried out, that the community is not subject to abuse or disrespect or anything like that.

that the police department can work the most effectively when the community trusts them.

And that's really what gets to the core of what we do.

I am very excited and encouraged by the recruiting efforts of City Council, of the Seattle Police Department.

I think that's a really great opportunity.

I myself speak to the Before the Badge program once a month to explain what the CPC is to incoming new recruits.

But the commitment to accountability has to be there because you want the best possible and most committed officers out on the street.

And now I forgot the first part of your question.

Oh, have you, is there formal input that's been provided?

So I have not been the executive director.

I was selected as executive director and confirmed in December of 2023, and I was in the interim role for about a year before that.

In my time so far, that has not been something that I have been part of, but because it's in the ordinance, we certainly can.

And because there's additional information and community concern around recruitment and making sure there's more officers and more good officers are going to be answerable to the community, that's something that I would like to raise up with SPD.

Thank you, Councilmember Moore, for that question.

I would just like to add that towards the end of December, we held two consecutive public CPC meetings where the co-chairs led a discussion among commissioners as to what the priorities, policy priorities, among other organizational priorities for the CPC are for 2024 and beyond.

And this was one of those priorities.

We are working through those priorities as best we can.

We've already held a meeting on the vehicle operation policy.

We're going to have meetings coming up on what, TYPES OF ITEMS CAN BE DISPLAYED WITHIN A SPD FACILITY.

AS YOU RECALL, THAT WAS AN ISSUE THAT CAME UP LAST YEAR.

YOU KNOW, STAFFING AND RESPONSE TIME IS AN ISSUE.

CBA IS AN ISSUE.

AS YOU CAN SEE, THERE ARE A LOT.

THE POLICY MENU TO WORK ON IS LONG, AND WE'RE GOING TO DO OUR BEST TO RESPOND TO THE COMMUNITIES NEEDS AND PREFERENCES ON ALL OF THOSE MATTERS.

AND WE'RE HAPPY TO CONTINUE WORKING WITH THE CITY COUNCIL, ESPECIALLY THIS NEW CITY COUNCIL, ON ALL OF THAT.

THANK YOU.

THANK YOU, COUNCIL MEMBER.

COUNCIL PRESIDENT, DID YOU HAVE ANOTHER ONE?

OKAY.

YOUR HAND WAS RAISED.

OKAY.

THANK YOU.

JUST TO CONFIRM.

ANY QUESTIONS?

OKAY.

As a chair, the prerogative, again, I've learned from city clerks, I should not go first.

So I just wanted to, first, I just thank you very much for your presentation.

And in a light moment, I would say, since you do have a working board commission, if you add those numbers to your numbers, you're not really the smallest, and then all three are pretty equal.

So it's a well-balanced three-legged stool.

I just want to make sure that we weren't unbalanced with our stool.

The next piece is, specifically with the Community Police Commission, is to highlight the need for partnership.

Because, for example, all the new members of the City Council came from the community, and we're all engaged on public safety.

I was clearly engaged on public safety.

So we're kind of coming from the same place, particularly because the last election was such a public safety focused.

you know, election.

And with that said, you know, we should be looking, like, I'm looking to engage the community.

I'm working public safety issues every day, and that we should have some partnerships, because, like, if I go to the Magnolia Community Council, the Queen Anne Community Council, I'd speak with the Southlake Union Community Council leadership or Belltown, Uptown Alliance, Belltown United.

Unfortunately, we don't have a downtown community council, but we're working with these all the time, and we're about to stand up District 7, the District 7 Neighborhood Council.

So I think there's opportunities for partnership, particularly with the district representatives, but also our at-large, we have two here who are very deep on public safety as well, to gain access to more parts of the community.

uh to reinforce that connection i think that's very important and given the uniqueness of uh you know the new council and what we ran on i think there's an opportunity to you know really do that outreach and by the way i also to the groups that you go to i also recommend uh very much i know some of them have been you know groups like the african-american community advisory council so important uh for the council members i think pretty much all of us have been to one or more BUT ALSO THE PRECINCT ADVISORY COUNCILS, WHICH I USED TO BE PART OF THE WEST PRECINCT ADVISORY COUNCIL.

SO I RECOMMEND IT'S A TWO-WAY STREET.

I THINK WE SHOULD BE WORKING TOGETHER BECAUSE WE BOTH ESSENTIALLY REPRESENT COMMUNITY AND RELATED TO POLICING.

SO I THINK THAT'S AN AREA OF COLLABORATION, AS YOU KNOW, IS A BUZZWORD FOR OUR NEW CITY COUNCIL.

A question that I had and playing off that in terms of your work plan, in terms of moving forward, in terms of engaging, what is really some of the highlights and is there across working with like the OIG, for example, in terms of their methodologies, outreach methodologies, is there a partnership on that front in addition to what I'm proposing from the council perspective?

Thank you.

We always welcome the opportunity to improve collaboration and work with all of you.

I had the great opportunity to be at Councilmember Hollingsworth District 3 Public Safety Committee of Public Safety meeting last week in East Lake.

And so we always want to make sure we have representation from the CPC to be able to explain who we are and also very importantly learn what community is saying what their concerns are about public safety and policing because The ordinance is very broad in terms of what our representation is supposed to do.

If community is concerned about police violence, we will reflect that.

You'll hear from us.

If community is concerned about lack of police officers, you will also hear that from us.

We are tasked with representing what community's concerns are about policing and public safety.

We do work closely, as I said, with our partners in as many ways as possible.

So, for example, Director Betz at OPA and I are beginning a process where CPC can support OPA in some of their work for complainants.

That's very much in the early stages, but it's something that is a great example of us working together on specific community-related or constituent-related topics.

But we always are looking for opportunities to strengthen our collaborations as partners, in addition with SPD.

Thank you.

And my last question was already asked, but, you know, looking at the accountability ordinance, it did say, you know, input into the recruitment, hiring, and promotional practices of the police.

And I know your answer on that, but as an invitation, our third meeting, because it's so central to the pillars related to addressing the permissive environment that underlies our public safety challenges, is SPD staffing.

We need more officers on the streets.

We need to recruit more.

We need to retain more.

So that's going to be meeting three of this committee.

So as an invitation, please contact me with anything that you may have in anticipation of that meeting.

I'd welcome it.

Thank you.

I look forward to it.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much.

We'll now move to the next item of business, and you're welcome to stay.

Will the clerk please read item three into the record, please?

Office of the Inspector General with Inspector General Lisa Judge.

Welcome Inspector General Judge.

Thank you so much for joining us today and over to you please.

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to come and talk with you this morning.

I think this is the first time I've met some of you, so I'll give you a little bit of my background.

I am almost finishing my first term here as Inspector General.

I come from Tucson, Arizona.

Wildcat.

There we go.

I was general counsel for 23 plus years for the Tucson Police Department.

In that time, I also worked nationally with the International Association of Chiefs of Police as in their legal officers section.

I've been a member of the IACP's policy committee for close to 20 years now.

So I had a pretty deep background in policing policy.

And being the lawyer inside of a police department, you're frequently the one who understands the issues and is trying to push the department in a good direction.

So I had a lot of professional contacts up here.

And I had family who lived here.

So I had a decades-long connection with the Seattle community, spent a lot of time here.

Good long story short, I'm not an inspector general by trade, but I learned the hard way when I came up here how to do this job.

We started from a department of one to now a department, as Greg said, of 22 and a half folks who are doing the work of OIG.

So I'm just going to tell you a little bit about our purpose and our vision, because I think that Greg and our CPC partner did a good job of that.

So in the accountability ordinance language that created OIG, you can see that really the two things that come out of this that are important to OIG's work is that we were created to provide systemic oversight to the Seattle Police Department.

And we were also intended to eventually take over those functions that the federal monitor does to ensure ongoing reform efforts consistent with the consent decree.

And I think the Seattle Police Department has done a commendable job over the past decade plus of being a department of reform and innovation.

And so our job is to work with them collaboratively and our partners to continue that trajectory.

I'd like to just pause for a second and give my my deputy a little chance to introduce herself as well.

Hi, thanks so much for having us.

I'm Bessie Marie Scott, Deputy Inspector General, and I'll make it quick.

But fun fact, I just came back to the accountability triad last year after being gone for several years.

And I started in policing accountability as the policy director of the CPC in 2017 and then the interim executive director when Faye Lopez left.

So it's nice to be back.

Welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Bessie.

All right.

So just a little bit about, you know, kind of how we approach the work, our mission and vision.

We really our role is to support constitutional, informed, compassionate policing through independent, objective, systemic oversight.

One of the choices that I made very early on in setting up the office was one of the core functions of systemic oversight is providing audit and quality assessment through audit work.

So I decided to use the Gagas principles, the yellow book principles for auditing.

There aren't many accountability entities in the country that use those stringent, governmentally accepted auditing standards.

But I thought it was very important to the credibility of OIG's work and the ability to go back and have data and objective information to back up our findings and recommendations to the police department.

So one of our core teams is our audit team that applies yellow book standards to audits and to reviews that we do.

And I think our whole office strives to use those standards.

And we do this with a fundamental commitment to objectivity, accuracy, but we balance it with empathy for community concerns.

And we try to infuse all of our work projects the concerns that community has, that stakeholders have.

We do a lot of stakeholder engagement when we initiate projects to make sure the things we are concerned about, the questions we're asking are also those questions that community and stakeholders have about the underlying work.

And all of this is infused with an understanding of law enforcement principles, laws and tactics for safe and effective policing.

A little bit about our structure and how we're staffed.

You can see that we're fairly heavy on the substantive side of things.

We have a new standards and compliance team that is largely responsible for taking over the core work of federal consent decree monitoring.

We've got an audit team that has auditors, and we picked up one of our functions under the ordinance is auditing SPD's use of surveillance technology.

we begin our audit responsibilities once a technology has been approved by council.

For the first probably three or four years of OIG, there were no approved technologies for OIG, but in the last two, two and a half years, we have begun taking on those audit responsibilities and they increase every year as council approves technologies.

Our first year started with a review of 10 SPD technologies.

I believe we have 16 that we just did last year and probably close to 20 or upward of 20 this year.

So we have two surveillance auditor positions that handle that work.

We have, as Greg Das mentioned, we took on the OPA auditor function.

So that was one person way back when, but we quickly discovered that it was a much bigger job and required a lot more than just simply looking at completed OPA investigations and making sure they were thorough, unbiased, timely.

So I'll talk about those functions a little more later.

And then we have a policy section, which really provides support to SPD and provides a lot of support to the other teams when we go in, have findings and recommendations when we need research on best practices, when we need some sort of work group to inform a particular policy project, our policy team takes that over and does that.

In the standards and compliance team and the policy team, we also have statistical analysts, some statistical scientists that work with my team.

And I think it's really important to have that capability with being able to analyze SPD data and to quality check SPD's own analysis of their data.

So I've mentioned the teams here and I think it's really important to just highlight the underlying bar there that all of our work necessarily involves a feedback loop with stakeholders and community.

It's important when we initiate a project that we get it right in terms of asking the right questions and making sure that our work is going to be a value add to SPD and we'll bring enlightenment to community.

So we like to solicit feedback on the front end, and then we have to communicate that work and make it accessible to community and stakeholders on the back end.

So we do try to make sure that all of our work is infused with community and stakeholder voices and understanding.

Just wanted to highlight a couple of our larger projects just to describe the collaborative nature of them.

I think most of these, except for providing the use of force report to the court, which will be filed this week, our first big report, that came from a court order.

The rest of it really was either generated by ordinance obligations or were requests from counsel for projects that we initiated.

The first was an audit that we did as a request from council to assess SPD's compliance with first the city ordinance and then the next year a state law that required SPD to provide certain advice about assistance of council to youth.

who were being detained in a Miranda context.

So that report really found, when we started digging into it, it involved a lot of looking at body-worn video, reading reports, doing interviews.

We discovered that there was pretty widespread noncompliance.

And so just to highlight the strong collaboration that we have with SPD, we quickly met with their leadership gave them a briefing and they got right on putting together trainings and making sure that they were messaging and training to correct those while we were still in midstream in the audit.

So I think it's really important in these, We've talked a lot about having collaboration with stakeholders and with community, but the partnership with SPD is really critical to being able to accurately assess the state of things within SPD and to provide them with meaningful, actionable feedback on our findings and recommendations.

So it is a critical thing to have trust and collaboration between OIG and SPD.

Our Safer Traffic Enforcement Work Group also, it really initiated from a lot of unrest and issues that came out in 2020 and trying to create situations where officers and community members didn't have to come into contact with each other in situations that could potentially be dangerous for either officers or community in unnecessary situations.

We thought, you know, especially with traffic stops, because I think we've seen nationally those can really go wrong.

There were ways to do traffic enforcement more safely.

and to do it in different ways that didn't bring those two groups of folks into contact with each other when it wasn't necessary.

So our first year, we instituted work groups and had folks nationally from Vera Institute, from the Innocence Project, National Innocence Project, Washington Innocence Project, public defender groups, SPD.

So we really got a lot of people in the room with a couple of work groups to come up with recommendations.

Our work group last year was really focused on safer, using technology and getting grants to create conditions where people could get their car fixed without having to get pulled over for a missing taillight or smoking tailpipe or something like that.

So we've really tried to, in this last round, be proactive about how we could better use government resources and create situations that would allow for better traffic safety and more safe traffic safety for officers and community.

I will move off that slide now.

The big areas of work for OIG in the coming year is transitioning the work of the federal monitor to OIG.

So we've been engaged.

Last year was a lot of coming up with an overarching work plan, coming up with methodologies for how we were gonna continue to look at the core pillars that were initially of concern to the court and community.

Things like how SPD uses force, how they investigate force, how they respond to persons in crisis, whether they have adequate supervision, all of those kinds of issues.

We're trying to create a web of ways in which we can continue meaningful assessment and analysis of that and helping SPD with critical feedback.

Surveillance technologies, as I mentioned, it's a growing body of work in terms of review.

Also, the city is beginning to explore using technologies in a variety of ways as force multipliers for the police department in terms of cameras, gunshot location technology.

So we've been working with the mayor's office to help inform them in their initial RSJI work for that project.

I'm gonna let...

Bessie Scott talked a little bit about the equity assessment that we're initiating at SPD.

And I think one of the questions earlier to CPC was, how do you create a more hospitable environment for recruiting?

What's gonna make somebody want to come and join SPD and join that team?

I think one of the things, especially, I think we've, Mr. Chair talked about the 30 by 30 report.

I think you have to create a hospitable environment internally for people who want to come to the department and feel like they're supported, like they have a way to feel like they are a true part of a team and they can bring their true selves to that team.

So I think working with racial and gender equity issues alongside SPD is work that we're taking on.

What I mean by responsive policy projects here is when we do audits, when we do other projects, sometimes there is an outgrowth of work from that that requires some best practice research and some policy recommendations.

So we try to have our policy folks being responsive to issues as they emerge.

A good example is during 2020 when SPD was engaged in the conflict that was happening downtown day after day after day, there was a request from council to provide guidance on less lethal weapons, what they are, how they're used and to make recommendations about those.

So our policy team did quite a bit of work during that summer to provide information and recommendations to council on issues like that.

We also have an ongoing collaboration with SPD to increase their data transparency and really their understandability and accessibility for folks who want to jump onto their website, look at their data, and try to make sense of how they use force, how they respond to people in crisis, other issues that are of import to people.

So we've been doing quite a bit of work with them on that front as well.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the core functions that we took on was OPA oversight.

Just briefly, the way that OIG does that is we touch those cases at two points.

One is at classification.

So when OPA receives a complaint, they make a decision about whether it is sufficient information and allegations to warrant a full investigation, whether it's something that can be resolved short of a full investigation, or whether it's really lacking in terms of them having jurisdiction or it making an allegation that can be investigated and making it a contact log.

So we look at that decision to make sure that it's been appropriately made, nothing's been missed, and that everything that merits an investigation does go to investigation.

Then after OPA has done their investigation, we look at it again.

We go through the whole file to make sure that it's thorough, that it's not biased, and that it's timely.

So we give them a certification, or perhaps if they've missed one of those prongs, a partial certification, If we don't agree that it's met those, we can also not certify.

And throughout the process, we offer feedback, both informally and formally.

We can direct them to do additional investigation if need be, but all of that information is captured in our annual report.

So you can see kind of...

how often we concur with OPA's decision making and where we have differences.

One of the functions that we took on that was not something the old OPA auditor did is conflict investigations.

So if a member of OPA is alleged to have committed some sort of policy violation or other misconduct, we confer with OPA and take those cases on and do the investigation in OPA's stead if they can't mitigate that potential conflict.

The other fairly new duty that we've taken on is having oversight of handling complaints against the chief of police.

Council, I believe a year and a half ago, adopted an ordinance that spelled out a procedure for doing that.

And that requires OPA and OIG to work together to make decisions about who is best to investigate complaints against the chief and to make proper notifications to council, mayor and other stakeholders as is spelled out in the ordinance.

I wanted these slides to contain a lot of information, but I don't intend to talk about them given our time constraints about all of them, but I wanted to highlight a couple of things.

In our 2024 work plan, in the OPA area, what we wanna do is try to really increase transparency around the work we're doing there.

improving our contact tracking system, and we're working to develop a website dashboard.

I think that our OPA partner does a really great job with their dashboard, putting their work on there to be transparent, to let communities see what they're doing, read their cases, and so we are working to to increase our visibility in our website with the OPA work.

We have also been producing quarterly reports on our classification decisions so that community has insight into those decisions that are being made and has some surety that OPA is making the proper classification decisions.

Our policy projects, one of the really large bodies of work that came out of 2020 was a Sentinel event review process and I believe our public commenter who was talking about ways in which the aviation industry has looked at risk and managing risk is using things like Sentinel event review where you look at root causes to try to find systemic factors that contributed to a negative outcome.

I think when you have an incident like an officer-involved shooting, it's rare that somebody just gets up and decides to come to work that day and intends that outcome.

And so often there are a variety of systemic factors that can go into creating a negative outcome where you can perhaps upstream have some impacts that limit or reduce the likelihood that those things are going to happen again.

So we did a two years long review process of the protests, data driven, but bringing police SPD people and community people into panel discussions to really problem solve together and come up with systemic recommendations that largely SPD has been very receptive of and accepting of.

We issued collectively 140 recommendations from the four reports and the four waves that we analyzed of that protest.

And most of them I think are either or in the process of implementation.

There are very few that weren't accepted by SPD.

And I think that's because we had SPD involved in the entire process.

So the findings and recommendations that came out of it were really things that had been vetted already by SPD in that collaborative process.

So here, I think now that we're done with that, we learned a lot about how valuable that problem solving process can be.

and we don't wanna lose that learning, so we wanna try to pilot a Sentinel event review with officer-involved shootings where there's a nexus with a person in crisis so that we can learn as much as we can about upstream factors that could potentially be improved or changed to keep negative outcomes from occurring in that realm.

Audits, we did an audit of discipline, and I think that's an area that still remains open for the court.

We are doing an update of that so that we can go back and look at discipline decisions from Chief Diaz.

He had very recently been appointed when we finished our audit, so much of his disciplinary decisions had not been included in our data set.

So we're gonna do a refresh.

of that to perhaps provide some insight to the court on how effective our accountability system is for individual officer discipline.

We're also initiating later in the year an audit of the impacts of overtime on officer performance.

This is largely based on a similar project that was done by NYPD.

I think we want to learn what happens when officers are working long shifts or working overtime and how that can impact their decision making, their overall wellness to see if SPD can perhaps find ways to mitigate any sort of negative outcomes that are occurring from that.

I mentioned our annual surveillance usage reviews already.

Mentioned this already.

And this slide just shows, it's an example of some of the recommendations we've made in the last few years and how effective they have been.

So I'm not gonna spend time on that because we're short of time, but certainly wanted you to have just some information about successes we have.

And before I turn it over to Bessie, I just wanted to talk about some of the challenges that we have.

I mentioned that we started with one person, me.

The ordinance originally gave us eight staff.

We're now at almost 23. And so when you grow in size like that, you necessarily need room to expand.

So I just want to say that In the future, we might look to council for support in making sure that we have appropriate space for our folks, that space is a challenge for us.

All right, Beth.

Yeah, thanks so much.

I'm gonna wanna go back really quickly to just describe the equity assessment that Lisa mentioned earlier.

So we are coordinating an approach using subject matter experts to look at policies, practices and procedures within SPD to identify elements of workplace culture that maybe influence various outcomes as if the institution as a whole.

And the goals of this assessment are to optimize employee recruitment, retention, and job satisfaction, as well as measure employees' fulfillment of law enforcement's three major functions, order maintenance, law enforcement, and service, and to determine the impacts of workplace initiatives intended to improve culture.

So we'll be using empirical methods to do this in terms of qualitative and quantitative data to maybe make some recommendations down the line in terms of improving workplace culture.

So the equity assessment is something we're looking forward to carrying out this year.

And I want to talk about community engagement.

We're responsible to community And you all asked about the differences between community engagement in the various functions.

I think our functions are different, we're independent.

And so we do collaborate when necessary, according to topic and trends.

We use a community centered design approach in that when we have a topic that we want to work on with community, we're very good at having targeted.

outreach and recruitment efforts to make sure that we have the most impact for the work that we're doing at the time so community engagement can be various different models from one-on-one meetings to roundtables but we're very clear about our community engagement strategies in terms of panels roundtable work groups and making sure that our information is accessible to community We have very dense reports, as you know, so we make sure that we break them down so that the community can understand.

And something we're looking forward to this year is redoing our website to add more content that has an education and outreach initiative around it for community engagement.

Thank you.

That's our presentation.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you so much.

I appreciate both of you for your comments.

I just want to check any questions from the committee.

Vice Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Inspector General Judge, for this presentation.

I have a question pertaining to one of your slides that has the heading, Recent OIG Projects.

I'm not sure.

I don't think there's any specific slide number listed, but in the context of the broader slides, on my sheet, it's slide 39. But Regardless, you know, there's a topic there in that upper left bucket or quadrant that says audit of youth access to legal counsel.

And I'll just share something that's been weighing very heavily on my heart and on my mind recently.

Last week marked the one-month anniversary of the death of 15-year-old Mubarak Adam.

A student at Chief Sealth High School, son of an immigrant and refugees.

And again, last week marked the tragic one month anniversary or one mark since he was killed.

First homicide in the whole city.

And...

We learned a couple things already, and I've worked with Parks to address some discrepancies with the camera situation, working alongside Chief Diaz to make sure we're effectively carrying out our public safety mandate, including the critical investigatory functions that are needed.

But one thing, and there was a great article, I think yesterday in the Seattle Times, that kind of highlighted an opportunity.

There was a state law, actually a Seattle City Council ordinance, first off, was put into place in, I believe, 2020 or 21 to grant minors legal representation.

And the state legislature took it upon themselves to basically add that protection at the state level.

We learned that You know, in this case, it is a huge barrier and impediment to giving the family answers.

And I believe that aggrieved families deserve answers.

That's why I fought hard to make sure, for example, families, you know, of people involved in officer-involved shootings, killings, have access to legal representation at the county level.

Again, aggrieved families deserve answers.

Whatever the circumstances or situation, deserve answers.

Here is no different.

They deserve answers.

And this seems to be a very vague, at a bare minimum, overly broad statute.

And I think there is an opportunity for the state legislature to make some technical cleanups to minimize the impact of something like this happening again.

I don't know if that was...

I wasn't involved in the creation of that statute, neither at the council level or the state level, but I can't imagine outcomes like this are what the authors envisioned.

Regardless, can I ask more about the specific scope of the audit that was performed or is in the process of being performed with respect to youth access to legal counsel, and can you share some of your initial findings?

Sure, it has been published.

So the audit is on our website, it's available.

The criteria that we use was really, we took the principles in the Seattle ordinance and the state law.

And that was what we assessed body-worn video on that provided the criteria.

So the Seattle ordinance and the state law do go further than Miranda law that's applied in an adult context.

So the Seattle ordinance required that youth who were in custody be afforded assistance of counsel to make any decisions about waiving rights.

The state law had slightly different language, but really it was designed with the notion that the undeveloped brain of a juvenile is more susceptible to being overborn, is not developed enough to make good decisions about waiving rights.

And so decisions about whether a juvenile would consent to allowing a search of their property, whether they would talk with police officers, required some sort of assistance of a lawyer before they made those decisions about whether or not they wanted to talk.

So there's a line, a hotline that's been set up that officers can call so that youth can talk to a lawyer before they decide they want to talk with officers or not.

We found that...

officers were largely not uh giving youth that they had in and we really when we went through we had to make decisions about is this custody where this law kicks in and these requirements kick in or is it just an interaction between officers where There's not a show of force.

They're not in handcuffs.

They're not in a patrol car.

It's a lesser type of, they're still being talked to by police.

They may still not be free to leave, but it's not custody for Miranda purposes.

And it's hard to do this because the law around Miranda and when someone is in custody requiring that warning is very complicated and nuanced.

And I think some of what happened with the investigation of that particular case stems from an understanding of how much you can talk to somebody, when you can talk to somebody.

I think there was perhaps a lack of understanding about the reach of these statutes and the state law.

Lack of understanding from whose perspective?

from the officers.

I think they may have felt more constrained about their ability to talk to individuals, involved witnesses.

And I think the state law doesn't do a good job of discerning between juveniles who may be witnesses to something and juveniles who may be suspected of criminal involvement.

And sometimes it's a blurry line, right?

But more clarification would be helpful so that if you do have a juvenile who is potentially a witness or a victim of something that there would be latitude on the part of law enforcement to talk with them and not feel constrained, because there is no distinction made in the state law currently.

Currently?

Yes.

So to the extent it was, in fact, a lack of clarity on the parameters or the applicability of this particular statute in this case of Mubarak Adam, Who is responsible for making sure our frontline officers and detectives and investigators are empowered and have a strong understanding of when it applies and when it doesn't apply?

Well, SPD has a training section, so I think they bear general responsibility for making sure officers are well-trained on the law, that they understand the parameters of the laws that govern their behavior.

SPD also has legal staff.

I mentioned that I was general counsel for the Tucson Police Department, and one of the main functions I had was training recruits, training officers, doing ongoing training, being available to answer questions from officers in the field if they didn't understand perhaps some nuance of a law and wanted to know if they could talk to somebody or not.

So I think SPD needs to have legal resources available and have legal interpretations in the form of training pushed out on these issues.

I have talked with SPD leadership, and I believe that's their intention in this area.

So there may or may not be an opportunity for enhanced training on this, you know, for remediation going forward, which, you know, and I see our central staff expert on public safety, Greg Doss, in the room.

Greg, FYI, will be following up for a one-on-one briefing on more on this.

But...

Did I hear this correctly, that the city ordinance, the relevant city ordinance, it only contemplated in custody situations, Miranda, you know, Miranda in custody situations under the Sixth Amendment and then the state statute that superseded and replaced essentially all and preempted all local ordinances, including Seattle's, that sort of, you know, it made it more, more broad.

And so it took it out of just in custody situations alone.

Yes, and without the verbiage in front of me, you know, they kind of meld together.

It's Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment.

Fifth, excuse me, yes, yes, yes.

It's a different right.

My criminal procedure classes from law school and the bar exam, yeah, okay.

So, okay, so I think what I mentioned earlier stands in terms of there might be an opportunity to clarify the scope and intent of that statute at the state level.

Was that from last year?

I think it was from the state statute.

I think it was a year the following session after the, like someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm looking at a table of experts here.

But I think that was a state legislative session immediately after the city passed its own local ordinance.

That's correct.

Did OIG weigh in on that?

Because one of your functions is to weigh in on the city's legislative agenda and under bills that are happening in Olympia.

On the state's juvenile, I don't recall at the moment if we did.

It was a few years ago, so.

Thank you.

Okay, Vice Chair.

I will note Sixth Amendment is very important and a very important topic right now.

And I do have some insight.

Wilbur v. Mount Vernon.

I'd be happy to talk about that.

As usual, speaking of legal, Judge, now Councilmember Moore, always coming in second in terms of raised hand.

Over to you.

That's not a general comment.

Back to more serious matters though, we've been talking about accountability and what the 2018 accountability ordinance that was many of the provisions did not make it through the collective bargaining process.

From your perspective as OIG and auditor, what would you say are the top three accountability provisions that would be very...

Well, really, what are the top three that the council should be contemplating?

Yeah, I think subpoena power has been mentioned quite a bit.

OIG and OPA do already have subpoena power in a variety of situations.

I think the subpoena power that currently is lacking is with regard to persons represented by the SPOG contract.

And it's for officers.

I know that they have concern about subpoena of their being subpoenaed, their family members being involved in those.

And so it's really just that subset of officers where there is no subpoena power authority currently.

And We have not had to entertain thoughts of subpoenaing officers or sergeants because we have a cooperative police chief.

We have a system where the city is still currently under consent decree oversight.

So we have a system in place right now where cooperation rules the day.

We have a chief...

who has a standing order for their employees to cooperate in investigations conducted by OPA and OIG.

So we rely on the chief's order for those employees to cooperate and give interviews, provide evidence, and things of that nature.

So the importance of subpoena power perhaps isn't a today issue, but it's building a system for the future when we perhaps may not enjoy such a cooperative, collaborative relationship, and we may not have leadership that is inclined to demand participation in oversight activities and investigations.

So I think that's one, providing clarity on the 180 day timeline so that it is told appropriately in situations where Seattle Police Department is investigating its own officers or other situations that allow OPA to have sufficient time to do investigations and then allow everybody to understand when that timeline is told and when it is running.

I think those are probably the top two issues that I would identify.

And if I may ask, in your position about standard of review, is that important?

It is important.

Again, clarity and notice is important to everybody.

I believe that it should be a single standard of review for a misconduct and not have what feels like a fairly nebulous, somewhat higher standard for certain types of misconduct.

Thank you.

Council President.

Thanks.

I have a whole bunch of questions, but I will try to put them in buckets.

Primarily about policy and then specifically about the next SCR that you're going to be doing.

A lot of your work is policy work, and it seems as though you mentioned that OIG went from one to now 22. So it seems as though your portfolio is growing, and I've always wondered when you presented in the past how you manage it all and why you have to do all of that.

And so when on one of your pages, you say that you conduct responsive policy projects.

And one of my questions is responsive to whom, who, how, who comes up with these, policy areas for you to investigate and make policy on.

Is that driven by the community work that CPC does, or is it something that your policy staff, I think you have, I don't know, three or four people just under that column, policy, come up with?

And because I ask, the only mention of policy, I think, in the functions that are going here is that you are to review the processes and operations of SPD and then enhance a culture of police accountability in various ways, but policy isn't called out in your long list of functions.

And so...

Yeah, I think having...

The policy focus is really to allow us to have research behind the recommendations and findings that we do.

Our policy analysts do best practice research.

They do...

Well, then where do your recommendations and findings come from?

There's a body of work that's...

Who drives that?

Let me talk about how it's initiated.

First of all, many of the policy projects that we've done, including the large-scale Sentinel event review, were driven by council and with regard to the Sentinel event review of the protests, the mayor...

we were asked to do a comprehensive review of SPD's response to all of the protests during the summer of 2020. So that was responsive to mayor and council requests for that review.

That was largely done by my policy team.

The safer traffic enforcement work group was largely driven by council concerns at the time.

Trying to think of, Some of the, Youth Miranda, that project was, that was an audit, but it was a request from council.

Some of them have been requests from SPD to help with certain issues.

Some of them have been, generated by general community concerns or just concerns about best practices.

We did a lot of work with SPD and OPA in the area of interviewing and adopting a model that's been used in the UK.

It's referred to as the peace model of interviewing.

We worked with an expert from the UK to develop training And hopefully we're going to pick that back up with some corresponding policy work with SPD.

But that was largely driven by a condition in the department where those who interrogate people, interview people, really don't have a cohesive training or a cohesive approach for those things.

And so it was...

a generalized best practice issue a few years ago, that you develop ways to limit the use of deception in your interrogations and that you do it in an open-ended way so that you get the best recollection of somebody that you're interviewing or interrogating that you get the best information without coloring it with bias or improper or undesirable components like that.

So I hope that answers your question about how many of these projects initiate.

So is it safe to say that in general, with the exception of the Sentinel event review process in response to the events of 2020, much of the policy work or the projects that you're doing were at the request of the past council?

Yes, many of them were.

Some of them were national best practice issues that emerged.

The interviewing and interrogation issue being one of them.

Use of deception in police interrogations being one of them.

So did you decide that?

I'm sorry to interrupt.

I'm just trying to get a sense of.

Yes.

So that came out at the national level.

That was a report.

And then did somebody in your shop say we should think about this?

And then did you go back to CPC and say, are you hearing concerns about this or?

How are you working with CPC about what the community wants to be focused on in general?

Yes, I've worked with several iterations of CPC leadership and staff.

And so at that time, I did go to them with a variety of issues, talked through them, and there was general disinterest in working with OIG on those projects.

But we do meet with CPC when we initiate projects.

I think we've had several meetings in the past weeks with them on the audits that we're beginning to initiate now.

So they are a stakeholder group that we meet with to bounce ideas around with and make sure that we're capturing the concerns of community from their perspective in our work.

Okay.

And you and I have talked about this before.

When I talk about your full plaint in me getting overwhelmed just listening to you, you mentioned surveillance impact reports.

For the information of the public, the surveillance ordinance was passed or revised in 2018. Yes.

and the reviews that you've been doing were simply already existing technologies that we had to, that council had to, there was a report and then we had to approve it in my committee because I was in charge of technology.

So, you have been tasked with now looking at technologies that were in use before the surveillance ordinance was enacted in 2018 and Since then, I don't believe that SPD has acquired any new technology.

There will be the package of technology that you already referenced going forward, but they haven't bought that.

So you're doing a lot of work just looking at already existing technology that SPD has been using, but you're looking at compliance.

So that is a large body of work, right?

Yeah, it's a little, there's more to it than that.

These are existing technologies, but all of the existing technologies SPD uses were compiled on a list.

And council is currently working through that list, formally approving those technologies for use.

And so, council just started approving SPD technologies, even though some of them have been in use for quite a long period of time, just three years ago.

And so that body of work started with I think 10 to 12 technologies and it continues to grow as council approves those, as you say, existing technologies, but they haven't been previously reviewed.

Their usage hasn't been reviewed.

So they are new in terms of they're getting a review of how SPD uses them.

And so we are having more and more technologies added.

One of the things that we've tried to be creative about working with the city auditor, because they have a corresponding obligation to audit all surveillance technologies that are not police technologies.

So, you know, rather than having this avalanche of technologies to have to review annually, we've come up with a system to vet them and to do a scaled down review of technologies that we've previously reviewed, focusing on the new technologies, getting a review of those, and then using a risk matrix to assess.

Some of the technologies really don't implicate civil liberties or privacy at all.

And so some of those fall down on the risk matrix.

Like binoculars that showed up on the list, just for an example.

I'm sorry?

Binoculars.

Binoculars, yeah.

Not a high-risk technology.

So those things will get little, if any, re-review.

So we're really trying to use the resources of our two auditors in the best way as we get more and more technologies to focus on the ones that really might have some potential import.

Okay.

One of your responsibilities is to review other jurisdictions and make recommendations to policymakers for increasing the effectiveness of SPD and related criminal justice processes.

So have you looked at other jurisdictions and their use of surveillance technologies and drawn any conclusions about what Seattle should be doing?

I don't think we've done that work in particular.

We've really been focused on doing the reviews themselves because that is a pretty significant body of work in and of itself.

We're aware of how other jurisdictions use technologies.

I think the surveillance ordinance that Seattle has is perhaps one of the most stringent in terms of safeguarding civil liberties and privacy.

So, you know, I'm not sure that there's as much robust information from other jurisdictions about how departments are using surveillance technologies as we have here in Seattle, but it's certainly work that we could provide.

Well, with the exception of the ACLU, I have heard that Seattle is our...

ability to take advantage of technologies to make up for the lack of police officers right now is really being hampered by some of the components of that ordinance.

So that's why I ask how far behind, because we have not bought any new technology since.

We're just looking at already existing anyway.

Yeah, technology can certainly be a huge force multiplier.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you mentioned that the SCR that you're going to be doing on officer-involved shootings was court-ordered.

So I have some questions about that, and I promise I won't take up too much time here.

But who is going to do that work?

Are you going to impanel another...

Are you going to impanel a group like the one in 2020, or will it be done by a consultant?

Can you describe how that work will go forward?

Sure.

I just want to be clear, it wasn't ordered by the court.

The court was very complimentary of the protest Sentinel event review and I think is interested.

No, I'm talking about what you said about this coming up one.

Right.

We haven't been ordered by the court to do this, but it's something that I think the court has expressed interest in OIG taking on.

We anticipate having a process that's very similar to the one that we had for the protests, the one thing that will probably be different is we started with a work group that had a variety of community members because unlike an officer-involved shooting where the sentinel event is self-defined, you have the shooting, in the protests we had many, many, many negative events happening day after day after day.

So we had to bring folks together to look at them.

We compiled data.

to show where the days where there were the highest spikes of uses of force, injuries, complaints to OPA, things like that.

And then we had to take those subsets and have our community work group pick the incidents that we would take a look at because we only had so many resources to devote to that particular project here.

We probably won't need a work group.

We may need a work group to assist us in fleshing out what the panel looks like and panel membership.

That's in the inchoate planning stages right now.

We're hoping to model it on the SCR that was done for 2020. Got it.

In closing, there were some criticisms of that process that were put forward to you and Antonio Oftelli in, I think it was May of last year.

And I'm just hoping that I'm offline.

I would like to know how you're responding to some of those points or concerns or criticisms about the information that was provided to the panel to review.

It was a subset of a lot of information like witness testimony, documentation.

other reports that were in the public record.

And then there was also some concern that there was no feedback opportunity that was allowed once the report or a draft report had been conducted.

So offline, I would like to know how the panelists are chosen and what information will be provided to them and how the response to some of those concerns will be addressed going forward.

Happy to talk to you about that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you for giving this.

One question that I had was use of force report, and you said it's coming out this week or soon.

Okay, so thank you for that.

Look forward to it.

Two, I had a question.

We've recently been upped like three FTEs, and that kind of goes to how you're incorporating your new staff, and is that enough?

Is that meeting the mark?

I think you generally asked that, but if there's anything specific on that, you know, maybe we can, you know, follow up on that in terms of the FTEs.

Regarding technology, the Public Safety Committee is definitely interested and will definitely work with our sister committee, Parks, Public Utilities, and Technology.

One curiosity question, as someone who worked in technology in his former life as a member of the intelligence community, You know, the President, the Executive Order 12333, signed in 1981 in terms of intelligence oversight, updated in 2004, kind of goes to the same thing.

And I was just curious if there's any parallels or if that's something that maybe you can look into in terms of, you know, finding opportunities to find good practices.

Because, obviously, technology is a major issue.

I'm in favor of employing new and better technology, but I'm also very mindful of civil liberties for various reasons.

and want to basically square that circle.

And maybe there's opportunities in terms of the federal approach.

And thank you for your point about interviewing.

Also in my previous life in Iraq, obviously interrogation, debriefing, getting that squared away is such an important thing that I saw in terms of Gitmo rules versus, unfortunately, my unit did Army Field Manual 3452, which kept us out of trouble, so I really appreciate how important that is, so thank you for your work on interviewing.

I think that could, you know, upstream, solve a lot of problems downstream, so that might be, you know, be interesting to follow up on that if there's anything additional.

I do have some questions where OPA and OIG kind of work together in terms of discipline audits, like when, you know, how things are done early.

But I think I'll leave that, because obviously we're going a little bit late, but this is such an important piece on that.

So I will leave those questions for your follow-up.

And I also liked your point.

I think this is very important in a general sense.

Each organization's different, and consider us as part of this as well, is the involving SBD along the way.

I think that's a very big lesson learned, and that's something that, you know, how can we The three organizations, us as a committee and as a council, how can we bring that in as well?

Because I think that, again, upstream, you get better outcomes with that kind of engagement.

So thank you for your work on that front.

And overall, thank you, and thank you too.

Thank you, sir.

Okay.

Members of the committee, thank you, Madam President.

We will move on to our last item of business.

I recognize time, but such an important thing and having the three together because of the overlap is so important.

We went with the three model.

Will the clerk please read item four into the record.

Office of Police Accountability briefing and discussion with Director Gino Betz.

Okay.

Welcome, Director Betz.

Welcome as well for being here and briefing us and bringing us home, if you will, the third of the three-legged stool, the third part of our triad for the last briefing of this meeting.

And I recognize too, again, this has gone over time.

I really appreciate your patience.

I think it's really important and particularly having all three entities together.

Director Betz.

Morning.

My name is Gino Betz.

I am the director of the Office of Police Accountability.

I'm joined by OPA's deputy director, Bonnie Glenn.

Together, we congratulate the new council members and thank you all for your leadership.

And Chair Kettle, we thank you for the invitation to talk about OPA's work.

I started at OPA in April of 2022. I'm a career public servant committed to enhancing police culture and promoting constitutional policing.

I like to tell people that OPA is in the trust-earning business.

And what I mean by that is that we work to earn both community trust and police officer trust, and we do it with thorough, timely, and objective investigations based solely on the merits.

Today, we hope to offer a high-level overview of why OPA was created, its responsibilities, and how it operates.

So in 2010, the Department of Justice found that the Seattle Police Department had a pattern or practice of constitutional violations regarding the use of force and expressed serious concerns about biased policing.

In 2012, a consent decree was entered to manage and improve SPD's policies, practices, training, and systems.

And in 2017, the accountability ordinance further civilianized OPA, created the Office of the Inspector General, and permanently vested the Community Police Commission's role in police oversight.

So, OPA has three primary responsibilities.

We investigate individual complaints of police misconduct against SPD employees.

Second, we are charged with enhancing police culture, and we do that by recommending policy and training improvements based on national policing best standards and community input and values.

And last but not least, we raise community awareness about OPA and the services that it provides.

OPA has 25 employees.

Our leadership is 100% civilian.

So from our supervisors to managers to assistant directors to myself, we're all civilians.

We also have 11 investigators, nine of which are police sergeants.

Two are civilian investigators.

OPA is physically and operationally separate from the department, but we receive administrative support, mainly in the form of human resources support.

And the administrative tie that we do have to SPD allows us to tap into their records and data immediately without needing a subpoena or anything like that.

OPA complaints.

Most of OPA's resources are dedicated to misconduct investigations.

An OPA complaint can be filed in person, online, emailed, or over the phone, and we have 180 days to investigate an allegation of police misconduct.

The most common allegations we see are unprofessionalism, bias-based policing, and excessive or unauthorized force.

OPA opens an intake investigation if a complaint raises a plausible misconduct allegation against an SPD employee.

At that stage, we're looking to answer basic questions like what parties were involved, where the incident happened, when it happened, and whether or not there is time-sensitive evidence that we need to collect, like perishable surveillance video, for example.

We aim to complete intakes within the first 30 days of getting that complaint.

Also, within the first 30 days, we decide the case's classification, meaning how that case will be handled.

And we have five options.

One is to contact log.

And if we elect to contact log a complaint, that means that we document the contact, but we take no further action.

That process is audited by the Office of the Inspector General.

Mediation is also on the table We could also do a supervisor action meaning that the allegation involves minor misconduct that but it's best suited for the employees supervisor to handle usually handled through retraining or coaching We can also elect to do a full investigation and last but not least we can do a rapid adjudication a rapid adjudication is when a the subject of a complaint accepts responsibility for the misconduct without undergoing a full investigation.

And the benefit to that employee is that they know exactly what the discipline will be when they accept a rapid adjudication.

OPA aims to complete full investigations within 120 days.

During that time, we interview witnesses and gather other evidence.

Completed investigations are sent to the Office of the Inspector General for review.

OIG may recommend additional investigative steps or certify it as thorough, timely, and objective.

After that, the OPA director reviews the case files and drafts a memo outlining the investigative steps and recommended findings.

When the OPA director believes an employee violated policy, the OPA director and the employee's chain of command meet to decide the recommended discipline.

The chief of police decides the final discipline.

I think I missed a couple slides.

I'll catch up.

Okay, community outreach.

Raising awareness about OPA services is a responsibility that OPA embraces.

We have two community outreach specialists that do the work that you see on the screen.

Just in 2023, they attended 74 events, had 6,686 community member interactions, and 18 presentations.

The goal, when we are out in the community, is to raise awareness about the work, the services that we offer.

And particularly, we try to be intentional with those community outreach efforts by targeting communities where they have disproportionate police contacts, but we're not seeing the same number of OPA complaints from those groups of people.

It's probably the most enjoyable part of the job So we love to do it.

As I said in the beginning, OPA is in the trust-earning business.

We believe that transparency and listening are critical to that objective.

Last year, we started publishing OPA discipline recommendations and the imposed discipline on our website.

We finalized a process for the chief of police to hear directly from complainants about how an officer's misconduct impacted them.

We also conducted two surveys, one seeking feedback from complainants about their OPA experience and another seeking input from communities with higher percentages of police contacts but low OPA complaint submissions.

That information will guide OPA's outreach and operations, improving how we serve the people of Seattle.

And at this point, I will turn it to OPA's deputy director to talk about our budget.

All right, thank you, Director Betz.

Good afternoon, council members.

You know, our budget, I'll just, next slide.

Gotcha.

Thank you.

All right, I wanted to talk a little bit about our budget.

I know people initially talked about our budget being about a little over 5.5 million, but we wanted to show you the breakdown.

If you look at the breakdown of our budget, 91% of it actually goes toward our personnel.

And as far as where we're at, because we're independent, we are actually located, if you didn't know, in the Pacific Building on Third Avenue.

And so as such, we're in a separate building just as far as people who are new to accountability in the Seattle Police Department.

But obviously some of our costs, 6% goes to lease.

Also 1% budget for equipment.

Our training is 1%.

We go obviously to be up to date on various trainings, including NACAL.

Other things like that, we have that budget as well, but it's very small.

Discretionary, you see our 1% is about $38,800 for that.

But as such, our budget, we use it very frugally as we have that.

One of the things I also wanted to talk about, as you can see over the years, it's been pretty consistent, our budget, that what we do have.

The other thing I wanted to talk about with regards to our numbers staff, the 31, we had two new staff that came on board at the end of November.

It was actually November 1st of 2023. That was the public disclosure folks that came over from SPD as part of independence.

So that was transferred to us as something that we wanted.

There is still a piece of that remaining, and that is the body-worn video redacting portion of that.

But at this point, we do have the two, and so that was very helpful, and it's been great to have them there with us working.

Also, one of the things that we're also looking at, though, too, up and coming is basically needs with respect to Just making sure that at one point there may be an opportunity for us to move, and that could be, but we'll have to see with respect to some spaces that we're looking at with regards to, that would provide savings.

So example, we're looking, at one of them is a Seattle Municipal Tower, and it would create a savings by doing so by moving.

But those are the things we're looking at, although there are other costs too, initially upfront, but over time that would save funding.

The other thing is, There are other things that with regards to the ordinances themselves, and this may not be at this time, but to talk in the future to council members, it has to do with the chief of police ordinance.

One of the things with regards to our staffing, it requires our civilian investigator supervisors to actually be the ones to handle those cases specifically.

And so what that means is the way the ordinance was written, it has to be a civilian investigator supervisor.

It does not allow others with numbers that continue to increase and so forth.

It makes it difficult.

So we look forward to following up with council with regards to that.

With that, those were the overarching pieces about budget.

I also wanted to share with regards to our community outreach piece as well.

One of the things that our folks also do is not only they do a know your rights piece, as well as we're excited to have a symposium in collaboration with community coming up.

One other thing I did want to also mention is with regards to our office that we do have mediation.

And so we do have mediation.

Our numbers aren't as large as we'd like to have because it has to have consent by all the officers as well as the complainants.

But as such, it's something that is to be offered as well.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Thank you all so much for being here, and all three departments for being here.

I know I've been rather quiet.

I've just been taking everything in.

Director Betz, well, one thing I wanted to comment on, how accessible the website is.

Like, I found it really easy to just navigate to be able to, like, if you wanted to file a complaint, get a report, information.

I think accessibility to government is so important, and a lot of people get scared because they just don't know how to do it.

And so, like, just looking on the website just in general, it just looked really amazing.

And then I was reading a report that you all did last year in 2022. I was wondering, one of the major, and I think you touched on it a little bit, one of the major...

One of the major allegations was professionalism, and I know that can be a lot of things.

Could you go into detail, like, what that potentially means when someone is filing a complaint alleging about professionalism from an officer?

Yes, thank you for the question, and thank you for the compliment about our website.

We have been very intentional about making it as accessible as possible.

We're also trying to improve user the user-friendliness of it to include or incorporate keyword searches, so you can type in certain buzzwords, and then it'll populate all of the related OPA investigations.

And can you repeat the last part of your question?

Oh, yeah.

The professionalism, I saw that was the number one piece of, you know, the highest, it was the highest allegation for officers, their professionalism.

Just wondering, could you go into detail what that, it can mean a lot of things.

Sure.

Professionalism is extremely broad.

It could range from minor misconduct all the way up to very serious, severe misconduct.

Basically what it means is misconduct that can undermine the public's trust in that officer or in other officers or in the department as a whole.

So that's the department manual's definition of professionalism, but as you indicated, it can be applied extremely broadly.

Thank you.

Council Member Moore.

All right.

Thank you very much.

A very helpful presentation.

I'm looking at the slide relating to classification, and I'm just wondering if you could give a little bit more detail about what's encompassed in each of those categories.

And also, can you explain sort of the pros and cons of rapid adjudication?

Sure.

So, a contact log means that It could be one of five things.

I'll break down the ones that I can remember off the top of my head.

The allegation does not raise a potential violation of SPD policy or training, or the allegation does not implicate an SPD employee, which we wouldn't have jurisdiction over.

or I know I'm missing a couple.

Give me one second.

I actually have it written down here.

Can we pull up that slide please?

Sure.

Slide nine.

Okay.

Contact law can mean that the complaint does not involve potential misconduct by an SPD employee.

There is insufficient information to proceed.

The allegation may be time barred because it's stale.

Or we may have previously considered or investigated that matter.

or the allegations are implausible or incredible that don't warrant any further processing.

Mediation is something that's also, it's a process that I believe can be beneficial to the work that we do.

A lot of, most of our investigations result in not sustained findings.

And that can be frustrating for a lot of community members.

But the research shows that mediation at least allows that communication opportunity for the community member and the police officer to sit down.

There is no power dynamic at the mediation table.

And we look at...

New Orleans, they have a pretty robust mediation program.

And the data that's generated from that program shows that almost every participant in that program leaves the table feeling satisfied, feeling heard.

You know, so at least you're leaving with something.

It may not be a sustained finding, You know, you're feeling better than beforehand.

Supervisor action.

We do a lot of supervisor actions.

Those are for allegations that are minor misconduct but are best handled by the employee's supervisor.

And the supervisor will either provide further training or coaching or counseling for that employee, and then they'll come back to OPA and say, hey, this occurred on this date.

and then it'll close out.

There will be no further action taken on those cases.

Full investigation, that's us putting all of our resources into investigating a complaint.

So we're talking to witnesses, we're gathering evidence, we're looking at body-worn camera videos and things of that nature.

And the rapid adjudication.

A rapid adjudication is appropriate for minor to moderate misconduct.

what happens is the officer can say, hey, yeah, my action did violate policy.

And what we would do is consult with the chief of police and present to the employee what discipline would be imposed if they were to accept a rapid adjudication.

They can decline it, and then it will go to a full investigation.

But this is an opportunity to forego a full investigation.

So does the officer have the right, the automatic unchallenged right to choose rapid adjudication?

Because I think there was an issue around that with Officer Otterer.

An officer has the right to request a rapid adjudication.

It would be my assessment about whether or not it's appropriate.

Okay.

So can you maybe, well, never mind.

We'll talk offline about that.

So the pros and cons of rapid adjudication are then?

I think the pros are that it it promotes an efficient process.

We don't have to undergo a full investigation.

I don't know that there is a con to it, but I do know that a lot I think it's underutilized.

It is something that we should is going to take us earning more officer trust so they can elect that process over a full investigation.

Okay, thank you.

And the mediation, is that something that the officer also has to agree to?

Yes, all parties have to agree to it.

Okay.

And we've gotten more reluctance from community members because there is no discipline attached to mediations.

So that's something we're trying to overcome at this point.

So it's more community reluctance than officer reluctance to engage in that mediation?

In my opinion, yes.

Okay, so we can work on that part.

Yes.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Vice Chair Saka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Director Betz, first and foremost for being here today and sharing this very helpful overview of what you all work on and the important mission that you perform every day.

And also, I am a bit remiss.

I also want to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to you and your team.

Same goes for Inspector General Judge for the work you all do at OIG as well as Director Ellis from the Community Police Commission.

I treasure and value the work that you all do every day to keep us safe.

I personally support a broad, expansive, comprehensive view of public safety.

And last public safety committee, we had the pleasure of, you know, having the three chiefs here.

And, you know, during that meeting, I expressed a fair amount of praise and gratitude towards the three chiefs and the rank and file of their organizations for, you know, everything they do, which, to be honest, I think is a sentiment that is needed now more than ever.

for our chiefs and the various workers within those functions.

But that doesn't also mean that, you know, me personally, I really do appreciate and value the work that you all do.

And I think in Seattle in particular, we have a unique opportunity to move away from this divisive, toxic rhetoric of us versus them, pro-cop versus anti-police and, And, you know, whatever it is.

And so, you know, I'm here to empower our police to better and more effectively carry out their public safety mandate.

We have an opportunity, I think, in this committee and then the broader council to do exactly that now more than ever.

And making sure they have the tools and resources and training they need to be successful.

Also, I have high standards of professionalism and excellence.

And you all helped to carry that out and set what that looks like with more specificity.

And so that's why.

And then because I support effective civilian oversight of law enforcement and constitutional policing, I think that's what the public supports and is demanding.

And so again, I just, I want to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation, really, for the work that you all do, and not just you all and FTEs across Seattle, but volunteers like Reverend Walden, who is sitting in the audience here, who show up day in and day out and help and advise and move the collective ball forward.

And so it's really, for me, people should come to expect a principled, consistent approach.

You know, here's one way I do that.

Now, my quick question.

So, I understand we have your office, Director Betz, has access to certain SPS data.

In, like, one of the first slides, you talked about the independent hybrid structure and how you have access to certain SPD data.

Are there any firewalls or anything or filtering processes in place?

Or do you, like, does your office have...

truly have, you know, unfettered access to SPS data?

And what does that look like?

Yeah, I mean, yes, we do have complete, unfettered access to their body-worn videos, you know, performance evaluations and records and things of that nature.

I come from Chicago, so I've worked in Chicago as an attorney at Chicago's Office of Police Accountability.

We did not have that access, and we had to subpoena all the information that we wanted to consider for our investigation.

Subpoena power is very important, and it's effective, but it's not necessarily efficient.

And it definitely is not as efficient as the access that we have here in Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair Saka.

Thank you for coming.

Again, thank you, everyone.

Regarding OPA, first, I'd echo the comments regarding professionalism.

To me, that's conduct on becoming an officer.

It's such an important piece, and it's serious, and it's part of the process, which I appreciate.

I also noted the comments regarding the questions related to mediation, because this strikes me as potentially another area where the three entities can work together and with us to really promote the mediation piece, really to get the community part of that engaged.

Because as we've seen around the world, that mediation between two entities can be so powerful.

And I think that's something that we should look to support first with the three entities, but also from our position as a committee and as a council.

One question that I had was, you know, in reading the different documents, it said that SBD is to forward to OPA significant matters of misconduct or policy violations.

I wanted to ask a question related, you know, has OPA considered asking OIG, you know, squaring the circle, partnering again among the three organizations?

to audit SPD's handling of minor complaints as opposed to requiring all complaints come to you.

And I ask this question because I think it's really important because at the end of the day, it's about developing leaders in SPD, you know, particularly the junior, you know, up to the sergeant.

And one way to develop, you know, top-notch sergeants is to empower them, to give them that responsibility related to particularly the minor complaints and the like.

and to, again, build that force, you know, to believe in your leadership team, but specifically, in this case, the sergeants.

And I see an opportunity here where, in terms of your op tempo and stuff, that, you know, we can...

find a way to empower, create, because ultimately better leaders really creates accountability, you know, and moving forward and getting good outcomes.

And so is there a way that we can do that?

Maybe, you know, using the OIG's audit process to ensure, because I understand the accountability pieces, but is there a way that we can move forward in this area?

Because ultimately, I really like to, you know, find ways to build a better police force in terms of the leadership pieces.

Absolutely.

I think you raise an excellent point, Chair Kettle.

I fully support empowering the department to supervise and manage its employees.

I have no desire, nor does OPA has the capacity to supplant the role of an SPD supervisor and manager.

So we met yesterday, actually, the accountability partners, and we're trying to figure out exactly what that process will look like, but it's that are definitely being discussed at this point?

Well, I definitely encourage it from my perspective, I keep going back to my military experience, but this is something that I believe, and I think Vice Chair Saka has a similar experience from his service in the Air Force, that you really need to, you know, to develop that leadership, particularly at the lower levels, and that pays dividends moving forward.

So thank you on that.

One of the things, too, that in terms of friction points that may exist is like notification, like the early notification.

We talked about early and late notification with OIG.

Is there a way, like the 530-day piece, is there, you know, is there a way to avoid the stress of, you know, the OPA potential investigation, or is, you know, while maintaining what your work, is there something that we can do along those lines?

So when I started at OPA in August of 2022, I went to every precinct roll call, and the feedback that I routinely got from officers was, hey, when I get this notification from OPA, the stress that it causes in my life for the next few months until, again, we have 180 days to investigate these cases.

So the five-day notification that we are compelled to send out to these officers, even though the investigation may not go any further, you know, if we could do away with that, that would be great.

I'm being told that that has to be bargained.

So we'll see what happens with that.

but I don't see anyone that supports continuing with this process.

I would find that to be a benefit to SBD, um, just like the, you know, the point regarding, you know, the, uh, minor or the smaller complaints and, you know, building the leaders.

Both are benefits to the police force and that I would look to further, and I understand that point, but I think this is important for us to really engage because we do need to move forward and we need to also remove those, those points that unnecessarily create a relationship that doesn't, you know, is conducive to, you know, moving along.

You know, and each of the three entities have their different relations, SBD.

We should pick from the best of all three and really, raise, you know, that engagement.

This goes back to mediation.

This goes back to engaging upstream and, you know, involving SPD early.

These are the kinds of things I think that with our support as a committee and as a council, I think we could really further the goal of accountability, which is number one here, obviously, but, you know, also the, you know, the force itself.

You know, and I just want to conclude really quick and say, and this goes to accountability too, that I support the men and women of the Seattle Police Department.

I think we have the best force in the country.

Now, the reason why is because of the consent decree.

It's the work that you've done.

And we need to be mindful of the reasons why we have a consent decree.

It's so important.

We cannot forget that.

But we should also acknowledge the advances that we've done in the last dozen years.

I think that's really important, and I think that needs to be heard by everyone, the community, the police force, the council, you know, this entire city hall.

That needs to be understood.

And I have the highest expectations and standards going to Vice Chair Saka's point regarding the police department.

I think that's something that should be embraced by the police department.

I think that should be something embraced by the three entities before us here, because When you are part of the best force, you should take pride in that.

And you should demand the higher standards, the higher expectations.

And paired to this, and this is the reason why we're here, if you have higher expectations, higher standards, you also have to have the accountability and transparency pieces that go to that.

And again, I think this is something that can be embraced by all pieces of this to get away from the us and them that Vice Chair Saka talked about.

And because, again, I do believe in the men and women of the police department, but also believe in what we've done here in terms of accountability.

And just to conclude, so I thank the force for their service to our city, for putting on the uniform, for wearing the badge.

And along with that, I also support the OPA, OIG, and CPC, and the men and women of your organizations to do the work day in and day out.

and i think i think we have avenues to push forward and build on the successes that we've had in the last dozen years and i look forward to partnering with all of you on the accountability side to ensure that we do have the best police force and the safest ultimately it's about you know providing that safe base for our city uh moving forward so thank you very much uh for coming i think we've reached i realize we've gone over a bit we've reached the end of today's agenda if there's I suspect there's not.

Is there any further business to come before the committee before we adjourn?

Hearing no further business to come before the committee, we are adjourned.

Thank you very much again.