Seattle City Council Public Safety and Human Services Committee 7/26/22

The July 26, 2022 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.33 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, Chair of the Committee.

The Clerk, please call the roll.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair Herbold.

Here.

Thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda let my office know that she's unable to attend today's committee meeting and therefore she is excused.

On today's agenda, we'll be hearing a presentation on gun violence prevention.

This is the second in a series of presentation that King County Public Health has put together for us.

This time, our focus will be on hearing from the Regional Domestic Violence Firearms Unit, the Harborview Medical Center-based intervention program, community passageways, and the discussion will be coordinated and led by Public Health Seattle King County.

We'll also be hearing also from Seattle King County Public Health and Abortion Access Briefing.

And thirdly, we're gonna be hearing the 2022 Mid-Year Accountability Report from the Community Police Commission, the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Police Accountability.

This is a statutorily required report referenced as a requirement in the 2017 accountability legislation.

We'll now move forward to approve our agenda for today's meeting.

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

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this time, we'll transition into public comment.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I'll alternate between virtual and in-person public commenters, but we do not have any in-person public commenters.

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

If you have not registered yet to speak, but you would like to do so, you can sign up before the end of the public comment period.

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

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

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

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

And once the speaker hears that chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments.

If speakers do not end their public comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

After you've completed your public comment, we ask that you disconnect the line and encourage you to continue following the meeting via the Seattle Channel or the listening options on the agenda.

Today, we have three people signed up for public comment.

And we'll just get right into that.

We have Howard Gale, followed by Tammy Hetrick.

Howard?

Howard, are you with us?

Hello.

This is Howard Gale with seattlestop.org commenting on our failed police accountability system.

Today you have three items on your agenda.

The first item concerns gun violence prevention, the core of which is figuring out ways to teach young people that conflicts and threats should not and ultimately cannot be resolved with a gun.

Third item on your agenda is the Mid-Year Police Accountability Report, which Seattle's accountability agencies present claims and statistics to obscure the fact that over this last decade, the SPD has harmed and killed more people than during the decade previous.

So while you tell folks the answer to conflict and fear is not a gun, You still pay and train your police, as we learned three weeks ago from a King County inquest jury, determining what led to the killing of Charlene Lyles.

You train your police to do precisely that, to end any threat by terminating a life with a firearm, and then to have your supposed accountability system label that murder, quote, lawful and proper, unquote.

Do you not understand that in the coming months and years, there will be 15 more, 15 more King County inquests into the SBD killings of the last few years, where a jury will come to one of two and only two possible conclusions, that the SBD either killed according to training and policy or that the SBD violated its training and policy.

Either of those conclusions is a direct condemnation of our failed accountability system, which for decades trains police that threats are to be met with a gun.

with deadly force that is rapidly and as completely as possible extinguishes a person's life.

But sure, go ahead this morning and tell us how you would like to reduce gun violence of others while you still pay for and sanction your own gun violence, and then cover it up with self-serving statistics and pretense.

If you want to end gun violence, start with a kind of police accountability that dozens of other U.S. cities have embraced post-George Floyd by creating direct community control of police abuse investigations, police discipline, and most importantly, police policy.

Go to see.

Thank you.

Could we have a little bit more volume?

Yes.

Our next speaker is Tammy Hetrick, and Tammy will be followed by Olivia Stassitia.

Tammy, I'm seeing you as not present.

I'm just gonna I'll call for you one more time.

Tammy Hetrick.

Still not seeing you as present.

Olivia Stassatia.

Olivia, are you within hearing range?

And can you become present?

not seeing any changes in the status of either Tammy Hetrick or Olivia Stassitia.

Those are our last two speakers that were signed up for public comment.

Looking at the topic of the public comment, you probably decided to speak at this afternoon's full council meeting.

So with that, we will end public comment and move into the items on our agenda today.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item number one.

Committee agenda item number one, gun violence prevention for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

We'll start with introduction of speakers.

If folks could just very briefly state your name and your affiliation, that would be fantastic.

Really, I'm so pleased to be joined by representatives from a variety of agencies and departments all working on preventing gun violence in our community.

And again, really appreciate you being with us and a special thanks to Eleuthera Litch from Public Health for putting together this panel on a really short timeline.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Sandra Shanahan with the Regional Domestic Violence Firearms Enforcement Unit.

Thanks for letting me be here today.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Deepika Naira.

I'm a trauma surgeon at Harborview Medical Center and the University of Washington.

I'm very happy to be here today.

Good morning.

I'm Dominic Davis, CEO and founder of Community Passageways.

Thank you for having us.

I guess I'll jump right in.

I think I'll just go first and get it out the way.

Thank you.

So I wanted to, first of all, thank the city and the mayor's office for the support of the work we do in the city.

I do want to give a shout out to HSD.

Who's been the strongest government supporter of the work that we're doing in the cities through and through the regional approach.

They've been super strong.

supporting us in every direction that we need them to support us in.

I want to thank them and I want to thank the council for making sure we have the resources to get this thing off the ground and do this work in the city and regionally.

I want to thank the council.

I also want to thank the council for considering and hopefully okaying the next round of funding so we can continue doing this work.

I'm just going to be proactive and say thank you for making sure we get some more funding and continue doing this work.

As I talk about doing this work, What I'm realizing through the data and what we're seeing is that the age demographic 12 to 24 years old, those shootings and the victims and perpetrators of shootings have dropped.

And I attain that to the work we do as a community organizations collaborating together to address that age demographic.

But now what we're seeing is this uptick.

and a 63% uptick in 25 and 40-year-olds being affected by gun violence on one side or the other.

We're seeing it hit pretty hard, actually.

In these last couple of months, there's been a lot of retaliation and beef and a series of shootings that's been going on that is right in that 35, to 30 age demographic, and we're, we're, we're really working with a lot of those victims, we need to figure out what does it look like to be able to scale up, build capacity and put more resources in place to help that age demographic now.

And we want to get those numbers to go down.

I think we can look at ourselves and say we are being pretty successful at this work, if we can now address the need, the need shift the pendulum shift, and I want to be able to address this, this, this, this situation that we're dealing with, with this uptake.

I'm hoping that we can have a good conversation, a continuing conversation about what does this look like.

Us, Community Passageways, and all the collaborative partners through SCSI and the regional approach are all willing to sit at the table and work together to really have a centered focus to deal with that 25 to 40-year-old demographic.

So I wanted to just say that real quick.

I know I don't have a lot of time, but I want to leave space for questions if anybody has any.

Thank you, Coach Dom.

I think the remarks that you're making really do a good job of creating some context for the work that is yet to be done, right?

There's been so much good work around focusing on youth violence, prevention of youth violence that we have now identified through that work an underserved and directly impacted population.

And we have to, I think, really think about how we can use what we've learned and the models that have been successful for other cohorts and shift that to the areas where we're seeing increases in violence.

So appreciate you creating that framework for this discussion.

Not seeing any hands.

Move on.

And Dr. Nara, if we could invite you now to go.

That's what I was just going to say.

Hi, everyone.

So I have some slides, but I think I'll just talk because it might be too much of a bother to try to share them.

But like I said, I'm one of the trauma surgeons at Harborview, and I'm the hospital lead for our violence intervention efforts.

And I want to talk a little bit about a few things.

Number one is sort of what our goal has been with this work.

Touch on sort of who we're making contact with and what we're doing with our violence intervention work right now.

And then sort of at the end, just talk for a couple of minutes about where we're falling short and where we really feel like we need additional resources to build and expand on this effort.

So I think you know we've all seen that the gun violence has increased in our community and we felt that at Harborview.

Usually we see about 300 to 350 patients who are injured by gun violence a year and that's been pretty steady for the last 10 years or so until 2020 and 2021 where we had two of the most violent years in Harborview history, meaning we saw the most number of individuals impacted or injured by violence, which is really awful.

In 2020, it was over 400. In 2021, we saw over 500 individuals injured by gun violence who were cared for at Harborview alone, and that's after excluding self-inflicted and accidental injuries, so a real problem.

And I think that I feel very privileged that we at Harborview have been able to partner with Seattle King County Public Health and the community organizations and the Regional Peacekeepers Collective in trying to work collaboratively to really develop a violence intervention program.

And I think when we started this program, it's a pilot effort, right?

And we're just starting it.

And so we had to say, hey, where do we want to start and who do we do we feel like we can sort of reasonably start with?

Obviously, knowing that that was not going to be sort of where we ended.

And so in doing so, we said our partnerships with the community are really important.

We want to focus on King County because a lot of our patients who are injured by guns do come from King County, by no means all of them, but a decent proportion of them.

And we'll focus on the youth, the 12 to 24 year olds, as Dom was sort of pointing out.

And so what we used to do is we would take, take, take individuals who are injured by gun violence and we would say, Okay, we're going to fix your medical problems we're going to, you know, do your operations, get you out of the hospital.

And we got really good at getting patients better from their injuries and getting them successfully discharge from the hospital.

But what we weren't doing is really finding ways to really support individuals after discharge.

And it's not that we weren't trying.

We just didn't have the resources to really provide that sort of intense wraparound type support that these individuals needed.

And I think we know that these individuals struggle with mental health, social reintegration, sort of substance abuse, all kinds of things that they really need help from.

And we really felt like by taking these individuals and really discharging them back into the community without really sort of resources and support to be able to stay safe and to find viable alternatives to violence, we were really missing an opportunity to really break the cycle of violence.

And I think that point of contact in the hospital is a really important opportunity, that if we do the right things and approach it in the right way, we really have a real opportunity to make a difference in individuals and also communities.

So having said that, sorry.

Thank you.

I'm wondering, can we pause for a moment and pull up the presentation?

Yeah, sure.

I think people absorb information differently, and sometimes it's helpful.

And if you don't want to run it, we can run it on our end.

I bet I can do it.

Thank you.

It kind of helps, again, allow the viewing audience and myself to be honest, absorb some of the information.

Really appreciate that.

Thank you.

Is that coming up for you?

Yes.

I don't know why.

Let me scroll through one second.

Looks good.

Okay, so this this kind of shows you what I was touching on, which is that really significant increase in the number of individuals that we care for were injured by guns in 2020 and 2021. And so like I said, we felt like we were treating and releasing patients after injuries and really sort of missing an important opportunity to break that cycle of violence.

And that's where sort of the violence intervention program that we partnered with our regional peacekeepers collective and community organizations.

with really sort of came from.

And so what we said was that, okay, we're going to partner together and we're going to find a better way to discharge these patients from the hospital with sort of intense support structures and support systems built into place.

But we can't do this for everybody starting off.

And so we're going to start off with the sort of group of individuals that we feel like we can have the greatest impact with and that we can reasonably start with.

And so like Don mentioned, we sort of focused on 12 to 24 year olds because we know that they are an age cohort that's commonly injured by gun violence and we felt like we had the right community support in place to really be able to help these individuals after discharge.

We also have been only sort of focusing on King County residents because of our community partnerships and really wanting to sort of start in our community before really taking on something bigger outside of King County.

And so so what this in practice looks like now is that so you have someone who comes into Harborview who's injured by gun violence.

They come into the Harborview.

They're going to be admitted.

You're going to take care of their medical and surgical problems.

And when it's appropriate, We are going to approach that individual and we're going to talk to them.

We're going to provide peer support and that peer support is going to be provided.

Not by me as their surgeon, for example, but by a credible messenger.

Someone who's been there, someone who gets it, someone who can really speak to them from a place of understanding and empower and sort of allow them to see opportunities.

and a path towards sort of change.

We were really lucky to hire Paul Carter as a part of this program as our first violence intervention specialist.

And Paul is exactly that.

He is like an amazing, credible messenger, but he has also survived gun violence himself and he really gets it.

And I think the youth that Paul sees feel like they can really sort of relate to Paul and trust Paul.

And so Paul provides peer support, but he also introduces the violence intervention program.

And offers it to individuals and if they would like to participate what that looks like in practice is that when they're discharged from the hospital.

We're not discharging them without sort of support structures in place, but now we're actually providing wraparound support structures.

and support systems and that's really through the work that Dom and Community Passageways and our community partners are doing.

So Paul actually passes that individual and everything that he knows about them and their needs and sort of what they've been struggling with off to our outreach workers in the community and they sort of pick it up from there and they do all the heavy lifting, which means making house visits, making sure that these individuals are able to get to their appointments and get the care that they need, trying to get the mental health support, you know, you name it, providing sort of emergency assistance for critical needs that they have.

But they're being discharged now with real support in place.

And I think this is the model that we want to build on.

And we think this model works.

And we think that this allows us to really sort of take what's happening in the hospital and use this as an opportunity for positive change.

So far in about six months of really having the pilot program going, Paul's approached about 52 youth injured by gun violence and 35 have agreed to the support services and been connected with our community partners.

The question?

Yeah.

So the model as described, describes an interaction in the hospital setting between Paul and the person who's injured by gun violence, but we've also heard reference to Paul being shot.

wrap around services and support for family members.

Does that only happen if the patient, the injured patient agrees to services or is there an opportunity in those instances in this case, practically 17 instances here where the injured person themselves did not seek services.

Is there an opportunity for Paul's engagement with family members?

I think Paul sort of, you know, makes first point of contact with individuals, but if that individual is not interested, but Paul knows from talking to them that they have siblings or family members who might be, I think absolutely you could connect them to our community partners in the same way.

Don, I don't know if you wanted to add to that, but.

Yeah, I didn't want to interrupt, so thank you for leading me in for that.

Um, yeah, basically, we do work with the family members we do provide services for the family that are open to the services and I'll give you an example there was a family who had a house that they lived in shot up.

that had been shot, he didn't want our services, but the family wanted to relocate.

So we relocated the mom and the kids, you know, the siblings, got them into a hotel, into a safe environment where we found a longer-term living situation for the family.

And we got therapy for the kids, right?

Therapy for the family.

And so we do provide that service for families.

Even if the individual doesn't want it, we are doing a holistic approach to deal with all the trauma that is caused by the actual gun violence.

Thank you.

Perfect example.

Thanks Tom.

We think of this as a really great collaborative start, and I think I can't stress how important that collaborative approach is.

But I do think that there's a lot of places where we need to really expand and build on this work.

I'm going to just touch on a few of those things.

Let's just look at 2021 and let's look at the patients that we saw at Harborview who were injured by gun violence.

I couldn't have planned this better because this plays into exactly what Tom was talking about that we're seeing on the community side, and I think Harborview is just a reflection of that.

which is that, yes, a lot of our patients are in that 12 to 24-year age group, but if you look at this 25 to 40-year group, these next two columns, they together actually are a greater proportion of the overall cohort than just the 12 to 24-year-olds.

So we're seeing a lot of individuals who are in that 25 to 40-year age group who are seen at Harborview for injuries related to gun violence.

And right now we're not actually able to provide these services to those individuals who I think many of them would really benefit.

I think the other demographics probably aren't going to surprise folks, but just to point it out, most of the patients that we see injured by gun violence are male, almost 90%.

Most are dealing with baseline social determinants of health and lower socioeconomic status.

It's reflected by their insurance status.

There's other ways you can look at this.

Most are either not insured or publicly insured, and I think that just speaks to some of the social determinants of health that are at the core of some of this.

Most are individuals of color, which is again, not terribly surprising.

So I think in expanding the program, yes, I think that there's a huge opportunity to expand to be able to provide these support services to that sort of 25 to 40 year age group.

I think on the lower end, we're capturing almost everybody.

We have very few patients likely who are younger than 12 years of age.

And when we do, we try to sort of incorporate them into the program because there's just so few of them, but that 25 to 40 year age group really needs needs needs to be incorporated and we need support to be able to expand to them.

I do think that our review, we see a lot of patients from outside of King County who are injured in.

in high risk counties like Yakima, Pierce, et cetera.

And we would over time like to expand to those counties also.

I think that that requires community partners in those counties and sort of building this program up over time so that we can actually provide support services to individuals cared for at Harborview who live in those counties.

And also so that we can be an example and help the level two trauma centers who are taking care of some of these patients who are less severely injured.

from those counties also.

I think that, you know, I think we can all agree that mental health and substance abuse support is really important after an injury like this and in general.

And I think that the impact that an injury like this, especially a violent injury, has on one's mental health is really profound.

And finding culturally competent mental health and substance abuse support is really hard.

and it's something that we really need to work on and need to expand.

And then lastly, I'll just say that there's a lot of medical conditions that we think of as complex medical conditions, and we provide multidisciplinary care.

You guys might be familiar with cancer as one of those.

Oncologists and surgeons and different medical doctors provide collaborative care.

I think we need to start thinking about trauma as a complex medical condition.

And we really need to be providing holistic, multidisciplinary care, both in the hospital and then also after discharge from the hospital.

And one of our visions is to really build a multidisciplinary clinic at Harborview so that when someone comes back, we're not just taking their staples out and sending them on their way.

We actually are able to integrate into that outpatient clinic visit their surgical care mental health counseling, social work, case management support, all of these other things that are really critical to the healing of that individual.

And I think that that requires support and resources.

And then I think we certainly have room to sort of expand on our program evaluation as we build out programs over time.

I'll stop there.

I know I went over the five or seven minutes that I had, but thank you, everyone.

Thank you very much.

I just want to take a step back and can you please describe the goals of your program?

Because I was reading the presentation that was linked on the agenda talks about gun removal.

So is that in piloting this new approach?

That's for another presenter.

What?

That's for another presenter.

We're having different focuses here.

This is a focus on the hospital program.

But I think we could still, focus on what, your question's still valid, what the goals are of the program, just not in reference to the presentation that you're looking at.

By targeting people who have been injured by gun violence, what is the outcome that you're working for when you're working with these folks, and how do you determine if it's successful because there has been mention of expanding the program?

I can start with that and feel free to sort of weigh in.

I think that there's several goals of a program like this.

Number one, we know that these individuals after an injury like this are at really high risk for re-injury and death due to re-injury.

And by the estimates we have, about 40% are re-injured within five years and 20% die within five years of those injuries.

So one of our goals is to decrease recidivism and decrease death due to violent injury and to try to help keep these youth safe.

So that's one goal.

The other goal is, I think, really trying to create opportunities and alternatives to violence.

And what that looks like in practice is making sure that these youth are back in school or that we help them with CVs and sort of jobs that can be sources of income and sort of economic stability that allows them to sort of move away from violence, creating sort of safe spaces, communities, et cetera, and trying to work on that.

And I think I could certainly go on with regards to several other endpoints and goals, but I think keeping these youth safe and helping them find alternatives to violence that are viable are the big goals.

Tom, I don't know if you wanna say anything.

Okay, basically, so I know what Community Passageways does.

And so this sounds like you are, it sounds like you're trying to implement the goals and the mission of Community Passageways, which I totally support.

And you're doing so by identifying people that are injured who are highly likely to be involved again in gun violence.

Okay, thanks.

And rounding us out today, we have Sandra Shanahan.

Sandra, delighted to turn it over to you.

Thank you so much.

I'm going to share my screen.

And this is that presentation.

Yes.

Thank you so much, everyone.

It's a real honor to be here.

So I thank you for this opportunity and to be alongside such esteemed panelists.

My name is Sandra Shanahan.

I'm the program manager of the Regional Domestic Violence Firearms Enforcement Unit.

I have to say it's with the city and county's partnership for the last several years that have enabled us to help implement laws that are specifically designed to reduce firearm risks on protection orders.

And with your support and leadership, our unit leads the nation in efforts to investigate and lawfully disarm those who are among the most at risk of firearm violence.

specifically domestic violence offenders and people who pose an imminent risk of harm to self and others.

This investment has led to life-saving interventions and system reforms that promote public safety.

So our unit works upstream.

We try to identify and intervene on high-risk firearm cases, and we follow the research of Dr. Fred Rivara, Dr. April Scioli, Dr. Fred Arolli, and many other leading national experts who use a public health approach to harm reduction.

And what we know is that the best available research shows that the most important element in preventing intimate partner violence and intimate partner homicide are removing the firearm from the situation.

And this has been a long echoed talking point for the Washington State Coalition for the last 20 years.

If we could get firearms away from domestic violence offenders, we could really have an impact And it's important because we all know that firearms in a situation where there's domestic violence increases the risk of homicide by 500%.

And when you have a unit that is honored to work in this space, we get to know the folks that come before us.

And what we have found is that domestic violence offenders are disproportionately armed in our community compared to the general public.

That's on a local and a national level.

So that means the people who are most violently recidivate are disproportionately armed in our community.

We've also found that people who have already been convicted of domestic violence offenses are overrepresented as defendants in both charged homicide and attempted homicide cases.

They use firearms 70% of the time and they kill acquaintances, strangers, in addition to intimate partner and family and household members.

So The risks of armed domestic violence offenders are not just inward, but they're outwardly focused.

And we believe that by focusing specifically on domestic violence offenders, we're engaging in really competent risk management.

The other thing is we'll hear a lot of folks talking about firearm violence as if these are mutually exclusive categories of people.

And the reality is these things are interconnected on some level.

And that's why having a regional and multidisciplinary approach is so critically important if we really want to have an impact.

And this graphic doesn't even begin to talk about kind of the supply side of the equation or the oversaturation of firearms in our community.

One thing I really like to talk about, and we're not going to have enough time to go through all of these, unfortunately, is we have so many pervasive myths in our society around firearms.

And those pervasive myths are powerful, and they stunt action.

So for example, everybody here on this call in the chambers has heard someone say, you know, if you take the abuser's gun away, he's just gonna use some other weapon.

Well, that's actually been studied.

Dr. April Zioli at Michigan State University has found that there is not a substitution effect.

When you disarm a domestic violence offender, you take the firearm away, the overall intimate partner homicide rate goes down.

We know that that's also similar for suicide.

Suicide is an impulsive act, and when you remove the most lethal means, like firearms, you can really have an impact.

We've heard a lot of talk over the last several years about just arming victims and somehow that's going to even the playing field, but the reality is having a firearm when there is domestic violence increases risks.

And I don't think an abuser is going to say, oh, that's not my gun, so I won't use it.

And I have to say, for my 20 years of working directly with survivors of domestic violence as they petition for protection orders, I can count on less than two hands how many survivors specifically sought out a firearm.

And when you really start to look at cases where women have used firearm or lethal force to protect themselves, the legal outcomes are not good.

So how we do this, we operationalize harm reduction by intervening as early as possible when the risks are highest.

We deescalate the situation or try to neutralize it by safely and lawfully disarming the individual, thereby disrupting the firearm tragedy from occurring.

And we do this across a multitude of cases.

So our primary cases are we screen all superior court protection order petitions to look for any allegations of firearms.

We also review all of the shots fired reports across King County, We look at felony and misdemeanor first appearance cases.

We specifically highlight domestic violence, sexual assault, hate crimes, harassment, and felony DUI.

And then we have an extreme risk protection order inbox and do direct outreach to the community and to law enforcement to identify risk.

We gather as much intelligence as possible from record searches, from victims, survivors, family members, and loved ones to get as much information as we can about the firearms specifically when were they last seen, where are they, were there any photos or social media posts, and then we share that directly with law enforcement to help promote safe recovery.

And we also share it with courts to help them in their assessment of whether someone is in compliance or not.

And kind of the enabling order that allows for this work is the order to surrender and prohibit weapons.

And those are available across all of the civil and criminal protection orders.

The other main body of work that we work on are extreme risk protection orders.

So unlike other types of protection orders that prohibit specific conduct and contact, extreme risk protection orders are singularly focused on temporarily removing a firearm from a person who has been determined by a judge to be an imminent risk of harm to themselves or others.

And so we know from research that ERPOs are a key upstream response to prevent firearm violence.

The other thing that's really important, we've heard a lot about this lately because of all the mass tragedies that have occurred, is that people before an attack often share those risks with other people or in posts.

And so we have a window of opportunity in up to 80% of cases to intervene at the right point in time to prevent firearm violence.

I wanted to just share, we've had several successful recoveries over the last several years.

This is our kind of original sergeant, Sergeant Dorothy Kim, who's now a lieutenant in Seattle Police Department.

And she was talking to the media about what things look like before our unit.

And that was that a year ago, none of these guns would have been recovered.

We'd never have done a search warrant or even have looked to see if there was an order to surrender weapons issued.

And so just we screen approximately or review approximately 1400 cases every single year.

And I just wanted to share a handful before I close.

So our detectives on our cases have been involved in several really important recoveries.

One involved a sexual assault protection order against a man who was accused of sexually assaulting his girlfriend's minor child and they recovered 50 firearms.

at a time of heightened risk when someone is being investigated for child sexual assault.

Our extremers protection order advocate and deputies work really hard every day to intervene to prevent the purchase of firearms or the removal of firearms when people are experiencing suicidal ideation.

Our deputies have helped get burpos on cases where someone has threatened to shut down the Sea-Tac airport with a mass violence incident.

They intervened to stop an armed conflict that was threatened against the court.

They've also worked in cases involving threats to employers.

And then we've had some pretty significant domestic violence cases.

This is an individual.

We assisted the survivor as she was getting her protection order.

We did a firearm interview with her and found out that her partner was threatening to commit a mass attack if she were to leave him.

He would come home from work, put on his ballistic vest and sit at his front window and train his rifle on people as they walked by.

We were immediately able to intervene with her as she accessed our protection order advocacy program and share this information about the firearms with law enforcement so they could immediately recover them at the time of service.

Excuse me.

And then we also, this is just an example of our work originates in this region, but takes us far and wide.

This is a situation where somebody fled an abusive and dangerous situation in another state, came up here, got a protection order, and we worked with law enforcement in the other jurisdiction to get those firearms recovered.

And so all of this to say, this work requires tremendous attention to detail, collaboration, coordination, networking, and really leaning into practical ways to disarm people lawfully and safely.

These are just a handful of metrics that we have captured over the years.

And I'm happy to answer questions or present at another time when there's more time.

And I just wanted to let everyone know that the PowerPoint does include all of the systemic gaps that existed before our unit was put into place at the end if you wanted to get that information.

So thank you so much.

I may have not heard correctly.

You made reference and quoted an individual involved in the extremist protection order program as saying that prior to some event or some change, and I don't think it was the enactment of the the policy, it sounded like you're saying something has changed in the implementation of the policy that has resulted in more gun recovery.

Can you let us know a little bit more about that?

Yes, thank you so much.

So the person that I featured was our sergeant who used to be or who was in our unit initially And what she was commenting on is that we had a significant law change in 2014 that enabled protection orders to also prohibit firearm possession.

And people who were restrained by protection orders were also required to surrender them.

Nothing happened.

Firearms weren't being recovered.

And so what Sergeant Kim was speaking about is that prior to the formation of the city-county collaboration, with a unit dedicated to successfully and lawfully disarming people as court ordered, nobody was getting the firearms out of these dangerous situations.

So it's only been since the formation of the unit in January of 2018 that we've been able to really work on implementing these laws fully.

And we believe that that has had a significant impact on public safety, both within situations of domestic violence, but also to the broader community.

So I hope that clarifies that point.

It does definitely.

I remember an article a little while ago in the Seattle Times about the extreme risk protection order and that after the order is expired, that there was some question of whether or not there needs to be some additional oversight at the expiration of the extreme risk protection order before a person is allowed to legally own guns again.

Can you talk about whether, and I think this article is probably over a year old, can you talk a little bit about whether or not the orders just expire as indicated by the date in the order or whether or not there's any sort of additional overview or scrutiny of whether or not somebody is actually ready to have their rights restored?

I think that's an excellent question.

I appreciate you asking it.

So our unit, we have an extreme risk protection order advocate that this body funded, and we're very grateful for that.

And one of the things that she does is she does outreach to all petitioners on extreme risk protection orders before their expiration to just get a sense of whether people feel like they maybe want to pursue a renewal.

And then it's also screened with our deputies who handle extreme risk protection orders and have expertise and they try to get a sense of is this a situation where the risk has been reduced and the order can expire on its own or do we need to triage it to determine if this case should be renewed?

So every year we have a certain percentage of cases that are renewed because those risks appear to be ongoing.

And so we've done that successfully.

And then in other situations, if the risks have subsided, those orders expire on their own.

And if there are no other prohibitions against that person possessing or owning firearms, like no other criminal convictions or other protection orders, then they are able to go have their firearms returned and released to them.

So we definitely are investing in that overview because we don't want anybody to slip through the cracks.

But we also want to honor that when people, when the risks have subsided, that they can go on to get their items back.

And so there's not only the capacity among staff to have a process to review whether or not there is still a risk that's evident, but there is a place in court to oppose the restoration of rights as well if there is found to still be risk?

Well, for the extreme risk protection order, the petitioning party could come back and try to renew no matter what.

And they could try to argue that the order should be extended for another year.

But the restoration of rights that are related to convictions, et cetera, it's a very different process.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Nelson.

First, I want to say that I really commend your work.

It seems as though this should have been happening all along, so thank you very much.

This isn't your jurisdiction, but you mentioned that you screen cases in Superior Court, and I'm wondering if there's any...

of a similar approach or any of that work being done, you know, within Seattle at Muni Court because there is a backlog of cases.

There are, let's see, 971 domestic violence cases and 455 harassment cases and 117 that involve weapons charges.

And I don't know if the weapons charge, I don't know how many of the weapons charges are overlaid on top of the domestic violence cases, which would then be, which would be elevated for this kind of intervention.

But is there any effort or thought of doing that with those backlog cases as well?

Yes, so, and again, I'm sorry, I didn't do the whole background, but we are a collaboration between the Seattle City Attorney's Office, the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, Seattle Police Department, and the King County Sheriff's Office.

So one of the co-chairs of our unit, Crystal Curley, is based in the Seattle City Attorney's Office, as is our extremist protection order advocate, another firearm enforcement advocate, and a deputy prosecutor.

So we have people who are looking internally at Seattle, the city of Seattle criminal cases to address firearm issues.

So I apologize for neglecting to make that more clear, but we are working in tandem on those cases.

Thank you.

Thank you.

See if there are any additional questions from my colleagues before moving on.

Not seeing any.

Eleuthera, I see your hands up.

Chair Herbold and members of the committee, just thank you so much for having us here today, and thank you to the panelists for agreeing on such short notice to step forward.

Luther Lisch, I am the strategic advisor for King County Public Health's gun violence regional approach, but I also wanted to just acknowledge that Tavita Briscoe, who is the liaison to the mayor's office for the city of Seattle, first ever appointed on addressing gun violence, and also Rene Hopkins, the CEO of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility partnered with us today to make sure that this panel was robust, and we just want to make ourselves available ongoing.

Chair Herbold, for any further questions or ways that we can shed light on the multi-dimensions of the issue.

Thank you.

I see Davida with us.

Should we make some space for additional comments?

Yeah, I don't have much more to say than what has already been presented, but I want to thank all the panelists for being here.

Also, Dom Davis and Deepika for, Dr. Deepika, for highlighting the 25 to 40 year old range.

It's a gap in services that I have pointed out since I've started in my position and is a high priority for the mayor's office and all of the work of the Regional Peacekeepers Collective.

I strongly support.

These are my peers.

in this work.

Sandra, I have not met yet, but I hope to collaborate more on how we could amplify the ERP roles.

I know that there's been some federal funding to amplify the extreme risk protection orders, and we are a red-flag state, so there are some ways that it's being underutilized and not prioritized much because a lot of people just aren't aware of it.

So a public awareness campaign is on my radar to elevate those extreme risk protection orders and also just this unit in general and how it could keep our loved ones and our families and our community safe.

Thank you for everyone for participating.

Thank you so much.

And just to put a finer point on it, I'm hearing that what's missing as far as the ability to expand the hospital-based program is funding from the regional partners.

Is that true?

That is true.

We are currently contracting with Public Health Seattle King County to ramp up the pilot, as Deepika mentioned.

And our goal is to both sustain that and expand it.

per the data and feedback that we've gained during the pilot phase.

We're also partnering within the national work, the hobby with just the Health Alliance for Violence Interventions, which sets the gold standards for this.

They're providing some TTA and support for how we think about ramping this up, and also hope that we can collaborate city, state, county, and ultimately at the federal level to draw down dollars as this is a proven best practice and evidence-based best practice, and we hope to draw resources to expand it to be available to everybody.

As you've often said, Chair Herbold, that you'd hope to see everybody affected by gun violence have this resource at the hospital.

We're also hearing, as Deepika mentioned, from both other counties and other hospitals in our region who are hoping to expand this and really provide these supports that are being called for.

I'm having my budget priorities meeting with Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell today, and I'll be sure to bring this up.

Thank you so much.

Really appreciate everybody.

Oh, Council Member Nelson, sorry.

Just really quick, I'm sorry.

When I asked my question before about this program, I asked, what are your metrics for success or how do you know that it's working?

I'm sorry, Council Member, is that question for me?

I know that was for the presenters of the first hospital-based program, because I believe that's what Councilmember Herbold was talking about when she talked about expanded funding.

Were you referring to that one?

Yeah.

So in response to the question about sort of what are the metrics that we're using, right now we're in a pilot phase and we've just sort of launched this program over the last six months.

And so we've been tracking our contact rates, like the percentage of patients who are injured, who meet criteria, who are actually able to make contact with, and then sort of enrollment in the program.

And then I've been working with community passageways and our community partners to really sort of look at outcome metrics in terms of How, how we're sort of doing with sort of meeting needs and keeping these youth safe.

And I think number one, we do a needs assessment in the hospital to identify with what the injured individual feels like their greatest needs are and then evaluate sort of our ability to meet those needs.

Number two, we do a measure of resilience and PTSD and look at those measures over time.

And then number three, like I said, talking to youth about sort of weapon carriage safety, trying to figure out ways to keep them safe and to decrease their likelihood of death and reinjury.

due to death due to re-injury.

And then lastly, like I said, we are also looking at sort of tracking and keeping an eye on things for six months, a year, and then even out further after the injury to look at how we're doing with getting these youth back in school or viable jobs.

And that's the other main metric.

Thanks.

Could I add one more metric?

We're keeping them alive.

That's the metric.

If they're alive, then we did a good job.

Couldn't agree more.

Thanks, Tom.

Thank you.

Much appreciated.

Thank you for the important work that you're doing.

And thank you for continuing to elevate the needs of victims and their family members and our communities in developing and creating comprehensive community safety.

Really appreciate everything that everybody's doing.

And I know it's really hard trauma inducing work.

So can't thank you enough.

That clerk, can you please read in item number two?

committee agenda item number two, abortion access for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

So moving on to the next agenda, I want to again thank folks from public health for joining us.

If we've got a couple people here with us from Seattle King County Public Health, if you could introduce yourselves and then I'll just offer a couple very short introductory remarks and I'll hand it back to you.

Great.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

My name is Heather Mason, and I am with Public Health Seattle King County.

I am the Family Planning Program Manager, and I believe I am the only one presenting on the topic today.

I'm going to share my screen if that's okay.

I have some slides to share.

Thank you.

So really, again, I want to appreciate that my council colleagues have shared my sense of urgency in responding to the Supreme Court's disastrous decision in Dobbs removing a pregnant person's right to basic health care.

feel appreciative that we live in a region and a state that's committed to preserving and expanding abortion access.

I want to lift up that in Washington state, 62% of people are in favor of helping pregnant people from out of state come here for a safe abortion.

Seattle, King County Public Health has already been doing so much to ensure that Seattle residents have access to robust, comprehensive, reproductive healthcare.

And in the wake of Dubs, they've been very, very active in identifying new ways to protect and expand abortion access.

I invited public health here today to provide an overview of the many ways that they are active in this fight as council considers the ways that we can ourselves take action to protect and increase abortion access.

Thanks for being here this morning.

Yes, thank you for having me to speak to our public health Seattle King County health, sexual health, sexual and reproductive health services, as well as our support and access to abortion services, including our coordination across health care systems and with community partners, more so than ever before now with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

So thank you, Chair Herbold, for the invitation.

Um, So just as a brief overview of what services we already provide pertaining to sexual and reproductive health services, we do have four family planning clinics.

They're all located outside of Seattle.

We have mostly in South King County where there's a lot more disparities and we provide full scope services.

So STI, contraceptive, pregnancy testing, emergency contraception, cervical and breast cancer.

wellness.

And then we have some other programs that also provide sexual reproductive health services.

The sexual health clinic, formerly known as the STD clinic, which is across from Harborview, primarily focuses on sexually transmitted infections and HIV services, but provides some contraceptive services as well.

And then our primary care clinics.

located in downtown Seattle, Burien, Bellevue, as well as our whole school based health centers network located in Seattle and in other parts of King County expanding into those areas.

and our medical mobile vans that serve Seattle as well as parts of King County provide some family planning services in the context of primary care.

And lastly, with the Department of Social and Human Health Services, the community service offices known as the CSOs and the Nurse Family Partnership who work with public health nurses provide some limited family planning services, all of which provide pregnancy testing, options counseling, and referrals into abortion services.

More specifically, our abortion service access, we do provide across all of our systems, non-directed voluntary pregnancy options counseling with referrals for all options, including comprehensive referral packets and additional warm handoff support to accessing abortion care.

We work with our clients to support enrollment in the pregnancy Medicaid program to cover the cost of abortion services or connecting them with the Northwest abortion access fund if needed.

In the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision.

updated, created a whole new public health website specific for folks to access around abortion services.

That's available at kingcounty.gov forward slash abortion.

And lastly, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, we have been conducting a lot of internal presentations across all of the programs within public health that are relevant to support abortion information and access, as well as community based presentations.

Before we talk more specifically about the Dobbs decision and overturning of Roe v. Wade impact and and ways in protecting access to abortion services, I just want to ground us in reproductive justice.

This is the framework with which we work from, and I want to thank and acknowledge SisterSong, a national reproductive justice organization out of Atlanta, Georgia, for this definition.

I think it's important to read out loud the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy.

have children, not have children and parent children in safe and sustainable communities is the framework with which we work under and clearly overturning Roe v. Wade further devastates many people's lives and has traumatic impacts across the country as well as locally and creates reproductive injustice.

So with the SCOTUS decision and overturning Roe v. Wade, I always want to point out this historical moment in time.

This is the first time the Supreme Court has rescinded an individual right in its entirety, which is pretty astounding.

And I also want to acknowledge the unfortunate significant impact it is going to have across the country.

Guttmacher Institute has estimated, based on their assessments, that at least 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion.

And with that, we know at least 22 of those 26 states, the abortion bans will be total or near total abortion bans.

So in the cases of incest or rape, abortions would still be prohibited.

This is a huge impact, as you can see, across our country.

The other area with this I'd like to point out, and you may have already seen in some news coverage as of late, that this also impacts miscarriage management, ectopic pregnancies, that there's fear and confusion about whether or not places where abortions are banned, if there's services for these conditions, and these conditions can become life-threatening without timely access to care, which is also another concern here.

So, abortion access is not only a legal battle a political game, or based on religious moral beliefs, it really is a public health issue with a deep.

negative impact on our populations.

We know from many studies that restricting access to abortion results in the erosion of the health of women, trans folks and non-binary people, especially those who have low incomes and are black indigenous people of color populations.

So it'll just exacerbate existing disparities and the health and wellbeing of large groups of populations that we wanna protect and serve.

We also know that it impacts maternal and infant health.

These studies were conducted only with women, so I'm referring to women in these cases.

Women living in states with less restrictive reproductive health policies are more likely or less likely to give birth to low weight babies, so the birth outcome and health and well-being of infants is impacted when we have restrictive reproductive health policies.

Conversely, when we have less restrictive, we have healthier outcomes.

Restrictive abortion laws also cause a higher rate of abortion-related maternal deaths, which is deeply concerning, especially when we already have such high disparities, especially for black women around maternal deaths and many of the places where there's going to be abortion bans there are large populations of black and African American women.

And we also know that abortion laws affect the economy too.

So having delayed access to abortion creates more costly health care service.

Conversely, having timely access to safe abortion reduces medical costs for health systems.

UCSF conducted a 10-year study with 1,000 women across the country to understand the impact of what it would be like to be denied abortion access.

In that, they found that women were more likely to experience an increased hardship and insecurity lasting years.

All of these outcomes actually have lifelong potentially lifelong and long-term impacts.

They're also more than likely to experience physical violence from the person they got pregnant with.

Pregnancy is actually a very high risk time period when there is intimate partner violence.

more likely to raise children, the child alone without a partner or family member, more likely to have more serious health problems and lower the level of maternal bonding, which is once again, that lifelong impact that is significant when being denied an abortion.

And then now I wanted to talk about local, potential local impacts here at King County and Seattle.

Guttmacher Institute, once again, doing some assessments, have identified that at least 385% of people who could get pregnant between the ages of 15 and 49, now with Roe v. Wade being overturned, the closest abortion provider is in Washington state.

So that is based on those surrounding states where there are abortion bans proposed or enacted.

That is a significant amount of people that potentially could come to our region for abortion access.

We want to make sure that our services aren't becoming overcapacity and so that it doesn't also impact the ability of our own residents in King County and Seattle to have timely access to abortion services.

This is on timely access.

Oh, so sorry about that.

No, no, I was just underscoring your point.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes, exactly.

Right.

And then additionally, you know, we've we've had a history.

This isn't new to Seattle to have folks coming from out of state.

What we anticipate is a large number of people coming and also coming with more medical complications due to the delay in traveling and getting services, Seattle has a very good abortion access system in place, it is more than likely going to need further support to accommodate the needs that are ahead.

Some later term abortions and we also have a really and thank you all for contributing to this a psychologically and physically safe place for these services to come.

And that is very important.

I also just want to note that the other delayed access to abortion services that we want to keep our eye on as well is that.

Now in King County and in Seattle, we have a larger number of religiously affiliated hospitals that don't perform abortion services.

And this was not the case 10 years ago.

So we are seeing a shift in access to service in some of our hospital settings that we want to make sure we can navigate and also mitigate the impact in our communities as well.

We also are looking at ways in which our abortion providers, volunteers, and patients going to abortion clinics can be protected from additional vulnerability to violence, as well as lawsuits from out-of-state abortions.

I know there are efforts made at the state and county and city level that we'll talk about briefly for some policies, and I want to thank you all for being part of that effort.

The other thing that we are watching and concerned about, which is why we're doing internal and external presentations and outreach is around confusion.

Folks in King County and Seattle are afraid that they can't access services, think that abortion services are no longer legal here.

There's lots of fear and confusion this ruling has created.

And so we want to ensure folks have the right information and know that Washington state abortions are still safe and legal and accessible and we want to help support that access and last year.

Yes, please.

Thank you.

Um, so what about folks coming into Washington state because they know that there's access here, but who end up either in clinics or hospitals locally that do not provide comprehensive reproductive health care.

What can we do to address that misinformation that can be perpetuated by these hospitals and clinics and what can we do to combat it?

Thank you.

That is a great question.

I will say one thing for sure, which we're trying to do, is direct folks to the Northwest Abortion Access Fund, for example, because that's their role, is to help navigate our systems and healthcare systems that will get them to the appropriate place where they can access comprehensive sexual reproductive health systems services, excuse me.

The other piece is really, I think, information campaign, public awareness campaigns would be another area to help folks understand where services are and are not available.

And that's something that we think we would love to see the state of Washington, really take the lead on just because of the breadth of it would be really helpful but also locally how we can further support public awareness campaigns I think is another helpful approach.

policy-wise, it is very complicated for transparency and accountability about what services are provided or not provided, and or in some cases, maybe deceptive practices with certain entities around what they provide, and in actuality, are providing more biased care than what the patient or the person was seeking out.

So I think it's a great question.

I think it's an ongoing conversation.

We are in conversations with some key stakeholders, such as Legal Voice and other folks who have been looking at other cities and states on some policies and ways.

And we can come back and talk further about that.

We don't have a full assessment yet, but I think it is an important question that we should continue discussing.

And I appreciate the question.

Lastly, I want to make the point here too, as other entities are seeing across the country, and we are starting to hear anecdotally here locally, folks now seeking out birth control more than ever before in fear of if they were to get pregnant.

So prevention is top of mind right now, which is a great time to also really take advantage of that thinking and getting folks into services where they have full scope contraceptive services, especially for emergency contraception.

We are wanting these services deeply protected here.

We know that this is the next phase of potential bans, if you will, or preventing access to contraceptive services across the country, especially emergency contraception, which is a resource that we have available to immediately prevent a pregnancy once after the fact of sexual intercourse.

And so those are some of our immediate kind of potential impacts that we're keeping eyes on and understanding and trying to mitigate Some of the ways we're trying to mitigate these potential impacts here locally is with some initial response by King County and Seattle.

King County Council just recently did pass a $500,000 funding to go to the Northwest Abortion Access Fund.

Seattle is proposing to also support the Northwest Abortion Access Fund with $250,000.

We see this as an essential organization in our communities, they coordinate travel, lodging, services, support services for people seeking both locally and out of state abortion services.

And then the other area that we are establishing is an emergency fund.

here in public health and that is to have timely access to financial resources to support the communities where barriers are coming up it's as of yet it's a little too soon to understand what those barriers are but we are in close connection with many key stakeholders, abortion providers, hospital healthcare systems, and community-based organizations to better understand the needs and anticipated needs to support them when barriers arise, or ideally prior to the barriers presenting themselves.

And lastly, supporting policies to maintain abortion rights and safety, which I also want to thank Councilmember Herbold and Morales for your recent proposals as well for some city protections that we really appreciate.

Some of those include making seeking and obtaining abortion services a protected class and also codifying the state local code to protect access to health care facilities.

We also are looking at other legal protections from other states abortion bans.

This is where states are looking at how to mitigate the impact of extradition, for example, of providers or other financial or legal impacts to our providers.

And that so far is including directives of our local law enforcement to not cooperate with out-of-state abortion investigations, and also executive orders to not use government resources to comply with out-of-state abortion bans and or to interfere with abortion access.

Those are just some examples of our current proposed or enacted local policies, things are moving quickly, as you can imagine, and more policies are coming forth every day now.

I am going to pause here and this is the end of what I've presented and open the floor for any questions.

Can you talk a little bit about the bill that was in the state legislature last session and very likely going to be in this upcoming session related to the hospital mergers limitations because again, as mentioned, A large number of hospitals do not provide comprehensive reproductive healthcare services.

And I think the number is almost 50% of hospital beds are not available for these services.

And just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the practical impact of that bill should it pass.

Yeah, so yes, unfortunately it did not pass last year as you stated, and we are hopeful that maybe more legislation will come forward this session as you indicated.

A couple of different questions there.

One, first and foremost, the proposed legislation from last year was really trying to enforce more accountability and transparency in the hospital system through the Department of Health's processes of these hospitals.

in hopes that that will create awareness and that that won't delay care for folks inadvertently going somewhere where they can't get the care that they're seeking out.

I have yet heard from some of our key stakeholders how they're intending to further advanced hospital mergers policy, it is, it is, like I mentioned earlier, complicated.

And yet, there are some ways with licensing credentialing other regulation mechanisms with which accountability and transparency could be highlighted and communicated.

I have yet to see some of the legislation also require still access to care by those entities outside of their own system really supporting the patient in accessing care elsewhere, which I've heard some rumblings might be a way in some of our policies to further support patients.

But I thought the bill, and maybe you said this and I just missed it, I thought the bill is intended to actually, in areas that don't have adequate access to comprehensive reproductive health, to actually block those mergers in those instances.

I have not read that in the bill, but it was, I mean, I think that's a great, I would have to go back and reread it.

When I was reviewing the bill a while ago, a year ago, it was really focused on, I did not see blocking language.

I saw- I might be just wishful thinking on my part.

Well, and I might not be remembering as well as I should, but we are preparing for legislative session now and we'll be reviewing that bill in particular and working with our partners in how to strengthen it.

And you have proposed a great strength to that bill as well.

But at this point, I don't have enough information to give you more at this point, I apologize.

Other questions or comments?

Are we at the end of your presentation?

We are.

Oh, man.

Well, thank you so much.

I really, really appreciate you being with us today.

Appreciate learning more about the development of the emergency fund at the county and how it can address some of the needs that aren't currently being met and appreciate the ongoing conversation as the city of Seattle looks for where we can interject, not just financial support for programs that impact Seattle and county residents and folks who are coming here, but also to the extent that there is regulatory reform that we can do.

like the two bills that Council Member Morales and I are sponsoring, but also whether or not I'm very interested in requiring hospitals and clinics to be more active in providing accurate information about the limitations of their services and using, you know, obligations under consumer protection to make sure that they're not engaging in deceptive practices.

So look forward to having ongoing conversations with you and other partners around around that work.

So really appreciate it.

Thanks for all that you're doing.

Thank you.

Thanks for all that you all are doing as well.

We appreciate your work and the ongoing conversation opportunity as well.

Thank you all for your time today.

Okay, well, the clerk please read in agenda item number three.

Committee agenda item number three, 2022, excuse me, 2020-22 mid-year accountability report for briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

So again, we have a panel of presenters.

Really appreciate being joined by the three police accountability bodies, the Office of Police Accountability, the Community Police Commission, and the Office of the Inspector General to provide a mid-year update.

This is, as mentioned earlier, a report required by the 2020, 2017 accountability legislation.

Presenters, please go ahead and introduce yourselves, just your name and your affiliation.

And then after your introductions, take a pause.

I have a couple of framing suggestions to move forward, and then I'll just pass it off to you to give your presentations.

Name and affiliation, please.

Thank you.

I can start.

I am Nia Franco, and I am the senior policy advisor at the Community Police Commission.

Thank you, Nia.

Good morning.

I am Miroslava Mesa.

I am the deputy inspector general.

Thank you for having us here.

Good morning.

I'm Lauren Caputo.

I am a data and policy analyst at the Office of Police Accountability.

Fantastic, thank you.

And really the only thing I wanted to just say is for the viewing public, we're gonna take presentations in the following order.

We'll hear from the Community Police Commission first, then we'll hear from the Office of the Inspector General, and then finally we'll hear from the Office of Police Accountability.

Take it away.

All right, thank you so much for having me here today.

I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen.

There we are.

All right, so as I stated, I am the Senior Policy Advisor for the Community Police Commission.

I'm really excited to be here this morning to present our mid-year report on behalf of the CPC.

The first thing I want to talk about is our state legislative agenda for 2022, what our priorities were, and some of the successes we saw during that process.

So, in 2022, our priorities were to we wanted to advocate for was to allow individuals to hold officers accountable for their actions, prohibit traffic stops for certain traffic violations, ban the use of tear gas in Washington State, remove arbitration as a route of appeal for discipline-related misconduct, and to remove accountability provisions from the bargaining process.

During the legislative session, some of our engagement strategies were to sign in pro or against certain pieces of legislation that the commission voted to support or oppose.

We also submitted written statements in support or in opposition of legislation.

And we also, when we were able to, had commissioners deliver testimony in committee hearings.

During the session, the CPC interacted with nine bills, five of which we supported, four of which we were opposed to.

Some of the notable legislative outcomes during that session were the passage of House Bill 1719, which added clarifications around some of the changes made during the last legislative session on allowing departments to acquire and use less lethal weapons, and House Bill 1735, which sought clarifications to ensure that officers could continue to respond to calls that include a mental health component in the absence of other co-responder models.

This year we've had a number of publications in the form of statements, letters, and even an op-ed that we submitted and had published in the South Seattle Emerald.

The statements and letters covered topics such as the SPMA contract negotiations, some concerns and questions around SPD data related to use of force and crisis intervention.

We also submitted a letter to our accountability partners focused on the CPC's perspectives on what it would take to reach true accountability within Seattle related to police oversight.

And additionally, we did pin an op-ed that was published in the South Seattle Emerald that focused on SPD's response to people in mental health crisis and offered some recommendations on how we thought that SPD could look to hold officers accountable and try to ensure that those deadly outcomes do not continue.

This year, there were plenty of challenges and opportunities that were faced.

The COVID-19 restrictions continue to be a challenge, but we were able to flip that into opportunities in terms of maintaining and holding even more virtual community engagement sessions through Zoom.

We also continue to have commissioner vacancies.

We have been working with the appointing bodies to get those vacancies filled.

Some of the other opportunities we've had is we were actually able to bring on new commissioners and new staff members this year.

We also took an opportunity with an opening that we had in the policy section to restructure the policy team and flip one of our policy analyst positions into a data and policy evaluations analyst so that we could focus more on data and research having to do with a lot of data.

As I stated earlier, we continued our ongoing community engagement meetings and actually being able to, as restrictions began to lift, go out to some of those community events where it was safe to do so.

The CPC also maintained our five work groups for this year.

They were behavioral health.

Within behavioral health, we focused on officer mental health and wellness, SPD response to mental health crisis, as well as taking a deep dive into de-escalation by looking at policies.

That work is still ongoing.

Our community engagement work group was responsible for holding all of our community engagement events, which I will get to shortly.

The Complaint and Appeals Process Workgroup, we were able to start that work at the beginning, at the end of last year, and we've ramped it up during the earlier half of 2022 by having our commissioners work on developing a work plan that looks to involve community members through membership in the work group, as well as holding town halls and focus groups to meet that requirement set by city council resolution that the CPC offer recommendations for complainant appeals process.

In our police practices work group, we have been focused on reviewing OPA's management action recommendations.

We've completed a few of those recommendation reviews and have sent them to OPA and SPD for further consideration.

And finally, we had our state legislative agenda work group, which managed all of our state legislative agenda work.

for community engagement and events.

We were able to collaborate and co-host alongside the Seattle Monitor, a series of community briefings on the core assessments to the court.

Those were on crisis intervention, use of force and stops and detentions.

We were also able to host additional community engagement meetings on specific topics such as the micro community policing plans.

We held a state legislative agenda recap We've had discussions about the 911 operations and the development and bringing online of the new 988 number.

And we've also held additional meetings to talk about the response that the CPC put together around the monitor assessments.

Recently, we also held a really great community discussion that was led by community members who have directly been impacted by gun violence.

To date, we have had over 400 people attend our community engagement events and meetings.

We also this year continued our collaboration with the Seattle police monitor this includes senior management attending the visioning methods analysis and planning meeting debriefs.

Senior leadership also has standing meetings with the monitor team, we were also able to hold those joint Community engagement meetings.

to offer feedback to the monitor on their court assessments, and we submitted feedback on the monitoring plan and methodology.

So this year, to wrap everything up, our priorities and accomplishments were as follows.

So for policy, we were able to, as I stated earlier, flip that policy analyst position to be more data and research focused.

For community engagement, we held strategic planning focus groups for youth engagement, as well as continued our virtual community engagement meetings during the pandemic.

as well as having monthly meetings with stakeholders, partners, and community members.

And we also initiated the recruitment process for our CE specialists, so that we could fill out that community engagement team.

In terms of collaboration, we were able to have a technical advisor, one of our commissioners, Susette Dickerson, involved in the police contract negotiations, and we also engaged with the Seattle Police Monitor and offered feedback on the assessments, monitoring plan, and methodology.

Internally, we continue to maintain our police accountabilities recommendation tracker.

We elected new co-chairs and were able to appoint two new commissioners.

We have updated our onboarding protocols and training for new co-chairs and commissioners.

And we have wrapped up our strategic planning process and our work plan to carry out the work in that strategic planning document is being developed and implementation will begin soon.

And that is the conclusion of the presentation for this session.

Thanks, Nia.

Just a couple of things.

The strategic plan, when will that be in a form before implementation, but still in an opportunity to review before you begin implementation?

I think I have a request in with the CPC to get a briefing on the strategic plan.

Absolutely.

Um, so I think it is in final form now.

Um, what I failed to mention is that our executive director is currently traveling back from a conference.

So I will make sure that, um, when she returns, that's at the top of her list.

So we can get that scheduled for you.

Thank you.

And then on the development of a complaint appeal process for context, employees of the department have a right to appeal the findings of an OPA investigation and the thinking with, this approach is that it is equitable to also have a complaint appeal process.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you've, I think I heard you say that you've done some external engagement and focus groups as part of the development of this.

Can you just talk a little bit more about that?

Sure.

So we haven't actually started those external engagements.

Right now, we have been meeting with the commissioners who are on that work group, and we're developing a work plan.

Some of what we're looking at is figuring out what kind of technical advisors we would need.

So we definitely want to, as we're going forward with this process, make sure that we're not stepping on any labor issues.

We're also looking at how we can involve community members directly in the work group.

And we're also planning to do town halls and focus groups.

Once we fully have our work plan developed, so we can get a broad swath of information from community members, we want to reach as many groups as we possibly can, as we could carry out that work.

Thank you.

And I want to also express appreciation for your lifting up the role that CPC Commissioner Suzette Dickerson is playing in advising the city in its labor negotiations.

And we have some lessons learned from the SPMA contract that we will apply.

in the deliberations around the SPOG contract.

So I'm really excited about that work and about having that expertise as part of those negotiations.

So really, thank you to the CPC for partnering in this long desired role for community.

Lastly, just want to touch very quickly on the efforts to get the CPC vacancies filled.

Can you just a little bit more detail on that?

How many vacancies are there currently?

That I do not know off the top of my head.

I know that we as a CPC currently have one vacancy and that's for our public defender, but I believe there are a few for city council and a few for the mayor as well.

Yeah, I've heard murmurings of some quorum issues for past meetings.

So let's definitely work together.

And if there's more that I need to be doing on my end, please do let me know and we'll get to recruiting.

Sounds good.

I can send you those exact numbers after.

Thank you so much, Nia.

Thank you.

Any other questions for the CPC before we move on?

Okay.

So let's move on to the OIG report, Office of the Inspector General.

Miroslava, thank you.

Good morning, and thank you, Madam Chair and members of the Public Safety Committee for having me here presenting the results for the OIG.

So for this year, oops, too many screens, there you go.

For this year, we are still continuing to work with projects that started back in 2020, all of those related with protest response oversight.

So one of the projects that were one of the main responses to policing action during mass demonstrations and exercising of First Amendment rights during 2020 was the Sentinel event review.

The Sentinel Event Review is now a set of four reports, from which two have been done, one last year.

But this year, we finished the second one.

And from that second report, we cover one just before CHOP-CHAS was created.

And out of it, we had 26 recommendations, 15 fully implemented, and eight that were accepted and in progress by SPD.

And out of all of those, only three were not within SBA's jurisdiction, but were referred to those that could be doing something about them.

Deputy Director, I'm sorry.

Can you just get a little closer to your mic?

I'm having a hard time hearing.

Thank you so much.

Yes.

That report was closed this year and has a companion.

It was a white paper that we commissioned from the leading, like the global leading academy person in crowd psychology and how interaction between community and policing or any kind of government entity during mass demonstrations can escalate or also facilitate first amendment rights.

So we got the support of that, and there is also a published white paper with recommendations for SPD that were commissioned by OIG.

Both are in our website right now.

And out of those two documents, both the Sentinel Event Review second report and the white paper of crowd psychology, there were two things.

There were a couple of recommendations that were similar or that were highly aligned.

And it's basically a recommendation for SPD to create a dialogue unit.

or create a way of having not just traditional tactics for managing a crowd, but also to facilitate.

So that was one of the recommendations adopted by SBE.

The second one that is also aligned between those two projects is the commitment to training in emerging practices.

And what we mean by that is there are many theories about how groups of people, when they are exercising their personal rights, behave that are dated.

And there is a lot of new science about how actually there are ways to communicate and to engage and to create a facilitation system instead of a management or public safety that is just based on order.

So that is also something that came out of that and was accepted by SPD.

And one thing that SPD has implemented that is in high alignment with those recommendations both from Sentinel-Event and the Cal Psychology Report is the creation of a pre-academy community service program, and we acknowledge that it's not only that that activity or that action by SPD is not only due to the reports that we provided because there were many other inputs that drove them to do that too, but it's highly aligned and it was part of the recommendations by our groups.

I'm sorry, so the recommendation for the community training, I'm sorry, the pre-academy community service program, is the beyond the badge program that recommendation?

Yes.

All right, I just wanna confirm that as conceived by the recommendation, if SPD's vision is aligned with what the recommendation was, And the SPD dialogue unit, that is intended to be officers who have a responsibility for communicating and negotiating sort of on the ground during a protest.

Is that more or less correct?

Yes, and also just building up relationships with community not only during mass demonstrations or any public demonstration but throughout the entire year, so it's about mixing community policing with actually.

patrol and operations and tactics.

So also when maybe people live in the neighborhood or work in the neighborhood who are not involved in the event, this unit is tasked with communicating with those individuals as well.

Yes.

And this unit is made of people that belong to different units.

It's something that is not just permanent.

So you have people that constantly are working with community because of their task and their full on capacity, but also people that are working in patrol or bicycle units that are trained to be part of the community and constantly are just reaching out.

Right.

And then just the page here, I think what you're intending, and you may have said this, but I'm having a hard time hearing.

The Sentinel Event Review is the coordinated stakeholder engagement that OIG has been leading.

And then there was an academic paper that was commissioned And the point that you're making is that there were these two different work products that made many of the same recommendations.

So kind of confirming the outcomes of their individual processes.

Correct.

That's exactly it.

Yeah.

And SentinelEvent, most of the recommendations are made by stakeholders and community members that discuss the issues and propose solutions.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for those clarifications.

And we continue to work on that.

We continue to have these work groups where community members, police department members from different levels and OIG continue to analyze the protests.

We are in the final two sessions, or the final two sections.

So wait free, that analyze everything from the Choctaw period and how it affected community and looking how to, What our panelists were trying to look for is how to provide public safety to community, even when there is no police presence, and how to avoid harm.

And from that one, we finished.

We had more than 12 sessions, each one of approximately three hours and a half.

So they were more than 36 hours.

And the report is being written.

You know, for this section two, we have also another commission document and it's another white paper.

And it's a white paper that is about what were the integral perspectives by different members of community in Seattle, not just those that were trying to provide policing, but also those that were protesting and the neighbors and business and just people that live in the city.

And what we got is a white paper where it identify the perspectives, feelings, and sentiment for many, many people by interviews that were conducted lately, but also by retrieving all interviews that were performed and were found by media.

So those two will be published very soon.

They are in their final form and they're just going through the reviews by the panel.

So we're looking forward to be able to present those in the upcoming month.

And finally, there's the last session, and the last set of analysis, and it's going to be the last report of Sentinel event related to protest reports.

And that will be happening in the last semester of this year.

And when that is done, one of the things that we want to do is to capitalize a learning one.

We have a work group of community members, business members, neighbors, and SPV that have the ability to to analyze and to find solutions.

And also they are really good in finding things that are viable and applicable that everybody care about.

So we want to continue to learn from them and bring them to the table.

So we are working with them and other stakeholders on how to use that Sentinel even review model to analyze other things beyond protest cases.

And that is going to be probably officer-involved shooting for uses of force that are relevant.

So that is what is being worked for the next semester and currently out.

For some reason, I had misremembered incorrectly that the effort was ending after wave three.

And given that these are the waves described sort of temporal chunks of time, if you will, can you describe what wave four is and what wave five is?

Yes.

So wave four and wave five is The fourth is the period after CHOP-CHAS was no longer in place, there was a period between July 4th and July 25th of 2020, where there were some isolated protests, particularly one close to the police guilds facilities.

So that is wave four.

And after that, SPV, like the rest of the year, SPD created some new units, new training and modify their policy.

So what we want to do is to analyze what happened after those changes and also council implemented changes with the use of tear gas and chemical weapons.

So we are going to analyze what is the after of those interventions.

So that's what we are doing those extra because it's a post action of some interventions by council and by the police department.

Thank you.

And the other thing that we have been working on is in policy.

And one of the learnings from 2020 is the importance of making it a participative process and not just a technocratic process.

And we developed this model that centers in producing harm, disparity, increasing procedural justice.

And what it does is by doing community outreach and also reaching out to experts and stakeholders, identify concerns, create workgroups that integrate these people that care about the topic, but also know about the topic.

And we are doing roundtables.

And after that, we put together their perspectives and coordinate that into policy recommendations that we provide to SPD for their adoption.

So, so far using that process, we have finished two different sets of policy analysis for SPD.

The first one was a deprioritization of minor traffic stops that ended up with the adoption by SPD and making changes to their policy.

And some traffic stops are no longer priority.

And the second one that it's ongoing and it's the first round, it's almost done and it's being implemented by SPD is about the use of ruses and deception by patrol.

And because there were so many questions after the first round table that yes, stakeholders and even SPD had about how to continue to improve that policy and make it and take it to other areas.

We are just finishing the second round of roundtables and we are preparing the feedback for SPD that will be given very soon.

And hopefully that will be the input for their final draft and potentially having a different groups and deception policy by SP.

Fantastic, really appreciate OIG's role in pulling together stakeholders, including SPD, specifically as it relates to the known outcome, as we've seen it for the deprioritization of minor traffic stops, and really appreciate Chief Diaz's leadership in implementing the recommendations.

And I'm also equally appreciative that you've involved my office and myself as it relates specifically to the ruse deception policy development, anticipate an equally satisfactory outcome.

There's still remains a lot of public interest in this issue.

And thank you for OIG continuing to push beyond just the question of the use of ruses, generally the use of deception more broadly in investigative practices.

I think it's really important in our ongoing work to install or instill public trust in the department and policing.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

And that takes us to another body of work that is the audit part of the work.

And this one We have two ongoing audits.

One that is the compliance of it on my chance, Dunlap-Kittens Youth Rights Ordinance.

And that is about an ordinance that has been in place for a year and so.

And what we are assessing is if SPV is complying with that and to be done by the end of the year with that one.

The second one, and that was a request of City Council.

The second one, it's an audit on SPV administrative leave for use of administrative leave by SPV personnel.

That is ongoing.

We are in the early stages, and we have an expected deadline.

We're expecting to finish by the first quarter of We have also recurring audits that we have been talking about from the past.

One is called Chapter 1418 Surveillance Technologies, and that is about the requirement of assessing yearly the use of surveillance technologies by SPD.

We have not been doing those in past years because there were not technologies approved by council up to last year, but this year there is a package of eight of them that have been approved.

Each one of them individually is an audit.

So when you see chapter 14, 18 in this presentation, we're talking about eight different technologies.

Each one of them will be assessed individually.

And after we finish that assessment, we will continue to do it yearly.

Our goal is to finish six by the end of the year.

This part of the body of work of audits is the most intensive right now for our office, even of the volume of policies that need, I'm sorry, technologies that need to be assessed.

And also because it requires the expertise of technical assistance.

And we have been working with consultants.

So this right now, it's the most intensive part of the work for the audits team.

And the second the current audit that we are also working on right now is Chapter 1412, and that is also related with surveillance and use of information, and that is something that we already assessed in 2019, and this is just a recurring one follow-up, so it is less intensive but equally important.

And here comes the other part of our work, and it is OIG is charged with reviewing OPA's work.

So every time OPA finishes an investigation, OIG's team reviews the files and all the information behind it to decide whether if it's certified or not as thorough, objective, and timely.

So up to this year, our unit has done 67 of those investigation certifications.

And the other thing is, There is something called contact locks.

And contact locks are those contacts from community to OPA that they are raising issues or complaints that are not given of their nature.

Either they're not about SBD or not regarding SBD personnel or the information is not available to do any follow up and actually identify what happened.

Those don't have any further work.

And the complainant only receives a letter saying that their complaint was received.

And if it was referred to someone else, well, to whom it was referred, and if it was nothing else to be done with it, the complainant gets that notice.

In the past, OIG do personal capacity in the past years.

We were working in a sample mode.

Since 2022, we have been reviewing individually each one of those.

Both the ones that have, there are two names for them, but all of them, we have been reviewing them individually.

Up to this semester, up to today, they have been done asynchronously.

So we review them in a retroactive way.

Starting next month, OIG will start working with the review of those contact logs as they happen, so we can provide OPA feedback.

as they are classified and if there is any need to reclassify them or do something different with them, we will be able to do it live.

I just want to just take a pause and underscore the importance of this adjustment to your practices.

What the deputy director has explained is that the OIG has moved from a practice of, I believe it was quarterly auditing of a sampling of OPA dispositions as contact logs.

They are now reviewing them all as sort of in, as a backlog, but moving forward, they're going to be monitoring those decisions in real time.

So if there's course corrections that need to be made, the OIG is positioned in order to recommend those course corrections to the OPA.

I really thank you for your adjusting your practices in response to concerns that we've heard from the public.

Council Member Nelson.

Yes.

Going back to the audit of the, um, surveillance technologies, um, you noted that there are eight right now on your plate and, uh, there are still some in the pipeline in my committee.

So, um, how much do that seems like a lot of staff time?

What is involved in that?

Or, or, um, how many people do you have devoted to that?

I mean, when these come in a surge out of our committee, um, how do you deal with that?

Thank you for that question.

It's a really good question, council member.

So right now we are testing for the first time how to deal with it because this is the first search our office is working with.

So one of the things that we did is we are hiring a person to be the full time manager of that project.

But also we are working by adding capacity to our units by hiring consultants.

And approximately 30% of all the audit capacities also refocused to do the surveillance work.

We are not sure what is going to be the strategy as we go by, because right now we have eight new technologies.

But next year, and as years goes by, we're going to have those technologies that were already reviewed in the past that are in a yearly cycle, plus the new ones that we'll continue to adopt.

That is something that we are trying to work and we have not experienced it yet.

Thank you.

I'll follow up later.

The other part of the work in OPA reviews is not just the contact logs, but there are also other avenues of resolution for complaints that are not necessarily investigations.

And those in the past, up to last year, we're also reviewing a sample mode, as we as Council Member Herbold explained about the contact logs.

For this year, we're also doing exactly the same thing that with contact logs retroactively.

From January to now, we did a quarterly review, but the full review and starting next month, we are going to be able to do an individual check of those and having the same mobility that we're expecting with contact logs.

So bias reviews, mediations, and rapid adjudications, that I know sound very cryptic, but they're just other avenues of resolution, will be also reviewed individually as they happen.

So we can provide feedback to SPD and OPA if needed.

And going back to the OPA work, that has been the biggest challenge for our office, especially after 2020. So we are a new unit.

OIG has only existed for four years.

And the work of OPA, as we know it, has been only in place for the last three years and a half.

And 2020 put our system and our capacities under extreme stress.

So there were many challenges on how we did our work, and we have learned from them.

But one of the things that we did is commission a study from experts of what was not working with our processes, what are the pinpoints for how we do the OPA review, and how can we get better.

And based on that, we will have a report that will be made public soon.

Well, we will have a report.

We don't have a report yet.

But based on that, we will also work in improving our processes.

But meanwhile, while we were assessed by this expert, we start working on fixing our processes and learning how to respond, even in cases of large surges of work, like the one that were the result of 2020, that continue to go to 2021, and eventually, hopefully not now, but we will have to face at some point.

So what we learned is one, how to standardize our processes and policies and how to do the work, the review.

Two, how to put at the center of everything quality control.

How do we have the capacity to do and be standardized, but also to be able to review what we do internally.

And finally, and that is the last step we're working right now is We are creating all this information and we are doing all this work and how we make it available and how do we create enough information to be more transparent so people can see what we're doing.

And for that, we are working in creating a case management system, which is a software to put all the information that our OPA review team is creating.

And so we can be better in reporting now and letting the public and all the stakeholders know what is the status of our work.

And finally, this last part, collaborations, is at the heart of everything that we do at OIG.

So in our body of work, we continue to work with the consent decree items and the monitoring team.

And our team also has worked and engaged in giving feedback to the planning of the sustainment plan.

Two, we have work in the four areas and assessments.

And the ones that we have worked with is use of force, stops and detentions, discipline, and crisis intervention.

The ones that have the highest value of work based on audits that our unit created recently is discipline.

And we are also working in preparing a youth support report in collaboration with the monitoring plan.

I'm sorry, monitoring team.

The second body of work that we have also worked with our partners, CPC, monitoring team, and OPA is state legislative agenda.

Our office was highly interested in three items.

And those items were traffic stops, use of deception and use of force.

In those three areas, we collaborated with different stakeholders within the city, of course, our partners, but also we work with other departments like the Department of Transportation and OCR to identify what were the needs and how those aligned with the city.

And finally, we have been giving technical assistance to the ACLU And also, we gave testimony to one of those deals in the state legislative cycle this year.

And we are hoping to continue to collaborate, not just with the city stakeholders, but also with the ACLU and other entities in the future.

And finally, we have also been working in data collaborations.

And I know that that's a topic that is highly aligned between the three accountability partners.

because that is one of the main ask by community.

How do we create data that is reliable and transparent and accessible?

And in that area, we have been working with SPD and OPA and the monitoring team in creating a strategy of how to make public information by OPA and by SPD more accessible and easier to understand by community, and also how we make it more reliable.

So that is one of the items that are part of the monitoring plan that we will be continuing.

We already worked this year and we will continue to work the rest of the year and the years to come.

And just to close outreach, our office has been learning from the past years, the importance of outreach to always keep up the community needs at the center of our work.

So we have worked with multiple community groups to identify needs.

We have given and been given technical assistance by the ACLU, Innocence Project, Policy Project, and many other stakeholders.

And we have given more than 16 presentations regarding our policy work.

And also, we have had more than 20 different outreach activities, including with mothers youth that have lost their life to gun violence.

So we can learn from them and we can apply that to our work.

And finally, our team has been working in providing and learning, providing assistance, but also learning from the National Associations of Civilian Police Oversight.

Thank you, Miroslava.

Deputy Director, I should say.

This is a mid-year review on the work that you've been doing, and I don't want to spoil the soup, if you will, but I do want you to say a little bit, I know there's more to come later, but a little bit around, you know, OIG's functions is very much focused on reviewing and critiquing other parts of the system, but what about the efforts that OIG is engaged in internally?

and working on continuous improvement for your own practices?

Thank you so much.

That's a really good question.

One of the philosophies of OIGs and needs is if we are asked to be the oversight entity based on criteria to SBD and OPA, we have to do the same with ourselves.

There are two things that are we're doing.

One is in October of this year, all of our audit unit and audit products will be peer reviewed by the National Association that does the peer review.

So they will take each one of our audit work, audit papers, and identify if we are following national and federal standards.

And the other thing is based on that also applies for policy work.

The other area that we also needed to assess is our OPA work.

How do we do that review?

And for that, we hire a professional, a highly recognized professional that perform a review of our operations, our processes, and our issues up to last year.

One of the things that we are looking forward is how to also assess our current state and we have been responding to all those areas of opportunity and risk and errors.

Thank you and look forward to hearing more about that soon, I hope.

Fantastic.

I really appreciate it.

Now let's hand it over to OPA.

Thank you, Chair Herbold and council members for giving us this opportunity to present.

I'm going to share my screen.

Why am I not seeing?

And how are we doing on time?

Should I, we are planning to present 2021, just to recap, because I generally would present, you know, around this time of year, we present our annual report from the previous year.

Do you want me to speed through that and get to this year's mid-year report?

Or are we okay on time?

maybe expedite the 2020 recap.

And yeah, perfect.

Thank you so much.

Awesome.

Yeah.

And our annual report from last year, we published it in April.

It's available on our website under the news and reports page and then reports.

So all of this information is taken from that report.

So I will try to speed through this.

We do have our interim director here as well, Grania Perkins.

to answer questions at the end, so I want to make sure.

I know she has a commitment at noon, so I'm going to try to rush through the first half of this.

So we'll be presenting 2021 annual report, and then we'll be going into the mid-year 2022 presentation.

So each year for the past five years, because you'll see later when I present 2022's data, the number of complaints we've received has been decreasing.

It wasn't surprising that 2021 was a decrease over 2020 because the protests from 2020 produced a lot of complaints to our office.

And then 2021 was a much slower year.

There was the transfer of 911 and parking enforcement out of SPD.

So 911 communications went first in the spring of 2021. At the time, or prior to their transfer, there were seven cases that involved dispatchers.

and they involved 10 different communications employees.

And then parking enforcement left SPD and went under SDOT in the fall, I think in September of 2021. And at that time there were 25 cases involving 26 parking enforcement officers that OPA had been working on.

So after the transfer, all complaints are redirected to either the community safety and communication center or to SDOT to handle those complaints.

OPA no longer has jurisdiction over those.

Over one third of sworn employees received a complaint in 2021, so a total of 505 employees.

And as you can see, a majority of them just received one complaint.

And then several employees, as you can see, received more than one complaint.

The proportion of cases classified for full investigation has increased over the past several years.

So this is a comparison of OPAs classification types.

So on the far left, you'll see the three bars showing full investigations.

So those 38% of OPAs cases in 2021 were classified for full investigation with an additional 14% classified for expedited investigation.

So over half of our cases went to investigation.

which is higher than previous years.

The most common allegation was professionalism.

We received a total of 1,485 allegations last year.

So each case can have multiple employees and multiple allegations against each employee.

So that's why you'll see a high number of allegations compared to the total number of cases, which was in the 500s.

Use of force allegations specifically decreased.

It was 60% decrease over 2020. So in 2020, we had 358 excessive force allegations.

And in 2021, there were 140. And for further comparison, in 2020, use of force allegations were 19% of total allegations.

And in 2021, use of force was just 9% of all allegations.

So a significant decrease there.

98 employees were disciplined following OPA investigations.

As you can see kind of in the middle there, the little gray bar, three of those cases, we finished our investigation after the transfer of certain civilian employees, so parking enforcement and dispatchers out of SPD.

And so those employees were not disciplined by SPD.

Instead, the sustained findings were referred to their new units.

But besides that, the most common discipline that you'll see is written reprimand.

26% of completed investigations involved one or more sustained finding.

it's a little bit higher than typically, right?

In past years, I remember it sort of hovering around one in five for several years.

Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, I think even in 2018, it was something around 18%.

So each year it's kind of gotten slightly higher.

And last year was the highest that we've seen in recent years.

One case containing two sustained allegations was overturned by the chief.

Many of you would recall that's the pink umbrella case.

From the 2020 protests, so there was one employee to sustained allegations that employee was not disciplined because the chief overturned those findings and made them not sustain train referral.

One other point that is jogging my memory about this particular requirement, there's a requirement in the Seattle Municipal Code that when the chief overturns recommended discipline, that there's a public notification requirement.

We, through the Office of the Inspector General, have a recommendation that there be transparency when The discipline ordered by the chief is out of range of what is recommended by the discipline committee.

And just wanna flag that as a high priority for transparency and oversight of the system as well.

Thank you.

Most appeals were filed through arbitration.

We're still open.

So this is a graph that's going to be showing all appeals since 2016. That's the earliest that OPA has the data from the city attorney's office.

And I think 95% of appeals filed from 2016 through 2021 were filed through arbitration.

And then the fact that 93 of those are still open and just eight are closed is pretty telling.

We issued policy recommendations on 22 areas of SPD policy.

So I'm just gonna highlight a few of those.

High risk vehicle stops, responding to subjects with knives, surveillance, and using vehicles as deadly weapons.

So using a vehicle to ram a human body and then canine deployment.

And those are just some of the areas that we continue to work on with SPD.

As it relates to the recommendations for subjects with non-lives, I know that SPD has been working on piloting the BOLAWRAP and I know that there had been some delay because the BOLAWRAP when used makes a very loud noise that could sound to some like a gunshot and so SPD said We need a modification in this product because we don't want to escalate things.

And I believe my most recent inquiry of Chief Diaz is that Borap had made a modification.

But just wondering, what can you tell us about rolling out that pilot?

So, actually all the accountability partners were invited to a demo of the bola wrap this spring, and we got to test it out, it does make a loud noise that kind of sounds like a gunshot.

If you're not familiar with hearing gunshots you it would sound like a gunshot.

We did get to see the BOLAWRAP in action.

I was not aware of the sound modification to it.

I know in addition to this BOLAWRAP demo that SPD has a new edged weapons training that they've been rolling out.

It's been going on since May.

So they're tackling this area, this MAR through a couple different trainings.

In addition to the BOLAWRAP pilot, there's the edged weapons training.

But on the bullwrap, the question is, when will those be, if you know?

When will they begin deployment?

Yeah, I'm not sure about that.

It's been sort of, I participated in a, the 2021 demonstration that many of the accountability partners participated in, and I know there was another one this past spring.

So this has been an ongoing area and just really, oh, look at that.

COO Maxey here.

Maybe he can give us some information on the implementation of ORAP.

I thought I'd thank you.

I just thought I'd give a quick update.

So we actually were finalizing the policy this morning.

We have volunteers.

We have the units ready for deployment.

I know there's going to be a final pass back through labor just to ensure that we haven't missed anything.

But once all of that gets done, we should be able to, I mean, we will be implementing it immediately once we clear that last hurdle.

Fantastic.

All boxes are checked.

We appreciate it.

It's great.

Thank you.

So we also updated the OPA manual for the first time in several years.

It reflects a lot of changes, including changes from the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

We collaborated with stakeholders, including OIG, CPC, the DOJ, SPD, all of those parties were invited to review the draft of it and then provide feedback.

We worked very closely with OIG before finalizing it.

And this manual formalizes programs, policies, and organizational changes.

It's quite different than our previous manual and we're very happy with it.

So now I'll be moving on into our 2022 mid-year data.

So we have an interim administration right now, as you're aware, that started in late January.

The number of complaints continues to decrease as I was showing in our first slide.

So we've received 205 cases in the first half of 2022. So that's through the end of June, which would put us on track to receive in the low 400s if we were to receive the same amount of complaints in the second half of this year, which would be a little more than 100 fewer complaints than last year.

Three quarters of complaints came from community members that we've received this year.

I'll click on that.

So three quarters of complaints come from community members that would lead one to believe that about a quarter of complaints come from within the department.

How does that compare to past year's trends?

I seem to remember it's normally about a third coming from within the department.

So this is actually a different data point.

I'm glad you asked.

It's a different data point than we've presented in the past.

So we found a new working in our database that would allow us to track specifically complaints where the community member is the source of the complaint.

So if you recall, we previously talked about it in terms of internal versus external complaints, and an internal complaint could be forwarded by an SPD employee on behalf of a community member.

In the past, we've considered that an internal complaint.

Like if a community member in the field tells an officer, I want you to forward this to OPA, We have counted that in the past as an internal complaint.

And now that is going to be considered an external or community member complaint.

So it's actually, it's a higher number of community member complaints.

I don't know if it's actually different than what it would have been given our older data was not calculating it the same way.

I would say this is just a more accurate number that three quarters of complaints are not filed by officers coming from an officer and then one quarter are coming from an SPD employee.

So we've classified 60% of cases for investigation.

That would include an full investigation and expedited, so it's about 10% higher than what we did last year, although we're only halfway through the year this year.

At the current moment, we still have 13 cases in intake.

Those should be classified within the next week, and we would assume that half or more than half given that 60% are classified for investigation.

More of those are going to go to investigation as well.

So investigation percentages are definitely increasing.

7% of all allegations have been for use of force this year.

So if you see here, use of force is the fifth most common allegation, whereas it was the third most common last year.

And last year, I think I said use of force was 9% of all allegations.

So a slight decrease here.

And then we also wanted to take a moment to talk about abbreviated DCMs.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with those.

You might've been briefed.

Due to critical staffing shortages, particularly in our leadership, managerial and administrative side, starting June 1st and then going through at least October 1st, OPA will be issuing abbreviated DCMs for not sustained cases.

So what those look like, are going to be, it'll say not sustained abbreviated on the DCM.

And sorry, DCMs are director's certification memos.

So those are the findings reports.

So those will say not sustained abbreviated, and they will have condensed analysis of the findings.

And then OPA, once we have the staffing and we've been able to train our new director and our new supervisors who have just started, We will then go back and reissue those findings with more analysis, expanded analysis.

There's currently no impact and there will not be any impact to sustained cases.

So those are still going to have the full analysis.

And this is in compliance with the accountability ordinance and the OPA manual.

We've made sure of that.

It's just due to the staffing shortages that we're having right now.

We don't have the capacity to write out the full analysis as we usually would.

And I appreciate Interim Director Perkins having informed me as well as other partners within the accountability system and stakeholders being informed of this change.

I would love to hear from you.

to get a sense of, I mean, I know what the regular full DCMs look like, but I'd love to get a sense of what an abbreviated DCM looks like, what it means to have a condensed summary.

Just want to understand what baseline information is included in these abbreviated DCMs for a later date, you can follow up on that.

Thank you.

Yeah, of course.

And I believe that's the end of our presentation.

And if I'm not mistaken, Interim Director Perkins might still be here, if you did want to ask that question.

I want to thank her.

Interim Director Perkins, thank you so much for stepping in.

I believe it was back in January.

You've been doing incredibly good work with so many challenges and really appreciate your ongoing service.

But of course, as always, if you have anything to add, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Ask an Irish woman to speak in three minutes.

I could take another hour, if given the opportunity.

Sincerely, thanks very much for those comments, Council Member Herbold.

It's always nice to be appreciated.

And on that note, I'm going to take the last minute, really, if I could.

I need you to indulge me to thank Lauren Caputo.

I'm unfortunately losing another staff member.

She's been poached, and I'm glad Brian Maxey's on the call because he's going to benefit from Lauren has gone back to SPD, her original home, and they're going to benefit from her data analysis.

Lauren really, I know, has presented on behalf of Andrew Myerberg as well at these presentations to City Council and has done a fantastic job.

So I just publicly would like to get that on the record to thank Lauren for all her work and her continued work, no doubt, in SPD.

Thank you.

Well, I don't consider it poaching if you're still in the city family and still focused on doing good work and promoting accountability and transparency and public trust in policing.

So thank you, Lauren.

And let's see, we know that the mayor has appointed a permanent director of the OPA, Gino Betz.

His first appearance before the committee will be scheduled for the August 9th meeting.

We'll be circulating a schedule for the discussions as well as collecting council member questions that they are interested in posing to the new permanent director of the OPA.

With that, are there any additional questions from my colleagues?

Seeing none, thank you again, everybody, for being here with us.

Just want to remind folks that there is a National Weather Service excessive heat warning for Seattle this week due to forecasted high temperatures above 90 degrees.

Tomorrow, temperatures in the low to mid 90s will, actually, they will begin today and will continue through the week.

please visit the city's website to find cooling center locations and other resources.

The next Public Safety and Human Services Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, August 9th, 2022 at 9.30 AM.

And before we adjourn, there are no other comments from my colleagues.

Not seeing any.

The time is 11.59 and we are adjourned.

Thank you.

Recording stopped.