Seattle City Council Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans & Education Committee 1/23/19

Good morning.

Today is Wednesday, January 23, 2019. It is 10.01 a.m.

This is our regularly scheduled meeting of the Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans, and Education Committee.

I'm Council Member Lorena Gonzalez, chair of this committee, and joining me this morning is Council Member Rob Johnson.

Thanks for being here.

There are two items on today's agenda.

First, we're going to hear from the Office of Inspector General for Public Safety as they present their 2019 work plan.

Then we will receive a briefing from the Office of Emergency Management, Seattle Police Department, and the Seattle Fire Department on the emergency 911 system outage that occurred December 27th and 28th of 2018 for CenturyLink customers.

As usual, we always start our committee hearings with a public comment period.

So I will call out each individual's name from the list.

You will have two minutes to provide us public testimony on an item on the agenda.

And we have one person who signed up in advance to provide us with some public testimony, and that is Alex Zimmerman.

Hi, my name is Alex Zimmerman.

I'm president of Stand Up America.

I want to speak about this new department.

What is her name?

I always forget a little bit.

Inspector Seattle Office of the Inspector General.

I spoke with these people for the last six months, twice.

We have a situation that is very unique, and from my understanding, I never see like this before.

Not in Seattle, not in King Country, nowhere.

and I live, have experience with police for many times.

We don't have a public comment to Seattle Police Commissioner, unique situation.

For four years, I spoke about this and talk about this.

I spoke with them, with this Inspector General right now, twice, nothing comes through.

And I spoke about this and I go to police commissioner, for last four year, dozen and dozen time.

Almost every time when I don't have trespass.

Guys, situation very unique.

We have very critical situation with police in Seattle, police commissioner don't have public comment.

Last hearing before this police contract, it's a 20 people inside, officer, judges, another government, and I ask everybody, guys, how is this possible?

We have a public commissioner.

Seattle police commissioner, and if we don't have a public comment, how is this possible?

Guys, who we are?

We are a fascist.

We are a Nazi, call me fascist, with Nazi Gestapo principle.

I cannot understand this.

How is this possible?

One commission, one commission, one commission don't have public comment, totally, for four years.

And I spoke about this a thousand times.

Stand up, America.

We need to clean this Dory chamber from this crook.

All right, is there anyone else who would like to offer us public testimony that might be remotely useful?

Seeing no one, we will close out the public comment period, and I will go ahead and invite those folks who are here to make a presentation on the first agenda item to join us at the table, and I will ask Roxanna to read the first agenda item into the record.

Agenda item one, Office of Inspector General 2019 Work Plan for Briefing and Discussion.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and do a quick round of introductions and then I'll hand it over to you all for the presentation.

Greg Doss, Central Staff.

Good morning, Lisa Judge, Inspector General.

Amy Tsai, Deputy Inspector General.

Okay, and I think there's a PowerPoint presentation.

Let's see if we can get that fired up before we get started.

And then Greg, were you intending on making any introductory remarks before we hand it over?

I can say really quickly that the Office of the Inspector General has created an Ordinance 125315, which you all passed in June of last year.

We're here today to talk about their work plan.

which is a review of upcoming work items including those that OPA and CPC have made requests for audits on and I'm gonna leave it at those quick comments and and leave the rest to Inspector Judge to talk about.

Hold on a minute we're having some technical difficulties.

Before we get started we'll go ahead and deal with the PowerPoint presentation projection.

And if we need to proceed without it, I'm fine.

Oh, I'm sure we can get it fixed.

Did you have some introductory remarks before we dig into?

I do have a few.

So why don't we go ahead and do that.

Pardon me?

Why don't we go ahead and do that, have your introduction.

That's great.

There we go.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to come and talk about our 2019 work plan for you.

We're very excited about the projects that we've got on tap for you and I just want to say there's probably nobody outside of my office that knows more about the Office of Inspector General than this committee, but I do have some sort of exposition in the beginning of my presentation for those who aren't so familiar.

I'll just beg your indulgence for a few minutes while I work through the first parts of the PowerPoint slide.

Of course.

But when we get into it, I don't know if you want to hold questions until after, and I will try to be mindful of the clock and reserve as much time as possible for questions and discussion.

But I'm certainly, if you want to stop at certain slides and have a discussion or ask questions, that's perfectly great too.

Well, we'll go ahead and dig into the presentation, and if either I or Councilmember Johnson have questions that we're just dying to ask in the moment, we'll make sure to do that.

But we're also, I think, perfectly fine queuing up questions till the end of the presentation as well.

Great.

Thank you.

So we have finally gotten the office up and running.

And as you can see, we're part of the three accountability partners that have been set up in the legislation to provide really comprehensive oversight of Seattle Police Department and, as a corollary, the Office of Police Accountability.

So we're right there.

in the middle providing the avenue for systemic review of the Seattle Police Department and assessment of the efficacy of OPA operations concerning individual investigations.

So just a little aside, we have spent the last seven or eight months really figuring out how to work with our partners and getting to know them and establishing good relationships.

I guess that's really all I want to say about the system now, and we'll dig right into the Office of Inspector General and our part of this.

So what we have committed to doing as our mission is supporting constitutional, informed, and compassionate policing.

And we're trying to do that by really focusing on research, science, and the significant amounts of data that SPD collects and aggregates.

And also by really engaging with community police commission and our community partners to make sure that we're prioritizing and informing our work in a way that takes into account community needs and interests.

So just a little bit about Office of Inspector General.

Just to be very clear, we're a new office.

We've only been up and running since May of 2018 and really operational in terms of having some staff since about June.

So it's a fairly short time frame.

And in that time frame, we've been able to, I think, on board some very impressive folks with some skills and abilities that I think are going to be very well put to use for the city of Seattle.

And we've got an organizational model that maximizes everyone's potential and will produce some good things for the city of Seattle.

So we're new.

We're neutral.

This is really a critical component and was really quite well thought out in terms of the establishment of the office, creating us as neutral and independent.

It's really a critical feature of being able to conduct audits, which is a central function of OIG under government accepted audit standards.

So we have adopted the GAGIS format for our formal audits and neutrality and independence is just simply critical to that function.

I just wanted to highlight those and the last bullet is also probably just as important.

We have been empowered with full and unfettered access to all of SPD operations.

I can't understate the importance of that in terms of having access to information, to data, personnel, facilities, everything that we need to be able to go in and really do deep dives into SPD operations.

Here is our new and improved org chart.

It has changed since the beginning of the office a little bit.

So as you can see, it's really divided into four main categories of functions of the office, largely supervised by Deputy Inspector General Amy Sighs.

We've got an auditing function, an investigations function, a policy and data section, and just sort of a general category of operations which will house our comms and outreach.

And eventually, if we grow big enough that we need to have independent finance and HR operations, those will go under that umbrella.

Currently, those functions are being handled by our Executive Assistant, Ms. Rita Santiago.

So what I'd like to do now is really go into each of those functions and talk specifically about what they're doing, and then get into our work plan immediately after that.

So we've divided up our areas of work into these basic functions.

And the first one I'll talk about is the audit function.

And that tends to have more of a historical focus on SPD operations.

So what our auditors go in and do is try to determine what SPD is doing and whether or not it's working, whether it's effective, whether it's efficient.

And in those analyses, if improvements can be made to the system to make things better for SPD.

So that's probably meat and potatoes function of any inspector general office and certainly is of ours.

One thing that's a little bit unique to us is the OPA classification and investigation review function.

So this is...

This person is sort of under the auspices of our audit section, but their focus is primarily on reviewing OPA classifications and reviewing OPA investigations to make sure that classifications are being done appropriately and that investigations are thorough, timely, and they're They are being conducted in a manner that community and the city expects from the Office of Police Accountability.

So the great thing that I want to highlight about the OPA position is this is an opportunity for real-time feedback during an investigation of misconduct so that there's a set of outside eyes looking at a misconduct investigation and being able to redirect investigation, request additional investigation, and course correct at a critical juncture in an investigation process before it's too late and the ship has sailed in terms of an investigation or a finding of misconduct.

So that's very critical.

The function of our office that's probably most near and dear to my heart is the policy review and best practices focus of our office.

And that's really the opportunity for SPD and Seattle to move beyond the status quo in terms of practices and policy and really get out there and look at what's on the horizon and what's possible.

for policing to advance the profession and really help give officers additional tools and skills and abilities to deliver quality constitutional police services to the people of Seattle.

Finally, and this is the function of our office, it's still in COET, we're in the process of hiring a comms and outreach person right now, but this will be very critical in terms of establishing a two-way feedback loop between OIG and community so that our work will also be informed and prioritized consistently with community concerns.

So I just wanted to talk a little bit more about OPA classification and investigation review and give you a snapshot of some of the workload and how this shakes out.

And I'm not sure if you want any additional information about what constitutes classification versus investigation, but I'm happy to provide that if you'd like.

I'm pretty familiar with what the delineations are.

Council Member Johnson, do you need?

Okay.

Okay, great.

All right, so just some numbers here.

In 2017, OPA was contacted with community complaints 1,325 times in 2017.

So that translates into our OPA auditor having to review over more than 1,300 classifications.

I don't have the current numbers for last year, but I would imagine that they're probably fairly similar.

The ordinance provides that these classification reviews will be done not in real time, but as an audit, a quarterly audit.

by random sampling.

We have not moved to that model yet.

We're in the process of moving to that model.

What we wanted to do was make sure that there was a seamless transition between the old method of reviewing classifications and moving to a new method where we didn't miss anything in the interim.

So we've continued on with that review of every single classification until now.

And we're just about to make the shift to audits rather than every classification being reviewed.

And when is that transition going to occur?

It should be by the end of Q1.

Yeah, and Amy, I don't know if you have any...

or current information about that?

I think we're still on target with that.

We have our OPA specialist who is currently looking at those classifications, and we are working through her recommendations.

Tito, the former OPA auditor, is also going to be generating a final report of what he has seen throughout the course of his tenure for the last few years.

And so we'll look at that as a body.

and then look at whether and how and how quickly we can move to quarterly migration, but that's definitely the goal to hit it by the end of Q1.

So you expect to get the former OPA auditor's report sometime this quarter?

Yes, that's expected in mid-February.

Okay.

And then once you do the quarterly reviews, what is that, what's the ultimate work product there?

The ultimate work product is we will aggregate information from those reviews that included in our annual report and reports to council.

We will also, you know, look at those for trends that we need to be paying attention to.

And if we're seeing in our audits something concerning about classifications not being done appropriately, we can and have the authority to move back to individual case-by-case classification reviews.

So it will be an assessment of all of those.

Great, thank you.

All right, so of the classifications that came in in 2017, OPA wound up conducting investigations in 34% of those, or 448. So of those, we're required to review all of those investigations, including the underlying evidence and any supporting information, and decide if it was thorough, timely, and appropriately done.

And that's work that is ongoing currently.

That is currently work that is being done by OIG.

We're in the process of hiring one additional auditor slash investigator that will be a hybrid position so there's some backup for our OPA auditor because that's it's a significant amount of of work for one person.

And we don't want to have a single point of failure with that one person.

So we want to have an additional body there, you know, somebody who's able to do that work and can share the load with our OPA investigator.

So just In our OPA evaluation, the things that we will be including in our annual report that I mentioned are the effectiveness of that complaint system as a whole in achieving fair outcomes both for community members who complain, and four officers, and fostering respectful policing.

We'll be looking for trends in those claims, lawsuits, and OPA complaint outcomes.

And we are going to be implementing tracking measures for the discipline process, for arbitration results, and for litigation.

So we'll be looking at those all four trends that we need to be paying attention to.

One of the things that I haven't heard you mention is, I heard you say arbitration and What was the other thing you said?

The complaint process, discipline process.

Yeah, but part of what is memorialized in the new contracts with both SPMA and SPOG are the agreement to rapid adjudication and to also have a more robust, meaningful mediation program.

Will those also be areas that the IG will be monitoring for trends?

Yes, every aspect of the complaint system, the discipline system, and all of the various tentacles that flow out from that will be certainly areas that we track, monitor, and look at for trends.

Great.

Thanks.

Okay.

And the other thing I want to make sure that I mention there was the last bullet on that slide.

is we are required by the ordinance to assess the efficacy of the civilian sworn mix at OPA.

And I think we're not at a place where there is sufficient data to do that yet, but we will start, we will undertake the beginnings of that audit this year, probably in Q4.

Okay.

A little bit about the audit process, and I don't want to belabor this too much, but because of our staffing levels and really the magnitude of issues that we could potentially be looking at at SPD, we've chosen to use a risk assessment approach to decide to prioritizing and identifying our audit topics.

And so what we do is we identify areas of concern and we look at the likelihood that those might occur and the potential for significant negative impact if they did.

And so we've got a matrix, and it was included in the work plan, of how we assess and prioritize the audits that we want to take on immediately.

I mentioned that we use the generally accepted government audit standards method for our audits.

So when OIG says that we've conducted an audit, it is done by those yellow book standards.

Anything short of that, which certainly occurs in my office, depending on the nature of the research we're doing or the availability of data.

We may choose other methods to assess things.

We may do reviews or studies, but an audit for our office means it's been done by federal GAGIS standards.

We think that's important because it adds a level of rigor, integrity, objectivity, and independence to OIG audits.

It, I think, makes them able to stand up to outside scrutiny and hopefully engenders confidence in community that we are independent and following rigorous standards for audits.

But, you know, there are There are things that get in the way of being able to do a strict GAGUS review, so we're also flexible and able to utilize our personnel and resources in other ways.

Because audits also take a lot of time.

I will, if you would like, provide you with our current audit schedule that shows the time frames that we're on.

You can see in terms of determining the scope of work and doing the background necessary, the work, and then the write-up.

It can take two to four months to conduct one.

I think that would be helpful and I appreciate the offer and I think we could easily amend the work the 2019 work plan that you have submitted to us for committee with sort of just an appendix that talks about what those schedules are for those special projects and other audits that have been identified within the work plan.

I think that would be really helpful and an important part of the transparency and accountability to both us but also more importantly to the general public who has a lot of expectations and excitement about the work that you all are going to undergo.

I also wanted to just quickly mention or sort of note that you have mentioned several times the auditing principles that are going to be guiding the audit work of the IG.

When we were researching how to best structure the Office of Inspector General and had an opportunity to visit several other cities who had adopted an Inspector General model within their police accountability systems, One of the things that we walked away with was the impression that this office is a little different than a lot of the other Inspector General offices that currently exist across the country.

And I say that because a lot of the Office of Inspector General offices that exist across the country were not solely focused, for the most part, on just police accountability and policing law enforcement related issues.

So they dealt with a variety of auditing requests in just about every single agency within that particular jurisdiction.

And so I think while it's important for us to have some standards that we are applying for consistency and for the rigor of the audit, and for the integrity of the audits.

I also think that having some level of flexibility to be nimble and to modify some of those auditing principles that are better suited for the office and for the type of work that you all will be doing is going to be really important.

Absolutely, and I would just add to that that one of the probably the most critical component of a GAGIS audit is independence.

And so to the extent that I or my office is intimately involved in any sort of operation or drafting of policy or something, it then impinges on that independence and the ability to do a strict GAGIS audit.

You know, many of the topics where I'm doing day-to-day work with SPD, it will necessarily involve a review or a study afterward to assess efficacy rather than an audit because of that more direct involvement with SPD.

But you're right, the flexibility is really critical.

Okay, so the planned audits that we have two are required by ordinance and two are audits that we've identified through our risk matrix analysis in conjunction with input from our accountability partners.

So the first is the police intelligence.

audit that is required by the Municipal Code Chapter 14.12.

We initiated this review in Q4 of 2018, so that is currently underway, and we expect a report forthcoming in the next couple months.

The surveillance review is not yet underway, but will soon be underway.

That is also required by ordinance, and it will cover 2018 activities of SPD.

So it's due in January 2020, but I would anticipate that we will have that for you well before 2020. The first of our performance audits that we've identified is an audit that takes a look at operations that are conducted in the context of mutual aid agreements or special commission operations of officers.

So I think with the efforts of the monitoring team and Department of Justice, there's a lot of focus on SPD officers in patrol in terms of use of force numbers, how they deal with mentally ill persons, their policy with regard to immigrants.

All of those things are fairly well documented and they're being scrutinized in some way, but when officers are engaged in task forces with other operations, it's not entirely clear how that information is tracked, if it's tracked, and so what we want to take a look at are those kinds of operations that are occurring in the context of a task force or someplace where officers are engaging in law enforcement activities not under the direct supervision of an SPD supervisor.

Does that include cooperation with federal agencies such as the Homeland Security Investigations?

Yes.

Yeah, so all of that will be swept in.

And I'll talk a little bit about it later when I talk about the input for our work plan that we got from our partners.

But that was something that we folded in in terms of CPC's recommendation about immigration status.

And so we're trying to capture information there in the context of task forces.

Because I think it's captured fairly well elsewhere in regular SPD operations.

And can you explain to us just briefly why, sort of why the IG office has selected this particular area as part of its focus for 2019?

How did you come to this decision to include it?

It has a lot of feed-ins and I think it's a good phase one audit to get us familiarized with a variety of topics that we intend to audit in terms of officers working under special commissions.

And I think it then starts to feed into secondary employment issues.

It definitely covers asking about immigration status and cooperation with other outside entities.

It touches on use of force issues that are not currently being tracked under regular SPD operations.

So it has a lot of high risk, high negative impact components in one fairly concrete group set of data, so we can take that data and then extrapolate it and turn it into other audits that have correlative but different focuses.

Okay, hopefully that explains it well enough for you.

Our other identified audit for this year, and What I would like to say is that as these finish and we identify other topics, we haven't included any more audits in our work plan now, but that doesn't mean that we won't be identifying and amending our work plan to include more audits.

But we want to see what comes from these two and what issues may arise in the coming Q1 and Q2 periods that may rise to the top of our priority level.

And one of the last slides I'll talk about are some of the horizon projects that we have.

So those may very well become audits that are conducted in Q3 or Q4 of this year, or we may identify other topics that are of much higher risk or priority for us than that.

So the last one that we've identified so far is an audit of retention and staffing.

And obviously, you know, that's been a huge issue for SPD about trying to understand the factors involved in why officers are leaving, whether officers are truly leaving at rates that we believe they are.

And so we want to really take a deep dive into that and understand that issue in its entirety.

And then I think Next step, obviously, is after that looking at hiring and hiring practices and figuring out, okay, now that we know what makes people go out the door and how many people are going out the door, what can we understand about what will bring people in the door who are qualified and committed to being police officers and SPD personnel?

So I see that on the horizon as a corollary audit for this.

And I think some people might look at the office's intention to audit retention and staffing as unusual or a disconnect.

So explain to us and the viewing public why looking at retention and staffing falls within the rubric of the work of this office.

Sure.

It has frequently come up in topics in just about every meeting where there are discussions about what is happening at SPD, the discussion about how they're really losing and attriting and having people leave for other agencies, and that it's really having an incredibly detrimental effect on patrol staffing.

on potentially moving bodies around at SPD to accommodate for movement back into patrol staffing.

And so we are trying to get some sort of objective handle on the true state of affairs and what, if anything, can be done to better understand and address it and do something about it.

So I think it does have an immediate impact on community and delivery of police services if you don't have enough people out there to take calls and to respond to violent crime and handle the law enforcement responsibilities that SPD has.

So I think that sounds to me to be a very critical need for both SPD and community.

Okay, special projects.

These are really the kind of more policy-driven projects that we've initiated or that we're about to embark on this year.

So we have already begun work on working in collaboration with SPD and with a variety of other partners.

This is really a fascinating project and I think a good one.

Just in terms of collaboration to really talk about and tout, there's been a lot of work done with regard to interviewing witnesses and victims of crimes.

And social scientists have developed a lot of techniques and better understanding about how how to really extract memory and how to extract good, reliable information from victims and witnesses.

And there's now starting to become a focus on using those techniques and that science to also elicit information from suspects.

This is a really exciting time to work with SPD and with social scientists and people, frankly, in the criminal justice system who have been trying to move these sorts of ideas forward for years about giving officers better tools for interviewing suspects and witnesses and victims based on the science of memory and cognition and human just human psychology.

So it's really a project about taking some fairly innovative interview techniques and making them part of SPD's arsenal for interviewing suspects and investigating crimes.

So we've worked with CPC to start this up.

We've had meetings with the National Innocence Project in New York, with Innocence Project Northwest here, with ACLU, and with SPD.

And so we're in the process now of bringing out one of the experts that we've identified as a potential partner to meet with SPD, do a presentation, and start figuring out what the game plan looks like moving forward with policy development and training development.

pretty exciting project for me.

We moved forward last year with a recommendation to SPD about engaging in a peer intervention program, and so the recommendation, and we're working with them to develop this, is a training and A program in which officers are given tools and techniques almost to de-escalate with each other.

De-escalation is certainly critically important in dealing with members of community and others.

But I don't think officers always feel comfortable.

And again, this is based on social science research with intervening with each other.

Because there are sometimes feelings like you're You're infringing on somebody else's authority, or you're overstepping your bounds.

And so a peer intervention program is a way to give officers techniques and permission to step in and help each other out when they need to de-escalate each other to basically keep to provide a backstop from, let's say, losing your temper or engaging in rude or unprofessional conduct because you're a human being and your buttons have been pushed.

And so we're working with them to develop that.

The last item that I'm hoping to further explore in 2019 is some sort of systemic review of critical incidents that occur at SPD, whether it's officer-involved shootings, pursuits that involve significant injuries or deaths, large-scale demonstrations where significant force is used, all of those kinds of things, having some sort of panel or review board set up with heavy community involvement and experts that really pick apart and analyze the systems that were involved to the extent there was a negative event to try to improve those systems to reduce the likelihood of a similar negative event in the future.

So hoping to get that off the ground, at least with some significant discussions early in 2019.

So, the way that the presentation is structured and your work plan is structured as a whole, there is a distinction between audits and then special projects.

The audits are, in large part, areas that are mandated by The police accountability ordinance that we passed in 2017, you made reference to two of those areas, the requirements to provide us a report and an evaluation and audit on the police intelligence.

components of the work that SPD does, and then the surveillance ordinance review.

And then there was a couple of other planned audits that are included there that aren't necessarily mandated by the ordinance.

And then we have the special projects area, which I'm assuming flow from the ordinances authority to allow whoever the Inspector General is to choose areas of his or her preference to prioritize in terms of the office's body of work for that coming year.

Is that, is my understanding correct?

These are, these are the special projects that we're seeing here around interrogation practices, peer intervention, sentinel event review, These are projects that are priorities for you as the Inspector General.

Yes.

Yeah.

As I perceive them to be, you know, paying attention to what's going on around the country and conversations around innovations, I think these are areas where SPD and Seattle could push forward and go beyond what is currently being done, you know, in most police departments and try to innovate and do some things that bring more community involvement.

to SPD operations that I think bring better practices that are grounded in science to SPD to improve the tools that they have to do their jobs.

So that's where those are grounded in.

But yeah, I believe the authority to do that is as you stated.

OK.

So maybe what you can do, and you've kind of alluded to this a little bit in your remarks right now, is explain to us why you think these are the three areas that should be further explored and assessed in 2019 and what experiences you bring to bear to allow this work to be successful in 2019 and ultimately, sort of what's the work product here?

What are we, you know, one of the things that we're trying to move away from that existed quite prevalently in the former iteration of the police accountability system is the generation of reports for the sake of generating reports that then went and sat on a shelf somewhere but were never implemented and nobody did anything with them and they weren't tracked.

And so I do not want us to get into the habit of, engaging in that past practice.

So I'd like to get an understanding of what are the work product outcomes?

What is it that the IG is trying to accomplish by virtue of prioritizing these special projects?

And again, sort of what experience do you bring to bear as the first IG for the city that will allow these special projects to be successful?

Sure.

With regard to the first interrogation practices, I think this really came to a head for me back when I was working as a police lawyer a couple of years, I think it's been a couple of years now, a case from Illinois that was really one of the first in my recollection to acknowledge the use of deception in an interrogation of a suspect as being violative of that person's constitutional rights.

And so it really kind of It highlighted something that I think has been bubbling and in some ways has been a huge issue in other jurisdictions with using deception and with using coercive tactics and certain schools of thought of interrogation to get information from suspects.

And that sometimes resulting in wrongful confessions and wrongful convictions.

Including juveniles.

including juveniles, especially juveniles.

I think they're especially susceptible to that kind of pressure and coercion.

So I don't believe that it is a problem here in Seattle, but what has come out of a lot of this is a lot of research and science about how human beings remember things and how they tell stories and at what points in in time, memory is maybe clearer or whatever.

And I think using that science to make the way SPD solicits information and gets information to investigate crimes is really critical.

Why wouldn't you use good science to inform how you interrogate and investigate a crime in the same way that you would use emerging forensic science if it came out to your advantage to solve crimes.

There's no reason not to use innovations in that way to make crime solving better and more accurate and reduce the likelihood that innocent people will in some way be swept up and punished for something they didn't do.

So to me, it's always been very critical.

It's an opportunity because the consent decree actions have so largely focused on patrol.

Patrol is, I think, born the brunt of most of the changes that have come through in the consent decree.

And this is really a project that focuses a little bit on the investigative functions of SPD, so detectives, folks like that, and gives them a little bit of something to do and gives all of them additional tools and skills to be able to, I think, work smarter and better to solve crime.

So you currently, this is more of an opportunity to clean up or make sure that there is some sort of standardized set of interrogation processes and training for officers that engage in investigations, but you're not putting this on the list for special projects because you believe that there is a pattern in practice or a trend of inappropriate unconstitutional interrogation processes at the department.

That is correct.

Now, if you spoke with my partners at CPC, they might have a different opinion about that.

And this is a project that we've undertaken in conjunction with CPC because they also have a strong interest in this topic.

I think they probably have different ideas about why it's necessary.

than I do, and I don't want to unfairly state their position or misstate their position, but from my perspective, it's about giving officers better tools and using what I feel like is fairly cutting-edge information that, for some reason, is not gaining wide acceptance here in the United States, but in other areas like the UK, is widely used to great success.

It would be helpful to have a better understanding, Lisa, about the differentiation between the audits and other work programs that are outlined in the authorizing legislation and what are interesting projects that you feel need to be prioritized but aren't necessarily part of the work program that was identified.

ballpark for us how much of the work that you're planning to do in 2019 is clearly laid out in the authorizing legislation and definitely part of the requirements that you need to perform as part of the duties of serving as IG and then what percentage is interesting projects that are important for us to understand and evaluate further but have more discretion.

Well, actually, I think that there is a fair amount of discretion built into the ordinance in terms of projects for IG.

There are certain audits that are mandated.

There are certain topic areas that are suggested and that we have a responsibility for, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that there is a requirement that it's done on any sort of delineated basis.

What Officer of Inspector General also has an obligation to do is keep an eye out for best practices and for moving the department forward in areas that we believe are critical to public confidence, to transparency.

and to community needs.

And I think that you would be hard pressed to find anybody who would say that wrongful convictions and false confessions, especially with vulnerable populations, juveniles, there may be other cultural factors that come into play.

in an interrogation where people are being swept up into the criminal justice system, perhaps wrongly, through perhaps no one's fault, but just a poor understanding of science and human nature.

And so I think that really is a, it's not just a vanity project for me because I think it's neat.

I think it is critical to the trust that community has in their police department, that the police department is using the best information and science and tools available to investigate and solve crime in a way that's fair and constitutional.

So I don't think any of these things that are on this list are just simply discretionary.

I think there are things that the Office of Inspector General believes are important tools for SPD to have to move forward in the framework of providing constitutional, respectful, compassionate policing.

I would say, Council Member Johnson, that there are, again, a very small number of clearly enumerated required responsibilities of auditing and investigation that has to, at a minimum, be done by the Inspector General.

There is a broader category of items that the IG would like to prioritize in the sort of special projects area that is largely left to the discretion of the Inspector General.

And this is our opportunity as council members and members of this committee to have a first view and hearing of what the Inspector General proposes to prioritize and to get a better understanding of what her thinking is as to why those areas need to be prioritized.

The enabling legislation also allows the city council to add to the work plan or otherwise modify her work plan.

if it deems that it's, if we deem that that's the appropriate thing for us to do.

And so this is a first opportunity for us to have a conversation around getting a more robust understanding of your thinking as to why these items made it onto the list and how you expect to advance that work in a way that is successful and fruitful and actually produces something besides a report.

And it's also our opportunity to sort of walk away with that information and think a little bit more concretely about what we as a city council think about your work plan and what we might want to also include in the work plan.

We haven't gotten to this section quite yet, but it's coming up.

But there's also a requirement in the ordinance that requires the inspector general to solicit projects from the other accountability entities and to tell us, as a city council, those projects that were accepted or rejected or tabled for whatever reason.

So we're going to have an opportunity to hear.

from you here pretty quickly what some of those decisions were and why.

Okay, and just quickly, some of these, the Peer Intervention Program is, I think, fairly low-hanging fruit with high yield, and so that was why it made it on there.

That's something that can be fairly easily done, and in fact, it's really just a matter of working with SPD now to develop what that looks like.

We've already met several times and they've taken it on, so that's a fairly easy one.

And it's a pretty successful program in New Orleans.

Yeah, and it works for New Orleans.

The critical thing here is to find out what works for Seattle, to take that model and take the science behind it and do something that's good for Seattle.

With Sentinel Event Review, I am consistently asked about high profile incidents like officer involved shootings.

And we had one tragic event just recently within the last few weeks.

that I think again highlights the need to have some really in-depth review process of an event like that that involves community and answers the questions community has about those kinds of events.

and looks at it from a broader perspective than is currently done just in the law enforcement review context.

So I think that is one of those things that to me feels like ultimately is really important for transparency and community confidence and just community involvement, frankly, in these kinds of things.

So one of the things that I noticed in the work plan that really stood out to me is that the Seattle Police Department has requested that the OIG consider providing a family liaison service to help coordinate information sharing to families who might be impacted in this space and that is sort of beyond the functions that are described in the ordinance for the IG.

And I think the work plan indicates that you all are going to continue conversations with them about that possible, about that suggestion and identifying other solutions.

So can you talk a little bit more about your understanding of their request for a family liaison service and why they believe the IG is the place where that should be housed and sort of what your perspective is of that suggestion.

Sure.

I think that OIG was thrown into the mix there because it came up prior to me joining the city of Seattle and having an actual OIG office in existence.

And so the recommendation came as a this function needs to happen and we will await the Inspector General to, I think, to kind of figure out where that goes.

I don't believe that it's a function that is properly housed in my office.

And it's been my experience in, you know, quite a long time of being involved in officer-involved shootings and other tragic events, working for a municipality that frequently families don't want to hear from the agency or from the government entity that was responsible for the death of a loved one.

And so I will be meeting with CPC to talk about what that looks like and where that might be an appropriate function, some sort of victim services function that's really not OIG.

The critical piece there, though, is you can set up somebody who's a liaison, but unless there is real time, real information coming from SPD to this liaison and going to the family, it doesn't work.

And so we've got to have a mechanism set up where the family liaison is housed appropriately, but they are getting everything that they need in terms of information to pass on to the family.

So we'll work, I'll work with CPC and SPD to identify that and set up the process and the mechanism for that information flow.

I think you should also include the Office of Police Accountability, who has sort of primary responsibility for investigations to begin with.

And as we move towards a model where there is increased civilianization within the Office of Police Accountability, I think there's an important, there's a unique opportunity to think about how this functions.

could or should fit into the organizational model of OPA.

Yes, and we've had preliminary discussions about, you know, where it really should fall and who should be responsible for that.

So they're folded into the discussion as well.

Okay.

Okay, should we move on to the work plan requests by our partners?

And we're running a little behind, so I'm going to give you like.

Speed through this.

Yes.

I'm going to give you about six minutes.

No problem.

No pressure.

So what we've done is with the work plan request from our partners, we've either decided to take their suggestions and fold them into the audits that we have currently planned or do some sort of assessment of when we can fold those in.

We got some really good suggestions from CPC, SPD, and OPA.

And we met with some council members as well and solicited information there.

So in terms of CPCs, they've asked us to do a racial disparity review.

And we are involved in some of the racial disparity discussions and analyses currently going on in the sustainment plan operations.

So we will do a pattern analysis of that for our annual report.

We're working with them on the interrogation practices project.

The federal task force immigration issue, we've worked into our audit on task forces and mutual aid agreements.

And they've asked us to look at litigation trends, which we will do in terms of a pattern analysis for our annual report.

OPA's work plan requests.

We're for IG to look at special commissions and the operations of police officers under special commissions, which we've incorporated into our mutual aid audit.

They've also asked us to look at the supervisor handling of minor misconduct allegations, which we will put on our 2020 slate when there's sufficient data to assess that program.

And they've asked us to assess the efficacy of changes to training and policy when it's rolled out, specifically with regard to use of force.

And we've got an ongoing review of that, and we'll determine probably after the sustainment period how we work that into a formal audit.

All right.

These are some of the other sort of horizon and topic areas that we're taking a look at.

I mentioned it a little bit, but I'll just highlight it here.

We will be tracking discipline recommendations and appeal processes for trend analysis.

And one of the things that one of our policy analysts will be doing very shortly is providing a workflow chart of the entire disciplinary and appeals process for us to use, because I find that It's very difficult to find somebody who has a complete and full understanding of the entire process from start to finish with all of the various pressure and decision points along the way.

So we will be providing that to our folks to have a general understanding.

We'll make that available to anybody else who wants that.

Also, the data analytics platform developed by SPD is really an amazing and offers really an unprecedented ability to access the workings of SPD via data.

And so we're spending a lot of time getting to know the DAP and what it can do in terms of our own data analytics.

So that's taking up a lot of time and energy, and it's quite good information.

And we will be partnering with the monitoring team to bring our expertise to use for them in the sustainment period.

That's great.

OK.

And I think I'll go ahead and just wrap it up there and leave you some time for any other questions that you have.

Council Member Johnson, do you have any questions or other comments?

So I just want to say thank you for putting together a very thorough work plan and presentation and for spending some time with us this morning to publicly talk about what you hope to be able to accomplish in 2019. I know that you are still working to fully staff yourself up and the office up.

I think that'll be sort of a critical component to being able to actually achieve a lot of the things that you've described that you want to do in 2019. And I think that the next thing that I'm interested in doing is making sure that any council priorities that may not already be included within your work plan are considered by the IGs.

So we'll make sure to follow up with you to make sure that those areas are properly included or incorporated or considered by you in some way to make sure that some of the work that we're doing here has some synergy with some of the work that you're doing.

So that'd be really helpful.

Okay, so I think that is it.

And unless you have anything else to add, we'll go ahead and let you go.

I do not.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Thank you all both for being with us this morning.

We will go ahead and read the second agenda item into the record.

So, Roxanna, if you can read the second agenda item into the record while those folks make their way up, that'd be great.

Agenda item two, emergency 911 system outage on December 27, 2018, response protocol for briefing and discussion.

Great.

And if you are here to make, to provide us some additional information on this topic, I'd invite you to join us at the table and Roxanna will work on Firing up the presentation.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Let's go ahead and start with a round of introductions, and then Ms. Kay, I'm going to hand it over to you for some introductory remarks, and then we'll kick off the presentation.

Yes?

Yes.

Great.

Let's do it.

Thank you.

I'm Lisa Kay, Council Central staff.

Mark Baird, the Interim Chief Operating Officer for the Seattle Police Department.

Good morning, Chris Lombard, Battalion Chief, currently overseeing the Fire Alarm Center, the Fire Department's 911 dispatch.

Hi, Laurel Nelson, Deputy Director with the Seattle Office of Emergency Management.

Good morning, Barb Graff, the Director of the Office of Emergency Management.

OK, excellent.

You want to kick us off?

Thank you.

With your permission, I'll just give you a, this is going to be a little bit of recap for you because you were on the 9-1-1 strategic planning process, but I can.

Not everybody was on that beauty of a task force.

It was a flying task force.

So I think we could all benefit from a little review of that history.

OK, so just a little bit of context of 9-1-1 and then how it fits with emergency management.

When we call 9-1-1, our call travels very quickly through an incredibly complex system, starting with private telecommunication providers, such as CenturyLink, which then connect with the state, and then with the county's 9-1-1 call routing networks, which then connect with the local 9-1-1 call centers, which we also call public safety answering points, or PSAPs.

The people who answer our calls when we call and who dispatch the aid work at one of these PSAPs.

Seattle has two of the 12 PSAPs in King County, one for police and a secondary PSAP for fire.

The Seattle, the police PSAP answers all of the 911 calls and then forwards any calls for fire or medical help to the fire PSAP.

Now Seattle's Office of Emergency Management doesn't usually become involved in any of these 911 calls or smaller scale emergencies, but it does coordinate the city's resources and responsibilities, including public information during large emergencies and disasters.

OEM also coordinates departmental continuity of operations plans.

Those plans focus on maintaining essential programs during crises.

So that's just a brief context, and I can turn the microphone over, I think.

Mark, are you the first person today?

That was the most efficient summary of approximately two years' worth of work.

So I appreciate it.

It felt much more detailed when I was in the midst of it.

OK, yeah, let's go ahead and dig into the presentation.

So good morning.

Thanks for having us to have a conversation about this.

I'm going to walk through a presentation I'm going to invite.

The others, as appropriate, to jump in when they have something to add.

And of course, we can take on any questions that you might have.

Thank you.

And this is in reference that I'm on one outage event that occurred back on December 27th of last year.

So we're going to first give a quick overview of the event to include a timeline of the two different incidents within the event that occurred, walk through some questions that have been posed, and then again, we'll field any questions that you have.

I think we also provided a summary document, and the slide just represents that that's there.

So this incident really was comprised of two events.

The first began on December 27th at about a quarter to one in the morning.

And at that time, the 911 center, that I'll just refer to as the center going forward, received information through its equipment logs that indicated that 911 calls were not connecting to the center.

About 32 minutes later, the center received information that we were once again receiving those calls and that everything was back up and running.

After that, between about 1.20 in the morning and about 9.17 in the morning, there were conversations up and down the chain of command and also conversations with King County E911 about what had taken place.

And King County acknowledged that there had been an event that impacted several agencies, and they began interacting with the vendors, which are both ComTech and CenturyLink, to find out what occurred.

It was at that time that we were notified that CenturyLink was experiencing a large problem that was basically a massive nationwide outage that went far beyond both the Seattle, King County area, but in fact beyond the State of Washington as well.

The second incident, which lasted significantly longer, it lasted about 11 and a half hours, began at about 822 in the evening on the 27th.

Again, the logs indicated that calls were not making it into the center.

Communication with King County E911 again indicated that it was a problem with CenturyLink.

It was an ongoing part of the national outage that was taking place.

And it was at this time that Seattle Fire Department, Seattle Police Department, public information officers got together to begin to create a consistent message for folks within Seattle.

The Seattle Fire Department issued an alert Seattle message providing people information that E911 was down.

and having them use normal emergency and non-emergency telephone numbers to communicate with the center.

At about 11.25 that evening, there was a statewide emergency alert system activation that also shared information about the outage.

And throughout the rest of that evening until about 705 the following morning, King County, E911.

While they were providing updates, the updates were basically that there was no change in the status, that the information was down.

So that's the two events.

The first one lasting about 32 minutes.

The second one lasting about 11 and a half hours.

In both cases, our knowledge of it was generated through the equipment logs.

communications with King County E911 was that this was part of a large national outage resulting from CenturyLink.

And in between then, we had very little information.

So we'll go through a series of questions to take a look about how it actually impacted our two centers.

So the first is what Affected did the outage have on 9-1-1 dispatch centers?

As mentioned in the opening, the Seattle Police Department's 9-1-1 center is the primary center.

That means that when a call comes in from 9-1-1, it goes to the Seattle Police Department center where it's triaged and then passed on to fire where appropriate.

They were unable to field the 911 calls from the general public.

Operators needed to switch the answering method over to the 10-digit lines I referenced earlier, both non-emergency and emergency numbers.

We leveraged interoperability with radio systems to communicate between the PSAPs, and it caused the center employees to have to really prioritize the work that they were doing.

And one of the things that Mark, you didn't specifically mentioned is that in addition to the 10 digit lines, there was also ability for people to text 9-1-1.

And that texting function is relatively new to the system.

It's part of the work that we were trying to do in terms of the next generation of a 9-1-1 and how we allow people to transmit emergency information to PSAPs.

Do we have a sense of how that functioned, whether it functioned well, or are there things that we learned from the texting capability, both in the outage context, but even broadly speaking?

So thanks for bringing that up.

Yes, I think it was near the end of last year that the text-to-911 feature became, I don't have some specific numbers on that, and I will get back to you on that.

We do know from taking a look at those other lines that there was about a 300 percent increase in the two 10-digit lines during this time, which makes some sense because we were actively communicating with people that this was the route to take in order to make contact with the center.

One of the complicating factors, and I think it comes up here in a little bit, is that CenturyLink is obligated to provide us kind of an after-action look and some information related to call performance when something like this happens, and they have a 30-day window to do that.

They've got about five more days in order to provide this information.

So at the moment, you know, it's hard for us to assess the calls that we don't get.

We're reliant on CenturyLink in this case to do that and we don't yet have that information so it's hard for us to quite tell on that.

But let me check and see what the texting load was during that time for you.

In terms of CenturyLink's obligation to disclose the impacts here in terms of people who weren't able to connect, is that a report that only goes to the FCC or are they required to provide that to us as the City of Seattle as well?

So we do get information about calls that weren't able to connect to our center.

It's fairly detailed.

So we will get that.

You know, in terms of, as you mentioned, there is an FCC investigation that has been opened on this whole incident because, again, it's much broader than what we had to deal with.

In terms of a complete report that will come out of this from CenturyLink, I don't know if that will have an impact on the timing of that.

But, again, they're obligated under about a 30-day window of time to provide a formal root cause analysis and documentation about the specifics and the scope of the outage.

And we will receive that within that period of time.

Or, you know, they'll be in contact with us and need to ask for an extension or something.

And what's the mechanism by which they're compelled to provide us that report?

I will need to check on that.

I believe it's just part of the agreement.

They're the vendor at this point for E901.

And are they the only vendor for E911?

Do we have any diversity?

I know there was a note within the presentation that one of the lessons learned is that we should have increased network and something other wonky word diversification in the system.

One of the things about this is we are completely reliant on both the state and the county for this.

There is a project underway that will provide diversity both within carriers, you know, so it wouldn't in this case just be CenturyLink or ComTech.

And they each have a little different part in this as I think the opening comments highlighted.

That project that will bring about some of this interoperability and diversity is in its infancy.

I think they're hoping to put together the documentation to go out to bid this year.

So it's probably a multi-year stage at this point.

But that will go towards addressing some of what you're asking.

Okay.

In several years.

And also that's, if my understanding is correct, that's at our regional level for the regional PSAPs.

And the state EIS net 2 is in place now.

And I don't know that that has more than one vendor.

So it's, as you know, very many layers.

Yes.

There's an incredible amount of layers.

But I think that the complexity of the project is what led to the desire to want to work as a region on some of these some of these issues related to the PSAPs and governance was a big part of those regional conversations, but also finding some sort of conformity and consistency in terms of the different types of technology that are being used at the PSAPs to allow for a level of redundancy that will be sort of the fail safe in the event that these things occur in the future.

I mean, back then it was like, in case these things occur in the future, and then it happened, right?

And so now I'm concerned that we have made considerable progress in terms of agreement as a region, in terms of the direction that we're headed, but you know, the realities around the potential impacts to public safety and meeting the needs of folks who need emergency services when we don't have the diversity in the telecommunications platforms that we need is, incredibly concerning to me and to others on the council.

And so I think we need to figure out how to get some clearer answers and a better sense of timeline and do a better job of communicating a sense of urgency around addressing some of these deficiencies.

So maybe somebody can help me do that.

And I think to kind of pick up where we left off here, I think we can go on to the next one now about where emergency response is delayed due to the outage.

And currently, as I mentioned earlier, we just don't have enough information quite yet to be able to properly reach any conclusions from this.

Again, I think that there's about five days left on that 30 days that they're obligated to.

We've also made requests for additional information, reference the missed calls.

And typically, if there's a small event, we get those in a fairly timely way and we take an active approach towards reaching out to them.

This is a rather sizable event and now some time has gone by on, so I'm not sure of the practicality of some of that.

But we intend to get all of the information from them that we can in order to make that assessment.

The question about what are the city's protocols for responding to these types of events?

And normally there is a tertiary option involving the plain old television services in which either primary or secondary PSAP can switch over to it for some redundancy.

Due to the nature and the magnitude of the event that we have here, this was not technically feasible for us to do.

As a result, the communication with the public was paramount in trying to get out the information that they needed to use the 10-digit telephone number and the texting option in order to reach out.

So I want to ask some questions about that, Mark, because these two outages happened, you know, within a dozen hours of each other.

And in the first instance, with a relatively short outage, engagement with a PIO, especially since it was overnight, makes a lot of sense that there wasn't a whole lot of information that you provided us about the engagement with any PIOs.

The folks who are trying to contact 911, certainly a very scary scenario when you can't get a hold of somebody, but I would imagine that you could find other resources in other ways.

It was the second outage where there was an hour and a half delay before contacting a PIO and then a little while again before that PIO was sharing out information with other folks in communication.

And over the course of that 11-hour outage, it seems like having had the previous night's experiences, we should have been working with PIOs more quickly than an hour and a half delay between our first communication about the outage and then getting information out.

Additionally, getting that information out by the PIO seems like it took several hours as well.

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what reforms you might be proposing to the protocols that would encourage a more swift communication with the PIOs and more swift communication from the PIOs out to the public about the outage because it just seems to me like an hour and a half on that second timeline before SPD shared that with the PIO that we were experiencing outages.

And then another two and a half hours before the PIOs were even sort of tweeting about it, which is of course a platform that some folks have access to, but some folks don't.

So I just, I would love to know how the after effects of this very longer term outage of 11 and a half hours have changed some of the protocols about, engagement with the PIOs.

Sure.

And for anybody that has any additional information on this, please feel free to share it.

You know, in in general, you know, we are looking at the event now after it occurred and coming off of the first incident that last a fairly short period of time.

There there was a lot going on during that time in order to continue to figure out what was going on and what may be the appropriate message to send.

I will need to reach back out to RPIO to get some good detailed information for you, which I'm happy to do in order to find out exactly where all of the communication began and what went into their planning and when they elected to get the information out.

I know we have a couple of different points set up on the timeline here.

But I think that that's different than the activity that was going on behind the scenes in order to get the information.

I can add to that a little bit too, Councilmember.

The outage wasn't really on or off.

It was kind of throughout the day it was kind of growing and shrinking, so to speak.

that there were certain elements that still worked and certain elements that didn't work.

And then within the county, there were certain parts that were working and certain dispatch centers that were not working.

So part of that was trying to assess or do kind of a size up as far as what still worked.

You know, before we just launched with these 10 digit or these backup 911 numbers, we wanted to make absolutely sure that first, 911 wasn't working for us.

There was nothing that we could do to fix it locally.

but that there, that it was widespread as well so that we couldn't work with partner agencies around the area to give them alternatives.

So there was, the timeline's maybe a little misleading in that regard that it wasn't like people were just kind of waiting and then at the last minute it was like, okay, we got to do something about it.

And I'll let you finish your comments and stuff, but I can address a little bit more kind of what we were doing behind the scenes too in that regard if that'll help.

I mean, I think, you know, that's helpful context.

Thank you.

You know, for me, as somebody who is not steeped in two years of E911 training, as my colleague Councilmember Gonzales is, what was important to understand, I think, was the lessons that we might have learned after this longer-term outage, and it feels like A half an hour blip overnight where we got some emergency help from tech support from bar two vendors and got the problem fixed is an event that is unfortunate but also probably didn't necessitate widespread communication.

However, any intermittent loss over a longer period of time feels like the kind of thing that, you know, there should be a time period protocol by which all of a sudden PIOs are now notified, and then they have to develop a communications plan to then get out to the various channels that they want to communicate out with the challenges with contacting 911. And it reminds me a lot of the, frankly, the, like, emergency notebook that Barb makes us all have or that Monica Simmons, our city clerk, makes me have at my house, right?

So that- And we thank them for that.

Yes, we absolutely do because that is, I know when something happens, that exists.

It's a piece of paper that I can go and refer to that gives me the playbook of what I should be doing in that point in time.

And so what I'm looking for here is as we get further away from this event, how have we learned from this in order to update those playbooks so that the next time around when we know we reach minute 29, well, at minute 30, we should be calling the PIO and making sure that the PIO is aware whether that's 1 o'clock in the morning or 1 o'clock in the afternoon.

And so for me, I think that these learning events are really important for us to continue to update our protocols.

That's all I was offering.

You want to add what you were going to say?

Oh, sure.

OK.

Yeah.

So we actually, during the day, we had made notifications to the PIO.

So during the day, that part of the outage was just the long distance component.

So people still within City of Seattle were able to call 9-1-1.

We tested that.

We verified that.

We actually tested the text of 9-1-1, both during the day and at the night.

And as you were saying, Council Member, that worked throughout the duration.

One of the things that we found was, again, the long-distance component, or the trunk component, is what was starting to fail.

And we were first notified that by NORCOM, the dispatch center over in the Bellevue area.

They do a lot of cross-county line interaction with the city of Bothell and whatnot, and they were having trouble receiving and sending 911 calls to the 911 centers up in Snohomish County.

So Seattle Fires Dispatch Center proactively reached out to all of the 911 centers that would be long distance that we work with in Pierce County, Snohomish County, and actually over in Kitsap County as well to make sure that they were at that time monitoring the backup systems that we have in place with our radio infrastructure so that if we needed to transfer information, even though we couldn't transfer the calls, that we would still be able to get a hold of them, transfer that information both for police and fire.

And then we reached out to all the other PSAPs or the 911 centers within King County.

So we made sure during the day before things got bad that things were working in that regard.

So everybody was at least able to pass information and then receive 911 calls there.

So that kind of got us through the day and then things kind of got better in the afternoon.

So as you were saying, at about 8 o'clock or 8.30 that evening is when we were notified by police that the system was down again.

So we actually, I responded to our 911 dispatch center at the fire alarm center, and we actually notified the PIOs right away.

So the PIOs actually were starting to come into the loop probably within 20 to 30 minutes, about the same time that we were.

So again, there's that size up element.

Just how bad is it?

Who can fix it?

Is it going to go from minute 29 to minute 30 as you were alluding to?

Once again, we confirmed or affirmed that everybody was listening to the backup systems.

So one of the first things that we directed the PIOs to do as we were trying to quantify the nature of this outage was to start monitoring all the social media feeds, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and everything like that.

One, to see what other regional partners were experiencing, kind of as a backup to our information streams.

But really importantly, too, to see if people were reporting information or people were trying, hey, I'm trying to call 911 and I can't get through in that regard.

We found out in the last couple years with some of our hurricane experiences and responses down in the southeastern part of the United States that people actually would respond or resort to some of those social media feeds to report emergencies.

So that was a good part for us.

So in addition, the PIOs and us, we started, again, kind of that coordination effort as far as around with the other dispatch centers and King County 911. Once we kind of made the determination that this was continuing to get worse, we weren't hearing back from the CenturyLink, the provider.

We were finding out from the state that this was experience, the experience was happening in other counties.

That's when we decided to, okay, we got to give people the alternative.

So our PIO started working with police PIO to craft the message.

The messaging for that and you allude to the playbook, you know again, this was such a unique experience We wanted to make sure that we were crafting it very well because one of the things that we found in the previous 9-1-1 outage a few years ago and other experiences is that That message does not pertain to the event.

When you give those 10-digit numbers out or something, people maintain those and hold on to those for years, if not decades.

And we'll continue to call 911 on those.

So we wanted to make sure that we had the right numbers, that we were reaching the right audience for that, and that it was going to get the help to the people that needed it the most.

And so we started sending that message out.

We wanted to make sure that we were sending the same message as the other 9-1-1 centers because, again, we work so closely together throughout the county.

One of the things that was a little frustrating for us is that we were hoping for a little more centralized message all along from the county, knowing that members, our citizens here in Seattle are watching news feeds that span the whole county, knowing that there are other people that may be on our bordering cities, you know, Shoreline, Tukwila, and whatnot, that get the same messaging, and they may not know that, hey, it's Seattle that answers my 911 call, or it's another dispatch center.

So, we were looking and working or hoping for some more consolidated messaging from King County 911. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and that is part of the after action that we're trying to figure out what happened and how we can improve on that.

What you did start to see is on the news feeds was you started to see that discoordination.

So, you started to see, you know, if you're having an emergency, here's a 10-digit number to call.

And then there was, you know, addendums saying, oh, this is if you're in Bellevue, this is if you're in Redmond, this is if you're in Renton and whatnot.

And again, what we were hoping for from King County 911 and their PIOs was to get that one.

We saw that that was not going to happen.

That was when police and fire PIOs decided, okay, we're going to take care of the citizens of Seattle here.

So that was about the time that you saw the alert message, Alert Seattle come out.

That was, that reached just under, half a million people.

They had already reached the media and we had been queued up in the different TV feeds and whatnot for that messaging to go out.

And then that's when the social media went out as well for giving those alternative numbers to call.

Barbara.

Although I myself had the sense to be on vacation at the time, Laurel Nelson, our Deputy Director, also was thoroughly engaged from the early morning time as well.

And so in addition to everything that Mark and Chris already brought up, I just thought you might want to hear from her other things that the Office of Emergency Management was doing as well.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Yeah, so for us, we were engaged from the onset when they had the first 1 a.m.

outage and were in the loop on the communications for that.

In the morning we reached out to our counterparts in King County Emergency Management as well as Washington State Emergency Management just to make sure that we're in the situational awareness beyond what the PSAPs are getting from their channels.

We did in the afternoon just kind of plant a seed that if for any reason the system became unstable again, what do we need to do from a messaging perspective?

And the PIOs were already on it as Chris had mentioned.

and already ready to get geared up as necessary.

There was the kind of disconnect of clearly we got our alert Seattle message pushed out at the same time King County has a very similar type system, so they pushed out their like alert system message.

And then not too much after that, you saw the emergency alert system message that went out statewide.

Throughout this time, I also want to recognize our counterparts in the information technology department.

They were pushing out routine updates on what was going on from a CenturyLink perspective.

So we were engaged with those updates as well as staying in contact with our counterparts in fire and police.

Just from the tail end, thank goodness the system became stable as we got into Friday there.

We were leaning forward appropriately, so we had already had a message pushed out and we had a generic message ready to go if for any reason the system became unstable again.

In addition to that, our counterparts in the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs had taken that generic message and translated it into six languages.

So we were ready, if need be, to be able to push it out to multiple languages, which is a larger issue that we need to face from a statewide perspective is the ability to push out in multiple languages.

You had asked council members, you know, what were the impacts and do we know?

We did, fire department and I think police department did as well, we did a time over comparison, time, hour before, day before, week before, year before and stuff.

We do know that we missed 911 calls.

Depending on the hour, upwards of 60% drop in call volume through the 911 lines.

We don't know what those were.

So, you know, we have not received any reports.

You would have heard by now if there had been a big fire or something like that that we didn't respond to, we would have heard about that.

So we, while we know that the call volume dropped significantly, we don't know what the result of that was as far as impact to the citizens at this point.

we don't have any, at this juncture, at this early juncture, we don't have any information or understanding of why the failure occurred in the first place.

No, they're still in the midst of working through that, both King County 911 is, but more importantly, CenturyLink is, which is really where the issues occurred.

The publicly available information that we're all available to see is that the outage did start somewhere in the southeast.

They think down in like about the Louisiana area.

It spread throughout the United States.

So the impact of this was huge, way beyond anything just local here to the citizens of Seattle.

As such, the forensics on this are going to probably be months in the making as far as getting all the nitty gritty details and whatnot.

As you were alluding, there are certain obligations where they're supposed to report to us.

The FCC is also investigating this too.

So this is getting attention at the highest levels throughout the nation.

So we'll make that information available to you as we find it.

That would be helpful.

And then, again, sort of the lessons learned and how that impacts our protocols and, you know, an honest assessment of our own response and what could be done better both I think as a regional partner in this space, what can we do better and how can we effectively communicate those lessons learned to our regional critical piece of the follow-up that I think it would be helpful if, Lisa, you helped us track here on City Council to make sure that that body of work is continuing to occur and that we're being really true to making sure that the general public understands that we appreciate and understand that this should not happen, and that we share their disappointment in the fact that it happened.

But when it does happen, we are at the ready to continue to meet the public safety needs of the people visiting, living, and working in our city.

That's an incredibly important part of our duty as public servants in this city is to continue to make sure that we're fulfilling that public commitment and that we are not letting the public down in terms of our basic obligation to meet those fundamental infrastructure public safety needs.

And that's part of the reason why I wanted to make sure that you all had an opportunity to come to committee is to make sure that the public had a good understanding that that we were in a lot of ways ready through protocols and understood what we needed to do to make sure that we met those public safety needs, but that there's always room for improvement and that we are working and actively looking for those opportunities of improvement within the system and within our own response to make sure that we do right by the folks who live, work and visit here.

Councilman Johnson.

So to follow on with that more specific question.

What are we doing to improve redundancy?

I mean it sounds like that.

This is a national problem supported by state and county and city Resources, but I'm wondering what are some of the next steps that we can take to improve some of the redundancy of the system

So that is exactly the next thing up.

So that's excellent timing.

And I believe somebody mentioned this a little bit earlier, but the King County Peace Apps are working towards a new architecture that will provide such a model.

It'll provide redundancy, interoperability, security, and some sort of fail-safe features.

It'll also provide some network carrier And I think that was mentioned also earlier.

It is a large project and it is, you know, early on in the project.

So I believe within this calendar year they're hoping to put together the documents to be able to go out to bid on it.

So it probably is a couple of years away in terms of coming to fruition.

If I could also mention there are about $70 million underfunded.

But you learned in the sustainability plan that there's that gap.

Yeah, there's a fiscal cliff related to how we fund at the county level our emergency management system that will require some sort of revenue adjustment or fix in a future legislative session.

And I think that fiscal cliff originally had been anticipated for 2020.

20, I believe, but now it's a few years to 2023, I think.

Yeah, now it's 2023. I'm having a little bit of a memory test on this one right now.

So in terms of the city of Seattle, we are always interested in being able to take a look at our protocols and procedures to find out where we can do better within this industry.

We do plan to take the information that we get along with the other information we have to really continue to assess how the event went and how we responded to it and where we can make some improvements.

to continue to take on any other further questions regarding this.

You know, as was mentioned, it was a little unique in the way that it was rolling through the day and didn't have some of those nice start and stops.

And so evaluating where some of those decision points are, I think it will be beneficial to everybody in both centers.

In terms of the reporting that CenturyLink has to do to us, I know we've spent some time talking about the fact that they have to report to us how many calls didn't actually connect.

Is there any other data or information that CenturyLink is required to provide us as part of this report in the context of this incident?

Or is there any other information that we should be asking CenturyLink to provide us to be able to better analyze some of the system, existing system vulnerabilities and improvements that can be made and or how the city can update our own protocols to be more responsive to what actually occurred.

Within the information that we typically get from them that they provide, it gets down to the, you know, the call that didn't connect information.

So down to the phone number of the, call that didn't come in to the center.

Again, typically these haven't been as large or gone on for as long, so we are talking about a large amount of data here.

And I also anticipate when we receive information from them that we are going to have some follow-up questions and probably need to ask some additional questions and may ask for some additional information.

So at this point, I'm not quite sure of that answer.

I'm happy to share what we come up with as we learn more about it as well.

Part of their report is a root cause analysis where they are supposed to get down to very specifics as far as what caused it and then part of their own after action, what they're doing to address that root cause.

And will our follow-up work consist of either hiring out or using our own staffing resources to circle back around with the people who might have missed so that we have a better understanding about that 60% drop and whether or not it was just good fortune accounting for most of it or whether or not there were, you know, emergencies.

I mean, to follow up with some subset, I don't anticipate that we're going to call everyone who wasn't able to get connected through, but to have a better understanding about what we missed would be helpful.

Yeah, and that is some of the work that's been done in past outages where typically the center will make some of those calls back.

So I will be getting with the center to see exactly what the plan is.

Part of that will be about seeing exactly what this looks like and what the amount of information is.

So I'll get back to you on that.

I suspect that depending on the volume of the calls that weren't able to connect, we can then make an evaluation of what a statistically significant representation of those numbers would be and then work from there.

Right.

I mean, you know, you're getting at the point that I was going to make as we wrap up here, which is to say, if we discover that in the course of the follow-up conversations, The majority of people were cell phone users from a long distance, though they happened to be Seattle residents.

And they also all happened to therefore then be in their 20s and 30s, then a response in the future when we have this kind of problem could be more social media focused than going on TV or radio, right?

So, getting a little deeper dive into the data about who we missed and the consequences of those actions I think would be helpful in determining course corrections for future challenges.

One other thing we could volunteer to do is I know that the Attorney General's Office has done a real public outreach to find out what was the harm done, who was impacted by this, because they're going to want to make their case and feed that into the FCC investigation as well.

We'd be happy to follow up with their office to say we're interested specifically in the Seattle stories.

I think that would be a really good idea.

OK.

Do we make it through the presentation?

Is this it?

I think we've been sort of jumping around a little bit here, but okay, anything else to add, folks?

Okay.

The only thing that I'll add is that many of the protocols that you saw used during this outage were some of the after action items that we learned from the previous outage.

I believe it was in 2014, and that was a much more regional to the Pacific Northwest one.

So the early deployment of the PIOs, the social media aspect, the getting those numbers out, the coordination, So we will you know our pledge to you is again to continue to analyze this.

How can we do it better?

But it was it was some affirmation to that some of the items that we put in place after the previous one were successful in bridging many of those gaps I Can just offer and I've said this many times of the thousands of services that the city provides Perhaps in my mind anyhow the most important are people who are trained and competent at doing

call taking and dispatching.

And my compliments always to the people whose staff, the Fire Alarm Center and the 911 Dispatch Center, do an incredibly professional job even under these kind of circumstances.

Yeah, I appreciate that you mentioned that, Barb, that both centers, to include PIOs and other staff that were working, you know, up and down the chain, did a really good job over the course of this period of time where a lot of the circumstances at the time were very much unknown.

And it was difficult, in some cases more difficult, because it was a national problem as opposed to getting some of the local attention.

So they did a fantastic job.

The partnerships, too, between police and fire, starting at the top with Chiefs Best and Skagans, all the way down to the dispatchers and stuff, I think are invaluable.

The fact that we know who to call over on our partner's side right away and start working on this is invaluable.

So, thank you.

So I want to echo that thanks and thanks to all of the folks who were in the call centers and having to triage the entire situation as it was happening in what appeared to be a very tenuous situation with not a lot of...

robust information to work with.

So I can only imagine how stressful that must have been and how hopeful you all were in terms of it ending very quickly so that we can get back to basics in terms of how the system works.

So I'm looking forward as a follow-up to getting a better understanding of some of that, getting a glimpse into the root cause analysis, making sure that once we receive that information, we have appropriately responded to understanding those root causes and other pieces of the system to modify our own protocols to make sure that we're doing better and constantly engaging in that improvement process.

And just really hoping that we can continue to have a regional collaborative approach with other partners in this space to make sure that we're getting out the most accurate, concise, clear information to people who need to access these emergency services.

And I really see that as an important function of of the work here, and I also saw that as one of the gaps.

There was a lot of go here, go there, and I think that created some confusion and anxiety, unnecessarily so, amongst our residents and other people who were trying to access the system.

I think the who's in charge of, who's at the top in the communications around these to really control and make sure that the PIOs have all the consistent information that they need, not just for our system, but for the region, I think is really important.

Because I think our POs did do a good job once there was a robust understanding of the depth of the system issue, I think they did a fantastic job of consistently getting out a message.

Where I saw inconsistency was in some of our regional partners Not accurately communicating who?

Who needed to be called based on where you were calling from and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in that space Anything else customer Johnson?

Okay, that is the last item on our agenda and there's no more business.

So we are adjourned.

Thank you all

you