Seattle City Council Public Safety & Human Services Committee Special Meeting 6/23/2020

services committee will come to order.

It is 10 30 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Gonzalez?

Here.

Councilmember Lewis?

Councilmember Morales?

Councilmember Morales?

Here.

Thank you.

Councilmember Sawant?

here.

That is thorough.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

So we'll now approve our agenda for the committee meeting.

And if there is no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this time, we're going to transition into public comment.

Before we open public comment, I ask that folks be patient as we learn to operate what is, for me, still a new system.

and I will moderate the public comment period by giving each speaker two minutes to speak.

I'll call on each speaker by name in an order in which they registered on the council website.

If you have not yet registered but would like to, you can still do so.

And we will be taking new people to sign up up until the end of public comment.

The link is listed on today's agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the mic, and an automatic prompt of, you have been unmuted, will be your cue that it is your turn to speak.

Please state your name and the item which you are addressing, and listen for a chime.

When 10 seconds are left of the allotted time, once the speaker hears the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your comments.

And if speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time, The speaker's mic will be muted after a 10-second buffer to allow us to call on the next speaker.

And once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following this meeting, please do so via the Seattle channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

So with that, the public hearing is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

First speaker on the list is Eric Ackerman.

Hello.

My name is Eric Ackerman.

I live in District 3, and I'm a state worker, and I'm a member of the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots, and I wanted to talk about police accountability.

Police across the country shoot and kill more people than active shooters.

We can't get exact numbers about how many people because not all police departments even report who they've killed, how many people they've killed over the course of a year.

Police accountability is often not related to substantive action for the officers involved.

We've also watched over the past few years that SPD compensation has ballooned since the consent decree reforms were imposed as a fact.

Paying police more.

Giving SPD more weapons.

Giving them war training.

Giving them de-escalation trainings that are incongruous with the rest of police culture and are brief and small in scope compared to the rest of their training and that do not fit Doesn't work.

There have been other consent pre-reforms.

None of this has worked.

Police accountability is still abysmally low, as it has always been.

What we need is for citizens to oversee police accountability with full power to discipline SPD officers to the fullest extent and place liability for use of force upon the officers and not leave the city saddled with that.

These are reforms that need to be done.

The report that you're going to hear is nice.

It's nice but it will not change anything in the end.

Thank you.

I can see the rest of my time.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Ellie Cassidy.

Hi I'm.

Hello I'm Ellie Cassidy.

I'm also from District 3. And I wanted to talk a little bit about what's happening in Capitol Hill right now and how the police have been showing us all how they first over police and then under police and how the police chief has also in multiple public statements said things that she had to backtrack that create a narrative that there are police needed when, in fact, the police are both over-policing and under-policing and trying to frame activists and protesters and young people who are marching in the streets to try to ensure that their community members remain safe.

She's creating a narrative that they're the violent ones.

And being I forgot to say that I'm also a business owner with a business two blocks from the Chaz slash shop.

And you know in the first few days after the police left it was peaceful there.

And we're not acknowledging that there's a lot of national and regional pressure against what's happening there that's creating instability and safety concerns that have been non-addressed by our city and have been allowed by our police.

The fact that a car was it they did not break for when a car was approaching the protesters and then a man with a gun was able to peaceably walk against them when they had been attacking and almost killed a woman, later that evening showed where the...

Thank you, Ellie.

Next speaker is Howard Gale.

Hi, this is Howard Gale from Lower Queen Anne.

You're going to hear a lot of facts, statistics and numbers this morning.

The only number that really matters is 28. That is the number of people killed by SPD since John T. Williams' murder less than 10 years ago.

And what matters really more than any numbers are the names.

Charlena Lyles, Yosia Falatogo, Danny Rodriguez, Ryan Smith, and the still unnamed African-American who was killed in Lower Queen Anne just a few weeks ago on May 19th.

It is the name George Floyd that got us to the point we're at now.

How can we disrespect his name by forgetting all of these other names?

I ask this question of everyone on public safety today, but especially Councilmembers Gonzalez and Herbold, who just three years ago, less than three years ago now, sat in front of many hundreds of people and proclaimed their shookness at the murder of Charlena Lyles.

Are your actions today going to be performative or formative?

Will you continue to pretend these systems work or finally act to upend the systems that are before you today, systems which allow injustice to continue, with just the pretense of accountability.

All of my specific concerns, which would take an hour of comment, I've passed on to Council Member Sawant.

I hope they're raised today.

And lastly, I just want to note, there was a model of new work, of real community-based police accountability, which we intentionally and assiduously ignored back in 2016 and 17. There are other models now in Nashville where there really is community accountability.

So if we're going to move forward, if we're really going to be shook by these recent events, We have to adopt real community-based accountability, not a walled-off partition system where we have the CPC without any power or any connection to the community, and then we have an OPA which certifies the murder of people like Falotogo, Rodriguez, Smith, and the yet-unnamed African-American Kim.

Thank you, Howard.

Our next speaker is Valerie Scholarette.

Scholarette.

Hi my name is Valerie Scholarette.

I'm a longtime city resident who has been following policing in Seattle since the murder of John T. Williams in 2010 and the subsequent reform consent decree.

Ten years and the deaths of 28 people at the hands of SPD later I'm not convinced there has been meaningful reform.

Today you'll be hearing updates from the OPA and the OIG, two offices the public is often told provide effective oversight for Seattle Police.

Yet there is little transparency about what these offices do and little news of what they achieve.

We are often told that the OPA has civilian staff as if that means its investigations of police misconduct are impartial.

On the OPA's website there is an organizational staff chart showing that 9 out of 10 existing investigators on the team are police officers.

That amounts to the police investigating the police.

The OPA has neglected to proactively take on investigations into several very questionable and tragic police shootings like that of Charlena Lyle.

It's the OPA's role to hold police accountable helping weed out bad actors and bad practices or does it exist to create the impression of accountability.

We now have protesters occupying a zone in Capitol Hill because they know we do not have an accountable police force.

Why should they trust the reform process that has been ongoing for 10 years.

I urge the committee and the entire city council to take on the task of making the police truly accountable not to each other, but to the public.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's the last speaker.

We have signed up for public comment.

I'd like to recognize that we've also been joined by Council Member Lewis.

For folks who don't have their agendas in front of them, we are going to be covering the Office of Police Accountability's annual report, and they are also going to include an update on the current investigations.

Then we will hear from the Office of the Inspector General about their 2019 annual report and update on what they are proposing to do in response to the recent mass demonstrations, and it's called a sentinel review.

And we'll hear more about that.

We asked the CPC to join us to give an overview of their annual report as well.

They were unable to join us today, and I hope to have them sometime in the near future.

Before we begin and dive into our agenda, I just want to have a few opening remarks to address not just the reports of the shootings over the weekend, but also to respond to the press conference hosted by Mayor Durkan and Chief Best yesterday.

I was disappointed, as I know a lot of folks were, to learn in the press conference I have had a lot of conversations with the council about the cancellation of the CHOP meeting to talk about how to end the of hope that the CHOP leaders who have been meeting to talk about their recognition that this is an unsustainable situation, if our fire department cannot enter the perimeter and deliver emergency aid at night because of the presence of guns in the area.

inability thus far for the police department to get there in time in order to allow the fire department to render life-saving aid.

And I appreciate that the mayor has been trying to meet with CHOP leaders in order to have this discussion and her involvement of community peacekeepers like Andre Taylor, if not at this time, and I do hope that that meeting can happen soon.

I do want to address Chief Best's remarks, and I quote, that a life might have been saved if it were not for the circumstances created by hasty legislation.

which is for clarity's sake, the city law banning crowd control weapons is not in effect, and it will not be in effect until late July.

The operating regulation is the temporary restraining order, which on June 17th, the city agreed to extend through September 30th.

That is the regulation under which the police department is operating as it relates to all crowd control weapons.

In any event, I don't understand how tear gas would have helped to save that young man's life on Saturday when the police arrived after he had been transported out of the area.

So not only is the law not in effect, it is really incomprehensible to me how even if tear gas was available, how that would have helped the situation when the fact is that the police arrived after he had already been transported out of the area.

You know, I think it's really important, one of the things that's getting lost in the shuffle is that it's very likely that the CHOP grew to be this situation that we're addressing right now because the police abandoned the East Precinct.

If neither the mayor nor the chief authorized leaving the East Precinct building, who did?

Were policies and procedures followed by officers leaving the building?

If another officer told others to do so, were they following policies and procedures?

What does it mean that a building full of public workers left their place of employment and we have no idea who it was who told them to do so?

I'm glad that we have the OPA here today with us because these are some of the questions I think we really need to get to the bottom of.

And I know that this is on everybody's mind, but I just have to say it.

I refuse to let go of keeping George Floyd and all the other black men and women killed by police at the center of these discussions.

This is not about the council.

It's not about the mayor.

It has to be about black men and women dying at the hands of police who are supposed to protect them.

It's about their families never seeing justice.

And it's about the culture of policing that has stopped these deaths, has not stopped these deaths, and has not insisted on justice.

And this isn't just something that's happening out there.

It's happening in our own community.

And the world is watching.

We have an obligation to get it right for Seattle.

This is also for the woman who was hit in the eye by a rubber bullet.

It's the first protest she ever attended.

It's for the family of an eight-year-old boy and the eight-year-old boy himself who was sprayed in the face with chemicals.

And in my role as public safety chair, I really don't want this situation to devolve into political finger pointing.

I want to be introspective and begin the hard work of righting historic wrongs.

perpetuated on black people and other communities of color.

And we must squarely examine the choices that have been made during the recent protests to bring to light what has happened and the damage it has caused, both physical damage to the bodies of Seattleites exercising their First Amendment rights and in the fraying of relationships and trust.

I want to thank everybody who has been sharing their personal accounts of what they experienced at Seattle protests over the last several weeks.

In the hearing that I hosted as public safety committee chair, I was joined by all my fellow council members.

And of course, thousands and thousands of emails sent to council members giving us powerful testimony and eyewitness accounts.

the videos and eyewitness accounts of citizens acting as historians means that the council and the police accountability partners have a firm foundation on which to rest our inquiries.

Again, thank you to everyone who has documented what you've experienced and to everyone who's participated thus far.

We've got a lot of work to do still.

So with that, I think we will hand it right over to Director Meyerberg.

I'll just read the item into the record here.

Sorry, I'll just read that into the record.

Thank you.

Agenda item number one, Office of Police Accountability 2019 Annual Report and Update on Current Investigations.

Thank you, Alex.

Let's start with introductions from the OPA team.

So good morning, everyone.

This is Andrew Meyerberg.

I'm the director of OPA.

Team, do you want to introduce yourselves?

Or I can introduce you and introduce yourselves.

I'm Geneva Taylor.

I'm a community engagement specialist.

Hi, I'm Ann Bettisworth.

I am the deputy director of public affairs.

And I'm Lauren Caputo, and I'm the data and policy analyst.

Great.

So thank you so much for having us here today.

So we are going to, as Council Member Herbold said, we're going to discuss our 2019 statistics from the annual report and then to go through the demonstration cases and to give a look forward as to some of the projects we have on deck for 2020. So Lauren is going to start to do a brief overview of the 2019 report and to talk about, again, our statistics and trends that we identified.

Anne Bettisworth, who's our Deputy Director of Public Affairs, will give an intro to our public affairs work before turning it over to Geneva Taylor.

And Geneva's going to talk about two specific community-engaged and specialist-led projects, which are the OAS Protocol, which we created with the CPC and OIG, and our new Know Your Rights project.

then I'm going to provide an update, uh, turning the ongoing investigations into the demonstration cases.

So without further ado, Lauren, you want to pick over and just to say, we'll take questions as we go.

We can also save some time at the end.

So whatever works for the council, we're happy to do Lauren.

Thank you.

I'll be talking about some of the developments from 2019 that we highlighted in our annual report, the first of which was civilianization of OPA leadership.

So in May of 2019, OPA completed its transition to a full civilian-led office as required by the Police Accountability Ordinance.

Our former captain and lieutenant transferred to other SPD assignments.

A deputy director of investigations who came to OPA at the end of 2018 replaced the former captain position and a new civilian investigation supervisor was brought on who replaced the lieutenant position.

OPA's top-level leadership now consists of the Director, a Deputy Director of Public Affairs, and a Deputy Director of Investigations, who each manage their own respective teams.

Additionally, OPA hired a new Investigations Advisor position in 2019, who is a civilian attorney.

He assists with investigations and drafting case findings.

other developments that were not included in our 2019 annual report.

They're new for 2020. We brought on our first civilian investigator a few months ago, and with the addition of our second civilian investigator, who is set to arrive in early July, OCA will now consist of 17 civilian positions, and nine sworn investigators.

And it's also important to recognize that the Deputy Director of Investigations and the Investigation Supervisor, who are both civilians, also conduct investigations of their own.

So we're a true hybrid office.

The second highlight I wanted to bring up was our efforts to empower SPD supervisors to address minor misconduct, which in turn allowed OPA to focus on focus more of our resources and energy on serious misconduct.

So in late 2018, with input from supervisors, OPA developed the unsubstantiated misconduct screening program, whereby frontline supervisors could document and investigate unsubstantiated claims or complaints made in the field that were refuted by video or other evidence.

Supervisors can conduct a critical review of the complaints and then screen those incidents with OKA to determine if a formal complaint referral is required.

Some of the most common types of complaints screened through the program are complaints of sexual assault or excessive force.

And in our annual report, we do give examples of some of those complaints.

For context, previously, each of these complaints would have required a formal OPA referral.

An OPA intern would be required to conduct a full investigation into the matter due to the nature of the complaints.

This was cited by officers as one of the reasons morale was low as OPA's practice of conducting full misconduct investigations into demonstrably false claims was perceived as procedurally unjust through the program in 2019. 242 complaints were screened with the OK Director.

The Director requested a formal complaint referral for 23 of those cases, often due to a separate potential policy violation that was uncovered during the review, but not related to the claim that was initially screened.

An additional result of the program is increased collaboration between OPA and SPD supervisors.

As OPA has shifted the handling of minor policy violations back to SPD supervisors, OPA can focus much more of its energy and resources on serious misconduct.

So on page 19 of our annual report, which In the interest of time, I'm not going to share my screen and go there, but it's available on our website, Seattle.gov slash OPA.

We analyzed disciplinary trends over the last five years.

In 2015, 15 percent of sustained findings resulted in no discipline to the involved employees.

And today, or in 2019, 100 percent of sustained findings resulted in some form of discipline.

Likewise, oral reprimands in 2015, were 46% of sustained findings in 2015 resulted in oral reprimands.

And today, or in 2019, 16% of sustained findings resulted in an oral reprimand.

And we've seen an increase in the number of suspensions and a slight increase in terminations as a result of our shift towards focusing on serious misconduct.

And then I'm gonna pass it over to Anne to talk about community engagement.

Thank you, Lauren.

Are there any questions on that before we move on?

Thank you.

I would like to pause to see if any council members have questions on that section before we move on.

I do have a couple of questions, but wanna defer to my colleagues first.

Councilmember, Council President Gonzalez, I saw you put your hand up, but I couldn't tell if that was actually a raising of the hand or...

No, I was just, I was just...

Motioning.

I'm sorry.

In mid-motion, I couldn't tell.

So, can...

Two things, one, as it relates to the new program that allows the OPA to focus on demonstrably true complaints and to dismiss those types of complaints that, by a review of the evidence, such as the review of, for instance, body camera or car camera video, that you're dismissing those.

I just want to flag that this is something that I have asked the OIG to monitor as this new program rolls out.

There's a large number of these cases that are being determined to be demonstrably false.

So this is just something I think it's really important that we have another set of eyes reviewing this new program as it rolls out.

And then the other question I have relates to the civilianization of the OPA.

If you could remind me, and all of us again, what the 2017 accountability ordinance says about the civilianization, what the SPOG contract permits, where you're at, and what the gap is between what you're allowed to do under the contract and what we had hoped to allow you to do under the 2017 ordinance.

Sure, I can address both, Lauren, if you don't mind.

So for the first one, so just to give a little bit of background, when I came into OPA in July of 2017, one thing that Tito Rodriguez, who was the former OPA auditor, and Ann Levinson had both found was that OPA was overusing contact logs.

For those that don't know, a contact log is where we just get a case and literally put it on a log and we write a letter to say we're taking no further action.

And what was happening was a lot of the cases in which there were these unsubstantiated allegations that were demonstrably false were just being put on a log.

So what we ended up doing was we shifted that policy pretty early on and we started looking at all these cases through investigations.

But when we were doing focus groups and when we were looking at these cases, we realized that these were literally cases where someone was saying, you broke my back or you raped me in the rear of a patrol vehicle.

And we know conclusively that it didn't occur because we have the video that shows that.

So what we did was we developed this pilot program and created a policy.

The policy was ultimately approved by DOJ, the monitor, and then the court to triage these types of claims that could be disproven at the outset.

Starting in 2020, we now have a shared drive where we share all these materials with the OIG.

So the OIG will be doing their own audit of these cases.

So for example, if the OIG looked at a case and says, well, you know, you should have If we did identify X, Y, and Z, then they could tell us and we would have enough time to be able to initiate an investigation and move forward with it.

So a couple caveats.

It's very limited in scope as to what we will look at.

And if someone says, I want to make an OPA complaint, it doesn't matter how unsubstantiated it is.

It still goes to OPA.

We still do our intake and investigation.

There are layers of review, so it allows, again, us to focus our resources, given that we have limited resources, on the more serious cases.

With regard to civilianization, we Basically, what the accountability legislation said, and Council Member Gonzalez, correct me if you want to, is what it said basically was that the OPA director should have discretion to figure out what the best mix of civilian and sworn should be, whether it was 50-50, 100% civilian.

But the purpose of the accountability legislation was to give that discretion to the director, given that the director was the one dealing with these cases and with the staff on a day-to-day basis.

What ended up happening in the contract was that they agreed to civilianize two spots.

So we have now hired both of those spots.

So we have hit the limit.

And the SPMA contract allowed for all of the two lieutenants and the captain to be moved out and civilianized.

And that was consistent with the ordinance.

So we have done what we can do under the current existing CBA.

Were the council or were the executive to negotiate a larger number of civilians, certainly we would hire more civilians consistent with that agreement.

But right now we are maxed out at our civilian investigators.

Thank you.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you.

I just wanted to add a little bit more context there that hopefully is helpful to the thinking around this space.

So the Director Meyerberg is correct that the Police Accountability Ordinance had some general language around the interest in making sure that there was a, I think the language used in the ordinance was a hybrid of civilian and sworn officers doing investigatory work at OPA.

I just wanted to make sure that I was clear.

The particular portion of the police accountability ordinance as is the case with so much of the language in the police Now, of course, I don't purport to speak for the Community Police Commission, but I think that there was an evolution in thinking for them, from my recollection.

Initially, they had wanted to see a model of an investigations unit that was 100%.

Civilian-led and through additional engagement, they rested on a recommendation that included a hybrid model of a mix of civilian and sworn investigators.

My understanding is that that that recommendation from the Community Police Commission has not evolved or changed as of yet, but I don't know if they have any intentions of revisiting the question around that particular mix.

The Police Accountability Ordinance also included some language that requested the Office of Inspector General for Public Safety to evaluate that model and provide recommendations based on um, best standards and practices, uh, about whether or not, um, the mix as established by the OPA was, um, the right balance or whether there would be a more appropriate balance in terms of the proportion of civilians versus sworn, um, uh, investigators in the, um, OPA, um, department.

I just think it's important for us to remember that so much of the police accountability ordinance was generated and driven by interests of the community police commission.

And that's part of the reason why we still have that three-legged stool, if you will, as our accountability system.

And again, I'm not sure if they are leaning towards a different I do think that as part of this conversation, it would be important for us to perhaps hear from either probably from Inspector General Judge on sort of her understanding based on her national work on where sort of things lie as it relates to 100% civilianization of investigation versus a hybrid model versus 100% cop investigations.

I know that there has been some material that has come out from Los Angeles, I believe, they were pushing for a 100% civilian investigation unit, and it turned out that the data in that case, from my recollection, was that review boards that were made up of 100% civilians tended to be actually more lenient and more forgiving.

uh, undisciplined cases, um, related to officers than those models that had a mixture of civilians and, um, sworn officials.

So, so perhaps if, if with the Chair's indulgence, we can, um, hear from Inspector General Judge on, on that particular dynamic.

I'm happy to have a free-flowing discussion, especially since we have a virtual table as opposed to an actual table, and we're all virtually sitting here together, so I think that's great.

I do want to also, as long as we are going to ask both OIG and OPA to opine on future changes to what the current restrictions of the contract say.

I would like to be reminded by Inspector General Judge and OPA Director Meyerberg, what the letters to Council said from each DOPA, the OIG, and the CPC about this letter, and I'm referring specifically to the letters that we appended to the Council resolution identifying what the priorities are for the community and for accountability stakeholders for the next bargaining session.

I don't recall whether or not that this particular issue has been identified as a high priority to sort of get back to the 2017 original language.

Thank you.

Madam Chair, Council President for letting me speak to this.

I was going to use some of my time later to talk about this, but I appreciate the opportunity to chime in now.

In terms of work that we did last year on this, because Council President is right, this is a mandate that we conduct staffing studies.

for the sworn civilian mix of OPA.

We were hampered in doing actual studies in 2019 because OPA was in the process of onboarding civilians.

And I believe their first civilian investigator has just started in the last month or so.

So we didn't have any data to do an actual analysis of our OPA.

So we began a survey of departments and those kinds of functions around the country to get a sense of you know, how these sort of hybrid entities are staffed, and if there's any sort of information about the effectiveness of having sworn and civilian investigators mixed, or, you know, basically just to kind of find out what the national landscape is.

And what we've come across is there are very few, and I don't really know that there are any hybrid models out there.

So this is very much an innovation in some regards.

Entities that do these kinds of investigations with civilians, I think, tend to be largely external.

And, you know, they're all civilian and external.

And I think the council president is right, both in the context of internal affairs type investigations and in the administration of discipline, the information bears it out.

And my own experience in terms of civilians dispensing consequences to police officers, they do tend to be more lenient than law enforcement folks doing the same thing.

That's not to say that it's not the right model.

I'm just telling you what our look at it and my experience has borne out so far.

So Madam Chair, one of the issues that we did flag as important, because we are required to do the staffing study and there's no data, and that OPA is really limited in the number of investigators they're allowed to have under the CDA, that even when they've hit their max in terms of what the contract purports to allow, it's going to provide us with very little information to assess the effectiveness of civilian investigators.

So we had flagged an issue that OPA should have latitude and discretion in staffing their office with the number of civilian investigators that they feel is appropriate, that would also give us a better baseline to evaluate the effectiveness of that and the impact on investigations for community confidence and for thoroughness and everything else that's important about OPA's function.

And that was the recommendation that was made by the two entities was exactly that, was to say that OPA director, whoever it is, should have the flexibility to staff the office with a combination of civilians.

I think it's important to be able to do that without putting a number on it, necessarily.

≫ Great.

So that has been flagged as a priority issue for accountability partners moving into the next set of negotiations.

Thank you.

Councilmember Sawant, I believe you have some questions.

≫ Yes.

Thank you, Chair Hubboldt.

I have several questions.

I'll just sort of read through them and also some points of these questions will get resolved today.

I feel like these are deeper issues that I'm glad we're discussing today, but I just want to register these points and these questions for future discussion as well.

One is we're talking about 2019 OPA investigations and not about 2020. I just – it just feels strangely out of touch given the monumental events that have taken place in the last 20 days in Seattle and nationwide.

So one question is, just concretely, what would we see differently if we were looking at the 2020 report?

Another question is, what were the complaints or the findings that were sustained?

And maybe this can come later.

Also, other concrete questions, what has happened to the officer who maced – meaning what action has been taken against the officer who maced the 7-year-old child during the protest on May 30th, 2020, which was the first day of the Justice for George Floyd protests?

And I was there – I mean, I didn't personally witness that happening, but I was there during the protest when that happened.

How is it possible that the person who filmed that was later arrested and charged with using a laser pointer of all absurdities, but the officer who assaulted the seven-year-old with mace has not faced any action?

I'm assuming that he has.

then please let us know.

The person who filmed Eric Garner's murder at the hands of the New York Police Department was also tracked down, as we know, and arrested by the police department later.

I believe he was recently released, but this is absolutely egregious, just imbalance of justice where the police officers who took Eric Garner's life didn't face consequences, but the person who filmed the murder faced consequences.

So what do you do to protect people who file or provide evidence for OPA complaints from retaliation?

What do you do when people providing evidence of Seattle Police Department brutality, like in this case, of the seven-year-old facing that are arrested when they are – who are documenting this are arrested on absurd charges, with the legal system clearly being used to attempt to intimidate or retaliate against any future recording or documenting of such incidences.

And I'm not asking these rhetorical questions.

I'm asking, actually, what do you do when these things happen?

Also, I just wanted to clarify from my standpoint and from the standpoint of the movement, when the OPA talks about civilian leadership and civilian investigators, I want to make sure the members of the public know that I don't believe that civilian, the word civilian means community-led or community having the power to have a say on things.

The mayor's staff are civilian, but that just means that they're not sworn officers.

They're still serving the So, you know, I think we have to make sure we understand civilian does not mean community control.

part of the problem in police accountability in the U.S. is the political establishment protecting the police.

In fact, this is the fundamental issue, really.

You know, what is the role that police play under capitalism?

But functionally, what we can see, even if we don't agree on the analysis about capitalism and all that, functionally what we see is that one of the big obstacles to police accountability is the police establishment protecting the police from facing consequences of brutality.

I mean, I just want to register that.

I think I mean, I don't know what this their evidence is about civilian all civilian actually being more lenient.

I just want to say that, though, whatever issues there are.

I think the problem is that the community that is facing the police violence has zero say I think we need to be very clear in what actually happens democratically speaking and that's why one of the demands coming out of our movement is for establishing an independent elected oversight board, community oversight board, independent elected community oversight board with full powers over the police including hiring, firing, subpoena powers, policies and procedure setting, all of that.

And I just wanted to share with the public also that I have asked the city council central staff to begin, you know, a charter amendment.

So it's not going to be a small thing, but it will be exactly the kind of change that we need in order to actually make a shift in police violence, because that would be a substantive shift, actually giving community oversight, because those will be elected positions that will be directly accountable to the voters, not this system where the political establishment is giving police cover and the police are giving political establishment cover.

Lastly, I want to quote Howard Gale, who spoke in public comment, and as he said, he sent my office letter and we've been in touch with him all along.

I would go to quote Howard Gale on civilian claim quote At the current time, only one out of 10 or more OPA investigators is a civilian.

All the others are SPD sergeants.

Crucially, this one single civilian investigator cannot investigate any serious complaint about an officer, even including things like material dishonesty.

The SPOC contract forbids any civilian investigator from investigating any complaint which, if upheld, might result in termination.

The claim by Director Meyerberg that there is civilian supervision of investigations is irrelevant for three reasons.

One, the only two civilians besides the director in the OPA tasked with supervising investigations have police backgrounds.

One had a 15-year career as a police officer, and the other worked for the failed Chicago Civilian Office of Police Oversight.

Two, supervisors can never know what evidence was missed, what questions weren't asked, or how poorly interviews may have been done.

And three, SPOG would never have bargained so hard to limit the number of civilian investigators and what they can investigate if they did not appreciate that it is the primary investigator level where complaints die.

I think these are very crucial, substantive comments, and I wanted to add them.

I would like to thank the board for the discussion as well.

I would really appreciate a response on these things today in an ongoing way.

I also think in addition to this, an independent elected community oversight board is what we need.

Thank you so much.

The OPA director and the Office of the Inspector General is in agreement that the Office of Professional Accountability needs the flexibility and the authority to hire additional civilian I understand your position, Councilmember Sawant, that you want to go further, but I just want to say that there is some baseline agreement as it relates specifically to the comments from Mr. Gale.

that there needs to be additional civilianization of the OPA.

And everybody agrees on that.

And that has been identified as a priority for us for the next round of bargaining.

And I also want to say I really appreciate many of your questions about the investigations.

We are going to talk about that in a moment.

So this agenda item is intended to be both a review of the annual report, looking back, and an update on current investigations.

And I do really want to give the OPA the opportunity to address the questions that Councilmember Sawant asked about the annual report while holding questions about current investigations until OPA has had an opportunity to finish their review of the 2019 annual report.

So I mean, there is a number of questions that were asked.

I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to recite answers to every one that was asked.

So what we can do is we can definitely give answers to council members, one and to others in writing after we're done.

First of all, I'm not going to comment on the specifics of any open investigations.

I can generally give you the overview.

We have a dashboard, but I'm not going to.

I'm suggesting that we not get into the update on current investigations until we finish.

The 2019 annual report overview, I would like to hear more about that.

And I have another, I think some other questions about the existing 2019 annual report before we move on to the forward-looking piece of your presentation.

I would also say, just to address again, just to address the last points first, you know, I think it's The system that we created was created based on community input, based on national research, based on the work of the community police commission, based on the significant work of the city council.

And again, not all the council members here voted for that legislation.

Certainly Council Member Morales and Council Member Lewis were not on the council at that point.

But it was passed unanimously, including Council Member Sawant voting for it.

If there's changes that the council wants to make to this legislation, and if there's a community board, if you want to change OPA, that's certainly within the prerogative of the council to do so.

I'm not going to stand in the way.

I can help you shepherd in those changes.

But this is the system that we created.

I think nationally, it's one of the best systems that's out there.

But again, if there's objections to that, if we want to try something else, then I support it 100%.

So, you know, the point cited by Council Member Sawant I mean, I don't know that they're necessarily accurate.

I mean, yes, we have two civilian investigators.

The reality is that's the most that we can hire.

We have civilian supervisors, one from the Chicago Office of Police Accountability that is a completely civilianized investigative agency, right, and another who was a 15-year veteran of the Irish police force and then worked for Interpol and then was an academic at Seattle University.

If having a law enforcement background or some understanding of how law enforcement works is a disqualifying factor from this work, I think that's a really, really bad idea.

Because I think it gives you an expertise and an ability to understand why officers do what they do, why things occur as they occur.

We've done our best to try to have more community involvement.

We have three community engagement specialists.

We have a number of other community members that work for our office.

When we reach decisions, we talk to them.

It's not just investigations.

We talk to many people in the office to get perspectives and diverse perspectives as to what findings should be.

You know, I don't think that I know everything in the world, and certainly I talked to a lot of folks in my office.

We do have an ability to assess investigative deficiencies.

Frequently, our civilian supervisors will be in interviews, listening to what is asked and asking follow-up questions.

We review our investigations from top to bottom to identify whether or not they were thorough, objective, and timely.

The OIG reviews them at multiple phases, do that same assessment.

So all these statements that we can make, I'm happy to provide answers and data that refutes them.

I mean, obviously, I'm not gonna answer every single question that was asked, but again, I'm happy to address them at a later time.

And frankly, I'm happy to address if there's decisions that you feel the council feels like I've issued that were an error, I'm happy to come back and address those as well.

So again, everything we do is transparent, it's on our website, and certainly my job to do a fair objective assessment of it's working, that's what I'm trying to do.

Thank you.

I thought that we had next in the presentation about the 2019 report was, I thought I remembered that Ms. Taylor was about to say something.

Yeah.

I'd love to hear about the community engagement.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Hi there.

This is Ann Buttersworth.

I'm the Deputy Director of Public Affairs, as I mentioned previously, and I just wanted to give you guys a brief overview of our community engagement program.

So this is from our 2019 annual report, just to wrap that up.

2019 was the first full year that we had a community engagement staff at OPA.

We hired three community engagement specialists in late October of 2018. And one of the first things we did in 2019 to get them stood up was we developed an outreach and engagement plan to guide their efforts for 2019 and 2020. And using that, That plan is how we've approached our projects and our various initiatives this year with regard to community engagement.

One of the things that we did that I think was really helpful for the community was we developed a suite of new informational materials available in six languages.

And these are useful in reaching various communities to provide information about what OPA is and does and how to file a complaint.

So it's not as useful in times of COVID, obviously, because we're not meeting in person, but in 2019, we used these materials and distributed them at over 90 events, festivals, meetings, with our community engagement specialists, trying to build relationships and introduce OPA.

The community engagement program is part of the larger public affairs team.

This team undertakes a variety of projects help us carry out our overarching OPA mission.

One of these projects was the OIS protocol, the officer-involved shooting protocol that was a project worked on by various system partners.

And I'm actually just going to turn it over to Geneva Taylor to talk about that project.

Thank you.

So I'm Geneva.

It's nice to – good morning to you all.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the officer-involved shooting protocol that we have developed.

over the last eight months, so this is kind of going back to 2019, some of the work that we've done.

From the last eight months, we have been really working on the OIS.

The OIS team has really been working on to create a joint officer-involved shooting protocol.

This seeks to really support the families who have lost their loved ones during an OIS.

We also want to make sure that we are sharing information out and making that information accessible two families who have gone through officer-involved shootings.

So this was created with the team, with our systems team.

So this was community police commission and our office, and we had support from OID and SPD.

And this really, we brought those entities together to really analyze the current individual plans and protocols that each of our offices have.

And we really wanted to align our work and to see where we intersected some of the work and to make sure that it did align, which we also worked together to develop the shared protocol, which provides a roadmap on how accountability entities can work together.

We collected with the hopes that this document would provide clarity regarding how accountability entities would collaborate together to respond to families affected by OIS.

This is not to negate are replaced the individual protocols that each of the offices have, but it's really to respond together in unity when we work with some of the families.

I believe that you all have access to the OIS protocol.

It is on our website.

And if you'd like me to go over that document with you all, I can kind of give you more of a clear view of what is in that document.

Is that something you guys would be interested in?

Yeah, I think something kind of high level, not too much in the weeds would be useful.

Thank you.

Okay.

So some of the things that are in this document is we really wanted to create shared values across the board with the document and the way that we went about doing this work.

So we created four foundational pieces in making sure that we were clear and communicated.

One of them is clarity giving information to some of the families who have lost their loved ones and making sure that it's clear that we that they know exactly what is happening.

Even if it's saying hey this is an open case right now we can't let you know a lot of the information right now but we did want to reach out and we did want to communicate.

So that's really important to us.

Another one is a community-centered approach, which means that the community, that family is leading how we are walking through the process with them during this time.

So if they are, and I will talk about that a little bit more, We also have cultural humility.

We want to make sure that we're coming to people with the ability to hear and to listen and to let them lead, even in cultural aspects when we are meeting with families that are different from us, to make sure that we really honor their culture.

Another one is responsiveness.

We want to make sure that we are responsive to families and to communicate with them through email, phone calls, face-to-face, do to make sure that we are responsive to the needs and some of their desires.

So this goes into the six steps.

First, the OIS occurs.

An officer-involved shooting happens, which is very tragic and traumatic for families just in general.

They have lost their loved one.

So this is really a challenging time for them.

So we really try to be sensitive to that.

We know that there is staff.

We first know that the incident occurs.

Then the second portion is to have staff members appoint a contact person.

We have a point of contact person, and that is from our office.

That could be a community engagement specialist like myself, or from the CPC.

And sometimes the family, sometimes we in the office actually know someone that has been affected.

are someone from that family reaches out to our office.

We create a point of contact person.

And then the third step is to assess those needs.

So I would get on the phone and have a conversation with someone who's in the family and say, hey, so what are some of the things that you would need?

And so this kind of This is kind of a pivotal point because they can choose to no longer engage with us and say, no, I don't want to engage.

Or they can choose to say, I just need, I would like to have a conversation with Director Nyberg.

Or I would just like to have my family and you guys can walk me through some of the steps.

So this is where we find out how much they would like to be involved and in which ways they would like to be involved.

And so it could stop here, and they could say, I'm not interested, or, hey, I was just wondering about burial services.

I've never done this before.

Can you connect me to someone who does some of the burial services?

Or they could say, hey, I'm East Asian, and I would really like counseling.

Kind of refer them out to folks who may need some of those, whatever their desires or needs are, we refer them out.

And so in there, it could be very, very, a quick process with them but it can actually go a little bit longer.

If they would like to coordinate a meeting with our office or with OIG or CPC or with SPD this would go into a further step which is coordinating the meeting.

And we would have a meeting with the family and we could revisit that meeting what that looks like.

And this also goes into how the family would like to set up that meeting.

This is what I was talking about when it talks about community-centered approach.

They are leading how they would like.

So if they would say I would like to only meet with Director Meyer-Berg or I'd only like to speak to these folks or I only want to talk to you.

That is an option as well.

So it's really really important during a time like this.

And I also believe that after that that is our that is our work with community but we would have some back we would have some internal stuff we would have to do with scheduling and with our offices and then we would follow up with the family and then we would close out the OIS process that that's the sixth step.

So if you guys have any questions about that about the OIS before I go into the other project that we are just starting.

Thank you.

I think the one question that I have relates to what happens after the OIS investigation is closed and what, I mean, how do these values of having having this be family-centered translate into the period of time that occurs after the investigation is closed in an instance where perhaps the family doesn't agree with the finding?

That's a really good question.

And so this protocol just was in place in May 2020. And are really trying to roll out this protocol.

It was not in place last year or anything.

It just started.

But we haven't really had a lot of experience with it.

Um, and it's kind of interesting because it's also something you don't want to have a lot of experience with, right?

We don't want to have more officer shootings for sure.

So, um, it's kind of like a double edged sword in some ways, but I think it's important to note that, um, that is something that we are looking into and focusing on because sometimes the, sometimes it's not sustained.

Um, sometimes they are not going to be happy with some of the results that do happen, but I think that one thing that is important, the way that we possibly communicate that to them and how we walk alongside them when this does happen and offer other community support, even if we're not that support for them, that we can get them into the right hands.

And if those right hands happen to be a organization, a grassroots organization that can support them during the time, I think that's important.

And even if it becomes a activist, if we've created somewhat an activist and gave more, and have given more power and empowered them to say, hey, this might be a way to walk alongside other folks who have lost family members as well, I think that's important as well.

But whatever their needs would be.

And that is challenging.

You're absolutely correct to walk along someone walk alongside someone when it is not working in their favor.

Thank you.

It doesn't look like there are other questions.

Can you move on to the other part of your presentation?

So there's not a lot of information and there still is suggestions that we're still seeking if any of you guys have any thoughts regarding the Know Your Rights project.

I'm very excited to be leading this project because I think it's very important.

I remember starting this job in 2018 and I was like we need to have a Know Your Rights project which is really to help people and community members to be informed about interactions with their interactions with police.

and to be knowledgeable about the law so they can actually make complaints.

I was thinking when I started the job, like, how can you make a complaint if you don't actually know what procedure or protocol was actually done improperly?

How can you make a complaint?

So I thought it was important to really kind of some of those interactions in a hand handout.

So we're going to be doing a pamphlet that will go to community members.

We have a great team.

We have some we have some internships.

We have an intern who will be working on this who's a law student.

We also have a lot of people in the office who a lot of civilians who will be working on different scenarios where most common scenarios that we have will be looked at a little bit closer and how to interact with, when community members are interacting with law enforcement, they will know some of the laws and procedures and some of their rights so they can then be able to make proper complaints.

And so this comes with a handout.

It's not a handout, it's more of a pamphlet for them.

And then it's also a presentation that will be given by community engagement specialists around the city to community members.

So this is a project we're really looking forward to putting out at the end of this year.

Thanks Geneva, I can take over.

You know, I think this is just an example of some of the community-based work that we're doing.

I think one of the big deficits we see in systems, right, is that people don't understand what we're doing and why we're doing it.

So the more we can provide information to folks, you know, to whether it's a family that's been affected by a family member through an officer-involved shooting or, you know, teens that are at community passageways or that have had issues with the criminal justice system.

Like, our goal is to provide information.

And there are times when we'll provide information and it will still be unsatisfactory because And they may not agree with the policy or they may not agree with the decision that we reach, and that's okay, but it's building a dialogue and building that connection with us and community.

And that's been a big work that Geneva's done and our other community engagement folks and the public affairs team.

And it's been – and I know the IG's office has been doing the same thing.

It's a really big push for all the accountability entities.

So – and Geneva's not kidding when she talks about wanting to do this Know Your Rights project for a long time.

She's wanted to do it literally from day one when she started at OPA, so we're finally getting it done.

I wanted to jump ahead and I know Lisa Judge has a lot to cover, so I'll just quickly cover and I can answer whatever questions folks have.

the current investigations for the demonstration case.

Director Meyerberg, I'm sorry, before we move on to the current investigations, I do have a couple other things about the 2019 annual report.

We didn't have much time to delve into the data in your report.

For instance, there's a lot of public interest around the number of sustained findings that are overturned.

chief of police.

I believe there's one case in 2019 with two findings.

There's a lot of interest around the numbers of appeals that SPOG makes to disciplinary findings.

I believe there are 23 in 2019 that are still pending.

There's also a lot of interest in the types of findings sustained findings as they relate to allegations.

So you have some really good information in here about how the allegations themselves fall out according to different types of categories.

So according to professionalism, bias-free policing, use of force, stop, detention, and arrest, search and seizure, lying, and so on.

What I don't see is the number of sustained cases for each of those categories.

And I'm very interested to know, of these complaints that you're receiving, for instance, there are 148 bias-free policing complaints.

How many of them were sustained.

So I would really appreciate getting that information according to the type of allegation.

I just wanted to flag that before we moved on.

Yeah, and that's definitely information that we can pull for you fairly quickly.

I don't have it off right now, but we can pull it for you and send you fairly easily that information for each, not only just for cases, but also per allegation, what is sustained and what's not sustained.

I just want to flag for the viewing public, there's a lot in this annual report that we haven't covered.

We haven't covered a lot of the the data-based information about the outcomes of investigations.

We also haven't really delved into, and this information is in the report, so that's why I'm just encouraging people to read it, the policies that the police department has changed because of your recommendations over 2019. And I think those are some of the broad categories that we're not gonna have an opportunity to talk about.

here today at this time.

But I do, I'm as eager as you are to talk about an update on the current investigations.

Yeah, so just two quick plugs I would say on our website.

We have, we're creating in the process of creating a dashboard that will map out the appeals, the ongoing appeals for all pending disciplinary cases.

So to give more public exposure or more public you know eyes on those that information so that will be on our website in a dashboard form similar to the dashboard that we have for our open investigations for the demonstrations.

We also have a a form on our website where people if they want to see other information so For example, if there's a community member watching today that looks at our annual report or hears this and they want to see different information or to see other statistical analyses, we have a form in which they can write that in and send a comment to us and we're collecting the comments and we can obviously provide whatever information folks want to see.

So Lauren does our data work through IAPRO, which is our database, and we have a lot of ability.

I mean, It's a little bit of an archaic system, but we have an ability to pull pretty granular data and to provide that to folks.

So again, if there's things that you want to see, we're always happy to put them on our website.

And all the information that you just discussed is on our website currently.

So do you mind if I move on to the current investigations customer?

So we, as people may be aware, and we put this out on our Twitter, we have a dashboard right now that's on our website.

And what the dashboard does is it shows all the pending investigations relating to the demonstrations and the progress of those investigations.

The dashboards are being updated in real time.

So what you'll see if you go to the website is there's a pie chart.

And as the investigation goes, the pie chart gets filled up.

So right now, I think we have 17 investigations that are listed on the website.

We will be updating that as we go.

There's another, I think, as of the current date, there's another 11 investigations related to the demonstrations that are in their beginning stages, so 28 total.

And those will be added to that dashboard.

They'll all be on the website, so you'll be able to follow them in real time.

We, I think, all in all received about 18,000 contacts in totality concerning the demonstration.

So contacts are an email, a phone call, someone coming into our office, a web form, any sort of, or an email from the council, that would all be a contact.

So all in all, 18,000.

Again, the vast majority of those were related to the pepper spraying of the young boy.

We are trying to be as transparent as we possibly can with these investigations, knowing that I am not permitted and I will not comment on findings before they're issued.

But again, I think we can still talk to people about processes, about where we are, when we're conducting interviews, and the steps that we're taking in each investigation.

We're trying to prioritize several of the cases to complete them within between 60 and 90 days.

We're just going to be delayed in some respects because of the amount of cases, the amount of body-worn video, the amount of private-party video, the contractual requirements that require certain notice before we can do interviews.

And that just delays our investigations.

And not in a pejorative term.

We can't do them sometimes as fast as we want to.

Generally, and people may know this, but generally investigations have to be completed within six months, 180 days.

So this is a fairly expeditious investigation if we're doing it in 90 days.

So and again, we're going to try to do it sooner, but the reality is that we don't want to rush through these cases.

We want to be as thorough and objective as we possibly can.

If people look at our website, it goes through what each investigation is.

So you could look at our website and we'll say, okay, this is the case of the boy that was pepper sprayed, or here's the case of people that were punched during a protest, or here's the use of tear gas after the 30-day ban was put in place.

So each of the investigations will have a topic.

And then it will show you again the progress.

So to echo Lauren's points, and I know we covered this a little bit, but all these cases will be going through civilians.

So our two civilian investigators will be assigned to demonstration cases, as will other sworn investigators.

And every one of these cases will ultimately go through not just our civilian supervisors, but also through me.

I'm the person that issues findings on all these cases.

where people involved are supervisors.

So in some of these cases, you're going to see, you know, lieutenants, captains, acting chiefs, and even the chief named as named employees.

Those investigations have to, by contract, to be investigated by our civilian supervisors.

So Mark and Grania, who are two civilian supervisors, will be actively taking part in those investigations.

So in multiple respects, these investigations will be civilian led, and in many cases, civilian conducted.

So we on the on the type of investigations or the the basis of the investigations.

I am looking at your website now.

I do not see an investigation that has been opened up for the question of.

The targeting, the allegation that the medic tent was targeted by SPD, is that one that is in the hopper?

We have one.

I think we were limited with text that we could put up, but 2020-0344 is that case.

And then also, in my opening remarks, I talked about the fact that we have a situation where the mayor says that she did not give direction to abandon, for lack of a better word, the East Precinct.

And the police chief says that she did not give direction to officers to leave the East Precinct.

Is there an investigation on who made that decision?

determination who ordered or informed or allowed officers to leave their place of work and whether or not that complied with SPD policy and procedure.

We don't have an investigation into that.

I think from my perspective, that's probably better addressed in the context of the OIG Sentinel event review.

So the OIG, I mean, so, you know, OPA is looking at these individual allegations of misconduct, you know, Officer X used excessive force, you know, there was the use of tear gas was not reasonable, necessary and proportional on protesters.

for overall um you know tactics decision making that's really going to be something where um lisa's lisa judges uh sent all of that review that's going to be done i think with community input with the work of bbc and ig working together will cover um but i think lisa will probably cover that in her aspect of the presentation um it may be very very well customer herbal that it comes up during the course of an investigation um but we don't have We have not yet gotten a case in which it was alleged that the leaving of the East Precinct did in some way, shape, or form violate SBD policy.

That's not an active investigation that we have.

And is it possible that that question, I mean, does there need to be a named person to investigate whether or not a group of people followed policy and procedure?

So I mean, I guess, I mean, as a general matter, we don't really have jurisdiction to investigate SPD in and of itself, right?

We would investigate individual actors.

So, for example, like if what you said was that Captain X made a order that was an unlawful order, thus violating policy, certainly we could investigate that case.

But if the overall question was that the general tactics or decision-making was, you know, problematic or there was some issue with that, that would be an issue that would be more left to our systemic partners, CPC and OIG.

Thank you.

So, again, I think what I wanted to be clear about is, you know, what we try to do, and this is even in the context of these OIS protocols and when we meet with families, and we did meet with the family, the Falatoga family, in the aftermath of that shooting, and so with the DPC and OIG was at that meeting.

Generally, what, you know, what we can do is we can let people know this is what we're doing, and these are the investigative steps that we're going to take, and this is why we're going to do these things.

And when we're done, we're going to come back to you and explain what we did and why we did it.

And we did that with the Falatoga family, where we met with them once at the time the case was initiated.

And then once the findings were issued, I went back and met with them to explain to them the findings and to hear their thoughts and concerns and rightfully anger at some of the findings that were issued.

We would do the same thing, I think, with these demonstration cases, where if the council would like us to come back and present on the findings, we're happy to do so and to let you know what we did and why we did it.

But what I won't do is I think it's frankly it's inconsistent with the OPA manual and with the ordinance, just comment in real time about the cases and whether misconduct was committed until I actually reached findings in the cases and our investigation completed.

That's all I have.

I don't know if there's questions for either the council members that are on the call or if there's anything else I can address.

I am scanning everything here to see if I see any hands, any texts, any notes in the chat, and I see none.

So yes, let's move over to Inspector General Judge.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Let me just really quick introduce the item here.

Item number two, Officer Inspector General 2019 Annual Report, an update on Sentinel event review of mass demonstration response by the Seattle Police Department.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I just wanted to make a couple of remarks before I get started.

I do have a PowerPoint presentation that's going to be run by my deputy, Amy Tsai.

just so that you've got some information up to look at while we're having a discussion.

But I do, I want to acknowledge the comments from Council Member Salant and the public comment folks who, you know, talked about the presentations today being a lot of numbers and, you know, taken in the context of what is going on right now and the urgency of the moment.

It also in some ways seems a bit tone deaf to me as well to be doing this when, you know, we've got some really critical work that needs to be done.

And so what I'm hopeful about is that the illustration of the work that we did in 2019, as we were finally getting up and running as an office, will give you some insight into how we do our work, how we incorporate community voice into it, definitely opportunities for expanding that.

And so when I talked about Sentinel event review, That will give you an idea of where we're headed in terms of community voice in our own work and process.

So I just wanted to acknowledge that and say that I hope that you will look at what we did last year and the projects that we've got ongoing with a lens toward understanding that community voice is very important in informing our work.

always looking for ways to improve and make our work more transparent, make the work of government more transparent, and to really be a voice for systemic change.

So thanks a lot.

And Amy, if you want to go ahead and share your screen so we can get started, that would be great.

Thank you for those opening comments.

We appreciate it.

All right.

So go ahead and flip to the first substantive slide, Amy.

Thanks.

So as you can see, our office was created as part of the accountability legislation in 2017. I came on almost two years and a month from today to get the office up and running, hire staff, and find a home.

So really in 2019, we were into our first full year of operation, undertaking the work that were mandated by the legislation, trying to to figure out our processes for identifying projects that were of importance to community and just getting up and running.

So next slide, please.

Thanks.

Just to give you a general idea of, we're working with a fairly small staff of folks.

And so we have four really core functional areas that we've focused our staff on.

One of those is my deputy and I, engaging in some strategic leadership functions, and I'll talk about each of these independently, but our main function really is auditing.

So we've got the bulk of our staffing as auditors going in and taking deep looks under the hoods at SPD, and also in reviewing OPA cases of investigations of officer misconduct.

That's a really critical function, obviously, at this juncture and something that we were designed to help add a measure of confidence for the public in what OPA is doing and how they're doing the work.

And we've got a best policy and best practices function.

So we've currently only got one policy analyst right now undertaking that work, but we really look to data and best practices to try to inform how we approach our work and how we generate recommendations.

And I want to just make a point that I know Inspector General Judge and Amy Tsai and Public Counsel President Gonzalez tire of hearing me make, but often When we think of auditing, we think of auditing being just a look back.

Your auditing function at the Office of the Inspector General is not only a look back.

You are able to, as I understand it, be auditing the actions of OPA in real time.

And if you see that things are missed, like, oh, they didn't interview a particular witness or other types of, or you don't agree with a classification, you have the ability in real time to have that conversation.

I think it's really important for the public to understand that.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for highlighting that.

I will go into that in a bit more depth when we talk about our OPA work.

But yeah, that's a very critical relationship that we have with OPA, the ability to give them real-time feedback so that they can correct deficiencies in investigations and make sure that the work that they're doing really is thorough, it's objective.

So that is very important.

And I think you'll see the numbers bear that out.

There are a subset of OPA cases right now that we don't that we look only retrospectively at.

And you'll see that there is a divergence in the numbers that are certified from us or that we are in concurrence with their decision-making when we've had a chance to have that ongoing dialogue and address deficiencies in real time versus when we're going back and looking at it after the fact.

Thank you.

So this is the staffing model that we were working with in 2019. You can see that we only really have three auditors able to do the bulk of the audit work that I'm going to talk about.

In terms of OPA review, we've got two folks and one of those folks is Halftime, currently our only outreach and engagement staff member besides Amy and myself.

So that's definitely a function to make our operations more transparent and have a good feedback loop with community.

We definitely need to step up our efforts with a dedicated, at least one engagement staff person who can help us communicating our mission to community and really making sure that we are taking in community input to inform our work.

We've got, we had two policy and statistical analysts in 2019, but we're currently at one staff person for that.

Switch to the next slide, please.

Inspector General Judge, on the question of resources, I think this is probably a question both for you and for Director Meyerberg.

I thought I remembered hearing the mayor commit to providing additional resources to address the increased needs associated with this large number of OPA complaints and investigations, and that, of course, affects your work, too, and the Office of the Inspector General.

Does this last slide include those additional resources?

Yes and no.

We had three positions added that went into effect this year so that we're not reflected in that org chart.

We're hiring those positions right now.

There was a freeze, but we were given the go-ahead because of the incredible magnitude of work that's going to have to be done with Sentinel Event Review and with OPA Review.

They've had close to 16,000 complaints come in related to this, and it's probably ongoing.

So because we are also responsible for quality control for that work, we're going to have step up our efforts as well.

So conceivably another person to dedicate to the OPA review function would be ideal, a dedicated community engagement person and potentially another individual who could assist with audits to beef up our staffing on the Sentinel event review process.

So we do have additional needs.

That's my short answer.

I don't want to turn this into a budget discussion, but we do intend to approach the mayor with some asks for additional resources to be able to handle this work.

Thank you.

So on this slide, this just breaks down a little bit of what our strategic leadership efforts look like.

A lot of time was spent with SPD, the Monitor, DOJ, and other partners working on sustainment efforts.

We like to do a lot of collaborative work, both with our system partners, with community stakeholders, and targeted projects.

One just that I'm highlighting here is we were part of CPC's important work with the Serious and Deadly Force Investigation Task Force that went on to inform some of the I-940 rulemaking efforts and provided a model for independent oversight of officer-involved shootings here in Seattle.

So really important work.

with partners and community.

We have an ongoing function for use of force oversight.

Director Meyerberg is called to the scene of officer-involved shootings, and he and his office can respond to other serious uses of forces, as can my office.

So when there is an officer-involved shooting, generally it's me or my deputy respond to the scene, are able to observe what's going on with the on-scene investigation, and then later in the interviews and investigation of officers so that we have eyes on whether the investigation is unfolding according to policy, whether there are anomalies that need to be called out and addressed, whether the questions that need to be asked are being asked.

So we have some real-time on-site oversight there.

And I sit on the force review board for SPD as a non-voting member.

But I provide pretty consistent feedback to the board chair and to the folks that are responsible for running that.

And it's resulted in a couple of improvements.

And I think it just helps to have eyes on how SPD is talking about the force they use, how in-depth They're going into their reviews of it and what kind of recommendations they issue and whether those are followed up on or not.

So we have oversight of that.

When I talk about our policy work, I can talk about some of the larger scale projects that we've got ongoing.

You know, really our work involves audits and ways that you can improve systems and do what may be described as nibbling around the edges, you know, innovations.

But I think the more important work for my office is pushing larger scale structural changes that I can talk about in the policy work.

I've got three ongoing right now that I think highlight that.

So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the government auditing standards.

We've opted to use the GAGIS standards just so that when we come out with a product, we have assurances that it's objective, that it's accurate.

provide sourcing for all of our information and our recommendations.

It's checked and we're committed to making sure that our facts are right and we're independent.

I'm appointed by council, but I'm really, the folks who are my bosses are community.

I'm entirely at I work at the direction of the public through council.

So fortunately, the ordinance was very careful about setting our office up to be independent and be able to exercise independent decision-making.

And I think that gives us a lot of latitude in being able to incorporate community voice into our work.

Go ahead and switch, Amy, please.

So getting to 2019, the completed projects we had there, our first one is an audit that's mandated regularly.

It's a recurring audit looking at SPD's gathering and use of intelligence information.

And that's information that relates to a person's private sexual practices or religious or political affiliation.

And this is an ordinance that was drafted and enacted in the 70s.

And so, what our audit generally came up with was that It would be a great idea to go back and revisit this ordinance and make sure that it takes into account modern information sharing capabilities like the internet and social media platforms and things like that.

So it's a bit outdated.

Generally, our audit found that SPD was complying with the ordinance.

Although the ordinance requires destruction of certain records after they're no longer needed.

And so one of the deficiencies in our first audit was that you could surmise that because SPD was complying with the ordinance carefully, they had destroyed documents that would have enabled us to make sure they were actually complying with the ordinance in terms of getting authorizations to gather information.

So all of that is available on our website.

We make all of our product publicly available.

So I would encourage you, if you're interested to take a look at the audit in a bit more depth.

The next one was a firearms inventory control review, and that came from an outside complaint that came to us through OPA.

Somebody had alleged that SPD had missing firearms from their inventory.

So we did a review and in fact found that eight firearms were unaccounted for.

So that's, I don't know if you want details about these, but all of this is available.

on our website.

Senator General, I have a couple of questions in the queue.

I've got Councilmember Lewis here.

I just want to, before we move on to Councilmember Lewis's question, I just want to clarify.

You're saying that the 2019 office of inspector general annual report actually makes a recommendation that we we update the intelligence ordinance that is that correct.

It was a recommendation in the audit itself.

So the annual report is a compilation of all of the of these finalized audits and the recommendations that came from those.

So the annual report is a synopsis.

Got it.

It would help me as the new chair of the Public Safety Committee to know what pending legislative actions you've made recommendations for that we haven't acted on yet.

I'm looking, I'm focused really on the body of work that I'm getting this year from you.

And so if this was a, if it does not explicitly say in the annual report that you recommend that we change this law, but it is in a 2019 audit that I may not have seen, I need that information so that I can focus my efforts as the public safety chair on acting on those prior recommendations.

I would be happy to provide you with the responses from SPD.

If you're talking, we can't hear you.

There you go.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, we can.

Okay, great.

I'm sorry.

I'm not able to appear with the assistance of a computer camera today, so that's made things a little difficult.

But anyway, so thank you, Inspector General, for your presentation just now.

I have a couple of questions as it relates to The on-scene kind of investigation, post-officer-involved shooting of yourself and the OPA director, as it relates to eventual kind of inquest inquiries.

Like, is the investigation that you conduct, does that inform any future inquest, or would it under the kind of newly proffered rules from the county executive, or would Would you yourself or your deputy or Director Meyerberg be called under any circumstance, for example, as a witness in the inquest proceeding to provide the findings of those investigations to inform that finding of fact?

I'm just kind of curious if it extends beyond just accountability in the department, but also towards informing those really important judicial practices, which we know are really essential to you know, to ultimately, you know, have a final kind of finding and determination on officer-involved shootings.

So, I was just kind of curious to what extent those investigations inform those processes.

Sure.

I'll start first.

My remarks will be more brief, and then I'll turn it over to Director Meyerberg to talk about his process there.

My presence at those scenes and at the office where the interviews are conducted, where briefings happen as the the investigation is unfolding is not a formalized investigation.

It's, it is a monitoring function.

So it's observation of what's happening, the ability to ask questions, to ensure that policy and protocols are being followed and to, um, you know, ask perhaps questions that are a little bit outside of the law enforcement box.

Um, when, when, uh, It seems like there's an opportunity or a need to do that at the time.

I've been discussing with SPD a way to more formalize my involvement there and to in some way document the things that we are observing, things that may, where we've provided feedback or perhaps noted something that needs to be addressed, and then providing that to SPD, but that has not occurred yet.

So with regard to your question about whether I might be a witness or have information to provide in an inquest.

I think that would be entirely up to the parties in an inquest to determine if I or somebody in my office had relevant information.

But it's really not an investigation that my office does at this meeting.

I hope that answers your question.

And I can address really quickly.

We have a similar role where when an officer involved shooting occurs or really where any type three use of force, which is the highest level of force occurs, I'm called and I respond to the scene with investigators and usually a supervisor.

My investigators are present during the interviews that are conducted of the named employees or the involved employees that night or that day.

and we have full access to the investigative files and to the scene when we're there.

As far as inquest goes, I think it's unknown whether or not we would be able to be called as witnesses.

Certainly there's some restrictions on disciplinary information that can be introduced at the inquest.

So it's unclear whether they would view, you know, if OPA has already investigated and issued findings on the case, including concerning policy questions, whether they would view that as invading the province of the inquest jury, I'm not totally sure.

And I think it's an unknown question because there hasn't been an inquest since the rules were, the new rules were created.

So again, unknown.

Right.

And thank you for that.

And you know, The basis of that question is because we haven't really had an overlap of this three-legged oversight structure with the inquest process.

So that's just a thought that had come into my head on what the involvement of these investigations and findings might look like interacting with that process.

So I appreciate you, both of you, indulging me and answering those questions for me.

I mean, certainly something that will be interesting to see is if we, once the inquest process starts, you know, if OPA reaches certain findings and then an inquest jury reaches contrary findings, how does that interplay?

And certainly that's an issue that we'll have to look at as it goes.

But again, as you said, Council Member Lewis, we really don't know the answer to these questions yet just because it's so new.

All right.

Shall I move on to the last couple of audits?

Please.

Okay.

Crime Stoppers was essentially a request from SPD to take a look at the relationship they had with the organization Crime Stoppers that takes in tips about criminal activity and provides information to law enforcement to help solve crimes.

The findings that we came to were that there really wasn't a good formalized contractual relationship between SPD and Crimestoppers.

And there was not a good definitive basis for the resources that were being provided to Crimestoppers.

And I'll just say that this came to our office from SPD because there had been some concern about Crimestoppers individuals who were housed within SPD perhaps obtaining information about victims.

And so, Director Myerberg, this may have even, in some way, touched your shop and come from you, but we looked at all of those potential concerns and that resulted in SPD terminating their relationship with Crime Stoppers and, you know, having them, their presence is no longer in SPD facilities and they no longer share information in the way that they did.

The force review board assessment was our effort at the request of SPD and DOJ and the monitor to take part in one of the last assessments under the sustainment protocol for the consent decree.

My office actually did an audit of the force review board, their efficacy, how well they review force, and other challenges that they were potentially facing in terms of how effectively they review SPD's serious uses of force.

So that's a pretty interesting document and is available on our website.

If you have questions about it, I'd be happy to answer it, but it was part of the sustainment process.

Any questions about it, or should I move on to some work that we began in 2019 that we'll be finishing fairly soon?

Please do.

Great.

Our canine unit audit will be published tomorrow.

It has been delayed a little bit because initially of COVID and now because of diversion of both SPD resources and resources from my office to the mass protest issues.

So that one was a look at patrol canines, their training, their supervision, how the unit is, you know, how canines are selected, a variety of issues that go into how well that unit operates were addressed in our audit.

And we'll be coming out with those findings and recommendations publicly tomorrow.

So we'll make sure that all of you have that.

Inspector General, before you move on, can you just give us a quick couple sentence on how this was identified as an area for the audit?

Absolutely.

It's a great question.

Because we sit at Forest Review Board and we try to go out and avail ourselves of opportunities to observe SPD operations, it was pretty clear in a couple of force review board cases, there was confusion about the policy that regulates when canines can be used.

And there was difficulty even in assessing whether force was appropriate or not based on the confusion about this policy.

So that bumped it up to a fairly high priority in terms of our workload, because canines are high liability, proposition for law enforcement, they directly impact public confidence in how force is being used.

You know, canines are an intermediate, fairly serious level of force.

Some of those incidents were publicized in the media, and so we thought it was important for community confidence that we get in there and take a look at how those operations were going on.

Thank you.

And perhaps Director Meyerberg would like to also add a little bit to that discussion.

Yeah, thanks Lisa.

So, the, so we, OPA, like OIG, sits at the Force Review Board, and these were cases that also OPA investigated.

So I think we had a series, and Lisa, I can't, I don't know the exact number, but you, I think, itemized them in the audit.

I think we had three or four cases where we looked at specific usages of canines and specifically also identify, like the OIG, that there appear to be disconnects between the manual, the policy, and then what officers are being trained to do.

So we had issued policy recommendations basically asking for a total reworking of the policy, and then Lisa Judge and the Inspector General's office took that on.

And as a result, I think the policy has been almost entirely reworked in a positive manner.

Yeah.

Thanks, Director Marburg.

One thing I want to add is overall, there was a fairly low level of canine deployments, and I think only three bites that spanned the scope of our project.

And so we had initially also intended to include a disparity analysis in this about, you know, who are canines being used primarily on and, you know, what are the factors that look like have some sort of play in decision-making with regard to calling canines to a scene or deploying them.

But with that low level of data, we decided to take a step back and then as a phase two for this, try to do some different data analysis to do some disparity work on use of canines.

So I just wanted to add that in.

Are there any other questions about the canine on it?

It doesn't look like it.

Thank you.

Okay, great.

Mutual aid and task force operations.

This was intended to take a look at, because SPD folks, when they're operating within a traditional SPD chain of command, have supervisors reviewing their work.

If there's an allegation that their work has been done improperly, or there's misconduct, there's also OPA who can take a look at officers.

You know, there are a variety of review mechanisms for assessing officer conduct when they're working for SPD.

When they go out and they're working with other agencies or other agencies are coming in and assisting Seattle, or officers are working on task forces, we didn't really feel like there was a whole lot of transparency into how, whether they operate according to SPD policy that they use for us, how that's recorded and investigated.

You know, there are a lot of things that are assessed now under SPD, but when folks go out and work in another arrangement, we just had a lot of questions about how those arrangements played out and whether there was oversight of the conduct of SPD officers when they were out of these other arrangements.

So we initially started that making sure that we had a lens on immigration enforcement.

So we met with stakeholders involved in immigrants' rights and ACLU partners and stuff to make sure that we were looking into the right things and asking the right questions.

But we're now keeping this audit open and including in some of the protest activities here that involved the mutual aid assistance of other law enforcement agencies.

We think that that's a really good opportunity to also assess those relationships So that will be included in our mutual aid and task force operations audit.

And as we all know, this is an ongoing rolling situation.

So when we hit a point at which we think we can have a stopping point for assessing mutual aid that's currently ongoing, we will do that.

And you can look forward to that being included in that particular audit.

And just to clarify, with the exception of the canine unit operations, the mutual aid and task force operations audit, the DNA sample destruction audits are ongoing work.

You don't have a final work product in the chapter 1412 is recurring, something you do every year.

Correct.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So we're hoping to wrap these things up.

Frankly, all of the resources of my office have been diverted to envisioning what the review process for these protests will be and in addressing immediate issues for council and community about the use of intermediate weapons and SPD's crowd control tactics.

So some of these are unfortunately now taking a bit of a backseat to that work, but they're largely completed.

So we're hoping to be able to still roll those products out.

We've not been able to initiate any new projects that were on our 2020 work plan because I think the work that's going to be necessary coming out of protests and focus on that aspect of SPD is going to largely consume our staff and our resources.

Understandable.

Great.

Amy, can you switch to the next slide, please?

So OPA review, we provide oversight of OPA handling of SPD's employee misconduct allegations.

So we review OPA case classifications.

And there's a little graphic up here that just sort of shows you how a complaint flows from coming in either from internally within SPD or from the public through it being given a case file, whether it goes with some determination that there's really nothing to investigate and it's closed, or it goes down one of the possible channels that Andrew described of perhaps being an expedited investigation, being sent over to the SPD chain of command for supervisors to take remedial action, whether there's a mediation process that might be better, or it's an investigation either criminally or administratively.

So I see that Council Member Swank has a question.

I'll just finish the slide and then I'm happy to stop there.

So we review OPA case classifications at the time they're made.

We're in the process of switching to quarterly retrospective reviews of those, which was what the ordinance contemplated.

So we have stuck with individual review of cases.

classifications since we started just so that we could have a confidence level with the decision making of OPA and whether they were deciding a complaint merited investigation or whether there was some other appropriate avenue.

And I think we've hit a place now where we are confident that they're making appropriate decisions about how to classify cases.

So we're moving July 1 to quarterly retrospective review of those.

And then after SPD has conducted an investigation and they're finished with it, we certify those each and every investigation that we've done to make sure that it was timely, it was thorough, and it was objective.

So the other function that we have is every now and then we also conduct investigations of SPD employees that work for OPA when there's a conflict of interest.

And we've had a few of those, but not many.

Thank you.

This might be a good time to hear Council Member Swann's question.

It's not a question, but really a comment in response to Director Meyerberg.

He accurately said that I did vote for the office of police accountability.

Can we hold this for closing?

I'm happy to come back to you, but I would really love to get through the OIG's presentation.

And I promise I will come back to you if you want to respond to something he said about your vote.

I just want to get through the presentation.

I will give every council member an opportunity.

I want to hear questions about the presentation.

I'll give every council member the opportunity to respond to anything that they heard in this entire two hours before we close the meeting.

That is totally fine, but just for the record, in the chat, I did say this is what I wanted to say, talk about, whenever you let me do that.

I wasn't insisting on talking right now.

I actually did not see the point in the chat, but I did hear the Inspector General reference, and I thought it was a question, so appreciate it.

Okay, so just some numbers here.

In terms of classifications, my office, reviewed 985 complaints that were received by OPA.

You can see that there was a 99% concurrence rate for their decision to classify something as a contact log, which is a case that would not proceed to investigation.

But these high numbers need to be, what they highlight is that when we have the ability to have real-time ongoing dialogue and provide them with feedback about deficiencies or concerns and they're able to respond to those, it leads to a fairly high level of our confidence that their work is being done appropriately.

I don't know that there's ever going to be, I think 99% is pretty high.

Because the standards we're dealing with are not certainties, I think there's always room for some latitude in decision-making.

I'm heartened that OPA has been so open to taking our feedback and addressing what we perceive to be issues or deficiencies.

And I just want to say that that's what those high numbers are reflecting.

I think I flagged for you that that number drops to an 88% concurrence rate for things that are supervisor actions where OPA makes a decision that it's really minor misconduct that's best handled by the officer's chain of command.

We've been doing that review retrospectively.

And so when there's not that opportunity to flag things for OPA, I think you see that our assessment that it was appropriately done drops off a bit when they're not taking in our feedback at the time.

100% concurrence for investigations.

And those are, and Director Myerberg can perhaps chime in on these.

For expedited investigations, the classification decision and the expedited, final expedited investigation come for review by my office at the same time.

And I wish he had had a little bit more chance to go into some of these programs that he had developed to explain them to you.

But essentially with those, there is an opportunity still for ongoing feedback and for them to make the appropriate decision whether a full investigation is warranted or whether there's enough information available through body-worn camera video or other kind of unassailable sources of information that allow them to make that determination.

When we get into certifying their finalized investigations, we reviewed 387 of those.

In 2019, 97% of those received a full certification from my office, so they were timely, thorough, and objective.

Notably, in 16% of those cases, We had provided it either some formal direction that they do additional investigation.

Yeah, I guess that we had had formal requests that they do more investigation prior to issuing that certification.

But again, highlighting the importance of being able to give them feedback and having to be responsive to it.

to the comment that you made earlier about the classifications and the drop off to 88% concurrence for supervisor actions.

Is there a systemic issue there that we need to understand?

Is there a situation where, it sounded like what you said was you don't have the opportunity to interact in real time and that this is an example of a look back.

But is there something, that could change for these particular types of of determinations that would allow you to to opine in real time?

Yeah I will defer to Director Myerberg on that but what I will say is it's a new program and so they were they were they had undertaken this program and you know we're kind of maybe feeling their way through, establishing their own criteria.

Now that we've had a chance to do our look back and can flag issues that should have been caught at the time that were of concern for us, that gives them the opportunity to course correct for those concerns.

And so I'll be interested to see what our next round of analysis looks like with these numbers.

If the numbers are improving and they go up, what that will say to me is that our feedback was taken in, incorporated, and it's improved their process.

If we're still having, you know, a level of non-concurrence that is significant like this, then I think maybe that would be an issue we'd have to address with OPA about doing real-time ongoing feedback with those particular decisions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I can just pause real quick just to say, you know, I think supervisor actions are, you know, obviously the most they're the most difficult to classify in some respect because they can be the most subjective both on OPA's end and on the OIG's end.

So the OIG could think that something wasn't appropriate for a supervisor action.

We may disagree.

I think the thing that's been really helpful was in the OIG's annual report they analyzed and looked at categories of cases that we needed to have more clarification on.

So I think the way forward really is to reach some sort of a common ground between OPA and OIG.

So, for example, if someone's driving above the posted speed limit without any other danger to other motorists, should that be a full investigation or should that be a supervisor action?

It's those types of categories that we can come up with and say, okay, here's when we'll do a supervisor action for a driving case versus an investigation.

So I think that will be helpful.

It's already been helpful to kind of formulate more clarity around when we're doing supervisor actions.

But I think it's not, I don't know.

I mean, I think you're always going to have a differential in these categories because, again, it's opinion based.

We have different opinions.

And ultimately, OPA has the discretion to make these classifications.

So I don't think you'll ever see 100%, but certainly we'll work together to create categories so it's higher than 88%.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And what I would like to add to that is the, the disagreements that we have and the conversations that we have about it and the underlying work that goes into this, it is, uh, is we will be transparent about it.

So, you know, there's nothing in terms of our conversations and our, our decision-making and back and forth that I think, and I think director Myerberg, you would agree with me that, um, we wouldn't feel comfortable making available, you know, so that, um, our decision-making processes are transparent to folks.

And it looks like you don't want to chime in on that, Director Meyerberg, but I think transparency.

Go ahead.

Yeah, no, I would say the same thing.

We're working together.

We're collaborating on those types of metrics to say, okay, can we reach agreements on classifications?

I think just in general, the more transparency, the better.

And we've talked about for years, you know, a discipline matrix and those types of concepts, which also go to transparent.

So, you know, we have job aids, we have all these things that we utilize to make our decision making, but none of it's secret.

I mean, it's all publicly available.

So we, you know, I think we're going to work pretty closely with the OIG to develop these frameworks so then they can just be, everyone can see, because I don't think there's any secrets.

We're not hiding anything.

Great, thank you.

I do, I'm noting that we are over two hours time and I do really want to hear from the OIG about the upcoming Sentinel review as it relates specifically to the recent demonstration response by the police department.

Okay, so I will share herbal.

Can I just make one quick little comment?

It's going to be fast.

Of course, on that last point.

Thank you chair on that last point related to the classifications issue.

I just want to note that I think, you know, having.

And so, I really think it's important for the public to understand that the IG, conceptually, is the watchdog of the watchdog, which is OPA, right?

And so, that inherently means that there can't be 100% agreement in these areas.

And I think, you know, to your question, Chair Herbold, around, are there, you know, patterns or practices that would be of concern to us as policymakers, if we start seeing too much alignment in this area in terms of the IG almost always agreeing with the OPA, that would be a flag, I think, for me that maybe we didn't strike the balance of independence as well as we could have structurally as it relates to the mission and the goals of the IG and the OPA.

So I know it sometimes can be uncomfortable to be in conflict, but I think in this area, it's important to have a healthy amount of push and pull to promote the ongoing independence of the entities.

So I appreciate getting a good understanding through this presentation on this slide about where those tensions currently exist.

Thank you.

point.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

And yeah, I'll just highlight the one takeaway at the bottom, that it's clear to us that when we have ongoing communication, and OPA is receptive to our feedback, it really does improve the outcomes.

And I think the numbers bear that out.

So Amy, can you switch to the next slide?

So I'm not going to, I know we got to get through this.

So I want to talk about some of the actual policy projects that we're working on that I think may have some impact in the work moving forward.

So Amy, if you could just move on to, let's see, this highlights some of the policy work we did.

Just process mapping, I think will be helpful.

And we'll have to figure out a way to work in some process mapping to the Sentinel event review so that folks understand have a visual representation of whatever processes may be important in analyzing SPD's responses.

So that's some of the work that we do where we assisted SPD with some disparity analysis information.

And that will highlight that we've got the technical expertise and the desire to really dig down and add disparity analysis to the work that we do and that we want to push out.

What else do I want to highlight here?

Let's go ahead and move to the next slide, Amy.

So I think these three things will give you a little bit of an insight to some of the systemic, the broader systemic changes that have been important to us and that maybe now some of these will be able to get off the ground.

Like I said, doing system-wide innovations have a much more immediate and transformative impact than just the recommendations with little systemic tweaks here and there.

So three long-term projects that we started in 2019, and one which hopefully will come to fruition this year is the Sentinel event review process.

That's taking an incident that has a significant negative outcome for community, whether it be an officer-involved shooting or a large-scale protest situation like this where force is used against people in a way that is unreasonable or that is perceived to be unreasonable and has a large community-wide impact.

Those are the kinds of things where it's really important to look at everything that contributed to that outcome and try to identify the root causes for these bad results and fix those root causes so that we can stop these kinds of things from happening in the future.

So I want to talk a lot more about Sentinel Event Review after I finish this, Councilmember Herbold, and just the work that we're doing to push that forward.

The other one that's on hold right now, sadly, is a good hard look at SPD's program and philosophy for interviewing suspects and witnesses.

We've done a lot of work with CPC, OPA, National Innocence Project, Innocence Washington, and other folks to identify some best practices.

And we got as far as engaging a consultant from the UK to come and assist all of us, my office, OPA, and SPD with developing a very comprehensive training and supporting policies around using interview practices that don't involve deception, that involve, you know, sort of the best thinking in social science about how you mine someone's memory for details and you gather facts without working in bias and coercion and things like that.

So very, very important work, but that's going to be on the back burner a little bit.

And the other one, But I wanted to highlight, and this was the very first recommendation I ever made to Chief Best back in, I think, August of 2018. And that was that SPD develop and implement a peer intervention program that would train officers, give them the expertise and the permission really to be active bystanders and to intervene with each other and help each other stay out of situations where, you know, perhaps they were, they were losing their temper or otherwise veering into unprofessional conduct that they could step in and, and, um, you know, assist each other in keeping each other out of trouble.

And, uh, I was, I was, uh, it, it, it struck me how many articles I saw in the wake of the, of George Floyd's murder about the value of these kinds of programs.

And, you know, there were other officers standing around.

and not intervening in this particular conduct and how programs like this really do have value.

So, you know, I think that's fairly low-hanging fruit and fairly easy.

And I don't want to give the impression that I think quick and easy fixes are the answer here, but certainly everything that we can do to assist officers in recognizing potential misconduct and getting it and actively stopping it, I think is a step in the right direction.

So Inspector General, Judge, as you identify this as a long-term project for OIG, it's not at all clear to me where we're at in the trajectory of this recommendation.

You said this is one of the first recommendations you've ever made.

Yes, correct.

Does SPD have such a program now?

And your work would be looking at how the program works?

Or are you instead talking about guiding SPD in creating the program that they have not yet created?

Yeah, I think we're still encouraging them to create the program.

We have offered to provide technical expertise and whatever they need to get it going.

And then to your point, if they had such a program, we would be working to evaluate the effectiveness of it.

But we're still trying to- Do your recommendations in this area include an obligation to intervene on behalf of officers?

Yeah, I think that's a standard policy that every police department should have, an affirmative obligation to intervene in violation of rights or in misconduct.

This would give them additional tools and training.

The program that's been really successful in New Orleans actually has officers wear a little pin that says EPIC, which stands for Ethical Policing is Courageous.

So if somebody's got an epic pin on, they've basically been trained and they've given their consent in whatever situation for officers to step in, move them aside and take over so that whatever it is that they're doing can be stopped in its tracks.

And so this is one of the first recommendations that you made as Inspector General, and you say that you continue to encourage SPD to develop a program like this, and you have expressed your office's willingness to do so.

Can you tell me a little bit about what's happened in between the time of making this recommendation and your more recent expression of continued willingness to help?

Sure, I think there's, you know, there's support at the executive level for this kind of program.

The way that it's worked most effectively in the agencies that have employed it is it's been a program that's been developed by patrol officers and, you know, sort of housed within the patrol function and used as almost an officer wellness tool to help them help each other.

And so my My initial thinking about it was that really it needed to be a program that was that was grown by SPD.

And there are models out there that you could just take and implement.

But, you know, to really get the buy in that makes this kind of program effective, that patrol really needed to take it and make it their own.

And so I've had I had discussions with patrol, you know, executive level folks.

I've had discussions with the with union folks.

about it and everyone has expressed some level of interest and support, but there has just not been something that gets it off the ground.

And I think there has been resistance to yet another program that comes from the top down having to be absorbed with all of the focus that's been on patrol with the consent decree.

But I think now we're at a time when you know, just like we've said before, nibbling around the edges and avoiding things that might have a really meaningful impact for community can just can be sidestepped or, you know, put off.

And this is one of those things that I think should be a fairly easy decision for anybody to make.

So we've been gently prodding them, but I think right now it's how does it come out?

Is it a program that's pushed out by the chief and developed by their training unit?

Or is it a program that you allow officers to take and implement and make their own as a way to keep themselves from engaging in unprofessional conduct with community?

Thank you.

Amy, switch the slide.

So that really gets us to a point where we can talk about what's going on with our process and Sentinel event review.

The public commenters and Council Member Sawant, again, their points were well taken about community really not being included in important decision-making and important processes that directly impact them.

And one of the things that's been important to me since I got here was trying to get actual community voices in rooms where force was being reviewed you know, at the force review board.

I come from a place where critical incidents have community members sitting as part of the review board.

So with sentinel that review process, I think that gives us a real opportunity to identify community members whose voices should be at the table in terms of conducting a wholesale review of all of the events that have unfolded in the aftermath of of Mr. Floyd's murder.

And really to incorporate community input and involvement in a variety of ways, we're working with CPC and OPA to provide a framework for the process.

And we're identifying a work group of folks who can help us envision what the sentinel event review process should look like.

In addition to that, I think it's really important to hear what folks have to say.

What are their concerns about this?

What are their desired outcomes about this?

And so I don't think I can wait.

So we intend to start a series of listening sessions via Zoom and potentially out in community if we can get some spaces where we can do social distance in-person meetings so that whomever wants to weigh in, and tell us what they want answers to, what things are important to them, we've got that feedback to take into this process.

Inspector General, we have about, I don't know, a couple thousand emails from folks demanding a community-led investigation of the police departments.

I will look forward to giving them a time and date when they will have the opportunity to engage.

in your Sentinel review process.

I do want to just flag, I'm glad to hear that you are working with the CPC on this.

Earlier, I think sometime last year, the recommendation from the CPC was to do a Sentinel review on another and I just want to confirm that they are aligned that this is the appropriate opportunity to inaugurate a city sentinel review with community?

I think we're at a moment right now where community involvement in the review is, it just has to happen.

And so some of this is out of necessity.

We are using this opportunity to develop and conduct our first Sentinel event review.

Really hard to have our first one be something of this magnitude and of this import to everyone, but I think I don't see any other way really to review this incident.

Thank you.

So Council Member, or Council President Gonzales, and then I'll let, there are no other Council Members who have questions about the OP, I'm sorry, the OIG presentation.

I'm gonna go right to Council Member Sawant, who I know is trying to wrap up her time with us in this committee meeting.

Council President Gonzales.

I already asked my question, but thank you.

Oh, you did.

Fantastic.

All right, so any more questions related specifically to the Office of, I'm sorry, the Inspector General's presentation, either about the 2019 Annual Report or their plans for Sentinel review?

Let's see, okay, great.

Seeing none, Council Member Sawant.

Looks like she might be gone.

All right, well, my apologies to Council Member Sawant.

All right, well, thank you both for – well, thanks to both of your teams, I should say, for joining us today and allowing us to both do a 2019 look back as well as a forward looking review of your work and its critical nature in light of recent events of the last few weeks.

I really appreciate your recognition that the work that you do has to be has to be nimble and has to be in response to what people's experiences are in real time.

And that might mean making changes from what you previously had as a planned 2020 work plan.

And I think that really shows that as organizations and as you are not tone deaf.

You're not just moving forward with the work that you had planned to do in 2020. You're making accommodations to address what the demands of community are today in this moment.

And I really appreciate, again, you're joining us here today, your work and your commitment to continuous improvement.

Thank you, Madam Chair, appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And if there are no more comments, it is 12.54 PM and the meeting is adjourned.