Select Budget Committee Session I 10/1/20

Folks, I think we're going to go ahead and get started here.

Well, good morning, everyone.

Today is October 1st, 2020. The Select Budget Committee will come to order.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda, Chair of the Select Budget Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Morales.

Here.

Peterson.

Here.

Sawant.

Here.

Strauss.

Present.

Gonzalez.

Here.

Herbold.

Here.

Juarez.

Here.

Lewis.

Present.

Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

Nye present.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk, and thank you, council colleagues.

We have everyone in attendance this morning.

I want to thank you for your time again on our full agenda for day two of the overview of the mayor's proposed budget for 2021. We spent all day yesterday having robust conversation with various departments and the city's budget office for a high-level overview, and today we have the opportunity to continue that conversation.

This morning, we will focus in session one on the Seattle Police Department.

This follows the summer's Seattle Police Department budget inquest that the City Council launched to get a better understanding of where funding is currently going.

We're excited to hear more from Council colleagues, your questions, questions you may have that the community has raised, and to get more details from the Seattle Police Department and the City Budget Office as we look at 2021. This afternoon, we will focus on Human Services Department, SMC, and OED.

Seattle, the folks at the Office of Economic Development have been so kind to offer additional time for us because we did not get a chance to get into the racial equity and COVID response components.

And thanks to Freddy de Cuevas for working with Director Lee and his team.

We did have some extra time at the end today, so they have kindly offered to come back so we can cover those last three slides.

I want to thank you all for your time.

Just as a reminder, we will do 30 minutes of public testimony this morning.

We will end by 1 p.m.

this morning, no later, hopefully a little earlier.

We'll give you one hour break for lunch, and we will have a hard stop again this evening at 5 p.m.

I appreciate all of your time, and I just want to do a quick shout out to our folks from the city clerk's office in IT and the communications team who have been so generous to help us run these remote public meetings.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Also, thanks so much to Farideh and Patty for making sure that the OED was reflected in our budget as published yesterday.

So there's no need to amend the agenda today.

Thanks for your quick work team.

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

We do have a few folks signed up for public comment this morning.

Thank you all for calling in.

Just a reminder, if you are not able to call in for public comment, there will be public comment provided for a long period of time on Tuesday evening, starting at 5.30 p.m.

The public comment sign-up sheet starts two hours prior to that, and we will look forward to a more robust discussion with those who can call in at this time.

I'm going to start by calling the first three people present.

You will hear a 10-second chimer at the end of your time.

We're going to give folks two minutes today to provide public comment.

I'll call in the order in which you appear.

And I'm also going to call folks who are listed but not present.

We haven't done that in the past, but I want to make sure that if there's folks listening in and they're not in our line to testify and they're on the listen in line, that's an indication to them that they need to give us a call on the public testimony line.

So with that, please note we are continuing to work to try to endeavor to make this remote public testimony process smoother every time.

And we look forward to continuing to get your feedback on this.

This time public comment is open, and the first three people on the list are Howard Gale, Melissa Terry, and Katie Nooner.

As a reminder, please push star six to unmute yourself, and we will also unmute your line over here, but you do need to hit star six to unmute.

Good morning, Howard.

Please go ahead.

Just going to wait another second here.

Howard Gale, followed by Melissa Terry and Katie Luner.

Howard, good morning.

Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning.

This is Howard Gale from District 7. This morning, you're going to be looking at the SBB budget.

$4.7 million of that budget is for the Office of Police Accountability, which has failed to stop or hold accountable the vast majority of officers for the abuse for the last four months, which now continues.

There have been near-death experiences, brain trauma, loss of sight, loss of hearing, 13 officers standing around while they watch a woman who was falsely arrested have seizures repeatedly, severe burn and concussion wounds, PTSD.

Just this Monday, we saw an officer brandishing a gun at protesters without cause, and on and on.

Just last week, we saw a police officer run a bike across a protester's neck.

The response of the OPA to that case was to refer this for criminal charges.

raising the obvious question as to why none of the other abuse was so treated.

And it highlights the fact that far too much of the OPA's nearly $5 million budget has actually been used this summer to avoid accountability.

So please, I'm begging the council, as part of defunding and reimagining public safety and police, please defund an accountability system which has not provided accountability.

and reimagine having public safety with accountability based on a citizen investigative model, on citizen accountability, and not on spending $5 million basically paper over the police abuse.

Thank you.

Thank you, Howard.

Melissa, good morning.

Just star six to unmute yourself.

Hello.

Good morning, Melissa.

Hi, thanks for taking my comments.

I am in District 4 and I have been fighting for Black lives during these protests this summer.

And I'm just appalled at SPD's response, at the mayor's response, at the city government's response.

to what happens when you stand up for Black lives.

And the police have been I mean my daughter had a flashbang explode on her knee that she's still scarred from.

I know that's very minor compared to other things that have been happening to especially people in the Black community.

But please I urge you to defund SPD.

Please.

I yield my time.

Thank you for calling in this morning, Melissa.

Katie, good morning.

Good morning, Katie.

Good morning.

Can you hear me?

We can.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Katie.

I am with, I'm in District 2. First of all, I'd like to say thank you for siding on the right side of the future and helping us build the start of things with this last overriding of the veto.

That was a big moment in history, and I know it's probably a hard decision, and I appreciate stepping on a limb.

However, it was just a start.

We do need to work on defunding SCD this next year by at least 50%.

I'm going to ask that we try and work for 80%, because as we know, when we asked for 50, we didn't quite get it.

So maybe if we ask for more, we can work on it, because this is the road to abolishment at the end of the day.

When Jenny Durkin put out her recent budget, she invested a lot more into the police than she did in black communities.

And I find that to be rather backwards considering that's the community or police traumatized black communities so much.

And it just shows that we would like to invest in traumatizing the black communities and invest in building it.

And we know that true preventative measures is actually investing in youth and actually giving them resources and opportunities to not go onto the streets to give grocery stores so that they don't have to walk a mile to a grocery store, things like that, and get caught up in crime and things even before they get there.

So it's very important that we continue this process in finding a way to defund and abolish the police completely, because that'll truly build the society that we are desiring today.

If we can invest more in education, more in the youth, and more into social services and mental health, and domestic violence counselors and all of those things.

This is on behalf of all of the Morning March Indigenous Coalition as well.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you very much.

The next four speakers are Kwan Wan Liu, Leah Lucid, Jesse Hagley, and Kelly Verity.

Kwan I want to note it says that you're not present, as well as Kelly.

So if you are listening in on the listen-in line, please do follow the instructions for dialing back into our Zoom meeting here so that we can have you present.

That's for Quan and Kelly.

I'm going to go to the two who are listed as present.

That's Leah.

Good morning, Leah.

Hi, good morning.

Can you hear me?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you.

Hi my name is Leah in the District 4. I'm calling first I would like to thank the City Council for overriding the veto.

As Katie said we know that was hard decisions were being made and we just really appreciate you sticking to your word.

I would like to say as a District 4 member Alex Peterson please learn more from unhoused folks about the navigation teams that you so love to support because they actually are not trusted And they are not reaching out and giving the support that you think they are.

They are often leading to police sweeps by disclosing where camps are.

And they're not trusted.

So please learn more from people working directly with these encampments.

I'm doing a lot of mutual aid with groups in these camps and talking to folks directly.

So please talk to them.

I also want to say, please defund SPD.

I've been out here.

I marched at the morning march.

I'm at a lot of other marches.

And we are just seeing firsthand the brutality of SPD that mirrors the brutality of the police throughout history in this country and up till today.

And I really am hoping that Seattle will stay strong that all of you will stay strong and bold so we can be an example to the country of how we can have a better future and work towards community safety.

Please do not let Jenny Durkan take money from the jumpstart tax and put it into the money that she's promising to BIPOC communities here.

That money needs to come from SPD not from other money you had already planned to put into other really useful programs for youth education housing food security all these other important needs that this money for this $100 million that she's saying that she's promising to BIPOC communities here needs to come from SPD.

Thank you so much.

I yield my time.

Thank you for your time this morning.

Jesse good morning.

Jesse, as we tee you up, I want to note again for Kwanwan Lui and Kelly Verity, we do not see you listed as present.

So please do dial back into the number that was offered for the public testimony line.

Jesse, I see you.

Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Jesse Huey.

I'm a district two voter.

First off, thank you for listening to your constituents and supporting our will.

to start the process of defunding the Seattle Police Department.

I acknowledge that that was a big step for a lot of folks on the council, and I want to thank you for that.

But the work is a lot bigger.

I want you to recognize that Durkin's proposed budget is austerity for BIPOC and working communities, and a blank check for a police department that has killed and violently oppressed the people of this city with impunity.

uh...

as we can see opa is worthless uh...

there's no justice there and there's no reform there even uh...

we uh...

we could really encourage you to listen to the demands of people take an enormous chunk from the Seattle Police Department and put it into actual public safety uh...

that actually keeps us safe because there's massive need in this community people are literally starving in our streets and all we're doing is buying bullets uh...

it's it's grotesque uh...

well i understand that my experiences they're very limited from in the police are uh...

have abused so many people that we don't even know about i was personally viciously beaten and arrested for no charges or for no reason uh...

charges weren't ever brought against me uh...

and literally just for standing adjacent protest i'm out of rip broken and uh...

There's no justice for me.

OPA is completely unhelpful.

I can't even get body camera footage for another six months, I believe.

There's no reason that we need to keep pouring money, any amount of money, into this violent oppression machine.

So again, defund SPV at least 50%.

I personally think we should go 80 and put that money directly into black communities, brown communities, and indigenous communities in Seattle and take care of the people who need it.

Thank you so very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time and for telling us about that experience.

We really appreciate you calling in.

OK, the last two people that I see are still listed as not present.

So I'm going to do one more call and double check with our folks from the I.T.

team.

Quan Wah Lee and Kelly Verity.

It appears that they are not present, so we will endeavor to make public testimony available again at every morning session for 30 minutes at the beginning.

Apologies to folks who are listed and not present.

If there was any confusion on our end, please do reach out to my office, and we will make sure to follow up with you.

Teresa.Mosqueda at Seattle.gov.

At this moment, we do not have anybody else listed for public testimony, so our public testimony session is closed for this morning.

Let's go ahead and move into other items on our agenda.

Item number one, Madam Clerk, could you please read item number one into the record?

Agenda item one, Seattle Police Department for briefing and discussion.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk.

We do have with us Interim Chief Adrian Diaz and Angela Sochi from SPD.

We also have Director Ben Noble, who's kindly offered his entire week to us.

Thank you very much, Director Noble, for being back.

Appreciate all of the time that it has taken to coordinate the multiple presentations, so I just want to say thanks again to the folks that Thank you for joining us.

As I mentioned to you when we chatted earlier, I've appreciated the candor in which you've come to the table.

And again, your comments that were made upon your chief appointment day, those are important statements that you made.

And I think that we look forward to hearing more from you, the frame that you bring to this conversation and the openness to I think it's a helpful conversation that we are hearing across the country.

So I just want to say thank you for your time today and for your willingness to always be at the table.

We will look forward to taking you up on that offer.

We do have all morning dedicated to this, and I have some opening comments, and then I'm going to turn it over to the chair of public safety, Council Member Herbold, for some opening comments and then to welcome Chief Diaz and the team as well.

Colleagues, as we enter into the budget season, we know that every budget season is a chance for us to really focus on one or two focal points.

And this year, the obvious focal point is around public safety.

This is going to require big changes.

There's big needs in our community that have gone unmet for years.

And this requires big thinking through a collaborative, big tent lens to try to move forward large changes that are not comfortable to many.

But this is what we've been called upon to do as elected leaders to make decisions in our community that are sometimes uncomfortable.

And frankly, when we've stood up and we've run for office, many of us have said that we're going into office to shake up the status quo.

I'm really proud of the conversations that we've had so far and I know that many of us continue to get feedback about the need for there to be more robust conversations but there to further to also be more change as we've heard from folks who testified this morning and over the summer.

I think the biggest questions that we have in front of us are how do we keep residents safe and all residents?

That includes folks in our city who have raised concerns about our very own police department and wanting to make sure that everyone in the community feels safe and that 911 is the number to call.

And when somebody shows up, they truly have public safety in mind for those who are both making the call and those who are receiving the services.

You know, I think as we hear more stories from across the country, Seattle's not in a unique position.

If anybody was up listening to NPR last night at 9 p.m., there was an entire hour dedicated to the changes that are being called upon across the country.

If you haven't had a chance to listen to that, I'll post some of those stories later today.

But NPR was doing some really great reporting on everything from Camden, New Jersey to what's happening in cities across the country right now.

And I think the questions that people are asking is, You know, when you have someone blocking your driveway, why is it that we're told to call 911 when you have a mental health breakdown?

The answer shouldn't be just to call 911. I think our council colleagues have done a better job than I am right now in articulating that we just don't always need someone to show up with a gun.

And that is part of the conversation that we've begun in my conversations directly with officers as well.

Many of them have told me.

They don't want to be the social worker or the mental health counselor.

And many of them are asking why they are the answer to our broken safety net.

We need to rethink what it means to invest in a safety net and invest upstream so we truly create the stability that many of you spoke about yesterday.

I look forward to having this conversation today.

I think it is our opportunity to take some big steps to put together the big thinking that we began this summer to examine the right place for services for our police department.

And it's important for us to really continue to hear the call from folks who are taking to the street.

The global wave of protests are happening.

Many are happening across the country and all across the globe.

and specifically from our black residents who are calling for black lives to matter, not just in murals on the street, but in policy and in practice.

I'll turn it over to Councilmember Herbold, who has been a steward of our Public Safety Committee.

And I just want to thank all of you in advance for your time.

These are tough conversations.

And again, thanks to the folks at SPD for, especially Chief Diaz, for your willingness to come to the table today and to share with us the 2021 proposed budget and allow for us to ask some questions about visioning and working with you to get to the reductions that make sense for our community.

Council Member Herbold, thank you for taking over and for introducing Chief Diaz.

Thank you so much.

I want to just start off by again thanking Chief Diaz both for being with us here today and also for joining me in my District 1 Town Hall last night.

I don't want to steal his thunder, but I really appreciate that the SPD budget principles are framed in the principles that he has authored.

and has taken to heart, and we'll hear more about them in a moment.

As we know, across the nation, growing the size of our police departments has historically been sort of a third rail of politics.

We never question whether adding and growing the size of our police department actually increases safety because we in government, assume it does.

SPD's budget, as we know, has increased every year since 2000, even during the grand recession, when overall the city budget went down.

In the four years that I've been in office, the SPD budget has increased dramatically from $299 million in 2016 to the adopted budget of $409 million in 2020. That's an increase of more than $110 million in four years.

I've supported these budget increases.

But we're hearing from many in our community and in communities across the nation that a larger department does not necessarily equal more public safety, and that we must incorporate other approaches, approaches that are being practiced in other cities, because sometimes they can lead to better public safety outcomes.

More people at the table in these discussions, people who have not been at the table before, have made me reexamine my own assumptions and my support of old ways of doing things, and I'm really grateful for that.

I continue to support funding to address public safety.

However, what's evolved in my position is it should not only be the police addressing public safety concerns, and too often we ask the police to do too much, and they are ill-equipped to handle many of the issues that we ask them to address.

And so what does that have to do with the police department budget?

Well, again, many of the things that we want to be able to do more of in an atmosphere of limited resources mean that we have to reinvest our traditional public safety investments.

A review of 911 calls that we requested over the summer began the process of identifying what work currently done by police might be best done by other types of professionals.

And we found that in 2019, 56% of dispatch calls were non-criminal.

It's past time that we work to solve these problems upstream so we don't have to rely and invest so heavily in a police force that is unable to address all of the issues that we've asked them to use policing in order to address.

And just want to again highlight the plan as identified in the council resolution that we passed this summer.

We proposed in our plan that we work to fund a community-led research participatory budgeting effort to advise on the creation of a new civilian-led Department of Community Safety.

and violence prevention.

As it relates to the community-led research and participatory budgeting effort, we've talked a lot about that.

We talked about that yesterday and really appreciate my colleagues' thoughts about that process and about the need to pull our community together in advising us rather than creating two separate processes.

As it relates to the creation of a new civilian-led Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention, I think the mayor's proposed budget has a new department, might be called something different, but it's consistent with our interest in creating a new department where we would transfer some departments out of SPD.

Our resolution identified as departments to transfer out of SPD emergency management, and parking enforcement.

Again, I really appreciate that the mayor's proposed budget has a new department consistent with this plan and transfers these functions.

We've requested that the chief pursue some out of order layoffs, prioritizing officers for layoff with the most sustained complaints against them.

while maintaining adequate patrol staffing in each district.

I appreciate receiving the letter from the Deputy, Senior Deputy Mayor Fong yesterday around that process.

Other parts of our plan include work to reprioritize now one calls for response and discontinuing bias placed policing practices that have harmed BIPOC communities and establishing a publicly accessible registry of police misconduct for all SPD officers, including whether a complaint involved use of force or racial profiling.

We also clarified that the days of the council retroactively approving overspent SPD budgets and overtime are over.

And we also identified our desire and need to collaborate with the mayor and the police chief in realizing what I think is mostly, despite a lot of the back and forth, mostly a shared vision.

These aren't symbolic changes that we're seeking.

It's about how we begin to shift the conversation in our lens away from police being the responsibility to respond to all of these issues.

I want to also flag, we talked yesterday about the fact that our budget action of the summer requested a report back from SPD by September 30th to identify which additional functions of SPD could be fully civilianized.

We have not received that.

We learned from Director Noble yesterday that we were unlikely to receive that in time for the beginning of our budget discussions.

work to try to answer some of those questions during budget.

Appreciate that we just this morning also received an executive order from the mayor.

I haven't had a chance to review it fully, but really want to look to see how this process I do not want to delay the process.

I do not want to delay the process that impacts our interest in moving on more realignment of the police department budget during this budget process.

not only our experts within city government, but our experts outside of city government.

And so with that, look forward to hearing more from the chief about the proposed 2021 budget.

Thank you very much Council Member Herbold.

Chief Diaz, welcome and thank you and your team for being here.

Good morning, thank you, Chairman, Chairwoman Mosqueda and Vice Chairwoman Herbold, President Gonzalez and the other council members.

And I also heard a cat that was also in the background.

So glad to have the cat listen to me as well.

But thank you for giving me the opportunity to brief you on the mayor and my vision for the Seattle Police Department in 2021. We deliver this presentation knowing that later today, during the community safety presentation, much more detail will be provided about the work to be done on reimagining public safety.

Right now, we specifically will be addressing the ongoing work of the Seattle Police Department.

As a chief of police, I've tasked my command staff and the entire department with five areas of work to focus on, right now and throughout 2021. Re-envisioning policing.

I've committed the SPD to actively engage in the process of designing the role the department should play in community safety.

Second, humanization.

It is my promise that we will prioritize the sanctity of human life in every situation and affirm each individual's worth.

Third, reinventing community engagement.

In the midst of COVID, it has changed our world.

I expect that in the next week and months, we will begin the hard work of ensuring the department is devoted to establishing true and lasting relationships throughout respectful interactions.

Four, fiscal stewardship.

The SPD will critically examine every expenditure to guarantee its meaningful contributions to community safety.

and number five, employee wellness and morale.

It's essential that the department retains the best employees.

Without them, we cannot provide exceptional police services.

It is my firm belief that if the department fully embraces this work, as I know we will, we will succeed at restoring the trust that has been diminished with some of our community.

This morning, the team will outline the mayor's proposed budget actions for 2021. These actions highlight the focus areas of SPD, and chart the initial path for the work we all are about to undertake.

But before we get into specifics, I want to provide you with a general overview of where we stand and where I want SBD to go in 2021. Yesterday marked the first full day of additional resources moving back into the Patrol Bureau, specifically to 911 response.

As I've outlined, a specific part of my plan to ensure we can support community safety for everyone in the midst of an economic crisis is to focus on our core mission, responding to calls for help and preventing crime.

Each year, approximately 800,000 calls come into Seattle 911 Center.

SBD officers are dispatched to some 270,000 unique events, and they see and engage in some 173,000 more during what we call on-use.

That is over 440,000 instances where SBD engages the public.

Almost all of this initial work is done by the officers in patrol.

Before I initiated this reassignment of patrol officers, patrol had the same number of officers responding to 911 that it had eight years ago.

Eight years ago, the city had about 150,000 fewer people.

And today, we have the same number of officers responding to 911 calls.

And how do we get here?

Special needs pop up, new types of crime, new community needs, new best practices.

And since patrol is where most officers always are, those new positions were generally filled by pulling from patrol.

And today, the department only has about 25 more officers than it had in 2010. It's an interesting point.

Since the inception of the consent decree, we've created 58 sworn positions to support that work, along with additional civilian positions.

So functionally, while those positions are essential to the incredible work this department has done to meet every requirement of the consent decree, on the street, it means we're the same size we were eight years ago.

Or more specifically, with increases of employees on leave, we actually have 35 fewer officers in service today than we did in 2010. I do not think that it's okay.

I do not think that cities should use a per capita analysis to decide how many officers they need on the street.

Because every city is different in geography, in crime, in the style of policing.

But it is a metric that lets you know that if you're in the right ballpark.

So when I looked at the data reported to the FBI and see that we ranked 22nd out of the 25 largest cities in the ratio of officers to population, it only confirms what I hear from officers in patrol.

They're stretched thin.

They're racing from call to call.

They're having to work extra shifts to ensure the colleagues are safe.

They don't have the time to address persistent issues and get to know their neighbors they're serving.

Last year, officers and detectives took over 1,200 guns off the street.

This year through August, they've taken another 717 guns off the street.

In those same eight months this year, they've recovered over 2,000 shell casings.

So far this year, patrol officers have responded to 37 homicide crime scenes involving 40 victims.

They've gone to over 315 shots fired instances, 197 sexual assault and rape cases, over 1,000 robberies, over 2,000 aggravated assaults.

And with a recent huge uptick, they've gone to over 120 arson incidents.

In connection to these crimes, officers have helped over 25,000 victims of major crime, about 10,000 of which are women.

So after hearing chiefs during almost my entire career say that patrol was a backbone of the department, I decided to back those words up with action.

not because it sounded good, because it makes sense when you look at the numbers.

When you examine five years of survey work by Seattle University, and over 14 years of direct survey following up with those callers who had officers dispatch them, you see a clear message.

When the people of the city call 911 for help, they want an officer to respond quickly.

And when they do, they're happy with the response they get from that officer.

If the amazing officers of the SPD can achieve that sort of customer service when they're stretched in, I wanna see when the type of top-notch public safety services we can deliver when they have the time to address the real issues.

I know I've heard already from some that they have concerns about what it means to not have the formal community policing team or to have fewer detectives in certain units.

This goes back to the same issue.

We've had an over specialization for too long.

We followed the model of creating a specialized unit to address every new issue or need again and creating a model where our 911 responders were only that the officers were only that officers who could answer calls and move on.

It is my vision that pushing everyone in the department to more of a generalist model.

we will be better to meet every needs of each and every incident.

The CBT officers will be in patrol.

They're gonna show the other officers what they've learned and how they can actually do more problem solving.

They're gonna show from what our detectives going back into patrol.

They're gonna be able to acquire better skills to meet the demands or the needs for prosecution.

As we do with everything, we will monitor how this new approach works.

We will watch caseloads.

We will watch response times.

We will watch clearance rates.

I hope this move alone makes it clear.

I'm prepared to make changes.

And when the need is clear, there is a plan for what to do next.

We will commit to evaluate how that works.

With the new challenges we are facing, economic shortfalls, staffing constraints, increases in shots fired and homicides, we need more officers on the street.

We need more officers investigating these instances.

I know it seems like a different time, but it was this January we had a mass shooting at Third and Pine.

And rightfully so, almost everyone in the city wanted more police in that challenging area.

We did, we increased the officer's presence at a cost of about $418,000, right up until things shut down under the pandemic.

And I say that this illustrates that the calls will come from across the city to see more officers in specific locations.

They come every year.

They come after extreme instances like the 3rd and Pine shooting and after more mundane.

Almost every year we're asked to put more officers out along Alki to address loud cars and racing and partying.

Almost every year we're asked to have more officers in Balcom to address drug dealing and general disorder.

Almost every year we're asked to do more along Rainier and other areas in the south end as they experience an unacceptable level of gun violence.

In recent years, we've been asked to put more officers out in Pioneer Square.

to address ingrowing encampments, drug dealing, and when workers are still coming to the offices, consistent harassment and assault of employees going to and from work by people in crisis.

Just last week, we were asked to do more in the Central District as residents confronted an intolerable increase in gun violence.

I mean, I say just last year.

And almost every year, we are asked to do more along Aurora Avenue North as violence ebbs and flows and women and children are trafficked and victimized.

I want to always be able to respond to these calls for help.

I want the department to be able to be part of the solution and to the underlying issues that drive the crime and disorder.

But responding to these calls to those issues means that I have to have officers necessary to handle the calls for service and to have that time to do the problem solving and community building work.

I fully support the proposals in the presentation we're about to go through.

There does need to be a significant investment in communities of color.

There are centuries of racism and injustice across our entire society that must be repaired.

There are several major functions that can exist outside of the police department's budget.

Additionally, as outlined in the executive order, I do believe a critical analysis of the calls we can respond to, that we can identify some specific incidences that can be safely addressed by other alternatives when they're developed.

I also have to be clear, I do not have enough officers right now to handle the work we're asked to do.

The call analysis will identify some of the work that could be shifted, but the alternative resources to handle those calls will not be there January 1st, 2021, and they won't be there December 31st, 2021. We have to bridge the difference.

This budget recognizes that I can push the department to do more with less, that we can release the positions next year that are highly unlikely to be filled.

I would love to have all the officers, there's work for them to do.

There are problems that they could help solve.

And while I love to have them, what I have to have is the ability to hire to stay as close to as 1,400 as possible.

Each drop below that will mean either slower response times, larger caseloads, or types of crimes we can no longer respond to.

These issues will snowball if the hiring freeze that was initiated in response to the COVID-19 driven by economic continues into 2021. It would take us years to bring us back up to current levels where we're stretched to handle our core mission.

I will turn it over to Executive Director Angela Sochi to walk us through the specific budget proposals.

And thank you.

Chief Diaz, thank you for your time.

Angela, I'm sorry, before you begin, I think there's a number of things that were said in your opening comments that people probably have questions about.

So I'm going to take a pause real quick to see if there's questions.

I'm gonna start here.

What I think I just heard you say was that you needed to have 1,400 officers and there's not the ability to have less or there's not a willingness to entertain the concept of having less than 1,400.

I think that does not jive with the conversation that we just had about how we could reduce the type of work that officers are currently being asked to respond to.

You mentioned that you have, a concern that there's not gonna be enough people out there to respond to the calls.

And I think the premise of the earlier comments that were made and this summer's conversation is trying to reduce the type of calls that sworn officers, those with guns are needing to respond to.

So if we are effectively transferring those calls that should be going to mental health providers, case managers, folks who are responding to situations where you don't need a gun, it would inherently mean that the size of the force would not necessarily have to be the same.

I mean, we're talking about people who are having minor fender benders have to have SPD called.

We're talking about sworn officers with guns on them directing traffic.

We're talking about people who are showing up when, as I mentioned, somebody is blocking their driveway.

This is not the type of calls that we would want our officers to have to respond to.

And so if we're effectively having a conversation about transferring those type of calls into another area, is there not a willingness to recognize that the type of sworn officers with guns, that number could inherently go down?

And, and what I think once we actually present how that gets analyzed and this part of a deeper functional analysis that we also have to do over the next several months to understand the workload and capacity and patrol it's very easy.

Chris Fischer will be able to articulate this later in the presentation about certain levels of staffing.

But I think already as we talk about moving and shifting some of those calls for service, as I kind of highlighted at the very beginning, We are already, we were already short-staffed as a police agency for many, many years, already seen numbers under our 2010 staffing levels.

That's 10 years ago with the city has considerably grown.

And so we can remove those certain calls for service as we kind of get into those investments into our BIPOC communities or even into mental health or homelessness.

And those can still go, those could still take into effect.

But I also know based on certain calls for service that we're still handling fine.

We have to have a certain amount of officers to be able to do that.

And right now we were struggling to be able to do that.

And we will continue to struggle if we see a smaller size department.

Council Member Herbold, I just want to turn to you first to see if you have any questions as a follow up.

I'm sorry, Councilmember, I think you're on mute still.

Thank you again.

I think, you know, I hear what Chief Diaz is saying.

I appreciate the perspective.

I've heard it myself for years that officers are literally going from call to call to call.

And I hear the chief saying that he needs more capacity so that officers aren't stretched so thin.

I appreciate that he is shifting officers from specialty units to patrol in order to address that.

The part where I feel, and I appreciate that the chief also acknowledges that another way to address these capacity issues is by reducing the types of calls that officers patrol officers respond to and supporting an infrastructure to work with other professionals to answer some of those calls.

These are these I think we are identifying a similar issue.

We are perhaps each focusing on more on and I think we also recognize that they're in identifying that a shared issue.

We are both recognizing that there are different ways to address the issue.

One way is to increase the number of officers.

The other way is to reduce the types of calls and the number of calls that officers, and I hear Chief Diaz acknowledging that.

But what I'm concerned about is the amount of time it's going to take per the chief's estimation and per the executive's estimation in order to begin to make that shift.

And I know that a lot of the things that the mayor is talking about wanting to do through her IDT and through the executive order, we're hoping to actually be able to start to put our arms around in the next couple months of the budget process.

That was the thinking behind some of the summer budgeting investments.

The $10 million is supposed to build capacity among organizations that have the expertise in engaging with populations of people that often are associated with 911 calls that the police department doesn't need to answer those calls.

The idea in the 2020 budgeting is to invest in building the capacity of those organizations, of those professionals now, so that we could begin the shift for 2021. So I'm hearing a lot of agreement about the goals, the identification around the challenges.

Where I'm hearing the most disconnect, I think, is on timing and schedule.

So I just leave it at that for now.

Yeah, and if I can add, you know, just so people know our plan, we did talk about I was giving the floor of fourteen hundred, but this is about one hundred officers less than we had budgeted last year as well.

About 14, I think it was fourteen ninety seven that was budgeted last year.

So it's not saying that we're not looking at being smaller.

It's just I'm looking at what, you know, I think that is what we are having to respond to and trying to deal with those response levels in the near future.

It is not that I am not looking at a small department.

I think that we have already been able to establish.

I think it is really what that size is and for me that staffing minimum level is.

There's others, please let me know.

Council President, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and thank you, Interim Chief Diaz, for being with us this morning.

Just really quickly want to talk about some of the comments you made related to the staffing model, as I think it'll be helpful as we dig into the substance of the presentation that Angela is going to be running here shortly.

But just want to dig into dig into some of the assumptions I'm hearing you make.

So in one of your comments, you said that we should not use a per capita staffing model, but then you referenced an FBI study.

And I want to confirm that the FBI study that you're confirming where you indicated that Seattle ranks 22 out of 25 is using a per capita staffing model.

Is that correct?

Correct.

Okay.

And so, and then really quickly, can you tell me if you don't believe that a per capita approach should be used at the city of Seattle for staffing minimum proposals, what is the model that you believe should, what is the model that the police department currently uses in determining the approach to staffing needs?

I think what we're hopefully focused on is really developing that functional analysis for every level of our department.

So we already know certain areas when it comes to patrol.

And I think Chris Fisher will be able to articulate certain metrics out of, you know, staffing, patrol staffing as well as shift staffing, because right now we are on a four to schedule and Optimally, we would want to, if we're looking at employee wellness, we would look to a 4-3 shift.

And then what does that minimum staffing require for patrol to be at?

And Chris can kind of, or Dr. Fisher can kind of go in more in detail with that.

But for us, it's really about taking a holistic analysis of our whole department and understanding what staffing looks like when it comes to each and every detective unit, our SWAT team, our special operations groups, and our patrol as well.

And we've done some of that initial work already on the front end, but that is also work that we would want to work with other partners and looking at over the next several months.

So when you say functional analysis, what does that mean?

So it's looking at, so if you look at a detective unit, it's looking at exactly caseloads, clearance raids, how big does a detective have when it comes to certain caseloads.

So if you look at, say, domestic violence, where we know where you know who the victim is, you might have a bigger caseload for domestic violence because you already know the victim or know the person who might have caused harm.

And a sexual assault case, it might be completely different because you don't know the suspect in that case.

And so So we would have to analyze each and every detective position.

Burglary is another one.

When it comes to traffic collision investigations, we've actually seen more call-outs for TCIS than we have in previous years because of when COVID has hit us, we have more people going on the roadways and speeding down, which has resulted in more vehicular deaths.

And so right now we would have to analyze each and every different detective unit throughout the department.

But when you say functional analysis, you're literally taking a widget perspective.

So in other words, number of cases assigned per officer based on each division.

And it's just, it's just at this point about the number of cases and the volume of cases.

That's what you mean when you say functional analysis.

Yeah, and there's certain there's certain things that are already best practices across the country when it comes to certain special operational units.

So you would take some of those metrics and say, does Seattle have the ability to respond to this many call outs for service when it comes to, say, a specific, you know, traffic collision investigations or a SWAT or So there are certain metrics that are already kind of best practices throughout the country.

And are we meeting those best practices or are we not?

And do we need to make adjustments accordingly?

Right.

And so what I'm getting at is that from your perspective, the police staffing and allocation recommendations that we have before us are primarily being fueled and informed by essentially work

officer workload.

Yeah.

For right now it is, yes, that is what we're, we're basing on her.

And, and of course there's lots of different agencies out there, uh, that look at, um, staffing agencies.

So I'm looking at, um, at a, uh, uh, cops office issue right in front of me now called a performance based approach to police staffing and allocation.

Um, And I just, I just want to, I just want to get, um, you know, sort of clear understanding from you about, um, these particular issues.

Now, this article talks about how, uh, there are different approaches to determining staffing needs.

And it says, quote, we found agencies typically take one of four approaches to determining staffing needs per capita, minimum staffing, authorized level, or workload.

It goes on to talking about how these different staffing models are flawed in many ways, and of course, looks at the steps of a workload-based assessment, which are fundamentally rooted in examining the distribution of calls for service by hour, day, and month, examining the nature of calls, estimating time consumed on calls for service, calculating an agency shift relief factor, establishing performance objectives and provide staffing estimates.

There are, however, alternative delivery systems to figuring out how to set these staffing models.

And I want to be really clear that the staffing models that are being baked into the assumptions for this particular budget are really fundamentally about officer workload.

Yes, and Dr. Fisher will be able, and I know Executive Director Angela Sochi will also be able to cover some of that more in depth.

But yes, that's where you start to then look into the offshore workload and to understand do we have adequate staffing to address that workload.

Yeah, and again, this This organization that is part of the U.S.

Department of Justice talks about the staffing landscape and it says the following, from a long-term perspective, police agencies face a three-fold challenge in meeting their staffing needs, a decreasing number of qualified applicants, expanding attrition, and a broadening scope of police work.

Do you agree with those particular long-term perspectives as articulated by the U.S.

Department of Justice?

Yeah, and as I noted already that there are things that we are looking at trying to remove off our plate, so to say, but so you know that is one part of that shift and is there stuff that the police department shouldn't necessarily respond to.

And that's, you know, what I've, that's one of the things that I've highlighted already.

And, and yes, I think some of those areas are those COPS office, I actually wrote a couple publications on community police over the COPS office.

So I'm very familiar with, with subject matter experts that are being able to articulate some of the best practices when it comes to this area.

Yeah.

And I think, and I appreciate that.

And, and I think that it's important to recognize that one of the observations that they also make, and I want to get your reaction to it, is that they, they also write in this publication that quote, yet while agencies feel they are understaffed, few are able to conclusively demonstrate through workload analysis that this is true.

As one focus group participant told us, quote, If the answer to our problems is more staffing, we will always be understaffed." Close quote.

Yeah.

So I think we've already, just in this initial conversation, we're not seeking to expand the police department.

We know that they were already looking at giving certain positions.

with a reduction of almost, you know, from 1497 to 1400. So I'm already looking at downsizing.

So I think I understand exactly what the publication is writing.

And I think it gets into moving certain types of calls for service over to certain other entities.

But I'm also looking at what our current workload is, knowing that even if I move those over, I'm still going to find ourselves, you know, doing a deeper dive into the functional analysis, but also still figuring out, like, is that where we should be?

And right now, there's nothing that's going to take those calls for service starting January 1st.

And so I got to figure out how do we still be able to maintain our ability to respond to the calls for service and the community safety as well.

Yeah, and I appreciate that perspective.

And I think the point that this article is making and that I am endeavoring to get on the record here in this conversation is that I believe that the Seattle Police Department's staffing model and assumptions underlying that are fundamentally flawed.

And so long as we are continuing to use the staffing model assumptions and principles that are baked into the mayor's proposed budget, We will continue to see very minimal decreases in the staffing projections.

Why is that?

Well, it's because we use a workload model perspective.

And that is the inherent problem, I believe.

in how the staffing model is structured and in why there is a philosophy and a culture of just de minimis reduction of levels of sworn staff members at the Seattle Police Department.

And this article continues and concludes that, quote, perceived understaffing may compromise community policing and problem solving efforts.

Increased duties arising from fiscal constraints reduce other officer time spent in the community.

While transferring community policing duties to non-officers, again, while transferring community policing duties to non-officers could help alleviate staffing burdens.

Our interviewees told us this could lead to public perceptions that the agency does not care about residents.

And I think it's really important for us to acknowledge what is perception and what is being data-driven.

And to me, it is important for us to continue to push ourselves to look at the underlying assumptions of the Seattle Police Department staffing models and allow that to lead the work of where the staffing levels should be set, as opposed to taking a widgets approach and saying, well, we have all this work, What else do you want us to do?

Well, we want to have a conversation about what that workload is.

We do believe that the scope of police work has been broadened way beyond the functions of core law enforcement.

That's part of the reason why the city council over the last two to three years has been focusing on bringing back the community service officer program to allow for, again, true community policing by assigning those duties to non-officers.

And that's the kind of conversation I want to engage with you in, Chief Diaz, as opposed to feeling like this morning has begun from a place of, I'm drawing the line in the sand at 1,400 officers.

regardless of this interdepartmental task force that the mayor is beginning to allegedly evaluate staffing levels and scope of work at the police department.

So I just want to encourage us to continue to have a conversation from a place of flexibility and understanding these different perspectives and to really acknowledge that there are some really critically wrong issues in terms of the models that policing and governments and cities have been using to make a lot of the decisions around budgets and the size of police departments palatable.

And so I'm gonna go ahead and end my questions there, but I'm sure I'm gonna have a lot more and Dr. Fisher just got a preview of where I'm gonna be headed.

If I might just real briefly, I don't think, from my perspective, we haven't settled on a methodology of the analysis for the functional analysis.

And the reason to have formed an IDT is to draw in perspectives, in addition to SPDs, with obviously Chief Diaz as central responsibility for the department, but the points you have made are are important.

Part of this is to rethink and to re-understand, if you will, the overall approach and not to rely on set methodologies that have necessarily been applied in the past.

The approach needs and wants to be a thoughtful and careful one that isn't fixed in past models.

I don't think we've settled upon the overall, and I don't think that necessarily be a singular approach.

But as you've described, it is time to take a step back and understand what are the appropriate functions of uniformed officers and what are not, and how that speaks to appropriate staffing levels for both a uniformed response and a non-uniformed response.

And I'm aware of using the word workload because it may have some baggage here, but what's the relative workload, if you will, or work assignment's a better way to think about it of those different functions.

So the goal is- I think workload and work assignment are the same thing.

Here's, I mean, I have spent the last three years talking with the executive around the staffing model and my concerns around the underlying assumptions in the staffing model.

And to have this conversation kick off this morning about how we can reimagine policing and community safety start from a place of there are no circumstances under which any of us should assume that less than 1,400 badging gun jobs are needed at SPD, I think is a disservice.

It's a disservice to this conversation.

And it's a it's a I think it's a disservice to the effort to really truly engage in conversation from from a perspective of of really being open to analyzing and evaluating what core law and function core law enforcement functions are necessary at the city of Seattle and which ones are not and have that lead the determination of where we end up in terms of the size of the police department.

And so I'm a little concerned that we're starting this conversation from the place of it's 1,400 officers or bust.

And I just don't think that that's going to be helpful.

Again, I'm not seeking to contradict the chief.

From my perspective, what the budget reflects is that that is the place we are until we develop a model and an approach to ensure that we have other ways to respond.

I think we all agree now that police officers are responding to calls where it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they respond to.

The concern is that if we reduce the force before we've developed a model about how we're going to respond to those calls, then we're not serving the public.

But I hear you very clearly.

We need to move quickly.

Yeah, I'll have a series of questions about that now, because I think I have a different read of what the budget says as it relates to rehiring in outward years.

But I will leave those questions to that portion of the presentation.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, for allowing me an opportunity to ask those questions.

Of course.

Thank you very much, Council President.

I did want to just note, I see Dr. Fisher, you do have yourself off the mute.

If you had a response to one of Council President's questions, you're welcome to do that just before we move to other Council members, just in case the Council President does have a follow-up question for you.

Thank you, Chairwoman.

No, I think the President said, you know, we'll get into that in the presentation.

I was just going to assure everyone that we're going to get into that, just to make sure that we save time for the whole presentation and don't put it all on the Chief to have every answer.

Yeah, no, we are definitely not putting it all on one person.

I think that this has been a systemic conversation from the beginning.

And I think it's important that we do have ample opportunity to ask questions.

So appreciate the chiefs time again.

But given that this is a quarter of the budget, I think it's it's an area where we will continue to have a number of questions.

I appreciate Angela.

and Dr. Fisher, your patience as we go through some of these questions, because a few more would be helpful.

I hope you appreciate in terms of setting the tone and our understanding, a base understanding before we go into the presentation.

I see Council Member Sawant and Council Member Peterson next.

Council Member Sawant, please.

councilmember Gutierrez.

Councilmember Gonzalez just made the very assumptions underlying the police department are fundamentally flawed.

And that is why at the end of the day it is the city Council's duty as the highest legislative body of the city to push for defunding by at least 50% in this fall's budget vote for I found your entire presentation very troubling, not surprising, but still troubling nonetheless.

I mean, just to preface what I'm about to say, absolutely, public safety is extremely important to all of us.

It wouldn't be accurate or fair to say that those who have been marching on the streets for Black Lives Matter do not agree that we want public safety.

In fact, the very people who face police violence also face, if you look at it statistically speaking, the worst outcomes in terms of crime because it's often related to inequality and poverty and other social conditions.

That's what the data shows.

Everyone wants to be safe.

All working people and communities have the right to be safe.

But the whole thrust of your presentation was to raise a specter of crime, violent crime, and the dire outcomes that would result if there was any kind of reduction to the size of the police department, however minimum.

So I wanted to share some data in this discussion to see what you have to say in response to this.

I wanted to quote from Danny Westmeath's column on January 10th of this year.

So just earlier this year, the column was titled, Third world hellhole new data shows Seattle had lowest property crime in decades.

And in that, you know, the whole I'm not going to read the whole column, obviously, but I'm going to read a part of it, but the whole column was in response to the dystopian picture that was being.

painted by the right wing nationally, including Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, that Seattle had become some sort of hotbed of crime.

And Danny Westney, and I'm quoting him because he's very far from being a socialist like me, but he's quoting numbers.

He says, quote, the truth is that while all the caterwalling was happening around the internet, Here on the streets, crime actually went down across the board in 2019. Robbery was down 9% from a year ago.

Burglary was off 6%.

Property crime in total was down 6% with the raw number of property crimes, mostly thefts, the lowest recorded since 2013. Maybe people are so fed up they aren't reporting all the property crimes?

Well, violent crime was also down by 4% compared to last year.

There were 5 fewer murders, 81 fewer aggravated assaults and 181 fewer robberies than in 2018. What especially stands out are the low crime rates.

Seattle's violent crime of 6.1 incidents per 100,000 people was the second lowest in a decade, according to city data.

But the property crime rate of 4,949 incidents per 100,000 people is by far the lowest recorded in the city since at least the 1970s.

The rate in 2019 was 20% lower than it was just five years ago, and more than 40% lower than it was 20 years ago, unquote.

Again, so I want to again say my point is to in no way minimize any crime, let alone violent crime, because for the victim of that crime, that is one crime too many.

But the specter you are presenting, Chief Diaz, Diaz, sorry, is simply not borne out by statistics.

And on the contrary, you've been completely silent in your introduction on the massive time your officers spent assaulting protesters and harassing communities of color.

So my question is, as the leader of this department, how do you justify this presentation in general?

But especially in the context of Black Lives Matter, the outrage at racist policing and excessive and indiscriminate violence directed at protest movements, my question is, how are your points and the thrust of everything you said in any way in line with the reality of statistics?

And also, what do you have to say about racist policing and the violence that has been directed against protesters?

Because I know a lot of people want to hear about that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member.

So I think right now the first part is that any officer that is done wrong goes through a process and I've had already in my very short period of time have held officers accountable for their actions.

And that is part of making sure that we have a robust accountability system.

Some might not trust that system.

That is a system that we have in place and I'm willing to just make sure that any officer that has some level of wrongdoing is held accountable.

Uh, I completely have supported black lives matter in the movement.

I have, there's, I've done my work in probably for over half my career in community.

I have been invested when, when people have, uh, you know, working with youth.

working with community groups, spending my time invested in those areas.

And even when victims would I've worked with that have mentored and guided have gone up to the hospital, I've been there at their side.

So I have been in the mix of that.

And and that is my commitment to the community.

My commitment is to making sure that I'm serving this city in the most appropriate and the safest manner that I have provided the leadership to ensure that this department is held accountable for its actions.

And when officers do wrong, they are gonna be held accountable for their actions.

Well, just as a quick follow-up, I mean, I don't expect any dramatic shifts in your thinking, Chief Diaz, but can you give us some specific examples?

You say you've held officers accountable.

I'm assuming you're talking about within the department under your chain of command.

I don't know if you're talking about the official process headed by the Office of Professional Accountability, but give us some examples of where you think that you actually are holding officers accountable.

So we've put two officers on administrative leave in a very short period of time for actions that resulted in, that were inappropriate and that have gone.

One, I sent over for criminal investigation at King County Sheriff's Office.

I've had to also move forward on terminations of officers just in the last month.

And so right now until everything, the paperwork is finalized, you know, but those right now are actually areas that I've done over the last month.

Thank you very much.

Thank you as well Council Member Swann and perhaps we can put a pin in that to continue to see where some of those accountability pieces could be reflected or lifted up or analyzed in the proposed budget that we see so that we can see if there's additional I think it's an important question that you've asked.

Thank you.

Councilmember Peterson.

I was recalling there was a study done in 2016 about police staffing, and I think it focused on response times.

I think it was called the Berkshire Report.

I wasn't here in 2016, but in office then, but I just, in terms, if you could just throw that in the mix, I know response times have been a concern of constituents of mine and, you know, in the North Precinct, which is a huge geographic area, the response times are something that, constituents care a lot about.

So just want to encourage you to throw that in the mix of your ID teaching.

There was this exhaustive study done back in 2016. And then also, to the extent you're able to through your remarks today to your team, whenever there's something that you want to do, but there's not the flexibility or that it's creating a huge expense item, because we are looking for ways to redeploy resources to community-led solutions.

And to the extent you're able to point to the police contract, the labor contract Seattle Police Officers Guild as being an impediment.

That would be helpful to highlight that because I know sometimes we sort of divorce the budget from the employment contract, even though the employment contract is comprising 80% of the cost sometimes.

So just want to, to the extent you're able to speak to that through your presentation, that would be helpful.

I know there are certain limitations to that, but I just wanted to flag that we know that the contract can be problematic too.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Peterson.

Chief Diaz, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Did you have anything else in response to that?

No, and I think, Council Member Peterson, I think one of the biggest things that I'm always constantly evaluating is the overtime expenditure.

So for us, it's about making sure there were areas that we spend the most overtime, making sure that that's staffed properly with our existing resources.

to try and drive down budgetary issues.

So I'm not paying a lot of overtime, because that is something that has come up over the last several years.

The Seattle Auditor's Office had done a report.

And so those are areas that I'm always constantly looking at and evaluating.

How can we actually create more efficiency in our systems?

How can we actually better be more judicious in how we spend our dollars, we want to make sure that we're tight and that's the right use of city taxpayer dollars.

So those are areas that I'm already moving forward on.

My moving officers back into patrol, that I was spending a lot of officer time in augmentation shifts, or so trying to get up to a certain level of staffing.

And now that I have officers in patrol, I'm able to then, you know, meet that guideline and reduce that level of overtime that I'm going to end up, you know, that I was going to experience later on.

And we did that within the confounds of the contract as well.

So, you know, as we, as we, I was already kind of working with our side of it.

I knew operationally what we needed to do.

And we had, while we saw the contract, we also had to make sure that we worked within the confines of the contract.

And we were able to do that and also reduce overtime as well.

So thank you.

Thank you very much.

Council President, please go ahead and follow up.

Thank you.

Just a couple of things.

One is the 2016 Berkshire staffing study.

I certainly My preference would be that we not look at that.

It had very little utility, frankly.

And I'm happy to talk to you, Councilmember Peterson, about concerns that I had about that.

And I think concerns that the.

Frankly, at the time, the police department had with the results of that study.

I do think this is an opportunity for us to take a different approach and one that is going to focus primarily on what the staffing model should be moving forward, taking into consideration performance, objective performance outcomes and.

and other data points that needs to be holistic and not just focused on functions and workload.

So that's one thing I wanted to say.

And then the second thing I just want to highlight as it relates to Council Member Peterson's comments about the collective bargaining agreements.

It is important for us in this budget conversation to acknowledge and be transparent That that there are portions significant portions of the collective bargaining agreements, both with and that do, in fact, contribute to.

a bloated need for staffing at the police department that is contributing significantly to overtime costs and to ongoing costs as it relates to the number of sworn officers that are actually might be needed.

And so those are barriers that I think need to be acknowledged publicly, and those are issues that will need to be squarely and directly addressed by the members of the Labor Relations Policy Committee, of which five council members sit on.

So I appreciate Councilmember Peterson's ongoing reminder to us and the department that these SPOG and SPMA issues present real barriers to achieving more change as it relates to staffing decisions and budget implications related to the same.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Thank you, Council Member Peterson, as well, for those questions that you asked and Chief Diaz for your response.

I think we can move on into the presentation.

We do have about two hours still for this morning's session, so we should have plenty of time.

Chief Diaz, I have one more sort of framing question as we head into this.

I believe that you mentioned even after you transitioned more officers into foot patrol that you still have the same amount of individuals in patrol that you had eight years ago.

Is that the accurate number that I heard?

I think Chris, Dr. Fisher can be able to highlight the exact numbers, but he'll do as part of that presentation.

Excellent.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

The reason that I asked that, and I want to tee this up for framing the discussion today, I'm going to share a screen with you all, is because we've seen from the reports, especially from Crosscut over the last year or a few months here that we've seen a number of accounts where the Seattle Police Department's budget has increased about 45% over that same period of time over the last eight years.

In fact, we see the highest number of or the most exponential increase in the time that Mayor Durkin has been in office.

So I think it'll be important for us to do the analysis of the right size of the police department's budget.

You correctly noted that the population in Seattle has increased.

But according to the same report, we already know that the number of dollars per capita or the number of dollars per individual living in our city has also increased.

So it's not a matter of the dollars per individuals going down, the dollars per individuals has actually gone up.

as the population has increased.

I think that these two charts really highlight the importance of the conversation that the council president teed up at the very beginning, which is really a question about the adequate workload, the right functions, and the right staffing model for those functions.

I wanted to tee this up as we have a conversation about what the proposed budget looks like for 2021. And also continue to remind us that as this makes up about a quarter of the general fund, this is really critical, not just for answering the calls for with the right size, scope, and functions of the police department are.

But as we're facing a huge economic crisis, really trying to be good stewards of the public dollar is important.

So I'll stop sharing my screen and turn it back over to you all to walk us through the presentation.

And before we do that, Chief Diaz, I just want to say thank you for helping to tee up this conversation today, for fielding these questions.

And I'm sure there will be more throughout this morning.

But I think that this conversation is not the first time we've had the chance to have a discussion.

ongoing discussion over the next few months here.

And we've already initiated it earlier this summer and over the fall.

So thanks for teeing this up.

And before we turn it over to Angela, any other comments from you?

No, thank you so much.

And I know Executive Director Sochi is waiting.

I'm sorry.

I did see it.

Did I see a hand on councilmember Morales?

No.

Well, I do have one comment one question for the chief before we move on I Think I heard you say that you had moved some Detective units back to patrol.

I'm interested in which units Because what I'm concerned about is the is the impact on investigations for sex trafficking for sexual assault and domestic violence And I know we've spoken a little bit about some of these issues before, but I am interested to understand why those units were moved to patrol, especially in light of some of the comments that you just made about the increase in those issues.

Sex trafficking never moved, so I'm not sure that unit that's in relation to human trafficking, there was no bodies that moved out of that unit.

The sexual offender detail had one that we looked at an analysis over the last five years to determine what that staffing level was.

And that is relatively steady.

We had a body that worked in the city attorney's office that had no connection to sexual assault cases.

And that position was abrogated.

So it looks like there were two positions, I believe.

have sent over the actual units.

And then DV was another unit that we are also currently assessing case caseloads for.

But we also took a five year and a 10 year analysis of how many detectives currently staff it.

And it was a minimal impact on on the detectives that that left.

It wasn't a full abrogation of the whole unit or anything like that.

And so we're currently assessing what those caseloads look like to determine if there's any major impact to our ability to respond to DV and investigate DV cases.

Well, I would just say, especially in light of COVID, we know that domestic violence is up there.

You know, somebody was killed just the other day.

And so I want to encourage us to make sure that we are keeping keeping people safe in that regard.

Yes.

I appreciate councilmember Morales' questions as it relates to the transfer from specialty units to patrol.

I've been seeking a little bit more detail.

I requested and received the numbers of officers transferred from each specialty unit to patrol.

But one of the answers that I've not yet received is not just the numbers of officers being transferred from a specialized unit to patrol, specialized units like with sexual assault, DV, elder abuse.

But how many are remaining in each of those specialty units?

It doesn't give us much context to know, you know, two officers were transferred without knowing the number of officers that are still in that specialized unit.

So I just want to let my colleagues on the council know that I am seeking that information and still seeking it.

And when I receive it, I will either share it with you or the fact that Chief Diaz now knows that there's broader interest than just my interest.

Maybe you could just share it with everybody.

And I hope, given the fact that I asked this question a couple weeks ago now, that it won't go into sort of the budget answer question process.

Hopefully there's something just ready and will be sent to us within the next day or so, as opposed to having to go through SharePoint and all that.

We'll work with our staff to make sure we get the information.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Well, long-awaited presentation from Angela.

We will turn it over to Angela.

Again, thank you, Chief Diaz, for fielding those questions, which I'm sure there will be more to come, but appreciate your intro remarks and answering those questions for us.

Angela, please go ahead.

All right, if I can get confirmation that folks can see my screen, that would be wonderful.

Thank you, thank you.

All right, so we've been through with Chief Diaz, his priorities for as new, newly appointed chief.

So I'm gonna, I'll pause briefly here for folks to absorb this information.

as I believe it's being published for the first time with the budget.

And then we'll go ahead and move right on in.

I'm going to see if I can move the video portion.

All right.

So the table here represents the 2020 or depicts the 2020 adopted budget alongside the 2020 revised and 2021 proposed.

These changes, both dollars across the multiple funds within the department, along with the FTE captured here, are based on the net changes compared or net change between the 2020 adopted to 2020 revised, which is going to include the rebalancing package, um, along with the council changes and supplemental information, supplemental budget information.

Um, and then alongside then the 2021 proposed, um, just an important comment here.

Uh, the, the, Comparison of the 2021 proposed to the 2020 adopted and 2020 revised budgets isn't necessarily going to align perfectly with the budget.

The change requests that are entered that will be reviewed by central staff and others are going to be taken from the 2021 baseline budget for SPD.

So there may be some discrepancies between the $49 million that's reflected here and other publications that have gone out.

High level.

Our change from the 2020 adopted is $49 million cut, $35 million from the 2020 revised.

From an FTE or a position standpoint, we're going from in 2020 adopted, 2,187.4 FTE, to an FTE level of 1,853 in 2021. If there are no questions, we'll move along.

We've already discussed the sworn staffing level is going to make up, as everyone knows, about 80% of our budget is attributable to personnel costs, 82% in 2020, 80% in 2021. The majority of that reduction that we're taking going into 2021 is attributable to the cut of funding for 97 sworn police officers, the abrogation of 47 of those 97 for a savings of 15.6 million.

We're cutting funding for 40 civilian positions for a savings of 4.1 million and also cutting funding for overtime for selected events and emphasis patrols for a savings of 2.7 million.

There's a lot of interest around staffing, around that sworn number of 1,400.

I just want to take an opportunity to reiterate that as we were writing this budget, we asked ourselves, who will respond to emergency calls on January 1?

Even if we could come to an agreement on alternatives by the end of the budget process, can we as a city actually hire, train, and deploy these new resources by January 1?

What infrastructure is needed?

How much capacity is needed?

Can we leverage community relationships to expedite the rollout of those alternatives?

How will we finance the transition?

Will there be any overlap?

We recognize that there were many outstanding questions that we needed to engage with community in order to answer some of those questions.

I know the executive has done work in that area.

I know council has done work in that area.

And I just wanna clarify, I'm not here to make value judgments.

I'm not here to say that 1,400 is the number, but the status quo today, 1,400 is necessary to maintain that status quo.

why it was built into the budget.

We estimated it would take two years to implement a new computer-aided dispatch system.

This is common for IT projects.

We build in time for quality assurance, change management.

We account for learning curves and build in extra funding for contingencies.

I may be too linear and too focused on logistics, but when I think about tackling a major shift in how we provide city services, I think the what you're seeing here is is a conservative approach to that kind of the the shifting tide around how we provide community safety services in the city.

We tried to acknowledge that in you know what's going to be forthcoming on the community safety proposal but for from our vantage point successful projects start with a plan.

A plan starts as an idea but it requires careful planning especially when it's planning major changes to basic city services.

That said, this is meant to be a holding place, what's built into the budget.

As everyone knows, we have processes in place to modify that budget as it's adopted.

We modify the proposed budget through this council process.

Through that lens, I just ask everyone to As these next slides come up, just know that that is the context through which we established this budget.

And by providing historical staffing information, again, it is really intended to provide you as policymakers with factual good information to inform your policy decisions and I truly believe that's my role in this process, is to make sure that you have the information that you need in order to make those decisions.

So with that, I will jump into.

Thank you so much.

I do see two hands.

I'm going to allow for Councilmember Herbold and Councilmember Morales to ask a clarifying question, and then colleagues, I'm going to ask you to hold your questions and we will allow folks to have ample time at the end of the presentation.

But because I didn't announce that earlier, if you have clarified questions, Council Member Herbold and Council Member Morales, and then we're going to get through the presentation and I'll go through each person so they have a chance to ask a number of questions.

But do know, Angela and Dr. Fisher, that means we will have to have time at the end for letting folks ask those questions.

Council Member Herbold, please.

Angela, I just wanted to say that I appreciate the final comments that you made around how you take an idea and turn it into a plan and then implement it.

But I also want to say that our budget actions that we take in the fall to go into effect starting in the following year, we can build into those budgets assumptions that plans can be executed at times throughout the year.

Not every plan that our budget recognizes has to go into effect on January 1st.

But it's very important, I think, for policymakers, for members of the public who we're engaging with, and for the city internally in order to hold ourselves accountable for us to use the budget as a way to set goals and timelines for realizing those plans.

And again, I haven't had a chance to take a careful look at the executive order.

I am concerned from first glance is it doesn't seem to identify timelines.

And so I think what I would like to see in this budget is a recognition that, yeah, we can't necessarily shift the answering of a bunch of 911 calls over to somebody else in January 1st, but we can build a budget with some assumptions around when we expect that to happen, and we can build a plan to make it possible.

And I think I heard you say that, Angela, but I want our budget to reflect that.

So hopefully we can work together to do so.

I do have clarifying questions about the previous slide.

So just want to make sure the funding for the 97 sworn police officers, these are vacant positions, that's correct?

That's correct.

The cut funding for the 40 FTE civilian positions, are those the transfers to the other departments?

I don't think so, because that wouldn't be a cut.

What are those?

So the civilian cut was developed at the outset of the budget process.

It accounts for the savings for 40 FTE.

It's a continuation of the civilian hiring freeze.

that was implemented in 2020 in response to COVID.

You saw some of those cuts in your 2020 rebalancing package.

This item here is a continuation of those cuts into next year.

We have not.

Sorry.

Go ahead.

Oh, just my last question related to overtime.

One of the items that I think has been perennially raised around special events and overtime is the question.

And I was visited by a coalition of organizations that traditionally work with a special events committee to put on large events every year and won a flag.

And I don't know if this links to this item on overtime.

The long standing practice of having police officers act as flaggers that is not, there's this this narrative out there that state law requires it to be uniformed police officers that is not in fact the case.

And I really want to look at having somebody other than, excuse me, police officers serve this function.

It's very, very expensive and in a financial atmosphere where we want to make sure that we are recouping the costs to the city associated with special events, and we want to work with the promoters of special events so that they do so, so that they fully compensate the city for the costs associated with special events.

We don't want to be using the most expensive staffing model for those events, so I'm hoping that this cut in overtime includes a shift away from uniformed officers acting as flaggers at special events or even street closures associated with construction projects and looks at a shift towards either non-uniformed police officers or other city employees like potentially SDOT employees.

If I might just, sorry, just backing up real quick.

More this afternoon, but the executive order does have deadlines, anticipating a report in March and anticipation of supplemental budgetary actions to follow.

But yeah, I think it's a good discussion for this afternoon in greater detail.

Council Member Morales.

Well, I just had a question about that, too.

I am interested to know which selected events will be included here so we can get more information, more specific information on that.

That'd be great.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Colleagues, please take a note of the slides that you would like the presenters to go back to, and I will go through the roll.

at the end of the presentation to make sure everybody gets a chance to ask questions.

We do have nine more slides to go.

So let's get through the presentation and then we will make sure to go back to the various slides where you have questions.

If it's a burning question, please send me a quick note if a quick clarification is needed.

Thank you.

All right, let's see.

So to Council Member Herbold's point, I, the, she's absolutely right that we could build into the budget and, you know, to the best of our ability, anticipate changes and what, you know, what alternatives in 2021 would look like.

When it comes to police staffing, you know, we have a lot of historical data that we can look at as, you know, someone in budget.

I've followed this very closely.

not only through the drastic increases in our personnel costs tied almost entirely to the delayed SPOG contract, retro payments and the increase in our sworn salaries tied to that contract.

The point I wanna make here as we contemplate next steps around sworn staffing, whether the number is 1,400 or 1,300, you know, 1,200, whatever the number ends up being, whatever we decide.

You know, and for those just, you know, I'm able to read from some of the budget questions that we've received.

For those of you who might be contemplating a continuation of the hiring freeze into 2021, I just want to use this opportunity to explain the impacts of that.

The last time we implemented a hiring freeze, you'll see it in the slide here, was in 2010 and extended through 2011. It was in response to the Great Recession.

Even though we resumed hiring in 2012, we didn't actually see any net new hires until 2013. Those hires weren't actually deployed until December of that year.

Fortunately for us at that point, the economic downturn caused by the Great Recession also slowed attrition.

We're not realizing that same benefit today.

If you slide over to the far right of that chart on this slide, we have seen a significant decrease in our deployable resources this year, largely tied to the hiring freeze that was implemented earlier this year, also tied to COVID and an increase in people on other administrative leave, whether it's paid parental leave or the The continuations are just for extra context and perspective.

I will be providing this information to central staff, so we can certainly dive into it a little bit deeper.

But should we continue a hiring freeze into next year?

Within a year, our field and number will resemble police staffing in the 80s.

At the time, the Seattle population was less than 500,000.

That could very well be the direction we're headed in or the direction we should head in as a city.

Again, not here to make those value judgments.

But I think it's important that should we revert to those staffing levels, it is absolutely critical that we expedite the development and deployment of those alternative models that we're talking about.

The funding the cuts to our funding going into next year.

I just it's I can't emphasize enough that at some point you know if we decrease our staffing to 100 or 200 and change our minds it's going to take many years to recuperate.

Or we'll have to live with the service impacts for the time in between.

So whether there's overlap in those services or not overlap in those services perhaps that's OK too.

I think we just need to acknowledge that until we stand up alternatives, until we identify what functions are going to be transferred out of the department, it's truly critical to understand that, you know, we need to do our best to anticipate where we might end up because we need to start planning now.

If we're going to hire or not going to hire, I can tell you that with the hiring freeze that we implemented this year, almost simultaneously we started planning for hiring when hiring was going to resume towards the end of the year.

It takes time to test, it takes time to recruit candidates for testing.

There's just a number of steps that have to happen.

And so I just encourage everyone to keep that in mind as we contemplate what the appropriate level of staffing at the police department is.

Whatever number you choose to fund, also keep in mind that we will field about 10% less of that.

When you factor in our shift relief, our furlough schedules, the officers available for emergency response each day will be a small fraction of the whole.

So those are just a few high level points.

Again, more than happy to go into this in greater detail, either offline through the budget Q&A, but hey, I urge everyone to think about as we contemplate cuts to the budget, just know that for us, that 1400 is necessary for the maintenance of our current service.

We can make changes to that service, but just know that we'll need to anticipate that in advance so we can plan the staffing and hiring piece accordingly.

And with that, I will pass it on to Chris to dive in a little bit more into the staffing models that are used to develop our minimum staffing, and then just some context sharing there.

Chris, do you want to?

Thank you, Angela.

And as we saw in the opening, we anticipated there'd be some questions around how the Seattle Police Department does the work of figuring out how many people it needs where, and then you add those up and that tells you how many you need in total.

So as the chief pointed out, we do not use a per capita analysis to decide what's the right number.

There are a variety of reasons why you shouldn't.

The reason it is referenced is It does provide you context.

Comparison always provides you context.

It helps us ensure we're not in the completely wrong ballpark or even the wrong sport, to play out the analogy.

And what you do see here is these are the 25 largest cities by population.

Those blue bars are the population.

The orange dots are their per capita sworn per 100,000 We see that Seattle there towards the end is at 185. This is data reported by all of these cities across the U.S. to the FBI for the 2019 Uniform Crime Report.

is that we are in the low end compared to cities of larger, smaller, and similar size.

So it just tells us we're not vastly overstaffed compared to similar cities.

We're not vastly understaffed compared to similar cities, but we are on the low end.

And that's just the context.

We do, I think as the question and points were made by several council members at the outset, We don't rely on a tool.

We recognize all of those same constraints and problems.

I immediately as the council president started quoting it, I knew what document she was quoting from because we use that document as well.

We use a variety of models.

We do use the managing patrol performance program.

MPP, as we call it, developed out of MIT that's been really in use since around 1975. In reality, that's an operations queuing model that sort of any service agency of any type could use to determine how long do I want my customers, my clients, my public to wait for the service.

And you feed into that very complicated program, it was developed a while ago, they tried to make it more user friendly, but you still have to do a whole lot of front end work to format the data to feed in things like how long are you spending on each service call, whatever your service model is.

How many people have to be tied up for each of those calls from your resources?

How frequent do you have different types of calls?

How long, if you have a mobile service unit, as a police department would, how long does it take you on average to get to different types of calls?

How much land area do you have to cover?

How many units do you currently have assigned there?

And sort of that incoming call rate per day, per hour blocks within the day.

And it spits out the, if these are your parameters, this is how long you will expect people to wait for each different type of call.

And then it's really up to the police department or any other agency that worries about how long people have to wait for service to adjust those parameters.

When we use that model, as we've used throughout the years, it changes.

Different administrations have decided that different amounts of officer time should be, quote unquote, free time to engage community, to problem solve, to build relationships.

Chief Diaz has made it clear he would like that number back at the 40% range.

It has been lower in recent years because of staffing constraints.

That's a large reason of why he pushed additional people into patrol, is to make sure people had time to do that.

And the 60% then is time on calls and time handling administrative paperwork, getting gas, taking a bio break.

And so you build all that in and you model it out.

But that doesn't always account for every reality.

It is a computer model.

It is a statistical model.

It is not an exhaustive model.

So there are also operational realities that you then have to layer into that.

For us, that's, you know, you can some of it put into the model as the consent decree.

Sort of was fully sort of baked into how the department does business we did in most cases.

There are no solo calls We don't send one officer to most calls for a variety of reasons recommended by the monitor in the court and experts and so that Increases the time until you're actually engaging the call.

So we have to build that in we also have span of control and unity of command issues and that you also build in to make sure you have the right number of sergeants and lieutenants and other supervisors.

And then you also have the outside of patrol, you have the issues around squads and coverage and who has time off.

shift relief factor.

And so all that gets built into sort of this queuing model.

We layer in the operational and that gives us an estimate.

But we know that that's one model.

So we also use sort of the performance based approach that Michigan State working with the COPS office put out.

That one's easier for us to manipulate in terms of to change things around, to predict what some different parameters would do to the other outcomes.

If we change this, how many officers we have in the patrol bureau, what would performance look like?

If we changed our goal performance time, how many officers does that take?

If we decided we were not going to have dual officer dispatch anymore, what would that do?

It's easier for us to do that.

In that model, it's a little bit more of a broken down equation instead of a computer program that takes very specifically formatted files.

That's why we started also looking at that model.

And then we also have looked at sort of what I would call back of the envelope because of that MPP model being difficult to rerun.

There were a few years where we did not have anybody with the time from an analytics standpoint to sort of completely rerun that model.

Our patrol commanders were really sort of looking at their daily call load and adjusting their minimum staffing.

And as, you know, sort of as is the desire of most researchers and analysts, what we really try to do is triangulate.

And as it happens to be, when you look at these models from different perspectives, they're in the same, back to the sport analogy, we're into the same ballpark.

And I know, and I agree with Council President Gonzalez, That the Berkshire report had questions about its ultimate utility.

It also taking a completely different approach about how they looked at it.

I wasn't here then either, but they also ended up in about the same guideline for the amount of calls that come in to 911 that officers are dispatched to.

How many people do we need to meet that seven-minute standard for priority one, in-progress emergency calls?

And then we do have other goals for the other priorities.

Because that's not in-progress, because it's not an emergency, we normally don't stress that seven-minute.

Its corollaries in the other priorities aren't quite as driven as in the priority one.

Um, but we do play that out and we try to see, um, you know, are we able to hit those metrics?

Um, where are we not addressing it?

Um, one sort of, and then we also look at how it plays out in reality.

Um, and this year, um, COVID, I think presented a, experiment that researchers across multiple fields, especially criminal justice, will be studying and trying to understand for years to come about what it did to data and the system.

And this is before the civil rights uprising and all of the repercussions of that important community work.

Just in those few months where COVID had really restricted the calls that departments across the country were going to to try to limit that interpersonal contact, to try to slow down any spread.

We were one of those departments, as most large departments and small departments did.

We tried to push as much as we could to online reporting, to telephone reporting, a lot of the recommendations from that MSU guide.

And what we still saw is even with that, and yes, you do have to layer in that we had, as Angela mentioned, additional people out because They would be in quarantine to make sure we slowed the spread, and they and their families were safe.

But even with restricted dispatch events that we were going to versus fielding through the phone or online, we were still having to augment based on our minimum staffing.

And that minimum staffing, be it designed by a patrol commander, by MPP, by the Michigan state model, by a triangulation of all three, It is a minimum.

It is that this is how many people for that shift or watch for that day in that precinct.

How many officers do you need to handle the call volume to meet your response time goals and to have an officer be able to stay in their sector, to stay in their beat, their neighborhood.

When we have less officers than that minimum staffing.

We either augment or if they can't get enough people in, there's one officer in the sector and they are having to dispatch across the sector.

They're not having to be able to spend time.

They might not have sector.

They may not stick within their sector if they have to help out a colleague.

And that sort of breaks up that whole idea of really working with your community and knowing what's going on in your community.

If you're having to race across broader boundaries because there aren't enough folks deployed to get to the basic priority one and priority two calls, which is really what we were focusing on in COVID as sort of that natural experiment that happened by everyone changing their behaviors to slow the spread.

And so that's what we look at.

We'll get into the specifics in a second about how that plays out in numbers, but that is how we approach trying to figure out how many staff we need based on what we know we're being asked to do by the public.

Um, and then, as the chief mentioned, there are for some specialty units, there are some best practice guidelines.

It's pretty limited.

Um, there hasn't, for a variety of reasons, been a ton of research on what are best practices in investigations or the work that detectives do.

But, um, homicide generally has some best practices.

around what is their caseload.

Really, it's about people think they should take in maybe four to six new homicides a year, each detective.

Our detectives in homicide also handle our assaults and our bias crimes.

So there is no magic number for that.

That's what the chief meant by that functional analysis.

We have to look at how many of those very serious cases come in.

How long does it take to solve them?

How many of them get closed?

And adjust that staffing as those trends change.

But we do have some best practice metrics on just specifically homicide.

We do have some best practice metrics on sexual assault.

They're recommended to take anywhere from two to eight new cases a month and hold for any one time.

And those investigations, those are really two of the only places that really have specific caseload.

Anyone working sort of in that internet crimes against children or trafficking, any of that online sexual exploitation.

There aren't caseload guides, but there are workload wellness guides.

That, as you can imagine, brings with it some tremendous trauma, vicarious, if not direct from what they have to see to do their investigations.

And so there are workload guides around how often they need breaks, how often they should be cycled in and out, what their broadest caseload should be, but not really that sort of this many per month.

And we have seen a dramatic uptick in that.

I believe that's been reported not just in Seattle, but nationally as we've had, you know, without school, without mandatory reporters, we have seen a lot of sort of increase in external reporting or noticing of online exploitation.

And so that's always something we're always watching that unit.

It's very stressful.

And then some of our other specialty functions like the SWAT team, there are guidelines from national security, from the urban area security initiative.

We get a lot of funding as a city and as a region to protect the port, to protect our infrastructure.

And there are guidelines around the size of your city and the nature of your city, how many people you should have in that sort of facility.

sorry, in that sort of unit.

And so that's what we think about when we try to start piecing together how many do each one of these areas need.

Angela, if you want to skip ahead.

And so then we add it up.

And so when we run that triangulation for patrol, we end up, when you do officers, when you do sergeants, lieutenants, captains, bike officers, West Precinct, downtown, parts of North Precinct, parts of the East Precinct, benefit, especially at certain times of day, a lot from having officers out on bikes.

They're one, they're more approachable.

Two, when we have traffic, which one day will return, something I think we all somewhat oddly miss.

Um, we will, the bikes get there faster.

Um, so when you add all that together, that comes up to about 745 officers in patrol to meet our current workload.

Um, we are not there now.

The chief was driving for that with his reallocation.

Um, we're going to see.

We're sort of stress testing this.

These are all models.

You do need to see how does it play out in reality.

And then as Angela mentioned, we also then, we do have those extra positions because we do not specifically as an organization or as a city fund our recruits and student officers.

They are funded out of unoccupied patrol positions.

At any one time, we can have anywhere from 80 to 100 students and recruits.

And so we do leave patrol positions open to make sure we pay those individuals for their time getting trained.

Then that leaves us, if you take away the 745 and the 100, that leaves you with about 555 officers to fill out everything else we do.

We sort of then just go down in descending order based on where do we know we have guides about how many we need, back to that homicide and sexual assault and the other specialty detective units and their workload.

We figure out we need around, you know, I'm not going to go through each number on here.

You see how many we need, we calculate we need in criminal investigations, special operations, you know, that's the SWAT team, traffic, harbor, arson bombs, they've had a busy year.

There's sometimes you can't anticipate that you're going to have a busy year people get and you that's what we sometimes do on loans.

If a unit is getting overwhelmed by cases, professional standards increased a lot during the consent decree, we had to increase our trainers, we've done a lot, you know, you often heard us reference the five times the training.

We also that's where our force investigation teams are.

Collaborative policing is in the other biggest bucket.

And then you see sort of the smaller where there are a few other folks.

The chief operating officer directly supervises the sworn officers who are required to sign off and take those online and telephone reports.

That's where most of that number is.

And so that, we add all those together and that's how we get to the number.

And I believe then that moves us to Angela to finish out some of the specific budget actions.

No, thank you, Dr. Fisher.

Thank you, Angela.

I'm just going to pause here very briefly.

I do want folks to continue to hold their questions, but given that the last three slides were just specific to item number one on your chart, I don't want those concerns that were also raised earlier to go unanswered as we then have more of the chart to go through.

So very briefly, I'm going to pause and see if there's any questions here on item number one as articulated in those last three slides.

Sorry, did I see your hand Council President?

Yeah, I do have a, so just so I'm clear, you're asking for questions on the sworn staffing portions of the presentation.

That's right.

So we're looking at the slides three, which it has backup slides on four, five, and six.

Right.

I do have some questions around these particular issues.

So just really quickly, when we look at slide number five, Yeah, I think, and frankly, this is true for all the slides, it's four or five.

I think what I heard were some remarks about if we go below these levels, then we have to live with the realities of the service impacts.

And I want to be really clear that the information that is being provided to us in this presentation on slides four, five, and six presume no reductions to the police department's scope of work.

Is that correct?

They assume no reduction.

This is sort of the conversation Council Member Herbold brought up, Madam President, about we don't assume any reduction starting January 1.

Right.

So this assumes that the police department will continue to have the existing scope of work that it has now.

Correct.

We anticipate it'll take some time to figure out what can be safely shifted to alternative responses and to build that capacity.

And then we could adjust.

We want to be ready on January 1 for the call volume we anticipate wouldn't change as we shift it to 2021, until that work was done.

Okay.

And then in terms of the information related to sworn officers, I'm just going to like quickly go through what I think I'm seeing here in terms of what we adopted in 2020 and what is proposed in 2021. And it's more for clarity sake because There's a lot of graphs and charts and bullet points here and I just wanna be really, I wanna have it really clear in my head.

So if you'll indulge me here.

So my understanding is that the 2020 adopted budget included 1,497 sworn officer positions.

So total FTEs for 2020 adopted budget was 1,497.

Is that accurate?

That's correct, yeah.

Okay.

But the 2020 adopted budget only funded 1,422 of those sworn officer positions, leaving 75 positions in 2020 unfunded and vacant, correct?

That's correct, yeah.

OK, so then in 2021 proposed budget we see a proposal for an abrogation of a total of 47 full time equivalent positions for sworn officers.

Which would then result in a decrease of 1450 full time positions that would be granted to the Seattle Police Department.

The 47 take goes from 1497 to 1450 authorized positions, 1400 of which are funded.

OK, that was gonna be my last question.

So the 2021 proposed budget then appears to fund 1400 positions, which is only 22 less than 2020, but there are still 50 positions, authorized positions.

There's 1,450 authorized positions in the 2021 proposed budget.

That's correct.

Yeah, we have, we retain 50 unfunded officer positions in the 2021 proposed budget with the intent of pending the results of the work that's being done as part of the IDT.

Okay.

And can you please explain both the data analysis and the policy rationale for funding precisely 1,400 sworn officer positions, but leaving 1,450 authorized positions on the books?

Yeah, if you could just, I'm trying to understand the policy rationale for that delta of 1,400 versus 1,450.

That makes sense to me, Council President.

Thank you.

Angela?

Yeah, so I would think of this more as a reserve.

We were reluctant to cut all of those positions until we knew the results of the ongoing work.

There is the police department's position on where our staffing should be.

There's the council's position, potentially many different positions on where our staffing should be.

This is all subject to continued discussion and collaboration on what that final number should be.

It seemed inconsequential to leave positions that couldn't be filled.

Either way, we don't have sufficient budget for those.

But the positions remain.

No action is planned for those positions until we determine the results of the 2021 budget process.

So Angela, help me understand that.

If the 50 positions that are authorized were funded, how much money, what's the dollar amount assigned to those 50 positions?

For the 50, sorry, just give me one moment.

It's around $7 million.

that is attributable to those 40 or 50, sorry, those 50 positions.

So those 50 positions that are authorized, but are currently unfunded are worth $7 million.

Correct.

Okay.

Roughly.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Quick math, but that's the ballpark.

Your math is going to be better than mine.

I'm asking you the questions.

I appreciate it.

And so you're saying that the reason there isn't a complete abrogation of those 97 positions, you're saying that the reason there isn't a complete abrogation is because it may be impacted by the IDT work that is going to be launched by the Durkin administration.

Is that what I'm hearing you say?

I should say that's my assumption.

As far as going into the budget, the department didn't propose the abrogation of these positions of the 47 and then made the decision to leave the 50. I would say it's because they are unfunded.

To be completely honest, I haven't given much consideration to those.

We established the need on the basis of maintaining the status quo.

We identified 1,400 positions.

the delta between the positions that were abrogated and the positions that we were advocating for was happened to be 50. That may sound that it was an afterthought, but that I haven't heard any clear necessarily policy kind of position on why the 50 were left, why they remain other than reserving some flexibility for us to make determinations around what the appropriate size of the police department is.

Well, I think that the inference that it creates is that the IDT could come out with a recommendation that we should grow the police force.

And that's why the 50 positions shouldn't be abrogated.

Is that one of the potential outcomes?

I can absolutely see how you could make that inference.

I can't speak to whether or not that was the intent of leaving the 50. It wasn't my change request that was developed.

So I don't want to speak on behalf of the executive and how that came to be.

But I would say that is a fair inference.

And I just want to be really clear that if the If the city council decided to eliminate the 50 position, the 50 additional authorized but unfunded positions, that would not have any budget implications on the police department.

Is that correct?

If the additional 50 were abrogated, there would be no. no effect to our existing staffing, if that's the question.

And the budget savings has already been, there wouldn't necessarily be additional budget savings and it shouldn't have any operational impacts.

The one thing I will point out is that, as Chris mentioned, our student officers and our recruits are not funded.

So a portion of the 1,400 goes towards, around 80 to 100 positions go towards, are occupied by those recruits and student officers who are not deployable.

That is a factor here.

And as far as the budget goes, all of our positions are, the funded level is in the budget for all of our positions is prorated based on anticipated attrition and hiring.

But Angela, you're not saying that the 80 to 100 trainee positions, for lack of a better term, are captured by the 50 unfunded, unauthorized, unfunded positions.

No, no, no.

Sorry.

No, that was probably confusing.

We're creating a little bit of confusion there.

So I want to be really clear that the issue with regard to recruits, that is included in the base number of 1,400 sworn officers that's baked into the staffing model.

That's correct.

Yeah.

So we're talking about 50 additional positions that are included in this mayor's proposed 2021 budget that are basically being held, preserved, even though there are no real dollars attached to them.

The possibility of someday funding those positions is preserved by virtue of not abrogating those authorized but unfunded slots for sworn officer positions.

Is that correct?

If I might.

Go ahead, Ben.

Consistent with the offline discussions we've had over the past few weeks as we were working on some issues related to SPD and budget, these vacant positions are not essential to the budget and can be eliminated.

There is a very long bureaucratic process involved with creating positions that may have been a reason to provide To avoid eliminating them all.

But again, we've separately communicated that they're not essential.

And we don't expect, won't have resources to hire into them.

So, honestly, a non-issue at some level, and I only say that because there are really important issues here for us to work on.

But also recognize that it's important for you to clarify the expectations on that point.

So I'm not trying to trivialize it.

I just don't think it's a major point, if you will.

But I recognize that position authority is an important aspect of the budgeting process overall.

Well, thank you for saying you're not trying to trivialize it while trivializing it, Dr. Noble.

But I'm going to finish my line of questioning here, and then I'm going to move along here.

So I just want to be really clear that these additional 50 positions don't have any service.

If we were to abrogate the additional 50 positions, there would not be any service impacts or budget impacts one way or the other to the police department.

Is that correct?

That is correct.

Yeah.

We, these were, these same positions were included in the compromise bill for abrogation.

Um, and yeah, so we are, we were fully prepared to, to relinquish those positions.

Um, I recognize that they were included in the compromise bill, um, but they were not included in the proposed budget as transmitted by the mayor.

Correct.

Yeah.

The budget had already been drafted.

So really quickly on the issue of the staffing models again.

So I understand that the proposed budget and staffing model projects new recruitment and hiring activities in 2021 based on just my initial review of the presentation and the documents.

And so one, I'm looking for confirmation that that reading is accurate.

My reading of the proposed budget here and the staffing model projections is that there will be additional recruitment and hiring activities in 2021. And if that is true, then I would like to get an understanding of how to reconcile those recruitment and hiring activities proposed for 2021 with the plans to reimagine public safety and begin the process of shifting to harm reduction models of community safety.

And that might not be a question for you, Angela, but whoever from SPD or the city budget office wants to answer is fine.

Yeah, I can take a swing at it.

to circle back to some of the chief's points.

At this point, there are a lot of unknowns around what a re-envisioned police department is going to look like.

Right now, we are concerned at the rate in which we are losing sworn police officers.

We have had a hiring freeze in place since mid-2020.

as we continue to separate employees, that 1,400 number that we're currently staffed at is going to continue to decrease, leaving us in a situation where we are operating at potentially much less than that.

So going into 2021, if we're talking about the maintenance of kind of current service levels, the 1,400 is needed, and that is going to require us to recruit, hire, and train new police candidates.

That said, I mean, if depending on the expediency at which we can establish alternatives and perhaps that's not necessary at this point, we don't know what it's going to look like.

And with that level of uncertainty, we feel that it's prudent to backfill for some of the attrition.

We're not talking about growing the police department in 2021, but the staffing model depicts and what's included in the budget is purely the maintenance of our current staffing level.

So how many of the 1400 positions are assumed to be necessary for backfilling of attrition?

So as far as I mean sorry asking how many we would need to hire in order to to backfill for attrition or how how many of the 1,400.

Sorry Angela I heard you say that the that this budget proposed does propose recruitment and hiring activities in 2021. However, those activities will be limited.

To back filling for the anticipated attrition.

With the understanding that the ceiling will be 1400, so you will not be hiring more than 1400 in any situation.

So, of the 1400. sworn officers that are proposed to be funded in the 2021 budget, how many of those 1,400 positions are assumed will be for purposes of backfilling, for a backfilling attrition of officers who are departing, retiring, or just for whatever reason leaving the police department?

So as far as, I mean, we're anticipating around 80 separations next year of fully trained officers.

If we were to hire, we always build in a buffer for about, you know, for a handful of recruits and student officers to separate as well.

We would have to hire or we would have to backfill for about 90 separating employees in order to maintain that staffing level of 1,400.

Okay, thank you.

That's helpful.

And that doesn't account for the separations that we'll continue to experience.

Again, our number, we're currently at 1,400 through the remaining three months of the year.

I anticipate we will continue to lose officers.

And so that will certainly be a factor.

We've tried to account for that in the staffing model.

Again, it is, you know, we do our best to anticipate what attrition is, but as you know, as, you know, former public safety chair, we're not always right on target, but typically in the ballpark, so.

That's very generous of you, Angela.

I feel like we've almost always missed the mark, and we've always been pretty conservative in our estimates around attrition.

Um, you know, just last year, we made a huge course correction.

I think it was close to 9Million dollars of, um, unanticipated underspend.

Um, so I think.

I'm asking these questions because I think it's going to be important for us to on the city council to really dig into, um.

the underlying assumptions of the staffing model and the projections of staffing needs, but also the reality of what we'll be able to hire and recruit and retain in order to identify if there is the potential for any additional savings that could be realized through that exercise.

So I appreciate your willingness to answer those questions.

I know we've all been talking a lot about The staffing model issues, and I'm sure that there will be some additional questions from my colleagues and additional questions and follow up.

And again, Angela, I appreciate your answers to my questions here.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Oh, if I could just quickly add some policy context for the Council President on this point.

And that is, as a policy matter, we think it's important to continue the influx of new officers as our new recruits in the last few years have been far more diverse than historically.

And we want to continue that influx of new, younger, diverse officers as well.

So that's just a little bit of a policy perspective behind our desire to keep hiring as well.

I just wanted to add.

Ms. Klein, you might want to introduce yourself for the record, since I don't think you had an opportunity to do that, so that viewing members of the public and maybe some of my colleagues would benefit from that context.

Thank you, Council President.

My name is Julie Klein.

I'm the Mayor's Public Safety Advisor, so that's the reason for the policy context there.

Thank you very much.

Vice Chair Herbold, and then Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

I'll make it really quick.

I want to just say that as it related to the conversation around the abrogation of positions, whether or not it should be the full 97 or not, I did work with the executive during our efforts to come up with a compromise to the council's 2021 budget that had been vetoed.

And the full abrogation of all 97 positions was on the table.

The executive did not did not object to it.

I appreciate the council president's concern that it might look like we're signaling our intent to hire to 1450. But I just want to confirm my understanding that there wasn't an objection.

to the full abrogation of those positions.

I also want to re-ask one of the questions that I've been asking the police department for some time.

The anticipated, estimated at the beginning of the year, Um, uh, separations for 2020, um, where I think 92 officers, um, and, um, we're, we're hearing sort of anecdotally that we have, um, reason to expect that, um, the actual separations are, are much greater than that.

When I talked to Chief Diaz a couple weeks ago, he confirmed for me that we have not yet reached that 92 number, but we do expect to exceed it.

And I just think it would be really helpful to get our arms around.

whether or not we're looking at a much larger number or a slightly larger number.

And in that context, and again, I know this is not, we can't be exact, but I have asked for, and I would still like a revised 2020 estimate for separations this year.

And then lastly, as it relates to this conversation around the executive's support for and the police department's support for, as we've heard today already, to addressing workload, given that workload is some of the under, that we have.

Our underlying assumptions for staffing and our shared desire to see how we can shrink that workload.

And given the fact that Angela has agreed that it is possible to elements of our plan, which can include shrinking the workload.

In my interest in doing so within the context of next year's budget, baking in further reductions associated with reductions in workload, I want to lift up again.

Our ability to do that, we all agree, is all about having a plan and executing that plan.

And in order to execute that plan, we have to work to build capacity among our external partners.

And the council in its 2020 rebalancing earmarked $10 million for capacity for just those programs and agencies who will carry out these expanded safety-related efforts.

And I appreciate receiving the letter from the Deputy Mayor yesterday, letting us know that Director Johnson will begin a process to develop this RFP.

And that because this funding was provisional, they'll be bringing an ordinance forward for council consideration, releasing those dollars for allocation.

I do find it unacceptable that it appears that this cannot happen during this year because of the refusal to execute the Interfund loan.

If there is a way that we can develop this RFP and act on the ordinance while we are in budget this year, So again, so that we can get those dollars out the door, build the capacity among those organizations who are going to be poised to take on some of this workload.

I would really like to hear from Director Noble whether or not that will be possible to do, acting on the ordinance during budget process related to this RFP.

Let me clarify, I think there was some misunderstanding about the issue on the Interfund loan is that I just don't actually think it's going to be technically necessary.

An Interfund loan is required if we don't have sufficient balance in the funds that are going to be called upon.

I have expectation that we will.

I indicated in the presentation yesterday, there's actually some fund balance that we'll be leaving 2020 with.

So given that, we may not, unless we not technically need the Interim Fund Loan, that may come down to a question of what share of the $14 million, to use the vernacular, can get out the door by the end of the year.

But the intent is to move forward with this RFP process as we speak and issue it.

But again, whether we're able to complete all that and make the awards and Write checks, in fact, the cost may, the contracts are probably on a reimbursable basis.

I'm only telling you this to understand the Interfund loan piece.

Expectation is to move forward.

What I do need to say, though, is that the budget for 2021 does not anticipate, that we have submitted to you, doesn't anticipate repaying that loan so that, or repaying, it doesn't anticipate these costs.

So if we use this fund balance in 2020, the 2021 budget that we have submitted to you would be out of balance.

So Council indicated that the intent was to find savings in 2021 to repay these costs.

And all I'm saying is that that would still be necessary.

But that is entirely the purview of Council and appropriate in the context of the budget and the work you are doing.

So we're taking you as directed, if you will, and I mean in a positive sense.

Moving forward, that will reduce the total resources available for 2021 and require some reductions and adjustments accordingly.

be able to tell you or provide an estimate of just how much we expect to get out in 21. But ultimately, we're talking about $14 million.

And if it doesn't get spent in 2020, it would then get spent in 2021. So that's the expectation.

Ordinance is passed moving forward.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Director Noble.

Councilmember Herbold, do you have a follow-up question or comment to that?

I'm good for now.

I may have follow-up questions as I mull over the budget director's response.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much.

Councilmember Morales, I do have a quick follow-up on this if you give me the grace of one second here.

Director Noble, I just want to make sure I understood the answer that you just provided.

My understanding was that the use of the Interfund loan was not problematic prior to last week.

And I guess my question is, it doesn't sound like there's objection to spending the 14 million.

It sounds like there was a commitment to spending at least four and the remaining 10 million that was concerning as council members were articulating our concern was that the $10 million was not actually going to get allocated.

Are you saying that it will get allocated, but the concern is around process for the RFP and how quickly that can be done?

Yeah, so the $4 million intent is to, as I understand, is to award to existing contractors.

We have folks, we have agencies in that space.

So we can move forward with that quickly.

The $10 million, we would award via an RFP.

The RFP is being developed.

It will then be issued.

There'll be then some time for folks to respond.

And it's just a question of whether that will all happen by year end.

and likely the decision-making will, whether the dollars are spent by year-end, open question and not for lack of interest.

And then the question on the inter-fund loan is just, is only, is a technical one about, well, if we don't need, the money isn't all going to, to all $14 million, are they available this year?

Are they going to get spent this year?

We have some cash reserves, as I indicated in the presentation yesterday, given those cash reserves exist, we may not need to do the Interfund loan.

That's an accounting piece.

That's not the critical, I think the critical policy issue is that we are going to move forward quickly on the 4 million, and this is a process thing that we can move quickly on that.

We've initiated the RFP process for the 10 million, and we will do that expediently, but to be careful and thoughtful about it, it will take a certain amount of time.

Okay.

Yesterday we did have a conversation trying to clarify that the council had not spent down all of the reserve funds.

I think this is an important policy decision that we had made to use the Interfund loan, recognizing that that money wasn't being used and was not going to put other infrastructure projects in jeopardy.

That would allow us as well to maintain dollars in the reserve.

So I just, I will follow up with you and I think it does get to executive director Sochi's comments earlier, which was about why the 1400 positions had been maintained with the assumption that community we will get through the rest of the chart.

I'm actually looking at slide four.

So if we could go back just a minute.

And I just want to make sure that I'm understanding the point that you're trying to make here.

Because it does, I know that while the FTEs might have only increased by 5%, the overall budget has increased in the last five years by 36% or so.

even though, which is substantially greater than our population growth.

So I wanna make sure I understand with more specificity where that increase is coming from.

Is it just officer pay over time, the equipment growth over the last five or 10 years?

So if you can address that for me, please.

Yeah, I would say, I, I didn't want to necessarily draw any conclusions from this.

You're absolutely right that our budget has increased at a greater percentage than the population.

What I've heard mentioned multiple times now is that there's this correlation that's made between the number of police officers that we've had or how that number has grown over time.

And that it's measured against the crime kind of statistics and whether crime has gone up or down and trying to make a correlation between the existence of a certain number of police officers and how that may or may not impact crime.

So as far as the budget increase goes, the large majority of that is going to be attributable to the cost of our personnel.

The SPOG contract that was signed at the end of 2018, increased, it included annual wage increases up to 16%.

So the cost of our officers increased by 16% over that period of time.

The AWI continued each year.

There was an increase, additional increases, and so that is going to be the primary factor for the budget increase.

Along with that, we've got

I'm sorry, can I stop you there for a minute?

Did you say that every year wages go up 16%?

No, no, no, no.

Sorry, that was a cumulative increase.

The contract signing was delayed.

We expired contract for many years.

There was a lump sum payment for the retro for that 16%.

And then going forward, we got onto the regular cadence of the annual wage increases, which is standard.

So you're going to see within the increased cost of infrastructure costs, the need for our equipment budget hasn't actually increased significantly over that time frame.

It is a very small portion of our budget.

I'd be more than happy to provide additional explanation, but But the main answer, the main reason is going to be the significant increase in the cost of a police officer.

Commissioner Morales, did that answer your question?

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Director Noble, I understand you have a clarifying point you want to make.

Yeah, I did.

Sorry.

With regard to the process around the $14 million, I was reminded by my staff, Adam Schafer, thank you, that there's a proviso the council has imposed on that 10 million.

So we'll need to get back, once you move to the RFP process, we need to discuss with you at what point in the award process you want to provide the additional legal authority to move forward with the spending of the money.

As written, it requires an additional ordinance, and I just want to acknowledge that we just need to coordinate on that and understand better what level of information we could run all the way through the RFP process and bring you the list of potential awardees or some step earlier.

But that doesn't have to slow us down, but just I needed, wanted to remind you about that key step.

Thank you, Director Noble.

I see our budget lead, Allie Panucci, as well.

Allie, would you like to offer any clarifying points on the $14 million that's been discussed?

Sure.

Thank you, Chair.

Miss Gata.

I'm Alec Pucci with your central staff for the record.

I just wanted to clarify in terms of what the council authorized in Council Bill 119863 that was the Interfund loan to support that $10 million investment, plus a large portion of the $4 million investments that were included in the budget revision ordinance.

The Interfund loan bill provided two options for how that loan could be repaid.

It was intended with savings from SPD, as described in Resolution 31962. And if the anticipated savings that would have been that would stem from those assumed savings were not sufficient, then the council provided language to say that revenue generated from the jumpstart tax could be used to pay back that loan.

So I just wanted to clarify that the council did provide two approaches for paying back that loan, but that the jumpstart money in the mayor's proposed budget is not, was programmed for other uses and the savings requested in that resolution are not in the proposed budget.

Thank you very much, Ellie.

OK, I have one more note on this slide.

Executive Director Sochi, thank you for walking through this slide and to the team, appreciate your comments.

I do want to note, though, on the last bullet here, It is important to note, yes, that while the population grew in Seattle over the last decade, according to the data that we are looking at that I posted as well, the SPD per capita spending actually increased 20% in that same time frame.

In 2020 dollars, the number of dollars per capita went from $443 in 2012 to $530 this budget year.

That's a 20% increase in eight years for the per capita spending.

So I just want to juxtapose that with the growth in population to make sure that it is not, a takeaway is not that dollars per individual have gone down.

In fact, dollars per individual have increased even as the population has increased.

So I want to offer that point of clarification.

Folks, we have 42 minutes and we have about four slides left to go.

We have, thanks to Director Noble and the team, we are going to hold slides 12 and 13, which are good lead ways into this afternoon's presentation on public safety.

And we're going to endeavor to get through items two through nine, which are covered in slides.

7 through 11. I think we can do it.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you all again to please hold your questions.

We will get through any questions that remain on these last really important high-level pieces that are being pulled out by SPD for our discussion this morning.

And then I'm going to ask if there's any questions before we adjourn session one.

So without further ado and interruption, Angela, Executive Director Sochi, I'll turn it back over to you to take us away on item number two.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

All right.

I'm actually going to probably move through these fairly quickly unless there are questions.

Many of these items were driven by the executive, so I may lean on Julie to speak to some of the policy decisions that were involved here.

While SPD cooperated in the development of these requests, they didn't necessarily originate It was a collaborative effort, but I would say mostly driven by the mayor's office.

And so I'll walk through each of these, but feel free to raise any questions you have.

Item number two covers the transfer of the parking enforcement operation to Seattle Department of Transportation.

This is going to include a transfer of 120 FTE for a total of $14.1 million.

In addition to that, We've identified about $800,000 in overtime that we are transferring as well, with the understanding that that's roughly the amount that parking enforcement has expended on special events in the city.

I believe it's a two or three year average that was used to establish that budget transfer amount.

There's an understanding between SPD, SDOT, and the Special Events Office that we will work together to figure out how to coordinate the deployment of parking enforcement to events that are staffed by SPD.

This topic is included as part of the, we have planned a future analysis on how we can, as a city, better staff special events.

We're looking into alternative staffing models and different methods and means of meeting that demand.

That will be an ongoing effort as part of the work group that's being convened.

That's right, Angela.

This is Julie Klein to just add.

And to the Councilor Herbold's question that she had earlier around this, that involves identifying places that city code and potentially state law may need any changes in order to make parking enforcement officers fully able and capable of doing all special events traffic direction.

So I just wanted to confirm for Council Member Herbold that that is part of our work in this space.

Sorry, moving along to item number four, the transfer of the Office of Emergency Management to a new independent department.

This group has already been acting independently for the most part.

They have existed within the SPD budget.

We have supported them from a budget HR fiscal standpoint.

But as far as the day-to-day operation goes, this group is largely independent.

Their budget transfer equates to $2.5 million being reduced or transferred out of SPD's budget.

and an FTE change of 14.0 civilian personnel.

Item number five is the transfer of the 9-1-1 call center to a new independent department.

This transfer amount is 18.2 million.

There's a total FTE change of 140 personnel civilian personnel specifically that will be transferred out to create the new Seattle Emergency Communications Center.

We felt like this was an important move to set up or to kind of pave the way for the contemplation of alternative response models to emergency and public calls for service, potentially in the future branching out from the strictly emergency to more of kind of rolling in some of those just general non-emergency type calls as well, or alternative response type calls, or calls that weren't an alternative response.

Julie, I'm not sure if you want to weigh in on that as well.

No, Angela, you actually covered the policy rationale behind it.

First step in the right direction of being able to add in civilian responses to 911 calls for help once we determine a public consensus on what people would like that to look like.

Thank you.

All right.

Item number six.

So in With the transfer of these functions outside of SPD, there was a recognition that they were enjoying some back of house support by belonging to a larger department.

We worked with CBO to develop and identify funding to transfer to either the receiving departments or to embed in the new departments positions to support kind of the day-to-day administrative type work that Again, units like the SPD budget section, fiscal, HR, were supporting prior to the transfer.

This was based on percentages and proportion of our current overhead functions and how that fit into the transfer proportionally to what we were currently supporting.

All right, item number seven.

This item builds into the budget the transfer of nine victim advocates, our victim support team, program manager, and our victim support team volunteer programs coordinator from SPD to the Human Services Department.

Council included this item in the Q2 supplemental.

We were able to incorporate this into the budget in 2021 as an ongoing item.

Working with HSD to transfer those employees, I believe the effective date was September 1st.

We're continuing to work through some of the issues around data access and making sure that that's a seamless transition.

The budget associated with that transfer was $1.28 million and a total FTE change of 11 personnel.

Item number eight is the addition of a civilian Investigation Supervisor and the Office of Professional or Police Accountability, sorry, for a total change to the positive of $167,000 and one FTE.

Madam Chair.

Council Member Morales, thank you so much.

I have you first in line for questions just as soon as we get through this next slide, item number nine, if that's okay.

Thank you so much.

All right and lastly item number nine.

This item increases SPD's budget by $750,000 in support of SDOT's expansion photo enforcement expansion that is planned for 2021. I believe Greg Doss has received a memo that goes into great detail on the the expansion specifically We've entered this item as it affects our personnel as far as needing to have the resources to review, the additional resources to review the number of citations that SDOT has anticipated receiving.

That is a legal requirement.

And happy to field questions, although I will say I probably won't be able to answer them.

Happy to get you answers, though.

That does it for the budget change requests.

I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Excellent, thank you.

That was very efficient in walking through that.

I'm sure that there are some questions, but thank you for leaving a half an hour for us to walk through those questions.

The first two people that I have signed up for questions on these change items are Council Member Morales and then Vice Chair Herbold.

Thank you for waiting.

Yes, sure, thank you.

I have a question on slide 10. I just want to make sure on item number 8 that I understand the logic here.

It says that there's been an exponential increase in complaints against SPD.

And therefore we have to hire another investigator and spend more money to investigate SPD and that should go in SPD's budget.

Is that what I'm to understand about that item?

Yeah, the Office of Police Accountability is embedded in SPD currently.

They operate as, I describe it as a, and I believe there's legislation that describes it in the same manner as a budget island.

We don't necessarily transfer money.

I understand that.

The point I'm making is that there has been an exponential increase in the complaints against SPD.

In 2020, this summer, And while there have been an increase in complaints made, I'm sure we heard at least 12,000 complaints made.

Now we have to also pay SPD to do the investigation of that.

And I just want to point out how troubling that is.

I understand the accountability measures that we have in place.

I understand that there are internal and external accountability agencies that we have.

Um, and I want to point out the, um, the inequity of asking for more money to investigate when there are 12,000 cases against this agency.

That's the point I want to make.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Council Member Rallis.

Council Member Herbold, please go ahead.

Thank you very much as it relates to the transfer of the parking enforcement officers to.

I'd like to flag for both the executive and for council members in case they did not get a similar correspondence.

The PEOs have communicated through their union, the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers Guild.

Their interest, they totally are supportive of the concept of a transfer out of the police department.

but they are less interested in being transferred to the Department of Transportation and more interested in being transferred to the new Community Safety Department.

And they very helpfully identify some of the functions that they are at the ready to take on, functions that that are formally provided by sworn police officers.

One of those functions relates to the issue that I raised earlier that Julie addressed, and that is the staffing of special events and flagging.

I do want to say again, and I'm happy to share this memo, I have a memo that says that there is no need to make a change in state law to allow for non-uniformed, non-sworn employees to do this work.

They have to be people who are empowered to override traffic signals, and there is nothing in state law that says only sworn officers are empowered to override traffic signals.

So really appreciate that the PEOs are open to taking on some of this work.

They're also interested in helping out with the verification that is required for red light camera enforcement, school zone enforcement.

This is a processing function.

This processing function might actually need a change in state law.

We talked about it earlier this week when we passed the legislation allowing for They also, the PEOs also express a willingness to respond to non-injury collisions, minor thefts, car break-ins, take the report and forward the reports to SPD.

And also open to doing work associated with reports of abandoned vehicles.

or RVs with people living in them.

They identify the reasons why they are well-poised to take on some of these functions.

And it has a lot to do with their experience working in a technology-driven environment.

Their diversity of this unit, more than 60% are BIPOC, Many, many people are multilingual in many languages, and they're really focused on de-escalation and and communicating and customer service.

So I want to just really flag both the issue of my interest in their support of taking on more responsibility, but also their request that we consider the transfer not to SDOT, but to the new community safety department.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Vice Chair.

Any comments on that from the team?

Oh, okay.

Council Member Herbold, thank you for putting that into the record, and we have noted some of those areas of interest for you.

I'm sorry, Julie, did I see your hand?

I was just going to indicate that, you know, nothing's off the table in the long term.

There are bargaining issues involved with taking work from SPA to the PEOs, which can be addressed, and we're poised to do that.

It's the right time to start doing that.

But SDOT made sense for us on a policy level in the immediate short term.

You know, given the special event funding is gonna go through SDOT who writes the traffic plan and the city's traffic engineer is the one who gives them the sort of powers that they do currently have.

So that made sense in the short term for a quick 2021 budget effectuation.

I think we're all open to long-term reshuffling depending on how the process plays out.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

The next person I have is Council President Gonzalez and then Council Member Lewis.

Council President, please go ahead.

Thank you so much, Chair Mosqueda.

Just really quickly, I want to go back to, I forgot the slide number, slide number 10. I have a different line of questioning than what Council Member Morales was asking about item number eight, which is the police accountability proposal.

So just the mayor had previously stated her intent to actually move the Office of Police Accountability out of the Seattle Police Department's budget.

Um, and if I'm understanding this presentation accurately.

The 2021 proposed budget maintains within.

The Seattle police department, so I'm I am seeking.

Some, um.

clarification on that assumption as I'm seeing it here on this particular slide and some explanation of the decision-making process that appears to have led to the 2021 proposed budget maintaining the Office of Police Accountability within the Police Department.

Absolutely, I can take that one council president.

So that was on our shortlist of, you know, operationally and functionally sort of independent units within the Seattle Police Department and was on our initial shortlist of.

organizations that we may move out to map out from under the Seattle Police Department.

After consulting with Director Meyerberg, some of the other accountability partners, and concerns with making any major changes that would implicate the consent decree and cause us to have to get, you know, higher levels of approval from the court or dealing with DOJ notification and approval of that, coupled with our concerns of maintaining the fidelity of access to information that OPA currently enjoys as being part of the Seattle Police Department, while we are not ruling it out as something that could potentially happen in the future, it didn't seem like something that we could feasibly accomplish for the 2021 budget.

So not ruling it out, open to that, also being moved out under the Seattle Police Department, it did not appear to be something that we could actually accomplish for the 2021.

Okay, so so.

I appreciate that additional texture to that and and do want to signal.

My concern that moving forward statements related to, um.

Um, And, and, you know, I personally, as someone who was the prime sponsor of the 2017 police accountability ordinance was.

a little shocked that that statement was made without any consultation of members of the city council, including myself, who was one of the prime authors and sponsors of what our existing police accountability system is.

It may sound like a small shift, but it could actually have I think it is important for us to understand that there are large implications as you all eventually found out after digging in a little bit more into both the operational pragmatic and policy issues related to a suggestion like that.

I would appreciate if moving forward there would be a more proactive effort or just an effort to include those of us on And I just, again, am concerned to hear that not even Director Meyerberg was consulted before that announcement was made by the mayor.

And just want to flag that my expectation is that that will not occur in the future.

Well said.

Thank you very much, Council President.

And I believe many of us echo that point.

Council Member Lewis, you are up next.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My question was actually asked.

So I'm satisfied.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you very much, Council Member Lewis.

I don't want to go on before we double check with all council members.

Council Member Juarez just wanted to check in with you too.

Feel free to let me know if you've got any questions or comments.

Okay.

I'm not seeing anybody raise their hand or chime in.

Okay.

I have a few.

I'm looking at item number five, slide nine.

And obviously this is an area that the Council had included.

I know Councilmember Lewis didn't have a comment on this, but he and others have been very clear about the interest to As chair of public safety, you've been a long-time champion of this as well.

I guess my question here is, I believe, Executive Director Sochi, you mentioned in your comments that you are assuming that this transfer does happen, that all of the 9-1-1 civilian efforts get moved into a new independent department.

It reflects here 100% change.

Is that correct, that all of those dollars allocated to that?

That's correct.

And then I'm trying to take that into account in light of what I believe, Ms. Klein, you said that this is going to be a transfer that is effectuated, and I believe I'm quoting here, once the determination is made through public consensus on what that should look like.

Is that correct?

No, slight tweak to that.

We're looking for consensus on what other services should be dispatched out of the Seattle Emergency Communications Center, the city of Moon.

So just a slight nuance there.

But the change is going to go, is the change already in effect right now then, given the directive that we sent up through our budget as well?

We have begun the process, correct.

There are a number of certifications.

We have to apply for an ORI.

We have to change the code before we can apply for the ORI, but the wheels are in motion.

Wheels are in motion, so you're anticipating then January 1st, 2021, that you will be able to see this transfer realized.

Fingers crossed.

That's our goal.

So we're hopeful that we can do it.

And is the same true as well of item number four here on slide eight?

Yes.

All right, thank you very much.

And I just want to turn back to Council Member Juarez.

I understand we may have had you on mute.

Apologies for that, Council Member Juarez, if you did have something.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, I was usually get in trouble for not having the mute on.

And so for once, I was talking away and nobody heard me, but that's okay.

It's probably good.

We have some quick, just briefly, I know we're going to wrap up here from what we've heard today.

We had about seven or eight questions teed up, and most of them were answered.

And some of them I can talk to Dr. Fisher offline about the Seattle Indian Health Board and the contract that we had been waiting on to execute for missing murdered indigenous women and girls.

So I'll just put that out there now.

Based on what I'm hearing today and what we've learned from the PowerPoint, the comment that I wanted to make, Madam Chair, is just preliminary within the four corners of what we've learned and what I've learned today.

I want to kind of begin where we end, or I want to begin and end in the same place that it's become clear, which we've already known that more police doesn't necessarily, or doesn't equal more safety.

Um, we're going to struggle with the question of whether 1400 officers, um, are either not enough or too much.

It's clear today to me, uh, based on some of the questions that were posed by council member Gonzalez, yourself and council member Herbold.

that we have to recalibrate the number of officers, which means in my view, where I'm looking at is the decrease based on current service levels and how we do that in redefining and changing the duties of police officers.

I think it's important that we pointed out about the population, the increase of 23%, but as Council Member Gonzalez said, that can't be a complete staffing decision or a sworn resource allocation decision, that there are other tools that you use, but it is still relevant.

So, basically, what I think I have heard and what I've learned, and I'll have some more follow-up questions, and maybe I'll run some of them by Council Member Herbold as well, is that the history and facts here are relevant and that, again, in many communities, particularly the BIPOC communities, and this has been true forever, more police officers do equal more violence.

And that's a fact that we can't look away from.

And I guess going forward from listening to and thank you Angela for your great overview and the information you provided in your analysis.

But what I'm walking away with is the question that you keep coming back to as well what we will struggle with is how we maintain current services with less police officers.

Basically, it's going to require us and you to think and act differently in a sweeping fashion about how we look at community policing and that this is a new day.

And I understand that you have your data points and your analysis and your tools that you look at.

Thank you, Dr. Fisher, for your information as well, and Dr. Noble.

But what's being required of us and should be and what we should be held accountable to is that we're marching in the direction of dismantling, reallocating resources out of SPD, everything that we've been saying, and now we're talking about how to get the plan done.

So Council, or Madam President, or Madam Chair, I'm sorry, that's what I kind of wanted to end with, that that's what I've learned today, the questions that were answered for us today, and that's where I will leave it, thank you.

very well said.

Thank you very much, Council Member Juarez.

I am not seeing any additional hands at this point.

I'll have some final comments at the very end.

Executive Director Sochi, Dr. Fisher, Chief Diaz, we do have some time to go into these next slides if you'd like.

We could also hold them for this afternoon's presentation, but if you'd like to walk through and sing a nod, why don't you go ahead and let us know what your preference is, and happy to have you take the next 10 minutes or so.

I don't know if Angela and Julie agree with me, but I mean, I think this is a lot of the meat of this afternoon's discussion.

So we could briefly preview it or just save it.

I looked at Julie just from executive direction here.

Yeah, I'm happy to preview and then.

There'll be plenty of opportunity for media and in-depth discussion and questions this afternoon.

I look to Council Member Mosqueda as leading on what she'd like to do.

Well, in that case, if it is a lead into this afternoon and Director Noble, if it's okay with you as well, I may ask us to hold this as a introductory component to this afternoon's conversation.

We know it's going to be robust and lengthy.

I would like for us to make sure that we're getting all of our questions put together.

So I assume all of you will be back this afternoon.

Is that a correct assumption?

Okay.

I'm seeing a nod from Dr. Fisher.

Angela, if we don't see you this afternoon, Executive Director Xochitl, thank you for walking us through this.

And Julie, you will be here this afternoon then?

Okay.

Chief Diaz, will you be here this afternoon?

I don't believe so.

I know that you're in good hands with Dr. Fisher.

Okay.

Thank you, Chief Diaz, for your presence this morning and for answering those questions.

And Vice Chair Herbold does let me know, as the person who has this department under her committee, she does not have any closing comments for this morning, and I'm sure we'll have more to say this afternoon.

Director Xochitl, did you have more to say?

Yeah, I just wanted to point out we did transmit a number of answers to some of the questions that were alluded to today.

I encourage you to check in with Greg Doss if you haven't heard yet, not to call him out, but there are the attrition numbers that Councilmember Herbold was asking about, and some of that information is included in that packet, along with, I believe, some of the other questions that Councilmember Juarez alluded to.

If you're not seeing something that you need, please do not hesitate to throw those questions in the tracker.

We will do our best to get back to you as soon as we can.

This work is really important.

This is, you know, me personally saying this work is very important.

And I want to make sure that you have the information that you need to make decisions.

And I really look forward to collaborating on this, not just through the budget process, but going into next year as well.

So thank you for the time today.

Thank you very much for all of your time.

Council colleagues, we will have the opportunity to continue this conversation this afternoon at 2 p.m.

We will start with the public safety overview.

I think it is important for us to re-initiate our conversation this afternoon with these slides that lead into what the mayor's vision of re-envisioning public safety means so that we can begin our conversation fresh and anew.

A few closing thoughts, and I want to, I think, add to what many of our council colleagues have said, including Council Member Juarez's closing sentiments there.

Some of the conversation that we had this morning revolved around the status quo, and I heard that term used a few times, that we are assuming status quo, that we are assuming that the workload and the functions of the police will remain the same, that we are funding the status quo levels of engagement that the police are currently required to have with the community.

And I think that's exactly the question that's in front of us.

Do we continue the status quo or do we make the changes that I think many of the community members across our city and country are demanding?

I think the question around status quo is really a matter of whether or not we are going to continue with traditional policing, traditional incarceration and prosecution methods, or if there's a new and re-envisioned strategy that I think Council Member Herbold really articulated well, that requires us to act with urgency and have that reflected in the 2021 budget.

I think we are poised to ask some more questions this afternoon about whether or not we're taking those steps, whether or not those steps are big enough and how quickly those can be reflected in the budget.

And whether or not we are actually examining whether the right place for services to be delivered to our community should be done through the police department, or as the chief has mentioned earlier, are we continuing to ask more from police officers year after year after year?

That, and Chief Diaz, I'm not attempting to put words into your mouth, but I think that that's part of the questions that we're trying to answer is are we asking your officers to do the right thing and show up at places where they have guns?

I think specifically members of our society have asked for us not to just reiterate that Black Lives Matter, but to also recognize that they're saying and chanting Black Lives Matter because currently people in their homes, out grocery shopping, driving, going for walks, are being arrested at higher rates and we're also seeing death at higher rates.

So it's really imperative for us to center the conversations this afternoon, not just on policy questions and dollar figures, but the actual lives that are at risk and the lives that have been lost.

And that's, I think, where we will pick up the conversation this afternoon.

We want to make sure that this is not actually a status quo conversation and it's not a status quo budget.

And that also requires us to make the investments necessary.

to invest in community at the same time so that those calls are answered, answered by trusted community partners and that priorities are shifted for officers back into areas where they're not being called to respond to situations where a gun or a badge is not required.

Or, as we've already talked about this morning, being deployed to our streets to direct traffic when it's also costly for our budget and it takes away from the officers, I think, that are needed given the current staffing models that the Council President and Vice Chair Herbold have so clearly articulated questions about.

We will begin the conversation again this afternoon, though, but that's the frame that I would encourage folks to bring into the discussion this afternoon, given that we've heard the term status quo used a few times this morning.

How do we push ourselves outside of this current box of thinking around just funding the status quo and quickly acting in 2021 to create public safety for everybody and through a truly reimagined system?

Council Member Herbold, did I see your hand?

No, okay.

Chief Diaz, I will give you the parting word this morning if we are not going to see you this afternoon.

Again, thank you for your time and I'll let you have the last one.

No, I want to say thank you to all the council members.

Thank you for us having the opportunity.

to discuss what our budget looks like, as well as, you know, we are trying to push our department into a very much more transformative process of looking at what items that we are doing, what types of responses that we're responding to.

I think over the last decade, I have mentioned this to many of you, that You know, we've said for a long period of time that we can't arrest our way out of some of these social issues.

And and so, you know, I'm we are committed to to moving some of those items out that we should not be responding to.

And that we're also I also know what our workload is and the areas that we are responding to and some of those staffing things.

And that's where these are the discussions that will help us really move the department forward in the future.

Thank you for your time, and I really appreciate this discussion today.

Thank you very much, Chief Diaz.

And through another venue that's not directly related to the budget, I do look forward to talking more with you about the accountability for the trolling or dragging of members of the media that's been occurring over the last few months and making sure that folks who are either from members of the press, to make sure that that kind of behavior stops.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We will see you all at 2 PM.

The Select Budget Committee meeting will adjourn until 2 PM.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.