Seattle City Council Committee on Public Safety & Human Services 1/11/22

Thank you so much.

The January 11, 2022 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will now come to order.

It is 9.30 AM.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Chair Herbold?

Present.

We're present, one absent.

Great, thank you so much.

So this is our first meeting of the year, and I'd like to start off with a warm welcome to our new members, Council Member Nelson, Council Member Mosqueda, who I believe will be joining us in a bit, and Council Member Peterson, who was an alternate over the last two years and is now a regular member.

I wanna thank you all for your willingness to serve on this committee.

On today's agenda, we'll be hearing first a briefing from the Director of the Office of Police Accountability on his findings about the Proud Boys ruse used by the Seattle Police Department on June 8, 2020. We'll also be hearing an update from Public Health on COVID-19.

And then finally, we'll be receiving a briefing on the December 9th Emergency 9-11 system outage from of Community Safety and Communications Center.

And moving right into the approval of the agenda, we'll approve our agenda.

There are no objections.

Today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objections, today's agenda is adopted.

As I noted in council briefings yesterday, there are some schedule limitations on the availability of presenters.

And so we'll need to do our best to stick to the schedule as much as possible.

And I have a tendency to let things run long and I'm just putting folks on notice that I will be doing everything I can to not let that happen in this meeting so we can get to everything on today's agenda.

This time we'll be transitioning into public comments.

As always, I will moderate the public comment period as follows.

Each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on each speaker by name and in the order which they registered on the Council's website.

If you've not yet registered to speak but would like to do so, you can sign up before the end of the public hearing by going to the council's website.

This link is also listed on today's agenda.

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

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

And we ask that you please begin stating your name and the item which you are addressing.

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

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

Speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided.

The speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

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

I encourage you, if you'd like to continue to follow the meeting, you can do so via the Seattle Channel or the listening options that are listed on the agenda.

We've got 11 people signed up for public comment today and just want to recognize that Council Member Mosqueda has joined the meeting.

Good morning, Council Member Mosqueda.

So I'll just jump in.

I'm calling folks.

I'm going to call people names two at a time.

So the next speaker will know that they're coming up next.

Our first speaker this morning is Howard Gale, followed by Laura Lowe.

Howard.

Good morning.

Howard Gale, District 7. You've been faced with overwhelmingly clear and consistent facts and data, continuing racial disparity in the SBD use of force, continuing racial disparity in SBD stops.

the twenty twenty constitutional and unconstitutional egregiously violent actions against demonstrators virtually all abuse of officers exonerated and the fpb having killed more people in years after john p williams and before you watched as our police accountability system is determined recent killings like the fpb murder of terry caver days before george floyd to be quote lawful and proper followed by the all too predictable fpb murder of barricade last year and then just six days ago another person in mental health crisis wielding knives was gunned down by the sbd a fact that remained unnoticed in council briefing yesterday this was the ninth person suffering a mental health crisis killed by the sbd since john t williams all lawful and proper these abuses of justice don't just happen it requires the folks in power at the opa the oig and the cpc actively undermine accountability to high-level investigators at the orgy with their livelihoods and well-being it's found the alarm at the point that so all these feelings of accountability are possible carolyn pick up a south seattle emerald document all this in eleven investigative pieces ko w reported on the abuses engaged in by andrew myer berg whose entire career has been spent defending police including defend new york city against the rightful claims of the central park five and when working as a city attorney in seattle was sanctioned by the court for hiding evidence during his prosecution of a man who was abused by police.

Despite all this, your solution today is to hear from the folks who have actually worked to minimize and cover up police abuse instead of hearing from the people who have lived and uncovered the facts of STD disinformation campaign.

We need civilian control of police accountability.

Go to seattlestop.org to find out how.

seattlestop.org.

Thank you, Howard.

Our next speaker is Laura Lowe, and Laura will be followed by Peter Condit.

Laura?

Good morning, Council, and thanks for your service to Seattle.

My name is Laura.

I'm speaking on the agenda topic of the police route.

I'm speaking also on behalf of Share the City's Action Fund, as well as myself as a renter in Seattle.

Share the City's Action Fund is a grassroots housing advocacy organization who are in coalition with communities most impacted by our broken justice system.

We have some core questions about the police roost, but first we'd like to say the treatment of members of the community as enemies to be tricked into committing offenses put everyone at risk, including neighborhood residents who might have been literally caught in crossfire.

And the sad truth is that SOG and SPD lied to the people of Seattle and also the former mayor who maybe claims to have not been in control of the police during this time.

Where is your urgency to address this?

Are you able to immediately change SPOG leadership, a step towards establishing trust that demonstrates you're here to protect your constituents in the city?

Do you believe that the ruse of falsely reporting on right-wing extremist activities and the abandonment of the East Precinct were the only ruses and lies recently perpetrated by SPOG or SPD?

We don't.

We need full disclosure and specific swift and harsh consequences imposed with haste while we left with no other possible conclusion than the fact that our city and our public safety is being run by fog.

We are emailing you a list of questions we hope are addressed with extreme urgency.

One are ruses or lies by the police ever acceptable.

If they could result in injury or death how are their use in Seattle causing harm.

Was there a cover up.

Two why were texts deleted.

Three, one, when did the city attorney's office know?

When did the mayor know?

Four, was there pressure on the Seattle Times to hold the story till after the election?

Five, FOG leadership seems to take an adversarial relationship to the mayoral power and control of the city.

Will Mayor Harrow continue to look at this as a situation that needs compromise or admit that historically so-called good faith negotiations have failed?

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today and please address this with urgency.

Thank you, Laura.

Our next speaker is Peter Condit, and Peter will be followed by Shannon.

Peter?

Hello, this is Peter in District 6. When the SPD engaged in their Proud Boys disinformation campaign, it was one tactic among many that they were using to suppress peaceful demonstration.

People on the street, myself included, knew within a day that they had been lied to.

We were being lied to all the time.

Remember, around this time a prohibition against tear gas was ignored in favor of just switching from one chemical irritant to another.

The only thing that made the department stop aggression like this was when you, city council, began defunding SPD.

Not reimagining and not retraining.

Defunding.

For their part, what were the so-called accountability bodies doing?

I honestly don't know.

And it doesn't matter anyway because the individuals involved are not the problem.

Nor are they still employed in the department to face any consequences or accountability today.

They knew well enough to quit or retire as soon as they could.

Even the chief of police gaslighted Chair Herbold at the time by telling her not to believe the news.

She did this in her professional capacity as a cop.

This is what cops do.

They are trained to lie.

They cannot engage in good faith discussions about fixing their behavior because officers do not have the freedom to disobey a harmful order.

It is not a problem with the individual people.

It is a problem with the job description itself.

This is what council may try to call, quote, traditional public safety.

It is not.

Cops are violence workers.

Accountability through the budget is the only way forward.

Defund SPD.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Shannon Feng, and Shannon will be followed by Eric Ratchner.

Shannon?

Hi, my name is Shannon Chang.

I am a District 7 constituent and part of a grassroots people power group focused on police accountability.

I am speaking on the agenda item about the June 8, 2020 SPD ruse.

Along with many others, I am deeply troubled by the OPA investigation into SPD's use of a ruse in the aftermath of their abandonment of the East Precinct.

It is alarming that in an already strange situation, city employees ostensibly responsible for public safety decided to and carried out tactics to spread misinformation, escalate tensions, and create dangerous conditions on our streets.

Even more upsetting is how high in the chain of SPD command responsibility for this incident lies and the unacceptable lengthy delay in making these investigation results public.

City Council members, I ask you to respond with urgency and use your powers of oversight over our city government to get to the bottom of how our system failed so dramatically.

The specific questions previous commenter Borello outlined are excellent ones to address.

We cannot continue to rely on the never ending consent decree process or the struggling accountability system.

Otherwise, circumstances like these will happen over and over again.

Council members Herbold, Mosqueda, and Lewis in particular, I saw a live stream from summer 2020 where the three of you attended the protest.

Please stand with the public again to bear witness to what is broken in our system so we can move forward to change it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Shannon.

Our next speaker is Eric Rechner, and Eric will be followed by Desiree Delight.

Eric?

Yes, good morning.

My name is Rick Rackner, and I too am calling to speak on the topic of the ruse, and especially to vocalize my utter contempt for the credulity with which the explanations offered for it so far have been received.

This was not contrary to those explanations.

An instance of a policing technique being misapplied to some situation for which it was perhaps not quite an appropriate fit.

What actually occurred here was first the Seattle police vacated the East Precinct and completely suspended emergency public safety services in the neighborhood of the protest.

And then having done that, they broadcast that a hostile group of armed adversaries was on route to the protest location with the explicit intention of seeking a confrontation with protesters.

What possible foreseeable result could anybody have expected from that course of action?

There's no tactical objective to be achieved here.

They had already abandoned the neighborhood.

There is no remotely plausible inference to be drawn here, other than that this was a deliberate choice by our police to create and then inflame the conditions for violence, which they did in a manner where the blame for what happened next could be fixed on protesters and not incidentally on city's political leadership.

So I urge the committee to ask themselves, has there really been accountability for those involved Has there been an honest assessment of what the objective of this ruse was and what took place?

Because if this report from OPA is what passes for accountability for this police department, then it's beyond reform.

It should be disbanded and replaced in its entirety.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Desiree DeLay followed by Valerie Schwart.

Desiree?

Do we have Desiree with us?

Remember to hit star six, Desiree.

Desiree, you're showing as still muted.

We need you to hit star six, please, if you can hear us.

There you go.

Hello?

Oh, there we go.

Sorry.

I'm new.

That's all good.

Thank you.

Hello.

Thank you.

I'm Des, and I used to be a Seattle homeowner.

I also used to have a dream of once reopening Seattle's infamous erotic bakery.

But in 2020, I sold my home, I moved away, and I pulled the plug on those plans.

And I want to tell you all how that hoax that played out on the night of June 8, 2020, added to my decisions to pull that plug.

And I'd really love to go into detail about my personal experiences on the ground, Junaid, but I've been given only two minutes here, so I just need to cut to the chase, and I'll be publishing the rest online if anyone wants to hear it.

So I guess we'll skip to all the important context stuff, and I'll just talk about the incident in question, and that being the hoax that FPD officers played on the very same public that they had just spent multiple days and nights brutalizing and gaslighting.

A hoax that is now somehow divorced from everything prior to that night and conveniently forgotten when discussing everything that's come after.

I read the OPA report and I paid attention to how Seattle city leadership has handled all of this.

So I can see the bigger picture at play here and it further cements my notion that I made the right decision to sell my home in October of 2020, change my address, vote in my hometown and pull the plug on trying to reestablish my beloved Seattle relic.

Because there's no way in this new hell I can see myself supporting a city that won't even take accountability for the very real, very reckless and immature actions of their police officers.

Actions that led to real fear, real rumors, real guns, real armed security, and real deaths of real young people.

We all can see that picture, right?

So that's part of what I say when I'm saying CHOP was a setup to derail the BLM movement and delegitimize our call to defame police as a whole.

And it worked.

And you continue to let it work.

Stop it.

do better.

And then I might bring back your dick cake.

That's all I want to say.

And also, ICE must be destroyed.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Valerie Schlorett, and Valerie will be followed by Sanders Leckler.

Valerie?

Good morning.

I'm Valerie Schlorett.

The story about SPD's Proud Boys ruse of June 2020 is not surprising, nor is it surprising that the OPA took so long to investigate it that the clock ran out on discipline.

In the meantime, we had local elections where policing was an enormous issue, but most of the public did not have the full story of police conduct during the protests.

In August, an investigator in the Office of Inspector General made a detailed whistleblower complaint about the OIG's rubber stamping of OPA investigations.

Issues related to the complaint have been investigated by Carolyn Bick in the South Seattle Emerald over the past five months.

Biggs' article of December 7 was, Investigating OIG Complaint in City Council's Court, but SCC Isn't Acting.

It reports that council members Herbold and Lewis declined to act when the OIG whistleblower gave them detailed information about egregious rubber stamping of OPA investigations, and further, that council member Herbold consulted with the OPA about what information to reveal to a journalist.

In council briefing yesterday, council member Herbold said she will ask OIG to look again at the OPA investigation of the Cub Boys ruse.

Since OIG is itself in question, having the OIG weigh in on its certification of this OPA investigation is not a solution.

We're in an endless cycle of obfuscation and gaslighting.

It's past time for council to do the right thing, instigate a fully independent and impartial investigation of the OIG and the OPA.

Thank you, Valerie.

Our next speaker is Sanders Lapierre followed by David Haynes.

Good morning and happy new year.

My name is Sanders and I live in District 7. I'm speaking on agenda item one.

A new police chief has not been confirmed yet and a new police squad contract has not been negotiated yet.

The council has the responsibility to approve these items the next year or so.

Please demand more accountability items as recommended by the OPA, the OIG, and the CCC.

Doing so is repeating the cycle we've seen from the 2017 contract.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is David Haynes.

David, be followed by Char Smith.

Good morning.

Thank you.

I want to address the rules and public health.

We have a public health crisis with a disease that spreads rapidly when sick vaccinated workers go back to work with no negative test.

This disease began to spread throughout nation because of Seattle and five other open border sanctuary, liberal cities where no confident strategy to stop the spread has ever been noted.

It's all about chasing variants for big pharma profits at the expense of real public health, where government officials have proven incompetent.

Speaking of which, we also have a public safety crisis where society is imploding because City Council thinks exempting evil drug pushers from jail who are committing crimes against humanity and getting listed nonviolent misdemeanor, destroying lives daily, imploding society, escalating violence is best practices.

Yet City Council has gone out of their way to appease devil's advocates of George Floyd protesters and BLM.

by browbeating cops spending more time on making a mountain out of a molehill about a legalized ruse to remind CHOP that someone other than the cops, such as a Kyle Rittenhouse type of person, was going to show up to stop the violence in Capitol Hill.

Yet there are bigger problems, such as an ill-trained, unqualified police chief and a civilian dispatch, where some are racist, woke, untrustworthy, playing politics during an emergency crisis.

Recently, I called the cops a few times about all these evil criminals in my Pioneer Square neighborhood.

And one time, in the middle of the night, it sounded like a kidnapping at Pioneer Square.

And the civilian dispatch said, we've already been down there an hour ago, and you've already called twice today, and I noticed you called last night too.

They're browbeating me because I call it about all these horrible things that are going on.

And during an emergency crisis, they go into budget politics.

Perhaps we need to boycott Seattle if the city council is going to continue to implode our society.

Thank you, David.

Our next speaker is Char Smith.

Char will be followed by Bill Wilson.

Hello.

My name is Char Smith.

I live in the South End.

I am a teacher and I have the distinct privilege to be able to speak with you this morning because unfortunately teachers can't usually do that.

Speaking to the ruse that was it's a strange word to use for it but this information campaign that SPD played out in June 2020 I got to tell you I don't have some prepared statement.

I'm not here on behalf of some organization.

I was just somebody in the streets because I want the cops to stop shooting my neighbors and stop shooting kids related, families related to my students.

And when the precinct was abandoned, it was kind of assumed that the expectation was a setup, but When reports came in that there were groups of Proud Boys coming into the area, I think it's pretty understandable that a lot of people's reaction was to then bring guns into the Capitol Hill neighborhood, because the police were very clear and have always been clear that they will do nothing to prevent right-wing agitators from harming protesters.

For the people who had just been getting gassed and getting beaten, That was a rough moment.

And it is my hope, although definitely not my belief, that the city council will act in some meaningful way to take money away from SPD because that is the only thing that prevents this sort of behavior in the future.

I really hope you all have some semblance of accountability plan that is meaningful, because in my entire lifetime, I've never seen anything close to that.

Best of luck.

Thank you.

Our next speaker, Bill Wilson, is showing as not present.

So we'll move down to Eric Salinger.

Eric?

Hi.

I hope you guys can hear me.

My name is Eric Salinger.

I live in District 7. I've called a number of times about the SPD response.

I think that there are a few things here which are kind of missing from this discussion.

And I just want to be clear that the protest ruse is, I know that OPA has to investigate it as a small part of a larger thing, but I want to be clear about something here, which is I wasn't involved in these protests except I would watch people march by my home and I would see a massively disproportionately militarized police response to peaceful protests.

I remember that the mayor got on TV, and I think some of the people who were in this meeting were also in that press conference and told us that the Proud Boys were coming.

I remember watching protests around this country and seeing how people who committed violence against Black Lives Matter protesters just kind of seemed to get away scot-free from whatever happened, both in Seattle and in other places.

I remember there was an incident where someone I believe related to a police officer drove their car into a group of protesters.

and they were just peacefully arrested and taken into custody.

There's a lot of context which OPA says they can't really look at when they're doing these investigations because they need to be impartial.

But I think that a lot of that context is really critically important.

When you're spreading rumors that there are some armed group of insurgents in downtown with guns, as someone who lives downtown and who just wants to walk his dog, I'm worried because those people might mess with me.

I'm not involved in the protest, but now they're a bunch of armed people with guns.

And I just watched downtown burn while the police department took a hands-off approach.

I just watched the police department abandon a precinct.

And earlier that year, I watched a mass shooting happen with people arrested to Las Vegas.

So the ramifications of this stuff go way beyond just protesting and into the fact that, like, people's lives get directly impacted.

So thank you for your time.

I hope you guys do something.

Thank you so much, Eric.

With that, that concludes our public comment for this morning.

Thank you all for taking time out of your days to come and join us and share your thoughts about today's agenda.

Just want to get things started here.

As I mentioned, we're going to try to Keep the timing on these items as tight as possible.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item one.

Agenda item number one, OPA investigation into June 8th, 2020 ruse.

Thank you so much.

Can we just start with a quick round of introductions, just your name and your affiliation for everybody who's here presenting on this item this morning.

Thank you.

I will, if somebody could just get started, maybe Senior Deputy Harrell, you want to get started with the introductions, if you're with us?

Hi, yes.

Thank you.

Thank you for allowing me to join today.

I am looking forward to hearing the updates and to working with council to find real solutions to some of these challenges we're facing right now.

Thank you so much.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Brandi Grant.

I'm the executive director of the Community Police Commission.

I also want to thank you all for inviting me today.

I look forward to hearing the briefing and posing some simple questions and hopefully being able to work in collaboration with you all to also come up with solutions to this situation.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

Andrew Meyerberg from OPA.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you, everybody, for being here.

I want to recognize that Council President Morris has joined us this morning.

Thank you, Council President Morris, for being with us here today.

So just some very, very introductory remarks.

This time's limited.

The case that we're going to discuss today, I believe, raises two sets of issues.

First, how RUSs, which are legal under state law, are implemented.

I, for one, believe that RUSAs need additional supervisory oversight.

It must be documented.

We only know about this case in an earlier 2029 case because of uh...

constituent immediate investigations on oversight uh...

is in important issue i've contacted both the office of the inspector general analogy is working to ensure that policy changes address concerns raised by these cases and is also raising important questions of whether despite state law making uses legal whether or not a renewed look at their efficacy is needed the second issue is one of cost uh...

addressed in the report which includes that the use of the ruse resulted in fear and alarm among community members who contacted me that evening about the use of the ruse resulting in my reaching out to then Chief Best.

On the process for discipline for sustained findings, there is a meeting at OPA with SPD management and the city attorney to discuss this case.

If there is the need for further investigation and what the appropriate range of discipline should be, they discuss that.

That meeting did take place yesterday, and the next step will be to present the case to the chief.

They are seeking to do that this week.

Last week, SPD noted to my office, the chief will not have much to say before he can go through this process to avoid any future appeal issues about presupposing his findings before the completion of the process.

So just if you're wondering about the absence of the chief here this morning, that is because of his efforts, appropriate efforts to make sure that he does not speak to issues that then again could be used to appeal possible discipline and findings coming out of this case.

want to thank Director Meyerberg for being here to present and as we heard introductions we're also joined by both Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell and the CPC Executive Director Brandi Grant.

If there are any No further opening remarks.

I think we'll just get right into the presentation from Director Meyerberg.

I'd like to leave as much time as possible for questions.

And for questions that we're not able to do, we can, of course, work to compile them and send them on afterwards.

So if there are no objections, I'm just going to hand it over to Director Meyerberg.

Great, thank you very much.

I will keep what I wanted to do was to give an overview of how this case came to us and how we investigated it.

And then again, like Councilmember Herbold said, is to leave as much time as we possibly can for questions.

I know there are a lot of them here from the group.

We first learned of this case in November of 2020, and that's when it was flagged for us by Omari Salisbury.

Initially, it was a request to our office from Omari about whether or not there was any video showing the Proud Boys in the vicinity of City Hall, Volunteer Park, and going to the CHOP area.

Immediately after receiving that inquiry, we did a search basically for all radio traffic and body worn video that were recorded that may have showed anything regarding the Proud Boys and nothing was located.

We communicated back and forth with Mr. Salisbury, asking him if he had any additional information.

He did not.

At that point, because of the lack of information, we initiated a full investigation.

So this case was challenging in a number of respects.

First of all, there, and as Council Member Hergold had flagged, there was a lack of documentation.

So there was no documentation that a ruse or any sort of misinformation or disinformation effort had been used, first of all.

Second of all, there was no after action report or any sort of accounting of who was involved, who supervised it, anything.

In fact, there was simply an absence of evidence aside from a audio recording that was provided to OPA.

So ultimately what we ended up doing is we spoke to as many people as we could within the department and we were informed by someone at the intelligence unit that there may have been this effort that was run through SPOC, which is the Seattle Police Operations Center.

After receiving that information, we reached out to SPOC.

What SPOC informed us was that yes, this may have occurred and that it was supervised and commanded by named employee one.

Once we received that information, we started to narrow down the investigation and we interviewed him.

As part of that interview, he gave a general overview of what the effort was and why it was done.

He also identified an officer who was named employee two in our case summary who was involved in coordinating the ruse and bringing officers on to participate in it.

We then interviewed that officer.

He identified other officers that may have been involved.

And we began a process of interviewing officers, playing them the audio recording, having them identify their voices, and if they could, to identify other officers as well.

We ended up conducting, I believe, over 10 interviews with a number of officers.

Some we were able to identify were not on the audio recording, but ultimately we were able to identify nearly all of the officers that were on the audio recording.

Again, we were very hamstrung with this investigation because we don't have a list of the officers.

And if the ones that we're playing audio for can't identify the other officers, or in some respects won't identify officers, unfortunately, we're stuck with that information.

We have no way to match up voices against the 700 other patrol officers that are within the Seattle Police Department.

So we were, in some respects, stuck with the information that we received during the course of the investigation.

Once we were able to identify all the officers, at least that we could, that were involved in the effort, we interviewed each of them and asked them, you know, what were you told?

What were you instructed?

What guidance were you given?

How was it supervised?

And what became very clear was that the answer was that there was virtually no supervision or guidance that was provided to any of the officers.

This ruse or this effort was generically created by named employee one, who did not provide significant supervision to named employee two, who in turn did not provide significant supervision to all the other officers.

There were other officers that did use misinformation as well during the course of subsequent days.

However, that information was generally talking about movies they had watched or what food they had eaten.

There was no other ruse that was the same as the the Proud Boy language that was used on June 8th.

So that's why we focused our investigations on named employee one, named employee two, and the officers that were involved in that aspect of the ruse.

In evaluating this case, certainly we felt that, and I don't want to mince words, that this was a really poor decision from all aspects of SB officers involved in this case.

I mean, I don't know that there's any way around that.

It was a bad idea not just to use disinformation and that I don't know if it was necessary, but also to use the Proud Boys as part of that misinformation.

I think what was clear was that the East Precinct had just been walked away from, the Chazz Chop was being formulated.

Tensions were high within Chazz Chop.

Prior to the ruse being learned about, folks had already brought firearms into Chazz Chop, And of course, there was a possibility that things could become escalated.

So in our minds, using that ruse served, and again, as we said in the DCM, to pour fuel on the fire, to take a already heightened situation and make it even more so.

So I wanted to discuss really quickly the policy recommendations.

One thing that Council Member Herbold had flagged was the lack or the absence of a policy recommendation that was part of our case summary.

One thing I think is important to note is that we use the ruse policy because it was the best fit for this case.

But really, this isn't a true ruse.

Really, this is a misinformation, disinformation campaign.

I think the closest policy is the ruse, and that's why we evaluated it under the ruse policy.

I do think that there is significant merit in reevaluating the policy from top to bottom.

Right now, what the policy does is it defines the times that a ruse can be used, and that's consistent with state law.

What it doesn't do is it doesn't provide guidance as to what types of ruses can be used.

What can you say?

What can you not say?

How should you document it?

And that was one thing that we had pushed for from our 2019 case, which I think you all remember, which was the Porter-Feller case that tragically resulted in his suicide.

One of the things that we had recommended as a result of that case was that all officers receive training on exactly this, using the Porter-Feller case as an example.

Here's when you should be using a ruse and here's when you should not be.

SPD did require training, but it was done through roll calls and not through a training module or training class, which is what we suggested to ensure uniformity of the training.

I've spoken to SPD, and I know Council Member Herbold has as well.

I believe that they are in progress of revamping the policy.

I don't know whether they'll go so far as to ban RUZs, but I do think that they're going to include new parameters around RUZs when they can be used, and certainly a documentation requirement.

With regard to the documentation in this case, it wasn't documented anywhere.

I think that was

Sounds like we're having a little bit of connectivity problems.

And I don't know if I glossed over anything, but I'm happy to turn this over to folks for questioning or to cede time to Ms. Grant or to Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell.

Director Marver, can you just restate the last point that you made?

I don't know if others were having a problem, but I was having some connectivity.

Starting with regarding documentation.

Yeah, so I was surprised.

One of the things that was surprising for us in this case was the absence of documentation given that the ruse was officially sanctioned or the effort was officially sanctioned by members of the chain of command.

It was done as part of, you know, demonstration management.

Generally, we would expect those types of things to have been documented in an after action report or in some official log to say this is what was done and these are the people that participated in it.

And the fact that that was not done resulted in a finding, a sustained finding, because of the expectation that that would be completed.

I do think that there's significant merit in requiring any time a ruse is going to be used to have it documented.

I don't think it would be overly complicated to do so.

I also don't think that, to our point, OPA passed the issue of management action for that to occur.

SPD can and should be reinventing and changing its policies all the time.

And I think this is something where, on their own motion, they should be changing and modifying, and I believe that they are.

Thank you so much.

Before we open it up for questions, I will want to give Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell and CPC Director Grant an opportunity to speak, and then we'll open up for questions.

But even before we get to that, Dr. Meyerberg, because there have been questions raised about the thoroughness of the investigation, can you just kind of run through quickly what the investigation consisted of?

Sure.

So basically what we did here was we looked at, we first of all we analyzed the audio recording that was provided to us.

We didn't have access at that point to other audio recordings.

I think what we later learned was that there was a longer audio recording that had, I mean we listened to it I think up to 1015 or 1030 PM, but there was an audio recording that went up to midnight where two other call signs were used by unknown officers.

So that was something that we were not aware of.

It may very well be the case that it was the same officers that use those call signs.

What I would say is that we asked every single officer we brought in.

We asked whose voices do you hear and who was involved in the effort and what we were in.

We received what we believe that was a full accounting of those folks.

However, given the existence of additional video.

we're open to doing a further inquiry to bring the officers back in and to ask them about that is to say, do you recognize any other voices?

The reality is, though, just like with our initial investigation, we are in many ways stuck with what we get from the officers.

If they say, no, we don't recognize someone, or they don't disclose any more names, which I don't expect will occur with the ones we previously interviewed, there's no other documentation, there's no other records, there's no other, materials that we can use to cross reference and to figure that out.

So I definitely think that that was perhaps the biggest gap in the investigation, but one that we're happy to keep looking at into a remedy.

With regard to the other aspects of the investigation, I would say that it was complete and thorough and obviously as we've discussed was certified by the OIG as such.

You know I think the other criticism that I've seen of the investigation and I think it has merit is that it's solely kind of focused on the this ruse instead of looking at kind of the broader picture of misinformation or disinformation provided by SPD or allegedly provided by SPD and From our perspective, that's for a reason.

Our investigations are focused on individual incidents.

We don't look at a series of incidents and to have that make it more likely or less likely than the incident that we're looking at occurred or didn't occur.

From our perspective, that is much better suited to the Office of Inspector General, or for that matter, the CPC, which are more systemic bodies that can do those assessments.

I believe that right now the OIG is conducting its stage two Sentinel vet review.

assessment and which deals with Chaz Chopp.

And what I would also assume is that this finding and this investigation, as well as the disinformation used in and around Chaz Chopp, will be central to that Sentinel vet review.

And then I think if there are additional questions after that Sentinel vet review, certainly I think the council will be situated well to address those and to evaluate them.

Thank you, Judge Marburg.

Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell, Would you share some of your thoughts with us and your observations?

Yes, absolutely.

And I apologize that they are not going to be quite as quite as organized.

But I just want to make a couple points, one of which is, you know, I, like many others, was made aware of this case through an article in the Seattle Times.

And this was daylighted for investigation by Converge Media and other sources on the ground.

And that cannot be how we operate.

I believe that if we truly want accountability within our system, we can't be allowed to have these facts obscured.

And I can only share that, um, for any amount of legitimacy of the system, we have to be focused on accountability and transparency.

And it does bother me a tremendous amount that there was, um, no documentation.

Um, uh, for Mr Meyerberg's presentation, there was no documentation around what was happening.

And truly, if this were, um, if this were a legitimate operation, there would have been documentation around it it wouldn't have taken outside sources to daylight it.

It would have been part of our after actions as a city around what happened around Chop Chaz.

So I'm somewhat relieved with the, what happens in the dark will come to light.

I look forward to working with the council to be able to figure out how this doesn't happen again in the future.

Um, but also have to admit that, um, this really doubles down on our desire to need to dig deeper, um, to dig deeper to the things that we didn't even, um, that we did not know were occurring and to ensure that, um, we dig deep enough to, to fix, um, what is, uh, what is rotten here.

So, um, I want to thank you for allowing me to have a few moments today.

I wanna thank you for, I wanna thank you for, I know that the council will be partners in working with us on this.

And I know that this is not gonna be easy work, but I know we have to do it on behalf of the city.

So thank you very much.

Thanks so much for being here with us and I too look forward to problem solving around this and other areas.

I see Council Member Lewis that you are first in the queue for questions.

I do want to give Director Grant an opportunity.

I'm to say a few words as well, though, because I know that ruses have long been a concern of the Community Police Commission.

I believe there was a meeting that a public meeting, a CPC public meeting at the end of last year, where this was a topic of discussion, maybe not specifically this this case, but the policy around around ruses and just really want to give Director Grant an opportunity to uplift some of their concerns and questions around this.

And I know they have some pending requests of the police department as well.

So, Director Grant.

All right, thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Also, too, just want to concur again, thank you for inviting us here.

I also want to thank the public commenters who spoke today.

I only really have a few additional questions because the points that they brought up were so pertinent to many of the things that the CPC has already shared in previous documentation that we had sent around.

I think, you know, Director Myerberg, a couple things for me and the CPC.

The point of clarification around the absence of evidence early on.

I think my biggest question would be, you know, per OPA procedures, when there is a lack of evidence or there's absence of it early on, what type of steps are you all taking to make sure that findings are validated, you have enough information and how you're going about those processes, or is there thoughts and plans of what you all will do when cases like this arise in the future?

And then I think, too, it would also be really helpful to have a better understanding of the misinformation versus disinformation and ruses.

To me, this was, in fact, just that, a ruse.

So the clarity around that particular sentence, I would love to be able to hear a bit more about.

But one of the biggest questions that the CPC had was, you know, from the complaint to the chief's desk to beyond that, why was the complaint so far beyond the 180 days.

Why did it take so long for this to be reviewed?

A case of this magnitude, is there a priority system that you all are going to put in place when cases of this nature come across your desk?

I feel like it was really disheartening to have, even though I'm thankful For Mr. Salisbury, the Deputy Mayor is completely correct.

We should not have had to have that daylighted by a journalist who had also incurred a lot of the trauma from that particular day amongst community members.

I would really love to hear what why it took so long, and then if there are going to be cases where it is going to take that long, we should really be considering the negative impact of what those particular findings are going to be when they are delayed.

And then what commitment do you have to community to make sure that we're informed in some aspect along the way?

If there are delays, problematic findings, issues that arise, I felt like it is time for us to go back and look at what the procedures are that are put in place.

It was extremely traumatic, the events that took place, and to have almost now going into, honestly, year two, for us to still be talking about this with no actual conclusion or solution is very troublesome.

Um, and I do have many other questions to follow up on, but I am completely comfortable with making sure that council also gets to ask their questions.

Uh, the commission will be following up with, um, some more informational requests that we have, um, after this meeting concludes.

So, um, again, I just want to thank you, but I want to put those things on your mind, Dr. Director Meyerberg and council.

Um, I hope you all also work in tandem with us to make sure, um, that they are taking the situation, um, seriously so we can make sure that it never happens again.

Thank you.

Director Myhre, before I open it up to Councilmembers, did you want to respond to that?

Yeah, I can respond to them.

I think there was three questions.

I'll respond.

I think I heard and can respond to them.

So for cases that have a lack of documentation, I mean, I would say it's rare that we would have this type of a case where there was a high level decision made to use a ruse or whatever you want to refer to it, where there would be no documentation.

So this is pretty rare.

There were other cases that stem from the protests where, for example, we knew that someone was subjected to police force, but we just couldn't find them because we didn't have a description.

We were never able to speak to them.

And we would have to look through body worn video.

And we're just looking for a needle in a haystack.

And we just had a lot of difficulty locating them.

But this type of a case where there's just simply no documentation of, again, a high High-level effort is abnormal.

Sorry, I think I was out for a little bit, but I'm saying certainly we can come up with ways or protocols to address this type of a case moving forward.

But again, this is very, very rare.

I've never seen anything quite like it before, and I don't know whether we'll see it again, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have plans in place to address that.

With regard to your second question, I guess the distinction I was making about a ruse versus like a misinformation or disinformation effort is that generally when you think of a ruse, a ruse occurs in the context of a criminal investigation For example, during an interrogation, someone says, well, you know, we have your fingerprints on this cup.

What do you say to that?

Like, that is, in my mind, a true ruse, where this was more of a formal effort that was done, organized by the chain of command.

So maybe it's an issue of scope, where I'm referring to it as an effort, misinformation effort versus a ruse.

But again, both are the same in which you're providing false information to achieve a law enforcement goal.

So I think you could address both through the same policy, but I would be careful to say within the policy, if you're going to make that change, is to refer to both, is to not just talk about ruses as a patrol officer would think about them, but also think about sanctioned disinformation efforts and potentially consider banning that altogether, even if you keep allowing ruses to occur.

With regard to the last question, I think it raises two really important questions.

First is the timing of the investigation.

What I would say is that the investigation started in December when we realized that we had no information that we needed to open up an investigation.

So we started it in December of 2020. When we proceeded through the investigation, for much of the investigation, we did not have named employees, meaning that we didn't know who was involved.

So we spent a lot of time trying to assess who was involved, who made the statements, what statements were made.

And then during the course of the investigation, we started to identify folks and to put them in as named employees.

The investigator on that case, and again, this is just purely resource issues that are important to note, but the investigator in that case, because the first name employee was a captain and then an assistant chief pursuant to the SPMA contract, our investigator had to be a supervisor.

In OPA, we have two supervisors.

That's the same supervisor that was working on the East Precinct case, that was helping work on the January 6th case, that was supervising nearly 100 other cases and had a full caseload.

So simply because of bandwidth, that supervisor is doing the best that that person can, but no one else is allowed to work on that case, again, based on contracts.

Once we finished the investigation, meaning that we identified as many people as we identified, wrote it up, we provided it to the OIG, and then they returned it to us with a certification.

There was another delay on the back end with the writing of the findings.

Part of that is because I was out on paternity leave for 30 days and was unable to write the case up during that time.

The other part of it is that during the 60 business days or so that I was in the office, I had to personally write up between 80 and 85 other cases.

And again, pursuant to ordinance, I have to write up individually each one of those cases.

And that involves looking at hundreds of hours of video, hundreds of documents.

And again, that's not an excuse.

I'm not thrilled about the delay in the case.

I wish I'd gotten it out sooner, but it's just a simple reality of the workload that we have at OPA and that I personally have as the director, just based on my job description.

So, But to your second point, which I think is important, Director Grant, is can we create some sort of a mechanism to, I mean, we do have a priority mechanism insofar as generally we focus on sustained cases that have pending 180-day deadlines.

The named employees, the two named employees to whom received sustained findings retired during the course of the investigation, so the 180-day no longer was applicable for them.

That being said, it still was a matter of public concern and that is obviously my frustration about not getting it done sooner.

But certainly I'd be happy to talk to the commission about how we prioritize cases and if you have ideas and how we can make notifications to the public.

about cases that may be coming up, what those cases would involve, I'd like to hear it.

We do use our dashboard, which is our general kind of outline of the cases that are pending, particularly for the protests, but maybe there is a better way to do it to avoid, like you said, the re-traumatization.

And again, I regret that.

In some respects, it's unavoidable, but I do regret that that occurred.

Sorry.

Thank you, Director Meyerberg.

Council Member Lewis, thank you so much for your patience.

recognize you've had your hand up in the queue for a while.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair.

It's good to be back here on the committee in 2022 and certainly welcome Council Member Nelson and welcome Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell.

Really appreciate your partnership as we dive into this.

Just to jump in a little to start with some table setting, you know, whenever we go back to the events of, you know, the summer of 2020, which I mean, for everybody was a really challenging time and just want to make space for that and acknowledge that.

Like one of the documents that I keep going back to, and I think it's just grounding for our conversation today as we seek accountability for police actions that occurred during that time.

is judge jones temporary restraining order and you know it just as table setting i go back to that whenever work we're doing a hearing like this for the section where you know judge jones determines that the use of force in the tactics s p d was using would chill a person of ordinary firmness from protesting uh...

judge jones agreed with the plaintiffs and said they had a strong likelihood of success That SPD specifically targeted protesters because they were protesting the police, that the police used tactics and a level of force.

that was motivated by being more extreme and harsher because of the topic of the speech that the protesters were using.

I go back to those, because I think when we have these conversations, we need to really center what we're talking about and looking at this whole episode in our history, that we had a department that was engaged in really concerning activity.

And the questions that I have today about this investigation as one episode in a whole bunch of episodes that led an article three judge, you know, appointed by a president, confirmed by the U.S.

Senate to say that our police department was being specifically brutal to protesters because they were protesting the police.

I just want us to keep that in mind on the importance of getting to the bottom of some of these episodes.

And I want to start maybe, Director Meyerberg, if you could just give a little bit more background on the SPOC, which was the body where this particular tactic was run through, just so the audience and everyone on the committee knows the role of that body.

Because I have a couple of questions related to that, but I just want to make sure we're all working from the same baseline.

Yeah, SPOC is the Special Operations Center.

It's located in the West Precinct, and generally during demonstrations, that's kind of the command center for SPD's operations.

Yes, so my question is, from reading about this in the Seattle Times, from reviewing the OPA report, there's been a lot of coverage that this operation that was run through SPOC was apparently not known to anyone but captain brennan the captain brennan conceived of this operation captain brennan decided he was going to run this operation to begin in his mind to deescalate tensions by uh...

deceiving demonstrators in the thinking there was a protest and i guess my comment is a or my question uh...

for Director Meyerberg would be, based on your kind of knowledge and understanding of the department, is it common that the chief, the mayor, assistant chiefs wouldn't know that this operation was occurring?

Well, I would say nothing about this case is common.

I think that's just kind of the outset.

I think that's the reality.

It's really difficult to answer because I've never seen that happen.

I've never seen this happen before.

You know, we spoke to the chief.

We spoke to the assistant chief of patrol or the former chief of police and all said that they did not know about the specifics of the operation that was ongoing.

Named Employee One was at that time running Spock.

Is it possible that information was not shared and was kept within Spock, within his purview?

It's possible, but I have no indication that the accounts that were given to our investigator were inaccurate, meaning about what was known by those folks, but I can't answer that question because I don't know the answer to it.

Yeah, I guess just as a general concern, if it was one incident where people didn't know what was going on with their commanders and with people on the ground, like I could get that.

But there's now a number of data points from our sort of ad hoc examination of some of these specific incidents where people didn't know what was going on and things bubbled up into being horrifying violations of the rights of people in the city.

The abandonment of the East Precinct, apparently no one knew about that except Assistant Chief Mahaffey and no one above Assistant Chief Mahaffey was aware of it.

You know, and there's been some different accounts based on some of the reporting that we've seen from KUOW and some other speculation in the community.

But these dots start to connect a pattern where during this time period, we're just hearing an awful lot of people in the high command didn't know about things.

And people in the middle management command level were making big decisions that had big impacts.

Nobody knew.

And I guess my concern is at what point should people have known and are there consequences for people not making themselves aware of these things that were happening if they're in a position of that level of authority and command over the police service in the city?

I mean, certainly it's a concern.

We articulated that same concern in our DCM about the East Precinct case.

I mean, the fact that there was this confusion or this disagreement between folks about who knew what and when, and then a failure to communicate out to community and media, public officials and others immediately afterwards when they knew what had occurred, I think, was a problem.

I think we had flagged this issue in other cases and in our August 2020 report that went out to the council, that there appeared to be this disconnect between command staff, like high-level command staff, and then these middle supervisors, like lieutenants and captains, about tactics and what would be done and how it would be done.

It certainly was chaotic, but yes, I would expect, like you do as well, that there would be more coordination, communication, and understanding by high-level command staff of what was going on under them.

And it's a problem that that didn't occur.

But, you know, when you say, so you've said it at least, I think, three times today, Director Meyerberg, that this operation was organized by chain of command, right?

So when I hear organized by chain of command, it sounds like that chain is starting with Captain Brennan, which seems pretty far down the chain of command.

So is that what you, when you're saying that in your presentation, is that what you mean by chain of command?

That's what I mean.

Captain Brennan on down?

Yeah, the chain of command is what I mean is by Captain Brennan down.

I have no indication from the investigation that we did that it was organized by someone else other than Captain Brennan.

And again, Grennan was shortly thereafter promoted to an assistant chief.

He was in a supervisory position over Spock.

It was very much the case that because of what was going on and all the moving parts that were happening, that people in the captain's role received, again, high-level assignments just like this.

But on that day, who would have been above Grennan in the chain of command?

It depends.

If it's Spock, theoretically it could have been.

It may have been Assistant Chief Herjack at that point.

It may have been whoever was running special operations.

It could have been Assistant Chief Greening.

I'm not totally sure who was heading that bureau.

Again, you know, Assistant Chief Mahaffey was running patrol operations, which this didn't fall under.

But there's a lot of, again, confusion.

There's people that are doing a multitude of different things.

So again, it's not necessarily that clear as to who Brennan would have reported to directly, or if he would have reported it to anyone.

And again, that may be part of the problem, or a significant part of the problem.

So if we reopen this, sorry, Council Member, just real quick, and I'll wrap up.

Um, like if this gets reopened, maybe we establish what the entire chain of command was.

Because the sense I just get is that when we're saying chain of command, it sounds like this is starting from the middle of the chain of command and going down.

And I just think that's an important kind of issue mapping for this in terms of determining who should have known.

Like, we know who did know, and we have representations of people saying they didn't know.

I guess my question is, like, who should have known and what the implication is going forward for how these kinds of things are organized.

One last implication to that is I think that Chief, Interim Chief Diaz has sort of set a precedent for should of knowing in terms of how that factors into discipline, because with the Pink Umbrella incident, and I know this wasn't an OPA recommended finding, but my understanding is the premise of Assistant Chief Herjack's demotion was Assistant Chief Herjack should have known Lieutenant Brooks was going to unconstitutionally tear gas a bunch of people and should have intervened and didn't.

Therefore, Assistant Chief Herjack was demoted.

It seems like by that standard of chain of command that's being applied, there should be more that's happening with how this ruse is dealt with to be consistent, which is why I'm focusing on the chain of command and how that is relevant.

to this fact pattern.

It just seems like, you know, I'm tired of being in a position where I'm reading in the news about the latest thing that comes out of 2020 and everything gets fobbed off on a mid-level person.

Everyone that's above, you know, that was in the mayor's office or the front office of SPD claims they didn't know about it.

And some guy in the middle gets hit with everything and all the responsibility.

And, you know, I just I just don't know if that's an effective way to run a hierarchical organization or to center accountability and responsibility for the actions of the park.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I mean, again, I'm not sure.

you know, exactly how to respond.

What I will say is that, you know, the, you know, a captain is obviously one level behind an assistant chief, who then is, you know, there's no deputy chief in the Seattle Police Department, so that's just one tier below an assistant chief and then the chief.

So a captain's fairly high up the chain of command.

But I don't think that that changes your overall point, is that there are a number of cases in which actions are engaged in by, again, even if it's high-level commanders, where the very top of the chain of command said that they did not have awareness of the case, and obviously that is a concern, and one that I'm hoping that Interim Chief Diaz will rectify.

Thank you, Director Myerberg.

I do want to give other folks an opportunity to ask questions.

We are going to have to wrap up in five minutes.

I appreciate the line of questioning, though, Council Member Lewis, I, like you, have been frustrated by the number of we didn't knows that have come out in this investigation and others.

Just looking for a raised hand from members.

Councilmember Nielsen, yes, please.

I don't want to speak out of turn.

I did see Councilmember Peterson had his hand up.

So I did not see that.

I'm sorry.

Councilmember Peterson?

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

I concur with the line of questioning that Councilmember Lewis asked.

So rather than repeat that, I'll just look forward to hearing what Obviously, this happened under the previous administration, but we're looking forward to seeing the new administration provide that level of oversight with the police department that's necessary.

Thank you.

Back to you, Council Member Nelson.

Thank you very much for this detailed presentation.

I actually also, like Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell, learned about this in the Seattle Times.

I'm bringing myself up to speed on the process of investigations in SPD.

And I just have a question about, um, so when was the investigation done?

And when did the I G, uh, sign off on the investigation?

And then when and when, um, Dr Meyerberg, did you forwarded on for potential action?

Uh, and when did the leadership of SPD know about this, these allegations and your findings?

Because in Council Member Herbold's preview of this session today, she mentioned accountability and also potential consequences, which I run out in 180 days, I imagine, after, you know, there is a timeline when those, can be recommended.

And so and there were in public comment allegations that there was a purposeful running out of the clock.

So that is sort of the timeline that I'm interested.

When was the investigation certified by the I.

G. And when was it forwarded by you to the powers that be?

So the investigation was certified by the OIG in mid-September.

So I believe it was September 10th or September 12th was when it was certified.

However, prior to that point, so several months prior to that point, both named employee one and two had retired from the police department.

So at that point, once they retired, the 180-day deadline stopped moving for them.

So there is no 180-day deadline because they're not members of the police department and there's no contractual bargaining agreement that applies to their actions.

So at that point, we finished the DCM.

So the DCM was finished in late December, was transmitted to the chain of command, and then there was disciplinary proceedings that were held in this week, or the beginnings of the disciplinary proceedings.

So there was a gap between September and December, and now all of a sudden it's in a new administration's

Okay, so it's the same.

I mean, I guess it's the same as far as the administration goes.

It's the same Police Department's administration in that interim.

Chief Diaz would have been the same chief that would have reached disciplinary findings had it been done in September versus in December.

And at that point in September, both employees had already resigned from the department.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Before we go back to Council Member Lewis, who I see his hands up again, other Council Members who haven't asked a question yet?

All right.

I have not asked a question, so I'm gonna put myself in the queue here, Council Member Lewis.

I just wanna real quickly touch on the named employees, I believe it's three through six.

The named employees three through six are all findings that have been identified as allegation removed.

And I'm just curious a little bit about first the use of that finding for a claim that it appears in this instance you are sort of acknowledging that there was a violation, but you're removing the allegation because of belief that those three employees had responsibility.

And I'm wondering whether or not it makes more sense to just rule on the facts of the case that there was a violation and then let the question of whether or not discipline for that violation, that that be a determination of police chief.

For the nature of policing, it seems like there are often situations that arise where officers have to use their discretion to address a difficult situation.

And so the question is, you know, are they not expected to make all of their decisions consistent with SPD policy, utilizing discretion, quote, in proportion to the public safety issue addressed?

If a decision to reference a group of armed proud boys could be foreseen to make a volatile situation worse, then why aren't the individual officers being held accountable, regardless of the supervision component, with a sustained violation, perhaps with an acknowledgment that there is supervisory work that should have been done, that wasn't done, and that that be considered as part of the decisions around discipline.

I'm just very concerned about the use of allegation removed while you're simultaneously you seem to be saying, um, that the that that that this would merit a sustained violation.

Yeah, I definitely see the concern.

I mean, from I think, fundamentally, from from my perspective, at least, is that, um, Obviously, I think the decision to use the Proud Boys was a very, very poor decision, but I think fundamentally what it stems from is the failure of any supervision over these officers' actions.

The fact that there was no guidance, no parameters, there was nothing told to them about what they should or shouldn't do.

Virtually all these officers said in their interviews that they had never had to do something similarly before.

They didn't know what they were doing.

I really view that fundamentally as a command failure and not, and yes, and errors on the part of these officers and problems, but I lay the responsibility for this on the level of command.

I mean, perhaps there's a better finding than allegation removed, but I don't think the appropriate finding for these officers, given the lack of any support and basically being set up to fail, that the appropriate finding would be a sustained finding.

I would just really urge, your role to be really focused on fact-finding of whether or not the violation of policy occurred, which you have done.

You have determined that a violation of policy occurred.

Not that this was a bad idea or bad judgment, but that it was a violation of policy.

And I support you in opining on whether or not somebody should be disciplined for a violation of policy if there's a failure of supervision.

But again, I'm concerned that this particular set of findings goes with the allegation removed is out of the scope of just a fact finding of whether or not the violation occurred.

Council Member Lewis, you wanna wrap this up?

Yes, and this is just a really brief like evidentiary investigation question, but director Mayerberg in doing your the this first round of the investigation.

And if this gets gets looked at again, was there any information that OK wanted to receive and they weren't able to?

That would have been helpful to make these conclusions.

I mean, I think of the fact that you know it's been well publicized that a lot of relevant text messages are missing.

from the police department and other executive departments.

And I just wonder if there were evidentiary issues that that would help to get to the bottom of this that you encountered.

And if that's an area we should look into, we look into this again.

So as far as I'm aware, there were no evidentiary The only evidentiary issue that we have was the lack of any evidence, meaning the lack of any sort of documentation of what occurred and why it occurred.

We did email searches and other searches and no response of information came back, and that's not a surprise given the nature of the effort.

You know, certainly we could do a text message search, and I know that text messages have been collected and have been collected as part of other litigation, but it was not necessarily something that we were at the time There was no evidence that we saw at the time that we didn't have aside from the lack of documentation around the groups.

Thank you, Director Mayerberg.

So we, despite my efforts to keep us on time, this ran over.

There's a great amount of interest.

I really thank everybody for being here with us today.

I will certainly forward on questions that council members may have that didn't get asked and answered, and will offer to collect them on behalf of my colleagues.

to share them with Director Meyerberg and Chief Diaz as we move on, and as appropriate, the Office of the Inspector General and the CPC.

I know the, as I mentioned earlier, there's questions about how OIG determines sufficiency of the investigation, and I have received some additional information from the OIG about that that I will also share.

With that, let's move on to the next item on the agenda.

Thank you again, everybody, for being with us, and a special thanks to Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell for being with us.

Alex, can you please read the next item into the agenda?

Item number two, public health update on COVID-19 briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

Let's just start with a quick round of introductions of presenters here with us today.

Hi, I think I'm the only presenter today.

So nice to see you all again.

And thank you for the invite.

This is, I'm Dennis Worsham.

I'm the interim director for Public Health Seattle King County.

And Council Member Herbold asked me to come and do a presentation on where we're at with COVID.

Thank you so much.

Why don't you just take it away?

And if you have questions, we'll let you know if they are.

Thank you.

All right, great.

I'm all right to share my screen?

Please, yes.

I will go there now.

And so can you see the screen from your?

Great.

Yes, we can.

Thank you.

All right.

As I said, I'm Dennis Worsham.

I'm the interim director for Public Health Seattle King County.

And I've been in my current role for about seven months now.

Prior to that was the director for infectious diseases and heavily involved in our COVID response.

Of course, this is not the news I want to be bringing, and I think we're feeling this across the city and county and really across the country and globe at this point.

You know, after a couple years of a pandemic and really in our response of hard work from all of us, both in public health for all of you in the electives and what you're doing in our community partners.

People are fatigued but are rising to the occasion of what we need to do here with our current surge in place.

I just want to go over some data slides with you.

I think that these are always good pictorials and really kind of painting a picture of where we're at.

To date, here in King County, we have had 248,755 positive cases of COVID, 9,950 hospitalizations, 2,196 deaths.

So it's really taken a toll on our community all the way around.

We've got good news in here, but we also have some challenging news of where we're at.

So in the current surge that all of you have been reading about and know about already about Omicron is a variant of concern that was detected in Africa just only about a month ago.

And remarkable how, and overwhelming how quickly it has come in and just taken over.

Our UW colleagues who do a lot of modeling believe that about 90% of our local COVID cases now are coming from our Omicron variant here.

So it's come in pretty strong.

We had Delta before that.

that was difficult, but Omicron is carrying much more transmissibility and higher impacts of disease in our community.

For our seven day average that we put in these markers here in the screen in front of you, we are now at this incredible high seven day daily average of 4,614 cases per day.

That's four times higher than our previous peak, which is back in November of 2020, before we had vaccines, and about 12 times higher than what we saw in Delta in early December of 2021. So huge increases of where we're at currently.

As we know, when looking at our data is we're actually seeing transmission increase among all ages.

And in particular, our highest among our 18 to 24 year olds, followed by 25 to 34. and five to 17 year olds in the third ranking of that.

So really among folks who are younger probably tend, as you can imagine, higher circulation in our community and some of our lower vaccine rates in those age groups as we're getting up to speed in some of those areas.

Case counts and incidence rates, as we look about race and ethnicity groups, have also increased.

Really highest among our Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander population, followed by Hispanic, followed by Black, and also seeing an increase in Asians.

In our white residents, we're actually seeing a decreasing proportion of cases since November of 2021. Although we are seeing increase of burden of disease here also in the city of Seattle, our highest really remaining outside of the city with Auburn, Kent, Federal Way, Burien, Renton, Tukwila, SeaTac and South King County area.

Hospitalizations are getting a lot of attention for good reason.

As you can see from this graph, just a huge spike of increased cases here needing to be hospitalized.

I know in the language that we have seen in the media and coming as it is less severe, but even a little bit of a lot is still a lot.

So in contrast to our tenfold increase in cases, hospitalizations have increased by fivefold.

So what that means is we're seeing on an average in the Delta variant about seven hospitalizations per day.

And now what we're seeing here with the Omicron is about 52 hospitalizations per day.

So about a fivefold increase from where we were in December in seeing our hospital admissions.

This increase in hospitalizations is really coming, you know, to a real challenge for our hospital systems.

You know, not only did we have the Delta surge, but we also have an increasing non-COVID hospitalizations.

And then, of course, staffing shortages with our medical teams, some that have resigned, some that have quit.

some that have been out because of illness.

And also the other part that's really taxing our system in particular is really having difficult to discharge patients into other settings because of outbreaks that are going on in long-term care facilities or a lack of staffing in places to put folks who may not need to be in the hospital, but yet not well enough to be out on their own at this particular time.

So most recent hospitalizations are highest that we're seeing around our COVID cases are among our 40 to 69 year olds and 70 plus followed by our 20 to 39 year olds.

Hospital rates for adults are really increasing with age and remain very low in our youth population as opposed to what we've seen in other jurisdictions.

Good news, when we look at our deaths, there really are no major changes currently that we're seeing in death.

We've been averaging through the Delta variant about one to three deaths per day, and our latest report was about two, so really unchanged in this particular area of where we've seen deaths.

This is an important slide, and if you are a New York Times reader, there was an article this morning that talked about New York and Seattle, and really that this really continues to be another surge of people who really are unvaccinated.

This is, if I can just orient you to this graph in front of you, we look at cases on the left-hand side, centers are hospitalizations and then our deaths.

and going back into August of 2021 until beginning of January, first week in January, is we can see that the blue line represents people who are unvaccinated.

The gray line represents people who are vaccinated.

And the orange line is the overall King County number.

And of course, that number is low and tends to follow the gray line is because we're such a highly vaccinated community.

But this just clearly ill three of these incidences and deaths that are grea those people who are unva and although we are seein in people who are vaccinat those cases needing to be It's just an important vi us that this is where our and our greatest tool in p and death is really about that not only are vaccines are good tool in this particular area, but we also have other tools in this multi strategy is really critical about limiting our indoor spaces and avoiding crowded and poorly ventilated areas for folks well fitted mass.

This is a message that we're really trying to, to, to to really get out into the community, and any help you can do with this is much appreciated.

Really having well-fitted masks or respirators are really, really key, and we're distributing as many as we can into the community.

KN95s are equivalent, or people can use double masks or double surgical masks, but really well-fitting masks are really critical in this particular outbreak.

The next slide I want to share with you is just, you know, kind of the general pieces of this is, you know, there are a few things about Omicron that are unique and challenging in different ways that I want to highlight here.

As I mentioned, our colleagues at the UW who do a lot of the modeling, about 90% of our transmission right now is of the Omicron variant.

It's predicted, looking at what we've seen in other countries and what we're seeing on the East Coast, that we're hoping is true for us, is we would anticipate by mid to late January, we'll be peaking at our highest point and then start that come down period.

Of course, that will vary on things that are unique to our own community that we're watching very closely.

Our age distributions are different, underlying health conditions in our population, Of course, we have some of the highest vaccine coverage in the country.

You know, we have looking at past infection rates, the time of season that this is hitting us, and kind of how our community adjusts or doesn't adjust to social mixing and behaviors around distancing.

All will determine when that peak will actually happen and when we begin to come down.

Things are likely going to be a bit more difficult before they get better as we move into that, before we hit that peak and start coming down.

So we plan as part of this because of again the burden of diseases so high in our community that there'll be large numbers of people becoming ill in the short time and which will be resulting and we're already starting to see an absenteeism of work.

and workplaces, uh, and, uh, hospitalizations, uh, staffing, uh, continue to be, will be challenged from that.

So we should, uh, anticipate, uh, that those things will continue to, to really make a challenge for us.

I heard it said, and I think it's a worth repeating is, uh, although this, uh, Omicron may be milder for individuals, it certainly is taking a toll and not as mild on our communities as it has the impacts of our hospital systems and our workforces as they're going to be impacted in this work.

I think one of the things we continue to raise here as our success here in Seattle and in the King County area is our vaccine rates are just outstanding for five and older.

As you can see from this graph, we are over 80% of people who have completed their vaccines and now almost at 90% of people who have received their first dose.

So this is really a huge testament to the protection that we have going in our community.

So good data points and then on the right hand side you see the maps of King County and as those are distributed where our protection rates really come into play.

It's a reminder you know for folks it's really important for folks to get their boosters when they're eligible for boosters.

and in our county we've done over 800,000 booster shots or third doses have already been administered.

We are pushing that number more.

The demand is high and trying to meet that demand in a variety of ways of increasing access points and using a variety of modalities in order to be able to get things out there.

People get appointments scheduled getting more capacity in t meet having some inroads o forward that.

So the messa get out to folks is it is to see people getting vac vaccinated.

If you're not and get boosted when you're eligible to be boosted and getting our colleagues and our community members and family and friends to follow that piece.

If you need to find a place of where to get vaccinated, you can certainly go to our King County COVID vaccine site and it will help direct people to those particular area.

One piece I want to share here, I know that a lot of I've heard from a few of you, as well as other elected that testing has really been a challenge.

And we know that that is the case.

When you've seen this, you know, tenfold increase of disease in the community, that also means exposures are high.

And it's really driving the demand on our tests.

testing areas and we are doing everything we can to meet that demand as best we can.

We've worked with the federal government to help bring in some sites and to offset where we've ordered a number of rapid test kits to get into the community.

You've heard the governor make that announcement.

Not all of those have arrived yet and when they do, we'll get those distributed out into the community.

Part of our challenge also was during the winter cold weather snap that we had around the holidays, we had a reduced capacity at those sites because of weather and also some staffing challenges as we're seeing this surge of Omicron is also having an impact on our own workforce and be able to show up and to be able to provide the work that is needed.

So we do know there are some really tough pinch points here in tests, but it's getting better.

At the county, we have purchased over 700,000 tests.

And our goal is to get 100,000 tests distributed into the community as quickly as we can.

We're prioritizing those initial tests into our high risk settings.

where we need to around our long-term care facilities, adult family homes, our emergency medical services, our healthcare facilities really are needing some help right now in testing and their own staff and residents in these congregate settings, including correctional facilities.

We've had, you know, major cases there and those outbreaks continue to increase at high numbers and concerning for us of our most vulnerable folks.

Uh, so we're really prioritizing our test kits into those areas and getting them out, followed into our broader community, community centers and community based organizations in that mixed here as we get more tests in.

Once it's kind of the spigot analogy, once we get this turned on and they start coming in, we'll have a better flow.

not only from our federal partners, but from the state and what we're purchasing here locally.

So I do anticipate that this will get better over the next week, and we'll make some progress here in where we go.

I know some questions have come up around testing for schools in the antigen test.

The Department of Health has that responsibility and is doing a good job in meeting that demand and working directly with schools in order for them to, for their own testing programs.

Because we, as you know, we have a high commitment of keeping to in-person learning as best we can for our students.

In the next slide here, in my closing comments, it's more of the same, is we have a lot of protective factors that are going well for us in this community.

We've got the right policies in place.

We are requiring masks to be worn in indoor areas.

We just need to get people to enforce that and make sure that we're meeting those things that are already in place.

We, of course, have vaccine mandates.

Uh, that's the verifications in places where people are gathering in indoor places.

Uh, and we are, of course, reiterating these messages as hard as we can about get vaccinated.

If you're not vaccinated, get boosted now at five months after your initial booster for one of the M.

R. N. A. S. Or two months after the Johnson and Johnson.

If you're eligible, wear a high quality, good fitting mask.

We're learning more and more in the science around indoor ventilation and air quality is critically important.

And if people are needing to gather in those spaces, getting good ventilation in is really, really critical.

And at this time, asking people to take as much of a break as they can around crowding in indoor places and keeping that social distancing, all the same messages are being given and are even more so now critically important as we move forward.

So I will stop there and happy to answer any questions around where we're at and what we are anticipating in the next little bit here.

Thank you so much, Director Wharton.

I really appreciate you taking some time to be here.

Do you have a couple more minutes?

I know you're really pressed for time.

Of course.

I'd love to help answer any questions.

And if we can't, we'll get you back the right answers.

And always happy to do follow-up by email if needed.

Thank you so much.

If folks can indicate in the panel by virtually raising your hand, that helps me see whether or not you have a question.

I do have two very quick questions, one related to the rise in hospitalizations.

And I know there has been a call action related to the rise in hospitalizations from the Washington State Medical Association.

I'm just wondering if you could speak to what you've seen.

We've seen the data on the increase in hospitalizations, but what do you know about the impact of that increase on hospital capacity locally?

And then secondly, just really appreciate you recognizing the difficulties around testing.

and appreciate the availability of tests being made throughout the county and appreciate the need to focus on vulnerable communities.

But what's your advice to folks right now who need a test and are unable to find one?

Yeah, lots of good questions and I'll do my best to answer those.

Let's start with hospitalizations.

It's probably the most critical I have seen our hospital situation in at least my time here with this Omicron variant being so high.

The issue is on several fronts.

One of them is the staffing capacity on the front end has been really challenged.

Not only as we've heard through reporting in other industries, but the great resignation during this time of COVID of people who were eligible to retire, retired or leaving the field.

has really caused a really a tough road here.

And now with Omicron in place and the high infection rates being, you know, in the thousands every day, and we know those numbers that we have are underreported, is it's taken a toll on people who are able to provide care are also becoming infected and needing to, we've seen the CDC change their guidelines to five days or other strategies in order to get workforce back as quickly as they can.

into those environments to provide the care that is needed.

So the Department of Health is working very closely on this issue and the governor's office directly with the healthcare system in order to provide additional capacity and support as they can around staffing areas.

The other area that is on the back end of this that is also a challenge is really around what we call difficult to discharge.

And as we look at some folks, whether they are living unhoused or whether they are elderly and live alone, is that they're not able to go to a care facility.

because those care facilities are also having outbreaks and can't accept new people.

And so there's just a pinch point there.

And so again, the Department of Health is working to stand up some maybe alternative health places where people can be discharged too to free up some of that capacity within the hospital and create more beds to be available.

So it's kind of a multi-pronged approach and not one easy solution to any of them.

It's kind of a multi-factor that they're doing and working very closely with calls every day to make some improved outcome here in this work.

So that's about the health care system.

Regarding testing, we're going to be putting out a blog today and we're happy to send that if you want to send that out to other folks.

It's a reminder is if you can't get a test, find a place to be tested, although we know that capacity is starting to open up a bit more, is that if you have been exposed, is to isolate and quarantine yourself and not put yourself out there until you're able to get a test and give it at least, you know, a few days.

And if symptoms occur is, you know, don't circulate.

And of course, you know, just all of the protective factors that you can do in not spreading the virus.

until you can get a test.

But again, I think that's gonna change here in the next week in particular, and we're gonna be sending out some messages about what folks can do in the short run.

Thank you so much, really appreciate it.

Other council members, do you have questions for Director Worsham?

I'm not seeing any additional raised hands.

Really appreciate you being with us here and thank you for all that everybody at Seattle King County Public Health are doing now and over the last nearly two years now.

Really appreciate it.

Appreciate you making the extra time today.

Our hearts and thoughts are with you as you do this really important and difficult work at a time where I know people are really stressed out and burnt out.

But as you said, they're still rising to the occasion.

So thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much.

I appreciate that.

And anything we can do to support you in getting the messages out, let us know.

We appreciate the partnership.

All right, thank you so much.

Happy New Year.

All right, Alex, could you please read in agenda item number three?

Agenda item number three, briefing on the December 9 emergency 911 system outage.

Briefing and discussion.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Director Lombard, for being here with us.

Are you our only presenter today?

I am.

All right.

So I'm just going to hand it over to you.

Introduce yourself.

Tell us who you are and why you're here.

Really appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Chair Herbold.

And good morning, President Juarez and other members of council.

I'm currently the interim director of the newest department in the city of Seattle, the Community Safety and Communications Center.

And so Council Member Herbold had asked that I provide a briefing on the 9-1-1 outage that we had last week, or I'm sorry, last month, and then give you guys also a couple other just quick updates on where we are with the forming of this new city department.

If we can get the slides up.

Or I can ask the clerk, do you want me to just share my own or?

I have copies.

There we go, thank you very much.

Okay, so on the first slide is, whoops, almost there.

Are you seeing that now, Director?

I'm seeing it, yes.

Go ahead, and we can scroll up.

So on the first slide to report here, we had reported to council last year, and council has been monitoring some of the staffing challenges that we've had over at the CSCC.

We continue to be significantly understaffed.

This is actually not just a city of Seattle challenge, but it's also the other 911 centers throughout the region, and actually a nationwide issue.

We had been even with that.

We have been very aggressively trying to hire and fill some of our spots doing lots of recruiting.

Unfortunately, the vaccine mandate for all of its benefits still set us back about 6 to 8 months.

We lost approximately 10% of our workforce.

due to the vaccine mandate.

So that kind of started us over.

So you'll see that I circled some of the numbers.

The communications dispatcher number one, that's our 911 call takers.

You can see that we are at less than half of our allocated staffing there.

So that's where we really are struggling the most with 911 calls.

We do have a lot of the dispatcher twos and dispatcher threes that all step in and try to answer those calls as best they are able.

This also gets to the issue that we've reported previously on the non-emergency or the SPD business line being shut down or shuttered during different times of the day.

And I'll report more on that in a little bit here.

Our total numbers for 2021, you can see circled in red there at the bottom.

While we lost a record number of people, 33 people.

And again, this is due to the COVID fax mandate.

This is stress.

This is kind of spillover from some of the protesting and whatnot from the previous year.

We were able to hire almost a record number of people as well, the 23. But that still was a net change of a loss of 10 people.

On the good news, we did just start yet another class just this last Friday of six people.

We've been doing classes about every month and a half to try to get those people.

and hired and trained into the positions.

We are continuing to try to hire our back office support staff.

This is one of the things that has also been kind of hurting our recruiting potential is that we are not yet fully staffed out as a department.

We, like many other city departments, are struggling to hire HR positions, finance positions and many more.

The city has many of these vacant positions posted and like so many industries, there's just a lot of people are just not applying for jobs right now.

Next slide, please.

One of the things that I wanted to report back to Council.

I know at the very end of the year, there was a lot of questions from you as far as the impact of the previous administration's hiring incentives.

As a reminder, those incentives were for us $10,000 for new hires and up to $25,000 for laterals.

We did see about a five-fold increase over some of the previous years, and this was actually good.

This has helped our numbers look a lot better than they would have otherwise.

These incentives are among, actually they are the highest in the nation, which was a phenomenal statement as far as the value that Seattle puts into our 9-1-1 system and our 9-1-1 call takers and dispatchers.

Classroom training typically takes about four weeks and then it's followed by six to seven weeks of training on the floor where people with supervision are actually taking 9-1-1 calls and kind of learning the craft.

So a new hire can take about three months to fully vest.

The numbers that you see there since the announcement came out, that's the 393 applications.

That refers to the five-fold increase that I was talking about over the previous years.

Next slide, please.

Just some numbers on where we are with the 911 answering again.

I kind of mentioned that we've been struggling just with the lack of numbers here.

Just as for the last week, our statistics here, the standard and our hope is to answer 90% of the 911 calls within 15 seconds.

We were able to meet that pretty close.

You can see the average was about 89.73, so even with our staffing crunch, we are just barely under the standard.

Now, again, we've taken all kinds of...

Roundup.

We've made all kinds of...

Yes, roundup.

You know, the challenge, of course, is that we've taken all kinds of measures to get to that point and, you know, not answering SPD's business line and taking incredibly long times to answer some of the secondary calls to do that, you know, with the priority being on active ongoing emergencies.

Uh, so we, you know, the hope is, is that as we get more people, we can really start to round out the better customer service, uh, you know, taking more time to answer people and help them with whatever challenges that have led them to call 911. Next slide, please.

Oh, yes.

Sorry.

Thanks.

Um, on that, um, you know, those fractions of a second obviously can make a big difference in somebody's health, safety, and their lives when calling 9-1-1.

And so I don't mean to make light of your efforts to meet that national standard.

As it relates specifically to the efforts to staff up, 393 applications that you've received since the incentive announcement.

Have you sort of already gone through that bunch to determine how many are viable applications?

Just so we can sort of get a sense on how that, I understand that's, The incentives have allowed you to increase number of applications five times, but I think an important metric is to look at whether or not that increase.

is representative of the applicants as well.

Sure.

Yeah, if the clerk could go back just a couple of slides to the, there we go, right there.

So if you look below the circled ones, you'll see what really is a math game.

You know, the more people we get applying and then we lose a certain percentage to the testing process and then we lose a certain percentage of the interviews and so on and so forth.

So what you see below there are the kind of the different incremental steps in the process then.

Only 22 of the 393 are folks that you selected for interviews.

Just for this period right here.

So it's kind of an ongoing process.

We switched so that our application process isn't like in Windows now.

It's just ongoing.

As they come in, we keep pushing them into the testing process.

Once they go out of testing, you know we're doing interviews, we're doing background, we're doing psychs.

So actually Council Member, if you were to total up those numbers, you know 22 plus 11 plus 9 plus 7, that gives you a better picture of how many of the 393 are getting pushed through at any given time, given the limitations of how many we can interview at any given time, how many the testing company can do, and so on and so forth.

That's super helpful.

Thank you.

And I also want to say that I am supportive of a 2022 bonus incentive for city employees.

And I know that the executive is intending to prepare a report on the council's request.

Um, it's due in March.

Um, the sooner we get it, I think the sooner we can have these discussions.

Um, the old 2021 incentive bonus program was only for CSCC and the police department.

Our request is to look at what the needs are citywide.

I don't wanna, um, I don't want to, um, to press, uh, preference the work of one department and the importance of workers in one department over the other.

And that's why I'm pleased that the council agreed that we need a citywide analysis of each department and design a incentive bonus program that serves the great needs of employees in all of our departments and and members of the public who are receiving service from all these departments.

So just wanna state on the record here that the sooner we get that information back from the executive, the sooner we can have that conversation about a 2022 bonus incentive program.

Thank you, Council Member.

Okay, so, you know, I made a quick reference on what that means.

You know, we have been doing everything.

We've been throwing all of our resources at 9-1-1.

So here is kind of the downside or the negative impact.

From the time period listed, we were unable to answer SPD's non-emergency line for about 15.6% of the time.

That's about 51 hours.

Now, of course, you know, that's not even distribution.

So, unfortunately, we're able to answer in the middle of the night, but there aren't a whole lot of people calling, you know, SPD's business line in the middle of the night.

So, uh, you know, distribution curves being what they are.

Unfortunately, that is quite a few hours during the day that we're just not able to answer it because we're putting all those resources to 911. It's pretty sporadic.

Some of the outages have been as low as five to 15 minutes.

Some of them have been a couple hours long.

So again, we are trying to do as much as we can with the people and the resources that we have.

Next slide, please.

Okay, we'll receive a an automated message when you're unable to.

Yeah.

And are you, do you direct those folks to online reporting?

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah.

So yeah, great question.

So the, the automated messaging has two parts.

It has, you know, a messaging that can refer people to other resources, online reports and whatnot, and then eventually we'll kick them into a, you know, a press one for press two, four, press three, four, to actually get them to, to some other resources.

So it's, yes, you're correct.

Council member, it is not just a strictly too bad, so sad.

Thank you.

And just for folks listening, what we're talking about right now is for the non-emergency line.

this is another project that Council was very enthusiastic in their support for last year.

This is what we're calling our dispatch protocol project.

The effort in this project is to really get a software package that will help our 911 call takers be a lot more consistent in how they are taking, screening and resourcing different incoming 911 calls.

Our hope is that this is that this is working in partnership with the triage one program mentioned previously.

As far as non police resources, this is also part of trying to improve, reducing or diminishing bias in calls on again, just trying to get overall more consistency to help quality assurance to help our metrics and everything.

The product team had its first operational meeting just last week.

The Red Star is kind of where we are in there.

We're getting ready to start with the RFP process to identify the different vendors in this space and who might have the best fit or best solution for Seattle and what we're looking to grab.

We hope to be able to finish that up by June of this year and actually start building and implementing uh...

the product uh...

in june uh...

so it's uh...

again this is an exciting one we're moving forward with this uh...

and and then uh...

again hopefully hopefully uh...

finishing up by the end of the year and i just want to flag here on

One, I am a little concerned that the RFP process is five months.

I am concerned that we're just getting started on it, given the fact that when we talked during the council's deliberations on the biannual budget adjustment, we decided that it was not a good idea to wait until the deliberations on the 2022 budget because CSCC would not have those funds available to do the RFP and to develop the RFP until the beginning of 2022. the council's action on getting those dollars for the dispatch protocol project in, I believe, August, early August, mid-August, before the break, was intended to make the delivery of the project happen more quickly than if we had waited until the budget discussions for 2022 that would not be in effect until now.

So I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the timeline here and how what is proposed might not quite meet our hopes and dreams when we discussed this back in late July and early August.

Yeah, thank you.

No, I absolutely share your frustration, Council Member.

So what we've been running into is actually, you know, without being too disparaging, city process.

Because of the size of the project, the funding involved, and the magnitude, it had to be assigned a project manager.

So there was a vetting process to get that that involved other departments.

We had to compete with all the IT projects in the city.

Now, again, fortunately, we ended up on top because the public safety nature and the impact that this has on police and on fire and on other departments.

But we still had to go through that process nonetheless.

So that, you know, that shoes up a couple weeks.

Once they identify the project manager, you know, all of this stuff that you see again, unfortunately, is, again, not trying to diss on my own beloved city here, but it is kind of the bureaucracy as far as the necessary hoops that we have to go through in the interest of being open and forthright with the public as far as how the money is being sent, spent, and giving everybody a fair chance to bid on it and whatnot.

So this is what I've been told, the fast tracking for the process to make sure that we are adhering with our own rules and regulations to have an open and fair process, if that helps.

Thank you, Director Lombard.

And the reason why this protocol project is so important is it allows the dispatchers to ask a set of questions that will help facilitate the development and implementation of other non-uniform police responses.

So it is an integral part of the infrastructure that needs to be in place before we make policy changes.

And those policy changes, we've often talked about them as being driven by a desire for better outcomes, by having people who are better trained and better equipped.

to respond to certain 911 calls that don't require a uniformed officer.

Given the fact that we have such a reduced number of police officers now to respond to those high priority 911 calls, there's also a public safety urgency associated with the development of alternatives.

We simply don't have enough police officers to respond to all the calls that 9-1-1 receives.

We want to make sure that officers are not responding to things that they don't need to respond to, not just because we don't want the negative outcomes that sometimes happen, but because we want those officers to be responding to only the things that they can and we don't have enough officers to do that right now.

So just want to emphasize um that there's a there's a public safety interest as well um in um as it relates to sort of traditional public safety as opposed to the broader community safety that we're talking about um and being able to respond um quickly to those calls council member lewis

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to jump in and echo that urgency, and I really want to applaud Director Lombard for working in very challenging circumstances to try to emphasize that shared urgency that this council has for this project.

I had the great privilege of taking a tour while Director Lombard was unfortunately in Washington, D.C.

on trip, so I couldn't join him in person, but a tour of the 911 call center where a lot of these concerns were really laid bare by the folks working there in terms of wanting these new tools, wanting these new services, wanting the ability to be more responsive to the calls.

for service from Seattle residents.

And I do just want to further support Chair Herbold's point.

We all are really well aware that there is a bottleneck in police hiring that is going along with the deficit in police officers that we currently have.

The council for two years in a row has fully funded a police hiring class, but as there's always attrition as people are coming in, people are going out, there's of course been higher than usual attrition over the course of the last two years.

To really respond to this crisis, just to put a fine point on it, we need to be able to hire some of these other services that can take on certain calls to free up the police to do things only the police can do.

And just in terms of these sessions being helpful for issue spotting for the incoming administration, I would just continue to put a fine point on.

Anything that can be done to fast track this dispatch protocol from the incoming administration is going to be time well spent to respond to the social service and public safety emergency we see on the street.

And I just want to lift up the efforts of Director Lombard and accentuate that this is a council priority and one that we look forward to working with the Herald Administration on hopefully moving these deadlines faster if possible.

So thank you.

Thank you.

So the next slide.

Based on what both of you were saying, this is one of the alternatives.

So just a quick recap.

As we were coming into the holiday season at the end of the year, Council had talked and in working with Council, we had agreed that launching both the protocol and the triage one program simultaneously, that would get things going a lot faster as opposed to doing first the protocols and then trying to build the triage one system.

As Council knows, in our briefings towards the end of last year, uh, working with the fire department using their existing mobile integrated health program to help us build this CSCC resource.

We wanted, Labor had expressed an interest in talking with fire and CSCC as we're building it out to kind of, you know, where are the lines between our firefighters and EMTs and our patrol officers and the middle, the health practitioners and whatnot that might be in this middle program.

I'm happy to report that last week we kicked off those meetings right after the New Year.

Had our first meeting with Labor to kind of work through some of those issues and kind of express, you know, where this is the middle ground that, as we've discussed, that there may or may not be overlap on on the spectrum, trying to identify, okay, you know, whose whose body of work is what?

And where's kind of this, uh, this, you know, neutral zone in between?

So I will report more in the future on how those meetings are progressing, and we're looking forward to keep moving this project forward.

Next slide, please.

All right, so the outage.

I'll get to this really quickly and kind of go through these next slides pretty quickly to kind of summarize what happened.

December 9th, 2021, last year, we had a statewide outage that occurred in the afternoon.

The company that has what's called the Ezinet, this is like an Internet that connects all the 911 centers in the state of Washington and routes all the 911 traffic.

the company ComTech was doing some maintenance on this EZ net throughout the state.

Normally, there's a couple redundancies built into the system, and when they do maintenance on one, it's supposed to automatically switch over to one of the alternative or the B side of it.

For whatever reason, this did not happen.

We don't know yet why that didn't happen, but both the state 9-1-1 office and King County 9-1-1 are investigating and should have some answers and feedback on that soon.

What happens when that failure occurs is that 9-1-1 lines then get routed to alternatives for every single 9-1-1 center.

In our case, we have a secondary or backup, and then our non-emergency, I'm sorry, not the secondary line, but an alarm company reporting line and the backup line, as we've talked about earlier in this presentation.

Next slide.

One of the challenges that we found is that when 911 lines start coming in on those, it doesn't present normally with like the caller ID or what we call our Annie Alley.

So there's a little confusion that happens from the call takers perspective.

as far as again, not recognizing it right away as an outage.

The outage actually only lasted for just over an hour, 15 21 to 16 43 hours.

Um, what happened is our folks did quickly realize that those were some emergency numbers coming in.

They've part of the other of the challenge that made it difficult to identify is that it wasn't immediate, that we were still getting some lines or some emergencies coming in on 911 as well.

So once we identified it, our supervisors were able to jump on it, confirm that, in fact, 911 calls were coming through some of those non-emergency lines.

again, this is the business one that we shut on shut off.

So the supervisor immediately turned that on so that people would hear it and then directed all the 911 callers to start answering all those lines with equal priority, uh, regardless of whether it was the business line or a 911 line, knowing that we were getting emergency calls coming in on both.

Next slide, please.

Uh, Even with the hiccup or the snafu caused by the EziNet failure, the EziNet failover, for the first part of this event, we did recognize that call volumes actually were pretty consistent for this hour.

So we don't believe that we lost any 911 calls.

We feel that they came in, they probably just came in on different lines and whatnot.

So call volume, at least for the first part of it, was pretty consistent.

Because we weren't sure of the cause or of the nature because we suspected that some 911 calls may have been getting dropped.

And again, in the first moments after this happens, you know, there's a lot of size up and troubleshooting trying to figure out what happened.

We started coordinating with the Fire Alarm Center and with the Emergency Operations Center.

So the decision was made to send out an Alert Seattle message just to those here within the City of Seattle that if people were not able to connect to 911, then to call the two backup or the business line numbers and only for emergencies.

And I've got the actual text of the message that was included in the text sent there.

Those public alerts were sent out also by SPD's Twitter.

And again, the Office of Emergency Management in Seattle.

So we identified some problems there that are also being looked into.

The WEA messages, those are kind of similar to like the amber alerts and the silver alerts that we get.

Unfortunately, one of those messages went way beyond just the city of Seattle or those in Seattle that have requested to alert Seattle messages.

That was part of the problem.

One of the other parts of the problems is that many, many, many of those receiving the message, for whatever reason, whether they didn't read through it all or misunderstood it, both reasons that we're relooking at the message content and how to clarify it even further, thought that they were supposed to call these numbers.

So because of these combinations of efforts, a message that people didn't read completely, a message that maybe we need to reform a little bit, and then a message that went way beyond Seattle that we thought, we basically imposed almost like a self-imposed denial of service.

We saw a huge surge in calls that happened almost right after it happened.

went out about a minute after the call.

So we went from about two or three calls in the minute before to up to 40. Now, each of the lines coming into Seattle, each of the lines coming into Seattle, each of the lines coming into Seattle, each of the lines coming into Seattle, each of the lines coming into Seattle, each of the lines coming into Seattle, can only handle 40 calls at a time.

That's the number of trunks that we have coming into the city, and then it just busies out.

All of those got maxed within a minute before the supervisors just described as going crazy.

So everybody kind of reported all hands on deck.

Go ahead and advance to the next slide, please.

Uh, In the following hour after the messaging went out, we saw a surge of over 1,000 calls to 911. Almost all of those were determined to be, again, people calling saying, am I supposed to report, or am I supposed to check this number, or is there a problem with 911?

Unfortunately, it sounds like we need to do some public messaging as far as don't call 911 if you don't have an emergency.

This was an increase of about 1200% over what we normally get.

Again, the normal for that hour during the day is about 79 calls.

Com Tech recorded that the outage was resolved about 1643 hours and shortly after the operations began to stabilize.

I understand the issue where people misread the message that didn't tell them to call, but told them if they had emergency, this is where you call.

Can you speak to so I that's human error and maybe there's.

The text could have been worded differently, or maybe no matter how it was worded, there is going to be some number of people who are going to misinterpret it.

But on the other element, where the announcement went out to people outside of the city of Seattle, folks who should not have received the announcement in the first place, can you speak to why that happened?

Sure, so if we can assume that there's a certain percentage of the population that for whatever reason, through our own fault, just misinterpret the message.

When that message went out to a much wider base, it went to South Snohomish County.

It went down all the way through King County.

It went over to parts of Kitsap County.

Uh, you know, it covered such a large area.

We had people from all of those non Seattle regions calling those two numbers listed in the message with the same confusion.

You know, am I?

Am I supposed to question?

Why did why did a larger number?

of people received the message.

So the the Office of Emergency Management is still trying to investigate that and kind of figure out what happened to that.

What they call the W.

E. A. Messaging.

It was not supposed to do that.

So that friend, the forensics of that are actually still ongoing as to why that happened.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Um, so again, the conclusions I've already hit most of those.

Uh, so we've already started working with King County 911 on, uh, on messaging, since it did hit all the 911 centers in the county that if we do alert Seattle messaging or something similar in the future, our intent is that King County 911 should probably take the lead on messaging they refer people to a website instead of phone numbers.

And then the website shows that, hey, if you live in this city, contact this number.

If you live in this city, contact this number, so on and so forth.

We feel that that would significantly improve our response should something like this happen again.

Again, we don't have specifics yet from the state or the county yet on why the EziNet automatic switchover did not happen, but we will report those back as soon as we can as well.

Again, we believe that no 911 calls were lost.

They just came in on different lines and possibly took a little bit longer for us to answer.

Next slide.

All right, that's a snapshot for where CSCC is and some of our recent activities.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Nelson.

Yes, thank you.

Yes, after I raised my hand, you got to what I was raising my hand for, which is on page seven, that the calls did not get routed to the B side, but this did not happen.

And that seems to be the crux of the problem.

So I await those answers.

But my question is a little bit broader than the slide pack, because my understanding is that King County holds the contract with ComTech, right?

And Seattle is one public safety, I think it is PSAP.

Let's see, public safety.

Can't remember what that is in an acronym for, but what is the city's relationship to the county when it comes to, looking at this contract with ComTech and having input on operations and getting information about what goes wrong when things happen.

Sure.

Thank you very much, Council Member.

So PSAP actually stands for Public Safety Answering Point, and that's kind of the acronym for the 9-1-1 centers.

So the Comtec EZ Nets are actually, that contract, I believe, resides actually at the state level because it impacts all, not just Washington.

Comtec's contract actually is significantly even further beyond just the state of Washington.

They have 9-1-1 services for a vast area.

So the state administers the 9-1-1 program through the county 9-1-1 systems.

And so ours is, of course, King County 9-1-1 through the county, through their IT department.

And so as far as the kind of the way that we funnel our complaints through our programs is through that county who then takes it up to the state.

So our ability to impact ComTech or to tell them you know what they can or can't do is really limited.

Uh, we just have to use the representative of authority through the King County 911 office, and they've been actually a great champion and a great partner in this.

They jumped on that, you know, filed the appropriate tickets and have been working very aggressively to find out what happened, what we could do to fix it, make sure it happened or doesn't happen again.

Thank you.

for that question.

I have a couple additional questions.

Before I jump in, I just want to see if any of my other colleagues do as well.

Um, so, uh, just interested to know whether or not, um, there was a national city, uh, CenturyLink outage in December of 2018. Are these the same types of issues that we're looking at here locally is what was seen with the uh, national outage several years ago.

Um, and then as it relates to this particular event, um, you may have covered it.

I'm sorry.

We're all King County 911 dispatchers affected.

And if not, what was different about the centers themselves that were not affected?

Sure.

No.

Great questions.

Um, so The telephone switching system throughout the United States, of course, is very tiered.

You have the big ones covering nationwide stuff, and that's kind of the 2018 one that you referred to.

And then it breaks down by regions into much smaller granules.

So the answer to your question is a little bit of yes and no.

Yes, in that they are kind of similar in that there were switching problems, but that's probably about as close as they were related.

The 2018 outage was a cascade type failure, and that was actually a software programming issue where when the switch failed, the system was set up to transfer the load of calls to another switch.

And what happened is through some software problems, they started transferring, you know, these huge loads, national call volume to other switches.

And with each subsequent failure, the switch in that case couldn't handle the additional load.

So they started failing faster and faster.

I guess if you were thinking of an analogy, if you had a couple of dump trucks and one got a flat tire, it'd be really hard to just take all of the dirt in one dump truck and put it in the one beside it, because now its tires are going to be under even more stress.

And then you keep shoveling it to the next one, eventually you're just going to bury the dump truck.

So that was kind of the national outage.

So at the more local level, in this case, at the state level, this was another switch issue that didn't fail over properly, but again, kind of different magnitude.

And this one wasn't caused necessarily, we don't know yet if it was software or not, but it was not caused by, you know, this big surge load from another switch failure somewhere else in the line.

It was solely independent.

on its failure.

And then I'm sorry, I forgot the second part of your question.

Oh, it was all the peace apps.

Yes, all the other peace apps in Key County were affected by this about the same time.

I suspect because of our call volume and our size, we were probably one of the earlier ones to notice it than some of the others.

Uh, but it wasn't too long into the incident before we again started reaching out to King County 911 and then found out that, you know, okay, everybody's starting to have the same problem.

Thank you.

And then just moving forward, um, you talk about whether or not the C.

S. C. C. Has a continue of operation, uh, continuity of operations plan that's can be used in situations like this?

And sort of what's the plan in the unlikely likelihood, but one that we would need to plan for, that both the Seattle dispatch centers are down simultaneously, both at CSCC and SFD.

Also, just interested to know what's happening at the county or state level to increase continuity planning.

And then lastly, how the county-wide 9-1-1 platform modernization project for next generation 911 might reduce the likelihood of similar outages in the future?

Sure, yeah, more great questions.

So we do have a continuity of operations plan.

Unfortunately, it's a pretty old one.

It still is reminiscent from when 911 was underneath the police department.

And so it still has a lot of the police department stuff over the top of it.

Unfortunately, we've been wanting and trying to get to it.

But because we again, we're still working on some of the staffing issues for the back office support staffing as well.

We just haven't had anybody to kind of give it the refresh yet.

But that plan does address, you know, different types of failures.

Like you were asking about, Council Member, as far as, you know, is it out and out outage?

Is it just part of the failover type system?

To address your question as far as big surges, you know, if both centers happen to be out, for example, and as you mentioned, both centers, at least on the local level, act as a backup for each other.

So if we have to physically leave either of the 911 centers in Seattle, they are redundant and back up to each other.

So, you know, the CSCC dispatchers would come to the fire alarm center or vice versa to to maintain operations.

We did experience towards the end of last year one such failure that you were talking about.

I think I had mentioned in previous testimony before the committee There was a transformer that actually blew in Interbay.

It caused a surge.

It made a big enough explosion that the 9-1-1 center received within a single minute about 80 9-1-1 calls about the explosion, reporting it, asking about it, and whatnot.

In that type of a surge or in that type of a failure, the system is designed and all 911 centers are designed to appoint a backup center.

The City of Seattle, the CSCC in this case, has identified Spokane as our backup location, and that has to do with geographic diversity.

You know, we get a big earthquake or something like that.

In that case, Spokane did start receiving some of the overflow calls for our interbay transformer explosion.

They were able to identify that it was a Seattle problem, but of course had no idea of where the problem was or no ability to assign them, but they were able to reach out to us in that case.

you know, as far as the log number of calls and whatnot.

Um, to update you on the project, the project is well underway now as far as the 9-1-1 modernization throughout the King County.

And this is our PSAP project.

we're all connected here at the county level, and that will, as you mentioned, Councilmember, have the potential to reduce, if not eliminate a lot of these types of challenges because all of the phone systems for all the 911 centers in the county will be identical.

Um, and that will We will not be limited to just going to from the fire alarm center to CSCC or back and forth.

It will provide options.

Now, we haven't worked out a lot of the policy yet.

You have to have the capability first, but it will allow some of the capability for our 9-1-1 folks to go to other 9-1-1 centers in the county as a backup option.

We'll still have to work on how they get the computer aided dispatching and the radio access, but from a phone perspective, yes, they will be able to log on at other 9-1-1 centers and start receiving Seattle 9-1-1 calls.

So we're very excited about that project as it continues along.

Thank you so much, Dr. Lombard.

of you taking the time to be here with us today and all the work that you're doing.

Any other questions from council members still with us?

Not seeing any.

So we'll conclude this item.

Again, thank you, Director Lombard.

Thank you very much.

And next, Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for Tuesday, January 25th at 9.30 a.m.

before we adjourn.

Are there any comments from my colleagues?

All right, seeing none, it is 11.59 a.m.

and we are adjourned.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Be well.