Seattle City Council Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans & Education Committee 7/10/19

Good morning.

Today is Wednesday, July 10th, 2019, and it is 9.30 a.m.

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

I'm Council Member Lorena Gonzalez, chair of this committee, and joining me at the table is my colleague and vice chair, Council Member Teresa Mosqueda.

Thank you for being here.

If there is no objection, the agenda for today's meeting will be adopted.

Seeing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

There are two items on today's agenda.

First, we are going to receive a presentation from the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs regarding challenges to citizenship, particularly as it relates to how the federal government is undermining the citizenship application process.

Then, we will receive an update on the Emphasis Patrols Program from various city departments, including the mayor's office, Seattle Police Department, Seattle Department of Transportation, Department of Neighborhoods, the Seattle Office of Economic Development, and Seattle Parks and Recreation.

So before we go ahead and begin the items of business on our agenda, we will hold our regular public comment period.

So this is the opportunity for members of the public to join us in committee to give us public testimony for up to two minutes on items on the agenda for today's committee.

So, Roxanna, the clerk has handed me the public comment sign-in sheet and nobody has signed up for public comment today.

So, we will not have an opportunity to hear from folks.

Is there anyone in the audience who wanted to sign up for public comment but didn't have an opportunity to do so?

Okay, seeing no one, we will go ahead and close out public comment.

Just for purposes of folks in attendance here at the committee table and for those in the audience and watching, I'm going to ask that folks speak slowly at the committee table because we have visitors from Belarus in the audience.

So, welcome to all of you for joining us today.

It's good to have you here.

And we do have live translation happening in the audience, and so to allow that spontaneous interpretation to occur live, I'm just gonna ask us all to slow our speech down.

I think that'll be...

particularly difficult for you and I, Council Member Mosqueda.

We are fast talkers.

But I'm so excited to have you all join us to take an opportunity to see how here at the City of Seattle, at the local government level, we engage in democracy and do the people's business in a very open and transparent way.

And we actually have several media outlets in the audience today, and I know several of you are journalists from Belarus, so really excited to have you all join us, and looking forward to having you observe our business today.

We have a really exciting agenda, and I'm looking forward to digging into it, and hopefully it will be a productive session for all of us.

Great.

Okay.

So, Roxanna, why don't you go ahead and read the first agenda item into the record.

And while you do that, I would invite presenters for agenda item one to join us at the table.

Agenda item one, challenges to citizenship presentation for briefing and discussion.

Good morning, council members.

Good morning.

Thank you for being with us.

So you all were in the audience when I was asking that folks slow their speech down a little bit to allow the translators some grace to catch up with translating what we're saying.

So if you could please heed that, that'd be great.

I know several of you at the table are also fast talkers.

Please.

So let's do a round of introductions, and then I will go ahead and hand it over to you all for the presentation.

I'm Kubu.

I'm the Director of the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs.

I'm Christina Gross.

I'm a Citizenship Policy and Program Specialist.

Megan Kelly Stallings, Citizenship Program and Policy Specialist.

Great.

So we thought that a good place to start is just to describe why we do naturalization in the city.

It's been a long program and why we're here today.

For folks in the audience who have less context and familiarity with the issues, naturalization is one of those things that happens in an immigrant's life that you will remember forever.

And for me, I remember when I applied to become a citizen.

This was back in the 90s when it was only $90 to apply.

I was a graduate student in New York City and flew home to Seattle.

And on the day of my swearing-in ceremony, And at that time, it was still INS, the Immigration Naturalization Service.

I wrote them a letter of my application and said, please, can you schedule this during my winter break?

Because I can't.

afford to travel back as a graduate student.

And they did.

And it felt like, wow, somebody's really listening to me.

That's feeling less and less the case these days.

So the naturalization ceremony happened to be the same day that the government closed in honor of Richard Nixon's death.

And I thought, how ironic.

I'm actually here in this country partly because of him.

and it would be tragic if I could not take my oath ceremony also today because of him but it has turned out Government was closed, but the oath of ceremony appointments were the only things that were happening that day.

So what would normally be a very long day, I was in and out in 20 minutes.

So thanks to Richard Nixon in different ways, I'm here, and it was a very efficient process.

So a lot has changed since then.

And we want to talk a little bit about what some of those changes have taken place.

And not only from the time that I did it, which predated the creation of U.S.

Citizenship and Information Services, USCIS.

And as you recall, there were three new agencies created under Department of Homeland Security as a result of the Homeland Security Act in 2003. a reaction to the tragedies of 9-11.

And so the functions of what was INS now got transferred to this new agency called USCIS.

And since that time, there's been a lot of, the mission statement was largely the same, even under a Republican president at that time who made those changes.

President Bush.

But today, under President Trump, USCIS's mission has changed.

And so we thought that would be a good place to start, just to give you a sense of what USCIS was created to do, and its stated mission statement, and now what it has pivoted towards.

So prior to Trump, USCIS focused on services and benefits.

And from its mission statement, as you can see here in the text that's highlighted in red, it's to secure America's promise as a nation of immigrants.

So that acknowledgment of our history and the function of granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship.

And today, among the many things that President Trump has done, including those early executive orders in 2017, that very early on cast his intention to beef up enforcement.

And some of that then cascaded, not only in terms of more border security agents, a heightened focus now on interior enforcement.

but also shifting USCIS towards more of enforcement.

And so you see some of that language reflected.

They took out that mention of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants.

It no longer exists in USCIS, its mission statement.

And rather, most of the language now has been changed.

And it talks about adjudicating requests while protecting Americans, securing the homeland.

So very much towards an enforcement framework.

And that's where our story begins.

So we're gonna turn it over to Megan and Christina to give you more detail about what has happened both in policy and practice over the last two years.

So first of all, just a brief overview of what our office does as it relates to citizenship.

The New Citizen Campaign was launched in 2016 as an effort to really increase the number of Seattle area lawful permanent residents who seek naturalization.

The campaign surrounds outreach and education, but also a lot of the focus has been on group processing events where volunteer attorneys assist applicants in applying for the N400, the citizenship application.

So as you may recall, we had a series of very large events or workshops where we assisted anywhere from 200 people in one day all the way up to 1,000 participants in one day.

This year has been a bit of a shift.

In 2019, we've only done citizenship clinics, as we call them, and these are smaller events that are focused on serving only 25 to 50 applicants in a day, and we offer these monthly through our nonprofit partners.

So it's been a bit of a shift on our end in terms of large, flashy events, and now we're focusing in on smaller settings where people can really get a lot of one-on-one attention, and through a collaboration of nonprofit partners.

Our other citizenship assistance program is the New Citizen Program.

And New Citizen Program has been around for over 20 years.

It was formerly housed in the Human Services Department and came over to OIRA in 2015. And it's 12 local partner agencies who provide case management services from clients from, you know, intake screening until usually the day they take the oath ceremony.

Can you get the microphone closer to you?

Sure.

You can pull it closer to you so you don't have to.

It's better?

Okay.

So NCP clients receive legal representation in case management services, including preparation for the citizenship test, and in many cases, their representative attends the citizenship interview with them.

Many NCP clients have disabilities that prevent them from becoming English proficient and passing the civics exam, and NCP providers help them obtain the relevant waivers of those requirements that would allow them to become citizens.

Seattle invests more than $1 million a year in citizenship, and that represents one of the largest municipal investments in citizenship anywhere in the nation.

We work with both with New Citizen Campaign and the New Citizen Program.

We work with 20 local partner agencies.

Many of them have been our partners for well over a decade, some since the beginning of the New Citizen Program in 1998. Okay.

So one of the things we're going to talk about today is the changes that have affected the citizenship application process since Trump came into office.

And a few of them are changes that have been implemented from the policy level, so coming down from USCIS leadership.

And these have already been implemented.

And these changes, to kind of sum them up, they greatly increase the risks of applying for citizenship.

Previously, if someone applied for citizenship, didn't meet a requirement or maybe didn't pass the exam during their interview, they could be rejected or maybe they would apply again a few years later.

But the actual risk of them applying was fairly minimal.

According to official USCIS policy, now if the denial of their case reveals any potential ground of removal, the government will now issue what's called a Notice to Appear that basically enters them into removal proceedings.

That was not previously policy, and now that really raises the stakes a lot for people who are applying, because before, you know, there was some risk to not succeeding, you could say, but the risks weren't nearly as significant in terms of potential removal.

There are several potential changes that are being made through the administrative realm.

And Christina will speak more about this in a little while.

But to date, our office has submitted eight public comments related to administrative, proposed administrative rule changes that would negatively impact immigrants.

So you'll see that these are, you know, appear to be changes to forms related to the citizenship process.

But these are administrative changes that have a major effect.

These changes make the forms more complex.

They make the process harder for both applicants and their legal representatives.

Some of these changes, especially those related to public charge, and again, public charge is a designation that immigration makes that determines that certain people who receive benefits are dependent on those benefits and therefore may not be eligible for certain types of immigration status.

Those proposed changes have had a real chilling effect.

They've affected immigrants' ability to live healthy lives because they choose to disenroll from benefits that they may need and are eligible for.

Our partners, our community partners have asked us to be involved in pushing back on these proposed rule changes to advocate against these changes that will really make their work harder.

And they're already seeing is making things more, you know, making their clients more fearful and nervous about entering the citizenship application process.

Yeah.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you so much for helping us understand the way that these policy changes, even the proposed ones, have had a real impact on whether or not people are applying for services that they're eligible for.

We hear about that happening here as it relates to eligibility for healthcare, even healthcare that undocumented kiddos are eligible for.

Obviously, lawfully permanent residents as well are eligible Medicaid expansion and wondering what it looks like.

You said that the advocates have asked you to weigh in.

What does that look like?

What's the current status?

How can we help?

And are there issues that you're also helping with at the state level to try to make sure people do know their opportunities, their rights to apply for state and local programs as well?

I can speak to that briefly, but I know that DSHS, who we partner with on...

Get a little closer.

DSHS, their Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance, who we partner with on the New Citizen Program, you know, they, I think, are trying to constantly inform people that they are, they remain eligible for benefits, that, you know, even I mean, the public charge changes haven't even taken effect yet.

They haven't even been approved.

But there's just so much concern and so much fear around it.

So I think they try to share information that's accurate and kind of dispel rumors around that.

But in terms of what we see, I mean, from our providers, we hear that people are afraid to be on public benefits.

They will disenroll from public benefits.

They are nervous that, being on public benefits will prevent them from becoming a citizen, which is not the case at all.

But they're, you know, in a position where they make really hard choices about whether they stay on public benefits versus pursue an immigration benefit.

And that, it's just so unfortunate that that's out there.

I would just add that it is a bit difficult for our advocates and for our office to create some kind of campaign or public education or awareness campaign surrounding public charge, specifically because even currently for people who are applying for U.S. citizenship, there are potential risks to receiving public benefits.

If they're applying for a family member abroad, their public benefits are being considered currently.

And so it's a very complex issue in terms of spreading awareness, because it's really an individual consultation that needs to be had with a legal professional to determine whether that person really should be receiving public benefits, because even now, even though the public charge that's listed on that previous chart is not, that policy has not taken effect, there is a foreign affairs manual policy that's already in place.

And so some of these things, the reason why we've listed really long lists of the things that have changed is that it's very complex to spread the word about these things, because There is no easy answer.

And so we would love to do a public awareness campaign and let people know it's okay to stay enrolled in benefits.

But for some people, it's actually not great right now.

And so we have to be very careful about how we spread the message that, yes, it is okay for the majority of people applying for citizenship.

But there's a small caveat.

Oh, and so one of, in addition to the national policy changes, we've seen a lot of changes at our local offices in terms of how USCIS officers are adjudicating cases.

One of the biggest local impacts that we see is also a national issue, and it's something that the council has taken action on, something we call the second wall.

Last summer, you all passed a resolution supporting the effort to bring down the second wall, as we call it, which is a backlog of cases, specifically for citizenship, but really for all types of immigration benefits.

This backlog currently in Seattle is over 16 months.

So that means in the past, somebody might apply for citizenship and receive their interview within three or four months.

Now the minimum is 16 months.

So this is a real deterrent for people as they're deciding on whether to apply for citizenship.

I won't go into all the items listed there, but suffice it to say that the different ways that the officers are handling cases in the office has also extended the time necessary to go through the interview.

For instance, they're asking every single question on the 20-page form, which didn't used to be the case.

This takes up a lot more time.

They're interviewing cases that they never used to interview for, so that takes away from time that they should be interviewing for citizenship applications.

And one of the most difficult changes that we've seen just recently and will be implemented next week is that the local Seattle office is now sending cases from the Seattle area to Portland and Yakima for their interviews.

So our nonprofit partners right now are basically in a panic trying to figure out how they will get their clients who are elderly and firm, who are oftentimes disabled, who don't own a car, how will they get to Portland for a 7.30 a.m.

interview.

And how will they accompany them for that interview when they have 12 other cases that are having interviews that same day, both in Seattle and Portland?

And so this is a big change that we've just seen recently, and we're kind of scrambling to figure out what to do about it.

But this is a type of example of what we're seeing pretty much on a regular basis over the last two years.

And these are procedure and policy changes that are specifically designed to created disincentive for people to want to participate in the process?

I would say disincentive or hardship.

Well, if it's a hardship, you're going to not have a lot of incentive to participate in the process.

USCIS' messaging around the change of venues for the interviews is that they're trying to lower the backlog because there's less of a backlog in Yakima and in Portland.

But we don't see it that way.

We see it as the potential that, yeah, it might decrease the backlog because so many people will be unable to attend and they'll be denied.

And so, yes, it may decrease the backlog, but they've been unable to give us any specifics about how many people are going to these different offices, how long this policy will be in place, et cetera.

So have you all given any thought to how the City of Seattle might be able to support an effort to mitigate some of these hardships?

Christine, do you want to talk about the flyer that we just created.

Yes.

In the rideshare.

Yeah.

We've been, again, basically scrambling over the last couple weeks to try and figure this out.

We're looking at different rideshare applications or carpooling applications that people might use to kind of connect.

We have a large pool of volunteers, for instance, who really would potentially want to help with this.

carpooling people to Portland or Yakima.

And so we're looking into that, but it's been a little bit difficult to coordinate in terms of insurance, and we're looking for a nonprofit partner that might be better able to take that on.

One of our local partners, Asian Counseling and Referral Service, is looking into whether or not they can use their van to take people back and forth, which could be sustainable if this were a month-long policy, We're pretty sure it's going to be a year or more that they're implementing this.

So we're trying right now, and we're trying to coordinate with our partners and actually reaching out to tech companies, too, to see if they could help to create kind of a matching type rideshare applications for our volunteers and our clients and participants.

So it's a work in progress right now, but we're trying to figure out the best way to do so that we'll not place any liability issues on our partners or on the city.

Currently, the folks who are being sent to Portland and Yakima are mostly surrounding the city of Seattle, so sometimes actually further north than us, but it could be that Seattle, actual Seattle residents are sent to Portland and Yakima soon as well.

So we're trying and we're trying to figure out what the best role of the city is.

I don't know if, oh, sorry, Kou mentioned we have actually a resource sheet too as well that offers information on Bolt buses and Greyhound and Amtrak trains and the cheapest hotels in those areas.

And so it's kind of disappointing to discuss because I wish we could be doing more right now and would welcome any ideas.

for how we could be more supportive of our participants and our partners.

Has there been any outreach to any of the community-based organizations in Portland?

There are quite a few in the Portland area that work in this space, and it would be It would be interesting to see if there's a way that we can create a connection between our community-based organizations and those that are in Portland who help to support refugees and immigrants.

That's a great idea.

We haven't yet, because this has been, I think, in the last couple of weeks.

But I think that's a great suggestion, and we'll take that action.

Great.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you.

So I appreciate the connections that you're making and the outreach that you're doing for potential opportunities to carpool.

But what is the legal requirement of the federal government to make a hearing accessible?

Is there not a legal challenge that can be brought?

We've, I think the AILA attorneys are looking at this right now.

And as far as we know, based on precedent, that there is no requirement.

Or Megan, do you have a different point of view?

And I was just going to say, AILA attorneys and, you know, other community-based legal advocates have been asking for accommodations to be made to assist in, you know, whether it's telephonic appearances by attorneys, and USCIS is one willing to make any accommodations.

Just a follow-up.

But there's no clear guidance that we can point to in federal policy statute that says, here's your requirement as the federal government?

Unfortunately, this type of policy in terms of relocating interviews has happened.

I'm not saying there's not a legal basis to fight it, but there's a long history of this happening, not in Seattle previously, but I mean, Christina can speak to when it happened in New York.

I'm hoping that, you know, the right legal minds can come up with some sort of duty that the government isn't fulfilling at this point.

What's different about this now is that in rural communities where people were far away from USCIS regional offices, that would put the responsibility on the applicant to get him or herself to an interview or an oath ceremony.

And sometimes it would be, you know, a few hours drive.

What's different now is that we actually have a regional office in Seattle, in this area, and people are being asked to go hours outside of where an office already exists.

And the infrastructure for transportation puts the responsibility on the person to pay out of their own pocket also to do this.

And with your union background, that's lost wages for many folks.

And then you kind of combine that with what we're going to talk about in a little bit, is the threat of elimination of a fee waiver, another means-tested methods to make naturalization more affordable.

So it's becoming, with all these barriers, more and more like a pay to play system that punishes poor people.

Something that, you know, a story we wanted to tell about the impact of kind of this shift within USCIS policy is something that occurred a few months ago.

Chinese Information Service Center is both an NCC, New Citizen Campaign, and New Citizen Program partner.

And they had a client who they had represented from start to finish as a participant in New Citizen Program.

this client had passed her citizenship interview, including the civics and English exams, and she was invited to attend an oath ceremony a few days later.

She was checking in for her oath ceremony, and the officer she spoke to, just when, you know, turning in a form, deemed that her English was not, in fact, good enough, and turned her away.

Thankfully, she had an accredited representative at CISC, and she told him right away, and he took action right away.

Other advocates within New Citizen Program and even in the broader immigration attorney community, no one had ever heard of anything like this happening.

Initially, it was like some interaction in an elevator or something, wasn't it?

It was like kind of a checking in desk.

You submit a form that you've checked all these boxes.

There was no issue with how she had filled out the form, but there was some sort of miscommunication, background noise, and she, according to the officer, did not appear to understand or respond in proficient English, despite the fact that that has nothing to do with the fact she had already been approved.

So initially a local CIS official stood behind what the officer had done and what had happened and issued a letter stating that the case had been reopened for reexamination and reevaluation.

But after this client's advocate from CISC responded with a comprehensive legal argument, And our office facilitated some intervention from Senator Murray's office.

That motion to reopen was rescinded, and the client was rescheduled for an oath ceremony, and she successfully took the oath.

But she was traumatized, and what if she hadn't had a legal representative?

The situation is really indicative of a cultural shift within USCIS that has emboldened officers to go beyond the rules, go beyond, you know, their role in certain circumstances to make it that much harder to get U.S. citizenship, even in this case for someone who had met every single requirement.

So this is Abdi Jama.

He is a partner of ours through the New Citizen campaign and New Citizen program.

They have been a partner of ours through the larger workshops and they have led or co-led six clinics in the last three years.

And they have seen an increase in the difficulty of the kind of cases that are walking through the doors at the clinics.

I think this has been a trend not only for clinic participants but also for NCP clients that people with the amount of fear in the air, the amount of negative rhetoric surrounding immigration in general in the country, people are now turning out to naturalize who have been permanent residents for 20, 25, 30 years or more.

In 2017 and 2018, our clinics saw an increase in the number of years that our participants have been LPRs.

So what this means, along with the increased difficulty of the cases, the increased questioning and interrogations at the interviews, this means that we have to be a lot more careful with the types of cases that we let through.

And a lot of our clinic clients end up having to go through a Freedom of Information Act request to receive a copy of their files so that we can feel safer about actually sending in their applications.

So this means that the work for our partners both in the clinic setting and in the one-on-one case management setting has increased.

It's gotten more difficult.

In the clinic setting we've responded by we're working on a much longer screening form.

One of the forms used by one of our partners is 17 pages long So this means a lot more time for our participants spent in the clinic setting But it is something that we're we're trying to implement to make people safer or feel safer going through this process And we can feel confident that they're okay and I think The only other thing I wanted to say about that is that a lot more of the cases are also not being pushed through in the clinics but are actually being referred back to our community partners for one-on-one services or also to private attorneys as necessary.

And I just want to do a quick time check.

We have about four minutes left.

Okay.

I think we're getting to the end here.

So this is actually what we most wanted to talk about.

I will try not to speed up my speech, but the changes to the fee waiver form have been something on our radar since last year, September.

While we were in the middle of the public charge debate and public commenting session, USCIS produced a changed form I-912 that went under the radar.

Essentially, when someone is applying for U.S. citizenship, the fee currently is $725.

People are eligible for a fee waiver if they are low income or receive means tested benefits.

Generally, it's for people who are under 150% of the federal poverty line.

The change to the form is intended to eliminate the use of a public benefits letter as proof that somebody is low income.

The vast majority of the cases that we see for folks applying for a fee waiver do use that public benefits form because it's the easiest proof of low income status.

So, this elimination is pretty much imminent.

We just submitted our third public comment on this issue last week.

But we believe that that change to the form can happen at any time, which will very much affect our services.

So, it has a potential to be devastating to the NCP program and very much hinder the new citizen campaign clinics.

What's even more worrisome is that we have heard through our national partners and advocates that there are changes coming to the fee schedule and also the potential elimination of the fee waiver altogether.

The USCIS is going through a fee schedule review currently, which is supposedly set to be released in August.

And what we believe will be announced is that the fee for citizenship will increase by 83%, which would put us at over $1,250 for citizenship, and that simultaneously they will announce the elimination of the fee waiver.

So this means that anyone who is at all low income or even middle income would be unable to apply for citizenship.

So we wanted to put that on your radar because this is something we are really, really nervous about.

This would devastate our programs if there was an elimination of the fee waiver and the fee went up at the same time.

Just the changes to the fee waiver form, which as I mentioned are pretty much eminent, That's going to very much hinder our ability to do our work and our partner's ability to do the work.

But the elimination of the fee waiver altogether is going to be devastating.

And so we are working to fight against these changes, but we wanted to put that on your radar that our partners are doing a lot more work currently.

And the setting that we're seeing in front of us means that they will have to respond yet again and really adapt to this new environment that they actually may not be able to adapt to.

I'm going to quickly go through the next couple of slides.

This here is numbers based on research from our national partner, the National Partnership for New Americans, and it has data for Washington and the U.S. that this so-called second wall, there are about 20,000, 28 people in the state of Washington who are waiting for adjudication of their application.

and across the country, almost three quarters of a million people who are waiting.

And we believe that half to two thirds of that 20,000 are in the Seattle King County area.

Just to put that 753,000 number into perspective, that's approximately the population of the city of Seattle.

That's right.

Yep.

And the impact on service providers.

I think the main thing here, Christina talked about, is that the cases are harder.

It takes longer to serve each client.

It takes more legal expertise for individual cases.

The threat to the programs that we provide is very real.

And then I think for me, there's a, what is, The end impact, I think at an individual level, it is a person's dream.

It was always my dream to become naturalized.

But there are also economic benefits.

So as you recall, people who are naturalized earn more than their non-naturalized counterparts.

have a sense of belonging.

And when you take those things away, it's really taking away their ability to envision a better future for themselves and their families.

And at a national level, the impact is our country.

It gets to the soul of who we are.

We have never been a country that's been based on whether or not you can afford naturalization because you're a high earner.

That has never been the case for us, but now we are on the precipice of that becoming the reality.

So there's a lot at stake here.

We're working hard every day.

Thank you for your support, and we follow up with you in the outreach to Yakima and Portland, and we'll get back to you with more details.

That's great, thank you so much for taking the time to pull this presentation together with a lot of rich information.

I see several opportunities here for the city of Seattle to enhance the work that we're doing in this space and look forward to having conversations with you.

during our regular check-in, which I think is happening next week, about how we might be able to advance some of those opportunities.

But really appreciate the work that you're doing.

I think you articulated it very well that this is an example of how this president has utilized his executive power and authority to undermine one of the fundamental values of America, which is to welcome immigrants and refugees and to be a place of sanctuary for people who are making very difficult decisions to leave their home country for very legitimate, reasonable reasons.

And I think that cities like Seattle play a really important role in creating systems of resilience that allow immigrants and refugees and their families to fully integrate into our society and our communities here and have been really proud of the work we've been able to do together to invest in those resiliency programs.

Everything from the new citizenship program to our legal defense fund that provides free lawyers to immigrants and refugees who are at risk of deportation and so many other things that we do that you all do every day in your office.

So really appreciate the hard work that you're doing in a space that is constantly evolving and not in a way that makes us proud as Americans.

really appreciate all the work that you're doing.

Colleagues, any other comments or questions?

Council Member Musqueda.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I know we're running short on time.

Just very briefly, there was an individual who came two weeks ago in our full committee and The chair of public safety and new Americans and gender equity was not there, Council Member Gonzalez.

And I think if she was, she would have been able to directly speak to what the city has done.

And I was hoping that you could also comment.

And I believe in civil disobedience, especially when we see kids and families getting locked in cages.

camps being erected that are creating unlivable and unhealthy situations for our immigrant and refugees that are trying to come to the United States.

But the individual who was speaking was trying to demand of the city that we do more to prevent ICE from arresting people for example at public places like courts and we didn't have the chance to have a dialogue at that conversation but do you mind very briefly just for the record talking about what the city of Seattle currently has in place to protect individuals who are especially going in for their court hearings for citizenship issues.

from being detained by ICE.

So that's clear, and we clear up that record.

I know that your staff had reached out to our office, so we had responded.

There's a couple of key things.

One is, there was a mayoral directive that went out in early 2017 instructing city departments not to share information about, personal information about city residents unless there was a warrant for that information And so that has cascaded down to the staff level.

The other is, we partner with community organizations.

The Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, for example, following an incident at the courthouse where ICE did arrest somebody who had, you know, shown up at the courthouse for a hearing, and they conducted their enforcement.

They arrested him outside in the public area, the sidewalks.

We can't regulate that area because those are public spaces, but we did reach out to the court, the Seattle Municipal Court.

They have since put up Know Your Rights flyers with a toll-free number and information about what to do if such an incident should happen to them.

I would just add to that that, you know, we just heard or saw a recent report.

I don't know if you all read the reports this morning or yesterday that King County has shared information, King County Jails in particular, has shared information with ICE related to individuals who are in detention who have immigration status complications or issues that is in contravention of a law that was actually passed and is on the books at King County and there is a lot of concern obviously related to how that information sharing occurred and why officers, correctional officers were Capturing the information in the first place and so I think there are there is an opportunity For us because we recognize that there are Seattle residents who are in detention at King County I think there's an opportunity for us to engage the county and getting a better understanding and sense of how the law that was passed I believe in was it, 2016?

I think it was just last year, actually.

Just last year, 2018, how that law is actually being implemented and how the training is occurring with officers to ensure that this type of information sharing isn't occurring.

And so this is on the tail of also the news that ICE was utilizing King County airfield to transport immigrants and refugees who were being deported from the country.

And so, again, part of the reason why I really pushed the prior administration, mayoral administration, around creating this executive order was precisely because I was worried that implementation of our laws that provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants and refugees were not being appropriately or fully implemented, and that our own staff, our own House wasn't unaware of how to actually implement policies and laws that were implemented.

And passed by city council and supported by mayors year after year after year and so I think the executive order went a long way I do think given the recent examples.

It would be a good opportunity to send to have the mayor send a refresher to Staff and to all of the departments within the executive to Once again reaffirm that this is the policy.

This is how you deal with it But to your point around what can we do to protect?

people who are coming into public spaces to receive public benefits?

Unfortunately, the answer is there are not a ton.

We cannot prevent ICE from having a footprint in the city, and they will engage in enforcement activity, which is why I've been really clear in my messaging, as somebody who came up in the immigrant justice rights movement, is to make really clear to folks that even though we're a sanctuary city, that does not mean that ice does not exist in the city of Seattle.

And there are still risks associated with moving about even in the city of Seattle and the county and King County and the state of Washington, there are risks moving around in public spaces so long as ice exists.

And there is very little that we can do to prevent that other than educate folks about what their rights are if they do have contact with an ICE officer.

So.

Thank you.

That's what I'll say.

Oh, Council Member Pacheco.

Sorry for missing your presentation.

Just to echo and support the comments that my colleagues have made.

And if I can ever be of service during my time, please let me know.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Really appreciate the presentation and your time here.

We're going to go ahead and move on to our second agenda item.

I apologize for being a little late to our second panel.

So, Roxanna, why don't you go ahead and read agenda item two into the record.

If you are here to present on the second panel, I invite you to make your way to the table as this item is being read.

Agenda item two, Seattle Police Department emphasis patrols update and evaluation for briefing and discussion.

And if the members of the media would like to move their cameras behind the dais, you are welcome to do so.

Sorry, I was distracted.

Okay, well, it is a full panel this morning.

We managed to wrap around the table.

I really appreciate your all's willingness to join us again for what is a third conversation around, or a second conversation around emphasis area and patrols and to provide us an update on the progress of this work.

Of course, this was an announcement that was made by the executive in May, if I recall correctly, that there would be additional law enforcement plus resources pushed out into specific neighborhoods, seven, at the time for a period of about 30 days in order to address some crime and disorder livability concerns in those specific neighborhoods.

After we had our last committee hearing, we learned in our office that the timeline of how long the emphasis patrols would exist would be Extended for a longer period of time and so that brings us to today which gives us an opportunity to as council members here directly from the various departments who have been engaged in this work to provide us with an update and I know that you all have a very in-depth data-rich, detailed presentation.

And nonetheless, I have several questions that I feel have still been unanswered from the initial letter that I sent to the executive and the police department in May.

So I will be pressing for answers in those spaces.

And I'm not going to let you go until I hear what I want to hear.

I just want to make that really clear.

All right.

Let's do introductions, and then I will hand it over for presentation.

Greg Doss, Council Central Staff.

Andres Mantilla, Director, Department of Neighborhoods.

The green light has to be on, Julie.

Okay.

Julie Klein from the Mayor's Office.

Sam Zimbabwe, SDOT.

Christopher Williams, Seattle Parks.

Chris Fisher, Seattle Police.

Eric Greening, Seattle Police.

Bobby Lee, OED.

Great.

Thank you all.

Who wants to kick us off?

I'll get us started here.

I think the number of people at the table is a good demonstration of the number of departments and the cooperation that was involved in this effort this summer.

And the mayor's department, as we kind of get started on the report out, up to date anyway, wants to make sure that we're Thanking from the bottom of our hearts all the departments for the the sort of extraordinarily hard work and cooperation during this entire project The number of hours in the effort was really above and beyond from all of the different city departments in this case and so we wanted to make sure that the council knows how much cooperation occurred during this emphasis project.

And I know the council is familiar with the sort of how this got started and why it got started.

But Andres Montilla from, I'm sorry, Montilla from Dawn is here and he's going to kind of give a little bit of an overview before we go into sort of the overall Seattle Police Department trends and then into specifics into individual neighborhoods.

And as it makes sense, if council members want to raise questions, that's great.

Great.

Thank you, Julie.

And so I will be kind of walking through various of the many of these slides and then turning to my colleagues when there needs to be more specific with the assistance of Bobby Lee from OED.

But I want to just echo quickly the staff recognition Many, not just officers, but many of the staff from all across the people at this table, but others really coming together in a way that really showed a new level of collaboration to have service delivery.

And so as you all know, this was an emphasis patrol program, but we saw an opportunity to take it beyond just the typical SPD-led efforts around emphasis patrols.

We saw it as an opportunity to bring a variety of departments to the table to really center on how do we improve that community relationship and that community feedback.

around what the community, what business owners want to see happen in their neighborhood business districts and along the streets.

And we're using this framework and this infrastructure, if you will, to start to expand that into kind of future walks or future attempts.

And we'll go into that towards the end of the presentation once we go over some of the basics.

It really showed us that this model can be effective and is effective when we're, you know, breaking down the silos of government and saying, okay, what are we hearing directly from the community and how do we address that in a timely manner?

Go ahead.

Yeah, I agree with that.

And if I may, the mayor's office.

Dr. Lee, if you can pull that microphone.

Thank you.

It has to be awkwardly close to your face in order for it to actually pick up your voice.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The Mayor's Office has spent an enormous amount of time coordinating this effort.

And I just want to recognize, of course, the Mayor and then Senior Deputy Mayor Fong, Julie Klein, Kirsten Grove, Kyla Blair.

Maritza Rivera, Sabrina Below.

These folks have really worked extremely, extremely hard to make sure we have a wraparound approach to solving problems at the street level and have rapid response back at the neighborhood level with real problem solving.

And so with that, I do want to recognize them.

OED's role in this is specifically to raise the voice of many of our neighborhood small businesses.

Many are owned by people of color and the immigrant population.

They're integral part of our economy.

Collectively, they are the contributor to our local economy, but also they contribute back as a real-time feedback to our city departments about the health of our neighborhoods.

So they're a great partner to our community policing, to neighborhood design, streetscapes, to land use planning.

They provide a real feedback, real-time feedback to our city departments, so they're great partners.

So not only collectively are they the drivers of our economy, but they're the backbone of our civic engagement and a great partner in that field.

And so my role in this is to make sure that their voices, again, many owned by people of color, immigrant population, have a say in how we solve real-time problems at the neighborhood level.

With that.

Yeah, so we're going to get into it.

We have about 40 slides to get through, so we're going to try to be intentional with our time here.

Okay, just a just a minute because Councilmember Mosqueda has a question so Happy to see all of your faces.

I guess I'm a little confused though about why this is getting so much attention For being a unique and I think you said Body that has gone above and beyond is this not the type of group that you have pulled together to address homelessness?

overall, I know we've had multiple conversations at the select committee on talking about what other cities have done.

Notably, the city of Los Angeles has had a task force that gets together, I believe, if not daily, at least weekly.

I had the chance to sit in on one of those briefings.

I know that many folks from the mayor's office also went down to Los Angeles.

city and had the chance to talk to folks there about the coordinated effort.

I would assume that a body like this comes together to talk about not just how to offer citations and infractions and book folks in jail, but also talks about how you can coordinate efforts to get folks inside.

Now, I think that's challenging given that on an average night recently the numbers showed that there's only six enhanced shelter beds open per night so I can see where there's a challenge in actually offering people a place to stay if we're not building housing and opening more shelters.

But does a body like this exist for helping people get inside versus citations and sweeping folks?

So thank you for that point.

I think there's a couple of things you highlighted there specific to housing the unsheltered and working with our shelter system, which is definitely part of this.

But what I'm talking about in terms of collaboration is that even if that task force existed, this is an opportunity for kind of almost every city department coming together and meeting the needs of the community, whether they be around housing unsheltered, whether it be in business support, whether it be in a needed law enforcement response, whether it be something along those lines.

And we're going to get into something like that, the details around that, so that as we continue to build this out, SPD will still be at the table, but it will be a broader collaboration of departments, including HSD, including our folks from FAS that are pitching into these solutions.

So you said even if it existed, does that mean it does not exist?

I think the HSD in the mayor's office is constantly convening around homeless coordination, for sure.

Yeah, and Julie, if you want to add to that.

Yeah, so before you move on, I think to To put a fine point on the line of questioning being posed by Council Member Mosqueda, it really does come back to the initial question that I asked back in May, which is, what is the theory of change?

What are we doing here?

And why are we doing it?

That is still very much unclear and in my mind has not yet been answered by the executive in terms of why are we doing this in the first place.

So I get it.

Emphasis patrols are not a new tool.

It's something that Seattle Police Department has used for a long time and it's just fancy talk for we're gonna put more cops in a particular area to do proactive policing to prevent crime and disorder from occurring, right?

But I haven't had a clear understanding yet.

I do not have a clear understanding yet of what is it that we are, what are the outcomes?

What are we trying to achieve through this effort that is being referred to as emphasis areas?

And we're going to get through that towards the end of the presentation.

But I will say that even though this is an emphasis patrol report in emphasis areas, what I'm trying to kind of articulate here is that it is a broader effort to bring city departments outside of City Hall and meet community where they're at and address their needs.

Some of those needs are SPD related.

A lot of them as we go through it, as we went through some of these walks, had really nothing to do with SPD.

They had to do with some of the improvements that SDOT needed to do as it relates to sidewalks, as it relates to crosswalks.

Parks is here.

We'll talk about a lot of the improvements that happened in South Park.

that were park related, you know, activation, cleanups in terms of park cleanups.

And so that's the opportunity as we see it is City Hall getting out of City Hall and going into community on a regular basis so that we continue to improve relationship.

And so that's what's exciting to me as Department of Neighborhoods is we are building this infrastructure that we can really add on to as we are seeing what some of the concerns are from community.

So, but that's not the theory of change because otherwise the theory of change would be to get bureaucrats out of City Hall.

I don't think that's what the theory of change is here.

Well, if we can go through the PowerPoint, we can, we can get a little bit more.

I'm going to push you all on this because I want to know at the end of the day, why are we doing this?

What is the purpose?

What are the outcomes?

What are the deliverables?

Because people are expecting to see sustained long-term change as a result of additional taxpayer dollar investments in this space.

And we're going to continue to get questions about why are we doing this while we are also not feeling a difference in our communities and in our neighborhoods as a result of these investments.

I feel like it's really important for us to have that question posed and have that question answered directly.

So if we go to the next slide, there's an element here that I think we can start getting into that.

So I'm going to turn it over, the next two slides, I'm going to turn it over to SPD.

Thank you.

So Madam Chair, council members.

First, we just wanted to kick off of an overview for some context of how the city is looking year to date on crime and noticed one little typo here.

So at the top, it says citywide crime year to date is down 13%.

That was meant to be in June, it was down 13% year to date through July 9th.

And when we pulled this data, as you can see on the table, it was down 11%.

In May as its own month, May, 2019 compared to May 2018 was down 10 percent.

June 2019 compared to June 2018 was down 13 percent.

And when you look at the line chart at the bottom, you see except for January where the numbers were close, so far every month this year purported major crime has been down every month and we're The only major category is where there is an increase.

And while small, every increase is not acceptable.

We have an uptick in rape that the department and other sexual assaults that the department is tracking and constantly discussing.

At our CSTAT meeting, our special victims unit has assessed all those.

There's no pattern.

They don't see any evidence of anything from a serial nature that's a concern.

There's some known relationship issues that there and then are aggravated assaults as Usual are occurring around nightlife and some individuals in either drug or mental health induced crisis moments That's where we see a large part of those Scale-wise, 13 and 14 increases.

Percent-wise, 9% increase in sexual assault, rape, and 1% in aggravated assault.

All other categories being down.

So that's just sort of setting the context city-wide.

Obviously, this is looking at seven neighborhoods.

And so I just want to make sure that I recognize the nuance here, because this chart shows us citywide data, which means that it's average, if you will, for all neighborhood, all precincts, all crime data.

And what we have seen in prior presentations from the police department is an acknowledgment that these numbers don't accurately reflect what is happening in specific precincts and neighborhoods when you really drill into the data.

And so, you know, those, these numbers change pretty drastically when you start really digging into micro communities and really look at that crime data.

And I think that's important because even though here it shows that aggravated assaults are up 1% year to date and that rape is up 9% year to date, that again, those numbers may be significantly higher in specific neighborhoods based on what is happening in those neighborhoods.

If Councilmember Herbold is here, she would say that that is, you know, that is a reflection of what we are hearing from people in neighborhoods who are concerned about additional criminal activity occurring in their neighborhoods that is of a violent nature, not petty property theft.

property crimes, but serious high-level violent offenses that need to be immediately addressed in order to keep victims and potential victims safe, but also to keep sort of the social fabric together in those neighborhoods.

Yes, and we will talk about that for these specific neighborhoods that are part of this initiative at the moment.

But we also routinely, I'm often, when I explain to folks in other departments how we use our micro-community policing plans, I really stress that I think more so than what I've seen other departments, when we talk about crime and trends at CSTAT, we're not talking, most of our conversations are driven around neighborhood level trends.

We're not talking about sectors and beats.

We're talking about what's happening in the different neighborhoods and who's up and who's down.

So I do think the department tries to address that and we'll get into that a little bit here.

But this was just to set the broader context for how's the city doing in the midst of this.

And so this is a little bit, Madam Chair, to speak to your question about theory of change, about what we were looking to do here.

And so I can, we're happy to provide to council a robust list of the research that we consult in terms of how we design this, but where I'm gonna zero in is on Dr. David Weisbord of George Mason University, who is, for lack of a better phrase, the father of place-based policing and understanding how crime concentrates in neighborhoods and locations and street blocks and why.

He mostly did a lot of his initial research here in Seattle.

And so one of his first big initial findings was Seattle has around 23,000 or 24,000 blocks, street faces.

About 1% of those blocks account for 23% of the crime.

that happens in Seattle.

It's a little bit more, I would say, super concentrated than in other cities.

What he further found and what drove the design of this work was when you lay on top of that, on those street blocks, the social factors in terms of measures about complaints around weeds, garbage, litter, graffiti, Block to block, the crime and those factors are, you know, voting participation, all sorts of measures that you can get from census and other community survey data.

When his team did this work, as much as crime varies from block to block, those issues, the scale of them varies from block to block, but what they found was that An increase in those measures led to an increase in crime and an increase in lack of feelings of safety.

And so the theory of change here was if we can address not just people wanting to see officers on the street, but get rid of the factors that research has shown both lead to feelings of not feeling safe and support crime, research done here in Seattle, that's why all these other departments are there.

If we can address the graffiti, address the overgrown bushes, improve the lighting, and make everyone feel that the neighborhood has some sense of sort of social cohesion and that the city has a grip on what's happening in that neighborhood, research has shown that it leads to increased feelings of safety and decreased low-level crime.

The other research in the area points to this sort of soft enforcement where the focus was not for the officers to make arrests.

The focus was to be out there, to make referrals, to give warnings.

If there was significant crime happening, they did the arrest, they used their discretion as they always do.

But the research also shows that for this sort of low level, feelings of unsafety that this approach joined with problem solving from other departments, that's the best way to get there without the consequences that can come from ramping up formal uses of sanctions.

And so that was how we sort of set this up.

And I think in two months, we've seen some good results.

I think we have to see how this, in terms of your sustainment, we need to see how that plays out.

And that's where we're monitoring it.

We monitor it every two weeks of every day, really, with our dashboards.

And I think this team is looking at it pretty routinely.

But that's really sort of how we got there and where the design was.

In terms of this, remind me, what is the name of the person you're?

David Weisberg.

Weisberg?

W-E-I-S-B-U-R-D.

Okay, Weisberg.

Okay, got it.

Sorry, thank you.

And so he's, I'm not familiar with this particular researcher.

Can you tell me more about who he is?

He really, I mean, he really is.

In terms of credentials.

So he's a PhD, teaches at George Mason and a university in Israel, I believe Tel Aviv University.

And I mean, I think I could produce three or four pages of his published research sightings, almost all of them on how do you do policing by place?

How does crime and other behavior concentrate by place?

And how do you do it in a way that doesn't, a lot of his recent research has been how do you do place-based or hotspot policing in a way that increases legitimacy?

He's done this work recently in Tucson and some other cities.

We were in conversations with him to do it here because of the built nature of our urban environment.

A lot of his work required having to do surveys of people living in the hotspots where a lot of our Fortunately, sort of the fun secret of Seattle is, while we have a lot of, for us, hotspots compared to a lot of cities, our blocks that have a lot of crime do not compare to blocks that have a lot of crime in other cities.

So the places where their data was able to show them they should do surveys were places that had apartment buildings.

And they couldn't get into the apartment buildings to do the surveys, so they decided not to do the research here.

But we were interested in learning that same thing specifically to Seattle.

But if you talk to researchers around the country in terms of, the sort of network of those who are experts on how you think about crime and place, most of them studied under Dr. Weisberg or they studied under his initial cohort of PhDs that he produced.

So he really is, I think, one of the gold standards of how you do place-based research about how environment impacts crime and how policing and other problem-solving efforts can address those issues.

So to me what you've described sounds very similar to broken windows kind of approaches.

How is this different or similar to that theory?

And maybe you want to describe the theory so that folks who are watching know what I'm talking about.

Well, Madam Chair, I think different people have different interpretations of broken windows.

I think the original theory involved working with the community to address those broken windows.

I think some departments, some other researchers or practitioners took it to being zero tolerance.

That was not how George Kelling, who sort of coined it, but Weisbord very much did the research of does focusing on those places work?

Kelling's theory was when a neighborhood looks like no one's in control, it facilitates criminal behavior.

That was the broken windows theory.

The operationalization of what you do about that has differed.

And so Weisberg really focused on, what are the things you can do from a policing perspective in those locations that reduces crime?

Does focusing police resources on a hotspot of crime, does it reduce crime?

Do you have diffusion of benefits?

Do you displace the crime?

That's the sort of work that he did.

But Broken Windows was really, it wasn't a strategy.

It was a theory about general disorder sends a message that any behavior is sort of tolerated.

People ran with that all sorts of different directions about, so then what do you do in response to that?

Kelling's original thoughts were you involve the community.

You can't fix these problems without the community.

Some places didn't involve the community, and they just decided that means we're going to arrest everyone for everything.

But that wasn't the intention of Broken Windows.

He's recently passed, but if you talk to Dr. Kelling, that was his intent, was to involve the community in fixing those problems.

Council Member, may I comment on this?

Absolutely.

So just to follow up on your question, September 5th, 2012, the city auditor's office delivered a report to council about the research conducted by George Mason University on this very topic.

So there's literature on our city website right now from the auditor's office that can provide you some background on it.

And just to speak to what he's saying about broken windows, from a cop's point of view on the street, that's You cite someone for littering.

You cite someone for walking against the light.

Every single thing you address.

What we're talking about here, place base, you put an officer in that hot spot or that block as presence.

And just the presence alone can have an effect.

on cost for service and feeling of disorder.

So it's more just let's be there.

We don't have to stop every single person for everything.

We just need to be there and that in itself will have an effect, so.

But in this case, I just want to be really clear, there have been citations.

We see things that need to be dressed and of course we we gave no specific orders that officer had to have any type of Numbers to reach or anything like that.

That was their discretion whether or not to take action Give warnings on certain issues, right?

And I think we're gonna get into this a little further into the presentation So I don't want to take us down that so quickly, but I just wanted to be clear that there have been some law enforcement consequences as a result of the proactive policing and the presence in some of these hotspots.

And what I don't have a clear sense of is what the citations were for, what the warnings were for, and what the jail bookings were.

I don't have granular detail on each of these categories, which

We've been keeping, it's been quite time consuming, but we've been keeping that data, and we've been archiving it for that exact question, and I'm sure we can supply it to you after this.

And along with that, we have been tracking over 300, as a result of this, over 300 maintenance related issues that we've been, as part of the IDT that I described earlier, continuing to update.

So you want to keep going?

Yeah.

Next slide.

And so just, we've hit on some of this, but just to quickly, to catch up on some time here.

So overall, citywide indicators are positive overall.

We talked about in June, across the city, not just these neighborhoods, officer productivity was up, 911 calls were down, and major crime was down.

In the emphasis neighborhoods, they had over 8,800 on views in May and June.

That's compared to about 6,600 in 2018. So that's an increase of officers proactively addressing an issue, logging that they got out and talked to somebody of 33%.

This work has been supported both by straight time of officers on patrol where the assistant chief and the precinct captains have directed them to these neighborhoods when they're not responding to calls and our overtime emphasis hours of about 3,800 emphasis hours across these seven neighborhoods for these two months.

And then there's all the stuff the other departments have done.

So just to, we're going to go through in detail by neighborhood, but just some of the significant maintenance and city department work.

In Ballard, a lot of activity and a lot of lighting improvements at Ballard Commons that Christopher Williams will talk about in a bit.

In Fremont, some improvements along the bike lane and crosswalks, kiosk staffing in downtown, reconfiguration in Pioneer Square of King Street landscaping.

And so do a lot of signage and illegal dumping attention.

Specifically in South Park, some improvements to the skate park.

In South Park, we also saw a lot of community concerns with some vacant properties.

And so, especially as it relates to trash and debris that's associated with those vacant properties.

I know Council Member Herbold, who was part of that tour, that was an issue for her as well.

And then in Georgetown, some additional street light and signage repairs.

In total, these are some highlights, but in total, as I mentioned, around 300, a little bit more than 300 maintenance improvements.

Now we'll start going into the individual neighborhoods and have different departments addressing what they've done in each neighborhood.

So Mr. Fisher, if you want to give us a quick overview of just what was going on in Ballard as far as hotspots.

Before we go into each specific neighborhood, the last time we had a chance to discuss this in committee, I asked, I don't know why I keep directing this at you, Director, I'm sorry, to everybody.

The last time we had the chance to have this conversation, I asked for data about why these specific neighborhoods were chosen, and I believe the answer that I got from you was that it was both a combination of data on potential crime and concerns, and calls and complaints that were generated from neighbors.

To me, that's not a quantitative way to define why we're going to certain neighborhoods.

specifically, you know, when I've had conversations with folks in the Central District, they've really talked about the need for more lighting.

And, you know, that was one of the stated goals that you just mentioned a second ago.

There's a desire to see more curb cuts.

I looked at you for lighting, but this is directly related to transportation.

They wanted to slow down some traffic in certain areas, wanted to make sure that there was some clear signage and lighting available.

That's something that I feel like would be a great way for us to respond to community concerns, but I still haven't seen the data.

So I'm wondering, has the data been produced to specifically show us, as Council Member Gonzalez mentioned, the slide three data shows the cumulative decreases in crime.

But if you're using this data to dictate where these emphasis patrols are occurring, have you given us the data specific to these neighborhoods?

Because I don't see it in this specific presentation.

So I'll let SPD talk about the data specifics.

But in terms of the central area, we did go and do a similar approach in the central area.

And in fact, thank you to Council Member Gonzalez around the public hearing that was held to kind of report out on some of those improvements around lighting specifically or traffic calming.

But as we go through this, we wanna also balance the tactical kind of specific improvements with also programmatic approaches.

And so that's what a lot of what the central area conversation was about, that we know that it's not just fixing the lighting or trimming the tree.

Those are important, but it's also investment, strategic investment in youth-based programs and business stabilization.

And so that's as we kind of go into next steps around that.

That's what we're hoping to kind of merge this into a little bit more, but I'll turn it over to SPD around the data questions.

Yes, Councilmember, so in the presentation we had prior, I think we tried, maybe we need to present, provide it in a different way.

We tried to present that some of these neighborhoods, especially like Fremont was one of them, was our hottest neighborhood at the end of 2018, the beginning of 2019 in terms of increase.

in our reported crime and calls for service.

And so that was sort of the clear winner.

If we were going to do this anywhere, where do we do it?

And then we tried to assess both precinct capacity.

If a lot of this work is being done by on-duty officers when they're not responding to calls, we couldn't do but so much in each individual precinct.

But we also had to look at with what we were asking them to do and what we were able to join up with other departments, Where were there other neighborhoods where we saw calls for service that were up, where we saw crime that was up unusually?

There was a spike we were addressing.

I don't think that the thought was in some of these we were going to be solving long-term problems, just the scope of what we were investing.

It was addressing why was there all of an all of a sudden an increase in calls and crime and complaints and what could be due to address something before sort of got to be a much larger issue.

There were some neighborhoods where they were not in the top seven, but in terms of what came up from community meetings, from meetings that many members around this table went to with BIAs.

and other sort of gatherings were hearing about really specific complaints in neighborhoods.

And I think that also factored into the broader, you know, where do we start this?

The idea was on, you know, seven and done and we're never going to address any other neighborhoods.

But it was we have to start somewhere and where were the places that seemed the most hot or the most in need of an immediate thing that could be addressed through officer deployment on emphasis time and through the collaboration with the other departments, and then see how this worked.

I mean, it is a theory.

It has worked in other places, but we need to see, you know, how this works here, what outcomes we get here before we also assess how do we, does this work in these neighborhoods for the problems that we were trying to address?

So, I mean, we can present that data in a different way if it makes it a little bit clearer about what each neighborhood had, but we tried to do that in that last presentation.

I don't have anything new today.

Absolutely, Council Member Skidman.

Just a quick follow-up.

You said it has worked in other places.

You're not talking about New York or New Jersey, are you?

I may have worked in places in New Jersey, but I'm not referencing New York City.

There are cities around the country that have done this sort of collaborative problem solving, increased officer presence with addressing sort of environmental issues to drive down feelings of unsafe.

I'm just asking for a few examples.

What cities would you cite as where it has worked?

I could get those to you.

Okay.

I know from looking through this stuff, there are places where this work has been done and it was found effective.

Right now, I can't recall the names.

Okay.

That would be helpful.

And when I reference New Jersey, it's in reference to the documentary that PBS did on the broken window strategy in Newark.

So I'm just making sure we're not referencing Newark because that's clearly not a place that we would want to model.

or a policy.

The only thing I'll just quickly add is this also helped us build off of two council-funded initiatives around the South Park Safety Task Force and the Georgetown Public Safety Task Force and allowed us to kind of bring some level of implementation to some of their recommendations.

And those were, you know, as you well know, those were council-funded.

And so the addition of those two neighborhoods was was partially also based on community feedback that we were hearing consistently through our investments at that level.

So we're gonna quickly, if there's no, okay.

We're gonna keep going.

So in Ballard, some of the community participants along the walk just quickly were through the Nordic Museum, the Ballard Alliance.

St. Luke's was also talking about the impacts of their presence along Ballard Commons and some of the relationships they were having both with the Ballard Alliance as it relates to reach and actually providing services to unhoused as well as the Ballard Food Bank.

You can see here around the route, I'm not going to go too much into detail around it as you have specific questions.

Some of the specific concerns that we heard, next slide, were around Ballard Commons Park, but also throughout the neighborhood business district around replacing signage, adding bathroom capacity.

I'll turn it over quickly to Christopher Williams from Parks to talk about that point.

Great.

So I'd like to start out by thanking and acknowledging Council Member Gonzalez.

Last year, you put $130,000 in the Park Department budget for enhanced programming and activation at Ballard Commons Park.

And this really helped us a lot.

Our theory of change approach to really any park is we know that increased activation and enhanced maintenance make a difference in a park.

The third rail of that stool is safety and security.

So we work closely with SPD when we need to do that.

But by far, activation and just taking care of the way the park looks makes a big difference.

Christopher, I know that you all are taking some cues from some programming and some models that have been done in San Francisco, specifically as it relates to one aspect of activation of the park, which is a safe and healthy restroom that is publicly accessible.

And so I just want to appreciate the work of your staff at looking at those models in San Francisco that I think have been really effective and well-received and are good examples of how cities can meet the hygiene needs of everyone in a public space regardless of their housed status or unhoused status.

Thank you.

And that's exactly right.

We started ground or rather we have broken ground on the installation of a Portland loo.

And that has been years in the making.

And we expect to have the Portland Loo up and running by September.

We've installed a temporary Santa Can so that people can have access to a public restroom during construction.

We have also leveraged the construction around the programming and activation happening in the park.

We will ramp up to seven day a week programming and activation on August 1st.

I want to acknowledge that our goal per the green sheet was to have that done by July 1st.

But we had a staffing and ramp-up issue, so we are doing Friday, Saturday, and Sunday programming and activation.

In fact, this weekend, there's a kids' carnival in the park.

We are leveraging activation with the Ballard Seafood Festival this weekend.

We also increased our level of park cleaning to three cleanings per day.

And this includes things like paying attention to benches, removing graffiti in 24 hours.

We treat single tents and encampments like standalone obstructions and we'll have those removed immediately for the most part.

And we are working with the Ballard Alliance to redevelop the play area in Ballard Commons Park.

So a lot happening.

Any other questions on this one?

Some of the other improvements really came at the hands of SDOT, so I'll turn it over to Sam to talk about some of the crosswalk and vegetation maintenance.

Sure, so I think that's an SDOT crew out there in that picture.

You know, we were able to address a lot of the sort of basic maintenance issues out there in the streets.

I think in terms of how this was helpful and for us as well, we were able to identify some things that just our own inspections might have missed.

So there was like an alley pothole that was leading to trash, you know, trash and debris collecting in an alley that we might have eventually found and addressed, but getting that information directly from people and how it affected multiple things from trash collection to just perceptions of order in the alley, we were able to fill that pothole the day of the walk.

So, able to get out very quickly and deal with things that were coming from community concerns.

So this just quickly is some of the photos.

But in terms of the results of the emphasis patrols, turn it back over to SPD.

Thank you.

So in South Ballard, our MCPP neighborhood named South Ballard, both months saw an increase in their similar month from 2018. So in May, there was a 40% increase.

And in June, there was a 52% increase.

And 911 calls for service from the community were flat, almost exactly the same.

When you look at the major crime, we actually in 2019 had three additional than we had in the same time period in 2018. So statistically flat and then we match, you can see in the graph, sorry it's hard to turn and look.

And talk to you can see that the on views which in 2019 which are the green line have been going up since February We were already working there, and then they really ramp up in May and June When this started and then July the reason there's no line to it just for future slides That's that's a partial month compared to the full month in 2018, so that's why that's just a dot so we've used through since the beginning of May through June over 675 emphasis hours across Ballard and Fremont, tracking those, they're combined in the budget code.

And then our teams made over 180 contacts in South Ballard, including 24 bookings into jail, 96 warnings, which are both oral and written.

Some of those we could, as asked earlier, I think we can get what the warning was in reference to, but some of them we may not be.

The whole point of sort of an oral warning is that there's not much of an official record.

And over 80 referrals and connections to services, including 13 referrals to lead.

Can you, so I have some questions about these referrals.

So there isn't a lot of texture in the presentation about what we're referring people to or for what.

So are these for homelessness services?

Are these for, what are we referring people to?

From the data that officers were tracking for this, it said there's crisis referrals where they're getting people connected with services.

There's referrals through HSD to get them connected to other services that they might need.

We can try to dig into that more to see exactly what was the problem that led to it.

But also, while the officers were doing this, we weren't trying to have them overly document.

We wanted to know, what are you doing when you're out there?

fully diagnosing what was the problem.

So in terms of what they tracked, but we can provide a little bit more as you use the word texture.

I think we were also just running out of space in this presentation.

No, I know.

This is slide 10 of 40. So I think it's It's really important for us to have this information, and I can appreciate that we don't want to create sort of a burdensome structure for officers in the need to document these items, but I do think that it's important for us to have at least a general sense and idea of what are these referrals to and sort of who is receiving those referrals.

And part of the reason why this is important to me is because in other rooms were having conversations about repeat offenders and high barrier individuals and actively evaluating what kind of strategies the city can utilize to be able to address that particular population.

And one of the things that we are seeing in the data is that we are very good at referring people and people are very good at following up on referrals.

but the quality of the continued engagement is an open question.

And so I think this is an important piece of data for us to continue to collect.

And I know that the Seattle Police Department has been very helpful in that other context in providing us with a lot of really rich data to give the electeds who are part of that work group an opportunity to dig in and get a better understanding of who this population is, who these individuals are, and what their unique needs might be.

And I don't want to miss an opportunity to collect data that could further our efforts to really address those individuals who may need something other than a law enforcement strategy and intervention to prevent negative activity in communities.

So I would find it really helpful to have those referrals, and I also would want to know not, you know, setting aside who they're referred to, you know, are these folks who are living in cars?

Are there folks who are living in RVs?

Are there folks who are living in tents?

And it's also a little unclear to me whether these are just these referrals are being made from contacts as part of the navigation team that are getting lumped into this or if these are independent from navigation team contacts?

So this is most patrol.

They could, the officers could have made a referral over to the HSD side of SPD collaboration with HSD.

referring people for services to those officers that are part of the HSD team.

Also, we could have referred citizens just to other city departments, which I spoke to before when I was first here on trying to do an education piece.

to the community as well as the officers on how to promote city services and direct people to the exact department that they're supposed to go to to ask the proper questions.

So we can dig that out.

I've been on my captains now for several months on documenting lots of information and we can pull that out.

And I appreciate that.

And I really appreciated your comments at our last committee hearing on this topic, which clearly indicated that In some instances, members in the community want officers to arrest people for things that are just not arrestable offenses.

And there is, I think, a greater important effort by the police department to make sure that officers who are doing patrol understand how to articulate that nuance in their contacts with individuals who want to see in some instances individuals arrested for reasons that don't merit an arrest.

That's correct.

Thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I appreciate the inquiry from our chair and would also add to that, in addition to understanding where these individuals are coming from, whether they're individuals living in RVs, outside unsheltered, information on the demographics in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, I don't know that you collect income data, but I assume that if we're talking about Crossing the street and not at a crosswalk if we're talking about littering as the two examples that were given These are going to fall into potential areas where people are going to be more likely to experience getting a citation or an infraction Potentially just by the fact that they're outside more often So it'd be great to have some of that additional demographic data on the type of individuals that are potentially getting both referrals and I would also extend that request to the jail bookings, infractions, citations and warnings.

I don't see a ton of information in here about the type of infractions and citations and specifically the jail booking content that led them to that situation.

That would be helpful to have.

We have, it's pretty layered.

We have, we've been manually recording this information.

As you know, our robust accountability system in the IA Pro collects the Terry stop information.

So there's a couple different ways we can extract that information to get it to you.

One last thing on this that I'm noticing, so there's a reference to the fact that there were 180 contacts in Ballard in particular, and of those 180 contacts, there were 13 referrals to lead, which seems low to me, and just wanted to get a better understanding of, of an explanation of why there were only 13. And maybe it's not low, so, you know, help me understand.

So, unless I look at the exact referral cover sheet.

So, the North Precinct is second highest in referrals to lead.

Now, we're talking about just one micro-community, and there's certain criteria why or that a person must fit to be referred.

So, without looking at the exact referral sheets, I wouldn't be able to speak to why they were referred or if they were a social contact referral or an arrest diversion referral.

So we also have that information that we could pull out.

All right.

Great.

Thank you.

So next, we're going to turn over to Bobby to go through Fremont.

OK.

For the time, I'll just kind of go through pretty quickly.

The end meeting is at 1130. Is that right?

I think so.

Was there a question?

Oh, the end time is 11.30, is that correct?

We started at 10.20.

Okay.

And we allotted 60 minutes, but our committee is scheduled to end at 11.30, so we technically have until 11.30.

So I'll just go through pretty quickly since we've got a lot of slides.

Yes, great.

Thank you so much.

Fremont has very similar characteristics to Ballard.

And then Director Lee, if you can pull that microphone closer to you.

Yeah, and I have extensive notes on what we collected from the neighborhood, but we don't have time to go through all of them.

But I'll be happy to turn them over at any time.

But themes are the, you know, is pavement marking on the 35th Avenue, which I think has been already resolved, vegetation issues, and of course, there's some, there is this one street, Finney Street Avenue, that has been a point of discussion extensively with that neighborhood because it has, it's kind of narrow, there's a bike lane, freight access is an issue for the restaurants, and so there's some problem solving there.

And then curb cuts, and then passenger loading zones.

And so, mostly it was related to transportation design related issues.

So to speak to the work in Fremont from the emphasis perspective, so we did see in May 161% increase compared to 2018 in proactive policing, and then 118% in June.

And overall, for those two months in Fremont, 911 calls were actually down 8%.

The teams made 35 contacts since the beginning of May.

Sorry, I should have said May.

And they made seven bookings and four service referrals.

Major crime was down 42%, with property crime down 58 incidents.

I think we see a lot of this in the end of last year and up until right about when this started, there had been a large influx of individuals around the Trolls Knoll area.

that was addressed and we have seen sort of the neighborhood stabilized.

And then I think with this other work, we saw some further decreases in activity in Fremont that had been a very busy neighborhood at the end of 2018 and beginning of 2019.

Any questions?

Council Member Pacheco.

So before I begin, My questions, there was yesterday an unfortunate incident that happened in the U District and I want to acknowledge the person who lost her life yesterday.

My, in the previous presentation and following Councilmember Mosqueda's point about how the neighborhoods were selected, I had asked the question about why the U District was not included given that it's perceived crime, it's real crime data was highest or among the highest in North Seattle.

The points that were made were, you know, from SPD this morning has been, you know, where do we start?

North Precinct has the second highest LEED referrals.

LEED expanded into the U District, which I appreciate.

There is also a number of concerns that I've heard from, to OED's point, from businesses there.

I've made overtures to your various departments about the need for, and assuming that this is done as a collaborative effort among various departments to focus our investments strategically in our city departments, to Council Member Gonzales' point of getting bureaucrats out of City Hall, the U District continues to be ignored.

And that, to me, is very alarming because the investment and the vision isn't very forward thinking.

And it's concerning because I get to be the, you know, with respect to your departments, the front line of defense for my district.

So I hear that time and time and time again.

And I want to make something very, very clear.

While I'm here on an interim basis, I am not here to be an interim punching bag for your departments.

It is very frustrating.

So I'm curious to know, what are you all going to do collaboratively to focus on the U District?

Because those are very much vulnerable communities.

To SPD's point, hate crime data is highest or among the highest in the U district.

We continue to neglect that area of Seattle.

We've made multi-billion dollar investments in light rail.

We have a light rail station opening up.

So the number of businesses that are there are minority and women-owned businesses.

What focus and what priority is this administration going to focus on?

Because I brought it up in conversations.

So I'm really just kind of asking collectively what this body is going to do.

Well, I can, if you want to talk about from the emphasis crime perspective.

I'll go first.

So a couple of things from the department standpoint, the department, doesn't ignore any neighborhood in the city of Seattle.

So when we talk about emphasis, we're talking about place-based directed patrols for on-duty resources.

We're always there for on-duty resources.

And I think maybe what you're referring to for us is have we supplemented with overtime officers in that area, not at this time, what's happened is we meet every two weeks in CSTAT and we're always looking at our numbers and we're always looking to readjust.

So as the numbers continue to plummet in South Ballard and Fremont, it's very clear, I think to anyone that now we have areas that are warming up.

One of those areas is the University District and the Aurora Corridor, which historically every summer starts to warm up.

So we are currently in the process of readjusting We've taken our bicycle squad out of the rotation in Fremont and South Ballard.

We're moving them to University Way, that neighborhood.

The CPT officers have been directed to go that way.

So we can update you on more changes.

We're coordinating.

We're going to follow our leads on the homicide.

And as you know, we had a homicide last night on the Aurora Corridor, and we have four this year in Aurora Corridor, one in UA.

It's concerning to me.

I live in the North End, so I see things as I'm coming and going back and forth from work.

So it's there, and we will adjust like we always do.

But going forward, we'll readjust resources and level things out where the data tells us to go.

Does that make sense?

So let me, again, reemphasize the earlier point.

An emphasis patrol would not have prevented the incident that happened yesterday in the U District.

What I still am concerned about is we went to do the emphasis patrols, specifically in North Seattle, in the areas where we, when it was said earlier in the prior committee, was where we received a number of complaints from Find It, Fix It.

Well, again, if we're following the logic of we use data to really go where we're going to focus our emphasis with regards to police, hate crime data, data of where perceived crime and real crime is highest in the U District in North Seattle, we ignored it.

Following and assuming everyone here collectively with the best of intentions said we're coordinating, it's not just police, we're coordinating city services.

If that's the case, why are we not, and to Director Mejia's point, focusing more where we're focusing our, as a community, collectively, our investments in light rail, our investments on where we're gonna have new growth in terms of population with the upstones happening in the U District.

So it just, that to me is focusing forward thinking collectively of what we're gonna be doing.

But we've missed the mark on this.

So Council Member, I appreciate your point.

And as we kind of take this to next steps and as we've through this have built kind of a collaboration infrastructure, if you will, amongst departments to do this type of effort, I'm talking now city service coordination.

Certainly, as we look into the U District, as we look up in Lake City, as we look into Beacon Hill and other areas down south, We are gonna try to take this model to scale.

And so that's at the end of the presentation as we talk about next steps.

We're really excited as OED and DON co-chairing this effort to try to do exactly what you're talking about.

Go into the U district and do an assessment of services as we've done in some of these areas as well.

So from a city service coordination side, that's absolutely the case.

All right.

Well, I want to thank Council Member Pacheco for his advocacy for the University District.

I agree.

I've spent a fair amount of time there, not just as an elected, but previous to being an elected office.

And you certainly see the complex public safety infrastructure issues that exist within the U District that have been ongoing for a long time.

I think that the population and the people who live in the U district are unique in terms of the entire city.

We have a mix of small business owners, major institution, students from around the world, and then just, you know, legacy residents who've been there for a long time.

We also have a large unsheltered population, primarily youth unsheltered population in that part of town, and that does include Unfortunately some students who are attending the University of Washington who are who continue to experience housing instability as well So I do think it's important for us to have an answer to the questions that councilmember Pacheco has posed That are holistic and give us as a council and him as a district for representative a better understanding of how the city is meeting those unique needs of that neighborhood within District 4. So I appreciate the line of questioning and the advocacy there.

Thank you, Chair, Madam Chair.

And as we continue to expand a version of this, we would love to work with you all to identify specifics, either micro-neighborhoods or larger neighborhoods within your districts to attend to.

So we're just going to move.

Did you have a question?

We're going to move on.

Eight minutes.

Okay.

I'm going to go quickly through Pioneer Square, but some of the improvements we saw there around the cleanup of benches, repainted benches, restriped crosswalks, a lot of distribution of sharp containers is something that the businesses really asked us.

And then a big concern was around a phone booth that was there, and we were able to remove that, and then also improve the benches under the pergola there in Pioneer Square.

The results of the emphasis area, go to the next slide here, SPD.

So in Pioneer Square, there was a significant increase, 78% in May, 31% in June.

Overall, 911 calls were down 15%.

We made over 100 contacts since beginning of May, four jail bookings, 22 citations, and multiple oral warnings and park warnings.

In May, crime was down eight incidents.

In June, it was up nine incidents.

So we're monitoring that.

There was some, as the Chief can mention, we did in June start to shift more from Pioneer Square to Pike Pine.

And so we're assessing how that shift worked.

We did take a lot of narcotics and firearms as a result of the work in Pioneer Square.

And there have almost been 700 emphasis hours spent in Pioneer Square since the beginning of May.

Bobby downtown streetlight We have street light issues in downtown.

I think that's been fixed already.

The street and sidewalk washing, and I actually learned extensively about the continuous washing that goes on in downtown area.

There's actually a district that does weekly washing on the weekends.

The landscape maintenance, the newspaper boxes, which was an interesting issue in downtown, is attracting nuisance, these empty boxes.

and then dealing with Third Avenue kiosk.

And so I'll just leave it there for now.

Again, I have extensive notes if you would like us to turn it over.

So then in downtown, which is a little more amorphous for us to design in terms of pulling data, because we have to go down to the reporting area to get, there's no neighborhood that's exclusively sort of the Pike Pine Corridor, but in how we were able to pull the data, We did see that officer on views were actually down in May in June That's because there's always consistently a lot of work going on there But we did as mentioned in June start to shift some of that work that had been going on in Pioneer Square up to Pike Pine they made over despite the Being down compared to 18, they have made over 100 contacts, including eight bookings, 45 infractions, 11 oral and parks warnings, and one service referral.

Crime was down 61% in May.

In June, it was down three incidents and over 700 emphasis hours since the beginning of May.

Soto?

Okay, we'll go into SOTO.

SOTO is a pretty dynamic place.

First, I want to thank SOTO BIA.

They have made considerable investments in their services.

They have invested, I think, a million dollars just last year, including homeless outreach and enhanced services.

Major issues are parking signs, vegetation maintenance, RV trash removal, and RV issues in general, including during sports events.

And the public health consideration for, again, RV related issues.

And I'll just leave it there.

I have extensive notes if you need them.

Four minutes.

On views were up both months and overall 9-1-1 calls were down.

In SOTO, officers made over 120 contacts since beginning of May, including 46 oral warnings, 26 bookings, two service referrals, and one, including, sorry, not and, including one referral to lead.

Property crime, which was the major concern, was down 9% in the past 28 days.

over 1,500 emphasis hours, and that's split between Soto and Georgetown just because of the budgeting code, but a lot of work being done in Soto.

Can I just mention one more thing?

Because it includes industrial area, the workers and bus services was also an issue.

So quickly, in Georgetown, again, thank you to the Georgetown Merchants Association, the Public Safety Task Force, who helped us coordinate the tour.

In there, we saw a lot of requests for sign repairs and vegetation maintenance.

You see an example here, as well as some pavement markings that we attended to.

So again, in both months, on views were up a lot in June, 116%.

SBD teams in Georgetown made 15 contacts, including several oral warnings, two citations, and one jail booking.

Overall, crime was down an incident in May and up three incident in June, but six fewer property crimes in June.

A lot of work around RVs in this neighborhood.

We have here a lot of, calls for, not calls for help, calls for ask for help, not 911 calls, just people asking to address RVs in the neighborhood.

And again, that split the 1500 hours, a lot of, not as much work in Georgetown as Soto, but it's a smaller neighborhood, but a lot of effort going on there.

So in South Park, I just want to, again, thank Duwamish Valley Youth Corps, Carmen Martinez, Paulina Lopez, the Cleanup Coalition, really helping us put that together, as well as the South Park merchants.

In South Park, there was a lot of work that was done by Parks and SDOT, so I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Christopher and then Sam.

Great.

Thank you, Andreas.

So, CMAR owns a skate park in South Park, and we are currently working with CMAR to develop an MOU that would allow us to engage in continuing maintenance of the skate park.

There are a few images there that show before and afters.

Our crews did enhanced limbing up of branches to create sight lines to the park from the street so SPD can drive by and see into the park.

We removed lots of vegetation, litter and garbage waste, and continue to partner with CMR and the local community to do graffiti removal and to really take care of the things that really, I think, emphasize that broken window theory.

The quicker we can clean it up, then the more that gives a message to the community that this is a cared for love space and the community tends to treat it that way.

Another area of emphasis, as you know, where Concord Elementary School is placed and a lot of our South Park families are regularly using trails and the bridge and access to that and lighting around that has always been a concern.

And so a lot of SDOT hours paid attention to that to make sure that the youth and kiddos were safe in accessing that trail.

And so turn it over to Sam.

Yeah, and I think just in coordination with Christopher, we were able to do a lot of the same things that Parks and Rec were able to do.

And some of the benefits of coordinating these efforts are that we're both doing those things at the same time.

So it's not SDOT going out one week and then Parks going out the next week to do similar or six months later do similar things.

We're sort of concentrating and focusing all those things right at the same time.

And just because I know Council Member Herbold is not here, but I know she would bring this up if she was.

The issues around vacant properties and it was also something we heard very consistently, not just in terms of one that was particularly of concern that burned down a couple of years ago that SDCI has been working with the property owner to do some cleanup, but then along 14th specifically and Cloverdale, some properties that have been bought up by that will eventually become projects, but in the meantime are fairly...

accumulating litter trash and so SDCI did go and work with those property owners and significantly clean up those areas.

What's important there is similarly it's it's 14th on one side and a very useful used trail on the other or alley I guess on the other side that has access into the business corridor so a lot of business the South Park Retail and Business Merchants Association was very concerned with that as well as community members there.

Council Member Esqueda.

That reminds me of the article I saw this morning.

It was originally published in Grist, but given that much of the dumping, illegal dumping that's occurring appears to actually be generated from those who are housed, not those who are houseless, I think that's an important element as we think about who's being sort of, Targeted maybe the wrong word who's who's being pointed to as the culprits for the garbage I apologize council chair Councilmember Gonzalez madam chair.

I do have to leave a little early I just want to say I appreciate the information and to the points that were made earlier by SPD I did go back and look at the main presentation and do see the data.

I'm sorry for that I overlooked some of those data points in the past.

I think councilmember Pacheco's point is still really well taken How does that data compared to other areas in the city?

I also continue to be interested in the demographics that we talked about and Overall, I think that will help inform our future analysis of this I think right now my biggest question is how does this comport with our city's commitment to race and social justice our rsji Efforts and I believe to councilmember Gonzalez's point to our commitment to diversion work and getting more folks in to lead Those are some of the big questions that I still have and I'm concerned that the hotspots focus gets us away from some of those RSGI and diversion principles without a total analysis of how we're getting folks into services versus citations and jail.

So I appreciate the presentation and I do apologize for having to go early.

Thank you for attending.

Appreciate it.

Okay, let's go ahead.

Yeah, just we have a few more so we'll real quick So in South Park on views were up both months by a lot and 9-1-1 calls were down almost 14% in South Park They made 15 jail bookings a since the beginning of May.

In June, reported crime was down 11%, which is four incidents.

Again, fortunately not a huge number, but still every decrease is a good one.

And over 285 emphasis hours have been used since the beginning of May.

This is just sort of an overview of SPD takeaways.

which I don't know if you want to expound on that at all, or if we can move on to the feedback loop.

Okay.

So I had mentioned actually, as soon as we announced this approach, we actually did hear from a lot of communities asking, you know, why aren't you here?

We want this type of coordination, including the university district, but also the Chinatown International District in Beacon Hill, in Othello, and in Lake City.

You know, so we're seeing that a version of this model is working in terms of what I'm talking about, kind of city department collaboration and delivery of service.

And at the very basic level, it's just communities access to department leaders and decision makers so that they feel that they have that connection into city government, which for Department of Neighborhoods is a core part of our mission is to lower the barrier into participation and information of city government.

We've been doing a lot of thinking about how do we continue this collaboration now that we've built up this kind of infrastructure, if you will.

So just quickly, as I mentioned, we, through this process, filled 305 maintenance and service issues.

We are doing regular updates to the community through, there's a screenshot here, but community walk updates.

So this is an example of the one that went to SOTO that shows some of the improvements that were made and then also a link, live links to resources and information for additional support.

So whether it be the community service officers, whether it be the Find and Fix It tool, whether it be other resources in the community.

So we'll continue to update that with some regularity.

The next slide there is how do we take this or start to take this a little bit more to scale?

So I mentioned the community walk updates.

At the mayor's direction, we are forming under the leadership of Senior Deputy Mayor Fong, but also Director Lee and myself, a neighborhood and community solution team, which is essentially how we take this into other communities.

And I'm talking again, the coordination of city departments.

So as we look at that, and as we look at potentially monthly director level or key staff tours similar to that paired then with community roundtable so that we continue to establish this community feedback loop.

Too often what we're seeing is that folks don't know how to access the information that they need.

or access it in a timely manner.

So we see that this model is working.

We see that there's a demand for it.

And so we're moving to fill that demand.

But we know that it can't just be the walks.

It has to be paired with programmatic investment as well.

And so we've been doing some thinking around, and similarly in central area, Council Member Gonzalez, through the public hearing and some of the efforts that we're working on that is really pairing this with an affordability and anti-displacement dialogue that talks about all the investments that are happening around affordability, whether it be through our equitable development initiative, whether it be through the various executive orders that the mayor has has signed as it relates to anti-displacement or housing choices, whether it be opportunity zones, and how do we bring that all together in a relevant way that talks to the community values and is informed by community values.

So we see this as kind of a two-pronged approach moving forward.

Central to that, though, is a better find-it-fix-it departmental coordination, and there's a technology solution that we need to integrate in working with The CSB and FAS on that portion is going to be essential to us being successful So this is kind of how we move into the next steps Quickly on the neighborhood and community solutions team as I mentioned it's going to be to continued relationship building with community as I mentioned again buildings bringing City Hall out to the community through walks and community roundtables and It's an opportunity to identify the challenges, improvements, and other opportunities, or to say, to address the community concern by saying, hey, we hear you, but, you know, we can't do this for whatever reason right now, but we're logging in and we're hearing and providing that dialogue between city and community.

And then this existing beyond the areas that we're already doing it.

So diversifying areas beyond the emphasis walks.

So that's our presentation.

Any, Council Member Pacheco, any questions or additional comments?

None?

Okay, so I appreciate the presentation for today.

It was very detailed and I appreciate that.

Again, I think there You know, I really want to just sort of emphasize around the theory of change that my questions are not designed to, you know, send a signal that I'm trying to undermine this effort.

It really is rooted in a sincere desire to have a clear understanding of what we are expecting to see as results.

And I take that responsibility as a council member with oversight responsibility very seriously.

And so for me, when I ask those questions, you know, I don't ask them casually and I'm not trying to be flippant.

I am very sincere as the chair of the Public Safety Committee in understanding why we are allocating resources in a particular way and for what purpose and what will the outcomes be that our constituents can expect to see.

And that's an important part of transparency, it's an important part of accountability, and it's an important part of just getting back to basics and delivering city services in an equitable, fair manner to communities who feel that they have not been seeing these types of investments occurring in their neighborhoods that are contributing to livability issues that will ultimately exacerbate and compromise some of the good work that we're doing in other spaces and in other in other areas of programmatic work for the City of Seattle.

And so I appreciate getting a little bit more texture around what the theory of change is here.

I think we have some clear follow-up in terms of the questions that Councilmember Mosqueda posed, the line of questioning that Councilmember Pacheco made around the U District in particular, but also some of the more granular detail around referrals, including to lead, and some additional details around what kind of citations are we giving, what kind of social contacts are we having with individuals.

I recognize that there are some instances in which people will behave in a certain manner that is not acceptable, and that that will require a public safety law enforcement consequential consequence approach.

I acknowledge that and recognize that that is sometimes the reality.

I also, at the same time, acknowledge that there are opportunities where law enforcement may not be the appropriate tool to intervene and to prevent that behavior from occurring in the future.

And that's when we want to really focus on those diversion aspects to make sure that we are not taking a broken windows approach that is really just focused on zero tolerance and funneling people into punitive jail systems that are extremely expensive and ultimately not going to yield the behavioral change that we actually are seeking to achieve.

I appreciate, again, the opportunity to hear more directly from you all about what it is we're trying to accomplish in a more holistic way, and Andres, your point around making sure that as a follow-up and a feedback loop, we are really focusing on upstream holistic approaches that will ultimately also create a huge impact.

It might not be immediate, but just because it's not immediate doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it.

so tempted by the quick fix to just Abandon some of those long-term sensible solutions that we know will work to address many of the livability issues that that Individuals are expressing concerns with today Thank You madam chair, and I appreciate the committee's attention to this issue.

Yeah, it will continue I assure you So with that being said that is the last item on our agenda and we are adjourned Thank you so much for being with us