Public Safety Committee 4/28/2026

Good morning.

The Public Safety Committee meeting will come to order.

It's 9.32 a.m.

April 28, 2026. I'm Robert Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Juarez is excused.

Council Member Lynn.

Here.

Council Member Rivera.

Council Member Sacca.

Here.

Chair Kettle.

Here.

Chair, there are three members present.

Thank you and welcome everyone.

For Chair Comet this morning, I'm not going to really do one except for to reiterate some points from Chair Comet on Friday where I spoke to an article by Danny Westneet that came out about a week ago in the Seattle Times talking about Little Saigon.

It was titled Amid Seattle's Neglect.

Very important article.

It is That chair comment is up on Seattle Channel from Friday's Public Safety Committee meeting.

And I was there at Little Saigon yesterday, you know, and the challenges that Little Saigon is facing remains as of yesterday morning when I was in the community.

In that article, there's a lot of different pieces.

Really important to hear those voices from the community and the points that they were making.

but one thing I wanted to highlight towards the end from the author of the article when he was talking about the efforts thus far and the key is when he says, but alarming, but it is alarming how little effect it seems to have.

Our efforts thus far are basically akin to running to stand still and we cannot continue in this vein.

Also in the chair comment on Friday, I spoke of the issue of Seattle being of two minds.

This is something that's a challenge for us as a city, and it gets us into a situation where it leads to some paralysis or it leads to elements that are working in cross purposes.

I think we need to look together, look for those common areas, and look at facts on the ground, like in Little Saigon, in terms of trying to develop a movement forward.

I also highlighted in the chair comment last Friday about our strategic framework for Safer Seattle.

We updated it this year from what we had from the previous term of the council, the two years of the council, and two changes I wanted to highlight.

One was a bullet pillar that was updated, and it speaks to, you know, furthering a functional criminal justice system.

There's so many little pieces within our criminal justice system that are not quite working, that we need some tweaks in.

and then a new one titled addressing the scene between public safety and public health, housing and human services.

This is very important.

So addressing the scene, by the way, means a lot of times means addressing alternative response.

This is primarily focused but not solely on the care enabling ordinance and the work that goes there.

We need to improve alternative response to get better outcomes.

Also, and I saw this yesterday morning, again in Little Saigon, but you know what?

I see it in Belltown every day.

I see it in downtown.

It's been an issue in Lake City, other parts, North Beacon Hill and D2.

It's not just Little Saigon and parts of the CID.

Pioneer Square is throughout our city.

It is addressing the drug markets, and this means actions that need to be taken as it relates to the public drug use and possession ordinance.

The ordinance, in my view, has been a failure in itself, but also in its implementation.

We must bring some clarity.

We must address the two minds issue.

We need to simplify it.

But going back to alternative response, we also need to bring in the alternative response aspect to the issue as well.

And separately, as I mentioned Friday, we're engaging with central staff.

The Legislative Department has an effort called Neighborhood Engagement and Mitigation Plan.

Think of this as the new version of a good neighbor agreement.

We need to further relationship between our service providers and the city but also more importantly with the neighborhoods in which they serve.

So at the end of the day we must take action working with stakeholders of which I see many here today.

Thank you for coming out to address the point again in the article.

It is alarming how little effect it seems to have and that means our efforts thus far in terms of addressing some of these problem areas.

And so I look to work with everybody in here.

I know most of you generally or specifically and I look forward to this along with my colleagues here in the committee and then the council overall.

Okay, that's Chair Comet for this morning.

And again, you can see Friday's on Seattle Channel.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing, seeing, no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Okay, public comments.

We'll now open a public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda or within the purview of the committee.

Clerk, how many speakers do we have signed up for today?

Currently we have 14 in-person and four remote.

So that means two each, two minutes each, under our new council rules.

Okay, let's go with the in-persons.

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 60 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

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

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open.

We'll begin with the first honored guest, former Councilmember Tanya Wu.

And as former Council Tanya Wu starts, I also wanted to note that Councilmember Rivera is here and has joined us just after we had the roll call.

All right, thank you.

Welcome.

Good morning, Council.

My name is Tanya Wu.

I wear many hats in the Chinatown International District, but today I represent the, or am the president-elect for the International District Rotary.

So let's be honest about what's happening at 12th and Jackson.

This past week, we've seen this population explode because of the nice weather.

And what we're seeing on the ground is a system that is not meeting the scale of the need.

and the reality is the scale of the crisis far exceeds the resources and tools that we're currently deploying.

We need to be clear about what we're dealing with.

This is not just one problem, this is about two.

It's a drug crisis fueled by stolen goods market and it's also a housing crisis.

And we can't address one without addressing the other.

We need to continue to address both.

The condition in this area continue to be serious.

It's pushing out into North Beacon Hill, it's spreading to other parts of the city.

We're seeing in the Lake City, we're seeing in Aurora, in Belltown, in Downtown.

And so we really need to prioritize what we're doing on the ground and we need to listen to community.

These conditions, open air drug use, ongoing safety issues and strain on businesses and residents are not improving at the pace our community needs and we've seen the data and we need more to be done.

So we need to support and continue supporting proven models like LEED.

We need to continue building more tiny home villages because in a less than 40 days, we're gonna see a major world event come to the Seattle area, and that's the 2026 FIFA Soccer World Cup.

And so there is added urgency and we need a plan and it's not very much time.

So, I mean, these folks who live in the neighborhoods and have to see this every single day, they deserve to feel safe and supported in their own communities, not only during World Cup or major events, but for the time that they are there.

and so please continue to do what you're doing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Kara Williams to be followed by Sharon Lee.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Kara Williams.

I live in D3 and work at the Low Income Housing Institute.

I'm here today to join the call to promote public safety throughout the city and especially in the CID by lifting the proviso that was placed on the 11 million for new shelter beds last fall.

For this year, these funds are not needed to fill potential federal cuts to our continuum of care and permanent supportive housing.

By keeping them per viso, they are being underutilized when there has never been a better time to use them to support the mayor's shelter expansion plans.

In a time of so much uncertainty and so much need, I ask that you meet the moment and not keep them on hold for a future budget when everything is in place right now to get more shelter alive fast, bring people off our streets, address public use, connect people to services like treatment for substance use disorder and behavioral health, and promote the safety of the public.

These issues are concentrated in the CID, particularly Little Saigon, where I work every day, and we need support to address the scene now.

Everyone is affected when not everyone has access to their human rights.

I ask you today to please prioritize the safety of everyone in Seattle, especially our most vulnerable neighbors, and lift the 11 million per visa on dollars for new shelter.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good morning.

I'm Sharon Lee.

I'm the executive director of Lehigh.

And we are one of the larger employers in Little Saigon CID, as well as we have lots of residents, over 80 residents who live in Little Saigon.

I want to speak to the committee today to have you stop the sale of stolen goods in Little Saigon CID.

People are shoplifting and bringing goods to Little Saigon to sell for cash to buy drugs.

Street vendors are supposed to have a business license and a permit to vend on public right-of-way.

Now, SDOT, Seattle Department of transportation is supposed to regulate and address this issue, but we do not see any enforcement.

We are continually faced with people offering to sell goods.

It's creating a serious public safety issue.

It fused the drug issue.

It's not just, it's actually a whole network.

It's a business network.

It's not just incidentally.

And lots of people who are selling goods are housed.

They're not necessarily unhoused.

and so we think the council should do something to put in place to stop the sale of stolen goods.

And also we ask that you set up more tiny house villages because when we are able to move homeless individuals out of Little Saigon into tiny house villages, we believe that this is a way to prevent them from returning because they will get services elsewhere.

So, for instance, when we open up Maple Leaf Village, we made sure there was a commitment to handle the residents who are, you know, people who are homeless in the Maple Leaf community.

And so we believe that we should have a target strategy to have more tiny house villages.

So we thank you for your support for this.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Tan McCarrig to be followed by Madigan Lodal.

Good morning, Council.

My name is Tan Makaraeg, and I live in District 3, but work every day in District 2, specifically Little Saigon.

When I first came here as an AmeriCorps volunteer, I had never seen anything like what is happening in Little Saigon.

All the open-air drug use, drug dealing, and stolen goods markets, blocking people who are just trying to grocery shop or get on the bus.

Seeing it then was shocking.

Seeing it day in and day out for almost three years with no significant change is enraging.

You will not find this kind of activity anywhere else in Seattle.

The CID in Little Saigon is the only place that this kind of rampant crime and drug activity is allowed to exist.

It is the only neighborhood that the city allows it to exist in.

The city's actions have pushed these activities into this Asian minority neighborhood, continuing the historical racism this community has faced from the city it calls home.

The people of the CID and Little Saigon deserve better.

There are organizations like Friends of Little Saigon and their Beautiful Neighborhood Plan, SCIPTA, Interim, and many more who are tirelessly working to uplift this neighborhood in the face of apathy and inaction.

it is your turn to help uplift this neighborhood.

The solution isn't to keep displacing people to other places, it is to bring services and shelter to them.

We need less arrests and more diversion.

We need more outreach, more social workers, more shelters, more recovery resources, more housing, more service options for these folks.

This challenge needs a holistic solution, and it is the city's responsibility to enact it.

Everybody who lives and works in the CID and Little Saigon deserves to feel safe, and it is the role of this council and city to ensure that.

Thank you.

Good morning council members.

My name is Madigan Lodal and I live in District 3 and I work in District 2. I'm here to ask you to promote public safety in the Chinatown International District by lifting the proviso on 11 million for shelter expansion and increasing services for our unhoused neighbors.

This community has been systemically discriminated again and ignored, creating an unsafe environment for all those who live and work in the area.

These conditions result in people avoiding the area further perpetuating stigma and discrimination to the Little Saigon community.

I personally have avoided going into certain restaurants or walking past certain streets when I'm by myself out of fear for my safety.

However, simply displacing people or putting them in jail does nothing to address the root cause of these issues.

I have also seen from working directly with people in substance abuse recovery that shelter without services does not create the opportunities and support needed for change.

By lifting the proviso on the 11 million, you can improve the public safety of this neighborhood by increasing shelter, providing the basic human right of housing alongside essential services.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Amanda Benson to be followed by Nathan Woodknife.

Hello, good morning.

My name is Amanda Benson and I'm a resident of District 4 and I work every day in District 2, specifically Little Saigon near the intersection of 12th and Jackson, the epicenter of this public safety crisis.

Since Seattle's drug possession and public use ordinance took effect in 2023, arrests have actually increased and lead diversions have decreased.

and yet the open-air drug use and selling of stolen goods that I see every day in Little Saigon on my way to work has only gotten worse.

There's no evidence that arresting people for drug use reduces use or addresses the root causes that bring people to that point.

Stable housing does.

That's why I'm here today to advocate for tiny house villages.

They're not just a place to sleep, they are communities that provide case management, peer support, stability, and dignity.

They provide a foundation that makes every other intervention possible.

Addiction treatment, employment, reconnection with family are only possible with stable housing.

I urge this committee to fully fund more tiny house villages and the wraparound services that make them so effective.

It's the most cost-effective, evidence-based investment the city can make in public safety.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, good morning.

My name is Nathan Woodenknife.

I am a resident of Seattle in District 3, and I work in Little Saigon for the Low Income Housing Institute.

We have an office with over 40 staff members and an apartment building with over 80 residents and many other buildings nearby.

Daily, we are presented with drug use, crime, and violence on the street in front of our workplace.

I believe we need to stop the sale of stolen goods in an open-air market.

These are not small one-off offenders, but rather large, organized organizations.

It's a massive market and the funds are used to help fund drugs that are sold to vulnerable populations and prey on those who need help and support the most.

I got off the streetcar at 12th and Jackson and I have to see this every day and it's rather heartbreaking to see what people are going through.

If we can get people off the streets and into shelters like tiny house villages, we can help stop this phenomenon.

And it's very important for the council to recognize what is going on and try to find humane solutions that can help support people rather than punish them for being preyed on.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up we have Andrea Suarez to be followed by Corey Ratliff.

Hi, good morning, Council.

My name's Andrea Suarez, founder of We Heart Seattle.

I'm here to talk about the harm of possession in our community.

We've picked up hundreds of thousands of needles and hundreds of thousands of pieces of foil that our county hand out to drug addicts.

I think that really just speaks to the drug-friendly and enabling culture we have.

There's other major cities that are starting to ban handing that out, especially tent side, without enrolling in programs.

So there's some little adjustments we could make to really shift from a drug-friendly city to one where we are a recovery-first city.

in terms of harm to women, especially, they're preyed on.

I've seen women trafficked.

I've seen women be the front people to go in and do retail theft for drug addicts.

So it's a very predatory element out there in terms of the culture.

When we talk about why it never gets better, Councilman Kettle, it's because we have an inflow crisis.

We don't have anything like Proposition F, which San Francisco has.

It says, if you're gonna come to Seattle, you need to pass a drug test for illegal substances before you get your food stamp card and your ABD card.

Little things like that are what other major cities and democratic round cities are doing to kind of create the not drug friendly culture.

My mantra is here is we have very cheap drugs and free crime, and that's what's creating the havoc we see in our community.

I heard a couple people talk about tiny houses and wraparound services.

Last time I went into a tiny house, I saw a designated tiny house to use fentanyl.

So help me understand how we're stabilizing somebody inside a tiny house village.

when there's a tiny house designated to smoke fentanyl.

Wraparound services aren't required.

The whole city is a wraparound service.

You can walk out the door and get services.

They don't have to be at the village.

So don't get sucked into that, that things get better there.

I don't know one person that's graduated from the LEAD program where you can smoke fentanyl in their program.

What I do know is when people get arrested and get a clear mind and go to treatment, they get better.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is Corey Ratliff.

I am a drug addict and homeless, and I just want to speak on the fact that it took me 45 days in jail to finally get my mind right and hold myself accountable.

Before that, I was in the streets all the way from Aurora to Tacoma, and I was being enabled from the city with free pipes, free foil, free housing, places that police can't really come in and do anything about.

So now we're encouraging and enabling a drug addict and a homeless to be comfortable in that situation.

That does not help the situation.

What helps the situation is to hold us accountable.

If we're slipping in the streets and we're selling dope or we're pimping or we're doing anything that's against the law, hold me accountable, arrest me.

Don't give me a slap on the wrist, don't let me go.

You know what I'm saying?

That time in jail is enough time for me to think take accountability for what I did, understand that I need to change things, get out, get into places like Hope and Chance or Battlefield for Addiction, start going to work, you know, things like that.

These sober living programs are the answer it was for me.

And I still have an older brother who's still actively in addiction, has no thought whatsoever of getting out of that situation because tiny home villages, housing projects, everything there is comfortable to be homeless and a drug addict.

Ten years ago, I couldn't do that.

You know, these days it's so easy to be a drug addict and you're accepted in the city because it's okay.

And we're just putting them into a building off the street.

So now the city is thinking that it's not a problem anymore.

No, it's still an issue.

It's not being handled correctly.

And I think the best way to do that is hold me accountable.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up is Marta Kadan, sorry.

My name is Marta Kidana and I'm the Community Engagement Manager at the Low Income Housing Institute.

Thank you for allowing the community the time to be heard here today.

In the fall of 2025, the Low Income Housing Institute developed a 15-point plan focused on the CID in Little Saigon.

The goal of this plan was to lift up the deep needs of community and various resources that can be activated to lift up our community.

Public safety requires a wraparound approach and we believe that tiny house enhanced shelters being included in that plan will help alleviate some of the strain that is being experienced by all that live and work in the area.

One of the items that we asked the City of Seattle to prioritize is the tiny house shelter funding, which was allocated at $11 million last year.

Prior to closing the budgeting process, a proviso was placed to ensure that the continuum of care funding was fully funded at the federal level and to ensure that the shelter funding would back that if there was any shortfall.

Now that these dollars have been secured, we ask that we lift the proviso and make more shelter possible and honor the advocacy that we, alongside our partners, have done in the region.

Our offices are located directly in Little Saigon.

For those of you that don't know, we're right on Jackson and Rainier.

And we often experience the common public safety issues you've heard about today, both ourselves and the residents that live in the unlocked property above us.

There's a need for many safety practices to be activated and many outreach and diversion programs that we want to make sure that are being protected and allocated for.

But we also ask that the highest of these be the sheltering and housing of our unhoused neighbors in Little County.

Please help us ensure that housing is a human right by releasing these shelter dollars so that shelter providers can do the good work of creating safe spaces without judgment or harm.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Theresa Bloomberg followed by Steve Rebstela.

Good morning council members.

My name is Teresa Bloomberg and I'm here on behalf of the Seattle Indian Center, a nonprofit organization that's been serving the international district since 1958. We've witnessed many negative changes in our neighborhood, especially increased open drug use and growing safety concerns for all the businesses, residents and families.

As a housing coordinator for the Seattle Indian Center, I see every day that enforcement that has been happening now is not enough.

We need real solutions, more shelters, access, more tiny homes, stronger pathways for supporting recovery and stable housing for those living on the streets and in need of support.

Our community deserves to feel safe.

Our unhoused neighbors deserve dignity, opportunity, and I cannot emphasize support enough.

We ask the city to act with urgency and balance.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My opinion has been clouded by the fact that I work primarily in Pioneer Square, Belltown, have worked in the ID, and have worked on Capitol Hill.

My experience has been clouded because there's too many carrots, not enough sticks.

You still have a perfect record in the times I've been assaulted and threatened.

No one has ever gone to jail.

No one has ever taken the ride.

No one has ever received what amounts to a ticket.

A very perfect record.

Now, I have been warned.

that when assaulted, if you do too much in response, you can go to jail, because retaliation is something you can go to jail for.

But it appears assault in Seattle, unless you use a gun, a knife, or a hatchet, is not jailable.

It's not worth your time and effort.

I don't know whether the courts or the prosecutor would do anything, because we have never gotten that far.

on that.

And I see a lot more.

I see that moving people out for trespass is something police can't do because no ID.

Who are they?

I recently had a situation where an individual alleged he owned the garage The police hadn't come within an hour and a half, almost two hours.

I was lucky.

I flagged down a police car.

Two officers were in it.

They checked.

Nobody had been assigned.

and they did go in and after several hours trying to help the individual, they did get them out.

Now, later on, the same individual threatened someone else and they did end up going to jail and I haven't seen them since, thank goodness.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Jessica Norton to be followed by Allison Blevins.

Good morning.

My name is Jessica Norton and for over 22 years I've owned a small business in Belltown.

Belltown is exactly what the city says it wants in a neighborhood.

We are the most densely populated residential community in King County.

We are socioeconomically diverse with million dollar condos alongside public, subsidized, affordable, and transitional housing.

We're walkable, transit connected, and filled with independently owned small businesses.

We also carry a significant share of the city's social services, serving some of the most vulnerable people in our communities.

and yet we are being overrun by a flagrant, violent, very violent open air drug market.

Much of it operating directly outside the housing and service centers people rely on for safety and stability.

Affordable housing providers in Belltown are reporting vacancies as high as 30%.

And that is not because we don't need housing it is because people do not feel safe here.

Even poor people do not want to live in an unsafe community.

Our bus stops have become centers of drug activity.

Residents are walking blocks past the stops closest to their homes just to find a safer option.

Small businesses, their employees and clients are navigating unsafe conditions every day and it is the biggest threat to my own business.

and many of us have stopped calling 911 because there are never any responses.

This is not compassionate.

Allowing vulnerable people to be exploited in plain sight outside the very services meant to help them is not compassion.

It is neglect.

and it is not equitable to expect neighborhoods like Belltown, dense, diverse, and already carrying so much to absorb this alone.

We're doing everything right as a community, but the city is not meeting us with the action the situation demands.

We need consistent public safety presence.

We need real enforcement of open air drug markets and we need safe, dignified conditions around our social services.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Alison Blevins.

On behalf of the Sandal Park neighborhood in Greenwood, I am asking the city to provide a dedicated police unit to the Sandal Park area, which is Police Beat J1.

Our community is struggling under the weight of drug dealing and usage at Sandal Park.

It is rampant and disturbing.

Often we call 911 and the police never come.

When they do come, they rarely do anything about open drug use and drug dealing.

We are asking the city to enforce the 80-inch vehicle width restriction, which is Municipal Code 11.71.070.

and the 72-hour parking limit, which is Municipal Code 1172-440 at and around Sandal Park.

We're asking that all current drug laws be upheld and enforced.

and please restore our well-loved, well-used community park back to the community.

And for the safety of our children, our community cannot continue to bear the burden of rampant unchecked drug use.

I have a petition signed by 151 of my neighbors.

Can I give this?

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

And our last in-person speaker is former Councilmember Sarah Nelson.

Welcome, former Council President Nelson.

Friends, we've had a bookend.

We started with Councilmember Wu, and now we end with former Council President Nelson.

And for the in-person, we also have some remotes.

Thank you very much and hello everybody.

Thank you Chair Kettle for having this particular topic on the agenda today because as you and other folks know on the committee and elsewhere that this topic, city policy on addiction and the drug epidemic is very near and dear to my heart, not only because I'm in recovery myself, but also because I believe that addiction, substance use disorder, fuels public safety challenges and chronic homelessness.

And so this is a key root cause of two of your major issues that you have to deal with.

So anyway, two things.

Number one, first of all, I have read the presentation materials and kudos to LEAD for its hard work in diversion services and I will remind folks up here that there are $2.85 million in the 2026 budget ongoing for recovery services.

And so just letting you know that there is money, that 500,000 for access to on-demand residential treatment, and that's on top of whatever was left over of the 300,000 that got in there in the 2024 budget.

250,000 for sober housing vouchers, 500,000 to non-profits providing housing and substance use disorder treatment and other behavioral health supports.

And so that money is there and so when it comes to what services lead case managers are encouraging their clients to go to, in-patient treatment is one option among other things.

And so just wanted to say, money is there.

And then finally, I just want to recognize that as you go forward, think about...

I'll be listening to how the drug ordinance has been working out so far since its passage.

Anyway, thank you.

Thank you.

Now we are transitioning to remote speakers.

The first remote speaker is Julia Beabout.

Please press star six when you hear the prompt, you have been unmuted.

My name is Julia Beabout.

I am commenting today on Seattle's public drug use policy.

As a third pipeline resident, When people ask me where I live, I often reply that I live downtown.

It doesn't get more down.

Like all jokes, it's funny because it's true.

If a drug user has reached Third Pike Pine, they have truly reached the nadir of Seattle's drug scene.

Like Little Saigon, like Belltown, we daily have crowds of 25 to 100 people using and dealing drugs, trafficking human beings, and selling stolen goods on our sidewalks.

They block residents from reaching their homes, have assaulted our neighbors, and are causing millions of dollars of damage and security costs.

As someone who has had a front row seat to the fentanyl and meth crisis since 2020, I and many of my neighbors believe it is first and foremost a public health crisis, but with public safety symptoms that have reached an intolerable level for our neighborhoods.

I'm here to advocate for the addition of a missing link in our current intervention approach, the reclassification of sidewalk vending without a permit as a misdemeanor.

Currently, vending without a permit is a signable offense enforced by SDAT, which is not capable of enforcing it.

Reclassifying this offense as a misdemeanor would allow SPD to take on enforcement.

Fencing of stolen goods plays a big role in the current sentinel and meth crisis.

Allowing SPD to confiscate the stolen goods will help disrupt the ecosystem that enables and funds the current crisis.

Let me be clear, I'm not necessarily advocating arresting the fencing individuals, but I am advocating for SPD's ability to confiscate the goods and disrupt the ecosystem.

Thank you.

Next up we have Howard Gale.

Good morning, Howard Gale.

September 2023's Drug Ordinance, which you'll be discussing, had a stunning five and a half pages of whereases all created to wave off the concerns of the hundreds that testified in opposition to that ordinance, centered around the concerns that police cannot be trusted to use discretion in assessing when possession or public drug use presents a serious threat, concerns that the city would fail to provide proper resources for diversion and treatment, and concerns that racial disparity in arrest would increase.

All of these fears came true.

One of the useless whereases states that the SPD shall, quote, create policy establishing diversion and treatment as the standard approach for most instances.

The 2023 ordinance also states that, quote, a lack of diversion opportunities shall not be a reason for arrest.

Yet, the data presented today demonstrates that whereas in 2024, 40.44% of people arrested for drug crimes were entered into post-arrest diversion, this percentage dropped to 19.11% last year.

Less than half.

A stunning, dismal, and predictable outcome from simply trusting the police.

Former Councilmember Theresa Muscatus said in voting against the 2023 ordinance that, quote, this law will exacerbate the racial disparities in who gets arrested.

A report from the King County Department of Public Defense last October found exactly that result.

African Americans are 4.1 times more likely to be arrested when compared to white people.

This report also found that arrests resulted in less than 3% either completing drug treatment or getting a court order to do so, another failure in a promised outcome of the ordinance.

The data presented today lacks the information, most notably on race, to determine most all of what the 2023 ordinance required for accountability.

This is part of a longstanding pattern where the council prioritizes punishment over protection and ignores accountability for unjust criminalization while demanding accountability for any programs that might offer just amelioration of systemic disparities and harms.

Thank you.

Next up we have Lars Erickson.

Good morning Chair Kendall and members of the committee.

My name is Lars Erickson.

I'm here today on behalf of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, representing more than 2,600 employers and 750,000 workers across the Puget Sound region.

Thank you for your remarks at the beginning of last Friday's meeting, elevating the important conversation about public use and possession enforcement and accountability, particularly in downtown and the International District.

I want to express our support for Chair Kettle's call for clarity, consistency, and measurable accountability in how this ordinance is applied.

Enforcement without transparency erodes trust and policy without follow-through leads communities carrying the consequences.

I also appreciate Councilmember Lynn's remarks underscoring the lived realities of the International District.

This is a neighborhood filled with many small family-run businesses, seniors, and transit-dependent residents.

The challenges there are not abstract.

They affect access to sidewalks, safety at storefronts, and whether elders feel comfortable leaving their homes.

The Public Use and Possession Ordinance was designed to balance compassion with public safety.

That balance only works when expectations are clear for outreach teams, law enforcement, service providers, and the public, and when the city holds itself accountable for results.

I originally committed to continue the leadership demonstrated last week Accountability is not punitive.

It is how we ensure the ordinance delivers the safer, more accessible public spaces our communities will promise.

Thank you for your leadership and continued focus on implementing to match the intent of the ordinance.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And our last public commenter is David Haynes.

All right.

Thank you, David Haynes.

George Soros, the evil billionaire, swore to destroy the United States from within.

And he uses Seattle as his pilot program.

He financed the straw donor, Jeanne Durkin and Obama, who politically appointed her, the U.S. attorney, who sued the police department.

And she, during the negotiation, slipped a sentence in that said low-level drug push is exempted from jail.

When the police negotiator signed off on it, and then the judge agreed, it became the law of the land, any jurisdiction in America that wanted it.

And Bruce Harrell led the efforts to exempt drug pushers under 3.5 grams.

And now we have a city attorney who was repeating the same failures of Pete Holmes by purposely informing the chief that she's not going to prosecute drug crimes that are listed as misdemeanor.

Even though some of those misdemeanor is based on the weight of the drugs, it's destroying all of these people's lives.

and all these unqualified Lehigh wraparound services that hook up with some alternative drool drug from Big Pharma are destroying the brains of people and not making them break their addiction.

It's like you could put all these people in the fucking streets into a jail for up to 21 days.

and then before they get released, you have them supervised into an authorized encampment that you could prop up within three days to be used all the resources that are available and make them focus on their drug addiction.

But instead, we got these nonprofits, all these virtue signaling women who think that they're so fucking advanced by giving alternative drool drugs to people and keeping them quelled and all screwed up behind the door.

They need to focus on breaking their addiction with healthy foods and exercise and make them do supervised community service.

Like go out and pick up trash to practice being an honest, worthwhile, diligent person instead of sloughing out in some untrustworthy non-profit that needs to be investigated along with the chief who needs to be replaced.

He is on record saying he is not going to

Thank you.

OK.

Thank you.

I really do want to thank everyone for coming.

This has been an interesting public comment in terms of the wide range of individuals that are here, organizations.

So I could tell we have Little Saigon represented.

We also have Chinatown in the ID.

We've had Belltown.

Thank you for coming.

North Beacon Hill?

Okay, got that.

I saw the hand raised back there.

Greenwood, Fremont, Downtown.

Great mix.

And then we've had individuals, but we've also had organizations.

I'd like to thank Lehigh team for coming out.

Also WeHeart Seattle.

Obviously we have our accountability partners, so we have a mix and some folks from the government side.

We have a nice mix of people to include two former local electeds.

Thank you Councilmember Wu and Nelson for joining us today.

And it highlights that we have neighbors in crisis, but we also have neighborhoods in crisis.

And by the way, sorry, but it's not just Little Saigon and the CID.

As you're hearing, trust me, I've been there.

Downtown, Third Pike and Pine, Belltown, Second and North, Third and Blanchard.

We have some places in Pioneer Square, Lake City.

But Little Saigon is a main piece, so I wanted to acknowledge that.

understanding that once you have a drug market, you have a stolen goods market, and then how that goes in.

And so I appreciate the points related to vending, because that came up from different angles.

And there's also the use.

About a month ago, I was in Belltown, probably as far as I am from former council member Nelson, from a person that OD'd and died.

at a bus stop.

And I talked to King County Metro.

The King County sheriffs were there.

I talked to an officer from the West Precinct.

And he was talking about the situation that led to that person ODing and dying there and being on the sidewalk as I could see him, again, as far as that distance.

And it really brings home the challenges that we face.

But it's also about understanding and speaking to the issues as they are on the ground.

and I think that's really important.

Also, the seam.

Thank you for mentioning the seam.

And I note the point about proviso.

It's not just from what you're talking about, but it also goes to the community solutions project for Pioneer Square, which is so important.

So thank you for that.

I understand and appreciate the point about enabling, because we do have an enabling kind of situation in our city.

and so that's really important to note.

And I would have to agree with Mr. Gale, which is, you know, so I just wanted to note this, you know, when, you know, he talks about, you know, the issue related to the bill.

As I said in my notes, it's been a failure in itself but also in its implementation.

So that's something that Mr. Gale did.

But I just want to close too that Some people said, yes, more diversion.

But we do need a rest, maybe more, maybe less.

But what we have to have is less of do nothing.

This kind of goes to Danny Westneed's question in terms of what's been the effect of our efforts thus far.

And sadly in our city, and I'll quote Chief Barden from CARE, sometimes in our city we do nothing and we call it compassion.

I think we know from the neighbors in crisis and our neighborhoods in crisis that that's not really something that we want to follow through.

So with that said, we will now move on to our first item of business now that public comment has expired.

By the way, you can also email us at council at seattle.gov if you want to do additional comments.

But now we'll move on to our first item of business.

Will the clerk please read agenda item one into the record?

Seattle's Drug Possession and Public Use Ordinance Policy and Data Review.

Thank you.

We have Mr. Doss from Central Staff who will do the first presentation.

And then separately, we also have SPD and PDA lead represented, with Chief Barnes leading the SPD delegation and Ms. Dugard leading the PDA team.

And for those that were here on Friday, I do believe that we have a new computer here at the table, which should facilitate our presentations.

Before starting, Mr. Doss, can you introduce yourself and where you're from for the record?

And can we just go down the table and do introductions before Mr. Doss starts his presentation?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

Greg Doss, your Council Central Staff.

Good morning, Brandi McNeil, Deputy Director at Purpose Dignity Action, or PDA.

Good morning, Lisa Dugard with Purpose Dignity Action and the Lead Project Management Team.

Good morning, Council Members.

Sean Barnes, Chief of Police, Seattle Police Department.

Good morning, Rob Brown, Acting Assistant Chief of Patrol Operations, Seattle Police.

Good morning, everyone.

Sarah Smith, Seattle Police Department, COO.

Good morning, Sam Wolf with Purpose Dignity Action, Seattle King County Policy Director.

Thank you.

I think we have a great mix of individuals here.

So with that said, and Mr. Doss, I believe if we go through your briefing in its entirety, that's probably the best and hold questions to the end.

Yeah, for sure.

If members would like, when I get to the last couple slides, they're going to be on data.

It may be helpful if I can take questions during that session.

But maybe before I get to the data slides, if I could press through.

Yeah, that'd be helpful.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Doss.

Okay.

Please proceed.

All right.

So at the chair's request, I put together a presentation that provides an overview of Seattle's drug ordinance.

That's Ordinance 126896. And today I'm going to give you a little background about the ordinance, how it came to be, and what it required of SPD in terms of drafting policies to enforce simple or personal possession and use and other drug charges.

And so I'm going to start today by giving you some background One second.

There we go.

So in May of 2023, the legislature changed Washington state law so that individuals could be arrested without diversion for violations of misdemeanor drug possession and use.

However, the new state law still placed a heavy emphasis on diversion when possible for drug related crimes.

Shortly thereafter, the Seattle City Attorney transmitted proposed ordinance 120586, which would have codified in Seattle Municipal Code the state's drug law.

And that bill did not do anything more than just codify the state's drug law.

It did not include any Seattle specific laws on diversion or arrest or any guidance to SPD.

Later, and that bill did not pass a vote of the full council.

Later that year, in August of 2023, Mayor Harrell authored and transmitted a revamped or rewritten council bill, that bill being 120645. That one also adopted the new state law, but that one also required a diversion emphasis for individuals who are potentially being arrested or under investigation of arrest for drug use and possession.

That bill also required a threat of harm assessment to guide officers' decisions when engaging with folks who could be arrested for drug use and possession.

I'm going to refer to that bill as the city's drug ordinance, the one we're going to be talking about.

Earlier this year, the committee heard the first annual evaluation of the drug ordinance, which was presented by the Officer of Inspector General for Public Safety and conducted by the University of Washington's Addiction Drug and Alcohol Institute.

I want to be clear, that evaluation was a study that was designed to determine how the threat of harm assessment was working.

So it focused on an individual and their path through the criminal justice system from the moment that they were arrested, then whether or not the threat of harm assessment was done and considered by an officer, and whether it went into the officer's decision to arrest or divert, and then on the diversions that resulted.

I want to be clear that what I'm doing here today is not that evaluation.

I will be showing you some data at the end.

The data is strictly number of arrests, number of diversion.

It shouldn't be interpreted in any way as to be an evaluation of whether or not that threat of harm assessment is working.

And we're going to talk about that threat of harm here assessment in just a minute.

Okay, so digging right in, I'll let you know I don't plan to read all of the slides, all the text on the slides that you're going to see today.

It's very narrative heavy.

I'll summarize what's going on here.

I wrote this presentation narrative heavy so that you had a resource.

There's no central staff memo accompanying this.

But what you're gonna see here is the excerpts from the ordinance themselves and SPD policy.

So you've got the exact language in front of you.

In its opening section, the ordinance establishes that SPD must adopt policies that will govern arrest and that diversion is the preferred approach when enforcing drug possession and use laws.

And then finally, a lack of diversion opportunity shall not be a reason for arrest.

So I'm gonna go on.

So SPD then, pursuant to the ordinance, developed policies that place emphasis on diversion.

This slide shows SBD policies that says, the very last service, when an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.

I'm on the wrong slide.

It's this last sentence, when an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.

Sorry, I got ahead of myself.

Okay, so as part of its policies, SPD developed a section on LEAD.

This slide shows that officers are required to contact LEAD when a subject is arrested and prior to booking at a 24-7 staff number that are answered by LEAD personnel.

So again, that's SPD policy 15.150.7.

So now I'm going to jump into the threat of harm assessment.

As I said earlier, the drug ordinance requires a threat of harm assessment for officers to guide their decision making in whether to arrest and whether to complete a jail booking.

I want to be clear right at the outset that the threat of harm assessment, whether the officer determines that there's a threat of harm to community or whether there's a threat of harm to self, In either case, the SPD policy manual does not mandate that arrests occur.

It does not mandate that arrests not occur.

Those things are covered under state law and SPD policy elsewhere.

The right to arrest or not arrest lays with the officer Under state law, officers are provided discretion to arrest or not arrest, and that is true of Seattle Police Department officers as well.

So, as we move through these sections, I want to be clear that whether we're talking about threat of harm to others or threat of harm to self, the ultimate decision for an officer to arrest is their own, and you will not find in the SPD policies something that says you have to arrest here or you don't have to arrest there.

So with that, jump into the threat of harm assessment.

What you see here is that officers, once they have established probable cause, may do the threat of harm assessments or shall do the threat of harm assessment.

To be clear, this is only done after an officer has probable cause to arrest.

So the officer has either seen someone using drugs or someone has admitted to using drugs and they have probable cause to arrest.

So none of this occurs until after they have probable cause.

I want to be clear with that.

The ordinance up there at the top of the slide requires SPD to specify conditions under which the public might be harmed when someone is using or possessing drugs.

And so in response to that, I'm going to sort of go back and forth between SPD policy and ordinance to show how they complement each other and relate.

So in response to that, SPD developed policy 15150.4 and established a number of different conditions by which someone who's using or possessing drugs may be considered a harm to others.

And I'm not gonna go through this entire list, but what I will say is that the last bullet, public harm is presumed if the possession occurs near a school, park, bus stop, station, or other transportation infrastructure.

also point out that the presence of community members or businesses nearby also would guide the officer into a threat of harm to others' assessment or situation.

So if you look at this list altogether, One takeaway is that most people that are using drugs downtown, they're going to be near a business, they're going to be near transportation infrastructure.

This assessment and these conditions would apply to quite a bit of open drug use downtown anywhere you are.

So that's noticeable.

But also notable is that the ordinance's framework still places an emphasis on diversion.

So even though an officer determines that there may be a threat of harm to others under this ordinance, there is still an emphasis on diversion versus arrest.

So now I'm going to move into the threat of harm to self.

So both the ordinance and the SPD policies state that if the assessment, if the officer doing the assessment determines that there is not a threat of harm to others, then by default, the next condition is that there is only a threat of harm to self.

And both the Both the ordinance and SPD policies, again, prioritize diversion in this category as well.

As you'll see under number three on the ordinance, the ordinance says that an officer will not arrest when the individual poses only a threat of harm to self absent articulable facts and circumstances warranting such an action.

Again, discretion lies with the officer as to whether or not they wish to arrest.

when an officer does arrest, they have to show probable cause.

Probable cause is indeed articulable facts and circumstances.

So that's something to note.

SPD's policies do not say that an officer has to arrest or not.

So there's a little bit of difference in what you're seeing between the ordinance and policy here.

All right, so, Moving along to the next slide, which is a continuation of threat of harm to self.

SPD policy encourages officers to contact lead case managers if those case managers are known, and that's what the first paragraph is all about.

The second paragraph is that SPD has identified certain conditions that, when they're met, may warrant a jail booking.

And here we see three bullets, possession of seven grams or more of the suspected narcotics, transportation to a community-based care, or to prevent the subject from causing additional harm to self.

So, with those three conditions, SPD may consider a jail booking.

Although again, I'm gonna keep coming back to my theme, SPD ultimately has the discretion to do whatever they want.

Okay, so now I'm gonna get into the data and just go over this slide and then, because it may, there's a lot of stuff up here, there may be questions, so I'll pause.

All right, so what you're gonna see on this slide is arrests and diversion data.

The first category at the top of the slide is pre-arrest diversion, which LEAD calls social contact diversion.

So when an officer believes that somebody, a subject may be in need of LEAD services and maybe not in that probable cause arrest situation I talked about, they may refer What through a social contact that person to lead and that that happens.

As you can see, there were 164 instances of that in 2024. There were 96 instances of that in 2025. So that that is showing that officers are doing that fewer times.

The next box is SPD arrests versus the post-arression diversion.

So the first row shows a count of people that were arrested.

And this is SPD data pulled out of their CATRMS system.

In 2024, there were 633 individuals that were arrested for drug use and possession.

And in 2025, there were 942 individuals arrested for drug use and possession.

Within those categories, within that row, the 633 and the 942, you can almost divide those numbers in half.

And half of those folks that were arrested are arrested for drug use and possession and more complicating factors like intent to sell or intent to distribute.

The other half are folks who are, I'm not going to say simple possession and use, but are using themselves and possessing themselves without those complicating factors, more personal use, if you will.

Then the second row is lead diversion data.

That is data coming from the lead organization on how many folks were diverted post-arrest.

As you can see, there were 256 in 2024 and 180 in 2025. And so the big picture here is that arrests are increasing 47% and diversions are decreasing 30%.

So with that, I'll stop and ask if there's any questions and then we'll go on to some additional detail.

Colleagues, vice chair, colleagues, no questions?

Yeah, keep pressing.

Okay, so this is the additional detail.

So what this slide attempts to do is to take that group of folks that were arrested in the prior slide.

if you see the row of SPD arrests, 633 and 942, and I said that about half of those folks were simple possession and use or were just personal possession and use.

This focuses on just that half, just the half of low level offenders.

So about 456 folks in total and the disposition of those folks using SPD data in 2024 and 2025. So you see a row or a column for 2024, a column for 2025, and then you'll see the various categories that SPD recorded.

You've got identified and released, Mark 43 recorded diversion, charged by officer, declined to jail, new offense booked, warrant booked.

So I'll go through each of those categories quickly in one moment, but what I want to highlight here on the data is these are a count of rests made by SPD, but there are about 10% of these numbers are folks reoffending.

So let's look at the 2025 category.

In the 2025 category, you have 456 count of arrests.

There were about 33 individuals, or roughly 7 to 10%, between the years that re-offended or were arrested twice.

So you may have a person that was part of the 69 group on identify and release and then they were re-arrested and maybe they were brought to jail at that point and they're in the decline to jail category.

So it's a small group of people, only 10% or so.

Most of these are standalone, but there are some duplications within these categories.

So a couple things to note, the Mark 43 recorded diversion, that happens every time an SPD officer arrests somebody and they refer that person to lead and they fill out a document, a template that they're required to fill out per SPD policy that shows that there's a lead referral happening.

So you can see that that happened 173 times in 24 and 109 times in 2025. Let me clear here, lead referrals can happen and enrollment can happen in really almost any of these categories and do.

So it's not it's not correct to say that 173 or 109 are the only lead deferrals.

Those are only the at the scene, filled out a template, did it the right way, completed diversion by SPD policies.

There are also going to be lead, lead is gonna be happening when there's an identify and release.

It'll be happening in any of these categories.

But again, as we saw in the prior slide, regardless of how you look at it, diversions are down by about 30%.

The last thing I'll highlight here is that there is a shift towards the charged by officer category and towards the subjects that were either booked or declined at jail.

That latter group, booked or declined at jail, grew about 191% between 2024 and 2025. And as you can see, the group of charged by officers grew from 80 to 180. I think we all understand the decline to jail, new offense booked and warrant booked.

Many folks may not understand charged by officer.

That's an option that officers have at the point of arrest where they may release someone and essentially fill out a form in their CAD system that forwards charges.

And SPD can correct me on the technical parts here.

I'm covering this at a high level.

Forwards charges to the city attorney's office.

Then they would release the individual and the city attorney's office will figure out how to press forward or not with that charge by officer.

In the last couple of years, there have not been any lead diversions coming at the request of the prosecutor.

The former city attorney was instead using a a drug assessment program that the court had on the ground and that was the primary option for drug use and possession subjects.

However, that's now changed.

and when the city attorney receives a charge by officer, the city attorney will be able to divert those folks to the LEAD program and out of the 43 folks that they have received so far this year, they have referred 33 to LEAD.

That's not exclusive of charge by officer but just the charges that are coming to the city attorney.

So you can see that on the ground there's a bit of a shift where officers are more often either taking folks to jail or referring them to the city attorney and the city attorney would make the diversion decision.

Stop and ask any questions.

Let's go ahead.

And then the takeaways, I think we've pretty much covered here.

SPD policies require or strongly suggest that folks are diverted through the LEAD program.

Arrests are increasing.

The portion of simple possession or use remains constant at about 50%, even though arrests are increasing.

LEAD diversions are decreasing, both at the pre-arrest level and post-arrest level.

And it's possible that LEAD capacity and SPD operational issues are affecting SBD's ability to use post-rest diversion.

That's something that all the folks at the table will be able to talk about today.

With that, I'll end my presentation and ask if there's any questions.

Thank you, Mr. Doss.

I appreciate the presentation and the walkthrough for the various pieces to include state law or local ordinance and also SBD policy.

I understand your points regarding diversion preferred.

Discretion, very important point.

Thank you for making that regarding arrest or non-arrests following probable cause.

Thank you for noting the transportation pieces.

and I was going to make a side note because we had one of the public commenters who each day with her business or employees are dealing with people in the alley.

So alleys are part of the transportation infrastructure and that business woman who was here has now left and also one across the street in Belltown also with the alleys is many issues.

I had a question regarding city attorney.

I've had conversations with a city attorney like on community court.

We need a new approved drug court.

We need an improved system.

These points in your briefing, thank you very much, really highlights the need to further our criminal justice, the functioning of our criminal justice system.

Before going to any questions, Chief Barnes or Assistant Chief Brown or Ms. Smith, to get all the names in, but Chief Barnes, if you had any comments, General Peacher before questions, please go ahead.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, council members.

Always a pleasure.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the operational realities facing the Seattle Police Department as we work to meet community expectations.

LEAD is a pre-arrest diversion program designed to connect individuals in low-level criminal activities with services rather than the traditional criminal justice process.

As you know, the city attorney has directed the drug possession and drug use cases be diverted to LEAD unless aggravated factors are present.

SPD will continue to follow this directive.

My goal today is not to dismiss the program, but to support it.

Diversion has value and can be an important tool.

In many cases, it is better than having what we've always done, which is no intervention at all.

But it's also important to be clear-eyed about what the program can and cannot accomplish and whether it's meeting the expectations of the people who live, work, and visit the city.

One of the central challenges that officers are being asked to do is to evaluate harm.

in situations where individuals are openly using and or smoking illegal drugs in public spaces.

In Seattle, this behavior is visible in parks, sidewalks, near transit, hubs, schools, and our local businesses.

And while the policy framework may seem to allow it, the community does not approve of it and this level of disorder.

Visitors also do not expect to see it.

Our officers are placed in the difficult position of responding to behavior that is clearly harmful to the public environment while being limited and the tools available to address it.

We should also acknowledge the empirical evidence.

Research from cities across the country shows that open-air drug use correlates with increased police calls for service, reduced foot traffic, decreased commercial activity, and heightened perceptions of fear and disorder.

These impacts are not theoretical.

They are measurable, and they affect the economic and social health of our neighborhoods.

Last year, King County welcomed 39.9 million visitors.

Many of them came from cities where open-air drug use is not tolerated, not legal, and not part of the local culture.

Their experiences of our city and their willingness to return to our city is shaped by what they see on our streets.

That matters for public safety and it matters for our economy.

At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves a simple but essential question.

Are we giving the community what they expect from our public safety system?

Are we willing to deliver the level of order, safety, and visible presence that residents, businesses, and visitors believe should be indicative of a major U.S.

American city?

Diversion is part of the solution, but it cannot be the only solution.

This program should be a supplement to the fundamental need for clear standards of behavior, clear standards of behavior in public spaces, consistent with enforcement, as previously stated, since my arrival, arrest for drug use and possession has increased by 47 percent, and a police department with the staffing necessary to meet the demand of community-based policing.

I look forward to discussing how we can align our policies or realign our policies, our program and our resources to ensure that Seattle remains a safe and welcoming, thriving community for everyone.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Chief.

And I appreciate that.

And to your point, as noted, we have neighbors in crisis.

We have neighborhoods in crisis.

So I think the question about harm is being answered two and a half years in.

But with that, I'd like to go to my vice chair.

Vice Chair Socket, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Doss, Ms. Dugard, Chief, for being here.

Really appreciate you all sharing your insights with us.

A couple of questions, comments.

First off, starting, Mr. Doss, you can go back to slide nine of your presentation, one that begins with SPD data, disposition of simple drug use and possession arrests.

Bad heading.

What would be...

Let's see.

Is it up?

All right, sorry.

And you said slide nine.

Yep, bingo, that's the one.

So what would be super helpful from my perspective?

First off, let me just say this.

The bright light of transparency is the single most powerful disinfectant in public policy.

Transparency is the single most powerful disinfectant in public policy.

That's in part why we're here today, if it wasn't abundantly clear.

What I would like to- this is great initial data and be curious to hear, you know, through the case study and other reporting from our partners that lead, co-lead, NSPD, you know, their take on this.

But what I would specifically love to see here is this data broken out by specific geographic location.

Data broken out by specific geographic location.

84 square miles of territory of coverage across the city.

Huge, wide swath.

What, 1,100 deployable officers currently?

We're on pace to hire a lot more over time, but can't single-handedly track every specific neighborhood, cross street, across 80. That's neither practicable nor feasible.

That said, There are some of the most notorious, infamous sites, locations, cross streets across our city that could use and benefit from this kind of enhanced data disclosure.

12th and Jackson comes top of mind.

Pike Pine Corridor, maybe some areas in my district in Pioneer Square.

The top three to five or the bottom three to five cross streets that we know attract the kind of community and public harm and behavior that we're trying to better address from a public policy standpoint.

I would love to see broken out this kind of data, broken out by some of these known problem areas.

Point number one.

Mr. Doss, if you wouldn't mind backtracking to, I think, slide number five, threat of harm assessment, where it talks about that sub-bullet there, SPD policy.

It says, Sub-bullet there, it says, public harm is presumed if use or possession occurs near a school, park, bus stop, rail station, or other transportation structure.

So my read of that in layman's terms is any transit stop or connection point.

And I appreciate the chief's comments a moment ago.

We are asking our officers to do too much.

In many material respects, we are asking them to assess, have complex assessments of public harm They're, in often cases, they're neither equipped nor trained nor resources to make those complex determinations.

That said, the department's policy, I would support this, is also pretty clear on what constitutes a presumed public harm.

And I can't think of a better, canonical example than 12th and Jackson.

in terms of checking all those boxes.

Well, at least the transit access.

And in fact, I was at a late-eight press conference unveiling a plan with the mayor last week, and President Greg Woodfill from ATU Local 587 was there, and he was celebrating this great achievement, and then he said, and he cautioned us, and he challenged us, 12th and Jackson, transit stop, out of hand, we need to do better.

All this to say is, on the one hand, it seems like, yes, we are absolutely calling on our frontline officers to make these complex judgment calls and that they're not empowered to make, they're not best positioned to make, that's probably a better way of stating that.

On the other hand, there are presumed cases, and in the case of 12th and Jackson, would like to see stronger action.

That's what I'll say there.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Council Member Rivera or Lynn?

Council Member Rivera?

Thank you, Chair Kettle, and thank you for convening these presentations today and bringing up the drug possession law as a point of conversation.

It's very necessary and I'm glad all the partners are at the table and in the room and community members showed up.

And I was just gonna say the U District is also on the list of high areas of this particular activity and it means that as I believe it's the most dense neighborhood in the city of Seattle.

We are seeing a lot of impacts to residents and small businesses and the small businesses being local, family owned mostly in that area having huge impacts.

by drug activity up in the U District.

So wanted to say that so anyone listening could know.

I know our district is also suffering from these issues.

Chief, you said something I'd love to hear.

It almost sounded like you were saying when you talked about realigning our policies and you'd brought up threat of harm assessment prior to that.

Can you tell me a little bit about what are your thoughts or do you have recommendations for eliminating threat of harm assessment as part of this work or how would we make changes?

I'd love to hear more about what you think needs to happen, I guess is what I'm trying to get at.

Thank you.

I think there is a significant policy decision that will have to be made about when is the best time to include, lead in the diversion of people who we believe need help.

The list, which was written before my arrival, is expansive.

It would have been better to say where not to than to list all of this, because then you have to go through and see to see the locations.

Almost everywhere where I am hearing complaints from businesses, from community members, and from visitors apply to this list.

So I don't know why this list was created this way instead of just saying it in the inverse, unless you are.

But I do believe that a very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can envy people using drugs.

and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist and whether or not we would send them to lead then or we would send them to the courts.

As you know, the city attorney has stated that if it comes before her, she will make the diversion to lead.

And so that's a policy decision that people will have to make.

I'm also concerned that When we are encountering someone who is in possession or is using illegal drugs under the influence, we're asking them to make a very important decision or engaging them to make a very important decision under the influence of what could be a narcotic.

In my experience, people make clearer decisions when they're not under the influence of a substance.

But again, it's a policy decision and I think will have to be made by the policymakers.

Thank you, Chief.

And I know that we have a second presentation from the LEAD program because I do have a lot of questions.

that Greg raised as part of this first presentation that I think we will have to fill in some blanks.

I will say that I understand what I have seen in the amount of time I've been on the council is just there are some concerns with the being able to consent to services and the need for, I kept calling it a sobering center, so people get picked up, they're under the influence, they get somewhere to sober up so then they can say, yes, I will accept services because I believe what I have heard is that if people can't consent, they're just back out on the street and they're gonna get rearrested and Greg talked about a lot of the folks getting rearrested.

Some of those folks in the data sets were rearrest.

So that is something that we need to, to grapple with and figure out how to best address, but I'll wait.

Council, I'd like to add on to the Chief's comments, specifically with how the Seattle Police Department is using this law right now.

Councilmember Saka, you're exactly right.

I think if you got that data about where it's being used, you're going to see that this law is being enforced in the areas you referred to, 12th and Jackson, Belltown, Third and Pike Pine.

Those are the areas where we get the most complaints about widespread public disorder that includes the open consumption.

And something I want to talk about where this law is being applied by our officers is when what I would call, and this is a phenomenon I've seen in recent years, what I would call defiant open consumption.

This is where somebody is trying to come in and out of their condo or come into their business or customers or tourists are traveling through an area.

and folks are openly consuming, not in the back alleyway.

I mean, they do that, too, but right there in the entryway of various businesses and various residences.

And they won't even step aside when those folks are trying to come in and out, making the residents and the folks traveling through feel very uncomfortable, understandably so.

This defiance is even when an officer walks right up and they feel like they're entitled to continue to consume.

And so...

I understand that somebody who is an addict, that jail alone by itself is not necessarily going to help them get to moving beyond their addiction.

But what I do want to see is behavior change for this type of defiant open consumption.

So this is something I've encouraged when I was the West Precinct captain in 2025, officers to engage in that and use this tool when appropriate, per their discretion, as Greg Doss had covered.

Let's see if there's anything else I want to add to that.

For Councilmember Rivera, The threshold is fairly low when we're applying it in these areas, because like Councilmember Saka pointed out, these are transit corridors.

It's easy to demonstrate that when somebody is along the sidewalk, even underneath an umbrella, but you have fentanyl fumes out in the general air, that's a harm presented to the community.

So we've been able to apply this.

It's a fairly low bar for the officers to be able to illustrate harm to others.

I'm not aware of any, if at all, harm to self-arrests that involve incarceration.

So I think that that's...

I just kind of want to give you an assessment of how we're applying this law now.

Thank you.

Thank you, Assistant Chief Barnes.

Ms. Smith, did you have anything to add?

Okay.

Can we come back?

Because we have to get the other briefing in, too.

Council Member Lynn?

Sure.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you.

This is such a meaty topic.

I feel like we could spend all day discussing this, and I know we have limited time.

As mentioned last week, we had a lengthy town hall with our North Beacon Hill residents.

and just a number of not only drug, open air drug use, drug sales, but just related concerns around assaults, deteriorating public safety issues in North Beacon Hill, and closely tied the issues that we see in Little Saigon.

And I think the one thing we can all agree upon is that we are not making progress nearly as quickly as we would like to see, both in terms of the neighborhoods, but all as well as the overdoses, the deaths that we continue to see, the continuing failure to address some of the mental health and drug abuse concerns, and we are making some.

I'm glad to see overdose deaths on the decline.

We have great new programs like the Overdose Recovery Center, but again, clearly not seeing the rapid success that we would like to see.

I do have a few questions.

One, I think it's really important that as we have this difficult public debate that we at least are having an open discussion, that we do see a wide differences of opinion, but I think it's important that we have clarity on what is happening.

So for example, I do think there's sort of a narrative that no drug possession arrests, that officers can't arrest for drug possession.

And I just want to clarify that that's not the case, that there are arrests happening for drug possession.

Another thing I just want to clarify, there was some misconceptions at our Public Safety Town Hall that arrests can happen for drug dealing as well.

I just want to make clear that we are making arrests for drug dealing, because there was a little bit of confusion at our Public Safety Town Hall.

So I see heads nodding.

I also just want to clarify in terms of, I see an increase in arrest for drug possession.

Just wondering if you could provide a little bit of context for these numbers, Chief.

It looks like it was around, could we pull up the slide that has the total number of drug arrests?

And it looks like it went up about 40%.

Yeah, so this slide is the one that shows the total arrests.

633 in 2024, 942 in 2025. And again, about half of those are going to be for more serious drug charges that include manufacturing or dealing.

And the other half, roughly, our 48 percent are going to be for less serious, more personal consumption and use.

Oh my god, okay.

And just wondering, in terms of these numbers, just wondering if you could kind of give us a comparison of how these, to the extent you know, might compare to other cities of our size.

I would have to get back to you on that.

We haven't done any comparatives of...

It's hard to find too many cities that compare to Seattle, sir.

So it's gonna take some time, but I think we could do that.

You know, what I will tell you is we made significant changes last year, my first year here, with how we approach some of these.

The first thing that I did was I did a instructional video Introducing my philosophy around whether or not we would or would not be arresting people for drug use and drug sales.

Clarifying, as you stated before, we do have the authority and power to do that.

And then our CEO at the time helped to author a training program based on the law so that officers knew what they could and what they could not do.

Some officers were even confused about it, just like you stated, you heard in your town hall.

So I clarified that, number one, when I first got here.

Another thing that we did was we started to move some resources to some of the areas that were mentioned, that we were seeing a lot of complaints and a lot of activities in 2025. And then in this year, one of our groups, our community response group, that's kind of like our Swiss Army knife, if you will.

They handle a lot of community complaints for us, rightfully so.

I've moved them from special operations to investigations.

So we're gonna go a little bit heavy on the people who are supplying people in the streets who are, quite frankly, preying, if you will, on people who are vulnerable in our community and so I look forward to this time next year being able to explain the number of people who were arrested for drug dealing, whether they're selling them out of RVs, encampments, or on the street hand to hand.

You will see some significant cases this year once they are up and running.

We've established some tools for them to do this work.

They just completed a training in undercover operations and operations around street level for drug enforcement.

So I look forward to next year being able to give you some of those statistics about what we have done in this area.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Okay.

And, Councilmember, can I just add one additional thing for some of the changes that happened in the year-over-year?

So a few other items that I think are really important to note that are exciting to know is that we've had an increase in our officers.

So we have been, in the last few years, finally making headway in getting our officers, getting more officers who are qualified on the streets, And while it is not enough, we are seeing a change in activity.

So some of these numbers are going to be part of the staffing and hopefully we'll continue to do more as we actually get to our full staffing that we're looking for.

So that's one note I want to mention.

Additionally, thinking about the chief's comments around actually moving our staff to different areas that are these hotspots, these spaces that need more attention.

We launched the downtown activation team that has additional emphasis zones where folks are coming in and doing operation and making arrests.

While those are not consistent, I do think that has led to some of these increases.

And then I know that Lisa will talk about this soon, but capacity.

I think capacity is going to be changing in the next year, both for our staff, but also for case management.

And so that has also affected some of these numbers, and that will come up in the later presentation.

That's one of the reasons why you're here.

And I do want to turn it over to Assistant Chief Rob Brown to also talk about what the on-the-ground experience is like for an officer, because I think that helps get to your questions.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm gonna speak, I'm gonna start briefly, historically.

I first became involved with LEED back in 2015. I became the sergeant of a downtown bike team.

At that time, there were two ways that people were entering the LEED program, fairly standardized.

This is before the Blake decision, Possession was still a felony for many of these substances.

An arrest was made out on the streets.

The arrestee was transported to the precinct.

And if it was deemed that it would be a good lead referral, then a call was made out to the green light program.

They would respond to the precinct.

There was a handoff made and the person did not go to jail.

They rather were released after speaking to the intake from, it was either REACH or the lead folk.

So that's one standard way.

The other thing I want to talk about is social referral, very briefly.

Social referral is made by an officer when they know that someone would be a good fit.

Now, let me explain this.

LEAD is a voluntary program.

You have to have somebody willing to engage in it.

and so it's not typically the first time that an officer encounters somebody using on the street that you're gonna make that great referral that they're gonna be even open to considering it.

It's the relationship that an officer builds over time with the people on the streets that they're encountering due to the nature of their duties out there, enforcing the law and coming across folks that are struggling with addiction.

So they can have an ongoing conversation and then reach a point where this person's like, yeah, you know, I'm done with this.

I need help.

And they can connect them up with lead.

And that's usually where that's going to get a more successful referral.

Let me fast forward to what's happening now because some of this has changed over time.

I'm not going to go into all of the changes, but Obviously, the Blake decision happened.

You have this misdemeanor that is on the books.

Quite frankly, when you have somebody who is arrested for open possession consumption, one of the questions they're going to be asked when they get down to the jail is, hey, have you consumed drugs recently?

And quite often, the answer would be yes.

That triggers a six-hour hospital guard.

in our resource-strained department right now.

That's a lot of resources committed to getting this misdemeanor booked.

So I'm just giving you the reality that officers get creative.

You have more charge by officer.

You have other avenues to address the violations on the street.

You also have continued LEAD referrals, but I want to address something here about what you're witnessing in this data, because I know it's been pointed out multiple times now, but not yet addressed.

I provided a training when I was at the West Precinct back in 2022 to the first, second, and third watch, all of the officers in the precinct, along with our partners with LEAD, and we saw a tremendous spike in LEAD referrals, which challenged their capacity to deal with that.

And in 2025, fast forwarding to there, LEAD, and I won't speak at length to this, but I know that you're gonna talk about the capacity challenges of 2025. And so we were communicating, we're like, okay, we can't do more trainings.

Let's make sure that the referrals that we're making are quality referrals, because we want to get the most bang for our buck with this very good program.

I believe, is there anything more you wanted me to address on that?

So that's kind of a status update of where we're at.

Lead referrals are still occurring, but we did start slow rolling it a bit in 2025. Thank you.

Thank you, Chief Brown.

Appreciate it.

We're going to keep moving.

And I'm not going to ask any questions, but I do want to make a few statements before we push over to the PDA side.

One is, this is our second meeting.

We had the OIG here earlier.

We have to have the data for the OIG and that piece to work.

and so we need to look at that.

This goes to furthering a functional criminal justice system.

And then in the interviews at the end, one of the issues was basically we need diversion or jail, but what came out of that, there is the kind of move along or do nothing piece, and that's something that we need to shrink and work on.

And so that came out of that OIG report.

Thank you, Chief Brown, regarding the medical declines.

I was going to ask about that.

I was actually a little surprised on the numbers because that is a major issue.

And that also goes to a furthering functional criminal justice system.

And we've had King County Jail Health here last year.

And so the data pieces on that are important.

And by the way, we also need to look.

King County Jail Health is a King County function.

Well, Harborview is a King County function too.

Why can't we have telemedicine?

we can't have the system being played, and we have to get to these root pieces in order to be able to do it right.

And so you kind of answered the question, by the way, in terms of these pieces.

And the last piece I was gonna ask and actually speak to, and I'm gonna use it as a transition to our next piece, is what's interesting, Chief, by the way, this was done before my arrival on the Council too, so we're not alone on that front, in fact.

Everybody on this dais came after this bill came into being.

But you know what's different also?

We didn't have alternative response back in 23. We didn't have the care department like we had today.

So this presents an opportunity to update, to bring in the alternative response piece, also to bring clarity and simplify and make clear for our officers, because we put them in a bad position.

As I said on Friday, for those sheriff's deputies and those officers from SBD that are sitting outside 12th and Jackson and the residents and the shop owners see this, but they also see this illegal activity.

That is not good for our Seattle Police Department.

It's not good for King County Sheriff.

And so these are the kind of things that we need to address.

And one way to do it, and particularly in the pre-arrest in that kind of space on view with the crisis care responders, the CCRs from the care department, is look for these opportunities.

But by the way, it's not just that.

We have the, you know, the STAR Center.

We have the ORCA Center.

You know, so we need to update.

We built so much capacity on the alternative response side that we need to update the system, the care ordinance itself, but also public drug use and possession so then we can have a better functional system that serves the police officers right, because I think they're being put into a very bad position, but also leverage not only care department, but also the nonprofits.

And as to close that piece, it's not by accident.

PDA now reports to care.

So with that, Ms. Dugard, if you can, again, well, you've already presented yourself, but if you can present your briefing.

Colleagues, no questions until the end, so we can ensure that this moves along.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Kettle.

We have two decks.

Deputy Director Randy McNeil will start us off.

I'll finish the first deck, and then we'll turn to Sam Wolf for a short exploration of the cohort that was diverted to lead since the drug ordinance was adopted and what the methodology of change has been and what results we've seen.

So, by way of introduction, lead recovery services model of care aligns with SAMHSA recovery framework pillars.

So, a safe place to live, access to medical and behavioral health care, relationship and connection, and a well-founded hope for a meaningful life.

LEAD is a combination of a few things, long-term case management, legal services, and legal system coordination.

So focusing on the first of those three things that I listed, long-term case management itself is a core recovery services intervention under Washington law.

and our case managers are skilled in supporting behavior change through motivational interviewing, brokering available benefits and services, providing housing navigation and legal system coordination, and connecting to clinically appropriate treatment services.

So some of the resources that lead case managers have access to are lead legal services, which is a small but mighty, as I like to say, team of lawyers who can address barriers that lay advocacy can't resolve.

So some things at first appear to be a money problem, they actually have a legal solution.

And so lead legal supports lead participants and lead case managers in removing those barriers.

core to the program and involvement in this framework is that all participants sign a release of information authorizing case managers to coordinate care plans with law enforcement, prosecutors, and others.

And these care plans and the related information that's shared by case managers is shared pursuant to LEAD's core principle, which is that no one can be worse off because they shared information with their lead case manager.

But another really key and important characteristic of LEAD is that this is not immunity from enforcement.

And as you heard Assistant Chief Brown reference, right, officers retain their ability to exercise their expertise.

Perhaps on the first encounter, they don't yet believe that a person is open or interested in receiving services, but after multiple encounters and getting to know that person, the officer decides they're gonna exercise that discretion, use that expertise, and decide to make a diversion.

But it doesn't prevent, again, continuing to enforce the law in the future.

So just because an officer has made a referral to lead, doesn't prevent them from deciding on the next encounter.

At this point, an arrest is appropriate and booking is appropriate.

Just briefly, LEAD has been rigorously evaluated.

There was an independent University of Washington, researchers funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, found that LEAD reduces recidivism for all crimes by 58%, reduced felony charges by 39%, resulted in 41 fewer days in jail per person annually and lowered the odds of entering prison by 88%.

A participant's odds of being housed increased 89% and their odds of being on the employment continuum increased 46% over their status at entry.

Lastly, in 2022, King County Auditor found that LEAD Seattle King County was unique among local diversion programs in its commitment to rigorous evaluation and using data to make program adjustments.

Now, I won't belabor this slide too much because I think Assistant Chief Brown covered the first two pathways very, very well, but there are three paths in to lead.

The first is an arrest diversion, a post-arrest referral by law enforcement.

The second is a social contact referral, and that is a proactive referral by a first responder outside of the context of arrest.

So at that point, maybe an officer doesn't have probable cause, but can identify someone they think is a good fit and they can still make a referral.

And going to a point that a council member Kettle made is that now there are also care responders and other first responders that are able to make referrals as well.

So they see individuals that might be a good fit, they can make that referral.

And then last are community referrals.

And these are referrals made by community members without the need to pass through the emergency response system.

So without the need to call 911, a community can make referrals as well.

And this third pathway also includes the pre-filing referrals that we've received from the Seattle City Attorney's Office.

And that is a new innovation as of this year that we are getting started as well.

So with that, I'll pass it over to Lisa.

So here are some data that I think are illuminating about the landscape that we've been collectively passing through over the last five years, six years.

And I do want to underscore something that Sarah Smith which is that the data that you see, the numbers going up and down, are really a simple story of changes in capacity, both for SPD, which was at a sort of all-time low compared to demand 2020 to 2024, and is gradually now starting to recover due to the efforts of many of you.

And then a parallel story of LEAD capacity, which despite in 2023, LEAD's an old program, right?

It goes back to 2011. And we've seen sort of steady slow but steady increases in funding and resources as the program itself expanded and the expectation of taking referrals from one precinct and then another precinct and then eventually citywide expanded.

But from a sort of high watermark in 2022, LEED took a dramatic reduction in city funding.

And I won't drag you down the rabbit hole of how that happened.

I don't think it was fully understood in the budget process, what was happening.

There's a long story behind it.

But that happened at the very same time that the ordinance put LEAD in a central role to take a significant volume of the newly prioritized enforcement activity around drug use and possession.

So what Chief Brown said and what Sarah alluded to are absolutely right that just as sort of the policy landscape expected us to take more work, our capacity to take that work was diminished by a fall off in city funding.

This council and the 2026 budget remedied that with stabilization funding, so we are just now in a position where if and when, because it is planned, we'll get to that at the end, SPD does roll call trainings on this methodology, how to make referrals, what referrals are appropriate, pushes out a department-wide e-learning, which Chief Brown has helped record with Chief Barnes.

permission that is about to go out to the entire department, we will be able to take those referrals and not have the system sort of collapse under the weight of demand.

Okay, so here on this slide you see referrals.

We went back to 2019 just so you can see how this whole ecosystem responds to sort of larger policy and political ebbs and flows.

So LEAD from the inception took arrest referrals.

It's not an alternative to arrest.

It also is an alternative resolution to arrest.

If officers make arrests, that incident can still resolve with a warm handoff transfer to LEAD.

And that happened throughout the history of LEAD from 2011 to 2019. Over time, officers started to rely more on social contact referrals because, as they would say, if they knew that somebody needed help and the person knew that they knew that, why should they have to wait until they had probable cause that a new crime occurred?

Why couldn't they be proactive and go ahead and initiate?

So over time, the SPD referral ratio started to center more on social contact referrals and less on arrests, just because arrests were less necessary in order to initiate that connection.

In 2020 and 2021, you see that arrest referrals vanished, essentially, and there are two reasons for this.

One, SPD capacity in the overall policy environment, but number two, because in 2021, after the Blake decision, the state legislature removed legal authority to make an arrest without making prior diversion efforts.

It was a sort of unfortunately worded law that was revised in 2023 to make clear that referral was discretionary, though encouraged.

So in 2023, you see a rebound because the legal environment for arrest was restored by the state legislature.

Also, at the end of 2023, the Seattle Drug Ordinance was passed, and so with a focus, sort of an intentional policy focus here locally, the bulk of those 100 referrals came at the end of 2023 after the ordinance was passed.

In 2024, you see a very robust utilization of arrest referrals.

In 2025, the fall-off, largely because we were not training, A whole bunch of new officers joined the department but have not been trained in lead utilization because we were at well over caseload limits throughout the LEAD program.

In 2026, interestingly, so 72 arrest diversions in the first quarter, so we're on pace for 288 for the year, which would even exceed the 2024 level.

So this is, in short, an option that SPD has shown it will utilize as long as we can take the referrals they are going to send us.

Next slide.

So this breaks the data down quarter by quarter since the introduction of the, or I guess we used the quarter before the introduction of the drug ordinance in October of 2023 as a baseline, and there's virtually no arrest referral activity happening.

and you see in quarter four of 2023, an enormous change as a result of the new environment.

And again, this is just really the department using the ordinance tools that it was given and differentiating some post-arrest and some pre-arrest referrals, but both in significantly larger numbers.

And again, you see this drop-off just as the lead capacity to receive was squeezed in later 2024 and throughout 2025 with a rebound in 2026 because that sort of sense of a ceiling has been removed because of the lead stabilization funding that you provided in the 2026 budget.

Next slide.

This is sort of if we drew a straight line from our quarter one experience, which Mr. Das will emphasize, that's never really how it works.

But if you just extrapolated from Q1, you would expect to see 380 SPD referrals.

That is before we do roll call trainings and the department-wide e-learning.

so you could expect that to go up, with the large balance concentrated on post-arrest referrals, and then 460 community referrals.

As Brandy said, that includes the pre-filing referral project with the city attorney's office.

I want to stop and say the ordinance focuses on the role of police.

This is a crime.

Police have authority to enforce it.

They can make arrests.

They can also proactively refer for care without arrests.

We can also engage these problems without police being the exclusive front door.

And LEAD is a part of that as well.

That's not what this presentation focuses on.

Community groups, the neighbors, business organizations, business improvement associations, in the U District, Council Member Rivera, the University District Partnership.

These have proven incredibly skillful, these organizations have proved incredibly skillful at identifying people who chronically violate the law related to behavioral health conditions and poverty, and they are able to make referrals that are very appropriate to lead services without having to burden the emergency response system.

However, so that, third route into LEAD was added in 2020, because SPD just couldn't make any referrals, and we had some resources, and they needed to get to people somehow, so our partners just could go out and find them.

And I want to stress that this third route into LEAD has been constrained historically by the fact that we prioritize police referrals.

We don't want law enforcement to be holding somebody who the right response is connecting them to long-term case management in a warm handoff and us saying we can't take them because we're taking community referrals.

So this is always the last served.

We never do community awareness promotion campaigns about this.

If we did, we would be swamped by much, much more demand than we can take.

And I think this is just a reminder that This ordinance provides for the role of law enforcement, the appropriate, legitimate role of law enforcement, and it is not the only way that we can find and solve these problems if we wanted to bulk up these strategies to match the ability of community partners to identify them.

Next slide.

Someone, Council Member Saka, asked for geographic data, and we all kind of laughed because we weren't sure whether to include this slide, but now I'm glad that we did.

So you can see the precinct breakdown, and indeed, the precinct concentration has swung between East and West precincts, and this is because of precinct-level leadership.

precinct leaders who really understand how to use the program and are well adapted to providing that guidance.

Going forward with precinct-level roll calls and the department-wide e-learning, I think we will see greater utilization from other precincts, not just concentrated in the East and West.

But of course, most of the hotspots that you've discussed are now in the West precinct, now that all of the CID is included in West.

And so you see a profile that you might expect here.

Ms. Dugard, just for the quick notice, is that for the public, West Precinct includes District 7, but also parts of District 1 and 2. And so this is not, the precinct breakdown doesn't necessarily match our district breakdown, just to make that point.

Thank you.

Okay, continue on.

And I just want to stress, LEED is not PDA.

We are project managers, and frankly, you could fire us.

That's a function that needs to be played, but we are just a contractor that provides that function.

We report to a policy coordinating group that is composed of the mayor, this council, the chair of the Public Safety Committee, traditionally represents the council.

That's Councilmember Kettle.

Chief Barnes are his designee, the city attorney, and the county counterparts, the executive, the sheriff, the King County prosecutor, and the King County Council Law and Justice Chair.

So we report to that body, that body sets policy.

Also want to stress, especially important at this moment, that the City of Seattle has aggressively audited the contract for LEED every year for years now.

It's one of the larger contracts that was sitting in HSD until this year, where we've moved to CARE.

and that auditing includes rigorous financial practices auditing, rigorous contract compliance, site visit, and looking at client files.

So if you're wondering, are your agencies confirming that work is being done, that it's the work that you contracted for, and that strong financial practices are being used, the answer is yes.

It's not necessarily a fun process, but it's one that we need to be going through, and that has been ongoing for many years now.

Finally, the King County Auditor, as you know, has identified many county side contracting challenges.

LEED, though, was included in a 2022 King County Auditor report on the county's diversion programs and was called out as unique among the community-based diversion options in our region for having been rigorously evaluated and for its ongoing commitment to rigorous use of data for ongoing program evolution and improvement.

And that, I mean, as the project management team, we have, of course, embraced that, but that is because we are accountable to our public funders through a formal structure of accountability.

Next slide.

So we've alluded to all of these.

I think you will see greater utilization of lead diversion to the extent that in the last year, there's just been a fall off of utilization due to the capacity constraint.

Because stabilization funding was achieved for 2026, and now we can lean into training, we should see an uptick in referrals.

And it's really,

You've heard from SPD, their intent to provide strong guidance about where that's appropriate and where they're not going to recommend the use of this tool, and that is totally appropriate.

The following slide shows where we stand with a data integration project that has been many years in the making, and we finally sort of cracked the nut.

Next slide.

For many years, officers have sort of had to rely on memory or analog knowledge about whether when they're driving down a street and they see someone that they think was referred to LEAD two years ago, are they still in the program or not?

They are able to call the green light phone number and find that out, but they didn't have that information at their fingertips.

That has now changed.

integrated into SPD's own business systems and information systems.

There is now an icon.

If someone's name is run, their current lead status pops up, as well as contact information for the case management agency that that person is staffed by if they are still active in the program.

If they're not, that information will also be available to officers.

So this greatly enhances speedy recognition of the status of the person.

LEAD is not.

The front door is just the front door.

LEAD is a long-term case management framework.

As we know, recovery from severe substance use disorder is protracted, and it is nonlinear.

The whole structure of LEAD allows those who are having ongoing touches with those individuals to have more information than they otherwise would so that they can strategize the best, most impactful response under the circumstances.

So to be able to access that information in real time is a real step forward.

Phase two and phase three, phase two is for later this year, but we'll have two-way integration and phase three is expected in 2027, but we are already in a very different and much better place than we've been in past years.

I'll quickly turn it over to Sam who has a study of how the cohort that came in since October of 2023 has been doing and the kinds of progress that they've experienced.

Okay, Mr. Wolf, yeah, if you can step through that really quickly.

And by the way, I also want to note, you know, the issues with the budgeting is also related to state funding, which is another subject.

But I believe we are now right-sized and so forth.

But to really quick, so we can then get to questions.

So it's important to get into the record, but we have these numbers and then we can ask all three of you questions.

Okay, go.

Sounds good.

Thank you, counsel.

Yeah, like we have been mostly talking about the implementation of this ordinance today, but we did want to touch on outcomes for the individuals referred since the ordinance.

So this slide, Brandy spoke about it, so I just want to pause here very briefly to contextualize some of the outcomes I'm going to share.

Lead clients are people who have complex situations.

Their care plans require nuanced planning across multiple systems, the criminal legal system, hospitals, healthcare, behavioral health, and of course social services.

Long-term case management is the critical piece of how LEAD contends with those complex situations.

Substance use disorder does not happen in a vacuum, nor can its response.

And so the idea is to weave together resources to address people's unmet needs and work towards behavior change via individualized plans, implementing those via long-term case management, and build a scaffolding that can support sustainable recovery that aligns with SAMHSA's four pillars of recovery, health, home, purpose, and community.

and lead case management itself also has embedded in it a case manager client relationship that for many clients, especially those who have been years without formal supports, is itself a key piece of that community pillar.

on the next slide, going into the data we're going to talk about, there's two units of progress that we track in the LEAD program.

On the left, substantive meetings.

These are meetings between LEAD clients and case managers where those individualized plans are, needs are identified, we discuss the goals, they work towards them.

Essentially, these are work meetings.

not just passing by contacts on the street.

While it isn't flashy on paper, this is where the motivational interviewing happens.

This is where smaller supports and connections to things are made.

And this is really where some of the actual work for behavior change and life change occurs.

Then going to the right, we call them accomplishments here, and we often call substantive meetings the building blocks of accomplishments.

These accomplishments are generally formal connections to external resources.

In our regular contract reporting to the city, we call these outcomes under a number of different categories.

So, for example, if somebody has an outcome or an accomplishment under the substance use category, what that means is that somebody enrolled in or followed up on medication-assisted treatment, they might have gotten a bed date and attended inpatient treatment, they might have completed outpatient treatment, any number of things.

But these aren't just referrals to services.

This is a formal connection where somebody enrolled in or engaged with that service.

And the building block relationship here is literal.

LEED's been evaluated a number of times over the years.

In one of our peer-reviewed outcome studies, researchers found a 2% increase in the likelihood of obtaining shelter and a 5% increase in the likelihood of obtaining permanent housing per contact between LEED case manager and client.

So really, those substantive meetings filtering into these formal outcomes.

On the next slide, getting into our cohort here, So what we did to show some outcomes is we looked at referrals received since the Public Use Ordinance.

Over 1,600 referrals to LEAD since October 20th, 23 through the end of February, 2026. This is about 60% law enforcement referrals.

over 1,300 unique individuals referred from these 1,600 referrals.

Again, about 60% of these are from law enforcement.

Of those, 667 individuals enrolled in LEED, and of those, 606 were assigned to REACH, which is one of LEED's subcontracted service providers, the largest street-based service provider that we have in our umbrella.

The 606 person cohort is about 75% originating from law enforcement.

For those 606 individuals, this table provides a breakdown of people who engage both with case managers to work towards goals and people who had those more formal accomplishments.

Just a couple of notes.

On the substantive meetings column in the middle, the rate of work is very high, with most clients working with their case managers towards multiple goals.

Just wanting to acknowledge this to note the sheer volume of work happening on a previous slide talking about substantive meetings.

We had over 33,000 substantive meetings across our Seattle program in 2025. On the right side, accomplishments.

Quickly noting, up at the top, you can see that nearly everybody that enrolled in this cohort had a formal accomplishment, connection, enrollment, and external resources of some sort.

What this table does not do very well is parse through how this looks for an individual client.

Again, this is a cohort of people referred across almost a two-and-a-half-year period, so from October 2023 through the better half of Q1 2026. Next slide, please.

So what we wanted to do to sort of break this out, we worked with Dr. Tim Thomas, who's in the audience now, to run the same dataset.

Sorry, I thought that was a question.

I just wanted to know where he was in the audience, that's all, thank you.

Front and right.

So Dr. Tim Thomas helped us to run that same dataset, that cohort of 606 individuals, through a series of regressions.

And what we saw testing for multiple variables was that the number of days post-lead enrollment was the single strongest predictor of achieving outcomes.

So, for example, these three bar graphs here each represent different categories of outcomes.

So, if you look at the center one for recovery or substance use disorder supports, this is saying that for clients who enrolled in LEAD three to six months ago, 19 percent have achieved at least one outcome related to substance use disorder.

with more time, the rate of achievement rises.

So after a year, the rate rises to about 44%.

And after two years of exposure to lead case management, nearly 70% of clients have achieved these formal types of outcomes.

Again, you know, enrolling and engaging with these external resources.

So in short, across different outcome types, The percentage of lead clients that you can expect to be achieving outcomes rises the longer that they are exposed to lead case management.

and the rate of this increase, we can also see change with access to different resources.

So we were talking about, well, many of the public commenters today were talking about Little Saigon.

We've been doing some close work there with the ambassador teams, with community partners, and in the summer of 2025, we had sort of a special assignment to utilize CoLead, to work with a cohort from Little Saigon.

CoLead is essentially high support, low barrier shelter that utilizes LEAD case management on site.

So as opposed to this cohort, which is receiving street-based LEAD case management, We brought 41 individuals in from Little Saigon, prioritizing people based on having very frequent encounters with ambassador teams in the areas, as well as people identified by either community or law enforcement as having public safety impacts.

For those 41 individuals who are receiving not just case management but high support shelter, we saw 95% of them achieving these formal SUD-related outcomes.

And we also saw over a 50% reduction in encounters with ambassadors.

So all that's just to say, adding more resources onto this can very much speed up the rate at which people are able to engage with recovery strategies.

In any case, all of the outcomes shared here today really do mirror the evaluations that have been done on LEAD over the years.

46% more likely to be on the employment spectrum than the control group, 89% more likely to be in permanent housing, 58% less likely to recidivate.

But the key is, for all of these evaluations, that they are tracked over the periods of months or years.

The consistent effect here is long-term case management plus time equals progress.

So I'll end it there, but I think this is the type of takeaway that makes me really excited about all the things that our SPD and my PDA colleagues shared today.

Database integration, the ability to take more referrals from SPD, and of course situating case managers and law enforcement so that they can better wrap around and coordinate for this population as that recovery happens.

Just getting us closer to a system of response that matches the complexity of the behaviors it's responding to.

Okay, thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

I appreciate the audit points, by the way, because King County was in the news again over the weekend.

And it's so important, so important.

Okay, quickly, basically a question each, starting with Vice Chair.

Again, you know, we're trying to wrap up before noon, at least slightly before.

Thank you, Chair.

I just want to thank everyone again for presenting and sharing your insights with us today.

Very, very helpful and valuable.

I want to briefly comment on some specific public comment that we received earlier today, because it's been on my mind and on my heart as well.

What we learned from that was that all these interrelated challenges work together.

And the solution lies in addressing the problem from a multi-faceted, comprehensive approach.

For example, we know that to your point earlier, Chair, once we have open flagrant drug use.

We have predators who come and target people suffering from these behavioral health drug use crises and challenges and sell to them.

Then there's a market to earn money to purchase these illicit substances.

And so then there's an illicit goods market and it's all right in the same ecosystem.

And so I wanna address the illicit goods market and why isn't the city addressing that SDOT is empowered absolutely right in the public rights away.

And I think the comment was first made by Ms. Sharon Lee from Lehigh but the same underlying concept was reflected in multiple comments that I heard throughout today about the unpermitted street vending and merchandise vending, in often cases, stolen goods, where it's known, documented, stolen goods.

And I'll share what we've been doing on this council and remind what we've been doing on this council to address that behavior today.

Last year, in the fall budget, the former administration proposed $2.7 million, $2.7 million to hire six new inspector positions to the Street Use Inspection Team, which includes an expansion of what's known as the JET or Joint Enforcement Team, JET, which includes street use inspectors.

So almost $3 million we funded for additional inspectors to ramp this up to better clamp down on this kind of behavior.

By the way, the same, less so with the sale of stolen goods, but the sale of other goods and food, we're getting to a point where it's coming to a head with these vendors, local businesses, et cetera.

But we funded, and it was included in our final adopted budget last year, almost $3 million to hire more people to better enforce this.

The second thing we did, was I sponsored, prime sponsor of both these things, but I prime sponsored a statement of legislative intent, basically a sly, calling for the mayor's office to lead an inter-department review and devise a action plan to better address unpermitted food and merchandise vending in our city.

We intentionally set a due date of that of April 30th, just ahead of FIFA, and we specifically referenced the correlation importance of FIFA, and my understanding is that report is coming soon.

So look forward to seeing what plan and recommendations might be included in the executive's report on that.

I will also be personally inviting SDOT to come present more on the street permitting and enforcement issue and including presenting on the slide in one of my future committee meetings that I chair.

I've read the code.

I think the code is crystal clear locally, what is permissible and what is not permissible, what is authorized versus what is not authorized.

The challenge that we're seeing- one of the key challenges we're seeing lies with implementation, lies with execution, lies with operationalization of these legal requirements and investments, and so we'll be taking that up in committee.

But all this very important feedback.

Appreciate the opportunity to learn more and contribute to the conversation.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

I think it is important to highlight, because we are pushing on the legislative side, the executive side, and all its different pieces to include S-DOP in partnership with obviously SBD, and as I've been noting, CARE, the alternative response piece.

Very important, so thank you.

Council Member Rivera, Lynn?

Okay, Council Member Rivera.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you again for being here, and thank you, LEAD, for this presentation.

I would love to hear more at a later time about LEAD's recovery services.

In particular, what kind of recovery services are people getting through LEAD?

And then, you know, I appreciate that it can take up to two years to get someone to accept services and get toward a path of recovery.

And of course, recovery is a lifelong journey.

And I think we all know this, appreciate it, and understand it.

And at the same time, let's take 12th and Jackson.

There are small businesses down there.

Taking two years to help someone get off of 12th and the Jackson is not helping that small business be able to stay in business and stay open.

So both those things coexist and they're true.

Our responsibility is to figure out where are the levers that we can tweak legislatively to both continue to do the work obviously of helping people get treatment because I don't think I've spoken to one person in the city of Seattle that doesn't believe people need treatment.

Fentanyl is a drug unlike we've ever seen and we're not gonna get out of it by just telling people to stop.

So I just readily acknowledge that.

While at the same time we need to address this reality on the ground with our businesses and not just our businesses near our schools and in our parks and in our right of ways.

We need to be able to ensure that our kids and our families and our individuals, our residents are living in a city that is taking safety and public safety seriously.

And that we're not just saying it, but they're actually, we're taking actions to ensure that our city streets are safe for folks.

So to me, yes, this is a challenge and we've over the years, taken different approaches and legislatively made tweaks to different laws to get to somewhere.

I do think, Chair, as you stated earlier, we need to re-look at this public possession law, drug use law.

I appreciate, that's why I was asking you, Chief, about what your ideas or what could be tweaked to make this better.

I appreciate you, Lisa, coming to talk about LEAD and the progress that you're making with LEED.

I appreciate that you say, and please, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different.

But I actually don't think more money in and of itself, you know, we have thrown a lot, I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the city.

That's not, that's a, Not that you shouldn't, we need to address this problem robustly, but we have a lot of money and that's just one area where we've put money to address this issue.

So, you know, we don't, we're in a budget deficit.

So are there other things that we can do to address the problem?

That's what, that's where I'm at.

What can we do?

Not, I mean, notwithstanding putting more money into it, to address these issues because I don't know that we have more money that we can put into it.

And I wanna make sure that the money that we have invested into it is working for us in as robust way as possible and that the laws that we pass are working for us in a robust way as possible.

So Chair, there's so much to say there, but I'll just leave it there.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Rivera.

best not to get into questions.

I'll invite you to make a statement because we do running out of time.

Councilmember Lin.

Thank you so much, and thank you to the panel.

Obviously, so much more to discuss.

I appreciate, again, as we heard in the comments and the discussion today, I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach to our public safety needs, to our substance use disorders, to meeting our mental health needs.

You know, I think oftentimes in chair, you talk about this two mindsets, you know, it's a, well, let's just arrest our way out of it.

I don't think that's gonna solve it.

I also don't think we can just say diversion without any police activity.

You know, I think there's a role and we can talk about the balance and whether we're doing the right approach.

You know, I think there's always improvement in coordination, collaboration.

I do think there's a big question of resources.

In my mind, I take a different approach that my colleague, I do believe additional resources are very much needed and I think they're being well spent on LEED.

You know, and I'm concerned about the many, many millions that our businesses and neighborhoods are spending on things like private security, on sort of, I think we have an emergency room approach to our problem, a reactive approach instead of a proactive approach All the money we're spending on security, on broken windows, and insurance is money that could be better spent being proactive.

Just one last comment.

I saw basically the South Precinct, no lead diversions.

South Precinct includes some of Saka's district as well, Soto, Georgetown, and just anything we could do to have some diversion from the South Precinct.

It also includes North Beacon Hill, I would appreciate figuring out why there are no and how to improve some of those.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Lin.

I suspect there will be more in the future.

I just want to thank everyone at the table, starting with Mr. Doss, who kicked us off from central staff, but also from SPD and from PDA, the lead and the combination.

Really appreciate you being here.

I also want to thank everybody who's here in chambers from all the different neighborhoods.

It's so important to have your voice heard, but also those that make things happen, to include the people who run the system.

and the audible pieces of it, for example, is really important.

But we have to do our job.

To your point, we need to be proactive, not reactive, and that's why we have the plan.

That's why we have these pillars and their guiding posts, like furthering a functional criminal justice system.

There's so many little pieces, and I'm working with, I will be working, have been, will be working on all the stakeholders, some that are here, but others, to work those pieces.

And at the end of the day, we have to have a mindset where we're setting up the system, we're setting up the people who are on the ground for success.

And we have to have that mindset, whether it's within SPD, whether it's within CARE, other elements of the city government with our partners on the outside, contracting in like PDA, we have to have a mindset of setting up for success.

Because at the end of the day, we have to do that, otherwise, Danny Westney in his article for a year, five years from now, can ask the same question with the same result.

That is not an option.

So let's work together and press forward and look forward to doing so.

And with that, at noon, we have reached the end of today's meeting agenda.

It's further business come before the committee before we adjourn.

No, no, no.

Here, nope.

No business before we committee.

We are adjourned.

It's too late.