SPEAKER_99

Good morning.

The Select Budget Committee will come to order.

It is 9.30 a.m., October 1st, 2024. Welcome to October, day three, four, let's see.

Day three of our department presentations.

SPEAKER_17

I'm Dan Strauss, chair of the Select Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

SPEAKER_09

Councilmember Moore.

Present.

Councilmember Morales.

Here.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Councilmember Rivera.

Councilmember Saka.

Here.

Councilmember Wu.

Present.

Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Councilmember Kettle.

SPEAKER_17

Here.

SPEAKER_09

And Chair Strauss?

SPEAKER_17

Present, and Councilmember Rivera is here.

Just not next to the microphone.

A present.

Thank you.

The Select Committee today is again, we're not accepting verbal public comment.

We accept written public comment every single day.

The next verbal public comment will be the public hearing on October 16th, the first day of central staff presentations.

Today, we are on day three of department presentations.

Today, this morning, we have the Care Department, followed by the Seattle Police Department, and this afternoon, we will have the Human Services Department.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Tomorrow in the morning, we will have the Office of Housing in the Seattle Fire Department.

In the afternoon is reserved for overflow.

Colleagues, we've been doing a pretty good job of staying on track and we're getting into some pretty deep policy areas as well as areas of the budget over these next two working days, which is why we have tomorrow afternoon reserved.

I want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to ask all of the questions that they need to ask here on the record.

We're going to, again, take lunch at the latest at 1 p.m., 1.30 p.m., starting back at 2 p.m.

we've got tomorrow.

At the end of department presentations tomorrow, please do have some general idea of your priorities for this budget cycle so that central staff is able to dig into these areas of your interest over the next week.

I know that October 16th feels far away and Central staff is already getting into the budget and will begin writing their memos next week.

So Jesse from my team will be stopping by each of your offices to meet with your staff to understand how and if we can help in any way.

Moving right into department presentations, we've got our first item of business.

Will the clerk, will you please read the short title into the record?

SPEAKER_09

Community assisted response and engagement for briefing and discussion.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you and welcome already here at the committee table, keeping us moving at 9.33 a.m.

I'm excited to introduce Chief Amy Barton and Thomas Rowland from the Care Department.

And every day we've got Director Eder from City Budget Office and Director Noble from the Central Staff.

Chief, I'll pass it over to you, take it away, and then we'll pass it over to Councilmember Kettle once your presentation's over.

SPEAKER_05

Good morning.

It's nice to be here with you today.

Thank you, Committee Chair Strauss.

I appreciate Tommy being here next to me.

He, I think, was civilian employee number two in the department and has done so much foundational work to set this thing up and to launch the Care Responder pilot.

And I thank everyone for their continued support.

So before I launch in, I just want to acknowledge I woke up thinking about a year ago today What was going on, the pilot wasn't yet launched, I was about six months into the job, I had been to a lot of community meetings, a lot of police roll calls, I'd spent a lot of time in dispatch, and what I had heard consistently was that I was never gonna get this pilot off the ground.

And I didn't know why, but I did hear that all the time.

We like you, we know you're trying hard, it's never gonna happen.

And I thought, of course it's going to happen.

Why wouldn't it happen?

The council supports it.

The executive supports it.

And then it did happen.

I got lots of support.

We staffed up the care team quickly.

We got the brand.

We got the vehicles.

And we were off.

So this time a year ago, I was going around to police roll calls, rapid fire, trying to make sure everybody knew who the care team was, what they looked like, this is how you behave, policies, protocols, working with dispatch to know when to actually deploy the team.

And so I heard a new thing, which consistently was, Amy, it's not gonna be here in a year or two.

It won't.

We know you're gonna try hard, but Seattle has a history of starting something, seed funding it, but never really investing in it long enough to scale and to be impactful.

And so I want to acknowledge that it is really meaningful to sit here a year later, having tested, we're about 10 months in, and having already started to scale.

We're extending job offers this week to go citywide seven days a week to have 24 people out.

And I just want to acknowledge that you are helping me to keep trust with community.

And I appreciate that you are keeping trust with community because they do want this.

And it is meaningful.

It's a significant step forward.

Next slide, please.

So in 911, that continues to be our primary priority.

This year we will respond to about 900,000 calls.

Again, 911 really in Seattle has been reframed to be thought of as the foundation for good design and first response.

We're driving a lot of innovation in what we consider priority one, what we consider an emergency, what is a non-emergency, how do we use online reporting, how do we divert to platforms like 988 and other resources.

On the care diversified side of the house, at the time of this slide, we had been to 781 calls.

And if you do some quick math, we have already saved police over 1,000 hours of service time.

And I cannot stress the significance of that.

We have saved over $130,000 of budget dollars, even if you just look at the hourly rate of the first responder teams.

And so I want you to imagine if we had been to 7,800 calls, that would have been $1.3 million in savings in first response this year.

Jurisdictions who have scaled go to tens of thousands of calls a year.

Some of my partners go to about 30,000 calls a year.

And again, they've invested enough to start to reap the financial rewards in the public safety budget and to also see better outcomes in individual lives.

Next slide.

This council has done a great job of surfacing and illuminating a lot of the gaps in service, the overlaps.

Council Member Moore, you shared the account of being on that corner where you saw all the different teams and nobody was actually getting an outcome.

In CARE, we are really uniquely poised to be able to see those system gaps, to see where the systems are failing, and to see who they are failing, and then to go to work and design something better, better deploy resources, or better coordinate existing resources in the community.

Next.

So this is the budget summary, the 2024 adopted.

Again, we just spoke about this a few weeks ago.

The proposed growth is primarily about the expansion of those care responder positions to be permanent positions to go from a team of six to a team of 24 with three supervisors.

Next.

As you know, we're limiting now to 10 hours a day versus 12, seven days a week, and that's going to allow us to cover more ground to be in all districts.

In the short run, the dollars to scale the program are thanks to Congressman Adam Smith and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who have been wonderful advocates for this program.

My understanding is that we got the largest grant from the Department of Justice in this last cycle, and I appreciate that.

And then we've also been supported by our community, who voted for this type of alternative response to policing through the participatory budgeting process.

And so I'm very grateful to our community for that.

you'll see in 2026, that's when the care expansion would hit the general fund.

That being said, I will continue to solicit and seek outside funding sources.

I know that there's great national appetite to see these types of programs scale, and I hear all the time, we need a blueprint.

And I say routinely, I said it again last week, somebody was talking about setting up a national academy for crisis responders in King County, that that could come into being, and I said 100%.

We want this available to all jurisdictions and municipalities across this country.

It's vital, and as much as we can share, we will.

Next.

This is what the expansion looks like.

We are already expanding to North.

I'm very grateful to Sally Clark and Kevin Grossman and others at University of Washington and UW PD who have offered us space so that we can have multiple stations in North Precinct for care to shift out of.

Our strategy will continue to be to co-locate with either police or fire.

Because in truth, we all do interact all the time.

We're often needed on the same calls.

And so I like the integration of these different disciplines.

I often say I like the social work ethos also to really flow across first response.

It's a really good influence.

And we learn a lot from one another.

These are the two actual position additions that we're asking for.

So I'm gonna start with the PDO first, the Public Disclosure Officer, because we are now a fully independent department.

And again, I'm going to have 24 first responders.

We also need to accommodate public disclosure requests just like any other department, and we have not had that position.

So I'm thankful to SPD who have continued to do a lot of administrative work for us, but that is not tenable and it's not appropriate.

So we need a full-time position, a PDO.

And then you may be aware of the mayor's new vision for the downtown activation team.

This is rapidly coming into being.

This represents a coordinated effort across 15 different departments to actually remediate areas of crime and crisis in the city and get people help.

So CARE has a vital function to play in this.

I'm a strong advocate that we need to intervene and divert people into services.

with an intent to heal and redirect and restore rather than to punish.

And so the restoration director, again, is somebody who can coordinate that effort on the human service side, and that should sit in our department.

Fundamentally, it's a diversion department.

Next.

And so in closing, I'll just share a couple of thoughts.

I do tend to make the moral case for the care department most of the time, but I also do think in terms of the budget.

And I've heard and witnessed so many stories now of people churning through our cycles, never really getting help, being returned to the streets, not prepared to be good neighbors, repeating the same crimes, falling into the same crisis, going back into the system.

A new friend that I have in town who's not very old at all shared with me an account.

She was a regular sort of middle class privileged by lots of accounts life.

And then she had several catastrophic events happen in her young life.

She started using heroin and fell into the cycle of using and dealing.

And she shared with me that in eight years she was arrested and I think booked most times 15 different times.

And then on the 16th time, for the first time, she was drug tested, and it was found that she was pregnant.

And so finally, someone offered her methadone.

And through that medical support and actually addressing her trauma and helping her to understand what it was she was reacting to, why she was using.

She was able to break the cycle.

She now has, I think her little boy's just turning six.

She's a fantastic parent.

She is a great leader in town.

I would not know her background if she had not told me.

She's a contributing member of society, and we see this everywhere.

And so the reason to offer my friend methadone and support is because she's a person, and she is worthy of it.

But think about what we spent arresting and booking and holding her in jail 15 different times and not getting her help.

So just again, commend the quite revolutionary work that is happening here to reimagine how we interrupt these cycles and what the city could look like in 10 years or 20 years if we persist.

And with that, I'm happy to take questions.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Chief.

Director Eater or Director Newell, anything to add?

Nothing to add.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you.

As per our protocol, I will now pass it to the committee chair overseeing your department, Council Member Kettle.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Thank you, Chief Barden, also the team, and again, our directors of CVO and central staff.

And so really thankful for you to be here this morning.

You're the first of the public safety entities to come.

And I think it's important to note that the Public Safety Committee oversees nine entities.

We have the Police, fire, now care.

But then we have the accountability partners, CPC, OIG, and OPA.

The legal side, the courts and the city attorney's office.

And finally, we have Office of Emergency Management, OEM.

It is one ecosystem.

And I say this now because it's really important for us to think of public safety as a ecosystem, not looking at each individual department.

And we have to look at how they mesh.

And clearly, I mean, it's good that we start with you because you are a bit of a blend.

And so it kind of highlights this piece.

And for public safety to work, by the way, we need all of them to be working functionally and well and to include the courts and that legal side, which is something I've been talking because there's issues out there with Olympia and state law and so forth.

for this new thing that we now have, alternative response, as you noted.

It's the wave of the future, if you will.

It's what people are going through.

And I believe in it, and I think we should.

But I also recognize with any new thing, there's going to be changes.

So to my belief, for my colleagues here, this buy-in and budget, this two-year, we have to set like a baseline.

and really get the data and get the information that we need.

I really think the next buy-in, the next two-year cycle, we'll probably be looking for some major course directions, or we should, whether we will or not is another story, at least on the executive side, because I've seen it too often.

So this blueprint, you know, we have to get the blueprint down, but we also have to be ready for change, too.

But that change has got to be predicated on, you know, what we're seeing on the ground.

And one of the things...

that I see and like to dig into a little bit is the relationship with the police.

As noted, we're supposed to have basically a dual dispatch, mutual dispatch, and that's important for the data sets.

But oftentimes, up to 85, 90, I don't know the exact number, it's police and then they call CARE.

How can we get to a situation where it's dual dispatch as opposed to a secondary dispatch because we need to have this data set in order to really affect change potentially in that second budget cycle that I'm talking about.

And I was wondering if you could speak to that piece in terms of what are the lessons learned so far?

What tweaks do we need?

How do we adjust?

Because this plays out in other areas as well that we can't really go to here in the dais.

I was curious on that front.

SPEAKER_05

And welcome again.

Thank you for acknowledging, yeah.

First of all, the ecosystem is so true.

I mean, from the first time I spoke, I said it's not enough to provide the best first response, then what?

I don't want to send a team out tomorrow.

We really have to see the whole system.

And again, whether or not we're getting people help so that we have outcomes.

On the police front, what I would say is that there has got to be better clarification of the role of police, the role of care, We are actively in conversations with labor.

That is a vital piece of this puzzle.

Who does what?

Who has first refusal?

Labor, there are four different unions I impact pretty directly.

And it took me about six months to realize that.

I was really not aware.

And I am deeply grateful that people did work with me, considering the way the city went about it.

Because I was late in the game.

I was months before launching the pilot before I really talked.

to Mike Solon and Spogg and others.

And they were supportive.

I set the limit of 24 in the first two years so that we could grow carefully and responsibly and lay a foundation where this will be here for my grandchildren.

I didn't want to do it fast.

I wanted to do it well.

And I really want to organize the work, not even the work that's the city work, but understand what are the nonprofits doing?

What is the role of community?

We've got lots of outreach teams out there.

I talk about the county teams.

There are four.

And so all of these things need to come together so it's very clear.

911 to care.

What are those call types?

When would you call 988?

Which then invokes a mobile crisis team resource.

So the first thing is clarification with SPOG in particular about call types and about primary dispatch.

It is true that I wanted the dual dispatch.

I arrived at that conclusion because I realized that there was a lot of risk and that everybody would feel better if police arrived initially and cleared the scene.

That that was just a good way of really analyzing whether or not police felt needed.

I knew I'd get buy-in if they were the ones to come to me and say, we're not needed here.

This is not appropriate for us.

And that has been established.

That has happened.

I hear that all the time.

And then I was always evaluating and interrogating the care side.

Did you feel safe?

Could police have gotten a better result or fire another unit?

Did you feel like it was appropriate?

So we'll do 1,000 calls this year.

And that has been established.

And so now I leave it to my partners And labor negotiations to discuss that.

And then secondly, I alluded to it off the top, police don't believe this is going to be around in a couple years because they've been burned.

You know, lots of innovations have happened.

The real-time crime center, that was going to happen 10 years ago.

And so there is this belief that we take a step forward and then elected officials change and we take two steps back.

And this is just basic change management strategy, right?

We don't acclimate to a new way of being until we know it is a new way of being.

There's a reason to invest in it, to understand, to get attached, to learn how to do it.

And I've come up against that in dispatch as well.

So I keep promising I will not leave.

I believe in this.

This is a national movement.

It will happen.

And those words will have a lot more weight when the words are also coming from your mouths and the mouths of the executives of people.

It is a different way of doing business, right?

SPEAKER_18

I think we're addressing that last point you made.

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_05

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_18

And tied to this, too, is you mentioned fire.

And this goes back to my point.

I'm kind of making a point about how we have to be framing things going ahead in the future.

fire, you know, in terms of Health One 99 and what they do.

And even in SPD, we have, you know, the mental health professionals and so forth.

And so then it could also be high acuity, low acuity.

SPEAKER_08

That's right.

SPEAKER_18

I'm coming into City Hall this morning on Denny.

There's an individual in the lane right in the intersection with Keenette North.

Medic One's there.

And this person's by himself, shaking, and I didn't see, I'll follow up with a fire run, I didn't see anybody, the medic one vehicle was there, and I'm like, is this a medium acuity issue?

And this is Denny, so this is on the border for care.

And so it's like, can you speak to that kind of balance too, in terms of high acuity, low acuity, and how do we see ourselves, and what can we do over the next two years to set us up to, you know, ensure that we're on the right path, that blueprint that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_05

Yes, I appreciate it.

And I always appreciate when you bring forward your awareness of specific people that you see this actually, and that you take it personally.

Who would I send?

What could we do here?

The way that I think about it is consent based intervention.

That is care.

So, in any type of human crisis, social work, public health issue, I would prefer to send care first if there's not evidence that there's a public safety threat.

Again, this is the diversion attempt.

This is what Albuquerque does.

I learned it through ride-alongs.

They will go out.

That exact scenario, actually, I was with a team who went out because somebody wasn't allowed legally to be on this median.

And again, one step in any direction, this could be a public safety crisis.

So ACS went out, talked to the person, and said, listen, we can give you a ride.

What do you need?

They tried to use motivational interviewing to entice the person off of the median.

But then what worked was one of the ACS responders said, the next call is going to be to Albuquerque police.

You cannot be here.

It's not legal.

We prefer not to call them.

We prefer to take you ourselves, but that will be the next call.

And then the person said, okay.

And that's like drug diversion court.

That's why it works, right?

But you have to be...

consistent in the messaging and in the follow through.

One of the ideas I have, and I don't know if it will come into being, but I've talked before about just centralizing this social work case management function in the city.

If you can imagine, I've got co-responders in police, highly trained responders who wear a ballistic vest, case managers, and then the HealthONE team, highly trained with real medical expertise, behavioral health expertise.

What if I had 80 care type responders, but a third of them were trained to also go over to police if that were needed?

That kind of flexibility and design, it would prepare us for a COVID type event.

or if there were again the next fentanyl right where suddenly we need way more health one and health 99 what we've designed instead is something really static and inflexible i love the police crt unit i am shocked that since 2010 we've grown to have five social workers It should be tenfold that.

It should.

That is a model that is tested, and it works, and it helps people.

And I go out with that team.

They get wonderful results.

Generally, the officer is sort of like an Uber.

They don't have a role to play, right?

But there's a reason that they're there, because it's high acuity.

This is someone who has become violent when escalated before.

So truly, we need HealthONE, we need CRT, and we need care.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

And we need the data because, again, we have to see where we are this year plus the next two years, in my mind.

Yeah, we do have that.

And then we can make major course corrections.

I could see minor course corrections, definitely.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

I would love to provide for you.

And police and their data analytics team, they have a crisis dashboard.

And that has been the most informative to design.

So you can actually see, again, those acuity levels, day over day, actually hour by hour, what types of calls are coming in.

And then you could go, okay, well, these would be care, this would be police RT, this is health one.

SPEAKER_18

Shifting a bit, I'm a little bit surprised, because I didn't know about it, the Seattle Restoration Director.

I'm a little bit guarded on this because you're a brand new organization.

The DAT, you know, there's a lot of different pieces.

You know, from a leadership management point of view, should we, you know, basically a department that's just coming out of basically a pilot be given this leadership role here?

And given that it's got a span of control in terms of the, you know, the various departments.

And can you speak more about how this came about and why was care decided to be the point versus like there's a lot of people who have experience at UCT and there's other elements within the mayor's office that could be driving this in terms of leadership.

Why do we have a Seattle restoration director and why is it under care?

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, again, this was not my decision, but it does make sense to me because naturally I've been uniquely positioned as sort of the hub of the system at the county level too and in the service providers.

I always joke that I'm like Seattle's middle child and I'm able to best see what happened to this person.

Health One went out three times.

I thought that they went into this housing environment.

Why are they back here on the sidewalk?

I'm at the data hub also.

So we use basically the same systems as police and then coordinate with fire.

So I think that's part of it.

It's just thinking about care is almost like the watchtower in design to be able to drive accountability and quality assurance.

Are we actually getting help?

I would say, yes, the pilot is new, but I am not new to leadership, and I'm not new to coordination.

And I think the perception has been also that I've been effective in those cross-sector partnerships and in driving needed change.

However, I am agnostic.

I could make a case five different ways for this.

I just know the work needs to be coordinated.

I don't care who does it, actually.

It needs to be coordinated.

And we need to make sure that when we go, again, if we're going to remediate a certain block, I spent a lot of time in the CID yesterday.

just walking around.

And I want to make sure that we actually get people help and we're not just sort of moving folks who are suffering around.

SPEAKER_18

I was going to say, Director Eater, there's going to be a lot of follow-up to you or the broader picture on this.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, happy to get the question, Councilmember.

We see the care team, as the Chief was just describing, as an ideal place for this kind of coordination to happen.

We need this role to coordinate the work of multiple departments.

The care team is uniquely positioned to do that kind of coordination and already is doing that work.

That's sort of core to their mission, to bring together the right people at the right time to help people.

as issues arise.

As you know, the program of the downtown activation team is modeled after the UCT team, and we're already currently piloting this kind of work along Third Avenue.

And we expect the executive will continue to develop the program, and we need this new position to help do that coordination.

SPEAKER_18

It's going to have to be a strong individual with a lot of experience.

Okay, one last question.

Sorry, Chair.

One last question for Mr. Rowland.

And I've done this to myself because the 911 call center needs to have equal billing.

And unfortunately, we tend to spend a lot of time with care piece.

But I'm also concerned because I've been to the 911 call center.

I spoke to the training class.

I've talked to some of those that were working online.

They were on duty at the time.

911 call centers, understaffed.

I don't see anything right now we'll check with central staff in terms of budgeting, in terms of increases.

We've avoided, I think, the mandatory overtime hours.

But where are we, and are you comfortable about where we are right now?

By the way, you're in between two directors, chief and a director, so I recognize that question kind of put you in a difficult position, but answer to the best of your abilities.

SPEAKER_11

I don't have a mic yet.

Okay, there we go.

So, yeah, we're not exactly where we would like to be yet.

911 is still working a lot of overtime.

We're on track to work around 36,000 hours of overtime this year.

We have reduced the mandatory overtime from 16 hours down to 8 hours per week, and we continue to work on that to try and improve the work-life balance of the dispatchers and the call takers because it is a very traumatic job for them, and they are the first first responders.

That being said, the largest problems that we're experiencing seem to be with having enough first responders to respond to the calls.

We're able to take the 911 calls, and we're largely on track with where our dispatchers National Emergency Number Association standards are.

While we would love to have a ton more call takers and dispatchers, we find ourselves as a city in a position where the budget is, there's a shortfall and we have to manage all of this.

So while there are unlimited wants for what everybody and every department would like, we're trying to manage as best what we can.

And the feeling is that having more first responders, whether that be police, or in this case, the care team to answer those 911 calls out on the street where community is, will be more beneficial than adding more call takers at this point.

SPEAKER_16

Mr. Chair.

Yes.

Anything further?

SPEAKER_17

Okay.

Council Member Moore and then Council Member Rivera.

Apologies.

Even though he said it was the last one.

He gave us fair warning.

SPEAKER_08

Great.

Well, thank you.

Thank you very much for being here this morning, and thank you for that context.

That is really quite phenomenal, what you've accomplished in a year's time.

So I'm looking forward to when we come back next year and hearing where we're at and have high hopes and expectations.

Part of that is my excitement that you will be—the first expansion will be up to North Seattle.

And I'm just wondering whether you have any sort of timeline for that expansion to the North Precinct.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, the job offers have gone out already.

Some have been accepted, so that team is assembling.

It'll be, again, very well-qualified applicants.

When we posted those CCR jobs, my understanding is nine hours in, I had 110 applicants.

And that's what happened in Albuquerque.

There were so many people prepared already and working in the space that wanted these jobs.

And so it's easier to scale this type of response and alleviate some of the burden in 911 and on police.

So yeah, we're probably six weeks out, Council Member Moore, from actually being there.

And I've been in North Precinct a lot.

I was just with Captain Agard again.

So we're wanting to really socialize the idea, make sure that the officers know the care responders and can benefit from their knowledge.

You know, it's interesting.

We talk a lot about who calls who and how they get deployed.

But I can't overstate how vital it is that, again, the knowledge of de-escalation through the social work perspective, through the mental health and substance use perspective, that that permeates all of first response.

That is a game changer.

I remember when I first started working with social workers, it changed.

It changed how I listened.

It changed how I reacted to people.

what I thought I was seeing.

And so I think you're, you know, again, it's harder for me to put that in a white paper, but already I'm seeing that in West Precinct.

I'm getting notes from the officers about what they have learned from showing up with CARE and watching, no, this is how CARE saw it.

And this is how they were able to deescalate and again, get somebody to yes quickly without using coercion.

So yeah, about six weeks.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah, I heard a similar statement when I went on a tour with Health One from the firefighters.

It was a real eye-opener, and they had learned a lot of interpersonal skills that were very helpful to their job.

I have another question, too.

So...

You know, the legislation that just passed around the loitering and soap and that, and looking at creating a specialized training curriculum for police and interacting with people who have been victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

What kind of role do you see for care along the Aurora corridor?

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, this is just my opinion about this, but I am of a mind where, again, if there is human suffering, if somebody has been victimized, CARE would always be involved in that call.

So I think that you've done a very good job emphasizing that we're concerned about the predators, right?

We're concerned about people who are victimizing, and we want to protect the victims.

So I think about CARE as protecting the victims.

and making sure that if there's an intervention that that is somebody with this type of clinical expertise in a perfect world in five years i i hope that that i say diversified response because i can imagine these different units and i can imagine a unit with real expertise in human trafficking where i can invoke peers people who have survived because i've witnessed that that it is often the person who has survived either trafficking or again recovered from SUD or then chronically unhoused and come into housing, those are the people often who know how to have the conversation and to inspire some hope, to say, I was you.

I was you, and now look at me.

It's so simple, right?

But we need to figure out a way to work that in to support first response, the care responders, because some may have lived experience, but that's not what I'm hiring.

I'm really hiring for the knowledge and the expertise in the field.

So we can talk more about this, but I think that about open use as well.

Again, anything where somebody is suffering, I would like care to be there at a minimum in a co-response capacity.

Great.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_16

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

Council Member Rivera.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you, Chief Barnum, for being here and your team.

So I have...

questions about the 911 call center and also the cure team.

So I'll start with the 911 call center.

I have concerns because I have constituents calling me telling me that they're reaching out to 911. They get routed to the non-emergency line and nobody answers the non-emergency line.

I also know that you and I have talked about this and you have shared some information about the non-emergency line and how you know, it can take two and a half hours for someone to respond to a non-emergency line.

I also know from your slide from last September of 2023 related to 911 call center that 30%, which is almost a third of those non-emergency calls actually wind up being emergency calls once the the call taker gets the information from the constituent who's calling in.

And so a third of those calls are actually emergency calls.

So if they're waiting two and a half hours to get called, that's an issue.

So I say all that to say, and when I was, I should say, I went down to the call center, as you know, and talked to your great team down there.

I was told that constituents should call 911 because the non-emergency line is not staffed, and so people have better results.

And we should also say that we've been telling people, call 911, even though police might not be able to come because of low staffing numbers.

But we need the data.

We need the information to know a crime has been committed, and so we have proper data by which we're making all these decisions.

So all that to say I have serious concerns about the 911 call center.

911 call center is an essential service.

And if folks are calling and not getting a response, this is a huge problem.

And in the context of now we have the care pilot, and we've talked a lot about the care pilot, but we haven't given as much attention to the 911 call center, even though This has been an ongoing issue since 2022. So I'd love to hear from you what your, and I didn't see anything really in the budget to address the call center.

Do we have, you know, I imagine you have positions that you would like to add to the call center.

What's the plan for that?

I understand there's an expansion of care, but we have little data to support the expansion of care.

And yet we're adding 23 positions to that but we're not adding positions to the 911 call center And then also I know with the overtime there's a lot of overtime.

I know that the call takers have mandated overtime So is it do you need position authority?

because it's more costly to do overtime as my understanding than actually hiring folks and So what is the plan for all this?

Because I'm getting concerned that as more time goes by, our ability to answer those 911 calls and those non-emergency line calls that is really an emergency call are not getting responded to.

It's only going to get worse over time.

So what is the focus on this?

And I'm gonna preface all this by saying I very much support alternatives to policing and not or, and 911 is an essential service that we need to be robustly staffing and making sure we're able to take those calls.

SPEAKER_05

Well, Council Member Rivera, if this is on the TVs and 911 right now, everyone's cheering for you.

So I appreciate the acknowledgement.

I appreciate that you've done your homework.

And although the council and sort of the public is more preoccupied with the care pilot, I am not.

90% of my time has gone to 911 from the jump for the reasons that you just stated.

If I can get it right, not even from the time of the first call, if I can inform the public, when do you call 911?

When is it an online report?

When do you solve your own problem?

When do you talk to your neighbor?

How are we asking people to behave in this system?

At least since 2018, folks in 911 have been pleading for more staffing because it's just like policing.

Calls are going up.

You can see the data year over year over year.

Calls are going up.

Non-emergency calls are also going up.

And we didn't really invest enough in technology.

I just upgraded the CAD finally.

It was about five years post-upgrade.

And so now that opens up, I should say, I think COO Maxie is in the room as well, a concerted effort in police to finally get us up to speed so that we could start to avail ourselves of basic technology.

One of them is callback.

If it is a non-emergency, Why can't it be like every other customer service system that says, you know, your wait time is approximately 48 minutes.

Would you like us to call you back?

This is simple.

I appreciate the pain that you feel with the constituents.

I am never out in community where I don't hear the same stories because it does happen every single day.

We're not managing expectations properly.

And I agree with you.

If I say 911, it should be because I'm going to answer the 911 call.

What Tommy was referencing earlier is that in this space of scarcity right now, I'm looking at priority one and two calls, which posit actual threat to life.

Someone could die or be assaulted, have generational impact here, and I have got to prioritize response to those calls.

The staffing shortages, the positions we've never had, largely do relate to non-emergency.

And you are correct about emergency versus non-emergency, the 30%.

But that would relate to priority three and four calls, which I still consider emergency, meaning there's a temporal nature.

I've got to get someone out.

But people aren't confusing armed robbery to be a non-emergency, not at all.

I've really analyzed that data.

The first six months, I was just up to my eyeballs in call data all the time trying to understand these disconnects.

And so I do wish that we could staff up.

We need about 60 more positions to be able to respond expeditiously to non-emergency and emergency.

And that is not feasible right now.

There are subsidies for care responders.

And also care is the best strategy we have to get cops to priority one calls.

Right now it's 11 minutes.

And if you think, again, about armed robbery, 11 minutes, how long that is.

So I just have to prioritize that.

My strategy right now with 911 is to retain people, to hire better, to be able to retain them.

There's a vacancy rate across the country, an average of 20%.

And so even if I could just get to full staffing, we were almost there last year and then there was just like police and people retired, there's more churn.

It looks like we're going to be fully staffed by the end of the year.

We've got two incoming classes.

It will be a game changer if I can have stability in that department.

And you all have been a big part of it.

We need well-being strategies.

We need this work acknowledged.

We need to refrain from mandatory overtime.

That is the main thing I can do to retain staff is not force them to work.

during their kids' birthdays and things like that.

So everything that you illuminated is correct.

And we're just using the resources as well as we can.

And then I am a huge fan of tech.

I think anything that can be automated, any way we can improve systems, we must do it right now because I don't have enough humans.

It's kind of an odd answer.

SPEAKER_15

You just said a lot there, but I'm not sure that you got to my question, which is, there are no positions being requested in this budget for 911 call takers or dispatch.

So I want to know what your plan is for adding positions.

And also, I want to see in terms of automated, not that I'm against automation, but if a person is calling in that 30% that actually turns out to be an emergency...

It just takes longer if it's automated to be able to get to the fact that that that call was actually an emergency legitimate 911 call not a non-emergency call and the last thing I'll say chief is that Everyone knows we have low staffing numbers at SPD.

At the very least, if someone calls 911, we should be able to, including the non-emergency line, because normally people call that even when a crime has been committed, but the person is no longer there.

and they don't wanna tie up the 911 call if there is someone needing immediate assistance, right?

But a crime has usually been committed when someone's calling the non-emergency line.

So we really, at the very least, if we can, get a police officer to get to someone because of the low staffing numbers, we should be able to take their call at the 911 call center.

Again, it's an essential service.

So I wanna know the plan for getting staff to a place where folks feel like they are getting that service, at the very least.

SPEAKER_05

My plan is to fill the 18 vacant positions by the end of the year, to continue to hire better so that we can retain positions, to bolster morale so that people don't continue to leave.

18 positions is a big difference.

Generally, I have 9 to 11 people taking calls on the floor.

Call takers and dispatchers, you know, because you spent time with us, those are different disciplines.

Nine people are taking approximately 2,500 calls a day.

And so it is astonishing, actually, what they're able to manage and how they're able to manage it.

So I always feel very defensive of what a good job they're doing in the space of scarcity.

People have been advocating for more pockets, for more positions for years and years.

And I could have done this this year.

I'm choosing not to because I have watched the role of care.

I know also that I can likely get more grant money, so it doesn't even hit the city budget.

But care is really useful at these conversations, at checking and advising.

Sometimes we don't know what's going on.

It could be that someone's overdosed or they could be napping.

We don't know.

Send care.

That is a better use of resources.

And so I validate everything you're saying, but the best I can do right now is staff up, fill those positions I've got, maintain that team, and then drive expediency.

And on the website, Sean Blackwell's doing an excellent job updating it so people know, if this, click here.

If this, click here.

If this, call here.

I don't have a good strategy right now to divert right to 988. I'm also contemplating having care responders rotate into 911 because that's what Durham does.

They can divert lots of calls right there to the care responder to take calls for one week a month.

And so we might look at that as well.

But again, I'll just keep reporting what we're trying to do.

You have identified something that has kept us all up at night.

People for years before I got here, Tommy is one of them,

SPEAKER_15

So just so I understand, you chose not to add 911 call takers, excuse me, and dispatchers because you wanted to expand care because you thought that was what was needed now.

That's half correct.

SPEAKER_05

In your priority order.

Yeah, I chose not to because I have 18 vacancies and I feel like I should not come to this council and ask for more positions if I can't fill the ones that I have.

SPEAKER_02

That's the point that I was going to make, Council Members.

There is a difference between adding positions and adding people who are filling those positions.

We have the authorized positions and the funding necessary to hire new people on when folks who are there decide for whatever reason they win the lottery or for some other reason they no longer want to do that work.

So the chief was talking about the strategy she's using to keep the people there and to attract new people, but we've decided at the executive side of the governmental divide that we have the positions and funding authority that we need.

We are working on retaining the staff who are in those positions and attracting new people.

SPEAKER_05

And I will come forward in a mid-year supplemental.

If I have stabilized staffing and we're at capacity and I can add more, I assure you I will quickly request more as we figure this out.

Because industry-wide, we're trying to figure out who is best for this job.

How do you attract and retain staff now in the space of Gen Z and millennials, where temperament and desires have changed around the workplace?

SPEAKER_15

Thank you.

And thank you, Dan, for adding that.

And we can talk more offline about this because this is something that is really important to me.

And so we can talk more offline.

I do have a question, Chair, about CARE, if you'll allow me to ask one more question.

SPEAKER_16

The floor is yours.

SPEAKER_15

Great.

Thank you.

On CARE, I'm wondering, it is a dual dispatch system.

So I guess I'm a bit confused about what is the service that care will be providing in its expansion, let's say to the north end.

Since we know we have low staffing SPD numbers, I know when I went on my ride along, which I've also shared with you, I was very concerned because there are a couple of individuals needing assistance and the care team couldn't help them.

And people were standing there, constituents watching this.

that says CARE, RESPOND, City of Seattle, and no one was stopping to help these individuals.

And so I'm just wondering, and again, I want to say it again, I'm going to underscore I'm supportive of alternatives to policing, but are we actually getting the outcomes that we're intending with this program to be able to justify the expansion of it, what can people expect?

Because I'm not opposed to expansion of things that work, but how is this going to help folks across the city, including the North End?

If it is a dual dispatch system and we don't have enough officers, what is the service that care team is able to provide given that limitation?

SPEAKER_05

Again, I'll go back to the 1,000 hours released back to police.

I think sometimes people get confused, and they think that police and CARE go together, and they remain in a co-response.

They don't.

Police go.

Sometimes they're there for seconds, because that is what the MOU required initially.

That was how I got that swift MOU with SPOG, was to say, we're going to test this, and we're going to get the officer's recommendation and some real data before I ask to go primarily to these calls.

It was the right thing to do.

Again, we're in month nine of this.

There are active labor negotiations happening right now, and I believe that we all assume that at a future state care will be dispatched alone primarily in collaboration with police, because that is what I'm hearing.

There's no evidence that police are needed in that dual dispatch model for these low acuity calls.

But to be clear, it's already 1,000 hours back.

It's already a minimum of $130,000 saved.

And so it's kind of a brilliant fiscal design.

You all have to pay for me to run 911. You've got to pay for my management team to run 911. And we get these bonus first responders that cost half as much as police or fire.

And that way, we're different.

If you look at Albuquerque Community Safety, Durham Community Safety, Durham Heart, those are new departments.

They're fantastic, but you've got new overhead.

With me, you don't.

You don't.

I'm just sending somebody instead of police.

We do have outcomes.

I have 100 pages right now.

I look at the outcomes every day.

Who got back to housing?

Who got back home?

Who was talked back into supported recovery?

Who was reconnected with a parent?

I mean, story after story after story after story.

I think in a lot of cases, police are skilled and they could have done it, but that would not have been the right use of two hours of law enforcement time.

And so I am with you.

I think it should be a true third first responder team that should be able to go solo as appropriate.

And we are working hard on that.

And I'll defer to the executive to say anything more.

SPEAKER_02

Director Eder, anything to add?

SPEAKER_15

Don't have anything in particular to add that would I think be helpful to the situation Yes, and I just want to be clear I I'm asking about what's the service that you're able to provide now because when I went on a two-hour ride along I Again, there were folks needing assistance that weren't getting assistance so I just want to make sure if we're doing it that folks are clear and constituents are clear and What is the service that is being provided?

And I don't want to take up any more time, Chair, so we can talk offline.

SPEAKER_05

We can talk offline.

I would say the scenarios that are painful that you described to me when we were one-on-one is when, because we are consent-based, I'm not coercive.

We're not designated crisis responders.

I'm not remanding anyone to treatment.

I'm not forcibly moving anyone.

And so that's, again, when you need more HealthONE, more police, more DCRs, and more care.

Most of the time, most of the time, we do get the outcome.

We are able to deescalate and at least get somebody into a place of semi-stability.

Next year will be a game changer for the city.

As the ORCA comes online at the Morrison, as we invest more in evergreen treatment services, as we start to actually bolster the system that can take people in and sustain recovery, everything will look different.

I like it when Mayor Harrell says, I don't see people who are criminals, I see people who are sick when I walk down Third Avenue.

I love that.

He is right.

And so we need to treat this like a medical emergency and get people help, and then everything will look different.

And my team is uniquely poised in the city to be able to talk people into, would you like detox?

They're more successful than any other team right now at getting that yes, but what is awful is the days where then we call detox and it's not available.

SPEAKER_15

But what is concerning to me about what you're saying is in this particular instance, the individual was not, they were passed out, they couldn't consent, they were about to roll onto Fifth Avenue where there was a lot of traffic.

A constituent flagged us down because they saw the car and they said, don't you see someone needs assistance?

And so in this case, someone needed to help that person.

They were not You know awake to be able to give consent, but we just walked away Yeah, and also there was an individual on 3rd Avenue on the street running in front of a bus Yeah, we didn't do anything about it.

So this is the thing that I have huge concerns about in terms of this team Why couldn't they then have called 9-1-1 or done something because that's what constituents are seeing though.

We're not doing anything and

SPEAKER_05

I don't disagree, but by policy and by municipal code, we are not going to forcibly move someone.

That would be a police call.

And I did agree with you.

If it had been me, I call 911 all the time.

I call my team all the time.

But that would have been a lower priority call, unfortunately, because of the escalating violence in this city.

And so that's probably what they were thinking.

You know, often we will call We Deliver Care.

or reach or somebody else where we can say, can you keep an eye on this person?

Because I have had the experience, too, where we do get someone out of traffic or we get them sort of stabilized, but then they're right back there a few hour later.

And I have watched unnecessary and tragic loss of life because we failed to intervene.

You hit on something else that, again, is a policy issue, a legislative issue, which is what is gravely disabled?

How are we interpreting this right now?

And that is not squarely in my lane, but it is imperative to a safe and thriving and healthy city.

We've got to look at how we intervene, who is able to intervene, and what resources do we really provide?

Because too often, we're walking away.

And I appreciate that it pains you.

I truly do.

It pains me, too.

SPEAKER_15

Well, maybe it's some training for your folks to know that they should be calling 911 or we can deliver some of the other things that are available, tools that are available, because that's not happening currently.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, and that's what I love about the feedback loop.

I mean, I'm always telling everyone, anything, I'm more interested in the criticism than when we're getting it wrong than when we're getting it right.

And that was a perfect case study for me to come back to the team and really talk to them about what options are available.

SPEAKER_17

Vice Chair, I think we're gonna continue on, if that's all right?

Sure.

Fantastic.

Council Member Saka, Council Member Morales, and then Council President Nelson.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Chief Barton, for being here today.

Appreciate your work of you and your team.

Congratulations and kudos for the early success in the last year in terms of growing and scaling the team and having a plan in place to do more.

Definitely some promising signs and opportunities.

also some opportunities to continue to do more and have an even greater impact but kudos to you and the team the mayor for You know his leadership on this issue and my council colleagues for making sure you all have you all have the supports you need to be successful More work to more work to do obviously so also I love the data reflected on a few of the slides, in particular how you have purported to save 1,041 hours of officer time.

I'm a huge fan of data, gathering data and making data informed decisions and then also leveraging technology to help us analyze, understand data as well.

This is exactly the kind of data that I would like to see and see more of from you and this team.

And I would encourage you to, I guess, dig in even further and better analyze and gather data around throughputs for this and what that potentially portends.

For example, you know, you say this amount of officer time, what is the average for the average officer, like, how much of their time is saved as a result?

How much, and, you know, taking it even a step further, how many more responses, how many more calls could they save as a direct result of the officer?

So, like...

We have to work closely with the police department.

But in any event, this is great initial data.

You know, I would encourage you to—let's keep that data collection, working closely with your partners and figuring out what other data sets can we collect and share out and be—in the interest of transparency.

Also, love your comments at the very beginning of this, Chief Barton, just noting some of the naysayers, and Seattle has an unfortunate history in many material respects of championing something, having a great idea, and taking that idea to full-fledged program or service, but it fails to...

attract the sustained momentum and effort and focus needed to make sure it's a truly thriving thing.

I've seen that here in the city.

That's consistent with my own high-level observations as well, and it's why I wanted to help and one of the reasons that inspired me to run.

And so, you know, now that I'm here, so we need to get out of that.

And now that I'm here, I'm committed to making sure you all have what you need to make sure this isn't just a well-intended idea.

This isn't just one of the first or first in the nation kind of program that we're launching and forget about.

You know, we need to move beyond aspiring to be the first in the nation to launch any new program, service, or law and launch, here's a new shiny thing, another new shiny thing.

You get a new shiny thing, and you get a new shiny thing, and you get a new shiny thing, and get in the business of making sure the shiny things that we do launch and unveil are successful.

and they're successful and they're accountable.

And so I'm more focused on making sure we have flawless execution of these new shiny things rather than go on to the next thing and forget about it.

So my commitment to you all is that this is not just the new shiny thing.

Let us do the work, but I'm counting on you all and the mayor to make sure you all tell us what you need to be successful.

The stakes are too high in this space in particular.

In any event, it also reminds me, colleagues, this is not primarily your struggle, but it just, and members of the public as well, in terms of these new shiny things and initiatives, strategic initiatives that we launched, it reminds me of a conversation we had yesterday about sidewalk investments.

So in Estat's proposed budget, that assumes no, the levy does not pass, there is no money for new sidewalks.

It focuses all the sidewalk money on sidewalk repair only.

We didn't pass that levy legislation proposal that voters are going to decide on.

We didn't pass that to be supplemental or to supplant our existing sustained efforts in sidewalks.

We passed it to supplement because the only way we're going to overcome this and close the gap is to make sure we have a sustained, focused effort over time.

It's just a great, prescient warning that the same issue kind of manifests itself in so many different ways and so many different policy areas.

That's why I loved it.

All right.

A few of my questions have already been addressed, which I like going in the middle of the pack.

But let me ask about the public dashboard of outcomes on your website.

I noticed that the dispatch data dashboard takes you to the SPD site.

So, again, I love dashboards.

Publicly accessible data needs to be open, accessible for all to consume.

Ideally, I would love for this to be a little more...

know, like the average citizen or resident to be able to, like, digest this data, rather than experts.

But, you know, we'll get there over time.

But when will the care department better be able to showcase its own data and outcomes, you know, related to its own kind of response units and capability?

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, this is underway right now.

I've actually just had another meeting with Lauren Atherley and his team at SPD, and also with John Ehrenfeld and his team at FIRE, because I keep insisting that we must present the data altogether.

The primary question is, is the city getting better or worse, right?

Are people becoming more healthy, more mentally healthy?

We need to look at suicidality.

We need to look at overdose, domestic disputes, things like that.

And we really need to look across all three teams to get a good snapshot.

You can imagine that as care grows and starts to carve out more low acuity calls from police, you might see police use of force go up if they're only going to these priority one hot calls.

So I'm very sensitive.

Data is really important to me.

Data science is important to me.

So we are working on that now.

How can we crosswalk our data?

In the short run, you're right.

We can start to put out what I'm looking at internally, put out just simple outcomes, simple outputs from care, and start to correlate our police getting to calls faster across one, two, and three priorities.

But I would say the first quarter of next year is when you will see the first iteration of that public-facing policy.

dashboard.

A few of my teammates in care, we didn't really have data analytics.

You know, we have people sort of tracking outputs and call times and things like that, but we didn't have analytics.

And so a couple of my teammates have been trained in Tableau now because I agree entirely.

If the public doesn't understand how to interpret the data, it's not really that useful.

So, yeah, it's a top priority of next year.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome.

Thank you, Chief.

And one final, I guess, really comment is that And this...

And first off, let me say, I have my ride-along scheduled, I think, with you and your team on Thursday, so I'm really looking forward to that.

I've had a chance to visit...

You all, during the first initial six hires of social workers, which is great.

SPEAKER_05

We were the first to meet them.

Did you know that?

SPEAKER_00

Yep, yep, yep.

But now I get to see the work firsthand.

And I want to see, by the way, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Including, you know, and have a similar experience to what my colleagues.

Because...

Yeah, don't just show me the good, because we know there's opportunity all around.

So in any event, but I'm really looking forward to that.

I do just want to, so with respect to a comment that Mr. Rollin made earlier about, because I am also concerned, as Public Safety Chair Kettle noted as well, about the understaffing the call center.

One of the things I had the opportunity to do you know, before I was elected on the campaign trail, was sit side by side, the call center operators and the dispatch team, and take, and just listen in and take calls.

And I heard, that's how I understood firsthand, like, there is a need for the services that you all provide.

Because a certain amount of those calls, just in my understanding, like, in my view, didn't require an armed response.

Many did.

But in any event, in doing that, I got a chance to talk to a lot of the workers there who at the time were feeling very burned out on the heels of everything.

Everything that happened as a result of the racial reckoning in 2020 when George Floyd was murdered.

And what happened here in Seattle, it didn't just impact SPD, it impacted all first responders.

And so the dispatchers and call center operators shared with me, they're all burned out.

And with low staffing, where they only continue to be burned out.

I'm glad that we reduced the mandatory overtime from 16 hours to eight hours, which is great, but...

I personally refuse to believe that it's, you know, the either-or approach.

And, you know, Mr. Rowland, in your response, I heard, you know, well, right now we're prioritizing responders.

And, you know, like, we'll get to hiring the dispatchers and the call center operators later.

You know, I personally believe it's, you know, it's an and approach.

And...

The work, yes, responders are important, but don't just think, I would just encourage you, I don't think you do, but just a reminder, call center operators and dispatchers aren't just a back-end operation.

They're not just the sight unseen.

Just because members of the general public, most of them don't see them personally, they're there and they provide a critically important role in helping you all Respond on scene and so we can't just be cycling through and and and and burning people out Across the spectrum not just responders So I would just encourage you I am also concerned all that is to say I am also concerned about the understaffing in the call center I just encourage you to to find ways to Focus on hiring and and you know ensuring adequate response and call center and dispatch capability Thank you.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, if I could respond to that.

If you go back to my departmental goals from the beginning of the year, it is the top priority.

Drive a learning organization and care that is related to culture and morale and figure out staffing and retention.

We did not ask for more positions because we must fill the 18 vacancies that I've had consistently.

In fact, I think it was almost twofold that when I arrived at the job.

And so it is a top priority.

If you Google Amy Smith, I have never spoken that I'm not talking about the heroics in 9-1-1.

And I love that you know it.

And again, I affirm that you're all coming out to see this work, to get up close, because it has been invisible and it has been thankless.

And it's hard to be them to also be...

recipients of the public's frustration and anger and hostility when we don't have a cop to send.

It's my folks who have to try to explain that, who obviously didn't design the system to be that way, but have to dwell on that reality.

There is real trauma from 2020. Those folks were in West Precinct.

Some of them were sequestered there, basically could not leave.

And one of the first things I learned in week one was calls to 911 did not go down during those months and years they went up.

And so you can imagine what that felt like.

And so some folks have moved on to other careers.

I've been very candid and tried to be very safe to say, listen, if there's so much harm done and it's time for something else, I support that.

And I will help you get to what's next full heartedly.

You know, I'm very concerned about people.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, Chief Barton.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

SPEAKER_17

No further questions.

Thank you, Council Member Tucker, Council Member Morales, then Council President Nelson, Council Member Wu, and Council Member Hollingsworth.

SPEAKER_07

You get all of us today.

Thank you.

Chief Barton, the first thing I want to say is thank you for your compassion.

I really appreciate the way you talk about this work and about the need for making sure that we are treating people who are suffering on our streets as people.

I think...

It's easy not to do that, and so I really appreciate you starting your conversation and your remarks that way.

I also want to say that we know that this isn't a shiny new thing that you're doing.

Alternative Response has been deployed successfully in other cities.

You've been to many of these cities and worked closely with people, and I appreciate that you're bringing your learnings and understanding about how it works well in other places to the work that we're trying to do here in the city.

So I just I appreciate your deep knowledge of this field, your commitment to the data and making sure that we all understand the potential of this department, because I do think we have the potential to dramatically improve our response to people who are suffering on the street.

And as you've been saying, correlated with that would be a dramatic improvement in the ability of our police to respond to non-emergency calls and to other non-behavioral health crisis calls.

So I think there's a huge net benefit to what you're trying to do, and I really hope that the success you're having now just continues to grow over time.

I do want to ask about, so we've talked a lot about 911. Thank you for indicating, I think, I just want to confirm, you said you could do 60 more positions and that would be, is that a goal or is that?

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, in the next five years, unless technology impacts that number, the goal is that if you call emergency or non-emergency in the city of Seattle, someone says, hello, 911, what do you need?

So yeah, that would be the goal.

Okay.

SPEAKER_07

So thank you for clarifying that.

That's good to know.

So let's hope that you get those 18 filled this year.

And then we'd love to see you back in the mid-year supplemental next year asking for another 18, if that's whatever your scale schedule is.

So going to slide four, I wanna ask about, so I know you're talking about sort of scaling up to 10 hours a day, seven days a week.

I'm interested to know what it would take for you to be available 24 hours a day.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, so we've actually been 12 hours a day, 11 to 11. So I'm actually reducing that time span just a little bit because we can cover more geographic locations and also the crisis data supports that.

that there's not a real advantage to those two hours.

I was just asked about this recently, what I think it will take to be citywide 24-7 and really make an impact.

I think it's about 96. I think when we get to about 82 to 96, because we will have furlough lines that look a lot like policing, right?

Multiple shifts 24-7.

And in Albuquerque, I was just with Chief Medina again, actually in Canada, the police chief there.

And he confirmed for me that that's when you started to see that dramatic impact of property crime.

I shared in August with you that it went from over 42,000 incidents to 21,000 incidents of property crime reported in about two and a half years.

And he said, yes, there was this tipping point.

that right around 70, 80 Albuquerque community responders out, they were covering enough of these calls that police were free, not just to do police work, but to investigate again.

They were able to build up their business supports.

Their violent crime was reduced as well.

So usually when asked, I say 96.

SPEAKER_07

Okay, good to know.

Sorry, I'm trying to type notes and follow along at the same time.

Okay, so slide five is where you talk about expanding north and then south.

I'll take it as long as it's an expansion.

So my understanding is that about 50% of 911 calls are for behavioral health.

They are not calls that would require SPD to go out.

SPEAKER_05

That's right.

SPEAKER_07

Okay.

That's right.

SPEAKER_05

It's at least that right now.

SPEAKER_07

And the reason they're going right now is because of the MOU that you referenced earlier.

That is just sort of the way that this pilot was set up originally because of some of the labor conversations.

And hopefully we will resolve those.

Yes.

Okay.

So what I am understanding then is that SPD completed almost 6,000 behavioral crisis reports in 2024. which is about 24 a day, just over 3,800 uniquely identified individuals.

And so when you talk about the potential for saving police officer time, for saving police staff time, that's what you're referring to is if we could get just crisis care team going out, there's potential cost savings there.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05

Even that paperwork.

I mean, when you really watch the system from 911 all the way through to that final report, it's so time consuming and so involved.

And so you just always want to be as, I think, expedient with regard to what profession you send.

Could this person get the right discipline?

But also, what is the most financially prudent response?

SPEAKER_07

So this morning, I see Chief Roar here.

The paper reported that SPD will stop responding to alarm calls due to understaffing.

It seems like the better use of police officer time would be to respond to those other calls, the emergency calls and just.

support the care team in doing your work.

So I'm interested to know how much it would cost to have care respond to all encampment removal calls.

This might not be a question you can answer off the top of your head, but this is the kind of thing I'm interested in understanding.

How much would it cost to have care respond to all the soap and soda calls?

I know Council Member Moore addressed that a little bit already.

I'm interested to know how CARE and HSD coordinate on safety prevention resources.

So if you could talk a little bit about that.

And really what I'm thinking is we have the Victim Advocacy Fund, we have Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, HSD has the We Deliver Care contract, we have a navigation team.

It feels like there's the crime victim advocates, I'm interested to know if those, um, are appropriate responses for the care team to go to instead of the police.

And I'm interested to know what it would look like to bring those contracts into the care department too, because I feel like what you're doing is you're trying to create one, um, I don't know, umbrella organization maybe for all of the non emergency things that we need to do as a city to respond to people who are suffering on our streets, rather than have things sort of hodgepodge throughout the city.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, I love where you're going with this.

So what I would suggest is the idea is coordination.

So when I was recruited to this role, it was explained to me that the city was going to go through somewhat of an audit to look at all of the different public safety, crime prevention, sort of the adjacent functions that did not need to sit in police and did not naturally sit in fire.

Where might they go?

I was agnostic.

I mean, I have been trained and well-conditioned to suspend judgment, to try to be scientific and academic and just listen and pay attention and look at data and how things are going.

And so I didn't have a big opinion about some of the things that I had heard suggested.

One thing I heard was perhaps the community service officers should move over to care.

Perhaps there were these different teams I had been made aware of.

However, as I got about six months into the work, what I realized is it's not so much that we need to move different functions.

We have to know each other.

We have got to have swift communication.

We've got to have interdepartmental meetings.

I did get to know the folks in survivor support quickly, the CSOs, HealthONE.

That's why I talk about them all the time.

And then there are lots of adjacent functions in the human service department, fantastic teams.

And so as I met with different people, I kept suggesting, I don't know that you need to be moved into a department, but I need to know you and how to support and promote your work.

When I'm in community, I need to know when to say, oh, let me call my friend Erica.

She's going to know the answer, or I will bring her here.

Jennifer Chow, who directs Department of Neighborhoods, is expert at this, right?

I don't report to her, and yet I do in some regards.

She's in Little Saigon.

She knows I can answer questions.

for this neighborhood, and she brings me out.

And so there is great cost savings, too, as we just better coordinate and work together and figure out where does prevention sit, where does early intervention, where does late-stage intervention.

I often say I see care as the diversion department, as truly the alternative to police or fire.

There is an emergency.

And I don't naturally conceptualize prevention functions sitting in the department for that reason.

However, again, that's outside of my purview.

I am a fan of reducing duplication 100%, you know, so we are working on that.

When you talk about care going to all these different types of calls, my perfect world is that I have lots of different resources that are deployable from 911. that my dispatchers could, in San Francisco, they do have a dispatcher dedicated to encampment remediation who has the latitude to be able to say, oh, this is a tidy little campsite.

This looks like somebody who is not in mental health crisis, who is not violent.

Laundry is folded, there's vegetables.

We're gonna send a care team out to see what's going on here first.

And then there are other images where it looks like, oh, the cartels might be using these tents.

There is indication that you would need law enforcement there.

So I think high level, we need to design a world where we have an array of resources, including peers, folks with lived experience and expertise that can be deployed in all different configurations, all types of co-response.

And that will be the game changer.

And I think it will save the budget when we get there.

SPEAKER_07

Thank you.

The last thing I'll say, thank you for that.

That was great.

It reminds me, I think, the last time you were here, I talked about just having been in Austin and witnessing a woman in a very busy, you know, lighted intersection who definitely needed a call.

And when I called 911...

the dispatcher said, do you need police, fire, medical, or mental health?

And there you go.

That's what I would love for us to be able to do as well.

The last thing I'll say is I really appreciate you going out to the CID yesterday.

We know, and I will say, I've been saying for years that when we're just moving people around from one neighborhood to the next without actually leading them to services.

All we do is make the next neighborhood mad.

So I appreciate you heading out there.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council Member Morales, Council President Nelson.

And Council President, thank you for joining remotely.

Colleagues, we do love to be in person.

And if anyone's feeling a little under the weather, please take Council President's leadership by example.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you very much for this presentation.

Let me say, first of all, that I am one of the millions that supports alternative response.

You're right, it is a movement.

And so that on the table, I want to note that the different models do make a difference.

And so we've had and we've seen the success of alternative response in Seattle with CRT and HealthONE, et cetera.

I was not necessarily hesitant, but I recognized that for care to be fully, to fulfill its potential, we've got to make sure that there are labor negotiations that are happening to allow for single dispatch so that it does take the pressure off our limited police staffing.

And so that's a really important piece that I think has to happen to realize the potential and the savings that we're talking about going forward.

My question goes back to the 911 and the non-emergency line.

I see the non-emergency line as a way to take pressure off of emergency response.

And so I just have a technical question.

And by the way, the non-emergency line has been a problem since 2022, or since I came into office.

It's been a problem.

And so what I'm hearing you say is that it's a staffing issue.

And so my question is, is it the same group of people that answers the 911 line and the non-emergency line, and it's just that we don't have enough of those people?

Or is there a designated person who could or should be answering just the non-emergency line to clear the pipeline of calls into 911.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, good question.

Currently, it's basically the same group of people.

I mean, as you're training up and upskilling into emergency call taking, people start with non-emergency.

There's a number of interesting models that I've come across in the country.

My friends in Denver, they set up during COVID basically remote non-emergency line.

So they're not using CAD data, which is sensitive.

They use Salesforce to just make tickets for these non-emergency calls.

And obviously, that opens up a whole realm of possibility when it comes to staffing.

And my counterpart, Andrew, there explained, yeah, if we determine that, no, this should be an emergency call, then it gets diverted back to 911, where it becomes a CAT event, and they take it from there.

So that's something I'm looking at.

I'm also considering, we do have...

professional call centers like Kings 3. I've actually visited their call center.

They're the ones who answer largely in this country, the pool emergency calls, elevator emergency calls.

I think Seattle Housing Authority has a contract with them.

There's all sorts of potential things that we could do from a business perspective and process improvement perspective that might alleviate the burden on 911. 911 is expensive.

Those are expensive positions.

It's expensive to staff and to run.

And again, it's sort of inflexible by design.

All of the things that I'm suggesting, though, I have a dispatcher's guild, right?

So this is another labor conversation where we would have to come to some consensus about that body of work which has belonged to that guild.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, well, to be continued, I suppose, you know, I'm very focused on doing everything we possibly can to staff up SBG.

You know, we passed a piece of legislation earlier this year to try to help offline.

I'll try to talk to somebody to find out what more can be done to help you recruit for call taking, be it 911 or the...

non-emergency, you know, response line, because I do second Councilmember Rivera's comments that this is something that I hear from constituents is, look, I didn't want to call 911. I just needed to make a call and nobody answers.

So more to be discussed going down the line.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council President.

Up next, we have Council Member Wu, followed by Council Member Hollingsworth.

We'll take another one from Council Member Moore because she was the shortest of everyone today.

Over to you, Council Member Wu.

SPEAKER_01

I promised to make this short.

SPEAKER_17

Sorry, that was not a dig.

Please take as much time as you need.

SPEAKER_01

I just want to say thank you for all that you do.

I see care team members out in the CID in downtown at 9 p.m.

at night.

And so they're out there, and they're doing amazing work, as well as the department.

And I see with my very own eyes the impact The connection, I guess the outreach that's being done may not have a very specific outcome now.

But it takes time.

It takes trust.

And we don't sometimes see the outcomes until much later.

But I believe this is having an amazing effect on people.

And while we're looking at passing things like soda and soap and looking at the drug ordinance, The difference between now and two or three years ago is that we have the care team.

We have groups like Reach and Lead and We Live for Care.

In the past, we did not.

And so I think this is the, like you said, the changing factor that will set our city up for success.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council Member Wu.

You are true to your word.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

SPEAKER_14

Now I feel like I have to be short.

SPEAKER_17

No, no, no, no, because I'm going to be long.

SPEAKER_14

Okay, I'll be fast.

Chief Barton, thank you.

I just want to say, for the record, we are incredibly lucky to have you lead the care team in 911, so thank you.

I have a quick question, and you mentioned it before, and I know that we have ORCA.

partnering with DESC coming online next year.

We also have Evergreen contract.

Can you explain real quick the game-changing piece that that will provide your team to be able for places for people to go?

I've talked to HealthONE.

And the number one things that firefighters have said to me is, Joy, we need a place for people to go.

The second thing, real quick, I spent time with, shout out to Station 25 on Capitol Hill.

They had 30 calls in 24 hours for their first aid medic.

And they talked about burnout.

They talked about places for people to go.

So can you explain what that will do for your team?

SPEAKER_05

Yes.

The first time I presented to council, it was June of 2023. And during the Q&A, I was asked about gaps in the system.

And I said I had been coached by my friends in different academic think tanks to say, I need a place to take people other than the emergency department and jail.

And I liked that turn of phrase.

And then I shared with the council, I don't have those places.

I mean, it was like 72 hours into the work.

I realized there is no place to go at the time.

I don't have low barrier shelter.

So sometimes people do have a place to sleep, but they are dependent on a substance and they can't use it there.

And so they're down here on the sidewalk.

Progressively, I'm observing people want help, want detox.

Fentanyl has poisoned the drug supply.

A lot of people became dependent on that drug unintentionally.

It was not their intention to use the drug.

And a lot of young people are losing friends.

And so progressively, I do see people say, especially with buprenorphine, buprenorphine in the hands of fire and EMS is...

the most significant change this year, hands down.

I mean, I haven't taken time to really just stop and applaud the advocacy that happened, because that can stabilize someone long enough to create this window of opportunity to say, will you come indoors?

We will help you.

We can work with you.

We can get you on methadone.

We can get you an ID.

We can talk about it.

trauma past or skills training or whatever.

And I often say until we can have that swift, you've got the window of opportunity, somebody says yes, and then orca center.

That is 23 hours post overdose stabilization to get a proper workup.

What is going on medically?

What is going on clinically?

And you have to have both sides for people.

So I have talked to people who came into sobriety, were doing really well, and then relapsed.

Relapse is part of recovery.

And so that was another thing I identified.

We've got to design a system that acknowledges that, that you can't be so prescriptive to say, OK, 28 days, you're good.

Go back to the same environment, but be a different person.

Nothing in your life has changed, but you have 28 days.

It doesn't work.

But if it does, that's an outlier.

And then we see these other systems that are designed to absolutely support people along the journey, even when it includes relapse.

And that's why I talk about drug court all the time.

There are a lot of fantastic interventions in town.

I've shared one of the UGM sites where there is a sober community, enhanced shelter for women.

And I asked, well, what happens if somebody relapses?

Because they do UAs.

They're trying to maintain sobriety.

And they said, oh, you go across the parking lot to this less enhanced shelter.

Your case manager can still be with you and help you understand why did you slip, what was going on here, so that people develop awareness of their own vulnerability, but also maintain the win.

We're going to get you back there.

We've got a place for you there.

We know who you are.

And that is what everything should look like.

And actually, I think we're making it more complicated than it is.

It really needs to be the best first response.

We divert first.

We reserve law enforcement or coercion for when diversion has failed, and we think somebody is going to really harm community or die.

And then right into a supportive environment where somebody can heal and redirect their life.

And it saves a lot of money when we do that.

I mean, high level, let's not lose sight that we don't want the 911 calls.

We don't want the 911 calls.

We want to break the cycles so that that call doesn't come in again next week.

SPEAKER_14

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And I know that when we don't have places for people to go and that person might not have gotten the help that they needed, they might attribute for 10 calls a day, five calls, you know, for that same person.

And it's, you know, it's the cycle.

So I get it.

The second thing, just really quick, and I told the chair I'll be super fast.

we're expanding care to the East Precinct, which I know that is greatly needed in our area.

One of the questions I had is how is that gonna integrate with the mental health professionals that are there?

SPEAKER_05

That are already in the CDC?

SPEAKER_14

Correct, and that might be a question for SPD, I know they're next.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, well, it's actually the same strategy everywhere we go.

I'm trying to asset map who is already in the field, who's in the case management business, who's providing what, because I want a swift handoff.

Some calls CARE has gone on have taken two or three hours.

That's not really appropriate.

I want it to be first response.

I want it to be quick triage.

What is going on here, and then what?

And to hand off to the right person or place, somebody who can really invest.

And so that will be the strategy, is to understand what is needed.

How do we use you?

And again, we've got a direct line B to B.

So Mary's Place, their call center, they have a direct line to my care shift supervisor.

And we use those lines all the time.

So it's not publicly facing, but it allows us to better coordinate because we do have high utilizers.

And we can just call and say, hey, I've got Michael here.

What happened?

And we are in the east already.

We're active right now.

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_14

You know that?

Yes, I did know that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

Council Member Moore, you're up next.

SPEAKER_08

Okay, thank you.

I have a question and then I have a comment just to correct the record.

So my understanding is that, is this correct that the care team are now allowed to take people to the crisis solution center?

SPEAKER_05

That is right.

And that was another game changer.

It used to be only police who could make that referral, but we got the MOU several months ago.

I think in June I signed it.

So CARE does refer people to the Crisis Solution Center.

SPEAKER_08

Okay.

And I think that's a huge, huge step, right?

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

I thank Daniel Malone for that.

Big deal.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah, okay, thank you.

And then I just wanted to correct the record, because I know that Council Member Morales had asked a question about utilizing care for soap and soda.

Soda and soap are very different.

Soap only applies to johns and pimps who've been arrested and charged with exploitation crimes and if a court enters an order.

So I don't really see a role for care in SOAP orders.

That's separate from loitering where we're looking at diversion for sellers where there certainly could be a social service and care role in that.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

Thank you for the clarification.

In my mind, I know if those folks are around, there are likely vulnerable young people.

And so I would like to have, again, just at least outreach activities so that people know that we're available when they need help and that I won't invoke law enforcement in that conversation.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Chief Barton, for being with us today for just over two hours.

And thank you, Tom.

SPEAKER_05

Was it over two hours?

I said you wouldn't have any questions left.

We just spoke.

SPEAKER_17

I will say that yours was so far the shortest presentation that we've received and the longest question session.

So it shows how everyone is deeply interested in colleagues.

This is totally how budget works.

So there's nothing wrong.

We're all on point.

I'm going to share some of my reflections that have come from over the last four plus years of being here on council and watching change and being on staff before that working regarding health one and being on the team that passed the legislation that started HealthONE.

Councilmember Hollingsworth is completely right.

We need a place for people to go.

And until we have a place for everyone to go, we're going to be struggling.

And that was really something that came from the folks over at HealthONE that have been very clear with me.

I want to take a look at the overall budget that the fact that we had shelters that were stood up using federal funding that the CBO and the mayor made the choice to not close them.

This is an impact on our general fund colleagues and it's an important utilization of our resources because in this moment we need to be looking at expanding how we use non-congregate shelter to address the drug epidemic that is on our streets, to ensure that we have medically assisted treatment that is easy to access so that we're not sending a person from their shelter on a bus through a place that they are familiar with for not good reasons in order to get their medically assisted treatment.

This is not about care.

Let me come back to my notes.

I was just kind of going off on a tangent there.

Medic One, Seattle started Medic One.

We then started Health One.

took about six to eight years to do medic one, or to health one, to get it stood up through the MOUs, through the legislation, through the conversations, through the people to people work so that folks could understand that having a social worker with the team reduced having a fire engine, a medic, a police officer, and then an AMR all at the Morrison where we could just send a health one.

And to have...

to have the care department stood up so rapidly is really impressive.

I know that this in a lot of ways was born out of what occurred in 2020 and that there were some tensions that you felt upon arrival and thank you for resetting that dial.

Because to be reminded that the pilot wasn't launched a year ago made me sit back in my seat a little bit.

How much work that you've done is incredible.

because we know that the more folks that we have like the care team on our streets, the more time that we free up for officers to do what only commissioned officers are able to do, to perform their highest and best use of the function of the funding and the position authority in which we give them.

I wanna focus in on the expansion here, and then I'm gonna move over to dispatch in a second.

You can clearly see from my colleagues that we support the care team expansion as much as fast as we can go.

Seeing in here that within your entire budget, we're looking at a $3.5 million increase to the care team.

And the budget is closer to $30 million, if I'm on the wrong pages again over here on my budgets.

35 for 26, 32 for this year.

Great.

Memory is serving even with my notes.

You can see that we believe in your care expansion.

Please do come back when you're ready to expand further.

Regarding dispatch, colleagues, I'm just going to read from the 2014 to 2024 a document that central staff presented because I think that this is really helpful information.

Dispatch has been in a bad situation for a number of years, also a product of 2020 where they were not feeling well supported and I don't blame them.

I'm gonna just call the 911 call response budget program houses the city's 911 call center because dual dispatch began in 23 Carriage Department in 21 was a budget of $17.9 million.

It is a reasonable proxy for the current 911 call response budget program.

Before that time, call center operations were one component of SPD's administrative operations budget summary level, and it's not possible to derive a 2019 baseline for this function alone.

On the basis of this imperfect comparison, costs for the current communications center budget program increased by $6.1 million, or 34% from 21 to 24. And so colleagues, I know that folks are asking for more dispatchers this year.

Everyone's asking for that.

Everyone wants that.

What I can tell you is in the last year, I have noticed a difference because I too call 911. And I speak to a lot of people in our city that are using 911. And I've noticed an improvement in the last year.

And I hope that your dispatchers know, from me to you dispatchers, we appreciate your service to our city.

With that, for CBO and central staff, I would like to know, I don't need to know right now, but Of the number of positions, what is our position authority, how many are funded, and how many are filled?

We don't need to get into it.

These are just the notes that I'm looking for to make decisions later.

I want to note that the vacancy rate was larger last year than it is today.

Just baseline period.

Keep on that trajectory.

Thank you.

you're also hearing from us that we really want more dispatchers.

So when you have your recruit classes filled, please do come back.

And I just want to say that part of the improvements that I've seen in the last year are also just from the upgrade in the CAD system.

I've also heard anecdotally from my residents that they have seen improvements in the non-emergency line.

It's also my understanding that if you have an incident that you need to have a written report number, an incident report number, you can call the non-emergency line the next morning and have that report taken.

And it's my understanding that those telephonic report writers start at 7 a.m.

So if anyone's listening and...

want to cut to the front of the line call at 7 7 30 a.m and i've heard that the response is very quick so thank you for your work there because this update in the cad system is quite helpful and then lastly i just want to know something pull out what you said earlier is for other cities that are trying to start a dual or sole dispatch alternative they have to fund an overhead And what you have been able to accomplish here is using the overhead for the 911 call center and other things that needed more attention, that needed that attention to also do this alternative response.

Clearly, I don't have any questions because all my colleagues asked all my great questions.

Thank you, colleagues, teamwork here.

I just wanted to get those items on the record.

But feel free to respond to anything that you heard.

SPEAKER_05

I just appreciate you all.

I appreciate the candor.

I appreciate the feedback.

And I love collaboration.

I do love co-creation.

I always feel smarter and more well-informed after these conversations, and more importantly, in better service to community.

And I have often said I do think of myself reporting to the person on the sidewalk.

That is how I think.

That is what gets me out of bed and what keeps me going during the day.

And a lot of my heroes in this work I know think exactly the same way.

And I always feel that you are motivated by similar things, that you really do want to alleviate the suffering and get people help, and that this is not political.

And so I just really affirm that and thank you for it.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you so much, Chief Barton.

And just noting again about this 911 call center, we're looking at about $19 million a year in 2019. The total budget in 24 was $24 million.

and it was just 2.3 for the care department.

We're now moving into a space where we're going to have another additional total $3.5 million for care as we expand citywide.

My best guess is that we'll need some more staff there.

Thank you for all you do.

Council Member Kettle, as chair of the committee that oversees the department, it's yours to close out.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Chair.

Chief Barton, thank you very much for being here.

Mr. Rowland, also thank you very much.

Just to close out really quick, 911, I've seen this from my time in Queen Anne in terms of the emergency, non-emergency, the online issues, as in my visit, the challenges in staffing and so forth.

But I've also been to the fire alarm center too.

So this is something that we can, to Council Member Rivera's points, this is something that we can look in the 25 program for the public safety community to look at and say, hey, just get it on their people systems.

How can we do things better?

Get that exchange going to get some way aheads to maybe assist in the challenges that we face on that side.

Separately, kind of going back to my point about alternative response early on and some major change.

You know, this budget, two-year budget period is key in terms of creating the baselines, you know, learning those lessons learned.

And I know there's going to be change.

You know, I came in the military not a few years after Goldwater-Nichols, which is a massive change in DOD after the Granada invasion.

The 9-11 was almost immediately, exactly in the middle of my career, after which came the Intel Reform Act, the Homeland Security Act.

So major changes there.

So I've seen, I've lived it.

And I could see what's happening now.

And in terms of my early remarks, so we just need to, you know, work together, which we'll do, plus the mayor's office and others, and use this two-year period to really establish, create that baseline, get those lessons learned, and then we can look to make adjustments that I think are becoming.

And, you know...

Totally support.

My only worry is that sometimes we create expectations because as someone who's lived in 24-7 watch schedules, you need a lot of people to do that.

And even with this plus-up, that's really not a lot.

So your ability to, you know, from a practical perspective is a challenge.

So we have to be mindful of that.

We should not over, you know...

You know, expectations management is always key.

But we'll be definitely working with you and your team and both teams in terms of the care responders and 911 to ensure that we're set moving forward, in addition to police, fire, and so forth.

So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_17

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Kettle.

Thank you, Chief Barton.

Thank you, Thomas.

We're going to now move on to the next presentation, if the clerk could read the short title under the record for item number two.

SPEAKER_09

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

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

We have Chief Surar, Chief...

Sorry, we've got...

Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey and our Chief Budget Officer Angela Sochi here with us today.

Colleagues, I'll note that with just, we've been in the committee for about two hours, 15 minutes.

This is a pretty typical amount of time to spend on public safety items.

This also means that at this point, if we spend two hours and 15 minutes on this presentation, that'll take us to 1.30.

leaving us 30 minutes for lunch.

So I would say let's not worry about that.

If we get to 1 o'clock and we need to spend more time, we'll just ask for you to return after lunch, if that's all right.

Chief, over to you.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_06

Am I turned on here?

Okay.

Well, I just wanna state for the record, it's not fair that I have to speak after Amy.

It's really not fair, but I will do my best.

And I wrote down some notes so I could stay very focused and keep it as brief as possible, because I realize that the questions are where the real benefit is for you.

I do want to start by thanking the Council for the outreach and encouragement that I've received since stepping into my current position.

I truly, truly appreciate your support as we are facing the most severe staffing shortage in recent history.

The city has already directed budget and staff resources to assist with recruiting and retention by authorizing hiring bonuses and very much needed wage increases.

And funding has been appropriated for new tools that will allow us to leverage technology to combat violent crime activity.

The proposed budget builds on these important actions by increasing our capacity to respond to the most pressing public safety concerns facing us right now.

Although we're encouraged by the recent increase in police job applications and our improved onboarding processes, it's still going to take us years to fill all of the officer vacancies and restore our staffing to safe levels.

To mitigate the impacts of ongoing staffing shortages, we must strategically focus budget resources on civilianization, technology, and overtime.

We must increase the number of civilian support staff to both alleviate the heavy administrative workload on our detectives and assist frontline officers with non-law enforcement calls for service.

We also need to implement new and expanded technologies to enable us to deploy our limited resources more efficiently and effectively.

And we do still need to increase our overtime budget to help offset service level reductions in key areas so we can respond quickly to public safety issues as they arise.

The challenges we face are not new, and we know from experience they will not be solved quickly or in traditional ways.

To maximize our limited resources, we must invest in these alternative strategies to build capacity to allow SPD to continue delivering the most critical police services with a limited number of officers.

The 2025-26 proposed budget does just that.

The investments in innovative strategies and technologies will lead to huge dividends in the future and enhance our capacities to improve public safety.

Thank you.

Now the person who really knows all the information will answer the hard questions.

SPEAKER_04

Good morning, counsel.

My name is .

SPEAKER_17

Angela, if you could bring the microphone closer to your mouth.

SPEAKER_04

Of course.

SPEAKER_17

There you are.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Angela Soce.

I am the Executive Director of Budget and Finance for the Seattle Police Department.

Happy to be here this morning.

SPEAKER_13

Good morning.

Brian Maxey, Chief Operating Officer, SPD.

Good morning.

Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_04

Alrighty, let's jump into the meat of the budget.

We're going to kick this off by just reminding everyone that SPD is a service organization, first and foremost.

Our personnel provide critical emergency response services, and right now, the demand for those services exceeds the current supply due to our persistent staffing shortage.

It's not a surprise or a secret to any of you that for, you know, Since 2014, we've seen a 25% decrease.

We had a high of 1,336 deployable officers in June of 2018. From that point, it's actually a 30% decrease in deployable personnel.

You see here in the table the visual that just captures what that cliff looks like despite efforts to increase and investments made to increase the size of the police department or to...

to add police officers above attrition over these past years, including the investments in officer recruitment and retention programs, the sizable appropriation increase that comes with the new contract that was passed earlier this year.

We are seeing an uptick in job applications and a slowing in attrition.

However, as the chief noted, it is going to take time for us to fully recover.

For that reason, as the chief noticed, we're not going to hire our way out of our staffing issues.

Recognizing this, the mayor's proposed budget invests considerable resources into supplementing the city's police service by leveraging technology and non-sworn staff resources.

All of this is built on the idea that our specially trained police officers should be doing police work.

There is an overtime supplement that allows our existing personnel to work more hours as they have been to maintain our service levels.

But we are introducing in this budget some new ideas that'll allow us to leverage technology and leverage those civilian staff members to help offset that staffing shortage in the near term.

All right, this slide here shows our overview change from the 2024 adopted.

We have a considerable increase, 76% of which is attributable to the annual wage increases and market adjustments that were passed earlier this year.

In both years, the majority of that increase is going to be there.

We'll get into further detail around the individual or the notable changes further on in the presentation.

Overall, our general fund budget, proposed budget in 2025 is $458 million.

In 2026, the proposed budget is $462 million, up from 393 in the 2024 adopted.

All right, our general fund reduction here accounts for the vacancy savings associated positions in 2025 and 2026. The department cannot fill our hiring plan is fully funded within the proposed budget.

This action here accounts for those positions outside of the hiring plan that are authorized but unable to be filled in in the next two years.

I will note this does not directly impact any programs or services, but does limit the amount of salary savings that could be reallocated for other purposes within the budget years.

Our second reduction item that we wanted to call out is the budget reduction associated with operating costs for our mounted patrol unit.

On this slide, I just want to emphasize, I know that there's been some inquiries around this particular topic recently.

We wanted to highlight here that this is a staffing issue.

It's not necessarily a budget issue.

That $200,000 line item as a percentage of our total budget is very small.

The reality is we have already eliminated a number of functions within the department, traffic enforcement, our community police teams, our anti-crime teams.

We are down from the 1,336 officers and we are at a position where The two that we haven't mounted are needed elsewhere within the department.

It's a harsh reality and one that we have struggled with for the last few years, to be honest.

And I think the time has come that given the city's overall revenue challenges, it seemed appropriate to make this decision.

Those two officers in the mounted patrol unit will be assigned to other police duties.

We are working on a decommissioning plan that takes into account the horses, use of the facility, and the other personnel, civilian support staff within the unit.

So that is not finalized.

This is a recent announcement, and the decommissioning plan is in development now in consultation with subject matter experts.

All right, and moving to our budget additions.

Going to lead with our ads related to civilian staff support.

the first being the real-time crime center.

In this action item, we're adding a total of 21 FTE over the two-year period, 12 in 2025 and nine in 2026. This action allows us to fully staff a 24-7 real-time crime center that will integrate our systems into a single view to provide situational awareness for both officer and community safety.

This is one component of the crime prevention pilot, also related to our closed caption television systems that are going live hopefully later this year, early next year.

Both real-time crime center software application and the CCTV are subject to the surveillance surveillance reporting process.

Those are, I believe, have been reviewed within committee in the last couple weeks and will likely be voted on later this year.

The focus of these items, the crime prevention pilot items, is to combat gun violence and felony crime.

Our RTCC, as some of you may know, is a space that was built out years ago but never fully staffed.

The RTCC is not a useful tool if it's not staffed with the analysts that are needed to consume the information and share it with our field officers.

Again, these are civilian positions that will serve in a supporting capacity.

Along those same lines, we're adding a total of 14 FTEs, seven in 2025 and seven in 2026, to provide investigative support to our detectives in homicide, robbery, and gun violence investigations.

Since 2018, our detective function has decreased by 43%.

We're down 101 personnel who are responsible for case management, investigating crimes.

These positions will support, this is a modest increase to support from a technical administrative standpoint, case management, evidence processing.

These will be available to our detective units.

These positions will be available to our detective units to support the investigative function within the department.

Moving on to overtime, the budget also includes a $10 million add in 2025 for supplemental police patrols known as directed patrols or emphasis patrols.

These enable SPD to direct sworn resources to locations to address specific community safety concerns.

These overtime hours are being allocated in 2025 and are supported by a city auditor report from July of this year that states that crime is concentrated in particular parts of the areas of the city.

This allows us to direct supplemental officers to to patrol those neighborhoods in those specific areas.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Before we leave this slide, I just wanted to point out that while we don't have any funding for this to emphasis patrol, directed patrols to continue into 2026, if it turns out that we need that for 2026, we will reevaluate absolutely in 2025 fall budget process and may make a different determination.

SPEAKER_04

Thanks, Dan.

I'll also add that our total overtime budget for 2024 increasing from 37 million in 2023 to 54 million.

That accounts for the wage increase, but also an additional four million that's allocated from salary savings.

This is the first year as budget director where I feel like our overtime budget is being adequately We have seen an increased usage in overtime to offset the staffing shortage in prior years.

We've addressed that through supplemental ads, but I think it's good fiscal management to address it on the front end as we're able.

So in this particular case, we're, yeah.

All right, moving on to the technology items.

Number four, scheduling and timekeeping software.

In the 2025 and 2026, we're adding funding, one-time and ongoing funding for workforce management solutions.

that will automate staff scheduling and overtime reporting.

In concert with the fire department, who's also implementing this, I think we've determined that Workday as a city enterprise solution doesn't serve the unique needs of a 24-7 public safety agency when it comes to deploying our resources, having a...

more detailed views and more ability in our operations center to have oversight into the resources.

This project, together with Workday, will allow us to manage those resources more effectively.

Technology item number two, we've got our CCTV cameras.

This item includes one-time and ongoing funding to install additional CCTV cameras where gun violence, human trafficking, or persistent felony crime is concentrated.

This item adds $425,000 in 2025 and an additional $50,000 in 2026 for ongoing costs.

These cameras will be fed into the real-time crime center as part of that item where we have the associated physician ads as part of the larger crime prevention pilot, again, going live in the coming months.

Lastly, we have our Automated School Zone Camera Expansion.

This item is funded through the School Safety, Traffic, and Pedestrian Improvement Fund.

This item, I'm noticing This fund adds $2 million in 2025 and $784,000 in 2026 to double the number of school zone cameras that track speed infractions in school zones.

SDOT, in partnership with SDOT, camera locations are identified.

The cameras are installed.

We manage the vendor contract and violation reviews.

This program has This program expansion was previously proposed in the 2023 and 2024 budget by Seattle City Council.

We were unable to implement that change due to a staffing shortage.

is able to move forward in this year because we have authorization to deploy parking enforcement officers to do the violation review.

Previously, we were having issues staffing the violation review component, which caused program delays.

SPEAKER_17

Yeah.

Any closing remarks from the presentation or shall I just pass it over to Council Member Kelly?

SPEAKER_06

I guess something I should have done before is introduce the people that are here to support me, my training wheels.

Our Council Director, you may know she has been off on parental leave and my hat's off to her about how quickly she has immersed herself into all the details of preparing the budget.

So I'm deeply, deeply, deeply grateful to have her back.

and to have her brilliance at the table as we're doing this.

And you all know my chief operating officer, Brian Maxey, who can answer all the hard questions that I have not been able to absorb the information in my four months here.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Council Member Cattle, as the chair of the department overseeing this department.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Thank you, Chief Brewer, for being here, Chief Operating, Mr. Maxey, and then Ms. Sochi, thank you so much for being here.

I note in your briefing, actually Ms. Sochi's part, she referenced the real-time crime center that was built.

And I also note that Chief Barton, not your Chief Barton, the other Chief Barton, that she mentioned that too in her briefing.

And it was emblematic of kind of false promises or a challenge in the relationship.

And I just wanted to note, as we start off, in terms of that point, that since January, through the Labor Committee, we have a SPOG interim agreement.

through our Governance and Accountability Economic Development Committee, chaired by Council President and I, Vice Chair of that committee.

We have our recruitment bill plus the incentives bill.

Within public safety, we have vacant buildings abatement, automatic license plate reader bill, street racing, the bill on scored jail, soda, stay out of the drug area, and soap, stay out of the area of prostitution.

And I should also note we appointed CARE and also reappointed OIG, which is very important, as we'll find out moving forward.

But last, and a week from today, is the CCTV and the Real-Time Crime Center that has passed out of committee and will be up for full counsel.

So to the point in this briefing and the point in the last briefing, we're pressing forward because it's super important in terms of accomplishing our mission of creating a safe base In our city.

Now, in terms of the briefing and the budget, you know, it's about people.

It's about, you know, personnel, sworn in civilian, but also working with the other elements of the public safety ecosystem.

You know, it's important for all these pieces to be working together.

So it's not just sworn in civilian, sworn in civilian of SPD, but also SPD working with fire and care and so forth, OEM and the like.

And it's also about the technology supports.

As an intelligence officer, I lived in the very technical world and how that supports and then how that kind of function can help those on the front lines.

And that technology support for our sworn officers who are on the point in a lot of times very dangerous situations is so important.

And the other thing too is that we need to build capacity.

You mentioned it in those sworn civilian discussions, but also the technology discussions.

Ultimately, it's about creating that ability to do investigations, for example.

Because of the shift, which was done for a good reason, you know, in terms of pulling for patrol and the like was necessary, but we need that investigative capability, that capacity back for our force.

So I just want to state that up front, and I look forward to working through this.

Now, on the budget side and in terms of oversight and responsibilities, I'm really interested in And Chief, you can pass this question quickly off.

But I note, first thing I should note, too, by the way, we have our responsibilities as a committee and a council.

And I'm mindful of my time in the Navy.

My last year was working with Congress, to which we always had to go back, ask for permission if we wanted to reappropriate monies.

So I just want to get this out of the way.

It's kind of schoolhouse rock.

We've had a proviso on salary savings in the past years.

And given my experience working with Congress and from SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK AND SITTING HERE IN THIS POSITION, THAT IS SOMETHING THAT WILL CONTINUE.

ON THAT, GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHERE WE ARE WITH OUR STAFFING SHORTAGE, ON THE SWORN SALARY SAVINGS, I SEE THE REDUCTION, AND I ALSO KNOW THAT IT'S FOR OVERTIME, IT'S ALSO FOR INCENTIVES, BUT THEN WE ALSO HAVE DIRECTED PATROL OVERTIME, WHICH IS LIKE AN ADDITIONAL OVERTIME, BUT THEN I see the 4270 and then the 4,300,000, these reductions.

I'm assuming the math has been done, but can you walk through that piece, that reduction, but then the fact that we do have OT, overtime, and incentives, and now this new directed patrol overtime?

How does that square?

SPEAKER_06

I'm going to let the person that knows the numbers best answer that.

SPEAKER_04

So as far as I understand your question, you're interested in understanding what items are specifically funded through salary savings?

Is that?

SPEAKER_18

Well, because of the provisional, any salary savings have been for overtime and incentives.

And now that pot has shrunk.

That might be smart, I understand, because of the gulf that we're trying to close.

But then that still is out there as a requirement.

And then we have some additional in terms of the direct So there seems to be a little bit more pressure on that.

And so basically, are we going to get in a situation where next year in mid-year supplemental, we say, oh, we ran through the salary savings and, oh, we still need more for overtime, given that reduction, that $4 million, $2.74 million and $4.3 million?

SPEAKER_04

I think I'm tracking.

So assuming a proviso was put in place, a similar proviso to what we have on our budget in 2024 that restricts use of salary savings to overtime and other benefit costs, and then the incentive program, which was also authorized, would we run into an issue?

And would we request the proviso be lifted?

I do not anticipate salary savings, we calculated $4.3 million in salary savings for the general fund reduction.

And then there was an additional 4 million that was calculated that's being applied to overtime in 2025. With the exception of salary savings, we had an ongoing salary savings cut in 2024 that is continuing into 2025 to fund our recruitment retention program.

So for 2025, there's essentially three different buckets of salary savings that are being applied.

This year is slightly different.

I'm not sure if you're familiar.

We use a hiring plan staffing model to determine and calculate how much salary savings is available.

In some cases, we take a reduction.

In some cases, we reprogram that funding.

The $10 million that are referenced in relation to the overtime for directed patrols, that is a new budget line, budget appropriation, and is not associated with the salary savings reductions.

Am I...

SPEAKER_18

No, that makes, well, you've accounted for one piece, so I appreciate that.

And then the rest is kind of still there, but it should be, trust me, I have Mr. Doss behind you, and he will be double-checking, and we'll be working through this.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

He's already sent a long list of questions.

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

May I jump in?

Yes.

On this point, the mid-year supplemental, you'll recall, included $12.8 million for the same purpose that we are proposing adding $10 million this year.

So that is a continuation of a...

policy decision that the city made in 2024. I think SPD has adequately and smartly answered your question.

I don't mean to answer it a second time.

I'll just point out that There have been some questions in the public and in the media about why not further reduce the funded positions that are not filled in SPD with much publicized staffing levels not being where we want them to be.

this discussion underscores the big picture answer, which is there are fewer people who are doing the work and there is therefore and there's just as much work to do.

So we're leaning on overtime more than we have in the past.

So we've decided that there are some reductions that can be made in the regular staffing side, but only in concert with adding additional overtime like we did for 2024 in the 25 proposed.

SPEAKER_18

Can I answer your question?

Can you go to the next slide?

The one after question?

Oh, yeah, the one that the graph after questions.

In answer to your question, we're working it hard, as my original statement, and we're going to close that, and we're going to increase the recruitment, and we're going to close that gap to zero, and then we won't have any overtime, and then we won't have a need for incentives because we're going on point.

So that's the answer, Director Eater, so we can tell everybody that.

We're going to make it happen.

The I know my colleagues will have a lot of questions.

I am interested in the directed emphasis patrols.

Each precinct obviously is doing this in some form or another already.

Can you speak to the value added to this in terms of what it will bring for basically what's happening on our streets today?

SPEAKER_06

Yes.

In the past when we had higher staffing levels, Each precinct, each of the five precincts had their own group of officers that could do proactive policing and respond immediately to hotspot policing, such as on Alki, Magnuson Park, North Aurora, Third and Pike, the hotspots that we all are aware of.

And that staffing no longer exists.

And so now what we have is a centralized team, our community response group, that we move them around the city from spot to spot trying to respond to the most urgent violence crises we have.

I hope that people have noticed that things are looking a little better around the Pike Pine corridor right now.

That took intensive focus, and we learned some lessons doing that, what works there.

We're pivoting to the 12th and Jackson area, which is really, really in need of a great deal of focus.

We spent some time earlier this summer at Alki.

I wish we could have stayed there all summer.

But that's what these emphasis patrols are about, is so that we can respond to urgent emerging issues.

Right now, we're looking at a series of robberies.

There's always something new coming up, and so that's what we use that pool for.

SPEAKER_18

And I appreciate that.

I also appreciate what my father used to tell me all the time, that many hands make light work.

So please continue the engagement with King County Sheriff as it relates to the transit corridors, King County Metro, what we're seeing on 3rd, applies to Aurora in my book, which is a state route.

Washington State Patrol Jeff floor and I are in frequent contact good and and I Won't I know probably councilmember Rivera will ask so I won't go into it But I'm very interested also and along those lines but going to the next step and it's different in terms of the relationship between the city and the school districts because obviously we need to improve our public safety in and around our schools.

And I recognize there's lanes and so forth, but we cannot continue as we've had.

And so I look forward to what we can do on that front as highlighted in the slides.

And again, I'll defer to my colleague who has much more insight, but please keep the committee, Public Safety Committee and the council informed in addition to the education because we need to, and this is important in terms of what we can do to support.

With that, Chair, I will, because I anticipate a lot of questions like before, I will cede until the end.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Councilmember Kettle.

Councilmember Nelson, your hand is up from the last presentation.

Still double-checking that you would like to speak.

Other colleagues, this is your opportunity to raise your hands.

Otherwise, I'll go into my remarks and then we'll be closing it out by passing it back to Council Member Kettle.

Vice Chair Rivera, thank you for raising your hand.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you, Council Member Kettle, for your thoughtful comments.

Thank you for being here in the presentation.

Well, first, I just want to publicly thank you all for the focus you've given the district, particularly at Magnuson Park.

We're continuing to...

you're continuing to work that as an emphasis piece.

And then to the point you just made, Chief, I understand that while there was emphasis at Magnuson Park, there was also some youth committing some carjackings and other theft.

And so focus had to shift from Magnuson to manage that and then back to Magnuson.

So it's a back and forth and It's again just underscoring the need for more officers and more attention.

And I know that the district is appreciative of all the efforts.

And I know we're going to have, you and I spoke next week, a public safety forum in the district to talk about some of the crime up north at Magnuson Park that I know touches more than just District 4. So all that to say thank you for your work up there and we'll continue to partner together Also to councilmember kettles point about the public safety around the schools and the partnership with Seattle Public Schools And I know you and I were at Rainier Beach this summer Talking about the SPS is safety efforts.

I know they've included additional not officers, but oh my gosh, security, security officers at the schools that are experiencing the higher incidence of youth violence.

And I'll just let you speak to some of the efforts you all are working with SPS on that front, because I know you've had conversations with SPS about your ability within the limits of what you're able to provide emphasis to certain areas around the schools in the city.

Can you talk a little bit about those efforts?

SPEAKER_06

So I would say there are layered efforts.

There's not a good way to describe one overarching strategy.

So over the many years, the police officers that work a particular patrol district that contains a school Those patrol officers that own their district, they have close informal relationships with building staff, with school security people, and I strongly encourage that kind of informal relationship work, and I know that that is strong and effective.

I've had conversations with the superintendent over the summer and the president of the school board, and we're being very respectful of the school board's prerogative to decide whether or not they want to formally assign police officers into schools.

So we're working through those issues.

I know the mayor's office has a very robust program to provide support to schools with a focus on crime and violence prevention.

So the police officer, uniformed police officers are paying very close attention to starting times, ending times, and that sort of thing.

But we don't have a formal program of assigning police officers to work inside of a school.

We're having those conversations now.

SPEAKER_15

Thank you, Chief.

And I will say that on the first day of school, there were some threats.

And again, thankful for it.

in an elementary school in the D4 and thankful for officers who came to check out that thread.

And it turns out it was one of those social, it was on the socials and it was coming from somewhere back east and not even in Seattle.

But nevertheless, we don't know that and appreciate your swift attention to that.

And yes, we'll say that with Seattle Public Schools, in addition to the security officers, there is robust youth violence prevention partnership happening with the city, as it should be.

And that is something that I'm very interested in and will continue.

And Deal was here to talk about some of the pieces on the mental health side, because all of this leads to, and you and I have also talked about all of the impacts that all this has had on youth.

So great to see supports that deal will be doing or it's in their budget.

And then HSD will hear from this afternoon and they're going to talk about the youth prevention violence programs as well, I suspect.

So thank you for all of that.

I just have one last question not related to, it's not in the budget because it's not an ad or a takeaway, which is normally what we get in terms of presentations.

But I know you and I have talked about some work you're doing also with the 30 by 30 and to support more hiring of women to the force and also the retention and providing of training to support our female officers.

SPEAKER_06

Absolutely.

As in our conversation, I really appreciated the perspective and the advice.

I know that as a body that is responsible for oversight of the police department, one of the ways you can monitor what our priorities are is by looking at budget line items.

And the 30 by 30 initiative is one of those complicated issues that doesn't lend itself well to a line item budget.

But I want to reassure you that there is robust work going on in the way that this type of work has to be done, because we're talking about a culture shift.

And you can't change culture by throwing money at it, to be quite blunt.

But we are working very hard and very diligently to look at what are the internal culture practices that not only attract women but keep women involved and encourage them to promote through the department.

We are implementing a very robust leadership development program in 2025. using our existing training funds.

That leadership development program started many years ago with a huge grant from Microsoft in the state.

And the leadership development program focuses on preparing leaders to change culture.

It's all about leadership.

culture, culture, culture.

And so we have a plan to put 240 of our internal leaders through that program.

And those will be the foundational pieces to ensure that not only do women, but everybody feels welcome in the culture.

And we make certain that women understand all the different techniques, all the different perspectives to be more effective as they're working their way through their profession.

Really, really excited to see where that goes.

SPEAKER_15

Really appreciate your efforts there, Chief.

Thank you so much.

Chair, thank you.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council Member Rivera.

Next is Council Member Moore, followed by Council Member Saka, and then Council President Nelson.

Council Member Moore.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much for being here today.

Thank you.

And I hope that we can convince you to stay permanently, but it'll be another discussion, I'm sure.

I'll introduce you to my grandkids.

So, you know, I'm getting a lot of emails.

Well, they're sort of a template, and there are variations on the template.

But they do raise an issue that I think it's worth trying to be on the record about here, and also because I also don't entirely understand it, which is the whole question of ghost positions.

This idea that we are funding for police staffing that we are not clearly going to be able to fill in 2025 and 2026. And this idea of salary savings, and you're talking about three buckets of salary savings.

Can you please explain all of this in the most simple terms for myself and for our listening public and for the people who are going to be reporting on this so that we are clear about what's actually happening here?

SPEAKER_06

I'll take an initial stab at it and then I'm going to pass it on to the experts.

So I'm going to try to explain it in terms of my experience as a sheriff, where I had a great deal of control over how the money was distributed within the department.

When we always, we lived off of salary savings.

We knew that we would never be able to fill all of our positions.

And so we could calculate and predict exactly how many vacancies we had to hold to create enough salary savings.

It's less expensive to pay overtime to more employees than to add additional employees to cover all the positions.

So there was some budget planning going on.

And again, I'm not talking about Seattle, I'm talking about my previous experience.

There is a different situation here because the magnitude of the vacancies is huge.

And it wouldn't make any sense for the city to put enough money in the budget to cover those 400 positions knowing they're not gonna be filled.

And so there has to be a wise budget decision about how much money do we calculate in salary savings.

So I'm gonna let my budget director get into more details and maybe the mayor's office wants to take a stab too.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I'm happy to add.

Historically, the department, during the baseline budgeting process, so that first step of the budget process where we calculate the starting point, where are we starting from, historically, we would, in that baseline process, How many authorized sworn positions do we have?

It was around 1,400 back in the day.

And we would fully fund all of those positions.

And then through the budget process, we would determine how many of those positions we would actually fill in the coming budget years.

From there, we would take a savings reduction, or that money would be reprogrammed for other things through the budget process.

But during that baseline phase, it did give the appearance that the department was, you know, when you're funding 100 positions over what you could actually fill, it looks like, wow, they gave them $20 million to start with.

That number went up as our...

as our vacancy amount went up.

So around 2012, 2013, 2014, we didn't have hundreds of vacancies to refund in the baseline process.

We might have 10 or 15. But as that number increased, it definitely gave the appearance that our budget was being inflated on the front end to then minimize the cuts through the budget process.

I can tell you this year we took a different approach in the baseline just because we do have, you know, Our authorized level is 1,277 FTE.

We're nowhere near that, so we didn't fully fund those positions in the baseline process this year.

Instead, we took into consideration the cost of the officers, how many we did actually anticipate funding, and took a slightly different approach in calculating what that baseline budget or that starting point would be.

The budget that is presented to you is based on fully funding 1,076 police officer positions going into next year.

That assumes that we're going to hire 15 above attrition, which I feel is conservative.

If we were to understate that amount, we would have to come in the mid-year and request more funding.

It's a delicate balance.

We use a staffing plan and we, you know, We don't have a crystal ball.

We don't know how the year is going to play out.

But we do know that we're seeing an increase in applications.

So our hiring plan assumes 120 hires and 105 separations.

If we separate fewer than 105, we we may not be fully funded.

So we have to build in a little bit of a buffer there to make sure that all of our positions are adequately funded.

And in the case of next year, I believe they are.

In the event that we don't hire 120, we could potentially generate salary savings over the course of the year.

In many cases, that's applied to overtime to offset those vacancies.

As that vacancy number comes up, in order to maintain service levels, we do have to rely on overtime to offset those vacancies.

So in the past, I think, four years now, we've had a proviso that restricts the use of the salary savings.

So for those listening, if we were to be funded for positions that we can't fill, the department is legally restricted by proviso from spending that funding on something other than police overtime, police benefits.

It's taken different forms in recent years, but we have had restrictions on the budget in that way.

SPEAKER_08

So why are we needing a new line item for overtime for the emphasis patrols?

SPEAKER_04

So we've seen an increased usage in overtime.

And we've either absorbed that through salary savings throughout the year.

But from a fiscal management standpoint, that's actually difficult.

So over the course of the year, we allocate money to lieutenants, captains, managers to manage that budget.

So we started this year with about $37 million.

We're on track to spend about $54, I believe.

If I don't have 54 to allocate at the front end, I'm grossly underfunding individual units.

And so as they're managing to those budgets, it becomes tricky throughout the year to hold them to budgets that are just, frankly, unrealistic.

By adding that $10 million on the front end, instead of coming in a mid-year supplemental, we're able to start from the beginning of the year and understand what that budget is.

We don't like to use salary savings for overtime.

We would like to have a fully funded overtime budget that we can operate from.

That overtime add helps us achieve that.

Does that answer your question?

SPEAKER_02

Council Member Moore, you asked for plain language.

I'm going to try to be...

consistent with that ask, there were salary savings.

The proviso is a restriction on the spending, which meant that we couldn't use it for any other purpose except for overtime.

So we used it for overtime and we still had a need in 2024 for an additional $12.8 million beyond the amount of salary savings that could be repurposed for overtime.

We anticipate that will happen again in 2025, and that's why we're adding $10 million.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_08

That was exactly what I needed to hear.

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_12

I think in the context of transparency, and if you will, truth in budgeting, We're getting closer, because what we're doing is the budget is funded for the number of positions they have, rather than for a much larger number, which we all know is not true.

When we did that, it was understanding that the difference, the salary savings, would be used for overtime.

This is just a much more direct way of saying, this is actually what we need for overtime, given that we have only less than 1,100 officers.

So give us a budget for 1,100 officers, knowing that they're going to work some level, and then give us a budget for overtime.

We all now know how that's going to get split, and it may not be enough.

I mean, they've signaled that, right?

But that's, I think, and for what it's worth, other departments, this is approached differently, that there's a recognition You have a certain number of positions, and you are unlikely to have them all fully funded for the year.

So when you build a budget, if you're a department with 1,000 positions, your first step is to do the simple math, 1,000 positions times their salaries and benefits.

And then you say, okay, well, either you do it or the budget office leans in and says, Yeah, but the data show that over the course of the year, you don't keep more than 90% of those filled.

So here's 90% of that number.

And you may yet still generate some level of salary savings.

We don't want to cut this too fine.

The salary savings provide some flexibility to address unanticipated needs without having to come back here every time.

And that makes a certain amount of sense as well.

So just to give you an overall sense of how this is approached, both in SPD and elsewhere.

And as both budget director and central staff analysis, central staff analysts regularly ask, what's your vacancy assumption?

So how, you know, of that 100%, how much have you assumed are not going to be not going to be occupied over the course of the year?

So give you a sense of the overall picture.

SPEAKER_08

Great.

Thank you.

I just have a few more questions.

And I think part of that overtime, though, is also driven by the MOU that we had with CARE, where that was the deal that we would increase the amount of overtime paid for policing sporting events and other public events as a condition of getting CARE.

So there's always that trade-off.

And I think it's important that people realize that in order to get CARE, we had to engage in a in exchange with the labor union was plugged to get overtime.

So there is a cost.

to bringing care because of the way our collective bargaining laws are structured.

And that's, to me, I think it's important that we recognize that that's a cost.

It would be nice as we go forward to perhaps not have it be quite so transactional, but I think as a community we need to decide what are our priorities, and if that means we have to pay a little bit more on this end, to move to a more holistic and alternative approach, which we are doing through care, then we are making that value judgment and choice.

But we need to be honest about what's involved in that.

I had another question about...

the CCTV cameras.

And I was just curious as to what the ongoing costs are.

So I see that there's the one-time setup fee in 2025, but then there's a, is that 50 million ongoing?

And I'm just curious what that covers.

SPEAKER_06

I'm going to have Brian take that one since you're my CCTV person.

Yeah, we have a budget for $50,000 this year.

SPEAKER_08

Or is that 50,000?

I can't tell.

It just says 50.

SPEAKER_06

I think it says 50,000, not 50 million.

If it's 50 million, I would question that too.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah, we can solve a lot of things with 50 million.

SPEAKER_13

So I mean, part of this is that we haven't gone through the contracting process, and I don't know the final numbers on this.

I know we're estimated for the overall RTCC and CCTV project for 2 million in the startup of 25. And then where we go from there sort of depends on the cost and maintenance of those cameras.

I see 50,000 in here, but I don't see ongoing costs that are budgeted out.

SPEAKER_04

Okay.

There seem to be the subscription costs for- Thank you.

SPEAKER_17

If we could all make sure we're in the microphones.

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you.

We may need to follow up with you, council member, to get you additional details on what the ongoing costs are for the CCTV.

SPEAKER_08

Okay, thank you, and appreciate that.

And this is my last question.

So I appreciate that the 30 by 30 is definitely a cultural change, and I appreciate all the work that's being done.

But I do want to call attention to, I believe, one of the main requests or areas identified in the survey was the lack of childcare.

SPEAKER_10

Yes.

SPEAKER_08

and also elder care, because unfortunately so many, well all of us, but particularly the burden tends to fall on women for the care of both ends of the spectrum.

So it seems, and there have been some discussion about perhaps there could be a way to subsidize, provide a childcare subsidy, maybe even build or utilize, build a childcare center.

got the, I won't editorialize there.

But anyway, so I do think that that is a critical piece to making 30 by 30 real.

And that's something that we ought to think about and whether or not there should be a childcare subsidy or some way to address that very real concern.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_06

I couldn't agree more.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

Council Member Saffa.

SPEAKER_00

All right, thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Chief Rohrer, for being here today.

I appreciate you and your leadership of the department.

Selfishly, for myself and my district, and I think on behalf of the people of Seattle, we'd love you to stay longer term, but definitely here that you have grandkids, and you've paid your dues and served in so many other great capacities, but just grateful that you're here now and helping shepherd our city on the police front through this really important next phase in our journey to create a safer, welcoming Seattle for all.

So I appreciate you, your leadership, and also want to call out, appreciate your partnership in addressing some notable public safety challenges in my district.

You called out one important one, which is the Elk High Harbor Avenue issue.

And so I want you to know that your partnership is appreciated by me and my constituents and the work of your rank and file officers in the Southwest Precinct to address some of those concerns is really appreciated.

I've gotten a few very grateful constituent emails recently calling out that officers have been more present in the Don Armini Park area, issuing tickets, giving people verbal warnings, and et cetera, et cetera, which, as we know, the Don Armini Park area, together with the Duwamish Head area just north of that area, is a place where people gather and congregate, use it as a launch point for It's a post-racing rally point where they go and sometimes, unfortunately, figure out what other trouble they're going to get into.

And so, anyways, I just appreciate you and your partnership on that issue.

And, you know, that is a seasonal issue in that area of my district, May to September in particular.

Anything can happen at any given moment in this city at any given time.

Some of the public safety related challenges for Elk High typically happen in that season.

So just encourage the department to continue to prioritize emphasis patrols, additional presence there in particular as much as possible in light of these staffing shortages.

Okay, well, I had a couple of questions, but I guess in the interest of time, and I know there's a lot of additional questions and comments from my colleagues, I think I'll put a few of these into the SharePoint site and we'll follow up later.

But the one thing I did want to ask about pertains to the mounted patrol.

Mounted Patrol in my district, but they provide a city-wide service.

It's less of a mounted patrol.

So I visited a month and a half ago now, and me and my family and Layla, one of my staffers, and their partner.

And it was great to see the work firsthand.

I got to meet the sergeant.

and the frontline officer, and a number of civilian support staff, and some people from the foundation, and of course, the horses.

I wish I could remember the horses' names offhand, but...

And so it provides less of a patrol these days, although I do remember 20-plus years ago seeing dozens and dozens of mounted officers, and that provides a very significant patrol presence and deterrence and show of force.

Less of that today, more of community engagement.

And, you know, they partner with...

individuals and organizations like the Buffalo Soldiers in Seattle and South Park.

There was the recent parade there in South Park.

And I've also learned that Mounted Patrol also provides a very solemn responsibility because it's the only amount of patrol not in the state not in but in the pacific northwest i think the closest next closest one is in s f if i understand correctly san francisco and so they provide a very solemn duty of for all fallen officers across the state that they go and show up.

And it's something that the families appreciate, other officers appreciate.

And so it's a community engagement piece that we're losing under this proposal.

And also, you know, there's a solemn duty there associated with that as well.

And so I don't envy these decisions, but I do appreciate, you know, you calling out earlier as part of this that The reason why the proposal is happening today, it's not so much of a staffing issue, or excuse me, it's not so much of a budget issue, it's a staffing issue.

But I'm just curious to better understand when you all went about that effort to make that uncomfortable decision in light of these really, really glaring staffing issues, what What alternatives did you consider to modify the program?

For example, as you know, there's two officers, a sergeant and an officer there assigned.

Could it be a bare-bones crew that only the sergeant or the officer, but not both, are there?

What factors informed the decision on that?

SPEAKER_06

This has been a decision in the making for well over a decade.

And people who know equestrian culture and the requirements of maintaining horses know there's much, much more to the operation than the horse and the rider.

The facilities are very expensive.

The horses have to be trained, exercised.

There's layers and layers of responsibilities to properly care for and respect the animals.

And over the years, the Seattle Police Foundation, through some very, very generous donations, have helped us, quite frankly, limp along so that we could continue to say we have a mounted unit The fact of the matter is they do a phenomenal job of community outreach and engagement.

People love the horses.

I mean, you can't not love the horses, I don't think.

But it's a very, very labor intensive operation.

And we really are only using the horses for community outreach.

We don't have the capacity really to use them for patrol or park patrols as they have been used in the past.

I've had to make some very painful, unpopular decisions about services that we can no longer provide.

And looking at the bigger picture, I believe that we have to be honest about what we have the capacity to provide.

I don't know, I can't give you specific numbers of the number of mounted patrols that exist in the state and up and down the West Coast.

I know that most police departments, they affiliate with a private organization that provides mounted patrols.

officers.

For example, I just did an assessment a year or so ago in San Mateo County and Marin County, and they have an entirely private posse for the sheriff's office that maintains the horses.

And so they are available for ceremonies and that sort of thing.

Again, this is going to be a very slow, thoughtful process where we look at where the horses came from.

Some of them are donated to us, and so we need to work with the donors about what they would like to see with the horses.

There are many organizations that use the horses for therapy for veterans.

There's Little Bit is one that I'm familiar with that works with children.

I just think there is a more upfront, honest way to use these horses, and I don't want to continue to portray that we have the capacity to credibly provide a mounted patrol.

I wish we could, and maybe somewhere down the road we can do that, but we have to make these really, really tough, unpopular decisions.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for that.

SPEAKER_06

It was not an easy one, I assure you.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

And if that's effectively what results, you know, at the end of this process, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

Who knows?

But, you know, I think the deprecation plan and retirement plan will be key that you all develop.

And if that ends up happening, you know, we would definitely like to see a plan to help Replicate in Seattle the the model that exists in San Mateo County that you said like like, you know, it's private Maybe that'd be effectively a form of public-private partnerships.

But in any event not not Not a fun result here given the important work that they do at least on the community engagement and outreach front and so Let me let me pivot Just a quick comment on emphasis patrols.

So, you know, I think, So there's a troubling rise in gun violence, as you very well know.

And you and I have been at a forum or two where we've bemoaned the fact and talked about how we lack the ability as a city to further regulate guns.

And we're prohibited by the state from doing that.

And too many guns and too many, like, there's so many issues associated with the rise in gun violence we've talked about.

But problem remains, we have, in the absence of our ability to regulate guns, You know, we still have too many guns on the street, too many people that need, you know, additional interventions.

And so I think about public safety challenges.

And my colleague, Councilmember Hollingsworth, has helped me think about it through the framework of PIE, prevention, intervention, and enforcement, the PIE framework, very helpful conceptual framework.

So, in the absence of—to the extent we're—and there's stuff we're doing on the prevention side, we'll continue to do.

There's stuff we're doing on the intervention side, we'll continue to do.

There's investments in this budget on that.

But to the extent enforcement plays a role in gun violence—and yes, it does—you know, I would encourage you in your wise judgment to not hesitate to leverage federal resources And call up the special agents in charge of your counterparts at the ATF, for example.

Emphasis patrols and task force to crack down.

Felons shouldn't have guns.

And, you know, maybe we need an emphasis patrol, a coordinated...

inter-agency, inter-department, inter-governmental response to address gun violence here amongst our broader set of strategies that we employ.

SPEAKER_06

We do have that in place already, and we work very effectively with our federal partners, with the U.S.

Attorney, Tess Gorman.

It's a very, very effective group.

I wish they were 10 times bigger.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you.

No further questions, Mr. Chair.

SPEAKER_16

Thank you, Council Member Saka, Council President Nelson, followed by Council Member Morales.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you very much.

A couple things.

First of all, I just want to say I'm very happy to hear some system-wide usage of the term place-based policing, because I think that the message from that audit was really important.

And I'm looking forward to learning how some of the other recommendations from the audit that was presented in my committee on the concentration of overdoses in crime in august uh are being implemented now and i and i do hear that progress is happening on that so one thing i wanted to ask you chief is is about your ideas for recruiting um i know you and i have spoken individually about um about some uh some tools you think would be important and how would the $800,000 of marketing money that we approved in the mid-year supplemental support debt?

SPEAKER_06

Well, I'm very happy to tell you that we have hired a new recruiting manager that has corporate experience in recruiting.

We are in the process of developing a contract with a company, and I may have mentioned this last time I testified, with a company that has developed an app for applicants.

And what this app allows is as soon as somebody makes an application to become a Seattle police officer, they download the app on their phone.

And we stay in constant contact with them during the process of testing, backgrounding, and onboarding What the research shows us is having a very high-touch process is how we keep people engaged.

And the biggest threat to losing candidates is another agency hires them before we do.

So our goal is to make them love us more so they will stay with us.

This particular app uses both AI and engagement with our recruiters and backgrounders to make sure that we develop a very close relationship with those applicants coming through the process.

We've also engaged a couple of private companies to assist us with the initial background screening of applicants.

The process of conducting a background investigation is lengthy.

And so we're trying to shorten that without losing any quality.

So we're bringing some retired officers to assist in that endeavor.

We have also created some recruiting videos that very specifically and intentionally showcase women police officers in very action-oriented scenarios.

so that we can show that policing is a career that engages all kinds of things from community relations to crime fighting to all of that.

So those are some of the things that we're doing right now.

I think that as we get our new recruiting manager on board, that's going to be a tremendous help in streamlining what we're doing.

I may have mentioned to you, Council President Nelson, that I have a personal concern wish that I'm trying to get together for recruiting women.

In this region, we have a female sheriff in Snohomish County, female sheriff in King County, a very engaging candidate for Pierce County Sheriff, who is a woman.

Our city attorney is a woman, our county attorney is a woman, our US attorney is a woman.

And I want to try and get some focus on the Pacific Northwest is a great place for women to be powerful and engaged in criminal justice, whatever that looks like.

So there's a lot of less formal things that we're doing, but also very tangible things we're doing in the recruiting process.

And of course I forgot to mention the signing bonus for lateral officers.

I'm sorry that that's, that's a huge, huge benefit because I, most of you know, it takes us a minimum of a year from recruiting to screening, to hiring, to training, to put an officer, from the application onto the street.

And it's about $200,000 or more to do that.

If we hire a lateral officer, we have about $150,000 savings.

So it's a great investment to bring lateral officers in.

I don't have all the data in front of me, but we are getting a lot of Seattle, a lot of people who left SPD are coming back.

And we're getting lateral officers from other agencies.

And those are agencies that former Seattle officers went to and now they're coming back.

And if I can be a little shameless, I really wanna thank this council because one of my brags when I talk to people is this council has been amazingly supportive.

Again, since I've come in the door, the outreach and the support to help us be more effective even though our staffing is low.

As I'm trying to recruit my replacement, I always lead with, it's 2024, and the Seattle police chief has had tremendous support from the city council, from the mayor's office.

This is a great place for police.

There were a lot of police officers that didn't feel that way in 2020, and so it really is a new day, and we're seeing the enthusiasm building.

SPEAKER_03

Well, thank you very much for that validation.

I do believe that the concerted effort from this new council to reinforce the value of our officers to our city, hopefully that's having an impact.

And the fact that we are focused on public safety legislation, that particular bill that you're talking about around lateral hires will be in full council on the 8th.

So what I'm hearing is that you've got some great ideas for some promotion about women in law enforcement in general in the region.

Are you working with the group that is doing the video making, or is that within SVD?

SPEAKER_06

So we have an internal group of people that are creating video content that showcases Seattle police officers in action.

We are also looking at some other agencies that specialize in police recruiting, but it's very early.

in those stages to look at that these other agencies or organizations have worked with the company that created the app that we want our recruits to download.

Our long-term goal is to have a seamless process from application all the way through training so that we are attracting the most successful people and keeping them through the whole process.

SPEAKER_03

Got it.

Okay, well, that is good to hear, and I'm assuming that there are resources to pay for the app that you're referring to, right?

SPEAKER_06

I believe it's $800,000 that we've been allocated to work on this and approve it.

SPEAKER_03

Great.

And while we're talking about technology and audits, I remember there was a piece of technology that was emphasized by Claudia in the auditor's office called FUSIS, which would have allowed for video reporting of thefts.

We can touch base on that again, but whatever we can do to streamline reporting would be good as well.

So...

then finally since i'm on auditing uh the the session is coming up in olympia and there is um i believe a bill that will be coming forward to bundle the um the amounts of that some of uh organized retail theft crimes to be able to provide more emphasis on on that prosecution but that's a little bit beside the case but we'll be talking about that later thank you very much for answering my questions

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council President.

Council Member Morales.

SPEAKER_07

Thank you very much.

Thanks for being here, everybody.

Several of my questions have already been asked, so that'll save us a little bit of time.

I do want to talk about the legislation that was just referred to to make the hiring bonuses permanent.

My understanding is that this budget includes about $3.3 million, assuming that that legislation passes for 2025. Is that right?

SPEAKER_04

recruitment retention package.

Yeah, I think the exact amount is slightly higher.

I think there's 3.9 carrying forward from an ongoing reduction that was appropriated in the last budget cycle.

SPEAKER_07

That's from previous salary savings.

Yeah.

Okay.

I just wanted to make sure I understand that.

And I guess my real question is, so the mayor referenced in his statement What speech did he give this week?

Something.

He was talking about 3,000 applications have been received in the department.

So my hope is that this would be kind of a one-time increase to the budget.

given that it seems like recruitment is working.

There's a lot of folks who are coming, as you just said.

We also know that there are some internal challenges with the department with discrimination claims and against women and people of color and sexual discrimination.

So can you talk a little bit about what retention strategies are in place, what resources might be going to retention to address some of the hostile work environment that we're hearing about?

SPEAKER_06

Well, as I mentioned before, I believe one of the most important pieces is we have to very intentionally develop our leaders internally to create a work environment where people feel welcomed and appreciated and inspired.

And I believe that the plan we have in place will significantly improve our supervision and leadership.

I think that's very important.

We're also interviewing, and hopefully we'll bring on board very soon, an additional EEO investigator so that we can more quickly address claims of unfair treatment.

um i i'm a little bit at a loss i don't have the the history of the claims that have been pending for a number of years it's it's difficult to be honest it's difficult to to track there are so many different entities that people can make complaints to and trying to keep track of which entity is investigating which complaint I'm still trying to get my arms around that.

I do believe that we're getting closer to coordinating those efforts better.

Since I've been on board, I have had my radar on high alert because I really do want to ensure that our workplace is welcoming to everyone.

And we talk about it when people are assigned to different positions.

When we're looking at investigations, we're doing our very best to not only conduct a fair investigation, but to make sure people feel like it's a fair investigation.

And that's really tricky to do because you can't share details of a personnel case.

And we have no control over what the different parties are telling to people outside of the investigative process.

SPEAKER_07

Thank you.

Appreciate that the need for accountability is sort of wrapped into all of that.

So you talked about your authorized positions and your fully funded positions.

And then for 2025, sorry, I'm losing track of my notes here.

So for 25, 26, you're assuming about 15 hires each year.

above attrition, right?

So you'll hire about 120. It's fairly typical for about 100 to leave.

So your net new officers per year is about 15.

SPEAKER_04

Correct.

SPEAKER_06

Okay.

I think we can do better than that, I will say.

I want to put a caveat in that because there were several things that happened concurrently in 2020 and 2021. Obviously, we had the pandemic.

We had people leaving because of the vaccine mandate.

We were also at the head of a wave of retirements that would have happened no matter what we did.

That wave is subsiding.

So I think 15 is conservative.

I am optimistic that we can do much better than that.

SPEAKER_07

Well, and I appreciate you making all of those points because you're right, there was a fairly precipitous drop off for a lot of different reasons.

SPEAKER_06

We knew this retirement wave was going to happen.

We've been talking about it for a decade.

So that unfortunately wasn't a surprise.

It was just exacerbated by all the other things that happened.

SPEAKER_07

And a really important point to make, I think.

So I want to go to slide four in your change summary.

2025, the budget goes up about 15, 16% to $457 million.

76% of that is due to AWI.

If I'm doing my math right, that leaves about $110 million in 2025. So can you tell me what that is attributed to?

SPEAKER_04

The actual, it's the, AWI is 47 million of that change.

The total, there's adds and takes.

SPEAKER_07

Oh, so that's 76% of the change?

Yeah, that's the change.

So the difference between 458 million and, I don't have the actual, let's see.

I'm just trying to understand, aside from the AWI, what is the other reason for the increase?

SPEAKER_04

The increase is going to be the budget ads, the majority of the budget ads that we went through today.

SPEAKER_07

All of that is wrapped up in the remainder there.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07

Okay, so side six, going to the reductions, I just want to confirm that the $4 million, roughly $4 million reduction is just under 1% of the department budget?

Correct.

Okay.

And what portion is salary savings?

SPEAKER_04

what portion of the salary savings is?

SPEAKER_07

I'm trying to understand what of the department budget, what portion of it is salary savings and what I'm really trying to understand is what is the balance of your salary savings

SPEAKER_04

we identified an additional 4.3 million in salary savings to go, that was transferred to overtime.

SPEAKER_07

Okay, so the, sorry, I'm losing track of all the different numbers here.

I'll follow up on that one.

Okay, so let's go to budget additions.

Sorry chair, I'm trying to get through this quickly.

Slide nine.

Okay, so we know there's a serious backlog in getting toxicology reports.

There's a backlog on sexual assault cases.

Can you talk a little bit about whether there...

I don't see any budget ads to try to address some of these backlogs.

Am I missing it, or is there some reason why there isn't a request to address some of those backlogs?

SPEAKER_06

In the toxicology lab?

SPEAKER_07

Yeah, or in dealing with sexual assault cases.

SPEAKER_06

Boy, well, the toxicology lab is run by the state, and so I don't know how we would leverage the state to add more positions to handle those cases.

SPEAKER_07

Is this the role of SPD in supporting getting...

I think part of the challenge is that it feels like there isn't the investigative work happening that can lead to that.

SPEAKER_06

I see what you're saying.

I would love to ask for those ads, but I would be disingenuous because I don't have officers to move.

If I were to add 10 sexual assault detectives, I don't have 10 commissioned officers to move into those positions yet.

We've had to prioritize and balance response to 911 emergencies and investigations.

We've shifted staffing around.

I just spoke to the lieutenant overseeing the sexual assault unit.

They are up to eight detectives from a low of, I think it was three or four.

So they're making some progress.

We still have a long ways to go.

There's...

I don't know what else we can do at this point because I can't get more police officers in the door quickly enough to move them into those investigative units.

SPEAKER_07

Yeah, I think that's part of the challenge that we have, that I'm having, because I think you mentioned the detective function is down 140 positions.

Did I hear that right?

I think that was the number, yeah.

101 positions of 43% change.

And I know that some of that happened in 2020. There were a lot of detectives or a lot of shifting around that were moved into patrol.

And so that is my question.

Are they still there?

Yes.

And what is the opportunity cost or what is the cost to the rest of the city if officers are in patrol instead of investigating trafficking, sexual assault, domestic violence, drug cartels, it feels like a lot of the things that we see on the street that people are frustrated by need the detective work and the investigative teams to be deployed.

And instead, everybody's on patrol.

SPEAKER_06

Well, and I wish we had the capacity to increase those investigative units by many, many, many detectives.

I have to balance responding to a 911 call for emergency response.

We are not responding to a lot of patrol calls as it is.

And people are very unhappy about our lack of response to patrol.

And so the balance that I'm trying to give to gauge is what is the most immediate, urgent need for a police officer.

And it's my best judgment that the way that we have them distributed now is the best we can do with the resources we have.

As we add more people to patrol, we will continue to reassess.

I've been working with a company that does staffing assessments and workload assessments.

We may be working with them in the upcoming months to review an outside set of eyes to review and see if there's something that we're missing.

But it really boils down to a math problem.

I don't have enough commissioned police officers to fill all the positions that we really need to fill.

SPEAKER_07

Which I understand.

And that doesn't solve the problem of us needing detectives to be doing detective work.

And so I certainly understand the position that you're in, but it sounds to me like what you're saying is we are just not going to be doing detective work for several years until we're able to hire 15 officers at a time every year.

And that just doesn't feel like the right

SPEAKER_06

right thing so um we we just we have to carefully prioritize where we're putting where we're putting those commissioned police officers and again we're we're having those discussions ongoing all the time about where where is that balance and you know i can tell you you know i get up every morning and look at my cell phone to look at the number of violent crimes that happened overnight And our robbery detectives, our violent crime detectives, our homicide detectives, they're all working extraordinary hours.

And our patrol officers, on a routine day, we're operating 10 officers, if not, on some days, 20 below our minimum staffing level.

So everybody is struggling to do the best they can.

I just have to say a shout out to my officers.

I don't know how they keep showing up every day because it's a constant frustration knowing that there's more work that needs to be done.

And they show up every day and they give it everything they can.

And I'm just so appreciative because they just keep going.

SPEAKER_07

I appreciate that.

The last thing I want to say is to just make a point about on slide 10, there's a, you know, about the emphasis patrols and to the point that Council President made about place-based solutions.

So I just want to be clear that the overtime for emphasis patrols, you know, I understand why that is It's an approach that's being taken, and it's true that the auditor recommended place-based strategies to address some of our public safety issues, but emphasis patrols are not the same thing as a beautiful, safe place for youth.

That is a very specific community-grown community-led program.

And, you know, it's funded by a burn grant.

There's partners with neighborhood-based community organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, with local businesses, with the schools, with parks.

It is very intentionally a non-arrest intervention.

And the police play a really small part of that program.

So I just think we need to be honest with the public that Emphasis Patrols And the specific example given in the auditor's report about a beautiful safe place for youth, those are two very different approaches to the problem that is being addressed.

So that's all I have, Chair.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

I see Council Member Hollingsworth and then Council Member Moore.

Is that a new hand?

Yeah, great.

SPEAKER_14

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll be quick.

Thank you, Chief Farrar.

I really appreciate all your work.

I just had a quick question regarding the...

And it's kind of following up on Councilmember Morales' question about...

I think it's slide nine.

Is it slide nine?

Investigative support.

Can you go into...

I'm really happy to see that we're civilianizing that to bring...

Right.

To bring more people on.

Back in 2022, I had two friends that were shot in Seattle within ten days apart.

One of them passed away, but the other one got shot in the neck by the same person.

And I know that you know, coulda, shoulda, woulda, if we had more this and that investigative support, but I know that we're really in need of that in Seattle.

Could you go into a little bit of detail about what they would do to take off some of the pressure of, you know, some of the officers that might not be, or, you know, that are detectives to add to potentially expediting some process and solving some of the crimes?

SPEAKER_06

Yes, we're bringing back retired detectives that know the processes.

Anybody here that's worked in the criminal justice system knows there's reams of, I call it paperwork, it's now electronic reporting, that needs to be done when somebody's in custody.

And so one of the first focuses will be to bring somebody in to do the heavy reporting the heavy load of electronic filing for first appearance.

There's just a ton of information that has to take place.

It doesn't require the person to be out on the street interviewing witnesses.

It's really a very administrative-type function that requires the experience of somebody who's filed a criminal case.

So that's one big area that we're focusing on.

We're also looking at getting additional people to help with the gathering electronic data.

So in so many cases, there's video, there's cell phone, there's laptop information, and we harvest a tremendous amount of data off of those electronic devices, and then we get printed.

We have to file search warrants, obviously, for all of the carriers for those cell phones.

And so it's a very...

administrative labor-intensive process.

So that's what we're trying to give to civilian employees so that the detectives are used for literally out in the field interviewing witnesses, trying to locate suspects, if that helps.

SPEAKER_14

No, that makes sense.

And I also wanted to highlight I had gone on two ride-alongs, one the first watch, and the second one was the third watch.

First watch, I struggled.

That was at 4 AM.

SPEAKER_06

That seems like middle-of-the-night watch to me, but, you know, I'm just a new kid.

SPEAKER_14

It was, but I wanted to highlight the fact that both watches, the officers were constantly responding to Priority One calls.

from, I wrote it down, robbery, assault, shooting, there was a rape, someone had driven a car through a store, drunk drivers, people on fentanyl just driving recklessly through the city, and they were constantly responding to these.

And unfortunately, the sexual assault call had been, you know, The person had to wait four or five hours and I can only imagine what that is like to be assaulted and then have to wait to get a call and receive help.

So just wanted to highlight that, whatever we can do to help expedite that process.

Because to me, and I don't know what it is within the police department if sexual assault is a priority one, but whatever that is, it just obviously you know how serious it is.

SPEAKER_06

That shouldn't have happened.

I would love to dig into the details, because normally, that would be a priority one call above all others.

I also know that when there's a shift where there is multiple shootings, robberies at the same time, Sometimes the screening process fails and a person who's not in immediate danger continues to get, you know, pushed back a little bit.

So that shouldn't be the norm for the victim of a sexual assault to have to wait that long.

Unfortunately, there are those times where that happens.

SPEAKER_14

So understood at the time there were shootings, there were, it was, you know, officers were getting called to different stuff all over the city.

So it was a lot.

that night.

So I just wanted to highlight that.

I'm sure there's certain circumstances to that piece.

And then the other piece I just wanted to highlight, and I know my colleagues have talked about it, and the recruitment piece, obviously you all know how important that is, but Also understanding that we're recruiting a new generation with millennials and Gen Zs, and that's a new way I've sent CO Maxie and Deputy Mayor Burgess websites of other departments around the West Coast and said, hey, we need a nice website to attract people.

SPEAKER_06

We are working on it.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you.

With IT.

I appreciate that.

But also the culture piece and creating that culture, that connection for folks that they see a different new way of policing in our city and what that means.

And I think that will be able to attract a younger generation for them to see a different type of policing in our city where they can be a part of the change actively.

So anyways, I just wanted to highlight those things and thank you so much.

SPEAKER_13

Thank you.

Councilmember Hollingsworth, could I follow up on that point just briefly and also address what Councilmember Morales said?

Both the Chief and Executive Director Sochi started out this presentation by talking about how this was all focused on capacity building, Seattle Police Department.

that we're getting additional overtime resources to increase the availability of the people we have, and then also leaning into technology and into civilianization.

The whole point of these investigative support resources is to make our investigations more efficient, to free up detectives to do the detection part, and take all that administrative baggage and move it to others that can do it in the back end.

We have one investigative unit that all they're capable of doing is intake.

That's all they do is enter the cases into the computer and they don't go anywhere because we don't have staffing to proceed with that.

But the real-time crime center, which we've also talked about here today, is also a hugely important system to make all of our processes, both our real-time 911 responses and our back-end investigations more efficient.

to enable the people that are doing the work that we have, even as we continue to hire and build and enter that dream state in a few years where we're fully staffed, this is going to make us more efficient immediately.

And what this whole budget focus is, is how do we deal with the urgency to increase our capacity immediately while we work on the long term?

So I think I think the answers to both your questions is exactly what we are proposing here and what we're trying to get at.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_06

We call it a force multiplier.

When we don't have the bodies, we use technology as a force multiplier.

And that's going to come on faster than the bodies.

And Mr. Chair, if I may.

SPEAKER_14

Please.

No, absolutely.

I just wanted to double check.

I really appreciate that because a lot of times people are so frustrated with the answer.

Well, we don't have enough officers.

Right.

And they're like, OK, well, how can we continue to build public safety, continue to recruit long term, but also civilize our police department?

And I think this is a.

you know, great way to show like, hey, we are making these investments.

And I just want to see more of it because I know in the short term, people want to see, they want to feel safe, right?

And they want to know that there's somebody at the end of that call 911 or that police are going to respond or that if a crime happens, a case is going to get solved.

They don't want to feel hopeless, you know?

So I think it's incredibly important.

So thank you all.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

And I see Council Member Moore, you've lowered your hand at this time.

Thank you.

Council Member Rivera, I saw a hand and it's dropped.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

With four minutes left until we are...

Council Member Salka, we've got four minutes left.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

SPEAKER_17

I've got a long list.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This will be quick.

Callum?

Blue?

Chance, Sebastian, Doobie, and how can I not forget the two lovable barn cats, Sully and Katy Perry.

I think there's real-life animals behind the impacts of the decision.

And of course, I mentioned the names of the impacted animals.

You better believe I'll mention the names of the impacted people.

Sergeant Brandon Cal and Officer Chase, Barn Manager Sarah Rotter, I believe, as well.

So it's part of the decision here.

These are real-life people and, in this case, animals as well that are directly involved and impacted.

I just want to share that.

And also, separately, I want to—like, we've heard various expressions of support and interest in the 30 by 30 report and recommendations, and there's a lot on this council.

And I'll just add my voice to that.

And from a male perspective, as an ally, I'm really interested in making sure we do better for our women officers in recruiting and retention, especially in creating a culture where they can truly succeed and thrive.

So thank you, Mr. Chair.

SPEAKER_17

Thank you.

If you went on two more minutes, you'd buy everyone lunch.

I'm going to first zoom way out.

And the reason that I take...

facilitating using Robert's Rules of Order so seriously, and thank you, Councilmember Hollingsworth, for teasing me about it, is because it sets up a forum for where we can agree, we can disagree, and we need to have a room where we can have candid conversations that is respectful at the base.

I would say that we haven't been there for a while.

And what made me sit back and what kind of surprised me about today was how candid this conversation was.

On the record, with TV cameras, as a group, and with departments.

Because what I heard coming from the police department, I'm not sure that I've ever actually heard before.

and what I heard from council members I haven't heard in a while.

And, I'll just center in on this point of chief when you were explaining how Unfilled and funded positions had worked at your previous departments.

That's how it used to work here as well.

I'll say it you don't have to and That's why you had three questions about salary savings and I had a fourth if they hadn't gotten to it and from here The question that Councilmember Moore asked about why is this a new budget line item, it's for transparency.

I also haven't received a budget from the police department that allowed general fund money to be used for a different purpose within our city.

So what I'm seeing from you is a more transparent budgeting process.

a team player where you're saying, we could use this money, this general fund money, absolutely we could.

And we know that there are other programs in the city that we would also be hurting if we weren't cutting, if those programs were being reduced.

So that's why I would say this year is a different approach.

And I just really appreciate that from a high level.

Now I'll dig into my questions.

We weren't gonna walk out the door there I appreciate the the focus also on civilian ization to allow us to be able to expand the capacity of our uniformed and commissioned officers to do the work that only that they can do so that we can Do more with what we have slide six And I think I was gonna just prompt this but I'll just make the point that when we release general fund money to the general fund it can be we can tie that to being used for anything from housing to homelessness services to Keeping position keeping staff within the city funded.

So that's what this this money represents on slide seven You've already covered it.

Council Member Saka took it a step further.

Slide 13. I'm going to get into the automated school zone camera expansion.

Is this SDOT funding that you're using?

It says it's coming from the school safety...

SPEAKER_02

So there is additional funding in this year's budget that is being implemented to begin deploying the cameras in the school zones.

It is not clear yet whether we'll be able to deploy them all this year.

If any funding remains, we would propose to carry that forward and continue the implementation into next year.

implementation was not done thus far this year because we didn't have sufficient staffing to review the automated camera feeds and to issue citations the way the legislature empowered civilians to do and that we have worked out with our labor partners to allow us to use PEOs for.

So we have funding for the PEOs to do this work, and we are expanding their work accordingly, and that allows us to move forward with spending the money to implement cameras in new locations.

SPEAKER_17

Director Noble, did you have something to add there?

SPEAKER_12

Just a technical funding point.

The revenues from the cameras go to this fund, and that fund can be used for essentially two purposes.

One is to invest in safety, and the other is to pay the administrative and enforcement costs for the cameras themselves.

So you were asking whether it was SDOT money.

It is the money that is in that fund, and this is one of its purposes.

So a technical explanation that might or might not have been helpful.

SPEAKER_17

I see both Council Member Saka and Council President Nelson raising their hands.

We're already over into lunch.

I'm about to say something that I think you might be saying, Council Member Saka.

I'm going to say the quiet part out loud from my perspective, and Council Member Saka can give me the thumbs up or thumbs down if he agrees, that I have a desire to see this be type of camera agnostic.

meaning we could be using this technology or this funding to support school cameras, red light cameras, block-the-box cameras, bus cameras, any of those.

Did I nail it, Councilmember?

30 seconds.

SPEAKER_00

Mr. Chair, yes, that was my initial position walking into these conversations, and I was reminded that there are notable color money issues, and under state law, we can only use those revenues for those two things that Ben mentioned, You know, adding new cameras or safety improvements.

So, in this case, I do think, as a policy matter, we should explore other non-enforcement safety improvements around schools, narrowing roads, more crosswalks, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_17

In 29 seconds, Council Member Saka.

Thank you.

So I'm gonna just put it on the record right now that I wanna make sure that we're using funding sources and setting this up in a camera type agnostic system.

Emphasis patrols, we can slide to there.

I guess why not expand the CRG, which does what I understand to be a little bit more strategic and disruptive rather than passive patrol work?

SPEAKER_06

So we don't really have passive patrol work.

We are not able to staff all of our patrol districts as it is.

So the number of people that we have in the community response group is under what we need to have.

And first priority is 911 response.

So as we add more people, we can add more bodies to CRG.

But as Councilmember Morales so appropriately pointed out, we have some very sensitive criminal investigations that we can't forget about either.

So again, as we bring more people on board, we're going to be looking at where is the most dire need.

The community response group officers often team with officers that are assigned to patrol at the precincts.

And so we can leverage the numbers that way as well.

But I would love to expand that group as soon as we can.

SPEAKER_17

Okay, and because what I'm seeing, and maybe this is my assumption from the past when we did emphasis patrols, it would end up being an officer standing on a street corner.

SPEAKER_06

I hear what you're saying.

I appreciate you saying that because there was a time in the past where officers were assigned to a post office without specific supervision.

We don't do that anymore.

They are assigned a specific mission.

They have a supervisor, and they are expected to have outcomes.

So I know that there was a time in the past that that other way may have happened, but not today.

SPEAKER_17

I'm glad that I checked my assumptions, because I believe we all agree that we don't need folks standing around.

We need folks fighting the crime.

SPEAKER_06

Oh, heck no.

If I saw them standing around, trust me, we'd be having a conversation.

SPEAKER_17

Last point I'll make, well, a good transition here, which is when you were listing women leaders in law enforcement roles throughout our county and tri-county area, I'll just make the point that if you wanted to stay, you could add yourself to that long-term list.

SPEAKER_06

I will host them in an informal, off-duty way to encourage them.

SPEAKER_17

Fantastic.

Councilmember Nelson, we're gonna hold your questions for writing because we are over time and I'm gonna pass it back to Councilmember Cattle, chair of the committee overseeing this department.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Director Natalie Walton Anderson, add it to your list in terms of leaders.

SPEAKER_06

In fact, she might be one of the most important people on that list.

SPEAKER_18

Director of Public Safety, very important position.

Won't go into that now.

Quickly, one, salary savings.

We got a lot of great answers.

If there's any follow-up, we'll be using our incredible central staff through SharePoint.

So we're in good stead with the Chair Strauss on that.

I appreciate, again, the answers that we got from that.

I'd like to point out, though, Director Noble, that the 1400 number is real.

But maybe in the budget numbers world, it's different.

But the 1400 number is a very real number that we have to have.

Mounted Police, I hope, perhaps a ceremonial with the foundation, private, public, private.

We have other ceremonial aspects to our police and the fire.

Knock on wood, in honor of all the animals mentioned by my colleague, Council Member Saka.

Investigations, two parts to this.

One, capacity, you know, in terms of the detectives piece and the technology, the RTCC and so forth, the LPR, CCTV.

All these things come together.

There is a plan.

There is what we're trying to do here in terms of the committee, but also working with the mayor and SPD.

Investigations in terms of what Council Member Morales was talking about, it's worth noting, going back to my ecosystem point, we have our accountability partners.

I have conversations with OIG and OPA.

We're talking about these investigations, the amount, the timeliness, how best to do them.

And we talk about color of money, but we also have color investigation.

Each has its little rules.

And so there's a lot of lessons learned going back to our discussion with Chief Barton in the earlier session.

And I think we'll be improving this through these discussions and understanding and the lessons learned that we're doing.

But it really highlights, again, the ecosystem that we have in public safety and how all these pieces come together, including our accountability partners, CPC, OIG, and OPA.

And so just to close, Chair, I'd like to note that, like I started, this is all about people.

This is about building leaders, which is another labor issue, which in turn could help with investigations.

But I just wanted to note that we do have the best force in the country.

And this has come about from the hard work over the last dozen plus years with the consent decree.

We should always acknowledge why we have a consent decree, but we should also equally acknowledge all the hard work over the last dozen years in terms of improving the reform, which will continue even once the consent decree is concluded.

That will continue that work that we've been doing And with that, again, to the accountability, we should be embracing accountability when you wear the best force.

That's something that we should take pride in doing.

And I look forward to that piece also improving as we move forward.

And I just wanted to close, if you can pass to the men and women of the Seattle Police Department our thanks for their service, but importantly, thanks to their families, their friends, their partners, their support system, because As I know from direct experience, that is so key in order to allow them to do their job.

So thank them.

And by the way, sworn and civilian across the board, this is not just solely those that we may see on the street.

So thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Chief.

SPEAKER_06

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Thank you, Chief.

SPEAKER_17

Brian, Angela, thank you for being here.

If there is no objection, the Select Committee meeting will be in recess until 2.15 p.m.

Yes, I'm giving folks an extra four minutes.

Hearing no objection, the Select Budget Committee is in recess until 2.15 p.m.