Seattle City Council Public Safety & Human Services Committee 5/10/22

Thank you so much.

The May 10th, 2022 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.30 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee with a clerk.

Please call the roll.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Present.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Chair Herbold.

I present.

Thank you so much.

On today's agenda, we will be hearing the first quarterly response from the executive to the council on our statement of legislative intent, requesting work to help identify potential non-sworn officer response for 911 call types, identified by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, and focusing on identifying calls that are categorized as appropriate for civilian response.

Secondly, we'll be hearing Resolution 32050 sponsored by Councilmember Nelson.

This will be up for discussion and possible vote.

And then third, we'll be hearing Council Bill 120320 that I'm sponsoring to provide some funding to address recruitment issues now, not just for hiring officers, but also critical but hard to fill city jobs, and also funding for a recruiter for SPD.

And that will also be up for discussion and possible.

With that, we will approve our agenda for our committee meeting today.

If there is no objection, the committee agenda will be approved.

Seeing and hearing no objection, public comment period.

The number of speakers signed up to testify this morning, each speaker will have two minutes to speak.

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

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

This link is also listed on today's agenda.

And once I call a speaker's name, you'll hear a prompt.

And once you've heard the prompt, please press star six to unmute yourself.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item which you are addressing.

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

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

If speakers do not end their public comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

Once you have completed your public comment, please disconnect from the line.

and if you plan to continue following the meeting, please do so via the Seattle panel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

There are 13 people signed up for public comment today, and again, I will be reading folks' names into the agenda, or into the records at a time.

First, we have Howard Gale, and Howard will be followed by Mackenzie Case.

Howard?

Good morning.

Howard Gale.

commenting on our failed police accountability system.

Sunday marked the third anniversary of the SPD murder of Ryan Smith, and next week marks the second anniversary of the SPD murder of Terry Caver.

Both black men experiencing a severe mental health crisis while wielding only a knife.

Both of these men were murdered within seconds of the police confronting them.

Both of these murders were deemed, quote, lawful and proper by our failed police accountability system, despite the egregious failures of police to follow their own policies of de-escalation.

In Washington State, police kill at over three times the rate compared to Canada, and at over 30 times the rate compared to the United Kingdom.

In Washington State, we require around 720 hours of training before a high school graduate can, with no skills or experience, carry a badge and a gun and legally take someone's life.

In Finland, There's a requirement of over 5,500 hours of training.

England requires over 2,200 hours and a college level degree.

The problem of attracting new police recruits is fundamentally due to a dysfunctional police culture that remains unchanged in over a century.

A culture fueled by outrageous salaries, requiring no skills, little training, and little to no accountability.

Do you not understand that people like that will choose to work in places where politicians do not make such a big show over accountability?

Do you not understand that you have given us a system that serves no one's needs, denying folks real accountability for the harms done to them by police while scaring off potential recruits with performative and empty words?

Yet today, instead of discussing how to make police more accountable and attract better police, this committee will discuss how to incentivize incentivize more of the same police to operate under a failed police accountability system.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Mackenzie Chase, followed by Reza Marishi.

Mackenzie?

Good morning.

My name is Mackenzie Chase, and I'm here on behalf of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

I'm here in support of Councilmember Nelson's Resolution 32050 to help higher police officers and to encourage Council to accelerate work to bring alternative emergency responses online.

Voters in our recent public poll overwhelmingly cited public safety as one of the top two issues they're most frustrated about.

Seattleites also overwhelmingly favor an all-of-the-above approach that includes police reforms and alternatives to police and making sure we have the right number of officers.

We applaud Councilmember Nelson's resolution for working to address one of those three critical areas.

We also know that not every emergency is best addressed by an armed sworn officer, so please work to quickly pilot and implement alternatives.

We were encouraged by yesterday's press release indicating there was a negotiated path forward, and we appreciate Committee Chair Herbold and Councilmember Nelson's work on this.

We urge council to continue to work together and with Mayor Harrell to advance all of the public safety issues voters are interested in.

Thank you for the opportunity to offer public comment today.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Reza Maharishi and Reza will be followed by Coco Weber.

Reza?

Good morning, I'm Reza Murashi and I'm the Director of Government Affairs at Kilroy Realty Corporation, and I'm here today to urge you to support Council Resolution 32050, which would codify the Seattle City Council's intent to approve separate legislation allowing the Seattle Police Department to use part of the unspent funds in its existing budget to offer appropriate and attractive staffing incentives.

This resolution will make Seattle more competitive and allow us to attract additional trained officers that reflect the diverse communities of our city.

As most folks here know, Seattle has lost more than 300 police officers over the last year.

Retail crime is costing both small and large retailers millions of dollars in lost merchandise and additional security expenses.

Businesses, property owners, and cultural venues have had to hire security and off-duty officers at significant costs.

Workers are also experiencing threats to their safety.

We must enable businesses to operate successfully by ensuring the safety of their customers, staff, and inventory.

These problems will not improve until the police staffing crisis is addressed.

We need people to feel safe on our streets because that is essential to bringing businesses back into the office.

This in turn is vital to supporting the small businesses that give Seattle its character.

Passing this resolution would be an important signal that our city leadership is committed to public safety in Seattle, which is in lockstep with voter preferences.

The latest poll done by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce shows that 46 percent of 700 Seattle voters cited public safety as one of the top two issues they are most frustrated about.

We also urge the council to work in lockstep with the mayor's office on approving and implementing legislation like Council Resolution 32050 to rectify the exodus of police officers in Seattle.

Mayor Harrell has expressed his shared interest in addressing the staffing challenges facing the police department and cooperation between the council and the mayor is a prerequisite to creating durable solutions to this important issue as our.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Coco Weber.

Coco will be followed by Peter Condit.

Coco?

Thank you.

Good morning, Council.

I'm a District 3 resident and educator, and I'm also someone who has been impacted by police violence while protesting police violence in this city.

I'm also a former clinician and reentry case manager.

I used to pick folks up from jail on their release day, and I also worked at a sentencing alternative program providing therapeutic alternatives to incarceration.

I've seen firsthand that not only does The types that I worked with had to qualify for the program, had to be incarcerated more than three times in King County Jail, and they also were diagnosed with mental health issues as well as substance dependence and abuse issues.

The people that were successful in our program were set up with housing and mental health treatment.

and care and primary care and were resourced in our community.

The jail time did not have any impact on whether or not folks who were experiencing incarceration in our city were going to be able to get out of that cycle.

We just saw the, so the attorney dismissed over 2,000 misdemeanor crimes which shows that this pipeline of spending a lot of money on police, responding to crime, spending money on jail time, spending money on days in court, is actually a complete waste of our city money to solve this problem of people who are the most marginalized in our community not having the resources to survive.

If we want a safer city, we need to reallocate funding out of the jail out of the um out of spd and actually get that money to create true infrastructure community safety such as mental health support um care and housing i ask you to not support this waste of our funding and actually put that money towards community thank you coco our next speaker is peter condit peter will be followed by latonya severe peter

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

Hello, this is Peter Condit in District 6. I am against giving the SPD any money for new cops, cop hiring incentives, or cop advertisement campaigns.

I've been helping neighbors all morning at Woodland Park.

The SPD is here with guns and forcing people's displacement because there's a housing crisis, and we have leadership who is willing to do whatever it takes to make unhoused residents less visible.

SPD is a violent, racist institution.

They respond to and escalate situations with deadly effect, killing, among others, Charlene Lyles and John T. Williams.

Their actions at this sweep today could kill someone new.

Meanwhile, dozens of volunteers, myself included, are here actually providing care to our neighbors.

Doing outreach and bringing people inside would be a lot easier if the city didn't spend almost $400 million on SPD every year, and if funding were instead available for housing and supportive services.

legislation under consideration today would move us backwards.

I'll also note that the idea of moving non-violent response out of the SPD is not something that we have forgotten and keeping those responders within SPD even though they are civilianized would be a mistake because as soon as you are not looking they'll just move officers to more deadly positions as they did with the community response group and take more officers away from uh...

the needs for the services that are actually helping people that money needs to be out of the s p p entirely not a civilian as response a non-police response

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Latanya Sevier.

Latanya's showing up is not present.

We'll go down to Trayvonna Thompson-Wiley.

And Trayvonna will be followed by, I believe, Emiliano Sanchez-Pedraza.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Tray.

I'm a resident of the Seattle District 2. And I'm urging y'all not to pass Sarah Nelson's resolution and the legislation for hiring bonuses for SPD or Lisa Herbold's legislation for moving expenses of new office hires and additional SPD recruiters.

This legislation is rooted in anti-blackness and racism.

I'm gonna call it what it is.

I'm a black woman and my family has been in Seattle for over three generations.

I've been demanding for our city to invest in the community and not cops for years.

Cops do not stop violence.

Why should we continue to invest in the system?

filled with oppression and lack of accountability.

Y'all give STD a blank check while residents are being displaced, unable to afford childcare, lack food support, and thrown in cages.

Y'all keep talking about cops leaving the force, yet no one is bringing up the lies that they take.

No one's talking about the fear they strike with Black folks like myself.

I've personally seen STDs viciously beat residents.

The cop is not a safe option for Black folks like me.

It appears that many of these White residents on this call that are calling in, asking for y'all to invest, truly just don't care.

Hiring bonuses are ineffective and waste valuable resources.

Salary has not been a primary reason given by officers leaving the department, and research does not demonstrate benefits to hiring, like increasing their salary.

Some of y'all in the city council claim to care about community.

You can prove that by spending the funding for community safety capacity building grants for programs like Creative Justice, Rainier Beach Action Coalition, and Community Passageways.

Research shows every 10 additional nonprofits in the city with 100,000 residents leave 12, 12% reduction in homicide rate and a 10% reduction in violent crime.

And it's time to stop investing in failed strategies.

Investing in mental health crisis response, team staff by mental health professionals, scaling up existing community-based violence interruption and diversion programs and affordable housing are much more effective.

Go ahead and invest in the community and stop investing in SPD.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker, Emiliano Sanchez-Pedraza, is showing is not present, followed by BJ Last, who's also showing is not present.

We will go back to folks if their present status changes.

We'll go next to Sue May Eng, followed by David Haynes.

Good morning.

My name is Sue May Eng of the Chinatown International District.

and I'm in favor of Resolution 32050 as Council Member Sarah Nelson introduced it regarding SPD staffing incentives.

This resolution is important because it addresses the significant shortage in police officers needed to effectively protect our city, especially the culturally rich historic CID neighborhoods of Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Saigon, where safety and security issues have escalated with a drastic increase in violence and property crime that threaten physical personal safety and the survival of the district.

Seattle is in a public safety crisis where we don't have enough officers to keep us safe.

This resolution provides an additional tool to quickly bring more officers onto the force.

This staffing incentive program will allow Seattle to be competitive in attracting a good pool of applicants.

It will allow us to be more selective and hire exceptional officers.

and those that reflect Seattle's diverse communities, preferably multilingual and community-oriented.

I urge you to support Resolution 32050 as introduced.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Going back to LaTanya Sevier showing us the consent now, followed by David Haynes.

LaTanya?

Hello.

My name is Latanya Sevier.

I'm a black, queer, non-binary resident of D2.

I'm currently calling in from a sweep happening today at a large encampment at Woodland Park.

These sweeps that you all on city council continue to refuse to speak out about, even though your job is public safety.

We all know that housing is public safety.

Displacement is not.

Today I urge you not to pass Sarah Nelson's resolution and legislation for hiring bonuses to SPD or Lisa Herbold's legislation for moving expenses of new officer hires and an additional SPD recruiter.

You all say you believe in data, but only when the data matches what you want.

In your own statement of legislative intent, you state that the NICJR report recommend that alternative response options should be developed for the 70% of calls for service that do not require a law enforcement response.

But you don't like that, so you allow SPD to get another report done.

You say you want alternatives, but can't move money out of SPD until alternatives are stood up and shown to be successful.

It's clear our public safety strategy of giving hundreds of millions of dollars to SPD is not working.

So what are you doing?

You give them more money.

Please explain to me why you think more money is going to change anything.

NYPD has a budget larger than most countries' military budgets.

Are they safer for it?

No.

Policing does not make us safe.

It actually makes us less safe.

Today is an opportunity to stop wasting the city's money on violent, racist policing and extract all the salary savings from SVD and invest in a true public safety such as meeting people's basic needs, like housing, health care, mental health care, and all the things that we all get to have every day and live in a safe environment.

I yield my time.

Thank you, LaTanya.

Our next speaker is David Haynes followed by Ann Smith.

Thank you.

David Haynes, District 7, Pioneer Square, the worst, most unsafe, creepy neighborhood in the Northwest.

It's outrageous that City Council has capitulated public safety efforts and policies to George Soros-funded organizations and institutes.

Why is City Council and colleagues and mayor and police chief and the judges allowing our entire police and justice system to be turned over to the agenda of the Vera Institute and another George Soros funded group known as the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

They are not qualified nor trustworthy and they are not elected lawmakers or even experts.

Yet thanks to city council for being, yet city council is responsible for why low level dollar drug pushers of crack meth and heroin are still exempted from jail.

This is the root cause of all the other problems related to junkie thieving property crimes.

What's the point in having city council in charge when they put an out of state, evil liberal George Soros funded nonprofit in charge of all levels of public safety and justice reform.

You're endangering the innocent lives going out of your way to keep evil criminals conducting uncivil war on community out of jail.

You're undermining the integrity of police reform and safety.

The only people you have made it safe for after capitulating to George Soros funded institutions is the actual criminals.

I can't believe how cowardice punch pulling our media is on your failed leadership that hasn't improved any aspect of our unsafe society.

Have some decency and resign.

This is a volunteer public service job, yet you act like you're doing us a favor by staying in office as if your agenda is to protect criminals, to appease racist, scorned activists, organizers, and protesters who hate police and innocent white citizens, yet you encourage them.

You people have purposely undermined civilization.

Thank you.

Our next speaker that is showing as present, Ann Smith is not showing as present, so we'll go down to Michael Malini followed by Ann Williams.

Michael?

Hi, my name is Michael Malini, I'm a renter in District 3 calling for the council to vote against hiring bonuses for SPD.

More police presence does not get at the root problems, root causes of all the problems referenced, and we should be investing this money in community solutions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker is Anna Williams, followed by Paula Mueller.

Anna.

Hello, hello.

My name is Anna Williams.

I am emailing you today to urge you to vote no on the measure going up for vote today to allocate over a million dollars to the police force.

Oh, my toddler is gonna sit next to me and give testimony.

I'm a D4 resident.

I'm a mom of a toddler.

I'm a homeowner and a small business owner in Maple Leaf.

And I understand that public safety is a huge concern, especially for people like me in North Seattle.

However, there's no data to show that increasing hiring bonuses correlates with increasing public safety.

There's lots of data to show that having stable housing and financial stability does decrease crime, thus greatly increasing both public safety and the quality of life for all residents.

With the money that is being put up for a vote towards policing, we could house over 100 people for an entire year.

I am absolutely in alignment that more needs to be done to increase public safety, but let's make a data-driven decisions on what actually increases public safety for all people, not just people who have the privilege, unearned privilege to live where I live, who look like I look.

So let's keep going and make some actual data-driven decisions.

Vote no on this measure.

Thank you so much.

I yield my time.

Our last speaker is showing as present is Paula Mueller.

Paula.

Thank you.

My name is Paula Mueller.

I'm a Queen Anne resident and chair a network of over 50 block watch captains in the Queen Anne community.

I'm here to support council member Nelson's resolution 32050. The city of Seattle is facing a dangerous shortage of sworn officers and at a time when crimes and especially violent crimes are on the rise.

This situation does not properly protect the citizens of Seattle nor those who come to visit our city.

Efforts to retain and hire new officers have been slow and unsuccessful.

Citing a recent report SPD has been able to hire only 13 new officers rather than the 40 anticipated and has had 43 officers resign rather than the 24 expected.

residents sent a clear message to city elected officials through last year's elections that public safety must be the city's top priority.

We have continued to send that message through surveys and other channels as well.

While we realize that our city needs other services for the homeless and those in crisis, we do not believe that reducing our police staff is the solution.

In fact, these people are the most vulnerable to the criminal enterprises operating throughout our city.

We must do more to attract and retain highly qualified officers while requiring transparency and accountability from SPD.

To get the best candidates, we must be prepared to offer incentive bonuses as part of a total compensation package.

Other departments in our region and throughout the country are all competing for new hires from the same shrinking talent pool.

Anyone who has been responsible for human resources knows that what employees value most in order of importance are respect, recognition, and reward.

It's time we begin to treat our police officers as valued employees.

I encourage each of you to honor the message that voters sent last fall about the importance of public safety in our city and support Resolution 32050. Thank you.

Thank you, Paula.

That is our last speaker that is showing up as a presenter.

With that, we will end public comment and move on to our items on the agenda.

Clerk, will you please read in item number one on the agenda?

Committee agenda item number one, response to statement of legislative intent, SPD 017A001, for briefing and discussion.

Great, thank you so much.

So I'll get us started here.

We're joined by Public Safety Director Andrew Meyerberg of the Mayor's Office and Brian Maxey, the COO of SPD and Lauren Atherley.

also of the Seattle Police Department, just to provide some brief background, and I'll hand it over to Greg Bossett on Council Central staff.

In August of 2020, the Council first requested that SPD undertake a 911 call response analysis.

In October of that year, 2020, the former mayor issued an executive order to identify areas of SPD response that can be transitioned, to civilian and community-based response.

That's work that was started almost two years ago now, looking at August 2020. Last year, the Seattle Police Department commissioned a report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform to analyze the 911 call types.

And that report identified 174 call types as possible candidates for alternative responses.

In a briefing here in this committee in July of last year, the executive highlighted the fact that they agree that up to 12% of calls for service can be responded to without SPD involvement.

in the near term.

And so this is 28 of the call types that the Nick Jr. report identified.

The Nick Jr. report identified 174. SPD wasn't really willing to go that far that all 174 call types could be diverted, but they did agree that 12% of calls or 28 of the call types could be.

And that was July last year that SPD agreed that 28 of those call types could be diverted.

So they agreed on those particular call types.

They felt that their call types could potentially be appropriate for an alternative response on a longer time horizon, a longer planning horizon in order to divert those calls.

But they wanted to do more analysis, sort of a check on the Nick Jr. report.

So in 2021, recognizing that SPD wanted to do this additional work, the council adopted a statement of legislative intent, and that can be found on the agenda.

And that statement of legislative intent requested SPD provide quarterly updates on the progress of this continuing work.

Council received the first update.

Again, that is included on the agenda.

And before the presenters proceed, I'm going to hand it over to Greg Doss on Council Center staff to highlight Recognizing the first quarterly report does not fully capture everything that we had intended, I just, for the record, want Greg to just real quickly touch on what we had anticipated be included in that first quarter report.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning Greg Doss Council central staff.

Good morning members of the committee, as usual, the chair did an excellent job with background and and stole much of what I would would tell you, I will, as she suggested, I will go into.

an overview of what the slide specifically requested.

It requested in the first quarterly report information on the specific type call types that could be handled without any SPD involvement at all.

And those would include calls that SPD agreed could be civilianized without any potential harm to civilian responders.

and such calls might include administrative responses say like traffic collision reports.

The slide also requested that SPD look at alternative responses to low-level misdemeanor calls or calls that could receive a co-response where a mental health professional could take a lead role while an officer remains available on-site for safety purposes.

Essentially, just assessing the various options for alternative 911 responses and coming back with a particular recommendations on what kinds of calls could be civilianized, including the Nick Jr's 12 percent of calls that SPD agreed could be civilianized immediately.

and other calls, 29 call types that could be handled without SPD involvement.

And so that was the focus of the first quarterly report.

And as the chair suggested, the department came back about a month ago and said it would not be able to provide all of those specific deliverables today, but instead would provide a report on the background and the progress of the R&D project to date.

So I believe that's what the committee is going to hear.

And then future reports will be heard on, I believe, July 1 and October 1. And they will deal with the specific recommendations that SBD might make on alternative 911 response.

So those are my comments and available for any questions.

Greg, and I just want to thank the executive for being here with us today.

I know it's not always easy to come and talk to us when maybe the work product might not be exactly as we had hoped, but I recognize that we have a new administration and that there There are a lot of, shall we say, balls in the air, and I really appreciate that you are here with us today, because I think that signals, and I'll turn it over to you to say so in your own words, but I think that signals a real commitment on the part of the executive to continue this work.

So that, I'll hand it over.

Well, thank you, Council Member, and thank you all for having us here today.

And I wanted to supplement one thing that Greg had said, and again, I think the background was we're on the same page as to how we got here.

But what I want to be clear about is SPD won't be making the recommendations about what alternatives we're going to roll out.

I mean, SPD will be involved in the process, just like a number of stakeholders will be, including the city council.

So what SPD and what they're going to talk about today is SPD's engaged in a call analysis that's a risk analysis, but it's up to us collaboratively to decide what calls will be shifted.

So I just want to be super clear about that.

and about the work that SPD is doing versus the work that we are gonna be doing collectively together and hopefully collaboratively together.

So with that, let me just, I'm gonna turn it over to both to Brian and to Lauren Atherly to talk about what the RMG project is and what the output we're hoping to get from it, how it could complement the work that's already been done and what the timeline is generally.

So Brian and Lauren, would you mind going from here?

Thank you very much director.

I'm just going to kick this off and, as is my want I will get out of the way of the math which I really believe is going to be the.

the centerpiece of this presentation today, because really what we are trying to do is legitimately understand the complexity of the questions that have been asked of us in terms of public safety.

And as you know, SPD's data analytics has gotten far more advanced than most people give us credit for.

In fact, just a month ago, we were at Harvard presenting some of the results on our EAQ and RMD systems at Harvard to people that were very receptive, seeing how we are pushing the envelope and using advanced analytics to actually understand these public safety problems.

The Nick Jr. report that called for the vast majority of our calls to be categorized that is appropriate for civilian response, honestly and directly, we take issue with it.

We don't believe that was a responsible analysis and they did not take into account, many of the variables that are critically important to safely navigating these calls, the 12% that we discussed last summer.

I don't want to call it a back-of-the-envelope analysis, but it was far less sophisticated than the approach we're taking right now.

That was a best guess, and certainly I do believe there are some low-hanging fruit calls that should and could be transferred to civilian response as soon as practicable.

But what Lauren is going to present today is the methodology for understanding at a much more granular and responsible level, what can and should be done.

And with that, I will, again, get out of the way of the math and turn this over to Lauren.

Does Lauren have the ability to share his screen for a presentation?

I don't know that that was provided to council prior to today.

Alex, are you with us?

Can Lauren do that?

It looks like I can.

Can everybody see that?

Yeah.

Perfect.

Well, thank you all for having me.

I promised to keep the math short and kind of keep this high level from a methodological perspective.

And just sort of as a matter of kind of practically setting the stage here, You know, in addition to the response body of work being complex.

The math behind it is inherently nonlinear and so it's it's from a practical standpoint in terms of identifying and routing these calls to an alternate responder.

There is both what represents the opportunity for alternative or differential police response, but then also the the operationalization of that or the practical implications for being able to route these to an alternate responder and both are a really challenging pieces of analysis.

So let me.

Just real quick, I'm going to go through kind of the rough background on differential police response.

Some of the history dates for about 50 years or so.

Talk a little bit about the principles of risk management, which we're adopting here from other industries who've used this approach for managing risk in their organizations.

The two sort of fundamental legs of that being severity and likelihood of the events in making that analysis and making high-level strategic decisions.

And then we'll talk a little bit about what a simulated risk matrix looks like and how that leads towards operationalization of the concept.

So broadly speaking, and I won't belabor this too much, policing as a function of a sort of broader municipal services has been attempting to find an avenue towards differential response since about the late 1950s.

Some of this really kind of came to fruition in the late 1970s with the Wilmington split half experiment and then eventually the differential police response experimentation that took place in the early 1980s.

And all of that sort of generally speaking has run into a bit of a roadblock at the PSAP, at the public safety answering point.

And mostly because it's very difficult to tell from what's being described over the phone, just exactly what people are dealing with.

And that is sort of the general limitation behind the Nick Jr. report is that it deals with perfect information.

And that perfect information is really confirmed after we take an all-hazard responder and we put that all-hazard responder in proximity to the call or the service that's being requested so that they can actually confirm And at that point, right-size the response.

Up until now, the data and really our understanding of what that general risk profile is so that it can be kind of visualized and accepted as a matter of public policy has been limited.

But in recent years, volume of data that we've collected and our ability to process it has really made a differential police response.

And by that, I mean co-response, I mean deferred response or alternate response possible.

Just broadly speaking, the literature behind this police response literature in particular is about 1200 publications between 1954 and 2020 and clusters into sort of four general areas of focus, two of them have to do with general police response and efficiency.

And that's fundamentally where we're focused.

That's going to be the bulk of calls, but I'd also like to highlight that.

The industry has advanced in taking a more sensitive approach to specific problems that are a little more easily identifiable from the way the call presents the PSAP, like people with mental illness, persons with mental illness, or like domestic and partner violence.

But again, all of these alternate response modes are really sort of dependent on being able to diagnose what that call is or identify it confidently at the outset.

So speaking a little bit from a risk management perspective, there are lots of industries that do highly and they engage in highly risky activities.

And lots of those industries have found a way to mitigate the daily risks that are posed by those operations through sort of a systematic approach to assessing and then applying policies based on the risk or what the risk represents to the organization.

Fundamentally risk managed demand borrows from the ICAO, International Civil Aviation Organization, which is the UN body that governs commercial aviation, and also air traffic control and firefighting in adopting a risk management approach.

But this risk management approach In terms of categorizing and then dealing with broad policies, sort of the myriad details that contribute to the operational profile of an organization is based in in kind of aviation, because there are really sort of similar use cases that apply here.

Generally speaking, the approach takes the likelihood of a severe outcome based in sort of broad categories, plots them on a risk matrix, and then just as you see the color coding here, applies different policies.

A high risk event, such as might be a severe and very likely event, as you'll see on the four-factor model just to the lower right of this risk matrix, would demand a risk mitigation.

It would demand that before proceeding with that action or that activity, the organization take some steps to mitigating risk.

At this point, most municipalities treat their general response profile as all high-risk.

What risk-managed demand is attempting to do is take the 400,000 or so calls that we respond to every year and then break them down into broader categories represented by the likelihood that a severe outcome, being death, injury, or harm, is going to be related to that event.

So now the concept of severity.

This is a little bit tricky, right?

Attempting to identify some objective criteria for scoring these events is really problematic.

Just to give you a sense for sort of both the complexity of forecasting risk, as well as this analysis, within the Nick Jr. data that was considered, it looks like about 300 initial and final call types.

In reality, when you combine the nonlinear relationships between how the call is received, how it's categorized initially and finally, and how it's cleared, there are about 41,900 flavors of call that the Seattle Police Department responds to.

So some objective criteria for assessing what those calls represent is a little bit difficult to come by.

The quality of policing, and police service can be kind of a squishy concept depending on what is important to a particular community.

But generally speaking, as we're discussing what is safe for a co-response or an alternate response, what is safe for a delayed police response, you know, where you could potentially provide a more satisfying option for people requesting service, really comes down to what does that call represent in terms of risk to life health safety?

So we have this this coded severity index from severity five being the highest severe.

outcome being the unnatural death of a person associated with that event.

Injury being severity three and severity four.

Severity three and severity four are defined by the standard of care necessary for the injury related to that person.

That's a medical concept, ALS or BLS, advanced or basic life services or life saving services, as defined by a response by a paramedic or a response by an EMT requiring then continued care and transfer to a medical provider.

Severity two would be simple first aid, something that can be attended to by an EMT or a higher level, but essentially the standard of care being applied for that person who was injured means that they can be treated at the scene and released.

And then a severity one response in this case would be no physical harm done to a person, but some harm in the concept of, say, the Cambridge Harm Index related to that event.

So fundamentally, at that point, kind of granulating the severity of that event to the offense and the harm as high harm or low harm classification.

When you combine the severity of the event and the likelihood that it will occur, you can plot it on this multidimensional matrix.

What I have here are proposed definitions just as an example.

What we will do with this analysis once the data is in its final state is actually look for a natural clustering of these data.

There are sort of two approaches to categorizing risk.

You can take a policy perspective that gathers information based on what the sort of conceptual risk is to the organization and what is acceptable to decision makers and policy makers.

Alternatively, you can look for natural clusters or patterns in the data where these things break out into a a natural form of categorization or distinct response classes, we will in this case, force four factor or five factor principal components analysis to determine where we actually see natural clusters in these data mathematically and then they translate into sort of simple definitions that can be engaged more broadly by stakeholders by community partners by policymakers and leadership, and by response organizations because Part of the struggle, generally speaking, in onboarding alternative responses and co-responses is in providing enough information to those potential co-response bodies to allow them to accept the risk as well.

They need some sense for what the risk profile is that they're accepting for their employees or their responders, their volunteers.

And this would translate that risk concept both as a multidimensional risk matrix, as I identified and will show you here in a simulation shortly, but also just in terms of simple definitions.

Very likely, one in every 10,000 responses, or approximately 90 a year, all the way up to very unlikely, one in every 2.7 million responses, or one every three years, given the volume of calls that SPD responds to.

So it's a little difficult to kind of conceptualize those things just in your head.

So a simulation of what that risk matrix looks like and the loading of that matrix when you include an axis like a bar chart looks very much kind of like this.

So we have this severity and likelihood, severity on the vertical axis and likelihood sorry, severity on the horizontal axis and likelihood on the vertical axis, and then the loading on the cells represented by the size of the cells.

In this case, I just want to point out this is a simulated matrix.

These are simulated values.

They are not real.

But this is very much what the first stage of the risk-managed demand analysis looks like.

When you combine the severity and the likelihood represented by about 14 years, or almost 5 million records of response data, and you combine that with the occurrence of these adverse events, these severities one through five, and plot them on a four-factor risk matrix like this, you get this kind of broad, multidimensional bar chart.

And from here, you can take these categories of calls and begin to source alternate responses for them.

It's a whole lot easier to wrap your head around for response tiers than it is about 41,000 different response types.

So broadly speaking, we've also taken the concept of the four-factor response, the four-tier response from the Nick Jr. report and reverse-coded it to reflect the sort of conventional use of call priority, where Tier 1 is now the highest risk type event that we would respond to, and Tier 4 being the lowest type, with Tiers 2 and Tier 3 being some form of mitigated co-response.

Tier 1 response is still always going to remain a police response, that is a response to a crime in progress where a police officer is either statutorily or as a risk responder best equipped to respond to that event.

As reflected in the simulated risk matrix that you see there, that is projected to be a relatively small volume of calls.

Tier 2 responses would be an event that does represent an elevated risk of adverse event to responders or bystanders, but there's likely a better co-response alternative that can meet the needs of that event more effectively.

In that case, by pairing the co-responder with a police officer, you are effectively mitigating the risk to the responder, ideally there, and allowing for rapid intervention should that event devolve to basically a tier one response.

Tier two response.

Once the immediate life health safety risk is mitigated would revert to a tier three response.

This analysis is both strategic, as well as tactical, it has broad implications at this high level for building capacity and resourcing appropriately these four different tiered responses.

But also as a as a function of risk mitigation on the ground, it has implications for basically the continuum of contact from that initial call that comes into the 911 center, all the way through the final closure of that event.

With dynamic risk mitigation in the middle tier two response, as I was saying, as soon as that risk is mitigated and the immediate life health safety issue addressed can revert to a tier three response.

Similarly, tier three response where there's no sort of immediate or or forecast risk.

to the responders may be best handled by a co-responder with police staged nearby, as we believe potentially police can inadvertently escalate an event, but you would want them available to respond rapidly should that event turn out to be something else once the responders arrive and can make a better assessment of what's being reported to the PSAP.

Tier 4 responses are actually kind of the going back to that original differential police response concept, they are what was attempted to be realized in the 1980s.

And that is where appointments, walk-up counters, and basically as technology has evolved for us now, the ability to report crimes and other sort of myriad services that are not maybe directly related to police, but maybe public safety related, or would generally come into the 911 center.

be able to report those in some sort of an online self-service portal, be able to direct those responses to an alternate responder, because there is no sort of forecast or perceptible risk to responders or bystanders.

There is no immediate need.

And it is an opportunity for the city more broadly to provide a more satisfying and ultimately a more risk-mitigated response for that body of work.

So forgive me, I'm sure this is the first of a variety of conversations and in-depth conversations that we'll have related to this concept, but that's kind of the first high-level briefing.

We are at the data development stage working with our partners at Seattle Fire Department and the Seattle Information Technology Department in bringing these data together and categorizing the risks so that it can be assessed, just sort of as I suggested there.

Initial sort of steps after that, from a mathematical, from a methodological perspective, examine the reliability of the force factor, sorry, of the risk factor analysis that's being done there, and just exactly what the level of effort necessary to forecast that risk in an operational setting would be.

Thanks for your time.

so much.

Before I open it up to questions, I first want to state we will need a copy of the presentation for purposes of posting with the agenda all materials that are, thank you so much, really appreciate that.

Also, I want to go back to something that Director Meyerberg said about the collaborative effort and that the recommendations are not going to be purely SPD's recommendations.

I understand that folks are meeting with central staff this week to discuss that collaboration and ongoing executive processes, including sort of this internal work group that is working on this analysis.

Do I understand correctly that is something that's happening?

We meet with central staff today.

I'm really optimistic what will come forward on that process piece.

I think it will be very, very helpful for us on the council to be represented in that work moving forward.

I do see there's some questions there.

I just want to get some baseline understanding, though, before I open up to questions.

Is it an accurate description of this analysis, this risk-managed analysis, to say that the purpose is to analyze the Nick Jr. study of 911 calls as they were originally dispatched, the events that transpired during the call, and the ending or final call type that was recorded in the CAD or RMS?

And if so, you just stay in a couple of sentences what didn't happen with the risk with the Nick Jr. analysis that you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I would say that the Nick Jr. analysis is a good rough cut.

But it's based in perfect information.

It's based in what we know to be the final sort of disposition of that event, which is really only confirmed after a responder arrives at it.

So the risk managed demand analysis here, this concept, both incorporates data that was not available to the Nick Jr. analysis being those adverse events and outcomes.

And there is a one-to-many relationship between those.

And also, it sort of evolves that concept to better understand just exactly what it takes to implement it.

The Nick Jr. analysis from a high-level perspective is a great way to begin to enter the conversation.

Once these events have resolved themselves, they kind of land in these buckets that you can roughly say, well, that eventually didn't end up meeting a police responder.

But the trick in this is being able to forecast, not predict, but be able to forecast in terms of supporting human decision making at the various stages along call processing, what this event may turn out to be so that we can right size the response from the perspective of evidence-based policing that's referred to as kind of the Goldilocks policing.

And really what we need to be able to determine in this case is what is necessary to assist the spectrum of response and that continuum of response and being able to right-size the response.

Absent...

Can your report only look at the original call type?

And are you now looking at everything that happened afterwards?

Is that the bottom line?

Yeah, correct.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold, and I appreciate the presentation.

I just want to ask a couple questions about steps forward and when we can expect to start seeing maybe some kind of substantive on-the-street pilot to start doing some of this work.

I appreciate the letter that was sent along on April 26th from Chief Diaz.

But I want to clarify something I just don't understand over two years of having these meetings and talking about this, that the chief and the second paragraph of the letter, which is in the committee record, indicates more than 97 percent of all calls received resolved differently than they are initially classified.

In reality, it's not possible to accurately predict the outcome of every call.

And I appreciate, given our current system, that that's where we are.

What I just don't understand, and maybe I can get an answer from someone on the panel here today, is Denver, Colorado has been doing this for two years.

Denver, Colorado has responded to 2,700 calls without any incident or problem that are dispatched through 911. And they have been able to figure out a way to triage those calls in a way that sends an appropriate responder during their pilot for 2,700 calls?

Did they go through a similar data analysis project like this?

Why haven't I heard from any of the panels over the last two years, like a site visit or analysis or assessment or discussion with anyone from Denver about how they respond to these calls?

Because I feel like whenever we have a presentation like this, it's like, you know, We have no conception how a major U.S. city can respond to calls differently, but we have a major U.S. city with a similar population, similar demographics, similar politics to Seattle, and they've been responding to these calls for two years.

They're expanding it now to respond to 10,000 calls per year.

So I'm just curious, have there been discussions with what Denver's doing that allows them to do this work?

What are they doing that we're missing?

Is this assessment and analysis I'm going to get us there and are we kind of following their example.

What, what, like how can we learn from the city that is doing the work, I guess is my question.

I can answer that and I'll shift it over to Brian as well because I know that he's more he's done some backgrounding on Denver.

Part of what we're up to right now and part of the work we're doing with, we will be doing with central staff and part of the work we're doing internally with our work group is to do deep dive research into the different programs across the country.

Denver being one of them, CAHOOTS obviously being another one.

There's a number of programs that exist in other jurisdictions that we want to examine, we want to research, we want to understand how they work and what criteria they use to dispatch calls and so on and so forth.

So that is ongoing.

What I can't speak to is what has been done over the last couple of years.

What I can speak to is what we've done since January.

And I don't mean to push the question, but we are working very vigilantly, again, with a broad swath of department heads, folks, and others, eventually in central staff, to develop exactly the understanding that you're developing, and if possible, to pivot, to pilot.

So, sorry, Council Member.

No, but wouldn't that be dispositive, though, Director Vyerberg?

Like, shouldn't that be the first thing we do?

Like, go and look at a pure city and see how they're doing the thing we want to do?

That's what I just don't understand.

Yeah, I guess from my perspective, it is an important decision point to know about what someone else does, but I'm not sure it's dispositive.

I'm not sure Denver and how they're doing their thing should dictate how Seattle does it.

It's going to be relevant information and something we want to know but I'm not sure it's dispositive of how we're going to roll out our resources, Denver has different dynamics and I don't know Brian if you can talk a little bit about Denver but, but as far as you know they have more resources for mental health providers that respond to calls like they have in the 50s but, but again it's it's it's a little bit of a different framework than what we have in our current structure in Seattle.

I think it's on the table of things that we can consider and something we are certainly interested in.

And Denver has been a model that we think has worked thus far.

But I think we want that to be part of our work and not the sole part of our work.

We do want to do this data analysis and this risk mitigation work first.

Thank you.

Moving on to Council Member Herbold.

I think Brian Maxey was going to respond to the question.

I'm sorry.

Yes, absolutely.

I just have a little bit more information, Council Member.

We did meet with the Denver Star folks when we were in Boston as part of that Harvard conference.

And we also have been talking with BJA.

They want to send us out there and create a colloquium there to further dive into their data.

But the success in Denver, there were two things that I think were critical from talking with the Denver folks and the police chief, as well as the actual responders themselves, is that the responders, there was sort of this organic group that came together and said, hey, we are interested in providing this service.

We to date have not yet had that occur, to my knowledge, in the city of Seattle.

The calls that they're responding to...

No, go ahead, sorry.

While they are, in fact, respond they think they're up to, like, almost 4000 total calls here today, not here today but program to date, but the things they're responding to are historically things that the police did not previously respond to a lot of their.

they actually offset some of the medical responses, they offset some of the things that were just unserved, like picking up of syringes is a large part of what they do.

They do have a discrete body of responding to suicidal individuals, which accounted to about 200 calls, and they do respond to that.

But overlaid on top of the star, which is the pure civilian mental health provider response, is the co-responder model.

In Denver, they have 32 mental health providers that co-respond with police.

To what Lauren was talking about, you have that variability about whether the police will take the lead in a given situation or the mental health provider will take the lead in a given situation, depending on circumstances on the ground and the associated risk.

They did not do a formal risk assessment like we are doing, we are definitely pushing the envelope of trying to create a mature system here, which hopefully will allow for transfer of more calls than is currently handling.

They have a very small, discreet set of calls.

They did work with their PSAP, their 911 call center, to develop protocols to assess and dig deeper into the incoming calls.

And I know that CSCC is working on protocols that will help them determine the risk too.

So there's a parallel effort there that I can't speak to directly, but I believe it's underway at CSCC.

So yes, we're working with STAR.

Yes, we've met with them.

We do understand their system.

There are some low-hanging fruit calls that we believe could be transferred to the CSOs on a rather expedited basis if we can get through some of the labor issues associated with that.

But what we're trying to get to is a more comprehensive and mature response.

And just very, very briefly to walk back something I said earlier, when I referred to the Nick Jr. report as irresponsible, I didn't mean that the report itself was irresponsible.

Incomplete is a far better word, but what I meant is wholesale adoption of that, I believe, would be irresponsible for the city of Seattle.

So just a brief follow-up, Madam Chair, very brief.

So I appreciate that overview.

I'm glad that the department and the mayor's office are looking at an existing program.

I would just say I do think that there's a certain practicality in examining an existing functioning model in a pure city, even if it might not be completely responsive.

And it's just something that I think is important context for the otherwise data-driven system.

Like, I'd feel more comfortable doing something that is based on something being successful somewhere else than completely something being conceived.

from the ground up.

I also just wanna, like Brian, you said something that doesn't completely accord with my understanding from the STAR program that maybe we could look into to clarify.

My understanding is from the 2,700 calls the pilot did, the department in Denver identified that 2,294 of those would have been responded to by police otherwise.

So I don't think it's purely sort of doing functions that are kind of akin to like what the mid might do right like I don't think it's just you know cleaning up needles or or doing.

You know, distributing bottled water or something I do think they're responding to things that that Denver police was responding to before and that's definitely part of their plan to scale it to an annual 10,000 calls a year.

The last thing I, but I want to, I'd like us to check into that, because I, you know, I mean, obviously don't know that for a fact, but that's what I've seen reported and indicated in some of their data.

The other thing I would say is, is I've, I've heard a very large amount of entrepreneurial interest from from different provider organizations in doing something like this in Seattle.

Maybe that hasn't been getting through kind of to the mayor's office and I could maybe transmit a couple of those leads for consideration to maybe be integrated into how the executive side folks are thinking about this and maybe getting some proffers and what that implementation vision might look like from some of those people who have reached out.

The last thing I would say just to share that I found interesting, in Denver where they do have a maturing response alternative, they've been losing fewer police from attrition.

Not, I mean, everyone is losing police through attrition, but Denver has been losing fewer.

In 2019, Denver lost 100 officers.

In 2020, generally a high watermark for officer departures, Denver lost 81, fewer police in 2020 than 2019. I just think it's an interesting correlation that a department with a response alternative also has different attrition dynamics.

I don't know what to attribute that to, but I did find that to be an interesting correlation.

But in any event, appreciate that it's something that's being looked at.

And I will share some of those resources, Brian, with you and Andrew Myerberg in terms of some of the people who've expressed local interest and appreciate that there is interest from the panel in that.

So thank you so much.

≫ Thank you.

≫ Thank you.

≫ Thank you.

≫ Thank you.

When looking at programs and the services that they offer, I think it's true that there are services that are picked up in the community that police officers are not doing now.

But there are also services that are being picked up that police officers would have to do.

And I think that's a point that Council Member Lewis was making.

And I think you see that nowhere better than in Eugene with CAHOOTS.

Because in CAHOOTS, you have mental health providers responding to not CSO administrator types, but you have people that are trained in mental and behavioral health responding to person down and wellness check calls.

And they have been for 30 some years, calls that have not been going to Eugene Police that would otherwise have been going to Eugene Police and would go to Eugene Police.

And so I think what you see there is, is an evaluation of a program where you have to take these other considerations into factor, you have to factor in these other considerations and it's important to say that you can alleviate stress from police with alternative response.

and that indeed that they are picking up services that police would have to go to.

So I just wanted to echo Council Member Lewis's responses with that experience in CAHOOTS.

Thank you, Greg.

And Thomas, just wrapping up this train of thought here before moving on to you.

I do want to just flag that we do have downtown emergency service centers, mobile crisis teams that currently are not being dispatched from 911, but they respond to when first responders call them.

And that, I think, is a really good example of a local program that could potentially be dispatched from 911. I also want to thank you, Brian, for recognizing that one of the lessons learned thus far off of the work that's been done is that there should be the ability of either CSOs or the county's Emergency Services Patrol to tackle some subset of Priority 3 calls.

And just want to recognize that I think there may be a little bit of a difference of philosophy here about whether or not we do the The full on analysis or whether or not we work to try to do some.

some low hanging fruit, some things that we all agree can be done.

We all agree is right now are low risk to calls that CSOs are already responding to in many cases.

But again, just they're responding because they're being called from police officers who don't need to be going to the scene in the first place.

So really, I would like to see us sort of stage our work here.

rather than waiting until we have a final product.

But those are conversations I know we will continue to have within the work group.

So thank you.

That's from Mosqueda.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I want to thank you, Lauren, for the walkthrough of the presentation you provided and appreciate the chair has asked for that to be posted publicly.

Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to dive into the details before but I do want to thank you for providing that analysis and know that this is a point in time, sort of preview of conversations to come.

So just want to note that appreciation for you.

I do, however, want to come back to the word that was used earlier and appreciate the clarification that has been offered but the word irresponsible was used twice in reference to Nick Jr.

And the word not responsible was used at least once.

And so I feel it's important to really clarify for members of the public who might be confused about the comments that question this national research body.

This is a research body that we have worked with.

And that, in fact, the report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, known as Nick Jr. actually cites the partnership with SPD in their own report.

It says the Seattle Police Department contracted with Nick Jr. to conduct this analysis for SPD calls for services from the period of 2017 to 2019. So it's not some external third party, you know, entity that doesn't have credibility.

This is a group that has gone into contracts and partnerships with cities and jurisdictions like Washington, DC, Oakland, and Stockland, and California, Portland, Oregon, Indianapolis, Indiana.

They work with an array of organizations just earlier today announcing a huge partnership at the national level with organizations like Center for American Progress to reduce gun violence and to promote the use of non-armed officers for responses.

I do think that it's important for us to clarify the credibility that the National Institute for criminal justice reform has at the national level and within our own city.

I think today is the first time that I'm hearing a question about whether or not even the 12% of calls that we had initially agreed could be offloaded to non-armed officers is now into question.

So I think it's important for us to work towards moving forward to solutions together and want to make sense that I want to make sure that we are not questioning the very entity that we have contracted with in the past.

I think that the way Lauren, for example, phrased it publicly here, and I think that the sentiment is captured in the page and a half slide response.

But the more appropriate, I think, analysis is to say that this is a first cut, a great way to begin the conversations.

Those are the two comments that I really heard and do want to emphasize the important role that the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform should have with the analysis going forward.

Again, I'm going to ask that we have a commitment to have the analysis that's currently being done, recognizing this live response was a point in time, have that analysis be reviewed by a third party, because I'm concerned that there's a questioning of the credibility or the methodology that Nick Jr. used, and also want to make sure that we have the opportunity for a third party to provide an analysis of the analysis when we complete it.

And then also for the record, as should be clear from the slide request, no one, especially no one on council has been suggesting that we adopt the Nick Jr. report in whole.

There's not an interest in a copy paste.

That's why we have the slide response.

And I think that's why you're going to see more conversations to come on this.

So I want to make sure that I get out there again, the interest in having a third party do an analysis of whatever report comes forward from our internal deep dive.

Well, let me just say, Lauren, before I kick it over to you, thanks, Council Member Mosqueda.

I think that's really good clarification and we appreciate it.

And thank you for, I think there's no disagreement, certainly on the executive side of, you know, how reputable that organization is.

So I appreciate you calling that out.

So thank you.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

Just to, you know, I think this has been a good discussion today and really appreciate that we're getting into this part of the work.

I guess one thing I want to really emphasize, because we've been talking kind of a lot about sort of the low acuity first response.

But, you know, I don't want us to also lose track that, you know, there's an opportunity cost when we have SPD officers doing things that other folks can do, given the current staffing crisis we're facing, given the allocation of resources.

Like every time I go to a Mariners game and I see SPD officers directing traffic, you know, I'm like, I'd much rather see that overtime shift be a burglary emphasis in a small business district, right?

Whenever I see officers augmenting parks employees for an encampment removal, when we know that the Public Defender Association is capable of doing encampment ops without needing to take up police resources, I think, you know, those officers could be walking a beat in the neighborhood business district instead right now, right?

And I really do think that has to be part of this equation where, you know, we're going to pivot to, you know, what is an agenda item next talking about hiring, which we need to do.

And I appreciate the leadership of the chair and council member Nelson and queuing up some good proposals for our consideration.

But it's also part of the equation that we have big opportunity costs where we're electing to have officers do things other people could do when we need them to be doing things only they can do.

And I would just encourage us going forward to continue doing that work as part of this project and appreciate this conversation as part of moving us toward that.

And I think we want to be really clear about I'm sorry, Councilmember, what we want to be really clear about was that this is that opening discussion.

And we were really focused on the data and where we are in the data.

Absolutely.

Councilmember, it is an end and proposition.

And I agree with what you're saying.

And I think it seems like we are all very much on the same page where we want to be innovative, we want to be collaborative, we want to create We want to create alternative responders that are going to take the calls that we should not be sending officers to.

We totally agree.

But we want to be deliberative and not create things for the sake of creating things, but create things that make sense.

But again, this is the first step.

And I apologize because we are trying to do this work well.

And this administration is doing this work a little bit differently.

So I do apologize for that.

We may be moving a little bit backwards to move forwards.

But I hope that we'll make it up in the fact that we very much want to collaborate with the council and do this together, not separately.

Thank you.

And I just want to restate something I already said, but put it within the public safety context that Council Member Lewis just said.

One of the lessons from notes I've received from meetings that you've been having with central staff is one of the lessons learned is actually consistent with the recommendation of the prior administration for the creation of what was then being called CARES 1. And those were person down and wellness calls.

And this executive, recognizes that some of those calls can be handled by CSOs.

So we don't have to stand up a new triage one.

We need to figure out a way to allow CSOs to take those calls.

That is a subset of the 12%.

I think it's about 4,000 calls.

But we should get moving on on alternate response for those calls that you guys acknowledge are calls that CSOs are currently handling and they could handle if dispatched off of 911. The CSCC acknowledges that although they're really looking forward to the acquisition of the new protocols, the RFP is out now, and training and implementing those new protocols, that they could do the dispatch to CSOs.

Recognize there's some labor issues, but I really think that we need a staged approach where we get going on some of this stuff now, because it will allow our police officers to be spending their time on the things that only they can do.

Thank you.

Um, I must get a and well, maybe it may be first, Lauren, because I think he's responding to something that was already said.

Then comes from mosquito.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I just wanted to confirm real quick.

We are actually contracted with the Council of State governments to quality assurance on this analysis s O.

So they have been following along with us, and they are confirming they are our third party quality assurance partners.

Thank you so much, Lauren, for coming back to that question, because that was part of my follow-up.

So could you tell me a little bit more about what that means, what their role is?

Are we doing an internal analysis and then sort of the final product gets shared with them and they do some vetting and then it's the final?

And just so that I'm clear, what is the timeline for filling out and populating this matrix with the four call types, with the actual data?

Thank you, Councilmember.

So a little additional detail on our collaboration, and this is our standard approach to quality assurance.

Whenever we have a, whenever performance analytics and research has a large analytical project that has some sort of major policy implications for the way that we respond to things, we feel that it's important to have a third party quality assurance vendor with us.

So Council of State Governments is actually integrated with the development team.

They attend regular meetings, We're currently in a pause.

We've been on a pause for about a week and a half now as we're waiting for ITD to catch up with some data development.

But as soon as that data is back in our hands, because we don't want to continue to burn their funds, we will pick up with those weekly meetings again.

They follow along at each stage, and I've asked them to respond to three discrete questions.

One of them has to do with the confidence that we can have in relating the adverse event to the police response.

The additional piece is related to The clustering, so the question of likelihood is an open question.

Initially, we'll look for natural clustering in the data.

We do recognize, however, that that bears some weigh-in from stakeholders and community partners and that may change.

We've asked them to weigh in on the math behind the clustering as well as the implications for any adjustments made to that parameter.

Specifically, the loading on the different cells in the risk matrix, And then the final question, after we assess the level of effort necessary, technically necessary, to assist CSCC in more confidently identifying these call response tiers, they will be backing us up on that approach.

That approach is probably going to be highly computational in nature.

It's a complicated piece of math and processing, and so they'll also be backing us up on that.

So they follow along with our development process.

We run a hybrid agile development process in performance analytics and research.

They're also focused on those three discrete questions that we have.

They'll be digging into the math, the methods, and the implications, and then rendering a final report for informing us whether the way forward that we've selected is advisable or not, and offering any suggestions for the future.

And that's fairly typical of this type of engagement.

Oh, and I apologize in terms of a roadmap.

As soon as this data is prepared will populate the matrix, the projected timeline for that.

is imminent the next couple of weeks.

The idea is that that will be available for the July report.

There are some technical dependencies on our partners at ITD, and that's an open risk for us.

Once that is done, Council Chair, I just want to acknowledge your wish that we proceed on multiple fronts.

We are not waterfall.

We prefer an agile approach, which means not necessarily a linear, you know, sort of step through, but multiple parallel paths that get us all there at the same time in an efficient capacity.

And Director Meyerberg has really sort of led that direction in terms of making sure that we're building capacity strategically based on this evidence, while the technical effort to operationalize that analysis is ongoing at the same time.

Let's never Peterson.

Thank you, Chair, her bald, and thank you terrible for lifting up this important research, appreciate the mayor's office and SPD being here to report on that progress even though you're in the middle of it and I I think the theme we're hearing here is that we want these alternatives in place as soon as possible and for an appropriate subset of the 911 emergency response calls.

And so I just want to let you know, I concur with my colleagues who are saying, you know, let's dual track this, let's do a pilot as soon as possible, acknowledging that we do have this matrix of other efforts happening with triage one health one community service officers, the DSC mobile crisis response unit.

Could we get a date on next steps?

When will this analysis be finished and how soon do you think you could roll out a pilot that's integrated?

I was reading Oakland, California just launched their pilot last month, in addition to having cahoots out there and Denver Star for a long time.

So could we get some dates so that we could then know and the public can know when to follow up on this.

I understand the next stage will be a report, the second quarter report in July.

And what I'm hearing is it will include this data, but I'm not quite sure what comes next.

Well, let me jump in there real quickly.

I mean, I think as I'm gonna hold Lauren to this imminent deadline, but that's what we're hoping is that we're gonna see this data imminently.

After that point, I think what we are planning, again, collaboratively planning to do is to have stakeholders coming to the table from a variety of different entities and places, including central staff and the council to start talking through the risk of these calls, what we are comfortable as a city shifting.

then we're building out the research, we're building out kind of the modeling around what could take on some of these calls while at the same time pivoting what we can pivot.

So what I would say is I think July would be a great, I mean, I think that's a great deadline for the status update, but I'm hopeful that we'll get some of these other things moving before July.

Council Member, I don't necessarily have an answer for you right now as far as what those dates are, but we can provide a supplemental, a response To the group just to say here's here are some of those timelines and what we're hoping to do as far as standing up our work groups and our collaborative work together.

Fantastic.

Great.

All right.

Well, again, thanks for being here.

Really appreciate it.

Appreciate hearing that this administration is committed to doing this work and committed to doing it collaboratively so we can move forward together.

Really, really appreciate that.

There are no further questions or comments.

We'll move on to the next item on our agenda.

Clerk, please read in item number two.

Committee agenda item number two resolution 32050 resolution relating to Seattle Police Department stating the council's intent to lift a proviso and anticipated 2022 salary and benefit savings to fund staffing incentives for uniformed police officers for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Thank you so much, Alex.

For the next two items, we are joined by Ali Panucci and Greg Doss of Council Central Staff.

This resolution is sponsored by Council Member Nelson.

Before we get started, Council Member Nelson, would you like to speak to your resolution or have Central Staff describe it?

Council Member Nelson, you are muted currently, I'm sorry.

I'll go ahead and speak to it and then central staff can pick up the pieces.

All right, so I am chair of the economic development technology and city light committee, and I'm supposed to be focused on helping our economy recover as we emerge from this pandemic.

The priorities for my committee include downtown and neighborhood district revitalization and reducing the displacement of BIPOC-owned small businesses in areas of our city that are undergoing rapid gentrification.

So why am I doing this?

Well, because on the campaign trail and since taking office, I've heard the same thing over and over and over again.

Residents don't feel safe.

911 call response times are through the roof and businesses are closing because of crime.

So the plain fact is that we can't achieve an equitable recovery unless we improve public safety.

And that should be our only job.

And that's why I'm putting this forward today.

My resolution makes the case for taking urgent action to address the city's escalating rates of violent and property crime amid Seattle's SPD's historic and very severe staffing shortage.

My resolution identifies a tool used by virtually every other city in our region to accelerate the hiring of new officers.

And clearly, Seattle's not the only city scrambling for labor, all right?

But partly because of low morale, our city has lost more officers than any other city, about 400 since 2010. January 2020 those are officers in service are fully trained and experienced officers are are leaving SPD for neighboring jurisdictions.

And so I learned something when I was talking to an officer I met a couple of weeks ago.

And he said that when an officer in SPD applies for a lateral position in the neighboring jurisdiction, they have to get the sign-off recommendations from fellow officers.

And he told me he had filled out three in just one week.

And I think those officers were going to, if my memory is correct, Sammamish, Everett, and Snohomish, I believe.

Puyallup, Sammamish, and Everett.

And those jurisdictions, and every other jurisdiction in our region, use hiring incentives to recruit officers.

So to level the playing field to compete for a limited pool of applicants, Seattle must do the same and implement a similar program.

And then finally, my resolution sets the stage for releasing restricted funds in SPD's budget to pay for incentives and other recruitment support strategies.

That's it.

And when I put this forward in March 23, I frankly didn't care the specifics of the incentive program, how much money should be spent on it and what the details should be.

I figured I would leave that to the executive to really devise a system that will be competitive and that the council would later approve.

I simply wanted to provide the policy framework to discuss what's going on in our city and give our residents and our constituents a chance to weigh in.

This resolution is the necessary first step toward the action we'll hopefully be taking later this meeting.

So I'm Allie.

Greg, do you want to add anything to what I've just said, or I will now answer questions or comments.

Morning Council Members Chair Herbold, Council Member Nelson, thanks for that introduction.

I'm Allie Panucci of your central staff.

I will be leading the presentation today.

Greg is available if necessary, but is doing double duty.

So please, if there's a question, I'll need a minute to get him fully back online.

But I think we can probably cover it with myself and you all in this discussion today.

I don't have a lot to add.

Council Member Nelson did a good job of describing the intent of the resolution.

I think she went into more details that are outlined in the recitals.

expressing some of the policy goals and background information.

The resolution itself, as she described, is really expressing council's intent, if adopted, to support a staffing incentive programs.

And it would provide a clear direction to the executive that the council is willing to consider modifying or lifting the proviso to release some of the funds restricted by the council's budget action this fall in adopting the 2022 budget to support those staffing incentive programs.

I won't jump fully ahead to the next item but we'll just know the resolution and the council bill kind of work hand in hand.

The resolution would set the high-level policy intent and then the council bill that Council Member Herbold has proposed is a step towards implementing a specific program under that authorization.

And I'll leave it there.

There is one amendment that I'm happy to describe at the chair's direction.

Thank you, Allie.

So before we get the resolution before us and begins discussing any amendments, are there any questions about the resolution, the base resolution?

Okay, seeing none, and maybe there will be as we get further into the conversation.

Council Member Nelson, as sponsor, would you like to move resolution 32050?

So moved.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded to adopt resolution 32050. Council Member Nelson, do you have additional comments about the base legislation before we move on to discussion of the amendment?

No, I will provide closing comments before the vote.

Perfect, thank you.

So I have proposed Amendment 1 to the resolution.

I move Amendment 1. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you so much.

I moved and seconded to amend the resolution as presented on Amendment 1. Allie, could you please describe Amendment 1?

Yes, thank you.

Is my screen sharing working OK?

Great, so Amendment 1 proposed by Councilmember Herbold would modify the proposed language in signaling Council's intent to modify the proviso.

Specifically, the amendment would signal intent to only release funds in the amount necessary to implement a staffing incentives and recruitment support program, acknowledging that some of SPD's 2022 salary savings is one of the strategies to help mitigate the projected gap between the city's general fund expenditures and revenues projected in 2023 and beyond.

So what I have on the screen here is the effect statement.

And then I will scroll down so you can see what the specific text changes proposed in this amendment would do.

And as we refer to the sort of projected 2023 budget challenges that the council has been discussing at last week's finance and housing committee, the makeup of the finance committee is the same as this committee.

So you were all briefed on where we stand there.

So I won't say more about that now, but happy to answer questions.

Thank you so much.

Really appreciate it.

I don't have much to add here.

I just wanted to propose this language to recognize that we do have 2023 budget constraints and that that is a consideration that before the council as it relates to the adoption of future legislation to support staffing and recruitment incentives.

And that those are all considerations.

I know they're considerations of the executive as well.

And that also in recognition that right now in this point of time, the value of the, the budget proviso, the salary savings is estimated to be between $4.1 and $4.5 million.

It may increase in value if the ability to hire officers consistent with the now revised hiring plan continues to slip, and so the language as written sort of presumed that we were going to make all of the money available in salary savings for this purpose, and this gives us some opportunity to sort of right-size that investment.

So that's all I have on that.

Any questions about the amendment?

Comments?

Councilman Mosqueda, yes.

I'm sorry.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair, I appreciate the amendment that you're bringing forward here.

I do intend to vote yes to support your amendment.

I will, however, underscore my concerns with the underlying legislation.

I appreciate the amendment because I do have to care about policy details.

I do care about the impact on our overall budget and I do care about how spending in one category affects spending in any other category in our city budget.

That's our responsibility as budget members, members of the Finance Committee, and all of us heard that the gap that we are currently facing, while it has shrunk from approximately $148 million to about $35 million, thanks in large part to our central staff's deep dive analysis, thanks to Tom Mikesell and Ali Panucci, for working in collaboration with Julie Dingley, our Director of the City Budgets Office.

We still have a multi-million dollar gap for the 2023-2024 budget years and the out years.

In large part, that gap was filled with jumpstart funds that helped to make sure that we were not in the red in 2020 and 2021 and 2022. However, we are very much needing to make sure that we close that gap.

As you heard the director from the city budgets office say in our finance and committee meeting last week, we are now apparently asked our departments to hold back funding for 2022 spending, which is spending priorities of the mayor's office and city council members, including things like hygiene centers, bathrooms for folks who need to use it as tourists or folks who are lived to their house and those unhoused.

We've asked for funding to be held back on things like the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights outreach and important critical aspects of every budget item that we agreed to as a council and an executive last year that I know are painful decisions for not only the departments to ask for a hold but also for community members.

And now the departments are being poised to go through an exercise of having to hold back potentially 6% of their budgets for next year.

None of us want to be in that position, especially as we seek to recover from the impacts of COVID on our economy and the health of our population.

So it is through this budget lens and again all five of us do sit on that finance committee that I want to raise concerns about this approach today and also emphasize that the Seattle Police Department's budget got $355.5 million in last year's budget.

This included funding for 125 new hires.

This also made sure that there was no cuts to the current SPD staffing plan, that there was no cuts to SPD officers in the proposed budget, and funded an expansion of the community service office, funded new technology that the court monitor deemed as essential, funded 4.6 million additional funding to bring the total to over 26 million in overtime, added 4 million for discretionary purposes above the proposed budget that was sent to us, and added nearly a million dollars for travel and training in the midst of COVID still.

All of this was done in collaboration with the mayor's office and all council members to make sure that the full core functions of the SPD budget were funded.

And one of the potential strategies that we had to deal with was trying to make sure that we recruited 125 officers.

I still think that that should be done using existing resources, I do not support making an effort to deep dip into the reserves that are being made possible from this proviso and lift it.

for a blank check.

I appreciate that the amendment helps to really scope that and really help prioritize what potential actions could be taking place, but this is not the time for us to be looking at giving over money to SPD to use in this critical juncture where we are asking other departments to put a hold on current spending and potentially think about reductions next year.

We're going to do everything we can to make sure that that's not the case by the end of the year, but I think we need every dollar available to make sure that we are investing in core government services, and that is making sure that people have access to critical services in addition to public safety.

So given the full hiring plan was already funded last year, I do not support lifting the proviso.

I do, however, Madam Chair, support your amendment to try to scope this resolution in front of us.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

Before I hand it back over to Council Member Nelson, I just want to clarify, because I know, Council Member Mosqueda, you're a prickler for precision, so you'll appreciate this.

This is not new money for SPD.

This is money from salary savings associated with the $125,000.

officer spending plans is dollars that they cannot already allocated to SPD that they cannot spend.

So I just heard you say something that made it sound like we're giving over new money to SPD.

That is not the case.

This is money that is currently in their budget that they can't spend because of the the salary savings budget proviso that the council placed on it.

And I totally agree with you, Council Member Mosqueda, and I think the executive agrees as well.

I don't think, I understand from my conversations with Budget Director Dingley that they intend to look to salary savings as SPD, salary savings as one way to help ameliorate some of the citywide budget impacts associated with reduced revenue.

But I think what this amendment does is it tries to recognize that This this these funds and they're in there significantly more than we anticipated when we first enacted the proviso on the salary savings.

may be a useful strategy to address a number of issues.

And given that we all voted for the staffing and the funding necessary for the staffing and hiring of 125 officers, money that is in that category For hiring officers, it seems appropriate.

I mean, if you're still supportive of that goal, it seems appropriate to spend some dollars to help us, well, not meet that goal now because we've already slipped, but to at least meet the 98 officer goal.

Council Member Nelson.

Just a quick follow up, I appreciate you clarifying for the members of the public and also for any council members that this is not new money.

We always struggle with that sort of dynamic when it comes to lifting provisos.

So, yes, I want to emphasize that this is not new money.

I think that the point about handing over the funds that are currently have that have a proviso within SPD, that would be allowing them to use it.

So I do appreciate that you're amendment helps to scope what that amount would be within that existing funds that currently have the proviso on it.

And again, I think the concern, while it is a larger amount that's currently being held in the proviso than we originally thought it might be, the gap that we have to deal with at the end of the year for not just 2023, but the out years as well is significantly higher than anyone had known before.

Thanks in large part now we know this because of Tom my son Ali Pinochet good work we have a six year financial plan, but the hundreds of millions of dollars that are in the out years as a potential gap is what has given me great pods here.

So thank you for helping to clarify, though, what the lifting of the proviso effect actually is appreciate that thank you so much customer Nelson.

Thank you.

I just wanted to clarify that my resolution doesn't say spend all the money that will be salary savings in SPD's budget as a result of the fact that more offices are leaving and it's difficult to hire new officers.

In fact, only 13. I don't specify that everything should be spent.

I identify those salary savings as a source of funding.

and I appreciate you nuancing Council Member Mosqueda's portrayal of what this does.

This does not take money away from other priorities.

This is money that already exists that council, knowing probably some projected budget shortfalls in the future year, funded at 125 officers.

OK, so they made that you made that decision last year.

And and this is simply keeping that money for use within the department to get to the goal that was originally stated and funded, which is to hire officers.

And so we can disagree over what would be a better use for this money.

But I'll just state for the record that people are dying.

We don't have enough officers to respond quickly to emergencies.

We say that we want to get guns off the street but we don't have investigators to really do that work because they're deployed to patrol.

To me, and this is just my personal thought, nothing is more important than ensuring the safety of our, of, of, of our residents.

And so, Anyway, that's what I'm trying to get at here.

I realize that council members and the executive might be looking to use some of the salary savings for other purposes, but I think that we have to go through the conversation and define in the next piece of legislation that we'll be talking about, how much money are we talking about and what will it cover?

So I will now, well, I see Council Member Peterson.

I can recognize Council Member Peterson.

Thank you.

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

I agree with my colleagues.

Public safety is a priority for our constituents.

And just want to say briefly, I'll be supporting Council Member Nelson's resolution.

I've always supported it.

I support it with Chair Herbold's amendments.

So I'll be voting for it today.

I'll have longer remarks when we discuss Council Member Herbold's council bill in a moment since they're interrelated.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

I'm assuming those are old hands.

We can call for a vote on the amendment, yes?

Okay, great.

Well, closing remarks because- On the amendment?

We're just doing the amendment right now.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Will the clerk please call the roll on the adoption of amendment one.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Aye.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Five in favor.

Thank you.

The motion carries and the amendment is adopted.

Council Member Nelson, would you like to make closing?

I want to give you the ability to make closing comments on this resolution.

So if there are other council members who have comments on this resolution, we'll take them first.

And Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Appreciate the work that you tried to do here to find some common ground solutions.

As always, colleagues, I am not going to be able to support this resolution in front of us today.

I already outlined the budget structural issues that we're facing.

I think again, this is a critical moment for us to look at every dollar and we've made some very tough decisions as a collective city family already in 2022 on very important 2022 priorities.

We've asked folks to put a pause on a number of investments that I know all of us are deeply troubled by.

And so as we do that, we can't on the other hand be then freeing up additional dollars that could help us at the end of this year to address the structural budget issue that I believe is going to create greater ramifications for 2023 and 2024. This is also about making sure that we have investments in things that the human resources department within our city has identified as ways to improve not just retention, but recruitment.

I'm going to cite from the recruitment and retention work group, the final report, which Seattle Police Department was a part of.

It did not identify pay as a barrier to either hiring or retaining SPD officers.

That includes incentive bonuses.

It did not identify hiring bonuses as a recommendation.

In fact, the four recommendations made by the workgroup included a focus on leveraging technological solutions and revised business practices to engage candidates in the hiring process, to advance top talent quickly through the process, and extend offers in a more competitive timeframe.

In response to the slide that's in front of us, the response said SPD communicated the department did not experience an increase in hiring since implementing a hiring incentive in October 2021. And as mentioned in the memo from central staff, Central staff contacted the Research Director of the Police Executive Research Foundation and the Executive Director of the International Association of Police Chiefs to determine if there are any specific evaluations or research on the effectiveness of hiring incentives in policing.

And it noted that the information that they received from the Human Services Department noted, offering hiring incentives is a short-term strategy meant to induce prospects of a job offer.

However, once an employee is on board, even a structured sign-on bonus with additional payout tied to time and service has limited impact on retention.

The money is a one-time fix that may not compensate for uncompetitive wages, difficult or unsupportive working conditions, lack of opportunities to develop career relevant experience and skills, and limited promotion opportunities.

It noted that signing bonuses for newly hired external talent can negatively impact employee morale.

Employees promoted internally or already working on the job can feel undervalued and unappreciated when their financial package does not match what their external recruits are.

And I would also note that the city unions have not asked for something like this because I think of that concern about recruitment among various critical services that our city provides outside of SPD.

Labor Relations has indeed advised that hiring incentives are extended pre-hire and would not have direct labor implications.

So I, I again, I'm not going to be supportive of this effort here in front of us today we are asking more and more frontline officers that is very true and to the conversation that took place in agenda item number one, we're also doing everything that we can to improve the type of calls that officers go out on so that they're responding to the type of calls they signed up for.

I know that that's going to have an impact on retention strategies and I'm hopeful it will also help improve recruitment strategies as folks know that there is a very specific type of response that they can assume that they're going to go out on from SPD and not have to be housing connectors mental health counselors and case managers.

the city and the nonprofit community.

COVID had a significant impact on all of us within the city family and our nonprofit community, and we know that there is a huge demand right now to make sure that more human service providers are coming into our city to provide additional support so that we can go upstream.

That is part of the interest that I have in looking at a comprehensive suite of investment strategies in the fall when we consider the budget so that we can look at Folks who are concerned about public safety I will again reiterate that we have a full hiring plan in place over 300 and $55 million did go to SPD and very interested in making sure that we get our alternative strategies out the door so that we can continue to decrease the call demand on our existing officers and improve retention and morale that way.

Happy to work with my colleagues, Madam Chair, especially you, as you've been leading this effort on the frontline for many years.

And I know that many folks on the frontline within SPD are interested in how we create a work plan that more meets their traditional SPD roles versus housing connectors and case managers.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to clarify something you said reminded me of something I wanted to respond to because I was listening to public comment.

This resolution does not.

presume what will be in the recommendation that we receive from the executive on hiring incentives and recruitment program.

And so, and I've heard from the executive that they too are skeptical about a traditional bonus program where we just cut a check to all new recruits.

So I would not want to characterize this as as presupposing what recommendation we get from the executive.

All right, handing it over to back Council Member Nelson, the sponsor of the resolution.

Over to yours.

Thank you.

These are not my closing closing again, a nuance of what was just said.

Yes, you're right.

You fully funded Council Member Mosqueda.

SVD's hiring plan.

So why not use that money to accelerate the hiring of officers?

And you touched on retention.

You're absolutely right.

A better way to keep our department whole is to keep officers from leaving.

And retention bonuses would be grateful and they would also signal that we appreciate the work that our offices are already doing.

Unfortunately, this does not get at that because those retention bonuses have to occur in bargaining.

So we can't touch that.

But you're very concerned about what is this going to do to future budgets.

And I was listening to the presentation last week.

From 2010 to 2022, general fund revenues grew by 86%.

and general fund spending grew by 97%.

We are approaching the level of revenues that are greater than pre-pandemic levels.

So there are decisions that have been made by this city council that have led to the difficult conversations that we will be making next year regarding the budget.

But you already had one of those difficult conversations last year when you approved funding for 125 officers this year.

And so again, this act, this resolution does not contemplate taking money away from other priorities.

In fact, it is simply leaving the money there for its intended use.

So, and I, we can, I don't want to belabor this point anymore and just, and just move on that, um, you know, I listened to public comments too.

And, um, like many of them, I want to get back to focusing on improving policing in Seattle and strengthening in our community policing model to build trust, better trust between the community and our department.

We also have the consent decree to get out from underneath, but with improved accountability measures.

We can't do any of this in a situation of crisis in the police department when there aren't even enough people to investigate the serious crimes that are leading to the crimes that our patrol officers are responding to.

And so times have changed a bit since last year when these conversations were at the fore.

And our constituents living in communities that are more directly impacted by crime have spoken out in clear support of this resolution.

And there was an op-ed in the Seattle Times from Dr. Harriet Walden and Victoria Beach and C.D.

Panthers coach Terrell basically saying, please hire more officers our community needs it.

Same thing in the Northwest Asian Weekly last week.

It was written by David Della and Tony Au and Dr. Ming Xiao and Anna Hao.

all community members that are concerned about what's happening in the Chinatown International District.

This is coming from across the city.

And most recently, there was an op-ed in the Puget Sound Business Journal, making a point that maybe not very many people realize, which is that Our community gatherings are at stake if we don't have enough officers to do all the traffic control and safety for the festivals that people are dying to go for this summer as we emerge.

And so I simply want to say that I know that this is a difficult conversation, which is precisely why it's been in the public realm for discussion for a couple months.

But the voters are on the side of a common sense approach to fulfilling our primary duty.

as elected, which is to protect the health and safety of the citizens of Seattle.

And that's what this resolution is trying to accomplish by paving the way for getting into the specifics of modifying the proviso that we'll discuss next.

So thank you very much.

I ask, I recognize that there are differences of opinion in this meeting, but I ask my colleagues for support of this resolution.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson, much appreciated.

Clerk, please call the roll on the passage of the resolution.

Council Member Mosqueda.

No.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Four in favor, one opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion carries and the legislation, the resolution is adopted.

Moving on to the next item in the agenda.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item three?

Committee agenda item number three, council bill 120, 320, an ordinance relating to appropriations for the Seattle Police Department amending and proviso imposed by ordinance 126490, which adopted the 2022 budget and ratifying and confirming certain prior acts for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Thank you so much, Alex.

Again, we are joined by Allie Panucci and Greg Doss of Council of Central Staff.

Allie, could you please briefly explain the council bill and what it does?

Sure, thank you, Chair Herbold.

Council Bill 120320 would modify the proviso imposed by Council Budget Action SPD-3B1 to authorize the use of SPD salary savings to pay for moving expenses for new officer hires and to pay for the salary and benefits for an additional recruiter.

Specifically, it would release $50,000 of the salary savings identified to date, which is, Chair Herbold previously described, is estimated to be about $4.1 to $4.5 million.

Immediately, SPD would have authority to pay for moving expenses for lateral hires that are hired in at a certain pay band and to hire another recruiter, assuming they have an open pocket.

In addition, the bill requests that the Seattle Department of Human Resources works to amend the city's policies around moving expenses to provide greater flexibility to pay for moving expenses for new police hires and to extend those benefits to a broader range of positions when an appointing authority determines they're unable to recruit persons in the immediate employment area.

That intent language also asks the Human Resources Department to prioritize modifying that rule so that SPD could offer moving expenses to pay for moving expenses for new recruits.

But again, also to expand that more broadly looking at the needs of all of the departments across the city.

Currently, the criteria for moving expenses is really focused more on executive level positions, and likely is offered as a sort of a benefit to entice people to accept employment.

This would be looking at the rules to modify them with more of an equity lens to offer it to a broader range of positions, perhaps that come in at lower salaries, but moving expenses would help attract a broader range of candidates and help those candidates be able to relocate to the city.

And I'll leave it there for now.

Thank you so much, Ali.

Just a couple of additional comments before I open it up for discussion.

As I think we all know, during the work on the 2020 budget, the council requested a report from the executive on a citywide hiring incentive program and requesting that vacancy issues be analyzed.

among frontline workers, among departments that have service issues not being met because of vacancies, or analyzing issues that are analyzing how vacancies are inhibiting a department for fulfilling a core function.

The report indicates that there are a number of positions that departments struggle to fill, a number of positions important to city businesses.

including police officers, carpenters, truck drivers, civil engineers, and 911 dispatchers.

Consequently, as noted by Council Central staff, the bill requests the Department of Human Resources to amend its personnel rules to provide appointing authorities greater flexibility to pay for moving expenses for new hires, including police hires, because the current personnel rules limit this flexibility for some reason to only higher pay bans such as department directors and I think that is a vestige of a an old way of thinking and we recognize that we want to be we want our departments to be able to recruit great public servants to come work for our city and helping to pay for relocation costs.

helps us do that across different salary levels.

That is not a benefit that should be only available to department directors.

So, consequently, they request that the Department of Human Resources amend its personnel rules.

provide that greater flexibility.

The second part of the bill is to release the proviso on spending, I should say, not release the proviso, modify the proviso on spending for the police department.

The modification to allow for this funding is actually not needed for other departments because they can currently use funds from position vacancies once SDHR changes the rules allowing hiring authorities to pay relocation expenses of recruits.

In other departments, it is not the case for SPD with the current proviso.

So all the other departments in the city, if they wanted, once the rules change, they can use their existing salary savings created because of the recruitment issues that departments have in order to pay for relocation costs.

Only SPD can't do that because of the proviso.

Um, and so that's why the base legislation would release, um, $650,000 for SPD.

As, uh, as noted, the bill is complementary to the resolution the committee just considered and that the work, um, that the executive is proceeding with.

Um, regarding funding noted here again.

These are not new funds.

These are funds already in SPD's budget to support salaries associated with SPD's hiring plan to hire 125 officers of council funded in the 2022 budget, now modified to 98 hires.

Um, releasing the funds would work to assist with that now reduced hiring plan, which I think makes sense, again, given the earlier council action.

to fund the hiring plan.

Said differently, if you voted for sufficient funding to hire 125 officers in November last year, hopefully there would be equal support for some of that existing funding to meet a lesser version of the same goal.

So that's the thinking here.

Any council members have questions or comments on the council bill before discussing the proposed amendment?

So I'm offscape.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I do think I have a question for central staff, if possible.

So we are looking at departments, SPD and other departments, correct?

Yeah.

Okay, great.

And so the bill in front of us assumes that moving expenses for SPD related recruits would be taken from the salary savings, which as we know, is slightly larger than originally anticipated when we passed the budget last year.

Again, my argument is still that we still have huge needs at the end of this year that we'll need to account for for our upcoming biannual budget.

But I do want to ask a question about the other departments.

I understand from the discussion that we all had in the finance and housing committee meeting last week, that the city budget office is currently trying to do a much more thorough job of real-time budgeting, having accountability reports from the department.

So we know in real time if there's underspend.

However, we know what the underspend is currently at SPD.

Do we know what the universe of underspend dollars is for the other departments and how much this may cost in total?

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

We don't have that information currently available.

It is something we have been in ongoing discussions with CBO and they are working on that.

I think there are a couple of dynamics working here.

As a general strategy, we are looking at underspend to help mitigate the projected shortfall in 23 and perhaps beyond.

How that works in practice is somewhat complicated for the other departments where we're not able to track so in such fine detail, sort of the real-time salary savings.

There are a couple of things.

There are a number of specific spending proposals that were included in the adopted budget that are currently on hold pending sort of better news forecasted for 2023. So those are like not necessarily salary savings, but specific spending adopted in the 2022 budget that are currently on hold, and I think you or Chair Herbold mentioned a couple of them in the discussion on the resolution.

And then in addition, the Budget Office is looking for underspend across departments that might help mitigate that.

They're not currently restricted by Proviso, so the executive, the departments themselves alongside CBO and the mayor's office can decide to use some of those to offer moving expenses if they determine that it is a critical position without requiring authorization from the council.

My understanding is that moving expenses are offered on a pretty limited basis under current practice, but that's anecdotal.

I don't have actual data to support that, and so I don't think that it is a tool that most appointing authorities are using in a significant way that would, if they have significant salary savings in any one department, that it would really feed into that.

But I do think that other departments are being asked to hold back certain spending.

They're being asked to look at their vacancies and salary savings to help mitigate those problems.

And I'm not sure if the same expectation has been made of the Seattle Police Department.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Allie.

So I think I would like to get the bill before us.

We can continue discussion either on the base bill or move forward towards the amendment.

But in my interest in some forward momentum here, I'd like to move the committee recommend passage of council bill 120320. Is there a second?

Second.

much.

It's been moved and seconded to remove recommended passage of the bill.

Council Member Nelson, I understand you have proposed Amendment 1 to the Council Bill.

Would you like to move Amendment 1?

So moved.

And I will second the amendment.

and hand it over to you, Council Member Nelson, to speak to it or have central staff describe it.

Your choice.

I'll speak and then have central staff get into the specifics.

Before I speak about the bill at hand.

I do want to note to respond to something that Council Member Teresa Mosqueda said about that we'll have slightly lower salary savings in SPD's budget.

Going back to the legislative history, Council Budget Action SPD-008-A-001 would cut 2.7 million from SPD's budget that was in Mayor Durkin's budget on the assumption that SPD would only be able to hire 125 officers and incur 125 separations in 2022. When the at the beginning of this year, it was noted that probably weren't going to be able to reach 125 officers and the projected salary savings was more like 1.4 and that was back in 1.4 million and that was back in February.

Now we've got a projected $4.1 to $4.5 million in salary savings in SPD.

So that's a significant increase because SPD is not able, because they don't have the tools, I believe, they need to hire the officers that council funded.

that.

Anyway, um.

So when I, um I just I think that there's been a misunderstanding.

I did not say that there was a decrease in the amount in the proviso.

I was agreeing with the chair.

Madam chair that there was an increase in the amount of underspend anticipated.

So I'm not I'm sure just want to make sure I heard as well.

I'm sorry for not for not catching that

Yeah, and when I heard the word slight, and I thought that that 1.4 to 4.5 was more than slight.

Anyway.

So, just moving on.

When I saw Councilmember her bolts bill.

didn't really like it very much because I thought that $650,000 for relocation expenses and to hire a an SPD recruiter was not very much money and also relocation expenses.

precluded spending any incentives on people who already live in Seattle.

And after speaking with Director Hamdi, it is clear that there are a lot of people in Seattle, particularly in the immigrant community that would like a job in SPD.

But after a lot of discussion and the realization that compromise is the art of politics, I came together with Council Member Herbold and the mayor and have agreed to this friendly amendment.

And so I invite Ali now to go through the specifics.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

So amendment one to Council Bill 120320 sponsored by Council Member Nelson would increase the amount of salary savings SPD would be authorized to spend for the purposes described in the bill from 650,000 to 1.15 million.

and expand the use of those funds to include paying for a national search to permanently fill the chief of police position, and for a national ad campaign to help attract candidates for vacant police officers and so as Councilmember Nelson described the current estimate is about 4.1 to $4.5 million of salary savings currently estimated.

in SPD's 2022 budget.

This would increase the total amount they would be authorized to spend from about 15% of the total available funds identified to date to about a quarter.

So it would leave about three fourths of the funds available still restricted by the proviso and would require further authorization by the council to release additional funds.

Thank you, Ali.

And thank you, Council member Nelson.

Uh, their comments.

Council member Nelson.

Yeah, just to note that as we've heard from the mayor, this is not, um, this is just the first step that there will be other, um, strategies and potential items that can, uh, that will be put on the table at a later date.

But this is really important now because this is money that can be spent right now we might not be able to, who knows how much we'll be able to spend of the salary savings that's currently on the table.

And so I think that this is a good start to meeting immediate needs to put the tools in place that we can start actually recruiting the officers that we need.

The same thing I was thinking, introducing the bill.

Knowing that the executive was gonna be bringing us a proposal, what could we do now?

Thank you.

Any other comments or questions?

Allie, I see your hand up.

Is that an old hand or a new one?

It's a new hand, Council Member Herbold.

I just, I meant to offer sort of a little bit more detail on how we landed on the original $650,000 number, if it's helpful to the committee, but I'll go ahead and do so.

Okay.

I will say it is not knowing how many potential candidates might seek reimbursement for moving expenses.

There was some sort of rough estimates of what this funding could accomplish.

So we assumed about $100,000 for the new recruiter position.

That is likely an overestimate.

It will depend on at what point in the year that person would be hired and how much money is needed for their salary.

benefits, but assuming $100,000 for that purpose, that leaves $550,000.

That would allow the police department to offer the maximum moving expenses currently allowed, which is $25,000 to 22 officers or up to 36 officers if the average moving expense was $15,000.

And I'll just offer that because of the current personnel rules, They really could only offer these to lateral hires at this time, and SPD is currently projecting about 17 lateral hires in 2022. So this amount was identified as enough to offer moving expenses to a broad range of those lateral hires, likely leaving some left over if the personnel rules are changed.

And again, if it is a successful strategy, the council could reconsider releasing additional funds.

Thank you.

Appreciate that clarification, Ali.

Super helpful.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair.

I think I'll make my comments here, um, regarding the amendment and the underlying bill, and then we'll not comment later.

If that sounds okay, Madam Chair.

I know you're trying to get us out on time.

I do want to note just stepping back a Yeah, somehow Seattle's unique and I think Councilmember Lewis commented on how Seattle is not unique in the last committee meeting.

I believe, Madam Chair, you've noted as well the similar situations that we're facing across the country.

But since it was noted earlier that Seattle somehow an outlier, I do want to point us to the police executive research form that President Chuck Wexler noted, you've got a workforce that is being compressed on the front end, you've got a drop in people who want to be officers.

On the other end, you have a significant increase in people who are resigning and retiring.

We have a survey, we found that 44% increase in retirements and 18% increase in resignations across police departments.

In Atlanta, for example, there was a loss of about 400 to 500 officers over the last three years.

In Phoenix, their police department is down 13% of its allotment of officers.

Philly, the department is down 440 officers, or 7% of the total police officers budget for the city.

In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the department is down 96 officers, and that's actually 18% of its allotted force.

And in terms of the sort of data that backs us up from Reliant Hiring Solutions, a firm that works with law enforcement around the country to set up job fairs, it said it was difficult to find recruits across cities, according to CNN.

So this is not an isolated situation in Seattle.

And I appreciate that the good chair has been trying to find some solutions to address this.

I would also, proposed to our colleagues here, though, that there are multiple ways that we can address the decrease in officers.

And while we're not unique in experiencing officers retiring or leaving the force, we can respond uniquely and be on the front edge in terms of how we respond in alternative services.

Many of those services supported.

I do wanna applaud Madam Chair Herbold and Vice Chair of the Finance and Housing Committee because there is a both and approach here.

But shelter, mental health, food security, all of these things do generate better health and safety for our entire community.

So I'm suggesting that as part of our way to address public safety issues, we hold these conversations for later in the year to really make sure that we're having a conversation about where we would like any underspend to go in future budgets when we look at the universe of dollars available and the universe of needs at the end of this year.

According to the central staff memo that is in front of us on this legislation, central staff noted this may in fact future budget decisions before Council.

In addition, the salary savings are considered one time resource hiring an SPD recruiter, unless intended to be term limited is an ongoing expense, this would assume that in 2023, either.

a, the number of funded police officer positions would be reduced to offset the cost of paying for the recruiter or be additional general fund would be needed to maintain the number of funded police officer positions.

In the latter case, the impact would worsen the existing structural deficit of the city's general fund.

Given the national downturn, I am unsure and not interested in funding a recruiter position for a labor market that is declining.

And I don't think that this is the best use of funds when the city is currently facing this ongoing structural budget issue, where general fund expenditures are outpacing general fund revenues and the gap and how fast revenues are keeping up with inflated costs or services.

And I will note, as folks heard in our meeting, this predates me and the council members who are currently deliberating the upcoming budget with it.

We know this has been a structural issue for a number of years.

And thank goodness we had support for jumpstart, which helped us come back in the black in the last two years.

What I believe what we're saying with the bill in front of us and this resolution, excuse me, and this amendment is that we're already making a determination for how to use potential underspend and making decisions now that will impact 2023 and 24. budget cycles and essential services.

So I think the question in front of us is, do we have an opportunity to work with our city family including protect our coalition for city unions, as well, who are interested in training and development wage increases.

benefits, career advancements, and fairness and equity in the workplace.

All of those items is what they identified to us when we asked about what strategies they would like to see proposed.

They did not indicate that they would like to have funding that could be used for some of those services used to do hiring for a long-term position, possibly with short-term dollars.

Again, the Recruitment and Retention Workgroup final report noted that the importance of a multi-pronged strategy to really making sure that we're looking at recruitment and retention across departments, and I'd like for us to continue to keep that report in mind, think about those four recommendations to leverage technological solutions revised budget business practices, engage candidates to retain top talent and to extend offers in a more competitive timeframe, I would suggest that probably one of those more competitive strategies, it does include a moving incentive.

and I think it's an important component of a larger picture, but with the addition here that's being proposed, I still cannot support this bill, and especially if this amendment hangs, given the impact on the upcoming budget, and do commit to working with the good chair to identify ways to flush out or fill out the rest of those strategies across departments.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

So the figures that were provided for other cities and their loss do not approach the 28% loss in officers in service happening in Seattle.

I didn't hear 21, 22, or 28. So we, I believe, are unique in our situation here.

Um, and, uh, I am not privy to the conversations that council member mosquito is having with our representative organizations.

What I'm listening to is our constituents who are saying that they want better, um, public safety.

And so that is what I was I don't think that even if we were to authorize the full $4.5 million and it were spent in 2022, which is not really a possibility, that's a drop in the bucket of a $117 million projected budget gap in 2023. and there are other places to make necessary cuts to balance our budget.

I wouldn't call that right-sizing.

I would call that our job to budget for what we can afford.

But public safety is not the place to make those cuts.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

Looking for additional hands here before we call the vote on the amendment.

Council member Peterson.

I can make my comments up to the amendment.

I support the amendment.

Thank you so much.

Not seeing any additional comments on the amendment.

Please call the role on the

Council Member Peterson.

Yes.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Four in favor, one opposed.

Thank you.

The amendment is adopted.

Are there further comments on the bill as amended?

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Humboldt, and I just want to thank you as our chair and also customer Nelson for putting forward both of these legislative measures.

Mayor Bruce Harrell for his leadership to coordinate today's collaboration and compromise.

Mayor Harrell once again demonstrating his skill at unifying diverse viewpoints, finding common ground.

This was timely, healthy and necessary for our process for good governance in our diverse city.

This amended resolution and the amended council bill removing expenses and enhanced recruitment can serve as an acceptable first step A sturdy shovel to start to dig ourselves out of the severe staffing shortage hole and public safety created over the past two years.

The exit interviews of SPD officers revealed specific themes about perceived lack of support from City Hall.

And I'm hoping that some of the actions we're taking are served to rebalance that so that officers do feel more supported.

I believe we must also acknowledge that summer is coming.

Summer is coming.

It'll be here in just 40 days.

And we know that historically summer brings a spike in crime and gun violence on this spike coincides with the warmer months when hundreds of thousands of Seattle residents deserve to feel safe to enjoy all their city parks, such as Gasworks Park and Wallingford where the city hopes to host a large July for celebration.

Yes, we must reform the police union contract.

Yes, City Hall is overdue in launching alternative emergency responses to many lower risk 911 calls.

At the same time, the staffing shortage at SPD is so severe that we'll need more than a shovel to dig ourselves out.

We need a high speed elevator at this point.

We need it soon.

So I look forward to us all receiving from the mayor's office and SPD a bigger and bolder recruitment and retention plan with details ready to implement for achieving success to hire and keep our frontline public safety workers here in Seattle before the summer crime spike is upon us.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson.

Councilmember Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Similar to Councilor Peterson's remarks, I really appreciate the convening of the mayor's office and reconciling perceived differences between the resolution and the ordinance and harmonizing those proposals into the united proposal that we have today in front of us.

I think it's a really important symbol, not only for the police department, but also for the city as a whole to see a functioning, united and productive Seattle City Hall relative to the conflicts between the executive and legislative branches over the last two years, that as we've discussed in several respects today, has resulted in a public safety situation in the city that is at a very high level of acuity of crisis.

I appreciate this approach and look forward to Mayor Harrell transmitting additional steps in accordance with what we're requesting in the resolution.

and implementing the resources that the city, well, the city council is proposing to unlock via these proposals today.

Building off of some of council member Mesquita's comments, you know, I could continue on council member Mesquita and cite a lot of those same statistics about peer cities.

Even more recent statistics, New Orleans is losing 50 police officers or has lost 50 police officers in 2022 alone so far.

Dallas, you know, in Texas, perceived as being a more police-friendly jurisdiction, in the middle of 2021 had lost 144 officers and only replaced 77 new recruits.

San Diego, a more conservative jurisdiction in California, as of March 14th of this year, had been losing 20 officers per month so far throughout 2022. So this is a national crisis of police hiring and retention.

Part of what it puts front and center really is the previous conversation that this council was having about the need to develop, invest in and scale certain response alternatives to free up officers for jobs that only police officers can do.

And that has to remain one of our focuses as we proceed on a recruitment and retention strategy, and also look at how to do some retrenchment and how the city of Seattle manages its caseload and manages its work with the resources that are allowed to us.

The city that is going to be successful in the future in the United States is going to be the city that honestly confronts and takes on that work.

There is no way we are going to replace all of the officers that the city has lost within one year.

We have a hiring target of 98 officers, but we need to do everything in our power as these measures today are doing to meet that 98 officer hiring goal or potentially even exceed it.

But we also need to go forward with the realization that we're not going to replace all of the officers that the city has been losing within the next 24 months.

we still have things the community expects us to respond to that we need to.

The critical thing that we need to keep centered that I know has been a difficult contextual thing to discuss is that recruiting was challenging in the decade preceding our recent hiring shortfalls and challenges.

In the period post-consent decree, officer hiring has always been close to fairly attritional of in and out.

Although now, as we see, it's at an extremely high acuity of hiring one person for every four people we are losing.

But it does just have to, I think, be put front and center.

But even in times when we had relatively better one for one replacement recruiting, we still had large volumes of unmet response need in the community because we need to be developing some alternative methods of responding and mitigating these impacts on the community.

So I just wanted to re-echo that to commit to the shared yes and approach that Chair Kerbald and Mayor Harrell have been emphasizing that we need to be committed and determined and put in every effort and resource to enhance our police recruiting but it is also necessary, absolutely necessary, if we want to have an adequate first response, that we'd be developing and building up alternative ways to respond to and do certain functions that historically have been done exclusively by Seattle police officers.

So with that, I look forward to voting for this ordinance, appreciated the opportunity to vote for the amended resolution earlier, and look forward to supporting these measures at full council.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Nelson.

I first of all, I wanted to say that I appreciated your friendly amendment to my to my resolution back there.

I didn't I was not able to convey that.

I believe that that strengthened my legislation.

So basically, thank you very much for coming together with me to further this policy direction that we've got to do something about public safety.

To me, again, the details don't make as much difference as the fact that we are doing something right now to address this.

And we are also signaling to potential recruits to our existing officers that public safety is of importance, and also showing our constituents that we are responding to their concerns.

So I appreciate the opportunity to vote for this today, and I look forward to working with you and the executive going forward on whatever next steps may come.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

Council Member Mosqueda, additional comments?

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I said I would be brief, but I really appreciate the opportunity to piggyback on Councilmember Lewis's comments as well.

I really appreciate the ongoing effort that will happen after today for these alternative responses.

Much has been made about polling.

In the last few months, but I do want to direct us to the recent LA poll conducted by Crosscut where it said 92% of respondents said that they if they could direct where tax dollars went, they would spend those tax dollars on helping folks with addiction issues and mental health support and services.

I think that we have an opportunity going forward in our upcoming budget to do more of that and to really prioritize funding in that way.

So that is one of the reasons, as I noted, that I'll be putting no on the underlying bills here today.

But I do think that if this legislation goes forward, which I think it's poised to do, there's two follow up requests that I would have of the executive.

And I do want to thank as well, you know, for example, Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harreld and Mayor Held as well for Um, keeping much open door to how we address these issues together.

So one of the questions that I'd like to make sure that we address that this goes forward is the equity issue between departments, recognizing that SPD has the largest budget in our city's general fund and how smaller departments are going to be able to make comparable offers if moving.

offers are put forward.

So I'd love to see what we have in mind to assist with equity analysis between departments.

And then lastly, would also love a follow up from the executive or SPD as we think about recruitment.

Yes, that's important, but also retention and especially compliance with existing requirements for existing officers.

As noted in the Seattle Times article of the 86 officers who were involved in the May 2021 May Day protest, a number of those had mask violations, refused to wear a mask.

And then when Labor and Industries tried to come investigate not only the mass violations, but the concern among folks who had experienced officers not wearing masks and were met with retaliation or dismissiveness.

The labor and industries state safety inspectors reported that SPD officers quote refused to answer questions during the inspections and barred compliance and safety officers from accessing SPD files even after the inspections were approved by a lieutenant and the inspections were showed to the government showed their government identification.

The July report showed that officers claimed they had never heard of labor and industries or occupational safety division.

And the office of inspector general report cited incidents where officers routinely disobey direct orders from interim police chief Adrian Diaz to wear a mask and observe social distancing.

So as we think about the number of officers who are currently not available to be deployed, the number of officers who are on extended leave, I'm very interested in knowing what the executive strategy and the department strategy is to ensure compliance with health and safety regulations.

increase vaccination rates, but at the very least make sure that we are not just trying to look at who's coming in the door, but how we are maintaining requirements for existing officers to comply with health and safety, which will then yield more folks being available to be deployed to critical calls.

Those are the two follow-up questions I have if this moves forward, and Madam Chair, I appreciate the work you do, but I will be voting no today.

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

All good things to keep an eye on moving forward as SDH looks at changing the rule about relocation costs.

The foundation of our effort is about equity, so we should definitely track how our goals are implemented and whether or not they are really realized as making offers to recruited public servants, whether or not we're actually making them a more equitable policy and approach to doing so.

So thank you for that.

And thank you also for recognizing the shocking, I think, revelation of the lack of adherence and disregard for masking policies that were in place in the state of Washington for addressing prevention and, you know, another way of keeping the public safe, which is a core responsibility of police officers.

So the refusal to wear masks and the refusal to cooperate with investigations around mask wearing I found very shocking.

So thank you for for lifting that up to as a core element of the law enforcement mission.

Some closing remarks before we call for a vote on My, my bill here really want to thank my colleagues for noting the challenges that other cities have faced in sworn officer stand staffing.

The fact that it's a national issue around recruitment of police officers.

The fact that we actually.

And that is actually happening within the context of the great resignation, which touches all job sectors.

We need to figure out how to recruit smarter.

I also want to recognize that I wholeheartedly agree with the comments made by my colleagues.

that the staffing challenges at the police department not only means that we need to address our recruitment practices and be smarter about how we recruit people to serve the public, but that we need to develop alternatives to ensure that the officers that we do have are able to respond to the most pressing public safety threats that only they can respond to.

The commitment from the executive expressed earlier today to collaborate with the council on this work is a very welcome step and really appreciate the mayor's role in the development of these two pieces of legislation before us today.

For the bill, given the funding for the SPD hiring plan, it is in the 2022 budget already.

I believe it does make sense to take this step that can facilitate meeting the hiring plan, even though it's now only 98 officers.

I recognize that that is approximately a quarter of the value of the current value of the salary savings proviso and look forward to ongoing conversations about how to strategize around around those funds to address a variety of needs under the budget chair's direction.

The resolution adopted earlier helped set the stage for what will be forthcoming from the executive about staffing incentives, and I think still recognizes the council's authority in lifting or modifying a proviso.

The details are very important when we modify provisos because when we proviso funds, it's precisely because we have decided that we want to see how those dollars will be spent.

and so those details matter.

And with that, I appreciate the support of my colleagues on this vote and look forward to bringing this to full council.

And with that, will the clerk please call the roll on the passage of the bill as amended?

Council Member Mosqueda?

No.

Council Member Nelson?

Aye.

Council Member Peterson?

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Four in favor, one opposed.

Thank you so much.

The motion carries.

The committee recommends that the council bill pass as amended.

Both of these pieces of legislation, both this council bill and the resolution have a divided vote, so it will not be heard on the next council meeting, but it will be forwarded to the May 24th council meeting.

And with that, any other comments or questions from my colleagues for the good of the order?

Not seeing or hearing any.

Thank you so much.

The next Public Safety and Human Services Committee is scheduled for today, May 24th, 2022. The time is 1219 p.m.

We are adjourned.

Thank you.