Seattle City Council Public Safety and Human Services Committee January 28, 2020

I'm on.

Good morning, and welcome to the Tuesday, January 28, 2020, meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee.

It is 9.34 a.m.

I am the chair of the committee, Councilmember Lisa Herbold, and I am joined by Councilmembers Lewis, Peterson, and Morales.

I'm just going to quickly go over our agenda for today.

We're going to start with approval of the agenda.

We'll follow with public comment.

And then our items of business today will be we're going to hear from SPD Chief Best on a briefing on the recent downtown shootings and the police department's response and actions.

We will hear a number of Fire Code Advisory Board appointments.

Then we are going to hear a resolution related to the city's efforts to consider raising in the collective bargaining process a number of items that we have heard in a previous public hearing related to the 2021 contract renewal, specifically around police accountability.

And then we are going to finish up the morning with a report on the City Council's budget ads related to the Human Services Department.

This committee has oversight not only of public safety issues, but human services issues, excluding those related to homelessness investments, which my colleague Councilmember Lewis, who chairs the Select Committee on Homelessness, has oversight of.

So we're going to hear back.

a summary from central staff on the status of the implementation of those human services budget ads.

Since we have a number of people signed up to speak today, I just want to talk a little bit about how we're going to be handling public comment.

We have 30 people signed up to speak.

Because the chief's time is so dear, what we're going to do is we're going to hear from half of those 15 people, and then we're going to take a break.

And then we'll hear from the chief, and then we'll reopen public comment to hear from the rest of the speakers.

And so with that, if there are no objections, I would like to approve the agenda.

Seeing no objections, the agenda is approved.

And so now we'll move into public comment.

And again, we have, 30 people signed up at this point.

And so we'll take the first 20 minutes worth of speakers.

Because after that, after the first 20 minutes worth of speakers, we're going to have to take a procedural vote to extend the public comment period beyond 20 minutes.

And again, we'll do that after hearing from Chief Best.

And so with that, Alex will be your timekeeper.

He will let you know when you have a minute left to speak, and then he will let you know when your time is up.

You have two minutes to speak.

I will read names into the record two at a time, and I request that you take the mic two at a time so that we can ensure a smooth progression of folks to the mic and prompt timely public comment.

With that, I'm going to begin.

We will start with Jim Erickson followed by Patrick Foley.

I am Jim Erickson, a resident of Forks Hill.

I volunteer in the East and West Precinct Advisory Council.

Currently, the public is disappointed in the deteriorating crime conditions in the wider downtown area.

I think we should focus on continual improvement within Seattle going forward.

utilizing three metrics of success.

Crime stats for person crime and property crime on the police dashboard were temporarily suspended in May 2019. Let's activate those stats so that the public can measure year-over-year improvement in our neighborhoods.

The Seattle population is growing and we need to increase the SPD headcount.

If cops are leaving faster than we are recruiting, we need to try something new.

Let's organize organizational improvements in Seattle City Government based on best practices in other cities, such as Minneapolis.

For example, in Seattle, our city attorney is an elected position.

In Minneapolis, their mayor appoints their city attorney.

Thank you.

I'm there and Patrick fully from Lake Union we're a small Seattle development company and my partners and I are behind the state hotel project a second and Pike.

Just a historic preservation.

About 4 years there were people at the city with the current mayor time that asked us to take this project on because of the.

Street crime and situation at that corner in this dilapidated building that's been had been sitting there for many years and so We made the effort to make a significant investment at that corner.

Yes, it was a good project and a good investment, but at the same time, we have felt it was a civic duty to take this project on because my partners and I love this city.

And since we took this project on, it was a massive renovation.

It's a $40 million investment at the corner.

And since we opened last March, we've had significant crime around the building.

We have people run into the restaurant at Ben Paris throwing things, making a scene, coming into our lobby, going to the bathroom on the windows while our guests are sitting at the restaurant.

Our sales are down in the restaurant.

We have had staff that is chased out of the building.

We have had increased security by $200,000 a year beyond what we had in our budget.

we've got a lot of respect for her.

We've got a lot of respect for her.

We don't we rarely see police down there I the chief was nice enough to meet with me and I have a lot of respect for her, but I believe her hands are tied to some extent.

We asked for We're struggling there.

Our sales are down.

And I'm just asking that you reconsider whatever policy that you have in place for arresting people and then letting them out, because I think it's a failed experiment.

And I'm just asking for your help.

Thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Natalia Whitkey.

I'm a resident and business owner in Seattle.

I would like to begin by acknowledging this council for their efforts to uphold the rights of minorities and underprivileged persons within our community.

That being said, the desire to be politically correct versus community correct is destroying our neighborhoods and undermining the safety of those who live, work, and visit this city.

By letting convicted criminals back out on the streets to wreak more chaos and commit more crimes is violating our right to safety.

As a taxpayer and a citizen, safety is a basic human right which we expect to be upheld by our law enforcement, prosecutors, and legislators, I stand before you today to express that I do not feel safe in the city in which I live in.

Existing policies Existing policies are failing to protect our citizens.

As legislators, you answer to us, your constituents.

I am requesting that existing policies be evaluated to determine if they themselves are contributing to the social conditions of the city of Seattle, which are now violating my right to feel safe.

is Catherine Stanford.

My name is Nora Chan, the founding president of Seniors in Action Foundation in Chinatown.

The heart of our city should be safe and welcoming for all who live, work, or visit here.

Downtown is everyone's neighborhood.

3rd and Pine Street is one of the busiest corner of the city.

Current situation is unacceptable.

We must take bold action to ensure the center of our city is safe and welcoming for all.

We need leadership on the city council to protect our low income and marginalized communities.

Small business are particularly vulnerable and there has been lots of stealing and criminal activity on Third Avenue and Chinatown District.

Third Avenue is the center of public life in Seattle, home to arts and cultural institution, regional attractions, small businesses, retailers, civic space, local company, and the most used transit corridor in the region.

Chinatown has our own Wing Luke Museum, lots of restaurants with different kind of food to eat, and it is cheap too.

But for far too long, criminal activity has persisted along portions of this area, fed by a deeply rooted drug market that far too often led to violence.

This impacts visitors, workers, transit riders and the most vulnerable among us, those living on the street and in low-income housing.

Crimes against people are up more than 40% over the course of a two-year period in this area of downtown and Chinatown.

Public safety is my objective.

I raised $175,000 to put up camera, but lots of people against it.

Can you wrap up, please?

Because they worry about facial recognition.

So please help.

Seattle deserve to feel safe.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Narasan.

It's either Narasan or Karasan, I'm not quite sure.

Catherine?

Good morning, Councilmember and Chair of the Committee, Lisa Herbold, and Committee members.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

My name is Catherine Stanford, and I'm here representing the building owners and managers of Seattle-King County, but here speaking on behalf of many of those who have buildings and properties in downtown Seattle.

This has been a concern, the public safety issue of ours, for quite some time, and because it has been allowed to fester and continue, we believe that we're at the tipping point.

We are concerned about the safety of our tenants, about our staff, and about the people that service our buildings.

We're having more and more challenges actually getting folks to come and do the work in our buildings.

They don't feel safe.

Our tenants don't feel safe.

So we need to do something about that.

And I want to say that I have been working in downtown Seattle for over 30 years, first as director of real estate at Pike Place Market, and then with my business at 3rd and Stewart.

know what I'm talking about as far as like what I see on the streets on a daily basis and how our public safety has truly eroded in the downtown area.

I walk around all the time.

So we're asking that you come up with and fully support a strategic plan that is sustainable and that will continue.

This is going to take a while to undo all the damage that's been done.

So we're asking that the time is up to get this done.

Appreciate it.

Thanks.

Jeremy Oon.

Good morning.

My name is Mark Kerrison and I'm a downtown resident.

I have been for eight years.

I live over by the Central Library.

And last year there was a shooting at the library.

I believe it was a homicide.

Left a bullet hole in the window.

The library was quick enough to have that immediately repaired.

After the recent shootings, how long will it take us to repair our reputation as a city?

And at what price?

Those of us who live and work downtown, we pay the highest price.

in where we walk and where we choose to avoid to walk.

We have a responsibility as a society to deal with this dilemma, and we have a decreased confidence in every day with this madness in, first of all, our leaders, in our police department, And most importantly, in our civic responsibility as a city to solve this successfully.

Thank you for your time.

Jim Rowe.

My name's Jeremy Une.

I've been a driver for Metro for the last 18 years.

Many of our drivers know that Third Avenue is notorious for illegal activities.

We have buses that go through that area day and night.

Recently, we've received many words of thanks for the way our drivers and so many other members of our staff alongside Metro handled this frightening situation.

Transit control worked very hard to reroute buses out of the area and to keep people safe from the chaos.

We, the union, are proud of all the people that were out there driving, working in the tunnel, the transit control, and every other part of the transportation system.

The community is ours.

Everyone has the right to be safe.

The streets are owned by the citizens, and that makes the city thrive.

We should all be able to wait for a bus, walk to work, or just walk around the beautiful streets of downtown Seattle and not be afraid.

Well, it is our responsibility as employees of King County to protect those that visit the city It is also our responsibility to protect the transit operators.

We need to work together to solve this problem, not just talk about it.

People's lives are relying on it.

Good morning, Madam Chair and council members.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak this morning.

My name is Jim Rowe.

I live downtown on Second and Pike.

I have two adult daughters and a two-and-a-half-year-old grandson who occasionally like to spend time with me, and they'll come downtown to do so.

And that's becoming less and less of a treat for them, because when they come downtown, they've made it very clear that they don't feel safe.

I am also the owner and operator of three downtown restaurants, Metropolitan Grill, Elliot's Oyster House, and Heartwood Provisions.

And I talk to a lot of guests.

I talk to a lot of people.

And I constantly hear that people do not feel safe coming downtown.

And it's reflected in our business.

Our guest counts, our revenues are down.

More importantly, we employ about 400 people And when I sent out a message last night to cancel a meeting this morning so that I could be here, this is a note that I got from our human resources executive.

She said, for the long life of our company, we have trained our people to be welcoming and hospitable to our guests.

Now we are scheduling safety training and how to deescalate the threatening situations that come into our restaurants off the streets.

Very sad.

And that doesn't mention their need to come to work, leaving work.

They don't feel safe.

I love our city.

I love our reputation that the city has as a safe place.

That reputation and that reality is very much in jeopardy.

And there's a lot of factors we can attribute to that, but I would say much of it has to do with the choices that we make as a city and as city leaders.

My hope, if anything positive comes out of the horrific events of last week, it's that it serves as a wake-up call.

I believe it's Kristen Taton.

Unconstitutional police reform has caused societal implosion.

In 2012, the mayor, as a U.S. attorney, sabotaged the integrity and safety effectiveness of police reform by slipping a sentence in that said low-level drug pushers will be exempted from jail.

This resulted in prosecutors and cops refusing to go after and jail evil drug pushers, destroying lives daily.

Now we have racist police leadership getting rich off overtime, not fighting crime, while previous counsel squandered their privilege, allowing lobbying efforts of the Community Police Commission director, who was also the public defender, Lisa Delgard, to add crack, meth, and heroin, then give her millions under law enforcement assistant diversion with one caveat, guaranteeing illegal aliens pushing drugs will also be exempted from jail and deportation.

All while cops conduct a war on homeless, acting like a hero to the business community, blaming houseless for all the problems.

We have ill-trained cops, incapable of stopping drug pushers, which is directly related to all the violence.

We need to fire the police chief and prosecutors and the mayor and fix the unconstitutional police reform by taking that one sentence out of the unconstitutional police reform that exempts drug pushers from jail.

No sympathy for the devil imploding first world led by a treasonous government.

Kristen Fashion, is that correct?

And Christian will be followed by David Whitman.

Is there no Christian?

All right, we will hear from David Whitman then.

No David Whitman, okay.

Brian Thompson?

No on Brian Thompson.

Jim Miller?

Thank you.

And Jim Miller will be followed by Sabrina Villanueva and Howard Anderson.

Thank you for holding this hearing today.

I'm Jim Miller.

I'm the president of the Belltown Business Association, recently appointed to the Belltown United Board of Directors.

I serve on the Metropolitan Improvement District Board of Directors, and I'm also the executive director of the Millionaire Club Charity.

I've been working downtown for 10 years.

I moved downtown two years ago near Target to experience urban living, but not to experience where I must navigate my way around crime.

My experiences mirror many.

The problem has been known for many years.

Our political leaders change, our police chiefs change, but what hasn't changed is consistency of crime and lawlessness in the Pike Pine Corridor.

The individuals involved are known prolific offenders.

Releasing prolific offenders back on the street is not a solution, but a symptom of a broken system.

It is time to restore public trust and fix the broken system.

After we hear from Sabrina and Howard, we will take a pause to hear from the police chief.

Good morning.

My name is Sabrina Villanueva, and I am here on behalf of the hundreds of tenants in the buildings that I manage.

One is on 3rd and Stewart, and I hear daily from my tenants the crime they are dealing with, the harassment, the assaults.

Just last week, just to reinforce that this is not new, we have a small tea shop, and there was a young woman that was randomly assaulted, punched in their side, in her face.

We have it on video.

And they deal with this every single day.

It's getting worse.

It's not getting better.

And people are leaving Seattle.

We have data to show they are not renewing their leases.

Their clients and customers don't feel safe.

So they're not coming to patronize the businesses in downtown and the businesses are leaving It's a reality and the folks that I'm representing are small businesses.

I'm talking to three five people companies counselors chiropractors Piano makers, it's it's really the companies that make up the fabric of our city.

And so we really are asking you to address the prolific offenders.

You know, a lot of these people are repeat people that are committing crimes.

Please enforce the law and hold people accountable.

I've been a property owner, a business owner, longtime tenant going back into the 70s.

I've been on the Police Advisory Committee.

One of the points that one of the former speaker mentioned is about the police issue here and that is one that I think and recently comments nobody's really brought up the issue that we are understaffed and 25 years ago, we were under staff 50. Now, I think we're 200 or 300 for a city of this size.

And with the growth that we've had, we are not going to get a hold of our street again by just shifting more police downtown and then ignoring the rest of the city.

Please look at that issue.

The other thing is the mentally ill.

I've seen more and more people that are handicapped, they're on the street, and they're sitting there and they're not being attended to.

Our special needs have to be addressed at the problem.

The drug issue is huge, and we have a lot of other issues that follow from those two things, the mentally ill, inadequately covered, and the drug issue.

We need help in a way to really deal with that in a hard way.

Thank you very much.

that Chief Best join us at the table.

And before I hand it over, I just wanna do a little context setting as it relates specifically to the council's role in public safety issues as context setting that for this year's work plan that I think was initiated through last year's budget process.

I will be doing a deeper dive on my 2020 work plan at a later date, and I encourage your input and participation to that work plan.

But right now I'm just going to talk very briefly about the budget actions that this council took last year as it relates to public safety.

Public safety and criminal justice were at the center of the budget work the previous council did in the 2020 budget.

The council made a number of additions to the 2020 budget consistent with its authority over that budget, which includes approving spending and oversight.

So some of the actions will require or request reports, and that's one of the ways that we work with the executive to get outcomes on programs that we may have asked the executive to work on developing.

First, I just want to touch very quickly on the issue of staffing.

In my time on the city council, we have increased the size of the public safety budget by $100 million over a period of about four years.

A lot of those dollars has been devoted to increasing the size of the police department.

Because of difficulties that we have had in meeting our hiring goals and also reducing or addressing retention and reducing separations, a lot of that money has been spent on overtime.

So we're still getting the increased, some of the increased hours on the street, but we're not getting as many of the new officers as we would like to see.

There has been strong consensus throughout the city over the last several years that we do need to grow the size of our police department.

So some of the budget actions that the council requested in November for this year, will be to get a implementation plan and recommendations on the Community Service Officer Program and ongoing reports on its implementation.

The Community Service Officer Program is a council initiative.

Two years ago, the council identified funding in the budget in order to reestablish this very popular program that allows, among many other things, allows police officers, sworn officers, to spend more time on proactive policing.

We also are going to be receiving ongoing reports from the police department on meeting our staffing goals as it relates to our plan to add 200 officers.

And that will, those staffing reports will include not only the goals related to new hiring, but also our goals related to retention.

The council in the budget process approved funding recommended by the mayor and the police department for recruitment and retention, a recruitment and retention plan and assistance deriving from the recommendations included in the final report of the police department's recruitment and retention work group, great work that was done last year.

Other focuses that this council really drilled down on last year relate to both the high jail user interventions that are going to be necessary to address what some people refer to as prolific offenders.

There have been a number of recommendations to the council and to the mayor from the municipal court for how to address some of those issues.

So we are going to be receiving a report On how to implement a high barrier probation program, we're asking that the city auditor review the municipal court's probation program.

Well, you guys are talking about how we are dealing with high utilizers, people who are cycling in and out of jail, and I'm letting you know the work that's being done to make changes.

We're also going to be looking at an analysis from the mayor's office for an implementation plan for what's called case conferencing for, again, for higher barrier individuals, including metrics of success.

Lastly, there are a number of diversion programs that the council invested in, $3.5 million in ongoing LEAD, funds for LEAD, $500,000 for youth diversion, and then another $1.3 million for another set of youth diversion programs.

And then, finally, we are requesting that law report on expanding pre-filing diversion opportunities for those over the age of 25. Lastly, I just want to share with the folks at this table, as well as the viewing public and the audience, an update from the city attorney's office.

And this is in regards to the suspects involved with Wednesday's shooting.

Two of the suspects involved had no criminal cases referred to the city attorney's office, so the high utilization are cases that have been sent to the King County Prosecutor's Office.

The City of Seattle deals with misdemeanors, and so two of the suspects had zero cases referred to the City Attorney's Office.

The third suspect had three domestic violence property destruction cases referred in 2015, and they had no victim participation so they were not pursued.

There was one theft case where the city attorney pled, charged the suspect, and the individual pled guilty.

This is the entirety of cases referred and handled by the city attorney's office involving these three suspects.

Their previous incidents were referred to other jurisdictions, including the King County Prosecutor's Office.

And with that, I'd like to hand it over to Chief Best.

Is this on?

There we go.

Can you hear me now?

If the green light is on, yours should be on.

You just have to get right up on it.

Okay.

There you go.

I'll try to get very close so people can hear.

First, let me just start off by saying good morning to everyone.

Thank you, Chairman Herbold and the council members for inviting me here today to talk with you at the Public Safety and Human Services Committee about how the Seattle Police Department is working together to make substantive changes to the conditions in the Pike Pine Corridor.

Let me start by saying, first and foremost, that what happened last week at 3rd and Pine was completely unacceptable.

I know each of us is thinking about those who were hurt, and we just cannot allow that kind of violence in the city, and we have to do more.

and that's why I'm here today to discuss this.

I want to tell all of the folks that I heard from their public comments, we hear you, we hear your concerns, and they're very valid, and we're gonna take every effort to make sure that we keep this city safe.

Nora Chan, in particular, when you said, the heart of our city should be safe and welcoming for all, I could not agree with you more.

I just want you to know that you're being heard, and these issues are very, very important to us, both personally and professionally.

Before I get into the presentation, I want to take a moment to again thank all of the first responders, but particularly the officers of the Seattle Police Department for their work that day at 3rd and Pine and the work that they do every single day.

We are asking more of them than ever before and they need to know that they are being supported and that we support them.

And the last, but finally on this issue, is just thank the media for continuing to provide the photos of those wanted fugitives who we're looking for who were involved in the shooting at 3rd and Pine.

I'm gonna start with a few data slides, and then I'll turn it over to Dr. Chris Fisher, and then I'll come back to you with more information.

But first, I just wanna talk about, as I've said multiple times, statistics don't matter to a person who's been the victim of a crime.

We know that.

But we do need to use statistics to invite the important context and guidance about where we need to focus our efforts and what we need to do.

It just can't be a guessing game.

We have to have some statistics to validate what we're doing.

Across the city in 2019, we saw a 3% decrease in violent crime, a 5% decrease in property crime, and an overall 5% decrease in major crime.

I've heard the statements before,

I need silence, please.

Please allow me to finish.

Please allow me to finish.

I'll take my turn and then you can take yours.

I've heard the statements before that of course crime is down, people have stopped reporting.

But we know...

I would request that there no longer be any disruption of the Chief's presentation.

One thing that we know is that in every year across the country and certainly across this place as well, the city, that some crimes do go unreported.

We know that.

But we also know that certain crimes, murder, burglary, and motor vehicle theft, do have high levels of reporting.

If you walk outside and your car is stolen, you report it.

If someone breaks into your home and starts stealing your property and rifling through your personal items, it gets reported.

If someone is murdered in the street, it gets reported.

We know that that is actually scientifically or research-based to be true.

And consistently, we saw a decrease in those categories in 2019. In the West Precinct specifically, we had an increase of 3% of reported violent crime.

Most of that attributed to aggravated assaults and rapes.

The West Precinct covers essentially Pioneer Square, the north end of Soto, Queen Anne, and downtown.

In the downtown core, the smallest reporting area that we can look at that includes the Pike Pine Corridor, we saw a 5% decrease in reported violent crime.

The numbers at this level are very small, but 2019 was down.

compared to most other major crime categories.

I'm going to turn this over to one of my esteemed colleagues and members of my team, Dr. Chris Fisher.

He's going to take us through a few more of the data points.

Then I'll conclude with what we are doing to address the current issues in the current state and downtown Seattle.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chief, and I will be brief.

I know people want to focus more on the plans, but as the Chief pointed out, we do just want to give the context.

So this is our CSTAT dashboard.

We do our biweekly CSTAT meeting where we go through this with all of our commanders and focus on where we see crime trends.

These slides, once any confidential information has been redacted, are posted on our website.

I do want to address the comment earlier about the public dashboard.

We have been working on it.

We changed our records management system this year, and we've had some issues of making sure in the middle of a year that everything stays consistent from one system to the next.

That's why we do post the CSTAT slides publicly, but our plan is to get that up very shortly.

The data team has been working nonstop to get that up.

But just overall, the West Precinct, it was a mix.

We saw some major crimes going down, robbery, burglary, theft, and some increases, rape, sexual assault, aggravated assault, and motor vehicle theft.

If you look at the line chart on the bottom, the dark blue line is 2018 month by month.

The light gray line was 2019 month by month.

Most of the months for the West Precinct overall were below 2018, September, October, and November were above, but generally the West Precinct as a whole was a general positive story in terms of where the major crime categories were going, particularly the decrease in property crime and decreases in robbery and homicide.

Focusing specifically on the downtown commercial micro-community policing plan that includes the Pike Pine Corridor, what we see is that there were decreases in robbery, theft, and motor vehicle theft.

Again, as the chief mentioned, overall, compared to a precinct or the city, these numbers are relatively small, so percentage changes are large, but we did see five additional reported rapes and sexual assaults, eight additional aggravated assaults, and 18 more burglaries.

Moving to gun violence, this is shots fired.

We track shots fired in three different ways.

Criminal discharge of a weapon, which is proven by eyewitness or evidence, be it shell casings or property damage.

That's the dark blue on this graph.

The light gray is non-fatal shootings where someone was hit by a bullet.

And the dark gray on the end, those are fatal shootings where someone was killed because of a gunfire.

And these are incidents, not the number of people hit.

But what we do see is that in West Precinct, shots fired in 2019 overall was down with nine fewer shots fired.

two additional non-fatal shootings, and the same number two of fatal shootings comparing 2019 to 2018. And you can see, we started collecting these data back in 2012. Every week, a detective goes through every incident that may involve a shots fired and reviews them.

That's how we compile this data.

There's no charge for shots fired.

And so you can see, going back to 2012, the general trend for shots fired in the West Precinct.

Dr. Fisher, is shots fired still dependent on somebody making a complaint?

Generally, yes.

If officers saw a vehicle or home that had gun holes in it, it's very likely they would note that and it could become a shots fired incident or property damage from a proactive deployment of officers.

If they just find shell casings and no one's reported anything, it's sort of hard for them to know that's a new shell casing, someone didn't drop it, it's not something that got missed if there was a prior one in that area.

So for just random shots fired with no hard evidence other than casings, it's probably not.

But if an eyewitness called and said, I saw someone shooting, even if we can't find evidence, that would get counted.

I mention this because I am concerned that the shots fired stats might also replicate some of the other things that we've heard about property crimes, a reduction in complaints rather than a reduction in shots fired.

I know in my district in District 1, both in South Delridge and in South Park.

People's experience of shots fired increases, but the reporting doesn't always reflect the level of increases that people are experiencing on a day-to-day, because people just don't call them in anymore.

Yes, in cities across the country, especially those who have tried the acoustic gunshot locator systems, they generally find anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of shots fired or reported, depending on the city.

A lot of that's cultural and the volume of shots fired.

But that is what sort of the research out there shows about the reporting of shots fired.

And then for the downtown commercial core again on shots fired, generally the numbers are fairly consistent and small-ish for year-to-year.

We don't have a lot of variation year-to-year.

Most years are 11. We have a few years where we hit 14 for a total, but not a whole lot of variability in the shots fired reporting.

You do see some difference in the distribution of whether it's just shots fired or someone hit.

In 2019, there were six shots fired, four non-fatal, shootings and one fatal shooting.

And that is the whole of the, to provide some context for the discussion, and I'll now turn it back to Chief Best to go over what the plans are.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Dr. Fisher.

If you would like to speak in public comment after the presentation, you can do that, and you can sign up over there.

Okay, I'm going to continue with my presentation.

So you've heard some of the details of the past few days, and I want to summarize where we are right now.

We all know that we cannot change the entire area overnight, nor can we resolve the complex issues that come together to lead to gang violence.

mental health crisis, addiction, and affordability.

But starting over the weekend, we're really focusing our efforts and we've launched some new things to work on it.

The first thing is, you know, the mobile precinct, we're putting it as a base location within the downtown corridor, Pike Pine in particular.

You will find it either in the 1500 block of 3rd Avenue or at Westlake.

And we're also providing high visibility foot beats and bike beats in the immediate area.

And that includes bringing detectives in, you know, on their regular duty time to put on a uniform and be visible and present in the area.

And we've also committed our command staff, myself included, to be in the area at least three hours a week uniformed so that we have a full visible presence in the downtown core.

And we want to make sure that we use that increased visibility to make people feel safer in the area.

We're rotating non-9-1-1 responders to augment West Precinct resources, which means the people that we're pulling in from other areas are from our anti-crime team or for our community police team who rotate in periodically in uniform to help augment resources in our downtown core.

And we additionally are making sure that as people come out of the academy, not going into details about our staffing issues, I think we all know we have them, but as they're coming out of the academy, we're going to deploy more of those resources to the West Precinct to make sure that we get their staffing up to their augmented level.

So that should help in some of the downtown deployments.

We're also focusing the work of our community service officers.

They have three primary prongs.

It's youth intervention, as well as community engagement, but also system navigators to assist us in reaching out to people who have a whole host of issues that we can refer them to systems to assist them.

And we are going to deploy those resources with a particular focus in our downtown core.

And additionally, when our mental health providers come on board, we'll ask them to pay special attention to our downtown area as well.

The expansion of the Seattle Fire Department's HealthONE resource, having that additional resource as available to us to help make referrals, we think will also be of benefit to the downtown core.

And then we're working with private building security to identify problems that they're seeing as well and have a communication with them with the officers that we have in the area.

The increased visibility from the Westlake area is intended to prevent criminal behavior through discouraging it in the first place and being right there if someone is committing a crime in front of an officer so that we can have an immediate and quick response.

As we noted before, extra resources in the area are not new.

excuse me, but a lot of the time those resources have not been uniformed and they've not been visible officers.

In fact, the day that we had that mass attack in downtown, we were doing a by bus in the area trying to take a drug dealer into custody.

So we have a lot of resources that we're deploying that aren't always as visible as our high visibility presence.

You won't see uniforms and sirens, but we are working on these prolific dealers in the downtown core.

The success of this effort won't be in the number of arrests.

Of course, if we see significant persistent criminal behavior, we will arrest people, and we do arrest people, and we are going to continue to work with our prosecutors to appropriately hold those individuals accountable.

Again, if someone needs services and they're not victimizing others, it's also an opportunity for us to divert them into resources that they need through our community service officers or through mental health providers that will be in the area.

When it comes to investigations and intervention, it is important to think about that there are three very real types of challenges that we're facing in this area, and really the whole city and in some cases the entire country.

But it's the combination of behavioral health needs people living unsheltered and outside.

You know, the narcotics trade that people are so worried about.

Additionally, the gang and gun violence.

Each of these areas brings with it unique issues that make people feel unsafe and actually make people unsafe.

And they each need a specific type of response.

And right now we're working to arrest more people involved in the recent spate of shootings that we've had.

We've made several great arrests which have been shared via the media and are close to making many more.

Getting these dangerous individuals off the street immediately makes everyone safer.

The City and the Seattle Police Department are also working with trusted community organizations to develop additional youth and gang violence intervention efforts in addition to all of the recently released requests for proposals that you've seen from our human services department.

And the mayor has pulled together teams from both the prosecutor's office and others to implement protocols to focus on the most significantly violent and criminal actors.

When it comes to the physical environment, we're working on a host of issues there.

We need to do this.

We know it's been done before, but as somebody mentioned in public comment, it needs to be sustainable.

We need to have a way to make sure that we're keeping these efforts focused and long-term.

And we'll be working with our partners to address those conditions that research has shown can contribute to environmental facts that attract and support criminal behavior.

First, when it comes to the physical environment and activation, we have a coordinated effort around 3rd Avenue and Pike and Pine for improvements.

We've done crime prevention through environmental design reviews.

We want to activate the spaces down there, use property and storefronts so that people see a visible presence, not only of police officers and community service officers, but other city personnel that can assist us in this.

As well, we're working with King County Metro and Sound Transit related to issues around the bus stops and the tunnel entrances that have been identified.

We're working additionally with groups of business leaders, many of whom are here today that we've talked to.

and we're engaging them as stakeholders in the outcomes.

We're working through the Office of Economic Development and the Department of Neighborhoods, and we're meeting with them routinely.

I think someone mentioned I'd already been down in the area talking to some of the business owners to try to come up with solutions to affect the problems that they are...

that they are seeing.

You know, I'm going to close by saying that I confirm that this cannot be a flash in the pan response.

We're using resources that will not draw off of 911 responders that are in other areas of the city.

We have to use this approach to get us through the near term and we're assessing other options that can allow an effort like this to be maintained well into the future when the issues have been fully addressed.

Again, sustainability is key here and making sure that we can have long-term results so we're not sitting at this table again in the future talking about the same issues that we've been talking about for decades in this city.

We'll do as much of this work with our regular time resources as we can, but there will be some overtime expenditures as well.

We can't do everything with on-duty resources, but we're trying to do as much as we can with them.

bringing detectives out into the field to assist us with augmentation and high visibility support.

We're also going to be supporting our investigative work, and it will require some overtime spending, but we want to make sure that we're also addressing the narcotics issues that we know are occurring downtown and working with, again, all of our city partners and other stakeholders to make sure that we have accountability in this area.

Thank you, Chief Best.

I want to ask particularly the Council Member who represents District 7 and downtown whether or not he had any comments or questions for the Chief before she left?

Yes, thank you so much madam chair Just a couple things and first chief best I want to say how greatly appreciated I am for your leadership over the last week as someone who represents district 7 as someone personally who has a PO box in the post office at 3rd and Union who walks that corridor on a near daily basis and who could have personally been in that corridor on any given weekday at 5 p.m.

You know I feel this very acutely and I share the frustration of my neighbors and the business owners in that corridor and I do I just want to start by recognizing the work that our first responders did I really appreciate that police were able to be on the scene within 15 seconds.

The life-saving measures that those officers applied to the victims of this tragedy undoubtedly prevented further loss of life.

The quick work of the police in identifying three suspects and quickly remanding one of them into custody.

And I just can't say enough about the professionalism and the great work not only the police department but the fire department EMTs, nurses, actually the metro drivers, the union who testified earlier, thank you as well for the work that our metro drivers did in quickly rerouting and cooperating with the investigation.

So I just wanted to preface my questions with that gratitude.

And it's been good to get information and briefings over the course of the last week from you and the department.

Everyone's been very professional and the coordination with my office has been very close.

The first thing I want to ask generally is if this presentation, I noticed it wasn't kind of loaded into our presentation materials that Chris if you could maybe send that to my office I'd like to send an update to my district with some of this information to let folks know especially the immediate next steps that the department is taking in the corridor.

One other area that I wanted to flag that has stood out for me, and I think it's an area where my office would like to work with the department on some possible strategies or resources, is that at least two of these suspects, maybe all three of these suspects, had active warrants at the time that they were on the corner at 3rd and Pine.

I know that there's an active Department of Corrections team that operates out of the West Precinct to go and find and remand folks who are on a Department of Corrections warrant I'm back into custody and I've met with folks on that team.

I wonder if there's a way that we can enhance the partnership between that team and the department even further to be more efficient and effective at finding folks in the Pike Pine corridor that are on active warrants, particularly for violent felonies, where a superior court judge has ordered that they be remanded back because they want to compel their attendance for a hearing or for a trial or for whatever pending action in court that they are on warrant status for.

I think that, you know, given, you know, my experience in knowing it, you know, warrants are typically issued with all the particular information, the photograph, that that could be an area of cooperation that could get folks that pose a potential harm in the corridor back into the Superior Court quickly.

And I just wondered if you could speak to that a little bit, potentially here, and ways we might work together on something like that.

Well, certainly thank you for that.

We have a neighborhood team that goes out every day and they have made arrests for hundreds of people in the downtown corridor who have warrants.

I'd look forward to working with you in any way we can enhance that team, enhance those efforts to make sure that we're getting that information.

But they do do a lot of work in the area already.

They are absolutely outstanding in the work that they're doing, but we obviously are open to increasing that effort in any way that we can.

I look forward to working with you on it.

Thank you.

And I don't want to stop folks from asking questions that they may have, but I also want to be respectful of Chief Bestime.

She came with a very short notice request on my behalf, and I know she has another pressing appointment.

I think we have like 10 more minutes before we have to head out to something else.

Thank you.

Councilmember Peterson.

Thank you, Chief Best, for being here today.

And thanks, everybody in the audience, for coming.

I share your frustration.

And one of the things I didn't see in the presentation, I'm glad Chair Herbold said we'll be talking about it in the future, but the issue of police staffing.

In talking to residents throughout my district over the last year, one of the key themes is that we need more police officers.

And I agree with that.

And in looking back at the statistics, Back in 2014, when I was a legislative aide, we had about 1,355 officers.

And now, five years later, we just have 58 more officers.

So that's only 11 new officers each year.

So I'm just concerned about that.

And I know there was a report done by Berkshire in 2016 calling for 175 more officers.

I just want to say I want to be supportive of how to help retain your officers.

We talked about what a great job they did in this tragedy, and so we want more of them.

And we want to make sure they're not, you know, when there is a crisis, that out the other neighborhoods are still fully staffed, because everybody deserves to feel safe no matter where they are in our city.

So I just want to be supportive of that, and please reach out to my office if you need anything.

Thank you very much for that support.

You know, staffing is one of our most critical issues.

The mayor's office put together a team, an innovation team to help us work on not only hiring and recruiting, but retention as well of officers.

We are on an upward trend, but we definitely could use more staffing.

And that's one of the critical things that we're working on right now.

We ended the year with 16 more than we started the year with.

We've added an additional academy class so that we can get people in.

We do immediate hiring now, so the minute that we have people hired, we're bringing them on.

Council and the mayor's office approved for us to have a lateral bonus incentive as well as a new recruit incentive for people who come on to the organization.

So we're working on a whole lot of fronts in every single area.

Again, just making sure that we support the officers and that they know that we support them fully is going to be an important cog to this as well.

But there's nothing more important than the hiring, recruiting, and retention of men and women.

on the Seattle Police Department and I appreciate your support and future engagements to help us in that effort.

And again, in another couple weeks, we are going to be asking SPDBAC to give us a report on the 2019 goals versus what was achieved.

And we have slightly exceeded our goals, if I recall correctly.

And if you want a copy of that report, you do not have to wait for my committee meeting in another couple weeks.

Feel free to email my office at lisa.herbold at seattle.gov.

I'd be happy to send you that report.

In addition, I would love to share with you, Councilmember Peterson and anybody else who's interested, the recommendations coming out of the hiring, the recruitment and retention report.

And these are recommendations that SPD is working on implementing this year, along with the bonus program that you mentioned.

Thank you for mentioning that.

I forgot to do so.

And one other additional thing that I meant to mention, excuse me, was we also are working on our wellness issues.

We've had a recent presentation for officer wellness.

I think that none of you are not aware that nationally there has been a trend in officer suicides.

And we want to make sure that we are working to make sure that officers are healthy and well in their current environment.

And so that's another initiative that will be coming on board as well.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you for being here today and sharing your information.

As many of the folks stated, this is a longstanding issue.

Downtown, these particular intersections have had issues for decades.

And as you mentioned, there are very many intersecting issues that are causing these challenges.

So you mentioned behavioral health, narcotics, homelessness, gang violence.

And while we know that each of these may require specific responses to deal with the folks, depending on what their particular issue are, I wonder if you could talk about the dozens of initiatives that we have.

We have a youth violence prevention initiative.

We have the LEAD program.

We have many different work groups throughout the city through different city departments.

And it seems to me that if we were more strategic about thinking about what our outcomes are and did a better job of coordinating some of these, that we might be able to move the ball forward in making some real real changes in the kinds of interactions that are happening on the street.

So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about some of those initiatives and if there is a way that we could start to coordinate those better.

I know at the state level right now, they're talking about a new coordinated body for firearm safety, for example, to really start collecting data in a way that is targeted and strategic and helps us start to think about what interventions we need.

But as you mentioned, there are lots of other challenges too.

So I'll just leave that open for you.

Well, thank you, Council Member.

And I couldn't agree with you more.

There are challenges and we do need to have a coordinated effort and response to all of them.

There's no one size fits all answer to some of the things that we're seeing in the streets and some of the behavioral crisis issues in particular.

One of the things that we are planning to do when our community service officers come on board is in their role as system navigators, is to make sure that they're not working in a silo, so that they're working with HealthONE, they're working with our service providers, they're working with all of the providers that the Human Service Department has brought on as well.

And additionally, with some of the private sector businesses are bringing in social workers to work in their businesses too.

So none of this can be done in a vacuum.

It's going to take a coordinated effort.

I couldn't agree more.

If we're sharing information and sharing referrals, that is only going to make the downtown core, or any place in the city for that matter, better and safer for everyone, including the people who we are engaging, who really could use those services to help them.

Thank you.

I have one more note that Dr. Fisher reminded me.

We also, and I didn't want to be remiss and forget this, we also have been convening a work group with public health with Patty Hayes, a whole lot of services providers there.

We really are focused on intervention and prevention issues for both behavioral health and youth violence.

So I think that, again, coming together and looking at these things holistically and not in silos is going to help us down the line.

Thank you so much.

Again, I appreciate the time that you are giving this committee today and members of the public, again on short notice.

And my warm thanks and gratitude for the first responders, both in your department and the fire department.

I really appreciate that they put themselves on the line every day and appreciate their partnership with this council in moving forward our shared goals of safer communities.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

Thank you all for having me.

So now we are going to return to public comment, but I will still need to make a motion to amend the agenda to extend the public comment beyond 20 minutes, if that's okay with folks.

I also move.

Second.

All right, none opposed.

The motion passes and the agenda is amended.

We'll have Jennifer A.

followed by Carl Haglund.

And again, if folks could take the mic two at a time or at least line up, that'd be great.

Oh, and I'm sorry, I did want to make one extra clarification.

Because of the other items that we have on our agenda, I would ask that you try to keep your remarks to one minute for the second stage of public comment.

Just do your best.

I'm not going to be real strict.

All right, thanks.

For years, business owners and citizens who live, work and shop in downtown Seattle have been pleading with city officials to put an end to the lawlessness occurring.

Each time we hear you're working on it, you're drafting a robust response and that this behavior is unacceptable and won't be allowed, that is until the next time it happens.

Enough lip service.

Stop talking.

Start acting.

Let's talk about repeat offenders.

You all, let's talk about repeat offenders.

You all have developed the protocol.

You've legalized narcotics.

A person caught with seven grams or under of heroin is no longer a lawbreaker.

Prostitution is legal.

Littering is legal.

Defecating in public is legal.

Drinking in public is legal.

And it appears by all accounts, you've made drive-by shootings legal.

Or maybe you're just renaming crimes so we don't look so bad.

A drive-by shooting is now called an illegal discharge of a firearm.

When there is no consequences.

For crime, it will lead to constant lawlessness.

Seattle City Council, King County Council, all must mandate that law and order be restored.

The solutions?

No more diversion programs.

They clearly are not working.

We need mental health and substance abuse treatment, please.

Instead of utilizing the extra space at the King County Jail for the homeless, it should have been left a jail with true wraparound services.

Can't you all see the suffering associated with lawlessness?

This is not compassion.

And lastly, since they seem to be in hiding, I'm calling out Pete Holmes and Dan Satterberg, city and county attorneys.

They need to speak to the public and soon.

They must prosecute lawbreakers to the fullest.

State and federal laws must be followed.

The more rapid they move to do this, the more they will restore the trust of the people.

And please, please, Lisa, Get ready to negotiate the 2021 SPOG contract and be fair and honest in your negotiations.

We have outstanding officers who serve and protect us daily.

They deserve respect.

Thank you.

One more thing.

And in closing, I used to tell my kids nothing good happens after midnight in downtown Seattle.

Now it's day or night.

Good morning, guys.

I'm a little nervous here.

I don't typically speak in public.

But my share is going to be really different than what I originally thought it was going to be.

I thought it was going to be about my tenant getting hit in the face or a guy practicing shooting my tenants coming out of a building or the woman with the 9mm Beretta last week that threatened my construction team.

but I'm gonna speak about the tragedy of those three shooters.

These people that are hopelessly trapped in their addictions.

Somebody's arrested 50 times, and you kept letting them go.

25 times, and they let them go.

The third shooter, admonished by four Superior Court judges because he kept carrying a gun.

These people are trapped in their addictions.

And the conversation we need to have is not about the 1%.

Myself, who's developing 600 units of housing, has a large in-house construction remodeling team, who's been creating good workforce housing now for, I know, since 1992. That's the conversation about the 1%.

It needs to be about the 1% of the 1%, the 100 people that are trapped on our streets, and we're playing catch-and-release as though it's a bass-fishing contest.

That needs to stop, and we need to help these people.

I'm Lou Bond.

I'm the manager of the Melbourne Tower.

I've been there for 33 years.

We're right at third and pike.

We represent also 30 some small businesses and the Walgreens is our corner.

How many more must die?

How many more must be hurt?

It's terrible.

What I didn't notice in some of the stats were stabbings.

You know, the number of people around us that are threatened by knives.

We had somebody across the street right in front of the Thai restaurant on Pike Street who was murdered, stabbed.

That didn't show up.

That was the day before.

Enough is enough.

Here's the problem.

We don't say no to bad behavior.

Okay, we have to as a culture, as a community say no to bad behavior.

People that are addicted to drugs, we need to take them off the streets.

This is a failed experiment trying to deal with drug addiction on the streets, mental illness on the streets.

It's not your all fault.

It's all of our faults.

We have to stand together.

We have to put resources together to say we're taking drug addiction off the street.

We're putting them in a treatment center.

We all have to get behind this.

Mental illness, we have to get them off the street.

We can't not, I appreciate that, we cannot allow, no, no, we cannot allow these to continue to persist on our streets.

It's not okay for people to sleep in our alleys.

Thank you, Mr. Vaughn.

Yeah, thank you.

It's not okay.

We've got to do something now.

I appreciate it.

It's not okay.

Followed by Rebecca, Let's see, Ancetalo, perhaps?

Go ahead, Amy.

Greetings.

My name is Amy Darling.

I work in the downtown core in the medical dental building.

I'm a health care provider.

And I just want to acknowledge the amount of fear and frustration that I hear in this room.

And I feel that, actually, on everybody's part.

And the thing that's remarkable is that when we are tuned in to the fight or flight mechanism of the fear and frustration in our hearts, it severs our capacity to be empathic.

And so there's a huge divide between all of us because we can't hear each other.

And so my encouragement is that we actually try to feel our feet on the ground and hear each other, allow the person in front of the microphone to speak.

I was in my clinic when the shooting happened on Wednesday, and I walk down Third and Pine every single day I'm in clinic.

There is a very predominantly white demographic in this room right now, and we are accustomed to feeling safe and secure.

And that is a privilege, unfortunately, not held by all people in this city and this country.

And my concern actually arriving in this room today is to really encourage the city council, as you enter into negotiations regarding the SPOG contract, The concerns I hear expressed today are about impunity, about impunity for people harming other people and not being held accountable.

And as you bring your eyes to the SPOG contract negotiations, my desire is not that the circumstances and the tragedies of this week be utilized to use a heavy hammer and a rubber stamp in the SPOG contract negotiations, but instead, like with spellcheck, and like the antiquated before our devices did it all for us, to bring your eyes to impunity in the contracts.

It's not going to have it highlighted in bold.

It's going to be limited and embedded in all parts of the contract.

And please, value all lives, our black and brown brothers and sisters, that they receive care and respect in the same way that everybody else in this room desires.

Thank you.

Thank you.

whose name is Rebecca, and I think it's Ansatalo?

Is there any Rebecca here?

Let's try that.

I'm Rebecca.

I'm Ali Gambari, but I have to go run my business, so I just take Rebecca's position, because I have to go.

I've been sitting here for long.

I'm sorry.

I have to call the next person on the list.

I know, but let me finish.

Let me make it easy, because I have to go.

I have to run my business.

First and foremost, I want to say thank you for all you do.

What is your name, please?

My name is Ali Ghanbari and I own Cherry Street Coffee House.

So you're not signed up at all?

I am.

You are?

You just have to look a little harder.

I'm there.

First, I want to give my love and respect for all of you that you try to do the right thing for the city.

I give my love and respect to police and fire.

But I think I should give my love and respect and gratitude for all of you that make community be community, rather than just keep clapping for police and fire and our city official, because I've been doing this community thing for the last 30 years.

So I'm not here just for four years or eight years.

I've been here for 30 years.

So I think people should appreciate us and give us the respect that we deserve.

I think one thing I want to do maybe sounds pretty naive.

I think the sense of urgency is the most important element today.

because we heard this before.

One thing we need to learn from Chinese, that they're going to build a hospital in 10 days.

And we need to start thinking like that.

Instead of putting more officers, that they're going to get mentally ill people back to the jail that we cannot do anything about, we need to build the institution that takes care of the mentally ill people and drug users.

I think that's the kind of stuff we need to do.

So please elevate the sense of urgency, because that's what we need.

Thank you.

We've got Gene Dorsett next signed up.

Is there a Gene Dorsett in the room?

Gene Dorsett.

All right, then we'll move on to Howard Gale.

Hi.

Can people hear?

So I'm here to talk about item seven, which is the upcoming spa contract.

And I'm going to make this really brief.

Right now, what happens in the contract negotiations is a complete black box.

And the only way to pierce that black box and really understand how we lose accountability is to have someone on the negotiating committee.

And I'm a little horrified that what's being talked about today, the resolution is simply a recapitulation of what's already Seattle Municipal Code.

When we only have, you guys only have two meetings before contract negotiations begin.

So there's a real sense of urgency.

I'll leave it there.

I actually did email everyone on the committee this note, and I hope it is taken into consideration.

Finally, I just want to say this.

I understand people's concerns here.

I'm also looking around here.

I go to lobby days for mental health.

We are number 50 in providing for mental health in the country, in this state.

Okay?

The question is, I don't recognize any faces here.

What we're witnessing in the mayhem and the chaos downtown is the outcome.

So we can't be angry at an outcome when we have not been paying attention.

Okay?

Unless you're taking care of people.

So I hope to see everyone here, if you really care about this, if you only want to jail people, I don't want to see you.

If you want to really figure out how to help people, then come to Lobbying Day for NAMI in February.

This is Paul Guglielmati, followed by Greg Smith.

My name is Pauly G, and today I'm here to talk about the upcoming contract negotiations between the police union SPOG and the city of Seattle.

The union contract is public enemy number one in regards to unconstitutional policing.

The reason a Seattle police officer can punch an unarmed, handcuffed, and helpless woman in the face and still not get fired, that's because of the union contract.

But how do we get here?

The negotiations are held in secret and the process is deliberately wrapped in confusion.

There is something called the Labor Relations Policy Committee.

However, the LRPC is not a vehicle for police reform, but instead is actually used to undermine reform.

Councilmember Morales, your membership on the LRPC is deeply concerning to me because what you don't know will be used against you.

Simply put, if a councilmember is on the LRPC, they can't later vote no on the police union contract.

The community only needs three councilmembers.

to reject a proposed contract.

However, the five LRPC council members must vote yes on the proposed contract or the city may face a lawsuit for negotiating in bad faith.

Thank you.

So the opponents of police reform, the defenders of racist policing, many of the people shouting lock them up in this audience.

They want people like Councilmember Morales on the LRPC in order to ensure that your voice and the voice of community is silenced.

In other words, it's a trap.

So I ask you leave the LRPC immediately.

Finally, there should be a CPC technical advisor at the table representing community at all times during the negotiations.

The city must do better on this police union contract, and it's time community had a voice.

Dennis Johnson.

Hi, I'm Greg Smith.

I'm a downtown resident.

I'm a real estate developer downtown.

I'm a partner in many small businesses and the arts.

I've worked in downtown for over 40 years.

My experience is that it's never been worse than it is today from a safety perspective.

I believe the vast majority of all Seattleites desire a community and city that feels safe.

I don't care who you are, that's what you want.

We do not have that.

As an example, the current jail that we have today that was once over capacity is at 25% full.

Growing up, there's a TV show that I used to watch, and the theme song was Don't Do the Crime if You Can't Do the Time, sung by Sammy Davis Jr.

Seattle's theme song today would be, do the crime, because you won't pay the time.

Based on my past experience with the city government, I don't think much will change until the public mandates it.

I'm hoping I'm wrong, but with that in mind, what we need, and I'm focusing on, is a citizen's initiative to address public safety.

I believe that it can be passed by the voting public and force the prosecutor, the city council, and the mayor's office to be forced to deal with specific rules to address this problem.

Thank you.

Johnson?

Jonas Johnson.

Great.

Jonas Johnson will be followed by Frank Katz.

Hi, my name is Jonas Johnson.

I'm a local real estate owner and developer.

I'm a third generation Seattleite.

And my family has owned property at First and Pike and Westlake Park for over 30 years.

I think the current way that we're handling the drug epidemic and mental illness is inhumane and unacceptable.

At our building in Westlake, we have had continuous break-ins.

We have had drug issues and often people entering the building unarmed.

Because of this, the police have been unable to resolve the situation.

We have had to hire 24-hour security at the building.

Business owners want to be part of this solution, but it's not a burden that we can bear alone, and we need to be able to take strong action.

I grew up half my life in Sweden, a place that is often wrongly understood as a model of leniency.

They are tough on drugs and tough on violence.

They have a different approach, though.

They have an approach of helping the sick versus putting people behind bars.

Kindness and compassion need to be attacked.

We need to attack the drug epidemic at its core.

We need to empower the police to do arrests, but we also need to have mandatory rehabilitation.

We need to take aggressive action.

I'm having my first child in one month, and I don't want her to grow up in a city where we turn a blind eye to human suffering.

This is not the values I stand for, and this is not what I want to teach my family.

Thank you for your time.

Byron Madsen.

Byron Madsen will follow Frank Katz.

Thank you very much for having this hearing.

I appreciate an opportunity to speak.

I just have a couple of thoughts.

I've lived in a lot of cities, I've lived in a lot of downtown cores, and I've run a lot of big businesses.

And when I look at the problems, I live at Second and Pike and work in Westlake, so I go through this and I'm not going to repeat everything everybody else has said.

And I do want to acknowledge specifically that we do need to deal with issues like homelessness and mental health.

These are all critical issues that we have to deal with.

But what I've learned in my experience is that sometimes you just have to focus on something.

You know, I'm sure you've heard all the stories, how to eat an elephant one bite at a time.

Third and Pine is a very special area.

And frankly, we as a community have created this problem.

You know, we've taken and we've got these stores full of luxury goods.

We've got very easy transportation.

We have very little police presence.

We have difficulty enforcing the laws.

We shouldn't be surprised.

that drug sales are taking place on every corner, that people are urinating and defecating all over the street, that people are peeing on the restaurant windows at the places nearby.

It's a very special place and it needs special attention.

And maybe if we can focus on one place, and maybe four or five places, one in each district, but we can't just be focused on the big issues, we also have to start building and having some successes.

One thing, second thing I want to say is I think we have to think very hard about some of the choices that we've made.

We have to balance things.

We have to decide whether we want to spend our money on new streetcars or on new facilities to treat people with mental health issues.

We have to decide whether we want to protect everybody by keeping everybody out of jail or by allowing for the fact that some people will commit crimes 30 and 40 times.

I encourage you to think about those two things, and obviously, I appreciate what the Council has done.

I hope there's some way that we can get some leadership to build unity across all these important areas that participate in this, because it's not any one person's problem.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Brian Madsen.

So one comment I just want to make at least preliminarily, Lisa, goes to your comment when you talked about the fact that many of the people that were involved in the shooting of last week, it seemed that the city wasn't aware of them because of the misdemeanors that they occurred, but yet they were arrested multiple times.

Of course, I'm left asking myself, how in the world could it possibly be that the Sheriff's Department is not communicating with the Seattle Police Department so that you know that you need to communicate and join your forces I kind of felt like, frankly, you were trying to defray the responsibility.

To me, it just puts the responsibility more squarely upon the city as to what is broken and trying to make sure that the city of Seattle streets are safe.

So I'm going to kind of go back maybe from some of the more recent speakers and just talk a little bit more, I suppose, on the people that I see every day, because I feel like not all of us seem to be walking the same streets that I do.

because my Wednesday morning started off the same way as it has the last five years.

I walk from the transit center, I walk underneath the Yesler overpass, it's the same tents, it's the same ones I have to walk into Fourth Avenue and risk my life getting hit by traffic to avoid them.

I look at needles on the ground, it happens and it's been happening.

As each of you know, I've sent emails to this council probably for five years and finally got a response from Andrew, Lisa, and one other person this last week, and I've constantly tried to bring attention to the fact that nothing is changing.

I could take all of Carmen Best's presentation and boil it down to one thing, and that is allow the police officers to do their job.

More specifically, I think that the policies need to be put more in place from the standpoint of, I have friends who are police officers.

I've known the SWAT commander.

I hear too many times that they will not arrest somebody because they face so many responsibilities and internal investigations that was brought about by Durkin's DOJ thing that occurred a number of years ago when she was a US attorney that binds them down in red tape, the inability to be effective in their jobs, All they need to do, all they need to do is be effective in their jobs and be allowed to perform their duties.

That's it.

That's all that needs to happen.

And everything that I see on the streets will just simply disappear.

I ask myself, why can't I go to Bellevue and not see the same thing?

It's simply because they're allowed to do their job.

Thank you.

Hi, Gene Burrus.

Thanks for having this meeting.

I'm a downtown resident.

I live a block away from Thurden Pine where this shooting has occurred.

and I've lived there for about a decade now.

I was here, I appreciate the sentiment behind the statements that we can't allow this to be the new normal, but to tell you the truth, for those of us that live there, that rang as terribly out of touch with what's been going on because it is the normal of what we've experienced for a good long time.

I was here three years ago before this very committee after an almost identical event occurred at the identical spot, a multi-victim shooting.

at rush hour at 3rd and Pine.

And we heard a lot of the same, you know, sentiments for action and to do something.

And three years later, the budget priorities do not reflect that anyone actually took those concerns seriously.

What we need to do is actually make some hard choices about how we allocate the budget in this city and prioritize the things that need to be prioritized and public safety has to be number one.

All the other priorities suffer as a result of us not addressing that.

Affordable housing, who do you think lives above that McDonald's and who do you think lives within a number of those blocks?

Lots of people in low or no income housing that also deserve to be safe and deserve to be taken have the very temptations of crime and drugs that probably got them into that situation in the first place eliminated from them so they actually have a chance.

You want to talk about transit and climate change?

It's criminal to make someone wait for a bus on 3rd Avenue.

That's insane.

No one's going to do it.

And as businesses leave, tax revenues will plummet and all of our priorities will go by the wayside.

We need to make budgets that reflect that priority and take care of that first.

Gretchen Taylor will be followed by Cindy Pierce.

I'm Gretchen Taylor with the Neighborhood Safety Alliance.

Our downtown core is in freefall.

We are witnessing a crisis, a crisis in public safety, a crisis for the businesses downtown, a crisis for many of us in our confidence in our elected leaders to take back our streets.

Band-Aid fixes, quick fixes, aren't going to cut it anymore.

Quick fixes to, quote, try to stem the crime, the violence, the gang activity and the drug use are simply designed to make the designer, the creator of that quick fix feel good and to give business owners and residents hope that someone in charge has a solution.

We are losing hope.

We're losing hope for the future of our city.

We're losing hope that our elected officials will regain common sense and enforce the laws that will stop the violence to keep us safe and to regain the rule of law on our streets.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We'll be followed by Miguel de Aguiar.

Cindy Pierce.

All right, Andrew, Alex, Tammy, you're new, you've got fresh ideas, we're gonna expect a lot out of you.

We have come here for six years and nothing has happened, it's gotten worse.

And I'm gonna rely on the three of you to make it happen.

We can do it.

We can make this city safer.

And the first thing I want you to think about is this LEAD program.

The LEAD program that has not, we don't have any data.

I mean, I'm looking at your memo to the mayor, and you don't have any data to back up LEAD.

And that's all I want to say.

I just want to say, careful with that LEAD program, and I'm going to rely on the three of you to make it work.

Thanks.

Miguel Villagil will be followed by Eric Salinger.

Hearing you talk sounds like you got everything under control, and I don't know how you believe in this fantasy world.

I think based on the results, this commission should be dissolved and you guys should just quit.

This is everything we heard tonight.

I don't want to today, I don't want to repeat all this.

but you seem to keep doing the same things over and over and expecting something different.

Those of us who remember New York City in the 80s, it wasn't clean or fixed or those problems solved by people like you who are afraid to take risks and by our city government.

You have to make unpopular decisions.

You have to really try new things.

And that's not happening here.

It's just I see people doing PowerPoints and congratulating one another on a job well done.

And I think it's time to wake up.

We are tired of the same thing over and over.

And I don't want to live in a city surrounded by filth and criminals and drug addicts and all these people need help.

the help is not really being lenient to keep attracting more and more criminals from everywhere else.

Eric Salinger will be followed by Mark Stern.

Hi, so my name is Eric Salinger, and I've never really come to a thing like this before.

I live downtown, and I work downtown, and I'm really upset by what's going on downtown.

But the thing is that for me, the buck kind of stops at the city attorney's office.

Now, where I live, I talk to people, and everybody kind of laughs about, oh, the Seattle Police Department doesn't do anything.

I was at a coffee shop the other weekend, and there was a guy talking.

about how he basically chased down somebody who stole a woman's purse and got the purse back.

And I said, did you report it to the police?

And the barista coffee shop laughed, and she said, they're not going to do anything.

And that's kind of the attitude that I hear.

I listen to transit security joke about how the Seattle Police Department doesn't do anything.

But I read the news, and what's in the news is that the city attorney's office gives a teacher who punches a student 32 hours of community service.

What's in the news is the Seattle City Attorney's Office waits 200 and something days to prosecute a woman for rape, but I-976 passes, and bam, before the ink is dry on the vote tally, we have a lawsuit.

So the Seattle Times reports that they have more money, they have more staff, and they prosecute less people.

I think it's Como Reports, a pet shop that I go to, the owner gets beat up by a homeless person and the cops tell them that because the person's homeless, the city attorney won't prosecute.

So it's hard for me to feel like I can support our police officers because they're not doing their job.

But when I look at where the buck is pointing here, it all gets passed back to the city attorney's office.

So I think we just need to hold them accountable for this stuff.

And that's really all I have to say.

So thank you.

Do we have Mark Stern here?

If there's no Mark Stern, I'm going to move to the final speaker who we have signed up.

And it's Don Blakely.

We have one more after move.

Hi, I'm Don Blakeney.

I'm with the Downtown Seattle Association, and I want to come in first and foremost to express our condolences for the family and friends and the co-workers of the innocent lives of those who were affected by last week's shootings.

I also want to thank the police department and the fire department for their heroic response.

It saved lives, and it's an example of how to do this kind of complicated work in an urban setting.

The heart of our city should feel safe and welcoming for all who work and live or visit downtown.

Third Avenue is the center of our public life for downtown and it also brings downtown people from all over our city and from each of your council districts every day on the bus and it carries about 52,000 people a day and it needs to feel safe.

For too long the criminal activity on Third Avenue has persisted and it is a long-standing drug market that is fed by this activity.

Crimes against people, as we heard today, are continuing to rise in the West Precinct, and this has got to stop.

We've got to come together as a city and use all of the tools that we have, whether it's LEAD, or whether it's drug court, or a mobile precinct, or case conferencing, or more cops.

It's time to take Third Avenue back, and it's time to fix our criminal justice system that seems to be failing us and causing this, so this doesn't happen again.

There is one more speaker.

We've got Marguerite Richard.

Good day, everyone.

Yeah, enough is enough.

And I just want to say that I'm thoroughly heartbroken because I'm from here.

I was born and raised here.

And whenever I see somebody that is like myself doing something wrong, I'm saying shooting somebody and killing somebody.

And then the ones that have guns officially that we say that they're supposed to serve and protect, they shoot and kill folk too and get away with it.

And I have gone through so much hell and degradation just speaking out.

The Community Police Commission does not have the chief sitting there.

So who you talking to, a wall?

A wall of people that built another wall and then after they got through with that wall, they built another wall, huh?

And the Constitution talks about we the people will form a more perfect union because we live in an imperfect society.

You're always going to have the ill out there, huh?

And so that's what I'm concerned about.

You come down here and they abuse you too.

So good luck with this one, okay?

Good luck.

Thank you, Ms. Richard.

I want to thank folks for coming down and talking to us today and encourage you to join us in the future.

And we are willing to join you in partnership on addressing these issues.

If you could read Alex items number 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 into the record together, please.

Item two, appointment 01533, reappointment of Tara Harkinson as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for term to August 31, 2021. Item number three, appointment 01534, reappointment of Fritz Chess as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for term to May 31, 2022. Appointment, or item number four, appointment 01535, reappointment of Curt Howell Lusting as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for term to December 31, 2022. Item number five, appointment 01536, reappointment of Brad Middleton as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for term to May 31, 2022. And item number six, appointment 01537, reappointment of Hugo Soledo as member of Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board for term to May 31, 2022.

Thank you so much, Alex.

If we could do a quick round of introductions and then maybe just a few words on the Fire Code Advisory Board and what it does.

Hi, I'm Ken Brulat.

I'm the Technical Code Program Manager for the Seattle Fire Department.

Tim Munish, our Fire Marshal, was unable to attend.

He's an Olympian today, so I brought our Assistant Fire Marshal, Chief Deputy Derek Williamson, with us today.

So I'm here to talk about our five reappointees to our Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board.

They do a vital role in the city of Seattle.

They help we've been working tirelessly the last six months going over the different chapters in the fire code and we're continuing about every two Dr. Tara Hendrickson, she's a chemical engineer and she fills that role on our on our board.

She's been vital in some of the new technologies that have been out there including hydrogen and without her expertise we'd be missing out on some of the vital provisions that are in the fire code.

So would you like me to do one at a time or you want to go at

You can go through and talk about them all.

And just for my co-committee members, since these folks are all reappointments, we don't require them to come and join us in committee.

If they were new appointments, we'd want them to come and introduce themselves.

But given that they've served well, well enough to be reappointed, we defer to that recommendation.

And we appreciate that.

And with that is that it's a 15-member advisory board.

And right now, we have 12 of the 15 members So we have three vacancies right now.

One's in the insurance industry and two are public positions.

So if, as council members, if you have anybody that you're looking that wants to fill a vital role with the City of Seattle on advisory board, please have them contact me and we'll put their application through.

So I really appreciate that.

On that, before you move on, the roster suggests that all of the appointments have the mayor as the appointing authority.

It doesn't appear that there are particular seats that are permitted for the council to be the appointed authority.

So what I hear you saying is you have vacancies and all comers and you would consider putting them forward as a mayoral appointee.

Absolutely.

What we do is we take the applications and we look at them and then we make suggestions to the mayor and ask the mayor to, you know, please appoint those positions.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

All right, we'll move on to Fritz Chess.

Time to turn it on.

First, Chet, the R&D leader for Eden Labs.

He's been a vital part to the Seattle Fire Code Advisory Board based on his expertise in marijuana extraction.

We have what we call an administrative rule that helps us implement and enforce the Seattle Fire Code.

There's a new chapter in the Seattle Fire Code this year with with extraction equipment, and he's part of the review process for that.

So with his expertise, it's helping us digest that and get that to move forward.

So again, Chris Chess is another person we'd definitely like to be reappointed.

Kurt Howell.

Kurt Howell-Lutzig.

Biotechnical, he fills our labs research representative.

There's also a new chapter in the fire code, which I'll talk about that is effective, Hugo, our last member, which deals with higher education laboratories.

And again, Kurt's background in labs is another great addition to us to help represent that industry when we have new chapters in the fire code that represent that industry, he's able to speak on their behalf.

Brad Middleton.

So Brad's position is with BOMA, with Building Owners and Managers Association.

He's their representative.

He actually works for Urban Renaissance Group.

Brad's been at several different meetings that I've been at besides the Fire Code Advisory Board, other BOMA meetings that we've gone to together to talk about the Seattle Fire Prevention Office.

Brad is there to represent, again, the building ownership managers.

Anytime there's something that might be a requirement that's a hard fast in the Seattle Fire Code, Brad will say, well, is there a chance that we can maybe just make it a may instead of a shall?

And we'll work through those and find out different things that could make things more palatable to the building ownership manager.

So Brad does an excellent job representing the BOMA group.

And I think Hugo.

Hugo worked for the University of Washington.

He's stepped up and is one of our vice chair persons right now.

And he also has a certification as a fire inspector.

So that's something that I'm happy that he went through and got.

He's also a certified fire investigator also.

So he fills the role of our major institutions.

And with that is that new chapter I was talking about with higher education laboratories.

And we're able to use his connections through UW to take an entire fire code chapter that the state had looked at and decided not to make any significant changes.

And then they reviewed it, their group also, and then brought it back to us with any changes that they suggested.

So we worked together with them.

And without Hugo's support, we would be missing that connection with UW.

So we're respectfully asking for all of these reappointments to be reaffirmed and we can continue on with their good work.

Great, thank you.

And when do we expect recommendations for fire code changes?

How often does that happen?

You'll be seeing it.

The 2018 International Fire Code has been reviewed by the state of Washington and it goes into effect in July 1 of this year.

So the council will be seeing work probably in the next 90 days.

Good to know.

And maybe we'll have some of the Fire Code Board members come and participate in the presentation.

Absolutely.

We'll have Jim Fair, our chairperson, who will definitely be there, but we'll invite all of them.

And so I think it's really, I just want to underscore that this entity has requirements for specific issue area expertise.

And so these five folks that are before us today, one fills the requirement for a chemical engineer, the other one fulfills the requirement for somebody with experience in manufacturing.

One fulfills the requirement for experience in research labs.

One represents BOMA.

And one is representing Seattle's major institutions.

And so I think that that framework not only allows for relevant expertise to be represented on the advisory board, but it also allows for sort of a feedback loop for those individuals who represent larger organizations.

So, appreciate the thought that's going into this.

Appreciate, please let us, let the reappointments know that we appreciate their ongoing work.

Any questions?

No?

Okay.

With that, I will move appointment 01533, appointment 01534, appointment 01535, appointment 01536, and appointment 01537. Thank you.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

None opposed, none abstaining.

These five appointments will move on to full council on Monday.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right, Alex can you read item number seven into the record please?

Item seven, resolution 31930, a resolution affirming the city's good faith intent to consider raising the collective bargaining process for the Seattle Police Officers Guild, SPOG, 2021 contract renewal police accountability proposals that have been identified by the public and the city's police oversight agencies.

Great, thank you.

Thank you all for joining us.

If we could do a quick round of introductions and then we'll turn it back over to Greg.

Thank you.

Greg Doss, Council of Central Staff.

Andrew Meyerberg, OPA Director.

Amy Tsai, Deputy Inspector General.

Jesse Franz, Communication Advisor for the CPC.

Reverend Walden, Co-Chair of the CPC.

Thank you all for being here with us today.

Before Greg shares with the council at this table today, as well as the viewing public, the contents of this resolution, just a quick bit of background.

The previous Public Safety Chair now Council President Gonzalez presided over a public hearing towards the end of last year.

That public hearing is required by the Municipal Code to hear from members of the public their recommendations for consideration in negotiations in the SPOG contract.

That public hearing has to happen 90 days prior to the beginning of contract negotiations.

We heard from members of the public as well as from our, we heard also feedback and comment from the three legs of our public accountability stool, the Office of Professional Accountability, the Office of the Inspector General, and the Community Policing Commission.

And this resolution is intended to identify some of the things that we heard.

We've passed resolutions after the public hearing.

in past years.

We have not done so every time, but we have done so in past years.

And as the chair of this committee, I think it's a really useful exercise to sort of socialize the council and the public on what the top important issues are prior to us going into negotiations.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

You did a great job summarizing.

I don't have a lot to add, but I'll read the appropriate measures in the resolution so that they're on the record.

Several whereas statements, several pages of whereas statements.

I'm just going to hit the high points.

One of them indicates that the City Council recognizes the sacrifices and contribution of the Police Guild members.

strives to ensure that the city achieves its public safety goals while being strong partners in ongoing efforts to implement lasting reforms and accountability structures.

The whereas statements note that the City Council recognizes the right of the guild and all public employees to collectively bargain for wages hours and working conditions in the for all of their members.

They indicate that the collective bargaining agreement between the City of Seattle and SPOG will expire on December 15th.

31st of 2020 and that parties will begin negotiating that contract in March of this year.

They cite SMC subsection 4.04.120F which as you mentioned requires the council's labor policy and public safety committees to hold a hearing on the effectiveness of the city's police accountability system and that meeting has to be 90 days before the bargaining begins with the guild.

They indicate that such a hearing was held on December 5th, as you mentioned, and there was input received from the accountability partners, the Office of Police Accountability, Community Police Commission, and Office of Inspector General for Public Safety, all of whom are seated here with me, as well as 32 citizens that provided personal testimony or represented nonprofit groups, labor groups, or just have a stake in community police accountability.

And finally, the WERA statements note that the City Council passed at the same time as the last SPOG agreement, Resolution 31855, which requested that the City Attorney's Office petition the court in the consent decree case to review certain contract terms, some of which were articulated in the hearing on December 5th.

The operative section of the resolution simply states, the City of Seattle will consider in good faith whether and how to carry forward these interests through various means, including but not limited to the enactment of appropriate legislation, development of collective bargaining goals and objectives, and facilitating community police dialogue.

To the extent that Washington law requires any changes to be bargained with employee representatives, the city will seek to discharge such obligations in good faith.

As you requested, the folks here to my left have also provided written input that supports their statements on December 5th, and those letters are ready to be attached to this resolution at the end of this hearing.

Thank you And so we do have some potential amendments before we move on to that.

I want to give the representatives of the OPA OIG and the CPC an opportunity to speak to their priorities that are contained in this resolution So, thank you very much for having us today and thank you for having us at the December 5th hearing Obviously, this is more than anything that OPA does this is the contract that impacts us the most I would say Probably 90% of our investigations involve officers and sergeants who are part of the SPOG union.

We, in advance of the December 5th hearing, both the OIG and OPA identified and the CPC identified what our priorities were for the contract.

Of course, we couldn't give everything.

I mean, it's a long contract.

I think the section that governs investigations 3.6 is, you know, 20 pages or so.

So there's a lot there.

But we generally, I think OPA's thoughts fall into three categories.

First, they concern the 180-day deadline.

I think everyone's familiar with that.

The 180-day deadline governs when OPA has to complete its investigation in order to sustain findings or to impose discipline.

Under the SPMA contract, The city negotiated a very simplified 180-day deadline.

It was when OPA knew or should have known of misconduct.

The SPA contract is much more complicated.

So one of the things we're asking is that the city consider simplifying that to make it easier to follow both for OPA, the community, and for officers themselves.

We also talked about tolling the deadline.

So, right now, it does not toll, for example, when a criminal case is being investigated.

So, for example, OPA receives a criminal allegation.

If it occurs in the city of Seattle, we have to send it back to the Seattle Police Department.

If we do so, the timeline doesn't stop running.

So, functionally, we stop doing our work, but the clock keeps ticking.

So, for example, if the case is not done for four months, we get it back with only two months left in our deadline our timelines.

You know, I'll just go through in big steps, but also, you know, we had thoughts about arbitration.

So I think we recognize that arbitration is an option that virtually every other labor, or I think every other labor union has in the city of Seattle.

But I think there's ways in which arbitration could be improved.

So for example, were the city to bargain, no more de novo review of the chief's decision.

So right now an arbitrator, when they review what the chief decided, kind of look at the record from step one, can recreate the record as opposed to basing it on what the chief was presented with.

So that's something that we think could be negotiated and could be discussed.

One thing that OPA feels pretty strongly about, and it's not necessarily disciplinary related, but is mandatory transfers.

We referenced this in our letter that we submitted.

Right now, there is not really a system of mandatory transfers.

So, for example, you work in patrol, and then if you're lucky enough to apply to a follow-up unit or specialty unit, you do that, and you can get in.

It's very difficult to move out of a specialty unit once you're in.

So, there's officers that are ending up in patrol for 15, 20 years, and I think they want other opportunities.

I don't know how you would do it.

I mean, that's for the experts to figure out.

But I think a concept to move people around in the city and potentially in staggered methods would give patrol officers the opportunity to grow in their careers.

And I think more people would stay and want to be at the Seattle Police Department if that was the case.

One additional thing that was noted in our letter that we submitted yesterday was we've been focusing a lot on supervisor handling of minor misconduct.

So in its purest form, we believe OPA should be focused on serious misconduct.

excessive force, biased policing, violations of law, search and seizure violations.

But we do feel like it's important to re-empower supervisors to handle the small issues.

For example, a report not being completed or a training being missed.

When I first started at OPA, all those cases were coming to OPA.

And I think the department's moving in the right direction, but there's aspects of that that will have to be bargained with the unions.

So we're hopeful that that will happen.

And I think that will be a big benefit both for OPA and for the officers.

So there's a number of other issues here.

I can obviously address any questions the council has.

I don't want to take up too much time, so I'll turn it over to Amy.

Thank you so much.

Good morning, Madam Chair, Council Members.

First, Lisa Judge, the Inspector General, extends her regrets that she couldn't be here today, but thanks you very much for the invitation.

I will just briefly summarize the contents of our letter that you have before you today.

The Inspector General's comments focus around three principles that guide the recommendations and priorities of the office that are being offered to you.

And so those are first public trust, the idea that there needs to be transparency and also clarity.

So being clear and understandable, so having that be a theme that goes through the review of the SPOG agreement.

And also part of public trust includes building that culture of accountability.

So having provisions in there that foster the right kind of approach and attitude towards effective law enforcement and building that bridge with community.

Secondly, fair outcomes, a priority for the Inspector General, is looking at steps in the contract that affect procedural justice.

So in order to have faith in the outcome, there has to be trust that the process itself was a good one, both perceived as fair both for law enforcement and also for the community.

So there are elements in the recommendations that I will cover that speak to that.

And thirdly, needing a strong independent oversight system to ensure that those provisions continue and get strengthened over time.

So the Inspector General's recommendations, the first has been echoed by the community and the partners at the table, and that has been the idea of an external advisor or some sort of neutral advisor presence that can provide some transparency to the bargaining process.

There's also an element in that neutral advisor also that there's an opportunity for technical advice.

And there is certainly precedent and opportunity and an encouragement by the oversight entities that the technical advice that the three entities can provide continues to be part of that process.

And so both in agenda setting as is happening right now and throughout the process as well.

So particular points related to the contract have been articulated previously with the SPMA contract, so I'll be brief here.

The first one is subpoena power.

The inspector general and others, including the council, have repeatedly heard in talking to other jurisdictions the importance of getting data.

And so subpoena power for the inspector general's office is not necessarily in the same way that OPA might need subpoena power in an investigation.

This is subpoena power for systemic oversight for the auditing function of the office.

And so it's critical for that that the inspector general be able to get the information that she needs for a fair, effective audit at the time she needs it.

And so you have your normal public mechanisms like public disclosure, you have your usual routes of coordination and cooperation, but ultimately subpoena power is the final answer in the game.

If things aren't working, if you absolutely need something, that authority, that backstop needs to be there to support the authority of the office to make a claim for what it needs outside just what is already provided by city law.

itself and through the SPA contract.

Secondly, quantum of proof is having all misconduct allegations held to a preponderance of the evidence standard.

And the 180-day timeline that Director Meyerberg has spoken to, having clarity around what starts that 180-day clock and the provisions for tolling and other aspects related to 180 day.

And so when I talked about procedural fairness, it's if the process is clear, then it builds public trust that this is a system that everyone agreed to.

This is what the step is.

This is what triggers it.

And then you can have a conversation around, is 180 day fair?

Let's first get to, what does it mean to start that 180 day clock?

Arbitration is a theme that has resonated with both the oversight entities, the council, the mayor, and the court as well, having public confidence there.

And so that includes increasing the transparency and efficiency of that process, as Director Meyerberg noted, understanding the complexities and the precedents that is involved in all of that, but recognizing the importance of getting clarity and perceptions of fairness around that as well.

And finally, civilian sworn investigative staffing is a new concept that has not been raised before that the IG is highlighting.

And that is that in the SPOC contract, it allows OPA to hire up to two civilian investigators.

That represents a relatively small proportion of the amount of investigative on staff.

So the rest of them would be sworn officers.

And when the accountability ordinance was passed, the idea there was, what is the right mix?

What percentage makes sense?

All civilian, no civilian, some mix.

When you start with a base that the limit is two out of about 10, you are already constraining the ability to investigate what is the right mix.

And so just encouraging having the freedom within that process to be able to fully explore that question, get to the right answer.

And when everyone agrees on what that right answer is, not having to go through another round of bargaining for a final implementation of what that ideal model might look like.

And then I would just conclude by saying in terms of strengthening oversight independence that the Inspector General looks forward to working with the city on how to keep maintaining the strength of the oversight partners in resource staffing and in the ability to ensure that the system is doing what it's supposed to.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And before we move on to the CPC, I just want to flag because I know this is an issue that all three of the oversight bodies flag.

I do want to flag, I'm interested in having an offline conversation about arbitration in light of the Appendix C in the 1213 the December 13, 2019 filing that addresses what I perceived as many of the concerns with arbitration with a new randomized selection process and identified qualifications.

I wanna make sure that moving into negotiations, I have a good understanding of of what your ongoing issues are with arbitration given this new arrangement that has been worked out between Seattle Human Resources and SPOG as it relates to arbitrators.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for an opportunity.

I would like to echo all that has been said before, and especially with the external advisor with accountability experts being part of the bargaining going forth.

Also, number one here is the burden of proof and standard of review.

I would like for that to return to the use of preponderance standards for all allegations of misconduct.

Also, we've heard a lot already about the reforming of the calculation of the 180-day timeline, and I don't have to reiterate that because it's been clearly articulated by the other two speakers.

And also, the subpoena power, authority for subpoena power has already been there.

And also, reforming the features of discipline to process to affect public confidence.

And one is the standard of review.

And actually, and the other one is really stands out is the dishonesty.

I mean, to remove requirements that intentionality must be proven before.

And also, the last part of that is the obligation to be honest should extend to all actions and statements, not only to OPA during the interview, but all along.

Let's see here.

To ensure civilian oversight authority includes allegation of criminal misconduct and to make sure that these is there and to continue, and Andrew has already talked about the tolling that's necessary there.

And another one also is important that the chief should be empowered to place employees on leave without pay.

if there's an allegation.

I mean, and I think that that needs to go back into that.

And also the reform around secondary employment, that was a problem also.

So anyway, and also the revising of the statute of limitation for retainment of records, because sometimes you find out later that the records should have been held a little longer, especially in police brutality cases and stuff like that.

So, yeah.

So, I think everything else is pretty much articulated by our other two partners.

Fantastic.

Thank you all.

Any questions before we move into amendments?

Councilmember Peterson?

Yes.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody for being here today.

I wanted to clarify if when we approve this resolution, Greg had mentioned letters are being attached.

These are very thoughtful letters, thorough.

I just want to clarify that the voting on the resolution is not to vote on the letters, correct?

That's just sort of a clerk file.

It's not that we're approving the letters.

We are.

I believe the amendment is to attach them to the resolution as an attachment, not that we're approving the letters, but that it's a resource that becomes a resource that is referred to in the resolution itself as in C Attachment 1. It doesn't mean that we're approving the letters.

No, they're not.

It's in the whereas statements where they reference the letters, and I think resource is a good way to describe it.

Okay, thank you.

Sometimes we use clerk files if we're passing an ordinance, but since this is a resolution, simply including them as an attachment I think is just a cleaner way to have everything be in the single place.

With that, I'd like to propose Amendment 1 to Council Resolution 3190. And this is the amendment...

Oh, here, I should make sure that you all have copies of this.

these amendment packets?

Council Member May, I had one thing to my comments.

I think I would draw a differentiation that if the council were to try to send a statement that it was approving the content of the letters, you would want to do that in the operative section, and you'd want to say that the council is here by adopting or approving the content of the letters.

And so that's why I see it more as a reference or a resource.

And so this amendment is a technical change.

It adds to the eighth whereas statement, the specific citation for the Seattle...

municipal code provision that is referenced.

And so on line two, line nine, after whereas, the amendment is to delete the word the, and on page two, line nine, after the abbreviation SMC, we would add subsection 4.04.120G.

And then, of course, we will renumber the section and lines accordingly.

If there are no questions, I'd like to move Amendment 1. Second.

Thank you.

All those in favor of Amendment 1, vote aye.

Aye.

and opposed and abstaining.

Proposed Amendment 2 attaches to the resolution a letter from the CPC which supports the CPC statements made on pages 2 and 3. So the amendment itself on page 3, line 9 after the word decisions, we add and these priorities are further detailed in a letter from the CPC dated November 25, 2019 as attachment 1 to this resolution.

On page 7, after line 13, we add the words attachment 1, CPC, Community Police Commission's recommendations concerning City of Seattle's labor negotiations with Seattle Police Officers Guild and Seattle Police Management Association, November 25, 2019. And again, we then renumber section and lines accordingly.

I move amendment 2. Second.

Thank you.

All those in favor of Amendment 2, vote aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Abstaining?

I'm going to abstain from the three of them just because.

Oh, one abstaining, sorry.

Okay, go ahead.

I'm just going to abstain from adding the three letters just because of the complexity of it.

And I'm not on the Labor Relations Policy Committee, so I just prefer to abstain.

All right, I assure you that these have all been reviewed by the law department and there are no issues.

Thank you.

Proposed Amendment 3 to Council Resolution 31930. This amendment attaches to the resolution a letter from the Office of Police Accountability, which again supports the statements made by the OPA and the Office of Inspector General on pages 3 and 4. And so this amendment on page four, line four, after the word process, adds the words, and these priorities are further detailed in a letter from the OPA dated January 27, 2020, as attachment two to the resolution.

And then on page seven, after line 13, We add the words attachment to upcoming contract negotiations with Seattle Police Officers Guild January 27th, 2020, and we renumber the section and lines accordingly.

No questions?

I move proposed Amendment 3.

Second.

Thank you.

All those in favor vote aye.

Aye.

Abstaining?

One abstaining, none opposed.

The amendment passes 3 to 1 abstaining.

And then the final amendment is Proposed Amendment 4 to Council Resolution 31930. And this amendment attaches to the resolution the letter from the Inspector General for Public Safety, which supports the statements made by the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Police Accountability on pages 3 and 4. So this amendment on page 4, line 4, after the word process, And these priorities are further detailed in the letter from the OIG dated January 27, 2020, as attachment 3 to the resolution.

And on page 7, after line 13, adds the words, attachment 3, OIG feedback regarding Seattle Police Officers Guild contract negotiations with the city, January 27, 2020. And again, renumbers the section and lines accordingly.

If there are no questions, I'd like to move Amendment 4 to Council Resolution 31930. Second.

Thank you.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

Abstained.

One abstaining.

So the amendment passes, three approving and one abstention.

And then now that we have the amended version 31930 before us, are there any thoughts or comments?

I have a question.

In the Be It Resolved section where it says Facilitating Community Police Dialogue, just for the public and for me, could we clarify what that means?

Facilitating Community Police Dialogue.

Is this one of the recitals?

It's the Be It Resolved section one.

It's the end of the first sentence there.

It is sort of a general statement of one of the goals that has been identified.

The intent is to express an ongoing interest to facilitate dialogue between the community and police.

And that is an ongoing goal for part of our negotiations.

I was wondering if it had to do with the concept of community policing, but it's more the communication between the community and police.

Thank you.

Great.

Any others?

All right, with that, I move amended resolution 31930. Second.

Thank you.

All those in favor, vote aye.

Aye.

Abstain.

And one abstention.

Thank you.

All right, so this will move on to full council on February 10th.

Great.

And then our last item on the agenda is item number eight.

Thank you all for joining us and look forward to ongoing conversations.

Item number eight.

Alex, can you read it into the record, please?

Item number eight, report on 2020 council budget as the human services department.

This is for briefing and discussion.

If we can be joined at the table.

Really appreciate everybody's patience getting through a long agenda.

could do some introductions.

Thank you.

Allie Panucci, Council Central Staff.

Amy Gore, Council Central Staff.

Great, thank you.

So I have asked Central Staff, because of a lot of concerns we've been hearing from the community, about the pace of the executive's implementation of Council budget priorities enacted in the November council vote and I have asked that we as a council consider that our expectations for those budget ads be tempered by an understanding of whether or not these are expansions of existing contracts or development of new programs.

And so central staff have worked with the Human Services Department on getting some clarity on which items the executive feels are extensions of existing contracts, which items might be for services that some agencies already provide, but that we are considering whether or not to go out for a new RFP, and which items actually require some program development, because we're contemplating funding a service that isn't currently funded at all.

And so Amy and Ali have put together a summary, having worked with the Human Services Department that I think can inform our expectations.

I want to clarify that these are only the Human Services Department ads that are, these are all of the Human Services Department ads that do not include the Homelessness Services ads in last year's budget deliberations, of which there are many.

But that falls into the bailiwick of the Select Committee on Homelessness.

So with that, I turn it over.

Great.

Thank you.

As you mentioned, Ali and I are here to give a brief update on the status of council additions to the 2020 budget.

Last fall, council approved several changes to the proposed HSD budget, including youth development, health education, law enforcement-assisted diversion, and homelessness services.

And as you mentioned, this memo does not reflect homelessness service investments.

Last week, central staff met with HSD to discuss the status of executing contracts with providers to fund the council's priorities in the 2020 budget.

In general, they fall into four categories.

First would be an addition to an existing contract.

This is when HSD already has a contract with an appropriate service provider and can add the new or expanded program to that contract.

HSD's goal is to have these completed by January 31st of this year.

These contracts include $124,000 for sex industry worker diversion programming, $60,000 for statewide human service lobbying, $10,000 for transportation and activities for low-income seniors, and $55,000 for educational health programs targeted to the African-American diaspora.

Our second category would be new sole source contracts.

This is when HSD feels it is appropriate to use a direct contract rather than a competitive bidding process.

HSD's goal is to have these completed by February 29th of 2020. That includes $140,000 for a harm reduction outreach program for street-based sex workers.

Third, we also have new sole source contracts that include capital costs.

For example, building a health clinic.

Contracts with capital costs have additional considerations and require further legal review.

HSD indicated that they will take longer than the sole source contracts that they are trying to get done by the end of February, but did not have an exact timeline for us at our meeting last week.

And that would include the 1.8 million to construct a health clinic.

Finally, there were three different programs that were involved in ongoing discussions.

HSD indicated that they were deliberating about these ads to determine the appropriate contracting approach, i.e. sole source or an RFP, or the scope of work that will be funded.

This work includes outreach to relevant organizations and input from the mayor's office.

HSD did not have an expected timeline for these contracts, and this category included $522,000 for youth diversion, community building, and educational programs, $3.5 million for law enforcement-assisted diversion, and $735,000 for food access and nutrition programs.

We will be meeting again with HSD staff soon to get another update and we will hopefully get clarity on the expected timelines for these ongoing discussion category.

On those two items, the 300,000 for one time general fund for youth diversion community building education programs and the 222,000 for similar objective.

I remember there was a great deal of discussion during the budget process about the need to provide this funding because it could be used to immediately augment existing contracts.

I pointed to the $1.3 million in funding in new dollars that the council provided in the 2018-2019 budget.

In 2018, for the 20, well, for the biennium, we voted in 2018 to allocate in 2020 $1.3 million in youth diversion funds that was going to be, the dispersion of those youth diversion funds were going to be driven by a community-based process that the Office of Civil Rights was engaged in.

We have the timeline for that and the funding is, for the most part, on track with what we were told during the budget process.

But the need for these funds that are in HSD's budget, it was described that they would be allocated more more quickly, with more urgency.

If we provided that funding to HSD, then if we waited for the community-driven grant process that SOCR was leading for the anticipated 2020 funding for very similar programs.

So it sounds to me, though, that what was anticipated to happen with these funds and them getting out the door very quickly, is not likely based on the fact that even though it's identified as an existing contract, there are no additional details about the expected timing in 2020 and the only information we have is ongoing discussion.

Right, and I don't know if we can make a claim about how quickly it will go out.

HSD was not ready to commit to the January or February deadline at our meeting last week.

It did not, when we were discussing them, sound quite as complicated as some of the other longer-term contracts, but we can follow up with them, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, I think Following up on, I mean, we know what some of the services that the council was anticipating would be provided with these funds.

It would be helpful to ensure that the conversations are happening with the providers of those services.

I would ask that, again, given the council's expectation for this funding, it would be great to press a little bit on what we anticipate for expected timing.

Yeah, I think in the conversations with the department, as well as reviewing, there's a funding process manual that HSD provides that sort of lays out, under best circumstances, sort of the expected way that they sort of manage different budget changes.

and that sort of thing.

And I think one of the things that's pointed out in that guideline is that they develop a funding process timeline.

And so that is one of the asks we will have to the department for those contracts that we don't expect to see or they're not committing to getting out the door in January or February.

Can we see that timeline and understand where the questions are?

And with this budget ad in particular, I think the conversation during budget fluctuated between both an urgency of funding and also that the $1.3 million added previously by the council was, you know, and that the whole community-driven process to develop that RFP and all of those things was important, but not sufficient for all of those programs.

So it was a sort of both an urgency and a we need still more than that.

And my understanding from HSD is they are wanting to talk with those organizations that were named specifically in the council budget to understand their expectations in terms of the distribution of the funding between the organizations and those types of things.

So we will push a little bit and try to get more detailed information for the committee.

And it would be helpful to understand why they are being identified as new as opposed to existing because I was under the impression that some of these organizations that provide the services that we're interested in providing do have current contracts with the city?

I think at least one that I know of does have a contract with the city, but it's through D.O.N., and some of them have been previously funded by HSD, but I'm not aware that any of them are current contractees with HSD specifically.

So it's a contracting issue, not a which organization?

That was my understanding of the conversation, but we can double check everything.

I do have a question about the OSE sweetened beverage tax action, budget action for microgrants to increase fresh food options.

These are termed existing contracts, which implies the contracting should be completed by January 31st.

yet both are listed as in ongoing discussions with no further details.

Do we have any additional information?

For this ad, these are most likely either going to be kind of proportional additions to existing contracts or they will go through some process to choose one or more of our existing contracts and I think they just haven't made that decision yet whether it will be proportionally distributed or if certain contracts will be selected for a larger portion of those funds.

And but no No feeling that we'll be able to make those decisions by expected timeline?

Not yet.

Well this is, I appreciate you putting this information together, it allows us to follow up on what we don't know and what we want to know.

One of the items in the letter I wanted to put a finer point on, similar issue as I mentioned before, something that is identified as an existing contract but yet listed in the chart as an ongoing discussion without a lot of details, and that is the council's intent to expand the LEAD program.

I think there's been a lot of anxiety in the public around the timing for the expansion of the LEAD program.

LEAD has very good outcomes around recidivism and other performance measures that they report on.

There is an ongoing discussion about further developing those reporting measures.

There is nothing that to suggest that they are not meeting and exceeding the reporting measures that we are currently requiring their ongoing reporting on.

I know that my colleagues on the council have expressed some concern because some of this expansion that the council funded last year for the LEAD program is to expand into the geographic areas.

that many of us on the council represent.

The council allocated an additional $3.5 million to fully fund a program that's helping us address some of our most difficult challenges and to ensure that our city's most vulnerable citizens and marginalized communities can avoid the revolving door criminal justice system, which we heard a lot from the public about this morning, when appropriate and possible, while also improving public safety outcomes.

Right now, LEAD has received referrals for at least 300 individuals who they are unable to serve due to a lack of resources.

They are also unable to take new referrals, which is a key component of this program.

There's every reason to believe that the true need is much greater than the figure, which is why the council added additional resources to expand LEAD.

The backlog comprises what is known as social contacts.

The LEAD program has a prioritization process.

And social contact referrals, which again are what the backlog is composed of, are individuals whom officers have reason to believe commit crimes due to behavioral health conditions or extreme poverty, but they may not have probable cause to make an arrest for a divertible crime, that at the moment, but that social contact referrals can give them an alternative avenue to refer them to LEAD.

They try hard to prioritize social contact referrals from the business improvement areas in our city because, again, LEAD is a public safety program that exists to prioritize responding to emerging public safety and disorder issues that are identified by the communities where we live and work.

The concern that I think we all share about the current proposal of funding the current caseload and the backlog is it makes it impossible for them to, for LEAD, to take high-priority arrest referrals.

And they cannot operate as a program without being able to, again, the backlog is largely these social contact referrals.

They have been deprioritized because of the important need to take the higher priority arrest referrals.

And so that again is part of our interest and our desire to expand this program geographically.

So whereas I appreciate the correspondence that we received from the mayor's office yesterday about this issue and I appreciate the clarity of where there are right now.

I want to share with council members a letter that I would like us to send.

I'm distributing it in my committee because this is a letter from my committee and because we have Open Public Meetings Act issues, we have to sign it in open session.

And so this letter has four One is to confirm the mayor's commitment that the city intends to provide LEAD program funding in 2020 that includes the council's additional $3.5 million investment.

The purpose is to execute a contract for the additional LEAD funds by March 1st of this year with the provision that the performance data to be collected may be modified by a mutual agreement before the end of the year.

To affirm that LEAD is a public safety program and not a homelessness intervention program.

And just for ongoing information, I appreciate the opportunity I have had to speak directly with the mayor on this as well as Deputy Mayor Fong.

But there are still, there's still a need to get a better understanding of some of the conversations between the Human Services Department and LEAD.

And so the letter itself contains some questions that we'd like some answers to.

And then also, I just want to pass around, to complete the packet, the attachments that will accompany the letter.

Greg, did I miss anything that is important to mention here?

You seldom miss anything, but I might mention one little nuance, and that is that in addition to the backlog, the 300 individuals that are waiting to be accepted into the LEAD program, there is one other issue, and that is that As the program expanded into last year, went to Soto and into North Precinct, they stretched too far.

And now each case manager has a load of 45 cases.

And so it's not just a matter of the new money allowing the city to address the backlog.

The new money would also allow the LEAD program to right-size their their case manager client load.

And if that didn't happen, then they would actually have to go backwards.

They would have to reduce their cases, they believe, by 46%.

And you may have said that, I may have missed it.

I absolutely did not say it, so it was very helpful.

Thank you.

Are there other questions?

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you for putting together this letter to the mayor's office.

And in reading the letter, I agree with what you have here.

I just want to state that my interpretation of the letter is there's still a, you know, I appreciate the commitment of the mayor's office to maintain performance-based contracts.

I know there was a lot of hard work done by previous council and the mayor's office to make sure human services department sticks with performance-based contracts.

And I don't see anything inconsistent with that in the letter.

So I appreciate that commitment to performance-based contracts.

I know there are challenges with collecting the outcome data on recidivism.

We obviously want to see that the success of LEAD continue with those outcomes, and it's challenging to sometimes collect that data.

But I'm hopeful that LEAD and HSD will work out where to get that data.

So thank you for putting this together.

Yeah, I'm very optimistic as well, too.

And I'm just working to make sure that we're all part of the conversation moving forward.

Thank you.

And with that, I will end open session.

pass the letter, signing.

And if I'm going to filibuster here a minute while all the signatures get added, so we are truly in open session.

But with that, I'd like to really thank the work that central staff has done, both on the overall HSD funding issue, and in particular, the yeoman's work that Greg Doss has done this week on two of our hot issues on the committee agenda today.

So thank you so much.

With that, it is 12.07 p.m., and if there's no other business to come before the committee, we are adjourned.

Thank you.