Public Safety & Human Services Committee 21423

Thank you.

The February 14th, 2023 meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.35 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Would the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda.

Present.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair Herbold.

Here.

Five present.

Thank you so much.

So just a quick rundown on today's agenda.

We have two items on the agenda after public comment.

The first is a presentation on the Seattle Police Department 2022 Crime Report released last week.

And the second is a presentation on all of the upcoming 2023 Human Services Department Notice of Funding Availability.

So those are just the opportunities to fund services to the community arising from the major lines of business of the Human Services Department.

So with that, we will now approve our agenda for our committee meeting.

If there is no objection, our committee agenda will be adopted.

Seeing and hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

At this time, we're going to move into public comment.

I'll moderate the public comment in the following manner.

Each speaker has two minutes to speak.

I'll alternate between virtual and in-person public commenters.

I'll call on each speaker by name and in order in which they registered on the council's website in a sign-in form.

If you have not yet registered to speak but would like to, you can sign up before the end of the public comment session.

Once I call the speaker's name, if you are using the virtual option, you'll hear a prompt.

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

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

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

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

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

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line And we encourage you, if you want to continue following the meeting, to do so via the Seattle Channel or the listening options that are listed on the agenda.

We've got 11 people signed up for public comment this morning.

Nine of those individuals are going to be testifying virtually and two in-person.

And I'm going to start with the two in-person folks.

So I'm going to call names two at a time.

And we'll start with Marguerite Richard and Marguerite Richard will be followed by Azenay Smith.

Good morning, everyone.

Is the mic on now?

Well, anyway, testing 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And I've already lost some seconds asking me whether or not it was on or off.

Thank you.

Do you mind restarting the clock?

Thank you.

OK, so you have crime on there.

And I think the chief is supposed to make a report.

He's not in this building right now, per se.

I put Tyree Nichols on there because he is an indigenous black male that was gunned down, and I feel like if it affects one like that, it affects us all.

That's how I jump in on crime.

I don't understand why we're always the focal point of things like that, even in this city with all the years that I have spoken out about issues surrounding our protection.

I'll just give you a little scenario about yesterday.

I was here to get some information.

I went to the fourth floor, the third floor and the sixth floor.

Some minions came out on the sixth floor.

And then on the fourth floor, a guard came and stretched his neck out.

I was like, what's he doing up here?

He said, well, they have some boxes that need to be delivered.

But to me, it looks suspicious, like, okay, I'm here, I'm not doing nothing except for I'm on business.

And is it your business when I'm here on business?

Okay, we're here to eradicate all this stuff that would create a crime and hostility in our community.

And that's what it does.

We're not supposed to be intimidated.

The Bible said, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.

I don't know what happened the day where he was getting the beat down, but it's all over the nation as to what they do to us at any given day.

Like they say, any given Sunday, whatever day it is, they use to intimidate us and create hostility in our community.

Thank you, Ms. Bichard.

Our next speaker is Azhane Smith, and I apologize if I mispronounced your name.

And the speaker will be followed by Jocelyn Siska.

Yeah, my name's Azhane Smith.

I'm going to speak on crime, and I'm also going to speak on the, I guess, Human services funding, I guess around that part.

Crime, I feel like there's a lot of crime.

Um, where I grew up from, which is the south end of Seattle, also in the central district of Seattle, and also downtown Seattle.

I also feel like there should be more funding for, like my aunt says, indigenous Black people or Black people in the city of Seattle so we don't have to reach or feel like violence is the only key or participating or selling drugs in our community is our only gatekeep to succeed in society.

I also want to say, I would rather you rehabilitate and ask the people who are on drugs and ask the people who are homeless what they need and come to it at a therapeutic standpoint instead of I guess pushing them to the side like you don't care about them.

Because what I feel like is the city of the Seattle does not care about its people at all, whether they're on drugs and whether they are in the lower class.

So I'm asking people who have the power to fund that to do your job.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Jacqueline Cisco followed by.

Good love.

Jacqueline or Jocelyn.

Cisco Hello, this is Jacqueline Cisco.

This testimony is related to the agenda item crime report.

I'm speaking today as a parent of children who attended John Stanford International Elementary School in Wallingford.

A school which is located near the Pasadena and Camden on the Wausch right of way directly under I-5 just north of the Montlake Canal.

We've been watching this ongoing tragedy unfold here for years.

There have been fires murders drug dealing all within a stone's throw of a community school.

Several houses have been burned down on the street and on Monday several car windows were smashed.

I can see on the crime report presentation that this area in particular is one of the more dense spots for gun violence in North Seattle.

A visit in November by a local nonprofit showed only six people actively living within the encampment.

Now Washtaut has quoted 25 to 30 people.

The encampment has grown significantly during the last few months, and there is clearly a large amount of illegal dumping.

All while King County Regional Homelessness Authority has said that this encampment is next on their priority list.

Following many conversations with Washtaut, Washington State Police, and the RHA, we know that the RHA is the entity responsible for closing the encampment using funds provided by the state.

We heard that they're working on the site, but we don't have any timelines and we're concerned that the situation is getting worse for all involved.

We're compassionate groups with focus on the education and safety of our children.

We have explained to our kids that people living under the highway near their school or there through no fault of their own and our local government is able to meet their needs.

I'm asking for the city council to step in with regards to this site.

So far, the city has not taken action due to the encampment being on washout right away.

It is not accessible for the city to sit by and watch as the encampment becomes bigger, more dangerous for those inside, those who live within this neighborhood, and the students and staff at John Sanford International School.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next speaker that is signed in but is shown as not present is Shrivnas Gudlavetli.

and not seeing a change in the not present status, we'll go down to the next speaker that is showing present and signed in.

That is Eli Hachor.

And Eli will be followed by Tarul Kodtripathy.

Eli?

And if you have not yet, Eli, please hit star six.

Still showing you, oh, almost got you off of mute there.

Star six, please.

There you go.

Perfect.

There we go.

OK.

Sorry about that.

Hi.

Sorry.

Thanks.

Good morning, everybody.

My name is Eli Hosher.

And I'm also a father or a parent of a fourth grade student that attends John Stanford Elementary School.

Jackie did explain and describe the encampment, but I just reiterate that, you know, over the last year, I've seen it double and now probably almost triple in size and the amount of people living there.

And it's become really a ticking time bomb in the past four or five months.

We've seen three gun deaths, violent crimes, rampant drug use.

And then just like last week when we had a chance to give public comment to the RHA for immediate action the night, that next night or that night, the encampment caught on fire because of fireworks.

And then a couple of days later in Chinatown off of I-5, another encampment caught fire where they discovered a meth lab.

Obviously, you know, guns, drugs, weapons, money.

So it's clear that these are becoming more and more dangerous.

All the responses that we get essentially address majority of the language used is addressing the homelessness situation.

And as a parent and who's someone who obviously sees the safety of children being the priority here, I see most of that language geared towards what they say they are doing to address the encampment.

I just unfortunately have become numb to the sort of lip service that essentially feels like it doesn't get anywhere.

We received an email from WSDOT from Brian Nelson saying that nobody residing in the encampment possesses any immediate public threat to safety, which you'd have to be insane, honestly, to make a statement like that at this point, given all that's been taking place in these encampments.

And so I'd like to ask the city council or anyone with a background to please help step in and address the situation, address the safety of the children first.

Like Jackie said, or anyone, I'm sure you'll hear from others, we care about the homeless scenario, but this is about kids in this particular encampment.

And I appreciate any help from the city council.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Tarul Code Tripathi.

This speaker is showing as not present.

If that status changes, I will go back to hear from the speaker.

But moving on, we've got Ashley Cappell followed by Margaret Holt.

Ashley.

Hi, thank you for your time today.

My name is Ashley Cappell.

I'm a Seattle resident and also a mother to a six-year-old who attended John Stanford International School.

This is my second time in a week having to testify to our, and honestly, you can hear emotion in my voice right now because I'm pleading for you to help us address the crime that's putting imminent risk to our children.

Lastly, Council Peterson's office, I want to give kudos to them for really taking this seriously and advocating with us and on our behalf as community members But I really ask this committee, who I see within your scope, is to hold accountable our municipal, regional, state, and federal agencies to do what they need to do for public safety.

And I'm also addressing the encampment near John Stanford International School.

As Jackie Siska said, this is an encampment on Washington State property, therefore the Washington State Department of Transportation, the Washington State Patrol, KCRJ, are all, right now, the ones responsible for clearing this.

But honestly, we can't wait for them anymore.

We need your help working with them, advocating with them, and making it not a choice to clear this as soon as possible for the safety of our children and our community, but it has to happen.

The fires, the gun violence, so this is about the crime.

It is, I know the recent gun violence that has happened, the murder that happened in that camp is the responsibility of our Seattle Police Department.

I want to see accountability to what's happening in this camp, please, I ask you.

And so please, you know, continue to do your jobs as we elected you to do.

And I thank you for your time today.

And I hope that we can get clearer timelines.

As Eli mentioned, these timelines are not clear.

There's no clear state of action.

The focus is that finding long-term residency for these homeless people is more important than our children's imminent safety.

And I please ask you to do something about this.

Thank you.

Our speakers numbered 7 through 15 are all showing as not present.

I see many of them are here to speak on an item that is not on the agenda.

If you are deciding not to speak because you are recognizing that the caste discrimination legislation is not on the agenda.

I appreciate that and say thank you if you're listening.

But I will watch to see if the status of any of these people change.

And if they do before we end public comment, I will take your comment.

Our next speaker is an in-person speaker, Alex Zimmerman.

My name is Alex Zimmerman and I stay in here like always with my red sign and yellow David star.

I want to speak about crime, agenda number one for my understanding.

How we can talking about crime when you guys, nine council, make a fundamental constitutional criminals?

You not show us faces?

This a pure constitutional crime.

Is this not a rule, regulation, nothing?

And you're doing this for 10 months.

How you can put in jail people who steal candy for five bucks, for example, when you make a constitutional crime and nobody touch you.

I spoke about this everywhere.

Don't show us faces.

It's a constitutional crime.

You civilized country supposed to be going jail for lifetime.

You understand?

We're talking about this.

And I start speak with Marguerite Richard to mayor, you know, He's a pure criminal, you know what I mean?

It's not surprising.

He approved this for 10 months.

How is this possible?

He appoints his friend, you know what I mean?

Because it's only the same.

color, you know what I mean, is by definition idiotic.

You think in 750,000 people in the city absolutely idiot, maybe 95 percentage, but 5 percentage understand what is you doing.

When you not stop in criminal here, when you don't put you in jail, you know what this mean, for a lifetime.

American constitutional law have this.

When you violate constitution, you supposed to be go in jail for a lifetime.

How we can talking about somebody who steal five or 10 bucks?

Come on, guys.

Right now, I speak to 750,000 degenerate idiots.

You don't understand.

So we have nine consuls who are absolutely criminal to the bones.

Stand up, America.

Put them in jail.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Again, Speakers 7 through 15 are still showing as not present.

So we will end public comment.

and move into the first item on the agenda.

Mr. Clerk, can you please read in agenda item one?

Agenda item one is Seattle Police Department 2022 Crime Report.

Thank you so much.

We've got some presenters with us here today.

Really appreciate everybody who has made time to be with us to present the 2022 report.

Before I turn it over, just want to say I'm pleased that we're joined for the first time since dropping the interim from his official title, joined by Chief Adrian Diaz from the Seattle Police Department.

Chief Diaz will be presenting the 2022 crime report by the SPD data-driven team.

Again, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for the presentation.

Chief Diaz, if you are on the line, we're seeing you as muted.

My apologies.

Let's see.

Well, nothing like the dead air nudging somebody who, for a very brief time, did radio.

Director Marks, do you have a status report for the ETA for Chief Diaz, perhaps?

My apologies, Council Member Herbold.

There you are, all right.

I stepped away from my desk for a second, so.

So well, you probably heard how many people we had signed up for public comment.

And many of those people ended up declining to give public comment.

So we're a little earlier than maybe you anticipated.

So my apologies to you.

And thank you again for being with us today.

No, thank you for having me and thank you for all that's on in attendance for this year and crime report.

Appreciate your leadership Councilmember her world.

As I cover the 2022 year and crime report.

As we look into this is something that we've been doing annually, releasing the the crime report that is a comparison to the year before.

And so I want to just hit a caveat because as it compares to the year before, it doesn't sometimes have a reflection over a period of time.

And so sometimes we in our data, we actually do look at a five year weighted average, because when you have such as the pandemic, you have sometimes dips in air or issues that are going on that are beyond sometimes the crime issues.

And so We do look at a five-way to average, so it allows us to look consistently with what crime has been over the last several years.

And so, as I give this to you, the Year in Crime Report, we, you know, is always really to focus on encouraging our community dialogue and really just being open and transparent about what our crime stats look like.

I always give a caveat to it.

It is only as good as people report crime.

We know that in 2021 and 2022, there was consistent feedback that people haven't reported as much property crime because of sometimes the delay in reporting and processes.

However, we did see an increase overall in 2022 on overall crime.

And that has been a consistent trend over the last couple of years.

And so while we might not necessarily reflect all of the crime that is occurring in Seattle, this is a good foundation for us because it does highlight that crime has increased compared to 2021, which was at that time, our all time high over about a 15 year period.

Because really around 2008, we had gone to more of a data-driven approach.

And so in our systems really kind of started tracking more consistently our data and flushed out a lot of inconsistencies in data.

So it's really been over the last about 15 years that we can really make sure that during that process that our actual crime is pretty, pretty accurate in that.

When we look at overall crime, there is one of the highlights that I really wanted to just kind of note While our crime increased by 4%, really in the fourth quarter, we saw this actual decrease in crime during that fourth quarter, in violent crime as well as property crime.

But very specifically in the property crime, we saw very sharp drops in shots fired at shootings.

We also saw an aggravated assaults, a consistent drop.

And so that was something that we wanted to highlight We had been really focused on what we call our CAPE model, which is Community Analytics Prevention Environment Enforcement Strategies.

And we're hoping that that is what made a difference in that drop.

And we are continuing to see that same decrease in the month of January and into mid-February as well.

Right now, consistently, our violent crime, just in this year to date, into 2023, we're actually at a 27% drop in violent crime for a year to date.

So that is still staying consistent with what we saw in fourth quarter.

As we move on to our gun violence and shots fired, We have actually saw over the last three years a really sharp increase in the amount of shootings that our cities experienced and the amount of victims that are associated with many of these shootings and shots fired.

And I think we just need to change the slide just one bit.

I'm not sure if I can.

There we go.

In 2020, we saw 436 shots fired.

In 2021, we saw 620 and in 2022, we saw 739. This is obviously been one of the things that we've been some of our highest priorities and really addressing that shootings and shots fired.

We consistently see about close to about 16% of these shootings have had a some level of homeless nexus.

We've actually seen a consistent rise over the last couple of years in domestic violence shootings.

We've seen a consistent rise in road rage shootings and over the last three years.

And so this has been those elevations and as well as robberies has also been something that we've been paying attention to, very consistent with some of the shots fired that are associated with that.

When we have 739 right now at the very start of 2023, we're actually seeing a decline in the amount of shots fired, but it is still at a higher rate.

When we look at the homicides in 2023, we've had eight homicides so far to date, and five have had at some level of homeless nexus, which is kind of what we've been consistently seeing with the shootings and shots fired.

As we go on to the next screen, or no, sorry, the one before.

Perfect.

As in 2022, we did see a 19% increase in criminal shootings and shots fired.

But one of the things that has also been really just a highlight of good work by our officers is that even with less staffing, we've actually recovered the second highest number of firearms on record in 2022. That is, you know, also of concern as well, because with the amount of guns that we've recovered, it really shows just how much firearms are out there in the community.

And that is something that is something that we should all be paying attention to, to figure out how do we take more guns off the streets.

And sometimes they could be in the hands of people wanting to harm others in the community.

But last year, recovering 1349, being our second highest year, and our highest year was actually in the month of, or not in the month, in the year of 2018, when we recovered about 1,408 guns.

And so as this slide is showing you, shows you that the consistent work of the gun recoveries, but over really the last about six year period, we've actually seen about consistently over a thousand guns recovered every single year, with last year being the second highest number.

as we look into, oh, go ahead, please.

Thank you.

I'd like to take a pause here before we move on to the bias incidents reports just to see whether or not folks have questions specifically about gun violence and violent crime.

I'm going to kick us off and then I see Council Member Nelson is in the queue here and we'll work on getting folks in.

Just wondering, whether or not there's two, three questions.

First, whether or not you are seeing trends in the increase in fatal and nonfatal shootings, aside from some of the demographic data that you provided helpfully on on age, race and gender, any any information that shows trends?

Do people know each other?

Is it, are they strangers to each other?

Is it a lot of, I mean, anecdotally, we see road rage incidents, sort of what observations that you see that might be driving this increase beyond, of course, what we all know, which is the very large increase in gun ownership since the pandemic.

Also, very interesting to see the that although there's been a general decrease in shots fired in most neighborhoods across the city, there is a dramatic increase of concentration of shots fired in specific neighborhoods.

And whether or not there's anything that you attribute this to and any specific policing strategies that you are working on to really focus the efforts to reduce gun violence in those areas where it seems, from the heat map in the report, very concentrated in a couple areas.

And then lastly, the gun seizures work that you do, it's, you know, really appreciated to see the numbers of firearms that are taken into police custody.

We recognize that they're not all seizures, but I think the significant uptick is a result of gun seizures.

And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the use of the 24-hour judge in assisting you in in increasing those gun seizures?

Thank you.

Three questions.

So I'm trying to remember all three questions, so I apologize if I don't.

But let me start off with the second one.

One of the areas that was riddled with a lot of the gun violence for the first five months, the CID really had a sharp increase in the amount of shootings and shots fired that were occurring.

We've actually seen a decrease in the amount of shootings that have happened in that community.

And a part of that is the work that we started really focusing on a 12th and Jackson, very targeted enforcement on drug trades and gun recoveries.

We still see sometimes shootings that do occur in that community.

However, it has really dropped off after the first five months.

That is very consistent with also the work that Unified Care Team had been doing in trying to make sure that people were getting housing, but also addressing some of the criminal activity that was occurring within the encampments as well.

As we look into other areas, You do see sometimes increases off of concentrated violence that's in or around Aurora.

We've actually seen something that very consistent with some of the human trafficking issues related to what we refer to as pimps that are trying to traffic a lot of the women and some of the violence that's associated with that.

We've seen some of the violence that carry over into Lake City as well into Northgate.

We've seen Brighton Place has always been a very consistent area of violence.

down in the south end, as well as the about the 9500 block of Rainier Avenue, which is very consistent with the Safeway in around some of the schools that are down in the south end.

And then, I believe, Heather, I think your screen is, your calendar's up.

So, Those have been some areas and as well as South Park and Westwood Village, and then the downtown core.

So these are areas that have had those high concentrations of gun violence.

We have really focused our efforts on putting officers in those areas.

We actually conduct two calls a week that strictly focus on gun violence, tactical calls where we bring in investigators.

as well as all of our precinct captains, identifying what each and every shooting and seeing what the nexus is to it.

As you mentioned, we've seen that increase in road rage and domestic violence.

So we know that in domestic violence, we know that people know their perpetrators.

In road rages, we don't.

In homeless nexus, that sometimes They know people, but they might not have relationships or friendships with them.

And so there are sometimes targeting of just in homeless encampments.

So that sometimes isn't necessarily knowledge of whether they know firsthand information.

Sometimes it is related to drug trafficking or property trafficking, but it's not as clear cut when it comes to the shootings.

When we look at our work on identifying and solving something are actually really the, I should say, the nightlife.

We actually started to see, because things are opening up, we are seeing an increase in the nightlife shootings, but it's a very small portion still of our overall shootings.

It's about roughly about 6% of our shootings that have some sort of nightlife nexus.

Our robbery nexus has about a 9%, that is a reduction, in what we saw in 2021, but really that it's also the other things that we're sometimes not able to know is when we have sometimes a shooting that occurs where we don't have any victim information.

And that is roughly staying in about 30% of our cases where we don't have any information.

So it's not, we can't put it necessarily in a bucket.

Could those shootings be between people that know each other?

Possibly, or they could be shootings that are like very similar to a road rage incident where a shooting happens and there's no, you know, we're not able to identify victims.

I think, did I answer two of those questions or maybe?

Yes, you did.

You answered the first two.

The third relates to the gun seizure efforts and the use of the night judge to obtain warrants 24 hours a day.

Yeah, let me I would like to probably follow up with you back on that, because I am not aware of just how many times we've utilized the night judge.

I know that when we do work on extreme risk protection orders, that is something that we are working very closely with most of the time.

on those extreme risk protection orders.

Our crisis response team, our domestic violence team, and some of our homicide teams are consistently working that.

And most of the time might occur during the day, but I just don't know the usage that might occur in the evening hours as well.

Thank you.

Councilman Nelson.

I'm sorry, Council Member Peterson had his hand up first.

Go ahead.

I saw you raise your hand on the dais.

Okay.

I had a question about, can you go back to that screen?

I have other questions, but I thought that we were gonna wait till the end, but the slide that had the arrows, can you pull that up?

You know, the green and red arrows.

The, The report mentions crime having gone down in Q4 of last year.

But it has been under the heading seasonality and I'm sorry, I'm referring to the actual report page six, not the slide pack here.

But so I'm wondering, did you put the Q4 information under the heading seasonality because it is common for there to be less crime in the winter?

Is that is that the meaning of that?

Because that's That slide mentions crime decreased during the fourth quarter.

It doesn't compare to a different year.

So I'm just trying to get clarity on what that means.

You raise a good question because we do look at the quarters because typically in the summer months, you do see sometimes an increase in overall crime because it's more people active.

There's a lot more activities in parks and a variety of different places.

And so we do pay attention to where our activity might occur during each of the seasons.

And it actually, as I noted in the first five months, it was a very sharp increase compared to the year before.

And that is actually a sharp increase compared to any year.

And so that is one of the issues that we highlighted is that as we saw the first five months happen, and it's just such a huge difference between the year in 2021, we actually start to see a decline in overall crime from that point on.

And so that did carry into June of 2021 or 2022 through the summer months, instead of seeing a spike and being consistent with the first five months, we didn't see that spike.

And so we believe that that's actually that activity of what our strategy was taking hold that we actually started implementing that strategy during the summer.

And then we actually saw a very consistent stagnation of crime and then see that decline into the quarter four.

Thank you, Chief.

Said a little differently, whereas there is the graph shows seasonality in both 2021 and 2022. The difference this year is whereas the first three quarters of 2022 had higher rates than 2021, in the last quarter, it actually dipped.

2022 dipped below.

So they both went down, but 2022 went down below 2021. So, I'm not, I'm not wanting to jinx us but it looks like potentially there's some good news about us sort of working to turn the corner and I think you in the department for all of your work.

Councilmember Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

I'll have a couple of rounds of questions, but just to address the first few slides here.

Thank you, Chair, for providing ample time for us to discuss this very important year-end crime report comparing 2022 to 2021. I do want to thank the officers and detectives and SPD for their hard work.

over the past year, even though the department's been understaffed.

A couple of ground-setting questions.

The slide, this is perfect here, this slide you're showing where you're saying that crime is up overall 4% compared to 2021. I just, for me, an important metric is also looking at pre-pandemic times, so looking at what were crime rates in 2019. And I've printed those out.

And the 2022 numbers, when you compare them to 2019, the overall crime is actually up 17.2% in 2022 as compared to 2019. And that includes 19% higher on violent crime in 2022 when compared to 2019. In future reports, it would be helpful to get that baseline that's pre-pandemic, because obviously we'd like to get crime as low as possible, and I think that that's an important baseline to consider.

I had heard a mention of potentially January 2023 having I'm not sure if we're going to see any positive results, but when will we actually see the January 2023 numbers?

When you were indicating, chief, that there might be something positive in the 2023 numbers, A previous January because certainly in the media we've seen lots of shots fired homicides in January of this just this past month.

So just want to know when we'll see January also.

response times are mentioned here in this slide, being seven minutes and that being positive.

In the north precinct, which is the largest geographic area in the city, it has only one station, police station there, response times have been historically high because it's harder to get around the north precinct quickly enough to respond to priority one calls.

So I'm interested in knowing what the precinct by precinct breakdown is for response times to see if there's been any improvement in the north precinct.

Those are just some ground setting questions and comments, but I'll come back as we get deeper into the report.

But if you could maybe address a couple of those right now.

Is it okay if we just focus on the first?

I'm trying to break up the questions and the report according to topic area.

So is it okay if we focus first on the violent crime and guns fired?

Yes, Chair.

I was just addressing this slide, slide three, we have already been through.

So I was just going back to that one.

Okay.

All right.

I understood.

That's the overview.

Fair enough.

So, so customer Peter said I think your, your, your point is taken in on the kind of the five year weighted average is what we, you know, refer that to is stuff that might be pre pandemic and what that is consistent with, with that that timeframe.

So we actually, in our first month and a half that we've started doing, or just in the last month and a half, I should say, we compared to January 2021, but I actually also include the five-year weighted average.

In the first month and a half, we would be on average, our five-year weighted average was at 577. Right now in 2023, we're at 533. So we're actually under the five-year weighted average.

So if we were to take 2018 2019 2020 2021 and 2022 and combine those all were actually under that five year weighted average.

So that is a good, it's a good start to the year, but to your point is that when we have a shooting that impacts anybody in the community.

they're not gonna worry about what the numbers look like because they've been impacted by the violence.

And so that is really when we look at the homicides and some of the shootings that are impacting communities, as I heard from many people on the earlier calls, the accidental shooting that happened around that Pasadena location, it's driven a lot of emotion and a lot of concern about the type of violence that's occurring in and around many communities.

And so that's what we end up focusing our efforts on is trying to really make sure that we're putting our officers in the right place with what is consistent with some of the types of activities such as the shootings and shots fired or robbery calls for service.

And I think, I'm not sure if I missed another question on that too, so.

I'll ask your office for the response time broken down by precinct, we can get that later.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I can't and I can't get that to you.

And we actually have while we so one of the things that the reason why we noted the response times is that we consistently because a lack of, you know, the loss of officers, we really focus our efforts on making sure our response to priority one and priority to are the central components of it.

And priority three are typically paper calls.

And that does take sometimes a longer response.

And that is, you know, one of the concerns that we have.

But right now, as we look at priority one, by putting officers in very specific locations where you have high propensity for violence, we went from about a seven point seven and a half minutes to seven point two minutes.

So we're getting closer to that seven minute mark.

And so consistently, when we do see some of the shootings or some of the type of violence, officers are able to get there within a very, very short period of time.

But to your point, when you do look at a precinct like North Precinct, that is about 40% of our city.

And getting from one location to another can sometimes be different.

So when we look at seven minutes, it's the overall city response.

And that might not necessarily be what the North is.

The North Precinct right now is about nine minutes response times.

but when you have other areas of the city, sometimes that helps offset that nine minute response from the North Precinct.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you so much, Chair Herbold and Chief.

Thank you for providing this report and making a lot of time this morning for us to go over it.

I wanna zero in a little bit on the nexus that we've been seeing throughout the COVID period between some of the increasing crime trends and encampments in particular being a place where there's a big nexus for a lot of this criminal activity.

And I raise it because I do think that one of the best ways for us to make progress in some of the alarming trends we've been seeing, and Council Member Peterson, I think alluded to this in talking about, you know, pre-COVID versus post-COVID crime trends.

One of the things that we've also seen post-COVID is this massive whack that was taken to our transitional and shelter system and dramatically essentially transitioning our region to a on-sanctioned encampment form of shelter.

I mean, we need to have the courage to acknowledge that that's what it is, candidly, is an over-reliance on non-sanctioned encampments as a place for people who are living on shelter to live.

And that has clearly manifested in public safety consequences, because these are not spaces that are conducive for people to live.

Do you want to expand a little bit more on on what we've been seeing in terms of the granularity of the data in terms of the concentration in encampments of the increased activity that the department is saying?

Yeah.

So, you know, when you look at areas such as, you know, I kind of referred to the CID, you look at anywhere from sometimes some of the property being washed out property as well.

So stuff that's inter-associated with the freeway.

So you have Ethan King.

You have the interchange that happened between I-90 and I-5.

You have Pasadena locations.

You do see, as we look at data to try and identify what is consistent with some of the shots fired.

We also look at other different areas that have also seen an uptick in types of violence.

Sometimes you have an encampment that has one shooting.

and you have an encampment that has, you know, seven shootings or one homicide.

And so right now we saw a homicide that occurred around 120th and Aurora, just right behind the Home Depot.

And there's a large encampment that's associated with that, that both of the parties, because we did make an arrest in that case, that were associated with that homeless encampment.

And then what you try to do is try to identify like, is that, a part of the encampment, is this one-off situation or is this consistent level of violence?

And that is all something that it still takes time as we investigate those cases.

But right now, I think just seeing the amount of homicides that we've had this year alone that have that nexus to homelessness, the one at Second Michigan, that actually, that site had multiple homicides over the last probably about, I think, seven month period.

Those are the ones that you want to figure out how do you address those are the ones that, how do you make sure that you know you're you're offering resources but at the end of the day, you're also trying to address the overall violence that's also occurring in those encampments.

That is one of the probably probably the areas that was probably the noticeable area because we had several different homicides are actually a couple homicides that were associated with that location.

Yeah, I appreciate the sort of the issue spotting and problem solving role that the department has filled in working with the myriad of different agencies that are charged with remediating these encampment locations.

What I would just put on the record is, you know, early in COVID, My office had a very fruitful collaboration with the West Precinct under the leadership of the former captain there, Matthew Allen, and Just Care.

So a consortium of We Deliver Care, the Defender Association, where we really effectively brought the multi-tiered strategy to bear at some of these encampment locations that centered the dignity of all the people involved, got people placements into suitable transitional housing spots, typically hotel-based, and resolve the encampment location for the community without significant displacement or overly criminalizing people who are in poverty.

And I just put that on the record because I do feel like As that federal money has dried up, the city has drifted from our focus on looking at how we can lean into the lessons that we learned through that collaborative process.

And I give credit to the West Precinct for being a really active partner in that process.

It made a big difference for my district and the downtown neighborhood.

could make a bigger difference if it was scaled.

And I'm just putting that on the record for as we go forward to try to figure out how to deal with this segment of what we're seeing as a significant increase in crime like so much of crime is place based.

These mega encampments are clearly places that are not conducive to a safe environment for anybody involved.

Just sweeping and moving those encampments doesn't resolve the underlying issues.

It moves the underlying issue to another neighborhood, and it certainly doesn't provide help for the people who are living in those encampments.

So I just want to put on the record, a lot of that Just Care work has been diverted to help with partnerships with WSDOT and some of our other regional partners.

I think it would behoove us to really look at reinvigorating that partnership, especially in problem areas like we heard in public testimony today, and to look at dedicated sources of revenue to pay for those kinds of interventions.

Because, you know, I think that we're seeing the loss of that, that temporary resource that was running on temporary one time federal money during the pandemic.

And I think we're feeling the loss of that tool as we move forward and need to continue to make progress on these exigent things facing the community because we, you know, we can't wait any more on this.

And the department, the police department certainly can't do this alone without that kind of resource and support.

So it's a team effort, and I'm just pledging my interest in continuing to work on how we can really focus on that particular area and the partnerships that we know have worked in the past to mitigate it.

So thank you, Chief.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Good morning.

Good morning, Chief Diaz.

Good morning, Madam Chair.

Thanks for the presentation again.

Thanks for being here.

And thanks to the Chair for pausing here on this set of slides.

Appreciate it.

And I know there's a lot more to get into, so I'll save some of the questions for a little bit down the road here.

But I wanted to thank the Chief.

Thanks, Chief Diaz, for noting today in your opening comments, similar to what you noted when you were sworn in.

that overall crime is down, trending down at the end of the year, and I'm excited to hear more about the trends that you're seeing for the early reporting for 2023 as well.

Coming at this from a public health perspective, we know that gun violence is a public health crisis, and we also know that what we see in our community in terms of interpersonal violence is a public health crisis just as much as over policing or bias and racism.

So as I look to further understand and dissect some of the data that's presented today, I think we all come to this trying to make sure that we're addressing these public health crises together.

So both investments in making sure that the chief has the number of officers that they're asking for as much as investments in upstream solutions so that community have resources early on are both ways to address these public health crises.

I'm interested in lifting up some of the comments from early in this presentation, specifically noting that the takeaway from the first slides was that crime, excuse me, violent crime in Seattle began to drop in the fall of 2020. and in December 2022 had fallen to the fewest number of violent crimes reported since March of 2020. I appreciate as well that in response to my colleague's question, the chief has noted that we are still below the five-year trend or the average.

I appreciate that information right off the cuff, so we'll look forward to getting that information as well.

You also noted, and I'll quote, overall, Seattle crime is down 28% in the past five months, and violent crime is down 30% compared to early in 2022. This comes from the year-end drop in King County violent crimes report from the Seattle Times article as well.

So I want to thank you for continuing to provide a holistic view of what members of our community are experiencing and also emphasize that any incidents of crime or violence for one person is more than we want to absorb in our city.

But the overall statistics are really important.

If we're going to think about public policy and ways to change public policy or public investments, we do need to be looking at these macro trends.

I think it's also important for us to borrow and continue to lean on some of our national partners as well, recognizing that this is a national crisis, a national public health crisis with other cities of populations comparable to Seattle.

So for example, more than 700,000 more of these cities across the nation had far more homicides in 2022 than Seattle.

For example, our friends in Austin, Texas, with a population higher than Seattle, had reached 71 homicides last year, while Denver, Colorado had 88. Several cities with less than a million people recorded 100 or more homicides for the year, including Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbus, Ohio, Jacksonville, Florida, and Fort Worth, Texas.

So again, we want to continue to be in partnership with many of our cities that are working to address crime and incidents of crime in a holistic way.

And we also want to make sure that we're putting into context what Seattle is experiencing with what other major cities are also experiencing across the country as well.

And I just wanted to thank as well, Amy Sundberg, who's the chair of the Seattle chapter of People Power for Washington for her analysis that she shared with us and the council and the information that was provided in their newsletter, along with information in the Emerald City publication, what put a lot of these statistics into reference in terms of the national trends, along with Melissa Santos and Christine Claridge from Axios, who provided the following statistics as well.

That the last quarter of 2022 was the fourth consecutive quarter where the number of people age 18 to 24 injured or killed in shooting had declined.

The Seattle Times also reported that this decrease is likely a result of intervention work being done in community groups right here in Seattle because of upstream investments that we really began to invest heavily in in 2020. 2021-2022, and then in our now biannual budget.

And they noted in the Seattle Times article that this decrease was likely a result of the intervention specifically from community groups, as well as the social workers at Harborview.

So thinking about the broad spectrum of how we decrease crime, looking at early intervention, and alternatives to getting folks into services and programs, that this was a big return on investment and helped folks also get access to counseling services and in-person services, especially in schools.

Now, I agree that it will be helpful to look at the upcoming information and chiefty, as you mentioned, emphasis patrols.

I just also want to note, we did in our 2023-2024 budget put in, in partnership with the Chair of Public Safety here, a request for a report back on those emphasis patrols to help us evaluate what the best ways were to use limited officer resources and overtime spending to address the root causes of crime and to make sure that we aren't exacerbating the public health crisis that I started with, which is a disproportionate policing and try to identify ways for us to less than the chance that somebody ever interacts with an officer in the first place.

So because that was mentioned, I just wanted to flag that that is a report that we will be getting here soon.

And thank Melanie Cray for my office as well for working with you and your team and the chair to make sure that we could have that report back.

But I think that this is is painting a more holistic picture and I really appreciate the way in which we can draw a direct connection from early gun violence intervention investments, for example, $4 million in 2020 in gun violence reduction strategies, and to see how some of those earlier interventions play out.

Obviously, we need to be doing much more, but I'll have some additional questions about where officers are being prioritized.

And when we look at some of the response call types that officers had responded to in that last I'm going to put that in the chat box there on your slide, but I'll hold that for later.

Perfect.

And then one more question, I believe, Sarah, our council members, Nelson.

Before handing it over to Councilmember Nelson, Councilmember Mosqueda, was there a question that you were seeking to answer, have answered?

You know, I just really wanted to make sure that in all of these conversations and the back and forth, middle box here on decreased overall crime didn't get lost and that the trends were really trending downwards and I wanted to put into context the Seattle data relative to those other cities of similar size as well.

Thank you and just a quick follow-up on this topic before I hand it over to Council Member Nelson again.

To the point that you made Council Member Mosqueda about decreases in gun violence, I want to lift up the fact that the 20 to 24 age group saw a 55% reduction in gun violence in 2022 as compared to 2021. Currently, the most recent age demographics show that, let's see, 57% of the victims of gun violence were between the ages of 25 and 49. And that's an unusually large percentage for that age group.

thankfully, smaller percentage for the younger age group.

And Council Member Muscatia, you did a great job of highlighting some of our community-based investments that I think contributes to the reduction in this lower age cohort.

In particular, the Harborview gun violence prevention initiative that has wraparound services for victims of gun violence and their families, based on the understanding that the data shows.

that as this is a public health issue it needs to be addressed with public health interventions and these interventions make less likely that victims of gun violence and their families and loved ones go on to contribute to further gun violence.

And in our budget this year, we funded an expansion of this very, very successful program to an older cohort of people.

You know, as I see gun violence statistics come through the Seattle SPD blotter and note the age of the victim, I often remark to myself how urgent It is that we stand up the expansion of the successful gun violence program to folks over 24. And each time I see the victim of a gun violence incident who is over 24, I think to myself, oh, we still don't have that expansion.

And that is another victim of gun violence who is not going to receive services for themselves and their loved ones.

So I'm saying this to express the urgency.

If we want to continue to see these numbers go down, we need to invest in the resources to serve the people who are in the demographic where the gun violence is increasing.

And we have not done that yet.

We had King County here presenting to this committee back in July when we first identified in the county this trend of gun violence trending down for people under 24 and trending up for people over 24. That was, again, that was in July and we started at that point talking about the need to expand our successful program to an older cohort and We now have Seattle data that confirms the findings in the county are also similar to us in the city of Seattle.

And I'm just using this as a bully pulpit to urge both the city of Seattle and King County to work together to expand this very successful gun violence prevention program.

Thank you.

Council Member Nelson.

Thank you very much on that point.

I have remarked also the change in homicides in the age groups and it's trending upwards.

And when I inquired about it, I was told by SPD that the reason could be because of the increased association with.

gun violence in encampments.

It would be great to follow that up.

On that note, in the report it does mention that 16% of the homicides or shots fired, it says overall shootings and shots fired events contained a homeless nexus.

One question for a different time you can get back to me offline is do you track other crimes by location as well, not just homicides and shots fired incidents?

That's one.

I do want to say that as we're talking about trends, I do acknowledge that SPD is dealing with a severe staffing shortage.

And so I have to say that you're trying as hard as you can.

And it's a testimony to your leadership that things aren't a lot worse.

So thank you very much for your for your leadership there, Chief Diaz.

I am concerned about looking at statistics to base policy on as Council Member Mosqueda mentioned, and we'll talk about property crime a little bit later, but those statistics certainly do not reflect the reality of what's going on with small businesses.

But overall, I feel that I'm concerned about what the parents who gave comment at the beginning of this meeting might be feeling right now.

Because I heard them say things like, I've become numb.

to conversations about when we're going to get people housing, et cetera.

And another person said, we need to address the safety of the children first.

And so I think that that mindset is what is really where a lot of people are in the city when they're looking at overall crime.

And in fact, we do have to go back to the 24% increased numbers.

So for the record, we When they hear the response being, we have to center the dignity of everyone involved.

Don't stigmatize poverty.

We have to acknowledge the lack of those federal resources for, I think Council Member Lewis said transitional housing or whatever.

Let's be clear what we're talking about in this presentation today, which is the crime report of Q4.

I think that we have to be very careful about when we're talking about our homelessness crisis and our public safety crisis.

There is a huge nexus obviously, and I think that bears unpacking, but I don't think that now is the time for patting ourselves on the back.

about where we're at with crime in Seattle.

Was there a question?

The question is, do you have information about locations of other crimes following the statement on page 11 of the report, which is about shots and shots fired, 16% nexus?

But I mentioned that he can get back to me on that.

Okay, perfect.

And I would love to get back to you on that.

We do do a pretty comprehensive dive into just hotspot locations, repeat locations for service, hours that we actually spend time on at very, very specific locations, and then what types of calls that we get consistently at those locations.

So sometimes there's locations where It could be a grocery store and you're looking at theft.

Sometimes it could be a Rite Aid.

You're looking at theft, but then you look at some locations like maybe there's a housing area where you might see people that are experiencing crisis.

We keep track of all those types of things.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have hands raised from Councilmember Peterson and Councilmember Lewis.

Are those no hands?

Councilmember Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

And with the slides still up, I just wanna caution us on zeroing in on just three months of information, that fourth quarter last year, because this is a year-end crime report, which states very clearly that crime is up in Seattle year over year.

And then again, I think it really is important to look pre-pandemic to the, that we're 17% higher than in 2019. Page 8 of your report says gun violence reached an 11-year high in 2022. So I appreciate that holistic view looking at over larger periods of time here.

But following up, I really appreciate Council Member Lewis and others talking about the situation with encampments.

Some of my constituents, I've been working with them with a very dangerous encampment in under that's on WSDOT property.

The governor needs to act to take care of that.

There's money that's been dispersed to help those who are experiencing homelessness.

Many of them are victims of these crimes and victims of violence.

So they need to be brought into safety.

It's also impacting the surrounding neighborhood next to an elementary school.

So we do need to have action taken on that.

And so I want to understand, even though that one-time federal money ran out, there are a couple hundred million dollars that the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has, including a grant, in addition, a grant from the state to deal with rights of way here.

So, Chief Diaz, my question to you is what is King County Regional Homelessness Authority doing to collaborate with the police department so that, because in a low-income housing project, if there's one tenant that is, if shots fired are coming from a unit or fires are being set in a unit, the property manager is going to take action, going to work with law enforcement so that the other dozens of people are not negatively impacted or harmed.

So Does KCRHA give you any information?

Do they help coordinate so that people are not being victimized in the encampments?

Yeah, so we are our alternative response team out of our collaborative policing bureau works with the key county regional housing authority.

That's part of the unified care team.

All of the work that is part of that, they do better.

I should say they better speak to the very specifics of of what we do.

But we also do provide data as well to understand crime trends, things that are related to some of the encampments, some of the types of violence that is also occurring.

It allows them to be able to make informed decisions on what areas they need to look at addressing.

We know that right now we have been in conversations with WSDOT, with WSP and myself and as part of our team and our city's efforts are all having conversations specifically about WSDOT properties.

So we know that the areas around 8th and King, I know the areas around Pasadena, all of those are actually topics of discussion currently with everybody at the table.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just a brief question for you as we have gone through this discussion.

As the committee is well aware, the council passed A number of really good programmatic expansions and public safety and we've alluded to some of those during the session today, particularly around.

regional peacekeepers and everything else.

Are we gonna have some opportunities as the year goes along to have some check-ins per our accountability mandate with the executive on getting some of those things off paper and into the field to start making a big impact on some of these trends that we're discussing today?

And just wanted to kind of flag that for members of the public who are watching this, who I'm sure are eager for this conversation to pivot in the coming weeks, from our assessment of the previous year to the implementation of the things that we have budgeted for to make an impact on driving these trends down.

And that might be a good transition to continue on with the presentation, but it's more just a question if we have anything lined up in the coming weeks to check in on some of those investments and really make sure there's accountability on the executive side to implement those investments.

I think that's probably a question for the chair, not Chief Diaz, since if you're talking about a committee.

We are going to hear from HSD next, specifically on the 2023 NOFAs.

That is primarily for their standard lines of business, but it might be an opportunity to put a plug in for a subsequent briefing on the status of some of those investments, since many of them are made through the Human Services Department, either to our community based partners or It, the Human Services Department is a pass through to King County Public Health for some of the gun violence prevention work so I will definitely work with you and trying to, and other committee members and trying to set that up soon.

It is. mid-February and I know we all start getting a little anxious by by the time March comes around and we are not seeing these really important dollars out the door so appreciate that Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you so much and again I want to reiterate what the Chief said and what I also mentioned in my comments that for any one person who experiences crime or a form of assault, it's too much.

And so from a public policy perspective, that's what we're here to address, how we can continue to make investments, both upstream and in the direct services of the chief overseas.

Chief Diaz, I just wanted to ask you to repeat the statistic that you mentioned about the five-year trend.

I noted it down when you mentioned it.

I know we'll get follow-up, but do you mind just repeating that five-year statistic for us one more time?

Yeah, so as we look at a five-year weighted crime average, so we take, obviously, I think 20, it's 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. And in those years, we, specifically to violent crime, and I really wanna focus on violent crime, because I do think that there's, we just don't know fully what the property crime and the reporting structure is.

But out of the five-year weighted average was 577. 577 violent crimes up to year to date.

And we are at about 530 right now.

And so that is under the five year weighted average.

That is a good trend that puts us actually at a 27% reduction from last year's numbers.

But it's actually at the five year weighted average, we're actually down from overall five years average.

Um, and then when you look at actually consistently with, uh, property crime, and this is one of the things like, as I said, I'm, I'm, I'm cautious of just being, uh, just, just noting that, uh, we typically would be at around 4,995 property crimes at this point, uh, in a given year on the five-year weighted average.

Right now we're actually at 4,146.

So we're about 800 crimes over the five, under the five-year weighted average.

which is, again, it's a good trend, but I'm very cautious in that.

I'm cautiously optimistic in that trend that I think that there's some good work, but I also have been trying to make sure that I express my concern of really making sure that people are reporting crime.

And there's several different ways.

There's an online reporting system, there's a telephone reporting system, and then also, you know, waiting for an officer to respond out to a call for service.

And the more we can get people to report that crime, it gives us much more accurate reflection about what crime trends we need to actually be addressing and what people are experiencing.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis, I'm assuming that raised hand is a leftover hand.

Yeah.

No further questions, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

All right.

Let's move on.

I think the next section is bias crimes.

Yes, so let me just get my power up.

As we started to see when it came to bias crimes last year, in 2020 and 2021, we saw a marked increase in the amount of bias crimes from the years before.

We were actually seeing extraordinary levels of increase when you compare it to whether it was Asian hate, we saw LGBTQ issues, And this last year, we actually saw a decrease by 7%, a number of about 64 specific bias incidences of crime.

It's still too hard to determine whether that's a downward trend or it's still staying up in a very increased state from where it was.

five years ago.

And so that is something that we're just trying to make sure we pay attention to.

Our biases is decreased by 18% while hate crimes decreased by 14% compared to 2021. But again, 2021 was at the highest level.

So seeing those drops in that is actually some of the consistency that we're seeing maybe going back into pre-pandemic numbers.

But we'll still wait till that is And then we also want to make sure that people are reporting bias instances or hate crimes.

And if that's still occurring, we still see an elevated level of Asian hate.

And that's something that we're also paying attention to.

And as we talk into a property crime, a property crime did increase by 4% compared to 2021. But really the area that is probably where we've seen an extreme increase is the motor vehicle theft.

That is our 30% high.

We have also noted that Hyundai and Kia, based on the TikTok-inspired vehicle thefts, those have actually, were not in the top 20, the top 10 of vehicles stolen in 2021. And in 2022, those rose into number five and six.

That is some of the things that we're trying to address.

And in working with other states and other areas to make sure that manufacturers are putting provisions into their vehicles to ensure that the safety and as well as less likely for these vehicles to be stolen.

And and so I think right now, I believe that I saw the announcement on 1 of those dealerships that we're trying to.

But preventative measures to ensure that their vehicles were less stolen.

And, and I think that's all for all the manufacturers is something that we all have to be paying attention to, because we do consistently see Hondas that are stolen we see Toyota's.

Sometimes the Camrys and some of the Ford vehicles, those have consistently been in the top three overall for the number of years that I seem to feel like I worked in patrol.

So I feel like those are things that we also need to make sure that our manufacturers are doing to put preventative measures in place.

And then I think as we get into that, I did talk to you a little bit about the priority one status calls.

Despite our staffing challenges, our priority one response time was around seven minutes.

As we look at, at, you know, uh, as I kind of noted is putting, uh, officers in very, very specific areas.

Um, as you know, is from the, from the, um, the mapping that we are doing.

Uh, with very specific hotspots, you looked at the CID, we had an increased amount of officers in around the, the, the CID area.

We also have an increasing amount of officers in and around the 3rd and Pine area.

We provided emphasis patrols in and around 3rd Avenue, down from Pine Street down to around Union Street, in and around those side blocks, just trying to make sure that it's safe access routes for people that are taking the buses and still commuting in and out of work.

But those are also areas where we also had a number of shootings And we have seen over the last several months, some of those shootings start to be less in those areas.

And so that is consistent with what we're seeing in the overall drop in violent crime.

And I think that is open up for questions.

I know we've answered several questions, but I'm sure there'll be more.

Sure, so if folks have questions related to bias crimes, the property crime statistics, or the response times, this will be a great time to hear those questions.

I see Council Member Lewis is 1st in the queue.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

This is maybe more of a broader question asking for maybe some reflection from the chief on the overall report in terms of how it might inform 2023 priorities based on the trends that we're seeing in the data from 2022. And maybe just ask, given that we are still in a situation where the department is allocating limited personnel time to focus on the maximum possible impact on these public safety trends.

In terms of the priorities for 2023, how is the department going to take this information and allocate limited resources for the maximum possible impact to keep the city safe?

And what kinds of reforms or initiatives is the department planning to maximize the impact of the existing personnel that we have, given that we're not likely to see a significant increase in personnel until sometime later in the year?

Yeah, so one of the biggest things that we're actually doing and launching is tomorrow, we're actually launching a new shift schedule change.

So we have gone and worked with working on a four hour, so four day on, nine hour shift to two days off.

That is what the schedule is currently.

Tomorrow we will be launching a 10 hour shift, four days on, three days off.

What that allows us to do is have overlap of shifts.

So you will see overlapping between first and second watch for a number of hours, as well as second to third watch for about three hours as well.

And what that allows us to do is having officers having a little bit more personnel during those peak hours.

We will still continue to augment the amount of officers that we need to make sure our staffing is at a safe level.

So that is still consistent.

However, it allows officers to have an extra day off for their own level of wellness.

It is also consistent with what other agencies around the region are doing.

So it continues to allow us to be more competitive when it comes to recruiting and hiring staff and staffing.

This is something that we are excited to launch tomorrow.

Will we have some challenges in making sure that everything is staffed and everything's working appropriately?

We have logistics when making sure we have enough vehicles for those time periods where we've got doubled up officers.

There's also days that allows where a precinct has what we call double up days.

So it's when one for four days on, doubles up the last day that doubles up with the next set of four days on.

And so that allows us to shift resources throughout the city to be able to be addressing.

Sometimes it could be emphasis shifts or maybe it's taking officers and moving them over to do training and scenario based work.

And so this is actually allowing us to have a lot more flexibility in our deployment, in our resources, as well as a continuously focusing on that level of officer wellness.

Um, so we're really excited for that to launch.

Uh, I think that is, you know, obviously one of the priorities, uh, the second, you know, I think component of this is really still staying consistent with our violent crime, uh, addressing our violent crime and using our, our, our Cape model, you know, continually working with our community, using analytics to put our officers in the right place.

You know, hopefully, you know, that's the, when we talk about prevention, we talk about safe storage, we talk about a street arrest protection orders, but we also just talk about getting a lot of these guns off the street.

finding ways that, you know, people will be willing to turn in guns that they're no longer using because, you know, if these guns are stolen, they are going to be used out in the community.

And that is something that we always are being mindful of.

And the environment, you know, and I think that's everybody has a has a role to play in an environment, cutting back brush, opening up areas for line of sight, as well as increased lighting.

And we know what we want people to use spaces We want to make sure that people are coming out, doing walks in their community, coming downtown.

We want people just to be much more active.

And we're already seeing that activity pick up.

When I looked at I went and did a little shopping in New Village and there wasn't a parking spot available.

So that is really seeing those spaces being occupied helps reduce some of the type of criminal activity and then enforcement.

And it's really being pinpoint targeted in our enforcement.

We don't want to just go out and enforce every single law.

We really want to make sure that we're mindful about the laws that we're enforcing, that we're really consistent with the issues that we're trying to address.

And again, because we always are mindful about disparities and impacts in our community.

And so those are the things that our second goal will be focused on as we move into 2023.

Thank you, Chief.

And one of those priorities that I hear a lot in the community is commercial burglary as something for the department to be continuing to focus on.

And first off, I want to congratulate you on finally getting everything in place to move to the 410s.

I know that's been a big slog and took a lot of planning and work, and I'm glad that's finally getting implemented.

And congratulations on getting that over the finish line.

You mentioned that that has implications for the overlap period between shifts and sort of staggering the end of the shifts.

Lots of these commercial burglaries happen at a peak time, you know, between two and five in the morning.

What are the implications of the shift change?

for potentially having more personnel able to respond to alarm based dispatches during those hours based on the 410 shift?

Yeah.

So one of the things that in the shift schedule that we're moving towards, you have in our previous schedule, we actually had our overlap times based on literally about a half hour transition.

So you have people that are coming in and doing roll call.

And by the time that they're ending roll call, that next shift is coming off shift.

And so they're replacing, so you actually have sometimes less personnel that are out and about patrolling.

As we look at these transition times, you're actually given an hour transition time.

And so that means that, you know, people are doing a roll call, but then the next shift is actually already coming out and patrolling for at least a half hour before that other shift is actually going offline.

It allows us to have much more visible presence, hopefully much more visible presence as we are out there patrolling those issues.

And then as the shift ends, it actually would end at around five o'clock.

The next shift or the first shift comes in at four o'clock.

So between those hours, between two and five is what you mentioned, you would have a consistent level of officers patrolling those districts.

And you would see that as well as in the evening or in the afternoon hours, as well as the evening hours, a consistently overlay of shifts and as well as you know, what we call those double-up days, actually being able to use the resources that are extra in a precinct to be able to move them around to address, you know, sometimes the other issues that are going on in a very specific precinct.

Yeah, I appreciate that and look forward to seeing the felt impact of that during those hours to respond to those exigent issues.

So, greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

Council Member Nelson.

Thank you.

I mean, no disrespect, but the four percent increase in property crime is not an accurate reflection of what's really going on out there.

I know that you realize this to Chief Diaz.

And unfortunately, we only have anecdotal information about what is really happening to small businesses.

Crime against small businesses is going in the wrong direction.

And I know this because as public as as economic development chair, I am the one that hears about what's happening in neighborhood business districts and against individual business owners and Councilmember Lewis joined me at a meeting with one I've met with a group of Ballard business owners.

I plan to have another small business roundtable in my discussion to talk about other ways that we can not just address crime against small business, but also better record it.

Because yes, people are recording stolen vehicles.

That's fairly easy to do.

And there is a fairly high recovery rate for stolen vehicles in Seattle.

That's not the case for for other crimes and there's little incentive for business owners to actually report if they're not going to file an insurance claim because they don't want their premiums to go up.

or because they just don't know if there will be an officer that's available to come and take a report in a timely fashion, et cetera.

We know the reasons why these crimes are not being reported.

And I'm just putting in a plug that we do have to put all of the tools at our disposal to address property crime, particularly against small businesses.

And I'll note that we can't separate when it comes to what's going on with small businesses, we can't separate property from violent crime.

Because when I talk to small businesses, they often mention threats or violence against their staff and their customers.

And so just to note that a lot more attention should be focused on ways to gather more information about property crime and also certainly let's not make public policy based on simply a 4% increase in property crime that's shown here because I do not think that that is accurate.

Thanks.

No, and thank you for that Council Member Nelson.

One of the things that, and that's the reason why a part of me is duly noting my concern that that is not necessarily as accurate, but also just trying to make sure that people are reporting crime.

We are, you know, trying to look for and move forward on a project.

Right now, our online reporting system takes about 40% of our crime, and we want to make it much more user friendly and not shut down during times when people are trying to report crime and get frustrated with the system.

And that is something that we are hoping to, you know, continue to move forward on and launch sometime later this year, because as we still consistently have the staffing challenges, it allows us still to get the reporting that is needed for us to really make informed decisions about how we deploy our resources, addressing some of the other different crimes that are also happening to many of the businesses.

Thank you for that work.

Appreciate it.

And thank you, Council Member Nelson, just to follow up on that question.

I'm wondering whether or not the department is seeing any identifiable trends in armed robberies, whether or not there are common demographics among the shooters, or anything else that you might see as a pattern.

Yeah, right, you know, right now, as we look at some of the different consistencies with robberies, we have had a number of robberies where you might have somebody that is kind of organizing the robberies and having other people do the robberies for them.

We've actually made arrests in several different cases out of these.

Last year, we actually noted one of the cases where it was a pot shop robbery.

But it ended up, one of them resulted in a homicide in Tacoma, but we actually ended up being able to link that to a broader issue of consistent robberies that were occurring throughout the region.

And so much more organized when it comes to some of the robberies that we're seeing.

And that's one of the challenges that we're working through.

We're currently monitoring a couple of different robberies, but we have seen, as I mentioned, seen a little bit more of a decrease in the robberies this year so far.

So we're trying to make sure that we're, you know, identifying consistencies within existing robberies and seeing if they have a certain level of pattern.

Thank you and just a preview of an item that will be coming before the committee sometime this quarter and appreciate SPD working with our city auditor's office on completing a city audit of the trend of organized retail crime and expect that we'll be hearing that relatively soon.

And then I just had one more question, and I see Council Member Peterson, you do have your hand up, so I'll get you in there next.

Just interested in the statistic of the 46% increase in officer on view arrests.

I have two questions about that.

To the extent that this 46% increase may be, some of it may be because of emphasis patrols.

I'm wondering if you could speak to how SPD is ensuring that emphasis patrols aren't harming vulnerable communities when making arrests.

And then secondly, I see that in the Stat is not in the presentation it is in the report so it's just taking a minute here to find it, but it showed that a significant percentage of this increase on.

from officer on view arrests as opposed to calls that are, arrests that are initiated because of community-based calls, that a significant number of them were associated with premises checks.

And I'm just wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how a premises check is initiated by an officer on view event.

Thank you.

So premise checks we use as very specific directed patrols.

So if we're looking at a third and pine location, that is a premise check for officers to log to.

And so having those areas such as 12th and Jackson, you know, 5th and Jackson, 3rd and Pine, 3rd and Pike, you'll see premise checks at a higher rate because it's part of that directed patrol.

And then on the MER that we use, we identify that as being that directed emphasis that's part of that.

When it comes to seeing an increase, when you look at the second component of the officer-generated versus computer-generated CAD calls, we actually saw a sharp decrease in 2020, down to 31% of being officer-generated or on views.

In 2021, we were at 24%, and then last year we were at 25%.

So while we see an increase in the amount of arrest in an on-view position, it is really because of those directed emphasis, very specific targeted operations that we're focused on.

We did a motor vehicle theft operation.

Again, very, very targeted to very specific crimes that we're focused on.

Fentanyl, drug trafficking issues in and around.

very specific locations, organized retail theft operations.

So in those premise checks, you're going to see an increase in level of arrest.

But really, it's based on really our targeted effort on those criminal activity or criminal actions, rather than just addressing everyone and addressing overall crime and just say, anything that moves, we're going to make an arrest on.

It's very, very specific to the issue that it's at hand.

Um, so our actual CAD, uh, our officer generated CAD calls is actually only up 1%, um, uh, compared to 2021, but it's actually down pretty much about 12% from, uh, the years before, uh, when we had a lot more staffing.

Understood.

Thank you.

And to the second part of the question around how you're ensuring that these emphasis patrols, and I know as Council Member Mosqueda mentioned earlier, we do have a statement of legislative intent associated with this, the topic of emphasis patrols, but perhaps you could just speak briefly to how it is that In the emphasis patrols, you're focusing on the high impact violators and not harming vulnerable communities.

Yeah, so as as we've actually launched and I believe we did a presentation on our equity, accountability and quality system.

So we really started focusing on looking at a system of being able to identify disparities on the very front end, and being able to start asking questions about what those disparities look like.

And then also really kind of changing the mindset of just really providing focused, very specific operations with specific tasks to do.

And, you know, say we're focused on motor vehicle theft, We know what those actions, what some of the times the behaviors that are associated with that, where areas that are high propensity for motor vehicle thefts and really focusing our efforts on either the recovery or on the stolen vehicle side.

So running a lot more operations that are very specifically focused on the behavior rather than the population.

And so, as we look at those operations and then also making sure that we're tracking it through our equity system that allows us to really be able to have a mindful look at seeing that we're not trying to create disparate impacts in communities.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

And I did want to let you know that I do support expanding that evidence-based program for gun violence prevention.

Thank you for raising that.

And thank you, Council Member Nelson, for talking about insurance rates for small businesses.

I hear complaints from small businesses in my district as well.

Chief when I attend the roll calls in the north precinct which I've done every year since I've been in office I hear, you know, I get the sense about officer morale and.

I appreciate you highlighting some of the successes you're seeing in operations, but I am concerned officers are on overtime, so they are overworked as the department's understaffed.

Will there be a public safety plan that you all are coming out with?

I mean, you had the retention plan.

and recruitment but which was mainly a recruitment plan and then you've got this crime report will there be a overall public safety plan for 2023 and hoping it would also focus on these issues like officer wellness and addressing how they're working so much over time.

Yeah, so you know, one of the things that you bring up is exactly the reason why we really focused our negotiation on it and getting a 4-3 shift.

So giving officers that extra day off during their work week.

They work, while they work longer hours, but an hour more, having that freed up day allows them to, even if they worked an overtime during their days off, they still have two days off.

And that is That is part of that, just that resting recovery, because I am concerned about just how much overtime that our officers are working to make sure that the city is safe.

Right now, we are drafting two things.

One is an internal strategic plan that our executive director of strategic initiatives, Heather Marks, is drafting.

We actually have been working with the mayor's office on an overall public safety plan for the city.

And I think that that includes a lot of different conversations when it comes to the kind of the dual dispatch system, etc.

And so those are all part of that process, but internally, when it comes to just Our officer wellness that has also been part of our recruiting plan because in order to retain people, we got to make sure that we're mindful of of the things that would actually help keep people still doing this job.

And, you know, we've actually seen a just in the first month and a half, a sharp decline in the amount of people retiring and leaving the department.

So that's a good trend.

to start off the first month and a half of the year.

But, you know, we will consistently be monitoring that.

We're hoping that, you know, while we do know that it has been a challenge for the department, a challenge for our officers over the last couple years, that, you know, morale, while it's still being low, it is much better from where it was just a few years ago.

And we're hoping that You know, it's just part of the rebuilding because, you know, many of the officers are, you know, will hopefully be able to see some of their officers, you know, wanting to return to this department.

I've already got inquiries just in this last couple of weeks about people potentially wanting to return to the Seattle Police Department.

So I'm hoping that this is really a nice change as we move into 2023.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you so much.

Excuse me.

Thank you so much.

And I have just a few questions, if I might, Madam Chair, three, keep it to three.

So thanks so much for again, this report and for helping to peel back some of the layers on the statistics that we see.

As we think about investments across the spectrum, you know, I wanted to emphasize again, the support that the last three budgets have had for fully funding the full hiring plan as transmitted in the budget.

Again, that's included in the 23-24 budget.

I think it complements some of the other investments that we've made.

For example, with flexible use from the ARPA funds for small businesses, when there was a surplus for the awards that was given out to small businesses for flexible dollars.

I want to applaud Director Mark McIntyre who really redirected those to storefront improvements if folks had experience damage, they could use that they could apply for those funds so that was an important investment to respond to some of the damage, but looking upstream as well and one of the other issues you mentioned which is the mental health and well being of officers, we did in last year's budget provide some funding for a mental health provider for officers.

So I was wondering if you could comment on that.

We actually had two officers that we, excuse me, two mental health providers that we offered for Seattle Fire Department and working with you and your team, I believe we offered an additional mental health provider to SPD.

Could you comment on that as well?

Or if you want more time to get back to us, just want to make sure that that money was deployed and is being utilized.

And if there's any additional support you need for wellness that we are aware of that as well.

Yeah, no.

So actually, thank you for being able to support Executive Director of Wellness.

One of the things that we've actually brought in, we actually brought in a couple of different people from across the country that have expertise in this area.

Dr. Sobo from Chicago PD has actually been able to provide some insight and worked with our wellness unit on what that position looks like, the development of some of the strategies and recommendations that we need to be looking to move towards.

Our wellness unit had already had some of those recommendations already in the implementation phase, but you know that is right now moving forward.

We hopefully will have a job description and a process to actually hire that position very soon.

And that is, I'm really excited to have that because having a command level position just really puts us at the forefront of really trying to make sure that wellness is a valued part of this department.

And that was never part of when I came on, it was, you know, you go to calls for service and you might've seen something very traumatizing and it was just kind of like suck it up and move on to the next call.

And I think that now we're being much more mindful about just the types of calls that we're sending our personnel to and making sure that wellness is at the forefront of that.

When it comes to some of the recommendations that we're looking at, those are things that we can get back to you on.

You know, we've, you know, brought in some of the experts to say, Hey, you know, we should just, these things.

Are actually something that a department should look at doing.

And then seeing if there's any costs associated with that, then we would, you know, obviously work with the cap city council on what that looks like.

the support that we needed to move that across the finish line has been crucial.

And that's, you know, we're excited to launch that tomorrow.

Thank you for that update.

Yeah, looking forward to getting the feedback on what might be needed as well in the wellness department.

We are having similar conversations with the chair of public safety, with our friends at Seattle Fire as well.

And part of, I think, the wellness conversation comes from some of those early conversations that we had with folks two or three years ago, where first responders were really saying, hey, I show up to a call and I don't feel like I have the resources to help someone.

We hear often about landing zones and the need to be able to bring someone to services, whether it's behavioral health treatment, a recovery place, or even just being able to get them housing.

And so as we think about the ways in which officer responses may change given the dual dispatch program that is being launched through the CSCC and some of the other efforts that really Chair Herbold has led on to try to figure out where an officer might not be the first responder necessary.

I wanted to point to a few pieces in the report, it says of the top five categories for 911 call types answered by SPD in 2022, they were non-criminal in nature.

So traffic, suspicious circumstance, disturbance, assistance, excuse me, assistance public and premise check.

So I'm wondering if there is any additional feedback that you might be able to provide to us about how how policies might be changing since the, I think it was September 26th, community briefing that Chair Herbold held in her committee where she mentioned that the Seattle Police Department is automatically being dispatched on overdose and seizure calls.

And there's recent changes within SPD and Seattle Fire trying to address this.

At this point, is there any update on whether or not Seattle Police Department is being required to show up to overdoses or to seizure calls?

Or is there other things that you might want to highlight for us as we think about reducing the need for an officer to show up to the non-criminal in nature calls?

Yeah, so you know, we've actually been the primary responder to what we call person down calls.

Person down calls are, you know, sometimes people intoxicated, sometimes, you know, people passed out, sometimes people on overdose.

And so that has been consistent with since I've been in patrol.

And, and so we have looked at not only those calls for service, but also overdoses, as we've seen the increase in the amount of fentanyl, and then also the increase of fentanyl being added with other different types of drugs.

We've also seen an increase in level of behavioral crisis associated with it, as well as some level of violence associated with that.

And even in some of the reports that the fire department had noted during when firefighters are getting assaulted, some of those are occurring when they're actually on an overdose call and the person now has, whether it's provided Naloxone or Narcan, And now the person is now awake and sometimes it can be combative or sometimes fight with an officer or fight with a firefighter.

And that is also our response calls to those things.

So what we've actually seen is in our overdose calls, just from one year, we had roughly about 1,400 calls for service in 2021. And last year we had over 3,200 calls for service, just strictly in overdose calls.

And it's part of that is that just the amount of increase in fentanyl issues that we're seeing across the board.

And I think that's very consistent with what the medical examiner was noting on the amount of deaths associated with because of the increase of fentanyl deaths.

And so overall, I think that there's a lot of bigger discussion on what our response to as a county looks like when it comes to addressing fentanyl and addressing some of the other issues that we're seeing.

We have officers that have the ability to be able to provide naloxone.

And so that is one of the things that we're trying to do when we save life is really trying to make sure we have officers that are patrolling our areas throughout the city.

And sometimes they can be very, very quick to get into locations.

where fire might be responding from a station.

But also even consistently more is that even if the fire department responds, it's also making sure that they have the safety and security as well from not being assaulted when they're in their situation.

So I think the fire department has, they'll be able to talk a little bit about more of their calls for service.

I know that they're responding to a little bit more overdoses than we're experiencing, but when you look at the person down calls as well that we're already responding to, those are some calls that are not necessarily initially classified as overdoses, but could be overdoses based on either alcohol or some level of drug.

Yeah, I would very much be interested in that follow up conversation.

And I know that the chair has spent a lot of time working with both departments, but we I think we know that when folks have an overdose there, when they wake up, their response might be different if they see an officer there versus a firefighter or paramedic.

And so I would like to have additional conversation about that, because I also don't want to detract from what officers may need to be responding to in terms of some of the other statistics that we referred to today.

If there is a qualified EMT firefighter on on site and recognizing that we want to continue to move towards officers having the ability to to really focus on those crime related incidences when issues that are non-criminal in nature could be potentially handled by someone else as we see those top five categories in the 911 call type categories in your report really illustrating that I think that there's a ways for us to go.

Obviously, some of this will be informed by the CSCC dual dispatch program.

I'm hoping that it will help pave the way to bring up officers to go to more of the criminal related calls that are of concern to this entire council and the community at large.

And then that allows for EMTs, firefighters, and other partners to respond to those non-criminal calls and look forward to that discussion.

And then my last question for you, when we talk about crimes, incidents of crimes tied to encampments.

I know that that's a really concerning discussion for everyone.

Am I reading page 14 correct that it looks like bias crimes against unhoused people increased by over 200% in 2022?

That's not within the encampment.

That's for folks who are experiencing homelessness.

Am I reading that correctly?

Yeah, so that number was actually a very, very low number.

So to see the 200, it's actually 23 cases.

And so it is still concerning because you do see people that are homeless that are being impacted by sometimes people trying to take things into their own hand and they could be attacking somebody that is homelessness or that is experiencing homelessness.

And so that is one of the things that we track because that is part of our SMC code.

Homelessness is part of the bias crime.

And so that is something that we're paying attention to.

And we noted it very specifically, but it is actually a small number.

It's a 23 individual cases.

So 16 cases over that initial amount in 2021.

Okay, thank you for clarifying that.

And maybe further conversations to be had.

I know the Chair of Homeless Services and Public Assets has his hand up, so I will stop the talking here because I'm sure it dovetails with some of the issues that he'll be following up on.

But look forward to seeing what else we could do with your team and the community at large who is seeing that type of incidence as well increase.

Thank you, Councilmember Mosqueda.

Just a tag on there before handing it back over to Councilmember Lewis.

As it relates to the more than 200% increase in bias crimes where a homeless person was the victim, I would like some follow-up on the nature of those bias crimes.

I think that's really, it's telling that all of the other bias crimes have gone down and the department recognizes that that might be not because there are fewer bias crimes, but it might be because fewer people are reporting them.

But the fact that that is in evidence for all other categories aside from homeless, people who are victims.

I just think it would be worth a little bit more information about that.

I am hearing anecdotally more incidences of, as you say, Chief Diaz, of people taking things into their own hands.

And we know that our unhoused population is more likely to be a victim of a crime than people who are living housed.

So thank you.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you so much, Council Member Herbold.

I mean, I think just at the front, I'll acknowledge the comments from yourself and from Council Member Mosqueda about that really alarming statistic of the increase in crimes against people experiencing homelessness purely motivated by the state of the person experiencing homelessness.

And it's not why I originally raised my hand to be acknowledged.

I have a different question that I'll pivot to.

But I will just say, I think it's a sober reflection that a lot of the anti-homeless rhetoric that we have seen from media figures, and in some cases from politicians, almost certainly needs to be examined as a potential source of some of that sentiment and would just encourage us to be mindful of that as we reflect on how to continue to make progress for everyone in the city to be safe regardless of their housing status.

Pivoting to my question, which isn't entirely unrelated, but to kind of follow up on the line of questioning from Council Member Mosqueda about response alternatives, I just want to briefly maybe engage in a conversation with the Chief to maybe try to acknowledge some of the hurdles that we've faced culturally in the city of Seattle that maybe make, that have made us sort of a unique polity for making more progress on this issue.

And I get the sense from talking to people who are rank and file police officers or talking to people who have talked to rank and file police officers that That there might be some skepticism among line officers about the merits or desirability of alternative response systems that may be related in some cases to a misunderstanding of how it has worked in other cities and I'd be curious to get the chief's response to this but.

Typically these response services, all of which are at varying degrees inspired by CAHOOTS and Eugene Oregon Crisis Assistance Helping Out in the Streets.

CAHOOTS indeed got its moniker and name over 30 years ago when it started because they were in CAHOOTS with the police or, you know, are an attendance service that works with the police, not in an adverse way, but in a dynamic in the field way where Everyone's on the same radio, people are triaging in real time.

Police and cahoots responders see each other as colleagues, even though they're different services and different responses, but there is like real in the field interaction and mutual respect between the services.

Um, and I just wonder if there's, like, if there's maybe a way where we can work together as a council and with you chief as in sort of a rhetorical reframing of the conversation so that.

You know, we make it clear that these services are assets that can enhance.

the resources available to police to do the job they're doing in the field, that even though it's a separate response service, it's a response service that is designed to be dynamic and allow for that real-time triage to screen off calls that police really don't need to do and free up police capacity for additional work, whatever that work may be required, that is work that only they can do.

And I do think that we're sort of in a place where we maybe don't communicate as much as we could be in a deeper way about what the council goals are here and how it can be very beneficial to the department.

And maybe there's ways that we can work together to win over some of that skepticism that we might be seeing from people who maybe don't quite understand exactly what the nature of the service and what the goals are.

And I thought I'd take advantage this morning to maybe frame the conversation and those ways and maybe get your feedback and see how we can work together to advance those priorities because it should be part of the public safety plan that Councilmember Peterson alluded to that this council would desire.

Part of it should be really focusing on that 12% of calls where we have agreement between the council and the department that they could be done by another service as an alternative dispatcher.

But also emphasizing that it's a culture based on collegiality, triaging calls in the field and that it's a resource for officers.

And we should.

And indeed, that has been the reaction in cities where it's been implemented.

Indeed, that has been the The lobbying efforts from chiefs to get those services and other cities have emphasized that utility of the service.

And just want to give an opportunity to have the discussion in those terms and get some feedback as we, as we get close to closing out the hearing today.

Yeah, I do think- Council Member Lewis, I wanna, if I could just do a quick little me too.

Chief Diaz, you and I have talked often about the role that police chiefs had played in other jurisdictions.

Your former colleague, a police chief in Denver, took a frontline role in promoting the STAR program.

And it's so important to, as Council Member Lewis says, to embracing the interest in these alternate responses, not just from the public perspective where there is overwhelming support, but also within our city family, including our frontline police officers.

So we really critically need your leadership and expertise in advancing these discussions.

We are going to hear a little bit on what I hope will be progress in the development pilot in our next committee meeting, but that is not to take away from the importance of your answer to Council Member Lewis's question.

Thank you.

Sounds good.

No, and thank you for that, Council Member Lewis, Council Member Herbold.

When I look at this issue, there's always probably gonna be a little skepticism with any program that they're just not aware of.

And I've seen it over the course of my career.

I actually had the...

I only had one mental health case worker as part of our co-responder model when they increased it to five.

And that was a part of the product of initially like, how is this gonna work?

How are we gonna get more mental health workers into the system and how are they gonna respond to more calls for service?

That's also a little bit of skepticism when we had mobile crisis van that's literally responds out to our calls.

And now it's just an integrated part of our response to dealing with people in behavioral crisis.

We also have CSOs, and we traditionally, when I came on, that was part of our normal product of CSOs, and they went away.

And then they're like, well, then how do they end up, you know, following up on my service?

And now that's, there's now a product of what we do and calling them out for some level of follow up.

We also look at critical answer response.

And that has also been a product that I've been, you know, intimately involved with.

So I helped reestablish the CSO program.

And that's also product of it, but now critical is response and getting officers to respond out to to shootings and other things.

And so, you know, initially there was skepticism, but we've actually utilize that work on torchlight and for probably over a decade now.

And so there are a lot of things that initially started with skepticism.

And then once there's a product and they see the usefulness of it, that they, you know, officers do, you know, say, okay, this is actually really valuable.

Victim support team.

Initially, the first several months of the victim support team's establishment wasn't very, it wasn't utilized.

And then, you know, after people started utilizing it and said, gosh, this frees up a lot of my time and effort.

it becomes utilized.

And so I think that just we go in that with that mindset of knowing that there is going to be skepticism, but we're also trying to figure out how do we mitigate it and really become a useful product for the community at hand.

And I think that that is, I think, overall, our overall goal and what we see.

And we want to listen to officers in the process because they do know firsthand about what are some of the challenges that they're experiencing on those calls for service.

and how to make sure that those products of service, the social services can do that much better and being able to respond to those needs.

Council Member Lewis, any follow-up?

No, no, I would just offer the personal capacity and resources of my office to engage in those discussions chief in any way that you think would be appropriate because I do think part of it really should be at this point, a little bit more engagement to to work with.

rank and file leadership in the department to really discuss some of these concepts, the utility of them, how it can be helpful for a lot of the same concepts we've been discussing around officer wellness and officer time.

And that it really has worked in a collegial way in these other jurisdictions.

I mean, I would say it's somewhat analogous in a sense to the collegial relationship the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program has with with the police department.

I mean, we see that, you know, there's a lot of respect.

I've been involved in a lot of these efforts where we have in the West Precinct and in District 7, you know, had integrated teams of folks that have, for example, resolved an encampment location that involved SPD West Precinct officers involved, you know, outreach and social worker teams from REACH and from LEAD.

And everyone in those meetings greatly enjoys each other's company.

There's huge mutual respect.

And I think it's really just a matter of expanding on that kind of a model where we also build hearts and minds and break down perceived barriers between policing and some of these other competencies that help make us safe.

to the point that enhances the role of both parties and really helps us move forward.

So just offering, if there's a way you might want to work with convening some discussions with rank and file leaders within the department, I'd love to participate in those and see if we can break through some of the impasse on getting some of this done.

So thank you.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Very well said.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis.

Council Member Nelson.

Yeah, this is going to be a quick question.

So we've talked for the past several, several minutes, ranging from fentanyl overdoses now to alternative police responses, dual dispatch, et cetera.

And back to the question of what resources your officers need, Chief Diaz, one thing that hasn't been mentioned is substance use treatment.

And so would having more more options for publicly funded recovery based comprehensive substance use disorder treatment be an important resource for your officers going forward since we're putting a lot of other things on the table here?

You know, it is essential, Council Member Nelson, because under the Blake decision, we have to make sure that we refer people into into social services and substance abuse services specifically.

And so we need that level of identified programs that we can refer people into before, and if after two referrals, somebody is still consistently in possession of fentanyl or other drugs, then that can result in arrest.

But actually putting the prevention, we don't really have those prevention services or the substance abuse services already first at hand.

One of the things that I would say is essential.

I know the state legislation is working on some sort of revamping of the Blake decisions legislation.

So there might be some changes to it, but I think overall, there is still gonna be some need for substance abuse services specifically too.

Thank you for that answer.

And I might note, let's not forget also, it would be an important resource for people that are actually dying of addiction as well.

So thanks.

Thank you, Councilmember Nelson.

Really appreciate the time that we've spent today for the viewing public and for my colleagues.

We are going to have the Human Services Department back at a later date.

I don't want to lose my quorum here for the meeting.

So again, Chief Diaz, Director Marks, thank you for the presentation.

Thank you for the hard work that you and your officers and everybody at SPD have been doing to address crime in our city as well as to answer our questions and those of the public.

Thank you in advance for the follow-up to questions that you have agreed to get us offline.

Thank you so much for having me.

Take care.

All right.

If there are no further questions, I'm going to move into closing.

The next Public Safety and Human Services Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, February 28, 2023. And if there are no further comments or questions, the time is 1148 AM, and we are adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you.