Seattle City Council Public Safety & Human Services Committee 62822

the public safety and human services committee will come to order.

It is 933 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Present.

Chair Herbold.

Here.

For present, Councilor Mosqueda is excused.

Thank you so much.

So on today's agenda, we will be hearing first an appointment to the Community Police Commission.

Next, we'll be hearing an update from the Mayor's Office on the work plan for the 911 call analysis and scoping of future alternative response.

Then we'll be hearing an overview of 988 and the behavioral health crisis system from King County and Crisis Connections.

And finally, we'll be having another discussion about the legislation regarding investigations of the chief of police.

The intent in this committee meeting is to move the substitute version.

And so that will become the version before the committee for final consideration at the July 12th meeting.

We'll now approve our agenda for our committee meeting today.

If there's no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing, seeing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this time, we'll transition into public comment.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following way.

Because the number of speakers signed up to testify this morning, each speaker will be given the full two minutes to speak.

I will alternate between speakers, between virtual and in-person commentators.

and I will call on each speaker by name and in the order in which they registered on the council's website in the 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 a speaker's name, if you are using the virtual option, you will hear a prompt, and once you've heard that, you need to press star six to unmute yourself.

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

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

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

If speakers do not end their public comments at the end of the allotted time provided, 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 if you've called in.

And if you plan to continue following the meeting, you can do so via the Seattle channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

We have three people signed up for public comment.

We'll start with our first person signing in to speak to us remotely, and that will be Howard Gale.

Howard will be followed by Marguerite Richard.

Howard.

Good morning.

Howard Gale with Seattlestop.org.

commenting on our failed police accountability system.

Today is day four of the King County inquest into the SPD murder of Charlena Lyles.

Five years ago, the pregnant mother of four was murdered in her home by Seattle police, just four weeks after Seattle's police accountability legislation was passed.

Legislation that instead of providing more justice, provided more death and harm over these last five years.

My op-ed in the South Seattle Emerald last week documented how twice as many people experiencing a behavioral health crisis were killed by the SPD over the last nine years when compared to the nine years before that.

The county inquest process continuing this and next week, which had been opposed by the city of Seattle, is a small potential measure of accountability that our city leaders seem determined to ignore because their police accountability system has already deemed the Lyles murder, quote, lawful and proper, unquote.

Chair Herbold, you said nine days after Charlena was murdered that, quote, we are already shamed.

What I am pledging to you is to work on finding a new way of doing things so that we actually get different results, unquote.

Yet our city went on to murder Albert Fredericks Jr., Danny Rodriguez, Ryan Smith, Terry Caver, Derek Hayden, and the person still unnamed on Beacon Hill in January.

These were all people experiencing a behavioral health crisis like Charlena, all killed, quote, lawful and proper.

You promised after Charlena the results would be different, and they have been.

They have been worse.

If you want to pay justice to the memory of Charlena Lyles, then embrace the future of police accountability that dozens of other U.S. cities have post-George Floyd by creating direct community control of police abuse investigations, police discipline, and police policy.

Look forward to a future of justice and not backwards to a mythical past and promises that we now know five years later were clearly false.

Thank you, Howard.

Our next speaker is Marguerite Richard and Marguerite will be followed by John Williams.

Yes, my name is Marguerite Richard and I'm not new to this.

Like somebody said, I'm true to this.

Being as it may with the inquest process, I am under the understanding that it's hit the news that the SWAT team was there because of the family.

I don't know what type of incident.

It doesn't matter to me.

I just think it's time to dissolve everything that's not working.

That community police commission is not working.

There's nothing working in terms of what you feel our relationship should be with law enforcement.

And so I'm saying what you're gonna do.

Now, you don't have to, you can be on your own time clock.

And then some wave will come through here.

And you say, what just hit?

Well, the pandemic.

Because if you go to Judge Spearman's court, he's like, your face has to be covered.

OK, Judge Spearman.

In all essence, I'm saying what is not working is what you're doing illegally.

Because if you were doing something legal, things would change.

And that's stuff where those people, you pay them off, the family off, and then you turn around, they gotta figure out whether or not the police did right or wrong.

That's too much drama.

That's too much trauma.

That's just too much for anybody to go through.

And I'm almost certain that tempers are flaring because how are you gonna be calm in something like that?

And the woman was the indigenous black woman and she was pregnant.

She had four children left behind.

I wasn't there.

No taser, but taser is supposed to be on you and in operation.

So I'll be back because my time is up.

Expired.

Thank you.

Our last speaker is John Williams.

Mr. Williams is showing as not present.

And we'll just give it a couple seconds to see if that changes.

I am not seeing Mr. Williams as present.

And so with that, we will end our public comment period for the day.

Thank you everyone for joining us.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item number one.

Agenda item one, appointment of Jeremy Wood as member, Community Police Commission for a term to December 31, 2022.

Thank you so much.

So we're joined by Deputy Mayor Harrell, Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell for this particular appointment.

And am I correct in that this is a hybrid presentation?

Do we have Jeremy with us virtually?

Excellent.

Good morning, Jeremy.

Good morning.

Thank you for joining us.

With that, I'll just hand it over to Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell to introduce the appointment, maybe say a couple words about the CPC.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Mr. Wood has come highly recommended both by the CPC members as well as former CPC members is taking over the position that was held by Commissioner Colleen Echo Hawk has come highly recommended by Ms. Echo Hawk.

is a practicing attorney who graduated from the University of Washington Law School, a former assistant city attorney with the city of Seattle, and has a legal background and lived experience within our indigenous and tribal communities.

He is, has family who are formerly incarcerated persons and would really provide a great perspective that the CPC currently has open and available in terms of lived experience, as well as experience with our tribal communities.

Thank you so much.

Jeremy, could you please say a few words about your interest in serving on the Community Police Commission?

Really appreciate your willingness to serve, given your long history serving in various capacities with the city.

As Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell mentioned, as a city attorney, that I had the pleasure of working with you as former chair of the Human Rights Commission, so thank you.

Thank you Councilmember Herbold and thank you to the Senior Deputy Mayor.

I obviously don't have too much to add.

I appreciate the recommendations from the CPC and from Commissioner Echo Hawk.

As the Senior Deputy Mayor mentioned, I had a first cousin who has been in and out of the justice system much of his life, which makes these issues particularly acute to me and I've always been passionate about criminal justice reform, all my day-to-day practices in the representation of Indian tribes and defending their sovereignty and their communities.

My pro bono practice has been mostly in the area of criminal justice, representing individuals who have been incarcerated beyond their time, helping seek clemency and resentencing.

I represented the caucus of legislators of color in New York and fighting for police transparency.

And then it was an honor to serve the CPC itself as counsel while I was an assistant city attorney.

I think that as our city moves towards the appointment of a new chief, the voice of the CPC and the community voices and supports will be essential in shaping the future of the department and trying to create a city that is is safe for all, regardless of race, regardless of housing status in this city, which unfortunately has not been at all times.

I would just take one quick moment to acknowledge the family of Chilina Lyles as they go through the difficult experience of the inquest.

And once more, thank you to all who have recommended my appointment.

Thank you, Jeremy.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to not so much ask a question, but I'm really excited to be here to vote for my friend Jeremy to serve on this commission.

I've known Jeremy for a long time, both socially and professionally, and know that he is a exceptionally qualified lawyer.

I believe a Division I Court of Appeals clerk, a former Assistant City Attorney in addition to his private practice.

And I'm really excited to have someone of Jeremy's caliber stepping up to serve in this capacity and look forward to voting for him this morning.

Thank you.

Any other comments or questions?

the Human Rights Commission and the CPC around how to broaden the community scope of the CPC to bring in more voices.

And I am just really optimistic that you can help serve as a bridge for some of those discussions that are really, really needed and timely.

Thank you again for your willingness to serve.

Any further comments?

No, just really excited about Jeremy's contributions to the CPC and Jeremy, looking forward to the work that you'll do.

All right, thank you.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilor Nelson?

Aye.

Council Member Peterson?

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Thank you.

Congratulations, Jeremy.

I look forward to getting to work with you again.

And I really, really want to send my hearty congratulations.

Thank you, council members.

All right.

The clerk, please read in agenda item number two.

Agenda item two, update on work plan for 911 call analysis and scoping a future alternative response.

Great, thank you so much.

We're joined by more of in person presenters as part of this panels.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Just we'll hand it over for a quick round of introductions.

We're also joined by.

Asha Venkataraman of Council Central Staff, who is joining us virtually.

And after you say a few quick words, I think I'll have some of my own, but then we'll hand it back over to you.

So start with introductions, please.

Anne Nolte, Mayor's Office.

Andrew Meyerberg, Mayor's Office.

Monisha Harrell, Senior Deputy Mayor.

Thank you so much.

So really appreciate your willingness to appear before committee to present on the process that the mayor's office is engaging in together with a interdepartmental team of stakeholders, including the council, potentially in the hopefully near future, if it hasn't already started, including some external stakeholders, if I remember correctly.

And how that process is going to be informed by the 911 call analysis that was completed last year that I know we're doing a risk assessment.

on those findings.

So there's a lot of interest in the community in this issue.

There's a lot of interest on this council in this issue.

And I think the urgency around this is driven not just by wanting to make sure that the likelihood of harm is reduced by ensuring that the appropriate responder is responding to calls for help.

But we also wanna ensure that with a reduced number of officers in our police force, that we are maximizing their staff time and not sending them to calls that they don't need to sit.

need to respond to so that they can respond to calls that only they can respond to.

So, I think there's a lot of urgency around this work and I really appreciate this administration's willingness to forge forward.

With that, we'll pass it on back over to you.

Absolutely, thank you so much.

I think we share a lot of the same goals and visions.

And so first, I just wanna thank you all council members.

I really appreciate you allowing us to join you today.

I think that Council Member Herbold has spoken a little bit to why we are interested in a diversity of call responses that come into the 911 call center.

We do recognize that we do not currently have the resources particularly for a city of our size.

to be able to respond to all of those calls with the same blanket response.

And also, even if we did have those resources, it's not the smartest way for us to go about all of those calls.

We know that some of those calls don't need as high a touch.

And I'll talk a little bit briefly about the difference between priority calls.

Just, I know that you all know this, but I know that there might be people who are newly watching us who don't know these things.

So forgive me if I repeat a little bit of knowledge that you already know, just for our viewing audience, that there might be some things that we can help them better understand when we use language as well.

But we also know that despite our resource constraints, there are different situations in which we could just better utilize our resources by having other options available to us.

Right now, we have law enforcement that is able to, and they prioritize responding to what they consider priority one and priority two calls.

priority three and priority four calls are responded to on an as available basis.

And so let me just jump quickly to defining those four types of calls so that we're able to, when I say priority one or priority two calls, everybody kind of has an understanding for that.

So priority one calls are life-threatening events, major crimes in progress, immediate help for firefighters or police officers.

Those are classified as priority one calls.

Priority two calls are where there are threats of violence.

It might not be something that is currently in progress, but there's the threat and there's a strong threat of violence, escalation, major property damage, incidents where an officer presence could deescalate.

or avoid escalation of a situation or disturbances using weapons.

So really, if you think of, it's not the threat happening, but there is somewhat of an imminent threat in the cases of priority two calls.

Priority three calls are those where there's investigations or minor incidents that are occurring, but where the response time isn't necessarily critical.

So that might be a call where burglary has occurred, but the threat is no longer currently there.

They need to get to the calls, take the reports, but they wouldn't be preventing crime, you know, so there might be a little bit more time in being able to respond to that particular call.

And then a priority four call is one that's classified as a nuisance or mischief event.

So that might be, and those are also not time sensitive, but it may be graffiti or something that is not immediately time sensitive.

The reports still need to be taken.

but the response can be delayed and still be just as effective.

So when we talk about priority one, two, three, four calls, that's really what we're referring to around those priority calls.

So with our limited resources, our officers have been prioritizing responding to priority one and priority two calls.

Those are the calls that there is an immediate, there's an immediate need for response and the priority three and priority four calls get taken, but they may be responded to on an as available basis.

And sometimes those as available basis calls, some people have complained that there's a longer length of time in responding to those calls.

particularly if somebody thinks about, you know, something that might be new graffiti on a private property, that would be considered a priority four call.

And that call might not be responded to for maybe even a day or two where people go, where our officers go, they take a picture, they document the report, but they know that those aren't as time sensitive or urgent.

So as we're talking about the 911 responses and justifiably so, it is what calls actually do officers need to take.

And so something like a graffiti call might be one in which you don't need an officer response to take the picture document and do that work.

you will still need some sort of certification on the report, but you don't necessarily need an officer to respond to that particular call.

So when we talk about prioritization of calls, we're really talking about which of those calls that come in need an officer or a firefighter response.

And so that takes us right into the risk managed demand analysis and, oh, go ahead.

Thank you, I just wanna make two points.

One, I wanna underscore that one of the things that we learned in a recent presentation on response times that the city has shifted from a policy of going into priority call status handling, where when they're in priority call status handling mode, Almost no three and four priority calls get answered, but that's a decision that's made at the dispatch level.

The new approach, as I understand it, allows for a Z classification or disposition.

But those decisions are made by the sergeants.

And so, in my mind, that's a better approach because at least you're having somebody on the ground with law enforcement expertise making that decision.

It also responds, as I understand it, to and OPA recommendation for more oversight of the decision on the practice of allowing priority three calls to self-resolve.

So I do think that that's a better approach and just wanna sort of clarify for the public because there's been a lot of, we've received a lot of emails about this and there's been some press about this, this new approach.

That's the one point.

The other point though is the fact that we were in a priority call handling status for something like 230 days last year and around the same number of days in January of last year.

in 2020, and that we have this disposition process.

That's part of why I think we're frustrated by the demand management approach that we're using, because those decisions are already being made.

to not send police to respond to those lower priority calls.

So just wanna kind of create some context for, again, for our desire for urgency.

We wanna make these decisions in the right way, absolutely, but we have already been making them for the last two years to a certain extent.

Yeah, and thank you for clarifying some of that.

And we agree, there have been adjustments that have been made.

So some of this is a little bit rear facing because those adjustments around the priority calls have already been made in order to ensure that we're responding to priority one and priority two calls.

and we have already begun uh looking at and thinking about how we respond to priority three and priority four calls because you don't necessarily need you need the ability to be able to document the incidents write good reports those reports again may still need to be certified by law enforcement but those reports can be written and then reviewed by a law enforcement officer at the precinct and then signed and certified in that way without them having to go out and physically look at each scene.

I appreciate that.

Council Member Nelson and Council Member Lewis.

Thank you very much.

I think we're getting off track here, but I don't know if I would characterize the new way that 911 calls are being dealt with as an improvement, because in the old system when 911 was dealt with in SPD, my understanding is that When calls came in that were lower priority or designated priority three and four, the dispatcher told callers that a response was likely to take a while and they were given options to file online or uh call back or call the non-emergency line so um but now because the um community safety and communication center is not designating calls at all they're all being put through to the queue and a supervisor sergeant is uh doing the triage at a later point and um dispatching to those high priority calls but not getting back to the people who, to all callers.

And so they're left with no communication and, you know, they're not given options.

And then those calls hang around in the queue for a long time and they're eventually cleared, which is the Z code that we were talking about.

So I do agree that we need to, to talk about this much more.

And thank you very much for having this item today.

But I just wanted to express that there is a customer service issue going on with the call with the system right now with no communication.

And that's why people are getting upset.

So I'll support that and just say that you are correct that they used to get more of a timeframe from the dispatcher as to when they would be responded to.

And that is something that you're right from a customer service perspective.

they should be given that information.

There's a little bit of a, you know, we're working out the transition period from having the call center located in SPD to being its own department.

And so where that communication takes place and how quickly that communication takes place is definitely a system improvement and well-received.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold.

This might be better for later in the presentation, but I wanna focus more on welfare responses.

So I think I'll maybe get some of my questions regarding like admin, law enforcement investigations out now, given that that's kind of what we're discussing.

In terms of tier three and four calls, I think there's a lot of potential Given some of our existing practices and given some of the expertise of some of the other folks currently in the city family to have them take on more of those responsibilities.

I can think particularly of parking enforcement officers being appropriate.

responders to document and write reports on car prowls after the fact, where it's really an element of doing a report, taking pictures of the damage of the vehicle, talking to witnesses to get statements of what was missing, and then forward that report on for consideration of the city attorney.

given that there's no danger in that situation.

I also think that things like other similarly situated misdemeanors like package thefts could be investigated by CSOs, where sort of similarly it's about retrieving surveillance footage, writing a report on what was taken to document it.

One step that I would encourage the executive to consider is looking at our retail theft program as a possibility for an additional level of certification of those reports.

We currently have a system where one police detective aggregates all of the loss prevention reports of uh and you know i see dan nolte nodding and you know he's he's well aware of this uh but uh loss prevention officers which are not uh sworn officers they're employees of private retailers write the reports for the police that then go through a police detective who in turn signs it putting their certification on it after reviewing the sufficiency.

You could have a system where the sworn personnel who oversee the CSOs are the officer who would affix the certification through a similar arrangement for doing that body of reports.

So you're bogging down one sworn personnel member, but empowering 40 CSOs to be able to do that kind of work in the field and respond for those lower priority calls.

And this is just an additional request for central staff that I don't need an answer for now.

And I guess for the executive, but I would also like a report back on how we're looking on community service officer recruitment.

Because I think the potential of expanding that workforce, if they can take on more of the administrative priority three and priority four calls, particularly ones that are after the fact, And if we are having a successful time recruiting for this year, given the money that the council has provided for the recruitment of CSOs, that would just, I haven't had a report back on that in a while.

So I'm just flagging an interest in that, but I don't need a response on that now.

But otherwise I would encourage really looking at CSOs and PEOs for some of those tier three and tier four calls and looking at the arrangement with loss prevention officers as a potential model to do that within any current restrictions and in keeping with best practices of making sure a sworn officer can put their stamp of approval on a report.

I appreciate that.

Um, we are working to see which, um, what's functions and features, uh, within SPD can be moved to, um, civilian, uh, activities.

And so we will definitely take that into account.

All right.

I know that we are, keep me honest on time, but let's, we'll go into just a little bit about the risk managed demand analysis.

And I don't know if this is a good opportunity to show the screen.

Yeah, I'm trying to get your attention.

So as we've been talking about identifying some of the options for 911 dispatch, other than just going directly to law enforcement and fire.

And so specifically speaking towards the, I'm gonna be kind of deliberately not talking about the fire enforcement part of this right now.

So we're just gonna be talking about the, law enforcement response.

But as you all know, SPD is working on a, we can go to the next slide.

is working on a risk managed demand analysis.

And just for those kind of watching, this will help us to determine which calls can be responded to with resources other than a sworn officer response.

And so looking at the 911 calls that come in, what is the consequence of not having an armed response, a sworn response, and what is the likelihood that there would be a bad outcome without a sworn response?

Each of the calls is categorized based on this matrix.

Those items that are in red would clearly go to an SPD officer for response.

Those items that may be in green there would then go to an alternative response, potentially CSOs or some other.

form of response.

And then of course, we begin to work out between the orange and yellow areas, what is the most appropriate triage of responses that would fit within those areas.

And they may not always be just a sworn response.

And this is where we'll get into what are some of those areas in the orange and yellow.

that require an immediate response, but maybe a sworn response isn't the most ideal response.

We'll talk about it a little bit later, but this is one of the concepts that the mayor's office has been working on called the third department, where there might be another critical response that's not necessarily a sworn response, which is our best option.

And that would be another option that we're hoping to have available to 911 with resources available about how that department would be described and put together by the end of this year.

Any kind of questions?

And I know you're all, we are also waiting for the RMD report.

So as soon as it is available, we will take a look at it.

We will make sure that the data looks, you know, all of our questions are answered through that and by that.

As soon as we've kind of verified that aspect of it, we won't hold onto it too much longer, but as soon as we verified those aspects of it, and we don't have it yet, but when we get it and we verify that, we will send it to council pretty quickly.

Thank you.

Just a couple of things.

Just want to flag, because you did mention the third, public safety department, I want to flag that Seattle Municipal Code 3.15.060 defines the community safety and communication center as a community safety and communication center to provide timely, accurate, vital information to the city's first responders, city service providers, and to the public, and to provide civilian and community-based services and solutions to community safety challenges.

So just, again, want to flag that when the council created this department.

It was with that vision, it was originally proposed as just a communication center, and we broadened, deliberately broadened the focus so that it could house these functions.

Also, just are we, is this all we're doing on the risk managed analysis or risk managed demand analysis?

Yeah, this is just what we're talking about right now.

Can you just give us some sense of the timeline for that work product?

I know we have a Q2 report, but there's been a lot of discussion.

some changes in the subject matter of the reports moving forward.

Our first quarterly report did not contain what we expected it to contain.

So we're, I think we're a little bit behind.

So wanna get a sense of when we're gonna get the Q2 report and what we can expect it to contain.

We are anticipating the RMD report any day now.

We have on our timeline, we are basing on getting this in July, which of course is next week, beginning next week, and being able to evaluate that data, look it over, and then hopefully have that to council by August.

And can you just talk a little bit about the interdepartmental team?

what its structure is, what the opportunities are for council collaboration, what its role is.

And then we'd also talked about an external review of the analysis as well.

Can you touch on that?

So I'll talk about the IDT, the internal IDT first.

I try not to use too many acronyms because I know people are watching us, interdepartmental teams, and then talk a little bit about the public response in the next slide.

So we have been working with central staff really closely, and we'll be working with council to make sure that the things that we're looking at and the data and knowledge that we have is also shared with you.

I think that Asha and Greg, I know that they're somewhere on the screen behind there.

We've been working very closely with the central staff team, the mayor's office team has been working very closely.

And if we'll go to the next slide.

We will take this information and data that we have to also work with our folks from community, our stakeholders and community in behavioral health crisis response and other community groups with expertise to help us look at the data also and to, you know, help to gauge their input around what we're seeing and around what they may be seeing.

We have currently started interviewing a number of different community stakeholder groups, doing some one-on-one interviews with community stakeholder groups to gauge and gather their input around public safety.

in general, and we will be in the reports that we produce, you will see the interviews that we have conducted.

You'll see both the dates and times of those that we have conducted interviews with to inform some of the direction that we'll be taking.

All of that data will be made available to council and be working again.

Council Central staff really closely to make sure that if there's anything that they feel we're missing, that we can go out and get that and then supplement that data.

Council Member Herbold.

Oh, sorry, Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just as a foundational question on this slide, talking about the process, I've asked this question before in private and in open sessions about the extent to which our process is informed by the process other cities have used to set up alternative responses.

Part of, the reason I would like, ideally, the executive to look to some of these other cities is it just seems from reviewing them that other cities have been able to move much more swiftly and efficiently to stand up some of these alternatives.

When I look at how comprehensive this process is, I think this could be great for us to be in a position to do something revolutionary that goes above and beyond what some other jurisdictions have done.

I also worry that It puts us in the position of deferring low hanging fruit where it's well established by other jurisdictions that those calls can be taken on by other response services.

You know, I speak in particular about welfare calls, which a number of jurisdictions have unloaded to other responders with no issue or consequence, but at massive benefit to the utility of their police services to focus on things that are criminal in nature.

And I just want to make sure that we don't get so bogged down in the process that we defer for a year or two years or three years on getting something out into the street, given that we're sort of building an airplane as we fly it, right?

Crime disorder, public health issues don't wait for us to finish our process and develop a response.

In a major city, it's ongoing and it's happening and, if we can triage to a certain extent to roll out certain responses as we build towards some of those bigger ones, I think that would be something I would be more favorably disposed to.

So I just wanna make sure we don't kind of wait to go from zero to 40,000 calls, but if we can carve off, you know, 5,000 calls a year for a service we all agree on, that we take advantage of that as soon as possible instead of waiting.

And if I could make underscore, not make a finer point, he made a very fine point, but underscore, we've all had conversations about how we can consider alternatives on a shorter timeline than the full call analysis.

And we've had conversations about which calls might be considered of the hundred or so call types that are being analyzed under this system.

And I'm just hoping that you can share with us the executive's thoughts around which call types could be expedited as a pilot or a carve out of a larger body of work that would wait on that larger call analysis, but what we can do sooner rather than later.

Chair Herbold, what was the number?

Can we just, okay, thank you.

I'll speak really quickly just to the, to Council Member Lewis's question, then I'll defer to the Senior Deputy Mayor about some of the pivots that we would consider.

But I think there is, and Council Member Lewis, we've talked about this significantly and Council Member Herbold as well.

We do believe that there's significant merit in evaluating what's going on in other jurisdictions, you know, between Eugene, Denver, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, there's a lot of really innovative things happening.

As part of our ongoing work, we have done a significant amount of research into those jurisdictions to understand exactly what is it that they do?

Is it scalable?

Would it work in Seattle?

And the answer with some of them is obviously yes.

And I know that central staff has done their own research as well to dive into some of these topics.

And I think what we're committed to is combining our notes with central staff and working collaboratively with them to understand these programs, to make sure that yes, it is something that we can pivot.

but I want to be clear that work is ongoing.

We are very much looking into these programs and we hear you loud and clear of the need to consider pivot sooner rather than later.

Do you want to?

Yeah.

And so I'll just, I'll talk a little bit about obviously health one is referring is answering some of these calls right now.

There are options to expand health one as we move forward.

And we're just trying to be really deliberate about how we are, doing some of these responses.

Some of these responses are coming because we don't have the resources right now, and we are having to innovate in the moment.

And so I think that a lot of what we are doing in terms of alternate responses are in practice, and it's just how do we solidify those, not just for a band-aid patch for the moment, but how do we set them up for long-term success?

And so we do have a pretty unique situation with some of Seattle in that we have More limited staff, we have 84 square miles.

We have a pretty interesting geography in people's ability to respond.

When we have smaller staff teams, I'll give CSOs for example.

If we have 13 CSO members covering seven days a week, 24 hours a day and 84 square miles, there isn't a lot that we can dispatch uniformly from 911 that all 13 people across the city could expect the same amount of service and delivery.

So some of the things that could be shifted immediately, we just don't have the human resource to shift immediately.

But as we think about what that structure is, we can build for both our geography, as well as, you know, as well as the personnel that would be needed for those things.

Council Member Nelson.

What was the name, what was the number of that council bill you mentioned that established the CSCC?

I didn't catch it.

I didn't mention the council, though I mentioned the location and the municipal code.

3.5.060.

3.5.060.

Thank you.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you.

And Deputy Mayor, I appreciate that response on particularly Health One.

Just to take a step backwards though on Health One, and I think this is important because as we reconcile our current responses and our current bureaucracies, I think it's important to figure out what any new service, what niche it would fill.

I think a helpful way to think about it, and I'd like to talk to the executive about this is, like I've talked a lot, and I know the mayor has talked a lot as a candidate about CAHOOTS crisis assistance, helping out in the streets, the Eugene program, and there's a lot of derivative programs like CAHOOTS in other cities.

Health one is to fire department ladder companies, what CAHOOTS is to the police, I think is the best framework to think about it.

HealthONE, from my understanding, was conceived as a way to not have to dispatch a full ladder company for something that could easily be dealt with by a more nimble and smaller team to save money and to save the efficiency and effectiveness of when we dispatch firefighters.

it does not necessarily correlate in the same way to police time and service.

So I think in terms of the body of work that is missing from our current system, it is having a HealthONE equivalent for the police service.

which could, in my estimation, would be something like a STAR program, a CAHOOTS, or Albuquerque's Albuquerque Community Safety Program, all of which are, programmatically pretty much the same despite being in different cities.

So I would encourage us to do a pilot for a service like that as soon as possible.

And I look forward to having that ongoing discussion.

And just to underscore, again, Council Member Lewis's point, Around this time last year, under the previous administration, there was an announcement that they were ready to create a triage one program to answer person down and wellness check calls.

There was none of this, we need to analyze the risk associated with having, they were doing a risk analysis around all these calls, but they heard us when we said, we wanted to deal with some of the lower hanging fruit now, while we're still doing the risk analysis piece.

That got hung up, not because there was risk about having an alternative response, that got hung up because of labor discussions.

Um, we, um, I recognize that, um, we're not fully staffed up for CSOs and there's a lot of interest to, um, support the growth of, um, of that unit.

Um, I believe, um, we added six positions to CSOs above and beyond, uh, what was proposed last year.

There's 24 positions for the CSOs that are funded.

And just wanna, if the capacity issue is the issue, let's work together to get the rest of those positions filled.

But as I've discussed with you, Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell, I would like us, even while we have capacity issues, I want us to be building the system.

And so, you know, really it's, to me, it's about making sure that the dispatch system, that the Community Safety and Communications, Community Safety Center is hiring a dispatch system and that that is going to help with this.

But they've told, Director Lombard has told me that their current system can dispatch directly to CSOs now.

So again, we'd really like to get some movement on those two call types without waiting for this analysis while still supporting this larger body of work.

Yeah, I will add again that we only have 13 ish CSOs.

So for the 911 call center to dispatch directly to 13 people, seven days a week over 84 square miles.

we would not be able to, the CSOs in the way they are currently configured are not waiting around for emergency calls.

So to be able to dispatch them directly from the 911 call center isn't feasible at the moment, but we are working on recruiting and response and how that might work.

We know that the, you know, the 911 call center is able to dispatch to a number of different groups.

That system's not seamless yet.

They are still a relatively new department.

We are working on still finding their permanent leadership.

And so until we kind of, get to a point where we know we can do it consistently and with good outcomes.

We are being a little bit more cautious.

I would say that, you know, I can't, I don't wanna speak for the prior administration, but what we saw with the triage one was not nearly as far along as you might think it was.

And so that is, you know, we are looking at the system from what we have.

and where we were, and I think we are making pretty good progress.

I know it's probably frustrating for you all going through a transition, but I think that, you know, we are, we are working with what we have and trying to build those sustainably as we move forward.

I will just also add some of what we've gotten from the 911 line.

So health one is a huge help, huge support from the fire department.

So some of those are being able to be dispatched.

from the 911 call center.

I will also add the addition of the nursing hotline has actually been a tremendous help, has helped to alleviate calls into the 911 hotline and is a great service that has been set up and helps to, for people who might not know whether or not they should call 911 or not.

the nursing hotline actually helps to alleviate some of the pressure on that particular system.

And as we're looking at the additional department, we've also been doing roll call visits with our different law enforcement departments.

precincts and one of the things that we've heard overwhelmingly that they would like additional supports for calls that I think we know could best be handled by those with additional training and skills are services around mental health supports.

for calls that would have a mental health component, we have heard even directly from officers that supports in and around mental health would be something.

So when we talk about the third department per se, we are gonna be looking at those calls that can be resourced.

through additional mental health supports and services to compliment some new investments that the state and the federal government might be willing to help us make in those areas.

Just one last point on this.

I mean, I'm gonna start just by recognizing, I appreciate your diplomatic remarks, Deputy Mayor about the previous administration.

I just wanna state that I am incredibly pleased with the responsiveness, collaboration, determination of this administration on this issue.

So I just want to make that abundantly clear us being tough on you is mostly our frustration over lack of progress in these issues that predates you.

So I do want to just reaffirm that, but I do want to do one more plug and we can follow up after the meeting on this.

I think a lot of the questions, Deputy Mayor, that you raised regarding some of the capacity issues related to the communication center and the nature of how we would integrate some new service into this.

I think that those are issues that would benefit from the scoping and development of a pilot to, you know, help to troubleshoot through those issues.

I think a big part of this really is just starting to do the work and making a commitment.

Central staff put together for me, because I was curious, you know, what it would cost to put together a pilot in keeping with how the STAR program in Denver started as a pilot with just one van and one team.

It would cost somewhere between $700,000 and $1 million a year to run a pilot like that.

That would pay for two basically EMT, outreach worker, peer support, navigator type folks, and then one supervisor.

and also a ongoing research data analytics support to track the metrics of the pilot to aim towards scalability.

And, you know, I think we've seen with a lot of these programs nationally, they all start with a pilot like that, but then over the course of 12 to 16 months, they're able to scale.

And I think that one of the things we have not done over the last two years is just make that plunge and do the pilot, because the cities that did do that in 2020 have mature, well-developed programs.

And I would just encourage us to look into the possibility of that $700 to $1 million investment for that pilot in order to start getting that in the field work that can inform the scalability and adaptability of some kind of service like this.

So I'm happy to follow up offline on that, but I think that we're at the point in our process where that would be an incredibly helpful next step forward.

Thank you for that.

And I, I assume central staff, if they haven't shared with the, our collaborative team, if they, if they would share that, if they haven't already, We'll definitely take a look at that.

This is uncollaborative, right?

Council Member Nelson, you're in the queue.

I know that Asha has a clarifying question about dispatch comments, and then maybe while you have the mic, Asha, you could talk a little bit about council's participation in the interdepartmental team.

Absolutely.

Thanks, Council Member Herbold.

I had a clarifying question.

I will confirm that the estimate that Council Member Lewis has been talking about was shared with the executive.

On the dispatch, I just had a quick clarifying question.

Are HealthONE and the nurse hotline directly dispatched, or are they secondary responders?

I just wanted to make sure I was understanding correctly.

Health One can be dispatched directly from 911, and the nurse hotline is a separate number.

And so if somebody calls 911, they don't get referred back to the nurse line, but we promote the nurse line as an alternative to 911 if somebody has a health issue.

has a question pertaining to physical health that isn't considered life-threatening, but they don't know what the next step should be.

So if somebody calls in to 911, they are not referred back to the nurse line, but we are promoting the nurse line as a means to be able to, stave off some of the calls that might come in through 911. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, but I'll just give you an example that more people are probably familiar with.

Every year around Thanksgiving, 911 gets a lot of calls about how long do you cook a turkey?

And so many years ago, they had developed basically a turkey hotline so people could ask those questions directly to the turkey hotline.

But this is much more serious.

But there might be questions that people have that are health related that they need an answer to, but it's not like somebody is in the process like they might die at that moment.

And so the nurse hotline, when people are in that phase where they don't know where to go with an answer or to get a response, they can go to the nurse hotline.

And the nurse hotline may triage with them and say, no, you need to call 911 and then connect them to an EMT or other such service.

But it gives them an ability to be able to not wait until an emergency to ask what could end up being a health emergency question.

And then I saw we can go to the next slide.

So we've been talking around this a little bit, so we're a little bit ahead of this slide.

But again, identifying the calls, what some of the responses might be, how we might be able to use, again, CSO officers.

for some of the calls, particularly as we're thinking about priority three, priority four calls and other calls that we can divert from 911 to save resources.

So as we've been talking in and around this, but that's that topic there.

And then we just wanted to give you all an update on some of the statements of legislative intent that were from that were from earlier years.

And so I'm gonna pass over to Director Mayerberg to kind of talk about some of the best things.

So I'll go through these quickly.

We do have upcoming responses for all these slides.

And I believe it's Council Member Peterson, Council Member Herbold and Council Member Lewis who all have outstanding slide responses.

with regard to the CSO program.

And I think to, you know, to really put a finer point of what we've been discussing today, we have had conversations within our ongoing work with the CSOs about what would a pivot look like?

How would you do it?

What calls would you go to?

And do they have, frankly, and I think the senior deputy mayor touched on this a little bit, is do they have the internal skillsets and expertise to pivot to this work?

And if so, to what part of the work?

And obviously, you know, we are very much looking at paper calls, we're looking at crisis, and I'll use welfare checks and persons down call.

But we're also looking at broader spectrums as well.

You know, for example, you know, found property, that's not a not a weapon or not drugs, you know, requests for transport, requests for food or shelter, you know, those are types of calls that could also be shifted to CSOs.

And they likely would be able to take those up with very minimal training.

So We will be addressing that in the slide response to you and to reaffirm that if we can move more quickly, we will.

We are trying to be deliberative, but we're also trying to be responsive to what we hear from you all and from the community.

So the next was Council Member Peterson's slide that talked about calls that have- Can I ask a question on the previous slide?

On the previous slide?

Yeah.

I wanted to go back to a question I'd asked of Asha at some point, and I know Council Member Nelson's in the queue too.

I can wait until the end.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, just one remark I'd make here.

Council Member Herbold and I in particular spent a lot of time with the CSOs over the course of last year discussing the possibility of what the scope and where they might move in the city family based on their obligations.

I walked away from that experience with the understanding that the culture of that unit, unless it's evolved, sort of wanted to fill a role of almost like a police auxiliary sort of unit, that they were interested in staying in SPD.

Some of them aspired to be SPD officers.

And so I'd want to be really careful, with all of these different units that we really look at what the culture is and what the role is.

Cause I think there's a lot of utility that can come from having kind of a police auxiliary, like I mentioned earlier, like responding to level three and level four calls and like in our haste, cause I know we've been talking a lot about wanting to do things quickly.

I would still have us be cautious in terms of what obligations we put into certain units, if it doesn't necessarily fit with, the exact role they wanna fill.

So in terms of, you know, taking on kind of welfare check responses and other things like that, I'd really wanna make sure that fits within what that unit has envisioned as its role and culture.

The sense I got is they wanted to be more of a police auxiliary going forward.

And I would just make sure that we're careful about how we structure it.

But I think within that role of a police auxiliary, there's lots of things we could have them do that would be helpful to the response issues that we're facing.

I think that your foundational point is correct, that we need to have our vision also incorporate the vision of that workforce.

But I will say that things have changed since last year.

I think as it relates to some of those cultural issues that you're raising, I think there's a little bit more diversity of opinion.

Council Member Nelson.

I said, I'll wait till the end.

Oh, to the end of the presentation.

Got it.

All right.

And then if after we're done going over the slides, which I know you're not done yet, I do wanna return to the question I'd asked of Asha.

Do you wanna do that now?

We can return to the Asha question now and then- That'd be great.

Since I think it's still much more focused on the earlier conversation.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks customer.

Um, so we have been talking to the mayor's office to Andrew and the senior deputy mayor and to Dan about what participation in the interdepartmental team looks like, and and and Greg were able to go to a meeting earlier this year.

with the working group.

And so the idea is for us to be able to participate and looking at the RMD data analysis and be part of those conversations once the executive is ready for us to be involved.

And so we've been sort of keeping closely in the loop about what timing looks like and then to some extent what the what the working group will actually be looking at and then if how membership is currently structured and is changing.

So I defer to the Deputy Mayor for any specific details about the IDT itself, but we have been having the conversation about what it might look like for Council to be involved in those conversations and be able to look at the data sort of in real time.

So just to make sure I understand what you're saying, Asha, you're saying you're still working on defining the role of council to engage in this body of work?

Yes, we are still in conversation about what that's going to look like and what the timing looks like.

All right.

My recollection is that was part of the report.

last time the executive came to present.

And so again, I hope we can solidify those agreements because they are, again, they're foundational to, I know we have a tendency maybe sometimes to do things sequentially and given that perhaps you don't, plan to pull together the work group until the analysis is done.

Maybe the thinking is we don't need to have all that worked out until the analysis is done, but I think some things can be done in parallel so that when it's time to go, we're ready to go.

We know how busy schedules get, so we can set those meetings on the calendar early, even before we have the RMD in place.

We'll work on that.

So the next slide was from Council Member Peterson, who asked us to look at calls that have a mental behavioral health nexus, to look at the current response options to those calls and gaps in services, and how the city could scale up services to address those unmet needs and associated costs.

We very much agree with the intent of the slide, and it has been part of our work.

And it's very apropos to what you're gonna be doing today, but we have been meeting with Crisis Connections and King County Behavioral Health to understand more fully what they do.

And we think there's a lot of opportunity to partner with them and to work with systems that are already up and running that might be able to be scaled up.

So, but we are continuing to evaluate this and we'll get Council Member Peterson a more detailed response to the slide.

Council Member Peterson.

Thank you, Chair Herbold.

Thank you for that response to our request for this information.

I want to echo the comments of my colleagues just that I know you wanna get it right the first time and you're being methodical and I appreciate that.

And we also have a sense of urgency since we've been trying to do something in this realm for many months.

One of the reasons that I was interested in having the council approve this request, which we did in November of last year, was because just to realize that there is going to be a cost When we're trying to do two things at once, we're trying to have an appropriate police response.

We're also trying to stand up other emergency responses for those experiencing behavioral health crises.

And so costing it out is really important to just have the realization that this may require additional investments, at least initially.

And so I just wanna make sure, and I appreciate your wanting to see, to not duplicate what other, what King County may be doing.

I do wanna ensure that we have some level of control on the city side though, that we are getting the services, that it's easy for people to call, 911 or 988 and get the response and they don't have to navigate a King County system of phone numbers that's only Monday through Friday 9 to 5, but that they're getting a 24-7 response and If we have to contribute to that cost, then so be it.

I know we do that with the Nurse Family Partnership Program, where Nurse Family Partnership is a King County nursing program, home visitation program, evidence-based.

and we wanted to provide additional nurse family partnership services in the city.

So we just supplemented that cost, which is very efficient because they already have the infrastructure.

But we do.

I just want to make sure that we do get the cost estimates as well, just so we have a reality check on what we need to start investing in.

Thank you.

And I would say we hear you loud and clear as well on the times and the dispatch times, particularly, you know, obviously if we have these services, we need them to be dispatched the same as, you know, whether it's under 30 minutes or whatever the timeframe is in the same way we would have a law enforcement asset dispatch, you'd want the same thing.

So we would have to work on staffing up, buying up.

And again, it's just one piece of the puzzle that we're looking at, but we appreciate this line.

Thank you.

The last slide that we have, do you have anything to add to your deputy mayor?

The last slide we had was concerning triage one.

And I think, you know, we've communicated this out to the group, but we'll reaffirm that at this point, the mayor's office is not proceeding with triage one for a host of reasons.

And we will lay them out more specifically in the slide.

And again, you know, we, That doesn't mean that in concept, we didn't agree with some of the concepts behind it, but we just think that we'd, again, like to be more deliberative and to think through, through this administration, at least think through what a more cost-effective, more practical, and a better option might be to respond to that same subset or a variation of the subset of costs.

I'll just add that this one wasn't, as far along as I think might have been publicly communicated.

And so since we were kind of at the beginning phases of both this and the work we're doing around the third department, combining what we wanted to do with this with the third department at the same time, and then trying to figure out how we can roll those out.

is the approach that we've taken.

What I will say is that we, if we come up with something that we can roll out sooner, we will pilot it.

We're not cautious to the point of inaction, but I think we are trying to be really deliberate with all of the resources that we have available to us right now, which is the combination of wanting to make sure that we're setting up systems for sustainability and potential permanency doesn't mean we won't try something new, but also working within the resource parameters that we kind of have as a city right now, both in terms of, person power as well as financial and other.

And so we're just, we're balancing all of those things to figure out how we step forward with each particular one.

And in particular, when we dug into this one, there just wasn't a lot of structure there to even begin to move that forward, which is why we've combined this pathway in with the other pathways we're taking.

I just want to say I hope that report includes, it doesn't need to be called triage one, but the part of the earlier proposal, however far along it was or wasn't, that I think there was a lot of support for.

The hangups were, as I understand it, about what workforce was going to do it.

I hope that report that you send us gives a commitment to address in something that we can pilot soon.

The person down in wellness calls was about, I think it was the plan was about 8,000 calls a year.

That's a place to start.

And that is, I think the foundational point that every chance I have an opportunity to talk to you either senior deputy mayor Harold or you, Director Meyerberg, I have been pleading with you that we move forward on that small subset of calls.

Madam Chair, can I ask you a question?

Sure.

Yeah.

I similarly would like to echo that that subset of calls that was identified a year ago, I believe is at an appropriate place where a scoping discussion on a pilot would be a fruitful exercise between the executive and the council and how we might move forward on that.

I recently read and just wanna mention a few things from there's a May 29th meeting article from The Economist about Albuquerque's plan and the process about how which that plan came about.

And it was striking to read through this article.

I'm looking at it right now on the dais for reference.

But it was born out of necessity of Albuquerque's police service going from 1400 officers to 1000, sounds familiar.

It was, scoped to respond to calls that are very much along the same line of what we identified in the analysis Council Member Herbold's referring to as a scope for a response alternative.

And that is namely speaking from the website of the Albuquerque Community Safety Program.

calls that are dispatched via 911 with behavioral mental health nexus, community disorder, street outreach and resource responders, homelessness, mobile crisis team clinicians, looking at the Denver Stars website and the scope that they identify, which is very similar, calls that pair mental health clinicians and EMTs to respond to low risk, low acuity calls coming into the 911 system to provide medical assessment triage, crisis intervention, deescalation, transportation, resource connection.

So a lot of these programs across these different cities are responding to calls of the nature and scope that Chair Herbold has identified and that we've discussed previously in the committee.

And it seems like following all of those programs started with a one van pilot.

So, I mean, it's a point I've made several times today in this hearing.

I think that to a certain extent, that was kind of what triage one was envisioned as by the previous administration.

And I agree, it's not completely clear, but in terms of reconfiguring a pilot along the lines of what some of those other city programs are, I think there's a lot of runway for us to look into that in terms of how it relates to a third department.

I would encourage us to not wait for a third department to be created before we pilot a service like that.

We could park it in the human services department or the call center department as we wait on how that service can be set up for that pilot and then move it to that new department.

But I just think it will give us a lot more clarity.

We'll get a lot more data and a much, clear understanding of what that response could be by going after that already identified subset of calls.

I think this might be the end.

Council Member Nelson, are you ready?

Yeah, so I just want to clarify first that my comments about 9-1-1 protocols were not meant as a criticism of the Harrell administration.

I realize that you inherited a brand new department that is not even a year old right now, that as well as a severe SPD staffing shortage.

So, so just, I hear my colleagues, impatience for an alternative response and to fulfill the mission for that.

And I also am really looking forward myself to the third department and its unveiling.

But I just My priority is getting this right and because we're talking about lives here and and how they're responded to and emergencies and we need to avoid unintended consequences and that means really paying attention to the details, costing things out, understanding whether or not the models in other cities would really work here in as big of a city.

For example, Cahoots has been around for years, and it's great.

It handles, I think, about 8% of the calls in Eugene.

We also have a successful similar model, which is HealthONE here, very expensive to expand, but should be.

I don't know, I'm just saying that.

I hope that we're all on the same page here.

And some of the challenges that I see going forward is the very availability of social service providers, whoever they are, 24 seven, because we're talking about nonprofits and we need to figure out whether or not we can actually contract with these people to do this work 24 seven.

Another thing is who's going to decide what kind of call this is coming in.

CSCC doesn't designate the priority of calls anymore, so that's part of figuring out, well, what kind of call is this and who should it go to, et cetera.

So anyway, it's very complicated and I just believe that we should proceed with alacrity and careful deliberation.

And thank you for that.

And trust me, no criticisms were taken by, wherever we have customer service improvements, particularly for our community members, we're always gonna try to do better.

And so it was heard and received very well.

What I will add is that we do, we know that there's a balance between getting it as right as possible, taking the appropriate risks and still moving things forward.

And so while we are still about six months in, we are trying to do all of those things as well as we possibly can as well.

I mean, we know we are building the plane as we fly, but we're just trying to be, with both our resources, as well as the needs of community, as well as not setting up potential staffers and service members to not be successful in the projects and programs that we would put them out for.

We do take all of those resources into account.

We will continue to keep you all as council and central staff engaged.

I think within the mayor's office team, we have at regular check-in meetings with almost every council member.

So besides just our conduit through council staff, we also, have regular calls with each of you.

And we will continue to do that as we go forward.

If there are ever any questions, we always maintain an open working relationship.

We wanna maintain an open working relationship.

And we also wanna be really clear and transparent as much as possible with our Seattle public around what we're doing and what we're trying They won't all be home runs, but we will put forth the effort to make sure that we're as responsive as we possibly can, but also as wherever we can preview where there might be holes, we'll try to do our best to mitigate that risk to make sure we're not putting people's lives or livelihood in danger.

Council Member Lewis.

Just one closing remark on this, because I think Council Member Nelson hit on a good point of, you know, if we can provide the appropriate response.

I mean, just to share a brief anecdote that the other day in Queen Anne, there's a fairly, there's an individual, some public health issues that has had several outbursts in neighborhoods around the Queen Anne neighborhood.

Police responded to attempt an intervention.

After about two hours of working with the person, they weren't able to do anything because they couldn't establish probable cause for a crime.

They didn't really have access to a resource the person could take advantage of.

It's not the fault of those police officers that it wasn't an efficacious response.

It's not what they're trained to do.

That is one of the holes that's in our current system that's experienced by my constituents on a daily basis.

And it's a hole that these systems and these other cities are able to fill.

It means no disrespect to the police.

They did their best, they showed up, but the two hours they spent with that individual could have been spent responding to a number of other obligations that are currently.

on their plate.

And I think it really shows, you know, if we look at the whole economy of our responses and what we need to respond to, to honor our true charter responsibility for public safety, we need to fill that gap with something.

Cause it's also not the case that every response with a police officer under the current regime is an efficacious response.

In many cases, it's not due in, you know, not do it all to the professionalism of the police due to the limited number of tools at their disposal and the limits of what they are able to effectively resolve.

I appreciate that.

And one of the things that I will, we have long underfunded mental health and mental health supports.

I will say that the one resource that we will have, and it's not gonna come soon enough, but will be in a few years, there is going to be an emergency mental health hospital where people, that is gonna be in North Seattle.

It's gonna be near Northwest Hospital.

It'll have 130 beds.

I think we're all anxiously awaiting that particular resource to come online.

And we are hearing from our law enforcement officers that they need a place to be able to take people in mental health crisis that is not an arrest, not imprisonment.

And so when that resource comes online, it will be long overdue, but it is something that we are looking forward to.

And we're looking forward to how we could potentially add to that particular resource and other resources in other areas around the city of Seattle, so that we will have places to take people in mental health crisis that isn't criminalizing them.

So that is a part of our overall blueprint going forward.

And we know that it is a desperate need for the city.

Don't forget the low acuity shelter that the council contributed to last year that's on a little bit, I think a little bit faster of a timeline.

So the mental health reference is a great segue into our next agenda item.

Really appreciate you being with us here today.

Thank you for your time today.

Yeah, I would really love if we could aim for the second meeting in July to come back.

You referenced the fact that the call analysis is going to be due any day now, so I'm hoping that the first three weeks of July could be used with the interdepartmental working group going over that work and coming back and presenting to us in our second meeting in July.

That would be very welcome.

And I also just want to flag, I'd love the opportunity to talk to you more about the CSO hiring, whether or not the executive is going, is intending to use the tools with the ability to pay for relocation costs, to recruit folks from other locations, and also whether or not the council had put some money in to speed up background checks for police officers.

I wanna make sure that that third party, the funding that we provided for third party screening of police officers is also being used for the CSOs.

I'm hearing that the timeline for background checks in the hiring process for CSOs is creating a little bit of a backup.

So we'd love to talk to you more about how to address those things.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Clerk, can you read the next item into the agenda, please?

Agenda item three is overview of 988 and behavioral health crisis system.

Thank you so much.

We have folks this morning representing King County's Behavioral Health and Recovery Division and Crisis Connections to talk about the new 988 number and the behavioral crisis system.

Will folks please introduce themselves?

Good morning.

I am Kelly Nomura.

I'm the director of the King County Behavioral Health and Recovery Division.

And thank you for having us today.

There is definitely a nice nexus here and a perfect segue for what we are going to be sharing with you today.

After Michelle and Michael introduce themselves, maybe I can make a few comments, and then I'll turn it over to them for their presentation.

Thanks, Callie.

I'm Michael Redding.

I'm the Chief of Crisis Systems and Services for the Behavioral Health and Recovery Division with King County.

Good morning, my name is Michelle McDaniel.

I'm the CEO of Crisis Connections.

We have been operating the 24-hour crisis line for King County since 1964.

So again, thank you for having us this morning.

It was really helpful to listen to the 911 conversation.

I really do think that there is some wonderful opportunity here for partnership between King County Crisis Connections and the city.

So just really appreciate being part of this conversation.

One of the things that you'll hear a lot about the 988 call line that is going into effect very soon here.

But please know that as part of preparing for this, as well as recognizing the need in our communities, we have been doing significant work and conversations about expanding our crisis response and supporting our communities, including partnering with law enforcement.

And so, you know, a few things were mentioned.

Clearly, our behavioral health system has been underfunded for, for a long time, and we are very appreciative of the recognition of that and what we're seeing in many ways, additional funding coming our way.

So we very much appreciate that and want to partner with everyone to make sure those resources are most efficiently implemented.

The example of somebody who was needing intervention and the law enforcement officers attempted to intervene and really could not do much and also did not have a place for them to take someone You heard earlier the emergency mental health hospital that is coming online, which we're looking forward to, but wanna also make sure you're aware that King County was recently awarded through the last legislative session, capital dollars for us to begin to build out what we are calling crisis centers here in King County.

And that really is meant to be a place for law enforcement and others to bring someone who's in a behavioral health crisis so that they can take someone to a safe place and then move on to their next call.

So we're very excited to be moving in that direction and would be happy to share more.

We're actually meeting with members of the city of Seattle council and others, the mayor's office as we're building these concepts.

So we're very happy to be part of these conversations with all of you.

We just wanna make sure you know that in addition to the resources that you heard about just now about 911, King County is definitely having the same conversations.

And our goal is just to make sure that we are communicating and partnering so that we are building together responses to these needs and making sure that we're working on a plan together and not inadvertently working against each other as we build out these resources.

So I'm gonna stop there and turn this over to Michelle and Michael.

But again, thank you for having us and we look forward to further conversations.

Thank you so much.

And just a couple of remarks on moving forward.

I really appreciate you joining us this morning to share this work.

I believe this is actually our second conversation on the new 988 system.

We had an early conversation last year.

We have a lot of material to cover here.

And so I promised that I'd help manage the time so you all can get through it.

So we're asking that.

We hold questions until the end, and if we don't have time to get to answers of questions, we have Anne Gorman from Council Central staff monitoring the conversation.

She can help get questions answered offline after the meeting in the interest of time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So I'm going to start us off if we go to the next slide.

Thank you.

So briefly, I just want to review that I will touch on what is the BHASO, that's the Administrative Service Organization, and what is our role and responsibility as an ASO.

And then within the ASO, what the crisis continuum looks like for King County.

And then Michelle is going to touch on the National 988 process and how that's been implemented through the House Bill 1477. through Washington State legislation.

And then Michelle and I together will talk about alternatives to law enforcement response.

So this is a picture, just a very brief background of the ASO.

These are the regions, there's 10 regions in Washington State that are considered ASOs, Administrative Service Organizations, that were stood up in conjunction with the Healthcare Authority.

The purpose of the ASOs is to participate in fully integrated managed care when we were required to step into integrated managed care and the managed care organizations, MCOs, stepped in to Washington State to manage Medicaid purchasing and behavioral health.

And that's fully integrated with behavioral health and physical health care.

But in order to continue the non-Medicaid services and crisis services, ASOs were stood up, required to be in place by January 2020. King County was a mid-adopter, so we became an ASO January of 2019, and have been functioning as that ever since.

So King County is actually considered the King ASO region.

You can see that King and Pierce, because of our density of population, are single county regions.

Other areas are multi-county regions, as you can see by the map.

And within the ASO, I'll talk about crisis services a little bit more in a second, but we also, have a function to administer state-funded non-Medicaid services, such as federal block grant funds for mental health and substance use services.

We continue to work with Western State Hospital for hospital liaison functions and other specialty programs, such as assisted outpatient treatment, jail transition services, peer bridgers, just to name a few.

There's kind of like an ongoing list on our funding table of other non-Medicaid services that we operate in the ASO.

Next slide, thank you.

So specifically for crisis services, these are the areas of which we are required to have by our contract with the health care authority, starting with a 24-7 regional crisis line that we contract with for crisis connections, mobile crisis response.

I'll talk more about that in a second.

And as well as to designated crisis responders who are the mental health professionals designated by the county who do IT investigations for those being reviewed for involuntary holds, according to RACW 7105 and 7134. And then we also oversee secure patrol management and stabilization facilities and involuntary treatment.

Next slide.

So to put that into a continuum picture, just to show you, the dark colors are the ones I just mentioned that are required by our contract with the Healthcare Authority.

But the lighter colored services are also crisis services that we establish in King County that believe are important for our community that are not funded by the state, but are funded locally.

So we can continue to build that response for crisis systems on a 24 seven basis.

So we have other programs like emergency appointments.

So we could help get somebody to be seen by a provider within 24 hours by scheduling an appointment.

I'll talk more about mobile crisis and emergency service patrol, but we have other programs like the crisis diversion facility, hospital diversion bed.

So we have what we think is a richer crisis continuum.

But to Kelly's point, we also understand as we've done analysis and assessment of our crisis system, that we do have some gaps.

For example, we don't have crisis stabilization and triage facilities more fluidly throughout the county for law enforcement to bring people to.

And that's one of the values of 90-day implementation is to talk about that safe place to go rather than law enforcement having to rely on the hospital setting.

So that's one of our future visions in the next number of years to see more facilities stood up throughout the county.

Next slide.

I'm going to pass this on to Michelle.

Okay, thank you, Michael.

So, as I mentioned at the top, Crisis Connections has been providing the crisis lane services for King County through that contract since 1964. But Crisis Connections is also, for a little over a decade, also a contact center for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

So at the very highest level, really what 988 is, is migrating from a 10-digit number to the 988 number.

So the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has been in operation since 2005 without funding to the call centers like ours to provide this service.

So we have been embedding this service within the crisis line that we are answering for King County.

Since again, our focus for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is responding to calls from King County area codes.

So we are one of about 200 contact centers around the country that are answering Lifeline calls.

And so back in 2020, the US Congress had actually passed the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, which designated 988. And so it will be going into effect nationally on July 16th, so very soon.

And so we have actively as Crisis Connections been building a separate 988 team since now there is dedicated funding through the Washington State Department of Health through a fee on phone lines to be able to actually have the funding to build this out.

We are estimating through Vibrant, which is the national administrator for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a potential of doubling the calls with this conversion from a 10 digit to a three digit.

The services, however, to callers will not change.

Our commitment is that this will be seamless for people who are calling.

So right now, as Michael had mentioned, we already have a continuum of crisis services, many of which at the call center level, we are able to dispatch as needed.

Our commitment is that that should continue to be seamless.

There are improvements to be made for sure.

There are gaps to be filled for sure.

But we really want to take a community member focused approach to this and make sure that we do not have any interruption service or any situations where callers are being bounced around.

We want to make sure this is seamless as possible.

So that is the promise of 988 is to be able to do a number of things.

But one is obviously to make it easier to access.

behavioral health support, but also to be able to reduce the stigma of asking for support and asking for help.

SAMHSA has a five-year vision for implementing 9-8-8, so I'll speak about the first one, because that's really specific to the call centers, and that is that there will be someone to talk to, that 90% or more of calls will be answered in-state by 2023. So what was meant by that is there are three contact centers within the state of Washington that are designated National Suicide Prevention Lifeline contact centers, and of course, starting July 16th, 988. And so those are Crisis Connections, Frontier Behavioral Health out of Spokane, and Volunteers of America, which is housed north of us.

And so the idea is that at least 90% of calls will be answered by contact centers within the state.

What happens with the system is it gets routed.

So if a contact center is not able to answer a call within a specified period of time, that call will be bounced to a national contact center backup.

That's often in New York.

So the idea is that we want to make sure that as much as possible, when somebody is calling 988 within the state of Washington, that they are able to talk to a contact center person within the state of Washington.

So Michael, do you want to discuss horizon two and three?

Sure, thanks, Michelle.

So I really love this vision of SAMHSA's painting here for the three horizons for 90-day implementation, because it really says that it's not just about a place to call.

I think for many people in crisis that want to talk to someone, the phone call is incredibly helpful and valuable.

And I would say most calls are resolved by that conversation.

But there are those that call that they need more of a response.

And so with 988 becoming implemented nationwide, Washington State has implemented House Bill 1477 to talk about how we in Washington State will implement 988 by enhancing our call center hubs, crisis connections, and the other two that Michelle mentioned, but also to then talk about the other crisis services within a continuum.

So someone to respond is about enhancing our mobile crisis response teams.

So all regions in Washington state received additional funding for enhancing teams.

In King County, we've had a children's crisis response team for many years.

We were only one of two regions in the state that had that.

So other regions were funded for additional youth crisis teams.

We in King County received additional funding because of 90 day dollars to almost double our mobile crisis response team.

I have some numbers later, I could show you what that looks like.

We've actually recently done that earlier this year by awarding a contract with a provider to grow our mobile crisis response team.

And then finally, I mentioned, and like Kelly mentioned as well, the safe place to go.

So thinking about those crisis facilities strategically placed around the county, especially in the city of Seattle where we have a very dense population.

So we're creating that vision as to what that looks like with additional funding that's coming our way.

in order to provide that safe place for help.

And that's a great resource for law enforcement so that they do have a place to go, drop somebody off for a possible IT evaluation or stabilization, and then be on their way to their next call.

Back to you, Michelle.

Great, thank you, Michael.

So we'll drill down a little bit more into Washington State House Bill 1477. As I mentioned before, at the very highest level, this conversion is basically a 10-digit number to a three-digit number and moving to 988. But really what has happened with our legislators is that they've really made it an opportunity to focus on doing some reform, to find additional funding and to, to really prevent us and continue to have what is, in many ways, a very antiquated system around behavioral health response.

So it's very forward-thinking legislation that provides dedicated funding to local national suicide prevention lifeline call centers for the first time, as well as, as Michael mentioned, funding to expand and improve crisis services across the country, across the state, I should say.

So I do want to highlight here where other states are related to legislation for 988. Again, there is no dedicated funding attached to this.

There is some Implementation funding, that's coming through with some grants from SAMHSA, however, not dedicated funding.

And you can see here that Washington State is just one of four states so far that have built in legislation to support 988 implementation, as well as to attach a fee.

And you can see that we have Washington, Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia.

Other states have enacted legislation without funding.

And we will, I believe, see over time other states develop this.

ultimately we end up having a patchwork throughout the country.

And so a little bit more about what was passed back last summer.

Again, one of four states to do this are very progressive.

So the funding is really focused again on supporting contact centers like ours and developing as well as building out a more robust behavioral health crisis continuum.

So beginning in October of 2021, if you looked at your phone bill, you would see that there was a $0.24 per month fee attached, and that will be going up beginning January 1st of 2023 to $0.40.

And again, those funds have been outlined in House Bill 1477 to be used for operations of call centers and contact center hubs.

So again, the three I outlined, including crisis connections, as well as a tribal-focused hub.

Technology solutions and crisis service expansion.

The legislation also outlines what is called the CRIS committee and so this stands for Crisis Response Improvement Strategy Committee, Michael and I both serve on this committee, and there is a steering committee that oversees this work.

and then many subcommittees, but the idea is that this is the group that develops the recommendations to support the implementation of the National 988 Suicide Prevention Hotline and the statewide improvement of behavioral health crisis response and suicide prevention services in the state.

So the committee is appointees are appointed by the governor and there are several subcommittees and I did want to touch on a couple of those.

To be able to give you a little more sense as to what the focus is on this work.

And I will mention that much of the work that's happening right now or immediacy is getting us ready for the July 16 launch, of course, which is right around the corner.

Some other improvements and investments, we will start seeing the benefits of those really in 2023, 2024, and potentially farther out.

I mentioned before the Tribal 988 group.

So this is the Washington Tribal 988 group that's examining and making recommendations with respect to the needs of tribes related to the 988 system in alignment with American Indian Health Commission.

There is also a cross systems response collaboration, so this examines and defines the complementary roles in interactions between mobile rapid response crisis teams, designated crisis responders, law enforcement, first responders, of the first responders, of course, 911 and 988 operators.

public health plans and so on and so forth.

So again, so we are making sure we are not developing these plans in isolation and they are siloed.

And the last I will call out is the group related to lived experience.

And so this is a perspective that is very valuable in this work as well, which is to engage the perspective of individuals and family members with lived experience related to recommendations outlined by House Bill 1477. Wanted to spend some time talking specifically about what are some of the alternatives to armed response, because I think that's a great priority for all of us.

We want to make sure that law enforcement is focusing on being there and present in the areas they're trained.

And again, that's supporting around law enforcement.

They are not expected to be behavioral health experts.

So one of the questions we received in advance was, how is 98 different than 911?

Of course, 98 was established to improve access to crisis services in a way that meets our country's growing suicide and mental health crisis.

9-8-8 will provide easier access to, of course, the Lifeline network, those 200 contact centers around the country, which are distinct from public safety purposes of 9-1-1.

And 9-1-1 is focused, of course, on dispatching emergency medical services, fire, and police needs.

Let's make sure that we are focusing that resource appropriately.

We have been coordinating since our founding in 1964 with 9-1-1.

That is not something new.

We are in constant conversation with 911 centers in our region in order to make sure that if there is a life safety situation that our call takers are dealing with, that we bring in the right resource.

So if this is a situation where our staff or volunteers here at Crisis Connections are supporting someone who is actively considering suicide and is not participating in trying to find alternatives, And to get support, we may be bringing in 9-1-1 as appropriate and bringing in them again, not necessarily transferring the call to 9-1-1.

We would keep custody, so to speak, of that call, but bring in the right resource.

But we are, as you've heard, actively working on improvements, actively making sure that we are elevating our training, so we actually have heard from 911 phone operators that they would like more training in behavioral health and understanding what the resources are.

They're very interested in that.

We are actively working with 911s and the 398 call center staff to standardize the protocols right now throughout the state.

They're similar protocols, but we need to standardize and make sure that we're using best practices.

So we are in the process of doing that and literally sitting down for hours and process mapping and working that out.

And that is including the BH ASOs in that process, of course.

We are participating in training 911 operators.

Again, something they're very, very interested in.

And then also, Crisis Connections is currently piloting and vetting one of our clinicians at a 911 call center, specifically Valley Comm.

So we are piloting and vetting a clinician to be able to support right on the front lines to, in the moment, educate and support the 911 operators and make sure that the calls get directed to the appropriate place.

So what we are focusing on reducing people's emotional distress.

I did want to speak briefly about the One Call program that we launched as a pilot in 2019. And with the support of Councilmember Herbold, we're able to secure funding through this calendar year.

And so this is a special line that we have just for first responders in King County to be able to talk to a crisis connections clinician and get support either en route to a call that appears that it may have a behavioral health component to it, or why they, once they're on the scene, if it is discovered at that moment that there may be a behavioral health component.

And so what you will find here is that they can call this line 24-7, speak to a crisis connections behavioral health provider, to be able to get real-time information, including if there's any behavioral health history or history of engagement with this particular individual, we'd be able to provide that if it's available.

Very helpful while they're on scene or before they get on scene.

We provide problem-solving and guidance, support in de-escalating the situation, all the things you can see here in the slide, including also access to other components of the behavioral health system that are available, like a next-day appointment.

And so we also provide follow-up and closed-loop referrals with individuals that the first responders have engaged with.

So this is a very unique program.

that Only Crisis Connections is providing in this area.

So I do want to just point here that we launched it in 2019 in October.

You can see here the first month we got one call from first responders, certainly through 2020 as we've been trying to roll out the program, pretty kind of stable going up quite a bit.

in some areas.

But as you can see here, now that we have more dedicated funding and the ability to do more outreach and engagement and really engage with the first responders to improving the system, you can see that the volume of calls continues to ramp up.

So we're very excited to see that program really starting to take off.

I'm going to turn it over now to Michael for our final slides.

Thanks, Michelle.

So when we think about alternative responses to law enforcement, I would say the Mobile Crisis Team is a key service to really talk about.

I've worked in the King County Behavioral Health System for more than 20 years, and I recall when DESC first started as a contractor with King County for the Mobile Crisis Team.

Typically, in many regions, the DCRs, the Designated Crisis Responders, who do IT evaluations, are also the crisis response teams.

And that doesn't really work for us in King County because our DCRs are so consumed with their time to keep up with the IT cases that they rarely get time to do crisis outreach.

So we actually separated those functions and have a dedicated mobile crisis response team in King County that's contracted with DESC actually for adult responses.

And then we also contract with the YMCA for the children's youth crisis outreach.

We call them CORS, Children's Crisis Outreach and Response System.

And so we found it incredibly valuable to have dedicated mobile crisis teams.

This mobile crisis team at DESC was set up largely for the purpose of being accessed by law enforcement.

And it solely started that way.

We now have the crisis line accessing mobile crisis and dispatching the team to the crisis line, as well as a direct call from a law enforcement officer.

So any officer in King County can call the mobile crisis team directly mobile crisis team operates 24 hours a day.

In its truest form, according to the Washington Department of Health requirements, it has to be two mental health professionals that respond in teams of two.

That's actually changing, and we're looking at the DOH rules and guidelines to talk about how peers are also involved in mobile crisis response as long as they're supervisioned by a mental health professional.

And I think that's a key strategy in terms of looking at the workforce.

That's been a challenge in terms of hiring qualified staff workforce to do the work.

So peers are very effective in doing outreach work, and we're starting to see them more involved in mobile crisis response.

Those responses are for primarily mental health and or substance use calls.

And like I said, law enforcement can access them directly.

They also provide transportation, The mobile crisis team will do a bit of follow up.

And if somebody needs like a next day appointments, they can actually connect them with the next day appointment and even drive them to that appointment.

Because the goal of the mobile crisis team is to resolve the crisis and then help people to connect to ongoing services and supports.

The intention of 988 is to, I've heard this talk about nationally and even within the Chris Committee, it is to look at 988 like 911 so that there could be a response dispatched just like 911 through 988. That said, I think we have a lot of work to do to get there because I think one of my staff looked at law enforcement in King County.

There was about 3,500 officers throughout King County that could be you know, maybe dispatch through 911 at any moment.

In a mobile crisis team, we have 39 staff.

That's a very big difference from 3,500.

I was happy to say that we got funding to almost double the team, but we're doubling 39. So we actually were able to add another 22 FTEs to the mobile crisis team.

So still a long way to go.

That said, I think DSE works incredibly hard at the work that they do.

because they're held to a standard of responding to emergent needs within two hours and urgent needs within 24 hours.

Next slide.

Before we move on to the next slide, not a question, but just a clarification for the viewing public and a reminder for my council colleagues in case a refresher is helpful.

Just want to note that the council has significantly increased funding for the mobile crisis team over two budget cycles.

In the 2021 budget, council provided a million to fill a shortfall in revenue from the county's mental illness and drug dependency sales tax.

That funding supported existing positions and allowed DESC to add four to create two behavioral health response teams.

And then in 2022, council provided 2.5 million in expansion funds for the mobile crisis teams and the behavioral response teams.

And want to recognize the leadership of council member Strauss in this area.

And we're working with council central staff to get a better understanding of the status of that particular expansion.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for that clarification that's that's super helpful in order to recognize that we do a lot of braiding of funding so that the needs that we have in King County, and in the Seattle community, we just don't have enough funding from the state to meet that need so we do braid like mid funding and city council funding as well so thank you for that.

The last thing I will reflect on is emergency service patrol.

And I bring this up, this is not an ASO service.

And you could see right in the first line here, it's pretty amazing that we've been doing emergency service patrol since 1976. So for 46 years, we've had vans and this is specific to a downtown Seattle area.

We have a specific catchment area that's dedicated to Seattle for, you can see in the picture of these vans, we have three vans that are available 24 seven.

We have a team of drivers that are trained to do outreach and engagement in the downtown area of Seattle for those that may be on the street, that are homeless, that may have signs of intoxication or substance use.

One of the great things about the ESP is that they have a direct line from 911, so they have radio dispatch that goes directly to the drivers.

So if 911 sees that a call could be diverted to an ESP response, that happens.

Sometimes if law enforcement or fire is on the scene and they want to divert that call to ESP, they will also then call ESP directly as well.

We are an alternate response as well as a co-response at times, which helps to alleviate law enforcement response.

The City of Seattle also does fund part of the ESP service as well.

I just want to also flag on that one.

Because of the questions about the suitability of the prior administration's model for triage one, the council requested the executive report back on whether or not the appropriate workforce was in fact the Seattle Fire Department that was originally proposed for triage one.

The report back to that request from council as it relates to triage one.

Again, that is for persons down and wellness checks identified not only CSOs as an appropriate responder, but also these particular ESP responders, because as Michael explained, not only are they dealing with that particular demographic, but they are also currently dispatched from 911. So that might be another alternative to, if we're continuing to have capacity issues with CSOs being on to take on that body of work, perhaps the ESP response might be an appropriate thing to take a look at.

And I'm happy to share that report with my colleagues so they can see that the executive themselves identified ESP as an appropriate responder for those two types of calls.

Thank you.

That is the end of our presentation, so I'll pass it back to you, Council Member.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Folks, I know I suggested we may not have time for questions, but if folks have questions that they want to get out and we can see if some of them can be answered, that would be great.

Otherwise, we can try to take some questions and collect them offline.

Not seeing any raised hands, I do want to ask a question that I had.

There's like sort of this three-part or scaled vision sort of sequentially over time.

And one of them includes funding the sort of the second stage of not just having somebody to talk to, but having more consistency of somebody to respond.

And the five-year vision on slide seven identifies sort of what the schedule is.

But I'm just wondering how much of this three-part vision is actually funded?

Do we have a pathway to providing the resources needed to implement the vision?

Really appreciate that we had the wisdom to fund the startup with the fee, as opposed to other cities that are still faltering there.

But I'm just wondering a little bit more about the next stage.

So for the second horizon, someone to respond, like I noted, we did get some additional funding from the health authority.

It was about 2.5 million.

Then when you leverage Medicaid, we actually did an award to DESC for another $3 million to expand the mobile crisis team.

That said, I think my point is we're expanding 39 FTEs to add another 22. So that's as far as the funding goes.

Is that sufficient?

I think time will tell.

given the volume of 9-8-8 calls we get in King County and City of Seattle.

I'm kind of fascinated to see what is 9-8-8 going to do to our behavioral health system in terms of crisis need, which is going to teach us how we need to continue to increase our ability to respond.

The third horizon is the safe place to go.

There was a, through this past legislative action, there's been significant funding applied for crisis facilities around the state of Washington.

Prior to that, we had specific Trueblood funding for two crisis facilities in King County.

So there's one being stood up down in South King County right now.

And then there's another award that's still open right now for another facility in King County.

The statewide dollars are coming out to be like $5.8-ish million for six adult facilities and two youth facilities around the state.

That said, I would encourage our King County providers to apply so that we could see more crisis facilities being stood up in King County.

Kelly and I have ongoing conversations around strategically thinking about where those places need to be in King County.

City of Seattle being a very, very prime area because of our density and crisis need.

So I don't know, Kelly, if you want to say any more about that.

Thanks, Michael.

I will just add that those are the initial conversations and advocacy work that we're all doing.

But we do know that we have, again, because of the increased recognition of everybody needing behavioral health, mental wellness support, particularly following COVID.

We appreciate both locally and at the state level, the recognition for focusing on funding going forward.

And so there's continued advocacy with many legislators in Olympia, who have joined us in acknowledging the need to build the funding for this going forward, these phases going forward.

So Although we don't have full commitment for everything that we're envisioning, we do have significant hope that there will be ongoing recognition for the funding to put at least some of the plans that we have and the city has and others in place to continue to strengthen our crisis response system.

Thank you so much, Kelly and Michael and Michelle.

And please do count on me as an advocacy partner as you continue those conversations.

around fully supporting this desperately needed system at this really important time when I think a lot of people are recognizing the mental and behavioral health crisis that we're faced with right now.

We've been faced with it for a long time, but I think there's a broader recognition that we need to seize on the momentum for that.

Not seeing any other questions, really appreciate your being with us.

If we have follow-up questions, I'll definitely send them your way.

Thank you.

Thank you for this opportunity.

Appreciate it.

Clerk, please read in agenda item four.

Agenda item four, an ordinance relating to civilian and community oversight of the police, establishing a process for investigating complaints, naming the chief of police, adding a new subchapter five to chapter 3.29 of the Seattle Municipal Code, and amending section 49 of ordinance 125315 to renumber the existing subchapter five of chapter 3.29 and sections 3.29500 and 3.29510 of the Seattle Municipal Code.

Thank you, Noel.

This is the third meeting for this bill.

The substitute version is a result of continuing consultations with the Office of Police Accountability and the Office of the Inspector General.

I'd like to ask central staff to describe the changes to the base bill included in the substitute version.

And just so folks understand the plan moving forward, I'd like to make sure that we get this bill before the committee at our next committee meeting.

And we're just giving this additional time to make sure that the bill is ready to be codified and that we fix any final technical errors.

But my hope today is that we vote on the substitute and then bring it back to my next committee meeting on July 12th.

And with that, Greg and Asha, could you please proceed?

I think Asha is taking the lead here on the overview of the changes of the bill.

Thank you.

Thanks, Council Member Herbold.

Asha Venkatraman with Council Central staff.

So I'm presenting this bill on behalf of my colleague and Gorman.

She's been doing the most of the substantive work on this.

I appreciate your patience as I cover this.

So as Council Member mentioned, the committee has discussed this draft or this legislation in committee before.

The draft was discussed on May 24th with the current version of the council bill that's in front of you introduced on June 7th and then in committee on June 14th.

You had a short discussion about changes that are reflected in the substitute bill.

As you previously discussed, the intent here is for the bill to create a different process for complaints that name the chief of police, given that the police accountability ordinance from 2017 does not cover that specific circumstance.

And so, as Councilmember Herbold mentioned, the substitute is a result of consultation and workshopping with the Office of Inspector General and the Office of Police Accountability.

And so, the CPC also weighed in on the bill and provided feedback.

So the substitute reflects input from all of those agencies.

So I'm going to go into a little bit of detail here about what the process is and then how it differs from the substitute bill differs from the original bill as introduced.

And so the two major changes here are that the bill removes any collective bargaining language since the chief of police is not represented.

But in terms of the process, the biggest substantive change is moving away from how OPA usually handles these excuse me, how OPA usually handles complaints in terms of classification.

So usually when a complaint comes into OPA, it has to be classified within 30 days to one of four potential categories.

In this substitute, we're looking at removing the 30 day time limit.

So there wouldn't be any time limit for OPA to make a designation in terms of which classification the complaint went into.

And the substitute would only allow for categorization into two types of classification instead of four.

And so usually with an OPA complaint, it could be a contact log, an investigation, an expedited investigation, or a supervisor action.

For the purposes of just informing the public, a contact log is basically when a complaint doesn't involve a potential policy violation.

There might be insufficient information to proceed further with the inquiry.

The complaint has already been reviewed or adjudicated by OIG or by OPA, or the complaint presents fact patterns that are clearly implausible or incredible, and there's no other indicia of potential misconduct.

And so the only as I mentioned, the only two that would apply in this scenario are either the contact log or conduct the investigation.

So neither the expedited investigation nor the supervisor action piece would be applicable.

And so you'll see in the substitute that both of those terms are stricken from not only the bill, but the definition section is in section three point two nine five hundred.

section also removes a requirement that the chief be notified of the complaint, which is something that is usually required in OPA complaints.

Instead, OPA must notify the Inspector General as soon as practicable, at least within 30 days of the complaint.

There's a new notification requirement that requires notification to the complainant and to the president of the city council, chair of the council's public safety committee and the complainant.

If the office of inspector general determines that OPA's evaluation of the claim is taking an unnecessarily long time.

And I'll go into some detail about what OPA is looking at in that intake process in a moment.

Upon the completion of intake, a civilian supervisor investigator determines whether an investigation is warranted.

And one of the things that the substitute adds is a reference to having an interview with the complainant during the intake process if they do desire that.

The next piece establishes sort of a overall consultative role for the Office of Inspector General as OPA is evaluating the complaint to determine whether the investigation is warranted.

And so they're looking at both OPA's process, but also as to whether any laws or SPD policies would have been violated if the allegations are later proven to be true, or whether criminal charges could result if the alleged actions are later proven to be true.

And those will come into play when in a little bit here when we're talking about whether an investigation is warranted and to whom that investigation goes to.

If OPA does determine that the investigation is needed, they'll recommend whether they think it should be an investigative unit within the Department of Human Resources or it should be an outside entity.

And one of the things that OPA needs to consider and document is whether there are any conflicts of interest, whether they are real conflicts of interest or even perceived that could potentially undermine the public trust if the investigation is conducted by OPA or by SDHR.

The next substantive section is in, oh, I should have mentioned, all of these changes are reflected in Anne's memo, the June 24th memo, starting on page three.

So those are as a summary of what the changes are here.

So in looking at the next section, which is 3.29.520, this covers the Office of Inspector General's role in reviewing OPA's process.

And in general here, if OIG disagrees with any of the decisions that OPA has made, the OIG decision controls.

And so as I go through sort of the circumstances that arise here and in any of those circumstances, if there's disagreement and OIG is who is the determinant moving forward for that decision.

OIG reviews the OPA intake to make sure that both the intake examination and the classification was timely, thorough and neutral and decides if it incurs with that classification, which is what I mentioned earlier about whether it should be a contact log or an investigation.

If it turns out that OIG cannot determine whether examination and classification was timely, thorough, and neutral, or it disagrees with the classification, OIG must notify a group of public safety stakeholders, which includes the mayor, president of the city council, chair of the council's public safety committee, the executive director and co-chairs of the CPC, city attorney, city director of human resources, and the complainant.

And I'll refer to that, that notification comes up in a couple other places here, and I'll just refer to that in the future as the sort of public subset of public safety stakeholders.

If OPA has recommended an investigation, OIG reviews the decision about who to give the investigation to, and this again has to count for any potential real or perceived conflict of interest.

If OIG does agree that investigation is warranted, OIG will notify the chief that an investigation is warranted.

So the notification to the chief doesn't happen until that investigation decision is made.

If OPA determines that the investigation itself could result in a finding of violation of laws or policies that prohibit harassment or discrimination, OIG will review whether full investigation is warranted and whether it concurs with OPA.

And again, also will account for real or perceived conflict of interest.

If OIG thinks that criminal charges could result, we'll consult with OPA, excuse me, to determine which non-city entity should do an investigation.

After that consultation, only OIG will decide whether the investigation should be managed by OPA or OIG and which non-city entity should investigate.

Lastly there, if OIG thinks the investigation should be conducted by a non-city entity, it will again consult with OPA to determine who should manage the contract and which non-city entity.

But again, after consultation, it's OIG's decision about how the contract, or excuse me, how the investigation should be managed and which non-city entity should investigate.

Next major section is about notifications.

So this is 3.29.530.

OIG is to notify again that subset of public safety stakeholders about whether it's OPA or SDHR that's going to conduct the investigation or it's a non-city entity that's going to do it.

And in making that decision, the assignment of the investigation, which is reflected in subsection 540, there are a couple requirements that are in the substitute.

If OPA is investigating, it must be by civilian personnel.

And if that can't happen, then the complaint will go to a non-city entity.

As I mentioned before, if the investigation could result in finding a violation of law or policies that prohibit harassment or discrimination, SDHR can be assigned to investigate.

SDHR also has the ability to decline that investigation.

If that happens, then OIG consults with OPA, as I mentioned before, to decide who should manage the contract and which non-city entity.

And then it's OIG's sole decision about how those questions are answered after consultation.

If the investigation is of a suspected violation of law, it will be referred to a non-Seattle law enforcement agency.

In general, with a non-city entity that's conducting an investigation of any non-criminal violations that name the chief, that non-city entity will not be a law enforcement agency.

But if criminal charges could result, then OIG will consult with OPA and find both an appropriate and qualified law enforcement agency to investigate.

And the bill specifically mentions that this should be one with particular expertise and reputation for trust and transparency.

With the powers that OIG and OPA have while investigating, they are able to issue a subpoena, either on behalf of OPA or non city entity, but either way, OPA director or OIG can subpoena the chief.

And then the other piece of that is one of the nuances to this bill, which is that if the complaint names both the chief and somebody, another officer or another employee that is represented, two different processes go forward.

Regular OPA complaint process for the represented employee, and then this process in the bill for the chief.

And in addition, difference in terms of the chief's investigation is that there won't be any range of recommended discipline and the file itself will not go to the chief.

And I just want to note, I think that's an important change.

There's been some attention to three complaints against the former chief that have not been investigated.

There was a complaint about the decision to leave the East Precinct in 2020 that included both the chief and other SPD officers.

And the result was that LPA did the investigation for the full complaint.

And I think it's important when the chief of police is part of a complaint that we have this bifurcated process.

So thank you for uplifting that.

Absolutely.

So once the investigation is completed, and I'm now at 3.29.560 about review, the inspector general will review if that completed investigation is timely, thorough, and neutral.

As mentioned before, if they can't make that determination or the determination is that it wasn't timely, thorough, or neutral, they must notify the subset of public safety stakeholders mentioned previously.

If OIG does find that the completed investigation was timely, thorough, and neutral, then for an OPA investigation, the OPA would transmit the file and the findings to the mayor, and if it is SDHR or a non-city entity that is investigating, the OIG will transmit the investigation, sorry, the OIG that will transmit the investigation and findings to the mayor.

Within 30 days of getting those results, the mayor will communicate to that subset of public stakeholders, or excuse me, public safety stakeholders, a statement on the investigation and the findings, and that would include whether the chief's actions were consistent with department policy, the city's values and SPD's values to protect and serve.

It will notify outside stakeholders whether the mayor intends to discharge the chief or take any disciplinary action against the chief, regardless of when that action would be final.

and it would provide investigative detail that mirrors the detail that would otherwise be available to the public by OPA in a closed case summary, discipline action report, or other related report.

So those are the bulk of the changes in the substitute bill.

I can pause now before getting into next steps if anybody has any questions.

Not seeing any virtual raised hands or in person.

Go ahead, Asha.

Okay, great.

In that case, as you mentioned, Chair Herbold, you could.

you can vote to replace the bill as introduced with the substitute version.

And then this would come back to committee July 12th.

Between now and then, as you mentioned, we'll be reviewing to make sure all the technical edits are correct.

We didn't miss any sort of unintended consequences.

There aren't any unresolved issues.

And to the extent that council members want to propose any amendments, we can work with you on those.

Those would come back on July 12th.

And if the committee decides to vote it out of committee, then it would go to full council for a vote on July 19th.

I do, you covered a lot of the changes without identifying who was the proponent of the change and I didn't ask you to do that, so that's completely fine.

I just wanted to lift up some of the things that the CPC was recommending as alterations and we received a letter for them and just wanted to sort of memorialize the changes that include that, We are stating explicitly that both intake and investigations conducted by OPA shall be conducted exclusively by civilian personnel, that any non-city entity conducting an investigation of a non-criminal violation will not be a law enforcement agency, and that an investigation of a suspected violation of law will be investigated by a non-city law enforcement agency.

There are a couple other changes as it relates to the recitals, but those are the main substantive changes coming from the CPC that we worked to incorporate.

All right.

There are no further questions.

I'd like to move the substitute version, so it is the base version before the committee for consideration at the next committee meeting on July 12th.

Second.

Thank you.

Please call the roll.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

The motion carries, and this version will be before the committee on July 12th, where we expect to schedule a committee vote out of PSHS.

Our next committee meeting is July 12th.

If there is any advance notice of absences planned, love to know it.

Feel free to let me know beforehand, just can help with scheduling if folks do know in advance.

Seeing none, appreciate everybody staying with us today.

It is 1158 and we are adjourned.