Public Safety Committee 6/11/2024

Public Safety Committee will come to order.

It's 9.34 a.m., June 11th, 2024. I'm Robert Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Hollingsworth.

Present.

Councilmember Moore.

Present.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Councilmember Saka.

Here.

Chair Kettle.

Here.

Chair, there are five members present.

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

Hearing, seeing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Before going into public comment for chair report or comments, I just wanted to note, yesterday at our council briefing, we had remarks regarding what happened at Garfield High last week.

And I wanted to note here for the Public Safety Committee as well, You know, we lost Amar Murphy Payne last week.

At the time, I was with the mayor, also the fire chief and council member Morales at Fire Station 25 when that announcement immediately, essentially, was happening.

And it's striking, you know, as we were there for the, you know, this meeting, the signing ceremony for the vacant building abatement legislation, all the cameras turned.

And they saw the vehicle, the police car, run up the street, you know, sirens going.

The battalion chief at the station donned his, as I call it, body armor or flak vest and got into his vehicle.

Shutters rolled up, he punched out, sirens going.

And I knew...

what had happened, and it's striking that this is where we are.

It's striking to me, in a way, and it struck me watching that battalion chief don his protective gear, his body armor, essentially, because that's what I wore 20 years ago.

And it's striking to me that, you know, one thing to have that happen in Baghdad, Iraq, as a course of a war, and being an adult in the military, but it's something different.

when it's needed for a high school here in Seattle, Washington.

And this is something that we should reflect on This is something that we should reflect on here in this body, the city hall, this chamber, the city council, and specifically for us today, this committee, this public safety committee.

We need to redouble our efforts and we need to look for solutions and press on all fronts.

And this was furthered in the afternoon when I joined Council Member Hollingsworth at the church with Bishop Witherspoon and the others of the committee.

community, and they talked about building community and building those relationships.

Chief Rohrer talked about building relationships between Seattle Police Department and the community.

But it's all the various types of community that need to come together.

And this is the lesson that we have to learn is that we have to be building community.

We have to be working on all angles and to include here in our committee, but also, for example, our community working with Chair Moore and her Housing and Human Services Committee, since a lot of the, you know, Human Service Department, HSD, has a lot of programs that relate particularly to youth and young adults.

or to the point made by council member Hollingsworth regarding our parks, we have to make them safe, particularly those that are frequented by children.

And these are the things that we have to do as a council working together with the various committees to include transportation committee in terms of safe routes to school and the traffic pedestrian safety piece.

And so that is a reminder to us that we need to to take these actions, to be present, to be mindful and be prepared in terms of how it relates to what we're seeing in our streets, what we're seeing in our school grounds today.

And I think this is something that we can do and we will do.

And I just wanted to note that because it was spoken to yesterday at council briefing, but I think it's really appropriate for us to raise the topic here in the public safety committee particularly.

That's a chair comment.

I would, if vice chair or anybody else on this specific topic would like to say it's anything additional, you may.

But I just wanted to open it up our committee meeting with that based on what happened last week and then as a follow-up to yesterday's council briefing.

Okay.

Oh, Council Member Moore.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you for those comments.

And I, too, am just incredibly saddened by the gun violence and the death that we saw at Garfield and really the gun violence that we are experiencing across the city.

Last night, I received an email from a a student at Ingram who also suffered the death of a student, the murder of a student, who recently, the suspect just recently pled guilty to murder last year.

And she outlined all of the failures that the school district and the city itself in terms, have produced in responding to that.

There is no, there was no training for students about how to deal with an active shooter situation.

They received, apparently, support dogs for a week.

They had no counselors on staff.

There were just, just an incredible failure to provide the kind of safety and wraparound services that we need.

We know that this prior council passed $20 million for counseling, and yet very little of that money has actually been released or made its way to schools.

So while we are unfortunately as a society awash in guns, and sometimes it can feel incredibly um hopeless and despairing i do think that there are active steps that we the council and the mayor and the school district can all take uh it working together to really as chair kettle has said to build community to look at non-law enforcement ways to address the sense of safety just by having better training and better support in our schools and in our community and certainly having better mental health and emotional support for our students who should not go to school every day wondering whether they're going to come home alive or a friend of theirs is going to come home alive.

So we absolutely need to do better, and I know we can do better.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much.

With no other comment, we will press forward.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda or within the purview of the committee.

Clerk, how many people signed up today?

Currently, it looks like we're going to have four, four person speakers signed up three or four and 10 remote speakers.

So each speaker will have two minutes.

We will start with the in-person speakers first and then transition to remote speakers.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in which order that they registered.

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

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comment within the allotted time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

The first in-person speaker is Mark Jacobson.

Next up is Jeremy Masner.

One second.

This is the sixth time in the last year that there's been a shooting.

I don't know if your mic is on.

Hello?

Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning.

This is the sixth time in the last year that there's been a shooting incident at or very close to Garfield High School.

Last week's victim is dead.

This comes after the 14-year-old victim at Ingram High School.

All of these incidents could have been averted had not Seattle Public Schools issued their indefinite moratorium in 2020 on allowing police officers in school.

This was done specifically to affirm the public school's commitment to 8,000 black students who make up just 14% of the district school population.

And it's resulted in two black students now dead.

Last June, right after the incident that started this one-year running streak, we had a big meeting at Garfield High School.

It resulted in nothing but the status quo.

No uniformed police officers on campus.

All the things we need to do, building community, mental health, restorative justice, fixing socioeconomic inequality and education inequality.

All those things absolutely need to be done.

But what we need to do something right now is have uniformed police officers on site.

I can't believe that that would not have deterred That shooter in that parking lot the other day, if there was a Seattle Public School, if there was a Seattle Police Department car parked in the driveway where they used to be, four years ago, my son went to Garfield High School for two years leading up to 2020. Not one single incident the two years he was there.

That was a different principle, and that was before this moratorium.

And, you know, the motives of the school board in seeking more equitable treatment for black students are laudable.

But the student, you know, they are.

We need to do these things.

They're not going to happen.

It's not going to lead to less gun violence, less gang violence in the even intermediate term.

That's a very long thing we all have to do.

But you guys, you know, you're elected to protect the public.

And the public is all the students.

What other public space would you allow six gun incidents in one year, and yet you had to be invited in by the management of that Westlake Center or the Olympic Sculpture Park before you could go in and have a presence there every day?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up is Jeremy Masner, followed by Melanie Skinner.

Good morning, thank you for taking testimony and thank you chair kettle for your your comments, I really appreciate that I just urge you to move.

As you said, beyond reflecting to acting as the previous speaker said it is time to act i'm here to support the police and resolving hotspots around the city.

Garfield is a hotspot what is happening at Garfield and the superblock around Garfield is not happening anywhere else.

It's not happening at Nova, which is just around the corner.

It's not happening in other places in the South End.

Garfield is a hotspot.

We need to support the police.

They have said clearly that they want more support for technology, so I'm glad that the automated license plate readers is on the agenda for today.

I support that.

I hope we can extend that to also have fixed locations.

license plate readers.

I'm aware that there's a lot of civil liberties concerns about that, but I hope that there's a plan you can proactively put together with leadership to partner with the community so that when there are drive-by shootings, the police have an immediate resource and they can understand what cars were in the neighborhood, what cars are unusual, and then combine that with ALPR to try to track those cars down.

The other thing the police have been very clear on is staffing and resourcing.

Please, please let's solve this problem.

Let's get the number of officers that we need.

It was heartbreaking to hear Captain Trinh say that the only way to get officers on campus after the March shooting was to pull people from the 911 dispatch center.

That's unbelievable that we don't have enough officers to staff there.

The last thing I'll just add similar to the other parent, please partner with SPS.

The school board is not providing leadership on this matter.

They are failing us.

We are counting on you to help put something in front of them.

Just walk them down the steps.

You're the public safety experts in Seattle.

tell them what needs to happen the parents will show up we will make sure that the school board does those things but we are really counting on your leadership here our kids this is tragic let's not wait for another incident of gun violence and another murder thank you thank you last in person speaker is melanie skinner

Hello, I'm just a little emotional, sorry.

It's been an emotional past several days, actually an emotional three and a half years at Garfield.

The message I wanna get across is that Seattle public schools in the city of Seattle have done nothing to prevent the shootings and the death of Amar Murphy Payne.

that occurred on campus at Garfield High School on Thursday.

Garfield has been in shelter in places six times this year, and that combined with the other most recent shooting of a Garfield student on March 13th is too much to bear for kids, teachers, and administrators.

More than 1,400 kids are required to be in the Garfield building every day.

We have a 911 emergency situation at Garfield that requires immediate action.

There are solutions.

And I have to say it, but the apathy and the ineffectiveness of the City of Seattle, Mayor Harrell, and Seattle Public Schools have overridden any meaningful and concrete changes.

There have been a multitude of meetings and public forums regarding safety, but nothing impactful comes of these.

And what is even more, maddening is that there's no sense of urgency.

The ideas have been thrown out there, and I have tried to work with the PTSA on safety advocacy, but the excuse is that this is a complex problem.

And yes, gun violence in the Central District is a complex problem, but we need to address the emergency that is right in front of us, keeping our kids alive while they are at Garfield High School.

Unfortunately, Community Passageways, an amazing organization, was not able to be on the ground on Thursday when Amar was murdered in front of the school.

They were in a meeting.

The shooting of a Garfield student three months ago was also a day that Community Passageways was not on the ground.

They were at a funeral.

That is too...

Anyway, I just want to say...

I'm just gonna say my last paragraph here.

I have many suggestions, and I just wanna say Garfield is an amazing special place where amazing teachers, administration, and a diverse student body exist, where amazing art, music, sports, and academics convene.

With only three days left for my senior, she is leaving her high school experience with a senseless death of a friend, and will now be living with the effects of trauma exposure for the rest of her life, and more importantly, what's for Amara Murphy Payne's family.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The first remote speaker is BJ Last.

Please remember to press star six when you hear the prompt.

You have been unmuted.

Good morning.

My name is BJ Last.

I oppose the expansion of automated license plate readers.

Like all surveillance Alpers, they're purely reactive.

They do not prevent violence.

They don't reduce crime.

They don't improve public safety at all.

That's actually potentially increased violence, given that there are documented cases of police holding random people at gunpoint due to inaccurate alper stands.

That should be something that's really concerning and unacceptable, especially you'll be amazed to know that the majority of the time that that happens, the families are black that are held at gunpoint due to incorrect alper information.

Outboard expansion gives all license plate scan data to a private company to store for 90 days.

This would allow any law enforcement agency or private group anywhere in the country to bypass Seattle Shield laws and request this data directly from the private company.

And like last week, council tied up funding meant for mental health supports for students.

Mental health supports are actually violence.

And this week, council is talking about spending $300,000 on outburst pension, which doesn't actually reduce violence.

Like, if the goal is to keep kids safe, then let's spend this $300,000 on things that are actually proven to reduce violence, like reversing the cuts to library hours and being the hiring freeze so summer camps with kids with disabilities don't get cut this year.

Art. and all of the other youth programming that Council Member Hollingsworth talked about investing in yesterday so that we're spending the same amount of money on kids outside of school as the Seattle Public Schools are spending on them are all things that are shown to reduce violence.

So why give $300,000 to a private company and make it easier for police departments in Idaho and Texas to get information on cars in Seattle when that money can go to investments that actually reduce violence in Seattle?

Next up, we have Aliza Bojani.

Good morning, Chair Kettle, members of the Public Safety Committee.

My name is Aliza Bojani, and I am the policy counsel for Legal Voice, a Pacific Northwest organization with offices in Seattle fighting for gender justice and reproductive rights.

I am testifying today with concern about expanding ALPR technology.

The world today is very different from when SPD first started using ALTR.

Abortion access and gender-affirming care is under attack nationwide, with multiple bans and restrictions on care threatening people's lives.

Right-wing extremists are targeting patients, their helpers, and health care providers through public records and private data sharing.

This is particularly significant when Washington has already seen an over 20% increase in people seeking abortion care from out of state, including from the neighboring state of Idaho that has a near total abortion ban.

We have already seen the Texas Attorney General attempt to gain access to gender-affirming care records from Seattle Children's Hospital, an effort that was successfully signed due to our state shield law.

However, the state shield law cannot protect records if they are stored off-site in a state like Arizona.

A hostile Attorney General can go directly to a third-party company to collect that data and circumvent the SCD entirely.

Furthermore, if data is retained for a long period of time, such as 90 days, this gives more opportunity for pinpointing people after they have received care, increasing danger to people seeking essential health care services.

Legal Voice appreciates that the Seattle City Council and Washington State Legislature are committed to protecting the rights of people to see accessible legal care in Seattle.

We ask that you consider storing ALTR data solely on premise at the Seattle Police Department and reduce the retention time to no more than 48 hours.

Thank you.

The next remote speaker is Taylor Riley.

Hi, council members.

My name is Taylor and I'm a D3 resident and I oppose automatic license plate reader expansion.

I'm a reproductive health researcher and I have serious concerns about the implications of ALTR expansion for abortion seekers here in Seattle.

We know that more people are seeking abortion care here from states that criminalize abortion like Idaho, Texas, and Louisiana.

Seattle is a safe haven for people seeking this care but will soon not be if this expansion is passed.

States like Idaho and Texas have bounty hunter laws and are actively seeking out people who support, provide, or access abortion care.

And this is not a future fear.

This is happening right now.

In my nearly 10 years of this work, we have not seen this level of criminalization and using tools like ALPRs to track and criminalize people.

Moving the license plate data to cloud storage will allow that data to be shared across law enforcement agencies.

And third party agencies and anti-abortion states could use this data to criminally prosecute those seeking abortion here in Seattle.

And there are really simple ways to address this for the council to stay true to its claim that Seattle is a sanctuary city for abortion seekers.

License plate data should be stored on premise at SPD, and the retention period should be reduced to three minutes like is done elsewhere.

And like a previous caller said, this is a lot of money going to expansion that doesn't help prevent violence.

So let's spend this money instead on what makes our communities and our children safer, like parks, housing, and libraries.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Cynthia Spice.

Hopefully I got that right.

Hi, I'm Cynthia Spees.

My comment today is regarding Agenda Item 2, the material update to SPD's Automated License Site Reader, or ALPR, surveillance impact report.

This material update will enable red states and ICE to circumvent Washington State's SHIELD law and the Keep Washington Working Act, which are meant to protect women seeking reproductive health care and immigrant workers.

I also oppose Amendment 1. The fact that ALPR data is so sensitive to justify not disclosing it is also justification for why SPD should not be retaining it.

The Public Records Act is a red herring.

The greater risk for domestic violence at the data is by SCD officers.

Officer-involved domestic violence is common and severe enough to create a call to action to industrial organizational psychologists published in 2023. They noted that, quote, officers are four times more likely to engage in domestic violence than the general population, end quote.

The safest approach that actually protects victims of domestic violence in stalking is to not retain the data of license plates of innocent people.

And then that one makes it illegal for a researcher to assess the system, but it is due to researcher that we have any statistics at all on STDs current system.

At the very least, Amendment 1 should have an exception added for researchers.

Demands on IT were given as a reason for moving off premise, but the infrastructure demands are directly tied to the data retention.

The shorter the data retention, the smaller the amount of data to be stored.

In fact, the most technically feasible approach is the shortest data retention, like New Hampshire's three minutes, because the decision to store or not store a license plate is made almost instantaneously when scanned, thus having the smallest amount of storage.

If only hits, i.e. plates matching a hot list were stored, then the database would be roughly 99.75% smaller than currently.

This saves the department money, which is better spent not tracking innocent people, and it reduces the burden on IT since they don't need to scale the system out.

It also reduces the year-over-year recurring costs.

If you approve this council bill as is, then you're actively making the world no longer a sanctuary city for women, girls, and or immigrants.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Alice Lockhart.

Good morning, council.

I'm Alice Lockhart.

I live in voting District 5. I'm a mother of young adults.

kids who have college friends who have gotten jobs in other states and my husband um teaches high school biology and many of his students in fact most of his students seem to go out of state for college they have been in this last week of school coming home and and and coming back to school and saying here's my sister she'll be in your class next year um These lovely young people, I know that many of these lovely and responsible young people would absolutely, if a friend needed abortion care, bring them home to get it.

And just the thought that they could be, because of Seattle data retention policies of license plate data, subject to bounty hunter laws and arrested is appalling.

Please don't do this.

Please, please do not do this.

Thank you very much.

Next up, we have Mike Asai.

Yes, hi, good morning.

Mike Asai here.

Good morning, council members.

Yeah, my heart is heavy.

You guys know who I am.

Today, this morning, I'm representing Shaka's Kids Foundation, the foundation that I started some years ago after my father.

I want to give my condolences to the Payne family.

It's a sad situation.

I didn't go to Garfield, but I've had many family members since the 60s that have attended Garfield High School.

It's sad.

And I Yes, there's gun violence, but I think we need to look at a holistic approach with our black youth specifically.

I think Little League football is a detriment to our young black youth.

My brother played Little League football.

He ended up in prison.

My dad kept me from playing Little League football.

I played Little League football without my permission because his mom had custody.

My son's currently in prison.

Not all black kids that play Little League football end up in prison, but the statistics show, and my son right now currently incarcerated with a lot of young black youth.

He's 28. A lot of them are coming in there at 19, 20, 21. They call him OG.

A lot of them play Little League football.

We need to look at a holistic approach in our youth that are 7, 8, 9 years old and look at the next five years when they turn 13, 14, 15, that they're not looking for a gun.

THAT THEY'RE NOT LOOKING TOWARDS THE STREETS.

WE'VE HAD A LOT OF TALKING WITHIN OUR COMMUNITY, BUT WE NEED TO HAVE ACTION.

AND, YOU KNOW, I DIDN'T KNOW NECESSARILY ABOUT THE AGENDA THIS MORNING, ABOUT THIS LICENSE PLATE READER.

I'M ON THE FENCE, AND I'M MORE ON THE FENCE AGAINST IT BECAUSE WE NEED TO BRING POLICE OFFICERS police officers back to Garfield, back to all schools in the city of Seattle, not just Garfield.

We need the community and the police to work together.

Do I trust police fully?

Not all the time, but I know there's some good cops.

We've got to get rid of the bad cops, but we've got to come together.

But let's look at things from a holistic approach.

Let's ban Little League football in Washington State.

I'm going to start that charge.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you guys soon.

Thank you.

The next remote speaker is Kim Pasciuto.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Kim Pasciuto.

I'm calling from B7.

I'm a member of a group called P4, Proactive Persistent People for Progress, a local group working to strengthen democracy and advocate for progressive values since 2016. We have invested a significant amount of time over the last four years learning about police accountability and oversight in Seattle.

And in that work, we have had the pleasure of interacting with Inspector General Judge and her team on several occasions.

As community members with a vested interest in public safety, we appreciate the role of the OIG and Inspector General Judge's leadership in standing up the oversight function devoted entirely to systemic improvements.

Having created relationships of mutual trust and respect with SPD, the systemic improvements recommended by the OIG are most often adopted and their impact is measured and reported.

Inspector General Judge is readying the OIG to take on the role of the federal monitor.

The steady hand she brings to that transition will be a key to its success and to seamlessly continue the ongoing work necessary to satisfy the requirements of the court and exit the consent decree.

We strongly support Chair Kettle's recommendation that her term as the Inspector General be renewed.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Shomya Tripathi.

Hi, my name is Shomya Tripathi.

I'm the Director of Policy and Civic Engagement at Asian Council counseling and referral service, and a D3 resident myself.

I'm here to express my concern regarding STD's proposed expansion of automatic license plate readers.

As an agency that serves over 30,000 Asian, Native, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander residents in Seattle and King County, we deeply understand the specific vulnerabilities that surveillance technology poses on immigrant communities.

The proposed ordinance would not only expand ALPR to STD's entire fleet, an already concerning and expansive scale of surveillance-based data collection, but it would also store data with a third-party vendor.

This is extremely concerning for many reasons, as it could undermine Keep Washington Working and allow law enforcement in other states to gather information directly from the third party.

Let's not forget why Keep Washington Working was passed.

A state agency was regularly sharing personal information with federal immigration enforcement agencies, assisting with the deportations and arrests of our immigrant community.

We know from our own complicated history that we must be vigilant, beyond careful, in protecting the privacy of our vulnerable immigrant communities.

This proposed ordinance would absolutely not do that.

And ACRS urges you to reconsider this ordinance and at the very least mandate that ALPR data be stored exclusively on premise at the Seattle Police Department and have a maximum retention period of 48 hours for data collected as 90 days worth of data retention is excessive and poses significant privacy risks and concerns about data misuse.

We absolutely need safety resources for our community.

I'm in agreement with everyone here.

But these proposals put our most marginalized communities at great risk.

Thank you so much.

Our next speaker is T.

Shannon.

T, go ahead and press star six.

Let's go to the next one.

Good morning, Chair Kettle, members of the Public Safety Committee.

My name is P.

Stannin, and I'm the Technology Policy Program Director at the ACLU of Washington, here to share our concerns and recommendations regarding the proposed ALPR expansion.

Investing in more surveillance technologies is a reactive approach and not the answer to improving public safety in Seattle.

Collecting and maintaining ALPR data will not prevent violence in the city from taking place.

and will instead threaten people's privacy and civil liberties, and stands to harm a range of groups, including people seeking reproductive and gender-affirming health care and immigrants.

The proposal to store data with Axon, a third-party vendor, is a major change from the current practice of maintaining ALPR data on-premise.

This would make it much easier for third parties, such as law enforcement in states with abortion bans, to access Seattle's ALPR data by going directly to Axon, while bypassing our protections, including Washington's Shields Law and the Keep Washington Working Act.

It's crucial to mandate that ALPR data be stored exclusively on-premise at SPD to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

We also recommend limiting data retention.

The longer ALPR data is retained, the risks only continue to grow through the amassing of more data points that can be used to paint a more full picture of people's movements and associations that can then be used against them.

We recommend limiting data retention to three minutes as in New Hampshire, which is all that's needed to run plates against the database and no more than 48 hours.

We all hold a sense of urgency around ending violence and increasing safety in Seattle, but collecting ALPR data will not help in these efforts and will actually put our marginalized communities at extreme risk.

Thank you.

And our last remote speaker is Maya Morales.

Good morning, council members and members of the public.

My name is Maya Morales.

I'm the founder of Washington People's Privacy, which focuses on people's advocacy relating to issues of tech justice, privacy, and increasingly our digital rights.

I'm calling regarding SPD's proposal for a massive expansion of ALPR-enabled cameras in roughly 360 vehicles, not all of them patrol cars.

There's an inherent conflict to the public in collecting and retaining ALPR data, but not making that data Public Records Act compliant.

So on the one hand, public surveillance of people in public must be accessible by that public, but on the other, collecting and retaining that surveillance data, which must be publicly accessible, engenders massive amounts of harm.

The best practice is not to collect it at all.

The next best practice is to enact regulations for the near-instant expungement of any records that do not match a law enforcement list.

Our strong recommendation is to block this mass expansion of ALPR surveillance, Failing lawmaker will to do that, plates that do not match a list should be expunged in a matter of minutes.

Potential law enforcement abuse of this data is not prevented by preventing public access to surveillance data.

And permissive sharing in interlocal agreements among agencies amplifies those harms.

One of the largest concerns about the use of third-party software companies for surveillance of people by private entities and law enforcement is that due to extremely broad and permissive privacy policies with loopholes galore for the sharing, transfer, and use of data for research purposes or to improve a product or to develop a new product.

This includes AI, predictive or speculative programs like risk and behavior assessments and automated decision systems.

ALPR data is just one slice of the personal data collected and used in more integrative models.

If any of Washington residents' data about our movements, travels, and locations that's collected by public surveillance practices is going to a third party, it is not protected.

And that is absolutely something to be talking about and that we need to address.

There's so much more to add here and we'll follow up the email after this hearing, but I'd like to point out to the council that in the current state of our nation, it is no coincidence that several of the public comments here today are from women, trans or non-binary individuals, immigrants, and people of color.

This fact should speak volumes to the council about the people directly impacted and harmed by mass surveillance.

Lastly, I want to express my deep compassion for everyone affected by the recent shooting outside Garfield.

And I want to lift up students and community members' calls to fund those mental health care resources on campuses and to prioritize community care.

The urgency of community members' calls to fund support cannot be ignored.

Thank you.

Thank you.

There are no additional registered speakers, and we'll now proceed to our first item of business.

And we will move again on our first item of business.

Will the clerk please read item one into the record?

agenda item one the reappointment of inspector general lisa judge thank you um as inspector general judge comes to the table this is very important uh appointment as you know uh the officer inspector general along with the officer office of police accountability and the community police commission our accountability partners with us who also have our role as the committee and the council and accountability And today, this is also important in a sense that the OIG has a unique role amongst accountability partners, partly because it's part of the transition from the federal monitor as part of the consent decree process.

So thank you, Inspector General Judge, as we look forward to voting on your appointment at our next committee meeting.

And we'd like to now...

have this opportunity to hear from you with your presentation, and then also have the opportunity for the members of the committee to ask questions.

And also, in terms of the, you know, taking the vote at the next committee, to have the opportunity for any additional questions to be presented that may come to the committee.

All right, over to you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, Mr. Chair, members of the committee.

I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

I also want to offer appreciation for the remarks that you opened the committee meeting with and for the speakers both in present or present and remotely who spoke about the violence at Garfield High School and in high schools in Seattle.

It is a tragedy and I offer my condolences to their friends and families, all the students that have lost their lives in gun violence or been harmed.

So thank you.

I just wanted to give a little bit of an introduction.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to come before you to discuss my reappointment as Inspector General for Public Safety.

I've submitted my resume, a pretty detailed report about the milestones, accomplishments, and work products that OIG has produced over the past six years.

I also submitted a report that was provided to the court recently conducted by Dr. Richard Rosenthal.

Sorry, I'm having trouble with my mouth today.

Dr. Richard Rosenthal assessing the state of the Seattle accountability system to inform your consideration of my request for reappointment.

I believe I've built a credible, high-performing, accountable Office of Inspector General, and I've worked diligently to maintain a high level of legitimacy in our operations with community and our stakeholders.

I want to take just a quick minute to talk about why I'm choosing to seek reappointment.

It's not easy work, and it has not been an easy road over the last six years.

But if this kind of work is done with purpose and with collaboration, it's highly rewarding to me personally, and I believe very impactful for our community and our police department.

Police officers are often the face of government.

And for some in our community, it may be the primary interface that they have with government.

So to me, there is no more important work than making sure that those interactions with our community members, with their public safety providers, is professional, respectful, legitimate, and is mindful of constitutional rights.

So one example.

Oh, welcome, that's nice.

As an example, I was with you talking about use of force and we, hello everybody.

For those who may be watching on Seattle Channel, we have a kindergarten class coming in that I suspect Councilmember Rivera will be here joining in to see the young children who are joining us and getting a little taste of democracy as we speak.

So welcome to the kindergarten class and the teachers and the chaperones, the parents and the like.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm sure you're okay with the slight interruption, Inspector General.

It's perfect.

I love it.

Yeah.

So, you know, I was before you recently discussing SPD's use of force, especially if you look at force in the crisis context, it has reduced dramatically.

I think part of the reason for that is the work that OIG has done with SPD to look at training, to look at the way that SPD approaches people in crisis, and SPD has done a lot of work to make that happen.

I think that's laudable.

They've had excellent results and I think that's an example of how our cooperative work has benefited our community.

I also really wanna underscore my desire to continue important work that's been begun by OIG that would greatly benefit from leadership continuity, not to mention how important I think stability is for our system right now as Seattle transitions out of the consent decree process.

Building OIG from nothing required a few years to reach a point really of understanding what the mandates are of OIG and what kind of expertise and resources were necessary to do that work in a meaningful way.

In this last year, OIG has finally achieved what feels like an adequate staffing number and an understanding of the full slate of work that's necessary to provide systemic oversight of SPD and OPA.

And we've built a operation now that is ready to assume the consent decree compliance functions.

So those are kind of the remarks that I wanted to make to start us off, and I'm available for questions.

Okay, thank you very much.

As usual, I turn to my Vice Chair first to see if he has any questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you, Inspector General Judge.

Really appreciate your comments here, your presence, and your leadership over this last period here.

And I couldn't agree more on the sort of imperative to have continuity in such an important role now more than ever.

But we will go through our deliberative process.

But I do appreciate and acknowledge your At least from my perspective, strong leadership so far.

And shout-out to all the kindergartners who just joined us.

Hi, everyone.

Hi, guys.

I have a young...

I have three kids, fourth-grader, second-grader, and soon-to-be kindergartner.

So maybe some of my kids' classes will be here in chambers, looking all cute in the background at some point as well.

So...

And anyway, I digress.

I wanna ask you, I wanna put you on the spot for just a moment and ask you three questions that, really shape and inform the way I approach things and really, I think, reflect a growth mindset.

I think we should be asking of ourselves constantly, especially during periodic points where we can kind of logically self-reflect, pause, reflect, and figure out how we're going to get better.

So three questions I'm going to ask you today.

Just hear your initial thoughts.

And then, would love during the next committee meeting to hear if you have any more refined thinking on any of them.

But kind of high level in both scenarios.

So first question is, during your tenure here, what do you think worked particularly well?

Question one, what worked well?

Second question is, what would you have done differently?

Another way of stating that is, What specific opportunities for growth for this agency, or you, would you like to help build upon on a going forward basis?

And third and finally, if reappointed, what specific steps would you take?

What things would you like to accomplish let's just say in the next year or two.

So what worked well, opportunities for growth, and then if confirmed, kinda high level plan, what are you gonna do in the next year or two?

I think, you know, just initially off the top of my head, what worked well was starting by building relationships based on respect, trust, and having a collaborative approach to the work.

I don't think we would have been maybe successful at all, but not nearly as successful as we have been if we hadn't built strong relationships with the Seattle Police Department, with the Office of Police Accountability, with CPC trying to work with our stakeholders to make sure that they are brought in and that our work is infused by that partnership.

Having a structure, a three-part structure, was a really well thought out plan.

It enabled us to have built in thought partners, to have built in areas of tension and conflict, to have to work through critical issues with different perspectives that impact public safety.

So I think building relationships early on and maintaining those, maintaining A focus on neutrality, objectivity, and reliance on data in our approaches I believe helped those relationships.

The other thing that really occurs to me is the work that we did that directly involved community members and external stakeholders I think made our work a lot more responsive, more legitimate, more robust.

specifically the Sentinel event review was a two years long process with community members, both helping us plan staff and determine the process.

And then community members working alongside SBD to problem solve the issues that happened from a systemic perspective during the protests of the summer of 2020. And I think out of that, we came away with, with a true sense of what was important to community, what things really went wrong in the eyes of community, and I believe it made it more responsive to those concerns, the end product, the recommendations that we made.

So I think, and that informs my approach moving forward if I'm confirmed, I strongly believe in having external stakeholders and community members as partners in problem solving public safety.

We have run a number of work groups around the use of deception in law enforcement, traffic safety, things like that.

And it's always so much more helpful to get different perspectives and weave those into our work and our recommendations with SPD.

So those are two big takeaways from my first term.

I, in our office, our mantra is feedback is a gift.

So I take your point very well that it's important to be open and receptive to feedback and to use those as opportunities to course correct, to improve, you know, to always be open to other perspectives and approaches.

Everybody's leaving.

Bye everyone, have a good day.

Bye.

Bye.

Well, let's just make an official.

Sorry, their cuteness is very distracting.

Let's just make an official.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

Loved having everybody join us, the kindergartners.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm supposed to be quiet.

You're right.

But I really appreciate it.

My daughter's finishing third grade, so it seems like yesterday she was in the same place.

So thank you very much for joining us, and have a good day, and whatever the next is on the program.

And Mr. Chair, if I may, I would love to say that I want to see at least one of you here right in one of these seats one day.

So keep listening to your teachers, your parents, your elders, your mentors, and work hard.

You'll be here, too.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Go ahead.

That's OK.

Remind me of the second question.

OK, sorry.

Yeah, so you directly addressed the first one, which is sort of what worked well.

The other is you started to address the second question, which is opportunities for growth or kind of done differently, things you can do to you know you can build upon.

And then the third and final thing is kind of high-level concrete actions you will take in the next specified period, in this case, let's just say two years, to achieve some of those things.

Yeah, okay, so lessons that I've learned, I think, revolve around a couple of general issues.

One is hiring and staffing, and the other is just about building in internal quality assurance processes early on so that you have your own internal system for assessing what's working, not working.

That feels most necessary for me in our function of OPA oversight and making sure that, you review that we do of OPA investigations and their classification decisions is really robust, that it's going well, and I think that areas where we've struggled a little in the early years was around that, and that was kind of a miscalculation on my part at the outset.

When OIG started, we had eight positions allotted in the accountability ordinance, and OPA oversight had been done by one person.

for a number of years prior to OIG coming into existence.

So I had no idea what kind of intensive resources were necessary to really have robust oversight of OPA investigation and classification work.

It's been a learning experience.

We now have a supervisor and three folks doing that work.

So that enables us to really get down deep, do good quality control work for folks for OPA and then have a process for internal quality assurance that we're doing the work we say that we are doing and that we report that we're doing.

I think we still have work to do there.

We're working on making it more transparent on our website.

So just learning about how to make our work understandable, how to make it transparent, how to make sure we're doing what we tell community and leadership we are doing are some of my big takeaways.

and I would do in the coming years.

Obviously the number one issue is making sure that there's a seamless transition between being under federal oversight and having a continuing robust system of quality control of policing resources and OPA resources.

in Seattle.

So we've already undertaken that work.

We filed our first report with the court.

We are in the process of doing a multi-part examination of SPD's response to crisis, including a qualitative review just to demonstrate for the court and the monitor that we have the ability to go in and watch body worn and read reports and make sure that the internal processes SPD has for reporting are accurate and just so that we can make sure that all of that is operating as intended and as reported by SPD in addition to the numbers and the quantitative analysis that we will do.

Thank you, thank you, and I appreciate your comments and public self-reflections there, and very helpful.

And I'll just say this, I couldn't agree more that feedback is an absolute gift.

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Doesn't mean you have to 100% adopt or incorporate, but it is important to hear, and we are all accountable for our own actions and inactions, so...

Thank you for that.

Thank you, Mr. Vice Chair.

If I could add one other thing, we also have various external mechanisms for making sure that we're performing as intended.

We had some issues a number of years ago with our OPA functions, so I brought in an external entity to conduct a thorough review of my office and our OPA function and give us feedback and create a report about how it was going and how we could fix things that had gone awry with that.

So I invite external scrutiny.

We just had an analysis done by Dr. Richard Rosenthal.

which means we are subject to peer review.

We're a member of an organization that includes the United States and Canada.

We just went through our first peer review after year three and passed on our first peer review, which is not common.

We submit work for external review with ALGA, the Association of Local Government Auditors.

So we have a number of external mechanisms that check us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Any further questions?

Council President?

Thank you very much for coming today.

This is the first reappointment of a member of the accountability system.

So I have a question first.

I don't know if this is going to be, can you please chair remind me what is, there were questions distributed and then there will be answers.

I don't know if I should ask questions now that are already on that sheet so I can hold them until next time.

I DO NOT HAVE.

I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR MYSELF.

I HAVE QUESTIONS FROM COUNCILMEMBER MOORE THAT COUNCILMEMBER MOORE WILL PROBABLY ASK OR WE CAN SEND TO INSPECTOR GENERAL JUDGE.

SO I WOULD SAY GO AHEAD.

AND THIS IS MORE FOR THE PUBLIC AND OTHER STAKEHOLDER ORGANIZATIONS IF THEY HAD QUESTIONS IN ADDITION TO MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL NOT ON THE COMMITTEE.

to give this opportunity between now and our next meeting.

So you can go either way, but if you'd like to ask questions now, please go ahead.

I'll mention one or two.

You touched on this already, and I had, when you talked about a seamless transition, once the monitor is no longer.

So what does that look like for your office in terms of staffing, and how does that change your body of work?

You and I have spent a lot of time together talking about your responsibilities in monitoring the ongoing use of technology that had been cleared by surveillance impact reports.

And so I do know that you're really busy on that.

We've talked about the fact that you've taken on a large policymaking role.

and now you're going to have this other body of work.

So what does that look like going forward?

Yeah, you can really take a look at our operations now, I think, to get a sense of what it will look like going forward.

We were given staffing to stand up a team that will largely be responsible for compliance activities.

So assessments, providing ongoing feedback to the Seattle Police Department around force investigation, force review, They've been on board now, a supervisor, a statistical analyst, and another policy analyst who are part of that team.

They were largely involved in producing the first use of force report that was filed with the court.

They are working on the crisis report right now.

They're also engaging in a number of activities to define the slate of compliance work moving forward.

And that's not going to be, You know, the audit function at OIG does performance audits, so those are risk-based.

We have a risk register with topics and things that come up from stakeholders or our own observations about issues that could become problematic.

We run them through a matrix to define which are, the most likely to occur, and if they occur, might have the most negative impact on community.

So that's how we prioritize our performance audits.

The assessments that we will do with our, for lack of a better term right now, our monitoring team compliance folks will be more of just quality control, quality checks of the various systems at SPD.

And honestly, for the last 10 plus years that the Seattle Police Department has been under federal consent decree, almost all of the scrutiny has been focused on patrol operations.

use of force, supervision and patrol, crisis response out on the streets.

There has been very little attention paid to the Investigative Services Bureau or other aspects of SPD.

So we're going to be looking to fold in to our ongoing compliance work work around that.

How do we look at the other systems to make sure they're functioning effectively and appropriately?

Council Member Moore, I know that you asked a question about the collision review board, things like that.

That's an example of areas that have gone untended under the consent decree, but will necessarily be part of the overall systemic work that OIG does to make sure that all of SPD's systems and operations are functioning effectively, appropriately, and in a way that our community And I don't know, I hope that answers your question.

Sounds like what you're saying is you'll be continuing a lot of the same functions that you've already been providing and you'll include investigation whereas you've been focusing on patrol, but the basic work of your office won't change that much?

Am I getting it right?

It will expand in terms of the scope of things that we look at.

within the SPD sphere of operations.

It won't be simply focused on use of force by patrol, how patrol responds to crisis.

It will be, and I think the mayor's office has already done some work around adult sexual assault.

going in and looking at that unit to figure out how they're doing their work, whether it's being performed effectively, whether resources are being used appropriately.

So we will expand into those kinds of, you know, the other operations of SPD after the consent decree.

Okay.

Well, I'll say what I always say, which is that the mission of the CPC is to make policy recommendations on all aspects of policing based on community input.

And I hope that when you say that you're working together with the other of the accountability system that that does include CPC because they also, they have a large policy-making or policy-recommending role.

One more question.

It's, I'm sorry to bring this up, but last July, OPA received complaints regarding the, a political flag and a mock tombstone in a precinct, and they were, they were, and then OPA referred the investigation to OIG because of a conflict, and so I'm just wondering what is the status of that investigation, because there is a timeline.

Yes, there is a timeline when there are identified individuals and they've been provided notice.

It happened a number of years ago, and so we're in the process of interviewing.

It's under investigation, so we're interviewing people who may have had access to that area, who may have been in that precinct who can provide information, trying to identify if there are individuals who may have some accountability.

So we've been conducting investigations for, I'm sorry, interviews for several months, I think.

So we're working through it.

Initially, we had decided that it would be better to hire an external investigator, just to get some distance between the city and any potential officer involvement, and it seemed like it could be a fairly large investigation.

There are CBA restrictions that prevent anyone...

What does that stand for?

I'm sorry?

CPA?

Collective Bargaining Agreement.

So there are union contract restrictions that prohibit...

anyone but OPA or OIG personnel, or I would imagine city, SDHR, IU folks, from investigating members who are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

So we had to change course and bring that back in-house at OIG, but it's under active investigation.

Okay, so it doesn't, It doesn't have to comply with the same 180-day timeline?

It certainly does once individuals who may have violated policy are identified.

Oh, okay.

We just haven't, you know, been able to pin enough information down to get to that point yet.

So it will absolutely be governed by the 180-day CBA requirement.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions?

I wanted to ask the, you know, the monitor noted in his December 23 accountability report, you know, various, you know, improvements that could be made to the accountability triad.

Have you, what specific related to that monitor report can you speak to in terms of OIG and maybe in your role working with CPC and OPA as well?

Yeah, I think that that report was really full of a lot of well-founded observations about our system and had some sound recommendations for us to take forward.

I would just say that some of those that were specifically pointed at OIG, we took to heart.

We've already pushed out our annual report from last year.

That was one of the main criticisms that we were just taking too long to report out what we were doing in the community.

So I do take Dr. Rosenthal's feedback.

So I agree that open communication, honest, respectful relationships with our partners is integral to a well-functioning accountability system.

I have a very open line of communication with Seattle Police Department leadership, with OPA leadership.

I'm working to cultivate those relationships with CPC.

I think I have a very open dialogue with co-chair Merkel.

And I do agree that it's really important that we be able to have mutually honest conversations, that we can be candid with one another, that we can work through conflict.

in a way that's trusting and respectful.

So I wanna highlight some of the ways in which we've offered support to the CPC in the last probably nine or 10 months.

We have been very actively involved as helpers in their hiring processes.

Last week, my assistant, Kenesha Richardson spent a good part of her day last week assisting Director Ellis with hiring an administrative assistant.

My deputy director, Bessie Scott, has spent quite some time assisting them in interviews with a policy director search.

My policy supervisor recently assisted with another policy director search.

My deputy is going to be assisting them in their hiring process for a deputy director.

So I think we're good partners when they need help from us in terms of trying to staff up their folks.

They have work groups.

I staff those with a supervisory level person every CPC Work Group has one of my office folks as a member of that.

That's been ongoing for quite some time.

I have supervisors staff their biweekly meetings.

I recently attended in person and did a presentation on OIG's 2024 work plan.

And that was a really helpful conversation because in that it became apparent to us that when we solicit feedback from CPC and other partners really in the fall to develop our work plan for the coming year, CPC really doesn't have any idea of what our priorities are, and so we're missing an opportunity to kind of have a pre-conversation so that we can say these are the things that are coming up for us, these are the things we want to focus on.

Then CPC, I think, can have more informed conversations, make better decisions about what input they want to push forward to OIG for our coming work plan.

We plan to have a pre-meeting with them before soliciting feedback.

Let's see, what else?

What else do we do?

My deputy has, because she was previously the interim director of the CPC, she has a lot of knowledge and experience about that organization.

So she has been having regular meetings with Director Ellis to provide technical assistance.

I think they're on the calendar weekly, but things come up and so we've been providing support in that way.

We have our quarterly partners meeting, which is a mandated meeting four times a year so that we can talk about the work that we're doing and how we can collaborate with each other.

And I think those are the things I want to highlight right now.

So I feel like we are trying to make strides.

And there are mutual obligations amongst us all.

So I think we all have to work toward having those clear and open relationships with each other.

Okay, thank you.

Moving forward, as I alluded to at the beginning, OIG has a special role as it relates to the federal monitor and that transition process out of the consent decree.

So that's an area of interest for me to ensure that is as smooth as possible and facilitated to the best of our ability.

So thank you, Annette.

And again, we will, if there's any questions, input that we receive, we will get that to you.

And then, you know, any response to the members of the committee and also, obviously, to the public record.

We did receive a letter, as required from the Accountability Office, from Director Gino Betts, who's been on the job for nearly two years.

So it's this level of observation.

And he noted that...

Inspector General Judge has been proven to be a committed and innovative partner, and then later said a proven asset in ensuring high-quality OPA investigations and decision-making.

So this letter from Director Betz will be also included into the record.

So thank you very much, and again, at the next committee meeting, we'll take the next step.

All right, thank you.

Mr. Chair, appreciate it.

Thank you.

President, committee members, appreciate it.

Thank you.

We will now move on to our next item of business.

Will the clerk please read item two into the record?

Council Bill 120778, an ordinance relating to the surveillance technology implementation authorizing approval of uses and accepting the 2023 updated surveillance impact report and the 2023 executive overview for the Seattle Police Department's use of automated license plate reader technology.

Briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Welcome, Mr. Johnson from Central Staff.

Also, we have Mr. Maxey and Ms. Keefe from SPD.

Can I read the next piece here?

Okay.

I have a question.

Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Chair.

I just have a procedural question.

I will be making a motion to...

Well, I guess I wanted to clarify whether you'll be seeking a vote today, because if you are seeking a vote today, I will be making a motion to table, and so I'm just seeking guidance on...

your preference for the procedure for doing that, whether you want me to make that now or wait until we've had the briefing.

We can check in with the city clerk's office.

My intention was to move the committee to recommend passage of Council Bill 120778. That was my intention after the presentations of Mr. Johnson from Central Staff and Mr. Maxey and Ms. Keefe from SPD.

Yeah, our advice from the deputy clerks is that a motion to postpone is a subsidiary action and has to occur after moving to recommend passage.

Okay, thank you for that clarification.

Thank you.

Okay, Mr. Johnson.

Good morning, Chair Kettle, members of the committee.

For the record, my name is Tommaso Johnson, council central staff.

I'm here today to provide a brief background and overview of Council Bill 120778. We're hearing Council Bill 120778 regarding automated license plate readers for the second time today.

It was heard in committee for the first time on May 14th, 2024. This Council Bill would approve the Seattle Police Department's expansion, fleet-wide expansion of automated license plate readers, or ALPR.

This is also referred to in some places as automated license plate recognition technology.

This council bill would approve SPD's expansion of this technology from a limited deployment, which was originally approved retroactively by the council in 2021, to a new fleet-wide deployment.

In brief, under the fleet-wide deployment, the automated license plate readers would be equipped to every SPD patrol vehicle and some other SPD vehicles numbering north of 350 vehicles.

This would be implemented through the use of vehicle recognition software included on the built-in dash cams of these vehicles, enabling the vehicles to recognize license plates that are passing into view of the dash cams, recording both the plate number as well as the time and date of the plate read and location information about where that plate is read.

have been several policy issues identified with regard to fleet-wide expansion of automated license plate readers.

You heard most of those referenced in public comment during the public comment period earlier today.

In brief, the two primary policy issues relate to the retention period of data generated by automatic license plate readers.

The current proposal in the surveillance impact report sets that period at 90 days for data that is not being used in an active investigation.

The two other policy, the second policy issue relates to access, non-SPD access to that data generated by license plate readers through two primary vectors or avenues.

Number one is the public records act washington state public records act data generated by license plate readers is considered to be public record and may be requested by members of the public the second policy issue as you heard referenced in public comment relates to attempts by outside entities to compel data disclosure by the third party vendor and There is one amendment currently on the agenda.

Amendment one would essentially memorialize in this ordinance current SPD practice related to responding to public records requests by requiring that SPD not publicly disclose ALPR data that links a specific plate to a time, date, and location.

It would require SPD to continue that practice unless required to abandon it by court order or a change in applicable law.

In the event that there was a court order or a change in applicable law, the amendment would also require SPD to promptly notify the city council at that point.

Thank you.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Okay.

Any questions for Mr. Johnson?

Okay.

Council Member Moore?

We're going to get to the procedural.

Because there are folks from SPD in the mayor's office here, I didn't know if they were going to be able to...

Are you going to be able to provide...

Is your role at the table to provide additional information during this presentation, or are we supposed to hold our questions until after this moves, or what is the procedure here?

They'll be next.

First was central staff.

Okay, got it.

Got it.

Then SPD.

I have no questions for central staff.

Thank you.

Council Member Moore for Mr. Johnson, Central Staff.

Yes, great.

Thank you very much, Chair.

So, thank you, Tommaso, for your memorandum.

And going through it on page two, you talked about how SBD is currently using this technology in limited deployment.

I think that's nine cars, as you mentioned, as authorized retroactively by the Council in 2021. And then you reference the council bill.

And that...

And then you also, sorry, talked about on page three, the top paragraph, you talk about the CER process for material updates to previously authorized technologies such as this proposed fleet-wide deployment does not require a new analysis or assessment on policy and civil liberties by the community surveillance working group.

Do you recall those statements in your?

That's correct.

Okay.

So I just wanted to talk a little bit more about the background.

So I have a copy of the ordinance, the 2021 council bill that did authorize the limited deployment of the ALPR and I note that in Section 3, and I'm hoping you're familiar with this, and I'm sorry I don't have the copy for you, but it does say the council requests the Seattle Police Department to report no later than the end of the third quarter of 2021 on the feasibility of retaining records of non-case-specific automated license plate reader data for no more than 48 hours.

And that was passed by council in authorizing the limited retroactive deployment of ALPR.

Do you recall that and are you familiar with that?

Yeah, I'm familiar with that.

that amendment by council to make that request.

It's predates my time here, but I've made myself familiar with the history on that.

Yes.

Okay.

And then it's my understanding that that request was made at the recommendation of the, the community surveillance working group and that they had produced a number of specific comments and recommendations.

And again, talking about at that point that there was a 90 day retention period and recommending 48 hours during which time it must use the data for specific purpose.

and retain no information at all when a passing vehicle does not match a hot list.

So is it your understanding that the council bill recommendation was based on the community surveillance work group recommendation?

Yeah, that's my understanding.

I believe the issue around retention period was brought to light by the work group.

community surveillance working group, potentially other public commenters during the original retroactive authorization.

I believe that that surveillance impact report approval process and public comment period started initially in 2018, and then the ordinance was approved finally in 2021. So I think that the 48 hour recommendation does originate from the community surveillance working group and was potentially also raised by other public commenters during that initial process.

And then to your knowledge, has SPD complied with the ordinance that was passed in 2021 in terms of providing a report on the feasibility of retaining records for no more than, in a non-case specific instances for no more than 48 hours?

I believe that the feasibility of a 48 hour retention period was addressed by SPD was communicated back to the council that that was not going to be workable operationally, but I would defer to SPD on that question as well.

They would have something to add there.

Yes, Councilmember, my understanding is we did respond to that and I'm working on getting a copy of our response just for the record.

Okay, so it would have been helpful to have had that response as part of this conversation because to me, all the information that I'm receiving is that 48 hours is feasible for non-case specific, anything that's outside of what's currently been authorized.

So that's the, for me, that's the broader issue here is that 48 non-case specific information.

So.

And council member in the latest letter to council that I sent out within the last couple of weeks, we did address the timelines specifically around the 90 day and the justification as well as the feasibility of the 48 hours.

So we've updated that as well.

Okay, I don't recall that being addressed in the memo about non-case specific.

So, anything that on a hot list or an active investigation or a warrant or an amber or silver alert, I did not recall you addressing why you need to retain any information outside of those categories beyond 48 hours.

Understood, Councilmember, and I think you are correct.

I did not specifically address that.

I did address the universal need to maintain the data for 90 days for investigative purposes, and we don't always know what plate we're going to be looking for in an event of an investigation that commences after the data is collected.

Right.

So that's a non-active investigation you're talking about.

So it's data that's collected that doesn't come through a match with a hot list for stolen vehicle, missing person, silver alert, active investigation, search warrant, all of the things that are listed in the current SIR, correct?

That is correct.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have no further questions for Mr. Johnson.

Any additional questions, Council President?

Vice Chair?

Okay, we will move on to Mr. Maxey and Ms. Keefe for your remarks.

Thank you.

I really appreciate the ability to be here and specifically to answer any outstanding questions that the committee may have.

This has been an ongoing dialogue for quite some time and some of the very, very important privacy issues that have been raised along the way.

appreciated the opportunity to really delve into most of those issues were flagged initially by SPD.

We're very cognizant of the privacy interests around our immigrant refugee communities and, of course, people exercising their reproductive rights within the city of Seattle.

So we're very sensitive to that issue.

I personally presented at the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys on this very topic, flagging the concerns.

And I believe we have addressed all of the potential avenues that someone might be seeking this information for nefarious purposes.

We are being very cognizant of the risks and we've explored it both on the Public Disclosure Act, we're seeking an amendment to the state law through the Office of Intergovernmental Relations.

We have examined the warrant and subpoena issue, as well as the third-party issue.

And perhaps for me, most importantly, we've looked very hard at how this information would be accessed internally.

I did hear one of the public commenters address the potential for abuse even by our employees.

And we are taking very comprehensive steps to lock down the information, assure a very few number of our personnel have access to it, can even get to it.

and requiring significant documentation, including the reasonable suspicion or probable cause underlying the search and documentation about the value that came out of it so that we're able to track that.

All of these uses will be audited by the Office of the Inspector General.

Lisa Judge has given us, I think, to date, two reviews of our surveillance technologies, looking at our use and ensuring that we comply with the SIRs and that we are...

respecting not just the letter but the spirit of our community concerns.

And I think I will leave it there as far as just introductory comments, but I know you have questions and that is really why we are here to address them.

I just want to impress on you that we intend to use this technology responsibly.

and that we really believe this will increase our capacity, not just to solve crimes, but to get to the perpetrators efficiently and with precision so that we have fewer impacts on, as we fumble around trying to identify the right person, this gives us the ability to get straight to the heart of the matter.

Thank you, Mr. Maxey.

Normally, I go to my Vice Chair first, but in this case, since I already have two hands raised, I will first go to Councilmember Moore, followed by Councilmember Rivera, who I should also note, for the record, has joined us for this presentation and is welcome here to the committee and also to ask any questions you may have.

Councilmember Moore.

Thank you, Chair.

I'm happy to go after Councilmember Rivera since I have spoken.

You might have my same question.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

Sorry, I'm just trying to access all this stuff.

So I do just, for the record, I want to state very clearly that I support the automatic license plate reader, the use of those as a tool.

And clearly, I believe that they're important.

I support the expansion of this program citywide.

I had talked about the privacy experts and advocates had really pushed for retaining on-site retention and storage.

In discussions with you, Mr. Maxey, and others, it became very clear that that's just operationally not feasible.

And so I have moved away from that as a position and am supportive of utilizing a third-party vendor.

But again, the issue remains the 48 hours and the access by a out-of-state actor through the third-party vendor.

And it seems to me that the...

The main issue here is how do we protect individuals who are coming to the state of Washington to access reproductive care or gender affirming care, people who are coming, people with immigrant status, How do we protect them from being criminalized and prosecuted in non-protective states?

And this council and the state passed a shield law for that very purpose.

But the shield law only applies to government entities or to businesses that are incorporated and or headquartered in Washington.

And Axon is not protected.

Neither.

Axon is headquartered in Arizona and it's incorporated in Delaware.

And I understand that the SPD has said we will be very clear in our contract terms with Axon that they are not to release that data and that they are to contact us if they receive a subpoena or court order to do so.

The problem is that there, as you well know, It's not uncommon to receive a sealed warrant that prohibits disclosure of the warrant's existence to the party that holds the information.

So, my question to you, I am getting to the question.

When I read this, sir, it says that the operational purposes, it will only be deployed for official law enforcement purposes, and these are limited to locating wanted, endangered, or missing persons, or those violating protection orders, locating stolen vehicles, locating stolen license plates, canvassing the area around a crime scene, and locating vehicles under the SCOFA law.

It seems very clear, and those all require a hit of some sort or immediate information.

It seems very clear that those purposes can be accomplished within the 48-hour turnaround.

Once you get that information, you are allowed to continue to retain that information.

So I don't really understand, given the risk to the reproductive rights of people coming to Washington, what is the actual downside to SPD of not being able to retain non-relevant data beyond 48 hours?

Council member, good morning.

Carrie Keefe representing on behalf of Seattle Police Department.

I think logically speaking, oftentimes you don't know whether or not the information is relevant to an investigation within that 48 hours.

So to preclude access to data hours when an investigation is just beginning, especially in complicated investigations such as homicides or rapes or gun-violent investigations, that data may not be known to be relevant until that investigation is underway and an officer is able to talk to witnesses, gather up their information.

So within 48 hours having a bright line rule, you would be cutting off access to very pertinent information that could develop in the course of an investigation.

So that I think is the most compelling reason.

Um, and I think in, both the experience that you've had as a Superior Court judge, you've seen where investigations oftentimes are very long and ongoing.

And so being able to develop key information based on the information that's gathered throughout that investigation is critical in developing it.

Right, but it's very clear in the CER that the language says to assist with active investigation.

So if you have an open investigation, you are allowed to keep that information, the license plate information, until the investigation is completed, right, and even beyond that.

It's only when you don't have an open investigate, you're asking to retain this information for 30 days in a non-open investigation and the possibility that you might open an investigation in 30 days, it might become relevant in 30 days.

It's that narrow window that we're talking about.

It's not when you have an active investigation and now you have a license plate which you can add to that investigation, is my understanding.

So that may have been poor drafting in the SIR.

It was not meant to say that we needed an active investigation prior to the collection of data in order to retain it.

It was that the data that was going to be retained for 90 days could assist in an active investigation.

And I know there's been a lot of talk about domestic violence and how that might play out using this technology.

Remember, this technology just tells you where a car has been.

It does not tell you who was driving it.

It does not tell you what happened when the person exited that vehicle.

It is simply a location of a vehicle.

It seems far more likely in the domestic violence context that if someone subject to a domestic violence protective order had their vehicle within a certain location within the thousand yard or thousand foot boundary of the protective order, that would be compelling evidence against the abuser who has violated that protective order.

And while that might only be circumstantial evidence in a criminal case, in a civil proceeding in family court where a lot of those domestic violent protective orders are litigated, it's under preponderance, and that would be highly persuasive to the hearing examiner in those cases.

or the Superior Court judge if it was elevated to them.

So that's just an example of how that period of time could be useful, because you may not know the person violated that within 48 hours, 30 days.

It gives you that buffer.

Similarly, we know that most stolen vehicles these days are not stolen for joyriding or for some random purpose.

They are stolen specifically to use in other crimes.

If we have a hit on a vehicle that is not on our list that we now know was involved in a crime, having that 90-day buffer lets us look back in time to see what other crimes that car was associated with between the, and we may or may not know whether it was reported stolen because it may not be on the list.

People do not always tell us that immediately.

And it gives us that buffer to go back and track where did that vehicle go Again, that's a starting point because we don't know who was driving.

If you're ever doing a criminal investigation and you want to get at a person, this is a far more effective way of tracking a person than ALPR.

You know, that's where many of the confidential warrants go to, is to sell site tracking and location information.

So this, I see the real-time benefits of ALPR both bouncing off a hot list, tracking people in real time if there is a criminal event, think Cafe Racer from years ago, or putting together that investigative profile within that time-limited period to find out where that vehicle went and what they were involved in.

That is...

That is sort of the thinking behind how we would use this.

On the back end, when we have a real-time crime center, they will help navigate this, and hopefully we can get the information on that plate, figure out where it was, and provide a back out to patrol pretty quickly.

But for investigative purposes, we chose the 90-day as a significant need on our part.

I appreciate that, but if you don't get a hit, are you going to look at every single license plate to then track where it was?

I mean, you're going to be getting thousands of license plates, so that does not seem like a reasonable way to approach an investigation.

If you get a hit, or you know the active investigations you have, and then you get a license plate that's relevant to that, you get to keep that for the length of the period of investigation.

If you get a hit, you get to keep that information on the stolen plate, which would open the door to potential other crimes that I agree with you are likely to having been committed.

I'm really concerned that you're talking about sharing this data in a civil context.

This is limited to the criminal justice context.

So that raises a flag for me.

Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying.

So it's clear that...

the information that you're seeking to retain for 30 or 90 days is, it's not immediately relevant and I don't understand how you are going to have the resources to determine whether thousands of license plates that you are collecting on a daily basis are going to be at some point relevant to an investigation that hasn't yet been opened.

Certainly, we would have no way of knowing in advance whether that license plate was relevant.

That's why we're seeking the 90-day buffer.

It's when you have an event that happens with a vehicle, whether it's stolen or not, and we know that was used in a criminal context, then we can track where that vehicle came from, where it went, and it gives us more information about the who as we close in on the investigation.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Moore.

Councilmember Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you for the opportunity to ask questions.

I know I don't sit on this committee, but everyone knows really public safety is of paramount importance to me.

Mr. Maxey, I just wanted to go back.

So I, too, want to say I'm supportive of this tool, and I have privacy concerns as well.

So I want to get to ensuring that we're mitigating as much as possible for the privacy concerns.

for the privacy concerns for privacy issues while being able to utilize a tool that I know is necessary as we deal with the public safety issues in this city.

To the point that you made earlier about folks using this internally, I'm wondering what are the parameters and safeguards that you've put into.

You alluded to it, but I don't really understand or know, have knowledge of what the parameters you've put in place to limit this information to whoever at the department actually needs to use it so it's not broadly available to every single officer, but to mitigate for that privacy concern of how it might be used internally.

Could you speak to that, please?

Absolutely.

So the plan is to have a discrete few, and it's probably going to be the civilian analysts that we have in the real-time crime center, and presumably the captain that oversees that body of work.

it would be limited to that group to access the system completely.

And this is one of the benefits of using Axon's cloud-based storage is every time the system is touched, it is auto-logged.

You know, who did it, when they did it, and what they looked at.

We think that's really, really important.

The way we're looking at this internally is we're treating it as an internal search warrant.

If you want to access this data, You need to put together your basis for it, what the probable cause is.

If we decide to do this at reasonable suspicion, I don't know that we fully, we need to test the system a little bit more, but right now it would be a probable cause.

And we would look backwards at the data only under those circumstances.

And it's only accessed by those people.

So we would have, not only would we have a log of what was done, we would have a document of the reasoning behind it.

And again, all of that would be subject to audit by the Office of the Inspector General to ensure that our reasons for looking at the historical data were valid and that we were not in any way abusing the system.

So just so I understand, any officer actually has access to it.

They just have to have these pieces in place, the basis by which the probable cause for why they're seeking the information, and then they would have access to that information?

No, a regular officer would Certainly, if it was on the hot list, they would get the trigger for that.

Our belief is that if we turn this on fleet-wide, we know there's 9,000 stolen vehicles in the city of Seattle right now.

We do not have the capacity to react to each and every one of those.

It will just be noise to the frontline officer without some guidance about, no, actually, we care about that one.

That one was used in a crime or whatever we might know about it.

And we're going to develop systems such that perhaps PEOs can follow up if there's stationary hits on a stolen at a location.

Eventually, we might send other resources to go recover that when available.

but the average officer would not have the ability to search that 90-day buffer that I keep talking about.

That would be restricted to select personnel audited and to the documentation requirements that I was discussing that shows the need and the why, and then all of that will be audited by the OIG, and the report will certainly come to this body.

And who would that select personnel be?

I guess that's what I'm asking.

Who are you designating as that select personnel?

We're looking at the, for all of this technology, we need a real-time crime center.

These would be civilian analysts managed most likely by a captain that would sit in our room on the seventh floor, and it would only be those individuals that would have access to it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council Member Rivera.

Since I did skip over, Vice Chair, did you have any questions?

No.

No questions.

Anybody else?

May I ask a follow-up question?

Yes.

Sorry.

No, go ahead.

You can back up.

Okay.

Go ahead.

Sorry, I'm just pulling it.

Thank you, Chair.

So, I'm sorry, I just keep going round and round with you here, Mr. Maxey.

I appreciate your patience, but I am reviewing the memo that you sent out and looking at the period where it talks about the 90-day retention.

So, you're saying the 90-day retention gives SPD time for, gives time for SPD to appropriately investigate active cases.

In this timeframe, investigators can talk to witnesses, review video, and gather other evidence to ensure they have the correct suspect before querying information on license plates.

For an example, an investigator on a homicide case might get a lead from a witness on the identity of a suspect.

After receiving that testimony, the detective could look up that suspect's license plate and potentially find the suspect's location and apprehend them before they can harm someone else.

Fair point.

However, as you just correctly stated, the best way to locate somebody is their phone.

You know, this is our tracker, and I have signed dozens of warrants for cell phones that GPS locate suspects.

So it seems to me that the best, that you already have access to the best tool for locating and identifying a suspect, which is somebody's phone.

and that the use of a license plate in that situation is of minimal effectiveness based on the risk that it poses.

And so you're asking for a very long, and that also requires somebody to, it seems like a lot of time, officer time involved in investigation to get to the point where they need, potentially need a license plate when they could easily, once they have the identity, they can get a search warrant for the phone and geolocate them.

I agree that the phone is the best evidence if you know the person involved.

If you do not know the person involved or you don't have access to their phone number and to know what carrier they're on, where to issue those subpoenas, I mean, there's complications to that.

But if you don't know the identity of the person, then the license plate becomes relevant.

to find, will you say potentially find the suspect's location, but they could, I mean, just because the car has driven past one spot and that's where it's picked up doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be able to locate that person once you've got the license plate, does it?

No, but if you have 90 days worth of data and you have multiple ALPR hits on that plate as it moves around the city and perhaps goes back to a location, it gives you information about where that person, whoever was driving it, might actually be.

It narrows the search.

But you just noted if you had multiple hits.

If you have the hits, you get to keep the data, right?

So, again, the hits, you get to keep the data for as long as you need it once you have a hit.

So this isn't helping you.

When I say hit, I mean the read on the license plate.

I'm not talking about the hot list.

This car may not be on the hot list.

You learn at day 60 that a crime is committed using that vehicle.

Looking back at the historical data is what's going to inform you about the patterns of that vehicle for the investigation.

Okay, thank you.

And we don't have enough cars that we're going to have a complete map of everywhere that car went.

And that's where the amount of information that you have over 90 days will give us a better chance of having some usable data on the patterns of that vehicle for investigative purposes.

Right.

But you don't need their identi- never mind.

Thank you.

Council President?

Well, I have to admit I'm having a hard time following the intricacies of this conversation, and I'm not a lawyer, and so I apologize, but it's also difficult for me to separate the public comment and the issues that we heard about in public comment about what happened at Garfield from this discussion, and I've already said that what motivates my support, I'll say it again, what motivates my support mainly for this technology is not the ability to recover stolen cars, but it's to to interrupt the downstream secondary crimes that these stolen cars are used to commit.

And so can we just use a real-life example?

If we don't, as you said, Ms. Keefe, if your argument is we don't know what will be useful in an investigation until it proceeds.

And so if the department is researching what happened or is trying to figure out What cars were around Garfield last week?

I mean, would that, if it wasn't on a hot list to begin with, is stolen?

I mean, is that why this technology is of questionable help, or how does it work out?

And you probably lost the, I don't know if you heard, like,

Okay, I'll restate my question.

Forgive me, I'm distracted.

It's okay, it's okay.

Is this technology helpful in a case of a recent crime that might not have been already, where the car might not have been triggered as stolen, but the location could be helpful?

I guess is my question.

Yes.

I think the answer is yes.

Could that information be helpful?

And is that why you're arguing that this is necessary to keep this information as evidence for longer?

I'm just trying to figure out what am I not getting here?

I think the underlying confusion that I'm hearing from a lot of the questions is will we know that this vehicle was involved in a crime such that we flag it within the first 48 hours?

And I think the answer to that is no, we won't know that.

You might learn that, and even if we did, we'd be missing the historical data on that vehicle to know whether, where it had been and all of that information.

So just because on...

you know, day zero, this car is involved in a crime, doesn't mean there isn't huge value to looking at the past 90 days as where did that vehicle go, what other crimes were they involved in, what were the patterns of that vehicle.

It gives us so much investigative information to go find that vehicle.

If a car is stolen and on the list and used in a crime, it may very well be jettisoned within that 48 hours, and then we are missing...

the historical information that we need to figure out, you know, where that came from to basically track the movements of that car for the investigation.

So it's, I think that answers your question.

So the answer is yes, we don't always know.

We certainly won't know within that 48-hour window.

And if we lock it down to that, we use, we lose all capacity for investigative purposes to know the historical record of that vehicle.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I have a question.

Go ahead, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here.

I had a couple questions.

The first one was, is it yearly 9,189 incidents of stolen vehicles in the city of Seattle?

Yes.

So that's 191 vehicles that are stolen every week in our city.

Do you also have the data how much...

How many crimes are done with a vehicle?

I know that they, in the country, it's 70% of crimes are done with a vehicle.

Is that, I don't know, what would it be in city of Seattle?

So we've explored that data a lot.

There's a strong correlation between the stolons and the crimes.

We have not mapped it precisely, but anecdotally and based on what our Crime analysts are telling us there is a high correlation between the two.

Got it, no, understood.

And then my other question was, I saw on here that 569 vehicles since 2022 have been recovered with 11 SPD vehicles.

Do you have the number of recovery before?

Because it's been used since 2006, the technology, as I read in the memo.

Do we have how many have been before then, or was that just a highlight number for 2022?

Was that the most?

I'd have to go back and look at the annual data on that.

We would not have records going back that far because we switched records management systems.

Got it, understood.

Along the way, but we should have it from about 2015 to present.

I understand.

Yeah, no, look, I support technology uses in our city to create safe environments.

For me, it's not a this or that, it's an and.

We need this and investments in our schools and investments in technology and invest, like...

To me, it's an and.

It's not either or.

I think public safety in our city has gotten to be a little bit too partisan, and it should be a nonpartisan issue.

But I also have concerns, obviously, about making sure that the privacy for our city, or for that technology and for that information, is stored properly where it can't be used against folks like my...

like Council Member Moore and Council Member Rivera has stated for out of state, but I also understand the sense of urgency for us to be able to use this technology, to be able to recover stolen vehicles.

I can't begin to tell you how many times I've listened to people tell me about their vehicle getting stolen, catalytic converter, someone driving through their shop, a drive-by shooting, someone parking their car outside people's homes in North Capitol Hill and robbing people every night at 1, 2 a.m.

It's gotten to be repetitive.

And it's like, okay, what can we do to be able to curb this and really start making progress on public safety?

So thank you for answering those questions.

Council Member Moore.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for your indulgence.

So I just want to be clear, Mr. Maxey, that the information that Councilmember Hollingsworth just asked you about, the stolen vehicles, you would be able to retain that information pretty much indefinitely, correct?

If you get a hit on a stolen vehicle, you get to retain that information as long as you need it for the purposes of whatever investigation you have.

Up to 90 days, yes, correct.

Up to 90 days, or if it's an active investigation until the investigation is completed.

Correct.

Okay.

If you get a hit, so this does not...

Changing the 48-hour for...

What I'm talking about, so how do I make this clear?

The way the SIR is now, you get to keep, as long as you need it, 90 days or until the investigation is complete, any hit on a stolen vehicle.

And as you just said, many of those stolen vehicles are involved in additional crimes.

So now you've got the information about the stolen vehicle, you can then look at what other crimes it's involved in, correct?

Yes.

Because you've got that information and you can retain it as long as you need it.

Yes, we could, but that's all future-facing.

It does not have that 90-day historical record.

Right, but you've got 90 days to hold on to it or if an investigation opens or you've got an active investigation and you find it's involved, you can use it, you can hold on to it as long as you need it.

That is correct.

So the main focus of the SIR is to locate wanted, endangered, or missing persons.

You're going to know that.

You're going to have an amber or silver alert.

You're going to get a hit quickly.

You're going to locating stolen vehicles off of the hot list.

You're going to know that quickly.

Locating stolen license plates.

You're going to get that off a hot list.

You're going to know that quickly.

Canvassing the area around a crime scene.

Obviously, you'll get to do that immediately.

and locating vehicles under the Scoff Law, which there'll be a record of that.

You have access to protective orders in the system.

Every protective order, every sexual assault order, every ERPA order is entered into the Washington State database as well as the police database.

That information is all there.

You have access to that information and you will be able to retain it as long as you need it, either 90 days or to the conclusion of an investigation.

Is that correct?

That sounds correct, yes, Councilmember.

Okay, thank you.

That's just the point I wanted to make.

Thank you, Councilmember Moore.

I just wanted to, well, first, thank you, Mr. Johnson first, and also Mr. Maxey and Ms. Keith for joining us today.

I understand the points made.

I've read the SIR and the other data and the memos and the like, and have obviously had many conversations And to Councilmember Hollingsworth's point, this is a, you know, an kind of piece.

I'm also mindful of the, you know, the points that Councilmember Moore is making as it relates to those individuals, like with the public comment.

And, you know, so in some ways this is a little bit of a balancing act and somewhat of a, you know...

in many ways, in terms of the parameters, but also in a sense of, yes, there is concern as it relates to, you know, out-of-state actors, you know, with the warrants coming in, balanced with, you know, what we've heard and seen here on the dais and your testimony, but also what we all know in terms of these stolen vehicles.

And that's a real piece that we have going on.

And to date, I've not seen anything in terms of the LA Times, Seattle Times, New York Times, Washington Post, as a respect for a confidential warrant subpoena to be placed to now.

And I recognize the possibility of it.

Long way of saying I respect and understand the points made by Councilmember Moore and through the public comment and the conversations I've had.

And to that question, and I need to ask this question because it's come up in what Councilmember Moore was saying and in the conversations that have been had, is the question of 90 days versus 30 days.

Can you speak to that as an issue in terms of the impact of that and what would that make in terms of that balancing act as opposed to the privacy concerns that we have on one hand, but then also being able to work the public safety pieces is still be available for 30. Obviously, there's a 60-day difference, but how does that play into the factoring in?

And I bring this up because we do have a, you know, a potential walk-on amendment to go from 90 to 30. And I just wanted to say that.

And it's partly because of all the conversations we've had on council, in the committee on council, and also with the executive.

So...

You know, at the heart of that question, I think a lot of other questions really is the question of the vulnerability around the privacy interests.

So I would like to address that first and then turn to the time period if that works for you, Chair.

Yes.

Right.

So under the Stored Communications Act, there is a limitation on Axon from providing that information if it were subject to a subpoena de sticum or a warrant.

And Axon has responded when served with a similar type of information.

subpoenaed to STICM in Texas, it responded to it with a motion to quash.

It takes, Axon takes its responsibility very seriously and the prohibitions under the Secured Communications Act that prohibits providing that information because it neither possesses nor controls the information.

It is the information within the control of the agency, which is SPD.

And Axon was successful in objecting and opposing a subpoena de justicum.

The court ruled from the bench in Texas, denying a motion to compel.

It was body-worn camera information of 25 officers.

So there is the federal limitations, and that would apply here, too.

If there was, if Axon was receiving a subpoena justicum for ALPR information, they would follow that same procedure in a motion, you know, a motion to quash, giving third-party notice also to SPD.

Within the state of Washington, there are those protections baked into our state legislation, including the SHIELD Act.

We have RCW 1096040 and RCW 7115020. And both of those provisions prohibit that the state actors, judges, clerks, complying with either subpoenas or with warrants that are related to information pertaining to protected health care services.

So within both federal, state, and then also the city ordinance, we have the protections baked in.

to provide for that privacy, to provide that assurance that the narrative or the question related to what if someone from Idaho came over to Washington to get an abortion, and how would, if Idaho was trying to track that person down, how would they be able to get that information?

I think that while a remote possibility I don't think is very plausible.

And then when you look at the protections that are baked in to both federal, state, and local legislation, that is just not a likely scenario.

And it's one that a third party notice would also be given to Seattle city attorneys, SPD, and the city would be responding to protect that information.

So as far as privacy rights go, I think the narrative that has been put out and the remote possibility related to protected healthcare services, it's just not one that is a reality.

And so to look at it and hold up the, you know, the positive aspects of the ALPR and what its use as a tool in combating crime versus a remote possibility that really isn't plausible under the legislation that's in place, I think is one that the council really needs to consider as far as the cost benefit.

Thank you.

Council Member Saka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for all this really enriching, lively discussion.

I suppose on this last question, this last comment, rather, you mentioned the applicable statutes and laws, including the Washington Shield Act, which is really important and helpful.

And then also, if you take it a step further, You can venture down the choice of laws analysis and whose laws would be controlling under what circumstances.

Some of that would hinge on the organization's principal place of business.

Some of it would hinge on their state of incorporation.

Some of it...

Look, all these factors that I'm trying to purge from my law school memory from my civil procedure class, but you can get real academic with this real quick.

But look, you mentioned a comment, and so this is really to anyone, I guess you two would have the best point of view, Mr. Maxey, as well on the, This is a valid concern.

What we're hearing today, this discussion is centered around a very valid concerns underpinning privacy, underpinning or triggering reproductive rights and gender affirming care amongst other things.

And so you mentioned a moment ago that this seems fairly remote and less plausible, but what, What is that understanding based off of?

How attenuated and or remote are these, I think, valid concerns based off what we've seen?

All we can go off is we're not the first jurisdiction in the country or in the world proposing to adopt and wide scale implement this technology.

And what kind of, how prevalent, or not, how remote or attenuated or not, how many documented, known, maybe known is a better incidence of these kind of scenarios are we actually seeing in practice in other jurisdictions?

I'm not aware of any in this area.

I would note that in this scenario that's of concern and a valid concern is Spokane, which is the closest major city to Idaho, the Spokane Police Department has ALPR capabilities and in use, and they have not received any type of subpoena justicum or warrant for those records.

And that would be the most likely city, the closest major city to Idaho, that provides healthcare services And so it has not taken place in Spokane.

We conferred with our colleagues in Spokane and they have not seen this.

I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in Washington that's received any type of request for that data.

Yeah, and Council Member, I think this is an important question.

And I started this out by saying these were issues that SPD flagged and raised and investigated to ensure that we were not putting privacy interests at risk.

I've read many of the articles that are online that talk about the parade of horribles on this.

This is what's going to happen.

What I don't see in any of those documents is any citation to any record or any evidence to support it.

I know there was a some research that was done on, I think it was called Cedar Rapids, I may be getting that wrong, but it was, it's a reproductive rights organization that provides services within the state of Washington.

They've discontinued their Seattle branch, but I know Renton, and I think maybe Snohomish or Everett, they had information on increased level of services, which suggests that, you know, the criminalization of this in other states is having an impact.

To Ms. Keefe's point, it seemed, and I know Spokane has reported significantly increased service levels, and that's what you'd expect, because if you're driving, it, I mean, yes, it's perfectly possible someone drives all the way to Seattle to obtain that service, but it seems more likely that it would be Yakima, Ellensburg, Spokane, somewhere on the east side.

And we don't know with those increased service levels here in like the Renton area, whether that is people flying in or whether it is people driving in.

Remember, this requires you to bring your vehicle.

Again, that's why I raised the cell phone is if you really wanted to track them.

Similarly, Texas, you know, would have access to California being the closest, I think, to them to have a state where it is fully legal and not restricted in any way.

What I've read in the literature is one of the biggest concerns is having access to services close to your home.

because it's a burden to go there.

It's not a trip anyone enjoys, but it's the closeness of that that is important to providing blanket and comprehensive services around reproductive rights.

So if that's true, then I have not seen evidence of any jurisdiction where this technology had been requested.

Axon denies it, Microsoft denies it, because technically there's the Azure Cloud, which is another layer of third-party storage, and we have not, and Spokane has not.

So what I'm not seeing is evidence of this activity.

I fully see that it's theoretically possible, and yes, warrants do issue, and I can't imagine that These reproductive rights have been criminalized anywhere, but they have been, and what I don't know is how aggressive those jurisdictions are gonna be, but I don't have any evidence of it, and nor have I seen any of that produced in any of the literature that I've reviewed.

Council Member Moore.

Actually, that's, Mr. Chair, yeah, if I may, yeah, I directed my question to you and I was like thinking after the fact, if our central staff expert has, you know, their own point of view on that question, would love to hear that as well.

Mr. Johnson.

Thank you.

I was going to, you know, basically reiterate what was just said in the sense that I'm not aware of the specific instance where ALPR data has been sought from a third-party vendor for this purpose.

However, I will say that folks will probably be aware of the recent a case that was settled between the Texas Attorney General and Seattle Children's Hospital related to Texas attempting to compel Seattle Children's Hospital to disclose information related to young people seeking gender-affirming care in Washington State from Texas.

So, you know, while we're not talking about the same type of record, strictly speaking, or the same type of I think that that is, in a sense, an example of the type of out-of-state data access potential and the risks there.

I think the other thing in that regard is that the greater amount of data that exists, the greater the opportunity or the incentive is for potentially for out-of-state requesters to try to access it.

And so, you know, that's not to, I'm not disagreeing with anything that was said earlier, but I do think, you know, to my knowledge, this would be the largest deployment of ALPR in the state to date.

And it's one of these things that is hard to predict because the data hasn't existed yet.

on the scale that it will up until now, so there may not have been the incentive for requests or action.

Thank you for that additional context.

So...

You aptly noted an example I wasn't previously aware of, but I'm glad that you provided appropriate context in terms of distinguishing the fact pattern there between here.

One can draw reasonable inferences, but definitely not at all the same underlying technology issues.

Some of the broader issues, similar.

Since this is an issue that I was not previously aware of, can you comment on whether or not Texas was successful in arguing and successfully obtaining the gender-affirming care data from Children's Hospital in this case.

Did they prevail on the merits of their motion there?

That is critically important.

Yeah, that's a good question.

So my understanding in brief of the case was that the Attorney General of Texas had brought suit to try to compel Children's Hospital in Seattle to produce data related to individuals from Texas who were Texas residents who had tried to obtain certain forms of health care at Children's Hospital.

I believe the case was settled.

And the settlement included the fact that Children's Hospital would not disclose the data.

And in return, they agreed to not do business in Texas.

I believe they had some employees, remote employees, who were residing in Texas but working for Seattle Children's Hospital.

And they agreed to discontinue that practice as part of the settlement agreement.

Thank you.

Okay, given time, this will be the last question.

Council Member Moore.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, just two points.

One is that the SHIELD law was passed April 27, 2023, so it's only been in effect a little over a year, so there hasn't been a lot of time.

for people, for us to see its effect.

And then in terms of what's happening elsewhere, and I'll note that this was data that was provided to us by the ACLU.

So in 2023, 71 California police agencies in 22 counties were sharing ALPR data with police in anti-abortion states, despite such sharing being in violation of California law.

and in 2022. So, a year before the SHIELD law was passed, a report by the UW Center for Human Rights found that ALPR data collected in several Washington jurisdictions was being shared with out-of-state agencies, found the Vancouver PD shares its data with 664 agencies, including ICE in Washington, D.C. So, while the specific fact pattern hasn't happened yet, analogous fact patterns have happened.

Thank you, Chair.

Noting the sources of that.

Yes.

That's why I did note the sources.

Yes, because if those sources were correct, one would think, again, the LA Times, Seattle Times, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, all across the board would have reported on this.

This is part of the balancing act.

Again, I'm definitely in support of the privacy concerns and the like, but I'm also concerned of stolen vehicles used in violent crimes in Seattle.

So, Mr. Maxey?

Just a brief response.

From what I heard there, and I think I've read that same language as well, those were either police departments that were violating the law or police departments that were voluntarily sharing their ALPR data with other jurisdictions.

We will do neither of those.

Very important point.

If I might as well.

Just to confirm what Mr. Maxey just said, in particular, the UW report highlights what appears to be, you know, departments being out of compliance with Washington state law in regard to the SHIELD Act and to keep Washington working, which is intended to protect immigrant communities.

So, but my, you know, what I would add there is, while that is distinguishable from compelled disclosure directly from the third-party vendor, which we don't have evidence of.

I do think that that information speaks to the level of interest that outside state governments, outside law enforcement agencies, and potentially bodies of the federal government would have in the data.

So while it's a distinct issue, just to reiterate what I said before, it speaks to the level of interest that is potentially there for that information and the utility of it to folks outside the state for their purposes.

You know what, just to close, because we're going to move on right now, but it's interesting, it's interesting, Seattle PD, City of Seattle, has the best accountability system in the country.

Probably because of the consent decree, which points I've made to every precinct I've visited.

And so here is a case where our system, will be beneficial to us.

We just had Inspector General Judge here speaking.

She spoke to her oversight responsibilities as it relates to technology.

This will be an area that will be well covered as opposed to potentially jurisdictions in California, probably Central California, I don't know, who were disobeying or to your other point you know you know disobeying the shield law um so we have the best accountability system um and on top of that that is part of the remit of the oig is to review the you know uses of technology of which this was obviously going to be essentially top of lists are pretty much there.

So I'm just going to use that as the final point.

And then so I would like at this point, thank you very much for your remarks, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Maxey, and Ms. Keith.

At this point, I would like to move that the committee recommend passage of Council Bill 120778. Is there a second?

Second.

It has moved and seconded to recommend passage of the bill.

As chair, I would give a...

Normally, I would give a brief remarks, but I think we've well covered that because we've gone longer.

It was important to go longer and go through these questions and so forth.

And this follows up the last committee meeting and obviously ahead of the full council.

And I believe central staff's...

is given their presentation on this as well.

So I will move at this point, ask if there's any amendments to the bill.

Thank you, Chair.

Yes, I do have an amendment, Amendment 1, which everybody should have a copy of.

And this is to address the public records request concern with the legislation.

And this effectively codifies what SPD is already doing when they receive a public records request, which is that they are providing, not providing the information in a way in which a license plate can be tied to a time, date, or location.

Can you move it?

I'm sorry?

Oh, yeah.

So, thank you.

So, I will, at this time, move Amendment 1 to Council Bill 120778 and would ask for a second.

Second.

Second.

Thank you.

It is moved and seconded to adopt Amendment 1. Councilmember Morris, sponsor, you're recognized in order to address it, which I think you've already done.

I've done.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

I just want to make sure I'm okay with the city clerks on the processes.

Are there any questions or comments on Amendment 1 here on the dais?

Thank you.

I've read it myself.

I've gone through it, obviously, and support it.

Will the clerk please call roll on adoption of Amendment 1?

Councilmember Hollingsworth?

Aye.

Councilmember Moore?

Aye.

Council President Nelson?

Aye.

Councilmember Saka?

Aye.

Chair Kettle?

Aye.

There are five yes votes and zero no votes.

Amendment 1 is adopted.

At this point, There's been discussions, and I don't think, I will look down in terms of the possibility of a 30-day area.

Okay, so at this point, I will pass on Amendment 2. Are there any final comments on the bill as presented and as amended by Amendment 1?

Yes, Council Chair.

I'm very talkative on this one today.

Thank you for your indulgence.

So I am going to be voting against the, well, I'm going to be abstaining on the vote on the underlying bill because I am in the process of bringing legislation to reduce the retention period for the non-case specific data.

to 48 hours and because of procedures relating to SIR, I can't just make an amendment to that.

So that should be coming hopefully to committee in a short period of time.

And so I feel that until that bill has been considered, I am not comfortable voting one way or the other on this underlying legislation.

So I just wanted to explain my vote.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

Yes, I was aware of it.

Thank you.

And by the way, thank you for Council Member Moore and everyone in the consultations and the discussions that we've been having.

Obviously, I've been having many with Council Member Moore.

I am not surprised at this at all.

And so, which goes to the Amendment 2 piece.

Any other final comments?

Okay.

Thank you.

Will the clerk please call the roll on passage of Council Bill 120778 as amended.

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Yes.

Council Member Moore.

Abstain.

Council President Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Sacco.

Aye.

Chair Kettle.

Aye.

There are four yes votes, zero no votes, and one abstention.

Thank you.

The motion carries and the committee recommendation that council pass council bill 120778 as amendment will be sent to the full city council.

I recognize we've gone over about half hour plus, nearly half hour.

Okay, getting to the last point.

We have reached the end of today's meeting agenda.

Is there any further business to come before the committee before we adjourn?

Hearing none, seeing none.

No further business to come before the committee.

We are adjourned.

Thank you so much.