Seattle City Council Select Budget Committee Session II (afternoon)

This is Elizabeth from Council Chambers.

Seattle Child Journal is ready when you are.

Good afternoon everyone.

The recessed June 17th 2020 Select Budget Committee meeting is now back in order and we will proceed with our business.

It is 2 o 1 p.m.

I'm Teresa Mosqueda the chair of the Select Budget Committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll.

Salant.

Salant.

Here.

Lewis.

Present.

Morales.

Here.

Council President Gonzalez.

Here.

Chair Mosqueda.

Here.

5 present.

Thank you very much.

I'm here.

Oh Council.

Hello.

Council Member Juarez thank you so much.

Council Member Juarez.

Yeah thanks a lot guys.

Thank you.

Council, Madam Clerk, will you please let us know how many are here total again?

Six present.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk.

Colleagues, today we have the opportunity to hear, I'm sorry, Council Members, anybody else join us late before after roll call?

Hi, Council Member Peterson's here, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you so much.

Anybody else here that we did not get?

Madam Clerk, could you please let us know how many people are here again?

Eight present.

Thank you very much.

Council colleagues, we are continuing our conversation today in the Select Budget Committee.

This afternoon's section is focused on the budget conversations.

We have not yet received the proposed 2020 supplemental budget that would be coming from the mayor's office.

We hope to have that next Wednesday.

But this is the second conversation that we are having around the call from community to defund the police.

to examine our police department spending and to reallocate funding into community and upstream investments.

This is the second meeting where we've launched an inquest into the Seattle Police Department's budget.

Last week, we had a number of people who wrote in about how detailed that Seattle Police Department's overview was, and that's important for us to have that baseline understanding so we can figure out how to reallocate funding.

Today, we're going to have the chance to hear from council members across the country.

We have Jeremiah Eliason, Minneapolis City Council, Brad Lander, New York City Council, Gregorio Casar from Austin City Council, and Tracy Gallardo.

She's a legislative aide from the San Francisco City Supervisor's Office, Shaman Walton.

We have sent to you some materials so that you can have some background on what other cities are doing as they consider potentially We are going to take public comment for about half an hour right now.

I'm sorry, let me just make sure.

We have already, Madam Clerk, we have already approved the agenda this morning, so no need to do that again, correct?

Correct.

Okay.

At this time, we're going to open remote public meeting period again for session two.

I'd like to remind everyone that the council reserves the right to continue amending our process here.

If we deem that there's other ways that we can do this, we will, of course, continue to amend our system to get as many people in as possible.

Since we're all home, or trying to stay home as much as possible to stay healthy and to avoid the spread of COVID.

We want to make this process work smooth.

Please remember that you will have one minute to testify and we will continue this presentation or continue public comment until 2 35. As you have seen in the past, we will have this timer that's in front of us.

You will have one minute to testify and you will have At 50 seconds, we will hear a chime, and then you'll have 10 seconds to wrap up.

You'll hear a note that says that you have been unmuted, and we hope that folks will take that chance to wrap it up.

I'm going to ask our central staff or, I'm sorry, our communication staff or IT staff to send me over the list of folks who've signed in to testify, just so that I have that at the top of the list here.

And finally, as a reminder, as you do hang up, please do dial back in.

You'll have the chance to listen to the rest of public testimony or the rest of the meeting via the streams that are available, either streaming online live or the listen in line, or also you can watch on Seattle Channel.

Thanks to everybody who's already signed up to testify.

We know that there's a lot of interest in this issue.

And with that, I will just double check with our clerk's office if we have Folks who are signed up, please do let me know.

Council Member Mosqueda, I sent that email over to you for the spreadsheet with the sign-in.

Wonderful.

Just waiting for technology to keep up with us here.

OK.

Just received it.

Apologies for the delay, everybody.

Again, I'm going to read the first three names, and then you will hear you've been unmuted.

Thank you very much, Allison Isinger, for calling back.

We know we skipped over you this morning.

I appreciate you being on the line.

The first person is Allison Isinger, followed by Laura Chandler-Meyer, and then Rebecca Finks.

Allison, welcome back.

Thank you so much, Council Member Mosqueda.

My name is Allison Isinger, and I'm the director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness.

I want to be expressing great appreciation and thanks to you, Council Member Mosqueda, for introducing the Jump Start Seattle legislation, and to Council Members Subband and Morales for their advocacy for real progressive revenue.

I think everyone listening understands that we have the most regressive tax structure in the nation, and this is one of many efforts that we urgently need to ensure that we are responding to community needs that were at a critical level before COVID-19 began and that now have reached the level of a triple emergency.

I am speaking in strong support of the concept that among other things, a large portion of these funds will be directed towards housing for people at 0 to 30% of AMI.

Our AMI is probably going to change as a result of these crises.

But right now, what we're talking about is housing for people who are living, in some cases, on less than $500 a week.

Thank you, Allison.

And please do send the rest of your comments.

We know you were waiting to chime in this morning.

Appreciate you.

Laurel Shandlemeyer?

Good afternoon.

My name is Laurel Shandlemeyer, and I'm a resident in District 6. I'm calling to echo the sentiments that have been expressed by the community recently to drastically defund and even radically rethink the entire concept of police.

The recent acts of police brutality against peaceful protesters are horrifying, and they serve to underscore the fact that police don't keep us safe.

A safe society is built on economic opportunity for everyone, community engagement, decriminalization of nonviolent crime, a robust and compassionate medical and mental health system, and investment in education and affordable housing.

Why are we spending money arming militant bullies when we could be investing those resources in the community directly?

Please strongly consider immediately defunding the police budget by 50% and work towards eventually dismantling the police altogether for a safer and more affordable Seattle.

Thank you.

Rebecca Finks.

Welcome to Tiny House Program.

Hello, I am Becca Finkus.

I work for Lehigh with the Tiny House Program and Levant District 2. Thank you, council members, for your leadership during these difficult times.

And thank you especially to council members Morales, Sawant, and Mosqueda for proposing progressive tax plans that would generate much needed revenue to invest in affordable housing.

I support future efforts to defund SPD and de-police the navigation team as well.

I ask that you allocate funding from COVID-19 relief, SPD, progressive revenue towards tiny house villages.

As you will continue to hear, tiny houses save lives.

The villages have a proven success record and are quick to set up.

We have lost so many to our shortcomings in addressing police brutality, homelessness, and the racism written in the very law police are enforcing.

I look forward to seeing how you continue to use your positions of leadership to dismantle the existing system to perpetuate these very losses.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The next three people are Erica Gonzalez, Colin Jevmore, and Lauren Fay.

Erica, welcome.

Hi there.

My name, for the record, is Erica Gonzalez.

I am a resident in District 3 on occupied Duwamish land.

I wanted to speak about the demands that came out of CHAZ in the first couple of days.

and have continued to be common demands throughout.

I also really like to just say I appreciate all of your efforts.

However, I do not think any one of you have been as strong as I would like on this issue.

I demand, and black people who were at CHAZ that first night came up with these demands, I demand that the police be abolished immediately.

There is no reason and no excuse for the terror and lack of humanity they have shown to the Black people of Seattle.

Defund and abolish immediately.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Colin, welcome.

Hi, my name is Colin Devmore.

I'm currently a social worker who is embedded in the Seattle Police Department's Crisis Response Team.

Our focus is immediate response and follow-up to a wide variety of 911 crisis calls.

I'd like to highlight that there are currently five people in my role right now, and the City Council funded four additional positions last year.

Recently, people in our city and across the nation have been calling for more social workers to be the ones responding to 911 crisis calls when armed police are not needed.

Our team has many ideas about how our role could be expanded and used more effectively to meet the needs of our community.

One brief example is that in the current structure, social workers cannot respond to any 911 calls without the presence of at least two uniformed officers at some point during the intervention.

By funding more social workers and changing policies, we could be utilized in a much more effective way when enabled to use our clinical de-escalation skills The ultimate goal is providing safe, trauma-informed, and culturally competent responses to meet the diverse needs of people in our community.

I look forward to continuing this conversation about how social workers can be more effectively integrated into our emergency response system.

Thank you.

Thank you, Colin.

Lauren Say.

Hi, good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for for this public comment opportunity.

My name is Lauren Fay.

I am the senior business and operations analyst at DESC, serving thousands of individuals currently and formerly experiencing homelessness here in Seattle.

I'm calling on behalf of DESC in support of Councilmember Mosqueda's Jump Start Seattle Progressive Payroll Tax Proposal and plan for spending.

This proposal presents a very detailed spending plan based on input from many stakeholders, including labor and nonprofit providers that clearly prioritizes the urgency of addressing homelessness in our community.

We're grateful for the council members' broad outreach and ongoing engagement.

This is a long-time crisis, and the risks to homeless people and the employees working to address homelessness have increased significantly during the COVID pandemic.

This is a reasonable tax, and if we can't act now, when will we ever?

Greed has prevailed for far too long in our city, and we have the opportunity to turn that around for the benefit of us all right now.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Lauren.

The next three people are going to be Andy Nguyen, Murali Sivanhan, Freeman Ryan.

Andy, welcome.

Andy, just- Public health, I'm here to- If you could start again.

Thanks, Andy.

I'm Andy Nguyen, resident of District 2 and recent graduate of the UW School of Public Health.

I'm here to amplify the demands of Black Lives Matter Seattle King County and Indigenous community members, including defunding the police and reinvesting in community services and community capital.

This is in direct alignment with the official evidence-based policy statement from the 2018 American Public Health Association and a large body of research on social determinants of health.

They say policing reproduces inequitable social and economic conditions that precipitate intervention by law enforcement.

Amongst the 134 cited references on police violence in the statement, one notes that a meta-analysis of 62 studies published between 1973 and 2013 show that there was no statistically significant association between police force size and combined violent and property crime rates, and that violent crime remained stable when law enforcement abruptly withdrew from neighborhoods.

Public health has provided significant evidence for a social determinants of health approach, and we will continue to work with community on these efforts.

Significant funding for these issues is long overdue, and we must divest from trauma-generating institutions and invest in community-centered healing.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next is Morali.

Do we have Murali with us?

Welcome.

My name is Murali Subbarajan, and I live in Council District Number One.

I'm here calling to support the proposal introduced by Council Members Savant and Morales, which will raise $500 million to build affordable housing, COVID-19 relief, and other measures.

I want the council to show some political courage in this matter.

I think in an act of extreme cowardice, they backed out when Amazon and other businesses exerted pressure on them.

And after passing a bill, they repealed it one month later because Amazon threatened to pull out of the city.

And not being content with it, Amazon tried to buy the next election by funding huge amounts of money through the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

The people have stood up to Amazon.

Now it's time for you folks in the council to show some courage and fund this proposal.

Secondly, I want you to defund the police.

Why do we need to send police with arms drawn to take care of somebody who's got some psychiatric problems?

Fund social workers, counselors, so that we can provide some relief to those people in peaceful means.

Please.

Thank you, Tyler.

Tyler, Vassar will follow Freeman Ryan and Cassandra Gaspard.

Freeman Ryan, are you available?

Why don't we go with Tyler?

I see you online.

Hi, Tyler.

Go ahead, please.

Sorry.

Can you hear me?

Oh, is that Ryan?

Yes.

Ryan, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm here.

Great.

Well, go ahead.

Thank you.

Let me just restart your time.

Could you please start Ryan's time again?

Thank you.

Go ahead, Ryan.

Thank you.

So hello, everybody.

I've lived in Seattle the last six years, but I've moved to Minneapolis a month ago.

And on that basis, I'd like to comment here on what we've seen from the Minneapolis City Council.

Unfortunately, I have little trust in the Minneapolis Council to dismantle and defund the police as they have vowed they will, when they also voted to fund and increase the police budget six months ago.

And in fact, their bold words have been the decisive factor that has virtually stopped the protest movement here in its tracks, because many feel as though we can say mission accomplished.

By contrast, in Seattle, the protests have continued even longer, and the council has a socialist member, Shama Sawant, who is dedicated to calling out the politicians who can talk a big game but accomplish little.

In this context, the council has already voted to significantly limit the SPD's available weapons, and Sawant has a concrete proposal to defund the SPD by half.

But in Minneapolis, what we have is a year-long study on how to create an alternative to the police.

Is this really a tried and true method to research the most effective way to please the status quo and political establishment, while the movement that forced this issue loses the mass base of regular people who protested for change and pressure eases up on the politicians of Minneapolis?

Time will tell, but recent history in Minneapolis points...

Okay, let's try this again.

Is Tyler Vassar with us?

Yeah, hi, my name's Tyler Vassar.

I'm a postal worker.

I live and work in South Minneapolis.

I just wanted to come in in regards to the studies the Minneapolis City Council commissioned on police violence and restructuring the Minneapolis Police Department.

Just for some context, a few years ago, the City Council commissioned a study on raising the minimum wage.

I was a minimum wage worker at the time, and Jimmy Johns was on the lawsuit we filed against the city when they voted to block us from being on the ballot.

But that study that they commissioned came back overwhelmingly in support.

of raising the minimum wage, and city council completely ignored it.

It took a movement to win $15 an hour.

And so I'm just saying I have no confidence this study that Minneapolis City Council commissioned is for anything other than to divert energy from the movement into channels friendly to the political establishment.

If the city council in Minneapolis is serious about building a national model for restructuring the police, then they should actually lead, and at a minimum, follow the lead of the movement and so on in Seattle, and immediately ban chemical weapons used by police against protesters.

Okay.

Cassandra Gaspard, followed by Alex Markey, and then Prashant Neema.

Welcome, Cassandra.

Good afternoon, council members.

My name is Cassandra Gaspard.

I am an employee of Low Income Housing Institute and a former resident of Camp Second Chance Tiny House Village.

I just wanted to basically give an update on the success story of the tiny house villages.

I was a homeless single woman and sought shelter through the tiny house village program.

And within 10 months, I not only was employed, but I also have permanent housing.

So I really would appreciate more funding for the tiny house village programs as they really do work.

And I'm proof of that and the success of that.

And I know Council Member Siobhan has often had many programs that she has allocated for, and I would just like to see the defunding of the police and more money for the tiny house village program.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Alex Markey, followed by Prashant Nima and Mariah Andrigas.

Good afternoon, council members.

My name is Alex Markey.

I live in District 3. I'm calling today to express my support for defunding the Seattle Police Department and moving that money into human services to address racial inequity and the impact of COVID-19.

We're facing an economic meltdown potentially even more severe than the 2008 recession, and like that disaster, we're seeing the impacts fall hardest on those who can least afford it.

SPD's budget is approximately twice the budget for all human services combined, and that's unacceptable.

When we talk about defunding the police, we mean more than just reducing their budget.

We mean fundamentally reimagining how we address social problems like mental health and homelessness.

And when we talk about systemic racism, we're not talking about a few racist cops.

We're talking about a system that is designed to produce racist outcomes.

Until we address questions of policy and power instead of individual bad apples, we're never going to make a dent in those outcomes.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Prashant.

I'm sorry.

My name is Prashant Nema.

I am representing Coalition of Seattle Indian Americans today.

Our community strongly supports and follows the lead of Black Lives Matter movement and we are doubling down on our effort to raise awareness within the Indian community.

We want Seattle City Council to urgently legislate and defund SPD.

As everyone has recounted the failure of Seattle Police Department and the mayor, I call on the council members to defend police and use the funds instead to serve as per the decision of the black communities that have been on the receiving end of their violence.

I also call on the city to release all those who were taken prisoner during the protest after the escalation by Seattle Police Department.

These are people of conscience.

I further call on for the council member to remove Mayor Durkan.

Thank you.

Thank you Mariah.

Hello.

My name is Mariah Andrignis and I am also a mental health professional with the crisis response team with the Seattle Police Department.

Last year I sat in the budget hearing to hear you all approve the money that allowed us to expand the program from just one mental health professional to five.

And it was a huge relief to me that you saw the need for our program.

And I'm I'm here today to say that I feel we are very important and we want to support the community as much as we possibly can.

But we also see a value in our partnership with the police department because it allows us to do things that I as a social worker alone could not do and officers alone could not do.

We very much want to support Black Lives Matter and people of color and improve relationships and we are ready and willing to work towards that process.

Thank you so much and thanks for the work you do every day.

Dan Berger followed by Uma Raghavan and David Colmaris.

Hello.

Hello.

Can you hear me.

Yes.

Thanks Dan.

OK.

Sorry.

Hi my name is Dan Berger.

I'm speaking to you as a Seattle resident.

and in my capacity as a historian specializing in the study of mass incarceration.

Though I'm a professor at the University of Washington Bothell I want to note that I'm speaking here in a personal capacity and nothing I say represents the university or any of its units.

Since the 1960s police departments have grown dramatically not just in Seattle but around the country.

Central to their growth have been attempts to reform police brutality through more funding more technology or more training.

We have literally decades of evidence showing that metropolitan police departments now bring the weapons of war to the jobs of social workers, traffic planners, and crowd control.

As other cities are now showing, the funds spent on police could instead provide housing security, educational equity, employment, health care, and other necessary items.

And I hope this consideration is helpful in your deliberations.

Thank you.

It is helpful.

Thank you.

Uma, welcome.

Hello.

Hello can you hear me.

Yes we can hear you.

Hello.

Okay thank you.

My name is Omar Raghavan and I'm a tech entrepreneur and I'm not representing the boards of my company that I advise.

I'm representing the Coalition of Seattle Indian Americans today.

Our community strongly supports and follows the lead of the BLM movement.

We want Seattle City Council to urgently legislate and defund SPD by 50 percent as proposed by Councilwoman Sawant.

Hundreds of orgs and even about 35K individuals have signed on decriminalizeseattle.com to defund SPD.

Over 80% of the 43rd District Democrats voted last night to defund SPD.

Specifically, I'm asking City Council to five things.

Cut SPD 50%, take the East Precinct into community control, invest in community health and safety, don't prosecute protesters, remove Mayor Durkin, follow the lead of the King County Equity Coalition.

These demands are inspired by the work of the movement for Black Lives and Reclaim the Block, and rooted in years of work opposing police and prisons in this region.

Black Lives Matter.

Thank you.

Thank you.

David Colmenaris.

Good afternoon, City Council.

My name is David Colmenaris, and I'm a business owner and resident of District 7. I'm calling today to support the defunding of Seattle Police Department and for the progressive business taxes that have been proposed.

When I look at the proposed 2020 budget, I'm disgusted by the amount that is being given to the police at the expense of housing, education, and the environment, especially given how we like to pride ourselves in Seattle as being a progressive community.

Our budget is totally at odds with this, and that means that our talks of progressivity is just empty platitude.

Until we have a budget that reflects our values as a community, we will not be able to move forward.

The budget of SPD has increased over 36% in the last five years, and this has been with the growing inequalities we've seen.

Let's be clear that the police do not prevent these inequalities, are just a mandate on the problem, and we will endlessly throw money until we have the courage to tackle these difficult problems by putting money into our communities instead of in violent police.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Ginger Jensen, followed by Justin Roll and Elizabeth Salbro.

Ginger, are you with us?

Yes, Ty.

The fight to fund emergency response by defunding police is a national one, and the movement in Seattle just won a huge victory with the chemical weapons ban.

I support that Minneapolis City Council would follow and council members to launch concrete plans for racial justice, including an initiative to tax the rich and invest in green jobs, social programs, public education, and permanently affordable social housing.

and to cut the police budget by at least half to fund alternative emergency response methods by well-paid workers with the right to a union.

Here in Minneapolis, because of mobilizations by community organizations, money has been shifted toward restorative justice.

But then the establishment unites and votes unanimously to raise the police budget.

How strong can their political agreement be right now?

We can't have faith in the political establishment that got us here to solve the problem.

And this struggle will be won through relentless mass action.

We need a community-led, top-to-bottom purge of police forces across the country, where officers with histories of racism, sexism, and violence should be immediately fired by democratically accountable community oversight boards.

Solidarity from Minneapolis to Seattle in the struggle.

OK, Justin Roll, Elizabeth, is next.

Justin?

All right, good afternoon.

My name is Justin Roll.

I'm a District 2 resident and Amazon tech worker.

First off, I'm asking you to support the demands of decriminalized Seattle by defunding SPD by 50% and refunding that money back to black and brown communities.

This would reduce police violence against those communities and prevent austerity during this economic crisis.

And again, I'm an Amazon tech worker, and I support the Sawant Morales bill to tax Amazon over Jump Start Seattle because it goes bigger, it builds more housing, and it's permanent.

Amazon stock is at $2,600 per share right now, up over 600% in the past five years.

I've seen it.

You know, I watch the stock like a hawk.

And while Amazon is making all this money, they're contributing to gentrification, and people are being pushed out of their homes, and that's not right.

We need to tax Amazon.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And the next person is Elizabeth Salisbury.

I'm Elizabeth Salisbury.

I'm in support of the tax Amazon legislation and defunding the police by 50 percent.

I'm a community member of District 4. We want to keep saying that Black Lives Matter.

We need to take actionable and expedited measures to break the racist patterns in our city.

This includes holding big business and police accountable for how they take up space.

We are losing more and more black lives in the city because of police brutality, incarceration, gentrification, and homelessness, all of which big business and police perpetuate.

The economy and culture was built on the back of black, brown, and marginalized lives.

Big business relies on our infrastructure that we pay for, our community resources, and they benefit on the police force far more than our black, brown, and marginalized communities do.

taxing good business indefinitely and reallocating 50% of the police budget to facilitate the demands of Black, Brown, and marginalized lives.

Those have been taxed 100% with no return for generations.

It is, again, the least thing that we can do.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Daniel Wang?

Hi, I'm a volunteer with the Tax Amazon Movement and a member of Socialist Alternative.

I'm joining the calls to defund the SBD by at least 50% and I'll quickly make my case on how that is inextricably tied to demands for big business taxes to fund things like affordable housing in our public schools.

The Central District was 73% Black households in the 70s, now it's fewer than 18%.

And this has happened largely due to the implicitly racist phenomenon of gentrification.

Make no mistake, the housing market is one of the biggest perpetrators of violence against Black and brown Americans because it ravages Black working class neighborhoods and it puts people on the street where they are criminalized for their poverty and brutalized by the cops.

The primary purpose of armed law enforcement is not to protect and serve.

It is to sweep homeless encampments, crush strikes, and brutalize protesters.

It is to trample on and hide the downtrodden and to discipline the ones who dare to organize and take action in response to their condition.

Defunding the police is not about shrinking the city budget.

It is about redirecting our tax dollars to be used for the people who need them and actually generate them, reinvest in our communities.

Thank you for your time today.

We have two more people that we have time for, and then we are switching over our colleagues.

Apologies again for the delay.

We did take public comment this morning for 45 minutes, and we're doing 35 this afternoon.

The next two speakers will be Todd Foley, followed by Aspen Blaine.

Todd, thank you.

Hello, my name is Todd Foley from District 6. I'd like to address the council to ask why they haven't disqualified or removed one of their members, or even impeached, if that's within the council codes.

Where it pertains to civil unrest that the Chads has created in our society, it's written for all to see on Twitter who is leading and instructing them as to next steps to take over the city.

And I may go as far as to say the country.

Where it pertains to Chads being a sovereign nation, that they have separated themselves from order that our city's service provide and have protected by armed militia, it's known who their leader is.

Where it pertains to violence in our city, There's a video showing a city councilwoman at the front line of the protest screaming at city police officers to use their weapons to blow their brains out.

To her lack of respect for her fellow colleagues, the mayor, police chief, our state and nation's leadership, she's not fit for leadership in the office.

Where it pertained to the definition of treason, it's true that leading the side

Thank you.

And our last speaker is Aspen Blaine.

Hello, my name is Aspen.

I'm a constituent in District 5 and a small business owner in North Seattle.

I wanted to make sure I made a comment today because I understand the committee is discussing defunding SPD, and I want to make it abundantly clear we want to see these changes happen.

Rather than make vague promises, we want to see a minimum of 50% of the SPD budget be diverted to other categories with emphasis on funding education, mental health and addiction treatment and housing.

We do not want to see the SPD reformed or just reimagined.

We want and we don't feel like you need to do a study.

We need these changes immediately.

And I would like to say that as nice as it is that you're hearing from other studies, I think that's great.

We're often at the progressive forefront.

And I think we can do that now, too.

So I would love I really feel that it's necessary to see this defunding.

And I also would like to speak in support of the Morales taxing Amazon bill.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

That concludes our public testimony today.

Thanks, everybody, for your time.

We have an exciting panel of folks who are here with us today to share their feedback.

I know, council colleagues, it's been resoundingly said by our council here in Seattle City Council that we are prepared to respond, prepared to respond to the community organizations that are Black-led and leaders around the nation to adopt policies and procedures, reduce budgets to actually transform our system here, transform the police department, transform our commitments so that we can actually invest in and truly serve and protect all of our residents.

This type of action calls for radical change.

We don't need We don't need any more data on cost or costly reports.

We know what the community needs.

We want to take that bold action rooted in the request of the demands identified by black-led organizations and communities of color.

I'm really grateful for all of the members that the council have expressed support for this budget inquisition that we have launched last week and to make sure that we're investing in our community safely and stably.

We have two panels here today, and the first panel is made up of elected officials from various places around the country, and I'm excited to have them here who will share what their cities are working on and the process.

I will underscore what has been said before.

Nobody has quite yet done exactly what the community is calling for, but there are processes in place and strategies that are being discussed right now to demand or respond to the action.

And this is a really important presentation that we will have after by Andrea Ritchie, who will share with us her research and expertise on how budgets can be used to fuel alternative models of public safety.

Colleagues, it's really good to see many of you.

Folks probably don't need any introduction, but for our viewing audience who might not have had the chance to see some of these incredible leaders in action, As I have traveled the country and met with other council members, this is truly a lineup of progressive leaders who are helping to lead the change from everything from economic justice to racial justice issues, gender justice, and really transforming local economies.

We're going to first hear from Jeremiah Ellison, Minneapolis City Council member, then Brad Lander, New York City City Council member, Gregorio Casar from Austin City Council, And then Tracy Gallardo from the San Francisco City Supervisor's Office with Shaman Walton.

We're really excited to have all of you here.

And I just wanted to note, we have our colleagues lined up.

I know that you probably are in tight, tight time frames.

So let me turn it over to Council Member Eliason for your comments from Minneapolis.

Thank you again for everything that you're doing.

And it's great to see you.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate being on.

I'll try to keep it short, and then if folks have questions, I'm happy to answer questions once the whole panel's gotten a chance.

In Minneapolis, this is sort of where I think the start of this current phase of unrest has started, but obviously this has been going on across the entire country.

Every city, nearly every major city in America has been dealing with these issues around police violence.

And I think overall, like a net failure on behalf of our police departments to keep our communities safe.

And so in Minneapolis, I know that we've started these conversations well before this incident, but those conversations always sort of got us to these small measures, you know, funding these experimental programs, that really do work, but we've never instituted them in a way that was really important.

And so I just wanted to give just a quick nod to some of the things that we've been doing.

You know, at the county level, which is not the city, there is a mental health response team that goes out to calls unarmed to mental health crises.

At the city level, we started the co-responder team in in conjunction with the county, where we have an officer and a mental health specialist, not ideal, but has been great for de-escalation and is better than just police handling those calls on their own.

Some of the programs that have been extremely successful is our GBI program, also known as our group violence intervention program, which really aims to get folks who are sort of in, in a gang-involved lifestyle and work to help them transition out of that lifestyle.

It's been more successful than any other program or certainly more successful than a punitive system.

But again, it's gone underfunded.

And then lastly, the last thing I want to highlight, but it's by no means The last program I could highlight is our hospital-based violence intervention, which is when gunshot victims arrive at the hospital, you know, we meet them there and try to figure out, you know, for what reasons were you shot and how can we make sure that this doesn't happen again.

These are the types of things that I think we need to be investing in, but more importantly, I think that our next phase is to not only build those programs up, but to do community outreach to engage with our constituents to understand in what ways do you expect to be safe and how do we create systems that keep you safe in that way.

about a week ago, we passed the resolution that passed unanimous.

Anybody who knows the dynamics of city council, it's kind of unthinkable that we would have a unanimous vote to dramatically rethink public safety in our city.

But I think that every single council member has sort of woken up to this.

And our next step, which I hope will also pass unanimously, is to change our city's charter, because in the charter, we sort of have mandated that we have a police department, and so we're looking to change that to have a Department of Public Safety, that if the community chooses to keep police, police can exist within that, but this will allow us to expand what public safety means, because right now, the police have a monopoly on safety, which hasn't been working, so.

I'll leave it there and for the sake of not going on and on, but happy to answer questions.

Thank you so very much for being with us from Minneapolis.

We really appreciate it.

I know there will be some questions.

I'm going to ask us to get through this first panel and then colleagues, we'll turn it over to you and we'll do the call to see if folks have questions at that time.

But thank you for the inspiration, not only in terms of your action, but in terms of what the community has I've been doing in the street every day and demanding action has spurred action across the globe.

So I'm incredibly honored to have you with us here today.

Our next speaker will be Brad Lander, council member from New York City.

Speaking of police violence, we have seen the videos from New York and looking forward to getting the on-the-ground update from you in New York City.

Thank you, Council Member Lander.

You may be on mute, Council Member.

There we go.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Mosqueda.

And it really is an honor to follow Councilmember Ellison and the work that you guys are leading in Minneapolis to really think about what it looks like to dismantle the model of policing and the systemic racism it has brought for so many years and reimagine what public safety could look like.

And we're trying to follow your lead in New York City.

Unfortunately, even though the current crisis in a certain way sparked began in In Minneapolis, the first person in my memory that was choked to death saying, I can't breathe, over and over and over again was right here in New York City, and that was Eric Garner, whose killer remained on our police force for five years.

And the officers who stood by while that happened and subsequently lied about it in testimony are still on our police force.

So we have not been able to produce justice for countless individuals.

And Counselor Byer Olson talked specifically about responding to individuals in emotional distress, the number of individuals in emotional distress from Mohammed Ba to Saeed Bassel in New York City that have been killed by officers responding.

When someone had called, Mohammed Ba's mother called 911. and said I need an ambulance.

My son is sick.

And when cops arrived at her door, she said, I didn't call cops.

I called an ambulance.

Go away and bring an ambulance.

And those cops nonetheless broke down their door and killed her son.

So this need for transformation in policing has been clear a long time.

And the fact that we have not been able to rise to it till now is something that is on all of us.

And also, as Council Member Mosqueda mentioned, You know, then the response to passionate protest in response to abusive policing was more abusive policing.

And we saw lots of people on the streets of our city who were just out peacefully protesting.

And I was out there with them.

A lot of nights face unprovoked violence.

So we are trying hard to figure out how to respond.

And we have a sort of, I would say, maybe a shorter term and longer term, because our budget is due next week.

So the longer-term work that the council members spoke to, we're going to have to pick up and think about, you know, sort of this broader work to really reimagine how we achieve public safety.

But by next week, we have to deliver a budget.

And when the mayor proposed the executive budget after the COVID crisis, he proposed a hiring freeze on teachers and mental health counselors and social workers and parks workers, like hundreds of millions of cuts, 45 percent cuts to all of our youth programs, hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the Department of Education, but only $9 million, a cut of less than 1 percent to the NYPD.

So the council has been trying to be responsive.

Advocates have been pushing, and now the council is on board pushing for a cut of $1 billion to the NYPD.

Now, I know that's bigger than some city's budget.

uh...

but are the m y p budgeted six billion dollars so it's uh...

it's a sizable cut but it you know about one that that budget uh...

i won't go through it in all detail but it begins with a hiring freeze we hire if we don't do that we will hire the mayor's proposing to hire twenty three hundred new officers as a result of attrition next year six percent of our course so begins with a hiring freeze massive amounts of overtime spent on things like uh...

protest policing many other things like that.

Getting NYPD officers out of our schools, starting to move them out of mental health response.

And I can go in more detail if people really want sort of the details of where advocates are proposing those cuts, where the council is starting to really dig in.

Those negotiations will be taking place over the next week.

And the mayor has indicated that he's open to some cuts, but has said he's not, you know, he's not going to support a billion.

So how those negotiations take place you know, and how the council can land this in a way that, and then I guess I'll just add the point that obviously what everyone wants is to take cuts we make from the NYPD and put them into education and, you know, community safety and summer youth.

The challenge is we are also facing a $9 billion shortfall in revenue as a result of the economic crisis from COVID.

So just how much we can pull from those savings and put into black and brown communities and into the services we need and how much winds up going to cover this massive deficit that we're facing in the absence of federal resources just to pay our bills is one more challenge we're facing.

So we've got a busy week ahead of us, obviously, and are glad to hear what's going on in other cities as we try to get it done.

Thank you.

Council Member Lander from New York City, thank you so much for that.

And I think we will be very interested in how the next week's negotiations among council members and polling from community led demands plays out because we are in the same situation with needing to put our budget together within the next few weeks here to respond to COVID and also respond to the cuts.

So thank you for sharing that.

We will hold questions, because I'm sure there's a few.

Next, we're going to turn it over to Gregorio Casar.

He is a council member from Austin City.

Thank you so much, Council Member Casar, for being with us.

But thank you all so much for having me and having this conversation.

And we are having these conversations city by city.

Our city council last week took steps similar to many of you all, banning tear gas and chokeholds and sonic weapons and all of these things that we've seen used against communities of color for so long, and then most recently against community members of color protesting police violence.

We also took a vote in solidarity with our activist community here about our upcoming city budget.

We cannot legally pass a budget until later in the summer in July or August, but the community demand was $100 million.

Our police budget is $400 million.

We have a system of government where a city manager presents a budget and our city council and mayor approves it.

Our city manager just announced this afternoon that at a minimum there will be a reduction in 100 police officer positions along with no additional hiring.

But there are at least 200 open positions.

I think the council and a lot of the dynamic is going to be in that 100 to 200 officer range, which is between 5 to 10% of the police officer positions in our city, to be, again, not only for the reduction in policing, but also to be able to move that money over to the kinds of community strategies that were articulated by Council Member Lander and Council Member Ellison.

So we're working on those same issues.

We see that the most prevalent form of violent crime in our city is family violence.

And so there's also a real focus in our city to recognize that no matter how much you patrol a street, there is no addressing what is happening inside of those homes unless we're providing other forms of economic support, harm reduction, and safety and shelter for people.

So on top of, of course, addressing mental health and emotional distress and addiction with treatment and homelessness with housing, a major focus on that.

And then also on thinking apart from just the patrol functions of policing, what other things should not sit within the police department?

We're in a city where our forensic lab is still within the police department, and there's the police department.

Should there be a conflict of interest associated with that?

Should our cadet training and academy function within the police department or should it be separate?

Should 911 dispatch be within the police department?

There are other functions we are planning and looking at and trying to see what we can move over as early as this year.

Your budget is 400 million?

Right.

The city budget is in the billions, but the police budget is 400 million a year.

Okay.

Very interesting because ours is exactly that amount too.

So it'll be interesting to see how we can pull from similar efforts.

And we have a great presenter with us, Tracy Gallardo.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

If you could tell us a little bit about what's happening in San Francisco.

Thank you for being here on behalf of your member as well.

We know San Francisco just shared some news very recently, so looking forward to hearing what they're doing there.

Thank you, Tracy.

Yes.

Hi.

Good afternoon.

Thank you.

So Supervisor Walton cannot be here.

He's on the Budget Committee and they are discussing the police budget, of course, right now.

as we meet.

I think for us, it started back in March of 2019 with his ordinance to close down our youth guidance center.

It went national, received national attention.

In July of 2019, we started to discuss resolutions condemning the increase of racial profiling from businesses, from the community, the barbecue Becky things, the Collins wasting of police time, We began to create a neighborhood led safety plans.

So already planning to divert kind of police funding to these neighborhood efforts or having communities.

kind of figure out what kind of safety plan and what kind of police interventions that they needed.

Recently, Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Shimon Walton announced the redirection of resources of the police department in the amount of $100 million, but they specifically said that the redirection would be to support the black community in the upcoming budget process.

So we had started having meetings around reparations and what that could look like.

As you all know, prior to COVID, San Francisco was resource rich.

We thought we were going to be able to really look at some real reparations for our African-American community around housing, education, health disparities, continued criminalization.

It has come back up with all of this recent rise of inequities that our nation's hearing.

Supervisor Walton also introduced that all residents, regardless of their immigration status, would be able to participate in commissions and advisory boards and leadership functions within the city and county of San Francisco.

And he yesterday introduced an ordinance to amend the police code to make it unlawful to cause a peace officer to contact the person based solely on a desire to discriminate against the person on the basis of the person's race.

And if you read the ordinance further, it talks about what the penalty and fine would be for the people who are actually making those racist calls.

We have a hearing coming up regarding the discrimination against Black employees for decades.

We have some recommended changes to our civil service code that will go before the ballot.

And then finally, we have sheriff oversight that will go towards the ballot in this coming election in November.

So we have been working on this since his election last January, and we will continue working on this.

And he is on the budget committee.

He is asking that all city departments come up with plans on how they plan to address the black community.

We don't feel like having fair across-the-board cuts right now is equitable, so we will be looking at budgets through that equity lens.

We have a lot of support from communities.

We have ally roundtables that are happening.

We have really a Black agenda, Black-led community leaders coming up with what what this would look like, the $100 million set aside from the police department.

So we have been super busy like all of you.

Thank goodness our budget doesn't go in until the end of September though.

So we have time.

Tracy, thank you so much for that information and for the background on how long these calls have been in motion and also how much your counsel and your leadership has been taken into account.

I want to, just before we take questions, so I can hear real quickly, Tracy mentioned a goal of 100 million, I believe, at least being cut from the police department budget.

Did I hear that correctly?

Seeing nods, okay.

And then Council Member Kassar had to jump off, I believe, but I thought he said 100, maybe 200. Council Member Lander and Council Member Ellison, do you have a specific number or percentage of your budget that you're trying to aim towards?

Or have those discussions happened at that level yet?

We we currently don't have a specific number part of the reason that for that is because we are Redoing our budget outside of our normal process, you know sounds like a lot of us are because of coronavirus And so we're still sort of calculating what our budget shortfall is and that's really going to interpret That's really going to inform the rest of our budget decisions Thank you and We're aiming for a billion dollars of cuts out of PD budget.

That is six billion at least of at least a billion dollars.

Okay, and that's what percentage of your larger budget?

I forgot.

Oh, the larger of your police budget?

Yeah, city budget is 90 billion, give or take.

Policing is 6 billion.

We're looking to do cuts of at least 1 billion.

Got it.

Okay.

That is very, very helpful.

Thank you all for that feedback.

We know a lot of folks from local progress.

I know we get to see each other from around the country annually, but this is really what it's all about, pulling together progressive ideas so that we can learn from each other.

Councilmember Gonzales, Council President Gonzales is on the board.

Just wanted to see if you had any questions for the colleagues from Local Progress before we open it up.

And you might be frozen, Council President.

She's frozen.

Oh, go ahead, Councilmember.

Are you with us still?

technology.

This is what I said this morning.

We need universal.

We need universal broadband so everybody has high-speed access.

Council Member Gonzalez.

Shoot.

Okay.

We will wait for that to get set up.

And did I see a hand from Council Member Harbold?

I did not put my hand up.

Okay.

Council colleagues, any questions?

I have a question.

I have a question very quickly about the policy of making cuts right now.

Many of us have been in the position to want to cut our police department in half, for example, and to reallocate those dollars right now.

with the proposed cuts of 100 police, and I know that Council Member Kassar had to go offline, but if anybody else has made immediate commitments like that, how quickly do some of those decisions get played out in the street?

Have you seen that or have you talked about that yet within your cities?

Council Member Lander.

I mean, you know, one good feature of a hiring freeze, which then reduces the force by attrition, is you just start right away.

If we don't make that change, there will be a new cadet class recruited.

We generally do four a year.

So there would be one that starts in July.

Like, that's the difference.

And the plan here is not only a hiring freeze that would reduce the force down by 6%, but to lower the budgeted headcount so that we would achieve that reduction as well.

There are plenty of other things we're looking at that obviously are longer term if you're looking to move how you do mental health response or how you do response to domestic and intimate partner violence.

You've got to figure out who is going to respond, but at least the hiring freeze and overtime cuts would be immediate as of July 1st.

Great, thank you.

Any other comments?

Council Member Humboldt, I also see Council Member Sawant Council Member Sawant, did you have a question?

Yes, I thought Council Member Gonzalez was before me.

Okay, let me check.

I know that she was having internet issues.

Council President, did you have anything?

Hey, can you guys hear me and see me?

Man, I am the poster child of the massive need for universal municipal broadband if I've ever seen one.

I've had a rough time with my internet.

I apologize, colleagues.

I just wanted to say thank you to the council members from Austin and New York City and Minneapolis for joining us today.

I want to express a specific gratitude to Council Member Ellison, who I know has been working on these issues for a long time as an activist before being elected as a council member.

And I think it's appropriate for us as a council in Seattle to acknowledge the tremendous loss that the people of your city have experienced.

And some of the most moving videos of, frankly, testimony from black Americans that I've seen have come from the streets of Minneapolis.

And I know that some of those streets are in your ward, and some of them are in other wards.

And I just really want to acknowledge that pain and that frustration and also the leadership that you have exhibited in particular on behalf of the black community in Minneapolis and our nation's black community.

And I really am inspired by your leadership and inspired by your work in a moment of such ongoing deep tragedy and trauma for the black community.

So I want to thank you for that and want to extend to you our ongoing partnership and friendship and collaboration as you all continue to struggle with those issues on a national scene.

I know how hard that must be, so thank you for being with us, and I look forward to continuing to watch what Minneapolis is doing and to learning from you all about how you will lead the charge on defunding and your police department in such a bold way.

So I acknowledge that and appreciate you.

I also just want to thank, I know Councilmember Kassar is no longer on the line, but Councilmember Lander is still on the line.

Of course, we all have an opportunity to serve together on the Board of Local Progress, a national organization of progressive elected leaders that really do work hard to center our policies and our work in our respective council chambers on community-driven solutions.

and have really enjoyed the opportunity to work there.

And I think the fact that we have an opportunity to convene here is a real strong testament to why organizations like Local Progress are so important to continuing to build a nationwide local network of admittedly policy wonks, but also ones who are driven by a deep desire to serve our communities in a profound way.

So I want to thank Council Member Lander, who serves as the President of the Local Progress Board, for being with us today, and also acknowledge that you all in New York City have been hit the hardest in our country in terms of the loss of life from this global pandemic that is coronavirus.

And like Seattle, you have seen a swift, aggressive, horrific police response to protests that are about excessive force and as has Minneapolis.

And so I guess I want to get a sense from both of you how you all are dealing on the council level as policy makers and also as budget decision makers, sort of how you are, how you're evaluating some of the you know, police violence response in the context of driving policy decisions related to budget decisions about public safety and our police departments.

So, you know, I think it's important for the viewing public and for us as council members to hear directly from you, council members in other cities, the shared experience your constituents have had with regard to police violence being the response to a protest opposing police violence.

Because I think that it's important for us to really create that connection across the country and to really show a unified front as progressive elected leaders who are very serious about this call to defund our respective police departments in a meaningful way and in a way that we can really make a strong case as to why that needs to happen and how we can divert those funds into programs and services that are going to invest in black and brown communities that continue to feel the trauma of how this country has set up it's justice systems.

I'm happy to jump in and thank you.

Thank you for having us and thank you for all the work that your city's doing.

I know in Minneapolis, we don't have every single answer, but we're hoping that through a process, we can come up with a lot of answers and really innovate.

And we know that we're in uncharted territory when it comes to dismantling police forces and trying to create something that really works.

I think that When I start to see a certain level of unrest starting to occur, my instinct is just to be down there, physically down there to see what's going on.

And this instance was no different.

I remember I went to the vigil.

There was a march.

When the march started, I decided to head home because I was like, because of coronavirus and because of some other things.

But then I started getting calls from friends saying, hey, you know, the police are sort of acting violently here.

And so I called our mayor here.

You know, he wasn't quite hearing the same thing I was hearing.

So I said, I'm just going to go down there and I'll let you know what I'm seeing.

And what I saw was a police force that was completely unwilling to lean into any de-escalation techniques at all.

You know, much has kind of been made about the rebellions here, about fires and about, you know, looting and, you know, people love to throw those terms around.

But the first night of this unrest, like, Nobody was stealing anything, right?

Nobody had broken into any stores.

Nothing had been set on fire.

And so the situation on the first night was not what the situation has become and what it's known for.

And if you were on the ground that first night, you could see that people were hurt.

People wanted to be, people wanted their, that hurt to be acknowledged and respected.

And instead, what they got was sort of a constant rain of rubber bullets, marker rounds, flashbang grenades, tear gas, and mace.

That's what they got all night.

And even before, you had protesters doing stuff like throwing water bottles, which they always loved to use as an excuse to really bring down this really unnecessary hammer.

even before you had protesters throwing water bottles, there were videos on Twitter of people just walking during the march and being sprayed with mace by some of the police officers who were sort of like, you know, hanging out on the side.

And so at every turn we saw escalations, you know, and what it showed me was that when you have, you know, It showed me just how much our members of our department really resented our constituents, our residents.

And I think that we hadn't quite taken that seriously.

I think that we had sort of relegated a lot of things into the realm of annoyance.

We were annoyed by the fact that 94% of our officers don't live in the city, but we didn't understand really what it meant, and that it could potentially mean that officers really resented our constituency.

I think we're annoyed by the fact that Bob Kroll, who's the Federation Police Union president, sort of annoyed by his kind of blowhard attitude, or that he introduced Trump at a Trump rally here locally.

But I don't think we took, as a body, I don't know that we took seriously enough what it meant to have somebody like Bob Kroll as the elected leader of our police force.

And I think that what those moments revealed was just how much resentment our police force has for our residents.

And it's completely untenable, right?

At one point, Bob Kroll came out in a letter and said that if the police had been able to use lethal rounds on protesters the first night of the protest, that they would have been able to end the unrest.

And I just, I'm like, so now we have a police union president who's advocating for the use of legal rounds on, on Minneapolis residents.

It's just not appropriate.

How can you even walk back into a negotiation room, uh, with a body that feels that way towards your residents?

So, uh, these are all things that I think, um, we had in the past relegated as, I think we had miss, um, either misunderstood or, or, um, or underestimated, uh, and, and they just came sort of roaring to the forefront.

during the course of the sunrise.

And so I think that the idea of defunding the police is not new.

A small number of council members on the Minneapolis City Council, we basically try it every year, and we're unsuccessful.

But I feel like This sort of took maybe what was a fringe idea last budget cycle and has woken people up to the fact that we really need to do something about how we keep people safe because this model of safety really has failed.

And not just when it comes to these police murders and their response to the protests.

I mean, we have a whole host of a whole host of scandals that have happened just in my short time, my two and a half years in office.

And so it all sort of contributes to a culture that's failing to keep our city safe.

And I think that we now have the entire council taking that seriously.

Thank you for answering that.

I want to say how much we appreciate you sharing that story from the ground level.

And before we hear any other responses to Council President Gonzalez's comment, I want to acknowledge that we have Supervisor Walden on the phone with us, or here with us in Zoom.

and really appreciate you being here.

Your incredible staff, Tracy Gallardo, provided us with an incredible overview of the work that you have done in the last few years and especially in the last few weeks.

So Council Member Lander, before I have you answer any of the questions that Council President Gonzalez asked, I'd just love to give you a second to chime in as well.

The questions that we're asking are really what are our councils doing in response to the demand to defund police, to reallocate funding into health and safety programs, and to truly transform our concept of what it means to police and provide safety for our communities.

So thank you for joining us.

I know that you were just coming from a budget meeting.

Well, no, first of all, thank you so much for the platform and for the conversation and discussion.

I won't get into policies.

I know Tracy is always very thorough.

But the one thing I will just say, as we talk about redirecting resources, defunding police departments, and shifting resources into investments, and really focusing on reparations and strategies that feed into making sure we achieve full reparations, because this is what this is leading to.

This is something that's been going on for a long time.

The attempt at exterminating Black men, Black population, people of color in this country has been happening for hundreds of years.

And it didn't work with slavery.

It didn't work with segregation and keeping us from wealth and keeping us from reproducing.

It didn't work with mass incarceration.

And now there's been a big attempt with law enforcement to exterminate folks of color.

And so we're going to do everything we can in our role to try and make sure that we make changes to where these things can't continue to happen.

at the hands of law enforcement and that people are held accountable and we get the equity that all of our communities deserve.

And so thank you for having this conversation and platform.

And I'm just glad I had an opportunity to be able to tune in even though I'm a little late.

Thank you.

Thank you for being with us.

Is there any breaking news or anything like that?

You don't have to break news here, but is there anything that you are discussing right now and debating in your budget committee that you think would be helpful for us to know as we consider debating the same thing?

Well, we haven't, we haven't got to specifics in terms of where we're going to take resources from, uh, our police department budget and decide what areas they're going to go into, uh, for investment in the black community.

I would love to be able to report, um, more details.

And when we get to that point, uh, we can definitely come back and have this conversation, but we're really being thoughtful about where we pull resources from and how, how we shift them.

And so those conversations are happening and we have, um, community forums taking place with the black community, black leadership, black organizations, because we really want the community to lead on, um, a lot of these discussions.

And so I also want to respect that process as we are looking at where we're going to shift resources.

Thank you so much.

We have about five more minutes for this panel.

And I saw council member Swann and council member, uh, Herbold and Strauss.

Council member Swann, did you still have a question?

I did.

But before I ask my question, just because, you know, this panel has been sort of an intercity panel, which is quite interesting to hear from and appreciate the council members and staff being available for this panel.

So in that spirit, I think it's important for us to examine, at least I think it's important to examine what is actually happening in cities around the country.

And then I had a question for Council Member Ellison from Minneapolis, but just very quickly, I mean, as a public comment indicated, my office and our movement, we're demanding a defunding by 50%, At least 50% we of course are also demanding that they meet the protesters who were arrested be immediately released and all charges be Withdrawn and unfortunately that has not happened yet, so I just wanted to amplify that however In order to put the defund by at least 50% in context, I think it's good to see what's happening around the country.

I think the council member Lander from New York City shared the hiring freeze.

I appreciate you sharing about that.

But that would be, I think you said 6%.

I would like to hear if the New York council members are doing anything close to 50%.

I mean, I don't think all council members here are doing 50%, but I think our movement is and my office is.

But that's one example in New York City.

Portland council members, I think, today just voted to cut $16 million from the police budget out of $245 million.

So that is about 6%.

I mean, I think we have to be clear.

This is happening under the pressure of this uprising that started in Minneapolis.

And I wanted to congratulate the activists in Minneapolis who really sparked this rebellion.

And I've been fighting courageously.

And so whatever cuts we are getting from the police budget, whatever action we're seeing, I think it's credit to the movement, absolutely.

But we also have to put the numbers in perspective.

So in Portland, we are seeing about 6% cut.

In San Francisco, I think if the $100 million cut actually happened, It would be good, and I would applaud the city council for doing that, but that would be 16% of the budget.

In Los Angeles, the mayor has advocated for $100 to $150 million cut, which would be up to 8% cut.

So again, whatever happens, it would be credit to the movement, but we're talking about very small changes.

And then also, we have to keep in mind that in LA especially, I mean, it's another example, Posture Child of the wrong kind, where Mayor Eric Garcetti agreed to that 8 percent cut only after activists rallied outside his zone when, in outrage against the Los Angeles Police Department being set to receive a large increase in its annual budget.

for hiring bonuses like the city Council here voted to do last fall, which I was the only Council member to vote against, which is hiring bonuses for police.

So these are the same Council members who have done this from different cities, Seattle, And we're seeing in Los Angeles as well.

And so I think the movement has to be very clear that as public commenters were saying, we cannot put our trust in the same establishment that got us here in the first place.

And so on that note, on the Minneapolis, as I said, I appreciate council members being here to respond, appreciate this dialogue.

The problem, though, is that the Minneapolis City Council voted twice recently to increase the police budget, including Councilmember Ellison.

So I would just invite Councilmember Ellison.

Let me just finish, and if it's inaccurate, you can correct me.

But it's false.

So I just had to interrupt you to let you know what's false.

And we do need to, I'm gonna ask Council Member Ellison to respond to that, and we need to also hear from other council members.

Let me just finish my question.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so, and the movement in Minneapolis would not agree with you.

I just wanted to first, I want to say that I really congratulate the people in Minneapolis who have done a lot of work on the ground, and there have been strong mobilizations in the past years to defund the police.

So it's very important.

But my main question is, in the resolution that you created, you named what you call, quote, all constructive stakeholder contributors, including the mayor's office, the police chief, Hennepin County, and Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

I think it's problematic to call the mayor who called the National Guard on the protest, the police chief who's been overseeing all this violence, all of them to call constructive stakeholders.

So I'm just curious why you would call them constructive stakeholders.

Thank you.

Yeah, you know, I would say that, uh, you know, the way that our budget works is that we don't vote.

We don't vote on individual budgets.

The mayor proposes his budget.

I'm not going to pretend like I know how every budget system works in every city, but the mayor proposes his budget and both years, uh, I brought forward resolutions to cut the police department.

Uh, uh, one year was successful.

Another year was less successful.

Uh, and so, uh, uh, and so, uh, that's my record on the police budget here in Minneapolis.

Uh, and whatever you've heard, You know, I apologize for what you heard.

As far as, you know, involving all uh, involving all stakeholders.

Uh, I've had my disagreements with the mayor.

I've been public about them.

I've had conversations with the mayor about those disagreements, but the truth is, is that we cannot, uh, undercut democracy and the people in Minneapolis did vote for, uh, the mayor.

And so, uh, uh, and so, uh, I'm not going to sort of make an executive decision to cut out the people in Minneapolis, uh, and their electoral power, their democratic power.

just because I have disagreements with a certain elected official.

Certainly my colleagues who have disagreed with me for many years have never sort of cut me out knowing full well that my constituents elected me.

And so it's not so much about who I like or or whether or not I like the decisions, I can vehemently disagree with their decisions.

At the end of the day, you know, this is representative democracy, and I cannot disrespect the people of Minneapolis by cutting out an elected that they voted for and selected democratically.

So we can have those fights.

If the mayor wants to disagree on how we move forward, I'm happy to sort of duke it out with him, but I won't cut him out entirely because the people of Minneapolis elect him.

Thank you very much.

And Councilmember Lander, Councilmember Ellison, we want to thank you for that response.

And Councilmember Lander, I think you had something to add to that.

Yeah, I guess three quick things.

First, just in terms of sort of short, shorter term and longer term thinking about kind of the relationship between cuts and dismantling and reinventing.

So, you know, we've got a week to get a budget put to bed.

We are aiming to get a billion dollar cut out of a six billion dollar institution.

That's about 17 percent.

I think that is an ambitious goal for one week or whatever, two, three weeks from when this, when this uprising started, the longer term work of genuinely dismantling, you know, sometimes I try to ask people, think about the last 10 times you saw a police officer and tell me how many of them you really think we needed to send somebody with a gun.

Um, you know, I think, you know, maybe one, two, three, But if we're going to do a fundamental transformation that really thinks, what are we going to do when someone calls 911 with a domestic violence complaint?

What are we going to do to respond to people who are in mental health distress?

You know, and you really go through what community safety is, that is a fundamentally transformative process.

uh...

that is not you know just that simple as kind of taken uh...

append to the budget so i really respect the way that minneapolis and thinking about what it would look like to like announced commitment to dismantling but be serious about what it would mean to reinvent models of community safety and finally you know i'll just own some responsibility here on the on the one hand i have tried in my ten years in the couple to show up on police reform issues i've led the way with councilmember jimani williams in creating a white inspector general's office and strengthening our prohibition on bias-based profiling.

And I'll just be honest.

I put mistaken faith in incremental reforms.

I hoped that we could achieve more trust between police and communities.

I did not fight for significant reductions in policing or fully understand the impact.

And I had enough information.

I mean, it's not happening in my white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, but I've had enough conversations with my colleagues and with people in black and brown communities to know better.

So, I mean, fair enough.

Like, I'll own the criticism that people want to send my way.

Seems to me better to wake up at some point and say, we're going to need to change strategies.

And if incremental reform hasn't worked, then it's time to get bigger and bolder.

I'm not looking to kind of duck the responsibilities for past things I've done, but I guess the question seems to me my constituents want and our city wants is what we're going to do going forward.

Councilmembers, Councilmember Walton or Ellison, Councilmember Lander, and I don't see Tracy anymore.

Oh, there she is.

She's just on mute.

You know, I want to say thank you, because I feel like many of us are being moved to bold and progressive actions.

Many of us are responding to the movement.

And I know that you, as leaders within your cities, have already been at the forefront.

You have already been pushing for these types of productions.

You've already been calling for cuts and transformation.

And that is exactly why we wanted to have you on this Zoom today, because you are the leaders coming not just from, you know, ivory towers after years of putting money in your pockets and sitting in position to now sit on city council as sort of a pastime, like we know many of past councils had become.

We are now showing up as the activists that we were and the activists that we are.

and making these decisions on behalf of the community that we represent and that is exactly why we wanted to have you on here today.

You are truly leaders and the folks that we've heard from have asked for you to share your stories with us because they are looking at you across the country as leaders.

That's especially true coming from Councilmember Walden, Councilmember Ellison from Minneapolis, and thank you, Supervisor Walden.

We've been hearing a lot of San Francisco's comments as well.

Councilmember Lander, we know that you are in a leadership position in New York, but more importantly, on local progress, leading the way to help lift up these voices.

So it is with that intention to make sure that the leaders who are moving the dial within councils are sitting not just in their council chambers, but also coming from community and representing those values.

We do want to thank you very much for your work.

And I know Council Member Herbold and Strauss had a question.

I'm going to ask you to hold those because Andrea Ritchie is with us and an incredible, incredible researcher.

And Andrea, I apologize because maybe we could have had you follow up those panelists, and that would have been a good line of questioning.

But you're going to speak with us, and we encourage folks to hold your questions.

Council Member Herbold and then Strauss, you are in the queue.

And to our council colleagues from across the nation, a huge amount of respect, appreciation, solidarity, and We are following your lead in many ways, and we will keep leaning on each other to figure out what that next step is, what that blueprint is to make our commitments actionable.

That is what we have committed to and what we have done in the past.

And I wish I could hug you virtually, even if we were in person, I couldn't because of COVID.

So thank you, but please do stay on the line if you're able to hear from Andrea.

I think it's going to be a helpful presentation over the next 10 minutes, and then we'll take some questions.

Thank you, council members.

Andrew, please go ahead and introduce yourself for folks who might not know you already.

You are nationally known, and we are incredibly lucky to have you.

I know folks from Local Progress have been lifting up your work for a long period of time, and council colleagues were extremely, I think, blessed to have her with us today.

So give us a little flavor of the work that you do and how to make these commitments actionable within our cities.

Thank you so much for having me today and to be part of this conversation about reimagining public safety in Seattle.

I just want to emphasize that I really come before you all quite humbly as someone who's only visited your beautiful city, but as someone who has a deep appreciation for the community based organizations who are already have been and are building new visions of safety and that many of us look to and lift up as models.

And, you know, that I come before you not only as a researcher, but also as a member of the communities that we're talking about, including being a survivor of both state and interpersonal violence.

And that I'm also a New Yorker who has been part of Communities United for Police Reform and that has been driving this demand to cut $1 billion from the NYPD that Council Member Lander was referring to.

And so I think that, you know, it doesn't sound like many of you need much convincing, but to just reiterate kind of the trajectory that Councilmember Lander just laid out, I think that there is now a national consensus.

It's clear in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Tony McDade, Richard Brooks, but also the killings of Charlene Lyles and Jacqueline Saliers, that this is no longer the time for solutions of the past, which have, as Councilmember Ellison and many others have pointed out, failed us.

and that jurisdictions across the country who have been engaged, including Seattle, have been engaged in efforts to reform practices, policies, oversight for years, even decades, and are just seeing that changes to policies on paper and training and oversight have really failed to stop these killings, many more, but also the day-to-day violence of criminalization in our communities, and that that's been true in Seattle and across the country.

So Minneapolis officials have certainly acknowledged that the actions of the officer who killed George Floyd violated existing policies against neck restraints and the sanctity of life use of force policy that's lifted up as one of the best in the country.

That oversight failed to remove him and others involved in George Floyd's killing in spite of prior complaints.

In terms of de-escalation training, the officers who killed both George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks had gone through de-escalation training.

The officers who killed Charlena Lyles had gone through crisis intervention training.

I think if there was any doubt, it's clear in this moment that is unprecedented and that we're facing a triple pandemic of police violence against black people, a coronavirus pandemic that's decimating black communities and revealing in really stark detail the deadly consequences of structural inequalities.

and we're also in the midst of the greatest economic crisis of certainly my generation, that it's really time for solutions of the future and solutions that create a world where George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade and Richard Brooks and Charlene Lyles and Jackie Sailors would still be here.

So that does involve divesting not just financially, but also ideologically and for all of us emotionally from a system that's killing black and indigenous people and people of color and disabled people.

and migrants, and also failing to protect us from violence and harming us at the same time.

And really to invest, and this is the key part of the defund strategy that I just really want to keep emphasizing over and over again, that this is not just a budgetary austerity measure where we're looking at, you know, police should take their fair share of cuts across the board.

We're kind of, you know, I think that was an argument people in New York were making at the beginning.

that, you know, if the Department of Education is taking a 30% cut, then we shouldn't be not touching the NYPD's budget, right?

But we're not saying cut the NYPD and the DOE by 30%.

We're saying cut the NYPD by 30% or more at one point, you know, and increase the funding to DOE, increase the funding to the things that matter and care about and make our community safer.

And the responses and prevention and intervention programs that address violence that are already existing but are under-resourced, and also to create space and set aside resources to imagine and dream and experiment with new responses or new infrastructure or new institutions or new practices to fill gaps in what exists now.

And I think that also is something that requires us to really resist this austerity framework as the one that we need to be in.

So you've heard from community, you've heard from Black-led organizations, I'm simply supporting what they have to say in terms of investing in programs that are proven to prevent and increase people's ability to avoid and escape from all forms of violence, which include housing, which include comprehensive, voluntary, harm-reduction-based, accessible health care, community-based, non-coercive mental health care, and community-based violence prevention and intervention programs.

And I think Seattle is lucky to be home to or neighboring really a number of models that are being considered across the country that a number of us have shared with folks in Minneapolis, including API CHIA, a domestic violence prevention intervention program that is not law enforcement based.

The mobile crisis teams, the crisis solution centers that you have, the vital program that you have, These are all programs that if uncoupled from law enforcement would be, and given additional resources, would already step in to fill in some of the spaces to create community safety that we're looking for both in Seattle and adapted for local communities around the country.

And violence interrupter programs are certainly programs that you all have there that we are lifting up around the country and Council Member Ellison mentioned.

And in terms of a process, just wanted to point you to your colleagues in Durham, North Carolina, who I'm sure you're aware recently established a wellness and safety task force made up of community leaders in the black community who could be charged with identifying which programs are currently working to prevent and effectively intervene early in violence or meet unmet mental health needs and prevent crises or address homelessness and housing issues without violently policing homeless people, for instance.

and also identifying gaps in which experimentation, envisioning, practicing, trying different alternatives could take place.

So in terms of the question that you posed, Councilman Mosqueda, about sort of what people are doing around the country, as you've just heard, people are taking a number of different approaches.

And I have the privilege of working with dozens of communities from Dallas and Phoenix to Providence to Miami to Portland, Nashville to Chicago, New York City to LA, and have sort of identified six main areas that folks are targeting.

We've talked about We've talked about a few of them, but just to sort of lay them out in a structural fashion, one is to stop police department budget increases if they've been proposed, right, which spoke to you about having put a stop to that in a number of places.

I just wanted to point out that if Seattle's police budget had just kept pace with inflation over the past five years, it would be $285 million.

So that has actually been an increase of 285 million over the past five years that you could reverse.

And that would take care of 30% of your 50%.

So it's also about recognizing how increases have happened over a period of time and to reverse those.

we're going to be able to target a specific dollar amount, as you've heard, or a percentage.

And the importance of that, too, is that it's this year, not just over a period of years, but that we can start this year, and that those commitments need to be continuing.

That it's not that we're going to decrease this year, and then when the austerity period is over, we've recovered from this economic crisis somehow, we go back to the usual level.

So it's commitments over years, and I know that's what's been asked of folks in Seattle, is 50% this year, 50% next year, 50% until we're done.

Folks are definitely cutting budgets by amounts, by percentages, and also looking at overtime budgets.

They're looking at cuts to particular departments like public relations departments of police departments or legal defense departments.

And I just want to emphasize one caveat that I talk about in a toolkit that I shared with all of you is that cities spend a tremendous amount of money defending against police misconduct litigation and paying private firms at very high rates to do that.

They shouldn't be spending that money.

That should absolutely not be the case.

In fact, I would encourage cities to adopt a reparations framework that we heard about in San Francisco for survivors of police violence.

And I would point them to Chicago that passed reparations ordinance that provided reparations to survivors of an egregious sort of pattern of police violence committed by a particular commander there, but that can serve as a model generally for what responding to police violence and repairing the harm of police violence in communities can look like that would save money from legal defense costs, give people immediate relief, make structural changes to prevent it from happening again, provide people with healing, trauma support, repair, opportunities to build community together, and save money in that respect.

I do want to make sure that when we're talking about cutting sort of police department budgets that we're not cutting them in such a way that we're harming survivors by targeting police settlements.

Often people start naming police settlements as something that's, you know, part of the cost of policing that we have to cut.

And I promise you that when police departments or when people turn to that amount of money, they're not cutting the police misconduct that produces them.

They're cutting the repair to survivors.

And so we, if we're going to focus on cutting police department budgets, we need to make sure that we're keeping funds that are being used to repair harm to survivors, because until police no longer exist, then people who are harmed by them will deserve repair and compensation and reparations, but that we turn instead to the machinery that defends departments at a very costly rate instead of simply repairing the harm to people who are harmed.

So that's the budget part.

We've talked about shrinking department sizes.

We've talked about doing that through hiring freezes and allowing attrition to shrink.

We've talked about canceling new cadet classes.

There's also this question of terminating the salaries and pensions of officers who have repeatedly or seriously harmed community members.

In New York City, it's unclear why an officer, for instance, who killed Chantelle Davis is still pulling $140,000 salary every year.

It's unclear why the officers who killed Eric Garner or Marlee Graham or numbers of officers I could list who are still receiving very high salaries.

So I think sometimes we think, oh, if we cut the numbers, we'll go with the last hired, first fired, and that's kind of the way to go.

But actually, we can go for officers who are at higher salary levels if we do it based on the rates at which they've committed violence and the fact that they should no longer be in that position of power in the first place.

And then there's the question of cutting specific units and cutting the homeless intervention outreach unit of the New York City Police Department, which it's very hard to even say it because I've seen them be abusive and horrible and ripping homeless people off trains in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic and chirping them into the street and when they're unable to get up from the sidewalk, kicking them.

I mean, that's not outreach, that's abuse.

you know, we need to be able to cut homeless abuse programs or ones conducting street sweeps or encampment sweeps in cities like Seattle and Portland, and instead move that money to the things that people who are unhoused need, which generally is housing and support and permanent supportive housing and long-term housing and quality affordable housing.

So it's cutting those kinds of units.

It's also cutting quality of life units, vice, gang units, narcotics units, and reallocating funding to community-based non-coercive mental health treatment, drug treatment, and services and housing, as we talked about.

So eliminating units and moving money into the things into real solutions to the issues that those units are supposedly set up to address.

And then there's shrinking the scope, which is kind of related to that, which is coming up with alternative responses to 9-1-1, as we've talked about, taking police out of schools, colleges, universities, parks, public transit, public housing, etc. and certainly shutting down units that are specifically targeting protesters, eliminating collaboration with ICE.

So an example in Seattle, for instance, would be your emergency management unit is under the police department.

There's no reason that a response to emergencies needs to be something that is housed in a police department.

It should be housed in an area where we're focused on supporting people, not policing them.

Then there's a question of equipment.

Certainly, we can cut expenditures on equipment, whether that's surveillance equipment, military equipment, license plate reader, facial recognition, other surveillance equipment.

And then I think the most important one and the one that we don't talk enough about in the context of defund is how we increase or how we shrink police department's power.

And I think that's both important to your strategy as legislators being able to continue to move forward with this strategy of building a new paradigm of public safety that achieves genuine safety for most people.

And it's important to be able to achieve it both in terms of the political will and be able to move forward and actually enact the change you want but also in terms of being able to intervene in the law enforcement fraternal association contract negotiation process which controls a lot of what the expenditures of a police department are.

and the conditions under which police departments operate.

So I know your contract is coming up, and I think that there might be ways legislatively for you to make those negotiations more transparent and available to the public, and also to give city council, maybe it's a charter change, but to somehow give city council more control and final approval over those contract negotiations.

And that was something that was very successful in Austin in terms of getting some changes to the, contract with the department and something that I would invite you all to consider.

So those are some of the things that folks are trying around the country.

The last thing I want to say is, well, two things.

There are definitely some pitfalls along the way.

One is that we just want to make sure that we're not moving police from one city department to another.

We're not moving policing as a practice from police departments to the Department of Health and Human Services, where people are doing the same things but just wearing different uniforms.

I've worked with survivors of police violence in the past who have said, you know, particularly who have unmet mental health needs, have said, sometimes I can't tell the difference between whether I was taken in by a cop or a health worker.

And sometimes the jail or the state hospital where I'm confined on a 72-hour hold, they don't feel that different.

One of them, the sheets are slightly nicer, is how people have described that to me.

And another woman told me that she had spent 12 years under the control of handcuffs or Haldol.

And to her, she felt like her life was controlled in many different ways.

So to just be careful that we're not shifting one from the other, but that we're actually divesting from policing as a practice and investing in prevention, early intervention, meeting basic needs, and transforming conditions that produce violence.

So I'll stop there because I know that you all have questions and that our time is limited.

Thank you very much.

Do we have questions for Andrea?

And we also have Council Member Ellison still on the line with us.

Council Member Herbold.

You're on mute, Council Member Herbold.

I want to understand a little bit more about how I think it's important to understand that cutting specialized units, as you described, Andrea, results in budget cuts.

You can cut the units, but if you haven't eliminated the positions, to my understanding, you're not going to receive any savings.

You do as I heard Brad Landers describing you shrink the number of officers through hiring freezes and attrition or whether or not.

You look at times like the times that we're in right now, where we have a revenue crisis that is going to affect our ability to fund salaries for city employees across the city, and whether or not we look at that.

that problem that we have now and look at reducing the number of officers that we have working now in order to capture the savings from eliminating particular specialty units.

Yeah, when I'm talking about eliminating unit, I am talking about eliminating the positions in those units, but also there's often overhead associated with those units, right?

That creating a gang task force or a narcotics task force has a whole kind of structure around it that isn't just about the officers involved.

It's about equipment.

you know, the administrative support, the underpinning, the kind of structure of it.

So I think both are savings, but there's no question that in order to shrink police departments, we have to cut positions and that we're going to have to figure out what a reentry program is for police officers and how they don't just transfer into engaging in the same practices in a different entity, right?

Whether it's a state department or private security.

So can you speak to the difference between shrinking the number of police officers that a department has by hiring freezes and attrition versus layoffs?

And as it relates specifically to layoffs, what advice would you have for a city who is questioning whether or not we need to, in this moment, as opposed to later, in this moment, shrink the number of officers that we have in our police department?

I think every department is different.

So if you can achieve it by not hiring new positions or through attrition, great.

But I think ultimately we are going to have to, it's not just a budgetary exercise.

It's also about making a political decision to shrink the scope of the police department, right?

As to say, we don't need police responding to people without homes.

And if that means we have to lay off the police officers who are currently in charge of responding to people without homes, we don't need them.

It's like laying off any other city employee in a department that's no longer necessary, right?

Maybe at some point there was a tuberculosis department of the public health department, and at some point tuberculosis came under control, or we decided to treat it a different way, and that department closed.

That's what we're talking about.

We're talking about saying this is no longer the way.

Are any jurisdictions from your research doing that?

in terms of cutting police department, cutting units.

Certainly folks are aiming.

Cutting units, but achieving the savings from cutting the units by laying off officers.

Certainly, I've heard mostly of hiring an attrition at this point, or hiring freezes, cadet freezes, and attrition at this point, because I think that we're not at the point where the only way is to lay off officers.

I think now people are sort of cutting the fat or the sort of easier things to cut without going to the heart of law enforcement, fraternal association contracts, and layoffs.

But we're going to need to go there.

So I think it does require thinking about it, for sure.

Thank you, Council Member.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

I think that is important.

Thank you.

Councilmember Strauss, I think you had a question.

couple of statements and questions for the last panel and I already included Andrea with my question.

I'm glad I had the opportunity to watch the presentation.

I think it is important in all of these conversations that when we talk about defunding the police department we are not talking about reducing public safety.

What I heard from Superintendent Walton, actually what I read in the paper about San Francisco is non-criminal calls will be responded to by officers or civilians that do not have guns.

What I've heard from Council Member Lander, the story about when somebody dialed 911, they had police show up rather than the medic when they really needed the medic.

I heard from Councilmember Ellison is that they are starting up a department of public safety.

I think this is all critical in the conversation that when we are talking about defunding the police, we are actually talking about increasing responsiveness to the things that people are calling 911 about.

And so with Andrea, thank you so much for your conversations as well.

For the panel and Andrea, what are your suggestions on how we increase public safety by redirecting resources?

It's important.

for everyone who is watching at home or participating in the panel, that the center of this conversation, really the focus of our conversation is that we will still have someone show up to your home or to where you are and respond to you when you dial 911. And the focus of this conversation is who is the most appropriate person to show up and how can they support you in the best way possible.

And so that, for me, is the focus of this conversation.

And so anyone on the panel, and Andrea, as the second panelist, second panel, please, if you have suggestions or best practices on how we increase public safety by redirecting resources, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thank you, Chair.

I would say, first, we have to include police violence in our conception of what violence is, right?

So we will increase public safety by having someone else who is not an armed, uniformed person with a limited number of skills when it comes to people with unmet mental health needs, be the person to respond to people with unmet mental health needs.

Because half of the people killed by police in the United States are or are perceived to be in a mental health crisis at the time that they're killed.

So we could cut the number of police killings in half by having someone else respond, right?

And hopefully not respond in a way that feels similar to the person who's experiencing it, right?

in terms of violence by medical providers or coerced medical treatment.

So we are increasing public safety in that respect.

For instance, I think that We also have to step back from moments of crises.

I think we have to create conditions where we're not hitting moments of crisis, where we need someone to show up at our door right away because things have gotten so bad that now there's a flashpoint and we need an immediate response.

Because usually in that case, someone can't get there fast enough.

Often police aren't preventing violence, they're responding to calls and taking reports after violence has happened.

Right?

And so we want to make sure that we actually don't get to that point.

We want to make sure we get to the point as soon as someone is experiencing mental health needs or is experiencing an economic crisis or is experiencing a conflict in their home that they can't manage or a power relationship in a relationship they can't manage, immediately there's five options for them to access immediately that make it simple, that don't require you to think about whether someone's gonna go to jail or get deported or get killed if you call for help or, you know, that immediately there's just everywhere you go, you can find a solution that suits your situation and that works for you.

That you can walk down the block to the community mediation center and say, you know, my roommate and I have really been getting into it lately and it's getting, I'm starting to feel unsafe in terms of how we're interacting, right?

Or you can go to the local women's center and be like, I don't like how this relationship is feeling right now.

I'm starting to feel like I'm losing, you know, control.

I'm losing connection with my family.

I'm losing, you know, I'm starting to feel like things are happening.

So to really move back, and then I think also to realize that what I hear most survivors of violence say and what studies show is that the thing that would help them most to help them avoid and prevent violence is housing.

If they could just have housing that was theirs under their control, then they could exclude people from it who were violent to them.

But that, unfortunately, that's not often the case, or income support, or health care, or other things.

So I want to also emphasize that this investment piece of this is about preventing us from getting to crisis points.

And so there are programs that, like many programs in New York City, one I, or not in New York City, but many programs across the country, one I think of in New York City, for instance, that is underfunded and in fact now no longer working because it couldn't get funding, that would allow people who are experiencing the beginnings of a psychiatric crisis to just walk in somewhere and not be forced to take medication, not be forced to do anything, but just to say, I just need a place to, I just need a break, I just need a place to chill, I need to rest, I need to be able to sleep, I need to just take a break.

And whatever treatment they wanted or support they wanted, they could get, but none of it was forced on them.

But that resource was taken away.

And so now people must get to a point of crisis in order to have someone show up at the door.

And so I think I want us to move back to the things that we need to not get to crisis.

And then I know that there's questions about domestic violence, and I just really want to say a few things about that, which is that research shows that only half of survivors of violence at most, at most, this is a gross overestimation, ever call the police.

And another half drop out of any kind of process before it even gets to a grand jury.

If we're already talking about a solution, police, that doesn't address the needs of 75% of survivors.

And that's an underestimate.

So if we're talking about public safety, then we have to think about something that is going to produce public safety for survivors.

I also have noticed in the time of my research that a significant proportion of police violence that happens against women and queer and trans people happens when police are responding to calls for help.

So we have to also factor in police violence into the kind of violence that survivors experience.

And that also can violence can turn into criminalization.

where survivors end up being criminalized and then experiencing the violence of criminal punishment system.

So I think that when we're thinking about public safety, we have to think about what happens when police respond.

I know you all recently had a very tragic DV call where someone wound up dead at the end, and that there was a huge risk to a toddler in that interaction.

Nobody wants any of that.

And so we want to figure out how to prevent that.

In Seattle, DV calls make up 3% of calls for assistance.

15% are traffic calls.

15% are disorderly conduct.

So already, 40% to 50% of calls for assistance could be handled by someone else.

There's your 40% to 50% of the budget.

And there are community-based responses to violence already.

Neighbors de-escalate conflict.

Family members mediate things.

People call on relationships with people who are trusted in the community, credible messengers.

violence interrupters, faith leaders, but none of that is resourced.

So there's a highly resourced to the tune of $100 billion a year response to violence.

And then there's the ones that work that aren't resourced.

So this defund strategy is about moving to resourcing the more effective responses to violence to produce public safety in the way that you described.

So I hope that's helpful in reframing that.

Thumbs up.

Thank you very much.

Your research is incredible.

We really appreciate you providing a conglomeration of what various cities have done or should do.

I know you had a slide deck presentation that you're going to send afterwards.

So I think what we're probably going to do is take that and then use our pens to identify all of the items that you just talked about.

You've already identified 45 to 50% and that is going to be very helpful.

Before we move on, was there any questions that I didn't get to?

I saw a few videos of the live.

Hi, Council Member Morales.

Andrea, I just want to say thank you so much.

You've given us a lot of food for thought.

I think a lot of the issues you raise are questions that we are asking ourselves about how to proceed here.

You know, the domestic violence incident that you mentioned happened in my district.

I live in Southeast Seattle.

And so these are certainly issues that we are seeing far too often.

And the interaction of our community members with police that have these negative consequences, really traumatic consequences, as you know, you know, leave longstanding trauma in our community and with our neighbors.

And so we have to figure out what the right step is.

A lot of the kinds of programs that you mentioned, violence interruption programs and you know, other kinds of programs that are out there to provide these sort of responses that could eliminate the need for police response are also in my district.

And so I'm really advocating not just within the police, defunding the police conversation, but in our budget reallocation and the work that we'll be doing over the next several months.

to make sure that, as you said, these programs that are effective get resource so that they can scale up because a lot of these groups that we have, they know who the individual shooters are, for example, right?

Like, we know who they are.

There's 15, 16 of them.

We need the resources to intervene and keep them out of danger.

and provide them with the services that could help them get on the right path, whether it's job training or education or mental health counseling or substance abuse or whatever their families need so that they get out of that situation.

We know what these effective programs are.

And as you said, we need to stop funding the things that don't work and that put our community in harm's way and make sure that we're supporting our neighbors.

I will certainly be interested in following up with you and getting some specific information about how we do that best.

I want to thank you for being here.

Thank you.

And I do just want to add one thing to the thing you're saying about job training.

There's no point in job training if there's no job, right?

And that there's a lot of people who have skills from being entrepreneurs in criminalized markets that are now no longer criminalized and who are barred from those markets, right?

And so that's a form of reparations, right?

That people have done a lot of time and been shut out of economies who now should be part of economies that are now no longer criminalized.

And I had a young man who had been selling drugs, um, helping me on my campaign because he's really good at talking to people.

Exactly.

A lot of skills are transferable.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Looking to see if there's any other council members who wanted to say something.

Okay, Andrea, thank you again for sharing those tangible examples and for all the work that you have done.

Really excited that you were here.

Thanks to Aretha Basu from my staff who quickly got confirmation from you and we're really excited to have you and thanks to Aretha for making that connection.

We will circulate that PowerPoint and there's also a document that we circulated to council colleagues today that has a link to how defunding and reinvestments can be done, and so you have access to that PDF right now in your inbox, council colleagues.

I also want to say, you know, thank you, Andrea.

I want to thank Councilmember Lander, Councilmember Kassar, Councilmember Ellison, and Councilmember Walton.

I want to also specifically say thank you to the Black leaders like Councilmember Ellison and Councilmember Walton.

You know, we are in this moment where community has constantly said we need to be taking directive from Black-led leaders and Black-led community organizations.

And those are two leaders within cities that have not only had to stand up and fight for the right thing, but have been at the receiving end of police violence, I assume their entire lives, by the sheer fact that they are Black.

And so this council, I hope, sends a strong message of solidarity to those leaders, especially the black elected leaders who we had with us today as guests, who are here with us, who have a strong track record of being advocates, being fierce fighters for change, and doing so not just prior to council, but on council.

Especially now, we need to be listening to those black-led leaders and black-led community organizations that are calling for actions and doing things like what council member Ellison was talking about.

None of us on council are black.

None of us on council probably have experienced the same level that the average African-American person in this country receives on a daily basis.

And so as we hear from community members across this country, and as we invite people to be guests here at city council, I hope we constantly put in front of us the fact that we are not black ourselves, and we should listen to those who are community organizations that are Black-led, including Black electives that are stepping up and doing incredible things across this country.

So thank you specifically to Councilmember Ellison and Councilmember Walton for being here with us, along with Councilmember Kassar and Lander.

I think that this is a moment for us to listen and then act immediately.

And the act immediately is both by incorporating into our action plan what we've heard from New York, Austin, San Francisco, what we heard from Minneapolis specifically as sort of the epicenter of where this type of violence was exposed and ignited global calls to action, amplified the voices that had been for decades calling for action.

And we have the opportunity to not pick apart each other, but to truly put into action some of the strategies that Andrea has outlined.

We will be sharing with you the PowerPoint presentation, And not only that, very soon, I think what we're compelled to do is to take those recommendations and put them into action in this budget as a council, as an entire council, two Mondays ago, every single council person committed to doing this inquest so that we could look at how we can restructure, reallocate funding upstream, and decrease funding into the budget.

That is the commitment this council has already talked about, and I really look forward to making to make sure that we follow up on those items that we heard from the councilmembers and Andrea today to make this actionable.

It is imperative that we listen to the black leaders like councilmember Ellison who lifted up what he was working on and gave us some great examples along with the other councilmembers.

With that, I know we have an incredible opportunity to sign on to a potential proclamation from our council president, which is very timely.

And if she is still with us, I will turn it over to her.

Again, thank you, Andrea.

Just thank you.

It's inspiring to see you all doing this work and definitely want to lift up the Black-led organizations in Seattle and around the country that have pushed us to this point and agree that that's where the leadership needs to come from.

So thank you all for having me, and I wish you the best in your ongoing deliberations.

You're incredible, and we will lean on you for more advice and direction as well once we get that PowerPoint in hand.

Happy to be here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council President, thank you for taking over this agenda item.

This is really great opportunity, council colleagues.

Sorry about that.

My technology challenges continue.

Can you all hear me?

Yeah.

Thumbs up.

Thumbs up.

Yes.

Oh, man, I'm really struggling with my technology.

I'm taking over Councilmember Morales's usual struggle with technology.

So I'm sharing the love here.

So colleagues, click and get through this presentation with some semblance of internet connection.

But I am proud to bring forward a proclamation recognizing Juneteenth for your potential signature.

And I really want to acknowledge that this proclamation was drafted and driven by staff at the city council that are black.

And so this is a effort that it was organized by some of our black staffers in the legislative department who Asked if I would be willing to present this proclamation and really love the charge of drafting drafting this proclamation and honestly, I gave them full full reign and did no editing and really feel like it's important to make sure that we are giving voice to to our staff who are really struggling in this period of time as well.

And so I want to thank Breonna Thomas from my office in particular for wanting to have this proclamation.

And again, I want to also be able to lift up all of our legislative department staff that are part of our local black community who have really held us accountable to our own values and to the values of our broader communities.

So this proclamation is really in honor of them and in honor of all of the other city of Seattle employees who are part of our black community and to the black community at large.

And so this proclamation, again, is recognizing Juneteenth.

And I'm going to read just a little bit from the proclamation that reads, where it has been over 400 years since the arrival of the first kidnapped African slaves in Point Comfort Heft in Virginia in 1619. And whereas Juneteenth recognizes and commemorates the day of June 19th, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Texas were informed by Major General Gordon Granger that they were, quote, free, close quote, ending 246 years of chattel slavery.

And whereas slavery throughout the United States had been abolished some two and a half years earlier when President Abraham Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1st, 1863, but resistance to the executive order as well as continued fighting in the state of Texas regarding the abolishment of slavery significantly delayed the freedom of those enslaved.

And whereas on June 19th, 1866, one year after Major Granger's announcement, the freedom of African-American men and women in the state of Texas held the first Juneteenth or African-American Independence Day celebration.

And Juneteenth celebrations would later spread to all corners of the country, including here in Seattle.

And whereas for black people in this country, Juneteenth is the closest occasion of a freedom day to celebrate.

For the total toward that freedom deserve to be named.

And whereas the work of black liberation ranges across the country, across time and across multiple layers of identity, because the black experience is not a monolith.

Whereas Black leaders from Marsha P. Johnson at Stonewall to A.

Philip Randolph fighting for the dignity of Black workers have impacted our national construct of justice.

Whereas the continued violence against the Black trans community eclipses national averages of assault, harassment, intimidation, and murder.

And the proclamation goes on to recognize those in our own community who have played a huge role in fighting for the liberation of black people here in the city of Seattle and across the country, including Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter of Seattle King County, Mothers for Police Accountability, Community Passageways, Creative Justice, Not This Time, the Urban League, Africatown, the ACLU of Washington, NAACP, 2180, Equal Rights Washington, Village of Hope, Epic, No New Youth Jail, and the countless families of those lost to police violence and murder.

So with all that being said, we, the Seattle City Council, would like to proclaim and recognize June 19th, 2020 as Juneteenth in Seattle, honoring its historic importance, acknowledging the work still to come, and encouraging all residents to join us in its celebration because freedom is worth celebrating.

And again, I'd like to end by saying that we want to dedicate, we as a city council, by signing this proclamation, would dedicate this proclamation to the black employees of the city of Seattle in honor of their many sacrifices and commitment to this community and their undevoted public service to our constituents and to all of the people who live and work in this great city.

So with that being said, I would hand it back over to you, Chair, to lead us through the process of garnering signatures once folks have an opportunity to make comments should they wish to do so.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Council President.

I saw Council Member Lewis and Council Member Morales raise their hands.

Thank you for bringing this forward, Council President.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you Madam Chair and thank you Madam President for bringing this proclamation forward.

I just wanted to take a moment to recognize Camila Brown in my office who I know worked very closely with Breonna Thomas and a lot of the other legislative aides on the floor to bring this proclamation together.

I just could not be more grateful for the work that all of our staff does on the second floor and Camila's help in particular with the a lot of the social justice legislation that we're doing now, the premium pay legislation the previous month that we passed earlier this week.

She's just been doing amazing work for all of us here at the council and in my office and on this proclamation.

So I just wanted to recognize her work on this and thank her for bringing this forward for all of our consideration.

Thank you, and thanks to your team as well.

Council Member Morales.

Thanks.

Thank you, Council President Gonzalez.

I do want to acknowledge my staff who also helped with this, Alexis Turla and Lakeisha Farmer, who you all know has been deeply involved in a lot of the organizing work in our communities that's been going on for a long time and has really helped push our office to, as you said, hold true to our values and look for ways to implement and take action on the things that we're saying.

Um, the, that said, uh, they did ask me to, uh, make sure to share some of the events that are happening on Friday afternoon.

Um, so I'm sure there are many, um, we've got information about three.

Um, if folks are interested in helping celebrate in our community, um, the first is, uh, an organ, uh, an event organized by, uh, not this time called the next steps, creating a stronger Washington.

That's going to be from 1 to 4 p.m.

at Junkins Park.

There is a march, a Get Your Knees Off Our Neck March and People's Assembly hosted by Africatown and King County Equity Now Coalition.

That starts at 2. The march will step off at starting at 22nd and Madison.

Again, that's at 2 o'clock on Friday.

And then also on Friday is the Juneteenth March for Justice and Equity, hosted by Justice for Black Lives.

That's going to be at West Woodland Park Playground.

The march starts at North 59th Street at Finney.

And that is scheduled to go from 10 to 2 p.m.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

And if you do post any of that on your social media, we're happy to, I think as a group, collectively share that information out.

Council President Gonzalez, thank you again for bringing forward this proclamation.

I think this is a really important way for us to put into practice this ongoing commitment that we all have to lift up black voices and to not let history be rewritten.

So thank you for bringing this forward.

Council Member Strauss.

Thank you chair and thank you councilmember Morales for bringing up the march that is occurring at West Woodland Park in district 6 and a big thank you to DeMarcus for organizing this district 6 event recognizing Juneteenth.

I'd also like to recognize Amanda Pleasant-Brown and Lena Tebu in my office for their work with the proclamation and for their work to support our city and the residents of our city.

So thank you all and Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Any additional comments?

OK, seeing none, Council President Gonzalez, please close us out.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

I appreciate an opportunity to close this out.

So I really want to thank everybody who's spoken about this issue and in favor of this issue.

Council Member Morales, thank you so much for highlighting the events that are happening on Juneteenth that I think are provide an opportunity for people to celebrate.

When you go out and celebrate, don't forget to wear your mask when you're out there.

And I also just, again, really think it's important for us to acknowledge the Black voices that exist on our own staff and within our own city.

City of Seattle employee family, you know, this issue of The ongoing issues of fighting to dismantle institutional racism aren't just in theory.

They're not a hypothetical.

They impact, personally impact, so many of our thousands of employees at the City of Seattle, including on our legislative staff.

And I just really want to acknowledge in the same vein that Councilmember Strauss has acknowledged the tremendous contributions that our staff provide to us every day and the tremendous work of our legislative staff who are from the black community, how they contributed to coming together and pulling together this proclamation.

in a way that really honors their voices and the voices of other black staff and employees of the city of Seattle is humbling.

And I'm just honored to have had an opportunity to be able to be the person to present it to you all but do it in their name and in their in their honor.

So thank you for allowing me an opportunity to present and read directly from the proclamation and my sincere thanks and gratitude to to that We have a strong group of mostly womanettes, I'd say, of staff on our floor, and really looking forward to being able to share an opportunity with others on City Council to also provide voice to our own staff who play such a critical role in the work that we do.

We get to take the credit that they're really the ones who are doing all the work in the background, and for that, I am I am grateful and humbled.

I will also add Chair Mosqueda that I have received messages from a couple of our colleagues who are no longer on the call.

Councilmember Sawant and Councilmember Juarez indicated they would like to have their names added to the proclamation.

I want to say that in open session and before we do a roll call.

Thank you, Council President.

And with that, why don't we turn it over to the clerk to please call the roll so we can add our names to this important proclamation for Juneteenth.

Peterson.

Aye.

Salant.

Strauss.

Aye.

Herbold.

Aye.

Juarez.

Aye.

Lewis.

Aye.

Morales.

Aye.

Council President Gonzalez?

Aye.

Chair Mosqueda?

Aye.

Eight in favor and none opposed.

Nine including Council Member Solant.

Thank you very much, Council President.

Thank you for bringing this forward to our staff and to the community at large.

At this time, we are done with our agenda for today's Select committee on the budget.

It has been a long day with an hour break.

So I appreciate you all.

We will do our best to try to get you more than an hour break in the future.

I do want to note that for folks who've been through this process before, usually our budget sessions are long like this.

I think that adding the element of being online makes it hard to stare at your screen for this period of time.

And I recognize that we're all working under very stressful period, right?

First, we had to deal with COVID, a global pandemic, a deadly pandemic.

Then we had to deal with, you know, grappling with the consequences of a recession that's rivaling a depression.

And second or third, we then had to, you know, constantly see communities, communities of color, black individuals being abused in our own street and excessive force of our police.

And then the consequence of us now saying that we are going to come up and respond to that call for action.

So it's been a long process over the last few months working from home.

And I know it's not easy.

So I want to thank you and thank your staff, thank our central staff and IT folks and the clerk's office.

These meetings are going to be long on Wednesdays, but I will do my best to get you more than an hour break in the middle going forward.

we have a strong call to action.

Thank you.

And with that, a reminder, our next Wednesday meeting is on the 24th.

It will start at 10 a.m.

and we will have a 2 p.m.

session.

In the morning, we will discuss revenue, progressive revenue proposals and in the afternoon, we will ideally discuss the budget.

Again, we are waiting for the mayor's proposed budget to come down.

with elected leaders and with the recommendations that we got this afternoon.

So thank you to all of the people who've been signing in for public testimony.

Just a quick announcement.

Next Wednesday, there will be one link.

You will choose whether you're speaking at 10 a.m.

or 2 p.m.

We are not going to allow folks to do duplicate public testimony so that we can hear from as many people as possible.

We'll keep it at one minute just so you're all prepared for that.

But that is a change that we will be making because this is one agenda.

We're gonna have one public comment.

We will let you know what the agenda is as soon as we see the budget and whether or not that comes out.

And otherwise, if there's nothing else for the good of the order, I heard it was council members Herbold's birthday recently.

So she just logged off, but I wanna say happy birthday to her.

Council President Gonzalez, anything from you?

I just wanted to say thank you for a good meeting.

I thought it was really informative and I really appreciate you inviting our colleagues from across the country to share with us some of the work that they've been doing and some of the struggles that they have had.

I think it really does highlight that Seattle is not an outlier in this regard and that we we certainly lead the way a lot of times but there's always room for us to learn and I want to I just want to say thank you to all of the councilmembers who joined us and took the time to be with us this afternoon and look forward to the next conversation and digging into hopefully what is a rebalancing package that we can take a hard look at.

I appreciate your leadership, chair Mosqueda.

We are going to adjourn.

See you all on the 24th at 10 a.m.

Thanks to everybody in the background who made this Zoom meeting possible.

See you soon, folks.