Select Budget Committee Session II 9/30/21

Good afternoon.

This is Teresa Mosqueda, Seattle City Council Member and Chair of the Select Budget Committee.

Welcome back to the Select Budget Committee on Thursday, September 30th at 2 o'clock p.m.

2021. I'm Teresa Mosqueda, Chair, and we are going to start Session Two of today's agenda again.

Madam Clerk, can you please call the roll?

Gonzalez?

Present.

Herbold?

Juarez?

Here.

Lewis.

Present.

Peterson.

Present.

Morales.

Sawant.

Present.

Strauss.

Present.

Chair Mosqueda.

Present.

Seven present.

Thank you very much, Madam Clerk.

And as additional council members join us, I'll make sure to note their presence as well.

We do expect all nine council members here this afternoon.

I want to thank you all for coming back to session two on this Thursday afternoon as we seek to get a deep dive into the budget that has been transmitted by the mayor's office that we received on Monday, September 27th.

Again, thanks to Director Noble for being with us throughout the next session, as well as tomorrow through the afternoon as well.

We are halfway through our budget deep dive with each of the presentations in this afternoon We'll have a chance to talk to various departments as we consider items related to public safety and then transitioning over to the Seattle Police Department We will have a hard stop at 5 p.m.

For folks who have additional items after 5 p.m.

We will make sure to get you out of here by 5, because we're starting tomorrow morning at 930 again.

Before I have the next item read into the record, I did want to take a quick chance to say thanks to all of the council members.

This morning you had a number of questions.

We know that there's questions that have also not been able to be asked on the record yet for some of the other departments, and people may have questions after sitting with the presentations for a while.

as you in your office consider questions that you may have for the departments in anticipation of the upcoming deliberations on how we're going to be amending and changing the budget, please do know that we are interested in collecting all of those questions.

I used homeless services as an example this morning to say that I know that there was a number of questions from council members including myself that didn't get a chance to ask those but we want to compile all of those in one place so I'm going to turn it over to our budget lead from central staff, Ali Panucci, to remind us of the process for submitting your questions to central staff so that we can compile those all in one place.

Thanks, Sally.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Good afternoon, council members.

Just as a reminder, in general, if you have questions about the proposed budget, you send those questions to the lead central staff analyst.

If you're unsure, send them to myself or Patty.

and we will help get them to the right place.

We have a system in place with the budget office and executive departments to manage all of those questions and have a shared resource for council members and their staff to have access to those responses.

Specifically for these department presentations, I will send out an email later today, given that there were, I know, a number of questions that people were not able to ask to just streamline compiling questions from department presentations.

I will send out an email.

I'm asking people to just respond, and I will compile those all and work with the panelists to get you answers, if that works for you, Chair Mosqueda.

That sounds great.

I appreciate that.

I think seeing questions already placed on a list of questions will help folks know that that issue has already been addressed, and that we will anticipate the answers to those.

Thanks, Allie, for reminding us of that.

And before we have the next item read into the record, I want to welcome Vice Chair Herbold.

Thank you so much for being with us.

And did I miss anybody else who may have joined us?

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Wonderful.

Okay, Madam Clerk, can you please read item number four into the record from session two on today's agenda?

Agenda item four, community safety and community lead investments for briefing and discussion.

Okay, wonderful.

Well, again, colleagues, we have a large panel here virtually with us today.

This includes, again, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and Julie Klein from the Mayor's Office.

We have Tanya Kim, Acting Director, and Ricks Brown, also from the Human Services Department.

We have Chris Lombard, the Interim Director of Community Safety and Communication Center, the CSCC, the new department that many of us are very excited about.

Happy to have you here today.

We have with us Chief Harold Scoggins from the Seattle Fire Department.

Welcome, Chief.

Mariko Lockhart from the Office of Civil Rights.

Welcome, Director Lockhart and Director Rico Quindongo from the Office of Planning and Development, OPCD.

I'm missing a C there.

Office of Planning and Community Development.

And again, thank you very much, Director Noble, for being with us.

I hope I got everyone here.

And if not, of course, feel free to introduce yourself as our presentation commences.

And we do not have slides starting for central staff today.

Appreciate it.

We are going to go back into our normal practice of having the directors and departments report out on what is in the mayor's proposed budget for 2022.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda.

Move to the next slide.

We have a pretty broad set of folks here because the presentation today, per your request, covers two broad topics.

One is the community-led investments in budget action, so particularly participatory budgeting, the Strategic Investment Fund, and Equitable Communities Initiative Task Force, and the recommendations that are funded.

So we're going to talk about each of those items under kind of community-led investments as a category, and then switch to talk more about community safety.

Again, some of those investments are also community-driven, but not exclusively.

So that's led to kind of the large cast of characters we have teed up here.

There's a range of topics to be covered but look forward to doing exactly that.

So with that I was going to turn this over to Director Lockhart to talk about participatory budgeting.

We're going to take them in the order here that's that's set out.

So Director Lockhart.

Thank you Director Noble.

Good afternoon everyone.

So the city is embarking on a new participatory budgeting process, which we often refer to as PB for short.

PB gives community members real power over how the city spends a portion of its budget.

They will also play a role in monitoring the process following the allocation of funding.

In this case, the 2021 budget included $28.3 million for PB.

And this is a historic investment to which the mayor's 2022 proposed budget adds an additional $30 million in ongoing funding, making the combined investment of over $50 million, one of the largest participatory budgeting processes in the country.

The participatory budgeting process itself has the potential to be transformative and is the result of significant community organizing coming out of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May of 2020. Following his murder nationwide, there were calls to defund police and for justice for Black victims of police violence.

Locally, these calls resulted in numerous proposals coming from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color on how to divest from police budgets and reinvest funding in housing, education, and health care directly into the Black community.

In Seattle this resulted in the participatory budgeting process as well as other investments some of which will be described by others during the presentation this afternoon.

So what has SOCR accomplished since being charged with implementing an RFP process to contract with the administrator of the participatory budgeting process.

To fulfill this charge in a way that is accountable to the community organizing that led to this investment.

We started by meeting with some of those advocates to hear their concerns and ideas.

We are also in the middle of hiring processes for the three SOCR positions that are included in this funding that will provide us with the capacity to manage this body of work and we hope to have these new staff on board by the end of October.

Next slide please.

So this timeline is also available on our website and will be continually updated as we make progress on our next steps.

We're working on finalizing the RFP language for the contract with the outside administrator and plan to issue the RFP by the end of the year.

With the administrator on board in Q1 of 2022 we anticipate that the participatory budgeting process will begin then.

And that is the update on participatory budgeting.

Thank you.

I have a question for the chair whether we want to take questions on the components individually or whether we should continue forward.

Totally your call.

I believe we should do it all together as we've done already.

And then I do want to make sure that we get a chance to hear from Council Member Herbold as the chair of community safety before we go into questions that she will start with and then other council members.

So let's go ahead and go through this and then we'll go to Council Member Herbold as well.

The next step up is the strategic investment fund, and Director Dago will provide you some of the background.

I'll build way in on the budget piece, and then he'll come back and talk a little bit more about status as well.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Yes, thanks.

All right.

Excellent.

So our Actual Development Initiative team and OPCD leaned into the strategic investment fund process.

As all of you know we stood up with community community advisory group which established priorities for the RFP consistent with the parameters for how the fund was established.

And that same community advisory group reviewed applications.

We had such an overwhelming response, over 100 applications.

We broke them out into four subgroups that all reviewed a smaller number of applications and created a short list.

And that short list was brought together and reviewed by the whole group.

The focus was on funding for real estate.

opportunities, purchases for housing, cultural, and community space to combat displacement, strengthen community relations, and grow community wealth.

As all of you know, the budget in 2021 was $30 million for SIF, and we administered that process in coordination with a number of other departments and with council.

The 2022 proposed budget includes another $30 million, which would be split $14 million to go toward the OPCD EDI team and $16 million to go to Office of Housing.

Let me say a little bit more about that split, if I could, Director.

Absolutely.

In 2021, I think it's been discussed, the Strategic Investment Fund was funded from the one-time proceeds of the sale of what's colloquially known as the Mercer Mega Block.

So that was a one-time source of funding.

There was, given the level of community interest and the benefits and the list of projects we saw come forward, there was a desire to continue investments of this form on an ongoing basis.

And what we saw, fortunately, is that there was a significant overlap here between that interest and the council's direction on investments in the EDI fund and investments around housing, both that have been called out as jumpstart priorities.

So what the budget proposes to do, again, Director Kirinago described, the strategic investment fund proposals generally came along the lines of EDI projects around community assets of various forms and opportunities to acquire property for affordable housing.

So the budget, rather than continue separate programs.

What the budget proposes to do is to take 14 million dollars and put it as an ongoing support for the Equitable Development Initiative, again to advance particularly the community asset side of these investments and these projects.

That will be added to the additive and added to the base level of funding that's coming from the short-term rental tax.

So pushing the total annual ongoing funding for EDI, I think a total north of 20 million now.

So very significant and very importantly, ongoing investment.

And then the remainder is, and this was called out this morning in the context of the Office of Housing, goes to affordable housing, particularly projects that are focused on displacement.

So again, that this notion of strategic opportunities to acquire land and and potentially even build projects that can minimize or mitigate the impacts of displacement, particularly in communities of color, again, consistent with what had been the goals of the Strategic Investment Fund.

So we're finding a way to make this an ongoing program and to streamline it somewhat by placing it in the two departments that are core to the principles and the funding targets.

So that's kind of the budget background, if you will.

I don't know if Director you have a few more comments about the status of where things are now and I think it's good.

I do and I'd also I think it would be important to note that so as you made reference to the close to 20 million dollars the 5 million that was the base budget the 14 million that we're talking about out of the 2022 allocation SIF dollars.

We have had some kind of iterative discussion internally in the office around is there an opportunity to look at the tier 2 applicants that were identified in both this year's EDI process as well as this year's Strategic Investment Fund process and In contemplating a in contemplating one RFP in 2022 could our primary outreach be to those tier two applicants.

What what we know is that we can't get ahead of community and that like however we establish a new process next year and I think there's some thought that we need to put into that since we have two bodies that from community making decisions this year.

The CAG that was stood up for Strategic Investment Fund and then the EDI Advisory Board.

So what's the what's the relationship we want to set up next year.

We need to hear from community to get their input before we make any decisions in that in that realm.

But I just I know that there was a lot of support around the idea of how could we support those Tier 2 applicants.

The status bullets again that you all know and I want to say thank you.

Actually I should say thank you to to the CAG to the EDI advisory board to staff and to council.

You know we have these 13 project awards related to the SIP and the strategic investment funds.

We will announce them on a rolling basis as contracts are in place so that we don't complicate or make problematic any of the current real estate negotiations that are underway.

And my thank you of course to all of you is the passing of the legislation this week.

So thank you for that.

And I think that's that that covers my remarks.

Yeah I think.

We can move to the next slide.

All right.

My slide will be fairly easy.

Just a quick overview of where we're at with the Equitable Communities Initiative Task Force.

I think all of you know the process with 26 community leaders meeting over 30 times from October to June.

and develop their recommendations in the areas of small business, education, health, and housing.

The 2021 budget includes approximately 30 million for these endeavors, and the mayor's proposed 2022 budget includes another 30 million in ongoing investments.

That will primarily go through eight departments who are going to implement the task force recommendations.

Yeah, man.

Did you get it?

Where is it at?

Huh?

Where is it at?

Let's go.

Let's go get it.

Eric, you're not muted.

Please continue.

So the status update is the departments are actively working with their task force members who made their particular recommendation to either put out an RFP add funding to existing contracts, or in some cases, hire a consultant to do additional research.

And so that is my update.

Thank you.

Okay.

Sorry, I can't keep smiling from that.

I'm Tanya Kim, Acting Director of the Human Services Department, and I'm joined today by my colleague, with my colleague Rex Brown, who is the leader of our new division, Safe and Thriving Communities, and I'll have him present on the next couple slides, but wanted to remind the public as well as you of our new division.

As a reminder, the Safe and Thriving Communities Division was created in response to all of really the framework that Mariko has already described, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, of course, the work being done before that as well, and suing community advocacy efforts that urge the city to focus on black indigenous people of color and shift safety investments into community-based organizations.

So we all agree that people thrive when their lives are free from violence.

And at the Human Services Department, through this division, we're investing in violence prevention and community safety.

In this division, we are focusing on community safety, but also our mayor's office on domestic violence and sexual assault, which is our gender-based violence work.

And we have direct services, crime survivor services, with two unique teams inside of that, crime victim advocates and victim support team.

And I'm going to have Rex talk about these in more detail of what occurred in 2021 and what's ahead in 2022. Next slide, please.

Thank you so much, Tanya.

Again, my name is Rex Brown, and we have a number of accomplishments already from 2021, and the first of which being, as part of the community-led work group, HSD hired its first director of the new Safe and Thriving Communities Division, and yes, that's me.

The victim advocacy work was moved out of the Seattle Police Department to form a new unit, Crime Survivor Services, as Tanya just mentioned, within HSD's Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

HSD invested the $10.4 million based on community engagement feedback as 36 stakeholder groups consistent with a public health approach to safety.

In this particular RFP, there were 78 total applications, and ultimately, 33 applicants were recommended for funding to provide an array of strategies and services.

By the way, half of, almost half, 17, actually more than half, of the awardees are first-time awardees, which aligns with the design and intent of the RFP to promote community-led solutions, allowing community members and agencies to find safety investments.

In general, these awardees are providing services that include activating neighborhood-based strategies to reduce crime rates at hotspots, de-escalation support in response to shots fired, re-entry services, case management, community awareness about disproportionality in criminal legal services, family support to prevent youth from entering the criminal legal system in the first place, and supports to address family and gender-based violence.

In addition, HSD has invested $500,000 in the King County Regional Peacekeepers Collective to pilot programming to increase awareness and reduce gun violence.

STC issued a $300,000 RFP to reduce intolerance towards the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community.

This resulted in eight contracts currently being executed by STC and HTSD.

The 2021 $600,000 for gender-based violence response services was approved by CBO and we have proceeded with contracting out the gender-based violence CLFR funds.

Council and mayor's office approved, thank you.

$1.5 million for re-entry programming based on the Equitable Communities Initiative recommendations.

STC is on track for an October 15th, well, an October 2021 RFP release date.

We anticipate approximately 68 contracts from this RFP with maximum award amounts $225,000 to $250,000.

Also, the LEED contract has transferred to STC and its amendment to include an additional $3 million is being finalized.

Next slide, please.

So what does 2022 look like?

Well, our priorities were based on the change team co-leads, that's our race and social justice staff team, participating in a series of meetings with HSD's executive team where more than 20 2022 budget proposals from HSD divisions were reviewed.

Additionally HSD regularly engaged in the communities to get feedback on programs and identify unmet needs.

After completing this analysis and any subsequent engagement work divisions utilized the data to inform their prioritization of the 2022 budget requests that were submitted to the executive team for review.

The priorities identified to support safe and thriving communities are as follows.

The 2022 budget prioritizes the mayor's 2021 investment of $10 million in community safety capacity building to continue through 2022 as associated staffing for department safe and thriving communities division.

That's ongoing.

$1.5 million for the Public Health Seattle-King County Regional Peacekeepers Collective.

$1 million in programs to help support survivors and victims of gender-based violence and the addition of two victim advocates.

$400,000 addressing anti-Asian hate crimes and $300,000 for services towards American Indian, Alaskan Native peoples.

Now, in addition, much of the work is already going on now, beginning with discussions with relationship to the STC and Office of City Auditors.

We're partnering to produce a brief report based on recommendations from the OCA's 2015 report on street outreach.

This report will inform HSD's work with community safety awardees to conduct an external evaluation of that effort and implement in 2022. This concludes this slide.

And I'd like to return to our speaker, our facilitator.

All right.

I can jump in, Deputy Mayor Washington, if you like.

We have Interim Director Chris Lombard for the Community Safety and Communications Center, department and we have Chief Harold Scoggins from the Seattle Fire Department.

Both who have been integral in developing a new alternate 9-1-1 response model that we include in the Seattle Fire Department's budget.

We are quite excited about this pilot that we're hoping to operationalize at the beginning of 2022 and I'd love to turn it over to Chief Scoggins as the sort of primary laboring or on developing this proposal to discuss the response model and how it fits into his mobile integrated health unit.

Chief?

Sure.

Thank you, Julie.

And thank you to the members of the council for allowing us some time to talk you through what we're looking at here.

You know, what we see out in the field is we see a lot of people that are in need, but we also see the need to take the time to figure out what it is they need.

And a lot of these calls come through the 9-1-1 Dispatch Center, and Chief Lombardo will talk about that and the protocols and things like that.

But these are not people who are calling for a medical response or any critical type of emergency like that.

These are the person down calls.

These are the welfare check calls and different things like that.

It may not sound like a lot, but this equals almost 7,000 times a year, maybe even a bit more.

Just over 4,100 person down calls annually, close to 2,800 welfare checks annually.

And there's probably a few other ones that can be added in there also as this model continues to unfold.

So these are not those 911 medical emergencies, or even the low acuity emergencies.

We've taken the time to talk to our peers around the country.

We talked to Washington, D.C., to San Diego, to Oregon, and a few other agencies in between that we've either talked to or studied what they're doing.

And so that led to our thought processing coming up with what we think is an approach to helping us through this challenge that's in front of us.

One of the things we would like to do is we would like to have people on the ground to have a conversation, build a relationship, to offer referrals, to offer shelter, to offer, you know, get in the navigation process where they can get some help and connecting them with providers.

And these are not those 9-1-1 emergencies.

These are not those low acuity emergencies that we would send HealthONE where we need that type of resource to, but these are those 7,000 other calls that come into the system pretty consistently.

You know, our plan is to, you know, do more research.

We're in the design process right now, and Chief Lombard's going to talk a little bit about the protocol development, which really goes hand in hand with what we're talking about here.

So, Chief Lombard, I'll stop there and pass it to you.

Thank you very much, Chief Scoggins.

I also wanted to say, you know, there's been some discussion with Council as far as the, you know, why is Seattle Fire Department launching this unit?

CSCC is probably no less than six months away from this being even able to consider doing this.

We've only just hired our first HR director.

We're still trying to, we're still outsourcing our payroll, our additional HR.

We don't have a fleet manager.

We don't have facilities.

So the unfortunate part is knowing how important this is to us and how important this is to council, we wouldn't even be able to begin this initiative for probably, again, no less than six to nine months away.

And then it would still take the school uptime starting at that point.

So this is why, and many of you received a letter jointly authored from Chief Scoggins and myself, kind of pointing out some of these facts that if we want to get it going sooner, this is a good way to launch it.

To Chief Scoggin's point on the protocol system, one of the things that we found so far this year in analyzing how our calls are screened, how our calls are triaged, is that there are some inconsistencies, and this has to do with just the turnover of dispatchers, how often, how fast we can train them, And the fact that when people are calling 911, they are not very consistent saying, I'm a 40-year-old male that's having chest pain or something very specific.

They're traumatized.

They're unconcerned.

They're unfamiliar with what's going on and whatnot.

So it makes for some difficult question and answer between our call takers.

So the hope is with the protocol system that you authorized in the Q2 supplemental, thank you very much for that, that we have started to do the RFP process to find a protocol system that across all dispatchers will allow us to do that consistent questioning to weed out what's clearly not medical in nature, which would be a fire department type call, and to weed out what would be clearly an SPD issue, criminal in nature, and kind of try to identify that category in between the stuff that Chief Scoggins just referred to, person down type calls, welfare checks, so that all dispatchers are able to ask the same kind of questioning.

And we believe that this will really help eliminate some of the bias that goes into call screening and call dispatching and really improve the consistency.

So back to Chief Scoggins or Julie.

Sure.

I'll just add in, you know, as we design this, you know, we're going to turn to what I would call our regional expert in John Ehrenfeld as we start to put the design for this program to come together, which is really a good place for it to start.

You know, because it would be tied in with our mobile integrated health program, which includes, you know, our Vulnerable Adults Program, our High Utilizer Individual and High Utilizer Facility Program, our HealthONE Program, and there's case managers tied.

And John and his team They're tied also to public and private partners around the community.

So they will also be working to reduce or prevent duplication of other services that are already offered.

So that's another key that we're focusing on here also.

So I'll stop there and hand it back to Julie.

Thanks, Chief.

Thanks, Director Lombard.

So as you can see, the mayor's 2022 proposed budget includes just over $2 million for this new program.

And I think we'll be, the next administration can be poised to decide once this is up and running and we see how it's working and the number of calls that we can shunt this direction, whether or not an expansion is warranted and how quickly that can happen at some point in 2022. So.

Next slide.

Some other sort of additional investments to be notable investments for the mayor's 2022 budget in the police and criminal justice system.

For Seattle Municipal Court, there is additional funding in 2022 for a case manager for Seattle Municipal Court's Community Court, which is a diversionary court.

There is some funding specifically directed for the Domestic Violence Intervention Project Diversionary Program as well.

I would add this is not additional or new money.

This is money from the Human Services Division, sort of pot of money for these types of programs that we're specifically directing towards the DVIP.

or the Domestic Violence Intervention Project.

And then additionally, there is double the current funding to subsidize electronic home monitoring, which is an alternative to secure detention in pretrial and post-sentencing.

So again, we can try to keep as many folks out of jail as possible.

For the City Attorney's Office, we are adding 1.5 full-time employees, $257,000 towards pre-filing diversion for young adults, And then we're adding an additional $145,000 in 2022 for the Firearms Surrender Project.

With the increase in gun crimes and gun violence in our community, we felt that was a worthwhile and worthy increased investment there.

Specific to the Seattle Police Department, the 2022 budget of Mayor Durkin includes funding for additional community service officer units.

These are unsworn Seattle Police Department employees who are sort of key in the community interaction and the community policing space for the Seattle Police Department.

We are also including money for a video analyst for the Office of Police Accountability in order to be able to give them additional capacity and additional abilities to assess video.

There's a huge amount of video that the Office of Police Accountability has to go through, analyze, and try to splice into usable sections, given body-worn video and police officer dash cam video.

There is also included some funding for hiring bonuses to assist with recruitment of additional officers.

As I'm sure you all are aware, I believe I've presented to council before, we are in a sworn staffing crisis at the Seattle Police Department.

And in order to get up to minimum staffing levels, we really need to be diligent and thoughtful and deliberate about hiring and recruiting.

Most of the other jurisdictions around Seattle and Washington State, at least the large ones, do offer these sorts of hiring bonuses.

So very necessary for us to stay competitive for the best candidates.

And then just all of those items together total and some additional ad hoc items.

The mayor's budget increases the Seattle Police Department 2022 budget by $2,458,000.

Julie, I want to do a quick reminder for folks that we are going to have an entire session for the last half of this session focused on SPD, so.

Thank you, Councilmember, yes.

Yes, there is another whole presentation on that, so please note if you have questions related to We will start in about 45 minutes.

These were meant to give everyone a sampling of the range of items that are included in the mayor's budget.

I do want to turn it over to Chair of Public Safety, that would be Council Member Herbold, also Vice Chair of this committee.

And for a reminder for today's discussion for this afternoon, again, the latter half of today's meeting will be focused on SPD.

and we will take comments right now on the community safety aspects, which are largely centered in the Public Safety Committee, and we know that there's a lot of council members who have been integral as well in helping to create some of the alternative funding strategies and the alternative service strategies.

Council Member Herbold, appreciate your leadership on those efforts through your committee as well.

So focused on community safety in this first part, please take it away.

Thank you so much.

I'm wondering, This may not be a problem for anybody else but me.

Could we maybe think about taking questions according to the sections that were, like, can we do the participatory budgeting questions first and then do the strategic investment fund next?

Just because I feel like if it's going to be going all over the place, it's going to go all over the place, and I'm not going to be able to keep track of the questions that I want to ask.

That's a great idea.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for public safety.

Let's do that.

Thank you.

And why don't you kick us off?

Well, I'm going to, I think, Padora budgeting, I think that's in Council Member Morales' wheelhouse.

I don't have any specific questions about budget.

And Madam Councilmember Morales, you are on mute as well.

And I also wanted to say, Councilmember Herbold, if you wanted to say any comments, you're also welcome to do that at this point.

Yeah, I do, I wanna, I have comments regarding the HSD Safe and Thriving Community Division and the alternate response models, some sort of framing comments and some questions, but I just thought I would wait in case there were questions on the three bullets that are, I think all three of them are in Council Member Morales' wheelhouse.

Wonderful, thank you for that orientation.

Council Member Morales, please take it away.

Thank you.

Well, I don't have questions about PB.

I feel like I live and breathe PB right now, but I do want to give my deep gratitude to the staff at OCR who have taken great pains to make sure that they are engaging with community, with folks who are interested in the process, with folks who maybe aren't so interested but want to know more about what this process is intended to be.

I think they're being very very deliberate and very intentional about reaching out to folks to help make sure that that there is a deep understanding of what this is and I think it's important to acknowledge that they are really helping turn what had been a community demand as Director Lockhart said into an actionable process that the city will be able to benefit from in the future.

So I'm glad to hear that staff is engaged, that there will be folks coming on board at the end of October.

And I do want to again appreciate what I said yesterday, which is the acknowledgement from the executive's office that this should be a part of our regular budgeting process from now on.

You know, we're trying to grow this.

We're thinking of this, I'm thinking of this first year as our, you know, sort of test case to see what works, what doesn't work, how we do the contracting.

But I'm very excited about the process and really look forward to incorporating this as a regular way of doing business so that we can share power and decision making with our community members.

And I'm looking forward to the process.

I have a motion and a second.

Thank you.

Councilmember Herbold, I want to pause briefly with the orientation you gave.

I did see a hand from Councilmember Lewis.

I want to make sure your hand wasn't related to the first three bullets.

Great, so really appreciate that.

As far as framing remarks, and I will have some questions about the safe and thriving investment as well as the CSCC, but First off, I just want to appreciate the work of the Human Services Department in conceiving of and standing up this new Safe and Thriving Communities Division in response to the urgent need to build through community safety.

I'm thrilled that we have Division Director Rex Brown on board.

And thanks to you and all of your staff for these accomplishments over this short period of time.

And appreciate hearing Director Brown about the fact that the lead funding, the additional funding for 2021 is imminent.

The contract amendment is underway.

I really appreciate hearing that.

And like I said, I do have a couple questions related to this particular division.

I think maybe I'll put them on the table and then maybe we'll get, if it's okay with you, Madam Chair, we'll get the questions that other council members might have about this division and then we'll move to CSCC.

Is that okay?

Yes, that sounds great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

So We had heard previously from central staff funding for the Seattle community safety initiative, $4 million that council provided in 2020 to establish and operate community safety hub through in specific geographic areas with a coalition that's led by community passageways.

Funding was carried forward to 2021 because it wasn't spent in 2020. and it's currently supporting these hubs.

We had been informed yesterday, and I was cheering, that even though we couldn't find it in the budget, we believed that it was in the Mayor's proposed budget.

I have recently learned that is not the case.

looking to signal my belief that this is a really, really high priority for me and hopefully for my colleagues on the Council to continue in the 2021 budget.

I also want to highlight and appreciate the fact that there is funding in the Mayor's proposed budget for the One Call pilot that was ongoing funding to support work for crisis connections, one pilot, and it's really critical to our reimagining community safety work.

And then for folks who don't know what that is, it's a dedicated line for the fire department and other emergency medical responders to assist in a in serving individuals in mental health crisis.

And so somebody for the first responders to call to get referrals.

So say a police officer calls the one-call pilot when they arrive on the scene, and then they can be connected with a behavioral health expert.

who then can provide a behavioral health history, problem solving, and guidance around that particular individual's needs.

So it's a really important effort.

And they've asked for an additional year for the pilot to add to their evaluation.

So really pleased that that's included.

And lastly, I want to just make note that funding for LEAD is a really important priority for me and for this council.

We have on two consecutive years, well, actually, I think it was in two years over a three year period of time maybe, expressed our intention to fund LEAD to scale.

We passed a resolution last year, and I think a couple years ago we passed a statement of legislative intent.

The funding in the 2021 budget for LEAD was about $6 million.

Then we added $3 million.

We talked about that added $3 million earlier.

Last Friday, my Book Safety and Human Services Committee heard a presentation on the LEAD scale study that was requested by a statement of legislative intent and what it would take to appropriately scale and fund lead, except what are called already qualifying referrals.

And what the funding needs would be in order to get to scale by 2023. The council made this commitment in 2019 when we passed Resolution 31916. So I'm looking forward to conversations with my colleagues on the right way to scale LEAD in 2022 and then later on in the budget cycle in 2023. But for right now, my question is, how much funding is included for LEAD in the mayor's proposed 2022 budget?

Thanks.

I saw your hand from earlier, so we'll come back.

I think you did have a piece of clarification on an earlier comment, but let's take the lead answer first.

Let's not all speak at once.

Yeah, I don't have that precise figure.

I don't know whether anyone at HSD does.

If not, we can return with the detail.

Yeah, I'm trying to get that information.

It's the base budget with the AWI.

It's an inflationary adjustment over what had been the 2021 base.

Yeah, but I'll try to get that information for you.

So no increase over what was approved last fall for 2021?

Correct.

Aside from the inflationary increase.

OK.

And we'll double check that Council Member Herbold, just because we want to be sure and...

Oh, I've got it.

Oh, quick, go ahead.

Our finance people are listening, 6.3 million.

Thank you.

Council Member Herbold, just before we move on, Director Noble, did you have a clarifying piece or something you wanted to say from an earlier comment?

I did a couple of herbals pointing out the $4 million for the community safety.

I'm not calling home so lack of better language was not included.

That was an oversight, not a policy conscious policy choice that an error.

I do think we have a path, given the amount of funding we have and some additional funding was provided.

and a little bit of reserve that we are holding in case there were some third quarter changes.

I believe we have a path forward to fund that, and we will provide that to central staff as a potential.

We have a set of corrections to the budget.

So again, I look forward to working with Council Member Herbold to explain the path there.

But again, I wanted to be clear, that wasn't an intended, there's a lot goes into the budget.

I'll invoke the passive voice about mistakes being made.

Again, I think we have a path forward, so I just want to offer that clarification.

Really appreciate it.

And Ali, did you have something you'd like to add from Central South?

I just wanted to acknowledge that we had thought we had correct information, so apologize for the miscommunication.

I did send it out to everyone as well, clarified so and look forward to working with you, Chair Muscata, Council Member Herbold and Director Noble and all of the committee and coming up with some options for how to address this.

Great, and Council Member Herbold, more comments on that item from you?

Okay.

Colleagues, are there any additional, Patty, if you don't mind, I'm so sorry, do you mind putting up the slide number one one more time to orient folks to where we're at?

Any additional questions or comments?

We're on the Thriving Safe Communities section, is that correct?

Okay.

Thriving Safe Communities, which is the fourth bullet, and then there's a full page on it on slide number six as well.

Any additional comments on Thriving Safe Communities?

Great.

Patty, I'm going to ask you, if you don't mind, to go to slide number nine.

Slide number nine is the next bullet, which is our alternate response models.

And Council Member Hucknable, I'll turn it back over to you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you to Interim Director Lombard and Chief Scoggins for your work collaborating over the last year to help stand up the Community Safety and Communication Center.

I appreciate that the budget document says that The department is envisioned to provide civilian and community-based services and solutions to community safety challenges.

I want to recognize that while the department is currently home to 9-1-1 Dispatch, it's my vision and I think one that we all share that the new department become home of solutions for community safety challenges.

I appreciate what I'm hearing from folks about how best to work with the fire department, given some of the infrastructure challenges for CSCC and really am hoping that we can chart a path that will make it possible for the CSCC to be the home of the triage one response unit.

I appreciate Director Lumber that you had mentioned that would take more time if it was being developed out of CSCC.

I had previously, a few weeks ago, requested for two different timelines.

A timeline for if triage one is being stood up by CSCC and a timeline for if fire is standing it up.

Because what I believe central staff had heard before is it won't necessarily take more time But it would take more resources for triage one to be stood up by CSCC because of many of the things that you identified around the human infrastructure that needs to be in place over in your shop.

So, just wanting to provide that sort of for some framing.

I'm really glad that we're able to move forward on implementing the new protocol system.

I appreciate folks saying that setting up the new protocol system happens along with the development of triage one.

But my understanding is that new protocol system needs to be in place and people need to be trained on it before we're able to stand up triage one.

So really, really appreciate that we as at the council had the opportunity to work with you to fund that element sooner this year instead of waiting until passage of an implementation of the 2022 budget in January.

So just a couple questions, if I may.

Let's see, back in last year's budget, we had asked a question around whether or not there were benefits or costs of merging and or co-locating the fire department 911 call center and the CSCC call center.

The executive response concluded that it would take additional study, community input, and could be a multi-million dollar endeavor.

It further noted that consolidation is not feasible in the short or medium term, and that redundancy is possibly advantageous.

one location be out of service for any reason.

I'm just wondering whether or not the Mayor's proposed budget includes any funding for a technical and operations study to answer some of these questions, and whether or not such a study could or could include further exploration of integration of the call centers.

That's one question.

And then the question that I asked yesterday about the Nick Jr. briefing relates to the fact that there was some disagreement from the executive about the content of the Nick Jr. conclusions, or maybe not disagreement, a desire of the executive to sort of check some of the Nick Jr. assumptions around call types.

But there was agreement that 28 call types did not need SPD response.

And there was reference to the fact that in, I think the term was very near term, we could look at alternate to SPD response for those 98 call types.

That's 12 percent of current calls for service, and it accounts for 23,000 service hours.

But What we have with triage one is just a very small fraction of those nearly 142,000 service hours.

It's a fraction of the 12%.

So I'm just wanting to understand, again, considering that this 12% was identified as a, that we could identify an alternate response in the near term for that 12%, what is our plan for, I think it's six times the number of service hours that triage one program is planning on taking up.

Thank you, council member, for your questions and your observations on the growth and the expansion of the center.

So, you know, we've learned some phenomenal lessons in the last two years from the growth and the development of the triage one system, you know, what it took to get it off the ground, what made it work, what made it click and how it's been expanding.

As you know, or as council members may know, you know, we're getting ready to launch the third of the of the health one units starting, you know, just this this fall and whatnot.

So again, some phenomenal feedback and lessons learned on there.

So our approach with the triage one was going to be kind of to follow the same crawl, walk, run type approach.

We agree that there will most likely be more than the 7,000, approximately 7,000 calls identified in the person down and the welfare checks.

But beyond those, what we were thinking to kind of relate to what you were talking about as far as the 98 call types from the Nick Jr. work, some of those are going to be a little more nuanced as far as, is it kind of neutral?

Is it kind of like maybe a triage one in police or triage one in health one?

We figured at least with the 7,000 that those were very clear cut, that those were ones that we know today with high level of confidence.

that fall into this middle territory.

And so again, going back to the crawl, walk, run a type approach and the scalability, what we were doing is just for getting the program up, getting the program running and being able to identify stuff that we know right now today that we could start sending triage one units to go investigate.

That's why we just limited it to the two initial call types, but it certainly was not meant to be exclusive.

It was more just get the program up and running.

That's helpful.

And so this $2,150,000, is that just for the crawl component?

Or is that for a crawl, walk, run?

Is it allowed for the scaling up?

I would say that that is certainly the crawl walk portion of it.

As we get into a couple of these units out there, the crawl walk portion, we're going to start learning exponentially just like we did with the triage, just like we did with the HealthONE program.

I think it'll probably be the two million will get us the first, I believe we budgeted for the first three units out there.

And I think by that point, we will definitely be transitioning into the running phase where, keep using the analogy.

where we're able to identify how many of these types of calls we have, what more capacity that they can take, and then really start pairing off some of the additional call types.

Part of the protocol system that we're going to start working on, that we've already started working on ASAP, is an examination of the different call types that SPD has within the CAD system.

Currently, there's over 300 different call types, and you referenced 98 of them.

This is excessive.

This is excessive certainly for what other air departments in the region have and elsewhere.

So part of the protocol system is going to be doing a pretty deep scrub as well to find out how many of these different type codes, as we call them, are redundant, how many of them are just nuances of each other and whatnot.

So

We've got the list in the Nick Jr. report.

There's a lot of them.

But it's 28 call types that both Nick Jr. and the executive agreed don't need police.

So we have central staff who have made a request for the names of those 28 call types.

just so we can all just be on the same page.

And then my other question was about the efficiencies regarding locating 911 functions.

Are there any resources in the budget to study that issue?

I will defer to Director Noble on that, but I do not believe that we did not include that at this time.

We knew, looking even just locally within the region here, South Sound 9-1-1 down in Pierce County just built a brand new facility that was, you know, $65 million.

They consolidated, you know, several of their PSAPs down in that area.

We knew that the we knew just out of pocket that the numbers to any kind of consolidation were going to be pushing close to the $100 million range.

And so I again I'll defer to Director Noble on this but I don't believe that we had budgeted for study on that.

Director Noble do you want me to address that.

Please yeah.

Yeah.

Thanks.

So Council Member Herbold, I think one of the things that was sort of a prerequisite in our determination to begin such a study was to have CSCC have their feet under them, be fully stood up, and have them operational as a solo unit for a while in order to make the assessment sort of you know, operating on best facts.

So we really understood what this new department was going to look like, and then could potentially, if there was interest, then talk about funding a study for consolidation.

We didn't anticipate that that was something, especially given some alternate response models that CSCC is deeply involved in and setting up the new protocol system.

That was a realistic thing for 2022 to specifically put that in the budget.

I think we wanted CSCC to be able to feel themselves a little bit more before we start going down that road.

Also, I hope that answers your question.

I wanted to switch gears a little bit to a different question you asked, which is the 28 call types.

So the CSCC and the Seattle Police Department are going to be working closely going forward in figuring out You are right, triage 1 is a small portion of those potentially.

The Seattle Police Department is working currently and I believe in their presentation next, Dr. Fisher will be on and can probably give you more details on it.

But they're doing a risk guided approach to figure out of those 28 calls.

How we parse out and use the new protocol system at the CSCC to really drill down and identify which of those calls do not need a sworn officer.

The Nick Jr. report was sort of a 10,000-foot initial blush.

of the types of calls that we should be looking at.

And Seattle Police Department has taken that list and is running with it to make that determination.

That's going to involve speaking with the city attorney's office.

There are some state statutes that limit who can and can't respond to certain types of calls.

And it also is going to take us delving into some of these call types.

There's a very general call type of disturbance.

A lot of those don't end up meeting a sworn officer to respond, but a lot of them do.

And we have to figure out how to parse out which ones are which in order to be able to identify what this universe is.

But Seattle Police Department is working on that.

effort with the help of CSCC and the new protocol dispatch system will be super helpful in that.

So again, if you have more in the weeds questions, I would refer you to Dr. Fisher who's working on this project.

I talk to Dr. Fisher periodically.

I was under the impression that there's a set of calls that there isn't agreement with Nick Jr. that they were doing the risk assessment on, but I was under the impression that that wasn't the case for the 28 calls.

That the 28 calls, there's like, oh, we agree, those are calls that don't, and that we want to do the risk assessment for the, because the Nick Jr. report said, they didn't say 12%.

could be diverted.

That's just where there's agreement.

The Nick Jr. report, I think, said something like 50% of calls and SPD was like, I'm not quite sure that that's going to work.

So I will direct those questions more to Dr. Fisher.

I think that this is a good sign that this issue has come up yesterday.

It's come up today right now and it will come up this afternoon.

So this is something the council's closely tracking.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold, for raising that.

Council Member Lewis, you have your hand up.

Please go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to jump in while we're still on the triage one and would just ask if the vision for this, I mean, I think it is for these folks to be city employees that are based in a department, be it the fire department or somewhere else, instead of being provider-based like, you know, STAR or CAHOOTS or some of these other response systems, I bring that up just because the low acuity response work group that Councilmember Herbold and I were in that was convened by the CAHOOTS program and Eugene frequently cited that there are advantages to having a non-uniformed response that can help put folks more at ease when they respond, and it doesn't feel as sort of official, and that that can be helpful to build rapport with people who traditionally have been service-resistant.

and I just wonder if we're looking at a way where triage one could emulate that kind of vision, or in the alternative, if we could have another contracted response that could go into our, you know, cornucopia of response options in addition to triage one, perhaps as we continue to do the analysis that Council Member Herbold just discussed in regards to continuing to analyze different call types.

I just wanted to throw those questions out there and see to what extent that's been considered.

Yeah, thanks.

And if Chief Scoggins or Director Lombard want to weigh in, that's great.

I will just preface that question, Council Member Lewis, by saying we are working on the staffing approach for the triage teams with labor.

And it's very important that we work with labor on it in developing who the folks are that are going to be staffing the triage teams.

So I'm I without Yeah, I think there are a lot more labor negotiations and we need to work closely with them on developing what the teams look like.

And I'll just kind of leave it at that.

And I think we were looking regardless, you know, whether it's, you know, depending on which labor organization, I think we were still trying to shoot for them being city employees, you know, one way, shape, form or another.

To your point, Council Member, we noticed that too with the CAHOOTS program, and that was one of the things that we heard as well, whether it was volunteer or whether it was contracting out, that it was very difficult for them to maintain some of the consistency that we're hoping for here in Seattle.

Thank you very much, Interim Director.

We have about 20 more minutes before we give the remaining hour

I would like a response to the point that he made, which I think is a really good response, is that if these are city employees, and I think there are a lot of benefits for them to be city employees because of the stability of the workforce that the city of Seattle can offer, but What I heard customer Lewis saying is that when people are showing up in uniforms, even if they're not police uniforms, right, that might create barriers to developing relationships and just want to want to.

have some acknowledgement that um we're hearing that and that that is something that is is part of the conversation um is you know how people with their city city employees are presenting on the scene any additional response julie

Yeah, I think, um, all all things are on the table.

We're not ruling anything out, but we really do need to work.

With the, the unions who this is their current body of work.

Um, on what that's going to look like and how that'll how we'll move forward with this.

Okay, I'll ask one final question on this slide.

I want to know how quickly the mental health-related calls are going to be transitioned out.

We know that health-related calls do go to our friends at Seattle Fire, but the mental health specifically, is there a prioritization to move those calls in the very near future to a non-SPD response?

So again, so the protocol system, we anticipate, Mayor just signed just within the last two weeks, the Q2, which gives us the funding for the protocol system.

And so we will be able to, I believe it's, I think city rules and regs say that that's one month before we can actually start working on that beyond just discussions and conceptual ideas.

So as soon as we start working on the protocol system, certainly including the mental health stuff will be part of the protocols and what we can what we can identify for appropriate mental health.

The other part of this that's going to be significant is working with the HealthONE program, who's already got case management, and some of the other city departments to find and identify those mental health practitioner type resources that we can assign these calls to.

Presently, there aren't a whole lot of resources that are dispatchable from a 911 perspective that you can, you know, that are carrying a pager or have some kind of mobile computer in their vehicle that are just sitting there waiting for a mental health call to go to.

So we're trying to work through that as well to try to find how do we best assign and match up the incoming 911 call for help with the appropriate resource that exists, or if it doesn't exist, trying to find and better scope that call.

Thank you for that.

We'll look forward to hearing more information as soon as you can about especially the protocol system being set up for mental health calls.

Let's move to that last slide and see what additional questions we may have.

All right, so maybe just the first two categories, if we can put SPD's questions for the next presentation to come and Council Member Herbold, you are up first.

much.

So yeah, I have a question about the DVIP project in Seattle Municipal Court and the pre-diversion program in City Attorney's Office.

So for DVIP, I just want to reference that there was a request that I'm aware of from Judge Eisenberg at Seattle Municipal Court for this program and my understanding that this is actually being funded.

It's a court program, but it's being funded through HSD.

That's not my question, but correct me if I'm wrong when I get my question out.

I'm curious about how we are going to make the connection of this project to recommendations that we've received from the Criminal Legal Assistance Task Force on diversion principles generally.

They have some principles that they would like us to apply when developing diversion programs, avoiding being coercive, situation.

So if you're adding Having the source of the funding come from somewhere else in the criminal legal system is one of the principles that's really important to that task force.

So I'm just requesting that this program have these principles embedded, and I just want note that the slide indicates that they have $350,000 in HSD's proposed budget, but the notation in the budget document references a competitive RFP diversion program.

So I'm wondering, are they being asked to apply for their funding through a competitive RFP, or is the funding already guaranteed?

And if so, will the maximum award limit be at least the requested amount?

I'll pause there on that question before I move on.

Yeah, and I don't know if Rex is still available or not.

I'm not comfortable totally answering that question because I don't feel like I really know the answer to it, Council Member.

I'll have to circle back around with you on that, but my understanding is that This this wasn't asking them to apply for an RFP.

This was a directed funding is my understanding.

But again I will find out the answer for you on that.

Rex is here with us.

Oh he is.

Great.

He may know.

He may not.

Thank you so much.

I think that there has been a small error here and I think we've had some clarification from CBO as well as our finance department.

I'd like to get back to you later on that just to make sure everyone is clear and we're all on the same page.

I think it's the easiest way to clear that up.

That's great.

We're working it out, figuring it out together.

And I'll get back to you on it.

Thank you.

And Madam Vice Chair, if you had another question, could you make it short?

We do want to get the Council President and anybody else in before the 3.30 mark if we

Absolutely.

On the pre-filing version for young adults, we received a presentation from the city attorney's office in my committee a couple weeks ago.

The presentation was on a racial equity toolkit on expanding an existing type of program doesn't have to be Choose 180, but a program like Choose 180, but expanding it to adults over 25. Just wanting to know why the funding for that was not included in the budget, considering all of the work the city attorney has been doing on that expansion.

Two-fold.

Resources are limited and there were constraints placed on the available resources.

And also, given the upcoming election and the fact that there will be a new city attorney, we weren't clear what the policy direction would be from the city attorney's office more generally going forward in November and beyond.

So that may become more clear before council adopts the budget so you'll be in a different position, but we were faced with that inherent uncertainty.

Thank you so much.

Council President Gonzales and then Council Member Lopez.

My question actually dovetails, I think, nicely from Director Noble's response right now.

So I was, as we look at this slide, we see a few things that I think are fairly characterized as being in the area of violence prevention or violence interruption.

And I was wondering if the mayor's office or any of these agencies have had any conversations about whether it would be more appropriate to house some of these programmatic areas in a different agency, in a standalone agency.

So for example, in conjunction with some of the programming that is also designed to engage in violence prevention that currently lives within the Office of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

I don't think we've had any conversations about creating a standalone unit for all of these items.

I think that was sort of the vision, and I'll let Director Tanya Kim weigh in on that, of the new safety and thriving communities division of HSD is to hold a lot of these together there.

I think that's what you meant, Council Member, if I'm not understanding your question correctly, let me know.

And Director Kim, anything to add to that?

That's right.

I mean, if we think about the systems that we're working with and providers and victims and survivors, It really fits nicely with our mission at the Human Services Department, as well as with the other collection of safety investments that we have.

So oftentimes these are the same individuals or families cross-cutting multiple service areas.

And so by having them together, we are being efficient and also making sure that we're supporting our providers and the community members, I think, as a whole, as opposed to siloed.

And so I think that under Rex's leadership, as well as a team, frankly, because this is not a one person initiative, that's the intent of the work that we're doing.

And going back to the DVIP, you know, our gender-based violence in law and family does report to Rex.

That's where we are working collaboratively, of course, with multiple you know, folks in court, including the courts, as well as prosecuting attorneys, etc.

And so we're starting to streamline our relationships and move these together.

Yeah, and then.

You know, we do we so the city attorney's office is is currently housing this pre filing diversion for young adults pre trial diversion.

For young adults, the firearms surrender program.

And some of the.

regional domestic violence funding.

And so I think the sort of 30,000 foot question that I'm raising is whether given the ongoing streamlining of the work that you just referenced, Director Kim, if it would be a worthwhile exercise to explore whether we can create more efficiencies by rehousing some of these programmatic areas that currently exist within the city attorney's office under the umbrella of DVSA or sort of rebranded or call it something else so that it's more reflective of what the body of work is, which is really around violence prevention.

I would say as public servants, it's always prudent to see where we can streamline and be cost effective.

So I think it's a good idea to look.

I'm also super mission focused and I'm really happy to take on bodies of work that is really about the human services and social services and that network of safety where it makes sense.

And so really open to having that conversation.

I appreciate it.

I do want to flag for Council Central staff that this is an area that I'm interested in identifying a mechanism by which that of how we can continue to support this programming in a way that is going to be institutionalized and have good synergy with some of the human service components that are inherently part of this work.

So thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Council President.

Council Member Lewis, I see you up next.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I do have a couple of questions.

Briefly in response to something director Noble said about expanding the scope of pre-filed diversion in accordance with the report we got in the public safety committee a few weeks ago.

And the potential uncertainty about leadership change in the city attorney's office.

So we could just have some kind of companion legislation that makes the pre-filing diversion just a permanent thing that we do instead of sort of an additive program that City Attorney Holmes has pursued in their time in the office.

And I was just raising that if If the budgeting process is being impacted by potential uncertainty about turnover, there may be a way for the council to just institutionalize that practice, which I think would be a good thing.

I think that sort of the future of a lot of the work of the city attorney's office is gonna be based in some kind of refiling system rather than sort of the historic way misdemeanor prosecutions have been done.

Just wanted to flag that if that might have an influence on how we sort of go forward and budget stuff around the pre-filing area.

Thank you very much, Councilmember Lewis, and for bringing your knowledge from that department as well with you.

I made a note of it myself, and we will follow up with central staff along with your office, I'm sure.

Thanks for that flag.

I do have one question, and I see two hands still up, so I want to make sure that I didn't cut off any council members.

If you do have your hands still raised and you want to ask another question, I'll just ask a brief question here about the electric home monitoring.

on the electric home monitoring, the last bullet there on the left-hand side.

Can you walk us through what will be the additional funding for the electric home monitoring program?

Would this funding be used to subsidize the current stock of electric home monitoring options for people in the Seattle Municipal Court, or would this be used to procure additional electric home monitoring units?

Yeah, Council Member, this money will make it so that electronic home monitoring will be cost free for more people.

if that makes sense.

So we'll be able to subsidize more people to make electronic home monitoring an option for folks who would not be otherwise able to afford it.

I don't know that, I don't believe, but we'll have to directly speak to Seattle Municipal Court, that it involves, you know, purchasing any additional equipment.

It's just expanding the money available to subsidize to allow people to take advantage of that in lieu of secured attention.

And just to clarify as well, this was a specific request of the court in the context, just in the context that Julie Pine has described.

So counsel action might want to, as Julie described, more of its questions directly to the court itself.

Not that we're not happy to be an intermediary, but just to expedite.

Okay.

Wow.

So, um, I obviously defer to, uh, the folks who've been working in this field for a very long time who are on council here and are also part of the public safety committee, but that sure seems like an equity issue.

If those who are able to not be in detention are those who can afford electrical monitoring.

So I look forward to hearing more about, um, if it is expanding the number of people able to access, or if it's expanding the subsidies for the existing folks.

Thanks so much for getting back to us on that.

Council President, did you have additional questions?

Please go ahead.

Yeah, this isn't this is, you know, I think the the municipal court would.

Yeah, I'm sure they're listening right now and they're already queuing up an email with all of the statistics that they have available around this, but.

You know this.

This came to light, I think, in about 2000 and 17 through the work that I was doing on the I can't even remember what it's called anymore.

joint criminal justice something or other.

And sort of one of the points of information that was really valuable that came out of that is sort of my understanding and appreciation that we have this electronic home monitoring program that does in fact allow people to avoid active incarceration and And I also learned in that process that there was a huge amount of inequity in terms of who could access the home monitoring program, which does come at a cost.

And for those people who have means, obviously, they're able to buy into this option and not see the inside of a jail.

But for poor folks, especially those experiencing homelessness, this was not accessible to them unless the court had the funds necessary to make it free.

So what we were seeing is a lot of folks who were otherwise eligible to be released on their own recognizance, but needed to be monitored because of applicable state statutes, that they were in fact being incarcerated because of lack of means.

So really, I think ultimately, the system change is to have our legislators really advocate for reform in this area to not be so punitive.

and to not require surveillance.

But in the interim, I do think it is important for us to make sure that we allow, again, in the interim, allow for those who do not have the resources to be released from jail on this monitoring program the ability to do so.

The consequence of not funding this program while we wait for those state reforms to occur is that the poorest of the poor amongst those who interact with the municipal court will continue to be detained in jail until they have their case adjudicated and of course we have a huge backlog of cases that need to be adjudicated while the wealthy get to go free because they have the money to pay for it.

So So I just wanted to give a little bit of history around how this came about.

And I'm sure that the court is willing to provide us all with some additional information about sort of who's accessing the subsidized program and sort of what outcomes are seen as a result of that.

But I do want to say that I, in general, do not like surveillance programs.

But the issue here is that there are state laws in place that require surveillance for particular kinds of charges if people are going to be released.

So that's going to be sort of the long game in terms of our legislative agenda in this area, I think.

appreciate that.

Thank you so much for the background and thanks again for the follow-up as well on whether it's the number of folks or we're helping to subsidize it even further, which sounds like an important goal as well.

Council President, did you have anything else?

Any other questions?

Okay.

Colleagues, I'm not seeing any additional hands.

And I did, I'm so sorry.

OK, no problem and I know we're one minute over.

I will make this.

I will make this as fast as I can.

Let me pull up my notes here real fast.

I had some questions about the CSOs.

Should I hold for SPD or or may I ask that now?

I would love if you could hold that, and I will note that you are...

And I'm done.

Okay.

Yeah, we will hold that last box there under SPD for SPD.

Just to come in just a second, I want to thank the folks who've been part of this broad panel, and thanks to council members Herbold and Morales for your comments as well.

I know that much of the six or seven bullets that have been covered in this presentation are We have an hour and a half for this.

I would ask Madam Clerk if you could read into the record item number five.

I want to make sure everyone gets their comments and questions in after the presentation.

Welcome, chief Diaz.

It is another reading, so I apologize.

Good afternoon and thank you, Chairwoman Mosqueda, Vice Chairwoman Herbold, President Gonzalez and other council members.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to brief you on the mayor's and my vision for the Seattle Police Department for 2022. When I spoke to you last year during the budget process about my plans for the department, I highlighted my guiding principles.

centering our work on common humanity, reinventing community engagement, improving employee wellness and morale, fiscal stewardship, and co-creating a new model of community policing.

In the face of historic loss of officers, over 300 in the past 21 months, and amidst the ongoing pandemic, I can report that we still made significant progress in each of these areas, along with knowing that we have a lot more to do.

In a tumultuous year, we again operated within our budget and were able, with your help, to make investments to address immediate and future needs.

We restarted our hiring work, and while we did not reach our ambitious 2021 goal, we made real progress and continue to hit record levels of diversity in hiring, close to 40% minority hires and close to 20% female.

We're primed for exceptional hiring in 2022. We expanded access to wellness services for all those who have remained with us, and we'll continue to do all we can to make this a better place to work.

We've laid the foundation for rebuilding trust through reconciliation conversations and open and honest dialogues.

We're ready for the launch of a new model of policing with the community we serve.

There's real work still to be done, but I needed to begin with discussion by acknowledging and thanking the members of this department for their hard work and service to this community.

Officers and professional staff are incredible.

Throughout the pandemic, most of them remain on the front lines, risking their lives and health of the loved ones, like so many other first responders.

We've consistently asked them to undertake pronounced change, and they've responded successfully each time.

And I could not thank them enough for their commitment to this department and this community.

In a few moments, the team will outline the mayor's proposed budget actions for 2022. This proposal highlights how we plan to move the department forward in 2022, while not losing sight of the lessons learned in the past year.

But before we get into specifics, I want to provide you with a general overview with my vision of the Seattle Police Department in 2022 and the future.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone right now, SBU is focused on three areas, responding to and preventing violent crime and the loss of life.

working to retain exceptional officers we have while continuing to aggressively hire as many qualified officers as we can and implement a new approach to community engagement and policing grounded in real relationships Officers are doing work responding to and preventing violence right now.

We're on pace to take over 1,000 guns off the street for the fifth straight year.

They've recovered over 2,500 shell casings and are doing work to connect these events to understand who is driving the violence, who is at risk, and where the crime guns are coming from.

They also are directly saving lives, and we've expanded our EMT program, and officers are arriving on scenes of violence and injury and applying tourniquets, chest seals, wound gauze, and performance CPR.

They're on the front lines of overdose crisis we are in.

Already this year, we have more individuals who've died of overdoses driven by large increases of fentanyl overdoses than in all of 2020, which in itself was a record year, and officers are often on the first on scene administering naloxone.

They've seized over half a million fentanyl pills along with more than five pounds of pure fentanyl.

This is in addition to over 100 pounds of meth, 27 pounds of heroin, 15 pounds of cocaine.

This work is saving lives and disrupting destructive criminal trafficking networks.

This work requires personnel, and that is one priority that we're working to keep the amazing officers we have and bring on more qualified recruits as we can.

It takes a significant number of officers to safely respond to shooting scenes, to hold those who recklessly discharge dozens of rounds in our neighborhoods, and to disrupt these trafficking networks that prey on people's addictions.

The creation of the triage team and expansion of the community service officer proposals will provide some assistance in allowing freeing up sworn officers to respond to emergency calls.

Though in practice, this often is happening already, given our staffing constraints, so these proposals will help fill a capacity gap rather than create increased capacity.

We have or are implementing as many hiring and retention strategies as we can, but we'll continue to need new ideas and support to ensure we have sufficient number of personnel to do this work.

Those are my operational priorities, saving lives, answering calls for help, and having enough and right personnel to do the work and do it safely in a moment for the long-term wellness.

Functionally, my focus is a new foundation for how we approach public safety.

This approach is centered on around three primary tenets, relational policing, officer wellness, and growth mindset.

I believe the roadmap for this work is found in a more comprehensive model of community policing known as relational policing.

At its core, relational policing means officers, detectives, commanders, and command staff are all committed to establishing real and meaningful connections with the community we serve.

In practice, this means SB sharing more with the community and taking the lead from the community.

This budget supports multiple efforts to start reorienting how we approach every level of engagement.

We will launch a pre-academy training for recruits, connecting them to community and providing a foundation of trauma-informed care, social-emotional learning, and principles of de-escalation.

No other department is looking into this next type of training.

We'll provide every member of the department with both growth and outward mindset training, setting us up to embrace a culture of learning and a commitment to bettering both the entire agency and the community.

And we'll continue to grow and enhance our employee wellness services and engagement.

Finally, the department has continued to work productively with our accountability partners, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Monitor.

This proposal funds essential efforts to continue this work and to allow SPD to maintain this commitment to ongoing accountability, analytics, and transparency.

Just as we require employees to take annual training, we must annually invest in these efforts to ensure they stay on pace with the best practices and changes in technology.

In the midst of many challenges, I remain optimistic.

The members of the SPD have shown they can accomplish whatever mission we give them if they have the support and tools necessary.

I believe this budget continues the hard work we've done throughout 2021 and allows us to start essential new projects and expand existing efforts in 2022. I'm gonna now turn this over to Executive Director Angela Sochi to walk us through the specific budget proposals.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief.

If I could have the owner of the slide deck go to the next slide, that would be great.

Should I pause for a second to give, I don't know if there are any questions.

We're going to go through the slides and then we're going to come back to questions in common.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you very much.

Right.

So the 2022 proposed budget for SPD includes baseline changes, technical change requests, and operating change requests.

As noted in the prior presentation, the proposed budget is about $2.5 million more than our 2021 adopted budget.

To summarize, at a high level, we finalized the transfer of the parking enforcement operation and the call center.

We've made some corrections to allocated central costs, specifically the allocated costs for IT.

There was a duplicate reduction made in 2020. We've adjusted for standard cost changes.

The proposed budget also reduces by $3.7 million.

the amount needed to finance the community safety investments that you just got a preview of, and adds funding for a video analyst in the Office of Police Accountability, and also the citywide language premium staff stipend.

Additionally, $2 million was transferred to SPD from Finance General Reserve for paid parental leave backfill.

As many of you may recall, historically, we've requested this funding via the supplemental process.

That total expense has remained consistent in recent years, so we feel confident in building this item into the base budget.

instead of appropriating in the supplemental as we have previously.

Finally, we also reversed one-time reductions that were tied to COVID, such as event overtime, travel and training that was limited by travel restrictions and cancellations, and also portions of the executive's 5% cut in the baseline process this year.

kind of in line with that.

We opted not to request new funding for Cracking Games, and I'm covering all of these just kind of at a high level.

Many of the changes are neutral, and so we'll discuss where there are policy implications.

We'll try and go into greater detail there.

But again, it's the change requests that are represented are primarily technical in nature, but want to give everyone an opportunity to ask questions as needed.

As a reminder, though, we are going to take questions at the end of the full presentation.

Yes.

I do see Council Member Lewis's hand.

Council Member Lewis, did you have a quick clarification or can you hold your question for the queue?

Just really quick, and I think it would be appropriate here, Madam Chair.

You decide if it's too long and feel free to cut me off or punt it.

But on the comment about the Kraken games, My understanding is that we get overtime for games totally compensated from the sports teams.

And I just wanted to sort of check in and see what the case is on that, given that you just said you weren't requesting money for cracking games.

Yeah, so for the sporting events, those are all governed by contracts, reimbursement contracts.

The majority of those costs are reimbursed to the city's general fund.

There is a second step that typically happens where there's a budget appropriation that corresponds with those expenditures.

Because we've restored our event over time, and there still remains some uncertainty around the amount of overtime that will be needed for events in 2022. We've opted not to request a specific appropriation for the cracking games, but just wanted to flag that here as it's relevant to the event overtime discussion specifically.

Just again, try to clarify that point.

Just because SPD gets paid doesn't mean that their budget increases.

The budget authority actually is the amount of money they're allowed to spend, regardless of where the money comes from.

So a contract with an outside agency still requires increased budget authority in order to spend the proceeds, if you will.

So that's the further explanation of Angela's point, which I thought you did fine on, but just in case that helps.

So here we also have in that other appropriation category, that's going to be our traffic safety fund.

That is a separate fund housed in SDOT.

It is an operating fund.

We charge to that.

The revenue comes from the automated traffic safety program.

Our officers who review those the tickets and sign off on those, they charge their time to that particular fund, but it is not a general fund appropriation for us.

And then lastly, what you'll see in the full-time equivalent change line, as I noted earlier, we did finalize the transfer of parking enforcement and the call center in the 2022 budget.

And so what you're seeing there is a reduction tied to the transfer of the personnel.

in those two sections.

We can jump to the next slide.

The item one here, the community safety investments, this represents a $3.7 million reduction to SPD's budget to finance the new triage team and the regional peacekeepers collective, which we covered in the last session.

Item 2, I'll note this item is a budget neutral item and is a transfer of available funding from the salary line to the continued investment in technology items in the department.

Many of these we've discussed as part of the 2021 midyear process and further details available.

This covers a number of items that we've again discussed previously.

Happy to answer questions or to go into greater detail as requested.

We can go on to the next slide.

Here we have an ad of $1.3 million, not truly an ad.

Again, this is a transfer of department budget from sworn salary savings to finance the expansion of the community service officer program in 2022. I will note that this does require ongoing investment because we're at the mid-biennial.

We're only accounting for the 2022 budget need.

This will need to be revisited in the 2023-2024 biennium for the continuation of the expanded program.

Next slide.

And lastly, we have our hiring incentive program that we've proposed.

Again, this is a transfer of department budget for officer positions that we will not be able to fill in 2022. We would like to redirect that funding to support the hiring incentive program.

I will clarify this is a hiring incentive only.

I think there was some confusion around language in the budget book.

We apologize for that.

This is strictly a hiring incentive program and does not include retention bonuses of any kind.

Next slide.

Here we have $157,000 being added to the department's budget to fund a full-time video content creator.

This was also covered in the last session.

This was a request of OPA submitted on behalf of the department.

Next slide, please.

And to touch on some of the racial equity efforts, I know the chief went into detail on some of the stuff that we're doing at a high level.

Because we haven't made, I have since earlier this year been an active participant on our department's change team.

We really are looking for ways to to collaborate with our change team through the budget process.

I was really encouraged to see CBO this year, encourage departments to navigate that differently than we have in previous years.

There's always been a lot of confidentiality around the budget, and there was an open invitation to engage the change team in a different way this year.

As a result, I started going to the monthly meetings, and we didn't have As I mentioned earlier, the bulk of our budget items were technical in nature, central cost items.

I did not bore the change team members with those, but I do look forward to continuing collaboration with them on budget items.

really important to get that perspective as we are navigating various policy decisions, budget policy decisions specifically.

These bullets touch on a little bit of the things that we're doing to advance racial equity.

Again, these aren't tied to any new budget proposals, but do summarize some of the things that we're doing as a department in this vein.

Just real quick, I think I maybe forgot to mention this when I was, some of my introductory comments at the, this interaction between the financial operations of the departments and their change teams is something that we specifically encouraged this year.

So, and departments embraced in varying degrees, but not to diminish in any way the work that SPD did, but just so you know that that was actually part of a generalized effort.

recognizing that it's really important that we build budgets with this in mind, not just review them after the fact, if you will.

So, again, credit to SPD, but wanted you to know that that was part of an overall effort on the executive side.

Okay, great.

Julie, anything else?

That wraps up my I'm happy to go in question to the Q&A unless Chris Fischer has something he wants to add before we go into the questions and answers.

I am not seeing Dr. Fischer pop up, so we will make sure to note it if necessary.

So we're going to do Council Member Herbold as the chair, Council President, and then if there's any additional hands, please raise those.

That's in the queue so far.

Thank you so much.

I want to start with some opening remarks.

Thanking Chief Diaz and SPD staff for their presentation here today.

I want to note that we've been very focused over the last year and a half on addressing use of force incidents associated with policing protests, and we've been focused on incorporating alternatives into policing as we've discussed during the community safety and community-led investments presentation.

I really, really appreciate the openness of Chief Diaz to considering alternatives and the recognition that sworn officers may not always be the best response in some situations.

It's been a really challenging year and a half I don't want to lose sight of the fact that officers like other workers whose job it is to work with the public have also experienced stress and trauma associated with serving the public during COVID.

I appreciate the service of officers who have stuck with Seattle despite the challenges.

And I recognize that the shortage of sworn officers is resulting in significantly reduced 911 priority one responses.

These are responses that have a standard goal of seven minutes.

It's really important that we make investments to address the real world workload challenges for sworn officers, and I believe we can do so by quickly and carefully working to stand up alternative police responses.

We've seen a really staggering increase in domestic violence, elder abuse, suicide, substance use disorder, gun violence.

I've heard the chief say that social interaction is a perishable skill.

This is so true in the face of a year and a half of social isolation.

And I really I want to note that I want to lift up the fact that the department has proposed in this in this proposed budget to support investment in the triage team and the regional casekeepers collective through shifting $3.65 million of SPD's budget to support rolling out these alternatives and really appreciate that they're proposing to do so for the 2022 budget.

I do have a couple questions on some preliminary analysis of the 2022 budget.

You know, the presentation we just saw, it looks like, and as I understand that presentation, it is designed in a way to highlight the major changes in this budget over the previous year's budget, so to show cuts and adds.

But it looks to me that most of the things or additive were from salary savings.

I think the exception was the OPEA request.

So it's not clear to me where the two million dollars of additional funds in the SPD budget where those are being allocated in the SPD budget.

The things that we just went over, I think almost all of them said that's not added money in the SPD's budget that's reallocated from salary savings.

But if you look at the whole budget, there's clearly, as you mentioned, Angela, about a million dollar increase.

That's one issue.

And then I want to note that it appears that the mayor's proposed budget restores, and maybe this is where where we can find those ads, restores the cuts made in the 2021 budget that were proposed by both the mayor and the council, a mix of things.

The overtime budget from, it restores 6.4 million to overtime to the previous level of I think 29.6 million.

It restores $4.1 million to civilian position funding.

It restores $175,000 travel and training that the council had cut.

And it restores about $300,000 from discretionary purchases.

And so cuts were made in 2021. to overtime with the assumption that, and these were both made by the mayor and the council, these weren't just council cuts to overtime, with the assumption that COVID would suppress demand for services.

Executive requested in its July budget letter restoration of three million of that based on preliminary estimates, and the council provided most of that, although not all.

It's just the background.

My specific questions are, what were the decisions to restore the travel and training, the discretionary purchase, and the overtime budget?

Were they based on an analysis or on specific estimates?

So, for instance, did SPD determine that needs $5 million for the event over time.

We look at the training budget and determine that there were specific training certifications that were missed in 2020 and 2021 that required restoration of the full budget.

The deferred purchases require full restoration of the discretionary purchase budget.

So I just want to understand the thinking behind the restoration of those particular cuts.

And that's all I've got for right now.

Thanks.

Thank you, I'm happy to address those.

I'll kind of go, I'll go down the line first for the event overtime.

We restored the one time reduction fully for event overtime with the idea that we would need that funding as the city reopens, as the number of events that were expected to work increases.

In looking back, we didn't do an analysis of how many hours per se.

We do know that in 2020, we worked over time on about 68 event activities.

We've seen that increase in 2021 to 144 year to date.

We do know that the Seahawks have resumed, the Kraken have kicked off.

Climate Pleasure Arena, the concerts, things are starting to at least be added to the schedule, and so we do anticipate a full recovery at some point either late this year or early 2022. In 2019, just for reference, we worked over 600 event activities on overtime.

I don't know.

We don't know if we're going to have a full recovery in 2022. I feel like we were conservative and not requesting additional appropriation to account for the Kraken games that will be added.

22 of the Kraken games, I believe, are going to be worked in in 2022. They're scheduled.

So that's.

I would say from a estimates standpoint, we expect full recovery at some point and it seemed reasonable to request the restoration of the existing overtime budget that does not account for the parking enforcement overtime that was transferred specifically for special events to SDOT.

We also transferred a portion of overtime for the communication center as well.

So the When you add that $6.4 million to the 2021 proposed budget, it only gets you partway to that $29 million.

The remaining $2 million is attributable to the paid parental leave transfer from Finance General.

In talking with CBO, we decided it was appropriate to depart from that past practice of appropriating via the supplemental process.

Originally, the idea there was that we wouldn't know the actual expenditures until late in the year.

We've seen very consistent expenditures from about $1.8 to $2 million each year for paid parental leave backfill, and that's the origin of that $2 million.

In retrospect, I should have included that in the PowerPoint presentation that we just went through because I think it is It is reflective of new money that's going to be, it's not new general fund money, but it's new money that is being appropriated to SP in a different fashion than it has previously.

So that's, I would say the 2 million, that is truly an add to our base budget.

Additionally, we had a language premium.

stipend of about $19,000.

There were also some baseline adjustments that were a true add to our budget for the annual wage increases that have been restored citywide for select employees.

Those were put on hold in 2020. There are a lot of gives and takes and net changes in the budget.

The restoration of the salary and benefit cost budget for police officers is also included and does account for the source of funding for some of the items that we did highlight.

Normally, when we're repurposing funding within the budget, we were trying to think of the best way that we could represent that in this presentation.

It did make it confusing, though, in accounting for what were truly new ads and what was the repurposing of money.

I know, Council Member Herbold, your attention to the BSLs and transfer of money between BSLs, we wanted to make sure that we accounted for that as well.

Past practice, we would often work that out throughout the year.

and not necessarily present those transfers or build those into the budget.

We took a different approach this year and wanted to make sure that we were capturing the budget for items like the technology investments, moving that money around in the budget process as opposed to revisiting that mid-year like we did in 2021. It does make it a little bit more complicated, though, to unpack everything that is in the budget.

As far as the travel training and equipment and supply budgets that were restored, we do know that the travel and training has been limited due to COVID.

The reference to that in the change request, we did not do an analysis to determine specifically how that additional funding would be spent.

In our statement of legislative intent response, we try to explain how that money is allocated and how it's used, but it can be unpredictable.

We don't always know, you know, the certifications are often tied to or recertifications and the need for new certifications are often tied to personnel movement in the department.

So I would say for the travel and training, we did not do a training-by-training analysis, but we do know that we've seen limited travel this year due to COVID.

And for the equipment and supply budget, that was restored.

We have deferred expenses, we have just deferred costs tied to, you know, we've held off on furniture replacement, some facility changes and things that needed to be done over the last couple years.

We've tried to be very mindful of of expenditures just given the revenue crisis and uncertainty of this year's budget.

There are deferred expenses.

We also have some items, the less lethal tools.

For example, there are things that we're contemplating purchasing if the budget allows for it, but I can't tell you exactly how that $300,000 is planned for 2022 at this point.

A couple of comments I might add, just on that last item, when those reductions were taken, we didn't think that they were necessarily going to be ongoing, right?

They were really, my instructions, and again, as COVID hit really, and then with, let's hold all the cash we possibly can, any discretionary expenses we should avoid, but recognize that that would likely lead to deferred situations where we would need some additional resource in the future.

Just another point about the overall increase in the nominal budget.

It's important to recognize that there are also central cost charges, things like the IT budgets, HR functions, and FAS's space rent and vehicle charges that are passed through the department that are also driving increases.

And we use that structure so the departments face those costs directly and also so that they can spread those costs across grant dollars and other things so the city doesn't directly bear all of that.

grants are generally allowed to cover some share of those kinds of what I'm going to describe as overhead costs.

So that's just another factor, again, essentially outside the department's control that could be and is an overall budget driver.

It's true of every department.

Thank you.

I'm going to turn it over to Council President Gonzalez.

And I appreciate your patience.

And we will come back to Council Member Herbold at the end here.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just really quickly, I had some questions about the CSOs.

Can you just let, can you let me know how many of the current 18 full-time equivalents are currently filled?

So the last I checked, we had eight CSO vacancies, all of which are in an active hiring process.

So that would 10. We just hired 11. 11 of the 18 are currently filled.

OK.

And then when does SPD anticipate that the remaining seven will be filled?

By when?

They've held interviews.

And I believe we have a number of candidates in the background process that can take anywhere from two to four months, depending on on that process, but that is my understanding from HR that all of the positions have candidates identified.

We're just waiting the result of the background.

Okay.

And then, and then can you just give me a general sense of, you know, sort of from recruitment, you know, hiring to sort of, you know, you're in place and you're operationalized.

Like what, what is, what is sort of the average length of time?

The CSOs.

I'm going to see if Chris has an answer to that.

I do not.

And if you all don't, if you could just take a note of it and let us know that's fine.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just.

Yeah, absolutely.

Unless Doctor Fisher has the answer.

Best to confirm that I could guess at it, but best to confirm.

Okay, great, thanks, appreciate it.

Would welcome an opportunity to learn those details.

And then, can you just remind us, you know, sort of what functions are you, are SPD primarily utilizing the CSOs for at the moment?

Has there been any modification to sort of how or, you know, for what functions you all are using CSOs?

There haven't been any deviations from the original plans.

It is a mix of community outreach and engagement, follow-up via patrol, contact, or initiation.

And I know that they've assisted ad hoc on special projects.

the no major deviation though from from the original plan.

I know there was a special emphasis on youth services and youth youth engagement.

Is there is is there any way to determine or or is SPD at all tracking how?

CSOs are helping to reduce.

you know, to reduce, well, I guess to freeing up sworn officer time so that our sworn officers can focus on higher priority calls.

Is that information that you are all tracking in any manner or that you have all had observations about?

I'll punt to Chris on this one from a tracking standpoint.

If we're we're documenting that time savings anywhere.

We do know that they, I think about 50% of their time is going to sort of the resource engagement part where they're either helping patrol or helping on other projects.

I have not looked at the data, how often they're sort of being, handing off a call from a sworn officer so the officer can leave the scene and the CSO can take over.

It's a good thing to check.

We'll work with the data team to see if we can pull that out and get a sense of how, I know, that was somewhat limited during COVID just because of where we were trying to use them and not expose them unnecessarily to having extra person-to-person contact.

But as things have reopened, I think it's a good place to look in the data to see how well we can track that, and if we're not able to tease that out from our logging to calls as they do out over radio, so we should be able to tease that out, but that's a good thing for us to check on, Council President.

Great.

Grateful that we might be able to identify that data point.

Really appreciate it.

And then this proposed budget includes an addition of six community service officers for a total of 24. And I was just wondering where that number came from and whether or not the department has additional capacity to, you know, increase the CSO unit at perhaps a more drastic pace.

When we developed this proposal, it was in connection with the reimagining community safety work.

The idea, we took into consideration at the time that we had a number of vacancies in this area and wanted to make sure that we were putting forth a realistic proposal in terms of how many we could actually onboard.

Other considerations are, you know, identifying facility space for them, vehicles, making sure that they have the equipment.

and that we have the capacity to actually onboard.

And so I would say that the six was a conservative proposal, just we would love to have more CSOs, I'll put that out there.

But the six was meant to be a realistic addition.

We were going to start pursuing that ideally in 2021 to make sure that they were fully onboarded by 2022.

Dr. Fisher, anything to add?

No, Angela did a great job.

That's helpful information.

And then, you know, and then just the last question on CSOs.

So we even during our mid-year supplemental budget have had conversations about, and really it's sort of, it's a policy question.

There's been questions about whether, where the CSOs should reside.

And I've heard through the grapevine, but not directly from you all about about, you know, sort of your thinking about where the CSOs are most appropriately.

And so I did want to just ask the question on the record about, you know, my understanding is that you all very much believe that the CSO function should remain within the Seattle Police Department.

The alternative is to, you know, continue to allow there to be perhaps a relationship between the CSOs and SPD, but have the function housed in a different, department, most likely the Department of Community Safety and Communications, and just wanted to have an opportunity to hear directly from the department about your perspective as it relates to that policy question.

Yeah, happy to, to at least, I think there are plenty of subject matter experts and stakeholders that I think need to participate in this discussion.

Just kind of high level, I think, Whether the CSOs work at SPD or not, there's always going to be a body of work there.

There's always going to be police officers who encounter individuals who, through various contacts, whether it's through 911, through an on view, who need follow up, who need assistance, who need some kind of support that the police department, immediate support, I should say, that the police officers aren't, aren't able to provide, whether due to staffing constraints, the need to go to another call.

The CSOs are providing DV support, transportation.

They're assisting at crime scenes.

They have access to areas and information that wouldn't necessarily be available to them absent perhaps an MOA with another organization or agency.

We see there's not only an efficiency to having them, but there's the relationship piece too.

Having the CSOs have relationship with the police officers, I think there's a mutual benefit there.

There's a comfort in the relationship as we were establishing this program.

was we felt key to the transfer of workload to another entity or to another professional within the police department.

That, you know, that relationship we see as having learning potential.

We can see the CSOs engaging with police officers, or demonstrating different skill sets, sharing information that may not necessarily be available.

That's the access to, there's the logistical piece, but then also I think the kind of more holistic piece of just having these individuals work alongside police, recognizing that that they're providing a different service.

They have a different set of training, a different skill set that we think truly complements the work of the police officers.

I would just add, I think from speaking with that team, I think a lot of them feel part of what they signed up for was to be this resource in a police department.

And one of the, harkening back to the 2019 innovation team hiring and retention analysis, one of the suggestions was a civilian pathway to hiring.

And I think we've seen a couple of the CSOs from their experience decide that they wanted to apply to be a sworn police officer.

So I think we've seen from the folks who have signed up to be CSOs that a certain number of them then have realized that, you know, maybe they want to serve in a different capacity, but they may not have ever thought about that had they not had the exposure and the relationships that Angela talked about.

And I know Angela did a tremendous amount of work, and with so many others, in standing up the CSO program again and that analysis.

And I know that project really sort of showed that significant parts of community, when they were doing this outreach, wanted to be in the Seattle Police Department.

And they wanted them to have that connection, I think, for a variety of reasons.

I think we have to go back and look at what those notes said about what the reasons were.

But I do remember that was one of the sort of the bullet points that came out of that engagement work that Angela and others really helped lead about how to stand up the CSO program again.

Yeah, and I'm familiar with with some of that community engagement work that you all did.

That was during the time I was still chair of the public safety committee.

So, so, so I'm, I'm really aware of that.

I just, I just also know that that was then and this is now and.

And so I guess what the real question is here is sort of, is SPD at a minimum open to continuing to have conversations about that policy question that I framed up?

And I'll just sort of share that I'm interested in sort of wrestling with that particular question to determine what the answer is, and certainly would be interested in continuing to engage with The various stakeholders in this area, including the police department, around how we find resolution to that overarching policy question about where the CSOs are most appropriately housed while still maintaining the integrity of what their purpose is, which is to sort of provide some, you know, alternative and relief to sworn personnel at SPD.

I think we're happy to engage in that discussion and just hope that.

I know with some of the other transfers of functions outside of the police department, we made the decision before we actually worked out some of the logistical details.

And in this case, I think just, you know, we're working hard to get this group fully operational.

And my hope would be that we could engage the CSOs and everyone else to work out some of those details before we actually initiate any sort of transfer.

Yeah, and I think we're all sensitive to that and appreciate the desire to want to have that conversation in a way that sort of facilitates resolution to the policy question, perhaps before we engage in the mechanics of a transfer.

So I appreciate you flagging that for us.

Madam Chair, I don't have any additional questions.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to explore that area.

of course.

Thank you very much, Council President.

I'll have a few questions and then Chair Herbold, I don't see any additional hands yet.

So colleagues, if you do have hands before Council Member Herbold closes this out, please let us know.

I would also just add to the conversation that we just had that while the conversation about transferring out individuals who I think could be better I know that we're going to continue to talk about where I'm looking forward to continuing to get feedback from the board and council president Gonzalez about how it is so important to get feedback from folks in the moment that we are now about where the conversation may have evolved.

I think director Fisher you were alluding to that as well.

the diverse stakeholders, including labor, about how best we can provide these alternatives and where they are best placed.

I did have a question about slide number four.

This is a, you don't have to put it up, it's okay, Patty, you just wanted to orient folks back to the CSO conversation that we were having, and this builds on the council president's line of questions.

I wanna make sure that as we follow up on some of the CSO questions, I believe there was some additional data that you all were going to compile for us.

And I wanted to specifically ask if we could include in our feedback about the portfolio of the work that CSOs have, if we can get an understanding of how and when they are deployed, and if there is any specific responsibilities that armed officers are taking.

or if that is something that is written down as a protocol and process would like to see if that's written anywhere.

And then the CSR portfolio, it was sort of described as being similar to what it's always been, but I would love to sort of get that in writing as you think about responding to the questions that the council president already asked.

And then council member Herbold, I'm sorry, Dr. Fisher, did you have a question about Okay, just seeing some nods.

Okay, great.

And then Council Member Herbold, I don't want to steal what you've been really pressing on, but I'd like to just underscore it, if I might.

As we were preparing for this presentation as well, along with Council Member Herbold and other members of the committee here, I know that many people have been looking at the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, or NICJR, as we've been calling it.

That National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform found that there had been a significant number, a significant percentage of the calls that were currently being responded to by armed patrol that could, at some point in the very near future, be responded to via an alternative non-sworn police response without SPD involvement.

And I want to make sure that we go back to Council Member Herbold's line of questioning to explain both whether or not there is any movement in this in the last couple of days.

We have a proposed budget in front of us to reduce the number of officers who are currently responding to that 12% of calls where there was agreed upon differences between agreed upon responses that could be handled by an alternative response starting now.

The only thing I would add is I'm just concerned that we're conflating the universe of calls that the Nick Jr. report said, hey, we think that universe of calls, I think was around 50%, don't necessarily need a police department or police officer response.

I'm concerned that we're conflating that larger percentage with the smaller percentage, the 12%, which represents only 28 call types, that the executive agreed with Nick Jr. and said, we agree that in the near term, we should work to divert those 140,000 calls a year.

The triage one program as it looks now is proposing to divert about, I think it's about a fifth or a sixth.

of those 140 hours of calls represented by that 28 call type.

So earlier, Julie Klein said, oh, SPD wants to do another analysis of the 28 call types.

My understanding is that you were going to do that risk analysis with the universe of call types that Nick Jr. has said might be possible to divert.

That's great work.

I want that work to happen.

But if there is indeed a subset of 28 call types that are low-hanging fruit, that we all agree don't need a sworn officer response, I want to get working on that right now.

So that's, I think, just the only clarity I would offer.

And perhaps I'm just making the question more muddy, and I apologize if I am.

No, and thank you, Chair Musqueda and Vice Chair Herbold.

I know you and I have talked about this before.

I will try to re-explain the thought process, and maybe the thought process needs to be different.

So when we got the Nick Jr. report, as they clearly state, their analysis looked at the high-level call type, what the name says, as well as how often someone was arrested.

And they also matched it up with, did that call type seem to be related to an RCW, and whether that was a misdemeanor, a felony, or a serious violent felony.

Those were the factors they took in when they divided stuff up into their tiers.

So when we first got that, we looked at it, I think, and saw Again, on that same name level, yeah, these 28, the names sound like generally something, I think the only questionable one that we've always highlighted, and Julie mentioned this, is disturbance.

I think that one is slightly complicated.

There are four different ways of how disturbance is logged in a call.

They have different subtypes, and disturbance in and of itself is a very broad category.

That one particularly gives me pause.

But then, as we continue to look into the report and as we engage Dr. Alpert, that's we really were sort of turned on to this idea of this risk-based, there's a way, it's been done in other countries, it's never been done in the US, but there is a methodology to do it, and we've been talking with folks who can support us to do that, where, from my sense, from a methodological standpoint, it makes sense just to do it to all the calls.

The number of calls doesn't affect the analysis, the analysis is, and you run the same numbers through, to make sure that we're not, at a name level missing that one of these call types, something like people tend to get hurt a lot, or when officers get there, there's someone injured a lot.

And making those up, I don't know what those could be.

But the idea is to construct how often based on data, Is there harm?

And there's a whole science on harm.

Harm is not just harm to the person.

There's broader harm.

And so that's what we'd prefer to do to make sure we're not placing anyone in any sort of unintended risk or liability by sending someone to a call that on face value, on name value, seems like it's going to always be safe.

But if we look at the data, maybe it's not.

And we had had those discussions for years about the person down and the welfare check and fire and SPD and labor for both agreed.

Yeah, these calls when we get there, one, sometimes no one's even there.

And two, when we get there, we're not really necessary.

And I think from Julie's other point is with these 28, maybe we can, I need to talk to our data folks about could we do this risk analysis quickly on just these 28?

Does that work?

Will that duplicate effort that slows stuff down or is it not really a big deal?

And also do the labor sort of discussion.

And as Julie pointed out, you know, missing property, found property, I believe there's an RCW issue there around other folks taking possession of that.

But those are just the checks we want to do on the group that we're with.

they were in the Nick Jr.

National Institute list that just on face value, you're like, yeah, I can see why, why are you sending police to littering?

For example, that just makes sense.

But, you know, I feel we should just do the due diligence.

If we want to push faster, we can see if we can on these 28 where we think they look pretty simple.

But that was the, that was, I think, the complication here is that Methodologically, I think it makes sense to apply the same lens to all the call types.

But if you want to look at these 28 differently, we can try to subset those out and get a sense of, can that go faster than doing everything?

Yeah, and that is what we had discussed last time we talked, is that you would take a look at whether or not it made sense to phase it.

I just want to say, I, there's urgency, not just because we're reimagining policing and we want to reduce police contact when it's not necessary, but there's urgency because we're, the number of officers we have to respond to 911 calls is greatly reduced.

So if we can get them off of those calls that they do not need to be responding to, and we can do it quickly, then in doing so, we can reduce those 911 priority one call response times and get them back to where, closer at least, to where they need to be.

Right.

I think to one of your other areas that you like to focus on, we have been, the CEO of Baird has been really pushing and working with the CSCC about can we change some of the language on the online reporting tool to encourage additional online reporting.

There's some language there about whether you know a suspect, and we're a little worried people might be overly interpreting.

If you know, like, yeah, the person was in a red sweater, like, you don't, you don't, that doesn't help.

You don't know who that person is.

That doesn't count.

And one or two other wordings where we think, oh, you might not get follow up.

I think it was one of the other things, you know, if you file online, there's no guarantee you're going to talk to a detective.

There's no guarantee you're going to talk to a detective in any case necessarily, depending on what evidence is available.

So I think we want to clarify that to encourage people who don't really feel they need to see an officer face-to-face to report online if they can.

So I think that will help there.

I know you've talked to folks nationally about this administrative that helps offload.

But yeah, totally here.

And I think we're very open to how do we make sure officers are going, especially now in this crisis, to where we need the officers to be.

We just don't want to send someone to a call that an officer needed to be at I think we just want to be diligent but totally agree that it can't take years.

Part of this budget funds this analytic work to develop it and test it to make sure it works.

So I think we're on the same path.

We may be slightly different, I think, on the timeline, but I don't think it's a huge difference.

I see Councilmember Peterson and Councilmember Herbold.

Councilmember Herbold, you still have the mic.

Did I cut you off?

No, that was your question.

I was just, I was just taking over.

You're right, that was my question.

All right, let me, as we talked about, we'll come to you at the end.

I'll go to Councilmember Peterson and then we'll come back.

Thank you for helping elaborate on my question and appreciate the answers.

Councilmember Peterson, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chair Mosqueda, and thank you for arranging today's agenda so that we could hear about alternatives to different types of responses before we got to SPD.

And I want to reiterate my support for scaling up alternatives to not only prevention, but also emergency responses.

But now that we're talking about SPD's budget, here, I wanted to make sure we addressed, because I didn't see it in the PowerPoint, the number of officers in the budget, it says that there was a net loss of about 193 officers since the beginning of 2020. And then what I had read in various statements from the executive was that they're trying to, and I'm approximating here, but that they hope to hire 125, but Patricia might end up losing 90, so you end up with a net of 35 approximately.

So I'm trying to, when we say a net gain of 35 though, that's off of a revised baseline of having lost 193, so in a way, If we compare January 2020 to January 2022, wouldn't it be a net loss of 158 even after you gain 35 net approximately?

Okay.

I just wanted to sort of set that context, and I don't think there's a magic number for how many officers, but as Councilmember Herbold was saying, you're just having the basic coverage while we scale up alternatives.

It's important to me that we have that basic coverage for now.

Because it takes a long time to hire officers, even laterals need to be trained up to the consent decree training standards.

So what, could you tell me a little bit more about what SPD would be doing to retain the officers that we have, since that might be one of the most efficient ways to at least keep the 24-7 911 response, at least for priority one calls?

No, great.

Thank you, Councilmember Peterson.

I think you generally got the math right.

I don't have all those numbers in front of me.

Angela can check them.

I think she does.

But yeah, so I mean, part of that is the capacity to train.

125 would be a record number.

We have, though, this year demonstrated we can do an SPD-only class with the Academy, and we believe if we get The unknown is how many people apply and qualify.

As the chief has said, and I think as we demonstrated early on when we had folks who've been waiting in the wings during the COVID pause, we can push people through.

Right now, our holdup has been getting enough people to apply.

And so I know you asked about the retention, but just part of the equation is getting more people in.

So we do think we can hit the 125. It is ambitious, as the chief mentioned in his comments, It's been ramping up.

Anytime we've had a pause, it takes time to get that machine running again.

We feel it's running again.

So we do hope to hit that number.

The attrition number is always a guess.

There's a little bit of formula to it about how many people are eligible to retire and how many years on.

This year, I think as the year has gone on, we have seen the early separations slow down.

while folks who are eligible for retirement have retired at a still slightly higher pace.

So we may be better able to more closely predict the attrition number because it is, I think, a little bit more, we're getting back to where it's more folks who are able to retire instead of folks leaving early, which was the issue in 2020 and in the first half of 2021. So I think we're a little bit more confident that that attrition number will continue to come down.

Our estimate may still be high.

It may not.

I think we're going to have to monitor that month to month.

In terms of retention, I think one of the biggest things, it was one of the items in that recommendation from the innovation team, was the wellness schedule.

I know the chief and others in labor have been discussing an alternative shift schedule.

I know the staffing is a constraint to that.

There is a minimum number of officers we need to be able to do the 410s.

I believe we're still able to do that, but that's why we're also trying to keep that moving.

We don't want to lose so many folks that that doesn't make sense anymore.

I think we've heard from enough people that that model is a big boost to wellness and likely a big boost to both recruitment and retention.

As the chief mentioned in his comments, we've also been trying to increase our wellness services.

We've been trying to have mental health professional access at all of the precincts so that it's not having to find the resource, the resource finds you.

And I think to one of our earlier discussions, one of the other big recommendations in the 2019 report was developing leaders or really like investing in the department, not in buying equipment or other.

It was really about getting people access to building their skill set so that they could have a vision of a career path within the department and potentially after the department.

And so a lot of that is having access to training.

As Angela mentioned, some of that is you have to have certain training to do certain jobs, like our TCIS, our major crash investigations.

significant training that takes a lot of time and it is costly to know all the math and the science around impact and angle and speed.

But so there's those about that people have to be certified to do it.

But then there's also those personal development leadership development that I think the more we can offer that which we've been doing that you've mentioned the growth and outward mindset.

I think the more we can show the employees that the department wants them to grow within the department to gain new skills and that the city and the department are willing to invest in that, I think that's a huge part of retention.

So I think that with wellness and with the including the shift, I think are some big Items that can help there and I think just continuing as the chief has been doing internally and we've been posting on social Is just continuing to acknowledge good work.

I think in any field people like to feel valued And so I think just continuing those efforts also can let people feel that you know There the reason they're in it is being recognized And people appreciate what they do Thank you, thank you

of course.

Thank you very much, Councilmember Peterson.

Okay, Councilmember Herbold, I am not seeing any additional questions, so if you'd like to finalize our questions here for today, you are more than welcome to.

Real quick, I'm not getting a clear read of whether or not we are going to be able to implement 410s or not.

And this is, you know, it's a high, it's such a high priority, right, for, and it has been for years.

And so I just, I know central staff has asked lots of questions, and again, we're getting mixed messages around the staffing levels being a barrier.

Are we going to be able to hire 410s?

I would have to check in with operational folks.

Not a project of mine.

Okay, all right, fair enough.

A couple other questions.

You touched upon this, Dr. Fisher, and I'm maybe just going to frame it a little bit differently.

You acknowledged the ambitiousness of the hiring plan and is completely appropriate.

I want to just put a few, a little bit of meat on what that means to be, which is based on their years.

So that I think we can anticipate separation of 85 fully trained officers in 2020. And that's low, right?

We haven't seen a number as low as 85 since 2017. On the hiring side, the goal is 125. That's never happened.

Even when we had hiring bonuses in 2019, we were able to hire 108. So given those trends, why would it be Why wouldn't it be advisable for us to hold another five or so million in reserve to see what happens with the hiring plan?

I think I would start the most recent normal year, 2018, there were some other, I think, broader issues around separations.

2019, we start to see that recovered.

The beginning of 2020, we were seeing record low separations up until June.

Um, like month by month, when we look at our, we were starting to think we were going to have a record hiring year in 2020 until the second half of the year.

Um, so I think we see the uptick that we saw.

We think some of that as the, as that once hiring went on pause, it takes time to come back.

We think we've worked through that and the, the process What are your thoughts?

I'm not sure it's implemented, I'd have to check with HR, but there was the plan to have the system to help electronically manage, because it was a lot of paper, and tracking all of the backgrounding to speed that up.

And then also with the chief's proposal around this relational policing pre-academy training, where we would hire people almost immediately And they would go through this pre-training before they started the academy.

So there wouldn't be this pause where we sometimes lose people to other agencies who are able to pick them up more quickly.

I think all that combined gives us the hope that we can hit that number.

There's no guarantee.

Every year, I don't think we've ever hit the exact estimate.

It's a forecast.

But I think Seeing where we were, I think we just launched some new, I believe today, some new sort of very targeted radio ads, online radio ads.

I don't know how many people listen to just plain radio anymore in this age group.

But if you're willing to sign up, Jeremy Muscata will take you.

But I'm thinking more of the 19, 20-year-olds.

So I think that we We're doing what we can do to expand the reach.

The system is in place to be able to process more.

And we think if we can implement some of these retention efforts, we can slow down and also just sort of natural.

A lot of people have left and unless people want to leave early, I think we may have pushed a lot of people may have if they could pull early, they pulled early and we may have worked through sort of folks who are in that position.

And so I think all that combines together.

We think we can.

The attrition can be lower and we hiring numbers that are a little higher than we've done.

But again, it is a forecast and it is an ambitious one, but I know it's the focus of the chief and I think we hope we can hit it.

Thank you.

Signaling that I'd also like some additional detail on the technology spend, $5 million.

Would like to know whether or not the expenditures are necessary for compliance with the consent decree, or which expenditures are helpful for the development of alternative police response.

And the context for that being, of course, that we approved 2.25 million in additional technology funding just a month ago in the mid-year supplemental.

So we want to understand this $5 million technology add within the context of things that we want to do because of policy or have to do because of the consent decree.

And then lastly, we've talked a little bit about the feeling that we'd like a little bit more transparency in the police department's budget.

I appreciate Angela's remarks earlier about trying to get the funds in the BCLs as we intend to extend them this year rather than coming to us mid-year.

asking for those funds to be moved after they've been spent differently.

And I don't know if one thing is leading to lack of transparency in another area, but specifically in the what the budget calls salary savings.

On the presentation, you can add up the things that say, oh, this is supported by salary savings, so it has no impact to the budget.

Adding that up, it comes to about $7 million.

But we don't have anywhere in the budget book where it says These were the salary savings that in total, and here's how we decided to spend them.

And that's different than what we had in the 2021 budget.

In the 2021 budget proposed by the mayor, she specifically called out 15.8 million in salary savings that were redirected to other mayoral priorities.

So I'd really like to see that total number of salary savings and where it all goes.

So we could totally send you the technology breakdown just for high level rather than going through it now.

But some of it is continuing that work that you already helped us fund.

It wasn't going to get done in that year, and there's more to do to continue.

And so a portion of that is very specifically about continuing to have the analytic capacity and tools to do the reporting that has sort of become standard because of the consent decree.

But then, and we'll relay this all to you, there are a few projects that are about sort of going beyond the sort of where we are and really trying to push forward the whole field about how we measure and manage around quality and equity and disparity and really baking those analytics in to our management style and our meetings.

Just like we have the crime analytics, we want to build the tools to be able to do that in dashboards as easily as we do as crime up or down.

So that's part of that work that we want to do.

And then some of it is doing this research around this sort of risk-based, you know, demand model on call alternatives.

So we'll send you the whole breakdown, but some of it is consent decree, some of it's continuing the projects that were already underway that need continued work, and some of it is some new projects that are on our horizon that we think continue to move us the right direction.

And I'll let Angela handle the budget part.

So you're correct that there is much more salary savings available than it's represented on this overview slide.

I've already promised Greg Doss a full breakdown of how that money's been reallocated or redirected.

In some cases we're not, we're for separation pay and deferred comp and some of these items that we discussed at the mid-year, those benefit costs, those didn't require a redistribution.

And so those aren't represented.

But a portion of our salary savings, we're looking at likely between $18 and $19 million in salary savings next year.

So a portion of that is funding the community safety investments that we talked about.

you know, I think that's about 3.6 million reduced off the top.

And then from there, we've accounted for the funding needed for separation pay, the funding needed for deferred comp, the civilian personnel costs, the continuation of those positions.

that we discussed at mid-year.

Again, we'll provide a full breakdown of how that money's been allocated in the budget because these are transfers where we didn't actually need to transfer money between BSLs to account for these.

You're correct that it's not clearly represented in the budget.

Greg and I have already been discussing how we can map that out for everyone.

So it's very clear in the supplemental information that we provide.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you very much.

Madam Vice Chair, I appreciate your line of questions.

All of my colleagues who've asked questions today at SPD, I want to thank you for your engagement.

And I'll have a few instructions here for those who have questions and did not get a chance to ask them today.

Or if you sit with this information and have some more questions that come up, we are happy to help field those.

First, thanks for your deep engagement today, colleagues.

I do want to thank members of SPD and the city budgets officer with us.

As we close out this item, I want to remind us all that this is tough work.

This is transformational work.

This is work that's being discussed at the national level and in cities across this country.

And we know that this conversation has been expedited and reignited in many ways because of how many people turned out in the streets last year.

I want to again remind us and root us in why we're having these discussions.

especially as we think about the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and then the thousands of people that we saw taking to the streets in a call for a moment of racial reckoning.

We are all working towards, I think, a national conversation that is playing out very locally about how we can reimagine public safety and reinvest in community support services so that people don't ever have to interact or engage in in violent situations or interact with the police in the first place so that people have greater stability, health, and safety.

And we also know that across the nation, there's been growing incidences of crime, and we are committed to making sure that our city is a safe place, a safe place for residents, a safe place for small businesses, a safe place for tourists, and especially centering ourselves on making sure that this is a safe place for Black, Indigenous, and people of color to live and feel safe in their own communities as well.

We have done a number of things in the last few years, and many of them I think are reflected in our discussion today.

Mostly, I think that it's important to note the continuation of this council, and I believe within the mayor's budget, we will be continuing to do some additional analysis.

But what we'd like to see is a continuation, and some of that is reflected in our discussion and draft budget in front of us, the participatory budgeting process, which we talked about today.

The $10 million that went into community safety and capacity building that we increased to $13 million.

As director noble summarized yesterday in his presentation, there is a continuation of that to the tune of $10 million.

So making sure that those investments are kept whole in the upcoming year and future year has been greatly appreciated.

three community safety hubs and hotspots to address issues of gun violence, which has also been plaguing our nation.

So I really appreciate the discussion today is trying to both center investments in community and really right-sizing our investments in traditional public safety.

And as we continue to do this, you know, there are still national headlines like the one that we just got from the New York Times just as we began this conversation at 3.30 today.

noting the higher than previously counted number of people who died due to interactions with armed officers at a national level.

So this is not about being punitive in any way.

It is truly about trying to center our conversations on how to do that right investment in upstream investments and make sure that public safety is addressed.

And that means freeing up officers to focus on those high acuity cases that the council president talked about and reducing the need for any officers to have to spend their time showing up when what they should be doing is focusing on those high-acuity cases and letting mental health and case managers and housing connectors go to calls that they're currently having to go to.

So we will continue this work.

We know it's transformational, as we talked about at the beginning of this meeting.

It is a movement and not a moment.

And we want to make sure that we are addressing these underlying issues of both deaths and high rates of injury and violence and also We are making sure that we are investing in upstream solutions for greater housing stability, access to economic stability and food security.

With that, we know it's going to be a few tough conversations, but appreciate Chief Diaz.

Thank you for being here.

Dr. Fisher, Angela Sochi, thank you as always.

We know where to find you.

And as the vice chair and chair of public safety noted, these conversations have been ongoing and we anticipate there to be a back and forth dialogue with you as well.

And Angela, you noted already your quick work with Greg Doss and central staff.

And we know how quickly you all have been working to respond to some of our questions.

So there will be many more, I'm sure, to come.

But this is a good foundational understanding for us today.

And I think that centering these conversations on the both and approach, we can both address the traditional public safety concerns and we can think about how we invest in community safety upstream to reduce incidences We are also aware that there's many questions that weren't able to be asked today, so you may get some more questions from us, from other council members that did not come on to camera today.

Allie Panucci from Central Staff sent a reminder to our colleagues at 445 today about how you can submit your additional questions.

The deadline for submitting your questions to Central Staff is tomorrow.

That's Friday, close of business.

And we are asking you to send those to Patty and to Allie.

And a huge round of appreciation and applause for Allie and Patty for coordinating those questions with us and for Patty for being with us, for managing the screens and materials.

Thank you very much.

And Allie for being with us as well as Ben Noble all day today and all day yesterday.

We will see you for one more round of sessions tomorrow starting at 9.30 a.m.

Colleagues, the last thing I will note for you is that there's two items on tomorrow's agenda that are relatively new.

One we noted earlier this morning, which is moving the HSD presentation that is not related to homelessness to tomorrow afternoon.

That'll be the last item covered.

The first item covered tomorrow, per the request of some council members, was including OPCD, Office of Planning and Community Development, at the beginning of our agenda tomorrow morning.

So they have really impressively put together a PowerPoint presentation for us, and that is also in your inbox, and it is on the revised agenda.

Appreciate OPCD being here.

We're gonna start in the morning with OPCD.

We'll have Seattle Department of Transportation.

We'll have back the Department of Parks and Rec in the morning.

We'll have a break.

And then for our second session, we'll have COVID response and recovery presentation.

followed by that final HSD presentation.

Thanks again for all of your work today, and if there's nothing else, today's meeting is adjourned.

Have a great night, and thank you all for the work you do.