♪♪
-Okay, thank you, everyone, for being here, this afternoon.
I'm really excited to talk about a few things
we're doing relative to public safety.
And I certainly want to thank
Seattle University President Eduardo Peñalver for --
you'll hear from him in this presentation,
but I want to thank him for letting us in his house,
house of education.
And I -- that's not in my prepared remarks, of course,
but I've been watching you publicly talk about some
of the political challenges
and sort of nurturing the academic minds.
And how you allow creativity in expression
and calibrate the need for all people to be heard.
So I think you're branding this great university very well
in your leadership.
So I want to thank you for having us here today
and for your continued leadership.
I want to sort of level set with a quote and
that quote came from Mark Twain, of all people, and I love it.
"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection."
We're trying to get better with everything that we do.
And we're here today to provide a six-month update
on our CARE dual dispatch pilot
and to make an announce about the future
of the CARE Department.
And I recognize many of the leaders in the community here,
the family of activists,
and leaders, and public safety zealots, if you will.
And I want to thank you for being here
because we're all committed to keeping one another safe.
Last year, you may recall we announced that CARE,
our third public safety department,
working alongside Police and Fire
to better understand the needs of our communities.
And deliver improved public safety outcomes
for all residents.
You guys get this?
I broke my pen while I'm so excited here,
so it's a pen-breaking day.
Since October, our pilot, our dual dispatch program,
has been in full swing,
featuring six dedicated CARE responders who are between --
who are behavioral health specialist
with all prior field experience.
Many have either bachelor's or master's
degrees in a related field.
But the pilot, of course,
CARE -- couple our CARE responders with SPD officers
with units dispatched simultaneously
by the 911 calls -- call center and called on by the police.
So our CARE responders, let's make it very clear,
have successfully
and safely assisted community members in need
and freed up police resources across hundreds
of emergency calls.
This is critical work.
This team is respond, to give you some data,
to over 500 dispatch calls with an average response time
of less than ten minutes
and an average time on scene of approximately 40 minutes.
Over a third of requests involve transport
to shelters and day care centers, time-sensitive ask,
which quite candidly,
would have taken police away from other priorities.
CARE is providing people the help
that they need through behavioral interventions
and crisis de-escalation, resource navigation.
And assistance in finding services by providing
basic supplies like food or water, clothing, hygiene items.
So today, the purpose of this afternoon,
is to announce that we are expanding CARE citywide,
seven days a week, over the next coming months.
We will hire 18 responders and three supervisors
as part of our midyear budget supplemental and expansion
supported with a $1.9 million investment in federal funding.
This expansion was informed by a 911 call data,
the data that we examined,
and will immediately include neighborhoods under SPD's
East Precinct like Capitol Hill and the Central area.
And followed by North Seattle and then South and Southwest.
The expansion plan includes new partnerships
with Seattle University that I'll describe in a minute.
This is all the evaluative work that they're providing with us,
the University of Washington School of Social Work.
I lied to the president and said I wasn't going to mention
the University of Washington at all,
but I had to mention that as part of their master level's
practicum placements.
In other words, they get actual experience
as they're preparing for their master's degree.
And of course, the Crisis Solution Center,
which receives direct referrals from our CARE responders.
But here, at Seattle University's campus,
we're really celebrating the longstanding partnership
on public safety research that's done right here.
They evaluate, they examine,
they improve our CARE Department.
Seattle University has been an essential partner
in our public safety work from the Seattle Public Safety Survey
to evaluation of community policing plans.
Again, we want that sort of academic validation
that everything that we do
to make sure we are good stewards of public funds.
Now they will evaluate the CARE expansion,
including field observations, emergency response data,
and feedback from our public safety partners.
Again, I talked about when I first took office
about being a learning organization.
You cannot learn effectively unless you are ready to evaluate
and look at the data
to make sure you're making wrong decisions.
And if you're not -- right decisions or wrong decisions
and never be afraid to pivot,
never be afraid to let the data inform your decisions.
And that's how we approach all of the work we do,
in particular, public safety.
So as your mayor,
I'm fully committed to creating a city
that is safe for everyone.
And we know that, again, diversifying
and iterating our emergency response options
is going to be the key to this kind of work.
I want to thank the CARE employees
that have sort of allowed us to look under the hood
as we do this work and to self-actualize
and grow with you.
CARE was built on best practices from other cities
doing similar work.
I recently attended a conference,
a US mayors conference, and we actively --
I actively engaged with other mayors on this kind of work.
We think this is the kind of policing approach
that is indeed going to save our city,
and indeed, save this country from some of the problems
we're all facing.
We will look at expanding this citywide
with crisis responsive alternatives to nonviolent,
nonmedical emergency calls. And so we want to make sure
that we're going to continue
to do our work addressing the underlying health issues,
and quite honestly, just helping all of our neighbors
when they need it the most.
So with that, I want to introduce our next speaker.
I'm going to take the time to fix this darn pen
because it's been irking me while I've been speaking.
Because I want to introduce Chief Smith
and give her the props that she deserves.
A little bit about her background.
Chief Amy Smith holds advanced degrees in ethical leadership,
administration, and organizational learning.
Most recently, completing a doctorate
at Vanderbilt University
where she honed her data science and behavioral research skill.
She spent 20 years in leadership
at human services organizations in Washington,
Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
And she's an example of one thing that we try to do.
We try to recruit really, really good talent.
And having said that about Chief Smith,
I do want to let many of you know, she knows this,
that all of this,
when we had come up with this concept of CARE,
was a pilot, was an experiment.
And she's been working as an interim position
and I'm very pleased to announce
that we will send a package to Councilmember Kettle and company
of the City Council for a final confirmation.
We are convinced she is the right chief at the right time
to lead this important body of work
and so we will be sending her for confirmation.
And hopefully, that will be favorably --
there will be a favorable process.
We're going to whip the votes, by the way.
I'm letting you know now,
but a favorable outcome in that process.
So with that, Chief Amy Smith.
[ Applause ]
-I'm happy to be here today.
I made a joke at a forum a couple of weeks ago
that these occasions are the only way
I get to see my friends.
And it's kind of true, especially today.
I love that we're here
in the Sinegal Center for Science and Innovation,
a nod to scientific principle in practice.
What is predictable, what is knowable,
and curiosity is so vital to scientific method
that asking why isn't enough.
You have to also create a lot of space for candor,
for debate, and for dissent.
The moral psychologist, one of my favorite teachers,
Dr. Jonathan Haidt, wrote,
"I have striven not to laugh at human actions,
not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them."
And so before sharing some learnings from the first year,
I want to first acknowledge my mayor, Bruce Harrell.
Now that I've spent a little bit of time
in the political landscape,
I am more convinced than ever he is the only person
who could have talked me into this
and really inspired me into this space.
And I want you to know that he has been nothing but supportive.
He has given me a lot of space to think.
He has given me latitude to imagine.
And he's also given me license to act and I thank you for that.
And I also want to acknowledge Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess
who consistently asked me two things.
"Do you feel supported and what else do you need?"
And he did that again yesterday and I thank him for that.
These men and other leaders have given me license
and supported me in just showing up and being authentic,
showing up exactly as I am and describing things as I see them.
And that's the only way I know to be, so I thank you for that.
So also from the outset,
I said that I was going to be indiscriminate with the press,
that I would talk to any community member,
anybody who wanted to have a conversation.
I heard my teammates a couple weeks ago,
one said to the other,
"If an unmarked van pulled up and asked her a question,
would she get into the van?"
We don't -- maybe. I don't know. I don't know.
But I want to acknowledge that from Day 1,
I trusted the press and people writing about public safety.
I trusted that people were sincerely trying to understand
and trying to communicate things about how we could do better
and how we could be better.
And I'm really gratified today, a year into this,
that that trust is valid.
You have been great with me.
I have not been misquoted
and this work hasn't been politicized.
And because of that,
I've been able to actually focus on these issues
and the people that really matter the most.
And so I commend that and I thank you for it.
I'm going to share a few things I got wrong
and then I'm going to share a few things
that I think we're getting right.
The first thing,
last year, I said publicly several times
that I was really agnostic about my title,
that whether it was chief or director, I was going to be Amy.
It was inconsequential to the work.
Mayor, if you're keeping score, plus five points.
I was completely wrong and you were right about that.
The mayor's vision was not to set up another little pilot team
to be underinvested in and
not supported the same as Police and Fire.
His vision was to set up
and legislate a third public safety department,
three different departments of first responders,
to invest in it, to support it.
And again, to let the data demonstrate
that half of these calls
could probably use a civilian response.
I came to realize in the first year
that we swing wildly in our rhetoric,
in our political rhetoric,
that there's two ideas out there.
One is that we compel people to comply
with our societal expectations.
And then the other is that we really don't intervene at all
under the auspice of compassion.
And I can tell you that through the lens
of behavioral psychology and neuroscience, both are wrong.
We are -- humans are complex mammals,
and we're mammals, right?
We still need basic incentives and deterrents
when we think about action.
We're hardwired to survive,
and what is familiar feels safe,
and sometimes that's on an unconscious level.
And we have stripped much of what we know about
human motivation out of our structures
and out of our systems.
We need incentives and deterrents,
and the less developed the brain is,
the more clear those need to be, cause and effect.
We have brilliant interventions and community-based
organizations in this city.
Many are represented here today.
They're models and programs that work
and they work because compassion, and support,
and assistance are balanced with accountability.
They work when somebody starts to have hope
that their life could be different,
that they could be different.
And to me,
really good case management looks a lot like love.
It's not our job in the public sector
to tell someone who they are and how they will recover.
It is our job to ensure
that there is a broad array of resources available
for all different kinds of people
and all different kinds of circumstances.
The CARE team has spent a lot of time
mapping the system, getting to know these other teams,
and providers, and resources.
It's not just in the nonprofit sector.
It's also at church. It's in the private sector.
Jen Carl, talking to you.
We have established a direct line
for these teams to go right to the CARE supervisor shift phone.
And that allows us to collaborate,
to case conference all the time, to share resources.
And really, watching all these teams work together
across sectors has been the inspirational experience
of my life, truly.
Chief Scoggins likes to say,
"One plus one equals three," and he is so right about that.
When we work together, our efforts are multiplied.
They're magnified.
And I think it's the best wellbeing strategy
you could ever want in these professions.
As the mayor mentioned, to date, we've been to 539 calls.
I forecasted last fall it was going to be
all different things and it has been.
Someone is lost
or someone was abandoned by their friends downtown.
Someone has been evicted
or released from medical care, recently.
They have no idea where to go next.
Someone is hopeless after losing a job or a spouse.
Someone doesn't have clothes or doesn't have shoes.
And I promised that I would not recommend expansion
until the data demonstrated that we're getting it right,
that the team feels safe,
that the officers have not been needed.
And especially that the community believes in the model
and wants the expansion.
And all of this has been established now.
We used to call SPD back only to make a referral
to the Crisis Solution Center.
We've called them back one time recently
because we were going to provide a ride for someone
who became erratic as they were entering the vehicle.
It was not a big thing. We called police.
They came. They gave the ride.
I'm really happy to have just recently signed the MOU
with DESC
that now CARE can make that direct referral
to the Crisis Solution Center
and I thank Daniel Malone for his partnership
and his leadership.
This is another example of something
police should not need to do.
I was wrong last year to focus so much on call types.
The call types frequently misrepresent what
the actual need was.
I sometimes use trespass as an example of this.
We're moving toward a dramatic simplification
in 911 dispatch design.
Rather than having hundreds of call types
which largely misrepresent what the problems and emergencies
turn out to be,
we need a really simple system
that says does this require a gun and a badge?
Is there reason to believe that? Is this a fire?
Does this require emergency medical transport?
If neither, that stuff in the middle,
that should be a civilian response.
I was absolutely right to design with Police and Fire.
I conceptualize this as three divisions
of one big public safety team.
And I do hear from leaders and elected officials
all around the country
that this is likely the secret ingredient.
This is the X factor.
And Seattle is emerging as the blueprint for
how we should do this work.
I appreciate that Seattle is acknowledging the types
of calls actually coming in
and this is consistent across the country.
Two of my top priority one calls are overdose and suicide.
We know we lost 73 people in Seattle to homicide last year.
We lost over 1,300 to overdose in King County.
Out of 33 major metropolitan areas in this country,
Seattle-Tacoma is the second highest
when it comes to attempts to die by suicide.
And so those are the emergencies.
That is the threat to life right now,
and we need to acknowledge that,
and set up first responder units who have protections,
and provisions, and wellbeing strategies,
and can be directly dispatched.
I will answer more questions, later.
You know I like the questions
but I want to close with the thing
that I'm getting the most right, personally,
and the thing that I think all of my heroes
in this work are getting right. I shared last fall
that I've trained myself to look at a person
and think what would I do if this is someone I love.
And every morning when I wake up,
I reflect on three different questions.
Do I believe every life has equal value?
Do I believe that every person can change?
And do I believe
that while someone is breathing we keep trying?
I do.
I'll share with you
that I get e-mails from all over the place
with subject lines like, "If you see my daughter."
I hear from parents who are absolutely beside themselves
because they know that their child is living
unhoused somewhere on our streets
or they know that they're dependent.
People implore me to help.
Several times, someone has said, "This is what she looks like.
If you see her, tell her I love her."
I get e-mails from people
who are worried about their family businesses,
that their dad's business is going to close
because these little tents have popped up
and people can't get in the front doors.
I've sat in a lot of community meetings and neighborhood
meetings where grief, and loss, and fear just hang in the air.
And I have yet to come close to this,
to see these problems and issues in context
and have them not make sense.
It makes perfect sense.
I respond to all of those e-mails
because I know if I was that mom in Yakama,
that's what I would do.
I would send that plea.
And I know if that was my dad's business,
I'd send a similar message.
And I know if this was my kid's school,
I would be scared and I would feel betrayed.
I get to see miraculous things every day.
People recognize me sometimes now
and then just like abruptly tell me their story of recovery.
I got served coffee and someone was like, "I'm 15 months sober!"
And I was like, "Great! That's awesome!
Thank you for telling me."
Last night, I spent the best possible evening
at Champ Boxing gym in Rainier Beach
and I watched as my new friends, these brilliant men and fathers,
coached these kids.
They're running drills
but they're also breathing confidence, and hope,
and integrity, into young people.
I was shocked.
I thought it was going to be like eight people.
No, it was like -- they're laughing.
It was like 45 people packed in.
It's hot.
All different ages, you know, all genders.
It was really exciting to watch.
And the moment that really impacted me was at one point,
you know, they're drilling, and then suddenly,
Kevin Loyal calls out, "What's the definition of integrity?"
And all these little hands shot up.
And the young man's answer was,
"Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching."
This struck me because that is exactly word for word
what I was taught, you know,
in a neighborhood that looked really different
but was also really the same.
And I was taught that from birth
and I have carried that throughout my life.
That principle informs everything I do,
and how I think, and what I say, still.
And so I want to close with a reminder
that real change never happens in government buildings.
It happens in our home and it happens in our neighborhoods.
And I thank you all for being part of that.
[ Applause ]
Thanks.
And now I get to introduce Councilmember Bob Kettle
who has been wildly supportive from the first time we spoke.
He is the chair of the Public Safety Committee.
Please confirm me, Bob.
It'll hurt my feelings if you don't.
-Okay, the first thing I have to say
is that standing here is that the mayor has it right.
You want to go ahead of Chief Smith
and not follow Chief Smith.
So I know that I can't compete so I'll be very short.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Thank you, Chief Smith and President Peñalver.
Thank you very much for having us here.
Bottom line upfront,
as I said, we cannot succeed in public safety
if we don't also succeed in public health.
And we cannot succeed in public health
if we don't succeed without CARE.
We need to have the Community Assisted Response and Engagement
as we move forward in public health.
We need the outreach of CARE on our streets
to help those in need and we need the example that they set,
you know, that shows our communities, our neighbors,
Seattle is a caring city.
As values this third approach to the challenges
that we face on our street every day.
And so we, as the Public Safety Committee and as the Council,
want to work with you, Mr. Mayor, first,
but also, Chief Smith, to ensure CARE success.
And, you know,
our strategic framework
to address the permissive environment
that underlines our public safety challenges
has one pillar specifically designated for public health.
It's so important to focus on that because, again,
we can't succeed in public safety
if we don't also succeed in public health.
But we also have a second one that says
that we can't do this alone.
First, we, as a city government,
the mayor's team, you know, the various executive departments,
the legislature, you know, the council, the committee.
But also, City Attorney Davison and the judicial side, as well.
We have to work together as one Seattle team.
And we have to do so with the county and the state
that has that public health,
those public mental health responsibilities,
public safety responsibilities. And I said this before,
but one thing I want to change today
is that I also want to acknowledge
and thank our federal partners.
I want to thank Congressman Adam Smith and
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.
I've met in my office or theirs
and we talked about these issues.
And it's instrumental the support
that we've gotten on the federal side,
particularly with respect to CARE.
And so I want to take that opportunity right now
to acknowledge and thank them for their support.
So again, we cannot succeed in public safety
if we don't succeed in public health.
And we cannot succeed in public health without CARE,
without our Community Assisted Response and Engagement.
So thank you so much.
And now, President Peñalver.
[ Applause ]
-Thank you.
I'm delighted to welcome you this afternoon to our campus,
to the Sinegal Center for Science and Innovation
here at Seattle University.
Seattle University is proud to be Seattle's university.
In that capacity,
we're always looking for ways to support
and serve our city whose name we share
and whose success is essential to our own.
And among the ways we serve Seattle as a university
is our rigorous and relevant research in support
of innovative policies and practices
to make the world and our city a more just and humane place.
As the mayor suggested in his opening remarks
with that wonderful quote from Mark Twain,
being progressive means seeking progress,
not demanding utopian perfection.
It means effective action, not empty and performative slogans.
The essence of progressive policy should be pragmatic
and evidence-based innovation to make the world a better
and a more just place.
And it should aim to foster a spirit
of informed experimentation and continuous improvement.
Seattle University applauds Mayor Harrell and Chief Smith
for their innovative and progressive work in conceiving
and rolling out the CARE team.
And by providing a more flexible toolkit
for the city to respond to 911 calls,
a toolkit that more closely matches the diversity
of human needs of those seeking help.
Seattle is leading the way nationally
in developing alternatives to traditional policing
for situations
where the traditional model is not what's called for.
At Seattle University,
we're proud to be doing our part
to support this important work through the efforts
of Seattle University professors Jackie Helfgott, who's here.
And Matt Hickman,
of the Seattle University Crime and Justice Research Center,
as well as their student researchers.
Together, they're helping the city to study
and evaluate the performance of the CARE team
during its first year.
Gathering data and offering critical analysis to ensure
that this innovative program is achieving its goals.
We look forward to further supporting the city's
efforts to find new ways to foster a safe, secure,
and just community here in Seattle.
And it's now my privilege to turn the podium
over to Dominique Alex, the CEO of Mary's Place.
She's a Husky, but she did study for a year at Seattle U.
And I'll just say both her parents are Red Hawks,
so I'll turn it over to Dominique.
[ Applause ]
-Thank you.
Before I get started, I just want to acknowledge
the blue shirts and coats in this room.
And those of you that are also on the front lines
every day working with our unhoused neighbors
or those that are in crisis.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mayor Harrell and Chief Smith
for inviting me to be here today.
We are grateful for your leadership
in recognizing the importance of well-coordinated
person-centric continuum of care.
And we're excited about today's announcement
of the CARE services expanding in our city.
The CARE's team is standing in the gap,
providing an important resource for people
who need help in critical moments of fear,
confusion, grief, and distrust.
Recently, the CARE team met a woman struggling
with her journey of homelessness.
She had been barred from several shelters and was feeling lost,
overwhelmed, frustrated, and threatened.
The two CARE responders handled the situation
with compassion and empathy.
They didn't see her as a problem but as someone in need.
Through calm conversation,
they were able to deescalate the situation
and understood her background.
They saw her as a person first.
The responders brought her to our women's day center
and provided our staff with valuable information
about the woman's mental health needs
and her basic resource needs.
Which included food, hygiene products, and clothing.
The CARE's team members waited patiently
for the woman to calm down,
ensuring a safe and positive environment.
And provided her with a location
of our overnight shelter accommodation.
They provided our staff with their phone number
for future situations that may warrant a coordinated,
collaborative response.
This is what the CARE's team does.
They show up and they are present with people
where they are and provide them with what they need and deserve.
These teams can provide compassionate,
trauma-informed care in a situation
where a unified -- excuse me,
a uniformed police officer's presence may not be
the necessary or right response.
With the addition of the CARE's team,
we have a system that doesn't just respond to crisis
but walks alongside individuals and families
every step of the way,
addressing not just the immediate needs,
but long-term goals and challenges.
That helps people navigate very complex systems
and access the resources and opportunities
they need in a trauma-informed and culturally-responsive way.
By creating a truly coordinated,
person-centric continuum of care,
we can transform how we support our neighbors
who have been most impacted by inequities.
We can move from merely managing crises
to fostering genuine long-lasting change
in people's lives.
This is not just about improving our systems,
but also about recognizing the full humanity and potential
of every individual and family in our community that we serve.
It's about building a community
where everyone has a support they need not just
to survive but thrive regardless of their station of life,
their background, or moment of crisis.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
-By the way,
that's my spokesperson right there, Jamie Housen.
He said I can speak.
That was pretty powerful, authentic, brilliant,
one might add, and I want to thank, again, the team.
And Councilmember Kettle,
I really appreciate the way
you thanked our federal partners because we did receive a grant
that I mentioned.
And it's because I think that our federal delegation,
their love for our city and our love for this state
warranted the kind of investment they advocated for.
So thank you for making sure we gave them their proper due.
Having said that, we'll entertain a few questions,
and I'll just call you out.
Chris, please.
-I have a question for you, Chief Smith.
-Here we go. Yes.
-You're going from responding to a very small part of the city
to now going citywide.
Can you explain just logistically
how this is going to work for your team
in responding citywide? -Yeah.
Cat, do you want to take the mic?
This is the first time I get to do this.
I have people who know more about this, yeah.
Yeah, it's -- go ahead. So this is Cat Hernandez.
She is the CARE team manager. She was a 911 supervisor.
She is the best in the business overnight
because she uniquely understands the systems,
the nuance of call types,
also has an MSW and was in crisis response before.
She is phenomenal and now can prove it.
Come on. -Good question.
-She knows I hate compliments,
so that's why she did that.
So luckily, we're -- being housed within 911,
I think we already come from a system
that has developed processes for this that we get to work within.
So it's part of why we're following some of
like the geographical spread, some of the organization
that we see already with the precinct model.
We're doing ours a little differently
because North precinct we know has a call load
that's comparable to any other two precincts combined
and also just geographic spread is similar.
So we're going to treat that as two different sections
of the same zone.
And we really want to make sure
that our responders in a given area
are familiar with that area, present in that area,
that when they're dispatched,
they can have a quick response time.
Which is especially important for also
if we're going to be relieving officers
and encouraging them to use our services, to not feel like.
"Well, I could have done this in the time
it took for me to wait for you to come get to us."
So we want to make sure
that also even when they're not on calls
that they're out visible in community.
Making people familiar with their uniforms, their vehicles,
that they're a safe person to approach for assistance.
So for all those reasons,
we're going to have a very place-based strategy
to make sure that we're physically in those areas
and everyone's being dispatched from within the area
in which they're operating.
And we're also going to be doing a staged rollout piece by piece.
And making sure that our very experienced existing
CARE team members are going to spread throughout those zones
so we don't have all of our experienced just in
our original area.
So we can all support each new team as they come on
and give them that kind of hyper support
that they need and then roll out our next area.
-So does that mean, for instance,
with Capitol Hill and the Central District,
they would be stationed out of the East Precinct?
-Anywhere in the East, actually.
We're still investigating locations.
It could be co-locating somewhere like that.
That's where the victim support team for Human Services is
and we work closely with them.
It's also potentially exploring co-locating with Health One
as they look for additional spaces.
It may even be community centers or community spaces.
We're very adaptable in that regard because the team knows,
"Get out of my house.
Spend time out in the field. Minimal time in the office."
-I say it nicer than that.
I do.
-I don't. -Thank you. Well done.
Yeah, that was good.
That was her first answer, so good job.
-Any other questions? Yes, Dave?
-What is the kind of breakdown of CARE dispatch directly --
like directly from dispatch
versus an officer calling for a CARE member?
And then to the latter point,
does it feel like officers are starting to understand
that this is an option that they can actually use?
-Yeah, I can answer that. Yeah, that's a good question.
So to date, it's about 88% of the time, officers are asking,
"Please join me," or, "Please come after."
What isn't probably understood is that the way
that I designed this, I had a primary question.
We stood up and rolled out fast.
In a perfect world, I would have had a year.
This is the brand. This is who we are.
This is what we do.
Lots of training with law enforcement.
Another mistake I made,
it didn't occur to me it was just the West Precinct
that needed to know us because that's where the pilot zone was.
Because police augment, everybody's everywhere,
and that whole department needed to have awareness
of who this team was.
You have to be very careful
when introducing something like this, right?
Because if it goes wrong,
if somebody has a negative experience or interaction,
it can go sideways quickly.
So what I was trying to do is not directly dispatch, you know,
even when we fell within the criteria initially,
I wanted to know will police ask for this.
Will they?
And they do, all the time.
I think I shared last year in an interview
that I was actually surprised we wanted to hear over the radio,
I listen all the time.
It's a little bit neurotic.
But to hear all the time, you know, "Is CARE online?
Do we have a CARE team?" The CSOs,
that's another unit that's really important to police,
these secondary response units.
So right now, it's an 88% of the time
police have been requesting it to date.
It's not going to continue to be that way.
We do have capacity. We could expand right now.
In fact, I recommended it about a month ago.
I saw if we're only going on two or three calls in a shift,
that's unacceptable.
I know that we need to be dispatching
to more calls than that.
And again, the onus is on dispatch.
911 is, you know, sort of the architect of response.
And so I need to make sure that my folks in 911
really understand when to recommend
or when to ask the caller, "Does it seem like this
or does it seem like this might be more useful?"
And that's all new, so is that -- yeah?
-Yeah, just following up on that,
does -- are the current CARE responders being used to
the maximum extent that they can or is there dead time?
-Yeah, well, to date,
I would say the way they've been used is appropriate.
About half the time has gone to spending time in community
on the front lines of service.
I see Dom Davis from We Deliver Care.
I've gotten a call here from CoLEAD.
Basically every outreach team in town, the MID ambassadors.
There's a reason we know target loss prevention.
We are trying to become embedded in the system,
and then uniquely, we can organize the system.
And go, "Okay, when do I just call Jen?
She probably knows this person."
Or, "When do -- Dominique, right?
When is Mary's Place the right resource?"
So it has been very scientific the way we rolled out first
build strong relationships.
Who does what for whom? It's so complicated out there.
You know, in a perfect world,
you could just run a query and go, okay,
I've got a 65-year-old woman who has two cats
who has this diagnosis and this. What are my options?
But that is not how it is right now.
So that's how they've been used.
Going forward, it's going to be more calls, you know, a day.
Again, I have no patience for this.
You know, we've got so many people suffering
and so I want to absolutely maximize every single minute.
There's urgency, yeah. Thank you.
-Go ahead, you -- -Can I? Connor?
Oh, I know people now, see?
Yeah.
-When do you plan to have these 18 people actually out
in the community serving?
And then also, will they still be working 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM?
-Yeah, good question.
So some of this is contingent on the supplemental budget process.
These, again, are new positions that are being created.
I've got the job specs, already, for the supervisor,
as well, because now we won't have a manager and a team.
We'll have teams with shift supervisors
reporting up to a manager.
But those positions were already created at the outset
and now they just need to be approved.
It's going to be a swift hiring process
because I get inquiries constantly
and there are a lot of teams in the county
who are really interested in joining.
And I will always have bias toward people
who are already in the system, and familiar,
and know how to use the radio, and things like that.
My guess is that the first wave of hiring
will happen in July or August.
And what I've been told and what I believe is that by year end,
by the end of this calendar year, everybody will be out.
We're moving from three 12's.
We had been doing three 12-hour shifts and a floating four.
I got that from Durham.
I had heard that it's a good model
because it allows you to be out of the work for four days
which is mentally easier.
And I also really wanted the four hours for
after-action review, rigorous evaluation.
Are we getting it right? What is the feedback?
What are we hearing from other first responders?
But that's now a lot of things are automated, you know,
and we don't have to spend that much time sort of on
the academic side of it.
So we're moving to ten-hour shifts.
Noon, right? Is it noon to 10:00 PM?
Yeah, noon to 10:00 PM, and again,
that it just looks like that's
where we would be the most useful
and we can cover more areas reducing slightly.
And we will continue to iterate all the time.
That's what I'm trying to set up is, you know,
when the next wave of whatever kind of crises happens,
you know, can we be flexible and adjust time.
If it turns out that 2:00 AM is
when we're really needed all the time for suicidal ideation,
then we need to have the flexibility to change.
And right now, we're not organized with labor yet,
so I'm saying try everything.
You know, try as many things as you can
so that we can figure this out.
Thank you. -Please.
-Yeah, Josh Cohen with Cascade PBS.
Question for Chief Smith. It sounded like in your remarks
that you think there are many more calls
that CARE could be responding to.
With the data you have now,
do you have any way to sort of quantify
how many more responses CARE could be getting?
-Yeah, I mean I'll say high level,
we get almost 900,000 calls for service.
If you just looked at the calls,
again, about 40, 50% of the time,
they just don't require Fire or Police.
It's all different things.
It doesn't mean that currently right now,
Fire and Police aren't the most skilled up
and prepared to respond.
But sometimes when I think about it, I think, oh, no,
for this, I'd call a mechanic.
For this, I'd call WSDOT. This would be parks.
You know, this is behavioral health.
This is a housing specialist.
And so I'm speaking in general terms
but I do know that right now, I mean,
just I can look at one little crisis category
and there's 8,000 calls for service.
The other interesting note is that these calls take
a longer time to do well, right?
It's generally not an acute crisis.
It's often something that's a little bit complex.
And it has been interesting.
I look at the data every day to see time on scene.
There are calls that have taken three hours
and that was appropriate.
And if we hadn't invested the three hours,
this would have turned into an acute emergency.
So, yeah, good question.
Jen, I'm going to compliment you, again,
if you ask me a question, yeah.
Yes.
-No, two comments released about the first
from Councilman Kettle who, by the way,
for what it's worth, I third the request for confirmation.
That aside, you mentioned that we can't do this work alone.
And then, Chief Smith,
you mentioned the complexity of the system
that we're working with.
So my question coming from the private sector,
is how do we continue to really support the work
of the public sector, of public safety, of public health?
Where do you see more involvement from us
to continue this work that we're doing?
-Yeah, I love that question.
You know, I love that everybody is trying to figure out
where they fit in right now in my experience.
I mean, if you're talking to me,
you probably want to help, right, and I appreciate that.
I've gotten a more specific framing in my mind
now of the role of the public sector.
I feel like we should be responsible for the response
to that 911 call and for sort of late-stage diversion,
right, as you're sort of bumping up
against the criminal justice system or some other crisis.
That's really where we sit.
That's where I like the taxpayer dollars to be going.
I feel like prevention,
that is largely community.
You know, that's what I described in the gym.
Jen Carl I got to know
because she is running loss prevention for Target
and she set up her own little diversion strategy.
I think was it during COVID
that this happened initially with the --
-Just after.
-Yeah, 2021, started to -- she's also getting a PhD.
in criminal justice, which is awesome.
But she started to notice of course
there's a difference between someone stealing a sandwich
and a flat screen, right?
There's a difference here.
And actually set up a new sort of legal process that, you know.
"You can't come back.
You can't come back for a year if you stole from us.
However, conditional trust pass. You can come in.
You can go to this desk.
If you are hungry, I will give you a sandwich
and we will try to connect you to services."
That is what I want to see from the private sector
and I do see it a lot.
I know the Hospitality Association well.
I know the BOMA folks.
Everybody's trying to figure out
how can I help minimize the burden on the system,
on the public sector, right, to respond to this.
And also, we all need to be part of this diversion,
which essentially is just,
"What do you need?
What is going on here? Are you hungry?
Are you in crisis?"
More and more, I'm seeing people want detox.
I think that we're losing so many people to fentanyl.
I think most people have lost friends
and they're starting to realize that this will kill me.
And so there are these cogent moments.
I never saw it a year ago, personally,
but now I see it just about every day
if I'm out walking around.
"Would you like us to call detox?"
"Yes." And that is fantastic.
And so we need to make sure that when somebody says yes,
we have that treatment on demand.
And again, Chief Scoggins, Jon Ehrenfeld's in the room,
heroic effort to change the system almost overnight
it's happening and I really appreciate
that because we've got to be scientific about this.
We need medical support. It needs to be on demand.
And when somebody's not doing well,
when they're in crisis or there's mental health issues,
we've got to go to the person.
We can't set up a system that puts all the onus on the person
in crisis to navigate a system that I, myself, can't navigate.
Yeah. -Thank you. Come over here.
Please.
-This is for you, Mayor Harrell.
-Oh, shoot. We were on a roll here!
-It was a good run. It was a good run, yeah.
-So we've heard Chief Smith say that 40 to 50%
of these calls could probably be responded to
by someone without a gun and a badge.
But right now,
the city's MOU with SPOG severely limits the size
that CARE is allowed to grow.
So is one of the city's big priorities
in upcoming negotiations with SPOG
to get that number increased?
-Absolutely.
We recognize that there are labor
or bargained for conditions of employment
that we inherited
and I think that SPOG understands that policing
in 2024, and 2025, and for the future will change.
It's changing in this country. And so we have those discussions
and that coupled with accountability measures.
And so as we grow academically, and with data,
and with the commitment of --
and I also want to take one more note of the community leaders
in here helping us love this city.
I see you.
That we will bargain for these issues
with the police department,
with SPOG, and hopefully,
expand and I feel very optimistic that we will be
where we need to be in the next coming years.
David?
-Yeah, sort of following up on that and for Mayor Harrell,
how broadly,
how big can the city go when it comes to alternative response?
This is an extra, whatever the math is, 12 people.
-Sure.
-How much bigger, money being no object,
could this go or should this go?
-So I have two responses.
One is one mystery was solved during this press conference
and that was when Chief Smith said
that when you talk to Chief Scoggins,
"One plus one equals three."
I see why I'm always scrutinizing
his budget now on overtime.
But more importantly and more seriously,
that is the question of the day.
You know, I've said in my encounters with the police
that when you look at what's tearing this country apart
in terms of racism and unreasonable force,
Councilmember Kettle said it best.
The health challenges.
I have zero desire as your mayor to arrest someone that's sick.
That's not our strategy.
So how big can CARE go?
I do not know. The data will lead us that way.
And that is --
and I think you see her brilliance
in her analytical skills in looking at
how we are responding in our 911 center.
And I've visited there.
I've actually taken my wife there,
and I listen to the calls,
and it's just amazing the decisions that have to be made,
and it's, quite honestly, it's very stressful, too.
I have to recognize that. How big can we go?
The data will lead us that way
and I'm not putting a limitation.
Because when I walk downtown.
And I'm going to be very candid here.
I see a lot of people that need help.
They don't need to be arrested with handcuffs.
There are times to make an arrest.
I don't mince words there.
But there's a time to -- I'll use the word you used.
There's a time to love and be compassionate.
So I place no limits on this.
I know that's a rhetorical answer,
but that's the best you're going to get from me today.
But we're not putting limits around this.
And when I talk to other mayors in this country
and I talk to them all the time.
We have the mayor of Daejeon,
South Korea in town right now and we had dinner yesterday.
I even talked to mayors from different countries
about this approach.
You know, we're not talking about guns today.
I'll talk about guns in the next hour.
What's happening to our country,
this has to be the approach which is based in compassion.
So we put no limits on it, David.
I don't know how you're going to quote anything
I said on this answer, by the way,
but I think you get the gist of what I'm saying.
Okay, I think we're pretty good. I didn't dodge any questions.
Thank you for being here.
Community, thank you for being here, all of you.
I'm not going to call any by names,
because as soon as I do that,
"You didn't call my name, Mayor."
Thank you, President, for allowing us in your house.
Thank you, Dominique, everybody.
Oh, our chief here.
You snuck in on me on the flank here, Chief Rahr, thank you.
Let's do this.
And I just want to, again,
as we go through the confirmation process,
end with an applause for Chief Smith.
[ Applause ]