♪♪
-Hello, I'm your host, Brian Callanan.
Seattle has expanded its
Community Assisted Response and Engagement
or CARE department teams citywide.
What impact is this 911 alternative response program
having on public safety?
And what's its future in a challenging budget season ahead?
After launching in downtown Seattle in late 2023,
civilian CARE teams are now citywide,
responding to lower level behavioral health calls.
-That's freeing up officers
from a short-staffed Seattle Police Department
and earning praise from neighborhoods across the city.
-It's going to take this multidisciplinary,
multi-pronged approach to right the ship.
-But the current dual dispatch model
with police officers accompanying
CARE's social workers on every call
carries high costs.
CARE's chief says sending these responders by themselves is safe
and cost effective in a tight budget year.
-Every time I dispatch CARE,
we're saving 50 cents on the dollar at least,
versus a police response.
-What negotiations are needed to help the department scale up
and pay for Seattle's growing public safety needs?
-A potential sales tax is on the table and being discussed.
-We're talking to Chief Amy Barden
to clear the air about CARE.
-My primary concern, which is the human suffering.
I don't like spending a dollar
if I don't think it's going to help.
-Caring for the future of public safety in Seattle,
next, on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪
Welcome, once again, to "City Inside/Out,"
here on the Seattle Channel.
Brian Callanan with you, and I'm joined by
the chief of the Seattle CARE department, Dr. Amy Barden.
Chief Barden, thanks a lot for being here.
-Happy to be here. -Let's break this down.
I wanted to start our discussion by explaining
what the CARE department is.
The mayor calls it the third branch
of public safety in Seattle.
How do you describe it?
I just want to make sure we let people know,
'cause this department has only been around
for less than two years at this point.
-That's right. Yes.
Seattle CARE Department has been established
as the third public safety department,
with the intention of being co-equal
with the police department and the fire department.
There's three divisions. The largest is Seattle 911.
So, that's about 150 dispatchers, call-takers,
administrators, analysts,
who field about 900,000 calls every year for service
and then dispatch the call.
The second Division is the CARE Crisis Responders.
And so when you hear CARE,
that's often what people think about.
These are first responders who have been trained
and have a skill set to go to
appropriate behavioral health emergencies, right from 911.
So they go alongside police sometimes.
We dispatch police at the same time as CARE.
Sometimes, they are encountering people who are suffering.
We call those "on views."
And so they can respond to those calls as well.
We've been to about 4,000 calls now, that unit,
in the last 18 months, and without incident.
It's gone overwhelmingly well.
We've called police back for assistance
three different times only.
Twice, I think it was, to make a referral.
Now, we can do that ourselves.
And then the third division, by the ordinance,
describes an Office of Violence Prevention.
And I think the desire --
That was the prior council that drafted that legislation.
But I think the desire is just to really coordinate
prevention work, right, and re-entry work.
And to make sure that we're all working in a coordinated way.
-You've had some time to look
at some of the gaps and problems in the system.
Can you take me big picture on that?
What's most urgent for you to fix here?
-Yeah, I think in simple terms.
I think, when I have a 911 call, I have an emergency.
I can send a diversion team, right? So, that would be CARE.
I can send somebody unarmed out to assess and analyze
what's going on and what services are needed.
Many of our calls, I often say about half --
they're really social work in nature.
We've got overdose.
We've got suicidal ideation sometimes,
mental health crisis.
Sometimes, it's something like dementia.
Something is going on cognitively.
People need help, but that doesn't necessarily require
a gun and a badge.
Un, so, I should be able to send diversion
and then, ideally, hand off to a system that can help the person.
CARE responders are supposed to be first responders.
They're not supposed to be case managers.
It's not my desire that they're on the scene
for six hours, working through everything.
My desire is that they can rapidly triage and then say,
okay, this person should be at Connections, right?
Or this person lives in this
permanent supportive housing environment.
We need to get them back home, get them help,
you know, rapidly respond and hand off to a system
that will help the person.
When I think about enforcement, a coercive intervention,
if I'm sending law enforcement out,
it should still be with the intention to help.
So if somebody is going to be arrested, to what end? Right?
So we talk about open use often.
If you're arrested and then referred to LEAD
or referred to some sort of diversion service.
-Open use of drugs. -That's right.
Especially a drug like fentanyl,
which should be considered lethal, in my opinion.
You know, we should be able to swiftly refer somebody
into, still, a useful system.
So, that's my criticism of things like jail bookings.
But is it going to help the person? Right?
I sort of reject the notion
that a booking, fundamentally, is a deterrent to break a cycle,
especially a long cycle of crime or crisis.
However, if you were booked and then you had detox supports
and comprehensive reentry planning and case management
and started to understand what your own pattern was,
what it was coming from, what the causal factors were,
and we returned you to community healed in some way,
improved in some way,
then the city would look different.
-I think so too, and I wanted to talk about
this idea of expanding the CARE's crisis responder teams.
This has been happening over the past few months,
and the department's been growing pretty quickly.
It started as a pilot project downtown
less than two years ago.
Now, it's citywide.
Can you explain why this program needed to go citywide?
I think the data you're taking in on 911 calls
indicates that they're needed in more areas,
but I wanted to get your take on that.
-If you were to be able to say police,
fire, EMS or CARE mental health,
half the time you'd hear mental health first.
That is what people are calling about.
-Are they requesting it
when they call 911? -Yeah.
I just learned yesterday, actually,
in the past few months, we have 600 accounts
of somebody calling, saying, "Can I get CARE?
Can I get the CARE responders there?"
That's a really good sign for me
that people are becoming aware of the resource.
But I also hear, firsthand, in community,
often it's, you know, we want to get somebody help.
We know we don't have a lot of officers left.
We don't want to waste their time
on this non-law enforcement issue.
However, we need an intervention.
And sometimes, there's a real sensitivity
in vulnerable environments.
I'm on the Youth CARE Board, and so folks have told me like,
"We don't want to call 911
because we don't want to invoke law enforcement."
You know, these are kids. They're vulnerable.
But we do want to get them help.
We need an intervention.
-I do want to talk about what's happening
bigger picture with public safety,
because Seattle has recently hired
a new chief in Shon Barnes.
There's been a resurgence also in police hiring
for the first time in years, here in Seattle.
Has that made a difference for 911 response times
or your crisis response teams making a difference?
They're supposed to be taking the pressure off of police.
What are you seeing? Some of the trends, maybe?
-Yeah, unfortunately, I have not seen
our police response time to Priority 1 calls
improve at all since last we spoke.
-Can you explain what Priority 1 calls are?
-So, Priority 1 --
we did a pretty significant improvement project last year
to really define what is Priority 1.
It's supposed to be threat to life, right?
There's an immediacy.
So we went through an exercise with police,
with police command, and then with 911,
to say, okay, what does that mean?
And so, the simple explanation is --
I think somebody could lose their life in five minutes.
Somebody could be gone in five minutes.
This is likely to escalate.
Lights and sirens, go.
We had really strayed far into this "what if," right?
We were calling lots of things Priority 1.
And so it really diminishes then the clarity in dispatch, right?
It should be very clear where I send the unit first.
Priority 2 -- again, we think it's likely
to get worse quickly if we don't get somebody out there.
So it's really the temporal aspect.
Priority 3, what CARE is responding to --
somebody should have a response, but, theoretically,
it's not going to be way worse in 40 minutes, right?
We're saying it's less urgent.
And then Priority 4 --
generally, that's almost more like reporting, you know?
I often say, okay, your bike was stolen yesterday.
It's not more stolen today, right?
So we want to take action, but it's not the same thing
as an armed robbery.
-Got it. -So, despite our efforts,
we've basically cut in half
how many calls are defined as Priority 1
from February last year to February this year.
And yet, it's still about 11 minutes to get police on scene.
And so what that tells you is that we still have
lots of concerns in our community.
Police staffing is absolutely improving, and that is so great.
But the academy takes a long time, right?
And so I've heard command often remind people,
well, it's going to be about a year.
A year later is when this person is really in service,
able to take these calls.
-Danny Westneat had a piece about this
in The Seattle Times a couple of weeks ago.
He talked about improvements in Seattle crime numbers,
fewer 911 calls.
But he also wrote that his work has been criticized
by the Seattle Police Officers Guild and others
who might say crime isn't really down.
It only seems to be down due to a drop in 911 calls.
The critics would say people aren't calling
because they don't think an officer will come
in the first place.
How do you respond to that way of thinking?
-What I would say is all of those things are true
[Chuckles] concurrently, which is really interesting.
It is. I track violent crime very carefully,
meaning the FBI categories of violent crime.
That is improving for the first time, to my knowledge.
You know, it was getting worse 2020 to 2023.
And then we started to see improvements in 2024.
-You're talking murders and things like that?
-Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Homicide, rape, aggravated assault, these types of things.
Yeah, that is improving.
It is also true that people
do not report property crime at the same rate.
I talk to small business owners and people like that
all the time, where it's like, I don't want to lose my insurance.
It is true that people still don't call 911
because they know that police are short
or they perceive they're not going to come anyway,
or they don't want to be on hold for a long time.
Again, our response time in 911 is pretty fast now.
But I only have the resources in the field
that I have in the field, so I can answer the call real quick.
I can put it in the queue, dispatch it really quick,
but it still could be two or three hours
before you get a law enforcement response.
And so I would say, on the whole,
yes, violent crime is improving.
There's no question.
But I don't feel like we're really addressing the --
my primary concern, which is the human suffering.
If you look at our -- Again, every week,
I'm watching the overdose dashboard.
Improved a little bit last year.
I think I was back to 30 neighbors lost last week.
And generally, the national trend --
half those folks will be under the age of 45.
And those -- In my mind, that is avoidable.
It is preventable.
And so that's what I tend to focus on is the crisis side,
the mental health side.
-And I'm going to come back to that drug issue in a little bit.
But I did want to talk about another issue
you've been talking about with the Seattle City Council,
which is changing the way that the CARE department's
crisis responders are dispatched.
Currently -- you touched on this earlier --
there's this dual dispatch system,
where officers end up going wit CARE teams.
Why do you want to change that?
What do you want to change it into?
What would that accomplish?
-Yeah, well, during the pilot phase,
I thought it was really wise and just prudent and cautious
to dispatch police at the same time as CARE.
I had good reason to believe that,
you know, that we had the protocols, right,
that these were going to be safe calls,
that the CARE responders
were not going to be harmed in any way,
that they would be useful.
The first 600 calls we really scrutinized.
I mean, I read every call detail, thinking about,
you know, would another unit have been more useful
in this situation?
What are the service gaps?
Did you have a place to take the person?
And it was very clear, by the first 600 calls,
that we were getting it right.
88% of those calls were requested by SPD.
That was a major data point for me
because people would say, "Oh,
law enforcement will never use this.
They won't like it." Yeah, they do.
And yes, they do.
You know, they want to do the work that only they can do.
And I find that law enforcement,
overwhelmingly, they're helpers.
That's why they go into this service.
They want to help.
Now that we've been to over 4,000 calls without incident --
You know, I survey the CARE responders even about, like,
compassion fatigue, things like that.
You know, what is your energy level?
You know, I'm very protective of the new responders.
And it's just going well. They're fine.
It's over -- I think we're at 4100 calls.
Our average time to the scene
hovers between 12 and 13 minutes,
even now that we're citywide,
which, again, is interesting.
It means I'm more expeditious with these Priority 3 calls
than I am with Priority 1.
-Okay, let me come back to that in a second,
'cause I did want to touch on this solo dispatch thing,
if indeed it is something that could come about.
I think it would have to be negotiated with SPOG,
the Police Officer's Guild,
the union for rank and file members.
Do you think this is something they would support?
What can you say about that?
-Yeah, I would say partly.
So, if you look at Albuquerque,
100,000 calls in, about 50% of those calls
were deflected from police,
meaning, historically, police would have gone.
The other 50,000 are not.
It never would have been a police call.
So when you think about somebody who calls 988
and then 988 now can dispatch a mobile crisis unit,
there's no intention --
That would not have been a police call.
That is a different body of work.
And so, the answer is yes for police body of work,
for these call types that, historically,
police would have gone to.
That absolutely should be negotiated.
That's very important.
Our labor relationships are very important to me,
just as a person, but also it's --
We're just better together, you know?
We really need all of these different teams
who are in similar spaces to agree
who do we send first, who has first right of refusal.
But lots of teams can respond to some of these incidents.
And so I want to design a system that's flexible,
that says, okay, CARE's not available.
Do I have a community service officer?
Community service officer isn't available.
Can Health One come out and do this transport?
-Right, right. There's a lot of different pieces here.
I'll be interested to see how that pans out
with labor partners, for sure.
But you mentioned this, with the expansion across the city.
So, it's 24 CARE crisis responders
now responding to all the neighborhoods.
There are three supervisors, seven days a week coverage.
Is that enough staffing for the work you're doing?
-No, no, not at all.
I mean, if we were really just to look at a few
different crisis categories, the calls that come in all the time,
I've said I would need about 96 responders,
because we want to be --
I don't know if we need to be 24/7,
but, by the data, 27.
You know, there's only about four hours
where you don't consistently see these crisis calls,
mental health calls, coming in.
-And so -- -The very early morning hours?
-Yeah, what happens often
is that people are coming back to work, right?
And somebody is passed out on my threshold or...
So, I've got these three folks in the garage
and, you know, this is what's happening.
So we get a big uptick 5:00, 6:00, 7:00 in the morning.
And again, the calls keep coming in pretty consistently
until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.
-I see. -The hours that I've been
most concerned about are 5:00 p.m.
Often you have case managers leave,
there's resources that close up,
and then you see this escalation until about midnight, 1 a.m.
And then you also see some crime happening, right?
And so I'm putting all of the onus on police
to respond to everything after hours.
-This original expansion of CARE citywide was paid for,
as I understand it, with a $1.9 million federal grant.
the Trump administration has been cutting
all sorts of federal funding, as we know, nationwide here.
Are these dollars safe going forward,
or how do you pay for
an expanded CARE system in the future?
-Yeah, so those were congressional earmarks.
Thanks to Smith and Jayapal,
who've been great partners and advocates.
Luckily, that money was already in the bank, so I didn't --
We also had a BJA grant for training design
that we did in partnership with UW,
which, again, was already --
That -- that check was already cashed.
And so that's been fine.
-Okay. -When I think about the budget,
I tend to take a step back and just look at public safety.
That's approximately half the general fund.
And if we were to look at police, fire, CARE,
and then our adjacent contracts --
things like LEAD, right? Diversion.
Our outreach contracts...
I believe that there is ample money there
to get a better result,
but we just have to be more clear on who we send first,
and then what happens next.
So, it saves a lot of money when you break the cycle.
I know people who were
20, 30 years in these cycles of crime
that correlated with drug use.
And then, you know, I often talk about
drug diversion court --
18 months later are entirely changed
and rehabilitated and redirected
and are leaders and connected to family and paying taxes.
So I feel like, if we would just really focus
on what breaks these cycles --
We've got to start believing every person can change.
Every person can change, can be better off.
So, we've got to start there
and then be more pragmatic and scientific
about what works for what person.
So, if we try something again, if you try a diversion path,
and the person is, by the safety data
or by the Health One overdose data,
if they're worse off in six months,
let's try something else.
-And this is even with the city
staring at a $240 million budget deficit?
I just want to make sure I put that in focus there.
-It is true that sending CARE --
If I look at 41 minutes, on average, we're on the scene.
If I'm to look at two patrol officers
versus two CARE responders, it costs about half as much.
The CARE responders, they're well paid,
but the overhead's entirely different, right?
We don't have ballistic vests.
We don't have body cams. It's just different.
-Yeah. -And so I feel like
it's fiscally prudent to, in dispatch,
think, okay, what will most likely help the person?
Again, going back to LEAD, wouldn't it be cool
if I know that this is somebody who is...
struggling with substances,
why not also dispatch that LEAD worker,
effectively, right, to be there on scene.
Or with our response to unhoused folks,
I've learned that, very often,
somebody who has lived through those experiences
will get the yes is the best.
And so we've got to be more creative
and not just think about police, fire, CARE,
but also, what is the role of peers?
Who has the strong relationship?
Can I have a case manager on file that I can confer with?
-Right. Quick sidebar on this.
With the state legislature this year,
they passed this bill -- House Bill 2015.
It would authorize local jurisdictions
to impose a 0.1% sales tax to go towards public safety needs.
Mayor Harrell's been talking about that a little bit.
Is that potentially an answer here?
Do you have any insight on that?
-You know, I'm not sophisticated enough
in my understanding of the budget and local taxation
to make a recommendation.
I will say, I'm very fiscally prudent.
I don't like spending a dollar
if I don't think it's going to help.
That just -- It just bothers me.
Notoriously, I don't like long meetings.
You know, I talk fast, I'm moving fast.
I feel like I want to invest in things that people,
especially our folks left behind, will feel.
They will feel a difference.
And so, some of our investments,
I feel like if it's not clear that this intervention
would predictably re-pattern behavior or help someone,
just save the money.
Don't even spend the money, you know?
Because I do see it through the lens of dispatch.
I know what I'm paying that call-taker.
I know what I'm paying that dispatcher.
I know what that cop's paid.
I know what CARE's paid.
I know what it costs Harborview.
And we're just --
Again, we're hemorrhaging money, very often by design,
but we're also not helping people.
We're prolonging suffering.
-I do want to make sure I touch on another state issue
with you as well, though.
House Bill 1816
would have given jurisdictions with 200,000 plus residents
the right to have an alternative response unit like CARE,
outside of law enforcement.
This was a bipartisan bill. You testified to support it.
It didn't pass this session,
but I do feel like we're going to hear about this
again in the future here.
How would a measure like this affect the work of CARE
or other organizations?
How would it impact the work you do with the police,
fire department, etc? -What got misconstrued --
There was a narrative out there that said
this will sidestep bargaining --
collective bargaining, impact bargaining.
I personally would not support that.
That is a, I think, a very problematic precedent to set.
However, once the work is bargained --
So, for example, if CARE has bargained
these six call types, they are for CARE responders.
We have decided this is police body of work.
This is CARE body of work.
Then, jurisdictions should have the right
to expand and contract relative to the data.
So, that's really important.
You don't have --
In the fire department, for example,
is Health One expanded.
Health 99 is added.
You know, police unions --
police unions would not dictate
whether or not that was an appropriate response.
We know that as fire body of work,
and they get to innovate and grow and expand.
I think that people have the right
to the best first response,
and we're starting to see lawsuits all over the country.
There's an interesting one in Multnomah County right now,
Disability Rights Oregon.
We're starting to see more lawsuits
that say, "Hey, city, you have the right first responder.
You're not sending them."
And then I have an adverse outcome here
because somebody was autistic
or because of this or because of this,
and you're just failing to do right by your citizenship.
-That is going to be an interesting one to track.
Thank you for bringing that up.
I did want to talk a little bit more
about people in crisis, dealing with drugs, etc.
You've talked about this.
Are there places to bring the people
you're trying to help here?
Help me out with that,
and just how you're responding to the drug crisis.
You said the numbers really haven't been going down
in a way you'd like to see. -Yeah, no, they haven't.
But there's a lot of, I think, exciting innovations
happening right now.
We talk about the STAR Center.
We talk about the ORCA Center,
which is post-overdose,
Connections opening, UW behavioral health research.
I just spent time at Valley Cities.
I think we're growing in capacity in the system,
which is good.
When it comes to detox,
It is so complicated.
There's a drug court manager, Christina Mason, I love,
and I called her one day.
I said, why do we take people to Skagit County?
And she started to explain to me, like, all of the different
restrictions and conditions of entry
for all of these different resources.
Yeah, you could do a whole episode.
It could be a series.
-[ Chuckles ] Okay. -But we --
Again, we've just made our design so complex,
where if you don't --
if a person doesn't fit exactly in this bucket,
that can't be received into treatment.
And so I'm very anxious to get closer to a design
where it's like, is this a behavioral health emergency?
If the answer is yes,
and you don't have a high-acuity medical need,
meaning you don't need to be at Harborview,
you don't have an IV.
It should be no wrong door.
You can come in, and we can get a comprehensive assessment.
What is going on?
And that, to me, always means
the medical components -- physically, what is happening.
But then, psychologically, what's happening?
There's a difference between somebody
who just, again, used a drug recreationally
at a party at UW last week,
and somebody who's been doing heroin
since they were 11
and has been in and out of corrections
since they were 15.
Those are different people.
-Can I go down that path a little further?
'Cause I've heard Council President Sara Nelson
talk about this idea.
She wants more funding for drug treatment.
And she would also support more involuntary commitment
for people who have severe impairments
after many years of addiction, for example.
So, is this idea of involuntary treatment,
putting someone into treatment without their consent,
part of the answer when it comes to our drug crisis?
-In my opinion, this is the most complex part
of the conversation.
It really is.
We know there's tons of evidence and research
that supports the idea, and logic supports it --
if I am ready to change,
I am more likely to be successful if I want it.
It is also true that with drugs like fentanyl, meth,
what people report to me is that you lose yourself entirely.
I've heard many times, like, no day of the week
would I have chosen to change.
I was a non-person. Somebody described it that way.
You could not have asked me my favorite meal,
and I would have the answer.
You know, my brain was just completely overwhelmed
by an obsession and a need to use this drug.
And so, you know, I tend to think in ethical terms,
and I tend to think, what would I want?
What would I want for my daughter, for my son?
We have Ricky's Law on the books,
which suggests that somebody under the influence
of a drug like fentanyl could be considered gravely disabled.
And so I am looking to the medical community
to make stronger recommendations about what is the runway here.
If we know somebody has developed a fentanyl dependency,
how long do we have, basically?
Because what I hear consistently from medical folks
is it's not the same as heroin.
There were folks who would use heroin for 30 years
and still have a semblance of a life.
And we're not seeing that in other circumstances.
And so I think we need to have a flexible system
that can accommodate that involuntary referral.
The lower hanging fruit for me --
and I had an experience again yesterday --
most days there's an account of somebody
who is ready for help, who asks for help.
We, you know, call for help.
And, you know, three hours later, the person's like,
never mind, I'm out of here.
And they leave Harborview
or they walk away from the CARE responders.
And so I think there are plenty of people, especially --
You, perhaps, have heard about
the new -- the buprenorphine, the injectable.
-Yes, right. -The 30-day.
The DESC is seeing great results.
People know that on the streets, you know?
And so if there is a promise of a drug
that can mitigate those horrific withdrawals
and will help you,
you know, we will help you address
whatever the circumstances are that need to be addressed.
You know, do we need to quash warrants?
Is it a housing concern?
Do we need to rebuild relationships?
People don't want to suffer and languish and die.
I think there's also interesting psychology.
When I talk to people and they feel like I've failed everyone.
I have burned every bridge.
I've got no one left.
My life has no value in my own mind.
So then why would I change anything?
Why would I stop using?
And I've heard a lot of people say,
I didn't care if I died. -Wow.
-Right? -There's so much to unpack.
And I'm sorry that we need to wrap up here,
but I did want to ask --
maybe the 30 second version, if you could --
where CARE is moving from here.
What should people expect to see from your department?
-Yeah, so, we should continue to see 911 supported
and centered in public safety design, right?
Those are the first, first responders.
We should invest there first.
They should have the best technology.
And they should also be a trusted source
for recommendations in the system.
If you ask the average dispatcher, they will tell you.
I mean, that's how I learned all this stuff first.
You know, like, why does this person keep repeat-overdosing?
Well, because of this, right?
Because it's five days to intake, they're not going.
So I want to prioritize that.
The CARE responders should continue to expand.
They just should. It's the appropriate discipline
for about half of these calls.
And again, I believe, if we look at the budget holistically,
it's always going to be a cost savings
to send the best first response.
And then, hopefully, we get close
to that swift secondary response handoff,
where, very easily, I know,
okay, this is somebody who's escaping trafficking --
this is the resource.
This is the trusted resource.
-All right. There's so much ahead here.
Thank you very much.
Talk to you in just a sec here, Chief,
and we will be right back.
What are people saying on social media
about the expansion of the CARE team?
Another person comments...
We'd like to know what you think.
Send us an email at contact@seattlechannel.org,
or find us on social media.
Great to have that input.
And thank you very much, Chief Amy Barden,
for joining me from the CARE department.
-It's great to talk to you. -And we will see you next time
on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪