SPD

Is Participatory Budgeting in Seattle Finally Moving Forward?

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Missing Texts of Mayor, Police Chief, and Fire Chief

The big scandal of the weekend was the Seattle Times breaking story about key texts from Seattle city officials in a period that includes June 2020 being unavailable for public disclosure. This news follows Thursday’s news of a whistleblower investigation of improper handling of public records in the mayor’s office. As Daniel Beekman and Lewis Kamb write:

Perez similarly didn’t know about the whistleblower investigation until Thursday, he said. He said he now expects to raise the issue in the lawsuit over police violence.

“Evidence must be preserved,” he said. “Obviously, the city didn’t preserve this evidence and that’s a big deal. And then, the city has covered up the fact that it didn’t preserve the evidence, and that’s an even bigger deal.

Perez is representing the Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County organization in their lawsuit against SPD.

In response to this scandal, at this morning’s Council Briefing Council President González said she’d been contacted by City Attorney Holmes and they’d agreed to launch a new effort to increase public trust by potentially launching a new public disclosure entity for the Mayor’s office.

Participatory Budgeting in Seattle

Also at this morning’s meeting, CM Morales announced she is going to introduce legislation to release the proviso on the $30m for participatory budgeting at her next Community Economic Development committee meeting on May 18 at 2pm. This legislation will instruct the Office of Civil Rights to write an RFP to look for an organization (either local or national) to manage the participatory budgeting process. Her hope is this legislation will be voted on by full Council at their May 24 meeting.
This is good news for those frustrated by the stall in this process moving forward, and CM Morales’s rejection of the process being run by the Department of Neighborhoods means more adherence to the Black Brilliance Project’s recommendations. David Kroman wrote an excellent piece highlighting the tensions that have arisen between the Mayor’s office and the City Council around implementing this ambitious project.
 

Other Seattle News

Tomorrow morning at the Public Safety and Human Resources committee meeting, CM Herbold and her colleagues will once more discuss the SPD budget legislation pertaining to that pesky $5.4m overspend of last year. CM Herbold says the Police Monitor is concerned about even the $2m cut (to go to PBP) introduced in a compromise amendment last time the committee discussed this. She sounded frustrated with the Police Monitor’s response, saying she doesn’t understand why he thinks more money will solve the SPD’s staffing problems when their 2021 staffing plan is already fully funded. Even so, she is suggesting compromising still further by releasing another SPD proviso related to out-of-order layoffs.
Out-of-order layoffs were a frequent talking point last year, with the Council investigating whether they could lay off officers on the Brady list first, but CM Herbold says the legal department has determined this is unlikely and maybe even impossible, due to both state law and the fact SPD is currently hiring so anybody laid off would be first in line to get rehired.
The committee will also be discussing the transfer of the 911 call response department and parking enforcement officers from SPD to the new Community Safety and Communications Center.
Meanwhile, in election news, Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller has joined the Seattle mayoral race. The filing deadline to run for office this year is next Friday, May 21.
 

Other News of Note

King County Police Officers Guild calls for Sheriff Johanknect to resign
King County Police Officers Guild calls for Sheriff Johanknect to resign
The King County Police Officers Guild is calling on Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht to resign after a survey of union members.
www.king5.com  •  Share
A year later, more questions than answers over Seattle council's stance on defunding SPD
A year later, more questions than answers over Seattle council’s stance on defunding SPD
After reaching out to all nine Seattle councilmembers for clarity on their positions on defunding SPD, we were left with more questions than answers.
mynorthwest.com  •  Share
Police, Protests & Public Safety
Police, Protests & Public Safety
David Kroman’s interview last week with former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best.
crosscut.brand.live  •  Share

Is Participatory Budgeting in Seattle Finally Moving Forward? Read More »

Police Reform Bills Passed by the WA Legislature this Session

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I am back from vacation and wow, do we have a lot to catch up on.

First, I’d like to share an insight from The Stranger reporter Charles Mudede:
There are two ways of dealing with policing at this point in American history. One way is to deeply defund the institution (which is an internal solution), and the other is decriminalization (which is an external solution). The former, to me at least, seems to be, politically speaking, a long shot. However, the latter, which basically gives the police less to do in our world, has serious political potential, as exemplified by the legalization of pot.
And now onto the news!

 

Washington State Legislature News

Where did the end of this year’s session leave us?
To address the Blake decision, the legislature passed bill ESB 5476 re-criminalizing low-level drug possession by making it a misdemeanor and requiring local jurisdictions to provide treatment options for drug users; people who violate the new law are to be directed to “assessment, treatment, or other services” for the first two violations; after the second violation, a violator can be referred for prosecution and, potentially, a fine or jail. The bill has a two-year expiration date, which is potentially good news for those dissatisfied with the re-criminalization of simple drug possession.
Here is a list of police reform bills the legislature passed:
  • HB 1054 regulating police tactics
  • HB 1267 establishing a new Office of Independent Investigations that will investigate all police uses of deadly force in WA
  • HB 1310 setting new standards for police use of force
  • SB 5051 the decertification bill
  • SB 5055 the arbitration bill that collects arbitration data and reforms the process
  • SB 5066 the duty to intervene
  • SB 5259 collection of data on police uses of deadly force
Relatedly, a bill banning open carry of firearms at public demonstrations and at the state Capitol passed, as did a bill requiring judges to re-sentence anyone facing life in prison under Washington’s three-strikes law if one of their “strikes” was a second-degree robbery charge.
Bills that didn’t pass included one reforming collective bargaining for law enforcement to not cover accountability; removing qualified immunity to make it easier for police officers to be sued for misconduct; and the recently-introduced bill limiting police traffic stops.

Seattle News

This morning’s Seattle Council Briefing was nice and short.

Amy Sundberg on Twitter: “I am back from vacation and it’s time for this morning’s Seattle Council Briefing!”
“I am back from vacation and it’s time for this morning’s Seattle Council Briefing!”
twitter.com  •  Share
 

CM Morales announced she was unable to reschedule the Community Economic Development committee meeting, which she had postponed due to the verdict coming in on the Chauvin trial, and that it will therefore meet at its next scheduled time on May 18. As the participatory budgeting process was slated to be discussed at this meeting, this means a further delay in its discussion and eventual implementation. This inability to reschedule may reflect a lack of urgency and prioritization for this project.

 

CM Juarez reported on the status of the Equitable Communities Initiative recommendations for the expenditure of their $30m. They will be putting together a spending plan with the hope of the proviso on those funds being lifted by the Council by July.

 
At last week’s Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting, the committee heard a presentation on “Reimagining Public Safety,” which covered updates on unit transfers and the Seattle University Public Safety Survey among other topics. They also heard a report on Q1 SPD Budget and Staffing, which showed Q1 overtime was down compared to 2019 and 2020 and there were 58 separations of sworn officers during the quarter versus 30 hires during the same period. Salary savings from attrition may reach as high as $13m in 2021. You can also take a look at a slew of SPD exit interviews since last summer.

Election News

 

Seattle’s candidates for the 2021 elections have filed their financial disclosures, leading to several pieces including this one comparing the finances of several mayoral candidates. In the Sawant recall campaign, the judge has set the signature collection deadline for October 19; the recall campaign must collect a little over 10,000 signatures from District 3 residents by this date.
State Senator Joe Nguyen has announced he is running for King County executive, challenging Dow Constantine, who is running for his fourth term in the position. You can read more about it here and here.

Other News of Note

 

Compassion Seattle has a plan for a tent-free city. Does it hold up? | Crosscut

Compassion Seattle has a plan for a tent-free city. Does it hold up? | Crosscut
A new campaign to address the city’s homelessness crisis says existing funds are all we need. That’s doubtful.
crosscut.com  •  Share

Police Reform Bills Passed by the WA Legislature this Session Read More »

Seattle Public Safety Committee narrowly agrees to move forward with substitute bill cutting less from the SPD budget

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Happy Spring! Let’s get right to it.

If you want to catch up with this week’s Council Briefing, you can take a look at the Twitter thread.

This morning the Public Safety and Human Resources Department met to discuss the possible cut of $5.4m to SPD’s 2021 budget.

CM Herbold proposed a substitute bill. The actual salary savings from SPD they are discussing has increased from $5.4m to $7.7m, and the new substitute would keep $4.85m of these funds within the SPD and redirect $2.83m to other departments. The SPD says they want to spend their part of this money on separation pay, technology improvements, a few public disclosure positions, and several civilian positions including four CSOs. Of the amount transferred outside SPD, $2m would be allocated to participatory budgeting and the rest would be used for better evidence storage, another public disclosure position in IT, and five additional mental health responders for the SPD crisis unit hired through HSD.

The substitute bill does not put a proviso on how the SPD is required to use the $4.85m, which Greg Doss of Central Staff says will allow them flexibility to deal with arising issues. Instead it places a new proviso that would release this money in monthly increments dependent on the SPD giving the Council a monthly staffing report. CM Herbold signaled her intent here is to increase SPD budget accountability in spite of not taking away the $5.4m to reckon with their overspend of last year.

The Monitor for the consent decree sent a list of questions to the SPD regarding these funds and this bill, and CM Herbold doesn’t want to pass the bill out of committee before that oversight takes place. Instead she suggested the committee vote on replacing the original bill with the substitute to signal their intent. The committee voted to adopt the substitute with a narrow margin, 3-2. CM Herbold, CM Lewis, and CP González were in favor, and CM Morales and CM Sawant were opposed.

This new bill will still need to be voted out of committee to be voted upon by the full Council, and the committee vote will need to be held after the Court has been advised on these changes by the Monitor. The next Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting isn’t until Tuesday, April 13.

During his remarks CM Lewis also signaled an interest in the Council identifying separate funding to stand up a low acuity crisis response system like CAHOOTS in Eugene, OR and STAR in Denver, CO. He mentioned how cost effective systems like this have proven to be compared to hiring more police officers. He wants the Council to spend more time emphasizing there are great alternatives out there for public health and public safety challenges.

And that’s what I have for you so far this week!

Seattle Public Safety Committee narrowly agrees to move forward with substitute bill cutting less from the SPD budget Read More »

SPD swings back at #DefendtheDefund; and more state bills to support!

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We have a lot to cover today, so let’s dive right in, shall we?

First up, state legislature news.

HB1054, a Tactics Bill for Limiting Deadly Force, has a public hearing tomorrow, March 11th, and you can weigh in!

SB5051, the decertification bill to increase police accountability, also has a public hearing tomorrow.

  • You can sign in to register your support. (This takes less than a minute.)
  • You can submit written comments in support of the bill.
  • You can sign up to testify live at the hearing tomorrow.

    You can read my livetweets of this week’s Seattle Council Briefing. Of particular note, CM Herbold said the consent decree monitor and the DoJ have reviewed the less lethal weapon draft bill passed out of the Public Safety committee, and they have questions. She will meet with them sometime this week along with counsel and CP González.

    At this week’s Public Safety and Human Services committee meeting, the committee discussed HSD’s spending plan for awarding the $12m in community safety capacity building and voted to lift the proviso on these funds. This legislation will move forward to a full Council vote next Monday. The RFP applications are now available and are due April 9 by noon; the resulting contracts will be in effect from 7/1/21-12/31/22.

    The SPD also presented at this meeting, declaring they are in a staffing crisis and that the instability of the 2021 budget is causing general instability in the department. This is SPD’s attempt to retain the $5.4m the Council has been talking about cutting from this year’s SPD budget, an issue you might remember from the #DefundtheDefend hashtag.

    The SPD had a much increased rate of attrition in 2020. As Kevin Schofield points out, attrition “steadily rose from 2011 through 2019. 2011 was when the DOJ investigation into biased policing by SPD began, and the Consent Decree was signed in 2012.” The SPD would like to use the $5.4m to mitigate their high attrition rates through further investments in civilian hiring, technology upgrades and solutions, officer wellness, lateral hires, separation and family leave pay. If the money is cut from the budget, it would be added to the amount currently allocated to the participatory budgeting process.

    At present, the Council seems more sympathetic to the SPD’s case than they have often been in the past nine months. This legislation is likely to receive a committee vote at their next meeting on Tuesday, March 23 at 9:30am before moving to a full Council vote. If you would like to see this cut go through, now is the time to contact your CMs, and you can also make public comment at the March 23 meeting.

In election news, Nikkita Oliver has announced their candidacy for position 9 of the Seattle City Council (the seat being vacated by CP González). They are a community organizer, lawyer, and activist who came in third in Seattle’s 2017 mayoral race. They have been a key player in the movement to defund the SPD by 50%.

There has been some reporting on the Black Brilliance Research Project’s final report and presentation. It is both striking and illuminating what a different tone the article in The South Seattle Emerald (a Black-led publication) takes compared to other articles on the same topic. I am going to quote that article extensively, and I suggest both supporting The South Seattle Emerald and going to read the entire piece:

But despite the setback, BBRP moved forward to complete its critical work. Glaze and Severe said that misleading news reporting on the BBRP and subsequent City Councilmembers’ decisions to create additional requirements in response to that reporting slowed down the research progress.

“We had a couple of examples where there were a few reporters who have put out stories talking about the report that we put together and have said things like ‘it doesn’t contain details,’ or ‘it’s too vague or not detailed enough.’ Meanwhile, it’s like are you kidding me? We have produced something that is orders of magnitude more detailed than is typically required of literally any research consultant who has ever done research for the City,” said Glaze.

Glaze and Severe also said that they faced double standards which Black people and People of Color often face in professional settings. “As a Person of Color, as a Black person, I’m very used to what happens when people move the goalpost. They’ll say, ‘Alright, you just have to do this and you’re good.’ And so you not only do that, but you go a little bit farther above and beyond, so you’re definitely good, and then they’ll move the goalpost again,” said Glaze. Glaze and Severe say this repeated addition of new requirements caused a lot of frustration for the research team. “Honestly, the goalpost was moved no less than four times in the beginning,” said Severe.

Severe said that these added obstacles were also a result of the political context of the research project. “The project was very politicized from the beginning,” said Severe, “coming out of the uprising in defence of Black lives and a call for defunding the police, having folks in the streets.”

It sounds like CM Morales isn’t sure the participatory budgeting process will hit the projected timeline, but in an article at SCC Insight she said, “We might be pushing it to actually get money out the door in the fall, but I still have faith that we’ll be able to get money out the door before the end of the year.” The above article also lists details about the participatory budgeting process that still need to be decided. We should receive further updates on the participatory budgeting process at CM Morales’s next committee meeting on March 16.

In a last few tidbits of news, Mayor Durkan’s office has asked the state auditor to expand the scope of its audit of the contract between Seattle’s legislative department and the Freedom Project for their $3M research project. CP González mentions the Mayor’s office has itself engaged in no-bid contract processes, which makes her office’s letter smack of hypocrisy. CP González also had this to say:

González, who is running for mayor (Durkan will not seek reelection), called the letter a “distraction” from the issues Durkan could be addressing in the final months of her term. “I’m just confused about why the Durkan administration is spending time, energy, and resources on this letter… instead of on the real problems facing the city in the remainder of her term,” González said. “This audit was already happening, and it’s going to go through its natural course, and I don’t understand how this letter helps advance our city.”

Meanwhile, Seattle’s Director of Labor Relations, Jana Sangy, has announced she is leaving in June. Apparently the city doesn’t anticipate this affecting the timeline for the upcoming SPOG contract negotiations. However, this resignation could indicate problems:

But Peter Nguyen, who represented the Labor Relations unit during the last round of bargaining with SPOG in 2018, thinks that Sangy’s departure ahead of one of her unit’s most crucial performances is a sign of a struggling unit. “The resignation of the city’s Labor Relations Director is troubling,” said Nguyen. “There is not a very deep well of stability to fall back on during this transition to yet another interim director. It begs the question why this mayor has had such difficulty retaining solid talent in such a critical role.”

And with that, I’ll leave you to enjoy this lovely sunny Wednesday afternoon!

SPD swings back at #DefendtheDefund; and more state bills to support! Read More »

Seattle City Council attempts to hold SPD accountable for excessive overtime usage

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An update on yesterday’s Finance & Housing committee meeting:

There were three items of note discussed at this meeting that pertained to the SPD:

  • Legislation involving the acceptance of grants included a few grants given to the SPD, including one from the Department of Homeland Security. There was some concern over exactly what a loudspeaker listed was (although everyone seemed pretty confident it wasn’t a weapon) and concern over the type of training that would be funded. I haven’t read the list of equipment funded, but it sounded like most, if not all of it, was related to emergency preparedness as opposed to militarization. The Mayor’s Office and SPD are supposed to report back on the few open questions remaining about said equipment and training before this legislation is voted on at Monday’s Council meeting.
  • The SPD is asking for an additional $5.4m for 2020. While the stated costs that need to be covered are parental leave, FEMA reimbursement, and separation costs for larger than anticipated attrition, it is clear the reason these costs haven’t yet been paid is because the SPD already spent this money on overtime. The Council has been trying to rein in the SPD’s use of overtime for many years. They were reluctant to simply refuse them the money at this time due to issues of liability, but instead they passed a statement of intent that they will trim the 2021 SPD budget of at least $5.4m early next year so the SPD still faces consequences. The Council hopes that monthly reportage of SPD overtime that should start next year will help keep these costs in check in future.
  • The Council was supposed to vote on legislation that would lift the provisos on $2.9m of the SPD’s 2020 budget placed during the summer rebalancing efforts. The Mayor’s Budget Office projects the SPD will need exactly this much money to meet their expenses through the end of 2020, but some of the CMs suspect the SPD might underspend more than anticipated and therefore don’t want to release the money until after the true spending figure for the year is known. After some debate CM Mosqueda won her point and they tabled this topic until early next year, when any discrepancies can be fixed with the annual exceptions ordinance that they pass every year to clean up loose strings. This means the Council will be able to recover the maximum amount of money from the SPD that is possible, if in fact the SPD does underspend by any amount.

The Minneapolis City Council just passed their new budget, which cuts the police budget by slightly more than 4%, with the $8m cut being allocated to alternate investments in public safety. The City Council there had discussed shrinking the police force from 888 to 750 beginning in 2022, but after the Mayor threatened to veto the budget if they did this, they changed their minds in a close 7-6 vote. Minneapolis has been struggling to make any real progress on reform or defunding since the summer protests, running into repeated roadblocks.

In better news, the new DA of Los Angeles, George Gascón, wants to make sweeping changes to the criminal justice system, including stopping most uses of cash bail, prioritizing re-sentencing inmates who are serving excessive sentences, and calling for a Use of Force Review Board. His office will no longer seek the death penalty in Los Angelos County and will begin reviewing current cases with a judgment of death. While he faces opposition to these reforms, this is an excellent example of how important and transformative local elections have the power to be.

And, finally, an eye-opening chart from the Washington Post:

 

 

Next week the City Council will be trying to tie up some loose ends before the start of the Winter Recess, as well as hearing a presentation on the Black Brilliance Research Project preliminary report. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

Seattle City Council attempts to hold SPD accountable for excessive overtime usage Read More »

The Council shows where they might be leaning, SPD budget-wise

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Time for another report on the Seattle 2021 budget front! This week the Council have been discussing their Form Bs, each of which requires three CMs to co-sponsor. However, CMs do not yet need to identify how the City will pay for these proposals. So a word of caution: all of what we are about to discuss is preliminary and likely to change at least somewhat during the next few weeks.

With that caveat, first we have a thread covering the Council Briefing on Monday, October 26.

There’s been a fair amount of news coverage of CM Herbold’s proposal of legislation that would create new defenses for misdemeanor crimes in Seattle. The purpose of this legislation is to decriminalize poverty, mental illness, and addiction, and give judges and juries more room to consider these circumstances. CP Gonzalez had several reasons for thinking this legislation wasn’t best considered during the budget process, so it is unlikely to be included in any budget package. However, look for a similar proposal to come to the Council, probably through the Public Safety Committee, sometime after Thanksgiving.

Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
I’m listening to the Council’s discussion on CM Herbold’s legislative proposal for changing the legal definition of “duress.” This legislation is meant to decriminalize crimes of poverty.
6:39 PM ∙ Oct 28, 2020

Before we dive into SPD proposals, here are a few other relevant highlights from this week’s budget meetings. Please note that CM Mosqueda is co-sponsoring very little at this juncture due to her position as Budget Chair.

CM Herbold proposed a cut of $10 million from the FG for the Equitable Communities Initiative and an addition of $10 million to HSD for community-led public safety investments. This would ensure the remaining $10m allocated by the Council this summer for the ramp-up of community-led public safety organizations would be funded by taking the money from the $100m the Mayor promised to BIPOC communities. Co-sponsors are CP Gonzalez and CMs Sawant, Lewis, and Morales.

CM Sawant proposed adding $30m to ensure the Strategic Investment Fund to Address Displacement (established by the sale of the Mercer Mega Block) remains funded. Co-sponsoring were CP Gonzalez and CMs Lewis, Morales, and Herbold.

CM Mosqueda proposed an additional expansion to Health One, which was co-sponsored by everyone but CM Herbold. She also proposed adding $2.13m to restore several positions proposed for budgetary layoffs, which was co-sponsored by everyone but CM Juarez.

Onto the SPD and related proposals! You can see the agenda here, and warning, the Twitter thread breaks a few times because Twitter was being buggy this afternoon.

To begin with, it’s worth noting there aren’t any huge across-the-board cuts to the SPD being proposed. The Council and the Mayor are on the same page about wanting to move a lot of units out from under SPD’s umbrella, although they have different ideas about where specifically these units should be moved. CM Herbold is proposing a new Community Safety and Communications Center, which would be a more comprehensive center than the Mayor’s suggestion of the Seattle Emergency Communications Center.

In addition to many proposals requesting reports from SPD, some of which have already been asked for, the main proposals boil down to recapturing some funds from the SPD budget in the following ways:

  1. Cut $6.1m in vacancy savings. These are currently funded police officer positions that the SPD projects they will be unable to fill in 2021.
  2. Cut $3.7m in overtime savings. This is assuming special events etc. will remain at the same level as in 2020 due to COVID.
  3. Impose a proviso of $5m in potential attrition savings. Apparently the police department has historically been very bad at predicting their levels of attrition and tend to under-predict. This proviso will capture any funds saved from additional attrition.
  4. Enact 35 out-of-order layoffs of sworn officers. These layoffs, when combined with attrition, will complete eliminating the 100 sworn officer positions the Council said they would in the revised 2020 budget.
  5. Cut $475k from the travel/training and supplies portions of the SPD budget, while maintaining all training necessary under the consent decree.
  6. Abrogate 70 officer positions in the SPD. These are mostly unfunded and vacant positions, so this doesn’t realize any savings but does mean the SPD would have to go to Council to get any new positions added should they ever want to expand.
  7. Ensure all savings realized from SPD cuts is used for the participatory budgeting process (up to $1m) and for allocation by the PBP into community investments into public safety. (This amendment was walked on by CM Morales at the beginning of the meetings today.)
  8. Move the mental health professionals who are part of the SPD’s Crisis Response Unit to HSD and add an additional 11 mental health professionals to do the same work.

As you see analyses begin to spread across the internet, it is important to keep in mind that the transferral of many units (such as the 911 call center, the parking enforcement workers, etc.) will account for much of the drop in the 2021 SPD budget and the lower number of positions. We also aren’t sure yet which proposals will definitely be incorporated into the Council’s budget package. That being said, Kevin Scholfield did some preliminary math and says we’re looking at around a 17.3% decrease in the SPD budget from the original (pre-COVID) 2020 budget.

These aren’t the sweeping changes that many activists might have hoped to see, but in a note of optimism (what? in 2020?) it does set a trend for further changes going forward. As many of you may remember, in the summer I was hammering home how important it was to allocate funds this year to begin ramping up community organizations in public safety. Although these funds were passed by Council, unfortunately most of them will not be seen by community organizations this year, meaning they haven’t yet been able to expand. This delay is slowing the whole process down. In addition, participatory budgeting takes a significant amount of time. But it is encouraging to see that so far at least the Council doesn’t seem to be backtracking on their position at the end of summer.

What’s next? We get next week off from budget meetings, although we will be getting a presentation on the state legislative lobbying agenda during Council Briefing. We’re also waiting for the revised revenue projection from the City Budget Office. Then CM Mosqueda will introduce her balancing package on November 10, and the CMs will put together their Form Cs, which they will discuss the following week.

Meanwhile, some people are already asking if the Mayor will veto whatever budget the Council passes. Exciting times!

Happy Halloween! Have a wonderful and safe weekend!

 

 

The Council shows where they might be leaning, SPD budget-wise Read More »

SPD and Community Safety Issue Identification

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We have a lot to cover this time! This week the City Council’s budget meetings consisted of presentations from Central Staff including issue identification, along with statements from CMs about their Form As. Form As are a preliminary way for CMs to mark their interest in and support of various topics during the budget process. Form Bs, due tomorrow, are the next step in this process, each requiring sponsorship by at least 3 CMs.

SPD Issue Identification and Form As

Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
All right, the Seattle City Council budget meeting on issue identification for SPD is about to start. This should be an interesting one! Slide deck: seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&… Memo:

seattle.legistar.comConfirmation
8:59 PM ∙ Oct 20, 2020

You can also reference the meeting’s slide deck and related memo.

First, a reminder of where we are. 81% of SPD’s budget goes to personnel and overtime. The Mayor’s proposed 2021 budget changes the following: 1. 1,497 sworn positions reduced/ abrogated to 1,450 sworn positions, only 1400 of which are actually funded, along with associated salary reductions; 2. parking enforcement, 911 call center, and office of emergency management transferred out of SPD, along with some back office support monies; 3. a new OPA inspector supervisor position is funded; and 4. funding for more automated traffic enforcement.

SPD Identified Issues:

Staffing: The Mayor’s plan tries to maintain the status quo on staffing issues, with staffing returning to 2019 levels by the end of 2022. If instead the hiring freeze were to be maintained through the end of 2021, that would result in 1213 fully trained sworn officers in 2022, compared to 1329 in the Mayor’s proposal, which is a significant difference. The Council’s options include: 1. maintaining the hiring freeze and shrinking the force in this manner; 2. reduce SPD budget to capture the savings from unfilled positions/attrition; 3. reduce SPD budget to reflect a target of shrinking the force that involves retirement incentives and buyouts; 4. proviso the SPD budget to reflect layoffs in 2021, potentially specifying out-of-order layoffs.

There was also discussion about Chief Diaz’s redeployment of more officers into patrol, how to decide the proper size of the police force, and how all response times to 911 calls aren’t equal (in that calls vary, most are not criminal, and not all require a fast response). They also discussed Chief Diaz’s intention to continue to prioritize patrol over specialty units should the number of officers continue to decrease, which would potentially mean no change to 911 call response times but less detective and investigative work.

Overtime reductions: The Mayor’s proposal has a small overtime reduction of $2.7m because of fewer special events due to COVID and the elimination of emphasis patrols. The Council needs to decide whether to decrease the overtime budget further and whether to reinstate emphasis patrols.

Consistency with the 2020 revised budget: The Council needs to decide whether to annualize changes in staffing, command staff pay cuts, and travel and professional services budget cuts to carry forward into 2021.

The last two issues are trying to consolidate different dispatch services for economy of scale and fixing some small issues related to moving the Office of Emergency Management outside SPD.

SPD Form As:

The CMs submitted 19 Form As related to the SPD, although one is actually about the fire department. CM Pedersen submitted four asking for various reports. CM Morales submitted one to reduce staffing and use participatory budgeting to invest the savings in BIPOC communities. CM Sawant submitted one to straight out defund the SPD by 50%, as well as one to transfer the CSO program to the Department of Neighborhoods and one that will place more rules around moving encampments in order to reduce harm.

CP Gonzalez is interested in making sure the OIG doesn’t need more resources given all the units moving out of SPD, ensuring officers receive training on how to appropriately engage with sex workers, capturing the spending of any unfilled SPD staffing, and transferring SPD’s Performance, Analytics, and Research unit, at least partially, to the OIG. CM Herbold submitted several Form As: to rename the Seattle Emergency Communications Center and add parking enforcement officers to it; to get monthly reports on SPD overtime spending (she also expressed interest in reducing the budget for OT spending); a similar funds capturing from unfilled positions as CP Gonzalez; potentially transferring some functions of Harbor Patrol to the SFD, although it sounded like there were complications here; and annualizing the changes made in the 2020 revised budget.

Community Safety & Violence Prevention Issue Identification and Form As:

Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
Good morning, everyone! It’s almost time for the Seattle City Council budget meeting on community safety and violence prevention issue identification!
4:32 PM ∙ Oct 21, 2020

You can also reference the meeting’s slide deck and related memo.

This presentation looked at public safety programs that take place before or in place of law enforcement involvement, as well as harm reduction strategies within law enforcement, primarily crisis intervention teams comprised of a mental health professional and an officer. We also briefly went over the complicated structure the Mayor is proposing to reimagine public safety, which involves a work group, a task force, and three IDTs. There’s also a small amount of money that has an unclear purpose and might be available for other expenditures.

Identified Issues:

The City’s Community Safety and Violence Prevention Response: Basically the Council needs to decide how much to invest in each different type of response. Their options include community services that decrease opportunities for law enforcement (CSOs, call-in nurses, crime prevention programs) ; non-law enforcement government response instead of law enforcement response (Health One and similar); and law enforcement response that is paired with crisis response (crisis response units).

Health One expansion: The Mayor’s proposed budget expands this program to add a second team. The Council needs to decide whether to proviso this money until dispatch is adjusted, set it aside and wait for community input, or go ahead with this.

Lack of RSJI Lens and Duplicating Community Efforts: This is the biggest issue before Council in this area. Basically it is not clear that the Mayor’s plan has gone through a racial equity analysis. The worry is that since this analysis has not been done (or at least not been made public), it might (possibly unknowingly) further perpetuate racism in the city. This also covers the concerns about the lack of consistency around money allocated for purposes that disproportionately benefit BIPOC groups now being taken away to be given back in a different form to BIPOC groups.

Suggestions to deal with this issue include putting a proviso on some of these funds (probably on the $100m at the very least) until a racial equity analysis is done and made public; do not allocate these funds at all and instead spend them elsewhere; restore $1.08m to the Office of Civil Rights for criminal legal system alternatives (the issue here is the money in 2020 isn’t being sent out until December, so theoretically that money won’t be spent until 2021, meaning they can resume this funding in 2022 without an actual funding gap); and restore the $30m of the Strategic Investment Fund that we talked about last week that was supposed to go to equitable development and affordable housing from the sale of the Mercer Mega Block.

Another issue discussed is the conflict of interest of having the Office of Civil Rights not being independent. Their purpose is to speak truth to power, and yet their jobs are under the purview of the Executive, so that’s a problem.

Community Safety Form As:

Both CM Mosqueda and CM Lewis are potentially interested in expanding Health One beyond the Mayor’s planned expansion. CM Lewis is also interested in adding funding for a reentry program for the Native community, for a case manager for Native women facing domestic violence and sexual assault, and to SFD 911 dispatch for a consulting nurse. CM Juarez is interested in adding funding for Aurora Commons, which provides commercial sexual exploitation services. CM Herbold is interested in a report about needed funding for LEAD and in legislation that would help decriminalize poverty. CM Sawant is interested in getting draft legislation from legal about forming an elected Community Oversight Board that would have full powers over police accountability.

What does this all mean?

We’ll know more when we see the Form Bs, but we’re seeing a lot of friction play out between the Mayor’s vision and the Council’s vision. In terms of public safety, the Mayor is advocating for a mostly status quo budget while all her planning groups do stuff over the next year or two (some of which seems duplicative), and at the same time she’s moving money around in interesting ways. The Council has been taking a more hands-on approach since the summer and have their own ideas of how to proceed.

Certain CMs are not going to want to fund the Mayor’s promised $100m investment into BIPOC communities with its appointed task force, disregard for participatory budgeting, and her $30m Strategic Investment fund cut that allocated funds for similar purposes (not to mention the concern of where these funds will come from in future years, when JumpStart tax revenues have already been allocated to investments in things like affordable housing). There is a real concern about the lack of a racial equity analysis and an inconsistency of approach here. The Mayor hasn’t presented a plan that inspires a lot of confidence, and we’re seeing a lot of political maneuvering as a result.

CMs might try to capture some savings from the SPD budget to give to BIPOC communities instead, probably through a participatory budgeting process, and possibly less than $100m in order to retain the $30m in the strategic investment fund (and maybe also to fund the $13m gap in the balanced budget because of investments to community organizations for public safety that were supposed to be made this year).

Of course, enacting their own plan could cause more animosity between the Mayor’s office and the Council. Will it spill over and up-end their recent new deal regarding how to replace the Navigation Team, negotiated by CM Lewis? It’s hard to say how strong a commitment the Mayor has to this new plan.

One interesting point to reiterate is that with Chief Diaz’s priority of patrol staffing, a gradual shrinkage of the SPD wouldn’t necessarily impact 911 call response times all that much. Instead it would impact specialty units. This is noteworthy because so much of the public discourse on the subject of downsizing the police department has been focused on call response times.

Next week there is another evening public hearing on the budget on Tuesday, October 27 starting at 5:30pm, with signups beginning at 3:30pm. If you’d like to tell the Council your thoughts about the 2021 budget, this is a great time to share them! The rest of the week will entail budget meetings presenting CM budget actions and statements of legislative intent.

SPD and Community Safety Issue Identification Read More »

The Mayor released her proposed 2021 budget today.

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Budget season has officially begun!

First, here’s the thread on this morning’s Council Briefing.

The rest of this week’s schedule is as follows:

Wednesday 9/30:

9:30am-12pm Overview of the Budget process

2-4:30pm Overview of

Sustainability & Environment, Economic Development

5:30-7:30pm District 1 Town Hall with CM Herbold, discussing public safety and the West Seattle Bridge

6:30pm Rainier Beach Action Coalition Town Hall with CM Morales, State Senator Saldaña, and King County CM Zahilay

Thursday 10/1:

9:30am-1pm Overview of the SPD Budget

2pm-5pm: Overview of Public Safety and the Municipal Courts

Friday 10/2:

9:30am-1pm Overview of Homelessness Response and Office of Housing

2-5:30pm Overview of Transportation and Parks

There will be a half hour of public comment every morning this week at 9:30am if you’d like to share your thoughts about the proposed budget (more on budget details below). There is also a District 4 town hall coming up with CM Pedersen next week on Thursday 10/8 6-7:30pm.

Mayor’s Proposed 2021 Budget

The Mayor released a pre-recorded message on her budget, complete with cheesy music and multiple backdrops, which was heavy on discussing her past successes and light on details.

Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
Mayor Durkan is speaking about systemic racism and saying we’re living through one of the most consequential times of our lives. Needs growing while revenues shrink.
8:03 PM ∙ Sep 29, 2020

But let’s dig into the actual budget, shall we? You can find the budget executive summary here and the SPD Department Overview here. The Budget Office will be presenting on the details of the budget over the next few days, but I can give you a little preview now, and then we can revisit at the end of the week with more details and signals from the CMs as to how they’re receiving the proposal.

Overview of proposed 2021 SPD and Public Safety Budget

  1. Calls for 1400 sworn officers instead of the 1422 in 2020’s budget (Note: this seems to completely overlook the provisos in the revised 2020 budget calling for the layoff of 100 sworn officers. In addition, it seems to ignore the attrition already experienced in 2020 alone, which could mean hiring new officers to reach this level. Expect more details about this later this week.)
  2. Parking Enforcement and 120 employees moved to SDOT
  3. Office of Emergency Management becomes independent
  4. 911 Communications Center becomes independent stand-alone unit and is renamed the Seattle Emergency Communications Center.
  5. Victim Advocacy Team transferred to HSD (comprising of 11 FTES and a $1.25m budget)
  6. Expands capacity of the OPA and OIG, specifically by adding a civilian investigator supervisor to OPA and funding a study about coordination of resources between the OPA, OIG, and CPC.
  7. Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) reorganizes probation services by reducing in-person day reporting and moving to collaborative Community Court model.
  8. SMC reduces traditional post-sentence supervision to focus on higher-risk charges. (#7-8 reduce SMC budget by $1.4m & cuts probation staff by 13 positions, a 25% staffing cut, while adding $100k for a non-profit case manager to make referrals to community-based agencies supporting clients to achieve self-sufficiency outside the court system.)
  9. The City and County are working on an agreement to redirect some resources now spent on jail operations toward community-based supports, which would reduce jail use.

The 2021 proposed SPD budget (~$360m) represents a 12% cut compared to the 2020 SPD budget (~$409m). However, once the simple transfers of units (and their budgets) outside SPD ($38m) are factored in, the proposed cut is ~2.7%, or around $11m.

The Mayor’s $100m to BIPOC communities controversy:

Since the summer, the Mayor has been promising $100m invested in BIPOC communities in 2021 (although this may have started out as a promise of investment into Black communities). Although she has been cagey about where she’d get this money during the revenue shortfall caused by COVID-19, PubliCola broke the news that this money would be taken from the already allocated Jumpstart payroll tax passed this summer:

“Under the council’s plan, payroll tax revenues would be used in the short term to fund rent relief, non-congregate shelter beds, immigrant and refugee relief programs, grocery vouchers, and direct assistance to child care centers and other small businesses. In the long term, the tax is supposed to provide $214 million a year for low-income and affordable housing, equitable development, small business support, and Green New Deal projects.”

Many of these projects were advocated for and will directly impact BIPOC communities. Mayor Durkan’s actions in this regard will once again cause BIPOC communities to scramble and fight against each other to get much-needed funding. In addition, Mayor Durkan is putting together an appointed task force to allocate this $100m, even though community has been asking for a robust participatory budgeting process. As a result, more than one respected community member has refused to serve on the task force, including Sean Goode, who wrote an op-ed about the problems inherent in this plan.

What about defunding by 50%?

The Mayor’s proposal doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting King County Equity Now’s demands for defunding the police department by 50%. Even accounting for the $38m needed to fund units transferred outside SPD, a 50% defund would provide community with around $166.5m in funds to re-invest every year. While not even shrinking the police department as much as would be accounted for by normal levels of attrition, Mayor Durkan is proposing giving 60% as much funding, which won’t be determined by participatory budgeting, won’t be for only public safety-related needs, and will be taken away from other already allocated purposes that the community needs and has advocated for.

In conclusion, King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle are not going to be happy about this proposed budget. Neither are some CMs. We’ll have to wait and see how the conversation progresses over the next several weeks. The budget season is scheduled to run until November 23.

The Mayor released her proposed 2021 budget today. Read More »

Another Wednesday, Another Budget Meeting

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Another long Wednesday of budget meetings!

Mayor Recall:

Mayor Durkan has filed a motion to reconsider the judge’s certification of the recall petition. This is a precursor to a probable appeal, and we’re now waiting for the petitioner to respond. If you’re interested in how this recall effort works, this is a great analysis. The key point revolves around whether Mayor Durkan is ultimately the individual responsible for the use of tear gas and other chemical crowd control agents by SPD during the pandemic, or if that responsibility resides with Chief Best. As the article states, delaying the possible recall is in the Mayor’s best interests even if she loses her appeal, both because it allows more time to pass for Seattleites to forget what happened during the protests in June, and because if Biden were to win the presidential election, she might get a new cushy appointment in DC in January.

Timeline:

After today, we have two more weeks of budget meetings, including a potential extra meeting next Thursday, and the Council hopes to vote on the revised budget on Monday, August 3. The City Council will take a vacation the last two weeks of August. The Mayor is expected to bring her proposed 2021 budget sometime in mid-September, beginning a new set of budget meetings that will probably extend until sometime in November. I believe the new SPOG contract negotiations are supposed to begin in December and can last around six months.

Today’s Budget Meetings:

The first part of today’s budget meetings were concerned with amendments on two bills, the COVID relief proposal and the Jump Start Seattle Detailed Spending Plan. If you’re interested in the details, you can see my Twitter thread.

Aside from observing the dynamic at work within the Council, another interesting thing that came up during this part of the meeting was during a spirited discussion about tiny home villages, when it came up that money put aside in the original 2020 budget to build these villages hasn’t yet been used. Several CMs expressed concerns that the Mayor wouldn’t actually use the money allocated to building tiny home villages in the Jump Start Seattle package either. The possibility was also brought up that this concern (that the Mayor wouldn’t spend the money as allocated) might apply to the entire package.

Twitter avatar for @amysundberg

Amy Sundberg @amysundberg
She expects the Mayor might refuse to spend the money on tiny home villages because they are being too prescriptive.
7:09 PM ∙ Jul 15, 2020

 

The second part of the budget meeting was issue identification on the 2020 Proposed Rebalancing Package, which came with a huge memo from Central Staff. The section detailing the SPD policy issues and budget amendments that CMs have proposed thus far related to the police department begins on page 104, or you can look at the slides beginning on page 23. This part of the meeting involved presentations by Central Staff on a variety of subjects, as well as a panel from Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now talking about their four proposed stages for divesting from the SPD and investing in community organizations. Here is my Twitter thread on this part of the meeting.

Important Points:

  • Review: the Mayor has proposed $20.3m in cuts to the SPD. Those funds have been included in the overall rebalancing of the 2020 budget and are not available to invest in community-based solutions to public safety. None of these cuts should require bargaining. Aside from $500k put aside for re-imaging the police and public safety, other aspects of the Mayor’s plan wouldn’t get funding till 2021.
  • To date the SPD has already run through their entire overtime budget for the year. This is after the Mayor made some cuts on that line of the budget to reach the $20m figure.
  • CM Herbold asked if they’d be able to get out of paying the remainder of hiring bonuses promised to recently hired officers, which was kind of shocking from a labor standpoint.
  • Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now are asking for immediate cuts from the police budget beyond the Mayor’s proposed cuts, along with funds to begin their proposed 4-Step Process, which is as follows:
  • 1. The community research phase should start right away and run through the summer and fall, and they need immediate money to start the process. CM Morales suggested the Council shift over the $500k mentioned in the first point above to do this.
  • 2. Investing in scaling up community-led organizations with technical support and capacity building. This needs to start in 2020 (ideally Sept-Dec) so the organizations can be ready to take over functions from the SPD sometime in 2021.
  • 3. Transition 911 call and dispatch under civilian control. They believe we can move to do this immediately. The Mayor doesn’t want to do it until next year. There was some discussion about potential interim first responder options while training up a CAHOOTS-style response system, and Central Staff is going to look into how quickly this transition could be implemented. There was also a brief discussion about decriminalizing misdemeanors.
  • 4. Support immediate survival needs by investing in housing. This includes dissolving the navigation team, stopping sweeps, and not requiring police referrals for homeless folks to get assistance. That last could be implemented quite quickly, but:
  • Anything having an impact on labor when it comes to these cuts gets complicated because it will have to be bargained with SPOG. Even if the Council passes amendments to lay off officers, to cap officers’ pay, etc. those provisos can’t go into effect until after bargaining, meaning the money freed up from those costs can’t be recovered to reinvest until an agreement with SPOG is reached. This doesn’t prevent the CMs from passing these amendments, but it does mean it’s going to be a tricky business for them to find the funds to invest in this four step process this year, especially given the already existing budget crisis due to the pandemic.
  • There seemed to be a general consensus that having clearly defined policy objectives in regards to defunding the SPD is important since otherwise the SPD could remove services the CMs want to maintain (for example, the Southwestern Precinct).
  • The proposed amendments to the 2020 revised budget, including those related to the SPD, are at the one sentence level of formation right now and need a lot of further development.

What does this all mean? Well, a lot needs to happen in the next two and a half weeks, unless the Council decides to delay that September 3rd vote. Because of labor issues and the time it will take to scale up organizations, I don’t know how feasible a 50% cut to the remaining SPD budget for 2020 is in practice. It partially depends on how quickly certain functions/departments can be moved from under the SPD umbrella (these sorts of changes are less likely to trigger labor issues), but while reorganization could help the Council get closer to reaching a 50% cut goal, it won’t free up any funds to reinvest in community organizations. And without the funds, those organizations can’t scale up, which endangers the entire proposal.

The Council’s challenge in the coming weeks will be to find the necessary funds to implement at least part of this four-step plan (I’m not sure how much they’d need to at least get a good start) and to figure out how to effectively signal they’re serious about divesting in the police force while navigating the thorny labor issues.

Exciting times indeed!

Another Wednesday, Another Budget Meeting Read More »