By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond to 911 calls that don’t require a police presence, announced Wednesday that they’ll soon be expanding into Southwest and Southeast Seattle. The team is part of the city’s 911 department, now called the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department.

In a news conference outside the Delridge Community Center Wednesday morning, CARE Department chief Amy Barden compared the pilot program to the construction of the waterfront tunnel that replaced the Alaskan Way Viaduct, making the new Overlook Walk park at Pike Place Market possible.

“The vision was to recapture and acknowledge the spirit of our ancestry, the essence of our shared values, to reaffirm our connection to nature and to each other,” Barden said. “And so then my thoughts naturally turn to the past two years, to my adventures and the questions and comments and skepticism and incredulity I’ve encountered.”

The viaduct replacement may not be the most auspicious metaphor (just south of the Market, the waterfront street widens into a vast, ugly highway), but the skepticism about the CARE team’s progress is just as real as criticism of the tunnel project was a decade ago.

That skepticism, Barden noted, has sometimes come from people who think it’s unsafe to send social workers to respond to 911 calls, or asking why the city is spending money on the CARE pilot instead of police. More recently, though, it came from members of the City Council, who interrogated Barden last week about why CARE hasn’t shown more progress at improving conditions on Seattle streets.

The pilot program, which began with six staffers in 2023, is now a 24-person team (plus three staff who don’t respond directly to calls) for which the city spends a little more than $2 million a year.

In a meeting of the council’s public safety committee last week, council members interrogated Barden about what they described as a lack of results from that spending. Cathy Moore (whose district was not served by the pilot program until very recently) said she was dismayed to hear that her constituents were calling 911 for people in crisis and CARE wasn’t being dispatched.

“We have enough money in the city. We have enough services in the city to make it work. You’ve been in place now for a while. Why are we not doing a better job with the resources that we have?” she asked.

Other council members piled on, saying the city already had “an abundance of services” to help people in crisis (Rob Saka), that CARE was failing to call designated crisis responders to force people into treatment (Moore), and that the project, in general, “isn’t working” and shouldn’t be expanded until it is (Maritza Rivera).

“It’s a very broken system, and we have to fix it,” Moore said. “And just creating one more … agency, and [spending] another $100 million, is not going to fix it if we don’t come together holistically and talk about how it’s broken, be honest about where it’s not working, and the fact that we have different ideological positions about what should be happening. And we need to be evidence-based and be prepared to say sometimes, ‘Your civil liberties do you no good if you’re dead.'”

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Barden noted that the CARE team has just 24 members, spread across the city, which means that in Moore’s council district, there probably won’t be more than two to four people available to respond to calls at any time. “North is absolutely a priority for me,” she said. “We are studying those crisis hot spots, but I want to manage your expectations.”

One thing Barden didn’t bring up explicitly is that the CARE Team can only refer to services that are available, and that those services—including long-term treatment, case management, housing, and even basic detox—are not as ample and widely available as council members repeatedly suggested. Nor is it a great use of resources to send people through inadequate light-touch services again and again, Barden noted.

After Barden said 14 days in a facility isn’t long enough for someone to make major, necessarily life changes before sending them back out onto the street, Moore objected, citing the common refrain that relapse is a part of recovery and it often takes “many rounds” of treatment for people to get sober.

The other solution Moore suggested, involuntary commitment, is not a simple matter of pulling people off the street and taking them to treatment; even those who meet the standards in state law can only be confined for five days against their will, plus a potential 14 more with a judge’s order.

Speaking with PubliCola a few days after the council meeting, Barden expressed frustration at council members who say “‘Hey, Amy, can’t we round everybody up and detox them?’ … I don’t know why it’s so difficult to grasp that different levels of support work for different people. A lot of people [on the street] are demonstrably getting worse, but we’re like, ‘Sentence fulfilled, return to community!'”

In its first 18 months, the CARE team has responded to just under 1,800 calls. While council members like Saka expressed skepticism about expanding the pilot “unless and until” the pilot “is starting to achieve better results,” the primary constraint on the CARE Team’s size is a memorandum of understanding between the CARE department and the Seattle Police Officers Guild limiting the total number of CARE responders to 24. Any future expansion—Barden has suggested 96 responders as a near-term goal—will have to be bargained with SPOG, which has historically resisted reducing the police department’s authority in any way, including for jobs such as directing traffic at special events.

On Wednesday, PubliCola asked Harrell whether he shared the council’s concerns about CARE’s effectiveness. “I think that there was somewhat of a misunderstanding of the role and scope of these fine people,” Harrell said. “So we will take the feedback. … And hopefully, a year from now, we’ll have even more success stories on the lives we save.”