By Erica C. Barnett

During a tense meeting of the Seattle City Council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department chief Amy Barden said a labor agreement between the city and the police guild has prevented the CARE Team, a group of social workers trained to respond to mental health crisis calls, from doing their jobs effectively.  “It is unacceptable to not fully maximize this important team, and it’s also unacceptable to waste even one dollar in such a challenging budget environment,” Barden said bluntly.

As PubliCola has reported, the CARE Team has to operate under the limitations of a Memorandum of Understanding adopted as part of the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract last year.

But the contract also includes many restrictions that result in police, rather than CARE, continuing to respond to most 911 calls. (A police sergeant determines which calls get routed to CARE—another way in which the team’s work remains directed and constrained by the police department.) Those limitations prohibit the team from responding to calls if “drug paraphernalia,” such as foil or a pipe, is visible; if a person seems likely to be “confrontational”; if a person in crisis is inside a building or car; or if there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime, among many other restrictions.

The new rules also prohibit CARE from responding if a minor is present—a factor that could be contributing to a gender imbalance in the type of people CARE assists. “Perhaps we are not serving women as often as we should, because they have children with them,” Barden said.

CARE is not a party to that contract, and Barden did not see the new restrictions on her team until after labor negotiations wrapped up and the contract became public.

Last week, Barden said, the CARE team was told 911 would not dispatch the team, with or without police officers present, to any “private property where someone could be trespassed” for a crime, such as shoplifting. “What this means—and this actually happened last night—is that someone can be in a QFC parking lot, clearly struggling mentally or emotionally, and when that QFC employee calls 911 and asks if we can send someone to provide resources, our only option is to send an officer. We are not even permitted to send an officer and dual dispatch the CARE responders at the same time.”

The way Seattle’s 911 system is set up, a police sergeant decides in the moment whether calls can be dispatched to CARE,  effectively putting police in charge of a separate public safety department. In the incident Monday night, an SPD sergeant determined that CARE couldn’t respond to a crisis call on the sidewalk outside a QFC in the North Precinct because they were near the QFC door; a 911 dispatcher sent police instead.

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The CARE Team is the only group of non-SPD first responders that is explicitly prohibited from responding to crises in specific locations and scenarios. The Fire Department, Health One (operated by SFD), and SPD’s civilian Community Service Officers have no similar restrictions. Under the restrictions, Barden said, CARE can only respond to between 10 and 20 of the 2,400 calls 911 receives on a typical day. “Today, we estimate that the 24 responders are, on average, fulfilling only 28% of their capacity due to the constraints described,” Barden said.

When the city first started discussing whether a team of unarmed social workers could respond to 911 calls, back in 2020, police argued that they needed to be on hand in case the situation escalated and suddenly became dangerous.

After a lengthy public debate, CARE began as a “dual-dispatch” system in which CARE responders would have to wait for police to accompany them and confirm that the scene was safe before letting them proceed. The SPOG contract adopted last year allowed CARE, for the first time, to respond to certain 911 calls without a police escort, and lifted restrictions on the size of the team. This year, the CARE Team is supposed to expand to 48 people.

On Tuesday, Chief Barnes resuscitated many of the same talking points police made in the years leading up to the latest contract, arguing that  it’s risky to send social workers out on calls that might start as something that seems innocuous, like trespassing, and escalate into violence. For instance, Barnes said, he once had a gun pointed at him while responding to a call that was originally reported as “dementia.” You just never know, Barnes suggested, when a situation might go off the rails. But according to Barden, the CARE team has only had to call police for additional assistance 16 times since 2023, and never because a team member was in physical danger, because they only respond to calls that are unlikely to escalate, based on the analysis of 911 call outcomes that preceded CARE’s deployment,

Barnes seemed particularly affronted at the idea (which, to be clear, no one had suggested) that police don’t care about the communities where they work,

“Most police officers that I have learned from and work with, they want to serve their community, too, and simply having a badge and gun doesn’t mean that we don’t care,” Barnes said. “Doesn’t mean that we don’t have children with autism. Doesn’t mean we don’t have parents that are suffering from dementia. And we want to serve our community just like everyone else. Just because we have a badge and a gun doesn’t mean that we should be relegated to certain types of calls.”

CARE, like the other 130-plus unarmed first-responder teams that exist across the nation, was created in response to community outcry against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and local killings by police, including Charleena Lyles, a woman experiencing a mental health crisis who was shot by two officers after she called 911 in 2017.

The demand for unarmed first responders, in other words, originated with Seattle residents who demanded an alternative to police response. By design, programs like CARE “relegate” police to other types of calls. The fact that Barnes seems eager to relitigate this settled question seems to suggest the former Madison police chief hasn’t fully bought in to the way alternative response works in Seattle.

It’s unclear if the city can change the agreement that restricts CARE from responding to most calls without reopening the entire SPOG contract, which isn’t up for renewal until 2028. Barnes said he talked to the new head of the SPOG, Ken Loux, recently, and Loux  “informed me, and he said I could say this publicly, that they support CARE, but they want to abide by the MOU or the agreement, that’s it.””

Alison Holcomb, Mayor Katie Wilson’s public safety advisor, told the council that Wilson’s office “is actively consulting with the city attorney’s office on the proper interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement and this particular addendum, referred to as the CARE MOU, and we hope to have an answer about what potential next steps could look like in the near future.”

To read my live reporting on Tuesday’s meeting, which includes reactions from city council members and more comments from Barden and Barnes, check out my Bluesky thread.