Category: Mental Health

City Council, Mental Health, Police

Police Contract Has Prevented Unarmed Crisis Responders From Doing their Jobs, CARE Chief Says
Seattle CARE Department Chief Amy Barden

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.

 

Mental Health, Police

Two Years In, CARE Chief Amy Barden Says Her Crisis Response Team Still Faces Roadblocks

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, our guest is Amy Barden, director of the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department.

Barden has been on the job for just over two years, running the city’s 911 operations while also setting up an unarmed team of social workers who respond to emergency calls that don’t require police—the CARE Team.

The CARE Team is expanding to 48 members this year, and their size will no longer be capped under the city’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), which has historically resisted reducing the duties that legally have to be performed by police, like directing traffic and responding to 911 calls.

Barden has not had a single one-on-one meeting with Police Chief Shon Barnes since former mayor Bruce Harrell appointed him as police chief in late 2024, PubliCola separately confirmed.

Barnes, who frequently speaks at length to friendly TV and radio outlets, told two KIRO hosts shortly before last year’s election that SPD officers typically don’t seek assistance from CARE on crisis calls because they are “problem solvers” who resolve most crises on their own.

“It doesn’t make sense to get to a call and then realize, well, this is something for the CARE Team. When you’re already there, you just counsel [the person in crisis, you solve the problem, then you move on to something else,” Barnes said. “So it’s not that the officers don’t like it, it’s that if they’re assigned to a call, when they go there, they’re going to do what we pay them to do—to solve that problem.”

Barden said officers frequently that people in crisis tell them that they don’t want services. “My colleagues in CARE are, like, yeah, they don’t want services from you. … Why would [they] say yes to an officer? And again, that’s not the same skill set. No matter how cross-trained they are, they can’t have the same conversation that these [Mental Health Professionals] can hav. And our understanding of the resources and the system is totally different. So that’s something we really need to work on.”

But the contract also includes new constraints on CARE that limit where the team is allowed to go and when they have to back off and call police. CARE can’t help people if there are signs that they’ve recently used drugs, for instance, and they aren’t allowed to go inside most buildings or respond to people inside cars.

CARE had no direct say on the contract, which allowed SPOG to determine their working conditions, but Barden said that she was periodically asked questions about issues that impacted the team.

“One question I got, very specifically, was, ‘Would you feel comfortable if CARE can’t go into private space,'” such as permanent supportive housing, Barden said.  “I said, ‘Categorically, no—that would render them virtually useless.'” But that restriction ended up in the contract anyway.

Police sergeants are also still responsible for deciding whether to send cops or CARE during individual 911 calls, putting the team at the mercy of the cops they are supposed to be freeing up so they can respond to other duties.

Barden said that she expected police to direct more calls to CARE after city labor negotiators approved the contract, which also boosted cops’ starting salaries to $126,000 after a six-month training period. Instead, “I’m really disappointed that it’s actually gotten worse since the contract, and I don’t understand that,” Barden said.

“I had a theory that it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re just in weird negotiation land, and everything’s going to go back” to normal, Barden continued. But the sergeants who decide whether to dispatch CARE are increasingly sending out community service officers (CSOs)—civilian SPD employees without formal training in mental health care or social work—to calls that Barden says should go to CARE.

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“If you look at the data, you can see more and more and more police are routing to CSOs rather than routing to CARE the way that they were in the first year,” Barden said. “The CSO calls go up, and the CARE calls go down. … . I value that team. … [But] that is not a first responder team that is trained to go to clinical calls. It’s not. And so there’s some natural conflict and tension there.”

Barden also told us she supports integrating CARE and the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s Mobile Rapid Crisis Response Teams with 988, which connects callers in crisis to trained mental health crisis responders, rather than the police-oriented 911 system. We also talked about how CARE has evolved in its first 27 months, what happens when people call 911 for a person in crisis, and Barden’s hopes for the team under new mayor Katie Wilson and a more progressive City Council.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health

Council Rejects Full 2024 Funding for Youth Mental Health, Calls Previous Council Lazy and Irresponsible
A young man testified in front of the City Council on Tuesday.

Bob Kettle accused Tammy Morales of failing to do due diligence before proposing legislation to release funds collected from a payroll tax increase this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected a proposal from Councilmember Tammy Morales to release the full $20 million that’s supposed to be collected this year to fund youth mental health services. The previous council voted 6-3 to approve an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax for this purpose.

Dan Strauss, who voted with Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle against Morales’ proposal, then introduced an amendment that added $2.25 million for gun violence prevention to the $10 million the council has agreed to spend this year; the remaining funds will go back into the city’s JumpStart fund and can be used to address the city’s $260 million budget deficit.

The vote was virtually identical to the one the council, convened as the nine-member budget committee, took last week. What was different was the level of vitriol council members directed at both the original tax increase, adopted by a previous council that the new council has turned into a synecdoche for government waste.

Rivera kicked things off by asking Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington a series of leading questions about the actions of the previous council in order to establish that that council, unlike this one, “didn’t do the research,” chose $20 million as “an arbitrary figure that was not actually needed,” and “did not get guidance from mental health professionals.”

Saka (who ultimately voted for the proposal) piled on, saying there had been “no rational basis” for increasing the JumpStart tax to fund programs to improve student mental health, a comment that prompted astonished looks from some of the kids who had just testified about how such programs had benefited them.

Then Kettle jumped in, saying the previous council (which also included Lisa Herbold, Alex Pedersen, Debora Juarez, and Teresa Mosqueda, now on the King County Council) had shown an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Kettle then launched into a little interrogative exercise with Washington and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim, who were both on hand to answer questions.

Speaking about Morales as if she was not sitting right there, Kettle asked both executive staffers to confirm that Morales had not coordinated with the mayor or HSD when drafting her legislation to release the $10 million to the Department of Education and Early Learning. (Council members are part of the legislative branch, and are not required to seek approval from the executive branch before proposing legislation). Then, he turned to Council Central Staff director Ben Noble, who contradicted him—saying that “yes,” Morales did work with Central Staff on the legislation.

Kettle didn’t appear to like that answer, and corrected Noble, saying he clearly only meant yes “in the sense of getting the amendment into the system, calendaring, you know, into the system.” Noble responded that in fact, central staff put the same work into Morales’ amendment that they would put into any amendment, including an analysis of the underlying policy. Kettle switched tacks again, summarizing for Noble: “So, clearly, not with the executive, the people who have to carry out what needs to be done.”

It was a weird moment, made weirder by all the leading questions that gave the mayor’s office an opening to talk about how personally insulted and hurt Harrell and his staff were by the suggestion that the mayor would use mental health funding to close the budget gap.

“The mayor cares about this issue very greatly,” Washington said, “and so to just hear it put out there like he’s just going to take this money for mental health and [use it to] close the deficit gap was hard for me to hear, and very untrue, because he doesn’t have the power to do that.”

As the central staff analysis of the underlying legislation notes, in the absence of explicit action by the council to spend the full $20 million, “the remaining $10 million in appropriation authority will go unused, and the funds will either remain in the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax Fund balance and be available for spending in 2025 or future years, or the appropriation could be abandoned, and the monies diverted to other eligible purposes in 2024.”

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health, Police, Taxes

Council Increases Spending on SPD Marketing, Rejects Proposals to Release Youth Mental Health Funding and Block Expansion of Encampment Removal Team
Screenshot from one of SPD’s new recruitment ads, produced under a $2.6 million marketing contract that the city council just voted to expand.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved Mayor Bruce Harrell’s midyear budget adds virtually unchanged on Wednesday, despite several efforts by Councilmember Tammy Morales to amend the proposal.

Morales wanted to release all of the the approximately $20 million the city will collect in payroll taxes for youth mental health programs this year, instead of waiting until next year or later to spend all the money. Morales said her amendment would “maintain the commitment” the council made to students, who organized in response to a shooting at Ingraham High School in 2022, during last year’s budget.

The mayor’s office, which recently released its plan to spend $10 million of the money collected this year, has said that because the tax was only proposed, and approved, at the end of last year’s budget process, the city needs more time to come up with a plan to allocate all the funds in the future. Channeling this argument, Councilmember Bob Kettle called Morales’ comments “an injustice to the executive,” then went further, arguing that the proposal to fund student programs “came out of nowhere” and emerged “out of the blue” last year.

Council President Sara Nelson jumped on that one, saying she could tell Kettle exactly why there was suddenly an extra $20 million for youth mental health care: Because former councilmember Kshama Sawant wanted to raise taxes before exiting the stage, essentially creating a budget problem by providing too much money for students without a clear spending plan.

Obviously, it takes time to figure out how to spend a sudden windfall and, having done that, to get the money out the door. A larger concern, for those who want to see the full $20 million go to mental health services for young people in the future, is that once the funding is rolled back into the larger JumpStart fund this year (and used, as it inevitably will be, to help patch the city’s ongoing budget hole), it will be harder to claw back for its intended purpose in future years. Council members have already expressed skepticism about the entire $20 million, suggesting that perhaps the city should reconsider getting into “a whole new line of business” and let the funding lapse back into the larger, easy-to-pilfer JumpStart fund.

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The council also rejected a Morales proposal to redirect funding for 19 new members of the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments, toward the similarly named CARE Team, a group of social workers who are dispatched, along with police, to certain non-emergency 911 calls. Earlier this year, Harrell announced the city would take back funding it had been providing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority for outreach, reallocating it to the UCT.

The 19 new UCT members would include 14 people with the title “counselor,” who would “support outreach-led encampment resolutions, provide referrals to shelter during encampment removals and provide support to individuals to move out of immediate hazard/obstruction locations,” according to a budget memo.

Finally, the council approved adding $800,000 to an existing $2.6 million police marketing contract, with a new provision from Councilmember Cathy Moore stipulating that half the money has to be aimed at recruiting women. Moore’s amendment replaced a proposal from Morales that would have not allowed SPD to spend the same $400,000 until it reported to the council on how it is currently spending the marketing dollars to recruit women and a status update on its goal of a 30-percent female recruit class by 2030.

Public safety committee chair Kettle objected to Morales’ amendment, saying that while he is “110 percent behind” efforts to recruit more women to SPD, I don’t think [the amendment is] needed in the sense that everything I see regarding recruitment, everything I see, is already including women in those recruitment efforts.

In fact, Kettle added, “I haven’t seen anything but women in [SPD’s] recruitment efforts.”

As PubliCola reported earlier this week, the marketing firm SPD hired on a no-bid “piggyback” contract, Copacino Fujikado, produced three video ads that exclusively feature male, apparently white, officers rescuing people from dangerous situations, including one in which a male officer saves a crying woman bound with rope from a man who is holding her and another woman hostage.

City Council, homelessness, Media, Mental Health, Police, Transportation

This Week On PubliCola

A weekly digest of stories PubliCola published this week.

Monday, April 1: Seattle Times Shocked to Learn Even Groups They Disagree With Can Get Street-Use Permits

The Seattle Times denounces the city for granting a permit for the Cascade Bicycle Club, which advocates for safer streets, to use the West Seattle Bridge for its annual fundraising ride.

The Crisis Care Centers Levy, One Year Later: Where Will the Kids Go?

Guest columnist Brittany Miles discusses the immediate need for a crisis care center for kids under 17, and the hurdles crisis care centers will inevitably face as King County tries to site them in local communities.

Tuesday, April 2: Tentative Police Contract Includes 23 Percent Retroactive Raise, Raising Cops’ Base Salary to Six Figures

PubliCola breaks the news about double-digit wage increases for police, at a time when other city workers will get cost of living adjustments that barely keep pace with inflation.

Don’t Open Pike Place to Pedestrians, Council Member Urges

Pedestrianizing the traffic-choked road in front of Pike Place Market is a popular proposal, but new Councilmember Bob Kettle wants to make sure the city doesn’t do it.

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Thursday, April 4: After Series of Hurried Meetings, Homelessness Authority Decides to Continue Search for Permanent Leader

The embattled regional homelessness authority will keep looking for a new leader, rather than suspending the search as two powerful search committee members urged last week. Plans to restructure the authority to give more power to elected officials also continue.

Friday, April 5: Police Contract Offers Big Raises, No Significant Accountability Improvements

We got a copy of the tentative police contract, which the police union briefly posted before replacing the contract with a photo of the union president. The contract includes almost none of the baseline accountability measures the city adopted into law in 2017.

New Police Contract “Does Not Appear to Address Accountability at All,” Reform Advocates Say

Reporter Andrew Engelson dives further into the details of the contract, and talks to advocates for police accountability who say it falls short of their lowest expectations.

King County, Mental Health

The Crisis Care Centers Levy, One Year Later: Where Will the Kids Go?

By Brittany Miles

Last April, King County voters overwhelmingly approved the Crisis Care Centers Levy, which funds behavioral urgent care. I have followed the measure closely as the parent of a teen with early-onset schizophrenia, because one of the five centers is designated for children and youth. I, along with other parents of children with severe mental illness, hope the centers support kids who desperately need help.

But since declaring victory, the Metropolitan King County Council has not been transparent about the next steps. After hearing no updates for several months, I published an op-ed asking county leaders: “Now what?” It was not until late summer that the planning team began engaging with the community. Kate Baber, the county’s Crisis Care Centers planning director, started monthly community meetings, and interviewed key informants, including me, to learn more about the crisis. By late December, King County Executive Dow Constantine sent the plan to the King County Council. Now, we are in the legislative process, with early investments starting midyear.

Sounds good, right? Well—maybe. During the run-up to the election, the council had a solid communication plan to inform voters about the cost and benefits of the levy. The core message: The Crisis Care Centers are the missing piece in our behavioral crisis response, and the cost of $1.2 billion over nine years is worth it to save lives.

Voters agreed, but they may have missed the fine print. The first center is not scheduled to open until 2026, with one center opening each year until 2030, and that is only if the county does not encounter the kind of delays that are common in major procurement and real estate transactions. I learned about this timeline last May, when King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay posted about the schedule on Twitter. It felt like a bait and switch—business as usual by King County political leaders, who focused on selling voters on the levy’s long-term value instead of being up-front about the lengthy process it will take to site and build the crisis centers.

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Even the 2026-2030 timeline seems optimistic. The centers will attract a diverse population to suburban neighborhoods, which may make residents uneasy, so we should expect the siting process to go through a NIMBY stage. It will take a lot of time for the cities that are open to the centers to convince their residents of the good they will do for the local community.

Kenmore, for example, expressed an interest in being home to one of the crisis centers, but its city council just voted down an affordable housing development that had been in the works for years.  How likely is it that a crisis center will work in a community that rejects low-income housing in response to a backlash from residents? Hopefully, other cities, like Bothell, Lake Forest Park, Burien, Kirkland, Kent, Renton, Auburn, Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle, are devising plans to effectively manage residents’ criticism and opinions on the proposed change to their community.

What do we do until the centers are open? Baber’s Initiative Planning Team, which leads the implementation process and planning for the levy, wisely recommends increasing mobile crisis response. There are multiple community agencies and partners that do the work of crisis de-escalation with local law enforcement. If a loved one is in danger or needs immediate support, they will receive connection to care and avoid arrest or worse consequences.

There is a gap for kids with severe mental illnesses who need higher-level care. I sought outpatient providers during a recent crisis, but they turned us away because they couldn’t provide the necessary level of care. While kids like mine may be a smaller population, there are few options when these kids are in crisis and parents are flummoxed about what to do. The emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital is overburdened and cannot always admit kids who need their stabilization services most. Late last year, it took multiple to Children’s ER to get my child admitted for a 10-day stay. They required higher-level care to stabilize, and this helped immeasurably. If we did not get them admitted, I have no idea where we would be today.

I applaud the work Crisis Care Center Initiative Planning Team has done so far done so far to plan for the Crisis Care Centers. In the meantime, though, the team the needs to address the gap in services for kids with severe mental illness. While there are programs available, they are not equal to the needs of the diverse pediatric population. My most ardent wish is that the first center in 2026 will be for kids, because no one has a satisfactory answer to where they are supposed to go  in times of their greatest need.

Editor’s note: This post has been edited to remove a paragraph that said families with private insurance are unable to access mobile outreach and response services. In fact, they are eligible for these services. PubliCola regrets the error.

Brittany Miles is the single parent of a 15-year-old with early onset schizophrenia and a member of the Kirkland Regional Crisis Response Community Advisory Board.