Tag: 911

homelessness, Police

“Unacceptable”: Burien City Manager Complained to Police Chief, Sheriff About Lack of Immediate Response to His 911 Calls
Burien’s Town Square Park, as seen from City Hall (via Google Maps)

By Erica C. Barnett

We’ve reported before on Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon’s habit of calling 911, sometimes multiple times a day, to report on the presence of people he believes are using drugs, setting up tents, or behaving oddly outside the window of his office at Burien City Hall, which overlooks Town Square Park in downtown Burien. But emails obtained through a records request show that he took things a step further earlier this year when he felt the police weren’t responding quickly enough to his requests for immediate, in-person service.

In February, just a few weeks before the Burien City Council passed a law that effectively makes it illegal for unsheltered people to sleep in the city, Bailon contacted then-Police Chief Ted Boe directly to complain that he had been on hold with the city’s non-emergency 911 response line for 25 minutes after he called “to report ongoing open drug use and an encampment commencing within Town Square Park.”

“This is the second time that I encounter this problem,” Bailon told the police chief. “Please help me to understand why this continues to happen with KCSO’s 911 system, and what caused this issue this evening.” At the bottom of the email, Bailon attached a screen shot of his phone capturing the length (25 minutes and one second) of the call in progress.

As a point of comparison, when former city council member Lisa Herbold texted then-Seattle police chief Carmen Best in 2020 to say she was concerned about a dilapidated trailer that showed up her house, which she believed someone had set up as part of a political stunt, she was admonished and fined $500 by the city’s ethics and elections commission.

In another incident, an administrative assistant for the city received a call from a woman who claimed to be “from Eastern Russia” saying that “Homelessness is an issue everywhere, not just in Burien, and illegals were going to get that lady on the video,” according to the staffer’s summary.

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The staffer took “that lady on the video” to be Councilmember Akey, who was caught on tape confronting a group of unsheltered people outside her downtown Burien condo and telling them she would call the police on them if they didn’t leave. (At the time, they had the legal right to set up tents on the sidewalk until 6 in the morning).

Bailon again complained to Boe directly, this time demanding to know why police had not come out to take the staffer’s report. The police chief investigated and informed Bailon that there had been a error by the call taker, and told Bailon if the staffer would call 911 again, the police would log the call and send someone out immediately to take her report.

In response, Bailon demanded that Boe send someone out immediately without the need for a 911 call, adding, “911 command staff need to be proactive on this failure and approach the City to correct the issue. It is very common for 911-non emergency to take up to and over 20 minutes to accept a call, and I do not want my team to have to wait for extended periods of time due to a failure on the part of a 911 operator and the 911 system.” (In Seattle, the non-emergency line is separate from 911 and callers have to leave a message.)

Boe responded by telling Bailon that the woman had been reprimanded for her mistake, and asking him again to have a staffer call 911.

Instead of making the call, Bailon escalated his complaint to Boe’s boss, King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall, sending her what was by now a lengthy email thread and complaining that Boe had “dismissed my request on two separate occasions and, instead, instruct the City to call 911 again to file a new report. This is unacceptable. I do not understand the reason for the City being instructed to file a new report instead of the 911 system fulfilling its obligation to the City of Burien.”

The head of patrol for the sheriff’s department responded to Bailon’s email to Cole-Tindall, explaining that if Bailon didn’t want to wait for police to come out to City Hall, someone could easily take a report over the phone; all the city staffer needed to do was call 911 again and someone would take the report or come to City Hall right away. Instead of taking either route, Bailon said he didn’t understand why the sheriff’s office was forcing him to make a “special request” to have an officer sent over, and insisted, again, that the police send someone over without another 911 call.

By the end of the email thread PubliCola reviewed, two days had elapsed between the initial call and Bailon’s email refusing, for the fourth time, to have someone dial 911 again.

It’s unclear whether the administrative assistant ever filed a report about the phone call from the woman “from Eastern Russia,” which the email thread indicated the city at least initially considered a high-priority “threat.”

Drugs, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health, Police

Six-Member Behavioral Health Team Launches to Respond to Non-Emergency Calls, Accompanied by Cops
CARE Department Chief Amy Smith

By Erica C. Barnett

More than three years after city council members first started calling for a civilian response to behavioral health emergencies, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced Wednesday that a new six-member dual-dispatch team is ready to deploy in the “DAP zone”—the stretch of downtown between SoDo and the Denny Triangle that is the focus of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s business-focused Downtown Activation Plan. “Often, we don’t need a gun and badge; we need people trained and skilled at the kind of outreach and kind of treatment that we want to see,” Harrell said at the announcement at City Hall on Wednesday.

The team will be housed in the city’s recently rebranded 911 call center, now known as the Community Assisted Response and Engagement Department. (Not to be confused with the recently rebranded encampment response team, now known as the Unified Care Team.)

The team of behavioral health specialists will only respond to low-priority calls—those that require a “prompt” response but aren’t “urgent,” according to the city’s call priority system—that may be appropriate for a behavioral health response.

Unlike in other cities, like Eugene, Oregon (whose CAHOOTS civilian-response program does not include cops), police will accompany the CARE team on every call, “clearing the scene” and determining it’s safe for unarmed responders to approach,  department chief Amy Smith said Wednesday. Smith said she, not the police or fire department, insisted on this model, because “in the little area where we are [operating], the threat of violence is much higher than it might otherwise be and in years gone by.” If it turns out police aren’t necessary, Smith added, “we will articulate new policy and protocols.”

Working between 11am and 11pm, teams of two, will drive to the site of Priority 3 “person down” calls—for example, a person who is passed out at a bus stop—and calls for Priority 3 welfare checks, a catchall term for when “it looks like somebody’s not doing well,” Smith said.

Currently, there are relatively few such calls in the nine police beats that include at least part of the Downtown Activation Plan area. In  2023 so far, according to city 911 call data, there have been a total of 88 Priority 3 “down person” calls and 565 Priority 3 welfare check calls in the pilot area; last year, those numbers were 27 and 488, respectively.

Smith told us the relatively low number could be due to 911 dispatchers deliberately “upcoding” calls—giving calls a higher priority than they might ordinarily receive—”to make sure that somebody does go out.” Adding Priority 2 calls to the mix—a category that includes “altercations or situations which could escalate if assistance does not arrive soon”—only boosts the 2023 numbers to 663 and 862 in the DAP zone, for person down and welfare-check calls, respectively (compared to 595 and 985 in those categories for 2022).

While 130 or so calls a month could be plenty to keep a six-person team busy as they get up and running, it seems likely that the team will need to expand to more areas of the city outside downtown—or more urgent, higher-priority call types—to make a meaningful dent in the number of calls that don’t really require police.

“I know that that’s not enough area, but I’m very defensive that I only have three teams here and we have a lot of calls to get to,” Smith said. “And stay tuned, because it does need to expand.”

Asked why the mayor’s office chose downtown—and specifically the area  Downtown Activation Plan area—for the pilot, given that there are so many other neighborhoods with acute behavioral health needs, Smith said deputy mayor Tim Burgess was responsible for choosing the DAP zone as the first area for the team to focus. “And I think that’s smart, because I really like a comprehensive effort, so you can test things,” Smith added. “It’s already an area of emphasis where there are resources [already going].”

However, Smith noted that even with behavioral health teams responding to calls, the city isn’t paying for any new programs or places for people to go once the new first responders arrive.

“I don’t want people to hope that I’m showing up with a secret set of resources,” Smith said. “I don’t have anything more than what we already have in the system.” The crisis care centers levy, which passed in April, and a new opioid overdose recovery center funded partly by federal grants will add some capacity, but—as we’ve noted—the mayor’s latest budget provides no additional funding for treatment, behavioral health care, or diversion.

Police, Transportation

Officer Responding to Overdose Call Killed Woman In Marked Intersection Where City Canceled Safety Project
The intersection of Dexter and Thomas, where a police officer driving an SUV struck and killed a 23-year-old student Monday.

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This story has been edited to reflect the fact that the Seattle Police Department, not the Seattle Fire Department, confirmed that the police officer was responding to a call about an overdose.

On Monday, a police officer responding to an overdose call in South Lake Union in struck and killed a 23-year-old student at Northeastern University, Jaahnavi Kandula, who was crossing Dexter Avenue on Thomas Street in a marked intersection, according to police.

According to the Seattle Fire Department, the department was responding to a call for aid 6th Ave. N, a few blocks away; the Seattle Police Department confirmed that the call was “a priority one call for an overdose.” An SFD spokeswoman told PubliCola the man, who was in his late 20s, “was evaluated and did not want to be transported to the hospital.”

The police department has released few details about the collision and was slow to get information out to the public Monday night. SPD did not confirm that Kandula had died until Tuesday afternoon, nearly 18 hours after the crash, and initially did not disclose that the collision involved a police officer, tweeting only that they were “investigating [a] collision.” The department’s official post still says the officer was responding to an unspecified “priority 1” call—the most urgent call type, which can include everything from a person unconscious at a bus stop to an active shooter—rather than an overdose.

SPD said it could not respond to questions about the collision, the officer who was driving the SUV, or the speed with which they released information to the press and public. “This is still an active investigation,” public affairs Sergeant John O’Neil told PublICola. “The information we can provide, such as times, speed, who did what, who knew what etc. is extremely limited while the investigation is going on. … We do not know at this time if there will be a criminal investigation.”

SPD did not confirm that Kandula had died until Tuesday afternoon, nearly 18 hours after the crash, and initially did not disclose that the collision involved a police officer, tweeting only that they were “investigating [a] collision.”

What we do know is that that, as of at least last year, sending cops out on overdose calls is a routine practice.

“The SPD/CSCC Policy is to dispatch police along with SFD to a specific set of calls including persons trapped in elevators, hazmat situations, active shooters, scenes of violence, down persons, suicides, overdoses, domestic disputes and certain similar types of calls,” an spokesman for the Community Safety and Communications Center (CSCC), which answers 911 calls, said. “In every case the call is screened with SFD first so a trained fire dispatcher can make a determination whether SFD will respond.  If SFD will respond, the call is always dispatched as priority 1 for SPD.”

In other words, if you call 911 about a possible overdose, any response from the city will include police, even if the person only needs medical attention.

It’s unclear when this policy became routine, but it may date to late last year. Last September, Council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold mentioned at a council briefing that she was talking to the fire department about implementing an “automatic joint response, with SPD escorting SPD,” for all overdose calls after firefighters raised concerns about people being violent and belligerent when medics reversed their overdoses with Narcan.

People who “receive Narcan or who are coming out of a seizure for another reason, [might] be unaware of their surroundings and have an initial violent reaction,” putting first responders at risk, Herbold said. This is a common complaint among law enforcement officials, although it’s unclear how often overdose victims actually attack first responders.

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The collision also raises questions about the safety of the  intersection where it occurred.

For years, the city had been working on a major safety upgrade in the rapidly developing Dexter corridor, with a new protected crosswalk at Dexter and Thomas as its centerpiece. The new crosswalk would have prevented vehicles from using Thomas Street to cross Dexter while slowing perpendicular traffic on Dexter itself.

Last year, Mayor Bruce Harrell canceled the remaining elements of the safety project, citing the need to cut costs amid budget challenges. “This project is a green street/public realm project that connects South Lake Union with Seattle Center. The reduction would pause the remaining project scope indefinitely,” Harrell’s 2023 budget says. The cuts amounted to $2.2 million of the $5.5 million project, according to Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen, who pointed out that the city council did not restore funding for the project in their version of the budget.

“The Traffic Collision Investigation Squad is examining this event,.and the information detailed in that investigation will determine next steps and help identify any changes we can make—both in our infrastructure and operationally—to ensure this kind of terrible event does not happen again.” —Mayor Bruce Harrell

“Following approval of the budget, the Mayor’s Office has directed City departments to reevaluate how the project should best move forward, what improvements can be made with the current budget, and what further steps should be taken to improve safety along the corridor should additional resources become available,” Housen said.

Although the new pedestrian protections would not have been in place in time to prevent the collision Monday night, the elimination of funding for an important pedestrian and cyclist project that was already underway speaks to an ongoing lack of progress toward Vision Zero, a goal the city has adopted of ending traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030. Harrell’s SDOT director, Gregory Spotts, has promised a “top to bottom review” of the city’s Vision Zero strategy.

“Our public safety strategies must include ensuring our streets and sidewalks are safe for all users,” Harrell said in a statement sent in response to PubliCola’s questions. “We will continue to look to the data to determine where safety investments can and should be made, including regularly reassessing ongoing and future projects like the one at Thomas Street.”

“The Traffic Collision Investigation Squad is examining this event,” Harrell continued, “and the information detailed in that investigation will determine next steps and help identify any changes we can make—both in our infrastructure and operationally—to ensure this kind of terrible event does not happen again.”

According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, no one has been hit or seriously injured at the intersection of Dexter and Thomas since at least 2018.

City Council, Police, public safety

SPD Risk Analysis Recategorized 911 Calls More than Half the Time

Pie chart showing that SPD changed the analysis of the risk of 911 calls 54% of the timeBy Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department presented its initial “risk managed demand” analysis of 911 calls to the city council’s public safety committee earlier this week, a long-awaited presentation that was cut short because council members needed to get to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget speech. The eventual goal of the analysis, which looked at 356 call types and categorized them by the risk of harm they posed to callers, is to come up with a system for routing some calls to non-police responders or co-response teams, in which police serve as backup to service providers; this initial report is just a first step toward that eventual goal.

As we’ve reported, Mayor Bruce Harrell has adopted a go-slow approach to implementing alternatives to police, frustrating some council members who have been pushing for years to implement a pilot for responding to low-risk calls, along the lines of programs already in place in cities across the country, and see how it works. Earlier this month, Harrell’s office indicated they were open to a small pilot along the lines of Eugene’s CAHOOTS program or the Star program in Denver; his proposed budget for 2023 includes about $2 million for this purpose.

First, SPD gave each call type a risk number based on how the city currently responds to calls—an “all-hazards” response that always includes police. Then they applied a “mitigation” factor, essentially asking: What would this call look like if non-police responders were available?

SPD’s analysis looked at 356 different types of calls and categorized them by risk, taking two passes at the question. First, they gave each call type a risk number based on how the city currently responds to calls—an “all-hazards” response that always includes police. Then they applied a “mitigation” factor, essentially asking: What would this call look like if non-police responders were available to go out either alone or in tandem with police?

Between the two rounds, SPD data crunchers manually “recoded” more than half of all calls; 31 percent were “upgraded” to a higher risk level (meaning SPD believes police need to be present) and 23 percent were downgraded to a lower risk, based on the assumption that non-police responders would de-escalate a situation. SPD Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey told the council that, for example, a welfare check might be categorized as Tier 1 (the highest-risk situation, requiring police), but further analysis would downgrade it to a Tier 3, which a social service provider could respond to with police backup.

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In response to questions from committee chair Lisa Herbold and Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, Maxey said SPD looked at the risk to people on the civilian end of 911 calls, rather than police, because the estimate of risk to police would have to be based on the current all-hazards response, which created the risk of “bootstrapping” the assumption that the risk to officers is generally higher than it is. “It seems like a completely different exercise to me,” Herbold said. “If you include use of force, then we are skewing the data in favor of a police response,” Maxey responded.

Herbold told PubliCola she was also concerned about the fact that SPD’s modeling required so much intervention by a human being who reversed the initial finding more than half the time. Since SPD’s model “only gets it right about half the time,” she said, “is this one performing the way SPD wants it to perform? Should we think about revising the formula?” It may be, ultimately, that there is no truly objective formula for pinpointing how much risk every 911 call poses to anyone, which means the best course of action could be moving forward with alternative responders based on the imperfect information we do have, rather than perfect information that will never be possible.

During the next phase of the analysis, SPD will begin setting up a “call triage system” in which bots that can process and categorize natural language to help 911 operators categorize calls based on their level of risk, using the “objective” measure of word frequency to augment call-takers’ human instincts. Accenture, a multinational management consulting and data analysis firm that has had a blanket contract with SPD since 2015, is developing that system now.

The public safety committee won’t meet again until December, after adopting the 2023 city budget.

City Council, human services, Mayor Harrell, Police

Seattle Was Supposed to Create Alternatives to Police for 911 Calls. What Happened?
Health One vehicle, 2019
Seattle rolled out its Health One program, part of the Seattle Fire Department, in 2019. Since then, progress on alternatives to traditional policing have been small-scale and ad hoc.Seattle City Council from Seattle, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

More than two years have passed since the protests against police violence that erupted after George Floyd was murdered in the summer of 2020, and many of the changes the city considered in the aftermath of those protests have failed to materialize.  Beyond the demonstrable fact that the police have not been “defunded”—reductions in SPD’s budget have been modest, and most have come from shifting jobs into other departments, not actual cuts—the whole idea of “community safety” has been largely abandoned in favor of “reform,” an idea that has been around for decades.

In Seattle, initial reforms, which were supposed to be followed quickly by more meaningful changes, included a lot of administrative shuffling, with mixed results. Parking enforcement officers now work for the Department of Transportation, not SPD, a move that has prompted a complaint at the state Public Employee Relations Commission alleging unfair labor practices and that forced the city to refund millions of dollars in parking tickets.

Separately, the city’s 911 system moved out of the police department and into a new department called the Community Safety and Communications Center. Although reformers hoped the CSCC would be able to direct some calls, such as those involving a mental health crisis, to civilian responders, that process has stalled. Earlier this summer, SPD began explaining why.

According to a recent presentation to the city council’s public safety committee by SPD chief operating officer Brian Maxey and senior research scientist Loren Atherley, a frequently cited SPD analysis concluding that 12 percent of 911 calls “can and should be explored for alternative responses starting now,” as a report from then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s office put, it was flawed. The 12 percent number was based on a report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR)  that found that nearly 80 percent of 911 calls in Seattle were “non-criminal” in nature.

In fact, the SPD officials told the committee, the city should never have used the NICJR report as the basis for staffing recommendations in the first place, because it relied on “perfect,” after-the-fact information about how various types of calls were ultimately resolved. In real time and in advance, “it’s very difficult to tell what is being described over the phone what you are dealing with,” Atherley told the council.

SPD’s “risk matrix” locates different types of 911 calls on a grid with two dimensions: The severity of the outcome and the likelihood it will happen. Currently, according to SPD, the department responds to all calls as if they are in the red “extreme” zone.

“The NICJR report that called for the vast majority of our calls to be categorized as appropriate for civilian response— honestly and directly, we take issue with it,” Maxey added. “The 12 percent that we discussed last summer—I don’t want to call it a back-of-the-envelope analysis, but it was far less sophisticated than the approach we are taking right now.”

That new approach involves using a “risk matrix” to categorize every 911 call based on the likelihood of various outcomes if an armed responder is not present, ranging from “negligible” to “catastrophic”. The risk matrix is based on safety management systems in commercial aviation, which determines risk based on a complex analysis of past events to decide which kinds of risks are acceptable and which must be avoided at all costs. Currently, according to SPD, every call gets treated as if it’s likely to be catastrophic; the point of the analysis is to figure out which calls don’t require an “all-hazards” response.

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At a followup committee meeting last month, Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell said this analysis will enable the city to determine  “what is the consequence of not having an armed response a sworn response? And what is the likelihood that there will be a bad outcome without a sworn response?”

So far, SPD’s analysis has determined that there are about 42,000 different types of 911 calls—meaning that of the 400,000 or so calls the CSCC receives every year, each call type occurs an average of ten times a year. “Maybe that’s too granular,” Deputy Mayor Harrell said in an interview. “Maybe we can we can put those together. But there’s certainly themes, and there’s overlays to that in which we can in which we can say yeah, there are there are a significant number of calls that do not necessarily need a police response.”

The CSCC’s interim director, Chris Lombard, did not respond to requests for an interview.

City council members impatient for changes have questioned whether SPD and the mayor’s office are slow-walking the analysis on purpose to delay taking action. Pointing to cities like Denver, Eugene, Houston, and Albuquerque that have implemented alternative response models—including “co-responder” models that pair police and mental health professionals and triage models where low-risk crisis calls go directly to non-police responders—council member Andrew Lewis argues that there’s no need to wait for a lengthy analysis before starting to reroute some low-level calls.

“I don’t know what is unique or special about our city that we cannot do this basic work, but I would like to… figure out how to put forward a very precise, efficient, and disciplined timeline to deliver on this critical body of work and not treat it like it is something that is unprecedented or obscure or difficult to do,” Lewis said at the council’s weekly briefing this past Monday. Continue reading “Seattle Was Supposed to Create Alternatives to Police for 911 Calls. What Happened?” →

City Council, Morning Fizz, Police, Transit

Bike Board Member Asks for Encampment Ban Near Bike Lanes, Poll Tests Streetcar Popularity; Council Clarifies “Z-Disposition” for 911 Calls

1. Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board member Dr. Doug Migden wrote to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office earlier this year to complain about the homeless people he sees while riding his bike, and to suggest legislation that would ban people from sleeping within up to 200 feet of any bike facility or sidewalk.

“First, I voted for Mr. Harrell and the primary reason is that crime and encampment related filth in Seattle is now totally unacceptable,” Migden’s letter begins. “I have lived on the north end of Queen Anne, in a house I own, since 1997. Unfortunately I’ve never seen Seattle in such a mess.”

Council member Alex Pedersen installed Migden on the bike board earlier this year, rejecting a different nominee the board identified through a months-long recruitment and nomination process. The bike board advocates for and advises the city on policies to make Seattle safer and more welcoming to cyclists from all backgrounds, including low-income and homeless people.

Given that “bicycle commuters in West Seattle can’t even safely get to downtown because of encampments and illegal activity such as IV drug use on or adjacent to bicycle pathways,” Migden continued in his letter, “how about a policy whereby nobody can camp on public sidewalks, on bicycle paths, or within 100 or 200 feet of such public spaces. This is not too much to ask and it’s certainly doable. Enforcement would be needed though. Perhaps more police officers on bicycles would help with this and other crime related issues in Seattle.”

“How about a policy whereby nobody can camp on public sidewalks, on bicycle paths, or within 100 or 200 feet of such public spaces.  Enforcement would be needed though. Perhaps more police officers on bicycles would help with this and other crime related issues in Seattle.” —Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board member Doug Migden

Yes, Migden wrote, it’s important to “take care of” truly “vulnerable populations,” but a lot of the homeless people he sees around are able-bodied men who “are not mentally ill,” are “in no distress,” and are well-off enough to “indulge” in cell phones. “[S]tratification and picking apart which illegal campers truly need assistance and which ones are basically freeloading off of responsible citizens who pay taxes etc., is crucial,” Migden wrote.

The mayor’s office, in a standardized response, told Migden they would forward the information about the encampments he reported (including “disgusting RVs” in Fremont and Ballard) to the city’s encampment cleanup squad.

2. A recent poll tested voters’ opinions about completing the long-delayed downtown Seattle streetcar project, along with various local funding options, such as increasing the commercial parking tax, increasing the local vehicle licensing fee, and increasing local sales taxes, already among the highest in the country.

The poll, conducted last week, seems to favor streetcar completion—stating, for example, that federal funding could cut the $350 million estimated cost of the streetcar almost in half, but is only available for a limited time. (Federal funding for the streetcar is far from certain, although, as the Urbanist pointed out earlier this year, a potential $75 million request for federal funding still gets a “high” rating from the Federal Transit Administration.)

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“Connecting Seattle’s two existing streetcar lines just makes sense,” one of the poll’s test messages begins. (Many polls test messages that could be used for or against a proposal or person during a future campaign.) “This project will link our busiest transportation hubs serving people coming downtown by bus, light rail, ferry, Sounder, and Amtrak train creating a more seamless and convenient transportation system.”

Former mayor Jenny Durkan paused work on the downtown streetcar connection in 2018, citing cost overruns. Before and since then, streetcar skeptics have argued that the downtown line is redundant with existing bus and light rail service and would not serve enough riders to justify the ballooning cost. Last year, the city council gave the long-moribund streetcar a kickstart by providing $2.4 million in funding to resume work on the project.

It’s unclear who’s behind the poll; local political consultants, transit advocates, business groups, and streetcar proponents all told PubliCola it wasn’t them.

3. During an update on the city’s efforts to established an alternative response system for 911 calls that don’t require an armed response, city council public safety committee attempted to clarify an issue that recently confounded a prominent local columnist: The so-called “Z disposition” the Seattle Police Department gives to certain low-priority calls.

Previously, committee chair Lisa Herbold noted, dispatchers would routinely put the 911 system into “priority call status,” meaning that calls that didn’t rank in SPD’s top two “priority” designations (which include violent crimes and crimes in progress) would not get any response at all. Now, an officer reviews lower-priority calls before deciding whether they merit a response before dismissing them. “In my mind, that’s that’s a better approach, because at least you’re having somebody on the ground with law enforcement expertise making that decision,” Herbold said.

In April, she added, the city’s Office of Police Accountability recommended establishing a clearer system for assigning low-priority calls, in response to a high-profile complaint about two officers who ate breakfast near the Ballard library rather than responding immediately to a call about a person asleep inside their car.

Councilmember Sara Nelson said that in her view, the new system is actually worse, because under “priority call status,” police would at least tell low-priority callers to call back or give them a general estimate of when they might hear back about their call. “There is a customer service issue going on with the call with the system right now with no communication and that’s why people are getting upset,” Nelson said.

Efforts to replace police with civilian responders for some 911 calls remain largely stalled, and the Seattle Police Officers Guild has demanded to bargain any changes to the SPD-centric 911 response system.