Tag: CARE Team

Mayor Wilson, Police, public safety

Report: Police Contract Severely Limits CARE Team’s Ability to Do Their Jobs
Flow chart demonstrating how a CARE dispatch proceeds when a 911 operator directs the team to respond to a call directly.

By Erica C. Barnett

A new report from the city’s Office of Inspector General confirms what Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department Chief Amy Barden has been saying for more than a year: The new contract between the city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), which was put on a fast track last year after Katie Wilson beat incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell, drastically limits the ability of the CARE team of civilian first responders to respond to crisis calls, which is the entire the reason they exist.

Although many other US cities now have crisis response teams who have replaced police for calls that don’t require armed officers or where police may make the situation worse), Seattle has increasingly lagged behind. When Harrell announced the new contract, he emphasized the fact that it allowed CARE to respond to calls without police in tow—what’s known as a “primary” response—for the first time since its inception, in 2023.  A Until last year, police had to be present, at least initially, during every 911 response.

But the new contract also included a memorandum of understanding between the city and SPOG that dramatically reduced CARE’s ability to respond to the type of calls that were supposed to be its raison d’être: Welfare checks, “person down” calls, and nuisance calls.

The agreement, which CARE had no role in crafting and did not approve, “prohibits CARE response to calls involving substance abuse, persons in homeless encampments and on private property, and individuals in crisis,” according to the report. “This excludes a significant portion of the population CARE was intended to serve.”

“CARE’s scope of work remains significantly impacted by the terms of the SPOG contract,” the report says. “Even as the SPOG contract adds a new response type, expands call types, and removes the cap on new staffing, it also further limits the CARE Team.”

 

In a statement, Mayor Katie Wilson’s office said the review “places an important spotlight on limitations placed on CARE crisis responders under the SPOG collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the prior administration. Seattle’s residents have been unambiguously clear in their demand for an alternative response to emergency calls, and the CARE crisis responders were curtailed by past City leadership, through no fault of their own.”

Barden said she sees some positive news in the most recent data from the report, which show a 32 percent uptick in CARE responses compared to the previous 12-week average. “I think this is due in part to the team being available early morning, and in part due to stronger relationships with the SPD precinct captains and more clarity about what constitutes a crisis call that is clinical in nature and most appropriate for the CARE team,” Barden said.

Wilson’s office said the mayor is  “optimistic about the positive and productive collaboration Interim [Police] Chief [Andre] Sayles has formed with the CARE department and other community safety partners. That commitment to partnership will be an essential qualification for our next permanent chief.”

The team is planning to start operating out of library branches with a high number of crisis calls, and is launching a partnership with the downtown jail to intercept people leaving jail who need services, which Barden said should use up the rest of the 32-member team’s capacity. “I anticipate that these strategies will create more work than we currently have staff for, so I am not concerned with the existing limitations explained in the OIG report,” Barden said. The  city’s 2026 budget included funding for 48 CARE crisis responders, but Barden said she thought it made sense to spread out or slow down hiring in light of the current economic forecast and $175 million budget deficit, which could force cuts to many city departments.

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Without a change to the underlying SPOG contract, however, CARE remains severely limited in its ability to accomplish its original remit of responding to 911 calls in the place of police. The current contract runs through the end of next year.

“Dual dispatch,” which was previously the only way CARE could be sent out on calls, is limited in new ways under the MOU, the OIG report notes; officers who would previously have been directed to call CARE to provide assistance can now “take immediate action if they believe it is appropriate” without calling the team at all. Another problem, according to the report, is that SPD’s very slow response to low-priority calls that require dual dispatch under the contract means that “community members do not receive help when they need it, even if CARE is available,” undermining confidence in the team.

A large number of the calls CARE responds to—388 in the first three months of 2026—originate with police who respond to calls and then, after determining they’re appropriate for social workers, refer them to CARE. These calls, known as “SPD request” in the report, are the most common way the CARE team gets dispatched, followed by dual dispatch, primary dispatch (meaning 911 directed the CARE team to go to a call), and on-views, in which the CARE team witnesses an incident or situation where they can help and self-dispatch by responding in real time.

All of the restrictions in the SPOG contract apply to every kind of CARE response. For example, if CARE first responders saw someone in distress while walking through downtown Seattle, approached, and saw signs the person was using drugs, they would have to walk away and call SPD to the scene. Under the SPOG contract, SPD sergeants can override any 911 operator who decides to dispatch the CARE team to a call. The OIG report doesn’t indicate how often that happens.

 

 

LGBTQ+, Police

Interim Police Chief Andre Sayles Says He Won’t Be Barnes 2.0: “I’m All About Collaboration”

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, after negotiating a minimum $741,000 settlement package with former police chief Shon Barnes, Mayor Katie Wilson announced she would be appointing one of Barnes’ two deputy chiefs, Andre Sayles, as interim police chief while the city begins a formal search and hiring process for the next permanent chief.

Barnes recruited Sayles last year from his job as police chief in Beloit, WI, about an hour south of Madison, where Barnes was previously chief. Like Barnes, Sayles has a family home in Illinois, a few miles outside Beloit (Barnes’ family home is in Chicago). where his wife continues to live; his kids also live in the area. His Washington state home, which he describes as his primary residence, is in east King County.

PubliCola sat down with Sayles at SPD headquarters last Friday for a conversation about the future of SPD, how his style and priorities differ from Barnes’, the culture at SPD, and more. I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.

Erica C, Barnett (PubliCola): Barnes recruited you to come to Seattle. You’ve mentioned that you’re personal friends. I’m curious why you decided to say yes to the interim chief job, given the circumstances of his departure and the fact that you’re so closely linked with him.

Andre Sayles: I never knew [Barnes] before January 2021. He came to my swearing-in April 2021 when I became police chief [in Beloit], and we kept in contact with each other professionally and developed a friendship personally after that. So when he presented [the Seattle deputy chief position] to me, I said, you know, I know I can be successful here. I can bring my personal touch to it, being a human first, and not being a chief or anything like that, and treating people with dignity and respect, not just inside the police department, but in the community as well. So I said, hey, let’s take this challenge because, you know, challenges help you grow.

PubliCola: What have you learned so far about the differences between policing in a small town like Beloit and a larger city like Seattle?

Sayles: I think sometimes it gets lost in the wording of ‘small’ that Beloit is a very diverse community. We dealt with a lot. There was a time where we were averaging anywhere between 10 and 12 homicides a year, for a city that’s anywhere between 38 and 40,000 people. That’s a lot of work for a quote-unquote small town. I truly believe policing is transferable. My skills and ability can go anywhere in this nation. As a patrol officer, I led homicide investigations. I led the drug and gang unit. It’s [a matter of] scaling your knowledge and skills to where you’re at.

PubliCola: Do you think that SPD has been doing that? Chief Barnes was doing a lot of community meetings, but they weren’t very well attended by actual community members. Will you change anything about how SPD does community outreach?

Sayles: Well, I think we have to remember if there’s 25 people in that meeting, sometimes people talk to 10 other people. So we are reaching people. But it’s a matter of getting more seats filled, more people to come to those meetings. And I think when we leave, we should provide a challenge to our community members: Hey, next time we have this meeting, bring two people with you. Because we want to hear from everyone that’s in this specific community. And let’s continue to do it, because I don’t want it to be a situation where we don’t show up.

But I would be happy if we showed up to a place and there was one person there, because that’s one person that’s dedicated to what we want to do for that community. Then that person is going to say, ‘Hey, they showed up five times. They’re committed to community policing.’

PubliCola: The city’s annual budget discussions are coming up, and there’s been a debate over whether SPD will slow down police hiring to stay within its budget. Can you talk about that possibility?

Sayles: I don’t know if we’re going to slow down, but we’re going to look at some steps to make sure that we’re able to get officers on the street in a timely manner. We may hire the same amount of people, but we may say, ‘All right, let’s take a two-three week break from hiring.’ So we can get people through the field training program, get them through [Basic Law Enforcement Academy], get them through post-BLEA, and then say, ‘All right, now let’s hire a certain amount of people.’ So it’s going to be a collective effort with our recruitment and retention team, and also the mayor’s office, to say, What does that look like? Let’s come up with a plan to say we’re going to hire X amount of officers during [each] quarter. That’s going to help the patrol staffing numbers and give that work-life balance back to our patrol officers to make sure that they can utilize their time away and be with their families.

PubliCola: To talk about the money, though, SPD will likely be over budget this year because you’re hiring more people than anticipated. There’s a huge budget deficit. Mayor Wilson has asked every department, including yours, to come up with very significant potential cuts. Is SPD going to cut its budget or resist taking any cuts?

Sayles: I think our biggest thing right now is to leave the people out of what we may put forward on the budget, because we want people, There’s some things that we may look at. Like—do we need to buy new chairs every year, or can we come up with a rotation for equipment for offices and things that nature, being very cognizant of the budget and being good stewards of the budget, and creating a roadmap and a plan within SPD, presenting it to the mayor’s office, presenting it to council members, and saying ‘This is what we’re committed to do.’ I think that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve been working diligently on that as an executive command staff team. I would like to bring in our captains and say, ‘What do you see in your precincts? What do you see in your unit?’ and have a group session on these things.

PubliCola: I saw that CARE Department Chief Amy Barden posted a photo of the two of you on Instagram this morning. In the past, she’s expressed some frustration about CARE not being authorized to respond to the kind of calls they were set up to respond to. Have you sat down with her and talked about her concerns? And will we see any changes with the relationship between SPD and CARE going forward?

Sayles: I met with Amy twice over the seven days I’ve been interim chief. I met Amy at a community meeting last year, where there was a situation that required CARE, and we co-responded to that situation together.

PubliCola: What was the situation?

Sayles: Then-mayor Bruce Harrell was at a Safeway talking [at an event promoting a food access initiative], and a gentleman was yelling and screaming. And we went over and we calmed down that situation together. So it’s going to be a new approach, because my ideas are similar to Chief Barnes, but they’re somewhat different, and my relationship with Amy is going to be different than Chief Barnes because I’m a different person. I’m a person that that is all about collaboration. Not saying that Chief Barnes was not, but I’m just talking about me specifically.

We’ve had a good conversation over the last week about some of the things that we want to do. So it’s bringing in SPD, bringing CARE to the table, bringing in Fire, bringing in the mayor’s office. And prior to us leaving the room, everybody agreeing that this is what we’re going to do, bringing in [the Seattle Police Officers Guild] and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re looking at,’ and putting a lock on that door before we leave, and everybody can walk out saying, ‘I like the collective idea that we came up with together.’

PubliCola: I want to ask a question about the Bite of Seattle shooting. I understand that you’re not going to be able to provide specific information, but there’s been a feeling of lost trust because there’s just still no new information coming out about what happened. What can you tell me about what’s going on with the investigation and why we don’t know anything yet?

Sayles: It’s one of those roadblocks in policing that some day, hopefully, we can get past in regards to the information that we can provide. I think the biggest thing is when we provide information, sometimes it gives that person that we may be looking for the idea and the advance knowledge of, ‘Oh, they know who I am.’ And we unfortunately sometimes have to keep that close to the vest because we have to proceed in our investigation with caution, and say, ‘We have this information. We can’t fully give it out to the community yet because, unfortunately, sometimes people help these suspects in these situations. I had a great talk with our investigators yesterday. Hopefully, in the coming days and coming weeks, there’s some things that’s going to happen that we will be able to talk about.

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PubliCola: I want to talk a little bit about the culture at SPD, which has been criticized as misogynist and anti-LGBTQ. Under former chief Barnes, there were a lot of problematic incidents and missed opportunities, including the way SPD handled the [anti-trans] Mayday USA rally last year. Do you think there’s room for improvement in SPD’s relationship with LGBTQ+ residents, and how will your  approach differ from Barnes’?

Sayles: People have identified that I came from outside, but I was actually a part of [SPD’s] LGBTQ+ Advisory Board until taking the interim position. I hadn’t seen anything in my 13, 14 months that would lead me to believe that’s what occurred. But I can’t be ignorant to what has been put out there and what has been said. So I want to strengthen that relationship. I think we’re making inroads to strengthen that relationship.

I know in July we had a meeting where there was a person that was trying to disrupt the meeting, and everyone in that group, from what I heard, actually was like, ‘Hey, the police are here. They’ve been here. They’ve been supportive of what we’re trying to do. Like, you can’t come in here and try to disrupt this meeting. And we’re developing a great relationship with the police department.’ I think it’s all about relationships and understanding that the things happened in the past, we have to be aware of it, but we also need to move past it and work on strengthening that relationship beyond some of the missteps that happened in the past. 

PubliCola: I’ve heard some critics and commentators say that the next permanent police chief needs be someone with roots in this community who rose up through the ranks at SPD, as opposed to someone who comes from elsewhere, like yourself. What do you think of that critique?

Sayles: I hope that we get a leader that wants to be involved in the community, someone that’s going to lead this department for our people inside this police department and outside this police department, not leading because you want a certain title. I think that’s the biggest thing, and that’s what it should be—a person that’s going to look at what SPD stands for: Service, pride, and dedication. If it’s a person from the inside, by all means, let’s go forward and be great. If it’s a person from outside, let’s forward, let’s go forward and be great.

PubliCola:  Are you applying?

Sayles: I have not had an opportunity to take a second to even think about that. It’s been a long week, and as things start to slow down for me a little bit. I think I’ll take a glance at it. But once again, I’m more focused on the people inside this police department—how can I help them?—and then also on our community members. I’m a person that’s selfless. I don’t really talk about myself and what I’ve done, and here’s this accolade or that accolade. I’m all about the people, and I’m all about a we mentality instead of a me mentality. So, if I decide to put in for it, I’ll decide to put in for it. But I haven’t thought about that because I’m focused on what we need to accomplish now.

PubliCola: Like Barnes, you still have a home in Illinois. What is your long-term plan, as far as moving to this area permanently versus keeping a home out of state?

Sayles: My home is in the Issaquah area. My secondary residence that I worked hard for is in Illinois. I asked the mayor when we talked, I said, ‘I just want to know that I have a place here in Seattle. Whenever there’s a permanent decision made, I would like to remain here.’ I came here because I believe my higher power put me here for a reason, and that is to be a leader within whatever role I have here at SPD.

I think I have shown that I’ve been very involved with our rank and file. I’ve been involved in our professional staff, and I’m getting myself out there in the community more than I have over the last year. I’ve been involved in the community, but now I want to be more involved in the community. And this is a place that I chose to come to. I uprooted myself to come out here because I believed in what the mission and vision was of Seattle before Chief Barnes, during Chief Barnes, and where we’re going to go in the future.

 

Morning Fizz

More Big Changes at City Departments, Jamie Tompkins Has a Podcast, Mike Solan Thinks He’s Cute

1. Mike Solan, a police officer and the outgoing president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, insulted Community Assisted Response and Engagement Department Chief Amy Barden in an Instagram post on Thursday, calling her “clueless” and her team of first responders a group of “social workers that want to cosplay as first responders. They are not first responders.”

The CARE Team is a group of first responders who can be dispatched to 911 calls that don’t require police, including some mental health crisis calls. The SPOG contract adopted last year expanded the size of the team but placed new restrictions on their ability to respond to people in crisis, requiring them to back off and call police if any sign of drug use is present, if the person is inside a car or building, or if the person is “aggressive” or “confrontational.”

During a recent appearance on the Seattle Nice podcast, which I co-host,  arden expressed frustration at the new restrictions and the fact that police sergeants still serve as gatekeepers deciding whether 911 calls require a police or CARE response. Barden said she was “disappointed that it’s actually gotten worse since the contract,” with sergeants directing even more 911 crisis calls to police unnecessarily, leaving the CARE team unable to their jobs.

Solan, a guy who loves to Photoshop his head onto bulging superhero costumes, grabbed a photo of Barden he probably thinks is unflattering (but is actually cute), and professed outrage at her “attacks on sworn sergeants, SPOG members, and civilian community service officers (CSO),” who, Barden correctly observed, are responding to all kinds of calls for which they don’t have the same specialized training as CARE.

Solan will step down as SPOG president next year. He’s endorsed a mini-Mike.

2. Jamie Tompkins, the former chief of staff to fired former police chief Adrian Diaz, has a new gig: Like the rest of us, she’s now a podcaster! According to an Instagram post, the new show, “Respectfu11y” (or “Respectfu11y”? It’s a really confusing name) will feature the former Q13 anchor telling her own story for the first time. “She’s held the mic. She’s held the space. Now, she’s not holding back,” the promo copy reads. “Real. Raw. Rebellious.”

Tompkins was fired last year after investigators concluded she had lied about an affair with Diaz that violated SPD policies; investigators also concluded she had faked a handwriting sample in an effort to prove she did not write a love note found in Diaz’ car. She filed a tort claim against the city, seeking $3 million in damages for alleged gender discrimination, last year.

Her guests so far include a social media influencer and an actor-turned-“connection expert” who played Frankie Valli’s wife in “Jersey Boys.” They’re probably famous; PubliCola is not the target audience.

3. Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections Director Brooke Belman, resigned on Thursday to return to position as Deputy CEO at Sound Transit, PubliCola has confirmed. Belman, the former deputy CEO and interim CEO of the regional transit agency, was appointed to head the department last September, replacing interim director Kye Lee after longtime department leader Nathan Torgelson left the city in March.

Belman’s apparently sudden departure—we’re told she gave two weeks’ notice—may have come as a surprise to Mayor Katie Wilson, who did not make an official announcement.

The change at the top of the city’s permitting department came on the same day that the city’s other development-related department, the Office of Planning and Community Development, released legislation and zoning maps for “Phase 2” of the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan update (unfortunately, reporters were told yesterday, OPCD can’t remove former mayor Bruce Harrell’s signature branding without legislation changing the name). We’ll have more on the zoning changes in a separate post; for now, you can check out the detailed new zoning maps here.

4. Hamdi Mohamed, who was appointed head of the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs by former mayor Bruce Harrell in 2022, is out, she announced on Wednesday. Mohamed, who supported Harrell during his unsuccessful reelection campaign, will be replaced on an interim basis by former OIRA director Cuc Vu. OIRA provides support to immigrants in Seattle, including know-your-rights trainings and programs that provide legal assistance to migrants and people targeted by ICE.

Mohamed, who’s currently on leave awaiting the arrival of her second child, told PubliCola “it’s a bittersweet moment” to leave the city, but she’s hoping to “support this work in a new way, especially right now when immigrant communities are under attack.” Mohamed was an active supporter of former mayor Bruce Harrell and is one of many department heads Mayor Katie Wilson has replaced in her first month in office.

During her four years, Mohamed said, she was able to increase OIRA’s budget by 40 percent. “It really took holding the line for the community advocating for them, and being able to articulate why the funds that flow through our office directly support community organizations on the front lines.”

 

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.

Mayor Harrell, Police

New Police Contract Includes Few Accountability Concessions In Exchange for Another Hefty Pay Increase
Police Chief Shon Barnes, flanked by Council President Sara Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell

In theory, the new contract allows the CARE Team to respond to more call types. In practice, it says they can’t go to homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.” 

By Erica C. Barnett

This morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes announced the new police contract we reported on yesterday, including starting salaries of $118,000 for new recruits, rising to $126,000 in six months.

Sergeants’ pay will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.

In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. Last year, Harrell signed a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. Once the new round of raises go into effect, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years. New officers also receive bonuses ranging from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for officers transferring from other departments.

“This contract ensures Seattle will remain competitive with other major city police departments and adds incentives for the skills that modern policing requires,” including a 1.5 percent or 4 percent salary boost for officers with two- or four-year criminal-justice degrees, Harrell said Wednesday.

“These recruitment improvements will allow us to build a police force that reflects our community’s diversity and meets the demands of 21st century public safety with respect to accountability. This contract delivers significant account accountability reforms that address concerns raised by the accountability entities and the community, and builds on the successful resolution of the federal consent period earlier this year. ”

In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved.

Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for misconduct that doesn’t rise to the level of a fireable offense. Whether this is an improvement to accountability, as opposed to a simplification of OPA’s workload, remains to be seen; the federal consent decree SPD was under until earlier this year called precinct-level discipline “admittedly ‘appalling,’ quoting an OPA supervisor), so bringing this kind of discipline back inside SPD will have good or bad consequences depending on how sergeants use this new authority.

Bob Kettle, head of the city council’s public safety committee, said bringing discipline back in-house would produce better sergeants, which would lead to “better lieutenants, captains, assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and maybe chiefs of the future. We have to invest in our leaders early to get the return later.”

One accountability issue the contract does not address is arbitration—an outside process police officers can use to get disciplinary decisions overturned Harrell’s chief of staff Andrew Myerberg said the two sides remain at an impasse on arbitration because the Seattle Police Officers Guild does not want to make concessions on four separate issues related to discipline.

Under the current arbitration rules, officers can  bring in new evidence and witnesses that the city hasn’t seen, and the arbitrator can use any standard of proof they want to decide whether a cop is guilty of misconduct. For example, arbitrators can require the city to present “clear and convincing” evidence that an person is guilty of misconduct that justifies the punishment they received. Arbitrators can also completely relitigate an officer’s case after the fact (known as de novo review).

Myerberg said the city couldn’t get SPOG to bend on changes to these requirements, as well as a request for a new standard saying that an arbitrator can’t overturn a disciplinary decision (such as firing) by the police chief unless the chief’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”

All those issues are now heading to interest arbitration between the city and SPOG, a secondary bargaining process overseen by the state Public Employee Relations Commission. If the city succeeds in placing more guardrails on arbitration, it will come at a cost—likely additional salary increases for officers in exchange for agreeing to restrictions on arbitration.

“The city had an opportunity to finally deliver on the promise of the 2017 accountability ordinance, to build a system where misconduct is investigated swiftly and discipline can stick. Unfortunately, this contract largely maintains the status quo,” Jazmyn Clark, smart justice policy program director for the ACLU-WA, said. “While some procedural clarifications are welcome, meaningful accountability reforms, especially around arbitration and disciplinary appeals, remain unresolved. Public confidence in the police cannot grow if the mechanisms for accountability are still subject to closed-door processes.”

As Harrell telegraphed earlier this year, the CARE Team, a group of social workers that currently responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, will be allowed to expand without restriction in the future and can respond to more types of calls, including behavioral-health calls from the public and requests for shelter and transportation from people on the streets.

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During Wednesday’s announcement—and before she had actually seen the new contract—CARE Department Chief Amy Barden said the changes would allow the CARE Team to respond to up to 47,000 calls a year.

However, the contract language actually places so many restrictions on what types of calls CARE can respond to that the true number of eligible calls is likely much lower. What’s more, the contract actually prohibits CARE from responding to exactly the kind of calls Barden has repeatedly said are more appropriate for social workers than armed police.

Under the new agreement (which CARE played no direct role in negotiating), SPD won’t allow CARE to respond to 911 calls on their own, and will instead send armed police officers, in the following circumstances:

  • If a person is anywhere besides a public space, such as a car, business, or residence;
  • If a person is in a homeless encampment, defined as four or more tents;
  • If there has been any report of “aggressive or threatening behavior towards others, destructive or confrontational behavior, or behavior posing a danger to others”;
  • If “drug paraphernalia” is present, indicating drug use;
  • If a minor is present;
  • If there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime;
  • If the person is exhibiting “extreme behavior that might warrant investigation for a potential involuntary commitment (e.g., public nakedness accompanied by crisis.”

This list arguably covers most circumstances in which CARE might be called to respond to a person in crisis. Under these criteria, CARE can’t respond to a call about someone living in permanent supportive housing or staying in a shelter, or someone whose behavior stems from public drug use.  They can’t respond to a person in their car or who has wandered into a business, or someone who lives in a tent that’s near other tents. Barden

Many of the terms in the list are subjective, leaving it up to officers to decide whether a person is being “confrontational” or if their behavior is “extreme.” (The example given in the contract, of someone who takes their clothes off while “in crisis,” is a good reason not to let SPD decide which calls require police—people who remove their clothes in public are often using drugs that make them hot, which doesn’t on its own mean someone needs to be involuntarily committed).

The contract still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council before it can go into effect. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.

Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.

The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)

The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that significant new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.

Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.

 

 

City Council, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Council Takes Up Harrell’s “Inherently Unsustainable” Budget; New Spending Includes $800,000 in Speculative AI Spending
Mayor Bruce Harrell, speaking at AI House in September

1. Your sales taxes are going up next year, thanks to a vote by the City Council Tuesday that approved a 0.1-cent increase that can, in the future, be used for any “public safety” purpose, including programs the city is already funding through its general fund.

The new tax, authorized earlier this year by the state legislature, will add $23.7 million in new funding to the budget to pay for 24 new CARE Team first responders, keep the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program going, and fund treatment, firefighters, and other non-police public safety programs. It also includes $15 million to supplant general fund spending on CARE, giving the city $15 million more to use on any purpose.

But, as a City Council central staff memo on the budget notes, there’s nothing in the state authorizing legislation that requires the city to use the new sales tax on new programs. (The original idea behind the legislation was that cities would use the tax increase to pay for police.)

According to the central staff analysis, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget is unsustainable and relies heavily on fiscal sleight-of-hand to come up with a balanced budget in 2026, tumbling precipitously into massive deficits in 2027 and beyond. These tricks include relying on a one-time $141 million fund balance left over from 2025, which won’t be there to balance the budget next year; funding programs that will be necessary long-term, like food assistance for people losing federal benefits, with one-time resources, so that they don’t count toward future deficits; and assuming a $10 million “underspend” every year in the future, allowing the mayor’s budget team to chop $10 million off each year’s expenditures automatically without actually making cuts.

Referring to the fund balance, the memo notes, “The Mayor’s reliance on this $141 million one-time resource to balance his proposed spending for 2026 reflects the inherent unsustainability of the 2026 Proposed Budget, and demonstrates the basic magnitude of the mismatch between the City’s expenditures and its reliable, on-going revenues.

This damning assessment by the council’s own central staff could have implications throughout the budget, which the city council will begin discussing in detail today. What it could mean for the public safety sales tax, specifically is that, if the council passes Harrell’s unsustainable budget mostly as-is, future councils (and a potential future mayor Katie Wilson) could choose to use the money not to fund CARE and LEAD and treatment, but to pay for police, fire, and other basics that would ordinarily be paid for by the general fund.

In other words: Like the JumpStart payroll tax fund, which was supposed to pay for specific program areas (housing, small businesses, Green New Deal, and equitable development), the public safety tax could be used in the future as a slush fund to pay for programs that have historically been funded out of the city’s general budget.

The proposed budget adds about $53 million in new spending compared to the endorsed 2026 budget.

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2. One of the new initiatives Harrell’s proposed 2026 budget would fund is Permitting Accountability and Customer Trust (PACT) program—an $800,000 proposal that will purportedly “streamline the permitting application process and improve customer services using Artificial Intelligence and data integration.”

Callie Craighead, a spokeswoman for the mayor, told PubliCola the city hasn’t picked a vendor for the PACT funding yet. “The integration of AI tools is part of the City’s most concerted effort to date to reduce permitting time, making it faster and easier to build housing across Seattle,” she said.

Harrell is all-in on AI; at an event at the startup incubator AI House last month, he told the crowd, “If you’re thinking, ‘Maybe there’s an opportunity to monetize these things the city’s working on, that’s fair game, by the way. Faster permits—we know that AI can play an incredible role there. …  Time is money, and to the extent we can reduce permit processing times, this would be an added benefit for everyone involved in that process.”

Craighead said the new “AI tools” will help permit applicants catch errors before they submit applications; help “staff apply City code more consistently and efficiently, [and help] the City find opportunities to simplify and streamline policies.”

There are some companies that claim to reduce permitting times using AI chatbots and near-instant plan reviews, but it’s unclear to what extent these tools can actually supplant the human workers who currently work with developers and homeowners on permits and ensure compliance with the city’s complex codes by, for instance, talking to people and answering questions directly and inspecting conditions on the ground.

Moving away from actual employees to tools created by AI startups—a change the city’s new AI plan refers to delicately as “workforce transition”—will face strong opposition from the city’s unions (the largest of which, PROTEC17, has thrown its weight behind Harrell’s opponent Wilson), and potential opposition from the public as well. Replacing public workers with software could also have implications for the local economy, which is increasingly tilted in favor of wealthy tech-sector workers. And, of course, the current frenzy of AI hype could turn out to be just that—hype.

The city’s new AI plan says the “City’s AI Proof of Value framework ensures pilots are judged on clear objectives, business value, responsible use, and long-term supportability, not hype-fueled adoption we hear from sales staff.” Which seems, I don’t know… a little doth-protest-too much?