Tag: Seattle Fire Department

City Council, Guest Contributor, public safety

As a Firefighter, I Oppose Criminalizing “Interference” with Seattle Fire Department Personnel
Photo by Joe Mabel; CC by SA 3.0 license.

By LéTania Severe

The Seattle City Council is considering legislation to protect firefighters responding to emergencies, making it a crime to physically interfere with them as they try to provide aid.

This proposal, which would expand the existing law against “obstructing” police officers to include Fire Department personnel, will not only fail to protect firefighters, it will make things worse for them and the communities they serve—particularly the Black community members who face disproportionate arrests and prosecutions under the existing “obstruction” statute.

How do I know this? For the last five years, I have been a firefighter/EMT for Central Pierce Fire and Rescue, giving me a front-row seat to the challenges of the job.

While my firefighting work is in Pierce County, I currently live and rent in Seattle’s District 2. I also have a PhD in Sociology and have spent the last 17 years researching homelessness, housing, and criminal legal system policy in Seattle and the broader region. I am Black, queer, and nonbinary, and I co-led the Black Brilliance Research Project, funded by City Council to answer questions around how we build community safety and community health. These experiences have equipped me to assess the current bill before City Council and compel me to speak out against it.

Firefighters are called to respond when people are having their worst day. Firefighters remind each other about this often. It helps ground us so that we don’t take people’s behavior or words personally. As firefighters, we work for the people. We don’t force our service onto people; that’s not our job. We ask them why we were called and what they need.

​​Firefighter work is stressful and grueling. I can tell you from experience that 24-hour shifts do not result in us showing up to calls with our best selves. Being woken up in the middle of the night to answer the community’s call for help when you are already sleep-deprived is demanding and keeps firefighters in a heightened “fight mode” for the entirety of our shift.

These conditions are among the biggest challenges we face. But the proposal before the council, which criminalizes community members for interfering with firefighters, does nothing to address the stress and impact on our bodies caused by our work.

The proposed legislation does nothing to address any of the underlying reasons that trigger the need for an emergency response. In fact, our community has seen money moved out of these areas of upstream intervention in order to put more money into policing the results of these failures.

Sometimes as firefighters, the stress we shoulder aggravates the situations we enter. In my experience, these are the times when we experience “obstruction” from the patients we serve. For example, impatient firefighters sometimes wake someone up from an overdose too fast by administering Narcan too quickly. In these situations, the person’s body will react with shock and confusion. That person should not be blamed for their body’s response. When we arrive on a call to an individual experiencing a mental health crisis, we should hold them in grace as we focus on helping them move through it and then do our best to address the root causes of that crisis.

Other examples of our own stress as firefighters aggravating the situations we enter include firefighters escalating stressful situations instead of showing compassion and using de-escalation skills; firefighters taking a patient’s refusal of services personally and attempting to force their services on a patient who does not want it; and firefighters not respecting the agency of patients

This bill doesn’t address any of these situations. Instead, it makes things worse by criminalizing the very communities we are called to serve.

We all know that firefighters are often called to intervene because of bigger system failures. Indeed, the proposed bill’s language acknowledges as much: “[I]t is well known that the challenges faced by all our public safety employees at the City of Seattle have increased with the rise of the opioid epidemic, economic uncertainty, and multiple public health crises – COVID, mental health, and substance use.”

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And yet the proposed legislation does absolutely nothing to address any of the underlying reasons that trigger the need for an emergency response. In fact, our community has seen money moved out of these areas of upstream intervention in order to put more money into policing the results of these failures. This bill, which expands expensive and harmful criminal legal system responses to social problems, continues the same pattern.

This bill claims to “give our fire department employees in the line of duty an additional tool for their personal safety and the ability to secure the scene of a medical health response or fire response, particularly in the case of bystander intervention while firefighters and paramedics are providing aid.”  But this legislation won’t actually prevent “bystander intervention,” because it relies on the police to respond and arrest only after an alleged interference. This bill does not deter anything. Instead it will make things worse by criminalizing behavior that can be better mitigated by addressing root causes. 

What could a better bill do? 

A better bill would move funding for addressing overdose calls from SFD and SPD to community members instead. Bystanders safely administer Narcan in the field every single day. They save lives and they do so compassionately, because unlike firefighters, they often know the person, or the person is a member of their community.

It is well established that firefighters and police officers are extremely ill-equipped to meet the needs of community members experiencing a mental health crisis. I have never received good training on responding to calls in which individuals are in mental health crises and I’d bet that Seattle firefighters haven’t, either.

The common denominator between overdose and mental health calls is that they require an immense amount of patience. When fire departments are understaffed, patience goes out the window. Again, this bill does not address this problem. There are many things that can improve our job, such as more training, more staffing, better schedules, addressing system failures, more tools to regulate our nervous systems on shift, de-escalation training, Narcan administration training and mental health crisis response training.

What if rather than expanding a system that causes harm, we actually focused more on assessing which social safety nets have utterly failed the folks who need us? What if we moved funding out of SFD and SPD to empower community members to respond to mental health crises?  What if we actually committed to addressing the root causes?

I suspect we will be told that addressing root causes is impossible given Seattle’s budget deficit. But it’s never too late to reallocate funding from our bloated punishment budgets (police, courts, and prosecutors) toward making firefighter jobs and our community safer. If the City Council cares about firefighter safety and community safety, they will vote NO on the current obstruction bill, and fund community response instead.

LéTania Severe PhD (they/them) is a Black, queer, non-binary researcher and firefighter who organizes with Seattle Solidarity Budget, a cross-movement coalition of over 200 organizations, fighting for a city budget that divest from harmful systems like police, courts and jails and reinvests in meeting community basic needs including housing, transportation, climate change resilience and more. LéTania is also a coordinator for Seattle’s new Community Response Network, which trains community members to respond to emergencies in their own communities.
Drugs, Police, public safety

Caller Was Lucid, Waiting to “Flag Down” Aid Car, When Officer Heading to Scene Struck and Killed Pedestrian Nearby
File:Seattle Fire Department - Aid 2 (Medic One vehicle).jpg
Photo by Joe Mabel; CC by 2.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

The 911 call to which Seattle police officer Kevin Dave was allegedly responding when he struck and killed student Jaahnavi Kandula in a marked crosswalk was not, as police and fire officials have implied, an opiate overdose that had to be reversed by paramedics under police supervision. In fact, a single aid car responded to the caller, who was lucid and alert when he dialed 911, and was finished within about 20 minutes. The call came from an apartment building 6th Ave. North, a few blocks from where Dave struck Kandula on Dexter Ave. on the night of January 23.

At first, SPD said Dave (who they did not initially identify) was responding to an emergency “at the request of” Seattle Fire Department first responders; later, they said he was heading to the scene “alongside” SFD. After SPD, in response to questions from PubliCola, said the call was an overdose, the Community Safety and Communications Center told us that police are dispatched to overdoses as a matter of longstanding policy. Later, Police Chief Adrian Diaz said Dave was responding “as an EMT” to a medical emergency.

In mid-February, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins repeated this explanation in a letter to the Community Police Commission, saying “overdose patients can become violent” after an overdose reversal, which can send an overdose victim into withdrawal. Officials from the fire department elaborated on this statement to PubliCola, saying they need police present when responding to overdoses because people revived from opiate ODs may have used stimulants like meth, whose effects come on in full force once the opiate overdose is resolved. They also said that other people on the scene can threaten or steal items from paramedics working to revive an overdose victim.

“I’m just trying to breathe right now and I’m trying to not freak out,” the man says. “It’s hard to think.” The dispatcher says he’s sending an aid car and tells the man to “flag them down” when he sees them.

But a review of the 911 call that resulted in Dave’s response—which PubliCola obtained, along with the incident report, through a record requests—reveals that the person who called in to report the “overdose” was a man who had walked down from his apartment and into the street to call 911 about what he thought might be a drug-related medical emergency.

In the call, which the fire department partially redacted, the caller is lucid, rational, and a bit frantic; he gives his full address and says he’s “freaking out” and having trouble staying calm. The caller sounds like he’s overstimulated, not overdosing on an opiate like fentanyl, as both police and fire have repeatedly implied.

“I’m just trying to breathe right now and I’m trying to not freak out,” the man says. “It’s hard to think.” After hearing more about the man’s symptoms, the dispatcher asks him if he’s been through this before and if he has any other relevant medical history or complications; the man answers no. Then the dispatcher says he’s sending an aid car and tells the man to “flag them down” when he sees them.

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An aid car is the lowest level of response to a drug-related call like this one. A spokesman for the fire department confirmed that the department sends one aid car staffed with EMTs trained in basic life support when a person is having a “suspected overdose” and is awake, as this caller was. The department sends an additional advanced life support medic unit with two additional paramedics when the person is awake and has a “confirmed overdose,” and sends two basic life support units and an advanced life support unit when the overdosing person is “unconscious, unresponsive, and not breathing normally,” the spokesman said.

Overdose deaths from stimulants are less common than deaths due to opiates, but they do happen; last year, according to the King County Department of Public Health, there were 158 stimulant-related overdose deaths, and there have been 18 this year so far.

A police department spokesperson did not respond to questions about SPD’s policy about driving practices when responding to a low-level drug call like this one. Nor have they responded to questions about how fast Dave was driving or whether he was taking reasonable care when he struck and killed Kandula in a marked crosswalk a few blocks away. “I am not able to share any further information than what’s already been shared since this is an open case,” the spokeswoman said.

The man who placed the initial call declined to comment.

Drugs, Health, Police, public safety

More Cops Are Training as Emergency Responders. Is That a Good Thing?

By Erica C. Barnett

The death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula, killed by a police officer driving to respond to a suspected overdose, has revived a longstanding dispute between Seattle’s fire and police departments about who should respond to medical emergencies, particularly overdoses.

Last month, after SPD announced that officer Kevin Dave was rushing to respond to an overdose in his capacity as an emergency medical technician (EMT), SFD union leader Kenny Stuart wrote a letter to Mayor Bruce Harrell objecting to the “troubling trend” of SPD officers “being trained and certified as Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and … deployed to medical emergencies in our city.”

The issue with this, Stuart continued, is that the fire department—not SPD—is responsible for emergency medical response as part of the county’s Medic One system; “randomly allowing additional EMTs from other city departments to self-dispatch or to perform EMS functions” has “led to delayed scene security, delayed medical care, decreased continuity and coordination of care, and general confusion in life-threatening emergencies.”

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking his response to Stuart’s letter, if any, on Friday.

SPD’s EMS trainings are not funded by the city; instead, the Seattle Police Foundation solicits donations to pay for trainings and equipment. The police foundation website says the police need trained EMTs to respond to life-threatening situations at active crime scenes before it’s safe for fire department medics to enter. The head of the EMS program, SPD officer Tyler Verhaar, did not immediately respond to a request for an interview; we’ll update this post with his comments if we hear back.

“If police continue to respond to [medical calls] unchecked, you will end up with officers who are EMTs jumping calls so they can get some good publicity, and that’s not what it’s about.”—Retired assistant fire chief A.D. Vickery

Stuart, from the firefighters’ union, declined to talk on the record about the union’s opposition to SPD officers responding to medical emergencies. But former SFD assistant chief A.D. Vickery, who started at the department in 1968 and retired in 2020, said he’s heard alarming reports about police officers “racing to the scene, putting everybody at risk, so they can be the first one to the patient.”

“The Fire Department responds to hundreds of thousands of alarms. We are very cautious. There’s lots of people on the rig all working to make sure we get to the scene in a  appropriate period of time without creating a hazard,” Vickery said. “If police continue to respond to [medical calls] unchecked, you will end up with officers who are EMTs jumping calls so they can get some good publicity, and that’s not what it’s about.”

SPD has declined to comment on the circumstances that led to Dave striking and killing Kandula in a crosswalk the night of January 23. Initially, an SPD blog post said the then-unidentified officer was responding to a nearby emergency call “at the request of” the fire department; later, a department spokeswoman updated the post to say SPD was responding “with” Fire. Subsequently, police chief Adrian Diaz said Dave was “responding as an EMT” to the initial 911 call itself.

Many police department officers are equipped with Narcan (naloxone) nasal spray, which can restore breathing by rapidly reversing the effects of opioids like fentanyl, sending a person who is overdosing into abrupt withdrawal. Although fire department EMTs have carried nasal naloxone since July 2022, the department prefers to deliver oxygen first to restore an overdose victim’s breathing.

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“With the increase in people using both methamphetamine and fentanyl at the same time, our teams then work to stabilize the patient’s breathing with small doses of naloxone ([which]also avoids a painful opiate withdrawal from excessive naloxone) and reverse the overdose,” SFD medical director Dr. Michael Sayre said.

According to one theory, bringing people back slowly also makes it more likely they’ll agree—in their groggy state—to go to the hospital, where they can access opiate withdrawal meds and learn about treatment options. “Some patients, once recovered from the drug’s effects, may refuse transport. That is a concern because it is a lost opportunity to connect patients with support services… that could be offered through the emergency department,” Sayre said.

Although the fire department doesn’t want SPD responding to medical emergencies themselves, they do want police on site when they respond to overdoses. One reason, which Fire Chief Harold Scoggins cited in a recent letter to the city’s Community Police Commission, is that overdose patients can purportedly “become violent” after they’re revived. A spokeswoman for the fire department said patients who overdose on fentanyl while also using meth, in particular, can “become quite agitated… risking harm to themselves and others around them,” because “when both substances are present, the sedative effects of fentanyl are reversed by naloxone, and the stimulant effects of methamphetamine then predominate.”

Curious how often first responders actually encounter hostile situations from bystanders, I requested the fire department’s database of assault reports from EMS calls. In 2022, first responders logged 135 such incidents, which ranged from verbal abuse and threats to punches, “donkey kicks,” and a “wrestling match”; one person threw a hamburger at a fire truck.

But the main reason fire EMS wants police at the scene of overdoses, according to Vickery, is to “control the scene to allow the EMTs or the medical personnel to do their jobs” without having to worry about bystanders or opportunistic thieves. “The environment that the overdoses take place in now is a much more hostile environment,” Vickery said. “In 1968, you might have an overdose in a particular area and it really was isolated to the room and the people that knew them, but there was not this the hostility that exists today.” Overdoses often occur on streets or in encampments, including many that first responders won’t enter without SPD backup.

Curious how often first responders actually encounter hostile situations from bystanders, I requested the fire department’s database of assault reports from EMS calls, which only includes incidents that involved formal reports (in other words, it isn’t comprehensive). In 2022, first responders logged 135 such incidents, which ranged from verbal abuse and threats (“Stated that he was going to kill us and that we were ‘motherf***ers””) to punches, “donkey kicks,” and a “wrestling match”; one person threw a hamburger at a fire truck.

Only a few of the reported incidents involved people brought back from an overdose with naloxone who were “combative” afterward and had to be restrained.

Overall, the reports unsurprisingly include many people in obvious crisis—like the person who was “slamming his head against the sidewalk several times before being restrained by SFD crews for his own safety as well as ours,” or the “well-known [patient]” who threw water on fire fighters before “barricading himself” inside a bathroom.

The tension between police and fire about their roles as first responders isn’t going away, as the police foundation continues to solicit donations for “training, certification, and medical supplies” for cops to respond to emergency calls. Vickery says he has no problem with police officers getting EMT certification on their own time, but says “there needs to be clear delineation” between the role of police providing backup at medical emergencies and fire personnel responding to those emergencies as EMTs. “The fire department doesn’t arrest people—stay within the realm of what your responsibilities are and support each other,” he said.

Drugs, Police, public safety

“Overdose Patients Can Become Violent”: Fire and Police Respond to Questions About Pedestrian Death
File:Seattle fire department medic 80.jpg
Atomic Taco, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, the Seattle Police and Fire Departments responded to questions from the Community Police Commission about some of the circumstances that may have contributed to the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old pedestrian who was killed in a marked crosswalk by SPD Officer Kevin Dave. Dave was driving to join Seattle Fire Department EMTs at a suspected overdose in South Lake Union. According to the response from Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, Seattle Fire Department policy requires police to be present when SFD responds to overdoses, because “overdose patients can become violent during treatment to reverse the overdose.”

The CPC asked the Fire Department to explain the reason it requires police officers to be present when Fire responds to overdose calls, posing four questions about the policy, how it came about, and “What percentage of drug overdose calls prior to the implementation of this policy included compromised safety, assaults, and/or injuries to SFD personnel related to reversing the effects of an overdose?”

In his response, Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins said that the requirement “goes back at least 20 years and is designed to provide scene safety for firefighters and paramedics as overdose patients can become violent during treatment to reverse the overdose.” He did not answer the CPC’s question about how common it is for people coming out of overdoses to be violent, saying only that “[e]ncountering combative patients or bystanders on emergency responses has unfortunately become a reality for firefighters and paramedics.”

Narcan (or naloxone), the widely available overdose reversal drug, is used daily by non-emergency responders, including drug users themselves, and other public employees are trained to use it in the absence of paramedics or any armed response. In 2019,  then-Washington state health officer Kathy Lofy signed a “standing order” that made Narcan available over the counter without a prescription to any person who wants it, calling it a “very safe,” life-saving medication.

“When weighing the decision to respond using emergency driving, officers must consider if the incident is life threatening, road conditions, vehicle and pedestrian traffic, weather, speed, lighting, and their own driving abilities.”—Police Chief Adrian Diaz

In his letter, Scoggins said SFD has developed a “new method for tracking assaults and threatening behavior experienced by firefighters in the field,” in general, and has begun reporting this information. PubliCola has asked SFD for this data and will update this post with additional information when we receive it.

Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz also responded to the CPC’s questions. After describing the training officers receive in “emergency driving”—driving under emergency circumstances, such as a high-priority call where someone’s life is at risk—Diaz said officers are justified in taking “risks [that] “can result in severe consequences for the public and the officer. … When weighing the decision to respond using emergency driving…. [o]fficers must consider if the incident is life threatening, road conditions, vehicle and pedestrian traffic, weather, speed, lighting, and their own driving abilities.”

Diaz said the fact that the overdose was a Priority 1 call would not, in itself, necessitate emergency driving. “The priority level is a factor to consider but is not generally controlling,” Diaz wrote. “While many Priority 1 calls would warrant emergency driving under our current policy and training, not all do and officers are expected to consider the totality of the circumstances.”

PubliCola has filed a records request the audio from the initial 911 call; SPD categorically denied a separate request for all recorded audio related to the Kandula’s death, citing their ongoing investigation into the incident.

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In a conversation with PubliCola last week, SPD Chief Adrian Diaz noted that Dave is a licensed EMT who was headed to the scene of a medical emergency, implying that he was on the way to respond to the reported overdose, not to provide security for the Fire Department. On February 6, the head of the Seattle Fire Fighters Union, Kenny Stuart, expressed frustration about SPD officers getting trained as EMTs and responding to medical emergencies like overdoses directly, saying this was the responsibility of the fire department, not SPD. (It’s a longstanding, ongoing issue.)

“Our EMS delivery system under the Medic One program is arguably the best in the country, and randomly allowing additional EMTs from other city departments to self-dispatch or to perform EMS functions at an incident does not improve or support the level of care we demand from this program,” Stuart wrote. “In fact, it unnecessarily complicates our response and diminishes the service that the public depends on and expects.”

Seattle Fire Department firefighters and paramedics are “the only personnel that are dispatched as EMTs” to medical emergencies, Stuart continued, “and they should be the only personnel who deliver EMS to the people of Seattle. We need our police officers to provide scene security and protect us so we can do our jobs effectively.”

Several years ago, SFD’s medical director told PubliCola the fire department preferred to use rescue breathing—a method to restore breathing in overdose victims without Narcan—followed by intravenous naloxone to facilitate a slower return to normal breathing without putting a person into instant opiate withdrawal. We’ve asked SFD whether this is still the department’s policy, and how the emergence of fentanyl has impacted overdose response, and will update this post when we hear back.

PubliCola has also reached out to Stuart.

City Council, homelessness, Morning Fizz, race

Homelessness Authority Board Signs Off On Request to Double Agency’s Budget; Fire Chief Responds to Letter Demanding Action on Hate Crimes
KCRHA KCRHA budget presentation graphic reading "Basis for 2023 Incremental Budget Requests"
Graphic from KCRHA budget presentation

1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation board, which has the power to amend and approve or reject the agency’s budgets, unanimously signed off on a budget proposal that would nearly double the size of the agency on Tuesday.

The additional $90 million, which would come from a combination of the Seattle and King County budgets, would pay for 400 new shelter and emergency  housing beds, raises for social service workers, day centers, and safe spots for people living in vehicles, among other new expenditures. Most of the new beds (345) would be emergency housing, which a presentation by the authority described as “a dignified place for people to wait for permanent housing.”

The unanimous vote means that after the budget is approved by the agency’s governing board—a group made up mostly of elected officials that is charged with approving the implementation board’s decision—it will be up to city and county elected officials to decide whether to fully fund the request or eliminate some items, as the city did last year.

“This isn’t necessarily what we should expect to see come back to us,” KCRHA CEO Marc Dones told the board on Tuesday. “This budget will be taken up and looked at in relationship to all of the funding priorities that the city and county have.”

For the first time on Tuesday, Dones offered a three-tiered prioritization of the agency’s new funding requests, which could guide city and county officials when they’re deciding what to fund. At the top: Safe parking spaces for up to 130 vehicles ($5 million); an increase in nonprofit homeless service providers’ pay ($15.4 million); and a $1.5 million grant fund for organizations focused on “centering [the] lived experience” of people who have experienced homelessness firsthand.

In the second tier: $750,000 to expand severe-weather shelters; $7.2 million to hire more agency staff; and $20 million for a new “high-acuity shelter” serving up to 55 people with significant behavioral and physical health needs. These new shelter beds would be in addition to the 40-bed high-needs shelter King County is funding separately as part of its ever-expanding shelter complex in SoDo.

For the first time, Dones offered a three-tiered prioritization of the agency’s new funding requests. At the top: Safe parking spaces for up to 130 vehicles ($5 million); an increase in nonprofit homeless service providers’ pay ($15.4 million); and a $1.5 million grant fund for organizations focused on “centering [the] lived experience” of people who have experienced homelessness firsthand.

The rest of the budget adds, including $20 million for emergency housing, $15 million for daytime gathering spaces, and funding to assist smaller and BIPOC-led providers, are now in tier 3. The city and county will both get their own crack at the budget this fall; last year, the city council made significant cuts to the agency’s proposal, declining to fully fund the high-acuity shelter and asking Dones to come back with details about a “peer navigator” program that the agency subsequently launched using one-time private donations.

Dones has been a vocal advocate for “emergency housing”—a type of bridge housing between shelter and permanent housing that could include single-family houses, converted hotels, or —and a slide deck they presented at Tuesday’s meeting suggested that this housing type has an off-the-charts 95 percent rate of exits to permanent housing and 5 percent rate of return to homelessness, meaning that almost everyone who enters emergency housing is permanently housed and does not become homeless again. We have asked the KCRHA how it came up with these numbers and will update this post when we hear back.

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2. Last week, Seattle Fire Department chief Harold Scoggins responded to a letter from members of the the city’s race and social justice network demanding action on hate crimes and racism inside the fire department after two incidents in which firefighters found nooses hanging in their stations. The initial letter asked Scoggins for regular updates on the investigation into the incidents; a restorative justice process for fire department staff; and the immediate termination of the people responsible for placing the nooses in the two fire stations, among other demands.

In his letter, Scoggins laid out a list of actions the department has taken over the past few years to train and educate staff about racial bias, including sessions on implicit bias, cultural competency, and microaggressions, but did not commit to any of the specific actions the RSJ teams demanded in their initial letter to the department.

“We are committed to pursuing the appropriate level of discipline depending on the outcome of an investigation,” Scoggins wrote, adding that the department had closed its investigation into the first noose incident, at Fire Station 17 in the University District because they “could not identify the responsible party.” The investigation into the more recent incident, at Fire Station 24 in North Seattle, is still ongoing, Scoggins wrote.

Cops, Health, Mental Health, Police

Seattle’s Newest Department Aims to Change the City’s Response to Crisis Calls
Health One, a Seattle Fire Department program that responds to low-acuity crisis calls, is a relatively new alternative for 911 dispatchers.
Health One, a Seattle Fire Department program that responds to low-acuity crisis calls, is a relatively new alternative for 911 dispatchers.

By Paul Kiefer

The last time Seattle launched a new department—Seattle Information Technology, which brought IT staff from across the city under one roof—the consolidation took years. “In contrast, we had about eight months,” said Chris Lombard, who leads the city’s newest department: the Community Safety and Communications Center (CSCC), which began work at the beginning of June.

In some ways, creating the CSCC involved fewer moving parts than the infamously messy set-up of the massive citywide IT department. When plans to move the parking enforcement unit to the CSCC fell through this spring, Lombard was left overseeing a single, crucial, service: Seattle’s 911 call center. The center, historically a civilian unit inside the Seattle Police Department, will play a key role in the city’s efforts to shift away from a police-centric approach to public safety, and the city’s decision to house the 911 call center in the department was one of the first concrete steps in that effort.

On the surface, the 911 call center hasn’t changed much since it left SPD. The dispatchers sit in the same cubicles in the same unmarked office. On one side of the room, call-takers try to draw out the most pertinent information from people in distress while racing the clock; on the other, dispatchers direct police officers to high-priority calls; and in the middle, a team of supervisors watches from a raised platform.

When a call-taker thinks that an emergency would be better handled by the Seattle Fire Department—an agency with more response options than SPD—they reach out to the fire department’s internal dispatch center, which was Lombard’s turf before he joined the CSCC. “Right now, [the fire department] is the gateway to a lot of resources, like mental health care or clinical referrals,” Lombard explained. “On our end, we’re still trying to figure out how we can connect people to more resources.” Last year, the 911 center transferred 17 percent of calls to the fire department.

Brandie Flood, the director of community justice for REACH, cautioned that housing and health care providers who can offer long-term support to people in crisis are already overstretched. “We could add a bunch of other response teams, but if there aren’t new or expanded pathways to get people in crisis the kind of back-end services they need, we just have too many cooks in the kitchen,” she said.

But the city’s goal in transferring the 911 call center to the CSCC wasn’t merely to reduce the role of the police department on paper. Practically every elected official and candidate for city office has voiced their support for scaling back SPD’s responsibilities by diverting more emergency calls to non-police responders. As new options become available to respond to emergency calls, the 911 dispatchers will be responsible for deciding who arrives on the scene first—police, the fire department, or civilian mental health specialists, for example.

For now, dispatchers are still limited to two options: police or fire. The city’s big plans for the CSCC are still on the horizon, and in the meantime, Lombard and his staff are sorting out the basics. The center hired its first human resources staffer within the past month, but other vacancies have been hard to fill. “Even though 911 operations were a civilian section within SPD, a prospective applicant had to go to SPD’s website to find job listings,” he explained. “It’s no secret that the police department has been struggling to get recruits, and [the 911 center] got caught downwind and fell victim to the same trend.”

At the same time, Lombard added, the existing CSCC staff are still processing the significance of their departure from SPD. For some long-time employees who were loyal to SPD, Lombard said that the shift has been “almost like a divorce.” But for other employees who felt taken for granted by SPD, the prospect of eventually taking a more active role in the city’s public safety system is a welcome change. “This is exciting for a lot of the staff,” said Lombard. “For the first time, they feel like the focus will be on us and what we can add to emergency response.”

The other potential game-changer in reducing the number of calls the 911 center refers to police is the rollout of the state’s 988 system next year. During the last state legislative session, lawmakers approved a plan to stand up a new statewide crisis hotline for mental health emergencies

One of the first chances for dispatchers to play a larger role in the crisis response system could come with the eventual launch of a program tentatively known as “Triage One,” a team of civilian responders who the 911 center could dispatch in lieu of police to respond to low-acuity, non-medical crisis calls. The Triage One proposal is modeled partially after the fire department’s Health One units, and the city council is still considering whether to house the program in the fire department or the CSCC.

If the Triage One units become part of the CSCC, 911 dispatchers would be able to communicate directly with the units, giving dispatchers a third option (in addition to police and the fire department’s internal dispatch system) when deciding where to direct an emergency call.

The other potential game-changer in reducing the number of calls the 911 center refers to police is the rollout of the state’s 988 system next year. During the last state legislative session, lawmakers approved a plan to stand up a new statewide crisis hotline for mental health emergencies. The 988 hotline will have three dispatch centers across the state, including one that covers all of King County; among other responses, the dispatchers will be able to send civilian mental health specialists to respond to emergencies. Continue reading “Seattle’s Newest Department Aims to Change the City’s Response to Crisis Calls” →