So just to, to lay the groundwork, w- what does this Washington Supreme Court do?

This court is our highest court in Washington state, um, so it's the final word on questions of state law.

Some of the decisions they make have sweeping consequences for our entire court system.

Uh, you know, things like throwing out felony drug possession several years ago, uh, preserving the capital gains tax that the legislature passed.

Um, those have had big consequences.

Uh, they also kinda set the standards for how the entire judicial system works.

So they can set things like public defender case loads.

Who have been the biggest spenders on these races, and, and why are these groups so invested?

Before we start talking about how to pay for this, which is a really big part of this, can you talk to me about where the city is right now on gun violence prevention and where this might settle out? What do you think?

Yeah, the mayor's plan was really different from what we've heard from the police department in that her plan doesn't mention the police department very much.

It's a big document if people have looked at it.

And a lot of it is, you know, things like programs in the schools.

Deborah Juarez criticized the plan saying, you know, it winds in all these things that have been around for a while, but they're not exactly new.

Like the Seattle Promise program, like the mayor includes that in the mention.

That's the city funding for two years of free college.

Can you help us sort through this police hiring story in Seattle right now? What's going on?

So maybe you could just remind us first, what is CARE, and how are they going to feature in Wilson's strategy to reduce gun violence?

The CARE Department was created in 2020, so it kind of broke out the 911 dispatch and the unarmed crisis teams that we have now, and it's a co-equal branch with the police department, the fire department, um, and it's headed by a chief named Amy Barden, um, who says that violence prevention was actually also part of their founding legislation, and now they're gonna grow into that responsibility.

Um, they are gonna take oversight of some of the community-based interventions that Seattle has been doing.

They have been under the city's main human services department.

Those are gonna get moved over under CARE.

Um, they're gonna have some new hires to oversee gun violence prevention, so they become kind of like the command center on the prevention side.

Um, we h- hopefully we might see more data, uh, coming out about these efforts, and I think that might help address some criticism from the public that people aren't always sure what these nonprofit contracts are doing.

Um, so can you go step by step with us, Amy? If there is a shooting going forward in Seattle under this plan, what happens?

Hmm.

And so those two numbers together, um, which includes also, like, a million dollars of interest that they owe, basically those two numbers together constitute the $13 million that has been, you know, one of the numbers in the press about what the audit found in terms of problems at the agency.

I mean, they've had over $500 million in public funds in the time that they've existed, so on one hand you could say 13 million is not that much given the scope of their work.

The audit said it also did not specifically find any fraud or misuse of funds, but then it said the systems are so weak and so sloppy that they can't rule out that fraud has occurred.

They said the funding is going to the service providers from King County for the actual assistance to people experiencing homelessness, but the problems are more about the inner workings at the agency.

So this audit was released, and then everyone was wondering what was going to happen when the board had its first meeting.

Yeah, what would it take to fix the RHA? And like you said, is this what county and city leaders and homelessness service providers want at this point?

Yeah, I was, you know, really just trying to gather as many sources of input as I could last week about what do people make of these audit findings, what do they want to see happen next.

Yeah, what do we know about what Kent is doing that's making a difference to address gun violence?

Some of the things they're doing, I think, are pretty general strategies, not unique to them, but they're just kind of things that they've, you know, realized in the last several years are really bearing results.

One of them is police are putting more attention into trying to track when the same gun shows up at different shootings and different scenes, even across different cities, so they can upload an image into this national database, and each fired cartridge case, apparently, you know, is unique, and so they can start to see, "Oh, these cases show that the same gun was used at multiple incidents in different cities across the county." And then another strategy, kind of, you know, in general in the last few years, is police are putting more resources into solving non-fatal shootings than they did in the past.

I talked to Kent Police Chief Rafael Padilla, and he said, you know, especially when staffing was, uh, strained in recent years, you know, police have always focused on fatal shootings 'cause, of course, loss of life is the paramount concern.

But Chief Padilla said there's more recognition now that solving non-fatal shootings is really key to preventing further violence.

How does this compare to what Seattle's doing?

doing?...

I think all these strategies are present in varying degrees around the county, and police recruiting has improved the staffing situation in Seattle.

What's in the new Seattle Police Officers Guild contract?

contract?It covers, uh, 2024, so one year retroactive through 2027.

It has salary increases each year.

There's a 6% raise that's retroactive, and then it goes on from there.

A big provision of it is expansion of the care team, which these are people who are not in the union.

They are in a whole different branch of public safety, the unarmed social workers, crisis responders that we've been piloting, you know, out on our streets as part of a new kind of unarmed alternative type of response.

But the Guild is signing off on how these teams that do some work that has overlap with police are actually going to expand.

It seems like so long ago.

What happened?

It's been a saga.

They predicted that it was gonna take about five years to resolve the DOJ's concerns, get SPD on a different path.

But this consent decree was under the supervision of a federal judge, James Robart.

And he twice put the brakes on and said, "We have a problem" when the city had been kind of saying, "OK, we just need to sustain what we've done.

We're on track.

We're gonna exit the consent decree." And then in 2019, Judge Robart said that the city officials had negotiated a contract with the police union that flew in the face of the goals of the consent decree.

Is there any evidence that the consent decree has been effective in decreasing police use of force?

What does RCP do differently?

During 2020 and protests seeking more racial justice, turning against incarceration, there was a huge push to say, "Can we build some new systems that are alternatives to the existing system of courts and jails and policing?" And so the big goal was to reduce, you know, police encounters and incarceration.

So the idea with this Restorative Community Pathways is that police, you know, refer a case to the prosecutor.

They say there's evidence, you know, that this young person committed this crime.

The prosecutor, instead of charging the person, they hand this case over to RCP, and that is-

Right, they're gonna go to RCP.

Right.

So, I spoke to the court's presiding judge, Ketu Shah, and he said that the co- the counselors that remain already have excessive caseloads, so he says these counselors are focused on providing wraparound services to the youth.