Video & as-it-happened coverage: Mayor Murray’s public-safety-spending plan, and how he’d address homelessness

(Added – archived video of briefing)

TOPLINES:
-Mayor promises 50 more SPD officers will be on street by end of 2015
-100+ neighborhood “micropolicing” plans in the works
-Re: homeless encampment sweeps, he says policies haven’t changed since before he took office

(added) OFFICIAL NEWS RELEASE HERE

As-it-happened notes after the jump:

12:08 PM: Click the “play” button to see live Seattle Channel video of Mayor Murray talking about his plan for public-safety and human-services budgeting next year. We’ll add key notes here as it goes, and when it’s over, we’ll replace the “live” window with archived video once it’s available later.

The mayor starts with a lengthy caveat that while city finances are better, they’re still not great.

For the public-safety budget (Chief Kathleen O’Toole is there with him, as is Councilmember Bruce Harrell, current chair of the Public Safety committee), he mentions points including:

*More officers on patrol: He elaborates by saying this will involve reassignment of personnel when necessary, but also says he’ll keep his pledge to increase force by 100 during his term – which means 50 more by the end of 2015
*More data-driven policing
*More civilian experts
*The federal court order will be complied with
*”Micropolicing” plans “to connect police to every neighborhood in the city … Getting officers out of their cars and walking the street” … “to be more visible on our streets and truly create a community-based problem-solving approach.” He says 100+ neighborhood plans are involved.

12:17 PM: He moves on to discuss human services via a stark stat about homelessness – 3,000 homeless children before “The Great Recession,” 27,000 now, statewide. He says the new city budget will “make no cuts” in city spending regarding homelessness. He also mentions that Seattle has 300 homeless veterans and a commitment to end that situation by next year, promising “rapid rehousing” as part of it.

12:30 PM: On to Q/A. Much discussion of SPD data, and mayor’s vow that they’ll “get it right,” especially because it’s clearly considered vital to the federally mandated police reform. The department’s newly hired chief operating officer was mentioned earlier as digging into the data situation. Then, in response to a question, he declares that, related to human services/spending, “We have a housing crisis that extends beyond homelessness.” He says the city does not have “the tools in place” to help people who want to stay in Seattle but can’t afford housing.

He then, responding to a question about homeless-encampment sweeps, says the city and nation “are in a massive homeless crisis.” He also says policies have not changed regarding encampments and sweeps since before he took office. But he says “the broad spectrum of what we should do” regarding housing will be examined. Overall, he says the city has a $60 million unmet need regarding human services.

12:40 PM: What about the police’s pilot body-cameras project? Murray says it’s really important to go with the pilot program first before going wider, especially to address concerns about privacy. They are not in use yet, Chief O’Toole clarifies – they’re still working on policies, “to strike that right balance between accountability, civil liberties …” But (later) she says she hopes they’ll be able to “get on with it” soon. Asked next when additional officers will be in service, she says they are in recruiting/training planning but trying to figure out how to accelerate.

12:50 PM: Q/A wanders off the topic, with one involving whether the $15/minimum wage will depress Seattle’s business climate; the mayor pointed to Weyerhaeuser moving its HQ to Seattle, bringing 900 jobs, and said the city will soon be announcing more businesses moving here and opening here. When the questioning moves back to SPD body cameras, the mayor says one consideration is all the video archives they’ll generate, how to deal with them, how to handle requests (including media) for archived video. Then, it wraps up at 12:52 pm. Again, we’re taking down the live-video window, replacing with a screengrab photo, and adding the archived video when it’s available later. If news releases and other docs become available, we’ll link here too.

Diane September 12, 2014 (1:20 pm)

THANK YOU for this report, since NONE of the local TV “news” showed this, and it was not live on seattlechannel 21, and I cannot access live internet video; ridiculously, one of the TV stations showed the empty podium, “waiting for the Mayor’s news release” but they never showed the actual event with the Mayor and Police Chief; nothing; grrrrr

M September 13, 2014 (3:52 pm)

Interesting that there are so few comments on this fairly big announcement, while every crime story seems to get scores of comments, often critical of whatever mayor happens to be in office at the time. And nobody has taken more heat than Murray. Every time some new crime gets reported the dooms dayers get even frothier and more tin foily than the last time. It’s simple – our pandering and pathetic mayor loves criminals, and pretty much every other evil as well, and hates everyone else. Gutless, pathetic, corrupt, incompetent….he’s a bad one. Tee.

And then he goes and hires 50 new cops, and that’s a lot of cops, and there’s not one peep out of the foilies. I thought more cops was what they wanted and so It seems like a humble apology/thank you might be appropriate.

The irony is that this time he really was pandering – to the public’s perception that crime is suddenly epidemic, when in fact, as he no doubt knows, it’s the explosive growth of social media and micro news sites like this one, which is one of the best I’ve seen, that are making us aware of crimes we would have never heard about 10 years ago. And with very little historical context, suddenly many many people are seeing Barbarians at the gates. And that’s the crowd the mayor was pandering to.

The reality is that we live in the safest time in history, in one of the safest and idyllic little cities in the world, and I would have rather seen the money spent on education or something else that might get at some of the real issues causing crime. Putting more, mostly petty, criminals in jail simply feeds the revolving steel door and creates an even larger population of marginalized, mostly young men, who are often unemployable and have no idea how or where they fit into the straight world, and continue to commit crimes because that’s all they know how to do. More cops making more arrests means more thugs and is a waste of money.