By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
Moments before Mayor Harrell announced at noontime today that the city is working on getting 20 spaces at the regional SCORE misdemeanor jail, the City Council’s Public Safety Committee had heard about – among other things – the inability to book many misdemeanor suspects into the King County Jail. This, despite an 18-year contract with the county costing $22 million this year alone, which led to Council President Sara Nelson exclaiming, “I want my money back!”
That was toward the end of an information-packed committee meeting with an agenda also including Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr‘s report on her first two months on the job, plus the confirmation of Amy Smith as permanent Chief of CARE (the department that includes the city’s 911 center as well as a team of crisis responders). Here’s the video:
The meeting lasted two and a half hours, starting with public comment and Chief Smith’s confirmation (which committee members voted 4-0 to recommend to the full Council, which might vote as soon as next Tuesday), until an hour and 20 minutes in. That’s when Chief Rahr began her update (see the slide deck here).
Rahr said she’s been focused on four areas – staffing, technology, accountability, and the department’s “criminal justice partners.” The first, she said, is still “a crisis” – hiring remains “behind where we’d hoped to be”:
She presented an overview of a recent overnight shift citywide to show how those numbers translate operationally (note that the Southwest Precinct, West Seattle and South Park, had six officers that shift, four below what it should have):
She said SPD staffing “is going to be below what we need for the next two to three years,” and she said her recommendations for speeding it up include recruiting and testing changes that would result in a “large pool of candidates” with “shorter processing time.” Overall, Rahr stressed, it’s an “extremely competitive market” since so many other jurisdictions nationwide are aggressively recruiting. But she said “the officers we have are working their hearts out” and thanked the council for being “clear” in its support for law enforcement.
Rahr was first to bring in the detention situation – saying they need “a third option” because some people are “too medically fragile for jail” but also “too dangerous for the emergency room.” Other topics through which she moved included the increase in gunfire-related calls, both without and with injuries:
“There’s so much gunfire, it’s just astounding,” Rahr said. She also noted that she had recently learned about a situation mentioned here before – state law requiring that juveniles have a certain number of gun-related incidents on their record before they can be detained.
Back to the subject of detention in general, City Attorney Ann Davison‘s briefing – with Smith and Rahr flanking her – was billed as the “criminal justice ecosystem” but focused on three “significant obstacles”:
Regarding jailing people for misdemeanors, she said that the current booking restrictions (dating to the pandemic), as well as jail staffing shortages, prevent police from booking suspects in more than half of the misdemeanors in city law.
As a result – the following numbers, which show that 27 years ago, the city had five times the number of misdemeanor suspects in custody, on average, as it does now:
That’s when council president Nelson exclaimed that the city did not seem to be getting what it bargained for – saying that with the city getting far less jail space than it seemed to be paying for, she felt like saying, “I want my money back!”
As mentioned above, shortly after this meeting, the mayor’s office announced that the city is contracting with the SCORE jail in Des Moines – owned by Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, Renton, SeaTac, and Tukwila – to use up to 20 beds. You can read that detailed announcement here. (It’s also worth noting that the city-county agreement has its roots in the city’s scrapped proposal to build its own misdemeanor jail, on which we reported extensively a decade and a half ago, since two proposed sites were in West Seattle – here’s our 2011 story with the jail agreement announcement, mentioning numbers far above what Davison said the county jail is housing for Seattle now.)
As for Davison’s two other “obstacles”: The “chronic hot spots” did not involve anywhere in West Seattle, so we won’t get into that, but the toxicology lab information is of note, since we’ve reported on suspected DUI cases that have taken a long time to get to charges – if they get to that point at all. Davison said the state lab that handles toxicology for DUI is averaging one year to get a report to her office. “I can’t do anything until I get that evidence … this needs to be addressed in an urgent way.” That would be up to state government to fix, she said. (You can see her full slide deck here.)
| 24 COMMENTS