Maybe you’ve seen them around town, members of Seattle’s newest department aimed at serving those in crisis, driving freshly outfitted Ford SUVs or hitting the streets in matching blue knit shirts.
They are part of Community Assisted Response & Engagement, or CARE. In the alphabet soup of organizations formed to take on various aspects of the fentanyl, homelessness and behavioral health crises, it’s easy to get them confused. But CARE — which features a civilian response to 911 calls — is a big deal.
Whether it has the opportunity to grow and meet the expectations of its strongest believers depends on an oft-overlooked facet of municipal government: labor relations.
For years, Seattle has wanted to emulate other cities, such as Eugene, Ore., which have an alternative to emergency calls besides an armed police officer. Of all the barriers to such a new service, possibly the highest was union restrictions.
Responding to emergencies is clearly police work. Police are represented by a strong bargaining unit, the Seattle Police Officers Guild. Nothing moves forward without negotiations.
So far, it’s been small steps.
In late 2023, Mayor Bruce Harrell signed an agreement with the guild to establish a pilot project that created up to 24 so-called Community Crisis Responders, trained “to deal with mental and behavioral health or social welfare issues,” according to the Memorandum of Understanding with SPOG.
The pilot allows “dual dispatch” — police officers and CCRs sent to emergency calls at the same time. If no officer is available, the CCRs have to wait, but a police sergeant could get on the radio and give them permission to handle the situation by themselves if no danger is present. In practice, that rarely happens, say CARE responders.
The MOU got the alternative response team off the ground. Now, a final agreement is being negotiated between the Mayor’s Office and SPOG that, if successful, would likely sweeten wages and benefits for cops in exchange for increasing the size of the CARE Department.
Most importantly, a new agreement is hoped to allow “solo dispatch” — civilians responding to calls without an officer present.
“That needs to happen today. It is urgent,” said Amy Barden, chief of the CARE Department.
It is necessary to relieve overworked police from calls that don’t need law enforcement, she said. It is also less expensive to send civilian crisis responders than an SPD unit, with their body cameras and other equipment. And outcomes for people involved in low-level infractions are better when handled by people with expertise in human services.
The goal is a well-staffed public safety department on equal footing with the police and fire departments.
It hasn’t been easy.
In July 2020, at the height of street protests over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, then-Councilmember Andrew Lewis wanted to create a new mental health and substance addiction first responder program, with unarmed medics and crisis workers responding to people in mental health crisis.
As The Times noted in an article, Lewis wanted the council to consider cutting SPD’s funding to pay for it.
Passed by the Seattle City Council in November 2020, Ordinance 126233 noted that “throughout the summer, Seattle residents have taken to the streets to protest the unjust murders of Black Americans, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake; all of these individuals experienced violent and lethal force at the hands of the police. …”
The new law recognized “the importance of providing alternatives to armed police officer response …” and moved 911 communications out of SPD, among other moves intended to shrink the police budget.
Barden was approached by Harrell’s office at the end of 2022 to lead the dispatch center. There was also money set aside for an alternative response, but nothing had happened, she recently recalled.
In August 2023, Barden said she finally sat down with Mike Solan, the president of the police union, to talk about what such an alternative would look like.
“I said, ‘I’m Amy, I just got here and I’m sorry. I would have conferred with you first,’” she said.
“This has been police body of work and you can’t make an argument that it has not been. I also know cops don’t like going to these calls. And I have really sincere gratitude to him because police had been without a contract for 3-and-a-half years, and he could have shut it down easy, right? Because if I didn’t have that MOU carved out of the bigger contract, I couldn’t launch.”
Since its inception in October 2023, the number of times a dispatcher tasked a CARE crisis responder rose from four in its first week to 151 the week ending Aug. 17, for a total of 5,896.
On Aug. 12, for example, dispatchers received 16 calls involving welfare checks or someone showing signs of distress on the streets that met the guidelines for CARE. They routed 14 of them to cops and CARE while SPD handled two of the calls on their own.
Dispatchers make a point of keeping CARE’s Community Crisis Responders safe.
At 4:45 p.m., they received a 911 call to check up on someone and CARE was not included in the response. NOT DUAL DISPATCHING CCR DUE TO AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, read the log.
That same day, I spent a few hours with CARE41 — the unit assigned to Holly Hodgson and Adelle Walker.
Strolling Cal Anderson Park in the high heat, they were approached by a young man. Living unsheltered, he told them he was recently discharged from the hospital with a leg wound and needed fresh bandages. Hodgson and Walker hooked him up with gauze pads.
Other work included helping an unsheltered assault victim in a wheelchair get a ride in a specially equipped van to a sanctioned encampment. They also steered someone outside the West Precinct experiencing delusions into a women’s shelter.
As for changing city policy to allow CARE more flexibility in responding to incidents without being accompanied by police, Hodgson told me: “I think they are working on figuring out our place in the system.”
Negotiations between the Mayor’s Office and SPOG are done behind closed doors. Barden said she hasn’t been involved for about a year when she told everyone she wanted 96 crisis responders because that would allow CARE to operate 24/7 throughout Seattle.
She believed outstanding issues were close to being resolved.
“I feel like there’s real urgency around this right now,” said Barden.
When I asked Solan, the SPOG president, what he wanted to see happen, he responded: “We are continuing to bargain with the city on the CAREs concept potentially becoming a permanent department within Seattle’s public safety structure. While I can’t get into details of these negotiations, I will say that we remain dedicated to fulfilling our bargaining piece in this process.”
Born out of the defund movement, the effort to create an alternative response to police could have run afoul of acrimony and mistrust.
To the credit of city and police union leaders, there is seemingly some willingness to find a workable way to move forward.
Whether CARE ever lives up to the hopes of its advocates to reduce response times to emergency calls while offering people in crisis appropriate services remains to be seen. But nothing happens without trust and bargaining within city government.
A successful agreement with the police guild to expand CARE would be a solid achievement indeed, and one for which Harrell could rightfully be proud.
