This would be astoundingly popular if the people loudest about it weren't abolitionists confusing the issue of a third department with cop and criminality rants. You can easily sell the public with an augmentation program that would handle "victimless" incidents. ODs, off-public behavior, etc...

Unfortunately, this always ends up with idiots shoving in "petty crime" like trespass and theft, Aabolish" rants, etc...

Folks have to decide. Do they want to sell this program so it has a permanent basis? Lose the rants and whines, advocate for a limited scope program. Then move on to your agenda after, and fight over expansion. Right now, you get this petulent "abolish and decriminalize" mix in that tells boring normies they should just accept theft and hassles as part of life until they aboslish capitalism. So the normies will continue to side with the police.

Your choice.

These staff are doing the Lord’s work! It takes someone special who shows up to work in poop, suicide, ODs and your garden variety unstable behavior. High marks to anyone on the front lines.

It sounds like this promising program's best hope for survival and growth is to distance itself from any of the zero-sum competition for re$ource$ with SPD associated with "defund" rhetoric (and perfectly embodied by this article's snarky dig at SPOG's desire for higher salaries and "goodies"), and to document the hell out of positive outcomes. Obviously some individual officers have discovered the usefulness of having somebody available to dispense Narcan and help people having non-violent mental health crises; maybe they'll soon see the usefulness of delegating the "person pooping in public" type calls.
The challenge is to document the good work this pilot program does to make a budget argument for scaling it up, without antagonizing the other departments and their unions.

@1: And to further support your point, the Stranger does itself no favors by repeating previous lies on this topic:

“But Smith doesn’t need to convince the people of Seattle and King County, who have been telling pollsters they want alternatives…”

The link at “alternatives” goes to a false and misleading story at the Stranger, wherein a majority of survey respondents in King County said they did NOT want alternatives, in part because they were afraid alternatives would mean fewer police. The Stranger just flat-out lied about this, to get the story they wanted from data which actually opposed the Stranger’s abolitionist position.

Commenters (myself included) completely debunked the Stranger’s version, https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/04/28/71999670/rigorous-survey-finds-king-county-wants-police-alternatives/comments

"The MOU also specifies that dispatching CARE team members cannot change the number of officers dispatched to calls, so dispatch still needs to send the same number of cops to calls even when CARE responds as well."

SPD is in a staffing crisis so the city sets up a new team to deal with certain specified calls so cops don't have to waste their time. Then the cops insist on going with the new team to every call anyway. Make it make sense.

If this concept is so popular (and I suspect that if properly framed, it would be) then why don’t proponents run a ballot initiative that includes dedicated funding?

A ‘first responder triad’ of SPD/SFD/CARE could be compelling - if, as others have suggested, the radical ‘defund’ nonsense were taken off the table. We need additional tools in the toolbox - not new tools replacing old ones.

Chief Diaz and Mayor Harrell are such a clown show. Eugene OR has been doing solo alternative response for years, and Denver, Albuquerque and New York City have been scaling theirs up for several years. I'm sure there are more recent stats but in an early eval of Denver's they handled nearly 3,000 calls without needing to call sworn officers for backup one.

These boobs are tying up officer time doing things others can do equally well for less instead of dealing with serious crime while whining about officer staffing shortages.

Ugh - Eugene has been doing this for decades

@7: The “clown show” you need to blame was “defund,” which, as noted above in this comment thread, has actually harmed the cause of police alternatives in Seattle and surrounding areas. Proponents of alternatives now have to overcome that hurdle as well.

All of that said, any such programs will start as small pilot programs, as described here. This program sounds promising, and I hope it continues and expands, without another “defund” clown show to discredit it with voters.

@9 Defund could and can't harm the cause of police alternatives when the mayor, chief of police, and SPOG are all actively spewing misinformation about alternative response and apparently hellbent on refusing to do what many other departments have been doing for years.

Defund is a convenient scapegoat but the calls are coming from inside the house.

Sigh...big typo day... couldn't

@10 Possibly, but the defund clowns played straight into their hands. Helpful hint, when you are losing in a public messaging war, the general answer is NOT to agree with the folks killing you in the messaging. If the SPD is spraying FUD about how this will harm staffing, etc...and the public is buying that argument, shoving forward an NTK to shout "yes, and good! Defund!!!" well...sort of confirms that.

Which goes back to my point in #1. Do you want thrilling and self-destructive abolition crap, or do you want this to get public support? The SPD will throw FUD. Youcan confirm the FUD, or you can say "no, this is in addition to". The latter wins, the former will kill it.

Again, your choice.

@12 But if the problem is the Chief and the Mayor then you have to actually say that, because nothing will change until the public understands they are being misled and they are held accountable.

Imagine a competent chief saying "Here in Seattle what we're going to do is proven path of departments and use civilian crime investigators (Denver, San Diego), civilian traffic investigators (Wilmington, Fayetteville), civilian crisis responders (Denver, Albuquerque, and New York City and at least a dozen more), and various forms of community service officer or police aide (Anaheim, Santa Cruz and many, many more) because using staff who can do the same tasks as well or better for less while enabling officers to focus on serious crime always makes sense, but especially so when there's a national police officer shortage and trying to fill slots we don't need to fill is a long and expensive mug's game."

What's Defund gonna do about that? Nothing.

And if the mayor won't fire this chief and hire one who'll say that, the only path forward is to fire the mayor at the ballot box.

"Do you want thrilling and self-destructive abolition crap"

I'm not an abolitionist. I'm a former police administrator, in fact.

It's bizarre how many people are in here commenting "I'd support this program if it wasn't for (strawman about defund or abolition)." The program has nothing to do with defunding police or abolishing the prison system, so you can feel free to support it right now without qualification. Choosing instead to talk about defund or whatever else says infinitely more about you than this program or any of its supporters.

@10: The current Mayor and Chief of SPD were not in office when “defund” started, and the current Mayor hadn’t been in office for very long when King County’s survey respondents said they opposed police alternatives because they feared loss of funding for the police. (See url @4, above.)

If for no other than PR reasons, we should start calling these programs “alternate responders,” or the like. The wonderfully joyous magic of “defund” means we should leave the word “police” completely out of it.

@15: "If for no other than PR reasons, we should start calling these programs “alternate responders,” or the like. "

That...is what they're called.

By absolutely everyone who knows anything about them.

Has been for decades.

@13 Sigh. Again, you will NOT "get rid of the Mayor" when the PR battle for this is being hamstrung by dimwits tagging in the abolitionist crap. The public just wants nice, safe, clean street and public places. If they can sell this as a way to that point, great they'll win. If they muddy the waters with abolition, abolish capitalism, and the rest of the clown college, then the program will die. So far the Seattle left has mostly gone with the exciting performative BS.

It's very, very simple. Sell it as an augment, not a replacement. And gag the NTK/Stranger wacktivists, maybe even throw them under the bus publicly to get this going. Then get the next low-hanging fruit and move the parking enforcement back out of the police budget. Then nibble away on the scope of the CARE team. It's a long slow slog, but it can be done. Or we can keep having public temper tantrums.

@17 " It's a long slow slog, but it can be done. "

But that's the point - it should not be a long slow slog. Doing it is bog standard competent 21st Century police administration that lots of departments have been doing for a long time without controversy.

A chief and mayor with the slightest modicum of integrity and competence could spin it up overnight.

@16: Then you might want to tell the Stranger, who used the phrases, “policing alternative,” and “police alternatives,” in this very headline post.

Call it, "enhanced police dispatch". Call it "supplemental police dispatch," or "police plus care."

No social worker should be dispatched alone until it has been confirmed that there is no crime at the scene, no weapons at the scene, no violence at the scene, or threats of violence at the scene. Then, at the officer's discretion, they can leave. Social workers need a radio and a panic button and training that at the first threat of violence, indication of crime, they are to retreat and call for police.

@4 perpetual troll tensorna says:
"The link at “alternatives” goes to a false and misleading story at the Stranger, wherein a majority of survey respondents in King County said they did NOT want alternatives, in part because they were afraid alternatives would mean fewer police."

This Stranger article is about Seattle and states: "Seattle and King County, who have been telling pollsters they want alternatives" with the embedded link for the word "pollsters" to an article about an actual January 2023 poll of Seattle residents (see the poll data here: https://downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2023/03/DSA-Chamber-Public-Safety-EMC-Research-2023.pdf). On page 12 of the actual poll there is an astounding 80% support (varying in different areas of Seattle from 78-83%) for "a new public safety force with unarmed officers to respond to lower priority non-violent calls." This poll was commissioned by the Downtown Seattle Association.

The King County report -- not a poll -- was done with residents in urban unincorporated King County which the study notes "represents less than one percent of King County’s unincorporated population." So, this study tells us little about King County and absolutely nothing about Seattle. This Stranger article links to it in reference to police alternatives. Nonetheless, one of 3 top-line conclusions in this report is: "When in an emergency or other unsafe situation that requires a professional response, residents want a specialized approach to finding a resolution; an alternative response needs to be an option."

So, tensorna, whether you are a disingenuos troll or a genuous moron matters little: your only purpose is to misdirect and misinform.

@21 -- The Stranger wrote an article that was originally titled "Rigorous Survey Finds King County Wants Police Alternatives." The study the article refers to found that 45.07% agreed or strongly agreed that King County should invest in police akternatives. 50.96% disagreed or strongly disagreed that King County should invest in police alternatives. That's the opposite of what the article claimed.

The survey also found that the main reason why people expressed opposition to alternatives was because they were concerned that resources for police would be reduced. In other words, the tactics of the defund movement have actually been damaging to the effort to fund alternative response models, because people want more funding for police AND an alternative response, not less funding for police to move funding to an alternative response. Because people believe that alternative response models will result in reduced law enforcement funding, they don't support them. There's a lot of work to do to repair the massive damage done by the defund movement if you want real alternatives to law enforcement response.

I agree with The Stranger that the King County survey was rigorous. I understand that's why you're now downplaying it, because you don't like its conclusions, just like how The Stranger flatly lied about it because they didn't like its conclusions. You need to open your eyes because the King County survey is telling you a path forward.

Perhaps ironically, perhaps not (tragicomically?) Seattle’s detectives and patrol officers are also, in fact, underutilized. According to the mayor’s recruitment plan “investigations have been negatively impacted because of the need to transfer detectives back to first-response patrol units.”

Here’s what Chief Diaz and Mayor Harrell had those scarce patrol officers and reassigned detectives handling in (most of) 2023:

1,170 calls about a non-traffic, non-crime, non-drug casualty (1.2X as many as weapon calls)
3,280 hazard” calls that weren’t coded as posing a threat to physical safety (13X as many as assaults in progress or just occurred)
5,453 noise complaints (36X as many as physical fights in progress of just occurred)
13,854 general crisis or person in a behavioral crisis (374X as many as robbery or carjacking in progress or just occurred calls)

(The list of what they’re being needlessly assigned to do instead of preventing or solving serious crime could go on - the point being that Harrell and Diaz are nerfing the capacity SPD to handle serious crime while sitting for years on funding for sworn staffing positions that they straight up have stated they won’t fill.)

In light of the fact the article details three examples of CARE responding to situations in which they were not dispatched by SDP, I don't understand why they don't just hang around 3rd Avenue and respond to situations as they arise. Almost every time I go through that area I see someone with an obvious mental health crisis or substance abuse emergency. It's not hard to find people in crisis in downtown Seattle.

Kudos to The Stranger and Nerbovig for this look under the hood of CARE. There has been little of this sort of detailed reporting in Seattle on SPD and city responses to disorder, crisis, and high need. Journalism based on critical thinking, like this article, is crucial to empowering the public to make decisions based on evidence rather than political spin. Thank you—and more please.