Afternoon Fizz: Encampment Removal Recommendations, Transportation Equity, and Police Testing
Council members say no to homelessness recommendations; equitable transportation advocates decry plans to cut community-based programs; and police recruits won't get a chance to take an easier test.
1. Seattle City Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Sara Nelson declined to sign off on a set of recommendations for responding to encampments at a King County Board of Health meeting yesterday; the recommendations, created by the Board of Health's homelessness and health work group, include limits on encampment removals, adopting harm-reduction policies such as a "housing first" approach to people with addiction, and increasing access to mental health and substance disorder treatment.
"If we do not remove [encampments], resolve, whatever it is, we are complicit in allowing a situation where more and more people fall into or [fall] deeper into addiction and chronic homelessness because their lives are further disrupted," Nelson said. "I think that it's also an issue of nomenclature— 'forced removal' versus 'resolution'... so much depends on the words in the statement, and so therefore, for these reasons, I will not be signing on."
Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, said, "I've often said that we need to lead with compassion, we need to start with the empathy, but then we also have to have the wisdom to understand that we have the broader community to also look after." Kettle praised the work of Mayor Bruce Harrell's encampment removal team, the Unified Care Team, and said he liked the model at the Salmon Bay tiny house village and RV safe lot in Interbay, which "gives people the ability to basically graduate from the RV to a tiny home."
King County Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Jorge Baron, who are both on the Board of Health, signed on to the "call to action."
2. In response to proposals to cut funding for community-initiated transportation safety projects from the 2024 transportation levy, the Seattle Department of Transportation's Transportation Equity Workgroup wrote a letter to the council saying the proposed cuts "will exclude your marginalized constituents who rely on a safe and accessible transportation system for their everyday needs."
PubliCola reported this week on amendments by Councilmembers Rob Saka, Cathy Moore, and Sara Nelson to scale back or (in the case of Moore's amendment) eliminate a proposed new participatory budgeting program aimed at building 16 projects identified and "co-created" by historically marginalized communities. Moore and Saka proposed moving funds from the proposed new program, known as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program, into a separate fund for projects council members themselves would select.
"After expressing our concerns at the previous two council meetings through public comments and letters, we are disappointed in your lack of commitments to the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) through cuts to equitable investments that center low-income, BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, disabled, and aging communities," the workgroup wrote.
"Community-driven projects take time in order to engage those who have been historically disengaged from city planning processes due to barriers such as: language access, lack of trust, and capacity. Relying on district-level decision-making only, as outlined in councilmember amendments, does not adequately address these barriers to full participation, and risks neglecting community-identified safety concerns in underserved areas."
3. The president of the company that created Seattle's police officer exams, which some City Council members have suggested replacing with a test that has a higher passing rate, appeared at a meeting of the independent Public Safety Civil Service Commission on Thursday to explain how the test is designed to predict future job performance. The Seattle Police Department began using the test, created by the National Testing Network in collaboration with SPD, in the wake of a consent decree by the US Department of Justice in 2012.
To "validate" that the test predicts job performance, NTN president Carl Swander told the commission, the company compares police officers' test scores, which are ranked, with their subsequent on-the-job performance evaluations. Swander said by demonstrating that "at [a higher score level], people are more likely to do better than at [a lower] score level," NTN can create a "cut score"—the maximum passing score—that weeds out people who are obviously unqualified to be police officers.
Other tests, like the Public Safety Testing exam that City Council President Sara Nelson has suggested as an alternative to the NTN test, don't "actually substantiate... that you're that what you're doing is predictive of job performance," Swander said. Ninety percent of applicants who take the PST test pass it, compared to a 73 pass rate for the NTN exam.
PSCSC director Andrea Scheele also confirmed that if Seattle did contract with PST in the future, it would have to create a custom exam for Seattle, which "eliminates or reduces, at least, the benefit of working with that company." Nelson and other proponents of changing the hiring test have suggested that switching to PST would allow applicants to submit their test results to multiple agencies at the same time.
A report the commission issued earlier this week notes that the PST test "is not an option” because the company “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now.”