Chief Amy Smith’s plans for Seattle’s CARE Department
Appointed Tuesday, she wants to expand the police alternative program, reduce 911 response times and expand criminal diversion efforts.
by Josh Cohen
/ July 31, 2024
The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to appoint Amy Smith chief of the fledgling CARE Department, which oversees the police alternative Crisis Responder team and the 911 call center. Smith has served as acting CARE chief since its creation in September 2023.
The new CARE Department — short for Community Assisted Response and Engagement — was born out of the 2020 protests against police violence. It is modeled on other cities’ experiments with sending unarmed civilian responders alongside or instead of uniformed police to answer calls about mental or behavioral health crises. The idea is that people in crisis are often better served by social workers than by police officers who are not trained in behavioral health and whose interactions with people in crisis can lead to fatal shootings.
“I do believe that we can reimagine how we respond to and how we prevent human suffering,” said Smith after the Council’s vote Tuesday. “I believe we can redesign our systems to better support positive change and healing in individual lives.”
Smith continued, “I believe that we can all come together to ensure in a city that is this smart, and well-resourced, and talented, and innovative that people do not die on our streets. We cannot let that be normal. I see no barrier to progress other than self-interest.”
CARE responders are mental health professionals with backgrounds in social work and crisis intervention. They can be called to a scene by SPD officers or dispatched by the 911 call center, either alongside a uniformed officer or in a team of two CARE responders.
The responders deal with people experiencing suicidal ideation and psychosis, make referrals to other service providers and provide rides to shelters and other services. They often engage with people experiencing homelessness and might also provide someone with basics such as food, water or socks.
The program started small: just six responders focusing on the greater Downtown area. In its first six months, CARE responded to 539 calls. About 88% of those referrals came from police officers rather than the 911 call center. Smith said a review of 911 calls in Seattle show that about 50% of calls are for nonviolent or non-medical emergencies that could be handled by CARE responders.
In June, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the pilot program would expand to 24 responders and three supervisors and start providing service seven days a week.
Smith has visions for expanding CARE far beyond that. In her confirmation hearings with the City Council and in the written materials she provided as part of the process, Smith shared how she wants the program to grow in the short and long term to better tackle the city’s mental health and substance-use crises and free police, fire and medical first responders for high-priority emergencies.
“This alternative response model we need is not set in stone,” said Councilmember Bob Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee at Tuesday’s meeting. “There is no doubt in my mind that we will need some major adjustments. … We’re not just passing CARE and we’re done.
In the immediate term, Smith wants to get priority one 911-call response time under seven minutes. At the start of 2024, the average for such calls, when someone’s life could be in danger, was 11.4 minutes. Priority two calls had an average response time of 75.7 minutes, and priority three calls an average response of more than two and a half hours.
Slow responses are partially a result of SPD understaffing. And while the mayor and Council have made police staffing a top issue and Smith wants more uniformed responders as well, she said at the July 23 meeting that “There is no path for [SPD] staffing in the coming years.”
As such, she wants to send more CARE responders to priority three and four calls to free SPD for priority one and two.
Part of the challenge with any response, said Smith, is that there are relatively few places for CARE responders to send someone in crisis or after a situation’s been de-escalated. The city’s Downtown post-overdose recovery center will provide one such resource, as will King County’s Crisis Care Centers, when they open years from now.
Smith wants something sooner: “We basically need pop-up shelters right now. I need to get people indoors and we need to get them help.”
In the next five years, Smith wants to add at least 60 more 911 dispatchers and call takers and get staff vacancy down to below 10% from its current 17%. She also wants to scale up the number of CARE responders to be able to work citywide, 24/7. Smith did not say how many responders that might require.
As part of its evolution, Smith envisions CARE will have a community violence prevention and intervention component and coordinate with existing violence intervention programs at the city and county level.
In 10 years, Smith wants to improve technology at the 911 center to rely more on machine learning and AI to “mitigate risk, reduce bias and promote efficiency.” By the decade mark, she hopes the CARE response team will have grown to its appropriate size, and that the community trusts the 911 call center to dispatch the correct responders for a given situation.
On Tuesday, Councilmember Tammy Morales relayed a story of a recent visit to Austin, Texas where she came across a woman in crisis, called 911 and discovered that the city’s 911 operators ask if the caller needs police, fire, medical or mental health response. It’s something she wants to see implemented in Seattle.
Morales also said she wants a fully funded CARE Department. Currently, CARE has an annual budget of about $30 million, compared with SPD’s annual budget of about $400 million.
By the 20-year mark, Smith imagines that two-thirds of CARE’s time and money will be spent on prevention and early intervention, and that the department will primarily divert people to services and programs rather than into the criminal legal system.
Seattle already has nonprofit and government entities doing violence interruption, homelessness outreach, diversion for low-level crimes and more. Seattle Fire has Health One and Health 99 to respond to mental health and overdose response. Seattle Police has a Crisis Response Unit that partners with mental health professionals.
During the July 23 confirmation hearing, Councilmember Cathy Moore shared an anecdote about doing a ride-along with CARE responders and arriving on a scene where people from many agencies and nonprofits were all working at the same time to help a woman in distress. Ultimately, none of the responders were successful in aiding the woman, according to Moore, and the Councilmember expressed concern about all the overlapping efforts.
Smith said there’s work to be done at the 911 center to improve who gets sent to calls and to improve coordination among all the entities doing this work.
At the July 23 meeting, Smith said there are efforts underway to give CARE oversight of homelessness-outreach contracts. That contract oversight moved to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to better coordinate regional responses. But Harrell moved homelessness outreach and prevention contracts back under the city’s Human Services Department earlier this year.
“I don’t have oversight of the outreach contracts yet,” said Smith at the Council meeting. “I know that’s something that’s being discussed by the executive. I do think that would be a good model. If I had oversight of who is doing diversion, who is doing outreach, so we can get this organized for the first time.”
Asked about the change in contract oversight, a mayor’s office spokesperson said, “It is an area of ongoing discussion, but we don’t have any plans currently.”
Though the CARE chief agreed there needs to be better coordination among responders, she also said the current response system is far from enough.
“We just need more of everything,” said Smith. “Health One is such a tiny unit. Health One, CARE and police co-response is six people per unit. There’s a false narrative that we’d already tackled this when we hadn’t gone nearly far enough.”