Resetting the vision for Seattle

Although he did not come up with definitive solutions, Queen Anne resident and former city council member and interim mayor of Seattle, Tim Burgess, shared his findings on how two hot button problems in Seattle, homelessness, in a community presentation on March 10 and policing, can be improved.

His talk, “Let’s Do a Seattle Vision Reset,” was the third theme of the Queen Anne Community Engagement Initiative, which aimed to educate Queen Anne residents about issues that affect the neighborhood.

Burgess said that both homelessness and policing are complex and difficult issues that must be addressed if Seattle residents want the kind of city they want.

He said at the last census there are an estimated 3,738 unprotected people in Seattle.

“That’s nearly half of the city’s total homeless population,” Burgess said, adding that King County’s statistics show the vast majority of them live with addiction or mental health issues.

“The tent camps that we see in our public spaces have essentially become permanent because the city government has no specific plan to help the people in these camps or to ensure that our parks and public spaces remain open and accessible to all.” said Burgess. “It’s not good for the people in the camps, and it’s not good for everyone else either.”

He said the city should adopt a comprehensive plan focused on identifying and treating the medical and health needs of vulnerable residents.

However, to do this effectively, the city needs more housing options, from emergency shelters to permanent supportive housing and everything in between. He said that the housing and medical services must be offered concurrently and that a fully integrated and coordinated plan must be developed for each of the chronic people so that the best interventions, strategies and programs can be identified and the resources allocated there.

He said that once these services and interventions are available, officials must ensure that parks and public spaces are clean and open to all and that camps cannot return.

“Now a word of caution here: there is no quick fix to the problem of chronic homelessness,” he said, adding that these people have often been homeless for several years or more in their lives and have suffered significant trauma. “It will take time and it will require the kind of individual care and treatment they deserve.”

Burgess said that since no other tier of government is adequately funding these services, it is up to the city to do so as it is very expensive to continue on the current path.

“We will never free our parks and public spaces from storage until we have accessible, readily accessible, retention-focused treatment services that can be offered and used immediately,” said Burgess.

He said the city’s economic recovery, particularly in the downtown and neighborhood business districts, will be hampered as the pandemic subsides without action being taken to address these issues.

“The people who live unprotected deserve these kinds of worthy, comprehensive services to help them,” Burgess said.

For Policing, Burgess explains that people should develop proactive steps that instill confidence in law enforcement and allow people to see officers as partners in preventing crime and keeping communities safe.

“This is a common value that we all have: everyone in our city, in every neighborhood, wants to be safe where they work, where they live, where they play and where they study,” said Burgess.

He recommends that the city raise standards for hiring new civil servants, particularly with regard to age and educational requirements.

Science shows that the young human brain is incapable of “making truly independent and objective decisions by the age of 25,” said Burgess, recommending raising the entry age for civil servants from 21 to at least 24 or 25 years.

He also suggests raising standards of education by requiring police officers to complete college education, and recommends offering new and current officers assistance with tuition fees or other incentives.

He said while studies were inadequate, those that have been done suggest that higher education officials are less likely to use violence than their non-college peers and are able to interact with a wide range of populations and solve problems cultural differences and differences.

Burgess also suggests raising advertising standards. Blocking officers with a history of misconduct from advancing; and have “better, more repetitive training”, especially in crisis training and de-escalation skills.

Burgess said the police department should also have higher standards of accountability.

He said that in order to improve accountability, a nationwide use of force policy, as well as a nationwide standard for the conduct of discipline and its investigation, needs to be established.

He also said the state should end the practice of private arbitration for police officers to appeal the discipline once it is imposed. Currently, officials can have an outside arbitrator review disciplinary actions privately and change and sometimes reverse them.

Burgess speculates that state legislation is unlikely to pass laws to abolish private arbitration, as other unions will see it as a threat to their appeals practices.

Finally, Burgess said law enforcement officials need to pay more attention to the science of crime and focus their efforts on the people who do the most harm.

He also suggests that officials work with “natural guards” – the people who live and work in crime-hit neighborhoods – to develop effective strategies to deter and detect criminals.

“Following the science of policing is very hard work. It takes care, diligence and important partnerships with the natural guardians that live in our community, ”he said.

At https://youtu.be/J6iTtCImmrk you can listen to the entire presentation, which includes a question-and-answer session.