All the role.

Commissioner, please say here after I call your name.

Commissioner Chair.

Also, uh Vice Chair White.

She's Commissioner Gudzal.

Commissioner Hayes.

Commissioner Fawn is absent.

Uh Commissioner Rashid.

Here.

Commissioner Perman.

Here.

Welcome.

I will take this opportunity to welcome our newest newest Commissioner Olega Perelman.

Is it correct?

I pronounced the name.

How you pronounce?

He did great.

Olga Parliament.

Commissioner Palman, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what brought you here.

I've been a resident of Bellevue for over 15 years.

And uh I have a lot of passion around human services, and this is my second time being in on this commission.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Let's go around and room the introduce ourselves and tell the Commissioner Feldman how long you have been on the commissioner commission.

I will start.

My name is Jess Karamsing and my nickname is Jimmy.

I go by Jimmy, and I'm with commission for almost three years and second year as a chair.

Sorry.

Now just still knew all.

But I enjoy to be with you.

Yeah.

Welcome.

Hello, Chris.

We know each other.

I've been on the commercial for four months.

Give four tech.

Yeah.

Staff, you want to introduce?

Hello, my name's Ellen Inman.

I'm a major with our police department, and I've been on the commission since last fall, so about September, October.

Welcome.

And I'm Ruth Blau.

I'm the human services manager.

Welcome.

Hey, Wolga.

Tony Sparza.

We've met and I've been here for seven years now.

And we met earlier today, but I'm Gisel Calaviz, and I've been working with the Human Services Commission about a year and a half now.

I'm Android, uh human services planner.

Welcome.

And I'm Christy Stengland, and I had the privilege of working with you before, and I've been here for almost eight years.

Thank you.

Welcome.

There are one set of minutes to approve this evening from June 2nd.

Any discussion about these minutes.

Is there a motion to approve the June 2nd minutes?

Moved.

And a second.

I second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed say nay.

These minutes are approved.

Do we have to sign?

Do you count abstentions?

Okay.

I believe Robert's rule says that abstentions counts as yes.

Human Services Commission values community input and looks forward to hearing from you during this meet its meeting.

In compliance with the Washington state campaign laws regarding the use of public facilities during elections, RCW 42.17a dot 555.

No speaker may support or oppose a ballot mayor or support or oppose a candidate for the election, which includes your own campaign.

Any speaker who begins discussing topic of this nature will be asked to stop.

At this time, we'll start oral communication.

Staff will call the names of the people in order.

They have signed up either online or in person.

Members of public may speak during tonight's oral communications for up to three minutes per person and agents or agency program.

There is a limit of three people speaking on the same topic.

The oral communication Peter will end after 30 minutes.

After everyone who has signed up to speak has been called, stop will ask if there is anyone else who would like to speak.

Staff, can you please call the speakers for oral communication?

Thank you, Chair.

Our first speaker for oral communications is Lawrence Luo with Transcend United.

Thank you.

Okay.

So I will start.

Yes.

Well, thank you very much for allowing me the chance.

My name is Lawrence Luo.

I'm the executive director from Transend United, a local 501c3 nonprofit organization.

I'm here speaking on behalf of the organization asking for your support for the city's support on our community event for seniors.

All right.

So Transcend United is a nonprofit organization.

And our mission is to elevate cross-cultural awareness and foster collaborations.

Now, um, so we have weekly events uh since 2023 at Crossroads Community Center, twice a week, and uh for seniors and most of our seniors are um underprivileged, uh language barriered uh adults or seniors, right?

60 and older, and uh so we provide a platform for them to socialize, communicate, and and you know, essentially have some fun, you know, and uh to to socialize, right?

Uh kind of combat the uh post-COVID uh uh error sort of uh isolations now.

Um since 2023, to some data, we have um 6,720 attended our um events now with over 800 unique attendees.

Now we have 11 unique programs uh within our um meets every week now and we also have 15 larger events that has over between 100 to 3,000 people attending uh during that time.

So now with that kind of a uh um impact, uh you know, folks are really just loving coming to our organization, our events.

Now we would really love to expand our program and to more communities, uh, more cultures and uh folks with uh with the needs, right?

Uh speaking languages using their own, you know, languages, uh helping them to gain access to resources, whether it's from the city, local, or everywhere, so they can have a better living in this country.

Um, so again, I'm here speaking on behalf of Transend United, asking for human services and City of Bellevue to support our event, uh, funding opportunities or otherwise other support that we can get.

Thank you very much for your time.

I appreciate the opportunity.

All right.

So give me one moment.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Hello.

We can hear you, and I will go ahead and start the timer again.

I appreciate that, and I I hope all is well in uh Bellevue.

Um I recently received a bunch of interesting reports about certain Alexander I've seen on camera tonight.

Um I read those reports, and even though I don't live in Bellevue, I find it very concerning.

Um his behavior, you know, in the region and in the community.

I want to first start by quoting my president Vanessa Kritzer.

I just want to say for the record that um some of the phrases used by Mr.

Zimmerman are not welcome in the city.

We are a hate free zone, and um and we and we believe that never again means never again.

I happen to share the views of President Critzer.

I don't speak for her, but only for me.

But um, I I find I think if we're gonna, you know, yeah, I think it's time that all of us condemn the Nazi rhetoric rhetoric, condemn the racist rhetoric, condemn the sexist rhetoric out of this individual, condemn the harassment of children by this individual, uh, and excluding him from City Hall.

He's not supposed to be campaigning, yet he already is tonight with his sign, which is against state law.

And I ask you remove him, please and enforce all the laws of the state.

I'm deeply concerned about his behavior, and I hope he receives mental health attention soon.

I want to thank you for your public service.

You all deserve better than the way you've been treated, and I hope you will stand up for your awesome selves because this has got to be a sacrifice serving in a city government building at six o'clock at night on Monday, and we all know soon that C Ox football will be playing a few Monday nights, hopefully deep into January.

So thank you for your public service.

Have a nice evening.

I'm done.

Our next speaker.

Oh our next speaker is Alex Zimmerman.

My name is Alex Ivan.

Zi hi, Nazi pig.

My name is Alex Zimmerman.

I want to speak about problem, but it's absolutely critical.

First, every time what is you will do in trick like this, so you don't show faces of people, I will complain to police.

I did this before, right now we'll do it every meeting, because not everybody doing like you.

Many people co-commission show faces, and I'm talking about this with manager and you in all this dory trick for many years.

This number one.

Number two, Mer Robinson cut speeches from one speak approximately 25 people every meeting.

The in she cut totally only to only talk only to 10.

Yeah.

So by definition, this pure crime because you cannot do this.

People want to speak, you say constitutional right, freedom of speech.

For last month's council meeting, don't have three meetings, not may meeting last Thursday, not meeting tomorrow.

It's very interesting.

This no co-acident.

Yeah, one what is you understand what is I am talking about?

Because we have a pure fascism, and you all fascist, because you all belong to the same fascist Gestapa big.

Yeah.

So next.

She give me three transpass.

Three times I appeal.

It's my right for appeal.

Human right.

In three times, my appeal is this appeal include US Supreme Court decision, but is exist for many years.

Nobody sees this.

They make decision with out show to the people my appeal.

By definition, this is a pure crime.

For example, when is this courts happen like this?

Judge will go to jail.

It's 100%.

Guarantee.

So we have situation absolutely critical, and I talked to human rights commission many times.

You need stopping this.

Absolutely stopping this because don't have sense.

You're not accept complaints, so you are Nazi pig by definition.

You not care about people.

You lie.

Yeah, so this is exactly what I want to explain to you, so you need to understand what is going on.

Ten days ago, you cut my statement for election.

They cut my statement for election.

It's never happened for 15 years.

What is I go for election?

They cut this.

It's a nice to speak to something on our agenda.

Thank you very much.

I very appreciate you.

Yeah.

Zig.

Viva Trump.

You've a new American revolution.

Thank you very much.

I did this for end.

So you know.

My statement.

They scare Nazi paid.

Is this not happening?

Is this happened three days before?

That's everyone that we have for signed up for oral communications.

If there's anyone in the room or online who would like to speak, go ahead and raise your hand.

Okay, go ahead, Chair Singh.

Okay.

Do we have any commissioner report?

Any.

So Mary's not here, so you can skip that part.

Okay.

Any staff reports.

Thank you, Chair Singh.

Um nice to see everybody in the summer.

Um, I just uh put in front of everyone the meeting schedule for the remainder of the year.

Uh this is our last and only meeting for July, and then in August, we take a recess.

And when we come back in September, we're going to be having go back to having two meetings a month.

And because the first meeting falls on the holiday, we have a meeting on the 7th, and then we have another meeting on the following September 15th.

On Monday, I'm sorry, the 8th.

On Monday, September 8th, our first meeting when we come back after the holiday, we're going to have a special meeting.

It will be from 6 until 9 instead of 6 until 8.

And we're gonna be getting started on the funding cycle.

So uh that oops, that night will be pretty packed in with information and uh sort of getting us started on the next round of work that we have coming our way.

Any questions about the schedule and the meetings?

Um that is the only announcement I have so these remaining all months september, October, November, and this no November, so twice a week, only December twice.

Twice twice a month.

Yeah, twice a month, yeah.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

Oh new business item.

Our first agenda item is presentation of Felview Community Crisis Response Program.

I will hand it over to CARES team staff to introduce themselves.

We have a PowerPoint that's gonna hopefully go work.

Yeah, it's it's fine for me.

Yeah, if you all can see for me, like expand it a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Looks good.

There we go.

Awesome.

All right.

Well, hi all.

Thank you for having us this evening.

Um my name is Dylan Gordon.

I am a field education supervisor with the Belly Fire CARES team, so I supervise all of the um CARES advocates.

There's three of me.

So I have two colleagues that were all field education supervisors together.

Um my credentials are I'm a licensed clinical social worker.

I'm Jordan.

I'm one of our crisis response social workers.

There are nine of me.

Um I ride both with CCAT and CARES 101, our social work dispatch unit that we'll talk about more.

I also am a licensed social worker.

Um, as well as most of our team are social workers.

Yeah, and um, so we're gonna just take some time tonight to tell you about the CARES program and the CCAT and CARES 101 and then we have a nice org chart that will kind of tie everything together for everyone to conceptualize what we're talking about.

Um a little bit of my background in CARES.

Um, in 2018, I was a student advocate, so I was getting my master's degree with um Cal State Northridge online, and I happened to cross Bellvy Fire Care.

So I did my first year practicum here.

So in 2021, I joined the team doing that per diem while I had a therapy practice on the side.

And um, and then I kind of found I wanted to spend my full time with CARES.

So then I transitioned into a role called case management specialist for a little bit.

Um that role doesn't exist anymore because I I did find more passion in mentoring the students, and um, so I kind of inserted myself in that realm, and they ended up promoting me to that and getting rid of that case management specialist role.

So um, yeah, so I've kind of traveled all through the different realms of cares here.

I have as well in a different way.

I went to get my MSW at with Simmons um intentionally to do crisis work.

I worked inpatient um in psych hospitals before this and on the floor doing their crisis services, which I really enjoyed.

So I wanted to further my education to be able to expand that.

Um, and then in my internship came here um in 2020 and was thankful to have a position open up.

It was the case management specialist position as it was before.

Uh so I took that position and then have rotated amongst the different things over the years within CARES, and I've been able to see the program develop to what it is now from a very small program from the beginning.

So very grateful to be a part of this program.

Right, next slide, please.

So Bellvi Fire Care started in 2012.

Um, it was a model that was adopted from Spokane Fire CARES.

So we are two programs in the state right now that have this specific model, which is getting referrals from well, Spokane is a little bit different, but we get referrals from fire department, police department.

They're sent over to our CARES advocate team, and they're doing follow-up case management.

Um when CARES started in 2012, it was just Natasha and about two um well student advocates.

We can't call them interns because they are here for free, earning hours.

Um, so they're called practicum students, and we call them our advocates.

And so when it started, Natasha was just looking over two students and um referrals were coming in from FIRE.

And then it progressed over the years, and FIRE and PD were submitting referrals to our advocates to do that follow-up case management.

Um in 2017, when our dispatch unit CARES 101, which I'll talk a little bit more in detail about in the next slide, was put into service.

That became a third entity that a lot of our referrals were coming from.

Um, and then in 2023, well, 2019 is when our CCAT pilot went about, and then in 2023, CCAT went into service full-time, and that became our fourth entity of referral source.

So Bellevue Fire Um advocates, we do take referrals from any city of Bellevue department.

We get quite a few from code compliance.

We get um a lot of action from service first.

They will, you know, call upon either CARES 101 if somebody is coming into City Hall that is in need of anything.

Um, they'll generally call CARES 101 or sometimes they'll call upstairs if CARES 101 isn't available.

That's the positive thing about us being housed in City Hall.

We're here and ready.

Um yeah, and so basically what that follow-up case management is looking like with our CARES advocates.

Each week we're having a meeting on Tuesdays, and we are staffing all of the new referrals that have come in over the last week, and that's where students are determining who they want on their caseloads.

Um we have a range of it depends on the time of year.

So right now it's summer, so we only have 10 advocates, and I say only because in the fall and winter we have up to like 25.

Um UW is one of our schools that we get the most students from.

We have a slide about that.

Um, but yeah, so over time, 2012 to now, the program has just really grown a lot.

Um and I think you can move on to the next slide.

Is there anything in this to numbers?

So the CARES 101 unit that I mentioned.

This one is staffed by nine professionals right now.

Everyone that is hired on to the Bell Vire CARES team holds uh masters of social work.

Natasha is very specific about wanting people that have a degree in social work because of our in social work values are very specific.

And um we travel the realm from micro to macro and everything in between, and a lot of the work that we're doing faces, you know, challenges that are brought on by systemic issues and everything like that.

And so when you are gaining your masters in social work, you're learning kind of how do I tackle all of these systems while serving people in the most effective ways.

Um sometimes we do get pushback from people that maybe hold a um LMFT that's like that's a therapist or other public health degrees, but we have core values and we like to keep it like that.

Um the CARES 101 unit is from 8 a.m.

to 6 30 p.m., seven days a week.

So starting at 8 a.m., this unit is dispatchable.

Um, they are a co-response unit.

So what that means is fire or police have to be on scene first and then request cares 101 out to them.

CARES 101 cannot go on scene first.

They can't pick and choose what kind of 911 calls they want to go to.

They are actively looking at the 911 board and seeing calls that they may anticipate that they're gonna get called on, or calls that maybe they should be called on and aren't.

And that's always a good conversation that we bring back to the um supervisors and everyone of how can we, you know, be effective for these kinds of calls as well, and maybe why was it missed that they weren't called out.

Um so the social workers can either meet on scene to where they're dispatched, or they can follow units to any hospitals that the clients are transported to.

Um, and then usually at the time of the scene, they are you know meeting these people on what we say is probably the worst day of their life.

Um the people that they are responding to are in crisis, and our role is not to, you know, fix or solve all of their problems right then and there, but it's to get them to a place that they're able to function, move forward, create a plan, whether that's going to um a hospital, whether that's finding shelter for the night, getting bus tickets for them.

Some people are in emergent need of needing a car seat, like that happened pretty recently.

So they never know what they're gonna get until they get on scene.

Um, and then they get back to the office, create a referral, and that gets sent over to our CARES advocates side, and we continue doing that case management for them.

And sometimes CARES One will hold their own caseload for the high acuity need clients, um, get them to a space that they can be more managed by a student.

Um, and then yeah, and then just a little fun fact five of those professional staff are previous or former students.

So we have um we like to keep people, you know, in the team as much as we can.

Great next.

Um, yeah.

So as I was mentioning earlier, we have an average of 22 to 32, uh 30 students and from 16 universities.

And so right now we have about 10 from I believe four schools.

Um the students are spending anywhere from seven to 12 months with us, just depending on their program.

We do get the most amount of students at a time from UW.

We have a positive relationship with them from the start of CARES.

We've had UW students, so they're our longest lasting relationships so far.

Um, and then we have some USC uh ASU, I think, and Denver students right now.

Um the students are coming to us with varying backgrounds.

We are not necessarily looking for the most you know expert people in the field.

Uh, we want people that want to learn.

Um, we're never gonna put our students in situations with clients that are too extreme or out of you know their scope of what they can do as a learner, um, especially having three supervisors that were all readily available and we're going in the field with them.

Um we do appreciate when people have strong backgrounds in social services, but again, we also appreciate the ones that are green as we say, and they're coming in to be challenged.

It's a very challenging practicum.

Jordan and I can both definitely speak to that.

Um I didn't know that I wanted to come back to this kind of work, but I'm here, and it's really um we make really big differences in people's lives, and it's pretty amazing.

We don't have um boundaries as far as how long we can keep clients on our caseload because it's a free service, it's voluntary, clients can tell us, you know, we don't want to work with you anymore.

Or on the other hand, we've had some people for eight years on our caseload.

We're gonna continue serving them for as long as they want our help.

Washington does not have um a great abundance of resources, so we have to get creative with how we're gonna provide support to people, and that's the beauty of having such a big team of people from like such diverse backgrounds of work and um just a huge like resource manual that we've accumulated over the years and stuff.

So it's really great.

And um, just as all the staff are MSWs, all the students here are pursuing their master's social work.

Next.

So CCAT, which is our community crisis assistance team, actually was piloted in 2021.

Um this occurred because we were seeing different needs in our community.

The Bellevue Police Department and the Bell V Fire Department decided to collaborate um to fit those needs of our community.

Um, we had I believe three units.

We had a officer and a social worker.

We had two officers who ride together who were uniformed, and two officers ride together who were wearing plain clothes.

Um, and in this pilot, they wanted to see if the team with an officer and a social worker would have different outcomes than the team of two officers, and if the officers in plain clothes would make a difference versus showing up in their uniforms.

And these were the outcomes of the pilot.

Um the referrals to the CARE as advocates for ongoing case management were up by 45%.

Um, which showed that when we had these special teams going out on calls, they were able to kind of assess a little bit better who would um fit within needs that we could maybe serve through our case management um services.

There was an average of three referrals per client to existing community services or supports from our teams on the CCAT pilot.

We were getting people in the community connected to whatever services they needed at the time.

Um there was an 80% decrease in number of arrests, which was amazing.

Um, and a 24% reduction in the use of force by police officers on the call set.

Uh RCCAT teams went on.

So with the pilot, they realized that we want to keep this around.

We want to fund this permanently.

And that launch was in September of 2023.

We now have five teams of five CCAT units, which are an officer in a special uniform and a social worker in unmarked cars.

And then they have a sergeant over them.

All of the officers had to apply for this role.

It's something that they're all very passionate about and they're specially trained, as well as us are trained for like it says cross-trained in mental health and police topics and skills.

We just some information about how we run the unit.

And with unmarked cars, the intention is just to um be less intimidating when we arrive on scene.

Um is anything about CCAT.

No.

I mean the times that you're in service.

Yeah.

CCAT, um, because we have five units, we uh we were originally seven days a week, 6 a.m.

to 140 a.m.

They did a heat map after the first year and changed our hours based on the needs of the community.

Now we have Tuesday through Friday, 6 a.m.

to midnight.

And then um Saturday through Monday, we have 6 a.m.

to 10 p.m.

So seven days a week, different hours varying different days.

We just found that at this time there's not much need overnight.

Um, so we wanted to overlap some of our units since more of the calls are during the day.

Um CCAT is different from CARES 101 in that we go to the scene immediately so we can get a social worker out there immediately versus um other officers who are on patrol, they have to go there, make sure the scene is safe to then call social workers.

It helps um get a mental health professional in acute crisis situations that maybe we would otherwise wouldn't be able to go to.

Um, and we've had some pretty good success in doing so.

And that's the biggest difference between CARES 101 and CCAT.

Um the officers being paired with a mental health professional at all times.

There they have one partner and only that partner, or two partners and only those two partners.

So we get to know each other very well and how we work, um, which I think gives us greater outcomes because we're able to collaborate with our different skill sets and um kind of merge those two worlds and to the best in the best way for the community.

They help us a lot.

We wouldn't be able to do our job without them, and they wouldn't be able to do it without us.

So I think you can go into questions now, or do you know what they end?

Sure, yeah, go for it.

Commissioner Singh is okay, that's close question.

Go ahead.

Um, I just had a question on the last slide around the 80% reduction arrest, just was really a shocking number.

So is it different?

Like, are we looking apples to apples the same kind of calls that you're going out to on both, and there's 80% reduction in arrest.

I tend to do the data, so I'm not quite sure.

Oh, yeah, go for well, I happen to be the sergeant on the pilot CCAT program.

So I didn't speak very fondly.

Um, when I just have to say I love this program.

Um, I I think for me, it was probably out of my 25 years law enforcement is one of the highlights of my career.

Um, and it's definitely an eye-opening experience.

If you're always just a traditional police and from the traditional mindset, it's a really different way to do um what we do.

Now, um, what I can speak to the decrease in arrest is you have to look at the type of calls that CCAT would respond to.

So a lot of times you're dealing with people who were trespassing, people who might be um stealing items like food items or different types of items like that.

It might be um disorderly conducts.

So there's where you have people who are in crisis and they may have some needs that aren't being met, or they have um some other things in their life, or some things that CCAT is a perfect application for.

CCAT will not, it won't necessarily be an assault or um some of those other crimes.

So I think you have to just kind of look at when you look at the repetition of calls that we were responding to with people who are in crisis or experiencing um just a really bad day, um, or have some needs, like there was mentioned about needing maybe a bus ticket or needing those are the perfect application for CCAT.

So whereas normally you might have somebody who's repeatedly trespassing and without having some opportunity to give them, take them somewhere else, or give them a ride somewhere else, or give them a bus to ticket to go somewhere they really actually would like to go, but they just can't figure out a way to get there.

That's where you're gonna see that kind of diversion.

So it was a really eye-opening thing, and that was just the beginning.

So I'm sure since that time frame, they've really just with the increased number of units and probably the increased resources they have available and the um more accepting mindset of it, not only on law enforcement, but also on the community.

That I'm sure that number, um, I haven't seen the numbers lately, but it's probably just even better, I would think now because we've probably gotten better at it.

Yeah, I think there are some situations that officers have to make an arrest, and then there's a lot of other situations where it's at their discretion.

And from working with the officers now, I can say that um they want to find a solution to the calls that are happening in the community.

And when they're faced with like, I can make this decision or I don't need to arrest them, but this is what happened on the call, and I have to think about like what's gonna happen if I leave them here.

Sometimes they feel more comfortable to make that arrest.

But with us responding with them, it opens more doors of like, well, they could go to this hospital or we could help them in this way.

We can safety plan and maybe this won't happen again.

And it um leads to more comfortability because they have now more access to services and resources to maybe actually solve the problem rather than um get put in this cycle of arrests and out of jail, and now they're stuck in the same situation that they were before, maybe even worse.

So I think a lot of times that's where you see the differences um of our unit versus a patrol unit responding to a call.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, like I mentioned, our officers and our mental health professionals are all specially trained, and these are some of the trainings that we've um put in place since CCAT have start has started.

All of our most of our mental health professionals are trained in CNT, which is crisis negotiation training.

Um otherwise more widely known as hostage negotiation, but that name has been recently changed.

Um, and that's a most of us are trained in level one and two, so that would be 80 hours of um crisis training.

We've also been trained in CIT, which is um crisis intervention training.

That's another 40-hour uh training that they usually do for officers that are in academy.

Um then defensive tactics, involuntary detention and other specialized trainings and mental health substance abuse and um teen development.

Uh, these have all usually been done with our partnerships.

So even if our officers had already been through CIT or we had already been through some of the mental health trainings, we did them again together so that we could grow together and learn um with each other, which makes our units even stronger when we're out um in the field.

What is the teen development?

The last one.

Teen development.

Teen development was teen brain.

It was um uh training that they did at the academy for people who are interested, and it was really geared towards um the differences in the teen brain versus the adult brain in a crisis and how to approach that in a way that doesn't escalate them or um cause them to have outcomes that would only worsen their ability to like function in society.

Um I was there with some of our other officers and MHPs, and it was a good training that they offered to us.

So these are the other police officers in the picture.

Um this is a picture from our crisis negotiation training.

So uh this was only one round that we did, and some of us are present.

You can see the red coats.

A couple of our officers are there as well.

But this was um a bunch of the different departments that had uh been hosted at Bellevue to do the crisis negotiation training.

And um not all of us are pictured here, but now I think there's only a couple of us that are not trained in CNT, and those are the social workers that only work on our CARES 101 dispatch unit.

I forgot to mention that most of our MHPs rotate between the two, so all of us go back and forth between CARES 101 and CCAT.

There's a couple of us who are just on CCAT and are just on CARES 101 in that in just the way that they had to work out the schedule.

That's how it ended up.

But our um program manager Natasha thought it would be um most beneficial for us to rotate to keep the cohesiveness within the program.

But um, most of us are trained in that now.

I think um I just want to share a quick anecdote.

We recently went to a conference for co-response.

Um something happened during one of the sessions, and I think it just really emphasizes the importance of these kinds of units, having a mental health professional with a police officer.

We were watching a video of a young gentleman who was holding a knife and he wasn't following commands and letting go of it.

And he said, You have one second, and then they tased him, and so he fell and dropped the knife, and the you know, risk was squashed.

But in a room full of police police officers and mental health professionals, there was like, you know, 200 of us in this room.

The police officers are trained for safety of themselves and surrounding people.

That's you know, their hierarchy of who they're gonna help.

As far as I understand, right?

It goes yourselves, community.

Others, okay, then yourself.

Okay.

Sorry, mixed it.

Um, so the person speaking was asking for opinions on what they saw.

And so we have the police officer saying, you know, safety, safety.

But then we had a mental mental health professional say, well, what if he was about to say you have one second before I hurt myself?

And so the police mindset was that he was gonna lunge at them with the knife, which is why they tased, whereas the mental health professionals were kind of like, what if he was gonna go for himself and they we could have intervened in a different way that the mental health professional maybe could have talked him a little bit more before the taser.

And so the video she was showing, there weren't mental health professionals on scene there.

But I think that is just a good way to kind of show you what the two minds are gonna think about in crisis situations like that.

If there is time, if there isn't time and the danger is escalated, obviously there's going to be different outcomes.

But in moments that you can quickly debrief and say, maybe let's try to tackle this from this way.

So I just thought that was really interesting to kind of see in real time when obviously there wasn't a real threat in front of us.

So CCAT can bring those kinds of important conversations to the scene where some people might see a threat, and other people just see somebody that really needs help.

Yeah, and we've seen that on scene um more than once.

We had a call with um a teenager who had taken some pills and had a knife and was on his uh family's playground set in his backyard, and see a couple of our CCAT units responded after taking the teen development training in the um CNT and all these things that we could apply on scene, and we worked well together, and after some time we're able to get him to drop the knife and walk into the ambulance with us to go to the hospital, and it could have had a very different outcome.

And um because we have done so much training and we had the two um mindsets on scene.

I think it really made a difference in how that call could have turned out.

Okay.

Next.

Um, so just very quickly, we uh staffed a new position in the last eight to nine months, I think is when Billy started.

So we now have an opi opioid outreach crisis response social worker.

Um, this is funded by the opioid settlement fund, so it's its own kind of entity within the CARES um group.

And Billy is specifically doing like follow-up case management to people that are experiencing um substance use issues with opioid, but then we'll also do outreach and public education in the community.

Um Billy's gonna start going to community court pretty soon and having a table as um just an open resource for people to go up and get like quick case management.

Um so this is a really awesome expansion to our program and having somebody that can specifically just kind of focus on the um drug crisis that we have.

We hope to get her out on the scene for overdoses and um have a lot of other ideas about how her position could be beneficial to the community.

It's just like she said very early on, so it's gonna be evolving um as time goes on.

But so far she's been a huge resource to all of us.

Um so as promised, here's that org chart to kind of make everything make sense.

Um I won't go into a lot of detail.

It's kind of self-explanatory, but Natasha's right at the top, and so she's overseeing cares, and then we have Captain Ryan Parrott who is overseeing CCAT.

Um, and then the colors all kind of you can't totally see, but the the purples to reds kind of show that we are taking on those CCAT cases and providing the case management on our student side, along with the red, which is our cares referrals.

Um we have the big team of mental health professionals and our police officers.

While this is up, does anybody have any like questions?

Our program can be kind of hard to explain because there are so many different legs of the program.

Um, I'm wondering if this visual is helpful or if there's any other questions about how we operate.

I don't have a question about how you operate.

So tell me if you're want me to wait.

But um, in all the needs that you respond to, you mentioned, you know, Washington is limited resources.

Um, what do each of you see as the biggest gaps in finding resources for your clients?

What need do they show up with that's the hardest for you to find a resource for them or a few of them?

Women's shelters.

There's just one in Bellevue, and it doesn't have a ton of beds.

Emergency shelters.

Not an emergency shelter.

Um, so that's a really tough one.

We're having to send people that are not well in a taxi sometimes to a different, like we've send them to Tacoma Rescue Mission.

Um I think uh the people that we see usually are people who have burnt bridges everywhere.

Totally.

They don't function well within the traditional services that we have available.

So some untraditional services in that regard would be great for people who are really struggling with mental health or substance use.

Um, by the way, most of the calls are people that we work with are under the umbrellas of mental health, substance use, elderly domestic violence.

Um I see anything.

Just family discord, but that's uh so I would say that there are things like a packed team.

Um it's hard to get accepted into that, but that's like a wraparound service where they go to your home and they have case managers and doctors and all kinds of people helping you in your home after you've shown that like the traditional services just aren't gonna work for you.

So more options like that where we're getting creative with our services would be nice, but like she's saying, shelters.

Um, there's not very many housing services.

Not many housing.

Um most of our clients are on Medicaid.

People want therapy.

You have to wait three or four months to see a therapist.

Those therapists are burnt out, so the services aren't great.

Um yeah, I don't know.

I could co-occurrence, I know we can go on.

I could probably find a problem now.

You tend to get stuck with like there's not very much co-occurring treatment for mental health and substance use where both are being looked at within treatment just like equally.

Some of the co-occurring treatment centers are usually like really geared towards mental health and have a substance use component, or if really geared towards some substance use and have a mental health component.

Um, but that's the same with like dementia and domestic violence, these things where they're crossing over, it becomes really difficult then to help people in our community.

We recently saw sorry, someone who is unhoused who also is in a wheelchair and has a service dog and has no identification because she's running from a domestic violence situation, and we're out of luck because there's all these overlapping things, and usually these resources are geared towards one of those things and outrule some of those other things because that's too challenging for their facility.

Um so yeah, they could go on and on.

Yeah.

So when I say we have people for eight years, yeah, it people contacted you or you provided services in last year or this year.

Any data?

We well, currently our case load is probably hovering around 250.

I guess I would say that's around the average of open cases we have at a time at a time.

Say in a year, yeah.

2020 or 2023 before CCAT, we had about a thousand referrals over the year, and that can only be more now.

Um, and some of these referrals are some of the same people over and over again.

So it's hard to say how many people we're seeing in a year.

Yeah, because sometimes we get a referral and we have a system in place where we make five attempts to make contact with them.

And if by the fifth time we have no luck, then we close them.

So yes, they're coming on as a client, but it doesn't mean we're necessarily serving them in any way.

These are the valvures, thousand.

All of our clients are Bellevue residents.

Well, um, if you're if we're on a dispatch unit and we get dispatched out to someone who's just passing through but is in a crisis while they're passing through, not technically a Bellevue resident, but all of these calls are happening within Bellevue.

Anybody sent to our case management team where we're doing ongoing case management, they're becoming a client of CARES, they have to be um residents of Bellevue.

Who are the referral people who refer you like police department refs you guys or yeah?

We mostly get Bellevue Fire, Bellevue Police, our cares 101 unit, and our CCAT.

So we have four main referral sources.

Okay.

Um, and then sometimes we'll get code compliance, service first.

Anyone that's works for City of Bellevue has access to the link for our referral.

Okay.

Mainly, yeah.

That's all the police get the information and just that's when they found out that this is the case you can handle better.

Exactly.

Yeah.

This is um the differences between the different legs of our program that we kind of touched on, but in like a more laid-out format.

Um I'm wondering if there's anything on here that's too when I ask a question.

Um I was uh wondering about your core age the demographic.

Um, and also uh what are the risk to your organization with the funding cut of Medicaid and other sources, yeah.

The for your first question, the age demographic.

Um that has changed over time.

So when cares first started, we definitely had a lot more referrals for the elderly population.

We had majority of our referrals were people that were falling in their homes and needed help, and so now it's kind of in this day.

We maybe have 30 to 50 year olds as yeah, I would say 30 to 50.

It's kind of a big range, but middle-aged people more mental health that we're dealing with versus when we were both students, it was a lot more elderly who don't have the resources that they need as they age.

Um then um for your second question, we are not at risk necessarily.

Our program is not at risk for losing any funding or anything like that.

We get grants, um, services are free to the community.

Um, we don't bill insurance, so with uh Medicaid cuts and stuff, that that doesn't really apply to our lot of our clients are at risk, but not from working with us.

So please feel free to chime in if you disagree.

But I think what I would surmise from knowing of their work is more their what is at risk is the sustainability of a workload when the demand goes up in our community.

Um because if Medicaid is cut, if that was an experience somebody had, they've already noted the challenge in accessing to services.

And so as we see more needs in the community, it just places a higher demand on their work.

Good is what I would foresee.

Right.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Uh ask if you uh receive any calls from um the service providers in the area and how your relationship with us.

Yes, we do get calls sometimes, like you mean from agencies asking if we can help anybody.

Yes, this does come up.

Um we usually do have to explain to them that we are only taking referrals through the 911 system.

Um we will try if if what they're calling for is quote unquote solvable, we'll provide them with resources that we know offhand.

Or if it does sound more like a crisis situation, we will encourage them to call 911 and request CCAT or CARES one.

Norcom is on the seventh floor, they're the ones taking all the 911 calls.

They're very familiar with our cares and CCAT units, so it's not confusing to them.

If somebody calls 911 and is like, can I have CCAT?

Can I have a social worker?

Um, so that's what's great.

And that's what's better about CCAT because they can dispatch themselves to those calls.

I think we forgot to, or I forgot to mention that CCAT is not dispatchable by Norcom, where like Norcom dispatches their patrol units on their own.

CCAT dispatches themselves.

So we're constantly monitoring the board and determining on our own what call would fit the need of CCAT, which can vary.

And a lot of the calls that come into 911 that we will attach to are service providers calling because they're concerned about their clients.

Um then when we get involved and do case management for those clients who have services in the community, we a big piece of our work there is usually in advocating for what they're hoping for with those services, helping them find new ones if those aren't fitting them correctly, and collaborating with their service providers and coming up with a plan for when they're in crisis or if they're in crisis again to minimize damage for them and the community.

So you say after open the case, you separate them uh till to be stable, so you make follow-up for the case after open after um maybe stable.

So there are any follow-up to you, or use you transfer to some way for follow-up.

We um so our main goal, the advocates we since we don't provide a service necessarily, our big thing is we're gonna connect you to a resource.

We're gonna be that bridge for you.

So we get the referral and we're doing the follow-up, but that follow-up is looking like okay, where can we pull from that would help them more?

And so our biggest goal is then to connect them with somebody that can address the issue hands-on, where we are more like you need a mental health professional.

Okay, let me go back to the office.

I I did forget to mention this.

Sorry, I'm realizing things that we missed, but our teams are going out in the field, so they're going to where the clients live, whether that's an apartment, side of the road, wherever they're meeting them and and then getting their goals, assessing their needs, going back to the office, researching mental health professionals, um shelters, everything, and then meeting back with the clients again.

And then getting their goals, assessing their needs, going back to the office, researching mental health professionals, um, shelters, everything, and then meeting back with the clients again.

Okay, this is what I found for you.

Do you want me to do an application with you?

You know, we're gonna bring a computer for them to work on.

We're gonna we're never gonna assume they just have everything they need to get things done, and we'll provide them with the tools to accomplish those tasks.

And then we go, we've completed this application.

You have your SNAP benefits coming in.

This is your food bank that you're gonna be getting food from every week.

Is there anything else that you need?

And hopefully they say no, thank you so much.

And then we go, okay, we're gonna close your case.

And that's what we mean by follow-up.

So we'll we'll continue until they are like you helped.

Thank you.

So when we're responding to 911 calls as C CAT or CARES 101, um, a lot of that work that we're doing is de-escalation on scene, coming up with safety plans, like in the moment, um, de-escalation of the crisis, whatever that looks like.

There are some resources that we can provide immediately, like certain emergency shelters or a next day appointment.

Um various different things, like crisis connections.

We can take them there.

Um, and then we will determine on our dispatch units if this is someone who could use the follow-up services, just like police and fire are determining that when they're on scene without our dispatch units with them.

And we then send a referral just like police and fire to the advocates for that follow-up if there's more needs that need to be met post-crisis.

But when we're on scene, we're looking at how can we minimize what's going on right now and get them stabilized for now to then get connected to those services.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jordan and Dylan, for taking up educate about the important work you do.

Yeah, thank you for having us.

Yeah, thank you all.

This is um Natasha and Captain Parents information if you have any questions about program related stuff.

Awesome.

Thank you.

So our next agenda item is update on value police department programs, initiatives from our very own exfil member major in mine.

And I will hand it over to you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Great.

Uh, thank you for providing some time tonight for me to speak about um the Bellevue Police Department.

I was gonna start with a little bit of an overview once we get the PowerPoint loaded up, so I can help everyone kind of just understand broadly what our agency, how we're structured and our primary response.

And then I'll go into a little bit about several community initiatives that we um participate in.

Uh CCAT, I will dedicate less time tonight um to talk about since we just had this wonderful um presentation from them.

I'm in it.

Do you want me to get out?

Do you think that might be impacting it?

Okay, let me help.

And then you go ahead.

I just got out of it.

Go ahead and try.

Okay.

Excuse me, one second I'm gonna try to jump back in if I can.

If not, I can read off the board.

Um, sure, that'd be great.

Sorry, it's mumbling.

So uh again, my name is Ellen Inman.

I'm a major at our police department, the Bellevue Police Department.

I've been with Bellevue for 25 years.

I'm assigned currently, I oversee our investigation section.

But prior to promoting to major, I was a captain where I worked in our patrol section for some time, and then also our personnel services unit, which is what we do recruiting, hiring that unit.

And then prior to that, I was a sergeant.

I also worked in patrol, and I worked on our pilot for CCAT for six months, which was, as I already said, a wonderful magical eye-opening experience for me.

I also worked in our office of professional accountability for some time as a sergeant, which is our internal investigations section.

And then prior to that, I was a major crimes detective for 16 years.

I did major crimes and special assault, which be crimes against children.

And then also major crimes would be robberies, homicides, those types of investigations.

So there's just a little bit about my career here at Bellevue.

Today I was going to talk a little bit again about our departments as a whole.

Initially, it's important, I think, to understand the mission of our police department, which is really in a nutshell to make Bellevue a safe place for everyone who comes here to visit, who lives here and who works here.

We do that by trying to reduce crime and reducing the fear of crime.

There's several different avenues we approach to try to do that, whether it be proactive policing, preventative policing, education, but really the backbone of it is collaboration and partnerships with our internal stakeholders in the city of Bellevue, our community members, and then the citizens who work, live and visit here in Bellevue.

So we do that every single day in addition to our partnerships with the fire department.

And we feel that we have great success by doing that.

We are a nationally accredited department.

We're one of just 6% of the police departments in the nation who are accredited.

And what that means is that we have very detailed policies and we do regular audits on those policies to make sure that we're complying with them.

And we have an on-site in-person auditor through Calia who comes every four years to do an a tedious on-site audit of our policies and our compliance with those policies, which would include our training, our adherence to training, and making sure that we're doing everything that we can to make sure that we're meeting the standard that they have set forth for us to have this accreditation.

We've been accredited for several years since 2005, actually.

So it's been a long time.

And we're very proud of it.

It's a lot of work.

We have a dedicated sergeant who truly just does accreditation in terms of the policy management.

We're always modifying our policies.

We've learned over the years that it's important to train, but it's also important to have policies that are consistent with not just the legislature, but also what makes sense.

So we oftentimes when you see um changes in the laws with the state of Washington, we oftentimes set a policy that was already in place that mirrored that law.

So that law really didn't change necessarily what we do in Bellevue because we oftentimes set a policy that either was the same as that law or sometimes more restrictive of that law.

So we are a little bit, I mean, I feel like we haven't had too many surprises over the years, but that doesn't mean that, and that's because we're very vigilant on trying to make sure that we're doing the best practices for de-escalation, our use of force and all the things that come with that with the department.

And I do think that we can attribute a lot of that to this accreditation process.

Um we do have guiding principles that every day in everything that we do, our officers and our city and our department that we try to follow and adhere to, um, when whether it be how we what policies we create and adhere to, the training we do, how we handle ourselves when we respond to calls, and also our um in the innovation and how we look towards the future and what we like to do differently or what we think can be better for our community members and our department.

And those are really respect, integrity, and countability and service.

And and those should be the basis of everything that we do and everything that we strive to do.

So I'll give you a little bit of overview of our police department.

And so one more, thank you.

Um we have two really main sections, but our biggest one is our patrol section.

So that would be a uniformed um when you have the officers respond to calls, they're um responding to the 911 calls, and that has very several different subsections within that patrol division.

That's the traffic.

So when we have accident investigate investigation officers, officers who ride motorcycles, which normally would be our traffic enforcement.

Um, what comes with traffic enforcement is trying to have um accident prevention because by enforcing areas where we're noticing a lot of speed or we get a lot of complaints of from community members where people are speeding through the communities.

We try to release or noise a lot of loud mufflers or people doing different um car events where they're meeting and doing different car events.

We try to respond and dedicate our traffic unit to those areas because the intervection for community members to their concerns, but also to minimize uh traffic accidents because traffic safety, especially in the summer where accidents go up in the summer with people's driving is very important just for trying to keep those accidents.

I mean, our goal is to have zero accidents every year.

Maybe one year we'll actually be able to get there, but that's always the goal with how we uh dedicate resources for traffic.

Our downtown unit, that would be uh anyone who's been in our downtown area knows it's more congested than ever, right?

And every year we as we grow as a city, it gets more and more.

We so we try to dedicate certain officers who work downtown.

Um, that way they have less response time, especially in height um times for commute.

And now with Amazon coming back to work and other members coming back to work more, it's important for us to make sure we keep our response times as fast as possible possible for um priority calls.

We have substations, um, crosswords and bacteria.

We actually have um two substations in those areas so officers go there and can do their work.

They don't have to travel all the way to City Hall if they need to go in out of their car to write reports or use the restroom or have lunch, but also we have volunteers who staff those so people can walk in to those if they have questions, or if they want to speak with an officer, they can meet with the officer there versus having to drive all the way to City Hall if they don't want to call or if they don't want to do an online reporting.

Um, we find with some of our community members, they're not they're uncomfortable using technology.

Um, maybe they have hearing issues, so they're uncomfortable using the phone, so they prefer to do a face-to-face.

And so that facilitates that interaction.

Um, it also is nice for community just to come in and say hi and for us to have a chance to visit with our community members.

We um developed a light rail in response to having our own light rail.

Um, and so we have uh five officers for that.

Right now we only have two, and then we staff it with some overtime.

And that's because we haven't had the great connection to Seattle quite yet.

And so once we have that connection, then we'll have the resources there full time.

But in the meantime, we do staff four people.

Um, we have days where it's you know used heavily.

Um, I heard the fourth of July was sounds like one of those days.

Then we have days where it's not used as heavily, but we can all expect that once we connect to Seattle, that will change.

And then we have, but we already have officers who are specially trained in that type of response because it is a different type of police response.

They ride bicycles and then they, those bicycles can go on the light rail.

And so we um, but we do have them every day of the week, Monday through Friday and during essentially daytime hours right now, um, which is nice because they can learn that type of police response because it is a more specialized, they develop the relationships with sound transit and also with King County Sheriff, who actually has the complete oversight of the light rail beyond the city of Bellevue.

And truly, actually, the buses in the different bus stations, you know, the larger parking rights above you is technically King County jurisdiction, but we oftentimes respond to those calls because they're somewhere else in King County and um just for a matter of timeliness, it's it makes more sense for us to respond to those.

So we partner with them.

And so it's nice that we've had a chance to start already start get a head start on building that relationship with each other.

Uh, and then we have a canine.

We have three canines who work, and that would be the dogs.

And so one during the day and two at night.

And then we have a SWAT team who also we support Seattle when they need assistance.

And we're a regional SWAT team.

We're a dedicated Bellevue, but we support outside of the city if they need additional resources.

So we train often with other jurisdictions because that's just the nature of this world when it comes to um staffing and to make sure that we can have resources within King County to support each other in the times that it would require a more high-risk specialized response.

We have a bomb squad, which is also a regional asset.

So in that bomb squad, we also oftentimes not only respond to calls within Bellevue, but it would also be outside of a Bellevue jurisdiction to support other regions.

Our bomb squad is very specialized and we have a lot of specialized tools, such as drones and different things that we use in terms of our response for that.

As our fine colleagues at CCAT and CARES, we also do crisis response in addition to CARES or in addition to CCAT, we have a crisis response team.

So when our SWAT team responds out, or we send out train crisis response officers who've gone through the specialized training so we can establish contact with people when we have that a situation if somebody's barricaded or we have a situation to try to de-escalate it and hopefully take enough time with them and have the specialized communication so we can convince them to um safely, you know, and participate with us and and surrender would be the word in terms of a barricade.

So we don't nobody gets hurt.

Not only they don't get hurt, but no one in the community or none of the officers get hurt, is is the win, isn't that what we look for every time we respond to one of those calls?

And we have crime scene response.

So when we have scenes that have different types of evidence that needs to be collected, we have officers and detectives who are specialized, field training, and then we have an honor guard.

So when there's um ceremonial events, um funerals, or it could be other even positive events, we have officers who are trained and um respond to those.

I did a screenshot on the right side just to kind of give you an idea for our calls from last year.

So this was at the end of 2024 for our response time.

You'll see at the bottom.

So for our priority one calls, which would be the most in need call, um, we have a response time of three minutes and 36, three minutes and 36 minutes or 36 seconds.

And so we're actually we've consistently been under our target time.

And considering how congested Bellevue can be at some times, excuse me, we're very happy that we're meeting that um issue.

We also, you can see the number of calls that we've had, over 52,000 911 calls last year.

And then we broke down kind of a breakdown of our other types of calls that we go to by priority.

We're staffed for 206 officers.

That would be uniformed officers, commissioned officers.

That includes detectives, and any other specialty assignments we have.

We have 50 professional staff who work with us and support us.

That could be our forensics lab or a property evidence lab and our records.

So when you walk into the police lobby, that would be our record staff.

And then we have on average 24 volunteers who work with us to support us through different programs.

And so I'll talk a little bit more about the volunteers as well a little bit later on the slide.

So a little bit about our investigation section.

Um again, patrol is the bulk of the work we do in terms of our staffing, but we also have a robust investigation section.

And here are just a list of a few of the things we do.

Um it's commissioned and non-commissioned.

So some of the professional staff I mentioned.

So sorry.

There we go.

Thank you.

Um, we have our uh major crimes, crimes against children.

Um, we do domestic violence and we have coal case, so that would be um open homicides that uh haven't had a resolution, or sky metal wallet would be one of our coal cases where he's a long-term missing child.

Um, we also have some adult long-term missing adults as coal cases that detectives work on and investigate property and fraud investigative assignments.

We have a proactive group, which is um our special enforcement team.

So when their whole goal is when we have um a string of maybe robberies um in the news, if you've seen for the last, I'll just say six or eight months.

It might be we had individuals who were targeting um people in the parking lot and stealing their purses from them.

In this case, they were targeting primarily elderly women in the parking lot and stealing and oftentimes Asians, so they were targeting Asian markets or different places and um assaulting them, stealing their purse or whatever they had were carrying and then fleeing.

That same group was also breaking into cars in the evening as well.

And this wasn't just in Bellevue, they were across the region.

They were all the way over to Kittsap County, all the way north and King County in between.

So it ended up.

So our Pro Act team ended up doing a lot of work on that, working with other jurisdictions to piece together the um evidence, identifying individuals, and then we made upwards of eight arrests, recovered several firearms, body armor, um, all the a lot of the things they were breaking into cars and they were targeting people who would leave firearms in their vehicles when they'd park.

Um, and sometimes in different businesses, um, people had a propensity of leaving they they found um so they would target these businesses because they that's what they were looking for as firearms.

And so um it was a really good resolution to a long investigation that had a lot of victims who were very impacted and some were injured and um went to the hospital.

So though that would be what we would have deploy our special enforcement team, and that's really just when we have um when we notice that we have uh an uptick of certain types of crimes and we want to respond quickly, and oftentimes we see the connection of outside jurisdictions that way they can we can deploy them quickly and hopefully um bring a resolution to it quickly so our community members, we can lessen the ability for there to be additional victims.

And so we find that's very successful.

Other jurisdictions also have proact units, so we work together as a team to hopefully um catch criminals and hold them accountable for their actions.

Um we also have agitable for digital forensic sections, so they analyze computers, phones, iPads, um anything that we might recover as evidence.

We have a forensic lab.

We're actually one of only three in, well, four if you can't watch the state patrol.

So Seattle Police, King County, Bellevue, and Washington State Parole.

We're the only ones that have a forensic lab in Western Washington.

So we're very proud of that.

We do all our own latent examinations and we do DNA examinations and we work closely with the other labs to support each other to gather the criminal evidence to hopefully identify people and hold them accountable for the crimes they commit.

We work through intelligence.

Right now we're a world of technology.

So that includes social media.

That includes people communicating via social media or other electronic communications and also posting things.

And so that's we often we have somebody who's dedicated to looking for things that might be threats to our community and to our city.

That would be the intelligence component.

If there's going to be protests or March, which we have a lot more now than ever in these past few years, several years.

So we really try to monitor that so we can work with those community members who are going to come and protest in March.

So we can create a safe space for them to do that and make sure hopefully we can partner together so they can have an opportunity to express their rights and express their speech.

But then we can also work through the boundaries of Bellevue in terms of if they have a permit or if they don't have a permit, and then we can try to work with them to keep them safe.

We also look for people who haven't told us they're coming, and if there's something that we need to be aware of, so we can prepare and try to help our community prepare for that in terms of intelligence.

And then we have technical operations, which would be cameras.

If we have strings of crimes, we can put up, we can deploy cameras to monitor activity in those areas.

And uh it might be an area that doesn't have a camera, and so that we can try to do some covert cameras or other things to try to monitor and see if we can identify potential suspects and then work through that to try to identify criminals who are it could be wire theft or they're stealing that's been a on the rise these last several years where they go to communities and steal wire and then it impacts community members because they have no internet or they have no, you know, whatever that wire was connected to, and it's a hardship for them and it's really expensive for those businesses.

Next slide.

Thank you.

Perfect.

Um, so our vision really is to do all of that and more.

Um, and how we do that really the most successful is then more, which is building trust, being transparent about what we're doing, um, how we're trying to build trust, how we're trying to have accountability for what's happening in our community, but also how what we're doing and our accountability that we're showing every day that we're providing exceptional service to our community.

And then oftentimes that through partnerships and collaboration.

And that's why we have all the things we do, including this dashboard that we built a few years ago.

We have a transparency and accountability dashboard that, oh, next slide, please.

Thanks.

That um is available to anyone who wants to log in.

You can just truly put in those words, Bellevue Police Transparency and Accountability Dashboard, or you can go in through our website and hit the links through the police department.

And then you'll be able to see uh detailed information about crime in Bellevue, our response to crime, if it's on the rise, if it's um declining, hopefully, um, and year end to year end to date where we're at right now.

Um, it's usually uh pretty when I say it's real time, it might be uh within a week or two of it being reported.

It could be a little bit more recent in time, but every time a case report's taken, our records department has to go through the process of accepting it and making sure it was um entered properly.

When we take police reports, we have to gather information when it comes to diversity and different times, different metrics that we have to report, and that's where we're showing our accountability and transparency.

So that can take a little bit of time because the computers don't always do it magically by themselves.

We have to have people who help them merge all that information.

So it usually runs about 48 hours.

Sometimes it could be a little bit longer, but it's not ever going to be more than typically more than a couple weeks.

So it's very up to date.

And that's where you'll also see the percentages can fluctuate a little bit because it will show you absolutely where the percentage of persons' crimes, property crimes, there's maps.

Um, they kind of mentioned a heat map.

It's really a map that shows you where the crimes are reported from.

We actually then use that information to do targeted policing.

Um, that's really how we find the most success.

So we're we're finding trends of where crimes are occurring.

Then we make sure we have dedicated resources there, not only to investigate them, but to try to prevent them.

So if it's car prowls are on the rise in certain areas or burglaries are in a rise in certain areas, we take that information and then target and deploy our resources to try to be the most effective we can with what we have to work with to try to prevent and intervene and then to educate.

And so we find that we've had a lot of success with that.

We've um we're we've absolutely decreased our property crime.

Um we're down consistently been down below almost a 30% this year from the year before.

Again, it can vary a little bit because that depends on how it's entered in, but it's been consistently in the 20s uh this year for our persons crimes.

Um when it comes to uh domestic violence, that's one for our person for our property crimes has been down.

Our personal crimes have been up a little bit, which is mostly attributed to domestic violence, and that would be um order violations, persons, you know, family members who might have orders with each other.

And so those types of crimes can be um cyclical with holidays or people spending more time together.

You can kind of see the rise and flow of those.

And those are honestly just an ongoing education to try to help people get resources for them.

If they have another place they need to live, we um have to work and respond to those a little bit different than it would be like a property crime that's happening.

So anytime you're bored and you want to hop on our web dashboard, you might be really entertained by seeing the data.

Um, we also just encourage people to look at it too, because it's good to know what's happening in your community.

Next slide, please.

We've also really focused in the last several years on recruiting because we've staffing for law enforcement, especially has been a challenge.

Uh, we are not immune from that.

Every nate, every department across the nation is really facing staffing challenges.

And this is a unique job that not everyone wants to go into, and it has its own special set of challenges with it.

And uh we're competing with the Amazons, the Microsoft's and the other businesses of the world.

Um, we also don't ever shut down, so you're not gonna always have a weekend off.

You're gonna work every single day of the year.

So we we don't we can't offer you stock options or you know, other things that maybe you might get from some other tech companies or other things.

So we really focus on um trying to always be really diligent on our recruiting.

We've been very successful in doing that.

We also did a new website a couple years ago and it included with that company that we work with, targeted marketing, so we can do it nationwide, or um, when we do go do a recruiting event out of the area, we can actually target before we go so it starts popping up on people's social media or on their Hulus or however they um access information.

If you see those little banners or their adjugate on your Amazon, it would be those type of things and using certain metrics, we try to target that and say, hey, join Bellevue.

Um, and we also do it if you're at the um T Mobile and watching a game and you know, targeting marketing can come up in your social media because we're always we always have the because we can set the geographic parameters on where we want it to go to.

We can do it through, we do it through Meta, but we also can do it through X.

We can pick and choose how we do it, trying to um one of the main reasons we did this is not only to hire, but also to access people in different communities that might not necessarily look just like our community.

We're trying to increase diversity, we're trying to be more inclusive.

And this is one of the ways a lot of the historically black colleges are not within the Seattle area.

They are in different parts of our nation.

Well, we I can't always afford when I worked in PSU as a captain.

I couldn't always afford to fly people out to the East Coast to go visit colleges, but I certainly could set up the geographic parameters for the targeting marketing to pop up.

So if they were having job fairs, so even if we couldn't be there in person, we could be on their phones, hopefully.

And it would almost be second best to that.

And we could really kind of complement that and try to get the most we could for trying to access and entice people to take a look at us and see if we're something that they would like to join, someone they like to join in a company and if Seattle or the Bellevue area, you know, with the beautiful mountains and the water, because not everyone's been to this area, so they don't necessarily know what it looks like.

So we also included some beautiful images about the different recreational things you could do here just to try to entice people to just consider us if you're considering this career.

We found good success.

We actually um the first year we launched this, uh, we went up almost 300% in our applications and we've stayed very consistently.

They stay very busy in that section.

So it's been a uh it was a good move and it's been a good investment of money for our police department, our community.

And we've had a lot of really interesting people apply.

I'll use a recent example from my current assignment.

We're hiring a new domestic violence victim advocate, because the one we have, she's worked with um King County for 35 years.

We've contracted with King County until now we're gonna have a now have an internal employee after we hire her replacement.

For some reason, she wants to retire after 35 years.

I don't know why.

And so in that job opening for the two weeks that I had it open, I had 50 applicants, and over half were from outside of Washington.

And Tucson, uh the East Coast, and I completely attribute that all to this website.

Um, because I put it up on the website.

I didn't even say change the targeting market, and I just put it up there, and I know the targeting marketing is out there because that's what they do for the lawn for the police.

So where that goes, the website goes and the targeting marketing, and then people click through all the available jobs, which both are commissioned and non-commissioned jobs, our professional staff.

And so I over 25 of our applicants are from outside Washington and our current eligibility hiring list.

Two of the three on our hiring list are not from inside Washington.

They're from Tucson and from San Diego.

So that just I think speaks to the power of targeting marketing and people who want to move to this area.

Next slide, please.

Um, another way we try to strengthen our partnership is our participation in our advisory council for the police advisory councils.

We have several that we've been um partnering with for several years.

Uh Chief Mylette, who is our former chief, um, stood up these councils and then Chief Shirley has done nothing but continue to strengthen them and continue to grow our relationship with all the different members.

And so these have been wonderful for us.

It's a good way for us to include different members of our community in conversations about the challenges facing our department, challenges facing law enforcement, challenges facing them within um the world, the nation, and the community, and we can collaborate and share our experiences and bring everything to the table and learn from each other.

And I would say over the years we've learned a lot from each other.

Excuse me, I think we're all stronger for it.

Um we do monthly meetings where they rotate between the different excuse me, between the different councils and um we also have the members, they have an opportunity behind the scenes so they can learn a little bit more about how we trained a de-escalation, and then we can kind of run them through some scenarios so they can see how that.

I think somebody touched a little bit on like somebody with the knife, how the decision making when it comes to deal de escalation and responding.

Um, they can go to the range, we can do defensive tactics training, they do write-along.

So it just helps helps them come do a maybe a kind of pull back the curtain of what it is to kind of a day in a life of law enforcement of a patrol officer, and then they can pull back the curtain and challenge and facing their community, and then together we can come together.

If anyone has an interest of ever joining any of these, um, you can go to the city of Bellevue to the website for the police department, and it has all the information about how you can link through if you'd like to join.

Uh, next slide, please.

Another way we try to strengthen our partnerships is our sector captor program in Bellview, we're set up really into three sectors, north, west, and south.

And so we have a captain who's assigned to all three of those sectors.

The whole point of assigning a captain is they should be very familiar with what's happening, the challenges facing good and bad, the good things and the bad things and challenges in those communities.

And so then we can deploy our resources, they can look at the dashboard, see the areas that need to be focused on, deploy the resources for patrol accordingly in those areas.

But in addition to that, they can be the one point of contact.

Sometimes it's hard when you live in a community and you don't know who to call.

And you know, call you don't really need to call 911 because you don't need to report something, but you have a lot of questions about what's happening, or you might go to the dashboard and have questions about what we're doing or what we aren't doing, or what any good ideas or suggestions you have.

So you can contact that captain and connect with them and have those one-on-one conversations with them about your area.

And we find that this has been really helpful for our community members.

It's also been very helpful for the captains because it kind of right, just is that point of connection versus you having to leave a message and try and find out and ask all these different people who you should contact.

You you know right away who should contact, and then they can um, you know, have the uh whatever it is if you're reporting to concern or problem, then we can have our patrol officers or uh we have crime prevention, uh, you know, civilian and what she does is crime prevention.

So she if you're having a business who's having a lot of burglaries, we can have her come out and walk through the business and the outside with you to see where we could put cameras or other crime prevention strategies.

SEPTET is what it's called, crime prevention through environment to try to hopefully minimize things.

Same with you have a business whose um a lot of vehicles are getting broken to, or a apartment complex that's having a lot of you know, crime that's happening outside where people are coming in.

We can work on if we can do a gate, if we can add in more lights and try to help you work through those different processes.

Also here we when you go to that this is this is from also the dashboard you can actually narrow it down for those different regions if you want to just know about where your community and the dashboard and you don't it's not that you don't care about the rest of above you but you're mostly focused on that part above you because that's the part that has the most meaning to you then you can actually go through the dashboard and do all of those things as well.

Can I ask a few questions?

Yes yes please you're going for a lot of conversation communication appreciate that I'm just trying to understand that the last point you were making in regards to um sitting down with a community member who may need to understand the crimes that are happening and how security could be installed is that security that police department would invest in or your those are the suggestions that you are recommending to the property owner or store owner.

Yeah we wouldn't be able unfortunately we wouldn't be able to pay the taxpayers we we work off taxpayer money so we oftentimes wouldn't be able to pay for that but we there are times that we have connections with other members of the community or we um let's say uh we did a and I'll have it on a different slide but we you know when we had a lot of high end days and Kiyas getting stolen so we had a big donation of the steering wheel locks and so we can do there are times that we have resources available that we can help them but we also work a lot with cares and carers has a lot of resources because um some of the things that our carers partners you know they talked about a lot because cares is you know a big big big um solution to a lot of problems in our community but there's a lot of other things that through cares or through the police department we have a lot of relationships with different um businesses in the community I'll say like an auto uh like an automotive repair so if people are um financially they can't afford to get their car fixed let's say for example that would be a way we can connect so we have a lot of way where the money may not come from the police department but it might be that we have a relationship where we know or through cares we can refer them to cares and we can get them some help or it could be there's some federal grant for a different thing.

So our um community prevention our crime prevention she would that she's the expert in it.

So that's where we would send her out but sometimes it is people already have cameras they're maybe just not in the right position or they haven't been installed just in the quiet area or they haven't turned back their shrubs for a long time or there's some other things that they maybe really didn't think of that can help kind of make somebody drive past their parking lot and maybe I I don't want to say go to the next parking lab, but it I mean let's face it that could be the case right like so if we can go to every community and get all of us on the same page in terms of lights landscaping so to where Bellevue doesn't seem appealing at all to come here and commit crime then that would be a win for her because she's done her job and they can keep on going somewhere else because they know there's going to be a camera that's going to record them.

And it would be the same for our um residential members as well that they might have certain types of cameras up but they might not be positioned properly or they might not have to use them quite quite right.

So we it's really just about educating and then if they can afford something then we can see if we can try to help find a way to support that or we can refer them in into the right you know kind of direct them in the right place or if it's something that cares depending on what the circumstances but that's her specialty so we can connect her with our different members to try to get that support and help.

Education is the first step and then we can kind of go from there.

My other question in regards to your recruitment just I I understand you're trying to improve the diversity of the numbers and and there's probably a lot of training that your team or teams are doing but I'm just trying to think about the city of Bellevue and knowing how diverse we are which is potentially different diversity than maybe Tucson, Arizona just making that up what training is being done specifically so if somebody's working mostly in North Bellevue or South Bellevue where you may have certain pockets of the population where culturally appropriate ways of communicating and understanding and being okay with certain things is expected.

Like what are you doing about that?

Well all of our officers get the same training and when it comes to that a lot of that specific training actually comes from the city of Bellevue itself.

So Bellevue everyone who works for Bellevue every employee gets specific training that's pushed out by human resources.

But when it comes to our police department um and I know that's a pretty broad question but if you're specifically if there's like language barriers or cultural barriers that would be part of the training that we get in terms of understanding one that there are those and I don't expect even myself to know the 50 or 100 different types of language or cultural barrels.

And I don't expect even myself to know the 50 or 100 different types of language or cultural barrels.

I just need to know that there are them.

And a lot of times it's just asking people if they speak English if they're okay with it.

But if they don't, we have, you know, different, many different resources to communicate with people in their own language.

Because that's really first and foremost the most important thing is once you can at least give somebody the opportunity to communicate with you in their primary language, then you can work through the what they're comfortable with, what's their norm, what you know, what obstacles there might be to their reporting and them feeling comfortable with you because that's really the goal.

Um, I will say that most of our interactions with people is because they've called 911.

So they have something they need from us, right?

They need to report something to us, which is the first step is in that initial call is oftentimes identified if there's a language barrier.

And that's through NORCOM who does our dispatch.

So then we can go out there and be a little bit more prepared.

But we have a language line, which is, you know, our phone that we can speak with people.

We do have many different officers.

Some of the benefits of having diverse um workforces we have many officers who speak more than one language, and that can be helpful.

Um, but we both know we all know Bellevue has many, many, many languages um that are spoken here.

And so that's the first important, just the knowledge knowing that statistically speaking, odds are English may not be the first, the primary language of some in your speaker with it.

And if they're under stress, they might actually speak language English pretty well, but if they're under stress, it may even be less, right?

And their ability to communicate with you and their ability to understand what you're telling them.

So that's where our officers are trained very well in doing that.

We have a um our training program.

So we have a training program for people that we hire.

So they're trained for 40 hours before they go to the police academy on many different topics, which would include topics that you're addressing.

They go to a six month police academy in Washington, which also includes those topics, and then they come back and then they have a 16-week FTO program, which also includes many times in different parts that topic, which a lot of it is also hands-on training when they're with another officer and they're going out.

So I feel very confident in the training that our officers get, and I see it every day in how they communicate with um our community members.

And we switched to body cameras um about a year ago, a year and a half ago now.

And we do, as part of our CLIA, we do regular audits of our body cameras, and we find nothing of uh reinforcement of exactly what I've spoken to is that our um officers are very good at recognizing and adapting to the needs of the community members when they respond out.

Okay.

Thanks.

You're welcome.

So how's the staff like, are you okay with the staff or are you still shortish?

Oh, we're still short.

Um it varies because you know, people like to retire for some reason.

I don't know why we should ban retirement and our problems will be solved.

No, I joke.

Um we, I think are currently at the beginning of this year, we're at 16 vacancies.

And so we tend to hover about that.

It might go up to 18, then it might go down to 13, right?

Because it just depends on um where we're at on the given month in terms of retirements.

And um it's not everyone that we hire is, you know, uh cut out to do this job.

Um, and that's not for lack of training.

It just might they might get in and realize this isn't the job for them.

I think you see that with any profession, and this is no different.

Um, and it also might be that you there's a lot of multitasking, and sometimes people um it's hard to drive, listen to the radio and work a computer at the same time, and sometimes they struggle with that as well, or different variations of that.

So we're always consistently right now, around 15 is probably the the um perfect one.

But I feel that we stay very proactive, as I mentioned on the website.

We have um, I think this year I'm told we're on mark to even have more applications than we've had the previous three years since we went to that new model.

Um, and uh we have a lot of resources we've dedicated to our hiring section, recruiting and hiring section to for this reason.

But it makes me happy because when I look at some of our like Seattle across the water, everyone you could look at up right now on the internet, they're faced with the a very different staffing challenge than we are.

So it just makes me appreciative that we don't have the staffing challenge that maybe some of the other jurisdictions have that ours, and this is really a nationwide problem.

It's not just a Western Washington problem, and it's not just a Bellevue or Seattle or King County problem or Washington State Patrol.

It is truly a nationwide problem in terms of um hiring, and it will just be to me some of it, yes, could be our um job, but also is uh the fact that a lot of people are retiring.

And so the people who got hired in the you know, 25 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, those large number of people are now ready to either go on to a second career or no career and just retire.

And so that's a lot of the impact that we're seeing across the nation, is trying to keep up with that.

And um, but I have every confidence that we'll get there.

But it may be that we always just have to hire people, and that just might be the way law enforcement does business, or at least in Washington State does business.

And that's okay, because I think if you staff to that and you just go in with that mindset that you're just gonna always have to be vigilant and be dedicated to hiring the best people you can hire and making sure they're trained the best they can train and having the best place for them to work, then hopefully they'll stay, and then hopefully and they'll be happy um and long-term employees.

But you know, we've had a lot of people who've stayed 20 and 30 years.

So that I think speaks for itself that we're just now needing to, you know, replace them because they stay here a long time and they're ready to go.

When did the decline start?

Well, it's always been if you look through, I can speak to the 25 years I've worked, and it's a it's a to me, there's a pendulum.

So it's always been kind of like this.

Okay.

Where, but I will absolutely tell you in 2020, it absolutely had an impact.

I think I think we can all agree, right?

A lot happened in our nation, and we were not um exempt from that here in Washington State.

And that had an impact in our field, and we have, you know, had to um some people a lot, I think a lot more people separated from this profession, not only because of what happened necessarily nationwide, but also we had COVID, right?

And we had some other challenges to first responders and that field.

And so where I look at that is um we've had a lot of opportunity to look at the way we do work.

Um, we've had a lot of really uh we always did escalation, as I think I'd mentioned earlier.

We've always had a very strong training on escalation in Washington State.

Um, so our legislative things that were brought into Washington State legislatively really, I don't think were that remarkable for anyone who worked in Washington State because we've I always think have been a little bit ahead in terms of kind of that mindset in terms of the laws of de-escalation, because since 2020, there's been a lot of laws that are specific to law enforcement that have been enacted and put in place, and some might argue that's impacted our field in terms of recruiting and hiring.

Um, and that could be true across the nation, and it could be true in Washington, but I can tell you that in our city of Bellevue, we've always, since we're clear accredited, we've always had many of those policies and many of those training, and that whole philosophy was already established for our department.

So I don't feel that that as a whole has been an impact on our department here.

It's just been the trend of there's a lot of jobs out there for people to work in, and it's hard to compete with the tech world.

I mean, we are kind of in the epicenter of tech, and so people have to say, do I want to work for here or go work at Amazon?

I mean, we are competing right with a lot of really wonderful companies for the the brightest and the best.

And that's a good thing.

Challenge accepted.

That's what I say every day that we come to work as challenge accepted.

We will absolutely take it on.

That's a different field, but yours different field, and we all appreciate what you guys do.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Can I have a motion to extend the meeting for 10 more minutes?

I'm almost finished.

Um yeah, uh, it's them the motion.

Okay.

So it's the meeting.

Okay, we'll extend to eight.

Yes.

Um, we have a second.

I second, yeah.

All in favor say aye.

Anyone for Nate?

No.

So we'd extending the meeting for 15 minutes.

So uh I had um uh uh one question.

You mentioned um um some emerging issues um that have been developing uh due to our political climate and our growth in Bellevue, such as crowd control or you know, demonstration.

And um curious how you kind of hedge what you see um coming in the future.

Um not just with crowd control, but um the uptick in school violence and other twists uh that we've seen increase of over the past five, 10 years.

Great question.

So um it really, I'll touch on the school one first.

Ever since uh, I mean, since the mass school shootings, uh our department, as I could speak to every department in Washington State, we do, but especially our department and King County, we do joint trainings like our fire department and we get together once a year and do a joint response to that training.

The mindset of um training has also been in several years, way more than 10 years ago, how we respond to those before it might be where people wait and get together and go in together.

And um, we've learned many, many years ago when it comes to I'll just speak again to school shootings that you don't have the time to wait for that, that you get there and you go in because threat the whole point is to stop the threat and to preserve life.

So there's been a lot of change in terms of trainings across the nation when it comes to response to school shootings.

Um, when it comes to Bellevue specific or intelligence gathering regarding those, we have a detective who's on the joint task terrorism, it's a federal task force.

And that's basically where that by being part of that task force for joint terrorism.

They have a security clearance, so they have access to information for our region in terms of any potential threats.

That wouldn't just be for school, it would be for anything.

And then they have the ability to receive that information since they have the security clearance being part of that joint task force, and then they have the ability to share it with our chief.

Um, and if it reaches the level of concern for it to need to be shared or with our community in terms of with our city, our city actually has a threat management team here within the city of Bellevue.

And so our detective actually attends those meetings with the threat management team for Bellevue and works with the risk management and all the different members who are on that.

So kind of just to speak generally to that, that's one way we kind of do for some kind of information regarding potential threats to our community, and that could include schools as well.

Um, when it comes to political, I would say law enforcement's always um been impacted by the political climate because it our our community members have the right to have free speech and to exercise that right.

Um, do I think that in the last several years we've seen more of those in Bellevue?

Yeah, I think if you live in Bellevue, you've probably seen them too.

And so we just work really well with the people who organize them.

It's it's oftentimes um nice if you have organizers who communicate well so we can help help them address their safety and provide a safe place for them to communicate exercise their free speech because they do have a right to do that.

And so all of our um staff are trained in that.

And then when it comes to crowd control, because that's actually a little bit separate thing.

Um we also um all of our staff is trained in crowd control and crowd control responses.

We always default to best practices in crowd control.

But again, remember we're CLIA trained.

So we've always been trained in that, right?

Because we've been KLIA trained and accredited for years.

So we've always not only had policies that are far beyond maybe what other agencies had, but then we've had to train to those policies, and then we have to prove we train to those because we get audited.

So it's really hasn't been an adjustment to us other than maybe we have more marches or protests than we did in years before.

So when it comes to staffing, we just make sure we allocate the resources so we because we always want to have officers there.

Again, they're just there usually monitoring, meaning they're just standing back, making sure that everyone's safe because sometimes it's not not always sometimes there's two groups that don't always agree or two, right?

Which they both have a right to have that, but our job is to try to make sure that everyone's safe.

So that's really our that we just make sure that we're trained and we keep up on the training that we make sure we have the dedicated resources to support those incidents.

And uh just one last follow-up question uh regarding schools.

Do you also work with the school district to provide them best practice training for any risk scenario um the might are arise?

Yes, we have our strong communication with our school, um, our that the same detective that I mentioned regarding the the threat assessment, the joint task that they also uh have worked to help with the school staff to help train them in terms of response to that.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

Uh, we can go to the next slide.

Uh and we can just go quickly through it because it's CCAT.

I think we all learned about CCAT tonight.

So and then we talked a little bit about light rail, so we'll go ahead and go through that one.

And then um our community academy.

I'll just circle back to this.

We do offer a community academy once a year for anyone who has any interest in attending, you can go through our website.

Um, it's open to anyone who's a member, a community member here in Bellevue.

But if you have any more interest of learning more in depth about what we do and how we do it, we encourage you to attend.

It's a great thing.

I love it when people come there and ask questions and we just get to know and learn about each other.

So we have a lot of success with this.

We'll go to the next one.

We also do it through our volunteer program.

If anyone has an interest in volunteering with our police department, we have a robust volunteer program.

As you can see at the bottom, lots of hours from our volunteers.

And we have them help us with a lot of things.

It could be with our vehicles, you name it.

And any projects I have, they love to help.

And it's a great way to we it's a great way for us to get to know our community members in more depth, but we also really need the help because we have so much work that we like to do, and we only have so many people to do it.

And there's a lot of wonderful things that our community members through volunteer work, especially at our substations or here at City Hall.

Um, and they have a lot of great ideas for us too that we're on how to do things a little bit different, which is really enjoyable.

Uh, next one, please.

Um, we have a women's empowered program that we um started in 2022.

It's been very successful, and it's for women, uh girls starting age 11, all up.

And we basically go through and have the participants.

There's several different classes where they learn different self-defense.

It's free.

Um, so if you're interested or if you have anyone's interested, um, you can reach out to Craig Hananumi, who um is one of our training staff, and he's also a community officer.

Um, and he's the skateboard officer.

If anyone's heard about Craig, I mean, I think most people have heard about Craig.

And um, he also um does a lot with um trying to find furniture for people who may need furniture.

So oftentimes he'll work with different families in the community, and if they're moving or they had to move out or something happened, they need furniture.

Then not only every person in the police department ends up doing like some spring cleaning and we donate stuff, but we also raise money as a police department to to try to help, and then we go out there and help them move the furniture.

So Craig's an amazing man if you haven't ever had the pleasure of meeting him.

Exactly.

You picked up great with kids.

So um, but if if this this is a really good program and it's very popular, so do reach out to him.

But I everyone who's attended just loves it.

Like it's nothing but success.

Yes, my wife has tended.

Oh, good.

Uh, next one, please.

Uh another example of strengthening our partnerships, and we have this coming up, um, our youth camp.

Uh, we actually just started this uh a couple years ago, and it's been so successful that we actually brought it originally it was middle schoolers, and now we've added high schoolers because kind of to your point, we look for a lot of ways to engage with our youth.

And this is one of because we don't have school resource officers um currently, and so this is another way for us to build those relationships with our youth.

And it was overwhelmingly popular, and so we have all different events and programs.

So if you have a middle schooler or a high school who might be interested for next year, I would definitely monitor this and sign up early.

Um, but I've heard like overwhelming success in this program.

Uh, next one.

My son is signed up for school.

Um, so this is officer Porter.

He's on our CCAT team.

Um, but he also uh loves to do different.

We all of our officers love to go do different education events and um partnerships.

In this case, he was actually doing some demonstrations on our drone and some different safety kind of to your point about threat, right?

Some different safety planning with the kids.

This was at Spirit Ridge Elementary when he uh did this before school, went out for summer.

So um we are happy.

We we've always partnered with the Boys and Girls Club and with different groups.

So YES with Youth East.

Uh, next one, please.

Um, we talked about these events.

So we look always look for giveaways from our crime prevention.

Um she just got a bunch of air tags, so we're gonna be putting together an air tag event coming up once they kind of get the details finalized, where we'll be doing air tag giveaway um for that as well.

Uh, next one.

Uh, we just started our first uh gun exchange, and so that was very successful.

We did that at the end of May.

It was our first one, and so we had 87 firearms that were turned in, and we gave out 13,000 in gift cards for that.

And that's just for people who live in Bellevue.

They can bring in a firearm um and drop it off if they don't want it anymore.

And again, it all comes down to safety, and that way we can get their firearms and then uh collect them and then hopefully they can get a little gift card in exchange for it.

So we appreciate it.

It was very successful.

Um, next one, please.

Uh, we do oftentimes we'll do coffee cop throughout the year.

And again, we find these are all the ways that when we talk about those, that vision of how we collaborate and build partnership and build that trust and accountability.

This is how we do it by always looking for it, not just going to nine calls, not just that, but like actually interacting with our community at all different opportunities and trying and all different parts of our city.

And so this has been very successful.

Um, and so we'll continue to do that.

And we do it all different um coffee establishes, they're very happy to host it, and then we come in and provide the coffee and provide the snacks, and we have officers, captains, detectives, um, everyone in between who um go there and talk with community members.

Uh next one, please.

And then we had we do neighborhood walks.

So we actually have three coming up um this year.

So I put the dates on there.

Um, they're on our website, and I can share this with you if you reach out later if you want.

Um so July 10th, the 23rd, and the 24th.

And so we have officers, the chief will be at the 10th.

Um, I believe was the one that he was going to go to, but majors, assistant chiefs, and um, we go and walk through neighborhoods with community members and have a chance to socialize.

Uh next one, please.

Uh national night out, which which is done across the region, not just Bellevue specific, but Bellevue and Fire, we partnered together.

Um, I put the date here, August 5th.

We have that coming up.

Uh, it's going to be in Crossroads from four to seven.

And so we um have there's Craig up there on the left.

If anyone hasn't met Craig before, um, he's everywhere at all times, and he's magical.

So you'll adore Craig and all the other officers and individuals who participate there, and that's lots of fun for the kids.

Uh, next one, please.

And then we also social media.

I mean, I touched on technology, it's huge, right?

It's part of everything now.

Um, every agency, including our own has really embraced it.

And we have a new public information officer who um is very good at it, and I think it's been beneficial, not only from recruiting, but communicating, right?

We we really try to communicate and be transparent and let the citizens know what's happening.

We've if you haven't noticed, we push a lot more information about our investigations now.

Um, I get the pleasure of doing a lot of those media things, um, which has been fun for me.

And um, so if you want to follow us, uh, I put all of the different Instagram, Facebook, X, and so you can please follow us, and then you'll see nine times out of ten, you're gonna see Craig on most of those posts.

So doing all the fun, and it will include the dates and all the all the different activities that we do throughout the year.

Um, and next one, please.

And then we also do an annual report.

So some of the information that you saw, those uh like with the data, that comes out in the annual report.

So we put that on our website, and it's a great way for us to be transparent, and that's really from our partnership.

It shows you that that's the document of our great success with our community is that annual report where we talk about our different programs, we kind of give a rundown of how the year went, and we put those out every single year.

So um the data you saw from 2024 I actually described at the annual report.

And we also have a spider attack notification that we started a couple years ago.

If you've called nine one, uh, you've probably gotten an invite, like on your phone to fill out a survey.

So we do a survey after almost every call.

We don't do an um Sun like domestic violence, we don't do it on certain calls, but we do it, would do it on the bulk, like a uh property crime or some other crimes.

And it's really just how was it, right?

What what did we do?

Well, what right?

I mean, we see those all the time for businesses, right?

Well, we're we we are in the service industry, and our job is to make sure that we ask people how the service was, and the best way to do it is to reach out to them and give them a chance to really truly tell us how the service was.

And so um, we've had uh, you know, not to brag, but we've had a very high, overwhelmingly positive response rate.

But we do have really, I think genuine feedback that's not always positive, which is really the important part because somebody might not take the time to call because they don't want to complain per se, but they want to provide feedback.

And so this gives them an opportunity to tell us what worked and what didn't work for them.

And it could be things like if there was a like cheer point, like a language concern or something that could have made them feel more comfortable.

That's important for us to know.

So we're constantly soliciting that information, and then it gets reviewed by the captains, the majors, and then um we make sure that, and then all our employees, if they do a great job, they hear about the great job they did.

If there's something that we need to work on on a whole as a department, then we include it in our training to make sure that we address it.

And we've had that, we we found that it's been really successful, and we appreciate that people take the time to fill it out when they get the it usually comes through like a text message because most people use a cell phone to call 911.

So then we just um give them a message to and they can choose to respond to the survey or not.

So and that should be it.

I think that was my last one.

Just questions.

And sorry for going a little long.

Thank you.

Uh tonight's presentation really helped to increase our understanding of multiple ways the city supports our residents.

Thank you.

And uh any other I think we are questions we are asked.

So thank you very much.

And it was a great presentation, pretty long and period detail oriented.

We got all the answers.

And uh we are in a recess next month, and there will be no commission meeting in August.

Our next commission meeting will be special meeting on Monday, September 8th.

Have a lovely summer.

This concludes our meeting, is adjourned at 8.

11 a.m.

Thank you.