The Community Health and Safety Committee of the Everett City Council met on Wednesday, July 2, 2025, at 5:00 PM in City Council Chambers. Councilmember Tuohy chaired the meeting, joined by Councilmembers Fosse and Bader (who arrived a few minutes late). The agenda included a Youth Violence Prevention Update from staff and a Legislative Impacts Briefing from staff.
Good afternoon, everyone. Um, this my name's Council Member Tui, and we're here tonight. The community health and safety council committee meeting uh on July 2nd, 2025. I'm here with Councilmember Fosse and Councilmember Vader will be arriving uh a few minutes late. We have two things on our agenda tonight legislative impacts briefing from staff and a youth violence prevention update from staff. And we're going to start with the youth violence prevention uh update, and we're gonna start turning it over to Jennifer. All right. Thanks. Um the mayor recently issued a directive around youth violence, and we've got kind of the um drill down on the police department perspective, but just as some context for that. Um Mayor Franklin had asked staff to tackle that issue starting in 2018. And the at the time, that directive focused on comprehensive gang reduction and youth violence prevention, um, working with community partners, working with juvenile justice partners, um, and several other initiatives under that. Um, the focus this year is just a renewed commitment to youth safety. Um, leading up to that directive, uh, the mayor called together a forum of school, community partners, youth, and that kind of helped create the content and um paths for the directive on youth violence. It's got four initiatives, um, prevention, so existing crime prevention programs and also new community focused strategies partnerships, existing partners, and then also other initiatives that promote youth safety. Uh community engagement and activation. So I think of this as kind of the like providing new um options and pathways and things that um get folks point pointed in the right direction away from any violence um risks. Uh, and then innovation. So using technology as we have in the past with the with the PDE and other departments to enhance our response and um and things like that. Um I think part of my point too in starting things off is just the recognition that there's lots of departments right now, community um uh community communications and community development are also both really involved in these initiatives, along with the police department. Um we're working to expand that so that we kind of have a whole of city approach so that we're really looking at um all the ways that different departments um interact with youth and can help um help uh prevent youth violence. Um item that we are likely to bring forward to council in the next few weeks, um, probably like a three to five week timeline, maybe faster. I think the mayor said faster than that, so maybe it'll end up being faster. But legal is working on an ordinance to um focus on um a legal graffiti. So um it would uh make it so that graffiti taggers would be subject to a civil penalty for violations and for costs incurred by the city to remove illegal graffiti. So um, you know, and when homeowners or businesses are are tagged with graffiti, like through no fault of their own. The city is funded for a long time. Um has a fund that helps single family homeowners do that cleanup, but we don't fund for multifamily or businesses, and they obviously are just you know just as frustrated at um at that cost. So uh this is an ordinance that at least one other city has passed. So we're working on fitting it into the city code, and we'll bring that forward to council. Um I think I'll stop. I might jump in, but um, Deputy Chief Hendrickson has a bunch of other stuff to talk with you guys about and related to some of the questions that Councilmember Tui and Bader uh sent our way before the meeting, too. So cool. Thank you. Yeah, I think probably we'll start off with uh the overall philosophy of the police department when we're dealing with juvenile crime. Uh, we really believe in a balanced approach. Uh, by no means do we think we should throw kids in the jail and throw away the key. We don't think that's the right way. Uh but we also believe that there has to be some accountability. Uh and so the police department is kind of in a unique area position to provide some level of accountability. Uh, and so we do aggressively go after suspects, whether they're juveniles or adults. Uh, but realistically, the real driver for us when it comes to juvenile suspects and violent crime uh is we want to interdict the cycle. Uh, something we've seen since 2017 when we first started seeing increase in gang violence in the town uh is one act of violence will lead to four, five, seven more shootings because we'll have a retaliation cycle that starts. And so we're able to go back afterwards and track it back. So what we found is the sooner we can interdict that and contact the original shooter, the sooner we can stop that violence. It is extremely common for us to go on a scene of a serious crime, and nobody wants to talk to us. Victim won't talk to us, the witnesses won't talk to us, people in the area won't talk to us. And we hear the common statement of don't worry about it, we'll take care of it. And we're literally seeing additional shootings after each of these incidents because of that. And so our philosophy is adopted a little bit. We want to really interdict that.