Mayor Jenny Durkan announced Triage 1 on Friday to set the Seattle Police Department and other emergency responders on a new path. 

With Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz and Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins at her side Durkan spoke about the new emergency response team that will handle certain emergency calls in lieu of a police response. 911 will also see changes in dispatch protocols and the community service officer program will be expanded.

The specialized responses will include professionals that are experts in outreach, behavioral health, and have tangible connections to the communities that they will serve. When at full capacity, this specialized response could respond to the potentially 8,000 – 14,000 non-emergency wellness check calls currently handled by sworn officers at the Seattle Police Department.

The formation of Triage 1, the city said is based on data from 911 calls. It will also take pressure off a depleted  Seattle Police Department that has seen more than 200 officers leave the force as of this past spring.

The new specialized triage response will be housed within the Seattle Fire Department Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) program, and will respond directly to wellness check calls identified by 9-1-1 at the Community Safety and Communications Center (CSCC). Utilizing a new 9-1-1 call-taking protocol system, dispatchers will be furnished with a new alternative to sworn police response.

“Seattle residents expect and deserve a timely 9-1-1 response, and part of reimagining community safety means providing meaningful and effective alternatives to a sworn officer. Building off of the success of the Seattle Fire Department’s HealthOne model, the new specialized triage response will provide an alternative response to some 9-1-1 calls,” said Mayor Jenny Durkan. “This specialized triage response will be a critical resource as we work to address the needs of our communities while reducing the need for sworn officers to respond to things like wellness checks.. Together with the expansion of the City’s successful Community Service Officer program and ongoing expansion of HealthOne to three units, we are making real progress on our commitment to re-imagine public safety in Seattle.”

“Not every call to 911 requires an armed response.  The specialized triage response model proposal is both creative thinking and a data-informed innovation, providing a qualified response to folks who require assistance but do not represent a threat.  I am increasingly hearing from constituents who are asking for exactly this kind of option, to help their family, friends, and neighbor," said Councilmember Herbold. "I have proposed funding in the second quarter supplemental budget for a new protocol dispatch system so dispatchers recently transferred by the Council from SPD to the Community Safety Communication Center can better deploy these new specialized triage responders. 911 call takers have been called the ‘gatekeepers for the entire criminal justice system.’.”

“The Seattle Police Department is dedicated to a safer and more equitable city by offering a wide range of community police services for all,” Chief Adrian Diaz said on Friday. “A majority of ‘persons down’ calls are people experiencing addiction or health crises, and when SPD responds, we still need to call another entity. Almost all these calls are not related to any criminal activity. With Triage One and an increase in the SPD’s Community Service Officers responding to these non-criminal calls, more sworn SPD officers in our already-diminished department will be freed-up to respond to crime.”

“The Community Safety/Communications Center is looking forward to adopting and implementing a question-and-answer protocol system that will better enable our 911 call-takers to proceed through a standardized interrogation process, resulting in each call being treated with more consistency from call taker to call taker.  A protocol system will further assist in the quality assurance process, enabling CSCC to further match questions and dispatched resources based on historical final dispositions,” said Chris Lombard, Director of the CSCC. “This new process will help operations by streamlining response, reducing bias among call takers, and ensuring crucial decision-making information is recorded. Additionally, this system could be built out further to also accommodate non-police response to incidents in the future.”

Internal analysis done by the Seattle Police Department and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) show that at least 11% of calls to our 9-1-1 call center can be responded to without the need for armed police involvement – this includes calls like wellness checks for individuals who do not need an urgent medical or safety intervention.

Historic levels of attrition have led to staffing shortages at the Seattle Police Department resulting in increasing call times and a more urgent need to increase resources for non-emergency call response. Over the past 17 months, the Seattle Police Department has lost over 250 officers and the capacity for over 300,000 service hours. The specialized response will be funded through strategic reinvestments of the Seattle Police Department personnel budget. Funds that the department is unable to spend due to historic losses of officers have been used to reinvest in an alternative 911 response models and administrative improvements and alternatives within the department such as Community Service Officers

Earlier this week, Mayor Durkan and the Seattle Human Services Department (HSD) announced awardees of the 2021 Community Safety Capacity Building RFP. The City is providing $10.4 million in one-time funding for 18 months for 33 organizations working toward community-led solutions to end violence and increase safety in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. These investments will support organizations providing an array of programs, services, and upstream investments meant to improve outcomes and contribute to overall community safety and wellbeing.

Similar approaches have been taken in Eugene, OR with their Cahoots program and New York City which is sending social workers on certain calls instead of police.