This is the third story in our Peoples’ Priorities series, where we asked community leaders what they and their communities feel are the biggest needs to address in Spokane in 2024 and then spoke with every city elected to see how well their priorities align so they can collaborate. Stay tuned for more.
At the first of four Public Safety Community meetings held in April, Spokane city officials asked for feedback to inform the search for a new police chief — a position the city is looking to fill after former-Chief Craig Meidl resigned at the beginning of the year. The listening sessions were designed to gather ideas from Spokanites about their priorities when it comes to public safety. Residents broke into small groups in the West Central Community Center at the April 9 session, where, in one group of about 10, Assistant City Administrator Maggie Yates questioned participants about what qualities they want in a new police chief.
People had thoughts.
Elysée Kazadi, a graduate student at Whitworth University who came to the Inland Northwest as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo five years ago, said a chief of police must be able to establish goodwill with youth, who are the future of any community. Any new chief must “be good with kids and teenagers for future planning,” Kazadi said.
Jeremy Sweeney, who said he moved to Spokane about a year ago, suggested that a new police chief should be able to work with program leaders in the community to learn the causes of homelessness and the mental health crisis. He said he wanted a “leader who can kind of really dig down and figure out, ‘Well, why are they doing this?’ You know, it could be a mental health situation.”
But Yates’s final question zoomed out from policing, asking what general public safety concerns the residents had.
“So my thing is safe streets,” said Sarah Rose, a local artist and traffic safety activist volunteering with Spokane Reimagined, an advocacy organization that wants Spokane to remake its streets with pedestrians in mind. “I want more data-driven improvements on our infrastructure to make streets safer for all road users.”
By “all road users,” Rose meant pedestrians, cyclists, children walking to school and, of course, drivers.
The issue of traffic deaths is made more stark when compared to other kinds of deaths. Last year, 25 people died from homicide in Spokane County, down four from 2022. The same year, 55 people died in car crashes, according to data from the Washington Department of Transportation (DoT).
After the attendees had given her their thoughts, Yates recapped to the room of about three dozen participants: “A lot of great ideas of envisioning safe streets, pedestrian safety, redesigning streets, good lighting, safety around bus stops, safety around school spaces for kids and youth, neighborhood activation, orientation for new community members, homelessness response and visibility of the police.”
The Public Safety Community Meetings hinted that Spokane officials are paying attention to a picture that encompasses more than just law enforcement to include how the city is physically designed to make people safe.
And it aligns with what RANGE has heard at community meetings and in interviews with activists and new city leadership for our series The People’s Priorities. In our third installment of that series, we turn to the issue of public safety — a topic that touches nearly every part of life in Spokane in one way or another.
Folks we spoke with late last year told us the city must lean into a less punitive approach to public safety that involves improving living conditions, meeting people in crisis with empathy and, at a higher level, improving coordination between the many jurisdictions that exist across Spokane County.
Traffic & the mayor’s public safety levy
The city’s listening ear seems like good news for people who want a more expansive vision of public safety, but it has some housekeeping to do in terms of rebuilding a police and firefighting force. On April 11, a few days after that first meeting, Mayor Lisa Brown announced a proposal for a property tax levy to raise nearly $200 million for various public safety and health initiatives. The city council on Monday voted to place the measure on the August ballot and, if voters approve it, would add $383 to the median homeowner’s annual tax bill.
According to the Spokesman, about 60% of the total $228 million projected to be raised in the next six years would be invested in backfilling budget shortfalls for police and firefighting. Of the remainder, about $80 million would be spent expanding both those departments.
The leftovers would be invested in community health.
Erik Lowe, a former property assessor who founded Spokane Reimagined over the winter after noticing rising rates of pedestrian traffic fatalities, had immediate thoughts about the way the city plans to divvy up the revenue. The day after the announcement of the proposal, he sent an email to Spokane Reimagined’s listserv criticizing these allocations.
“Boy howdy, we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Lowe wrote. “Not a single dollar is proposed for safe streets (emphasis Lowe’s). Over $100 million devoted to the Police Department. Another $83 million to the Fire Department. $0 for traffic safety.”
The final proposal may include some funds for slowing down traffic, but as the Spokesman’s Emry Dinman wrote, “how much money goes to which programs and priorities is not set in stone.”
Many believe crime is increasing. Is it?
In any conversation about public safety, it’s important to examine public perceptions of crime.
Though property crime jumped 10% in 2022, according to reporting by KREM 2 last summer, more recent data cited by KXLY Channel 4 in December showed that property crime dropped in 2023 and has been on a general downward trend for decades.
Yet interviews with Spokanites from that news report showed people believe crime is getting worse, and how could they not? It seems like every time you turn around, a bicycle is being stolen.
Perhaps the incongruous perception relates to the broad nature of public safety — in addition to addressing crime, city officials and community members RANGE interviewed said it’s also about creating environments in which dangerous situations are less likely to occur in the first place.
Former-Mayor Nadine Woodward referred to herself as a “law-and-order mayor” and, under her leadership, police installed light- and noise-emitting stations near the notoriously run-down intersection of Second Avenue and Division Street to deter unhoused people from hanging out. She also wanted round-the-clock patrols at that intersection, but lacked the police overtime budget to sustain them.
“The last mayor we had definitely had a more stringent view on what public safety meant,” said Justice Forral, an activist with Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR). “When you have the mayor … saying that they’re gonna make their police force stronger, it doesn’t really have the language of making things better or reform. The language that was used and has been used, as always been used, is ‘We need a stronger police force.’”
There was not enough money to cover Woodward’s approach, which was abandoned, and public safety is more complex than people just wanting to commit crimes.
Council Member Michael Cathcart, a conservative representing Northeast Spokane, said a more robust police presence in neighborhoods would calm some of the tension around crime and public safety, and there is evidence to suggest some Spokanites like the idea of more police. Even though Cathcart voted against placing Brown’s public safety levy on the ballot, he did so because of what he felt was a lack of details and accountability that the levy money would be spent on police and fire. KXLY reported that some people it interviewed agreed more police in neighborhoods would make them feel safer — even though perceptions of safety don’t always mirror reality.
However, some crises police respond to are medical or mental health emergencies, requiring the intervention of a medical professional rather than a law enforcement officer.
Other community leaders and new electeds seem intent to try different approaches, like developing medical forces that have an established presence in the communities to respond to health emergencies, altering the physical design of the city to make cars drive more slowly and more collaboratively craft relationships between public safety agencies.
So what are the worst problems?
The problems that need solving range from property crimes — like petty theft and car break-ins — to police brutality, long emergency response times and traffic incidents.
By mid-February, police had shot four people, killing three of them, which is more police shootings than had occurred in all of 2023.
The advocacy organization Mapping Police Violence currently lists Spokane as home to the second-deadliest police force in the nation, saying that each year, Spokane police killed an average of 9.8 people per 1 million between 2013 and this year. The only city that surpasses it is the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, which killed 14.6 people per 1 million.
But even that terrifying figure does not come close to the carnage caused by motor vehicles on the streets of Spokane.
Lowe told RANGE in an interview late last year that the biggest safety problem in the city these days is not rising police violence, murder or property crime rates. What he worries about most when his young child goes outside is whether they will be hit by a car, a kind of incident that is on the rise and growing more dangerous as average SUVs balloon in size and large roads with high speed limits are routed through neighborhoods.
Narrower streets, barriers in the roads, speed bumps, reduced parking — physical obstacles that make drivers slow down — are the secret to solving these problems, Lowe said, and all are measures that fall under the umbrella term “traffic calming.”
“The only thing that I’ve seen that seems to get drivers to slow down is something physical that makes them fear for the body of their car,” Lowe said.
Such solutions, like bollards, are low-hanging fruit that no one seems to want to pick, he said.
“That stuff is relatively cheap or is really cheap in the grand scheme of things and has the definitive impact in terms of slowing down traffic and making streets safe for everybody,” Lowe said.
Council Member Zack Zappone said that while the council ended up allocating traffic calming funds to police last year, he wants to prioritize traffic interventions that have a similar impact but aren’t as costly, like installing bollards and planters rather than concrete curbs that can cost $50,000 for one corner.
“We really need to have a reset and a new plan for how we operate, especially for folks that are experiencing crisis and behavioral health and substance abuse,” said Council Member Paul Dillon, who was elected in November and is one of the five council members who make up the progressive majority.
Rev. Walter Kendricks, pastor of Morning Star Baptist Church, told RANGE that prevention measures shouldn’t end with traffic issues.
“Well, the majority of our budget, if I’m not mistaken, goes to criminal justice,” Kendricks said. “And so I’m talking about the police. I’m talking about the courts and so forth and so on. Why do we have to invest so much money in that particular system when we could use some of those funds for preventative measures instead of spending it on police vehicles? We just went through that debate about the Teslas that they bought, which they didn’t even want.”
Kendricks was referring to the two Tesla Model Ys the city bought for the patrol unit as part of a pilot program in 2021 and later transferred to their detective unit, which didn’t place as much demand on the batteries.
“That was a waste of money,” Kendricks said. “Why can’t we put it into proven endeavors, which will help reduce crime, which will also help get people off the street, which will also help improve the quality of life for everybody?”
Emergency response, CAHOOTS, street medicine, data
Council Member Kitty Klitzke, who attended the Public Safety Community meeting, believes that the problems she’s focused on are very deep, embedded in the way local agencies overlap but fail to communicate. In an interview with RANGE last year, she advocated that as local governments create their comprehensive plans this year, they need to make communication with the other local governments and within themselves a feature of that planning. That cooperation will dictate relationships between the county’s 911 call center and local emergency response times.
But there is much Spokane can do on its own.
In an interview late last year, Brown articulated a two-fold strategy to improve public safety on Spokane streets. First, she wants to implement a street medicine force that could respond to unhoused folks suffering health crises in more humane ways than police are equipped to. The other part is to gather better information about things as simple as police and fire response times and present it in a way that tells an accurate story — good or bad — about how quickly the city responds to incidents.
She said the city currently leans too hard on police, who are charged with addressing problems, like homelessness, that they are not well trained for or even designed to address.
“I think currently most of the response to homelessness is through the city of Spokane’s code enforcement or law enforcement,” Brown said. “We want to look at street medicine and sort of outreach teams that can do that. Connect the unhoused population with resources: behavioral health, addiction treatment, et cetera. And I know that some of that already exists in Spokane. CHAS does it. Some other nonprofits have small teams.”
Homeless advocacy groups say street medicine can be incredibly effective at solving a raft of public safety issues, including solving budgetary issues for police departments by taking that work out of their purview. It was also a highly-touted method for treating unhoused COVID victims during the pandemic lockdowns.
Brown emphasized that the public sector must partner with the private sector in building these functions.
“The idea here is a coordinated approach and better communication and coordination between what happens on the nonprofit side and what happens on the city side,” Brown said.
Dillon advocated for restructuring some policing activity in Spokane by implementing something similar to CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On the Streets), a program implemented in the 1980s that partnered police with a community health organization in Eugene, Oregon.
“Eugene’s police department at the time was bigger than Spokane’s,” Dillon told RANGE. “They partnered with the White Bird Clinic. The White Bird Clinic was funded with about $2.5 million by implementing the system. It saved their police department $17 million, and you just saw better outcomes.”
This street-based response to mental health and substance abuse echoes the same impulse underlying Brown’s suggestion that the city should lean into street medicine.
“It frees up capacity for officer response for crime prevention,” Dillon said. “That’s a big issue that we see now. We’ve seen skyrocketing overtime costs, which is again connected back to a lot of staffing capacity issues, and then it lessens the touch between vulnerable populations and armed officers.”
While the Brown administration and the new city council seem tuned to these needs in ways the preceding government was not and some of the problems are possible to solve, doing so will require high-level, intergovernmental cooperation.
But there is some momentum building in that direction.
Lowe, who was also at that first Public Safety Community meeting in April, has proposed a 20-year, $1 billion proposal to “repurpose existing rights of way.” His grassroots organization is quickly building steam — and it’s helping draw attention to the idea that public safety is not only about crime and the police response to it.
“I think people are noticing the human cost [of traffic deaths],” Lowe told RANGE after those in the meeting circle had dispersed. Pedestrian fatalities are up dramatically in Washington and in the United States as cars become bigger, roads become wider and harder to cross and speed limits increase.
“They are noticing how much more dangerous their own neighborhoods are,” Lowe said.
What community leaders and elected officials told RANGE about public safety illustrates the need for a bigger solution to public safety problems than shoving more police at them. They deal with redesigning or modifying the physical spaces we interact in and preventing dangerous situations that may not be at the forefront of people’s minds.
The question is: Will our communities agree that a more expansive approach to public safety is the right move to make Spokane safer for everyone?
Editor’s Note: Erin Sellers, Valerie Osier and Luke Baumgarten contributed reporting.
