Seattle's CARE Team Expands with New Hires and Federal Funding Boost
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced additional hiring, increased funding, and the nomination of acting Chief Amy Smith (pictured right) for the permanent position of Seattle’s CARE team this past Wednesday. (Photo - City of Seattle)
By Lorcan Stokes
Last Wednesday, June 26, Mayor Bruce Harrell made an announcement at Seattle University that Seattle's Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team will expand its staff and presence throughout the city.
"We are expanding CARE citywide seven days a week over the next coming months," Harrell explained. "We will hire 18 responders and three supervisors as part of our mid-year budget, supplemental and expansion supported with a $1.9 million investment in federal funding."
In 2023, the city of Seattle announced that CARE would become the third public safety department, working alongside the Seattle Police Department and the Seattle Fire Department. The CARE team, which began as a dual dispatch pilot in October of the previous year, initially comprised six CARE responders—behavioral health specialists with prior field experience. CARE's mission is to respond to low-risk calls through "diversified responses" when police or the fire department are unnecessary.
According to the Mayor's office, since the program's inception, CARE has responded to over 500 dispatch calls with an average response time of less than 10 minutes and an average on-scene time of approximately 39—the majority of calls involved transporting individuals to shelters and daycare centers.
"CARE is providing people the help that they need through behavioral interventions and crisis de-escalation, resource navigation, and assistance in finding services by providing basic supplies like food, water, clothing, hygiene items," Harrell said.
Regarding the expansion and funding update, CARE was initially designated to parts of downtown in coordination with the Mayor's Seattle Downtown Activation Plan. Now, their range will extend to additional neighborhoods throughout the city.
"This expansion was informed by a 911 call data, the data that we examined and will immediately include neighborhoods under SPD East Precinct, like Capitol Hill and the Central area, and followed by North Seattle, and then South and Southwest," Harrell said.
CARE, initially designated to work in parts of Downtown, will now extend to neighborhoods around central Seattle. By the end of 2024, it will further expand to the North and South ends of the city. (Photo - City of Seattle)
Additional neighborhoods include First Hill, Judkins Park, Madison Park, Montlake, and Upper Pike/Pine before the program extends to North Seattle and South Seattle by the end of 2024. According to Catriana Hernandez, the Crisis Response Manager for CARE, this will involve assigning responders to the specific neighborhoods they will serve.
"We're going to have a very place-based strategy to make sure that we're physically in those areas and everyone's being dispatched from within the area in which they're operating," Hernandez said. "We're also going to be doing a staged rollout, piece by piece, and making sure that our experienced, existing care team members are going to spread throughout those zones so we don't have all of our experience just in our original area, so we can all support each new team as they come on, and give them that kind of hyper support that they need, and then roll out our next area."
In addition to the CARE expansion, the Mayor announced his intention to nominate Amy Smith, CARE's acting chief, to the position permanently.
"Now that I've spent a little bit of time in the political landscape, I am more convinced than ever he (Harrell) is the only person who could have talked me into this and really inspired me into this space," Smith said.
Regarding the timeline for filling positions, Smith projected that hiring will occur around July or August.
"I conceptualize this as three divisions of one big public safety team, and I do hear from leaders and elected officials all around the country that this is likely the secret ingredient," Smith said regarding CARE's expansion. "This is the X Factor, and Seattle is emerging as the blueprint for how we should do this work."
As for CARE’s upcoming objectives, Smith highlights that CARE's work will continue to place a prioritization on calls related to overdoses and suicide.
"We know we lost 73 people in homicide last year. We lost over 1300 to overdose in King County," Smith explained. "Out of 33 major metropolitan areas of this country, Seattle, Tacoma is the second highest when it comes to attempts to die by suicide."
The press release was held at Seattle University, a partner with Seattle's public safety departments through their Crime and Justice Research Center, where they conducted yearly Seattle Public Safety Survey evaluations. (Photo - City of Seattle)
She continued, "Those are the emergencies. That is the threat to life right now. We need to acknowledge that and set up first responder units who have protections and provisions and well-being strategies that can be directly dispatched."
District Seven City Councilmember Robert Kettle, whose position within the council has especially emphasized addressing homelessness and public health, also attended the announcement. He endorsed the CARE team's partnership in efforts to improve Seattle's public health.
"As the Public Safety Committee and as the Council, want to work with you, Mr Mayor first, but also Chief Smith, to ensure CARE's success," Kettle said. "And you know, our strategic framework to address the permissive environment that underlines our public safety challenges has one pillar specifically designated for public health. It's so important to focus on that because, again, we can't succeed in public safety if we don't also succeed in public health."
When asked about further funding and expansions into public safety and programs like CARE, Harrell emphasized that he is not limiting the potential for additional investments in alternative safety departments and that the city will continue to track CARE's progress.
"As your Mayor, I'm fully committed to creating a city that is safe for everyone, Harrell said. "And we know that, again, diversifying and iterating our emergency response options is going to be the key to this kind of work."
