Seattle officers ‘undermining’ city’s police alternative, report says

Leadership with Seattle’s new police alternative has become increasingly frustrated with what they view as “a pattern of subversion” by street-level officers who seem to be routinely rejecting or ignoring assistance from civilian responders, records show.

The trend, which may have begun up to a year ago, is a barrier to providing the sort of help the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement department is intended to provide, “undermining the city’s efforts to provide appropriate alternative response interventions,” staff said in an internal report, provided through a public records request.

CARE has become a darling both inside City Hall and among candidates for office. With any notion of “defunding the police” largely dead across Seattle’s political spectrum, the pursuit of a functioning police alternative to visible symptoms of mental health issues or homelessness has taken top billing. Mayor Bruce Harrell has proposed expanding the department in his latest budget, and nearly everyone running for Seattle office — both incumbents and challengers — have said they would work to grow the department.

But a full rollout has proved complicated, largely because its success depends on buy-in from the city’s largest police union and the officers within its ranks.

A temporary agreement between Seattle and the police union to run CARE as a pilot expires at the end of this year. That agreement mandates that CARE responders must dispatch alongside police. City officials expect to soon have a new agreement with the union that would allow CARE responders to answer calls alone.

Harrell declined to comment on the accusations of obstruction. Callie Craighead, spokesperson for Harrell, said Seattle police Chief Shon Barnes has been incredibly supportive of this program. This ongoing collaboration between CARE, (Seattle Police Department) leadership, police officers, and crisis care responders is what is necessary to solve the public safety problems on the ground and making this public safety evolution possible.”

In one email, the chief of CARE, Amy Barden, suggested leadership with the Seattle Police Officers Guild may be driving the obstruction. In late 2024, a representative with the union reportedly told dispatchers the new department would be “disbanded” in 2025. In the months that followed, CARE responders were dispatched less often, and officers even began waving them off.

A spokesperson for the guild did not return multiple requests for comment.

In an interview, Barden said she couldn’t say with certainty why officers were turning down CARE, but that she was sure it was an intentional action rather than a misunderstanding.

“I would have believed that the first three months,” she said in an interview. “The reason I don’t believe that is because I already have 15, 17 months of data.”

The CARE department is Seattle’s burgeoning police alternative for dealing with some of the city’s thorniest and often noncriminal behavior — the kind of uncomfortable scenarios, such as mental illness or substance use disorder, that may not warrant an armed officer but demand a response. As of now, the department is restricted to welfare checks and reports of “person down” on the street where there is no obvious sign of violence.

CARE’s ultimate goal is to replace police entirely on certain calls. Barden has been a vocal proponent of this approach as it would turn the department into a true alternative while freeing officers to answer higher-priority calls.

But because CARE responders could replace work currently being done by police, the officers’ union has exercised its right to bargain over the impacts of such a change.

The city and the union have not yet come to an agreement.

In the early days of the temporary agreement with the union, Barden said support was strong from all sides. Officers, who are often unhappy spending so much of their time responding to mental health and drug crises, seemed to be accepting and even requesting CARE’s limited services.

“It did feel like a great marriage between the two departments,” Barden said.

But in late 2024, something shifted.

Data showed a significant drop in requests to dispatch CARE. In September 2024, more than 80% of CARE responses came following a request from sworn officers. In October, that number plummeted to just 32%.

Initially, Barden thought it was an issue in dispatch — and indeed she found some breakdowns.

But she and other staff in the department also spotted a pattern of officers canceling a CARE dispatch or closing a scene before a responder could get there.

On June 25, for example, a call came in for a person who was down on the sidewalk on Boren Avenue. Dispatchers authorized a CARE responder, but the officer canceled the dispatch without giving a reason.

The same day, another person was found on the ground near Mercer Street. Again, a CARE responder was dispatched, and again the officer waved them off and then proceeded to spend another 54 minutes at the scene.

Between July and August, Barden and her team tallied 70 incidents, in which dispatchers determined CARE was appropriate, but the responding officer either moved on alone or canceled the dispatch entirely. That was nearly 20% of attempted dispatches in that period.

Staff argue that by denying CARE a chance to interact with people, there’s a missed opportunity to come up with longer-term solutions to their issues.

“In these instances, it is probable that a CARE (responder) would have elicited a different response,” staff concluded in one report. “These are opportunities for connection and intervention which are lost.”

In his budget proposal for next year, Harrell wants to expand the CARE department from 24 to 48 responders. He proposes paying for it with a new 0.01% public safety sales tax, authorized earlier this year by the state Legislature.

Members of the Seattle City Council have been largely supportive of CARE, though Councilmember Maritza Rivera questioned its expansion at a recent hearing.

“I have not seen any information about the work that CARE is doing that warrants the expansion,” she said.

More broadly, some have questioned why Seattle’s police alternative — a priority coming out of the 2020 protests — has yet to find its footing as other cities, like Albuquerque, N.M., have progressed further.

“The urgency for Seattle to catch up cannot be overstated,” former Councilmember Andrew Lewis wrote in a 2022 op-ed.

Barden said the issue points back to union involvement. It’s a frustration shared by others trying to reform policing, including a federal judge. But pro-labor voices have been hesitant to push too hard to roll back police unions’ bargaining rights for fear of starting down a slippery slope.

Barden is sensitive to undermining union power.

But, she said, “as it relates to people in crisis, we have got to change how we do business.