Seattle’s Community Assisted Response & Engagement (CARE) department is expanding, but it’s being blocked from doing its job by the conditions laid out in the new Seattle Police Officers Guild contract. CARE is looking to circumvent these obstacles.
It is preposterous we let SPD tell us we can’t dispatch CARE without them; it defeats the whole purpose of the program:
One of the chief issues currently in contention is independent 911 dispatch. The most recent SPOG contract continued to give power over which responder should respond to which calls to SPD by failing to allow CARE responders to be dispatched alone to the vast majority of calls to which they might be the appropriate response. Instead, that power rests with SPD sergeants, ultimately positioning the CARE responders and their deployment as another bargaining chip for the police guild.
Yeah that’s fuck, guess got to make sure the cops can kill people on a wellness check. Why I am with Abolish the police.
SPD has been on a work slowdown for… six years now? And continues to block CARE. At some point, the public is going to realize we can get more first responders on scene and more police work done overall by abolishing SPD than by continuing to pay them.
God they have done everything they can to stop CARE, even when the voters told them they wanted it they still try to stop it. Then they wonder why the public doesn’t have trust in them. Maybe you at least let them attempt to do what we wanted them to do without trying to throw up every block in the path?
