Since the racial justice protests of 2020, Seattle residents have been demanding an alternate mental health crisis response that doesn’t involve an armed officer.

Because SPOG contract negotiations have been stalled for several years and the City wants to move forward to launch a mental health dual-dispatch pilot, a tentative Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is under consideration by both parties. The result of this partial negotiation is the City will pay $8M in bonuses over the next 2 years to SPOG officers staffing special events - this bonus is on top of the overtime already paid for these shifts. In exchange SPOG will allow dual-dispatch, or co-response, to move forward.

However, SPOG will maintain control over the dual-dispatch program in a way that is inconsistent with best practices, has potential to undermine public trust in the program, and prevents its expansion by limiting its scope to specific call types and capping the number of civilian crisis responders the city can hire for the next 2 years.