The Olympia City Council, on Tuesday, December 6, formally accepted the community workgroup's recommendation for the Reimagining Public Safety project.
The city council also recognized Strategic Planning and Performance manager Stacey Ray and the community workgroup's eight members for committing their time over the last 18 months to learning about the city's public safety system, listening to the community, and collecting the diversity of voices and perspectives needed to develop recommendations.
According to Ray, the city council approved a community-led process to reimagine public safety in February 2021. The goal was to produce a public safety system that fosters trust and works for everyone.
The workgroup members are Chris Belton, Christina Daniels, Larry Jefferson, Malika LaMont, Vanessa Malapote, Todd Monohon, Ally Upton, and Wade Uyeda.
"This group is proud of our work. We are grateful to be trusted to hold this really important topic and all of the feedback we received throughout our time together to create these recommendations," Uyeda said told the councilmembers. "We expect the city to 'fertilize and nurture this seed'."
Recommendations
The community workgroup developed five goals that set the framework of recommendations for Reimagine Public Safety:
The community workgroup presented its recommended 21 strategies and 125 action plans to achieve these goals at the Community Livability and Public Safety meeting in November.
Ray said the workgroup also adopted the equity framework that they used for the project.
"We need better data and ongoing dialogue to build trust, understand disparities and identify more ways to reduce or eliminate those disparities," she said.
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FordPrefect
Once again our tax dollars are wasted talking about equity without fixing a darn thing.
“Acknowledge and correct the disproportionate impacts the city system has on marginalized community members.”
This sounds fair. Let’s get rid of the buses, they are certainly used much more by the marginalized members of our community. Nobody else feels safe riding them. Maybe we should stop the fire department from responding to tent-fire and overdose calls, pretty sure that service is overwhelmingly aimed at homeless addicts. Pretty unfair that such a small group should be pestered by the fire department so often. Perhaps the city should EQUITABLY enforce litter laws. The lack of enforcement here has led to the ’campers’ living in abject squalor.
“Build trust and legitimacy in the city's public safety system. -And- Reduce overall crime by addressing root causes.”
The trust is broken because the city council is stopping the police from doing their job. At no point did the people vote to stop enforcing our laws. The failure of enforcement IS the root cause of the mess we have today. Crime shouldn’t pay, but the city has incentivized the downward spiral of the addicted. There are no barriers to living on the street or in the woods in Olympia. You can have food, shelter, clean needles, a warming center when it’s cold, a cooling center when it’s hot, and free transportation to anywhere in the area on buses that don’t charge/enforce fares.
So I ask, in the name of equity, when are the contributing members of the community going to get the same preferential treatment as those who are marginalized?
Saturday, December 10, 2022 Report this
JW
Do we "Reduce the number of individuals who connect initially and repeatedly with law enforcement and the criminal justice system" by enforcing even less laws then we have now? Because there is zero incentive in this city for people to stop committing crimes.
Sunday, December 11, 2022 Report this