City Council Pledge to Review Use of Force Policies

I also feel that the State needs to make a new law and make changes in family courts to take care police and domestic violence issues.
Also they need a new law on homelessness and police that will save money on the budgets.
And if police make decent salaries they can provide better services to the public. No police shall make less than 35usd per hour and the City shall provide food for them while working.
At least a decent breakfast so they wont be eating sugary donuts that made them mad and crazy. Good food is important for the police to eat so there performance is a lot wiser.
What they did with the Floyd case was not nice like many other cases but we only learn from experiences and that is the only thing shall be what makes us improve and make changes. Betty Krull

Here is my opinion.
Being a police is not easy. My father was in the mexican military and guard the Ports in Los Cabos. He was nice !
Police can be arrogant at times some are jerks but most of them they want to help.
Even though some dont.
They are like bees...some bite you in the arm some in the leg...some are crazy bees ....but most of the bees they take care the City and the State whether we dont agree with the laws.
I support police to a certain extent.
The George Floyd was not the reason for black lives matter to destroyed the Country.
It was an excuse to do that.
Police needs to educate the public on limitations for crimes and what is expected to have a civil and free relationship between the parties. They must never forget is about them the public that are protecting.
I seen it all ...and all lives matter and together we must accept differences on the skin colors and the eyes...noses...cultures...food...diversity.
If we accept that we all created equal but at the same time we educate ourselves differently in cultures ...we can be one and live in peace. Betty Krull

Dear City of Bellevue,

While this conversation about use of force was a step forward, I urge the City to more strongly and broadly embrace racial equity work across all areas of Bellevue city government, perhaps with a racial equity task force, including funding, to include various constituency groups in Bellevue as well as various City departments. A strong example of this kind of work is the current Vision Zero program in the city.

Another example is that of one of Bellevue’s strongest private/public organization, Bellevue Schools Foundation. Their statement is below and can be found at http://www.bellevueschoolsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BSF-BLM-Statement-and-Actions-Final-90120.pdf

Respectfully,
Sally Fouché

As an example, here is the Bellevue Schools Foundation Position Statement on Racial Equity in Education. (I do not speak for the organization.)

The mission of the Bellevue Schools Foundation is to transform education and support our students and families in the Bellevue School District. The Foundation fosters innovation to help our students achieve the best possible educational outcomes. We are listening and learning. We recognize the need to expand our support to directly confront the systemic racial inequities present in our society, and to deepen our commitment to Black students, Indigenous students, students of color, and their families. These are just a beginning of our effort to prepare generations of students to lead us into a better, healthier future with racial and social equity. Safer, more inclusive schools benefit and support the academic success of all students.

For the 2020-2021 school year, we are committing to the following actions. We will:

1. Publish a detailed racial justice policy for the Foundation.

2. Work with the Bellevue School District to expand our existing racial equity program funding.

3. Fund racial equity training for the Bellevue School District and Bellevue Education Association leadership.

4. Amplify diverse voices in our community through our Education Connection Speaker Series.

5. Diversify our Board of Trustees further to reflect the students and families we serve.

6. Provide racial equity training for our Board of Trustees and staff.

7. Expand the number of diverse vendors we hire.

8. Enhance our feedback loop to more deliberately include advice from Black, Indigenous, and students of color, and families, community leaders, and business owners of color.

9. Revise and commit to racial justice actions annually to build on racial equity in education.

Bellevue Schools Foundation, established in 1979, recognizes public funding alone cannot support the exceptional education our students deserve and our community desires. We invite you to partner with us.

You mention first that you will "Review " current Use of Force policy. You then state that you will "Reform" that policy. To specify you will "Reform " the policy implies you already believe it is in need of change. This is not the position I want the reviewing board to take: It implies non-impartiality of the review board. Pre-determining that changes will be made to the current policy is, well, prejudicial. Please, don't follow that route in your review!

I support the police! They protect the county

I live and work in Bellevue. I am well schooled in Historical issues, including the development and support of law enforcement.
I am reminded of the problems with Highwaymen in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries; the reason the police were formed.
I am reminded of the creation of police units in the U.S. in the 19th century. The immigrants and the poor had no protection from crime.
Will the weaker or less fortunate have to live in fear because the police cannot protect them? Will I be forced to take the law into my own hands?

I watched the video of Bellevue police chief's talk on handling Oct 23, 2020 downtown protest. I have nothing but high praise for the prep work and appropriate measures taken. This active engagement prevented the protest from becoming looting and riots which I am very concerned.

As a single mom, police is the safeguard to my family, our community, and to EVERY community, especially in such a chaos time. To be honest , all police officers I've ever communicated are friendly and nice, I couldn't connect any of them with the word "racism" (I'm a minority). Yes I read the news about George Floyd however I can assure that there are much much more good cases out there every day but public just get used to enjoying our "police service" and never seem necessary to report them. Please do not let a few bad apples block your eyes, the right approach is to putting more effort (maybe more funding) on improving the process, the training and making the police force stronger and better!

I work in a high acuity psychiatric hospital, where most of the patients are there via police. We are able to maintain a safe environment without guards/police/weapons of any kind. When discussing police use of force, I believe it is a) important to engage trained mental health professionals in any police call and b) train police officers in deescalation alongside mental health/social workers. That is, police officers should go through the same training and education as mental health professionals.

I'd like to share an experience during winter of 2019, for our Bellevue PD and City Officials: This Policing problem is real. There’s a level of disregard for people in this town, a form of violence that infuriates us because so many of our Homeless on the streets grew up here and have deep family roots in Bellevue. City Leaders don’t get it. They expect Police to fix it. That’s never going to happen. Wake up. Violence takes many forms.

Children live in their homeless parents’ cars and attend Schools here. City Council knows this is FACT. Violence is real and prevalent so I’d like to give one blatant example about a Black Man I came across last year.

What happened to this Black Man is disgusting and immoral. I don't believe a caucasian white person would ever be treated in such a hateful manner. Black Lives Matter advocates will be upset hearing this, … a direct and deadly form of Police Violence in Downtown Bellevue, two blocks from our famous Bellevue Shopping Mall.

On a cold winter day I wore a heavy coat and gloves for my daily walk Downtown. Arriving on the street corner of NE 8th Street near the Mall, was a Black man waiting for the light to change. He had no shoes on; and wore only a light shirt and pants, wearing a knitted cap. He smiled at me as I joined him in walking across the crosswalk, asking what had happened. He claimed that a Police Officer or multiple PD officers had ordered him to get out of the Downtown area and stay away from the Mall.

He was obviously VERY cold and disoriented. There are FEW options around here for people like him. Probably none. No warming tents on our streets or sidewalks, or even any soup kitchens. No Bellevue Officials assigned to take care or help our most needy citizens. I walked the man to KCLS Downtown Library where I knew there was a Public Restroom and place to sit down and get warm. I felt like he’d been terribly mistreated. By almost any standard it was an Act of Violence, not unlike Police threats of Tazing or aiming a gun at you, or chemical sprays in someone’s face. I felt like this was an attack on ALL OF US. On an International Hate crime level it would be in the courts. Appalling disregard, … SO bad.

That’s my sincere input about Police Violence. Bellevue Leaders set up an atmosphere for Good or Evil. This type of treatment is NOT OKAY! Look closely at City Council lack of leadership to discover why Bellevue in NOT SAFE for so many VULNERABLE residents.

You may have heard a dicey term “Seattle is Dying”. … Things here in King County can get really bad, really fast. So we should ALL get busy fixing Bellevue’s worst Policing problems before it goes off-the-rails. Let’s be SMARTER than that. THANK YOU.

I’m not convinced that the city and police department are truly dedicated to transparency , but I’d love to be proven wrong.

I think putting ap envs class or environmental science class as a requirement to graduate high school especially in freshman and sophomore year is important. Or going to classes and make student plan and share their sustainability plan to the specifics (what to do, date,time, etc) is important as education is very impactful. Also making them take the test to measure their ecological footprint.

Dear Bellevue City Council,

Thank you for reviewing the Bellevue police policies and how they impact people of color. I am writing to tell you about an incident that I witnessed. I hope you can add it to other information that you’ve been reviewing to better understand this issue.



I am a 55 year old white woman. I’ve lived in Bellevue for 27 years, and have raised 2 children here. I work as a pediatrician in south Seattle.



Last summer (2019) I was taking a walk with my daughter, and while walking along West Lake Sammamish Parkway we encountered a (white) man in his 30’s walking down the middle of the road erratically. He was talking out loud and gesturing. We watched with horror as he came very close to being hit by a car. At that point I asked my daughter to call 911, and I walked over to the man, talked to him calmly from the side of the road. I learned his name, and he said that his car had broken down. I was able to persuade him to sit on a bench in front of the Little Store with me. My daughter was watching and calling from a distance. Without looking him directly in the eye, and sitting at his level, and mirroring his body language, I was able to engage him in some conversation. He told me his name, and that he had grown up in Bellevue, and that he had taken a medication in the past for his mental illness but was not taking it now, and that he had a doctor at Overlake Hospital. He said his parents still lived in Bellevue, and his car had broken down on I90 (“50 miles away” and he said he walked all the way), and he was trying to get to their house. He was not always coherent, but he was never scary or threatening. He wanted to get up again and keep walking, but I talked him into waiting there with me, as I was worried he would get hit by a car.



After about 10-15 minutes a Bellevue Police car arrived. Two officers (one man and one woman) walked over to assist. My daughter had specifically told them that he wasn’t threatening, and he and I were sitting there calmly. The officers walked up very close to him, stood over him looking down, and demanded his license/ID and demanded to frisk him for weapons. He got anxious, dropped all of the items from his pocket while searching for his ID, found an ID, and consented to be searched for a weapon. He did not have one. The officers stood there over him taking the report, and then said they were going to take him to the police station. I suggested taking him to Overlake as there is a psych ward there and he had a doctor there. They agreed, he agreed, and they took him away.



I have thought about this incident a lot. The officers were unfailingly polite and I’m certain they were following their training in handling this situation, and it ended well (from my perspective, anyway.) But if this man had been more volatile, or more paranoid, both of which are very possible in situations involving mentally ill people, he may have been triggered to respond aggressively to their body language and initial demands. In my mind, even though the officers did not act improperly, they did not act in the best way to prevent escalation of a situation. Anyone who has had training in dealing with mentally ill people knows that calming measures can go a long way in defusing anxiety and paranoia. Doing what I did – staying at a distance, staying at his level, not looking him directly in the eye, talking calmly – can result in making a connection that then facilitates anything else that needs to be done.



I know this episode doesn’t specifically spotlight any racial issues (we were all white), but it does point out to me that police are not always well trained to deal with all the different situations they may encounter. If it were my decision to make, I would employ other highly trained professionals (mental health counselors? Social workers? Crisis workers?) who would be called to situations that did not require an armed response. Those situations would be much less likely to result in the type of tragic outcome that we have seen with horrifying frequency around the country. I’m sure you can all imagine how differently some of these incidents would have turned out if the first contact person to an individual in crisis involved someone with a high level of mental health training. I’m sure there would be fewer officer-involved shootings.



I hope we in Bellevue can work together to make our police department the best it can be. I am so incredibly horrified by the many national instances of police brutality that I think it’s time we took a really hard look at our police as a nation, and figured out how to do things better. This incident illustrates, to me, the need to remove some duties from the police, who are not well trained for them, and move them to professionals with the correct training. We should use the police specifically for situations where we require someone with a gun to respond for the purpose of public safety. I believe this means we should look hard at our police budget, and use some of it to fund a different type of crisis response.



Thank you and please contact me if you’d like any additional information.



Sincerely,



Kimberly McDermott MD

2928 168th Ave. SE

Bellevue WA 98008

Mcdermott.kim@gmail.com