Vancouver police halts some misdemeanor arrests amid public defender shortage; city manager speaks

[00:00:00]Lawn, let's just like dive right in.

[00:00:02]We're talking about uh the memo that the police chief sent out on Friday about officers no longer arresting for crimes like shoplifting, trespassing. Is is that accurate?

[00:00:15]>> Well, I I think it's important to really talk about what it is and what it isn't.

[00:00:19]Um it's not so much that we won't be doing those types of activities, but we're changing the process that we're going to use to do a lot of those lower level uh crimes, those low-level misdemeanors. um because cities in Washington, not only do we have a city attorney's a section of our city attorney's office that um does prosecution for misdemeanors, we're also obligated to provide public defense for people who can't otherwise afford it.

[00:00:43]And so when you start looking at the list of things that we can charge for, um one of the things we've run into is simply a shortage of public defenders.

[00:00:51]There was a change at the state level for the maximum case loads that each individual public defender can carry.

[00:00:57]And despite our best efforts, um, we just haven't been able to find the people. It is not a budget issue. It is not a lack of us doing solicitations or reaching out to law firms or anything like that. Just we can't find attorneys that are willing to take the cases. And when a case goes to uh a judge, um, they assign public defenders in the order in which items are on the docket. So, if one item on the docket is theft of recyclables and then the next one is a misdemeanor domestic violence, the uh public defender goes to the theft of recyclables and then the next case gets dismissed because there's no public defender.

[00:01:33]>> I know we had talked about there possibly being some like miscommunications or maybe some inaccuracies that people are believing out there. So, what what would those myths be that you're hearing? So, one would be is that that um we wouldn't arrest. So, like for most of the crimes that are listed on there, the typical response wouldn't be to arrest someone anyway. I mean, arresting someone for, you know, again, theft of recyclables would be rare. Um, for the ones on that list, it's less than 1% of the cases.

[00:02:05]And usually, if it is, it's because there's something else going on, like the the officer feels like they've been endangered or the person is a danger to the people around them. think like shoplifting, things like that that would result in an arrest. Otherwise, what typically happens is they get cited, they get told they have to go to court, and then they end up in court. Um, when you issue that citation, it starts a 14-day clock ticking on the arraignment, and then they have to have a public defender. What we're shifting to is that rather than going to a citation, those would get referred to the city attorney's office and then the city attorney can time the date that we file when we have a public defender available. So, we we're trying to eliminate what we've been running into with this 14-day clock and give ourselves more flexibility. Um, none of those offenses have a statute of limitations that's less than 14 days.

[00:02:57]So, we have time. Um the other thing that we're trying to address is like say somebody gets picked up for misdemean misdemeanor possession three times over three months. Uh if we cite them, every one of those is a different public defender. But if they go to the city attorney's office, the city attorney can look at the pattern and they can file one charge with three separate counts, which is one public defender. So, we're really just trying to make sure that until we can figure out a way to overcome this public defender shortage that we are reserving that public defender capacity for what we would think would be the cases that the public would value the most.

[00:03:34]>> So, can you give me an example of, you know, last Thursday to today if someone is accused of shoplifting at a store here in Vancouver, what would have happened last Thursday and what would happen today? So under the old process, the officer likely would have just pushed the button on the computer data terminal that would have issued a citation. They'd hand the citation to that person and say, "You'll be arraigned within 14 days." It goes to court. Um there's a filing fee and then that 14-day clock starts ticking. The difference is now rather than pushing a button and issuing a citation, that person gets referred to the city attorney's office and they would get told that the city attorney's office will be reaching out to you with additional information.

[00:04:18]>> Are we worried though that people just won't show up for their court dates or won't interact with the system?

[00:04:25]>> There's always the hazard that that is going to happen. I mean, people right now routinely may not show up for their court dates because, you know, it's 14 days and sometimes people can't rearrange their their schedule to be able to accommodate that. It actually gives us more flexibility because then the city attorney's office can work with the individual to find out, okay, if we can't do this, then when are you available? The other advantage that that it creates for us is that um we have a community court. So for low-level offenses, especially for like our unhoused population, we try to divert people to community court instead to um ensure that this doesn't create additional impediments, you know, a longer record um to them being able to kind of re-engage with society.

[00:05:09]>> How did we even get to this point? Was this like Chief Troy Prices call or were there meetings with you or like how did we say like ultimately we have to make this decision because of the shortage?

[00:05:20]So, um, the city attorney's office has been looking at this issue for more than a year. Um, once the the state adopted the new case load standards, we really had to start digging into what can we do as a community in order to be able to to better manage this because we suspected from the beginning that we simply were not going to be able to find enough attorneys. And so we have done other things like we implemented a case waiting system where like you know um a misdemeanor you know con consumption of alcohol in a city park doesn't count that might count as.7 cases versus a low-level domestic violence that counts as one to help be able to assign more cases. So, we've been monitoring it for a long time, digging in into the statistics of what the uh police department has been doing for enforcement and trying to identify these opportunities where we could change our process um again to preserve that that public defender capacity.

[00:06:16]>> So, can a city just do something like this? Like, did you guys have to talk to city council or was this something that you guys could just make a decision and then, you know, tell the police force?

[00:06:27]So, this is one of those things that is an administrative matter. And so, you know, the city council in Vancouver makes policy decisions. A policy decision is, you know, do we have a police force? Um, do we have a domestic violence unit type of things that get talked about during the budget process, but how we do things um falls within the realm of the staff. Uh the easiest way for me to think about it is that the city council says what we should do, but then the staff uh has to figure out how we should do it, how we should deliver that service.

[00:06:58]>> Are there other cities that are doing something similar?

[00:07:02]>> Yeah. Um I believe Clark County at this point, if they haven't adopted our case waiting system, they are looking at it.

[00:07:09]Um Spokane, I know, has had issues with availability of public defenders. Uh this is a statewide issue um because there just simply aren't enough attorneys that are willing to do public defense or able to do public defense.

[00:07:23]>> So um will there was there ever going to be like a an alert or a way to like tell the public or was this always meant to stay internal?

[00:07:33]>> So with things like this, you know, we acknowledge that any of the documents that are created, any memos coming from the chief, you know, unless they're under attorney client privilege are going to be public. Um, you know, this is one of those cases. What we didn't want to do was to put it out there with a misunderstanding, like say people aren't going to get arrested for shoplifting because they absolutely will continue to do that. Uh, because we didn't want people who might have otherwise thought better of it to feel emboldened to do it like, oh, now it's open season in Vancouver. Um, so while it's not something that we would have necessarily publicized because it literally is just a change in process, we want the outcomes to be the same.

[00:08:09]Okay.

[00:08:10]>> Anything else? Um, that's all I can think