With reporting by Margo Vansynghel

The murder of the 25-year old Rayshauna Webber, a young mother, was by all means a tragedy. She was stabbed in the early morning of July 14th in Cal Anderson Park. Shortly after the killing, a talk radio pundit tied the homicide to “staffing issues,” suggesting that SPD is “stretched so thin” that any time “competing” emergencies happen — such as that night, with another emergency involving an unruly crowd, a fight, and an active shooter around the same time — there are not enough officers in the city available to respond. It’s an argument made as part of the “Seattle is Dying” approach to pushing for more police and a crackdown on Seattle crime.

But, internal emails show SPD regarded the situation the night of the 14th of July as “extraordinary” rather than a staffing issue. In essence, the night brought a terrible tragedy. But it was not caused by the factors pundits and some politicians have focused on.

“That [Seattle Center] call depleted all of our resources – with good reason,” SPD’s Night Duty Commander, Captain Ron Rasmussen, wrote to Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best and Assistant Chief of the Patrol Operations Bureau Eric Greening just hours after the tragic night.

“This was an extremely large and unruly crowd that took a lot of time to get under control. Under the best of circumstances we would have used everyone in the city on this call…The stabbing call was the icing on the cake.”

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“In general, if we get two big events on any given night – especially near shift change – we will run out of resources…By any measure this was an extraordinary event,” he wrote.

“We are a big-city agency. We are staffed to address a lot of different things that are happening simultaneously,” SPD spokesperson Sgt. Sean Whitcomb told CHS. “That is fundamentally how patrol operations work.”

He added: “I’ve not once heard that this particular case [stabbing in Cal Anderson] suffered because of staffing.”

In fact, internal emails and roll call sheets show, there was a full complement of overtime officers for nightlife on duty that night. In total, 17 officers were working the East Precinct, one more than minimum staffing levels prescribe, according to the roll call sheet.

Many officers, East Precinct Captain Bryan Grenon wrote in an email, were sent to lower Queen Anne to assist with what initially came in as a “help the officer” call, leaving the East Precinct with “bare bone staffing for bar closing and presence in Cal Anderson Park.”

Other city precincts, including the West and North, roll call sheets suggest, did not meet SPD’s “minimum staffing” levels for Saturday night, though there were extra officers on staff that night as augmentation personnel.

But that, the email from Rasmussen suggests, is nothing new: “We have never been able to staff for the additional call volume that you see Thursday through Sunday. Even at our best staffing levels we did not meet the needs for those time blocks…With the challenges that we’ve seen lately that inability to meet the call levels has been more noticeable.”

So what happened on that “extraordinary” night?

Logs of the computer-aided dispatch — CAD — system from the night of July 13 to 14th show that after the first 911 call reporting the stabbing of Webber came in at 2:44 AM (roughly 50 minutes after the “help the officer” call from Queen Anne) it took about three minutes for SPD to be dispatched.

At 2:46, a dispatcher notes, there were “no units” who could respond, though an officer was en route shortly after and arrives at the scene at 2:51, where a civilian was already administering CPR.

The officer who performed CPR noted that the victim had no pulse when he took over doing CPR. In the background, people screamed “Breathe!” over and over.

Then, things get murkier. The CAD log notes that at 2:54:39 a dispatcher told the Fire Department the scene was cleared by SPD and safe for medics to come in. 44 seconds later, the same message. Meanwhile, the victim’s sister was on the phone with a dispatcher, panicking, pleading to get an ambulance.

It was not until another minute and 15 seconds passed that Seattle Fire Department said they received the message that they could enter the scene. They were with the victim 23 seconds later.

SFD says for incidents such as these they aim to have a medic unit on the scene within eight minutes of leaving the fire station. “For this incident, we were able to meet this standard of care,” SFD spokesperson Kristin Tinsley said in an email.

SPD’s response time clocked in at 5 minutes and 38 seconds. The median response time for a “priority 1” call, which this was, is 6 minutes, SPD data show.

“Usually the goal is an average of seven minutes,” for a call like this, says Peter Bellmio, an Annapolis-based police management consultant SPD has hired multiple times to look at staffing needs. As for the three minutes between when the call came in and the moment someone was dispatched, Bellmio said: “It’s usually a sign of them looking for a unit. You’d like to have that be about a minute.”

The police management consultant, speaking generally and not commenting on the two cases of that night, also noted that with a “help the officer” call, it’s common in policing that “everybody goes because that’s just part of the job. That’s part of the culture.”

Bellmio has helped the city analyze patrol staff time in 2012 and 2013 with the help of the Managing Patrol Performance, an MIT-developed computer model used by police forces in major cities such as LA and San Diego to determine staffing needs based on input data such as travel times, units, calls per hour, response times, percent of time units are busy and other parameters in use by SPD at least since the late mid 2000’s.

In 2015, SPD shifted gears and hired consultants Berkshire Advisor to calculate staffing needs, though it is unclear whether they used the same computer model.

Now, records and internal emails suggest, the city has shifted back to the MPP system and Bellmio’s target numbers to determine the number of patrol positions needed, including for the night of the 13-14th of July. Earlier this year, Bellmio was hired to help SPD restart its use of the software to help with patrol staffing analysis.

“They were gonna use this to rethink their staffing,” Bellmio said.

“I think they were looking for numbers to figure out how can they use what they have as efficiently as possible. And that’s always been a theme in Seattle, about how to have a schedule system for patrol that the officers can live with, but puts more people on when you’re busy and less people when you’re not.”

Bellmio said he’s currently working with the city of Calgary on the same issue. “Seattle’s challenges are pretty common, frankly,” he said.

David Nichols faces a count of second degree murder and second degree assault (Image: CHS)

Mayor Jenny Durkan’s budget, which includes $1.6M to better recruit and retain police officers, is slated to be voted on and adopted by the City Council November 25th.

Meanwhile, Seattle has until the end of this month to complete its police accountability assessment and formulate a methodology for achieving compliance under the 2012 consent decree requiring the city to address allegations of excessive force and biased policing.

David Nichols, a 50-year-old truck driver who had recently moved to the state and was out for a night of partying on Capitol Hill when police say he stabbed Webber in a fight that started with an offer to light a cigarette, pleaded not guilty to murder and assault charges in August. No trial date has been set.

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