Welcome to The Newsfeed.

Seattle's Police alternative crisis team, tasked with going to non-emergency calls within the city, is struggling to be dispatched to those incidences.

Although the city expanded the Community Assisted Response and Engagement Team, also known as the CARE Team, in 2024, the program's chief, Amy Barden, recently said territorialism and bureaucracy are standing in the way of getting CARE workers dispatched to calls.

Established in 2023, the program sprouted following the death of George Floyd and the protests over police brutality.

An effort to address the mental health needs of people during emergency calls that are non-criminal or non-life threatening, they operate as a dual dispatch model that works collaboratively with the Seattle Police Department, and in some scenarios, it means an officer assesses a scene for safety first before leaving the case to CARE responders and heading to other high priority calls.

The Seattle Times reports, the Seattle Police Officers Guild or SPOG contract signed last October, was supposed to free CARE staff to go to calls without the assistance of armed cops and remove restrictions on how many responders the city could hire for its expansion.

During our sit down with Mayor Katie Wilson, I asked her what she could do to ease the tension between CARE and SPD and increase the dispatch rate of CARE staff.

-I mean, they're like staffing up.

And so I would hope that people are seeing, starting to see that already.

You know, it's going to be a work in progress.

And I think we're going to just figure out how we can really maximize the use of the CARE team.

And part of that is really like making sure that our officers understand the circumstances under which, like, they should be calling in the CARE team to take care of a call.

So yeah, I would hope that over the course of this year, that's something that people can kind of see around them.

-I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching The Newsfeed, your destination for a nonprofit, Northwest News.

Go to CascadePBS.org for more.