Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is rolling out a plan to tackle gun violence by better integrating city departments and maintaining services for youth. The announcement comes after weeks of relentless criticism of the city’s public safety track record by local corporate media and a slew of big businesses following the Bite of Seattle mass shooting in July.
Flanked by Seattle Police Department (SPD) Interim Chief Andre Sayles and CARE Department Chief Amy Barden, Wilson sat down with The Stranger and explained that the city had to do more to break down silos between the two public safety agencies.
As part of the plan, the CARE Department, which operates Seattle’s 911 call center and a team of 40 non-police crisis responders, is being given a bigger role. Wilson’s budget proposal will keep the department’s gun violence director and fund an additional gun violence coordinator. The department is also taking over nine contracts with nonprofits—worth about $5 million annually—to do violence interruption work for the city.
Barden says transferring the contracts will enable CARE department responders to quickly know when a young person in crisis has already been working with a case manager or mentor.
One obstacle to the CARE Department’s success has been the City’s labor contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), which represents rank-and-file cops. In August, Seattle’s Office of the Inspector General released a report claiming that the CARE department’s “scope of work remains significantly impacted” by the SPOG contract, which requires all 911 calls to be routed through a dual dispatch system that includes SPD officers.
Barden rejected the idea that the SPOG contract could throw a wrench in Wilson’s gun violence plan, saying “the contracts really don’t matter as long as the first responders know how to hand off to each other.”
Barden cited internal data suggesting that over the last six weeks, the CARE Department’s responder utilization rate has gone up to 80 percent as cops are diverting more cases. Last year during the same time, the team was only utilizing about 40 percent of its capacity, CARE Department spokesperson Bobbie Nickel says.
A large part of this could be due to the department’s expansion in early August, which broadened the crisis response window to 18 hours a day and nearly doubled its force. The growth was funded by a recent 0.1 percent sales tax hike.
Sayles said that under his leadership SPD management has been pushing rank-and-file officers to divert more calls to the CARE Department and clear up misinformation about the limitations of the SPOG contract. Sayles was deputy chief at SPD for a year and has been the acting police chief for seven weeks.
“Our supervisors [are] really diving into it and making those connections, understanding that we have a lot of work that we do on a daily basis as police officers, and saying this isn’t our wheelhouse,” Sayles says.
Wilson also pledged to increase SPD foot and cyclist patrols in Belltown, Little Saigon, Rainier Beach, and along Aurora Avenue North. She said this is the first step of a “focused deterrence” approach, which is essentially a carrot and stick strategy where punishment is paired with offers of services and diversion.
On top of the CARE team capacity changes, Wilson believes youth services can help ameliorate rising gun violence. The upcoming budget conversation will be difficult—the city is facing a $175 million budget deficit. But Wilson maintained she will shield funding for youth services. That includes maintaining mental health care investments and allocating $600,000 for a new after school program in Rainier Beach, plus keeping open a ninth Teen Late Night center in West Seattle.
The City is also partnering with the University of Washington and John Hopkins University to review its gun violence prevention strategies and develop a new review process to analyze every homicide. Some city council members would like to see the City pursue different partnerships, though.
Seattle City Councilmember Martiza Rivera has introduced a resolution asking the City to adopt that model and partner with the National Network for Safer Communities. Consulting with the organization could cost the city more than $400,000.
Embarrassingly, at a September 8 Public Safety Committee meeting discussing the resolution, Rivera mixed up Seattle’s shots fired and homicide statistics, inflating the latter count by “an order of magnitude,” as Publicola reported. Since 2024, homicides in Seattle have been trending downward. In the first eight months of 2026, the City had five fewer homicides compared to the same period in 2025, a 23 percent decrease.
Wilson said the City was already working on a focused deterrence strategy, and that, although she shared the same goals as the council member, Rivera “has a little bit of a different idea for how to get there.”
Ultimately, Wilson says although there is no “magic solution” to gun violence, her collection of strategies could bring down the numbers further.
“We are making progress—gun violence is down—and [yet] there is no acceptable level of violence,” Wilson says.
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