Spokane C.O.P.S., angered by need to compete for city funding, gets brief reprieve

Spokane’s nonprofit group to assist policing efforts got a three-month reprieve Monday night, as the City Council approved a $125,000 extension to its contract after weeks of volunteers, staff and advocates arguing the organization shouldn’t have to fight for city funding in the first place.

The contentious item in the middle of a marathon council meeting drew an hour of testimony from supporters arguing that Spokane Community Oriented Policing provides hope for crime victims while also accusing Mayor Lisa Brown of undermining public safety and plotting against the nonprofit, in one case threatening to campaign against any council member who withheld their funding.

“I’ve got a new hobby that I want to share with each member of you, the City Council,” said Jack Brucick, a former board chair and key person in the organization’s creation 32 years ago. “And my hobby is to assure that those of you who do not fully support and vote for COPS, I’m going to make it my hobby to make sure you don’t get elected.”

The mostly volunteer organization operates out of eight neighborhood hubs – down from a high of 12 – hosting programs that focus on community building, safety and, in some cases, assisting with nonemergency police duties like taking latent fingerprints at crime scenes such as burglarized cars.

Some council members reported concerns that the COPS operate unequally, with some frequently staffed and others frequently inaccessible.

But for some, the service provided by the nonprofit has been invaluable when the police didn’t or couldn’t help them.

One woman who testified Monday, identified only by the first name of Janet, said she had tried to contact police in the last week after her daughter-in-law had been missing for four days, but attempts to call 911 and CrimeCheck were not helpful.

“I came to you,” she said, choking back tears, as she turned to a COPS volunteer in the audience. “You helped me when nobody else was there.”

COPS was founded in 1992 after two girls were abducted in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood.

The city has funded the nonprofit for decades, in recent years giving as much as $500,000 per year, most of which is spent on salaries and benefits for its two full-time and two part-time staff – the executive director alone accounts for over $110,000 in salaries, according to the organization’s financial filings for 2022, the most recent year with complete filings available. Executive Director Jack Johnson said Monday he now makes closer to $90,000; he did not respond to a request Tuesday for updated financial reports.

The organization is almost wholly reliant on city funding, with nearly 90% coming from the city and less than 1% coming from grants or donations, according to a financial report covering the first seven months of the year.

Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke noted that this lack of diverse funding is unusual and had led the nonprofit to be unable to sustain itself without city funding.

Brown and police Chief Kevin Hall have asked for information about the effectiveness of the program and its use of city funds, requesting data and receipts, which they said they have not received, though Johnson has said this is not true or in some cases that the requests weren’t reasonable.

“Today I got a request from the city asking for a copy of our 2023 insurance information,” Johnson said. “What for? I’m sure you asked that for all of your other vendors.”

Councilmen Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle also expressed that the amount of scrutiny COPS is facing was significantly more than was occurring for homelessness spending or the arts, for instance.

In a Tuesday interview, Brown said her administration has been increasing scrutiny and monitoring of city contracts across the board, pointing to their ending of a contract with the Salvation Army to operate what had been the city’s largest homeless shelter due to concerns about a lack of cost controls.

Kelly Cruz, board treasurer for COPS and a 2019 candidate for mayor, said Monday that accusations the organization hasn’t been transparent with its financials were “an outright lie,” pointing to a recent quarterly report.

“But if (Deputy City Administrator) Maggie Yates, who is a representative for the mayor, doesn’t understand those, or didn’t get back to Lisa with those, or if the mayor doesn’t understand that, I’m more than happy to sit down with them and go over the numbers,” Cruz said.

Johnson said Monday that when he provided the administration with stats from their various programs, officials noted there wasn’t proof backing his data, and he was angered that this indicated his “integrity must be in question.”

She said various administration officials have requested data from COPS since the summer, but what they received was “incomplete and inconsistent.”

Brown noted that information provided to the city by the nonprofit indicated they had fewer than 200 volunteers, while their tax statements declared there were more than 400.

“Trying to nail these things down is part of our responsibility to the taxpayers,” Brown said.

The nonprofit’s contract was set to expire at the end of the year, and rather than renew it for another five years, Brown’s recent budget proposal offered $450,000 spread out over the next two years for a community policing program. She attributed the smaller investment to the city’s difficult budget situation, which required major cuts.

But rather than give the money to COPS without a competitive process, the administration has asked COPS to bid for that contract like any other nonprofit, which advocates characterized as a veiled attempt to defund the program in favor of some other, unnamed organization.

Klitzke rejected this argument, saying that COPS could continue getting the funding but that improvements to the organization’s services, data transparency and diversification of funding would likely be necessary. Brown added that she had no other organization in mind for the funding, nor was she aware of any other that performed similar work.

While Brown said she had “legitimate questions” about COPS’ leadership, she added that she believed the organization had merit and regretted how she had handled discussions about a possible future contract.

“I regret that we didn’t communicate more proactively with volunteers, because I do value them and respect that they’re out there to safeguard their neighborhoods,” she said. “I feel bad about the way this was rolled out, because my intention was never to devalue the volunteers.”

Monday’s contract extension of $125,000 will be reimbursable monthly through the end of March, intended to give the organization just enough funding to bid for the city contract.