Spokane to examine its 32-year partnership with C.O.P.S.

Spokane may soon reconsider its 32-year partnership with Spokane Community Oriented Policing Services, or C.O.P.S., examining whether it’s still worth the investment or if another organization could better fill that role.

The mostly volunteer organization has filled as many as a dozen hubs in neighborhoods across the city, 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.

“We get about 80% of our funding from the city,” C.O.P.S. Executive Director Jeff Johnson said in an interview. “If the city doesn’t fund us, we don’t have enough money to operate.”

But Mayor Lisa Brown and police Chief Kevin Hall have recently argued that the organization hasn’t provided clear data to demonstrate success with those programs or consistent community participation, arguing that their effectiveness seems to vary significantly based on the neighborhood.

“What C.O.P.S. means in one neighborhood is not what it means in another neighborhood,” Brown said Friday. “You have a couple that are, I think, pretty highly valued by their neighborhoods, but other neighborhoods where people don’t know what (C.O.P.S.) is.”

For decades, the city has regularly renewed its five-year contracts with the organization, recently at a cost of $500,000 per year. The current contract expires at the end of the year, but Brown’s recent budget proposal, released earlier this month, shows her administration is considering spending less money – and possibly with someone else.

The administration still wants to partner with volunteer organizations that can widen community safety outreach, education and other services, but it plans to open that opportunity to anyone who wants to apply. That could include C.O.P.S., but the organization would have to demonstrate its ability to hit certain metrics like any other applicant.

“I’ve stated before and will continue to say that SPD supports the COPS program and the volunteer efforts that it facilitates,” Hall wrote in an email. “What this support looks like will depend on how the COPS organization decides to proceed in the future. I’m more than willing to assist them in determining a strategy that continues the long partnership with SPD …”

“I think our request for information has not come in as quickly as it could have,” Brown said.

News that C.O.P.S.’ funding could be in jeopardy blindsided its members, Johnson said.

“We’ve been around forever and … I was shocked,” Johnson said.

The nonprofit has two full-time employees, including Johnson, and two part-time employees, but is otherwise entirely staffed by volunteers. Most of the $500,000 annual costs gets spent on its programming, utilities, supplies and leases for its various buildings. The terms of those leases are not entirely clear to city officials, Brown said – another data point the administration wants to sort out.

C.O.P.S. was founded in 1992 after two young girls were abducted in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood. One of the girls was found dead; the other has never been found.

West Central residents banded together to find a way to make their neighborhood and homes safer, in part out of frustration with what was perceived to be a lack of support from law enforcement and city officials to combat rampant violent crime in the area. Months later, the C.O.P.S. West Central location was created.

C.O.P.S. advocates have for years argued the organization fits nicely into shifting attitudes about the role of police in the community, or at least how to more efficiently use limited officers.

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, calls for police reform mounted. Proposals included shifting resources from armed officers to social workers and mental health professionals to let cops focus on crime. Then-executive director of C.O.P.S. Patrick Striker believed the organization already was helping to fill that role.

“The other part of it when you look at the defunding-of-the-police movement … people are saying, ‘Why are we using uniformed armed commissioned police for all of these things?’ ” Striker said at the time, pointing to a volunteer mounted patrol through a local park. “When you look at all these programs – here we’re talking to people in the parks, making it safer, but these are volunteers, not commissioned, uniformed, gun-toting police officers.”

While the organization’s mission hasn’t changed dramatically since its inception, the scope of its reach has. Just in the last four years, the number of C.O.P.S. Shops, where volunteers gather to participate in its various programs, has dropped from 12 to eight. In 2020, a neighborhood resource officer from the Spokane Police Department was also based at each shop; those positions were eliminated at the beginning of 2023 under former Mayor Nadine Woodward.

Voters approved a sales tax hike earlier this month, allowing the city to bring back the neighborhood resource officer program and hire seven new officers for the role. But it’s not clear whether they’ll be coming back to the C.O.P.S. facilities.

There are questions about possible redundancies in what the nonprofit and the police department are doing, as well as the opportunity for C.O.P.S. to seek grants to help cover some of the lost funding from the city, Councilman Paul Dillon said.

The decision to re-evaluate the nonprofit’s contract is happening as the city continues to dig itself out of a multimillion-dollar deficit and following the hiring of Hall, who has pledged to use data to guide the department.

“It’s been evident there’s been a lack of success metrics with info we have received,” city spokeswoman Erin Hut said. “We are evaluating that contract … again, we haven’t received data from them for success metrics.”

With the end of the year and the C.O.P.S. contract fast approaching, Johnson has raised concerns that there won’t be enough time for a competitive bid for the new contract. Brown said Friday that she and members of the City Council are both open to a limited extension of the existing contract while that process plays out.