(The Center Square) – After what started as a month-long effort to tackle crime and vagrancy downtown, Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall said Monday that the CORE plan only resulted in 13 service referrals among 143 people.
The city announced the Crisis Outreach, Response and Engagement, or CORE, plan in October following pleas from residents and business owners. More people are becoming unwilling to venture downtown as homelessness, open-air drug use and other related offenses proliferate.
Hall updated the Spokane City Council during its Monday committee meeting, providing better insight into the disproportionate crime in the downtown core.
“About 70% of the drug offenses in the city that officers are investigating are occurring in the downtown precinct,” he said. “The core area, that very micro-location, represents roughly 39%.”
The Spokane Police Department’s downtown precinct only encompasses about 2% of the city geographically, with the core area accounting for less than .5%. Yet, drug-related offenses are significantly overrepresented there, and Hall said SPD noticed similar trends with trespassing.
While only 13 of the 190 contacts resulted in a service provider making contact with an individual, Hall said SPD categorized 116 as an “enforcement contact.” He didn’t elaborate on what that enforcement was or for what crime, but he did provide several other data points.
“Not the success we wanted to see in service referrals,” Hall said, “but we are still attempting, as we’ve said in the past, with a very treatment-resistant population.”
All of the 143 people that SPD and its partners contacted accounted for 2,192 local arrests in their lifetimes. Hall said that the top 15% made up 52% of the arrests; the top 33% accounted for 80%, with the top 50%, or around 70 people, accounting for 93%, over 2,000 local arrests.
“A very small number of individuals creating a large number of crimes,” he said.
Councilmember Michael Cathcart eyed a high utilizer program before the CORE plan to tackle repeat offenders like Hall mentioned; however, the proposal seems to have stalled after the Office of the City Prosecuting Attorney requested more time to review it.
Hall said Monday that despite not publicizing it in October, part of the strategy was to identify people trafficking narcotics. SPD wanted to take a swing at the knees of the higher-ups, not street-level dealers and opened several active investigations throughout the CORE plan.
Service providers are coordinating with SPD, letting officers who to expect downtown, who shouldn’t be there and who is consistently driving through the area. He said the department would provide another update next month on the progress of those investigations.
One of the most significant issues downtown, and often tied to drug use, is homelessness. According to Spokane’s 2024 Point-in-Time Count, approximately 38% of the county’s homeless population reported substance use issues in January.
Hall said that when comparing 2023 to 2024, officers increased unlawful camping enforcement by 125%. “Sit & Lie” citations did trend down, but pedestrian inference is up 150%, he said.
Still, while enforcement might be up, residents might find it hard to notice an impact given increased calls for service. Unlawful camping enforcement did go up by 125% from last year to now, but calls reporting the offense are also up nearly 300%, according to Hall’s data.
Drug-related calls are also up almost 80% compared to 2023, with “DOA,” or dead on arrival, calls up 17%, according to Hall’s data. Some of the council asked for more information on the number of people accepting services, hoping to gauge the effectiveness of the CORE plan.
Hall didn’t have concrete data but said it’s safe to say that SPD offered services to most of the 143 people contacted. The issue, in his opinion, is a lack of options. He said these people need another place to go that’s not an emergency room or jail.
“I remember reading an unpublished evaluation out of Arizona where a certain jurisdiction captured every single time they engaged an individual,” Hall said, “and it averaged between 60 and 70 engagements before they were able to get them into treatment.”
Hall said SPD will continue the CORE plan into January.
