Nov. 15—Spokane may soon reconsider its 32-year partnership with Spokane Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, examining whether the investment is still worth it or whether another organization could better fill the role.

The mostly volunteer organization has staffed up to a dozen hubs in neighborhoods across the city, hosting programs focused on community building, safety and, in some cases, assisting with non-emergency policing tasks , such as taking latent fingerprints at crime scenes, such as burglarized cars.

“We get about 80 percent of our funding from the city,” COPS 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 recently argued that the organization has not provided clear data to demonstrate the success of these programs or consistent community participation, arguing that their effectiveness appears to vary widely depending on depending on the neighborhood.

“What COPS means in one neighborhood is not what it means in another neighborhood,” Brown said Friday. “You have a few that I think are pretty beloved by their neighborhoods, but in other neighborhoods where people don’t know what COPS is.”

For decades, the city has regularly renewed its five-year contracts with the organization, recently at a cost of $500,000 a year. The current contract expires at the end of the year, but Brown’s recent budget proposal, released earlier this month, shows his administration plans to spend less money — and perhaps with someone another one.

The administration still wants to partner with volunteer organizations that can expand awareness of community safety, education and other services, but it plans to open the opportunity to anyone who wants to apply. This could include COPS, but the organization would have to demonstrate its ability to meet certain metrics like any other applicant.

“I have previously stated and will continue to state that SPD supports the COPS program and the volunteer efforts it facilitates,” Hall wrote in an email. “What form this support takes will depend on how the COPS organization decides to proceed in the future. I am more than willing to help them determine a strategy that continues the long partnership with the SPD…”

“I think our request for information didn’t come as quickly as it could have,” Brown said.

The news that COPS funding might be in jeopardy caught its members off guard, 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 staffed entirely by volunteers. Most of the $500,000 annual costs are spent on programming, utilities, supplies and leases for its various buildings. The terms of those leases aren’t entirely clear to city officials, Brown said — another data point the administration wants to address.

COPS was founded in 1992 after the kidnapping of two young girls in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood. One of the girls was found dead; the other was never found.

West Central residents banded together to find a way to make their neighborhoods and homes safer, in part out of frustration with what was seen as a lack of support from law enforcement and city officials to combat rampant violent crime in the region. A few months later, the COPS West Central site was created.

COPS advocates have argued for years that the organization fits squarely into a shift in attitudes about the role of police in the community, or at least how to use limited officers more effectively.

After the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020, calls for police reform grew. The proposals included shifting resources from armed officers to social workers and mental health professionals to allow cops to focus on crime. Patrick Striker, then executive director of COPS, believed the organization was already helping to fulfill this role.

“The other thing, when you look at the movement to defund the police…people say, ‘Why are we using armed police officers in uniform for all these things?’ ” Striker said at the time, pointing to a volunteer horseback patrol at a local park. “When you look at all these programs, here we’re talking to people in the parks, which makes things safer, but they’re volunteers, not uniformed police officers with guns.”

Although the organization’s mission has not radically changed since its inception, the extent of its reach has. In the last four years alone, the number of COPS workshops, where volunteers come together to participate in its various programs, has decreased from 12 to eight. In 2020, a Spokane Police Department Neighborhood Resource Officer was also based in each store; these positions were eliminated in early 2023 under the leadership of former Mayor Nadine Woodward.

Voters approved a sales tax increase earlier this month, allowing the city to reinstate the Neighborhood Resource Officer program and hire seven new officers for the role. But it’s unclear whether they will return to COPS facilities.

Questions arise about possible layoffs at the nonprofit’s operations and police department, as well as whether COPS could seek grants to help cover some of the city’s lost funding, said Councilor Paul Dillon.

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

“It’s obvious there is a lack of metrics for success with the information we’ve received,” city spokeswoman Erin Hut said. “We are evaluating this contract…again, we have not received data from them regarding measures of success.”

As the end of the year and the COPS contract approached, Johnson expressed concerns that there was not enough time to launch a competitive bid for the new contract. Brown said Friday that she and city council members are both open to a limited extension of the existing contract while that process plays out.