Meet the Mothers

Meet our Founder

Reverend Harriett Walden

What is happening in America now makes me even more determined that we have to fix this.

— Rev. Harriett Walden

Mothers for Police Accountability, which I founded, began working in the late 1990s with the Seattle Police Department as well as county mental health practitioners to find more humane responses for officers dealing with people in mental health crises.

In 1997, following a standoff on a downtown Seattle street in which a man, wielding a samurai sword, held police at bay for 11 hours, Police Chief Norm Stamper agreed to look at a model for crisis intervention training that was being used in Portland.

I rode there with Seattle officers and observed first-hand how Portland police worked with mental health professionals to de-escalate crisis situations. That year, Seattle Police established a Crisis Intervention Team, a voluntary program for officers to receive training from mental-health experts.

And the training is included in the Memorandum of Understanding between Seattle and the Department of Justice (DOJ), as part of the city’s ongoing monitoring by the federal government.

Rev. Walden has been appointed to a citizen’s oversight committee by former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, and current Mayor, Jenny Durkan.

Photo Credit: Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut