Moving forward with security improvements in King County

(King County Metro General Manager Michelle Allison gave remarks to the King County Council Committee of the Whole on Oct. 6, 2025, which heard about plans to put new transit safety initiatives into action, a welcome effort in the wake of Metro operator Shawn Yim’s death last year. Monday’s transit safety report, including overall safety initiatives, actions already taken, an implementation plan for future efforts and next steps, came out of months of work by the Regional Transit Safety Task Force.)

King County Metro’s commitment to improving the safety of our employees and riders remains unwavering. We have a clear-eyed focus on what people, process, technology, and other resource investments we need to make to make a meaningful impact on transit safety.

At the heart of Metro’s commitments are continuing to focus on how we care for our employees and how we care for our riders.

The King County Regional Transit Safety Task Force identified opportunities to coordinate across sectors to prevent, deter, and ensure people are following our Code of Conduct on, at, and near transit.

We welcome the invitation for the external partnerships needed to create sustainable change by addressing what Metro alone can’t solve.

Supporting employees before incidents

Many of the recommended solutions from the Regional Transit Safety Task Force focus on putting resources and systems in place to prevent incidents from occurring or severely escalating, and we’re already active partners in making our disparate systems work more cohesively.

At a regional level, we are leading efforts and trying new ways to both communicate and enforce our regional code of conduct so that rider expectations and consequences are the same regardless of what transit agency they’re on.

We are working with our regional security, law enforcement, and behavioral health partners to make sure we’re doing what we can in improving the overall safety landscape. For example, in the Executive’s proposed budget, you’ll find a request for additional funding to continue and expand our behavioral health and ambassador programs and make this year’s increased transit security and Metro Transit Police presence permanent.

We are well on our way to install operator safety partitions on all our buses, implement enhanced training for 100% of our frontline workers, and implement additional safety communications so that our employees are better equipped in handling security incidents. We intend to complete these efforts within the next 12-18 months. Again, you’ll find that the Executive’s proposed budget includes additional funding to support these efforts.

Supporting employees during incidents

As much as we hope and will work towards zero incidents, we also want to make sure that we support our employees if incidents were to happen.

At a regional level, this again means working with our regional partners to make sure that not only are our employees getting a timely response, but also ideally from the best fit to respond to that particular incident.

Within Metro, we’re reducing our own internal response times by improving our internal mechanisms, and making sure that whoever does respond has the trauma-informed training to lead with care in how they respond to affected employees. And, that our response is trauma-informed not only during and immediately following but also over the long-term of an employee’s experience.

Supporting employees after incidents

Metro’s committed to provide employees with expanded wellness resources needed to recover from incidents. For example, the Executive’s proposed budget includes several requests for additional funding that supports employee wellness and trauma recovery support, ongoing peer support, and improved responses both immediately after and continuously after incidents.

In addition to supporting employee well-being, we want to make sure that our employees’ experiences inform how we continue to improve addressing safety on our system by making it easier and more accessible for them to report incidents. We’ve already started surveying bus operators who press the Emergency Alarm button on board the bus after the fact to see what the response was like, where there are gaps, and how we can improve.

Supporting riders

We’ve heard from this Regional Transit Safety Task Force that the current methods for riders to share with safety concerns with Metro, both emergent and non-emergent, were unclear or insufficient. As a result, in the Executive’s proposed budget, there’s a request for a capital improvement project to improve the rider reporting experience.

Additionally, we’re continually improving how we can better close the loop on rider and operator reports, both for how individual reports are resolved, as well as communicating how we’re using the collective feedback to improve safety on our system.

Next steps

We look forward to advancing this work with our regional partners with clear outcomes and targets in mind for what success looks like.

It’s not only about adding more budget resources, sustained change also requires that we have the leadership, policies, people, processes, technology, and partnership to make sure we are applying our resources most effectively to achieve our shared outcomes.

We have made progress on many of these recommendations this year and the Executive’s proposed budget includes funding requests from Metro to continue to build upon many of the prioritized solutions.

We look forward to working with Council on continuing participating in the Regional Transit Safety Task Force and to continuing to make progress on the recommended solutions.