A “due diligence” review of a potential alternative test for police recruits concluded that a test used by small cities and towns in Washington state is not appropriate for Seattle and would not speed up police hiring. In addition, the report says the alternative test, favored by Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess and City Council President Sara Nelson, “is not an option” because the company “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now.”
An independent city commission, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, produced the report after Burgess asked the commission to consider replacing the current test, which has a 73 percent pass rate, to one that 90 percent of applicants pass.
The PSCSC’s report compares the test SPD currently uses, developed by the National Testing Network in response to the 2012 federal consent decree, with another test created by NTN competitor Public Safety Testing. NTN created hiring tests for police departments in six of the big “West Coast Seven” cities, while PST’s test is used by suburban cities, rural jurisdictions, and Spokane.
According to NTN’s responses to questions from the PSCSC, which PubliCola obtained through a records request, more than 400 cities use their test, including 13 in Washington state.
PST declined to participate in the commission’s review and did not provide information about which jurisdictions use its tests.
The PSCSC has defended the NTN test, noting that the city worked with SPD and the testing company to develop the test in response to the consent decree and a 2017 police accountability ordinance that, though it was never fully implemented, is widely regarded as a baseline for police accountability in Seattle. Among other factors, the exam tests for “restraint in use of authority, integrity, ability to understand and help with human distress, group bias awareness, and commitment to equality,” according to the report.
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Nelson has suggested repeatedly that the test, and the PSCSC in general, are at least partly responsible for SPD’s inability to quickly recruit and hire police officers, a claim the PSCSC has disputed. The new report notes that new recruits spend, on average, about 28 days in processes where the PSCSC has any involvement, compared to 5.5 months in SPD’s pre-employment screening process, and 1.5 months before they start training at the state police academy.
According to the report, PST confirmed that they would need to develop an entirely new “custom” test for Seattle and then test it for validity, a measure of how well a test predicts recruits’ future job performance, a process that “could take months.”
“The primary benefit of engaging PST would be to give candidates applying to other regional agencies that use the PST test the ability to also send their score to Seattle,” the report notes. “However, that feature would not likely be available if Seattle required a new customized (different) exam.”
The report also cautions against using both tests to evaluate SPD applicants, noting that the two tests measure different things, and that one—PST’s—is easier to pass. Police “candidates may become savvy about which exam is easier and choose the easier exam to boost their scores,” the report says. “From a legal standpoint, [NTN] noted that this practice creates risk if the City were to face litigation related to adverse/disparate impact”—that is, if someone sued because a test excluded more people in a protected class, such as women or racial minorities.
“Typically, exams with high pass rates are masking adverse impact that would be present at higher cut scores or when used to rank order” candidates, the report says.
The report also recommends that the PSCSC conduct an open bidding process, known as a request for proposals, for the police hiring test next year. PSCSC director Andrea Scheele will present the report at the PSCSC’s meeting Thursday.
Last month, we reported that City Council President Sara Nelson planned to introduce legislation requiring the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, which oversees the initial stages of police hiring, to adopt a police hiring test called the Public Safety Test that around 90 percent of applicants in other cities pass.
Instead, after what she described as a consultation over “technical details” with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, Nelson has proposed a bill that softens the prescriptive measures she previously said she would seek to impose on the PSCSC. The new ordinance says the PSCSC should merely “seek to use” the Public Safety Test, “provided that any such exam is consistent with the goals of the Consent Decree or the City’s Accountability Ordinance.” That ordinance, adopted by the council in 2017, was superseded (and undermined) by the police contract the city signed with the Seattle Police Officers Guild the following year.
Currently, the city uses a test developed in collaboration with SPD in response to the federal consent decree; that test, created by the National testing Network, is designed to eliminate candidates with obvious issues such as racial bias, lack of integrity, and poor judgment.
In March, Nelson also said she planned to require the PSCSC to process tests more quickly by sending lists of passing candidates to SPD every two weeks instead of every six. Because the PSCSC is an independent, state-created body, commission director Andrea Scheele told PubliCola the city council probably lacks the authority to force it to do anything, noting that the last time the council tried to undermine its independent authority—by removing its authority to conduct police hiring tests—it led to a protracted lawsuit that the city lost.
Nelson’s bill also says the PSCSC “is encouraged to keep entry level police officer position registers current by endeavoring to provide an updated register every two weeks,” rather than requiring the commission to do so.
In the council’s weekly briefing on Monday, Nelson said switching to the more widely used Public Safety Test “would potentially shorten the application period time significantly, and also attract more applicants, knowing that they can just direct their scores to be sent to SPD as well as other law enforcement agencies” that use the PST test.
Nelson’s bill would also add a new position to the PSCSC, at a cost of $146,000 a year, “so that contact with applicants can be made within ideally 48 hours of that application landing at the city … so people feel like they’ve got a personal connection and also that their application is appreciated,” she said on Monday. The legislation says the commission should “endeavor to” contact applicants within two days both after they apply and after they pass the hiring test.
PSCSC director Scheele was unavailable for comment this week, but told us recently that the commission would do what it could to process police tests faster. As we reported, it’s unclear how much sending a list of names to SPD more frequently would speed up the hiring process; most of the logjams occur much further along, including at the state police academy, which only has five slots for SPD applicants every month.
In response to a question from Councilmember Cathy Moore about what SPD is doing to recruit more women, Nelson said that “the mayor, in his wisdom,” added four new positions (two police recruiters, a recruiting manager, and an admin) “for innovations such as the one that you’re talking about.” Nelson’s proposal would move three of those positions, in addition to the one that is already in SPD, from the city’s human resources department into SPD itself, “where they can interact with their colleagues and find out what is working.”
The legislation directs SPD to present a report on recruitment and hiring to the council twice a year, which will include “information and metrics on new and innovative programs that are designed to increase diversity within the department, to include an increase in female candidates, consistent with SPD’s ’30 by 30′ campaign”—an effort to increase the number of female officers to 30 percent by 2030.
Councilmember Rob Saka praised Nelson’s proposal, saying it “may or may not be true” that other US cities are having trouble hiring cops. (It is true. They are. There’s really just absolutely no doubt about this.) Saka said the solution to the problem was “twofold: addressing the really clunky [hiring] process and then also really notable officer morale issues.”
Nelson’s office responded to questions on Monday by pointing us to the legislation.
After suggesting last week that an independent commission’s process for testing and advancing new police recruits is contributing to the Seattle Police Department’s hiring challenges, Council President Sara Nelson plans to propose legislation that would require the commission to adopt a test with a higher passing rate and to advance candidates’ names to SPD more quickly, PubliCola has learned.
Currently, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission administers a test that was co-created by the National Testing Network and the city in response to the 2012 Department of Justice consent decree, which found that SPD routinely engaged in biased policing and excessive use of force. The test was designed to go beyond traditional evaluations, testing recruits for qualities like bias, personal integrity, judgment, and aptitude for the job. The NTN test weeds out more candidates than the more widely used Public Safety Test, which 90 percent of applicants pass on the first try, according to the Seattle Times.
Nelson did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But her legislation, as described to PubliCola, would override the PSCSC’s authority in two key areas. First, it would direct the PSCSC to switch to the Public Safety Test, which would ensure more people made it to the next hiring stage. Second, it would require the PSCSC to send lists of names to SPD 26 times a year instead of every six to eight weeks, as it currently does.
During a committee meeting earlier this month, council members suggested that the PSCSC’s process for testing and forwarding candidates’ names to SPD were creating a bottleneck that discourages potential police recruits and prevents SPD from staffing up; currently the department has just over 900 “deployable” officers, down from a high of more than 1,300 in 2017. “We cannot afford to lose people because of of basically bureaucratic obstacle and delay and process,” Councilmember Cathy Moore said.
“I share the City Council’s commitment to recruitment and retention of Seattle police officers, and over the past three years my team has continually improved processes, but I have serious concerns about any legislative intrusion into the substantive authority of the PSCSC, including the police officer exam. The PSCSC’s authority over the police officer exam is not appropriate for legislation.”—Public Safety Civil Service Commission Director Andrea Scheele
Scheele told Moore the PSCSC can probably manage to send lists of qualified candidates to SPD more quickly, especially if it gets a third staffer to help process the tests.
However, the council may not have the legal authority to order the PSCSC to use a different test, and any attempt to do so could lead to a legal challenge.
The reason for this is that the PSCSC is a creation of the state, not the city— and under state law, the commission has sole authority to “[p]rovide for, formulate and hold competitive tests to determine the relative qualifications of persons who seek employment in any class or position and as a result thereof establish eligible lists for the various classes of positions.” Changing this authority—say, to allow cities to override civil service officials’ authority to set hiring standards for cops—could require a change in state civil service law.
Courts have upheld the PSCSC’s authority in the past, Scheele notes. “The last time the Council passed an ordinance undercutting the commission’s independence it had to be repealed,” she said, after a state appeals court ruled that the city council acted outside its authority when it passed a law moving many of the PSCSC’s “substantive” duties, including officer testing, to the city’s Human Resources Department.
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“I share the City Council’s commitment to recruitment and retention of Seattle police officers, and over the past three years my team has continually improved processes, but I have serious concerns about any legislative intrusion into the substantive authority of the PSCSC, including the police officer exam,” Scheele said. “The PSCSC’s authority over the police officer exam is not appropriate for legislation.”
Even if the city did adopt a test that allows more people to move through the hiring process more quickly, it’s far from clear that this would result in more officers on the streets, since the civil service exam is just one step in a lengthy process that includes physical testing, pre-employment screening, drug and polygraph testing, and pre-deployment training, among other steps.
Most people fall off the hiring list at other stages of that process. Those who do make it through—about one in ten applicants—must go through basic training at the state academy in Burien, which only takes five candidates from Seattle each month—a true bottleneck. (Currently, the academy is already booked solid for the next eight months.) Police chief Adrian Diaz told the council earlier this month that hiring more officers would allow the academy to hold SPD-only classes, but that won’t happen at current recruitment levels.
The real issue with police hiring, Scheele suggested at the recent council meeting, is that people don’t consider SPD an appealing place to work. In 2024 so far, SPD has averaged just over eight applications a day, compared to around 6.5 immediately before SPD launched a new ad campaign last year
While pay could be an issue for potential applicants—at $83,000, SPD’s current starting pay ranks 15th in the Puget Sound region—other factors, such as the department’s increasingly public reputation as a hostile work environment for women, undoubtedly play a role. Last year, just 13.6 percent of SPD applicants were women, which is lower than the percentage of current female officers (about 16 percent) and a fraction of the number SPD will need to recruit to achieve its goal of a 30 percent-female police force by 2030.
Another issue, according to Community Police Commission co-chair Joel Merkel, is that potential officers don’t want to work in a department that doesn’t have strong accountability measures baked into its contract. “I don’t think civil service standards are the reason we have a hiring problem, and I don’t think lowering civil service standards is going to improve that problem,” Merkel said. “To me, accountability is the ball game, because if you have strong accountability in the [Seattle Police Officers Guild] contract, you’re going to create the conditions that allow the community and officers to build better relationships, and you’re going to give the community more confidence.”
The Seattle Police Department (SPD) is a toxic workplace for women, according to a damning internal report commissioned by SPD that was first reported by KUOW last week.
One woman who’s been an SPD officer for more than 15 years echoed the findings of the report, saying she’s been passed over multiple times for promotions by less-qualified male officers, and has seen this happen to many other female officers over the years.
“I’ve experienced men getting jobs with a lot less experience than me specifically, and other females not getting jobs,” said the officer, who requested anonymity. “I’ve seen this throughout my career,” which has included both patrol and office jobs, she said.
The internal report, by Washington State University Professor Lois James, was a part of the 30×30 Initiative—a nationwide effort to increase gender equity in policing. As part of the initiative, police departments across the country have pledged to boost the number of women in their departments to 30 percent by 2030. SPD signed on in 2021, with the goal of increasing the number of female recruits to 30 percent by 2030.
SPD isn’t close to reaching those goals. In 2023, out of 61 new officers hired, just five were women, according to Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell. Currently, just 16 percent of SPD officers are women.
James conducted focus groups and interviews with about a dozen women, who described a toxic, hyper-masculine culture in which women are often passed up for promotions and lucrative assignments because of their gender.
Women recalled watching less-qualified men get promoted because they had “connections” with other men in the department, or because they could work shifts that weren’t accessible to women, who often had family obligations men didn’t have.
One female officer said she told her supervisor she could work any shift but the night shift, “because frankly, there was nobody home to look after my kid… [And the response was]… this is the only one we have available… So I guess I’m not getting promoted. But then I’ll turn around and I see a counterpart who is going through a divorce, and he gets a hardship transfer assignment.”
Stories of sexual harassment and casual misogyny were also common. “I had a sergeant [tell] told me I look yummy in front of a bunch of officers,” one woman recalled; on another occasion, she said she was introduced at roll call by lieutenant who “was like, ‘don’t worry, guys, she’s married.’ It’s like, is that necessary?”
The officer who spoke with PubliCola said that while most of her interactions with male colleagues have been positive, she has personally experienced many of the situations women described in James’ report. Once, she said, a male officer was complaining about an officer who was pregnant. “He said that’s why he didn’t like women in his unit—because they go out on maternity leave and then everybody else has to scramble to cover for them,” she said.
James said harassment and discrimination are common across all police departments. “Unfortunately, my impression is that this is very, very typical and representative of police departments,” James said. “It’s clear that there’s a lot farther to go.”
Ivonne Roman, one of the founders of the 30×30 Initiative and a former New Jersey police officer, said female officers often cope with toxic work environments by keeping their heads down. “These women say: ‘I don’t complain, because I don’t think that it will be taken seriously.’” Roman said. “So there’s this disconnect between what the chiefs think is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground.”
In response to the report, Housen said the mayor was planning to arrange a meeting with female officers within SPD to hear their concerns. “Ensuring women at SPD attain positions of leadership, feel welcome and supported, and can serve free of bias or harassment is paramount for creating a representative department and building a culture at SPD that fully reflects the values of our city,” Housen said.
James’ report follows news of a lawsuit filed against Police Chief Adrian Diaz in King County Superior Court in January. Deanna Nollette, a 27-year veteran of the force and a former assistant chief of police, was demoted to captain—along with another assistant chief, Eric Greening—in July. In her lawsuit, Nollette claims that Diaz has “a history of misogyny. He is demeaning to women in the police force, articulating his bias that women should not hold leadership positions in the police force.”
“I am heartbroken to have been placed in an adversarial position against a department that I have loved and given 100 percent to for almost 28 years,” Nollette told PubliCola. “I have a responsibility to try to ensure that women who are with or join SPD have a fair and equitable opportunity.”
Diaz’s attorney, Ted Buck, said “Chief Diaz is disappointed that a routine personnel decision has led to these demonstrably false claims. The chief’s overt support of women in departmental leadership has been clear and consistent.”
Nolette’s attorney, Judith Lonnquist, was blunt in her assessment of Diaz: “It is reprehensible that an organization responsible for law enforcement is headed by a man who regularly violates the laws against discrimination,” Lonnquist said.
When asked if she thought Nolette was more qualified for the job of chief than Diaz, the current SPD officer replied, “Oh, definitely.” She said she was disappointed to see both Nolette and Greening passed over (and Diaz hired instead). “Both of them blow Diaz away,” she said.
The lawsuit—covered by the Seattle Times and other outlets last month—is the second high-profile gender discrimination case brought against the department in the past year. In February 2023, detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, known for promoting chess among young people in south Seattle, filed a $10 million complaint against SPD, citing “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis.”
Housen insists SPD is making progress toward the 30×30 goal (which SPD interprets as having 30 percent of its graduating recruit class of 2030 consist of women) and said the department has made gains hiring women into leadership positions. “SPD currently has four women captains and six women lieutenants,” Housen said. “Half of the department’s command staff are women.” In fact, five of SPD’s 13 command staff are women, and only one—assistant chief Lesley Cordner—is a sworn officer. The other four women on the command staff are civilian employees in budgeting, legal, and administrative or advisory roles—roles that are, in turn, held almost exclusively by women.
SPD’s lack of progress toward overall gender diversity comes at a time when the department faces what elected officials and Diaz have characterized as a hiring crisis. (It’s a familiar term.)
In 2020, SPD had 1,339 trained officers; by mid-2023, that had dropped to 1,029 – a 23 percent decline. The number of “deployable” officers—those who are fully trained and able to patrol—is lower; according to data provided by Housen, SPD had 921 deployable officers last year, down from and 1,094 in 2020.
The city began raising alarms about the declining number of SPD officers most recently during the Durkan administration, which instituted a short-lived hiring bonus program back in 2021.In 2022, Bruce Harrell announced a recruitment and retention plan that included bonuses of $7,500 for new officers and $30,000 to people transferring from other police departments. But Harrell’s office has seen lackluster results in its goal to boost SPD’s active force to 1,400 officers.
The numbers are part of a nationwide trend; in every region of the country, police departments are shrinking as retirements and separations outpace new hiring. A 2023 report found that total police force staffing in the US was down 4.8 percent from 2020.
Overall, according to SPD spokesman John O’Neil, 151 of its SPD’s officers are women, or about 16 percent, down from nearly 18 percent in 2021, but still above the national average for municipal police departments. According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the FBI, that rate ranges from 13.5 to a little less than 14 percent. According to the mayor’s office, 42 percent of the officers hired in 2023 were Black, Indigenous, or people of color and 9.6 percent were women.
Last year, 91 officers left the department, which, when combined with the 61 new hires, represents a net reduction of 30 officers.
City council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, one of six new council members elected last November, said SPD’s called those hiring numbers disappointing. “The number of women that were hired in 2023 was not acceptable,” Kettle said. “We need to have a representative force where women are well represented. We need to be creating that culture and an environment of inclusion. And also the idea that you can advance, you can be promoted, you can move forward in the organization.”
One police department that has made strides toward a more representative force is Madison, Wisconsin’s, where 28 percent of officers are women. The department makes a point of recruiting women and places women in prominent roles as teachers in its academy, as well as providing female mentors to new recruits.
San Diego’s police department, where 23 percent of officers are women, actively recruits women and is working to make its force more welcoming, including creating the nation’s first on-site child care center within a police department.
Policies like these can help attract women to police departments and encourage them to stay, 30×30 Initiative cofounder Roman said, adding that lactation rooms and generous family leave policies can also help with retention.
The benefits of hiring women are measurable. “We did a literature review on women in policing,” Roman said, “and we found that there are all these benefits associated with having a high representation of women: they reduce lawsuits, reduce use of force, they have a calming effect on their partners, and they have better outcomes for victims of crimes.”
Statistically, female officers generally have fewer incidents of excessive use of force and tend to use force less often than their male counterparts, and Roman notes that women who are victims of domestic violence are more likely to report it to a female officer.
The officer who spoke to PubliCola said that, in her opinion, conditions were better for women under Kathleen O’Toole, who served as chief between 2014 and 2018.
“O’Toole was very focused on career development and very supportive of women,” she said. Under former chief Carmen Best, who stepped down amid criticism of the department’s violent response to protests in 2020, “You saw women being promoted, you saw minorities moving into [positions of] deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs,” the officer said, but the 2020 controversy “kind of derailed what she might have brought to the table on that end of things,” the officer said.
Roman said physical fitness requirements pose a common hurdle for women seeking jobs as officers. SPD uses standards set by the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which include 20 pushups, 25 sit-ups, and 35 squat thrusts. Roman said that while these might not seem excessive, analyzing how many women consistently pass or fail the test is the best indicator of whether it’s discriminatory.
“I’ve noticed there’s an almost knee-jerk reaction that [some women] weren’t qualified to be cops because they can’t do 24 pushups within the first two weeks of the academy,” she said. “There’s no research that shows doing 24 pushups can make you a better, more effective officer.”
SPD has taken some steps toward improving its reputation and attracting more diverse recruits. Diaz frequently touts SPD’s Before the Badge program, a five-week pre-academy course designed to introduce potential recruits to members of the community and provide them with skills for dealing with on-the-job stress.
Brandon James, a lieutenant who’s part of the Before The Badge program, said he’d like to see more women officers.
“Recruiting is a challenge for everyone, and police departments are going after the same applicants,” James said. “We do see a good share of female recruits coming through. But absolutely, I wish it were more.”
1. During a briefing at the city council’s public safety committee about the city’s struggle to retain qualified staff in every department, City Councilmember Sara Nelson suggested there is no need to “study the benefit of [hiring] incentives” for police, “because it’s been shown to work in other cities—pretty much most if not all cities in our region.” With public safety “such a crucial issue right now,” Nelson continued, “this is something that doesn’t need a lot more study.”
Nelson, whose legislation to fund hiring bonuses will come before the same committee later this month, was responding to a presentation by the city’s Human Resources Department about a survey that concluded the biggest barrier to retention for most city staffers is the city’s 32-year-old job classification system, which creates artificial barriers to advancement for many city workers.
Her comments elicited immediate pushback from other council members, including committee chair Lisa Herbold, who pointed out that recent short-lived hiring bonuses did not lead to more applicants for police jobs, although they did get people to apply for jobs at the city’s new 911 call center. (After the city offered hiring bonuses for new SPD recruits in 2019, slightly fewer than one in five applicants said the hiring bonus was one factor in their decision to apply). Councilmember Andrew Lewis asked, semi-rhetorically, whether there was any city in the country that wasn’t currently struggling to retain officers right now. And Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda went further, apologizing to SDHR’s Keith Gulley “on behalf of the council” because “the work that you’ve done was impugned” by Nelson.
So, about that work: SDHR’s analysis found that, in general, hiring incentives serve as “a one-time quick fix that may not compensate for uncompetitive wages, difficult or unsupported work conditions, lack of opportunity to develop career relevance, experience and skills, and limited promotion opportunities” at the city, Gulley said. Additionally, signing bonuses for new hires can hurt the morale of existing employees who “feel undervalued and underappreciated” because they’re doing the same work with no extra reward.”
The hardest jobs to fill, according to the department’s survey, include carpenters, plumbers, and truck drivers as well as IT programmers, senior civil engineers, and public safety auditors.
The shortcomings of the city’s job classification system are especially troubling for mid-career employees, who frequently get stuck in mid-level positions because they lack a requirement, such as a graduate degree or specific college credits, to move up the ranks. Gulley gave the example of an accountant who had been at the city for more than 15 years but got stuck on the ladder because she hadn’t taken 24 hours of required coursework back in college. “That’s where the majority of our employees who have worked for the city for years get stuck,” Gulley said.
Of three possible scenarios, the city is using “baseline” assumptions in its forecast.
2. An economic forecast released by the city’s Economic and Revenue Council last week predicts the city will take in about $90 million more in taxes and fees this year than a similar forecast predicted six months ago, thanks to higher-than-expected revenues from sales taxes, the JumpStart payroll tax, and the tax on real estate sales.
In all, the city expects to collect about $711 million in general-fund revenues, which fund the city’s annual budget, in 2022—a 5.6 percent increase over 2021. The forecast also predicts the city will take in about $447 million in other taxes and fees that can only be spent on specific purposes, including taxes on real estate sales, which fund capital projects. Next year, the city predicts that revenues will continue to grow, but at a slightly slower rate.
1. After Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced plans to crack down on a street market in the Little Saigon neighborhood earlier this month, Seattle police officers swept the area last Friday, parking a mobile precinct at the intersection of 12th Ave. S. and S. Jackson St. and posting a half-dozen uniformed officers nearby. The southeast corner of the intersection, which housed an informal market for stolen goods, food, and illicit drugs, vanished; King County Metro removed a bus shelter from the intersection on Wednesday, and the neighboring strip mall installed a partial fence around its parking area.
The sudden police presence pushed people who frequented the market, including some who are unhoused, into the surrounding neighborhoods and encampments. A woman who lives under the I-5 overpass on King St. told PubliCola on Friday that some of the corner’s regulars briefly gathered near her tent on Friday morning before she told them to leave. “We told them aren’t welcome here,” she said. Other displaced people attempted to move into an encampment on 10th Ave. S, where they also encountered some objections, and a man selling toilet paper set up shop near a utilities box on a quiet side street. “We’re just being moved around in a circle again,” he said.
Although Harrell promised that “social service providers” would play a role in his plan to revive Little Saigon—an epicenter of Seattle’s public safety woes since the start of the pandemic, and one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods—Friday’s action relied exclusively on police.
Although some officers went door-to-door to nearby business owners on Friday to check in, one of those proprietors—the owner of Ten Sushi, located in the strip mall on the southeast corner of the intersection—wrote on Instagram that she still plans to leave the neighborhood, arguing that the police presence is only temporary.
“This improvement at 12th and Jackson demonstrates early results and a promising first step as Mayor Harrell continues to roll out his comprehensive approach to public safety,” a spokesman for Harrell’s office told PubliCola. “SPD’s efforts are one part of the administration’s broader strategy to ensure a safe and thriving neighborhood. In addition to addressing crime, next steps include providing social services, driving economic development, keeping areas free of litter and trash, and, most importantly, engaging community in immediate and forward-looking solutions.”
2. The Seattle Police Department estimates that its ranks could increase to 1,000 officers—still well below the department’s pre-pandemic size—by the end of 2022 if it is able to slow the pace of attrition, meet its optimistic hiring goals and count on officers returning from long-term leave.
However, a bill making its way through the Washington State Legislature may throw a wrench in the department’s plans. The bill, which would increase retirement benefits for officers who have worked in law enforcement for 15 years or more, could spur some of SPD’s older officers to retire early, interim SPD Chief Adrian Diaz warned during a meeting of the Seattle City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday.
In 2021, 171 officers left SPD, and the department hired only 81 new officers, most of them new recruits, as opposed to transfers from other law enforcement agencies. In January 2022 alone, SPD lost another 20 officers, including 12 who opted to leave the department instead of complying with Seattle’s vaccine mandate for public employees. SPD hopes to hire 125 more officers this year and has avoided making any estimates about attrition, but the council estimates that the department may lose as many officers as it hires in 2022. Meanwhile, 170 officers are on long-term leave; some of those officers will return, but others are using their paid time off before formally retiring.
In a pitch to boost SPD’s regrowth, former mayor Jenny Durkan debuted a hiring incentive program last October that offered up to $10,000 for new recruits and $25,000 for officers who transfer from other departments, though SPD spokesman Sergeant Randall Huserik told PubliCola in January that the incentives didn’t produce “any uptick in applications.” The council attempted to end the hiring incentive program in December of last year, but Durkan ordered SPD to continue offering bonuses to new recruits into the new year, erroneously claiming that the council’s vote wasn’t legally binding; Mayor Bruce Harrell finally stopped SPD from offering incentives earlier this month.
During Tuesday’s meeting, public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold and council member Sara Nelson, who worked together as council aides for Nick Licata and Richard Conlin, respectively, clashed over whether to renew the hiring incentive program. Herbold argued that the city should consider expanding hiring incentives for all departments with staffing shortages, while Nelson argued that SPD’s staffing shortage demands a more urgent response.
3. After activists thwarted the removal of an encampment that stretches along the west side of Fourth Avenue on Sunday, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office confirmed that the city still plans to remove the tents, which the city has deemed an “obstruction” in the public right-of-way.
As we reported yesterday, Seattle’s rules for removing encampments require the city to provide at least 72 hours’ notice and offers of shelter before removing an encampment, but there is an exemption: If an encampment poses an “obstruction”—that is, if it is located on a sidewalk, in a park, or in any other space used by the public—the city can clear it without notice, and with no offers of shelter or services.
While the City will do its best to offer shelter as available through the City’s HOPE team and the efforts of the RHA, we cannot allow tents and other structures to remain in the right of way if they are causing an obstruction or presenting a public health or safety risk,” Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said. “It is important to balance the immediate need to ensure safe and equitable access to sidewalks while we work to expand services and strategies to bring more people inside.”
By Erica C. Barnett
By Erica C. Barnett
By Erica C. Barnett
Nelson, whose legislation to fund hiring bonuses will come before the same committee later this month, was responding to a presentation by the city’s Human Resources Department about a survey that concluded the biggest barrier to retention for most city staffers is the city’s 32-year-old job classification system, which creates artificial barriers to advancement for many city workers. 