Tag: Seattle Police Department

Mayor Harrell, Police

New Police Contract Includes Few Accountability Concessions In Exchange for Another Hefty Pay Increase
Police Chief Shon Barnes, flanked by Council President Sara Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell

In theory, the new contract allows the CARE Team to respond to more call types. In practice, it says they can’t go to homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.” 

By Erica C. Barnett

This morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes announced the new police contract we reported on yesterday, including starting salaries of $118,000 for new recruits, rising to $126,000 in six months.

Sergeants’ pay will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.

In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. Last year, Harrell signed a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. Once the new round of raises go into effect, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years. New officers also receive bonuses ranging from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for officers transferring from other departments.

“This contract ensures Seattle will remain competitive with other major city police departments and adds incentives for the skills that modern policing requires,” including a 1.5 percent or 4 percent salary boost for officers with two- or four-year criminal-justice degrees, Harrell said Wednesday.

“These recruitment improvements will allow us to build a police force that reflects our community’s diversity and meets the demands of 21st century public safety with respect to accountability. This contract delivers significant account accountability reforms that address concerns raised by the accountability entities and the community, and builds on the successful resolution of the federal consent period earlier this year. ”

In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved.

Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for misconduct that doesn’t rise to the level of a fireable offense. Whether this is an improvement to accountability, as opposed to a simplification of OPA’s workload, remains to be seen; the federal consent decree SPD was under until earlier this year called precinct-level discipline “admittedly ‘appalling,’ quoting an OPA supervisor), so bringing this kind of discipline back inside SPD will have good or bad consequences depending on how sergeants use this new authority.

Bob Kettle, head of the city council’s public safety committee, said bringing discipline back in-house would produce better sergeants, which would lead to “better lieutenants, captains, assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and maybe chiefs of the future. We have to invest in our leaders early to get the return later.”

One accountability issue the contract does not address is arbitration—an outside process police officers can use to get disciplinary decisions overturned Harrell’s chief of staff Andrew Myerberg said the two sides remain at an impasse on arbitration because the Seattle Police Officers Guild does not want to make concessions on four separate issues related to discipline.

Under the current arbitration rules, officers can  bring in new evidence and witnesses that the city hasn’t seen, and the arbitrator can use any standard of proof they want to decide whether a cop is guilty of misconduct. For example, arbitrators can require the city to present “clear and convincing” evidence that an person is guilty of misconduct that justifies the punishment they received. Arbitrators can also completely relitigate an officer’s case after the fact (known as de novo review).

Myerberg said the city couldn’t get SPOG to bend on changes to these requirements, as well as a request for a new standard saying that an arbitrator can’t overturn a disciplinary decision (such as firing) by the police chief unless the chief’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”

All those issues are now heading to interest arbitration between the city and SPOG, a secondary bargaining process overseen by the state Public Employee Relations Commission. If the city succeeds in placing more guardrails on arbitration, it will come at a cost—likely additional salary increases for officers in exchange for agreeing to restrictions on arbitration.

“The city had an opportunity to finally deliver on the promise of the 2017 accountability ordinance, to build a system where misconduct is investigated swiftly and discipline can stick. Unfortunately, this contract largely maintains the status quo,” Jazmyn Clark, smart justice policy program director for the ACLU-WA, said. “While some procedural clarifications are welcome, meaningful accountability reforms, especially around arbitration and disciplinary appeals, remain unresolved. Public confidence in the police cannot grow if the mechanisms for accountability are still subject to closed-door processes.”

As Harrell telegraphed earlier this year, the CARE Team, a group of social workers that currently responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, will be allowed to expand without restriction in the future and can respond to more types of calls, including behavioral-health calls from the public and requests for shelter and transportation from people on the streets.

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During Wednesday’s announcement—and before she had actually seen the new contract—CARE Department Chief Amy Barden said the changes would allow the CARE Team to respond to up to 47,000 calls a year.

However, the contract language actually places so many restrictions on what types of calls CARE can respond to that the true number of eligible calls is likely much lower. What’s more, the contract actually prohibits CARE from responding to exactly the kind of calls Barden has repeatedly said are more appropriate for social workers than armed police.

Under the new agreement (which CARE played no direct role in negotiating), SPD won’t allow CARE to respond to 911 calls on their own, and will instead send armed police officers, in the following circumstances:

  • If a person is anywhere besides a public space, such as a car, business, or residence;
  • If a person is in a homeless encampment, defined as four or more tents;
  • If there has been any report of “aggressive or threatening behavior towards others, destructive or confrontational behavior, or behavior posing a danger to others”;
  • If “drug paraphernalia” is present, indicating drug use;
  • If a minor is present;
  • If there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime;
  • If the person is exhibiting “extreme behavior that might warrant investigation for a potential involuntary commitment (e.g., public nakedness accompanied by crisis.”

This list arguably covers most circumstances in which CARE might be called to respond to a person in crisis. Under these criteria, CARE can’t respond to a call about someone living in permanent supportive housing or staying in a shelter, or someone whose behavior stems from public drug use.  They can’t respond to a person in their car or who has wandered into a business, or someone who lives in a tent that’s near other tents. Barden

Many of the terms in the list are subjective, leaving it up to officers to decide whether a person is being “confrontational” or if their behavior is “extreme.” (The example given in the contract, of someone who takes their clothes off while “in crisis,” is a good reason not to let SPD decide which calls require police—people who remove their clothes in public are often using drugs that make them hot, which doesn’t on its own mean someone needs to be involuntarily committed).

The contract still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council before it can go into effect. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.

Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.

The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)

The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that significant new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.

Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.

 

 

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police

SPD Can’t Find Funds to Recruit Women While Spending $3 Million on Macho Ads; Affordable Housing Tax Will Pay for Police Surveillance Instead; Pro-Harrell PAC Goes Low

1. Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, the business-backed political action committee headed by Harrell’s deputy mayor Tim Burgess, sent out a condescending and misleading mailer featuring a résumé that his opponent, labor leader Katie Wilson, submitted as part of an application for a city transit board more than a decade ago.

The document, which includes Wilson’s former home address as well as the address and partially visible phone number of a long-ago employer, purports to show that Wilson has no experience. Ten years ago, Wilson included jobs going back to when she was 24 years old, including a stint at Julia’s Bakery in Wallingford.

At the time she submitted the résumé to the city, Wilson had just started her role as general secretary ot the Transit Riders Union, an organization founded in 2011 to fight for better transit. Since then, as the head of TRU, Wilson led three successful campaigns for higher minimum wages, helped craft the JumpStart payroll tax as a leader of the city’s progressive revenue task force, fought for free transit passes for youth, and led campaigns for stronger renter protections in Seattle and several other cities.

You wouldn’t know that from the misleading mailer from the Burgess-led PAC, though, which doubles down on Harrell’s strategy of pretending his opponent is an ineffective know-nothing. If one were eliminate the last 10 years from Harrell’s resume, his own most recent experience would include “two-term city council member (2007-2014)” and “failed candidate for mayor” (2013).

2. The Seattle Police Department’s budget for this year includes funding for a $3.3 million, two-year advertising contract with the firm Epic Productions of Phoenix, LLC aimed at recruiting new officers through online ads through the end of 2026.

This is just the latest of several recruiting contracts the city has funded amid annual deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As of this year, the city is hiring police at an unprecedented rate, according to a city council central staff analysis, a fact that almost certainly has more to do with new six-figure starting salaries than macho Youtube videos about “what gives us a rush.”

Interestingly, SPD’s budget counts those videos as part of its “30 by 30” effort to recruit more women, perhaps because there are women in the videos. The “30 by 30” initiative is a commitment by police departments to boost recruitment classes to 30 percent women by 2030 and to retain women through initiatives focused on improving police culture and meeting women’s specific needs. So far this year, SPD’s recruitment class has been less than 9 percent female.

While SPD was able to find $3 million for the Epic ads, they have not hired anyone for a position created in 2024 to oversee its 30 by 30 efforts, despite the fact that the city assumed funding for this position last year for both 2025 and 2026 would come from “salary savings that would accrue from vacant, funded civilian positions within the department.” According to a central staff memo, SPD chose instead to use this money for “civilian salary savings.”

“In response to the pessimistic revenue forecast in April, as well as threats of federal funding cuts, the Executive took immediate action to proactively prepare for significant negative impacts to the City budget. Additionally, given the unexpected increase in officer hiring, the department has had to take on an increase in expenses and has had to use the remaining civilian salary savings to balance the GF budget.”

SPD will also get nearly a million dollars from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for live CCTV camera surveillance in the Stadium District, part of a permanent police surveillance program, and for unspecified equipment and security costs for the six FIFA World Cup games happening here next year. JumpStart was passed explicitly to pay for equitable development projects, affordable housing, and other programs to benefit low-income people and underserved communities. Last year, the council voted to remove all restrictions on the fund, allowing the city to use it as an all-purpose slush fund for any budget purpose.

Police

Seattle Spent Thousands on “Organized Retail Theft” Operation at Marshall’s, Arresting Five and Recovering $400 in Merchandise

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, the Seattle Police Department announced it had completed a successful “Organized Retail Theft Operation” at the Westwood Village mall in West Seattle, arresting five shoplifting suspects at “retail store … which suffers a significant amount of theft.” That retail store is Marshall’s, which, according to police, is a frequent target for shoplifting.

The merchandise police recovered, which included warm clothing such as knit caps and sweatshirts, had a total value of $406. (SPD’s post, which calculates the total as $460, does not match with the amounts catalogued in the police reports.)

In addition to the five people arrested for theft, police arrested another man on outstanding warrants and booked him into SCORE jail in Des Moines.

It’s unclear why SPD described these arrests, which occurred individually throughout the day, as “organized retail theft.” The total amount of merchandise the officers recovered was well under the legal threshold for a charge of organized retail theft under state law, which defines that term as a theft by a group of people, or by just one person, of merchandise with a total value of more than $750.

Asked why SPD considers the Marshall’s arrests an example of organized retail theft, an SPD spokesperson responded, “Charges for cases are determined by prosecutors. While we arrest individuals for probable cause of a crime, that is where the process ends for us.”

Conservatively, the operation may have cost the city upward of $10,000, between the ten officers who played direct or peripheral roles in the one-day sting and the cost of jailing several people on misdemeanor theft charges, including two who remained in jail for almost a week.

Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes have frequently talked about the urgent need to hire more officers in order to address violent crime and other critical public safety issues. For many years, SPD has had a program that allows security officers to apprehend shoplifters themselves and file “security incident reports,” which have the same weight as a police report, saving the department the hassle and expense of going to stores in person, arresting people, and booking them in jail.

SPD would not provide copies of the incident reports for the arrests. Instead, they provided narrative summaries from which the identity of each officer involved in the operation was redacted, while the names of all but one of the suspects—a man in a wheelchair who allegedly stole several pairs of children’s shoes and was not booked into jail—were included in the narrative.

The narrative, and the three full police reports we were able to obtain by cross-referencing other publicly available records, said, “The mission of this operation is to disrupt shoplifting, the trafficking of stolen goods, criminal activity and other criminal activity that negatively impacts the public’s quality of life in the City of Seattle.”

When we asked for the reports, a representative for SPD’s public affairs office responded, “You will have to submit a PDR [public disclosure request] for the full police reports as SPD Policy prevents me from releasing them.” In fact, SPD’s policy manual says, “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” as opposed to through the public disclosure process. We have asked SPD to explain why they appear to be violating their own policy.

The three police reports we obtained, along with the summaries of two additional cases provided by SPD, show that SPD dedicated at least 10 officers and detectives to nabbing four people for stealing small, low-value items. The merchandise SPD recovered included three pairs of children’s shoes ($26 a pair), beanies ($7 each), cologne ($10),  two sweatshirts (at $30 each, the highest-value items stolen), and a pet toy (price unknown).

At least ten officers were involved in the bust, including at least two sergeants; their salaries, according to publicly available records, range from $129,313 to $161,470, or between $62 and $78 an hour. An SPD spokesperson said it was too soon to know whether any of the officers received overtime pay for participating in the operation. During the sting, a detective sat in the security office along with Marshall’s security guards and directed officers to arrest people who appeared to be stealing, according to police reports.

The cost of arresting and jailing people isn’t minor. Booking a person into the King County Jail on misdemeanor theft charges costs the city a minimum of $665, a price that includes a one-time booking fee of $278.60 and a daily  “maintenance fee” of $386.36 for every day a person remains in jail.

Three of the four people booked at the downtown jail have been released; one served a night in jail, while the other two were there for six days and seven days, respectively. The fourth person was initially arrested for shoplifting but was booked on two felony warrants and remains in jail; the city isn’t charged for felony bookings.

Asked what the police department hoped the Marshall’s operation and similar stings would accomplish, the SPD spokesman said, “The goal  of retail theft enforcement is to encourage people to follow the law.”

 

immigration, Mayor Harrell, Police

Harrell Says SPD Will Stand Strong Against Federal Invasion; SPD Promotes Former Deputy Chief Who Said Aurora Sex Workers “Enjoy It”

1. Mayor Bruce Harrell signed two executive orders on Wednesday that he said would “ensure that our city is prepared and resilient” if President Trump sends federal troops to Seattle.

The orders, however, are largely symbolic and include recaps of policies that are already in place—like a ban on police cooperation with immigration enforcement—or under consideration, like an increase to the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs’ budget, announced last month. One of the orders sets up a task force to come up with response plans if Trump does send troops to Seattle. The other highlights future legislation that would prohibit law enforcement officers from wearing masks to hide their identity and ban “staging and operations of federal civil immigration enforcement activities on City property to the extent permissible by law.”

City employees will also be required to go through training on the “protocols and procedures for complying with state and local immigration laws,” including the Keep Washington Working Act, which prohibits city employees from assisting in immigration enforcement.

Hamdi Mohamed, director of the city’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, said the two orders “send a clear message that we will use our full power to stand up and protect our communities—ensuring the Seattle Police Department and the city cannot and will not participate in federal civil immigration enforcement, creating a task force across departments who will meet with and coordinate responses with community organizations like OneAmerica, and writing new laws and directives to meet this moment to ensure that our local law enforcement prioritizes the safety and first amendment rights of our residents and community members.”

But Seattle, like all cities, has little power to actually stop federal troops from wearing masks (as they have in California, which banned masks) or enforcing immigration laws in public spaces—as they have in Chicago, whose mayor declared all public properties “ICE-free zones” earlier this week.

Harrell dismissed various potential scenarios, including a situation in which police cooperate with federal troops or ICE, as “hypotheticals,” saying, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Six Seattle police officers participated in the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection, including two who were fired after video evidence surfaced of them breaching the Capitol—the largest known January 6 contingent from any US police department. A 2021 video that surfaced in 2023 showed a large “Trump 2020” flag displayed at SPD’s East Precinct, along with a mock tombstone bearing the of name a young man, Damarius Butts, who was killed by SPD officers in 2017.

Harrell said there were no specific indications that Trump planned to send federal troops to Seattle, but said he wasn’t “worried” about “poking the bear” with his announcement.

2. New East Precinct SPD commnder Michael Tietjen isn’t the only controversial figure to receive a promotion and accolades from new police chief Shon Barnes. (As we reported yesterday, Tietjen was promoted to oversee policing in the city’s longtime LGBTQ+ neighborhood despite a history of misconduct that included an incident in which four officers allegedly harassed a trans woman.)

Three weeks ago, Barnes also announced the promotion of Marc Garth Green as commander of the West Precinct.

The job is a step back up the ranks for Green, a former deputy chief who was publicly demoted by former police chief Carmen Best after he made offensive comments about sex workers while defending SPD’s decision to focus on arresting sex workers rather than johns. During a heated exchange with then-councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, Garth Green said many of the women walking up and down Aurora are there by choice because they “make money and enjoy it.” He also suggested that sex workers themselves were contributing to gun violence in the area.

Garth Green was eventually reassigned to Harbor Patrol—the same division to which Tietjen was reassigned in 2007, after he and a partner were caught on video choking and allegedly planting drugs on a man in a wheelchair.

Later that same year, Garth Green and other SPD officers were accused of giving preferential treatment to an SPD captain who was caught trying to pay a woman for sex on Aurora.

In his announcement of four promotions  (the other two new captains are Kevin Runolfson and Heidi Tuttle), Barnes said, “Their advancement is not only a reflection of personal achievement but also a testament to the values of dedication, integrity, and leadership that we need at every level of this department.”

LGBTQ+, Police, Uncategorized

SPD Chief Puts Cop Who Called 2020 Protesters “Cockroaches” In Charge of East Precinct
SPD’s East Precinct in 2020

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, located at 12th Ave. and East Pine St. in the heart of Capitol Hill, came under new leadership in September, when SPD Chief Shon Barnes quietly removed the precinct’s gay acting commander, Doug Raguso, and placed a newly promoted captain, Mike Tietjen, in charge.

If Tietjen’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he was at the center of two high-profile incidents during protests against police violence in 2020.  In the first, then-sergeant Tietjen was suspended without pay for shoving a man forcefully into a bus stop, causing him to hit his head. In the second, he was moved to a different precinct after driving an unmarked vehicle onto a sidewalk full of protesters, later comparing them to “cockroaches” because of the way they scattered in the path of his SUV.

In 2007, Tietjen and his partner were accused of choking a man in a wheelchair and planting drugs in his hoodie; although then-SPD chief Gil Kerlikowske exonerated both officers in a press release, they were subsequently reassigned to Harbor Patrol. Two years earlier, according to KUOW, Tietjen was accused of ” punching and choking a man” he was arresting “to the point of unconsciousness.”

In an internal email announcing eight promotions, including Tietjen, Barnes wrote that everyone he was promoting had shown “the ability to rise to challenges, embrace innovation, and guide others with clarity and purpose. … The leaders we celebrate today represent our commitment to building an organization that is resilient, forward-thinking, and deeply connected to the community we serve.”

Raguso, a 22-year SPD veteran, was a fixture at the East Precinct who previously served as SPD’s LGBTQ liaison. SPD declined to say why he did was not promoted to captain. A department spokesperson said, “We promote our captains based on input from Command leadership, their Civil Service test scores, and other feedback.”

In 2021, Tietjen was disciplined for a 2020 incident in which four officers, including him, pulled up on a trans woman who was walking along the sidewalk and allegedly harassed her by asking her if she “had a dick under” her skirt.

Tietjen has an adult child who belongs to the LGBTQ+ community, from whom he is estranged. PubliCola is not providing any further details about Tietjen’s child in order to protect their privacy.

Raguso is now overseeing operations at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center—a recently expanded downtown facility where officers and civilian SPD staff monitor live surveillance footage from around the city. PubliCola was unable to interview him.

The SPD spokesperson acknowledged that Tietjen “had been the subject of complaints five years ago,” but said he had completed “an opportunity for training and growth” and “has successfully delivered results to the community” since then. “In his current role, he is building positive relationships in the community, in line with Chief Barnes’ promise to police forward and continuously improve our organization,” the spokesperson said.

Andrew Ashiofu, a member of the city’s LGBTQ commission who spoke to PubliCola on his own behalf, said Tietjen’s appointment “sends a deeply troubling message” to people living in “one of Seattle’s most LGBTQIA+-dense neighborhoods. His presence in this role is not just inappropriate, it’s dangerous. It sets a precedent that undermines trust and signals to marginalized communities that their safety and dignity are negotiable.”

“As a Black gay man living within this precinct, I do not feel safe,” Ashiofu continued. “How can we trust the police to protect us when those in charge are the very people we need protection from?”

Joel Merkel, the co-chair of the Community Police Commission, said that “promoting someone who’s had these type of disciplinary actions” against them raised concerns about the new police chief’s  “knowledge and insight into SPD’s history history and dynamics … particularly as we’re trying to change the culture of SPD. With the consent decree going away, it sends a concerning message.” SPD had been under a federal consent decree since 2012, and was seeking to have it lifted when President Trump announced he was unilaterally dismissing all Justice Department consent decrees over local police departments, including Seattle’s.

City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who represents Capitol Hill and the rest of District 3, did not respond to a request for comment.

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The complaints against Tietjen in 2020 were serious and highly publicized. All occurred on Capitol Hill within a short distance of the East Precinct headquarters.

In the first incident, for which he was suspended without pay, Tietjen violently shoved a man who had been trying to help another demonstrator who was blinded by pepper spray, pushing him and slamming his head into a bus stop.

Although Tietjen claimed he had simply tried to get the man to “spin around” and rejoin the crowd of people SPD was pushing out of the area,  video from his body-worn camera later revealed that he had “forcefully pushed” the man “down and towards the bus stop” as he was trying to assist a demonstrator who had taken shelter there, according to the Office of Police Accountability’s investigation into the July 25, 2020 incident.

“Moreover, but for the fact that the Complainant was wearing a helmet, he could have suffered very serious injuries based on the manner in which [Tietjen] pushed him, his momentum in falling to the ground, and his striking the bus stop with his head,” the report said.

In the second incident, on August 12, 2020, Tietjen was driving an unmarked SUV when he  accelerated suddenly and drove onto a crowded sidewalk at 11th and Pine, forcing people to scatter to avoid being hit. When someone confronted him, according to the OPA report, he compared the people he almost hit to scattering “cockroaches.” A widely posted video shows him saying he still works for SPD “because they pay me like 200 grand a year to babysit you people.” Tietjen was suspended without pay and received a “disciplinary transfer” to the North Precinct for that incident.

In the third incident, Tietjen was in an SUV with three other officers that pulled up to talk to a trans woman who was walking on the sidewalk during a protest. According to the OPA investigation, one of the officers took her picture with his phone and asked if she “had a dick under” her skirt. “She said that she told the officer to ‘come take a look’ and he replied that he would ‘need a microscope’ to do so,” the report says..

Later, the woman told OPA investigators, “the unmarked SUV again drove by her and an officer again yelled out to the Complainant to ‘show them what’s under my skirt.’ She started yelling at them, but they drove off while still saying things to her.” The OPA report says Tietjen acknowledged taking the woman’s picture and hearing someone in the car say something about a microscope, but denied most of the other details. The officers said they stopped the woman because they suspected her of “throwing rocks at” the East Precinct building.

Tietjen got a written reprimand for failing to document or report the interaction with the woman, and for failing to “counsel” another officer who shouted transphobic comments about why that was unacceptable behavior.

Five years later, Barnes promoted Tietjen to captain and put him in charge of public safety in city’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood.

Police, Tech

Police Department Acknowledges Using AI, But Says It Isn’t “Substantive” Enough to Label

By Erica C. Barnett

A recent complaint alleging that the Seattle Police Department used generative AI without attribution, in violation of the city’s AI policy, has been referred by the Office of Police Accountability as a supervisor action—“a minor policy violation or performance issue that is best addressed through training, communication, or coaching by the employee’s supervisor.”

The complaint, which is anonymous, alleged that a number of public statements from SPD—including an August blog post about recent shootings, an April statement from SPD Chief Shon Barnes about a new “Immediate Violent Crime Prevention & Enforcement Plan,” and a blog post about Barnes’ confirmation in July—were created with a generative AI tool such as ChatGPT.

According the widely used GPTZero AI detector, the August blog post is likely “100 percent AI”-generated, as is the April statement from Barnes; the July blog post appeared to be a mix of AI and human inputs, according to GPTZero, with 29 of its 42 sentences “likely AI generated.” ZeroGPT, another AI detector, found similar results, except that it was more confident that most of the July post was AI-generated.

As a baseline, I checked PubliCola’s last several posts using both AI detectors; both found them to be 100 percent human-generated.

Since 2023, the city has had a policy on generative AI that requires city departments to label AI-generated text.”If text generated by an AI system is used substantively in a final product, attribution to the relevant AI system is required,” the policy said. According to IT Department spokeswoman Megan Erb, city departments are supposed to “determine their standard for substantive use in line with the AI policy principles and relevant intellectual property laws.”

None of SPD’s communications have been labeled to indicate they were produced with AI.

In April, DivestSPD and other outlets reported that OPA recommended SPD come up with its own AI policy after discovering that a sergeant was using ChatGPT to generate reports. OPA said it could not comment on the complaint alleging AI use by the communications team, and SPD did not respond to questions about that recommendation. Currently, SPD does not have its own AI policy.

Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city’s IT Department director Rob Lloyd announced a new citywide AI policy aimed chiefly at allowing AI pilots to help automate city functions like permitting (a prospect that raises unrelated, but serious, questions about the human labor force doing many jobs that the city may eventually replace with AI.) When it comes specifically to using generative AI to produce text-based documents, however, the new policy is identical to the old one.

Lloyd said there “aren’t any penalties, per se,” for departments that misuse AI tools, “but you do have to go through a rigorous process.”

City departments are required to get permission to use AI systems, including free software such as ChatGPT that poses potential privacy risks. Erb told PubliCola that “SPD was authorized to use specific generative AI applications under City policy following a standard security and privacy review.” (We’ve followed up for more details on which applications SPD is authorized to use).

The city’s generative AI policy does not set specific thresholds for what constitutes “substantive” use of AI-generated text, leaving the term open to interpretation. According to a spokesperson for SPD, the department “has not used generative AI in any substantive way as part of its communications.”

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However, the spokesperson continued, “We are testing use cases, always with a human in the loop. To the limited extent it has been tried, we have explored using it to improve the clarity of existing writing for the public, find ways to get closer to presenting information in plain language, and brainstorm ideas. It is not used as a primary author of content.”

SPD’s legal counsel, Becca Boatright, said that “tools that use AI for grammar, suggested wording changes, suggested brevity/clarity, etc. are not considered ‘generative’ AI for purposes of this policy.”

“Technology is always evolving, and like laptops, social media, and spellchecking tools, AI is another tool in our toolbox to evolve communications, especially given staffing levels and our commitment to share information that educates residents,” the SPD spokesperson said. “It can help do tasks for experienced individuals, allowing them to dedicate more of their time to other responsibilities that align with SPD’s mission and values.”

Because the OPA complaint has been referred as a “supervisor action,” it’s likely that SPD’s Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis, will decide whether and how to respond to the issues it raises about the use of AI by her own office. SPD did not respond to PubliCola’s question about whether the department will take any action to address the issues raised in the recent OPA complaint.

AI detectors like GPTZero are not infallible. They use large datasets, including both AI- and human-generated text, to analyze patterns that indicate the likelihood that a text was AI-generated. Signs that a document was generated by, or with the help of, AI, include buzzwords or repetitive phrases, uniform sentence structure and length, predictable formatting (such as bullet-pointed lists and frequent use of em-dashes), frequent use of passive voice, and an excessively formal or robotic tone.

Here, for example, is the conclusion of the statement from Barnes the AI detector determined was 100 percent AI-generated, which featured a bullet-pointed list: “Public safety is not just about enforcement—it’s about collaboration. The support of our city officials, and our community is vital in ensuring we create long-term, sustainable solutions. I appreciate our ongoing partnerships and look forward to working together to build a safer Seattle.”

And here are the first two paragraphs of the August post about gun violence, which the two AI detectors also suggested was completely AI-generated:

Over the past four days, the Seattle community tragically experienced three separate incidents of gun violence, resulting in the loss of lives. On Thursday, we were confronted with a targeted homicide occurring in front of a place of worship. While the motive for this premeditated act is still under investigation, we recognize the profound impact it has had on those who witnessed this traumatic event, as well as the broader community.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, two additional homicides occurred. The first stemmed from an unauthorized and unregulated gathering, which culminated in the loss of another community member. Shortly thereafter, a third homicide was reported, involving an individual discovered deceased in a parking lot, potentially linked to a vehicle collision or altercation.”

Of course, humans can also write robotically or use AI-style formatting.

To find out more about SPD’s use of AI, PubliCola has filed a records request seeking all AI inputs and outputs, among other information, produced by department communications staff.