By Erica C. Barnett

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.

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.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

“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.”