By Erica C. Barnett
The tentative Seattle Police Officers’ Guild contract includes retroactive wage increases for the past three years that add up to a 23 percent pay increase, PubliCola has confirmed. The raises would increase the starting pay for new officers, before overtime, from just over $83,000 to nearly $103,000. Officers who have worked at SPD for six months would see their base pay increase to $110,000, and so on up the seniority line. Officers’ overtime pay, which is 1.5 times their hourly wages, would also increase commensurately. The new pay scale would make the starting salary for Seattle police the highest in the region.
The Seattle Police Officers Guild has not released the details of the tentative contract, which has to be approved by the city council and would only apply through 2023. The city approved a contract with the Seattle Police Managers Association last year that included new accountability measures, but SPOG’s contract reportedly fails to replicate many of these measures, and the new city council has said its priority is making police feel welcome and appreciated, not “micromanaged” by the city. The next SPOG contract after the tentative agreement, which will begin in 2024, is currently in mediation.
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The Community Police Commission, one of the city’s three “accountability partners” (along with the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Police Accountability, which is housed in SPD), issued a statement on Monday raising concerns that the tentative contract will lack key accountability measures and urging state lawmakers to pass legislation taking accountability measures out of the bargaining process. As long as the police union has the ability to bargain away accountability measures, the CPC argued, they will do so.
“True police accountability requires a robust, transparent, and independent system for adjudicating misconduct,” the CPC wrote. “This includes basic accountability tools such as subpoena power for police oversight bodies; public transparency into the disciplinary process; a balanced and proportionate burden of proof standard for assessing misconduct; and a system of review perceived as credible, including as it applies to private arbitrators who have the authority and ability to overturn a police chief’s disciplinary decision.”
Currently, if an officer is fired and the firing could be “stigmatizing to the officer” (making it hard for him to get a job elsewhere, for example), the misconduct finding is subject to an “elevated standard of review,” making it harder to prove than the ordinary “preponderance of the evidence” standard.
A recent assessment by the court monitor overseeing the federal consent decree between SPD and the US Department of Justice noted several accountability measures that would be key elements of the upcoming contract: Clarifying the 180-day limit on OPA investigations, limits on the OPA and OIG’s subpoena authority, the standards for reviewing officers’ appeals of disciplinary decisions; and reforms to the arbitration process.
A federal judge lifted most of the consent decree last year, but found the city still had work to do on accountability, along with racially biased policing and crowd control. The vice president of SPOG, Daniel Auderer, was caught on body-worn video joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about the killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave, who struck her in a crosswalk while going almost three times the legal speed limit.
Police raises will deepen the city’s budget deficit, which currently stands at $240 million due to $10 million in unanticipated costs from a new contract with 8,000 unionized city employees who will receive a 9.7 percent cost of living adjustment this year, about half of that retroactive pay from 2023.
The last police contract, in 2018, cost the city an additional $65 million.
UPDATE: The city council approved these contracts with the Coalition of City Unions, along with COLAs for city employees workers who aren’t represented by unions, on Tuesday afternoon.
Mayor Bruce Harrell initially proposed giving city workers a sub-inflationary 1 percent pay increase and subsequently offered higher, but still sub-inflation-level, COLAs,, prompting workers to hold “practice pickets” around the city.
Harrell recently instituted a hiring freeze for non-public safety departments, and human services providers worry that his next budget will roll back modest pay increases for front-line homeless service providers, whose median salary was less than $34,000 in 2019, according to a city-funded study released last year.
Harrell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The argument about the SPOG contract undercutting police accountability is a 6 1/2 yr. old trope/red-herring that won’t die: if a new SPOG contract completely embraces Seattle’s 2017 police accountability legislation nothing will change. All the cops that avoided accountability for the 2020 rampages would still escape accountability. Don’t blame the contract, blame our severely flawed accountability system which the SPOG contract further entrenches.
This is because the entity that investigates police complaints, the Office of Police Accountability (OPA), is headed by a Mayoral political appointee who oversees investigators that are almost all (except for 2) SPD officers who do their investigation while still serving as an SPD officer (and when finished at the OPA go back to regular SPD duties). The head of the OPA has always been a political appointee who keeps a finger to the wind and always avoids seriously investigating consequential police abuse that fails to make major headlines (e.g., 80%+ of police killings of people in mental health crisis). Every other US city has attempted over the last 8 years to move away from this type of accountability, replacing investigators and decision makers with civilians subject to varying degrees of community control (e.g., Nashville, Newark, and even the Washington state office of independent police investigations).
Currently the 2 civilian OPA investigators are prohibited from investigating “Any case that reasonably could lead to termination” (see p. 79 of SPOG contract currently in effect: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/OPA/Legislation/SPOG_CBA_expires_12-31-20_111418.pdf). This requirement would prohibit anyone other than a fellow SPD officer from investigating a case involving “dishonesty,” which is likely a part of almost any case of consequence. As noted in article above the SPOG contract also requires a higher evidentiary standard in these sorts of cases.
While there is much more that Seattle’s 2017 accountability legislation undercut and failed at — meaning that a perfect SPOG contract in alignment with the 2017 legislation is still unsatisfactory — two points deserve to be highlighted: at the same time the 2017 legislation was passed there was also legislation passed that required the Community Police Commission (CPC) to propose (1) a means by which police killings could be investigated outside of the SPD, and (2) a means by which people can appeal OPA findings that reject their complaints. A few weeks short of 7 years later nothing at all has been done on (1) and, after delaying any consideration for 6 years, the CPC now claims that they can’t do (2) because that would require bargaining with SPOG (not clear this is true) and, oh by the way, it is too late to have that bargained in the current contract. Utter failure all around.
Congratulations officers! This raise is a small consolation for the horrible treatment the City has shown you over the past several years.
How much do we have to bribe the cops not to kill or maim people of color and protesters? They enjoy it so much that I’m sure the price will be very high.
Why not have the police department pay for any civil lawsuit damages, rather than the city? How much will Officers Dave (couldn’t make probation at another department) and Auderer going to cost us? Are they going to get their raises too?
How about, if you cost the city money, you don’t get a raise?
From what I saw on television – that’s what cities smaller than Seattle but surrounding it are paying. We need to.pay higher to attract officers to work here as we have the highest cost of living and the most crime.
Seattle cops don’t want to live in Seattle anyway but also we don’t want more police, police don’t make us safer. Here is an upcoming movie about what would work: Free film screening of Reimagining Safety, April 17th, Wednesday @5:30pm. Followed by a panel discussion with the director, and local organizers. Let’s talk abolition!
This film details conversation about transforming public safety. Ten experts discuss how policing and incarceration create more harm than good, why the system persists, and what changes can be made to make everyone safe.
Trailer:
https://youtu.be/DIQMQtxo9Xo?si=1Z9TDI3GsONTpl34
Register here for in-person (Dinner and childcare will be provided) or remote attendance.
https://forms.gle/TqtkhAFao8dZDpbw5
Together Center, Redmond, WA
April 17th, 5:30 pm
Other screenings in area that week too. Please share out.