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.
