By Erica C. Barnett

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 That ordinance, adopted by the council in 2017, was superseded (and undermined) by the police contract the city signed with the Seattle Police Officers Guild the following year.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.