By Andrew Engelson

On Tuesday afternoon, a little more than two weeks after Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office publicly announced a new three-year retroactive contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, the Seattle City Council ratified the agreement 8 to 1, with councilmember Tammy Morales casting the lone dissenting vote. Almost immediately after the vote, Harrell signed the contract, calling it a needed step to advance “our vision for a city where everyone, in every neighborhood, is safe and feels secure.”

Morales, in an amendment that failed, moved to delay the Tuesday vote, noting that the contract was fast-tracked directly to the full council without any public hearings and after just twenty minutes of public comment—nearly all of it in opposition.

 “The community deserves a chance to make their voice heard before we vote on it. We shouldn’t be rushing this,” Morales said.

Before the vote, Morales noted that the new contract offers almost no changes to accountability measures for police officers. “I believe this contract as bargained does not protect the city and the lack of accountability measures puts us in continued violation of the federal consent decree,” she said, referring to the 2012 federal agreement between SPD and the US Department of Justice.

In 2023, US District Judge James Robart modified the consent decree to lift most restrictions on SPD, but on the condition that the department make additional reforms to its accountability and crowd control.

Speaking in defense of the new contract, Council President Sara Nelson said, “We have to attack our staffing crisis from both retention and recruitment and hiring angles, and this is an important piece of legislation to accomplish both of those goals – because it will also help attract new officers to the force and facilitate our recruitment efforts as well.”

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The contract, which PubliCola acquired and published in early April, retroactively gives police officers a 24 percent raise – broken down to 1.3 percent in 2021, 6.4 percent in 2022, and 15.3 percent in 2023. The raises will boost SPD’s starting pay, before overtime, to $103,000, making Seattle officers the highest-paid in the region.

According to an economic briefing before the vote by Ben Noble, director of the city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, the contract adds $39 million annually to the existing annual SPD salary budget of $170 million. In sum, the retroactive cost over three years totals $57 million, and adds $9.2 million to the city’s existing budget deficit, because the city didn’t put enough in reserve to account for the total cost of the raises.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, chair of the Public Safety committee, said before the vote, “Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it is a challenge for our budget. But if we don’t compete in this labor market, we won’t accomplish our goal of achieving a safe base in our city.” T

After signing the bill, Harrell said the agreement “will make meaningful improvements to officer pay and staffing, to accountability so misconduct is investigated, and to new efficiencies through diversified response options.”

However, critics point out that the contract offers only minor changes to accountability for police officers. It allows a 60-day extension of Office of Police Accountability’s (OPA) 180-day deadline for completing investigations into the most serious misconduct; tells arbitrators tasked with reviewing officer firings to “give deference” to the police chief’s decisions; adds just two more civilian investigators at OPA, bringing the total to four; and increases the amount of time OPA has to inform an officer of an investigation from five days to 30.

As Morales pointed out on Tuesday, the contract still forbids SPD from putting officers on leave without pay prior to an OPA investigation, including officer Kevin Dave, who struck and killed 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk last year, and officer Daniel Auderer, who joked after the fatal collision that Kandula “had limited value.”

“As many of the commenters have said, this [contract comes at] a moment when SPD is being sued by its own employees because SPD leadership did not keep them safe from discrimination, and is being sued by constituents for a permissive culture and demeaning victims of violence in their language and mocking victims in their break rooms,” Morales said.

Shannon Cheng, chair of People Power Washington, a group critical of current and past SPD contracts, notes that the 15.3 percent raise SPD officers will receive in back pay for 2023 alone is three times what other city employees received for the same year in their most recent contract. “It seems pretty standard that 5 percent is about what everybody was getting for 2023,” Cheng said, “and that includes park employees, 911 dispatchers and parking enforcement. Why is SPOG an outlier compared to everybody else?”

Cheng says that the minimal accountability changes in the contract fall well short of what the consent decree requires and what was in a 2017 accountability ordinance that SPOG negotiated away in its 2018 contract, including subpoena power for OPA, civilian investigations for most misconduct investigations, and significant reductions to the power outside arbitrators have to overturn disciplinary decisions. None of these changes made it into the contract.

“In these cases that the public is most concerned about, where officers are performing the most egregious behavior, you would hope to see discipline that would then change the culture and the behavior of the officers so they don’t repeat the same mistakes again. That backstop is not in there,” she said.

Joel Merkel, co-chair of the Community Police Commission, says the CPC is disappointed with the minimal accountability measures in the contract, noting that the provisions  “are very minimal things that don’t even come close to what the accountability ordinance [of 2017] contemplates,” Merkel said. “So our expectation at the CPC is that the city has a plan to include those things in the 2024 contract.”

Merkel said those reforms should include dropping the burden of proof for OPA in misconduct cases from the extremely high bar of “clear and convincing evidence,” (the standard used in criminal cases) to “preponderance of evidence,” (the standard used in civil cases); giving subpoena power to OPA; limiting the use of arbitrators to review firing decisions; and limiting the number of sworn officers involvced in OPA investigations. A current organization chart at OPA shows there are nine sworn officer investigators (who are required to investigate all serious charges), compared to what will now be four civilian investigators under the new agreement. 

Merkel notes that Judge Robart ruled in 2019 ruled that the city was out of compliance with the consent decree because it had failed to include those accountability measures in the previous contract. Without them, he said, it’s possible he could rule similarly in the future. “The last contract failed to include provisions in the accountability ordinance, the CPC objected, and Judge Robart cited that as one of the reasons to find that the city was out of compliance as it relates to accountability.”

In a statement released after the vote, the mayor’s office noted that “negotiations for 2024, including work to strengthen police accountability, civilian alternatives, and other items proposed by the City based on input from community partners and the federal judge overseeing the City’s Consent Decree with the Department of Justice, are still ongoing. Those negotiations are taking place with the assistance of a mediator appointed by the Public Employment Relations Commission.”