1. The Seattle Police Department recently released a set of recruitment ads featuring cartoon versions of police officers in various heroic scenarios—saving a bus rider’s
life with CPR, saving a man from drowning, and saving two women from a hostage situation—each based on “a real story of the Seattle Police Department,” according to the ads.
Last year, PubliCola reported that SPD had signed a $2.6 million contract with the Seattle-based marketing firm Copacino Fujikado to produce a marketing campaign, including video and radio ads, aimed at boosting recruitment. Copacino Fujikado was able to procure the contract without competitive bidding because it was structured as a “piggyback” onto an existing contract the company signed with Sound Transit in 2018.
The ads each feature what appears to be a white, male officer rescuing people from various scenarios. Over each, a female narrator describes the scenario in a tone of deep, almost reverent concern. “On a weekday afternoon in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood, an emergency dispatch went out on the radio. A man on a bus wasn’t breathing,” the narrator intones on the first ad, titled “First On the Scene”:
“The first to arrive was the newest officer in the North Precinct. Just weeks out from the academy. He approached the bus. … The officer could see the man’s face was pale. Even from afar, he knew that he had to take action quickly.” The ad continues in this overwrought style until the final scene, when the man—rescued by CPR—looks into the officer’s eyes and says “Thank you” before the image dissolves into a blue SPD badge on a white background. “A job with impact. From the first second,” it reads.
The other two ads are similar, each featuring what appears to be a young, white male officer in the hero role. (SPD has struggled to recruit officers who don’t fit this stereotype, particularly women, amid widespread complaints that the culture of the department is unwelcoming and misogynistic.) In one video, an officer saves a man from drowning; in the other, he rescues two women, one of them weeping and bound with rope, from a man holding them hostage in an apartment.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s mid-year supplemental budget includes $800,000 for Cupertino Fujikado to produce additional ads and marketing materials for the recruitment campaign. In an announcement last month, the CEO of the firm, Scott Foreman, said, “We are proud to share these untold stories, which demonstrate the depth and richness of a career in the Seattle Police Department and the diverse opportunities available within the department.”
A spokesman for Harrell noted that SPD recruitment has increased since “we’ve ramped up our advertising,” increasing to 16 applications a day, on average, in July. However, most of that increase occurred well before the current ad campaign. According to a June 16 announcement from the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, applications increased to an average of 15 a day in May and June. While the PSCSC noted SPD’s marketing efforts, a more influential factor might be the 24 percent raises that went into effect under a new police contract adopted in May that raised the starting salary for a brand-new officer to $103,000 a year—more than any other police department in the region.
2. On Monday, Mayor Harrell informed thousands of city and county employees that they will be required to return to their offices or work sites three days a week starting in November. King County Executive Dow Constantine sent a similar email to county employees, saying he was asking department leaders to come up with a return-to-office plan by next year, and Sound Transit is expected to follow suit.
The city, Harrell told employees, is “committed to learning the best lessons from the pandemic—and that includes recognizing the benefits of in-person work.
According to Harrell’s “return to worksite” email, working in physical offices has already “improved collaboration, a strengthened ability to foster conversations and explore new ideas, enhanced community and relationship building, and a real commitment to mentorship and employee growth, while still allowing flexibility that remote work can provide.” This is a common, if largely unsupported, argument for traditional office arrangements: Get everybody back at the watercooler, and those creative juices will really have a chance to flow!
Surveys of US workers have shown over and over that employees greatly prefer remote work because it provides better work-life balance, allows daytime flexibility (particularly for caregivers, who tend to be women), and gives people more autonomy over their own time. Working from home can also reduce distractions, allowing people to work in a more quiet and controlled environment than a busy, noisy office. It also eliminates commutes, which can add hours of stressful unpaid time to every work day, clogging freeways, and contributing to climate change, a problem the city of Seattle is constantly claiming it wants to address.
And while Harrell has suggested it is the obligation of workers, including government workers, to save businesses in downtown Seattle by coming back to the area and spending money there, working from home benefits businesses in neighborhoods outside the downtown core, which are also part of Harrell’s “One Seattle.”
Harrell’s email does not cite any data or examples of concrete benefits from office work.
After Harrell’s announcement, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera released her own statement, saying Harrell’s order was inadequate and that city employees “can’t provide” the “most complete and highest quality services” unless they are physically located at desks in downtown Seattle. Rivera said she supports an immediate four-day-a-week in-office mandate.
BK, you rule!
Ms. Barnett, both of us know from experience that independent journalists can work from home. (Or in my case, for my publications 2014-2021, from homeless, for that matter.) So I understand that you’re sympathetic to people still working from home. And of course I expect you to be unsympathetic to Harrell and maybe also Constantine.
But my recent experience applying for the lowest-paid accounting-related jobs I can find (on the theory that nobody wants to pay much for decades-past experience) is that they are very consistently in-office jobs. Even though they should be just as possible to do from home as higher-paying office jobs.
In other words, working from home has become a class signifier in America today. And complaining when elected officials want the people they supervise to send out fewer class signals is, um, an odd thing for a progressive to do.
Having written about customer service support staff who will now be forced to drive many miles to work from their homes well outside Seattle to do jobs they did perfectly well from home, I strongly disagree that this is a “class signal.” Highly paid white-collar workers who can afford to live in the city and commute via a quick train ride will be the least impacted by this. It’s the lower-paid city employees—there are many of them, largely women—who have been able to benefit from at-home work who are going to lose the most unpaid time from this shift.
Um, are those customer service support staff public employees? I was writing about the private sector. In which, for example, at Amazon, it was the people the company famously requires have degrees who worked from home and more recently have been protesting coming back to the office. Amazon warehouse workers never worked from home.
Once upon a time in Chicago, I knew a temp agency staffer who befriended and eventually married a custodian who cleaned the office she worked in. All of the recruiting agency staff I’ve dealt with in the past few years have been, as far as I know, working from home. I’m quite sure the custodians who clean any offices those agencies still have are not working from home.
My anecdotal evidence, also, is that in the private sector, working from home scales with pay.
Granted, for public employees that may not be the case. But that’s kind of my point. Someone doing a job for the city who can work from home, when the same job in the private sector is normally in-office, is indeed sending a “class signal”, or something very like it; maybe something more elemental, a “we’re better than y’all are signal”. Whatever that person’s individual intent may be, they’re still sending that signal.
Oh FFS. They are government employees, and they work for us. I am sick and tired of not being able to get a call — or even an email — returned for days because people are not in the office and able to SERVE THE PUBLIC WHO PAY THEM. No, they are not as efficient. No, city offices were NOT crowded and loud pre-pandemic. If hospitals, restaurants, and retailers can operate in this post-pandemic reality, so too can government. Get their butts back in the office!
What you said.
If you’re not getting a call or an email that has nothing to do with folks being in an office or not, since calling and emailing can be done from petty much anywhere equally well.
I agree, when I WFH, no one knows the difference of whether I am home or which days I am in the office unless I tell them. The only way some know is the fact of my home office being quite and my office being somewhat noisy depending on the part of the day it is.
Does everyone work more efficiently with water cooler talk, side talk and such, in the office, than at home, where phone calls can be taken when needed to, tracked with teams, outlook, and other IT stats software and hardware?
Comparing office workers (government or private sector) to healthcare providers in hospitals, cooks and service staff in restaurants, and stock clerks and cashiers in retail stores is a real apples-to-bowling-balls comparison.
I wish that people would understand this. The excuse I hear, sometimes, is that “we are service people” and that we are, BUT, we also do our work. I now being in finance and a team lead, I do not have time to dilly dally as our stats are tracked, collated and compared to the previous month, 6 months, year and going back as far as 5 or 6 years when our current finance system went into service.
Shouldn’t we have a return to pre-pandemic levels of bus service before getting more people working in downtown? Hey, let’s crowd the buses during an endemic! Or is the Mayor offering everyone free parking?
I would love to take the bus more, I am fortunate, my pass is paid for, BUT, I will not go on E line at night, not safe and pending Lynnwood opening, I will still have to take a Lyft home because the last mile will not start, we hope until September middle of month, maybe, if they hire enough drivers. They are hoping the link takes away need for a bus, which is great if you drive to the link station. Then most of those people will just drive to and from work, instead.
Why in holy living hell are the SPD recruitment ads featuring medical / rescue scenarios?
If folks want to become EMTs or lifeguards that’s great, but what in holy hell does that have to do with wanting to do proactive police work?
(I know there are big issues with proactive police work, but I spent 5 years in reform-oriented departments back in the day and to the extent you believe the police can contribute to preventing and solving serious crime, that’s what you want.)
Because it’s hard to recruit people with ads that depict running over civilians in crosswalks, showing up to scenes of violence an hour or two after the 911 call, and throwing away the personal possessions of people who have little more than the clothes on their backs. Almost certainly more successful to show police doing anything but their actual jobs.
Fair enough. While I probably differ from some folks here in believing good, equitable police work is possible, it’s crystal clear that’s not what SPD mostly does. It’s hands down an undisciplined, unprofessional, inequitable operation.
Washington State is currently rated at very high risk of infection from the latest COVID variants and rising. Great back-to-work timing, Harrell.