By Erica C. Barnett

During a meeting of the Seattle City Council’s public safety committee meeting Tuesday, the council made it through through a nearly hour-long presentation and discussion of the 30 by 30 Initiative—a nationwide effort to hire more female police officers, which Seattle officially joined in 2021—with almost no mention of the problem female SPD officers cited most often as a barrier to recruitment and retention: The widespread culture of misogyny, gender discrimination, and harassment at the department.

Instead, SPD representatives and council members talked at length about the need to accommodate women while they are pregnant and parenting small children, by providing rooms for milk pumping, flexible schedules, and access to child care.

Maritza Rivera recalled having no appropriate place to pump breast milk when she worked for the federal government in the early 2000s, adding that her bosses were “both women and mothers. So we as women need to do better for other women.” Saka, who has talked about his parental obligations after showing up late to council meetings, said it was important for dads like him to talk openly about the work they do raising their kids. And committee chair Bob Kettle, until recently a stay-at-home dad, added that men “do need to lead by example, both in terms of what we’re doing, but also in support of partners, spouses, mothers, wives, all the above.”

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In addition to accommodations for mothers, SPD representatives said the department has started providing women-only courses in defensive tactics; re-established a mentoring program; instituted “affinity groups” where people of the same race or gender can support each other; created videos featuring women (and a voiceover that sounds a lot like Diaz’ former chief of staff Jamie Tompkins) for SPD’s hiring page; and provided a management training course in “trust-centered leadership” to 24 SPD officers, with plans for another 240 officers to go through the class next year.

Child care, flexible schedules, and dedicated milk-pumping spaces are all important priorities—as are mentors, safe spaces for discussion, and free tampons, for that matter.

But those baseline needs, which the city has been aware of for many years, were far from the onlyissues women in the department identified when asked about their experiences working for SPD; in fact, the takeaway from the city’s 30 by 30 focus groups was that men, through their actions toward women, have made SPD a bad workplace for women. Several female SPD staffers have active, ongoing discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits and complaints against the department and individual men who work there, including former police chief Adrian Diaz, who is still on the force after Mayor Bruce Harrell removed him as chief last year. But you’d never know that from SPD’s presentation or the council discussion, which focused almost entirely on women themselves.

It’s unlikely that child care stipends, pumping rooms, and time off to take care of children will be enough to boost recruitment, and certainly not retention, if the larger underlying issues specific to the Seattle Police Department remain unaddressed. Until that happens, 30 by 30 will likely be—as Kettle put it Tuesday—a purely “aspirational” goal.