By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that, for the first time since before the COVID pandemic, more people are entering the Seattle Police Department than leaving it—precisely one more person, but still a step in the right direction for advocates of a larger police force. However, a closer look at those numbers reveals that the latest group of applicants, as well as the smaller cohort that makes it through the hiring process, are still overwhelmingly male—a bad sign for the city’s goal of having an incoming recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030.

According to numbers provided by the mayor’s office, 86 percent of the 84 new officers hired in 2024 were men, and 14 percent were women. Those numbers closely mirror the larger group that applied for police jobs last year; women also represented 14 percent of that group, with 84 percent identifying as male, 0.7 percent as trans or nonbinary, and 1 percent declining to identify their gender.

SPD has signed on to the national 30X 30 initiative, committing to have a recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030. It’s a lofty goal for an overwhelmingly male department whose culture has been described by women who work there as misogynistic, discriminatory, and rife with sexual harassment.

SPD’s most recent permanent chief, Adrian Diaz, was removed from his job after being accused of sexual harassment and discrimination, and finally got fired last year after an investigation revealed he had an inappropriate relationship with a woman he hired and promoted and lied to investigators to cover it up.

Mayor Bruce Harrell has touted the gender-equalizing credentials of his police chief nominee, Shon Barnes, who was police chief in Madison, Wisconsin for just under four years. ” Chief Barnes brings proven experience advancing the Madison Police Department’s inclusive workforce initiative that has resulted in 28% of officers being women,” Harrell said in his announcement.

In reality, Madison’s police force has been a national anomaly for decades, and hit the 28 percent level Harrell credited to Barnes four years before Barnes joined the department in 2021. Madison’s recruit class was 35 percent female in 2023 before declining to 21 percent in 2024, according to the city. Barnes may well be the best pick for Seattle’s police chief (the mayor did not reveal who any of the other candidates were prior to choosing Barnes, and there was no public selection process), but he didn’t create a culture where women see policing as a viable career option in Madison; he joined a department that had spent decades creating and nurturing that culture.

Seattle is a larger department with a reputation as a place where women’s complaints about misogyny, sexual harassment, and discrimination are not taken seriously. Even as he demoted former police chief Diaz because multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and discrimination, Harrell kept him on at his previous salary and praised him as a man of unimpeachable integrity. For Barnes, fixing that culture—and putting SPD on track to more than double the number of women who want to work there over the next five years—will be a more significant challenge than joining a department that has already done the work.