By Erica C. Barnett
In a Facebook post yesterday, former Seattle police chief Carmen Best inadvertently revealed that new SPD Chief Shon Barnes has hired retired police lieutenant Alex Ricketts to serve as his right-hand man in Seattle. Ricketts was most recently a community relations specialist for Barnes in Madison, WI, where Barnes was police chief before coming to Seattle; he previously worked with Barnes in Greensboro, SC, where Barnes was a captain.
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“Season final, Kraken lost after a great effort!” Best wrote. “Awesome to welcome Seattle Police Department new Chief of Staff who was there with our Seattle Police Chief,” Best wrote. The second of four photos included in the post shows Best, Barnes, and others posing in what appears to be a suite at Climate Pledge Arena; in the photo, Ricketts is wearing a sweatshirt for Kappa Alpha Psi, the Black fraternity to which both he and Barnes belong, according to publicly available records.
Shortly after the post went up, Best edited the post to remove the references to Barnes and his chief of staff.
A spokesperson for SPD declined to confirm or deny Ricketts’ appointment.
The most recent SPD chief of staff was Jamie Tompkins, who resigned last year after investigators accused her of lying and faking a handwriting sample during an investigation into an alleged inappropriate relationship with former chief Adrian Diaz.
This is news?
When your raison d’etre is to cast every SPD move in a suspicious or disparaging light, yes…this is news.
When the previous two permanent chiefs both massively mishandled the force and the force has been under a consent decree for years and years, bringing in people who don’t understand the regional politics and history might not be the greatest idea. It’d be one thing if one of the positions was A trusted colleague from his previous roles. But all of them? That seems both newsworthy and eyebrow-raise- worthy.