No overtime for property crime investigations through the end of the year, according to internal memo.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle Police Department is running so far over its overtime budget this year that officers have been barred from taking overtime except “to respond to urgent life safety events, address chronic public safety issues, or meet time sensitive administrative, contractual, or legal requirements (e.g., court appearances),” according to a November 18 memo.
“SPD must drastically reduce its overtime usage and costs in the remaining weeks of the year to address a projected budget overrun,” the memo reads. “To that end, ALL overtime usage must be pre-approved at the Assistant Chief / Executive Director level, including overtime in authorized categories.” (Emphasis in original).
For the rest of the year, according to the memo, SPD will not fund overtime for property crime investigations, including burglary and theft—effectively deprioritizing property crimes through the end of 2025. Police also can’t use overtime to investigate nonviolent drug crimes, attend community meetings, or work at the Real-Time Crime Center, among many other types of work for which officers routinely rack up overtime hours.
Other types of overtime—from homicide investigations to parking enforcement—will have to be approved directly by a member of Barnes’ command staff.
It’s unclear how SPD ended up spending down its overtime budget so much faster than planned.
SPD’s media relations team, headed by Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis, did not respond to detailed questions about the directive sent last week.
SPD routinely overshoots the overtime budget it receives from the city. The 2025 city budget included an additional $12.8 million for overtime, bringing SPD’s overtime budget to more than $53 million. That’s about $8 million more than the city spends on the entire Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team, a group of social workers who are authorized to respond to a limited number of 911 calls that don’t require police.
The extra overtime money still fell short, and even with an anticipated fundingboost from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s final supplemental budget, SPD was already planning to “absorb” 11,000 extra hours—about $1.2 million—by “repurposing unused funding from other parts of the budget,” according to a budget memo.
All those extra hours didn’t just go to patrol and crime investigations. Officers get paid overtime, plus a $225 premium, for working at special events and directing traffic outside sports stadiums—work that doesn’t need to be done by cops, but is guaranteed in their contract.
At a public budget meeting in September, Police Chief Shon Barnes defended SPD’s use of overtime, saying it was conceivable that the department will need less overtime in the future, as more new officers are hired and trained, “but because we’re in a very busy city, we do have a lot of special projects and priorities that we’re, quite frankly, trying to manage, and most of them today we are managing with overtime. … And it does take time… at best, a year before an officer, or maybe two years, before that [new] officer has fully realized [their] potential.”
Next year’s SPD budget actually assumes police will use less overtime—450,000 hours—than in previous years. A budget memo earlier this year noted that this was probably an unrealistic goal, given SPD’s tendency to use more overtime than it initially requests, and noted that if SPD continues to use its typical amount of overtime, the department will run up a $5.5 million deficit.
The city council, which includes several members who promised to “audit the budget” for waste when they ran in 2023, passed an amendment requiring SPD to include overtime data in its quarterly hiring reports “when available.”