A city report showed one-time bonuses have no effect on police hiring. The Harrell Administration rewrote it to say the opposite.

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council begins the process of dissecting and amending Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget, council members are already pushing back on the mayor’s police hiring plan, which funds a net increase of 66 new officers through 2028. The budget includes around $56 million in raises for existing SPD officers; it also incorporates SPD’s decision, which went into effect September 1, to eliminate hiring bonuses for new and transferring officers, saving the city a couple million dollars a year.

The bonuses, which officers receive in two payments (one when they’re hired, the second about a year later) range from $7,500 for first-time recruits to $50,000 for officers with prior police training and experience. Between July 2022 and May 2026, they’ve cost the city around $3 million, with another $1.4 million in second payments outstanding, according to SPD’s most recent data.

Council members, including public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, have pushed back on the decision to end hiring bonuses, which was a cost-saving move by SPD. At a budget committee meeting late last month, Kettle called the payments an effective tool for maintaining the hirng “momentum” SPD has achieved since last year.

Addressing interim Police Chief Andre Sayles, Kettle asked: “If we get lateral transfers, isn’t [paying the bonuses] a net positive for us?”

“Yes, I believe looking at a way to provide the incentive for lateral hires, specifically here in the state of Washington, will be ideal,” Sayles agreed. “Removing those incentives, particularly for lateral officers, has the potential to put us behind” neighboring jurisdictions, he added.

Since the city adopted the incentives as a way to boost hiring during a post-pandemic slump (and boosted the lateral bonuses to $50,000 in 2023), the efficacy of offering the one-time payments has gone (mostly) unquestioned,

But an unpublished 2024 analysis by the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation, based on a survey of newly hired officers and click-through rates on ads advertising various benefits of joining SPD, found that hiring bonuses weren’t a significant factor in new officers’ decision to apply for jobs at SPD. Instead, the analysis found that recruits were drawn by SPD’s competitive salary and benefits—which, at the time, were lower than the six-figure starting salaries SPD offers today.

PubliCola obtained several early drafts of the report, including comments and suggested edits, through a records request made last year.

“This evaluation found that incentive pay did not significantly impact police hiring numbers compared to other recruitment factors within the timeframe of the analysis,” one draft read. “The incentive alone is not enough to motivate people to join the Seattle Police Department,” another version concluded.

“The City should not continue the use of the hiring incentive as currently designed as an ongoing recruitment strategy,” one draft recommended..

Former mayor Harrell’s office, including then-deputy mayor Tim Burgess, public safety advisor Sarah Smith, and communications staffers, raised objections about almost every substantive element of report, from its tone, which they found too negative, to its conclusions, which they said the data didn’t support. “I don’t believe the evaluation is persuasive since the key findings are speculative,” Burgess wrote in January 2024. Every version of the report we reviewed was littered with comments from the mayor’s staff, highlighting the Harrell administration’s direct intervention in what was supposed to be an independent analysis by OPI.

By the time the mayor’s office was done with the report, it recommended keeping the hiring bonuses, rather than eliminating them.

Information that was unflattering to the program—like the fact that “100% of the employees who were hired and left since August 2022 were people of color,” as yet another draft put it—as was the fact that officers overwhelmingly mentioned salary as the main reason they applied. (Indirectly verifying this fairly intuitive survey result, SPD hiring spiked immediately after a new contract gave first-time officers a starting salary of $126,000 after a six-month training period.)

The report no longer mentioned that not one officer had mentioned hiring incentives in their self-reported reasons for working at SPD, nor that incentives ranked in the middle (above “in-person recruiting” and “personal referral” but under “salary” and “benefits”) on a five-item list that was included in the survey.

The final, public version of the report, now whittled down to just over four pages plus a chart of local police salaries, concluded, contrary to previous drafts, that it was “impossible to pinpoint the hiring incentive’s specific effect with the available data, It is clear from the survey and A/B testing that the hiring incentive is compelling to some applicants yet does not have as strong an effect as salary and benefits.”

“Given SPD’s staffing challenges, the relatively low cost, and the fact that other competing jurisdictions continue to provide the incentive, we recommend the continued use of hiring incentives,” the report now said (bold in original).

The new report also put a positive spin on the dismal finding that hiring incentives only beat out referrals and in-person recruitment in a multiple-choice question about people’s motivation for applying. “All but two hires selected incentive pay as having some level of importance in their decision to become a police officer,”  the rewritten report concluded. “Of these respondents, 23% ranked incentive pay first or second in importance, 41% ranked it as third, and 36% ranked it as fourth or fifth.”

Speaking to PubliCola last year, staff who were involved in the creation of the report expressed intense frustration at being asked to turn their office into one called a “propaganda arm of the city” by the Harrell Administration. “We tried to soften the language to appease them,” that staffer said, but the report ended up making claims that just weren’t supported by the data. “I’m not going to spend my waking outs doing that,” the staffer said; that staffer, and another staffer who worked on the report, quit their jobs and left the city over what they saw as interference in their work that compromised its integrity.

The report that found hiring incentives have no effect is based on the only available data, which is old. The city council only required a single report on hiring incentives, eliminating the reporting requirement when they increased the lateral bonus to $50,000 in 2024. But given that new recruits now earn six-figure salaries on Day 1, and pay for lateral officers has increased commensurately, it seems likely that salary is more of a motivating factor now, not less. Ending the bonuses now will help show whether Kettle and the police chief are right. If hiring craters, even at the newly inflated salaries, the council could look for money in next year’s  budget to reinstate them. That would be a “data-driven” approach—the kind this council routinely says they support.