The contract, which provides $126,000 paychecks to rookie cops after 6 months, also imposes restrictions on the CARE team of unarmed first responders, prohibiting them from responding without a police escort on most calls.

By Erica C. Barnett

With three council members voting “no,” the city council approved a new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that gives rookie cops a starting salary of $118,000—with an automatic bump to $126,000 after just six months—with few of the new accountability requirements Seattle residents were promised in 2024, when the council approved SPOG’s most recent retroactive contract.

The 2024 contract gave cops retroactive pay increases of 23 percent; the contract adopted Tuesday, which goes through 2027, gives them additional raises of 42 percent over the next two years.

The deal, which goes through the end of 2027,still falls far short of implementing accountability legislation the city passed in 2017. That legislation called for the city’s Office of Police Accountability and Office of Inspector General to have full subpoena power when investigating misconduct (to date, they’re only allowed to subpoena public records, precluding access to things like text messages on officers’ personal phones). It also called for an end to outside arbitration, a process that allows officers to appeal disciplinary decisions to private arbitrators outside Seattle, and a lower standard of proof for misconduct allegations. None of these measures are in the contract; only one, the standard of proof, will be subject to an additional arbitration process (meaning it could still happen if the city wins its case against SPOG.)

In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved. Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for “less than serious” misconduct, theoretically freeing up OPA to investigate more serious claims.

It’s unclear what will happen to cases involving professionalism and conduct unbecoming an officer, which are largely subjective; we’ve asked SPD and OPA whether a case like that of Daniel Auderer, who defended his offensive jokes about the police killing of 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula as “gallows humor,” would be dealt with internally under the new rules and never see the light of day.

“This has been part of a two year process to get here, two years for us on the [Labor Relations Policy Committee] and the Select Labor Committee. This is not a rushed process,” public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said. “One of the things I’m constantly looking at is to create a functional criminal justice—a functional public safety system. This is what we’re doing with this agreement.”

Three council members voted against the agreement—an unprecedented number in recent years. Councilmember Rob Saka, who announced his opposition in a press release and op/ed in the Stranger, said he couldn’t support giving such large raises to police without extracting some accountability concessions.

“I have lived through encounters where the actions of an officer cross the line, where I felt fear rather than protection. I’ve experienced police brutality firsthand,” Saka said. “These moments have shaped me, and I carry them with me every single day, not with resentment or animus, but with responsibility. No person in Seattle should ever feel powerless, unseen or vulnerable to unequal justice and an encounter with law enforcement.”

Saka also noted that the huge pay increases come at an increasing cost—by 2027, an estimated budget increase of $57 million a year— at a time when the city is facing major budget deficits and federal cuts to programs that serve vulnerable people.

The newest councilmember, Eddie Lin, described an incident in his 20s when a cop in St. Paul, Minnesota “ended up putting his hands around my throat while I was handcuffed in the back of the police car and threatening me” after he refused to give up the name of a drunk and disorderly friend who had escaped arrest. After driving him around town for half an hour and “continuing to tell me how they were going to ruin my life,” the officer threw Lin in jail, where he said he stayed “for several nights.” Later, he got pulled over by the same cop and was terrified the same thing would happen again.

“There’s one harm when misconduct occurs,” Lin said. “There’s another harm, which is just as serious, when that misconduct does not get addressed. And if we really want to move toward a more positive relationship between community and the police, toward a comprehensive approach, toward public safety, accountability has to be our priority.”

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Lin also noted that the contract includes no mention of the department’s purported goal of having a recruit class that is 30 percent women by 2030. In 2025, less than 10 percent of SPD’s new hires have been women, and the department never bothered to fill a position that was supposed to help with this goal.

Alexis Mercedes Rinck also voted against the contract, saying the agreement  fails to include meaningful accountability provisions that our community has demanding, has been demanding for years. … In short, this contract asks Seattle taxpayers to invest more in policing without requiring more accountability in return, and that’s not a deal I can support.”

Under the new contract, the CARE Team, a group of social workers who respond to calls that don’t require an armed police response,,will be allowed to dispatch without police officers present, a change Mayor Bruce Harrell and many council members have touted as a significant win. (The CARE Department, which includes the 911 call center, is a part of the SPOG contract because, according to SPOG, their work impacts police officers’ working conditions and therefore must be approved by the guild.)

But as PubliCola reported in October, the deal with CARE effectively prohibits them from responding to most crisis calls, forcing them to call police instead of responding if they see any drugs or drug paraphernalia, such as foil; if the person in crisis is anywhere besides a public sidewalk or public building, such as a library; or if the person is in a homeless encampment, among a long list of restrictions.

CARE Department Chief Amy Barden told PubliCola she’s “happy that the process has concluded” and hopeful that police sergeants will voluntarily refer calls to CARE, as she said they did in 2023 and 2024. “If we return to the level of collaboration that we had for so long, then the contract will not be nearly as restrictive to the work,” Barden said.

But relying on police to voluntarily work with CARE is different than allowing CARE team members to use their judgment and discretion, Barden added. “The neighbors that I’m most interested in helping are people who are struggling with substance use and people who are unsheltered, and those two populations are named specifically in the exclusionary criteria, so that’s a problem.”

She also criticized the prohibition on responding to crises in non-public spaces, such as businesses, comparing it to a medical response. “If somebody’s having a stroke in the lobby of a business, versus a public space, it doesn’t make it not a stroke. If it’s happening in the city of Seattle, there should be a team who goes to that event regardless of location.”

The agreement resolves some grievances between the city and SPOG by cutting additional checks to cops who worked at various special events, such as Seahawks games, in the past; officers who worked at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event in 2022, for example, will receive double their hourly pay plus a full day of vacation, while those who worked at the Seahawks game on October 7, 2021 will get extra pay equal to 10 hours of work. The agreement also provides free parking to 19 additional civilian SPD employees, including the HR unit and a front desk staffer, who work desk jobs at police headquarters downtown—a perk most city employees do not receive.

After the three councilmembers who opposed the contract spoke, Councilmember Dan Strauss began to justify voting yes on the contract, saying it was the only way to “move accountability forward” and allow CARE to assist more people. As a group of people who had testified against the contract earlier began to boo and shout, calling Strauss “complicit in the murders” of people like Christian Nelson, who was shot and killed by SPD officers near the Othello light rail station last week, the council moved quickly to vote, curtailing further speeches. While most of the council left to meet from their offices, Lin, Strauss, and Rinck remained at the dais, their expressions ranging from pained (Rinck) to detached (Strauss) as the crowd chanted “knees off our necks,” “jail killer cops,” and “shame!”

The contract now heads to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s desk.