Screenshot from an ongoing SPD recruitment campaign
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle Police Department has hired Epic Productions, an Arizona-based police recruiting firm, to “spearhead” its hiring campaign at a potential cost of nearly $6 million, according to internal documents.
In an email seeking volunteers to sit for portraits to create a “deep vault of photographs” for future recruiting campaigns, Assistant Chief Yvonne Underwood said the company “leverages a unique four-step process encompassing strategy, production, website design and management, as well as digital recruiting through online campaigns and social media management.”
Epic has produced recruitment campaigns for agencies across the country, including the Newark, Delaware police, the Virginia State Patrol, and the Chino Police Department. Like many other police recruitment ads, Epic’s videos highlight an array of dramatic scenarios and specialized units that most police officers will never experience and that are inaccessible to new recruits, rather than a realistic view of what it’s like to be a police officer day.
In the ads, officers operate bomb-defusing machines and drones, bust down doors, fly helicopters, and SCUBA dive as members of specialized marine units. It’s macho stuff—most of it performed by men, a strategy that seems at odds with the city’s purported commitment to have a 30-percent female recruit class by 2030.
At a time when other departments had to cut their budgets to help address a more than $250 million budget shortfall, SPD’s spending on ads has only ramped up. Since 2023, the city has spent more than $3.6 million on ads by the firm Copacino Fujikado, including a series of stylized cartoons that showed scenarios where specialized police officers—all men—saved two women who had been taken hostage, rescued someone who was drowning, and saved a bus rider’s life with CPR.
Another Copacino ad series, currently running on social media including Facebook and LinkedIn, features more male officers dramatically saving lives and training at the gym over a soundtrack that might be captioned “musical gunshots.” “THERE IS NO NO AVERAGE DAY,” the tagline says. The latest amendment to the Copacino Fujikado contract, issued in January, includes $25,000 a month for a “women-focused campaign.”
As we reported earlier this month, new police chief Shon Barnes (whom mayor Bruce Harrell recently credited, via press release, with a “record-breaking” first 100 days, citing no records) has already added at least four new staffers to his team, bypassing the ordinary hiring process to appoint his new staff directly. Barnes’ inner circle includes a new deputy police chief, a chief of staff, an “Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction,” and a “Chief Communications Officer”; at least two of the new staffers worked with or for Barnes in his previous jobs in Greensboro, North Carolina and Madison, Wisconsin.
Barely a week after expanding the new police chief’s personal staff, the department announced an internal hiring freeze for all civilian positions and a freeze on new consulting contracts. informing managers that they’ll need to seek approval from the mayor’s office for any new hires and that they should only seek to fill “positions critical for core service delivery.”
The email describes the limited spending freeze as a “temporary pause” that “[w]e anticipate … will be lifted later this summer.” Meanwhile, the most recent revenue forecast predicted the city will bring in $241 million less than previously anticipated over the next two years, a situation that could lead to steep budget cuts in most city departments.
Mayor Bruce Harrell turns to address a group of new SPD recruits at a hiring announcement Monday.
1. Earlier this week, we reported that the Seattle Police Department has only managed to hire five women, out of 60 new recruits, so far this year—a result that falls far short of the city’s “30 by 30” goal of having a 30-percent female recruit class by 2030. (To meet that goal, SPD would have had to hire 25 women so far; the five women represent 8 percent of the new recruits.
But the story is actually worse than that, because women are actually leaving the department at a much faster rate than SPD is recruiting new women to replace them.
In 2025 so far, according to the mayor’s office, 24 people have left SPD. Five of those were women. So not only does the net increase in female officers this year stand at zero, more than 20 percent of the people who have left the department are women. Put another way: SPD is losing women far faster than it is replacing them.
New police chief Shon Barnes said this week that the department was looking at why some women don’t pass recruiting requirements and may “give them another look,” adding that lots of departments have trouble hiring women.
He didn’t address ways the department could make women more likely to apply for jobs in the first place, since the real issue isn’t so much that women are applying and failing but that women don’t see SPD as a good place to work and advance their careers—understandably so.
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2. The final state budget adopted by the legislature last week failed to restore funding for a critical program that has successfully moved hundreds of unsheltered people indoors.
The program, a collaboration that includes Purpose Dignity Action, REACH, and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, resolves encampments in state rights-of-way by providing sustained outreach, intensive case management, and hotel-based shelter to former encampment residents. Unlike Seattle’s policy of aggressive sweeps, the program sticks with people and gets them indoors long-term; since 2022, more than two-thirds of the people in the program remain housed.
The budget the state legislature passed reduced funding for the program from $75 million to $45 million, which is just enough to continue services for people already enrolled in the program, but not enough to keep the “front door” open by resolving new encampments in the future.
Carolanne Sanders Lundgren, PDA’s chief campaigns officer, said that while nearly everyone, including people living in encampments, “agree that no one should be living in those conditions,” the systems that are in place to deal with encampments “do not do a good enough job of connecting people to real help that makes sense for their lives and circumstances.”
By slashing funds to the program, Sanders Lundgren said, the budget “halts all progress. The bigger picture is that as social and economic instability continue to grow, the need for resources like [right-of-way] outreach and temporary lodging–which provide immediate relief and a bridge to long-term stability–will only increase.”
Mayor Bruce Harrell and acting Police Chief Shon Barnes touted SPD’s latest hiring numbers on Monday. Standing in a gym at SPD’s training facility in Georgetown, the two men stood in front of by 15 members of the Seattle Police Department recruit class of 2025—a group of people Harrell said “truly represent our community.”
One thing was notably absent in the backdrop of new recruits: Women. SPD, which is facing multiple lawsuits from women alleging gender discrimination and harassment, has frequently said that recruiting more women is a top priority, but the department has not announced any specific efforts to improve the department’s well-documented culture of misogyny.
In 2021, SPD signed the “30 by 30” pledge, committing to have a 30 percent female recruit class by 2030.
To say they’ve failed to make progress is an understatement. Last year, SPD only managed to hire 12 women—just 14 percent of its 84 new hires. This year, that figure has dropped to just eight percent—an abysmal five women out of 60 officers hired so far this year.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a city so hyperfocused on increasing the number of bodies in police uniforms has failed to register alarm that almost all those new bodies are male. If your whole pitch for SPD is that you can make six figures and get a hiring bonus, you probably aren’t going to reach people who aren’t considering a job in law enforcement in the first place, particularly those who have heard about SPD’s reputation as a place where women get harassed and overlooked.
Still, it was a bit of a visual jump-scare to walk into SPD’s training facility and see that the city had chosen a phalanx of preternaturally buff young men to serve as the visual backdrop for their big hiring announcement. (One young woman became visible in the back of the group partway through the press conference.)
I asked Barnes—who received wide praise in Seattle for maintaining a better gender breakdown at the Madison, WI police, where he was chief before coming to Seattle—what the department was doing to address its male-dominated culture and proactively recruit more women. (Barnes had just finished telling three brief anecdotes in which various men expressed an interest in becoming a Seattle police officer to him personally).
“I looked at those numbers, and those numbers are not exceeding my expectations,” Barnes said. “Last year we hired 10 females,” he continued, misspeaking slightly. “This year we have five. So we still have some work to do on that.”
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“Maureen McGaugh”—the founder of 30 By 30— “is a close personal friend of mine,” Barnes continued. “And so I had a conversation this morning with staff about making sure that we give a second look to any female applicant before we give them a rejection letter—like, what’s going on there?”
“But you know, a lot of police departments struggle with” hiring women, Barnes said. “I think for me, it’s making sure that any applicant, no matter your demographics, you know that Seattle Police Department has a place for you.”
Overall, the 60 new hires represent a net increase of 36 officers, after factoring in 24 departures so far this year.
The police department remains by far the biggest portion of the city’s general fund budget. On Monday, Harrell said he would consider the new option of a 0.1 percent sales tax for public safety that the state legislature approved last week, using public safety as the “lens by which we will make decisions” on the upcoming budget. “That doesn’t mean that housing and child care and education and other climate change, the other strong components of our ecosystem, are not important,” Harrell said. But, he added, “we have to center public safety to make sure that our kids are safe.”
The local-option tax has to be spent on criminal justice, but the legislation adopts an expansive definition of that term that includes diversion, public defense, and prevention programs, which King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said he would want to fund, in addition to more prosecutors and cops, if the county passes their own version of the tax.
The city is facing a projected budget shortfall of $241 million over the next two years, on top of previous budget forecasts that showed growing deficits starting in 2026. Thanks to the council’s actions last year, the JumpStart tax, originally dedicated to four specific spending categories, is now an all-purpose bucket of money the city can slosh into the general fund at will, but the council may soon have to reckon with the volatility of a tax that depends overwhelmingly on fewer than a dozen companies.
PubliCola sat down with Interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr last week to talk about police recruitment and hiring, how the department plans to enforce the new SOAP and SODA laws, and how the process of hiring a new permanent police chief is going.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Erica C. Barnett (ECB): I want to talk about recruitment, starting with SPD’s advertising contract. I’ve heard there’s pushback from officers who say the ads (which show male officers performing heroic acts) that they’re not really representative of what an officer does on a day-to-day basis. What do you think of the ads, and do you think that they’re working?
Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr (SR) You know, I don’t know how you measure if they’re working or not. I know that the ads are not popular with police officers. I think there are more effective ways, in my opinion, to inspire and motivate people to apply the Seattle Police Department. One of the things that I have been pushing really hard for, and that we have actually incorporated into some of the videos that we have developed, show female officers doing action assignments in policing. And it’s important to me that we portray what real police work looks like. And sometimes real police work is, you know, sitting down, talking to a child and comforting them. Sometimes real police work is running down the street trying to catch somebody. I just think we need to have realistic ads, and we need to make sure that we’re showing all kinds of different officers doing the work.
ECB: And what about the hiring bonuses? Do you think that they’re the reason more people are applying to be police officers, or are the recent raises a bigger factor?
SR: There’s many different things that impact recruiting numbers—it could be the recruiting campaign, it could be the pay raises, it could be a whole number of things. I don’t have the expertise, and I don’t know who has the expertise, to parse out which one of these different factors increased recruiting.
But I do know that our numbers are up. The way that civil service is processing the applications and administering the testing—that’s being done differently. So instead of getting very large batches of names, it’s metered out so we’re getting a more manageable number of applications. We have really enhanced our backgrounding capacity by contracting with two different organizations that do some of the basic, mundane work of background investigations.
We’re just getting ready to sign a contract with a company that’s developed an app. When a recruit applies, they download the app on their phone, and the app is enhanced with AI, so that we’re staying in constant contact with that applicant. It’s called a high-touch strategy. We know with Millennials and Gen Z, a huge component of effective recruiting is to stay in close touch with them. Once a recruit has expressed interest in coming to work for us, we want to bend over backwards to make them feel welcome. We’re putting together a mentoring-type program where we assign applicants to a person in the department who then stays in contact with them.
Because what we’re really up against is, who can hire good recruits the fastest, and because we’re a large organization, historically, we’ve had a fairly slow process, and we’re trying to get more nimble at that so that we can offer a job much more quickly.
“I believe that the best predictor of future behavior is, how did this person behave in their previous job? What behavior have we seen them demonstrate? As opposed to, how are they responding in a testing environment?”
ECB: There has been a narrative on the current city council that the police test the city uses is too challenging, and that the city should shift to a test that most people pass. The Public Safety Civil Service Commission [the agency that administers the tests] has pointed out that the test was designed to help SPD comply with the consent decree by weeding out people who lack the aptitude to be police officers. You’ve defended adopting a test that lets more people through the gates. Why?
SR: My goal is to get the largest possible pool of candidates, and so I’m just looking at this pragmatically. That is, if I’m a person who wants to apply for a police job, I’m going to [choose] the website [with] the test that sends my results to, you know, 100 different agencies. It would take extra motivation for me to go to the other website that tests for a much smaller number of agencies. The things that we’re looking for, we will discover in checking references and doing background investigations, I don’t know of a written test that can predict bias or future intention of using force. It would take a lot to convince me that.
And again, I want a huge caveat. I am not an expert on this. I am simply saying from a pragmatic, common-sense standpoint, I believe that the best predictor of future behavior is, how did this person behave in their previous job? What behavior have we seen them demonstrate? As opposed to, how are they responding in a testing environment? In my experience, learning about previous behavior is where I would find the most value, and that’s where I want to put my focus.
ECB: What you’re saying makes me think of Kevin Dave [the officer who struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula, who had a history of alarming incidents in his previous position], to be honest. There was so much previous behavior there that SPD, I think, should have caught and didn’t. He obviously made it through the testing and hiring process. So how do you prevent people like that from getting hired in the future, especially if you make it easier to pass the test?
SR: We have to do a much better backgrounding process. I don’t know what happened in that case. To be honest, I haven’t reviewed the case yet, because I’m still waiting for [the Office of Police Accountability] to do their investigation. So when I get the investigation from them, I will review the entire file. I’m really, really surprised to hear that he was hired with that that information in his background, and I am going to look at what happened. How did we miss that, or if we knew it, why on earth did we hire him? I don’t have the answers to that. But that’s disturbing. I can’t defend that. I don’t know why it happened.
“I don’t think the polygraph should ever be used as a conclusion to anything.”
ECB: One of the things that you have talked about is changing the minimum qualifications to be an officer and considering potentially disqualifying factors on a “case by case basis.”
SR: So I’ll give you two specific examples. One: I have directed the unit to stop doing the oral board panels, and that’s based on what I’ve learned—[that] the value added by an oral board panel is very, very low. And there is research that oral board panels are more likely to introduce bias. [In an oral board], you have a panel of representatives, usually from the department, and what you’re testing is the person’s ability to conduct themselves well during an interview. We do an extensive personal interview of the applicant so we get an idea about their communication skills, their ability to engage in a human conversation, I just don’t think that there is a lot of value added by conducting an oral board. It takes up time and it slows down the process, and I am very skeptical about the value that it adds.
We had another practice: If a person failed their polygraph exam, they were immediately eliminated. I don’t think the polygraph should ever be used as a conclusion to anything. I had experience in the sheriff’s office where we had candidates that had excellent backgrounds, they had excellent job references, and failed the polygraph, and my practice was, let’s interview them and find out why they failed the polygraph, and if we came up with a plausible explanation, then we’re going to go ahead and hire you because all of the predictive behavior that we know about you, like prior performance, all that. Even the state Criminal Justice Training Commission requirements don’t set a threshold for what constitutes passing a polygraph. It simply has to be administered, which I think is fine.
Rahr answered press questions in May after Mayor Bruce Harrell announced her appointment.
ECB: What about other things in people’s backgrounds that might be disqualifying under SPD’s current standards, like reckless driving?
SR: I do know that driving behavior is another one of those areas where past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior. So depending on what the what the person’s age was [and] how often they got traffic citations, that would be more of a case by case basis.
I certainly don’t want to unnecessarily weed out a good candidate. And I think as we, as we open our mind to people with different backgrounds and different life experiences, I think we need to really be thoughtful about, you know, is this really a disqualifier?
I mean, I remember when having a tattoo was a disqualifier. My God, we wouldn’t have any cops if having tattoos was a disqualifier. And, you know, wearing a beard. Those two things, 20 years ago, were unthinkable, and there were all sorts of beliefs about the kind of people who get tattoos and have beards.
1. The Seattle Police Department recently released a set of recruitment ads featuring cartoon versions of police officers in various heroic scenarios—saving a bus rider’s
life with CPR, saving a man from drowning, and saving two women from a hostage situation—each based on “a real story of the Seattle Police Department,” according to the ads.
Last year, PubliCola reported that SPD had signed a $2.6 million contract with the Seattle-based marketing firm Copacino Fujikado to produce a marketing campaign, including video and radio ads, aimed at boosting recruitment. Copacino Fujikado was able to procure the contract without competitive bidding because it was structured as a “piggyback” onto an existing contract the company signed with Sound Transit in 2018.
The ads each feature what appears to be a white, male officer rescuing people from various scenarios. Over each, a female narrator describes the scenario in a tone of deep, almost reverent concern. “On a weekday afternoon in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood, an emergency dispatch went out on the radio. A man on a bus wasn’t breathing,” the narrator intones on the first ad, titled “First On the Scene”:
“The first to arrive was the newest officer in the North Precinct. Just weeks out from the academy. He approached the bus. … The officer could see the man’s face was pale. Even from afar, he knew that he had to take action quickly.” The ad continues in this overwrought style until the final scene, when the man—rescued by CPR—looks into the officer’s eyes and says “Thank you” before the image dissolves into a blue SPD badge on a white background. “A job with impact. From the first second,” it reads.
The other two ads are similar, each featuring what appears to be a young, white male officer in the hero role. (SPD has struggled to recruit officers who don’t fit this stereotype, particularly women, amid widespread complaints that the culture of the department is unwelcoming and misogynistic.) In one video, an officer saves a man from drowning; in the other, he rescues two women, one of them weeping and bound with rope, from a man holding them hostage in an apartment.
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s mid-year supplemental budget includes $800,000 for Cupertino Fujikado to produce additional ads and marketing materials for the recruitment campaign. In an announcement last month, the CEO of the firm, Scott Foreman, said, “We are proud to share these untold stories, which demonstrate the depth and richness of a career in the Seattle Police Department and the diverse opportunities available within the department.”
A spokesman for Harrell noted that SPD recruitment has increased since “we’ve ramped up our advertising,” increasing to 16 applications a day, on average, in July. However, most of that increase occurred well before the current ad campaign. According to a June 16 announcement from the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, applications increased to an average of 15 a day in May and June. While the PSCSC noted SPD’s marketing efforts, a more influential factor might be the 24 percent raises that went into effect under a new police contract adopted in May that raised the starting salary for a brand-new officer to $103,000 a year—more than any other police department in the region.
2. On Monday, Mayor Harrell informed thousands of city and county employees that they will be required to return to their offices or work sites three days a week starting in November. King County Executive Dow Constantine sent a similar email to county employees, saying he was asking department leaders to come up with a return-to-office plan by next year, and Sound Transit is expected to follow suit.
The city, Harrell told employees, is “committed to learning the best lessons from the pandemic—and that includes recognizing the benefits of in-person work.
According to Harrell’s “return to worksite” email, working in physical offices has already “improved collaboration, a strengthened ability to foster conversations and explore new ideas, enhanced community and relationship building, and a real commitment to mentorship and employee growth, while still allowing flexibility that remote work can provide.” This is a common, if largely unsupported, argument for traditional office arrangements: Get everybody back at the watercooler, and those creative juices will really have a chance to flow!
Surveys of US workers have shown over and over that employees greatly prefer remote work because it provides better work-life balance, allows daytime flexibility (particularly for caregivers, who tend to be women), and gives people more autonomy over their own time. Working from home can also reduce distractions, allowing people to work in a more quiet and controlled environment than a busy, noisy office. It also eliminates commutes, which can add hours of stressful unpaid time to every work day, clogging freeways, and contributing to climate change, a problem the city of Seattle is constantly claiming it wants to address.
And while Harrell has suggested it is the obligation of workers, including government workers, to save businesses in downtown Seattle by coming back to the area and spending money there, working from home benefits businesses in neighborhoods outside the downtown core, which are also part of Harrell’s “One Seattle.”
Harrell’s email does not cite any data or examples of concrete benefits from office work.
After Harrell’s announcement, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera released her own statement, saying Harrell’s order was inadequate and that city employees “can’t provide” the “most complete and highest quality services” unless they are physically located at desks in downtown Seattle. Rivera said she supports an immediate four-day-a-week in-office mandate.
Council members say no to homelessness recommendations; equitable transportation advocates decry proposals to cut community-based programs; and police recruits won’t get a chance to take an easier hiring test any time soon.
1. Seattle City Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Sara Nelson declined to sign off on a set of recommendations for responding to encampments at a King County Board of Health meeting yesterday; the recommendations, created by the Board of Health’s homelessness and health work group, include limits on encampment removals, adopting harm-reduction policies such as a “housing first” approach to people with addiction, and increasing access to mental health and substance disorder treatment.
“If we do not remove [encampments], resolve, whatever it is, we are complicit in allowing a situation where more and more people fall into or [fall] deeper into addiction and chronic homelessness because their lives are further disrupted,” Nelson said. “I think that it’s also an issue of nomenclature— ‘forced removal’ versus ‘resolution’… so much depends on the words in the statement, and so therefore, for these reasons, I will not be signing on.”
Kettle, who represents downtown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia, said, “I’ve often said that we need to lead with compassion, we need to start with the empathy, but then we also have to have the wisdom to understand that we have the broader community to also look after.” Kettle praised the work of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s encampment removal team, the Unified Care Team, and said he liked the model at the Salmon Bay tiny house village and RV safe lot in Interbay, which “gives people the ability to basically graduate from the RV to a tiny home.”
King County Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Jorge Baron, who are both on the Board of Health, signed on to the “call to action.”
2. In response to proposals to cut funding for community-initiated transportation safety projects from the 2024 transportation levy, the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Transportation Equity Workgroup wrote a letter to the council saying the proposed cuts “will exclude your marginalized constituents who rely on a safe and accessible transportation system for their everyday needs.”
PubliCola reported this week on amendments by Councilmembers Rob Saka, Cathy Moore, and Sara Nelson to scale back or (in the case of Moore’s amendment) eliminate a proposed new participatory budgeting program aimed at building 16 projects identified and “co-created” by historically marginalized communities. Moore and Saka proposed moving funds from the proposed new program, known as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program, into a separate fund for projects council members themselves would select.
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“After expressing our concerns at the previous two council meetings through public comments and letters, we are disappointed in your lack of commitments to the City of Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI) through cuts to equitable investments that center low-income, BIPOC, immigrant, refugee, disabled, and aging communities,” the workgroup wrote.
“Community-driven projects take time in order to engage those who have been historically disengaged from city planning processes due to barriers such as: language access, lack of trust, and capacity. Relying on district-level decision-making only, as outlined in councilmember amendments, does not adequately address these barriers to full participation, and risks neglecting community-identified safety concerns in underserved areas.”
3. The president of the company that created Seattle’s police officer exams, which some City Council members have suggested replacing with a test that has a higher passing rate, appeared at a meeting of the independent Public Safety Civil Service Commission on Thursday to explain how the test is designed to predict future job performance. The Seattle Police Department began using the test, created by the National Testing Network in collaboration with SPD, in the wake of a consent decree by the US Department of Justice in 2012.
To “validate” that the test predicts job performance, NTN president Carl Swander told the commission, the company compares police officers’ test scores, which are ranked, with their subsequent on-the-job performance evaluations. Swander said by demonstrating that “at [a higher score level], people are more likely to do better than at [a lower] score level,” NTN can create a “cut score”—the maximum passing score—that weeds out people who are obviously unqualified to be police officers.
Other tests, like the Public Safety Testing exam that City Council President Sara Nelson has suggested as an alternative to the NTN test, don’t “actually substantiate… that you’re that what you’re doing is predictive of job performance,” Swander said. Ninety percent of applicants who take the PST test pass it, compared to a 73 pass rate for the NTN exam.
PSCSC director Andrea Scheele also confirmed that if Seattle did contract with PST in the future, it would have to create a custom exam for Seattle, which “eliminates or reduces, at least, the benefit of working with that company.” Nelson and other proponents of changing the hiring test have suggested that switching to PST would allow applicants to submit their test results to multiple agencies at the same time.
A report the commission issued earlier this week notes that the PST test “is not an option” because the company “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now.”
But the story is actually worse than that, because women are actually leaving the department at a much faster rate than SPD is recruiting new women to replace them.
“If we do not remove [encampments], resolve, whatever it is, we are complicit in allowing a situation where more and more people fall into or [fall] deeper into addiction and chronic homelessness because their lives are further disrupted,” Nelson said. “I think that it’s also an issue of nomenclature— ‘forced removal’ versus ‘resolution’… so much depends on the words in the statement, and so therefore, for these reasons, I will not be signing on.”