Tag: police hiring incentives

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Police

Harrell’s Police Hiring Plan Looks Awfully Familiar
Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz and Mayor Bruce Harrell
Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz and Mayor Bruce Harrell at SPD headquarters Wednesday

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell and Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz announced a $2 million “recruitment and retention plan”  for Seattle police officers that would provide bonuses of up to $30,000 to trained officers from elsewhere who join the department and up to $7,500 to new recruits, putting Seattle’s hiring incentives roughly in line with those in other nearby cities. The city has lost 109 officers this year, according to Diaz, about two-thirds of them to retirement.

To make up for those losses, Harrell wants to hire about 500 new officers over the next five years, increasing the number of officers  from less than 1,000 to at least 1,400—the same number SPD has been saying it needs since at least 2020, when attrition first hit record-breaking highs. The $2 million investment would include about $1 million the city council released for recruitment incentives earlier this year, plus an additional $1 million that would require council approval.

Entry-level police officers start out making around $84,000 a year. That figure doesn’t not counting overtime and off-duty work, like directing traffic at parking garages and construction sites, which can bump officers’ take-home pay well into the six figures.

Despite the fact that experienced officers are still leaving the department in large numbers, Harrell’s proposal does not include retention bonuses for people already working in the department—a seeming oversight that Diaz said would be rectified during negotiations with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which are ongoing.

“It’s been nearly two years since the Council requested an analysis of what types of 911 calls could be responded to without police involvement. … Despite consistent requests from myself and other Councilmembers to act with urgency, we have not received a favorable response from the executive.”—Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold

“Mayor Harrell’s proposal includes a competitive economic package to focus on retention,” Diaz said, but “we can’t highlight a dollar amount.” In addition to more money for officers, Diaz said, “We’re hoping to get a little bit more time off for officers, because, you know, in this line of work, there’s a lot of stress” from responding to calls and dealing with traumatic situations. The retention proposal also includes incentives for higher education, more predictable shifts, and “a comprehensive wellness program.”

None of the proposals Harrell rolled out this week are particularly unique, and some are already in the works, such as the potential transition to four-day work weeks with ten-hour shifts. Nor have hiring incentives been particularly effective at recruiting qualified officers, particularly experienced “lateral” hires from other police departments, in the past.

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A Seattle Department of Human Resources review of two different hiring bonus programs from 2019 and 2021 found that hiring bonuses had little or no effect on actual hires, although 18 percent of people who applied for SPD jobs in 2019 said the bonus was one reason they put in an application. Cities across the country are struggling to recruit and retain police officers, and Diaz has noted that officers who leave the department often cite working conditions and morale as reasons for quitting.

When existing employees see new hires walking through the door with tens of thousands of dollars in their pockets, that can create its own strain on morale. Meanwhile, many other departments are facing similar recruitment and retention issues, but have not inspired a similar level of attention and investment from the city—something council public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold has pointed out on many occasions.

In a statement, Herbold said she agrees with Harrell that “hiring police officers is important,” but added that the city has taken few tangible steps toward setting up an alternative response system for situations that don’t require an armed response.

“We can’t keep asking police officers to direct traffic and help people in mental health crises when we don’t have enough officers to investigate sexual assaults or respond to 911 calls,” Herbold said. “It’s been nearly two years since the Council requested an analysis of what types of 911 calls could be responded to without police involvement. … Despite consistent requests from myself and other Councilmembers to act with urgency, we have not received a favorable response from the executive.”

City Council, Development, Elections, Equity, homelessness, King County, labor, Mayor Harrell, Parks, Police

Saving Invasive Tree Cost City $45,000; Hiring Bonuses Would Have Blown Up SPD Budget; Assaults at Sweeps Involved Pine Cones, “Veiled Threats”; Get Ready for Even-Year Elections?

1. Last week, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told PubliCola that the city has to make sure police are present at every encampment removal because Parks Department workers, who are in charge of removing tents and disposing of unsheltered people’s belongings, were being “assaulted” by “protesters” who show up at sweeps. The parks workers’ union raised the issue, Washington said, because the workers didn’t feel safe without police in the area.

Although we’ve been present at many encampment removals, PubliCola couldn’t remember seeing or hearing about any physical assaults by mutual aid workers who show up at sweeps—including from local TV news reporters, who are generally eager to jump on any drama related to homelessness.  Asked for clarification, a Parks Department spokeswoman said Parks employees had been both threatened and physically assaulted.

For example, the spokeswoman said, “a staff person was pushed during a removal, protestors have thrown rocks and pinecones at staff, a protestor grabbed the arm of staff while they were posting removal notices, protestors have screamed in staff members’ faces, and protesters have written veiled threats toward specific staff including naming their family members.”

The Seattle Police Department has lost about 400 officers since the beginning of 2020, and continues to lose more officers than it hires.

The Parks Department did not directly respond to a question about whether the Parks union requested and received a contract modification or other written agreement to ensure police would be present at all encampment removals. “When our labor partners came to us with employee safety concerns, we worked together to address them and act,” the spokeswoman said.

“A staff person was pushed during a removal, protestors have thrown rocks and pinecones at staff, a protestor grabbed the arm of staff while they were posting removal notices, protestors have screamed in staff members’ faces, and protesters have written veiled threats toward specific staff including naming their family members.”

2. As the West Seattle Blog reported last week, the Seattle Department of Transportation decided to “spare” a large, multi-trunked horse chestnut tree in West Seattle whose roots have caused the sidewalk to buckle, making it unsafe for pedestrians. SDOT said it had not decided what to do about the tree, which is at least several decades old, but was glad to have found a solution that doesn’t require cutting down the tree. 

The solution, which the Seattle Times summarized as “a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” comes at a cost to the city: About $45,000, according to a spokesman for SDOT, to build a new “parallel/corner curb ramp with minimal tree root trimming that should not harm the tree” and move a fire hydrant across the street.

It’s unclear what impact the success of this tree protest will have on future attempts to remove trees that are damaging public infrastructure or are in the path of development. Historically, “Save the Trees” has been a rallying cry in Seattle (and elsewhere) for laws that prevent the construction of new housing—particularly in North Seattle’s tree-lined, largely white single-family neighborhoods, where people of color were historically barred from living.

Horse chestnut trees are a rapidly growing invasive species that, along with mountain ash, “make up the majority of the non-native deciduous species” in the city, according to the city of Seattle. That quote comes from a report recommending the removal of these trees from a natural area in Southeast Seattle that is “infested” with them, hindering the growth of native species.

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3. The Seattle Police Management Association, which represents fewer than 100 police captains and lieutenants, have negotiated changes in their contract that, if implemented (the full contract is on the city council’s agenda next week), would cost the city about $3.39 million this year for retroactive and current wage increases. This extra cost would come out of SPD’s salary savings for 2022—$4.5 million the city saved because SPD was unable to hire all the officers the council funded in SPD’s budget last year. (The council could also decide to fund the contract costs from some other source, but that would require new legislation; paying for salaries out of the salary savings does not require legislation.)

Back in May, the city council and Mayor Bruce Harrell agreed to a “compromise” proposal that released $1.15 million in unspent salary savings to boost recruitment at SPD, after Councilmember Sara Nelson spent several weeks arguing that the city should just hand the entire $4.5 million to SPD for hiring bonuses. Conveniently enough, that $1.15 million, plus the money it will cost the city to fund SPMA’s contract in 2022, adds up to right around $4.5 million—money that would not have been available if Nelson had gotten her way and released the full $4.5 million.

Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said “it was purely coincidental that those two figures lined up.”

We’ll have a more detailed report on the SPMA contract later this week.

4. Last week, the King County Council agreed to delay a vote on a proposal by Councilmember Claudia Balducci to give voters the chance to decide whether to move county elections, including the races for county executive, county council, and county elections director, to even years. Balducci, echoing many progressive groups, has argued that even-year elections would boost turnout over the current system, in which many local races (including Seattle elections) are conducted in “off” years, meaning those without statewide or national elections. Continue reading “Saving Invasive Tree Cost City $45,000; Hiring Bonuses Would Have Blown Up SPD Budget; Assaults at Sweeps Involved Pine Cones, “Veiled Threats”; Get Ready for Even-Year Elections?” →

City Council, King County, Morning Fizz, Police

Council Funds Police Hiring Compromise, More Delays In Store for Civilian 911 Response, and Sheriff Questions Impact of Hiring Bonuses

1. It’s easy to forget, after the charged backlash election of 2021, that there was a time when the city seemed ready to rapidly replace some police officers with civilian first responders, particularly for low-level crisis calls that are often made far more dangerous by the presence of cops with guns. Since 2020, when protests against police violence galvanized Seattle officials to make pledges to reduce the size of the police force, the city has taken a hard turn toward the rhetoric and policies of an earlier era, one characterized by ever-expanding police budgets and support for law-and-order policies

On Tuesday, the city council’s public safety committee voted to release $1.15 million in unspent funds from the police department’s 2022 budget to help address a level of attrition on the force that several council members described as a crisis. The legislation was a compromise between two proposals by committee chair Lisa Herbold and Councilmember Sara Nelson, who has argued that hiring bonuses (and police spending generally) will help keep Seattle residents safe.

Nelson, who had tried to introduce an ordinance releasing all the money SPD won’t spend this year (about $4.5 million) because the council provided more money for new hires than SPD can spend, said “people are dying” because there aren’t enough police, adding that “our community gatherings” are also “at stake” if the city doesn’t hire more officers quickly.

The compromise measure the council adopted will pay for a new SPD recruiter, relocation expenses for officers moving from elsewhere, an ad campaign to recruit new officers, and a national search for a permanent police chief. Only council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda voted against the plan, arguing that there are other actions the city could take to improve public safety besides a recruitment campaign for police, such as funding shelter and behavioral health services.

2. Mosqueda and most of the current council (though not Nelson) were around in 2020 when the council began discussing ways to replace police with civilian responders for some 911 calls, such as calls about people passed out in public or those experiencing certain kinds of health emergencies. Although the Seattle Fire Department has two Health One units to respond to some medical crisis calls, another response unit called Triage One never got off the ground, thanks in part to a dispute with the firefighters’ union over civilianizing a body of work that has been the job of firefighters.

On Tuesday, SPD data crunchers and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s public safety advisor, Andrew Myerberg, gave the public safety committee an update on the halting progress toward launching an initial pilot program to send civilian responders to certain kinds of calls. Very quickly, though, it became clear that the police department believes that the data the city previously based its support for civilian response—a report by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which found that at least 12 percent of all 911 calls could be transferred to civilian responders right away—is misleading and unreliable.

“Whenever we have a presentation like this, it’s like we have no conception of how a major us city can respond to calls differently, but we have a major US city”—Denver, whose STAR team responds to thousands of crisis calls—”and they’ve been responding to these calls for two years.” —City Councilmember Andrew Lewis

“We don’t believe that was a responsible analysis, and they did not taken into account many of the variables that are critically important to safely answer these calls,” SPD chief operating officer Brian Maxey said. In particular, Maxey and SPD senior research scientist Loren Atherley took issue with the fact that the numbers in the NICJR report (called “Nick, Jr.” for short) didn’t include data about how various call types turned out—for example, whether a call for what seemed like a low-acuity health issue resulted in violence.

The SPD researchers said that before the city can move forward with any kind of pilot program, they need to spend months analyzing actual call data and running it through a complex matrix to determine how risky each call type is in practice; then, and only then, will it be safe for SPD to consider letting people other than armed officers respond to some calls. As an example, Atherley said, the NICJR report only identified 300 types of calls; SPD’s analysis, in contrast, shows that the 400,000 or so 911 calls each year break down into 41,900 different categories. “Policing … has been attempting to find an avenue towards a differential response since the late 1950s,” Atherley noted.

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Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who since 2020 has been promoting Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS mobile crisis intervention model as something Seattle could try to emulate, asked why the city couldn’t look at other cities that have already moved toward alternative 911 response models and try to learn from them. “Whenever we have a presentation like this, it’s like we have no conception of how a major us city can respond to calls differently, but we have a major US city”—Denver, whose STAR team responds to thousands of crisis calls—”and they’ve been responding to these calls for two years,” Lewis said.

After the meeting, Lewis said he was encouraged that Myerberg, from the mayor’s office, seemed open to a future pilot program that could launch before SPD finishes its data analysis. “One important point Myerberg made was that we’re not going to necessarily have the cadence of this work be based on the police department” and its schedule, Lewis said.

However, Seattle Police Officers Guild president Mike Solan told Q13 FOX this week that he believes any change that would allow non-police officers to respond to 911 calls would be a subject for mandatory bargaining in the new police contract. SPOG is reportedly already playing hardball about other issues in the contract, including any changes that would subject the police to greater oversight.

3. At a King County Council committee meeting Tuesday, King County sheriff nominee Patti Cole-Tindall noted that the sheriff’s office had provided hiring bonuses to 20 new deputies, including four lateral hires, since the beginning of 2022—not nearly enough to outpace the 47 commissioned officers who left involuntarily or resigned after deciding not to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Overall, 98 sheriff’s deputies and professional staff applied for exemptions from the vaccine mandate; most (81) were requests for religious exemptions.

Council member Reagan Dunn, who opposed the vaccine mandate, asked whether the county should do more to fund more bonuses and incentives for new officers. “In terms of the recruiting,” Cole-Tindall responded, “our signing bonus is great, but we know that Everett and Kent offer $30,000. I’m not convinced that that’s what has somebody coming to an agency. I think it’s more about the culture. It’s more about the opportunity. “

City Council, Courts, criminal justice, Elections, Morning Fizz, Police

Conservative Group With Ties to Assistant City Attorney Launches Pro-Davison Effort; Mayor’s Office Said He Didn’t OK Police Hiring Bill, Contradicting Council Member

1. Change Washington, a “strategic communications organization” launched by a right-wing nonprofit called Project 42 in 2019, has repeatedly provided a platform for the tough-on-crime views of now-assistant city attorney Scott Lindsay (including this evocatively titled promotional piece, “Ann Davison’s Plan to Eliminate Repeat Offenders“). On Wednesday, it issued an explicit call to action on Davison’s (and Lindsay’s) behalf.

“Ann Davison Needs Your Help!” screams the headline above an blog post imploring readers to contact Davison and King County Department of Public Defense director Anita Khandelwal to support banning so-called “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system from Seattle Community Court. The link for Davison is her generic city email address; the link for Khandelwal goes to a listing for her direct phone line, effectively encouraging Davison’s supporters to harass a county employee with no control over Seattle’s community court.

“[T]he Seattle Community Court has already failed regarding these criminals, because if the program was working as intended those serial offenders wouldn’t exist, and Davison’s initiative wouldn’t be necessary,” the blog post says. (All bolds in original).

This isn’t the first time Change Washington has encouraged people to flood officials’ emails and phone lines to support an agenda directly promoted by Deputy City Attorney Lindsay. Dann Mead Smith, who heads up Project 42, credited a post Lindsay wrote on Change Washington’s website with “stopping the proposal to do away with misdemeanor crimes in Seattle by activating its list of 35,000 subscribers and flooding the council with emails and comments.”

As we reported last week, Davison’s office sent a letter to all seven Seattle Municipal Court judges asking them to overrule the community court judge, Damon Shadid, who has been negotiating with Davison’s office over her demand to exclude people from community court who meet her “high utilizers” criteria. Community court is the municipal court’s therapeutic, less-punitive option for people accused of certain low-level, nonviolent misdemeanors.

Davison’s high-utilizers list (like similar lists Lindsay has made over the years, including the “high impact offenders” list that was the basis of KOMO News’ “Seattle Is Dying” video) is made up largely of people who are homeless and those who’ve been through court-ordered evaluations to determine their competency to stand trial. Or, as Change Washington puts it, people who are “not interested in living honest lives like the rest of us even when offered a helping hand to accomplish it.”

Change Washington headlines and stories about Ann Davison and her agenda

This isn’t the first time Change Washington has encouraged people to flood public officials’ emails and phone lines to support an agenda directly promoted by Lindsay. Dann Mead Smith, the former head of the libertarian Washington Policy Center who now heads up Project 42, credited a post Lindsay wrote on Change Washington’s website with “stopping the proposal to do away with misdemeanor crimes in Seattle by activating its list of 35,000 subscribers and flooding the council with emails and comments.” (That proposal would have allowed defendants to say they committed a crime, such as shoplifting, to meet a basic human need as part of their defense; it would not have “legalized” any crimes.) Project 42’s latest corporate filing indicates the group had revenues of more than $500,000 last year.

Change Washington’s post on community court lists all seven municipal court judges’ names along with a warning: “We won’t forget their names when they’re up for reelection. The time of judges flying under the radar with regards to criminal coddling and degrading the City’s public safety is coming to an end.”

It’s possible that conservative groups will recruit challengers for municipal court judges—the entire court is up for reelection, and has a history of liberal-conservative swings—but historically, most Seattle Municipal Court elections go uncontested and largely unnoticed amid higher-profile campaigns in Congressional election years.

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2. Earlier this week, Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson said both Mayor Bruce Harrell and Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell had given her the “thumbs up” to propose a bill that would lift restrictions on $4.5 million of the Seattle Police Department’s 2022 budget, allowing SPD to spend the full amount, or any portion of it, on financial incentives to recruit new officers. Because we hadn’t heard anything about either Harrell explicitly supporting Nelson’s contentious proposal, we reached out to the mayor’s office to hear their version of the story.

According to a Harrell spokesman, Jamie Housen, both Harrells’ conversations with Nelson about hiring incentives took place “before this ordinance was even contemplated. Councilmember Nelson informed the mayor of her plan to sponsor a resolution in support of staffing bonuses, generally. The mayor let her know she was welcome to put it forward and that doing so would not create an issue with the Mayor’s Office,” Housen said.

“Similarly, when Councilmember Nelson asked to discuss police recruiting with Senior Deputy Mayor Harrell, the Senior Deputy Mayor encouraged her to explore potential solutions to SPD staffing challenges from the legislative level, which might include incentive pay or relocation costs as potential options.”

Herbold, who chairs the public safety committee, has proposed releasing $650,000 of the restricted money to pay for relocation expenses for officers moving to Seattle from out of town and to hire a professional recruiter for SPD.