Tag: Seattle Police Officers Guild

labor, Police

Police Management Contract, Which Includes Concessions, Could Serve as Template for SPOG Negotiations

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council is expected to approve a contract between the city and the Seattle Police Management Association, which represents about 80 police lieutenants and captains.

The contract would establish new restrictions on arbitration (a process through which police can appeal disciplinary decisions for misconduct), make it harder for SPD to “run out the clock” on investigations, and implement other key provisions of the city’s landmark 2017 accountability ordinance. The city effectively abandoned the new law when it signed a contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which represents officers and sergeants, the following year; that contract supersedes the 2017 law whenever there’s a conflict between the contract and the ordinance.

The SPMA contract only covers police managers, but has potential implications for the hundreds of police officers and sergeants who are represented by SPOG as well. SPOG is just beginning negotiations with the city for its own contract, which expired at the end of 2020.

Once the contract is signed, captains and lieutenants will receive retroactive wage increases of 2.7 percent in 2020, 1.9 percent in 2021, and 4 percent in 2022. (Retroactive increases are common in police contracts, in part because they generally take years to negotiate, which means police often operate under expired contracts.) In 2023, police managers would receive a pay bump equivalent to the consumer price index increase, up to 4 percent. Overall, the increase just for this relatively small group of employees will cost more than $6 million through the end of next year.

The most significant change in the contract—and the provision that could have the most direct impact on negotiations with SPOG, according to several people familiar with police contract negotiations who spoke to PubliCola on background—is in the section on arbitration.

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Arbitration gives a police officer or commander who’s been accused of misconduct an opportunity to challenge the findings of the Office of Police Accountability and any discipline imposed by the police chief to an outside investigator. This process has been at the center of several controversial cases in recent years. In 2018, an arbitrator reinstated then-SPD officer Adley Shepherd, who was fired for punching a handcuffed woman who was sitting in the back of a police car; three years later, a state judge overturned the arbitrator’s decision, but such reversals are rare. Earlier this year, an arbitrator reinstated a parking enforcement officer (a position housed, at the time of the incident, in SPD) after Seattle Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz fired him for telling a coworker that he supported lynching.

Federal Judge James Robart, who oversees the decade-old consent decree between the US Department of Justice and the city, ordered the city to fix its arbitration process when he ruled the city partly out of compliance with the agreement in 2019.

The new SPMA contract would put additional bumpers around the arbitration process when a captain or lieutenant appeals serious forms of discipline, such as firing and demotion. Currently, arbitration is a kind of secondary trial: Officers are allowed to bring in new evidence and witnesses that neither the OPA nor the police chief have seen, and the arbitrator can use any standard of proof they want to decide whether a cop is guilty of misconduct. For example, arbitrators can require the city to present “clear and convincing” evidence that an person is guilty of misconduct that justifies the punishment they received—a difficult hurdle.

Often, arbitrators’ decisions can seem arbitrary: In the case of the parking enforcement officer who was reinstated, the arbitrator found that the officer had no disciplinary record or complaints about similar comments in the past.

The contract attempts to directly address many of those issues. First, it would prohibit police managers accused of misconduct from introducing entirely new information, or witnesses, during arbitration. Second, it would change the standard for the police department to prove the officer was guilty of misconduct to a “preponderance of the evidence” requirement, meaning that it’s more likely than not that the misconduct occurred. And third, it would require outside arbitrators to decide whether the discipline the police chief imposed for misconduct was arbitrary or capricious; if it wasn’t, the arbitrator will have to uphold it.

SPMA’s contract doesn’t directly impact SPOG or its ongoing negotiations with the city, but it does set precedents, of a sort, for the city to bring up during negotiations.

“This agreement creates a new discipline review system that marks a sea change in how discipline appeals operate,” the city council’s public safety committee chair, Lisa Herbold, wrote in a recent letter to a constituent. “It will help slow that backlog from growing by ensuring cases aren’t being entirely relitigated during arbitration as they currently are (de novo review). It will also ensure arbitrators, who are not generally experts on policing, don’t substitute their judgement for the police chief’s, undermining accountability as happened in the Adley Shepherd case.”

Advocates have argued for getting rid of arbitration entirely; legislation that would have done away with arbitration failed last year in Olympia. The ACLU’s People Power Washington project has demanded five specific changes to the contract; some, including subpoena power for accountability agencies looking into officer misconduct, are already in place. Continue reading “Police Management Contract, Which Includes Concessions, Could Serve as Template for SPOG Negotiations” →

Health, labor, Morning Fizz, Police

Omicron Hits Police, Library Workers Hard; Longtime City Union Rep Will Head Labor Relations Office

1. In the past month, the COVID-19 virus tore through the Seattle Police Department, placing dozens of officers in quarantine and adding a new strain to the department’s already-depleted ranks.

On January 12, SPD reported that 124 officers were isolating after testing positive for the virus: more than at any other point during the COVID-19 pandemic, easily surpassing the previous record of 80 officers in quarantine in November 2020. As of last Friday, the number of officers in quarantine had fallen to 85. Nearly 200 SPD employees have tested positive for the virus since the beginning of January, doubling the department’s total number of infections since the start of the pandemic.

The surge of COVID-19 infections, driven by the highly infectious omicron variant, intensifies a staffing shortage at SPD that has whittled away the department’s detective units and left some precincts with only a handful of officers to patrol large areas of the city. With fewer than 1,000 available officers—the lowest number in decades—SPD now routinely relies on non-patrol officers to volunteer for patrol shifts to meet minimum staffing requirements.

Another 170 officers are currently on leave, including more than two dozen unvaccinated officers who are burning through their remaining paid leave before they leave the department. The Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), which represents the department’s rank-and-file officers and sergeants, has not reached an agreement with the city about the vaccine mandate for city employees, which went into effect on October 18. SPOG is the only city union that has not reached an agreement with the city about the mandate, and its negotiations appear to have stalled.

In contrast, the King County Sheriff’s Office is still working with some unvaccinated officers to find accommodations that will allow them to return to work. Sergeant Tim Meyer, a sheriff’s office spokesman, told PubliCola that his office hasn’t seen enough new COVID-19 cases to pose a challenge for their patrol shifts.

2. The omicron variant is also impacting other city departments where staff interact directly with the public, including the Seattle Public Library, which last week reduced opening hours at branches across the system. For now, many branches will be open only sporadically, starting as late as noon on weekdays, and some will be open just a few partial days each week.

According to SPL spokeswoman Elisa Murray, 63 library staffers, or about 10 percent of the library’s staff, were on a leave of absence (through programs such as the Family and Medical Leave Act) for at least one day during the last two weeks of 2021; in addition, 32 employees were out due to COVID infection or exposure.

Compounding the problem, the library was already short-staffed before omicron hit; compared to 2018, the system had about 8.5 percent fewer staffers overall last year. According to Murray, “With a hiring push in the fall of 2021, we were able to restore pre-pandemic hours at most libraries by Dec. 6, just before the Omicron surge began impacting our staffing numbers once again.”

The library is trying to keep at least two branches in each of its six geographical regions open six or seven days a week so that no one has to travel too far to reach an open branch. Patrons of smaller branches, like Wallingford, Montlake, New Holly, and Northgate may have to travel to other neighborhoods to access services in person.

There is no standard pattern for closures across the city: Some branches are closed on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, for example, while others are closed on Saturday and Sunday. Murray suggests checking SPL’s website every morning to see which branches are open; the library requires a specific mix of staffers to open a branch, which means that one person calling in sick can be enough to close down a small branch for the day.

3. Shaun Van Eyk, the longtime labor representative for the city of Seattle’s largest union, PROTEC17, will soon be on the other side of the bargaining table as director of Labor Relations for the city’s human resources department. Van Eyk reportedly beat out Adrienne Thompson, former mayor Jenny Durkan’s chief labor advisor, for the position.

As a representative for PROTEC17, Van Eyk advocated for Human Services Department workers facing an uncertain future as the city’s homelessness division dissolved; argued against proposed free-speech restrictions that would limit what city employees could say online; and tangled with city leaders, including those at the Seattle Police Department, over the enforcement of Seattle’s vaccine mandate. (While police officers are represented by the Seattle Police Officers Guild, PROTEC17 represents civilian SPD employees.) In an email to union members announcing Van Eyk’s new position, PROTEC17 director Karen Estevenin credited Van Eyk with negotiating a COVID-era teleworking agreement and a recent wage increase for union members.

The labor relations division has undergone significant churn since the untimely death of its longtime director, David Bracilano, in 2017.

—Paul Kiefer, Erica C. Barnett

City Council, Media, Police

Critics Say Bombastic Podcast that Replaced Police Union Newspaper Represents Strategic Shift at SPOG
The Guardian, March 2015

By Paul Kiefer

The Guardian, the official newspaper of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), went out of print a few months into the pandemic. The paper’s disappearance was a sign of an important shift within Seattle’s largest police union, and one that closed a window into the guild’s interior life.

The print-only newspaper, which had a circulation of about 3,000 at its peak, was read mostly by police officers, retired police officers, labor organizers and city hall staffers. When articles from the paper did make it into the public eye, they were generally buoyed by controversy, like a 2011 opinion piece in which an officer called a training course on racial profiling an attack on “American values” and described Seattle’s elected leaders as a “quaint socialist cabal.”

Among SPOG members and retirees, however, The Guardian’s demise was a sign of a strategic and generational shift. The new guild president, Mike Solan, had recently defeated the incumbent, Kevin Stuckey, by promising to aggressively and publicly defend Seattle police officers against criticism from the public and elected city officials. Solan’s dramatic campaign video, featuring footage of riot police clashing with protesters, drew tens of thousands of views. Stuckey’s video, which focused on the guild’s stability and relationships with other unions, drew only a few hundred views.

After his victory, Solan began reshaping the guild’s approach to public relations. A few months after he took office in February 2020, Solan dismissed former SPOG president Rich O’Neill—who had retired from SPD and returned to SPOG to handle contract negotiations and media relations for Stuckey—and quietly shuttered The Guardian. In December of that year, he introduced a replacement: A bombastic monthly podcast called “Hold the Line with Mike Solan“, produced in the style of conservative talk radio shows.

“On the podcast, we hear the president’s opinion. Where’s the rest of the [SPOG] board? What forum does an officer have now to get their opinion out? There isn’t one.”—Former SPOG President Rich O’Neill

Typically, Solan uses his podcast to criticize the Seattle City Council, who he argues have sacrificed public safety and the well-being of police officers to appease an “activist mob.” The details of this criticism vary. In one 90-minute episode, Solan decried Seattle’s “Homeless Industrial Complex”; in another, he condemned the vaccine mandate for city workers as an ill-advised blow to SPD’s already shrinking ranks. In contrast to The Guardian, few other guild members have appeared on “Hold the Line”; instead, Solan relies on guests from outside the police department, ranging from former mayoral candidate James Donaldson to encampment removal activist Andrea Suarez.

While Solan’s allies pointed to The Guardian’s shrinking readership among younger officers as a reason to replace the paper with a podcast, O’Neill does not believe that younger officers were to blame for the paper’s demise. Instead, he said Solan made the change as “a way to give the president more control over the guild’s voice. On the podcast, we hear the president’s opinion. Where’s the rest of the [SPOG] board? What forum does an officer have now to get their opinion out? There isn’t one.”

SPOG published the first issue of The Guardian in 1970 as a venue for editorials about the state of SPD and city politics, announcements about deaths and retirements, updates on contract negotiations, and the occasional recipe. Although the guild appointed officers with writing experience to edit the paper, SPOG’s president had the final say on what made it into print. The paper was mostly written by officers themselves.

“It afforded officers a place to get their frustrations out,” Stuckey said. “If there was a training they didn’t like, they could write about it in the paper.” O’Neill said that he tried to strike a balance between allowing officers to air their opinions and avoiding direct criticism of elected officials or SPD command staff. He did, however, make some exceptions: The paper regularly criticized former city attorney Pete Holmes. Holmes did not return a call for comment.

O’Neill viewed The Guardian as a centerpiece of SPOG’s public relations strategy, and an opportunity for transparency. “It made officers more accessible,” he said. “The department has a policy that says you can’t speak to the press without permission, and if you try to talk to the press anonymously, you can get in trouble. But if you wrote something in the union paper, that was considered protected union speech.”

Some former readers outside the guild, however, believe publishing contentious articles actually harmed SPOG’s mission as a union. Continue reading “Critics Say Bombastic Podcast that Replaced Police Union Newspaper Represents Strategic Shift at SPOG” →

Courts, Police

Former Officer Fired For Punching Handcuffed Woman Sues SPD
In-car video from the June 2014 arrest.

By Paul Kiefer

Adley Shepherd, a former Seattle police officer fired in 2016 for punching a woman while she was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car, filed a lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department in federal court on Friday alleging that the department punished him disproportionately to appease the public and the federal court monitor who tracks reforms to SPD.

In June 2014, Shepherd arrested 23-year-old Miyekko Durden-Bosley after stepping into an argument between Durden-Bosley and her daughter’s father, Robert Shelby. When Shepherd handcuffed Durden-Bosley and pushed her into the back seat of his patrol car, she kicked him in the jaw. Two seconds later, Shepherd retaliated by punching Durden-Bosley in the eye, leaving her with two small fractures in her eye socket. After an investigation of the incident by the Office of Police Accountability, former SPD Chief Kathleen O’Toole fired Shepherd for using excessive force.

Shepherd maintained that he had followed his training and appealed his case to an arbitrator with the support of his union, the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG). The arbitrator overturned Shepherd’s firing, ordering SPD to re-hire him and offer him back pay. According to Seattle’s contract with SPOG, the arbitrator’s ruling was final.

Former Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes decided to challenge the arbitrator’s ruling, arguing that reinstating Shepherd would violate the “public policy against excessive force in policing.” Both the King County Superior Court and the Washington Court of Appeals sided with Holmes, and Shepherd did not return to SPD. The courts’ rulings were a victory for police oversight advocates, who argue that arbitrators too often allow officers to go unpunished for misconduct; to SPOG and other police labor organizations, the decision raised the worrying prospect that law enforcement agencies will continue to chip away at the binding nature of arbitrators’ decisions.

Rather than appealing his case higher in Washington’s court system, Shepherd has now taken his case to the US District Court of Western Washington. In his lawsuit, he alleges that O’Toole fired him to appease the public and Seattle’s consent decree monitor—the eyes and ears of the federal judge who oversees reforms to SPD as part of 2012 agreement between the city and the US Department of Justice.

Since his firing, Shepherd argues in his lawsuit, “there have been several high-profile use of force incidents that have gone unpunished or only resulted in short suspensions,” which he views as proof that his firing was a disproportionately harsh consequence for his actions. In his lawsuit, Shepherd suggests that SPD’s commanders may have singled him out because he is Black.

Shepherd also alleges that SPD “improperly train[ed]” him and then punished him for following instructions. In his lawsuit, Shepherd’s attorney cites a training officer who, during Shepherd’s appeal to an arbitrator, testified that officers were trained to react to a punch or a kick by hitting back.

SPOG is no longer involved in Shepherd’s case, and he is no longer seeking to return to SPD. Instead, Shepherd is only asking the court to order SPD to compensate him for his firing and its aftermath.

Uncategorized

Little Appetite on Council for Fighting Durkan’s Police Hiring Bonus
"Lateral hire" sign for Spokane Sheriff's Office in Times Square
Photo via @SpokaneSheriffOffice on Twitter.

By Paul Kiefer

Last Friday, outgoing Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signed an executive order offering hefty hiring bonuses as recruitment tools for the Seattle Police Department and the city’s 911 call center.

The order was a blunt tool for accomplishing a policy goal the mayor has pursued for months. In July, the city council declined to consider a bill drafted by her office that would have restored a hiring incentive program for SPD halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in early September, the council narrowly voted against a pair of proposals—introduced by Councilmember Alex Pedersen, with Durkan’s support—to offer hiring and retention bonuses for police officers.

The mayor’s order will allow SPD to pay officers who transfer from other departments up to $25,000, and new recruits up to $10,000, for the rest of 2021. The CSCC will be able to offer the same bonuses. Those figures are substantially higher than the hiring incentives offered to new police officers in 2019, when lateral transfers received $15,000 and new recruits received $7,500.

For the members of the city council who resisted the mayor’s previous attempts to reestablish the hiring incentive program, Durkan’s executive order appeared reckless. “It’s not clear whether the funding in this year’s budget is sufficient to allow this program to begin operating as envisioned,” said council public safety chair Lisa Herbold during the council’s briefing on Monday.

According to Durkan spokesman Anthony Derrick, the city will fund this year’s hiring incentives using $1.1 million in unspent police salaries that SPD hasn’t yet diverted to cover other expenses—a sum that would allow SPD and the 911 call center to hire around 44 experienced staff, 110 new recruits, or some combination of the two. As of late September, SPD had hired 57 officers in 2021, with plans to hire an additional 28 by the end of the year. The 911 call center, now housed in the city’s new Community Safety and Communications Center, hopes to fill 30 vacancies as quickly as possible, including 10 that opened after the city’s vaccine mandate took effect in October.

From the council’s perspective, the decision to spend the leftover $1.1 million could have budgetary repercussions even if SPD and the 911 call center don’t spend the full amount on hiring incentives. When the council discussed how to redistribute SPD’s unspent salaries earlier this year, it resolved to leave the $1.1 million as a reserve to cover unexpected costs, a decision informed by Durkan’s last-minute request in December 2020 to add more money to SPD’s budget after the department spent more on overtime than the council had approved.

For now, SPD hasn’t signaled that it will ask for a year-end addition to its budget like it did last year. But for a council worn down by months of debate about how to discourage the department from spending beyond its means, the prospect of losing the only contingency fund because of the mayor’s executive order is concerning. The launch of Seattle’s newest sports franchise, the Kraken hockey team, could accelerate SPD’s overtime spending over the next two months, adding to the risk that the council could face a repeat of 2020’s last-minute police budget crisis. In her comments on Monday, Herbold mentioned that the council may have “learned its lesson” about leaving dollars unassigned in the SPD budget.

Hiring incentives for police officers have become commonplace in Western Washington. Officers who transfer to Bellevue’s police department receive a $16,000 bonus; in Renton and Lynnwood, the bonus for lateral hires is $20,000. Combined with the starting salary for new, fully trained officers at SPD—a base of more than $83,000, compared to between $68,000 and $78,000 at other nearby agencies—the hiring incentives mean that Seattle police officers will remain the best-paid in the region, with brand-new officers making close to six figures. In 2019, hiring incentives seemed to help SPD boost its recruitment figures after a dip the previous year, rising from 68 new hires in 2018 to 108 in 2019.

Mike Solan, the president of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG)—the union representing most sworn officers in SPD—is skeptical that the incentives will work this year. “Dangling money to recruit new or lateral hires won’t get the job done,” he wrote in a letter to Durkan on Saturday. “Seattle cannot simply hire enough people to balance the loss of so many officers as other agencies across the country are competing for those same jobs.”

Despite objections from the city council’s labor relations policy committee, which establishes the city’s bargaining position during union contract negotiations, Durkan also offered to pay SPOG members to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Negotiations between the union and the city about the impacts of the vaccine mandate are still ongoing.

The council is still considering whether to approve more than $1 million in the city’s 2022 budget to continue the hiring incentive program. In the meantime, few council members seem eager to enter a political battle with Durkan over her executive order.

Health, labor, Police

As Vaccine Deadline Nears, Negotiator In Charge of Police Bargaining Leaves City

By Paul Kiefer

The window of opportunity for the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) to negotiate a deal with the city about the enforcement of the city’s new mandatory vaccination policy, which takes effect on October 18, is closing.

And this Friday, those negotiations will hit another snag: Ned Burke, the city negotiator responsible for bargaining with SPOG, is leaving Seattle’s labor relations unit. Jeff Clark, the interim head of the labor relations unit since the departure of former director Jana Sangy in March, has few options to replace Burke at the negotiating table, so Burke’s exit poses a challenge for the city as the deadline to reach an agreement with SPOG approaches.

Because SPOG represents public safety employees, the guild has an option that other public employee unions lack: as a last resort, the guild can bring its disagreements with the city before an arbitrator. After hearing arguments from both SPOG and the city, the arbitrator would unilaterally decide how the city will implement the vaccine requirement for police officers, including whether officers will get a grace period after October 18 to get vaccinated instead of facing immediate termination.  Burke would have been responsible for presenting the city’s argument to an arbitrator; instead, the city may need to find someone new to take on that high-stakes role.

As the sole holdout among Seattle’s public safety unions, SPOG runs the risk that an arbitrator could dismiss their demands as a tactic to stall the enforcement of the mandate, leaving their members to accept the city’s terms or lose their jobs.

With negotiations stalled, arbitration appears to be the most likely end to the standoff. And as the October 18 deadline approaches, SPOG is isolated. When the Coalition of City Unions reached an agreement with the city about the mandate last month, the Seattle Police Management Association—the union representing SPD lieutenants and captains, which initially bargained alongside SPOG—split with the guild and joined the larger coalition, foregoing its right to arbitration.

While SPOG and other public safety employee unions often prefer to take the gamble of arbitration instead of reaching a compromise with the city—in the past, arbitrators have often sided with police unions—the guild is in a challenging position this month. As the sole holdout among Seattle’s public safety unions, SPOG runs the risk that an arbitrator could dismiss their demands as a tactic to stall the enforcement of the mandate, leaving their members to accept the city’s terms or lose their jobs. Continue reading “As Vaccine Deadline Nears, Negotiator In Charge of Police Bargaining Leaves City” →