Tag: Shon Barnes

Police

In First Four Months, Seattle’s New Police Chief Spent Most Weekends Out of Town

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, selected to lead SPD by Mayor Bruce Harrell earlier this year, has spent most of his weekends out of town since taking the $360,485-a-year job earlier this year, according to his schedule, social media posts, and sources familiar with his travel.

Between February 1 and June 20, the last date for which PubliCola obtained Barnes’ schedule, Barnes’ schedule is blocked out almost every Friday afternoon, either completely or starting in the early or midafternoon. Usually, this is represented by a blank space after 3 or 4pm; on a few occasions, the afternoon is marked as “admin block” or “travel.”

This is in contrast to Barnes’ schedule on other weekdays, which is generally fully booked during regular work hours.

For example, his schedule for a typical Monday in March includes meetings with the head of the state Criminal Justice Training Commission, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste, and Office of Police Accountability Interim Director Bonnie Glenn, along with a briefing on the city’s new 911 AI technology and a ridealong with the city’s Downtown Activation Team. From Tuesday through Thursday, Barnes’ official schedule is similarly busy.

On Friday of that week, Barnes’ schedule looks like this:

 

Barnes’ schedule, combined with his social media posts, either confirms or suggests (by the absence of scheduled events on Fridays) that he was out of town 13 of 18 weekends between February and May. Barnes’ absence from Seattle is documented in his public schedule or on his public social media posts, or both, for nine of those 13 weekends.

Police chiefs are generally expected to be on call for incidents that happen outside regular working hours, including on weekends. Historically, police chiefs have often showed up on site at events that involve a major police response, such as mass shootings and protests that result in clashes and arrests, among other types of high-profile events.

However, Barnes has been out of town for a number of such incidents, including a recent anti-trans rally in Cal Anderson Park that led to the arrests of 23 counterprotesters. At the time, SPD told PubliCola it was “unrealistic to expect that any individual in the police department can be available around the clock for unexpected emergencies.”

We sent a list of detailed questions about Barnes’ schedule to SPD earlier this week. We wanted to confirm the specific dates when Barnes has been out of town, along with other details, and to find out what contingencies SPD has put in place, if any, for the times when Barnes is not in Seattle.

Barbara DeLollis, Barnes’ new chief communications officer, responded:

Here you go.

“Since taking the helm of Seattle’s police department in February, Chief Barnes has been tirelessly working to protect the Seattle community. So far this year, crime is down 9 percent compared to the same time last year and SPD has hired 94 officers,” said Alex Ricketts, SPD’s Chief of Staff. “The Seattle City Council’s 9-0 unanimous confirmation of Barnes last week as Chief of Police underscores his commitment to making the department a model for policing excellence by prioritizing transparency, collaboration, and accountability.”

Thanks for your interest in SPD.

When we wrote back to again ask for responses to our questions, noting that the police chief’s availability in Seattle is a matter of public interest, DeLollis responded, “The statement you have addresses your questions.

Barnes’ schedule isn’t always completely blank on weekends. In some cases, it shows that he was attending a conference, delivering a keynote speech, or attending a personal or family event (Barnes’ family lives in Chicago). For instance, from April 4 to 6, Barnes was attending a gathering of his college fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, in Greenville, North Carolina, where he delivered the keynote address. A schedule note in May indicates he attended a graduation ceremony for one of his children out of town. And on the weekend of May 30, which is blank, a social media post by Barnes shows that he was attending a Freemason meeting in Philadelphia where he was inducted as a 33rd degree Mason.

On other occasions, Barnes was busy attending conferences, often as a panelist or keynote speaker.

From Thursday, February 27 through Monday, March 2, Barnes attended the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives CEO Symposium in Glendale, AZ, where he was part of a panel called “Law Enforcement CEO Roundtable: From Chaos to Control: Best Practices in Critical Incident Response.”

Between Sunday, March 23 and Sunday, March 30, Barnes’ schedule shows he was at a conference in Kingston, Jamaica held by the Police Civilian Oversight Authority, where he delivered a keynote speech on March 26. (Barnes’ schedule is blank beginning on March 21, a Friday.) The schedule notes that the event was a “prior commitment.”

And from Thursday, April 24 through Monday, April 27, Barnes was at a public safety summit held by Leadership for a Networked World at Harvard, where he was the keynote speaker. According to its website, the group “creates transformational thought leadership and learning experiences for executives building the future of outcomes and value”; it’s headed by Antonio Oftelie, the federal monitor for the consent decree between the US Department of Justice and SPD.

PubliCola’s unanswered questions to SPD included how much, if anything, Barnes was paid for delivering keynote speeches at events like the conference he attended in Jamaica.

Between March 3 and March 13, Barnes was attending the lateral police academy, a condensed training for police transferring from other agencies.

Barnes, who is being sworn in Wednesday afternoon, has brought on at least five new high-level staff, including DeLollis, Ricketts, and a second deputy police chief, Alan Sayles. (Former interim chief Sue Rahr appointed Lieutenant Yvonne Underwood to deputy chief last year.) According to publicly available data, DeLollis and Ricketts each make $221,562 annually; new assistant chief Nicole Powell makes $294,757, and both new Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction Lee Hunt and Sayles make $302,016.

Mayor Harrell, Police

Barnes’ New Hires Top $1 Million, SPD Will Pay $30,000 for Training on “Stratified Policing”

1. New police chief Shon Barnes brought on five new SPD staffers last month, including a second deputy chief, Andre Sayles; a new assistant chief, Nicole Powell; and three new executive-level staff—Chief of Staff Alex Ricketts, Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction Eleazer Hunt, and Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis.

Most of these roles, including the second deputy chief, the executive director of crime and harm reduction, and the chief communications officer, are new; the chief of staff role was revived by former chief Adrian Diaz when he hired Jamie Tompkins into the position, but before that, the most recent SPD chief of staff was Clark Kimerer, who left the job in 2001. All five are direct appointments, meaning they did not involve an open hiring process, and none of the new hires are replacing people who currently hold jobs at SPD.

All those new top-level positions won’t come cheap.

DeLollis, most recently the head of communications for the

Hunt, previously a strategic planning and analysis administrator at the Greenville, South Carolina Police Department, will make $302,016.

Powell, previously the lieutenant commander over the New Orleans Police Department’s Recruitment and Applicant Investigation Section, will earn $294,757, assuming her salary is the same as that of all four of the current assistant chiefs.

And Sayles, currently the police chief in Beloit, WI, a town of about 36,000 about 50 miles south of Madison, will most likely have a salary on par with the city’s current deputy chief, Yvonne Underwood, who makes $302,016, the same as Hunt.

Ricketts’ salary is not publicly available yet, but the other non-administrative members of SPD command staff make between $260,770 and $294,757, so his pay will likely be in that range. Ricketts was previously a community engagement specialist working for Barnes in Madison.

Barnes was previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin; deputy chief in Salisbury, North Carolina; and a captain at the Greensboro, NC police department. His salary is $360,485 a year.

All told, the salaries of Barnes’ five new hires add up to at least $1.38 million, and that’s not counting the cost of benefits, such as health care and retirement, and moving costs, since all are coming to Seattle from other cities.

The city is facing a $150 million budget deficit, and most departments are under a hiring freeze; even SPD, which has been on a spending spree, has been asked to temporarily freeze spending on consultant contracts and civilian hires.

Mayor Bruce Harrell has asked executive departments have been asked to shoot for a 5 percent underspend this year, directed all non-public safety departments (except for “homelessness,” a broad category that cuts across multiple departments) to come up with 8 percent cuts going into the upcoming city budget cycle. Even the police weren’t spared entirely from the budget-cutting exercise (which is theoretical until the mayor proposes the budget); they’ve been asked to come up with 2 percent in potential cuts.

2. Speaking of expenses, SPD spent more than $5,000 on drinks, snacks, and lunch for the officers who worked at the anti-trans “Mayday Seattle” event in Cal Anderson Park, PubliCola has learned. That’s the rally where police arrested 23 counterprotesters after pepper-spraying the crowd en masse and Mayor Bruce Harrell blamed “anarchist” infiltrators for “prompting SPD to make arrests.”

SPD would go on to provide security for the same group when they held another rally and concert, for which they did not have a required permit for amplified sound. Police closed down Fourth Avenue and other major bus corridors during rush hour and set up barricades to prevent counterprotesters from accessing the event, which was in held in the public plaza outside City Hall.

Barnes also got approval for a $30,000 department-wide training in “stratified policing,” a concept he implemented in Madison. As far as I can tell, the idea is that police should “stratify” different types of “problems,” such as immediate, short-term, and long-term issues, and apply different strategies to each type of problem. This four-pager from the Madison Police Department goes into more details about the approach, which appears to involve a very large number of meetings.

gender, Police

New Police Recruits Remain Overwhelmingly Male, Despite “30 by 30” Pledge
Shon Barnes, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s pick for police chief

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that, for the first time since before the COVID pandemic, more people are entering the Seattle Police Department than leaving it—precisely one more person, but still a step in the right direction for advocates of a larger police force. However, a closer look at those numbers reveals that the latest group of applicants, as well as the smaller cohort that makes it through the hiring process, are still overwhelmingly male—a bad sign for the city’s goal of having an incoming recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030.

According to numbers provided by the mayor’s office, 86 percent of the 84 new officers hired in 2024 were men, and 14 percent were women. Those numbers closely mirror the larger group that applied for police jobs last year; women also represented 14 percent of that group, with 84 percent identifying as male, 0.7 percent as trans or nonbinary, and 1 percent declining to identify their gender.

SPD has signed on to the national 30X 30 initiative, committing to have a recruit class that’s 30 percent women by 2030. It’s a lofty goal for an overwhelmingly male department whose culture has been described by women who work there as misogynistic, discriminatory, and rife with sexual harassment.

SPD’s most recent permanent chief, Adrian Diaz, was removed from his job after being accused of sexual harassment and discrimination, and finally got fired last year after an investigation revealed he had an inappropriate relationship with a woman he hired and promoted and lied to investigators to cover it up.

Mayor Bruce Harrell has touted the gender-equalizing credentials of his police chief nominee, Shon Barnes, who was police chief in Madison, Wisconsin for just under four years. ” Chief Barnes brings proven experience advancing the Madison Police Department’s inclusive workforce initiative that has resulted in 28% of officers being women,” Harrell said in his announcement.

In reality, Madison’s police force has been a national anomaly for decades, and hit the 28 percent level Harrell credited to Barnes four years before Barnes joined the department in 2021. Madison’s recruit class was 35 percent female in 2023 before declining to 21 percent in 2024, according to the city. Barnes may well be the best pick for Seattle’s police chief (the mayor did not reveal who any of the other candidates were prior to choosing Barnes, and there was no public selection process), but he didn’t create a culture where women see policing as a viable career option in Madison; he joined a department that had spent decades creating and nurturing that culture.

Seattle is a larger department with a reputation as a place where women’s complaints about misogyny, sexual harassment, and discrimination are not taken seriously. Even as he demoted former police chief Diaz because multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and discrimination, Harrell kept him on at his previous salary and praised him as a man of unimpeachable integrity. For Barnes, fixing that culture—and putting SPD on track to more than double the number of women who want to work there over the next five years—will be a more significant challenge than joining a department that has already done the work.