1. Mayor Katie Wilson announced two new department heads on Friday. She’s replacing her predecessor Bruce Harrell’s finance director, Jamie Carnell, with city and county budget veteran Dwight Dively; and she’s replacing Harrell’s Office of Economic Development director, Markham McIntyre, with his deputy, Alicia Teel, on an “acting” basis.
Dively was budget director at the city until 2010, when then-mayor Mike McGinn replaced him with a former King County deputy budget director, Beth Goldberg. (McGinn said Dively had failed to adequately plan for the budget shortfalls of the Great Recession).
Then-King County Executive Dow Constantine snapped Dively up, and he remained in charge of the county’s budget until the election of Girmay Zahilay, who assigned him to help head up the Department of Community and Human Services after ousting Kelly Rider, who was head of DCHS for a little less than two years. Many inside the city bemoaned Dively’s ouster and considered his move a trade in the county’s favor (although Goldberg had her fans!)
McIntyre spent a decade in various executive jobs at the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce (which recently changed its own leadership, hiring former state legislator and state Department of Commerce director Joe Nguyen to replace Rachel Smith). McIntyre brought Teel over from the Chamber, where she worked for more than 15 years. (Editor’s note: This story originally said McIntyre served under Jenny Durkan, which is not the case. We regret the error.)
McIntyre was a Harrell campaign stalwart. PubliCola reported last year that he used an internal City of Seattle Teams chat to ask for city employees’ personal contact information on behalf of the Harrell campaign; those who provided their info received solicitations to support Harrell “in the home stretch.”
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2. The Tanya Woo rumor mill chugged back into operation this week. Unconfirmed, but we’re hearing that the onetime Seattle councilmember (appointed to a citywide seat after losing to Tammy Morales in District 2, Woo ran a second time, losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck), has reportedly been testing the waters for another campaign—this time aiming her sights at the state.
We heard this week that Woo may run for the state house seat that will be vacated by 37th District representative Chipalo Street, who recently declared his candidacy for the state senate seat being vacated by Rebecca Saldaña, who’s running for King County Council Position 2, occupied until recently by now-King County Executive Girmay Zahilay. (Zahilay’s longtime chief of staff, Rhonda Lewis, is in the position on a temporary basis). Seattle Port Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa recently announced she is also “considering” a run for Zahilay’s former council seat.
3. After setting right-wing activist hearts aflame by making the baseless claim that Mayor Katie Wilson has ordered cops to stop arresting people for drug crimes, Seattle Police Officers Guild president Mike Solan announced on his “Hold the Line” podcast last month that he won’t seek reelection.
Apparently, Solan has already selected his heir apparent—Ken Loux, a 10-year SPD officer whose talking points suggest SPOG is under siege by powerful enemies, rather than coddled by city officials who just handed the union a 42 percent raise.
“Make no mistake: Seattle’s politics have veered sharply left, unleashing a storm that threatens to dismantle everything we’ve built brick by brick,” Loux says in his campaign video over shaky images of Mayor Wilson and City Councilmembers Dionne Foster and Alexis Mercedes Rinck. “SPOG is staring down its most brutal years yet—a relentless assault on our unity, our resources, and our resolve.”
Solan’s headshot looms above Loux’s image on his website, making the younger man look like the Son of Solan. A Mini-Mike, if you will.
Police Chief Shon Barnes, flanked by Council President Sara Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell
In theory, the new contract allows the CARE Team to respond to more call types. In practice, it says they can’t go to homeless encampments, residences, businesses, or calls where a person is using drugs or being “confrontational.”
By Erica C. Barnett
This morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Shon Barnes announced the new police contract we reported on yesterday, including starting salaries of $118,000 for new recruits, rising to $126,000 in six months.
Sergeants’ pay will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.
In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. Last year, Harrell signed a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. Once the new round of raises go into effect, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years. New officers also receive bonuses ranging from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for officers transferring from other departments.
“This contract ensures Seattle will remain competitive with other major city police departments and adds incentives for the skills that modern policing requires,” including a 1.5 percent or 4 percent salary boost for officers with two- or four-year criminal-justice degrees, Harrell said Wednesday.
“These recruitment improvements will allow us to build a police force that reflects our community’s diversity and meets the demands of 21st century public safety with respect to accountability. This contract delivers significant account accountability reforms that address concerns raised by the accountability entities and the community, and builds on the successful resolution of the federal consent period earlier this year. ”
In fact, the contract includes just two changes related to accountability. First, it simplifies a 180-day “clock” for disciplinary decisions, removing some carveouts that have contributed to very long delays between the time when someone files a misconduct complaint and when it gets resolved.
Second, it allows sergeants, rather than the Office of Police Accountability, to determine discipline for misconduct that doesn’t rise to the level of a fireable offense. Whether this is an improvement to accountability, as opposed to a simplification of OPA’s workload, remains to be seen; the federal consent decree SPD was under until earlier this year called precinct-level discipline “admittedly ‘appalling,’ quoting an OPA supervisor), so bringing this kind of discipline back inside SPD will have good or bad consequences depending on how sergeants use this new authority.
Bob Kettle, head of the city council’s public safety committee, said bringing discipline back in-house would produce better sergeants, which would lead to “better lieutenants, captains, assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and maybe chiefs of the future. We have to invest in our leaders early to get the return later.”
One accountability issue the contract does not address is arbitration—an outside process police officers can use to get disciplinary decisions overturned Harrell’s chief of staff Andrew Myerberg said the two sides remain at an impasse on arbitration because the Seattle Police Officers Guild does not want to make concessions on four separate issues related to discipline.
Under the current arbitration rules, officers can bring in new evidence and witnesses that the city hasn’t 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. Arbitrators can also completely relitigate an officer’s case after the fact (known as de novo review).
Myerberg said the city couldn’t get SPOG to bend on changes to these requirements, as well as a request for a new standard saying that an arbitrator can’t overturn a disciplinary decision (such as firing) by the police chief unless the chief’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”
All those issues are now heading to interest arbitration between the city and SPOG, a secondary bargaining process overseen by the state Public Employee Relations Commission. If the city succeeds in placing more guardrails on arbitration, it will come at a cost—likely additional salary increases for officers in exchange for agreeing to restrictions on arbitration.
“The city had an opportunity to finally deliver on the promise of the 2017 accountability ordinance, to build a system where misconduct is investigated swiftly and discipline can stick. Unfortunately, this contract largely maintains the status quo,” Jazmyn Clark, smart justice policy program director for the ACLU-WA, said. “While some procedural clarifications are welcome, meaningful accountability reforms, especially around arbitration and disciplinary appeals, remain unresolved. Public confidence in the police cannot grow if the mechanisms for accountability are still subject to closed-door processes.”
As Harrell telegraphed earlier this year, the CARE Team, a group of social workers that currently responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, will be allowed to expand without restriction in the future and can respond to more types of calls, including behavioral-health calls from the public and requests for shelter and transportation from people on the streets.
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During Wednesday’s announcement—and before she had actually seen the new contract—CARE Department Chief Amy Barden said the changes would allow the CARE Team to respond to up to 47,000 calls a year.
However, the contract language actually places so many restrictions on what types of calls CARE can respond to that the true number of eligible calls is likely much lower. What’s more, the contract actually prohibits CARE from responding to exactly the kind of calls Barden has repeatedly said are more appropriate for social workers than armed police.
Under the new agreement (which CARE played no direct role in negotiating), SPD won’t allow CARE to respond to 911 calls on their own, and will instead send armed police officers, in the following circumstances:
If a person is anywhere besides a public space, such as a car, business, or residence;
If a person is in a homeless encampment, defined as four or more tents;
If there has been any report of “aggressive or threatening behavior towards others, destructive or confrontational behavior, or behavior posing a danger to others”;
If “drug paraphernalia” is present, indicating drug use;
If a minor is present;
If there is an “indication” that the person has committed any crime;
If the person is exhibiting “extreme behavior that might warrant investigation for a potential involuntary commitment (e.g., public nakedness accompanied by crisis.”
This list arguably covers most circumstances in which CARE might be called to respond to a person in crisis. Under these criteria, CARE can’t respond to a call about someone living in permanent supportive housing or staying in a shelter, or someone whose behavior stems from public drug use. They can’t respond to a person in their car or who has wandered into a business, or someone who lives in a tent that’s near other tents. Barden
Many of the terms in the list are subjective, leaving it up to officers to decide whether a person is being “confrontational” or if their behavior is “extreme.” (The example given in the contract, of someone who takes their clothes off while “in crisis,” is a good reason not to let SPD decide which calls require police—people who remove their clothes in public are often using drugs that make them hot, which doesn’t on its own mean someone needs to be involuntarily committed).
The contract still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council before it can go into effect. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.
Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.
The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)
The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that significant new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.
Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.
Mayor Bruce Harrell, with Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.
About half the $39 million in funding from the sales tax increase would backfill spending on existing programs; the rest would shore up the city’s crisis response system and fund new treatment beds.
By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his plans to allocate a new 0.1-cent sales tax to a slate of non-police public safety programs yesterday, including programs that might otherwise face budget cuts as well as an expansion of existing programs such as Health 99 and the CARE team, which responds alongside police to low-risk 911 calls.
Standing inside Fire Station 10 a few blocks from City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Harrell called the new tax plan part of a “comprehensive approach to investing in both quality, safety and public health as two sides of the same coin and interconnected and not in conflict.” The city council has to approve the tax before it can go into effect.
In all, Harrell announced, the city would be investing $39 million from the new sales tax on non-police public safety investments. Governor Bob Ferguson’s budget, passed earlier this year, authorizes local jurisdictions to pass a 0.1-cent sales tax to pay for public safety.
King County just passed its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase to help fund the county’s public-safety budget; assuming the Seattle tax increases passes, the combined sales tax in Seattle will total nearly 10.6 percent.
Only about half of the funding Harrell announced yesterday will be new. Of the $39 million, $15 million will supplant existing general-fund spending for the city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond alongside police to certain 911 calls—freeing up general fund dollars to fund other city priorities.
Another $5 million will replace one-time federal funding (from several sources) for LEAD, whose operator, Purpose Dignity Action, was facing a budget cliff for the nationally recognized diversion program. Last year, in response to a new law that made simple drug possession and use a misdemeanor, LEAD started taking referrals exclusively from police, rather than community members; the new funding, according to PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard, will allow the group to help about 100 more people next year.
The remaining $19 million will including funding to:
Add 20 new fighter recruits in 2026 ($2 million);
Expand the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s “field-based” work to provide opioid treatment and medicine to people living in shelters and permanent supportive housing, among other locations ($1.2 million);
Expand the fire department’s Health 99 response team, including two new case managers and new vehicles ($1.6 million);
Add funding for the Seattle Indian Health Board’s Thunderbird Treatment Center, a rehab center that was previously located in Rainier Beach that’s reopening on Vashon ($1.8 million);
Add funding for future detox and inpatient treatment beds through a competitive bidding process ($2.8 million);
Hire 12 new 911 call takers, plus three trainers and three administrative staff—an investment that will offset current overtime spending at the city’s 911 call center ($2.6 million);
Double the CARE team from 24 to 48 responders, a change CARE Department director Amy Barden said will allow them to respond to calls across the city for about 20 hours every day ($6.9 million).
Council president Sara Nelson, who proposed dedicating 25 percent of the new tax to treatment earlier this year, said she was not “going to split hairs” about how much of the funding in the new plan will go to fund new treatment beds (in all, the treatment portion of the proposal amounts to about 16 percent of the overall proposal).
“Because of my subject [expertise], my personal experience, because I see such a great need—throw all the money at this,” Nelson continued. Nelson has talked publicly about her own experience going to treatment for alcohol addiction and has frequently advocated for more direct city funding for rehab, which has not traditionally been under the city’s purview.
The CARE team is currently under a memorandum of agreement that restricts its size to 24 responders, does not allow CARE to go out on calls without police, and restricts the kind of calls CARE can respond to. This has limited the team’s ability to do what it was established to do: Respond to calls that are more appropriate for social workers than police.
Additionally, because police officers can choose whether to respond to calls themselves or hand them off to CARE, the volume of calls CARE can respond to has fluctuated fairly dramatically over time.
According to Barden, a city analysis of more than 50,000 calls the CARE team believes they can respond to, but can’t because of the MOU, that only 300 included any kind of police action, such as a citation.
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The MOU expires at the end of the year, and any new agreement with CARE will be part of the next contract between the city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). Ordinarily, SPOG contract negotiations tend to drag out for months or years, but the union is reportedly amenable to reaching an agreement quickly now that it appears likely that Katie Wilson, not Bruce Harrell, will be mayor next year. It now appears likely that the new contract will allow CARE to respond to more types of calls, expand to 48 members, and respond to calls without police in tow—a huge turnaround from the extremely restrictive MOU.
Harrell said he couldn’t comment on the MOU because the negotiations with SPOG are ongoing. But Barden, who is not a party to the negotiations, said she was optimistic. “I get along with [SPOG president] Mike Solan personally and I feel his support is genuine.”
If the city doesn’t manage to reach a contract with the police union that gives CARE more freedom to respond to calls, Barden continued, she has about “47 contingency plans,” such as working with King County to direct the CARE team to respond to calls to 988, the mental-health crisis line. Because 988 isn’t a city system, responding to those calls wouldn’t require negotiations with Seattle police. But that’s the nuclear option. Reading through the lines of Harrell’s and Barden’s comments Thursday, the city appears to believe SPOG will work with them to let CARE’s responders actually perform the jobs they were hired to do.
Also, SPD reassigns sergeant accused of sexual harassment and discrimination to a different division.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Police Officers Guild vice-president Daniel Auderer, who was caught on tape joking about the killing of 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula by a speeding officer last year, had his “Loudermill” hearing yesterday—an opportunity for public employees accused of misconduct to present their side of the story and answer any accusations against them. Auderer’s hearing was supposed to take place on April 1, but has been delayed at least twice since then. .
Seattle interim police chief Sue Rahr now has 21 days to make a decision about whether to discipline Auderer, and if so, what discipline to impose. The Office of Police Accountability has recommended discipline ranging from a 270-day suspension to termination.
Auderer has remained on duty, but in a non-patrol role, since last fall.
Last year, Auderer was driving away from the scene where officer Kevin Dave struck and killed Kandula when he inadvertently recorded a snippet of his conversation with SPOG president Mike Solan on his body-worn video. Dave was driving 74 miles an hour on Dexter Ave., where the speed limit is 25, when he struck and killed Kandula in a crosswalk. He had his lights on but had only “chirped” his siren at stop light down the street, and he was driving so fast that it was physically impossible for Kandula to get out of his way, according to a subsequent investigation of the collision.
On the tape, Auderer said he didn’t think there would be a need for a criminal investigation because Dave was “going 50 [mph]—that’s not out of control,” because Kandula may not have been in a crosswalk, and because Dave had “lights and sirens” on. Auderer also said he didn’t “think she was thrown 40 feet either.” All of these statements turned out to be incorrect. Dave also remains employed by SPD and did not face criminal prosecution for Kandula’s killing.
Then, in comments that were reported around the world, Auderer confirmed, “But she is dead,” laughed loudly at something Solan said, and responded, “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah.”
“Yeah, just write a check,” Auderer continued. Then he laughed again for several seconds. “Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” At this point, Auderer turned off his body camera and the recording stopped.
In a memo recommending a severe penalty, OPA wrote that Auderer had explained away his comments by claiming he and Solan were talking about the likelihood that the city’s attorneys would place a low “value” on Kandula’s life, with all the explicit discussion of attorneys happening on Solan’s unheard, and unrecorded, end of the call. “Even crediting your explanation as true, that does not excuse the callousness of your comments,” the OPA’s draft disciplinary report says.
Nor does it explain your full-bellied laughter. That you thought you were having a private conversation is not a mitigating factor – indeed, it made your commentary and laughter even more disturbing in the eyes of many, and confirmed for some their belief that Seattle Police Officers, however outwardly courteous they may be, entertain perverse ideas about community members, particularly when those community members are not white males.
In the past, the memo continued, SPD has fired officers for sending texts “showing biases towards women, lesbians, and people of color” and for referring to a Black community member as “Kunta Kinte.”
SPD confirmed the date of Auderer’s Loudermill hearing but did not provide any additional information about when Rahr will make her decision.
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In other SPD news, the department confirmed that Lt. John O’Neil, who has been accused of sexual harassment, retaliation, and gender discrimination, is no longer the head of the department’s communications office. Instead, SPD says, he has been moved to SPD’s criminal investigations department, where he will once again oversee women. As we reported earlier this year, all the staff who worked for O’Neil in the public affairs department quit or sought out other assignments in the department, including three women who took voluntary demotions to leave. Under O’Neil, the office became all male.
SPD maintains that it has always been the plan for O’Neil to transition out of the public affairs office, where the director has traditionally been a sergeant, not a lieutenant.
In a lawsuit against SPD and the city, four women have accused O’Neil of grooming, predatory behavior, retaliation, discrimination, and weaponizing the accountability process by filing frivolous complaints against his accusers with the OPA.
On Tuesday afternoon, a little more than two weeks after Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office publicly announced a new three-year retroactive contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, the Seattle City Council ratified the agreement 8 to 1, with councilmember Tammy Morales casting the lone dissenting vote. Almost immediately after the vote, Harrell signed the contract, calling it a needed step to advance “our vision for a city where everyone, in every neighborhood, is safe and feels secure.”
Morales, in an amendment that failed, moved to delay the Tuesday vote, noting that the contract was fast-tracked directly to the full council without any public hearings and after just twenty minutes of public comment—nearly all of it in opposition.
“The community deserves a chance to make their voice heard before we vote on it. We shouldn’t be rushing this,” Morales said.
Before the vote, Morales noted that the new contract offers almost no changes to accountability measures for police officers. “I believe this contract as bargained does not protect the city and the lack of accountability measures puts us in continued violation of the federal consent decree,” she said, referring to the 2012 federal agreement between SPD and the US Department of Justice.
In 2023, US District Judge James Robart modified the consent decree to lift most restrictions on SPD, but on the condition that the department make additional reforms to its accountability and crowd control.
Speaking in defense of the new contract, Council President Sara Nelson said, “We have to attack our staffing crisis from both retention and recruitment and hiring angles, and this is an important piece of legislation to accomplish both of those goals – because it will also help attract new officers to the force and facilitate our recruitment efforts as well.”
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The contract, which PubliCola acquired and published in early April, retroactively gives police officers a 24 percent raise – broken down to 1.3 percent in 2021, 6.4 percent in 2022, and 15.3 percent in 2023. The raises will boost SPD’s starting pay, before overtime, to $103,000, making Seattle officers the highest-paid in the region.
According to an economic briefing before the vote by Ben Noble, director of the city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, the contract adds $39 million annually to the existing annual SPD salary budget of $170 million. In sum, the retroactive cost over three years totals $57 million, and adds $9.2 million to the city’s existing budget deficit, because the city didn’t put enough in reserve to account for the total cost of the raises.
Councilmember Bob Kettle, chair of the Public Safety committee, said before the vote, “Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it is a challenge for our budget. But if we don’t compete in this labor market, we won’t accomplish our goal of achieving a safe base in our city.” T
After signing the bill, Harrell said the agreement “will make meaningful improvements to officer pay and staffing, to accountability so misconduct is investigated, and to new efficiencies through diversified response options.”
However, critics point out that the contract offers only minor changes to accountability for police officers. It allows a 60-day extension of Office of Police Accountability’s (OPA) 180-day deadline for completing investigations into the most serious misconduct; tells arbitrators tasked with reviewing officer firings to “give deference” to the police chief’s decisions; adds just two more civilian investigators at OPA, bringing the total to four; and increases the amount of time OPA has to inform an officer of an investigation from five days to 30.Continue reading “Police Contract Gives Big Raises to Officers, Still Fails to Meet Baseline Set in 2017 Accountability Law”→
SPOG’s logo and motto. The union’s proposed contract includes big raises and few accountability improvements.
By Andrew Engelson
A copy of the tentative contract between the city of Seattle and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) obtained by PubliCola includes raises of 23 percent (retroactive to January 6, 2021 and active through 2023) and offers only minor changes to existing accountability measures in return.
“After my quick read of it, there are barely any changes in here,” said Shannon Cheng, chair of People Power Washington, a group advocating for increased police accountability. Of the 23 percent retroactive raise, Cheng said, “That’s very generous. There’s a giant gaping deficit in our budget coming up and what we’ve been hearing from every other employee—whether it’s firefighters to the coalition of city unions—is that there isn’t money. Everybody is taking smaller pay raises.”
SPOG sent the contract to police officers, who will be voting on whether or not to approve it, on Friday.
Joel Merkel, co-chair of the Community Police Commission, said that the organization has not been formally presented with a copy of the contract. But based on what Merkel read in the document (which was briefly posted online this morning by SPOG and then replaced with a photo of union leader Mike Solan) he believes this may be only an interim agreement meant to address the issue of pay raises and recruiting, since it’s only effective through the end of 2023.
“What’s been posted on the police guild’s website does not seem to address accountability at all,” Merkel said, noting that the biggest changes in the contract concern pay raises—an issue Mayor Bruce Harrell and the new centrist-majority city council have said are necessary to deal with lackluster recruiting efforts and attrition.
The few changes to accountability in the contract include:
The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) must provide officers being investigated for misconduct, along with the police guild, with a full “copy of the complaint,” rather than “basic details” of the complaint.
The tentative contract removes a requirement that OPA inform officers and SPOG about an investigation within five days—a mandate the accountability office has said can cause unnecessary stress for office and unnecessary work for the OPA. If the OPA closes a case without further investigation, the office would now have 30 days to tell SPOG and the officer about it. OPA would also be required to notify the union when an active investigation is being referred to criminal investigation and to supply the union with the case number in that instance.
The proposal allows for up to a 60-day extension of the 180-day deadline for OPA to wrap up investigations, but only in cases involving “Type 3” force—the most serious type of excessive force OPA investigates—and only if SPD’s force review board refers the case to OPA within seven days after they review it..
The contract adds two more civilian investigators (for a total four) to OPA, which mostly includes sworn officers.
On the issue of arbitration, which has often resulted in SPD officers who have been fired for misconduct being reinstated, new wording in the contract states that “an appointed arbitrator will give deference to the Chief’s judgment as to the appropriate disciplinary penalty so long as the disciplinary penalty is reasonable and consistent with just cause,” a fairly vague change in wording.
Of these limited changes to accountability, Merkel said, “If there are no [additional] changes to the accountability section of the contract, moving forward, then we would absolutely have some pretty strong concerns. And we believe that Judge Robart will as well.”
Since 2012, US District Judge James Robart has been managing SPD’s consent decree, which requires reforms to police accountability and use of force. In 2019, Robart ruled the that Seattle was out of compliance with the consent decree after the city approved the most recent contract with SPOG, which failed to incorporate many of the measures that were included in a 2017 police accountability ordinance. In 2023, Robart lifted most of the remaining restrictions from the consent decree, but said SPD still had more work to do on crowd control and accountability.
During negotiations over the contract, which has been stalled for three years, the CPC wrote a letter urging negotiators to fully implement the accountability reforms measures in the 2017 legislation. The letter noted that “the current contract makes it harder to fire an officer for misconduct if that misconduct is … ‘stigmatizing’ to a police officer and makes it harder for them to get another police job.” That provision about officer stigmatization remains in the new contract.
The contract does not go as far in terms of accountability reforms as the Seattle Police Management Association contract, which covers about 80 lieutenants and police captains, and which the city council approved in 2022.
Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said in a statement, “The tentative agreement we have reached with the union reflects a commitment to our Charter responsibility to create a safe Seattle. We have focused on building an excellent police service through strong accountability measures and staffing, improving the recruitment and retention of officers through fair wages and benefits, as well as building out a comprehensive public safety response system by increasing options for civilian response.”
City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who chairs the public safety committee, and Council President Sara Nelson did not respond to requests for comment. SPOG also did not respond to a request for comment on the contract.
Council member Tammy Morales, who has sought more police accountability measures in the past, said, “I’m not on the negotiating committee, so this is the first time I’ve seen the contract. Due to confidentiality requirements, I am very limited in what I can say before SPOG votes on this tentative agreement. However, I am reviewing it line-by-line and will have a lot to say when it comes before [the] council.”
“When the last contract passed,” Cheng said, “it was made very clear by Judge Robarts that we were out of compliance due to how the accountability system operates. And [this contract] doesn’t make any fundamental changes to that. So in my mind, I don’t see how this gets us out from under the consent decree.”
The contract also gives officers more generous medical and dental benefits, and adds two more paid holidays – Juneteenth and Indigenous People’s Day.
“Those are two holidays for populations they’ve been biased against in the past,” Cheng noted.
By Andrew Engelson