We’ve been hearing that Mayor Bruce Harrell had a plan to deal with the staffing shortage and yesterday it finally arrived. Harrell’s presentation of the plan started with the ongoing staffing crisis the city has been facing for nearly two years.
Officer staffing levels are at their lowest in more than 30 years with over 400 officers departing SPD since 2019. This crisis is exacerbated by similar needs for more officers locally and nationally, creating an extremely competitive environment. Tangible impacts of the decrease in deployable officers include a continuing deterioration of police response times to priority calls, a 40% decrease in detectives available for vital investigative work, and increasing overtime expenses.
If you want the actual numbers, Seattle had 1,281 deployable officers in December 2019 and was down to 958 by December 2021. And the decline has continued this year with a net loss of another 49 officers as of May. The situation is so dire that a stage 3 emergency was declared last year. In April, NPR reported that the city had stopped investigating sexual assault cases because there were no detectives available to take them. The Seattle Times confirmed that story last month. So the plan now is to offer enough financial incentives to lure officers in from elsewhere and encourage new, local recruits to apply.
Harrell said the recruiting strategy involves hiring incentives of up to $30,000 for lateral transfers and $7,500 for new recruits. Candidates applying for the SPD would be reimbursed for applicant fees, travel expenses and relocation costs when hired, according to the plan. Seattle City Council would need to approve the incentives for it to go into effect.
“We cannot deliver the effective public safety, swift response times, and thorough investigations our communities deserve without a well-staffed and well-trained police department,” Harrell said.“While today SPD staffing is at crisis levels, we also have in front of us an opportunity to restore and rebuild a Seattle Police Department that lives up to our highest values and priorities. We need the right number of officers and the right kind of officers.”
The City Council, which two years ago wanted to cut the police budget by 50%, has already offered up $1 million for hiring incentives but it sounds like they plan to demand more money for alternatives to police before approving more money for hiring.
A new ordinance submitted to the council by the mayor’s office on Wednesday would free up an additional $1 million in SPD salary savings for “costs related to recruitment and retention of officers in SPD.”…
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Harrell said it’s unlikely the negotiations will be completed before the passage of the city’s 2023 budget in November.
Lisa Herbold, chair of the council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee, thanked Harrell and Diaz for the proposal in a statement Wednesday, noting she supports hiring more police but also wants to see investments into alternative responses that do not require police presence…
Citing the study, commissioned by the council on the heels of the 2020 racial justice protests, Herbold said Wednesday the city has to focus on bolstering alternative response, which will in turn benefit overworked officers…
“Seattle is falling behind on its commitments to create policing alternatives, and those impacts are being felt by community members who are not getting the service they deserve and by police officers who are stretched too thin,” she said.
Herbold isn’t using the words “defund the police” but she’s still clinging to the idea behind it. The reason police are stretched so thin right now isn’t because of cuts to funding it’s because SPD officers got the message from the council that they weren’t appreciated and many resigned for other jobs or retired. Money is one way of convincing them otherwise but I’d bet a lot of candidates would rather see some indication that the City Council has their backs and won’t turn on them the moment they get an opportunity to do so.
Finally, even if the Council goes along with his plan and recruits do apply, it will still take several years before the city can bring staffing levels back to where they were in 2019. Seattle’s acting police chief has estimated it could take 5-10 years to recover from this mistake.
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