In August 2020, back when it was trendy, the Seattle City Council voted 7-1 to cut its Police Department’s budget. The cut was small, less than 1% of the total police budget, but it was intended to send a message. The contempt that the Emerald City’s leaders feel for their police force is intense.
But now it looks as if the joke’s on them.
The city, having lost 250 officers in the last two years, found itself in a full-blown police retention crisis this summer. Suddenly, City Council members were all worried about police retention. In an August budget hearing, City Council President Lorena Gonzalez ambushed SPD’s Chris Fisher, insinuating that the difficulties in retention were the department’s own fault: “I think these numbers tell a story about how SPD has significant room for improvement — management of SPD has significant room for improvement for retaining the new officers and existing officers that have been hired or have continued to be an officer at SPD.”
Fisher put it very gently when he said that police officers like hearing from elected leaders that they want them to stay — something they were suddenly saying in that City Council meeting but usually did not say. “I think this is the first time in a while that they’ve heard it from a broad section of electeds,” Fisher said. “I know how much it hurt them to feel that they were the younger ones being told they might get laid off, and I think that was a message that maybe this wasn’t the place to be a police officer.”
Well, of course it isn’t the place to be a police officer. A month after that hearing, in September, the City Council had a chance to plow back into the police budget the savings from not having to pay all the quitting officers. As the Seattle Times noted in an editorial, “The budget had about $15 million unspent on salaries and other expenses. Council members considered this money ‘savings,’ which is true in the same sense fasting provides ‘savings’ on the grocery budget.” What’s amazing is that these additional cuts came at a time when the police were stretched so thin that they had stopped responding even to break-ins!
Now that another 100 officers are about to go off the street due to COVID-19 or vaccine-related issues, things are going to get a lot worse. Mayor Jenny Durkan has issued an emergency order offering a $25,000 bonus to experienced police and dispatchers to come work for the Seattle Police Department and $10,000 for new recruits who sign on through the end of the year.
But if you have experience and skills, why would you work for a boss who hates you and deep down wants you gone? Why not just let the City Council have anarchists run the whole city, the way it let them run the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone during the summer rioting of 2020?
If you’re an officer, there might not be any size bonus that makes it worth working in Seattle. Why not find a job in Boise, Bend, or Des Moines, where you won’t get shot and the people who pay your salary believe that criminals are a bigger problem than you are?
