The City Council’s Public Safety Committee just wrapped up its every-other-week meeting, and this time they did get to the Seattle Police staffing/response time briefing. That took up most of the meeting, in fact. And since this was the later-than-usual first-quarter briefing – days short of the end of the second quarter – a bit of new data was presented, beyond what’s in the slide deck prepared before the briefing’s originally scheduled date two weeks ago.
One headline: The percentage of women among new hires has increased; it was at 10 percent, though the national average is 20 percent, and SPD’s stated goal is 30 percent, but so far this year it’ up to 17 percent, 16 officers out of 95 new hires. Briefers again pointed out that overall, SPD is on track to end the year with eight more officers than it’s budgeted for, mostly since fewer are retiring or otherwise departing, and that would mean they’d have to either slow hiring or find someplace to cut. Councilmembers including District 1’s Rob Saka indicated the former would be entirely out of the question; even at this rate, SPD would end the year with 1,029 officers, and committee chair Councilmember Bob Kettle noted they need to keep building back to 1,400.
Another issue that got a chunk of discussion – despite the “hiring surge,” the number of new officers hitting the street is bottlenecked by a shortage of veteran officers who volunteer to become certified as field-training officers. (Currently, councilmembers were told, 130 officers are certified.) While waiting for assignment to a field-training officer, new recruits are limited to duties such as taking phone reports. “We don’t have anyone sitting around twiddling their thumbs,” insisted SPD’s Dan Eder.
In addition to staffing, the briefing discussed SPD overtime and response times. The two are linked in at least one way – the largest use of overtime is for “augmentation,” deploying officers on OT to keep minimum staffing levels and/or make special-emphasis patrols possible. The OT budget has “grown significantly,” the committee was told, but not because OT hours have grown – rather, it’s the cost of those hours, with wage increases implemented in the new contract. Also up, the call volume, but response times have remained relatively stable.
All this was just a briefing, so no legislation was proposed and no votes taken. We’ll add the meeting video when it’s available vs. Seattle Channel archives.