Diaz (Image: SPD)
There’s no timetable but the City of Seattle’s formal process for selecting a long-term leader for its police department is beginning and the person who has been doing the job has an inside track.
Interim Chief Adrian Diaz has been serving in the role since the resignation of Carmen Best in the wake of CHOP in 2020.
In his announcement of the start of the legally required search process. Mayor Bruce Harrell said he has been pleased with Diaz’s efforts.
“As we work to make immediate and long-term safety improvements at 12th and Jackson, 3rd Avenue, and neighborhoods citywide, I have been pleased with Interim Chief Diaz’s approach and commitment to progress on public safety,” Harrell said in the announcement. “Although I expect to conduct a robust search process, I encourage Interim Chief Diaz to apply.”
Diaz, right, with Durkan and Best (Image: City of Seattle)
The emphasis efforts with more policing activity and more arrests are part of a “hot spot” strategy supported by Harrell to try to calm business crime concerns and waves of violent crimes and shootings across the city. City Attorney Ann Davison, meanwhile, has launched a “Close in Time” plan to prosecute in a faster process and dig her office out from a pandemic-bogged backlog of misdemeanor cases.
Unlike the plan presented by the Harrell administration to the Seattle City Council last month for hiring a new Office of Police Accountability director, there are no dates or deadlines yet attached to the search for a new police chief.
The city charter requires the mayor’s office to conduct a search and name three finalists. The final candidate must then be approved by the council.
Diaz’s run as interim chief began in 2020 after Best’s decision to resign over what she said were frustrations with efforts to lay off police officers following criticism of her response to her handling of CHOP and the 2020 protests. Best said she could not be part of any layoffs. “This is not about the money. It certainly isn’t about the demonstrators,” Best said at the time. “I have a lot thicker skin than that. It’s about the overarching lack of respect for officers.” Her boss then-Mayor Jenny Durkan piled on, levying heavy criticism on the city council. “They wanted to micromanage and play mini police chief,” Durkan said. “Cut here, cut there, do this, do that. It showed a complete lack of respect and frankly a misunderstanding of how the department even operates.”
While the defund rhetoric has lessened in the two years since, the Harrell administration and Diaz have continued to beat the drum over the need to hire more officers, pointing to stats showing violent crime in Seattle reached a 14-year high in 2021.
The way in which SPD’s officers are getting involved with crime prevention and response also has changed. The department reported a 27% drop in officer-generated responses like an officer driving by and noticing a smashed window at a business. Part of the gap was made up for by so-called “community-generated” calls like 911 calls or someone flagging an officer down — those incidents climbed 6% to just over 233,000 events. Overall, SPD responded to 5% fewer events in 2021, according to the department’s reporting.
Meanwhile, amid ongoing worries about funding for police in Seattle, the department was freed this week to deploy some $2.3 million in Homeland Security funding for training and equipment including new vehicle barriers, body armor, and “tactical robots.”
In addition to the hiring and staffing crisis for the department, candidates for the chief job will need to consider anger and criticism swirling around the police officers union as labor talks over a new contract loom, as well as how to recover and respond to the department’s failures during the 2020 Black Lives Matter and anti-police protests.
Diaz is a Seattle Police veteran who has also worked as a defensive tactics instructor at the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission and once taught a course on policing for the Seattle Colleges system as part of an officer recruitment strategy. Diaz earned a Bachelor of Arts in criminal justice from Central Washington University and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Washington.
Best, meanwhile, has worked as a media commentator since her resignation and was announced this week as the new director of global security risk operations at Microsoft.
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Abolish the police. You see the crime? You see the police solving or stopping it? Exactly.
Your utopian commune is awaiting your arrival…
Ha,ha! But it’s not, because it keeps promising to be “Moving Soon”
Obviously you know a lot about solving and stopping crime. Get to it, then. What are you waiting for?
You apparently don’t see the nose under your own face…. When I moved here there were too few police and people complained bitterly about response times and lack of resources. Over about a decade the force was slowly built up to the point where crime had fallen and you could actually expect someone to show up if you called 911…. (instead of firemen coming, who could only sit and watch someone try to assault your neighbors.. yes that really happened) Then CHOP and COVID happened and poof those gains, gone again-and guess what, crime, especially violent crime is in a crazy upward trajectory. And this time around one needs to be genuinely concerned about being randomly stabbed or assaulted with a bat, or thrown down some stairs by a stranger while simply out and about in your own neighborhood.
I won’t try to tell you that the mental health care and drug rehab programs in this country and especially this city aren’t broken, but until and unless we fix them all we have left is the people who are paid to put themselves in harms way to protect us when things do finally get out of hand – but understand we did this… we (this city and it’s policies) let people get so out of control that it gets to the point that they get hurt when enough is finally enough.
Reasonable people do not want to live in your world where (known) violent people just get to do whatever they feel like with no consequences and the excuse that they just can’t control themselves overriding everyone else’s rights until they actually severely injure or kill somebody.
Really appreciate the very thought out reply, but you do know “Moving Soon” is just a troll, right?
Yes, he/she is. And trolls are best ignored, because they feed on attention.
I’m just speaking my opinion as freely as others speak their anti-homeless pro-police pro-capitalist-run it all into the ground for me me me opinion. Just trying to being a little balance to the comments.
And BTW I’ll move when my current situation finally evicts me to demolish the building and since I make about 1/8th the Capitol Hill median income you’ll probably see me living a park but not for long because it will be swept and then I’ll be in a different park for a short period until it too is swept and then I’ll be in a different park and well you get the point.
You are missing cause/effect. In the past, it wasn’t “too few police”; it was a shit economy. When crime was lower, the economy was better. When crime got worse, it coincided with housing crisis, rapid expansion of rents with no increase in salaries, and then Covid.
You want more cops to solve problems. You need to look at the problems and solve those. Cops don’t stop crime. Cops respond to crimes that occur. Stop the crimes from occurring by fixing the underlying systems.
Cops are literally the only service that people call for expansions without any calculations of effectiveness or evaluating results. If someone said, “let’s expand homeless efforts,” people ask for every dollar to be accounted for, and expect it to work 100%. If someone asks for help with drug rehab programs, people want the same.
But with cops, it’s always MORE. Just MORE. The idea that more cops means less crime is complete fiction. Look at per capita cop counts in Chicago. Double the cops based on population relative to Seattle, and way, way more crime.
Because, again, crime is unrelated to number of cops. Fix the economy. Make sure people have places to live. Make sure there are things for kids to do.
A couple of examples of ways that cops actually prevent some crime:
Of course, usually it is better to address the root causes of crime. But making blanket statements like “crime is unrelated to the number of cops” or “Cops don’t stop crime” tells me that you haven’t really given this any more than a superficial level of thought.
Also, comparisons to other cities are pretty meaningless. NYC has far more cops per capita than Seattle, and a lower violent crime rate, and much much lower property crime rate.
Not to mention when “get out of here, or I’ll call the police” or a ringing alarm begins to fail to be anything other than an empty threat, crime goes up because criminals understand that they can do as they please and still have a pretty small chance of actually being caught or punished for their misdeeds…
Did people not notice that shoplifters stopped even caring about attempting to hide what they were doing after it became clear that no one was going after shoplifters anymore…. Do you really think that it was just some kind of coincidence? Seriously?
Does simply having firemen prevent fires? Nope, but if your house catches on fire and the fire department says – gee, all of the firefighters are out on other calls, yours is just a little one, we can have someone there to take a report tomorrow, you’d certainly want there to be more firemen wouldn’t you? And then if the firemen aren’t always 100% occupied running from fire to fire and can do other tasks, like do safety inspections, give away smoke detectors and other proactive things they really might be able to actually reduce the number fires…
Is it all about police – nope, and I clearly never said that…. absolutely there are other things that make in impact here – not being able to keep people who are *known* to be violent multiple times under some kind of supervision is a BIGGIE and is absolute out of the control of the PD – all they can do is respond, we hope…