Fresh off the council’s approval of a new plan hoped to “accelerate” police hiring with a new recruitment and retention program, the Seattle Police Department says it is on pace to hire even fewer officers than it did last year.
In a report scheduled for the Tuesday morning meeting of the Seattle City Council’s public safety committee, SPD says it “continues to have difficulty recruiting and retaining officers, recording a net loss of 345 officers since 2020 and is currently on track to hire fewer officers in 2024 than it did last year,” according to a council brief on the matter.
In the quarterly report, SPD also says its overtime spending continues to climb as precincts try to patch over the lack of resources.
“Between 2022 and 2024, SPD’s overtime budget grew by 43% or $11.3 million, and there are indicators that the department will overspend its 2024 overtime budget,” the council briefing reads.
The SPD quarterly report (PDF) shows response times are also continuing to get worse across all precincts. Here in the East Precinct, the median response time for the highest priority calls has climbed 10% to 6 minutes, 36 seconds. If you’re waiting for a response on the lowest priority calls, settle in. The median “priority 3” response time in the East Precinct is now more than an hour and 43 minutes up from just over a half hour in 2021.
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It’s possible their alleged poor regard for women, at least within leadership, and willingness to maintain union leadership who denigrated and laughed about a citizen who was tragically killed by a police car has something to do with a lack of applicants. If SPD is not a misogynistic good-old-boys club it’s doing an excellent impersonation.
Maybe Below Broadway should post more about how much cops are shaken by online posting and never heartened by it.
Ha – yeah, the response time can climb WAY over 1 hour and 43 minutes. When I called them at 10am to report a break in, they sent a cop over at 5:30am the next morning! The cop started ringing my doorbell and pounding on the door, waking me up terrified that it was the criminal coming back to do more damage.
Bodies in motion may only be the tip of the iceberg and may end up being largely meaningless.
American consumers think the police can solve society’s problems. They cannot.
I won’t consider victory over SPD complete until waits for Priority 1 calls exceed 2 hours.
We should make cops salaried.
The changes made recently by the City Council should help in increasing the hire rates, and decreasing the separations. Let’s see what happens over the coming months.
No one wants to work for a bunch of MAGA bros
Can we get a graph that doesn’t start just before George Floyd’s death? It would be nice to see how this lines up with longer term trends. From what I understand, McGinn and the consent decree were unpopular in SPD.
Isn’t no police what D3 wanted? Be careful what you ask for, because it looks like – one way or the other – you got what ya wanted.