More ghost cops found in Seattle's budget as Council wonders how their "new crimes" will impact expenses
Seattle News:
On Monday, the budget committee heard issue identification presentations from their Central Staff on SPD (memo), the CARE department (memo), SFD, and LAW (memo), which in addition to the City Attorney’s Office also included issues related to the Seattle Municipal Court (SMC).
SPD:
It turns out there are more ghost cop positions than SPD’s Executive Director of Budget and Finance Angela Socci admitted to in SPD’s budget presentation a few weeks ago. Who would have thought! A reminder that SPD Captain James Britt also gave extremely misleading statements a few months ago about SPD’s current real time crime center, saying it had never been operational when there is proof it was being used back in 2020.
Central Staff identified 35 additional ghost cop positions in the proposed budget, which account for an additional $6.5 million per year. In the proposal, SPD has 1076 FTE funded for sworn officers, but based on their hiring and separation estimates won’t be able to get past 1041 FTE.
Per Greg Doss from Central Staff, 154 FTE from SPD were immediately not funded, 23 FTE were unfunded to put $4.3 million back into the General Fund, and 23 FTE were unfunded to provide $4.3 million for more SPD overtime. This is how the 1076 number was reached.
SPD is also receiving an additional $10 million in overtime for “emphasis patrols” in 2025, but that amount is not yet included in the 2026 budget. Doss suggested Council might want to spend the newly found $6.5 million on providing $10 million in additional overtime in 2026.
No mention was made of the $1.5 million for hiring bonuses that Socci had indicated in the previous SPD presentation was also being funded by salary savings.
Council President Sara Nelson said the council has “created a few new crimes” and wondered why overtime wasn’t projected to go up even further as a result.
The parking enforcement officers (PEO) also have 19-20 vacant positions (out of a total 104). One suggestion was to use some (or all?) of this salary savings to fund two new training positions to help streamline the PEO hiring and training process.
Council also discussed SPD’s 30x30 initiative, which has a goal to hire more women officers at SPD. There will be a more detailed presentation on this initiative at the end of the year after budget season is over. Possible measures being discussed are more flexible work schedules and flexible round-the-clock child care.
Councilmember Robert Kettle took the opportunity to once again blame the previous council for current staffing at SPD.
CARE:
Central Staff explained that the CARE dual dispatch has been difficult to implement because the CARE team is designed to respond to Priority 3 and 4 calls, but they have been located in places with a large call load of Priority 1 and 2 calls. This means officers aren’t available to be on the scene for the lower level calls, preventing CARE from doing anything but sitting around and waiting for them, often for so long that they are no longer needed once SPD arrives.
Thus far CARE has only been dispatched less than twice per month. They are more often requested as a secondary response, often to provide transport.
However, starting on October 8, CARE made operational changes to proactively drive around and respond to “quasi-medical calls,” increasing their activity. However, Health One will soon begin responding to behavioral health calls so there is some confusion as to the distinction between Health One and the CARE team.
The CARE team has been limited to the dual dispatch model due to the SPOG contract.
Another policy consideration was related to data collection by CARE, which isn’t as robust as hoped, at least partly because the team is being dispatched so infrequently. The council is considering a state of legislative intent (SLI) to have CARE develop more robust data collection.
A new Seattle Restoration Director position is also being added to CARE. This person, who has already been hired, is coordinating the work done by the Downtown Activation Team (DAT) and might have a much expanded role in future to help re-envision 911 response in the city with the potential for many different services/people to be dispatchable.
Kettle said the City needs to take SPD from being so central to its public safety response. He mentioned the roles that public health and public services have to play in public safety overall,
LAW and SMC:
LAW is worried because they will potentially be losing two civil attorney positions and one criminal attorney position in 2025. In addition to keeping that criminal attorney, they’d like to hire an additional “floating prosecutor.”
Central Staff also identified that additional funding for implementation of new policies enacted in 2024 such as SOAP, SODA, the new street racing ordinance, the re-criminalization of prostitution loitering, and the new SCORE jail contract, has not been included in Harrell’s proposed budget.
SMC has said they will probably need an additional $196,000 in 2025 and $520,000 in 2026 to transport defendants to and from the SCORE jail. Otherwise they would need to spend even more money for a new judicial department that could manage all the virtual hearings for those housed at SCORE.
Kettle said he is worried about the health of the “criminal justice system.”
Other Seattle News:
The city council also received the updated revenue forecast for 2025, which was mixed. JumpStart and REET revenue looks like it will be slightly up, but General Fund revenues will be down by around $20 million (driven by lower sales and B&O taxes), a further gap for the city council to fill.
This week the new police officer training academy in Arlington celebrated a soft opening. The facility is expected to be open fully by 2025 and could speed up training times for police officers.
The results of the gender-based violence prevention services investment passed in the 2024 budget have finally been announced.
The Stranger drills down deeper on the new less lethal weapons legislation being proposed by Harrell, including a lift on the blast ball ban. You can read some of the justification being presented for this proposal in my consent decree article from last week.
A Washington state defense attorney, John Sheeran, has been indicted for allegedly smuggling drugs into the King County Jail. Drugs he is accused of smuggling include methamphetamine, ketamine, buprenorphine, and THC. He was the defense attorney who initially represented Ed Troyer, the Sheriff of Pierce County, in the suit regarding the Black newspaper carrier. Troyer is not running for reelection this year.
The Seattle Student Union is asking for more money in the Seattle budget for student mental health services and also wants a student advisory council to be established to have a larger voice in how any money is spent.
Other Stories:
Austin Field writes about the new public defender caseload standards that are currently being considered by the state Supreme Court. He argues that public defenders are the main line of defense against law enforcement vigilantism. He writes: “To be clear, reducing public defender workloads isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats or even prosecutors versus defenders—some prosecutors acknowledge the need for better public defense. This caseload fight is about democracy versus authoritarianism.”
You can provide public comment to the Court about this matter here.
Meanwhile, a Washington state watchdog office recently published a report finding that prisoners in solitary confinement in Washington state aren’t receiving basic quality-of-life care and are subject to “dehumanizing and traumatizing” restraint practices.
Unsurprisingly the Washington Department of Corrections argues that they need more money to make progress on their goals related to solitary confinement.
The Washington State Standard reports:
“But Seevers, with Disability Rights Washington, said that there are several easy policy changes that the agency can make to reduce solitary confinement without additional funding, such as raising the standard of proof for infractions, as people are often put in solitary confinement while awaiting a decision on disciplinary action. “DOC has demonstrated that they’re not going to make changes unless there’s a legislative mandate for them to do so,” Seevers said.”
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