What July 25th, 2020 looked like on Capitol Hill
The Seattle City Council will hold a public hearing this week that officials hope will shape efforts to improve accountability from the captains and lieutenants who lead the Seattle Police Department.
Tuesday night’s hearing of the council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee is a key opportunity for community priorities to be heard before negotiations begin on a new contract with the Seattle Police Management Association, the union with fewer than 100 members representing SPD’s leadership positions. The committee’s chair Lisa Herbold says a new contract with the management union could bring critical changes to how SPD’s accountability systems work and that Tuesday’s hearing is a crucial public element in restarting the negotiation process that will move behind closed doors.
“It’s the point in time for the public to testify about what should be included in a new contract,” Herbold said. “Once negotiations begin, they are confidential and closed to the public until negotiations conclude.”
The SPMA contract is separate from the city’s agreement with the Seattle Police Officers Guild which remains under negotiation in a protracted labor battle that continues to flare publicly with disputes over how many sworn officers the city needs. SPOG has been operating without a contract since 2020. The impasse is not an entirely unusual situation for a major metropolitan force — agreements typically end up with retroactive wage increases given how long they can take to negotiate.
The unions are also typically better served by continuing to negotiate rather than turn the decision over to a third party. Cops — and their captains and lieutenants — can’t strike.
“Unlike many other employees, police cannot legally go on strike due to the nature of their jobs,” a city announcement of the negotiation process reads. “Instead, if a police union and the City can’t reach a deal, the negotiations can go to interest arbitration. In that process a neutral arbitrator would make binding decisions to resolve disagreements about the contract.”
While the SPOG battle smolders, the SPMA contract is beginning its new cycle after a 2022 agreement that carries the two sides through the end of this year.
Though the agreement was finalized last summer, it was shaped by a public process that happened in a much different Seattle. The public hearing for the previous SPMA contract was held in September 2019 — before the pandemic and the 2020 protests reshaped the city’s economics and politics.
Meanwhile, there is a better structure for addressing accountability issues in the next contract. In 2019, efforts to improve accountability priorities in the negotiations included adding a community representative from the Community Police Commission to the bargaining process.
Herbold says the stronger emphasis on accountability in the current contract grew out of the 2019 hearing represented a “sea change” and led to key changes including elimination of a 180-day limitation on Office of Police Accountability investigations and removing the requirement that intentionality must be proven in dishonesty charges.
Now, four years later, there is even greater public awareness for accountability reform amid findings from analysis of the SPD response to the 2020 protests that centered on a lack of accountability over ineffective and irresponsible crowd control strategies and communication failures by the department’s leaders.
You can learn more about the hearing and the public process around Seattle Police contracts here.
PUBLIC HEARING
On August 8th at 5:30 p.m., the Public Safety and Human Services Committee and the Select Labor Committee will jointly hold a Public Hearing on necessary changes to the City’s police accountability system that should be included in future negotiations with SPMA. Information about how to testify is included on the agenda. Opportunities for both in-person and virtual testimony will be provided. Sign-in for in-person testimony begins at 5 p.m.; virtual sign-in begins at 5:30 p.m.
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