The Seattle City Council’s public safety committee Tuesday will hear details of a 2023 report on the Seattle Police Department’s use of force that shows police have been reporting fewer total incidents while “the use of force increased with Black people, Hispanic / Latino people, and other racial minorities,” according to a council brief on the session.
The Seattle Office of Inspector General report (PDF) covers a three-year period — 2021, 2022, and 2023 — and documents a shift that recorded some of the overall “lowest use of force since 2015” for the department even as incidents reported involving Black and Hispanic/Latino people jumped.
The report also shows that Black people in Seattle are disproportionately more likely to have a cop point a gun at them. “Black subjects are still most likely to be subject to pointing of a firearm, despite not being subjects of force as frequently as white or unknown race persons,” Tuesday’s presentation reads.
The report comes as the public safety committee chaired by downtown representative Robert Kettle is awaiting the debate on approving new labor agreements with Seattle’s 1,200-member police union.
CHS reported here on efforts to strengthen accountability priorities in the negotiations included adding a representative from the Community Police Commission to the bargaining process.
Advocates have called for reform amid waves of Office of Police Accountability actions that have resulted in reprimands and training but few instances of demotions or terminations. Also powering the call for reform are 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.
The report also documents the final years of Seattle’s policing under a federal consent decree. Last year, SPD ended 12 years of federal controls and oversight after a civil rights investigation found evidence of excessive force and biased policing at the department.
Meanwhile, the city continues to struggle to hire and keep enough cops. Thursday afternoon, the council’s Governance, Accountability & Economic Development Committee will consider legislation hoped to improve the recruitment and retention of police officers by creating a new position “to be more responsive to SPD applicants,” according to a council brief on the proposal. The proposed legislation would roll out a simplified test for applicants and create a recruitment and retention office in SPD “that would be responsible for increasing the number of sworn officers.”
CHS reported here on federal recommendations handed down to help SPD boost its ranks. The federal report attributes Seattle’s police staffing issues to the COVID-19 pandemic, the shifting labor market, officer safety concerns, and community response to issues like use of force and biased policing.
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Even if anyone argues it’s just a few bad apples. As the saying goes, “A few bad apples spoils the bunch”
Ideally, everyone would be fired, and re-hired pending a third-party evaluation of their psychological state, previous record of on-job performance including pertinant body-cam footage, and additionally be forced to participate in months of sensitivity training in regards to the vulnerable populations they will encounter. Hell, write a whole new SPD charter that punishes rascist trash. Also smash the police union to pieces. The police are definitionally not a labor organization. Who breaks strikes? Not workers.
But hey, just pay them even more that should fix all these deeply-ingrained racial bias issues, right? Please, offer your best ‘alternate’ solutions because I see nothing else.
If gun violence levels and incidence of resisting arrest are consistent from year to year and equal across groups then this is very troubling and evidence of systemic bias.
Sadly they are not. The correct statistical analysis would be to look at the rate of use of force per capita among the studied populations to determine if force is used more frequently on specific groups. Then if there are real disparities, you dive deeper to try and find out why.
“Resisting arrest” is a key factor on whether force is used. Do minority groups resist more often than others?
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Hey Joy,
If you’re reading this (I know you’re reading this *wink*), what are you planning on doing to increase police accountability? Between the cop who raged out at the bus driver, this report, the cops who took 30 minutes to respond to the shooting at the Showbox, and the cops who raged out at the protest in February, the police are giving you multiple reasons to encode additional accountability measures in the cop contract.
Also, nobody wants the cops to have a 30% raise in a deficit year, especially when they’re abusing power like this.
Will you side with the cops or with your constituents?
You know the answer…. Joy loves cops more than anyone
A significant raise is necessary in order to hire more cops, which is badly needed. The force is down something like 500 since pre-pandemic years, and are now at very unsafe levels.
Hi zach,
Remember that time you knee jerk came to SPD’s defense when they were successfully sued by protestors for their excess force and then you read the article and realized the lawsuit was justified?
Maybe realize that cops don’t need to make six figures. Cops is a low-skill, low-risk, low-intelligence job that should be paid barely above minimum wage. I’m thinking $25/hour. Fewer cops are injured or die in the line of duty than roofers and they only make an average of $42k.
The biggest exodus of Seattle Police happened because they were far right anti-vaxxers who refused to vaccinate for COVID and left the force instead.
We don’t NEED more cops. And we definitely don’t need more overpaid out of control cops with nearly no oversight.
SPD is racist?? WOW I woulda never thought