Mayor Jenny Durkan selected him as a department insider to run Seattle Police after Chief Carmen Best bailed on the city. Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Seattle City Council kept him around as interim and then gave him the job to start last year. Now Chief Adrian Diaz is out amid allegations of gender discrimination, lawsuits, and the continuing to thin ranks at SPD.

Harrell scheduled a 1 PM press conference to make “a major public safety announcement” announcing Diaz is being removed as chief but will remain with the department to work on “special projects” as lawsuits alleging harassment and discrimination play out.

Harrell said Wednesday the department, faced with lawsuits and allegations against Diaz over internal discrimination, would be “better served with him stepping aside.”

“This is how you get better,” Harrell said.

Harrell announced retired King County Sheriff Sue Rahr will lead the department on an interim basis. Rahr led the sheriff department from 2005 and 2012 and Harrell called her Wednesday “an expert in recruiting” and a leader in bringing more women into law enforcement.

Harrell said Rahr will not be a candidate to permanently lead the department.

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. Harrell said that process will begin and added that the process will include a nationwide search to attract candidates from other cities but stopped short of saying no internal candidates would be considered.

Breaking down in tears, Diaz recounted his accomplishments as chief and thanked the department for supporting his years in the role.

Rahr said she would do her best “in the short time I am here” to get her department the resources it needs and that she will be listening for ideas and issues from the first day on the job starting Thursday.

“I decided it’s time to put up or shut up,” Rahr said about leaving retirement and her work with the Center for Innovations in Community Safety.

Earlier this month, Harrell announced the hiring of a firm to investigate gender discrimination and harassment claims against SPD leaders including Diaz. The investigation opened after four female SPD officers filed a claim against the department alleging sexism and a hostile work environment. Additional lawsuits and allegations have continued to grow around Diaz’s leadership.

A 27-year Seattle Police Department veteran, Diaz originally represented continuity and a safe choice as the city looked at external candidates to lead its department through Seattle’s pandemic recovery and out of the years of Blacks Lives Matter and anti-police protests.

The city was also facing the end of 12 years of federal oversight after a civil rights investigation found evidence of excessive force and biased policing at the department.

Meanwhile, the political battle over a new contract for its police officers also was playing out. An agreement on that finally arrived last month with a new deal that grants major raises for the city’s police force while adding few new accountability requirements for the department.

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.”

While their defund rhetoric lessened in the years since, the Harrell administration and Diaz continued to beat the drum over the need to hire more officers. A record number of homicides in the city in 2023 backed up the message.

But Diaz’s department continued to struggle to bring on more cops. The latest hiring report shows SPD with a net loss of 345 officers since 2020 and a hiring process currently on track to bring on fewer officers in 2024 than it did last year.

Meanwhile, response times are continuing to get worse across all precincts. In the East Precinct, the median response time for the highest priority calls has climbed 10% to 6 minutes, 36 seconds. 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.

SPD also says its overtime spending continues to climb as precincts try to patch over the lack of resources.

Wednesday, Harrell, who once worked as a lawyer handling employment law cases, said that the decision over Diaz came down to his ability to be able to focus on the job, calling the cloud of litigation “distracting.” But the mayor said he did not believe the tumult around the chief will further damage the city’s ability to recruit and retain officers citing statistics showing “a 300%” increase in applications following the announcement of the new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild.

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