Kent Mayor: ‘Our police department is fully staffed,’ but needs more officers

Kent Mayor Dana Ralph said its police department is fully staffed in budgeted positions.

“We did quite a bit of work over the last year in recruitment and have a lot of officers lined up or are currently in the academy,” Ralph said on The Gee & Ursula Show.

Despite the good news, the mayor said there aren’t enough police officers to keep the city safe.

“In Kent, to get us up just to average level staffing, with a population our size with the type of criminal activity that we have, we need at least another 30 officers,” Ralph explained. “There’s just no funding source. There was a bill proposed in both the House and the Senate this session that would have taken given the city a tax credit for existing sales tax, but the committee chose to not even vote on the issue. So we’re raising the flag.”

Ralph said the city offered a lateral bonus to people that came to Kent who were already officers in the state.

“We also negotiated a solid contract to become one of the highest-paid departments in the state,” Ralph said. “But we also have recruited some really young creative officers that were able to just go out and connect with a lot of new hires, people that may have not necessarily considered law enforcement as a career. And social media is a pretty powerful tool. Instagram is a great way to see what Kent Police recruiting is doing. And it’s paid off.”

Homelessness continues to be a problem in Kent. Ralph said the city has 88 permanent units available to those who need housing.

“I think every city could use more shelter space,” Ralph explained. “We work very closely with a lot of service providers on finding temporary shelter space with the idea of getting people moved into a more permanent solution.”

In an effort to create affordable housing, the city already allows four to six units per standard lot. A new bill in the legislature would let Kent increase that.

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“What we will see is developers coming in and buying up what is now affordable housing and putting in five or six units of what will no longer be affordable housing,” Ralph said. “So that is our biggest concern this, this bill plays itself out very differently depending on the city. If you look at our housing stock numbers, we have more in that middle-income range, from about 50% average median income up to 80%, so we’re really concerned about losing that stock and then we don’t have the ability for the infrastructure to keep up with that.”

Ralph will give her annual State of the City speech Tuesday night and said that the city has a lot to be proud of.

“Kent is a really strong community. We are a big city that still has that small-town feel,” Ralph said. “We’ve got an amazing park system with lots of access to nature for kids’ families. It’s just an all-around great place to live.”

Listen to Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.