‘People will die’: Former King County Sheriff says Seattle’s police staffing crisis goes far beyond Bite of Seattle

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) had 11 fewer officers on duty at Seattle Center during this year’s Bite of Seattle than the year before — 39 officers this year, compared to 50 last year, according to The Seattle Times. The statistic raises a difficult question in the wake of the gang-related shootout: Would more officers have prevented the violence and saved lives?

Retired King County Sheriff John Urquhart said the answer isn’t simple, but the stakes are.

“You can’t say that having more officers there would have prevented the shooting, but you also can’t say that having additional officers there would not have prevented the shooting,” Urquhart told KIRO Newsradio. “You just don’t know.”

Fewer SPD officers on the ground

Last year, SPD staffed roughly 50 officers at the Bite of Seattle. This year, staffing was down to 39, despite similar crowd size.

Urquhart believes the explanation is straightforward: SPD simply doesn’t have enough officers.

“I’m sure that the rationale is they just don’t have quite enough officers to staff as they would like and how they’ve done in past years,” Urquhart said.

He noted that while 39 officers might be adequate on paper for a large event, the bigger problem is what those numbers reflect about overall staffing inside the department.

“All things being equal, it might have been enough, and it’s quite possible that it wouldn’t have changed anything at all,” Urquhart said. “The bigger issue is staffing at the Seattle Police Department in general.”

A long-term staffing crisis

Seattle’s police staffing problems have been years in the making and will take years to fix, according to Urquhart.

“They were down so far, and it takes a long time to staff back up,” Urquhart said. “It takes years and years and years to get where they need to be.”

He directly tied the shortage to the political climate of recent years.

“They’re still suffering from, I think, the big part was the defund the police movement and the general antipathy from the Seattle City Council towards the police department, which appears to have changed, but now it’s too late,” Urquhart said.

For Urquhart, the Bite of Seattle is one example of a larger public-safety problem facing Seattle.

He stressed that delayed response times caused by chronic understaffing don’t just affect major festivals; they affect every 911 call.

“People will die because they don’t have an officer getting there fast enough, irrespective of what happened at Bite of Seattle,” Urquhart said.

In other words, the debate over whether 11 more officers at one event could have changed a single deadly outcome is, in his view, part of a deeper question: How many lives across the city are at risk when there simply aren’t enough officers to respond in time?

As Seattle continues to investigate the Bite of Seattle shootout and weigh changes to event security, Urquhart’s message was blunt. The city is still paying the price for years of shrinking the department, and rebuilding will take time.

SPD said it is working hard to increase the number of sworn officers in the department. They expect to hire 100 this year.

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