Rantz: Timing and explanations of Seattle police staffing report is fishy

There’s usually a pointed reason for a government agency or politician to release potentially controversial information on Friday afternoon and that’s what KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz believes happened with the Seattle Police Department staffing study.

Rantz says it’s awfully convenient that he and other media members received the 136-page “Berkshire Report” at 4:59 p.m. Friday.

“Generally speaking, when that happens it’s called a Friday Document Dump,” Rantz said. “They don’t want you to read it, they don’t want you to understand it, they don’t want to reach out, because if you try to reach out for someone to try to explain what it is that they just sent, they will be able to say, ‘Oh, we’ve gone home for the weekend.”

Related: Seattle Mayor: Staffing study confirms city needs more officers on the street

The report’s goal was to calculate how many officers should be on staff for the size of Seattle. While there was clear indication that the city was indeed understaffed, the controversy came after the city sent back a draft submitted by the consultant in November of 2015, with the city asking to revisit some of the issues.

“There are some very valid reasons as to why they might have sent it back, but the problem was the suspicion was the original report came back with data and numbers that the mayor or city council didn’t like, so they sent it back saying ‘OK, you come back with numbers we actually like,'” Rantz said.

Rantz says the handling of the report doesn’t assuage those concerns.

“Whether or not that happened it doesn’t matter because, unfortunately, this updated final report, and how it was handled (Friday) is making that kind of concern incredibly difficult to dismiss,” he said. “I’m not saying I believe that that’s the case, or I have any evidence to suggest that is the case, I’m simply saying the way this was handled (Friday) makes it very easy for someone to jump on this idea that you sent something back you didn’t like until you got something back that you did. Only the thing that you got back you still don’t like, which makes it even more confusing.”

Rantz acknowledged the possibility that the city received the report Friday afternoon and sent it out immediately, but that they should have then prepared to explain the extensive, and confusing, report better than some written statements from the mayor and police chief.

“These are smart politicians, right?” he said. “They understand that usually when you put out hundreds of pages of documents late in the afternoon, generally, it’s because you want to hide something. So wouldn’t you go out of your way to make it so that people can come on and explain: talk to reporters, talk to producers? If your goal is to quash all of the rumors over the original report and why it was sent back, you would think you would throw out some experts, or someone, to come on and just talk about it. I don’t even think the mayor’s office or SPD is hiding anything, it just seems this being handled very poorly.”

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