David Boze: Good news that Seattle police contract makes firing cops harder

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council passed the new Seattle police contract, but not without controversy, and not without a number of council members expressing regret over the very thing that they were passing.

The Seattle police are getting a big four-year retroactive raise, which means that Jenny Durkan is going to pay them 2018 wages for 2014. What struck me was that there was no controversy about the dollar amount. So now they’re earning 2018 wages from 2014 — call that the Sawant bonus, I guess, for all that our police have to put up with from her.

KIRO Radio reporter Hanna Scott said that the retroactive pay will amount to an average of a cumulative 17-percent pay raise for each officer over the six-year contract, which runs from 2014 to 2020.

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“They are making 2014 wages, which is a big deal,” Scott said. She pointed out that the police have been putting in many more hours to follow the reforms from the 2012 consent decree.

“They’ve been implementing those, much more oversight, a lot more on their job than there used to be, but they’re still making those older wages,” she said, adding, “They’ve done this, they’ve been good on reforms since that decree went in place, and needed this pay raise — plus the cost of living here has just been skyrocketing ridiculously over those years.”

The activists, however, are upset, because the contract rolls back a couple of reforms. I’m not saying I’m upset by it because Seattle police have a horrible job, and often times the politics of the city don’t support what’s necessary for the officers to defend the city. Seattle is getting to be a very dangerous place.

Activist groups “said that this rolls back reforms, hard-fought reforms,” according to Scott, and argued that the contract “superseded legislation passed by the city last year.”

This just sounds like a convoluted mess where you have activists wanting the police to have no risk of making a mistake. One of the problems I had with I-940 is that the individuals pushing it used examples that looked like the police wildly overstepped their bounds. In those cases, people were armed and failed to follow proper instructions from police. Cops are in a very unique position — it’s not like you and me. They’re confronting extremely dangerous people. I think a lot of people judge police from what they see on TV — police disarming people with no weapons or shooting a weapon out of their hands. None of that is realistic.

Scott said that the “big push in this state and in this city is de-escalation.” I think that would be great, but I wish there was more consistency on the part of the activists. When you have someone who is unwilling to be de-escalated, I wish that the activists would be willing to say, “You know what — that person was a family member of mine, but they weren’t listening, and that’s on them. It’s a sad situation and it breaks my heart, because I really wanted them to live a full life. However, I’m not going to blame other people for their actions.” They would make their voices so much more heard in the police community if there was more self-reflection on cases like that.

One guess as to who the council’s sole no-vote was — you’re right, it was Sawant. The City of Seattle is supposedly committed to all of its previous reforms. A judge is going to take a look at the contract, and if the reform rollbacks are too much, then the judge can issue a proper remedy. But supposedly, they’re on-track to keep all of their reform promises.

According to the new contract, it will be more difficult to fire Seattle police officers. For my part, I find that to be a good thing. It would be a lot healthier and a lot better if people were more open and honest about the challenges that officers face that other people do not face. If it looks like someone has got a weapon and they’re close by, the officer doesn’t have time to have a big debate about it. They’re going to have to respond as though the worst-case scenario is there, and that means that, sometimes, someone is going to get hurt.

On the education side, if there are techniques that officers can learn that make it easier not to hurt people, that’s fantastic. But we the public also need to take responsibility for ourselves and understand that there are certain things that we can do to diminish the chances that we will be hurt. Then I think there can be a greater openness about holding officers outside the law accountable, as long as you’re not trying to repaint the lines so that officers doing their jobs are somehow the bad guys.