New funding, old animosity: SPOG president claims SPD attrition will take ‘decades to recover’

Near the end of Jenny Durkan’s tenure as mayor, she is bearing the brunt of the Seattle Police Department’s criticism — for handing them checks.

To address the “immediate need” to fully staff SPD and emergency dispatch, Mayor Durkan has announced new hiring incentives in the form of additional signing bonuses.

While the order is ultimately subject to city council approval, the measure is intended to ramp up staffing in light of 310 vacancies in SPD and 21 in Community Safety Communications (CSC), as of July 2021 (62 SPD and 17 CSC new hires are reported in 2017). Neither figure accounts for recent separations over the vaccine mandate, for which the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) attributes 130 officers taken off duty, a figure encompassing exemption requests that have yet to reach decision.

Rantz: Mayor quietly admits Seattle Police staffing crisis, but could be too late

SPOG President Mike Solan has dismissed the mayor’s order as an attempt to deflect blame away from her administration in light of “historic levels of crime, putting public safety into jeopardy,” Solan told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

“Dangling money to recruit new or lateral hires won’t get the job done,” Solan wrote in an SPOG Board of Directors press release Nov. 1. “Seattle cannot simply hire enough people to balance the loss of so many officers as other agencies across the nation are competing for those same jobs.”

“They’re trying to optically look good as if they are championing employment for new police officers,” Solan added in the interview. “But the reality is these same politicians caused this staffing crisis.”

Solan mentioned that SPD was deemed fully compliant in 2018 with the Department of Justice’s consent decree, something he views as validation of the the department’s reform, and as important context when discussing political movements that call for police defunding.

“They said that this agency was the model, reformed agency for other police agencies across the nation to emulate,” Solan noted. “Days later, sadly, when George Floyd happened, these same politicians ran away from us as fast as they could.”

“They caused this staffing crisis because of that political betrayal,” he continued. “And then now dangling money to lateral hires and new hires, mind you, who are competing with other agencies across the nation for their employment, isn’t going to get the job done. This could take decades to recover.”

Solan characterized SPD’s staffing issue as a “hemorrhage,” which cannot be resolved with hiring bonuses.

In the same SPOG release, Solan indicated that he is looking toward a new mayoral administration to ramp up SPD staffing to the level he considers appropriate. That release implies that the issue not only lies with increasing new hires, but improving relationships with current SPD officers.

“SPOG would like to suggest to our current and soon-to-be newly elected politicians that if you want to hire new and lateral police officers, we suggest you also take care of your current officers,” the release continues. “These officers worked during the pandemic, are feeling the impacts of dangerous staffing levels and are without a union contract. SPOG is looking forward to working with our new mayor and the current/new city council members to remedy our city’s issues.”

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.