When Robert Eickmann noticed that his laptop, which had been
stolen along with his car, had been broadcasting a signal from the same
location for several days, he passed the information on to the Seattle
Police Department. Eickmann hoped this information—this
clue—would help the SPD track down his missing 1993
Saturn as well as his MacBook. Instead, the cops told Eickmann that he
should invest in software to remotely wipe his hard drive.
On Christmas Eve, a young family was taking a late-night carriage
ride through downtown Seattle. As they turned off of First Avenue onto
Pike Street, a BMW plowed into the side of the carriage. The driver of
the BMW backed up and sped off. But the people in the carriage wrote
down the driver’s license-plate number and called the police.
“They’re not going to charge the guy with hit-and-run,” Joanna Graf,
owner of Angel Horse Carriages, angrily grumbles three months later.
“They didn’t even contact the guy.” The police didn’t even
write the driver a ticket, and Graf had to pay for the $5,000 worth of
damage done to her carriage. “A hit-and-run—that’s pretty serious
for the police to just say, ‘Oh well.'”
The most frightening example of our police department’s inability to
police comes from Les Sandusky. In February, Sandusky was celebrating a
friend’s birthday at a house on Capitol Hill, when a group of uninvited
guests crashed the party. “Some guys showed up and we asked them to
leave,” Sandusky says. Instead, the men went outside and began writing
homophobic slurs on the house. Sandusky went to confront the six men
and was attacked.
“They surrounded me. One of them smashed a 40 ounce bottle over my
head,” he says. Then one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed
Sandusky in the chest and throat. Sandusky spent a week in the
hospital.
“There were eyewitnesses who knew their names and where they
worked,” Sandusky says. “One of the suspects even dropped his cell
phone [outside the house].” But no arrests have been made and Sandusky
says the detective on the case told him he would be “putting [the] case
on the back burner.”
Andrew Taylor, president of the Miller Park Community
Council, has fought prostitution and drugs in his neighborhood. He
believes officers in the East Precinct just can’t keep up with crime in
the area.
“I get the impression that when it’s life-threatening, [the police]
are there,” says Taylor. “But they’re basically running from fire to
fire.”
The SPD has been getting hammered lately in the dailies as well as
in The Stranger [“Tase First, Ask Questions Later,” Dec 13,
2007; “Head Banger,” Nov 29, 2007; “Gil’s Boys,” July 5, 2007; “Raw
Deal,” June 7, 2007]. However, the department has hit a number of
high-profile cases hard.
Solid detective work led police to 48-year-old James Anthony
Williams, who was arrested and charged for the brutal stabbing death on
New Year’s Eve of Shannon Harps. A month later, SPD swarmed 23rd Avenue
and Union Street and launched a citywide manhunt after a man shot and
killed Degene Barecha and wounded another man inside of the
Philadelphia’s Best Cheesesteak restaurant. Within 24 hours, the
Seattle Police Department apprehended the alleged shooter, Rey
Davis-Bell, at a house in Beacon Hill.
High-profile manhunts and investigations put a heavy strain on the
department’s resources, which forces the SPD to prioritize. This might
explain why folks like Eickmann and Graf—victims of crimes that
aren’t dominating the front pages of newspapers—are having
trouble getting the cops to return their calls. But it’s not
indifference and it’s not incompetence—it’s staffing. Seattle
simply doesn’t have enough police officers to do the job.
“The staffing [situation] is getting very, very dangerous,” says
Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) president Rich O’Neill.
Seattle has 1,307 sworn officer positions, and SPOG estimates
that more than 100 of those positions are currently unfilled. Things
have gotten so bad that cops are starting to seriously worry about
their own safety.
Some officers flying solo on patrol have been forced to resort to
shining their lights down dark alleyways and shouting orders to
disperse over their megaphones—instead of making arrests for
street crimes—because of the lack of backup. Clearly, SPD is in
desperate
need of officers. But does anyone want to work in
Seattle?
As the department tries to hold off a mass exodus, applicants just
aren’t coming fast enough.
In 2007, after complaints about long response times and heightened
workloads, Mayor Greg Nickels pushed for the city to hire 105 new
officers. The Seattle City Council also made hiring new officers a
priority, and just about every candidate up for election last year
pounded their fists about the need for more cops.
Easier said than done.
The city proudly announced that it had hired 60 officers in
2007—well below its annual goal of 80 new hires. On average, the
city loses around 50 cops every year to transfers and retirement. In
the first quarter of 2008, the city hoped to hire 33
officers—through recruiting and transfers—while holding
losses to 15. But in the first two months of 2008, SPD only had 21
recruits in training and lost 14 officers.
We’re in a recession. Jobs are harder to come by. Police work is
dangerous and opens a person up to public scrutiny. But the police have
a strong union, good job security, and good benefits. So why is Seattle
having a hard time recruiting and retaining officers? Don’t cops get
paid well?
Travis Gnehm, 19, wanted to be a journalist until his senior year of
high school in Bellevue, when he found an old police scanner in his
house. Before long, Gnehm was chasing officers out on calls, recording
amateur video of crime scenes, and offering the tapes to local TV
stations.
“After seeing what police do and talking to them, I figured this was
the job for me,” Gnehm says. Now, Gnehm is looking to find a local
police department that, he says, “fits me best.”
SPD, the Washington State Patrol, the Bellevue Police Department,
and other suburban agencies are courting Gnehm. He has been to SPD’s
recruiting fair—where the department shows off all its high-tech
gadgets, SWAT vehicles, K-9 units, and CSI squads—and been on a
ride-along with the department. Gnehm says the excitement of working in
an urban environment like Seattle is appealing, but he has
reservations.
His biggest reservation? He wants to find a department that will
help pay for his college education. Many suburban departments offer
higher pay for college graduates or even reimburse officers for school.
The SPD does not.
Smaller departments outside of Seattle are becoming a big
draw—for reasons besides tuition, as well. First off, suburban
departments are safer. Violent crimes are lower or nearly nonexistent,
and some officers say they simply feel welcome and more appreciated in
suburban communities. Working outside of Seattle also gives officers
the opportunity to have a shorter commute—less than 15 percent of
SPD officers live in the city—which may be why the Lakewood
Police Department was able to hire away seven Seattle cops recently.
Then there are the hefty hiring bonuses, the take-home cars, the
education incentives, and, most importantly, the higher pay.
A new officer in Seattle starts out at around $47,000 a year. But
those same rookies can make $5,000 to $19,000 more by signing on to
departments in Renton or Kent, plus bonuses for working patrol,
physical fitness, and college degrees. Across the lake in Bellevue,
Gnehm’s hometown, a new recruit with a college degree can make as much
in his or her first year as an SPD officer with more than four years of
experience.
With poor benefits, few perks, and low pay, SPD is not only having
trouble attracting new recruits like Gnehm, they’re having trouble
keeping the officers they’ve got.
As the city continues to pump money into the department’s budget to
hire more officers, experienced cops are walking out the door. Last
year, SPD lost 46 officers to other departments.
Some of those cops are leaving for better pay, or shorter commutes,
or what they perceive as more grateful residents. But many Seattle cops
are fed up with a drawn-out contract-negotiation process. Police
officers in Seattle have been working without a contract since December
2006, and a number of officers are already packing up and preparing to
jump ship if the guild’s contract isn’t nailed down soon.
“You [have officers] with three, four, and five years leaving,
that’s just devastating,” says SPOG president O’Neill. “It takes a year
to get someone hired, trained, and out there, and another before you
know which end is up.”
Even if the SPD filled all its open positions and found a
better way to retain officers, the question remains: Is a department
consisting of 1,307 officers big enough to police a city the size of
Seattle?
“I don’t think there’s an optimum number that you can say you get to
that point and say you’re fine,” says Dr. Otwin Marenin, a professor in
Washington State University’s criminal justice program. But statistics
from the U.S. Department of Justice point to the root cause of
Seattle’s police problem: There aren’t enough of them.
According to the Department of Justice, the national average is
about one officer for every 271 residents. Some cities have more than
that—New York City has one officer for every 218
residents—while others have fewer. Atlanta, Georgia, with a
population similar to Seattle’s, has one officer for every 279
residents. Denver, Colorado, has one officer for every 354 residents.
Seattle has just one officer for every 500 residents.
To bring Seattle’s officer-resident ratio down to a manageable ratio
of 1 to 250, the city would need to double what it currently spends
annually on patrol officers, to over $220 million.
While it may be financially infeasible for Seattle to double the
size of its police force, Council Member Nick Licata says there’s more
to policing than just numbers. “We’re not going to double our police
force,” he says. “This game of ‘how do you properly staff and pay for
police in the city’ is a quagmire of statistical dead ends.”
Licata agrees that Seattle needs more cops, but he says the ones we
have also need more training, and the department should pull from other
pools it already has, such as the 20 or more officers working desk jobs
at each of Seattle’s five precincts throughout the day.
“The question is, ultimately, does the population feel safe or not?”
Licata says. “The polls that they’ve done say people basically feel
safe.”
After a string of violent incidents shook Seattle’s downtown
core in the summer of 2007, the SPD responded with an unprecedented
show of force centered around Third Avenue and Pine Street, a hot spot
of criminal activity for years. But as officers made their presence
felt downtown, bad guys simply pulled up stakes, according to
neighborhood groups, and moved north to Belltown or east to Capitol
Hill. Now, the problems have spread and the department just doesn’t
have the manpower to extend patrols. SPD just can’t win.
Over in the Pike Place Market, Kristen Sekera—assistant
manager at Kasala Furniture—says a police crackdown in the
neighborhood hasn’t done much. “[Victor Steinbrueck Park] is out of
control,” she says. “I call it Crackhead Park.” Sekera says she
constantly sees people doing drugs in the alley behind Kasala—on
Western Avenue and Virginia Street—and has called police “two or
three times in the last month.” Still, she says, when the police do
come, it’s usually too late. “Two weeks ago, I called [the police], for
these underage kids smoking pot and drinking [behind the store]. It
took the cops 45 minutes to show up.” Sekera says as soon as the cops
showed up, the kids ran. “It wasn’t a prompt response,” she says.
One SPD officer—who asked not to be named—believes
because of hiring problems and unreasonable expectations, the SPD will
continue to be the “bad guy” in the mind of public. “I think officers
truly feel the community doesn’t support the police department,” the
officer says.
In the last year, SPD has taken a beating in the media. A number of
officers—including Chief Gil Kerlikowske—have been accused
of misconduct. Tensions have grown recently between some communities
and the department. With all of the ink spilled over police
accountability in the last year, it seems counterintuitive to argue for
more cops.
Is hiring more cops the answer? Well, that all depends on how
quickly Seattle wants its stolen cars returned, its hit-and-run drivers
ticketed, and its violent criminals apprehended and arrested. Clearly,
Eickmann, Graf, and Sandusky’s cases show the department isn’t living
up to expectations. Seattle is outgrowing its police force, and as the
department’s numbers plummet, things are only going to get worse.
If this were just a numbers game, $100 million would go a long way
toward super-sizing the department. While blindly throwing money at the
problem isn’t going to fix anything, it’s clear the city is going to
have to shell out some cash to attract more recruits, and keep the good
cops we’ve got. If things keep going the way they’re going, we’re not
going to get either. 
