As the City’s contract with SPOG expires next year, negotiations must begin soon anyway. Those negotiations must take into account the City’s ongoing failure to meet federal requirements. Any effort to start those negotiations early will strengthen the positions of any reform opponents within SPOG.

Pre-emptive grandstanding by City Council Members who are desperate to make everyone forget their own failures will probably not help this situation.

(I wonder how much the Council’s abject failures on homelessness policy have exacerbated the job stress police officers experience? Police are often the first responders.)

It's more likely due to the opiod epidemic that is going to reach it's peak in 2020, tensor.

Contracts are contracts. I'm not crazy about the SPOG, but the city needs to learn how to play by the rules.

Its so weird seeing how people fetishize rules.

Rules are written by those who benefit from the rules. Those who are disadvantaged by the rules naturally seek to overturn them, reform or completely throw them out. All written history is a chronicle of this struggle to rewrite the rules, a battle between the haves and the have nots.

Rules are arbitrary and unfair. If by some stroke of luck they happen to disadvantage the people who write them, they are enforced in an uneven fashion. For example, as a 20-something in 1990's Tacoma, I (half white and half Asian) walked around with long hair down to the middle of my ass, T shirts bearing pot leaf logos, and reeked of weed. If I needed directions, I'd stop and ask a cop. The number of times I was stopped and searched? Exactly once, and the cop asked me politely if he could look in my bag. He even ignored the glass marijuana pipe caked in resin that dangled from a thread of hemp from my neck as an impromptu necklace. Meanwhile, a Black family on their way to church on Sunday morning would get pulled over for a busted tailight, or failing to signal within the required time frame before executing a turn. The cop wasn't polite with them I can assure you.

But do go on about how you'd like everyone to follow the rules. Yes, your rules fetish, this bizarre dream fo an orderly world, where the people who benefit from those rules-namely, you- can sit on your porches sipping iced tea while the slaves work the plantation fields.

Fuck rules.

@5: Well, that was quite the long-winded diatribe for no particular reason.

There are consequences if the City does not follow the rules. As a taxpaying citizen of Seattle, I do not want to pay for rule-breaking which could easily be avoided.

See? No plantation slaves were harmed, or even involved, in the writing of this comment.

Wandering Stars dear, do dry up. You are undoubtedly engaged in at least several dozen contractual agreements that dictate the sort of life you have. What would you do if they suddenly changed the rules on you?

Contract are contracts. If the council was too addle-brained to not read that contract when they agreed to it, the blame is on them. And, as Our Dear Tensor points out, it's almost time to start negotiating a new contract. Maybe get some competent people in labor relations, and some non-idiots on the City Council?

I've lived in Washington for the better part of a decade and one of the most consistent things about living here is watching government incompetence at just about every level, including SPOG, the city council, and don't get me started on the state itself.

It's painful to watch people who think they know what they're doing find out that they're wrong and yet it's part and parcel of the culture here. As I said before, painful to watch this happen over and over and over....

RickFromTexas dear, SPOG isn't incompetent (nor is it government). SPOG is doing what unions do: Negotiate on behalf of their members. You may not agree with the union's positions (I don't) but those positions are based on the membership.