The Seattle City Council pitched some ideas on Tuesday for how to retain and recruit Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers. Ideas included higher raises, providing child care, and allowing cops to take home their patrol cars. City Council President Sara Nelson, who has criticized the City in the past for its “unsustainable” spending, floated the idea of the housing subsidies for police officers. At a time when the City’s hiring freeze threatens summer camps for disabled youth, the city council’s readiness to drain the general fund to perhaps marginally increase recruitment rates for police at the expense of all else raises serious questions about the budget priorities in a city facing a major budget shortfall, a housing crisis, and several other issues. 

At the meeting, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, SPD Chief Adrian Diaz, and members of the City’s human resources and recruitment teams presented the Council with an overview of the state of staffing, recruitment, and retention at the department. Diaz gave the same spiel as always, saying that SPD’s number of deployable officers has dropped by 375 in the last five years, sinking to its lowest number since 1991. No one mentioned that the number of major crimes reported in Seattle in 2022 is down by about 20,000 compared to 1991, but, whatever, let them continue to throw out that meaningless benchmark. 

As the cops and the council members pitched policy, they mentioned giving cops more money, allowing officers to drive their patrol cars on their personal time (which also likely means accessing the City’s free gas stations for City vehicles), education reimbursement, helping with child care, increasing hiring bonuses, and creating incentives for officers who speak a second language. Sounds nice. 

At one point in the discussion about competition with other departments, Nelson chimed in to ask about cities offering cops subsidized housing. Later in the meeting, Saka eagerly supported the idea.

If the idea here is that cops struggle to afford housing in Seattle, I’m not quite sure that holds. The presenters compared SPD wages to other departments, saying entry-level officers in Seattle make $83,000 a year. But that characterization greatly underestimates the amount of money SPD officers make in overtime. In 2022, the majority of SPD patrol officers made more than $100,000 with overtime. Some cleared more than $200,000, including officers Ron Willis and Robert Stevenson, who made $200,000 in overtime alone, according to numbers crunched by DivestSPD. Until we have a homeless cop problem, it seems far-fetched to suggest the City pays cops too little for them to afford to live in Seattle.

But even if the Council sees the housing subsidy purely as a way to entice people to work for SPD, paying for cop housing hasn’t seen success in other jurisdictions. Baltimore started a housing subsidy program for cops in 2022, and it continues to struggle with staffing. The City of Los Angeles created a housing subsidy program for the LAPD, paid for by donations from businesses. That program started in 2022, and yet by 2024 the City had still fallen short of its goal to hire an additional 1,000 police officers, netting an increase of just about 400 cops. LA also significantly increased police starting salaries and overall pay, all in an effort to recruit and retain officers. LA never hired the number of cops they believed the city needed, and the City now faces a $400 million deficit, created in part by the deal the City struck with the LAPD.

The Seattle City Council’s proposals make even less sense in the face of Seattle’s projected $200 million budget hole, a figure that analysts expect to double by 2026. A hiring freeze has already threatened summer camps for Seattle’s youth, the city’s own human service workers can’t afford to live here, several other departments are chronically understaffed, and yet the council is still out here pitching policy to either pay for or solicit donations for housing subsidies for some of the City’s highest paid employees, as well as using public funds to pay for their commutes in their patrol vehicles, all so we can still very likely fall short of our staffing goals. Glad to have these adults in the room. 

Instead of subsidizing police housing, the council might consider funding or asking private businesses to fund subsidized housing for people living unsheltered, the very people that the cops spend a significant amount of time hassling off the sidewalk. Or maybe the City could fund robust police alternatives, so that we don’t have to send a very expensive gun and badge to every call. After all, though surveys show that most people want more cops, those same surveys also show that people want police alternatives. But for some reason, this mayor and the last one seem content only to stand up piddly little pilot programs while other cities embrace change get results.

Ashley Nerbovig is a staff writer at The Stranger covering policing, incarceration and courts. She is like other girls.

25 replies on “Seattle Floats Subsidized Housing for Cops in the Face of a Homelessness Crisis, a Huge Budget Deficit, and a Million Other Actual Problems”

  3. Obviously this will inspire the unhoused population to apply for vacant cop jobs thereby killing two birds with one stone. The Stranger is just too salty to rightfully appreciate the pure genius of the new pragmatic-not-progressive Council

  5. I wonder if recruiting officers who would like to live in the city they are employed by, as opposed to some creepy subdivision in a dump like pierce county, where they spend their off time bitching about the residents of Seattle, might bring in higher quality law enforcement.

  6. Seattle is going to end up like Detroit. Boeing is on a downward spiral amid the disaster that is happening in the city. There are no affordability issues in Detroit. There are no job issues in Detroit too because there are no jobs.

  9. “After all, though surveys show that most people want more cops, those same surveys also show that people want police alternatives.”

    The link goes to an older story at the Stranger, which claimed a majority of King County residents wanted police alternatives. As commenters on that story (myself included) pointed out at the time, a majority of that survey’s respondents did NOT want police alternatives, in part because they feared funding for police alternatives would come at the expense of hiring more cops.

    So, on the topic of police and alternatives, the Stranger has been reduced to recycling old lies. (All the while wondering why the policies and politicians it supports keep getting rejected by Seattle’s voters.)

  10. if Billionaires can buy

    (formerly-) Supreme ct. ‘justices’

    Motorhomes, and get whateverthefuck

    They want why not give our poor Po-po

    brand New 800hp Po-po Motorhomes? re-

    plete with jails cells on the roof,* a small spa and

    just pay them for 24/7/365 ‘service’? stop ‘thinking’

    outside the box & just put them IN motorized Big Boxes

    I’m confident our Military

    has plenty of Miitary Vehicles

    we might re-appoint for the Urban

    Warfare, coming soon to all fascist

    neigborhoods anywhere near You:

    there’s Way

    Too dang Much

    Dissent, these days.

    *that’ll keep the

    (alleged!) Miscreants

    Quiet, out in the Weather,

    where we can all See them

    *don’t forget

    the Blue Lites!

  11. Maybe if the Seattle City Council spent more time on subsidizing housing for the homeless, and a variety of housing solutions, depending on the population, Seattle would be a more attractive place for police officers to work in, and to begin with.

    But otherwise – yes, I am fully opposed to subsidizing housing for cops who make a decent living – or anyone who makes a decent living.

    The new city council: what a bunch of clowns.

  12. As @11 said, The Stranger is lying when they say surveys have shown that people want police alternatives. The April 2022 article Ashley links to claims that a survey of King County residents showed they wanted police alternatives. When you clicked the link and actually read the survey, one of the key questions asked if people think King County should invest in an alternative non-police response. The answer? 45.07% agree or strongly agree. 50.96% disagree or strongly disagree. If The Stranger had any integrity, they would have retracted the 2022 article and issued a correction. Instead, they left it as published.

    In other words, The Stranger lied then, and is continuing to lie now. It’s the left wing version of Fox News.

  14. @6, few law enforcement officers chose to reside in the community they serve. This is arguably good for both the officer and the community they serve; in that it minimizes the probability of putting oath of office and individual friendship in conflict.

  15. @13 gonna stop right there with the racist lies, since Haiti’s troubles are intimately linked to colonialism imposed by the US and France, resulting poverty, the 2004 coup against Aristide, US businesses and individuals selling weapons to both sides, and compounding the problem further and further. Don’t even start with me on Somalia. We helped Ethiopia invade in 2006 as the moderate Islamic Courts Union was ending the civil war, but that meddling created Al-Shabab and extended the violence another 10-20 years and counting. Wikipedia has details you can read that will shock you.

  16. I lived for a time in one of those creepy subdivisions in Pierce County, South of Puyallup (We were getting Maison Vel Du-Ray ready to move in, and I had sold my house). It was all Seattle and Tacoma cops, military, and Mr. Vel Du-Ray and I. We never had any problems with the neighbors, but they would talk about the “animals” that lived in Seattle and Tacoma. They had no respect for the people who paid their taxes. (they also all slept around on each other. It was like a soap opera)

    Many places required residency to be a municipal employee, but that was ruled unconstitutional in WA in 1970 or thereabouts. Fun fact: You used to have to both establish residency (one year) and sign a loyalty oath to obtain city employment.

  19. This is what the neo-Gilded Age looks like. Where society protects a handful of money hoarders at the expense of everyone else and the masses are too stupid to do anything about it other than arguing amongst themselves.

  20. Perhaps the city council should consider improving Harrell’s awful One Seattle Comprehensive Plan (the blueprint for housing in Seattle for the next 20 years for those who might not know) to create enough housing so that police (if they wish), teachers, nurses, social workers, other city employees, baristas, retail workers, and lots of other people could live in Seattle instead of being priced out.

  21. @25 but they don’t want poors (i.e. people who can’t afford a million dollar SFH) living here they just want their capitalist paramilitaries to protect them and will throw them some scraps if it keeps them happy

  23. @27 is your point that, because something would be difficult to accomplish, the government shouldn’t allow the community even to try? And if the answer is “yes” how does that stance translate to, for example, providing hiring bonuses, etc, to try to get SPD to 1400 sworn officers?

  24. @28: My point is that plans should be realistic. Planning to allow for something to be done is not the same as a realistic plan to actually get it done.

    “…to try to get SPD to 1400 sworn officers…”

    For many years prior to “defund,” the Seattle Police Department consistently came close to having 1,400 officers on payroll:

    “The number of officers within the Seattle Department hovered between 1,200 and 1,300 for seven consecutive years before dropping to 1,094 in 2020, according to data from the city of Seattle.”

    (https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/mayor-bruce-harrell-new-seattle-police-recruitment-plan-staffing-reaches-30-year-low/281-e98429ee-fc88-47f6-8890-b961393e2047)

    By contrast, Seattle has reached the annual pace of 10,000 new housing units only four times in the last 28 years, often with large year-to-year variations, https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/OPCD/Demographics/AboutSeattle/Citywide_Permit_Report.pdf

  25. Cops are paid enough, so that’s not the problem. No raises are needed. Seattle Police risk their lives arresting criminals who are often violent, get them into the justice system, and then those criminals get out with no time served. It’s well known that the justice system in Seattle is considered a “revolving door.” This is pretty shitty for the people that risk their lives to keep us safe.

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