As Seattle police applicants lag, City Hall looks to bureaucracy

Since 2022, Seattle City Hall has signed off on more than $5 million to bolster the Seattle Police Department’s recruitment, to be spent on a marketing campaign, hiring bonuses and more.

But more than a year later, the payoff of those dollars is hard to find.

A slow ramp up of the ad campaign and inconclusive benefits from the incentives to new or transferring officers mean the city fielded roughly the same number of applicants last year as the year before and fewer than 2021. The department last year shrank to its lowest level since the early 1990s.  

Elected with a mandate to grow the size of the police department, a new City Hall now faces a challenging math equation as it hopes to catch even a whiff of the 1,400-person force it once had. Applications have increased so far this year, from six a day to nine. But that pace still falls below the trends of the early 2010s. As the force sits at fewer than 1,000 officers today, the speed of recruitment would need to jump and the trendline of departures flatten should hopes for progress become a reality.

With advocates of defunding the police largely swept from office, the language out of City Hall is now firmly pro-police. New members have visited precinct roll calls in their early days in office, an effort to banish the city’s reputation as unsupportive. Members suggested housing subsidies and day care for officers in a committee meeting Tuesday. For some, like Councilmember Bob Kettle, that alone could help shift the momentum.

“If you’re in a job where you’re not appreciated or wanted, that can be a piece that leads you to look elsewhere,” he said.

Should language fall short, the methods to increase recruitment largely fall into the buckets of retaining more officers, increasing applicants and converting more of those who do apply into officers.

Facing the lofty challenges of recruitment, policymakers have zeroed in on a bureaucratic process.

“We have to light a fire under our civil servants’ feet,” said Councilmember Cathy Moore.

For the second half of 2022 and much of 2023, recruitment and retention efforts were slow to get off the ground, despite the millions available for the project. In 2022, the executive branch spent just 18% of its available budget.  

After a similarly slow rollout for the first nine months of 2023, the city hired a marketing firm, Copacino Fujikado, late last year. The firm spent just more than $1 million in the final quarter of the year and planned a blitz of social media advertising through April, front-loading its available budget to the early months of 2024. The mayor’s office also paid $70,000 for short recruitment videos featuring Mayor Bruce Harrell.

The city has also offered hiring incentives — up to $7,500 for new recruits and $30,000 for transfers — but the effect has been unclear. While new hires reported considering them, they paled in comparison to the larger concern of pay and benefits, according to a recently released analysis of the program.

“It is impossible to pinpoint the hiring incentive’s specific effect with the available data,” the report said. Its authors nevertheless recommended continuing to use them because other departments are also using incentives and striking them could cause Seattle to lose ground.

Seattle’s police force has shrunk by more than 300 officers since 2020.

Just under 2,000 people applied to be an officer last year, about the same as 2022 and fewer than 2021. In 2014, it was more than 4,000. The conversion rate of applicants to officers — about 3% — has mostly held steady in that period, but the raw number has dropped with the number of applications.

One point of focus has been the entry test. Over the last 10 years, 68% of applicants passed and those who failed have needed to wait six months to retest.

The city’s Public Safety Civil Service Commission recently shrank that retesting timeline to three months.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s office has urged the commission to examine a different entry test. The current test, the National Testing Network, is used by large West Coast police departments like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Seattle helped develop it in 2012, with an eye toward the issues of use of force and bias raised as part of the consent decree process at the time.

“Their test was better at measuring any predisposition toward bias that could affect policing,” former Public Safety Civil Service Commissioner Judge Terry Carroll recalled.  

City officials have shown interest in switching to a more localized test, the Public Safety Test. Compared to the National Testing Network, more applicants pass the Public Safety Test, 90%, according to Jon Walters, its founder.

Andrea Scheele, director of the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, would be the arbiter of making that switch and is currently conducting an analysis of the difference between the two tests. Speaking Tuesday, she expressed faith in the current test and concern about abandoning it.

“I’m concerned that a change without having been fully vetted could result in lower standards,” she said in an interview.

But the mayor’s office and SPD staff have shown interest in switching, in part, because most Washington departments use it. By offering the Public Safety Test, new applicants could check Seattle as a box as they apply elsewhere.

“When our peer agencies are using it, we would be a little remiss to not look at it,” Kerry Keefe, the mayor’s director of public safety, said in an interview.

Hanging over the question of police staffing is the long-delayed contract between Seattle and the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which represents rank-and-file officers. The contract expired in 2020. As a result, Seattle pays less than Redmond, Kent, King County, Bothell, Edmonds and a slew of smaller departments.

Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess said Tuesday the city is close to an agreement with the Guild.

Councilmember Rob Saka called the endeavor of recruitment a competition between agencies that Seattle needs to win.

“If rock bottom is ever a thing, we’re probably here,” he said.