Seattle is still struggling to hire police officers as 911 response times go up

It’s such an old story at this point. Seattle jumped on the defund the police bandwagon back in 2020. When the city’s police chief criticized the City Council’s plan to cut the budget by 50 percent, they responded by slashing her salary by $100,000. Police Chief Best resigned not long after.

In the end, it wasn’t cut funding that reduced the size of the Seattle police force it was the clear message that cops were no longer supported by the city they worked for. The result was a wave of resignations from which the city still has not recovered.

Since 2020, the department has lost 515 officers and hired 190. Many have retired, but others said in exit interviews they did not feel supported by the city during the “defund the police” movement following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Staffer Greg Doss tells the city council about nine people are leaving the department every month, but he says that’s relatively good news because that number is down from about 13 to 16 in 2022.

The most recent data presented to the City Council showed that Seattle is now hiring about as many officers. In the first quarter they had 28 separations and hired 26 new officers. Holding even means the force is still down about 300 officers compared to 2019 numbers and that decline means the city can’t response as quickly to 911 calls.

Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz has suggested his department is at least 300 officers short of full coverage at pre-2020 levels, and the briefing from Council Central Staff corroborated those totals.

It has meant significantly longer call times across the board and the city, and the slide caused Seattle Councilmember Alex Pedersen to remark that the “median time for 911 response is completely unacceptable.”…

“We don’t have enough officers,” [Councilmember Sara] Nelson continued. “That’s what I make of it. They are stretched too thin. God forbid if there’s ever a major event, multiple shooter event or something like that, an earthquake, or something where we’ll be we get the officers to respond to emergencies.”

The city instituted a new program to offer recruits a $30,000 signing bonus but very few people have taken them up on it. Gee, I wonder why?

Here’s a chart showing the most recent response times for different parts of the city. Response times in red are worse than last year while response times in green are better than last year.

This shows that response times in the West and Southwest parts of the city have improved but look closely at the numbers and you’ll see they are still much worse than they were in 2020 in every single case. For instance, priority 2 calls in the west sector used to average a 35 minutes response time in 2020 and 2021. Now the figure is 53 minutes. That may be a 10% improvement over last year but it’s still terrible.

The same is true for priority one calls which are calls involving violence or imminent violence. In every case, whether the chart shows improvement this year or not, the average times are worse than they were in 2020.

KOMO News has a good video report on the situation, unfortunately I can’t embed it here so you’ll have to click over to see it.