City Celebrates New Contract For Cops — It’s Not That Great

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his negotiation team and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) came to a tentative agreement over a collective bargaining contract covering salaries and working conditions from 2024 to 2027. During a press conference Wednesday morning, Harrell, Chief of Police Shon Barnes, and Chief of CARE Amy Barden touted the contract as a historic milestone, but on closer inspection, their enthusiasm reads as premature, self-indulgent election-year spin.

The Biggest Decisions Yet to be Decided

It’s pretty bold of Harrell to call this a completed contract when in reality, huge chunks of this agreement remain up in the air. The negotiating team reached an impasse with SPOG on major changes to discipline processes for SPD, so the City plans to take it to interest arbitration. That means a lawyer will review both sides' proposals for the contract and rule on a finalized version. 

Effectively, the City scored no noteworthy wins on police discipline, including a longstanding goal to lower the evidence threshold required to fire a bad cop. The city has long debated whether to risk taking the contract to arbitration, which could lock them into a contract with worse discipline rules, or continue to move accountability forward through a slow, tedious grind at the bargaining table. The fact that they’ve finally decided to roll the dice doesn’t make them brave. It just indicates they’ve got nothing left to lose because it might be someone else’s problem in a few months.

Also, they’re kind of pretending they implemented the 2017 Accountability Ordinance, and they did not. They managed to shoehorn in a couple of minor bureaucratic changes, such as making adjustments to how OPA staffing works. More significant controversies have been kicked down the road, including the question of subpoena power for the Office of the Inspector General.

Only The Best For Our Boys In Blue

The bootlicking administration will have the KOMO-news-watching public believe that hefty raises for cops amount to a win in itself. However, with many accountability issues unresolved in the contract, the raises show just how easily the City will let the cops fleece them. 

The new contract offers officers almost $120,000 in their first year on the job. That’s a 13% bump from last contract for the cops, already the best paid in the state. They’ll get another bump of almost 3% two months from now and 3-4% the year after that.  

The steep salary re-emphasises the special place cops have in the City of Seattle’s hearts. For comparison, the Coalition of City Unions won smaller raises in their contract finalized last spring: 5% retroactive pay increase for 2023 and 4% for 2024. Plus, SPD’s “co-equal” department does not offer as high of starting salaries. According to the City’s website, CARE first responders start between about $83,000 and $118,000.

CARE Team Gains an Inch But Cops Remain in Control of Dual Dispatch

We know Harrell’s administration is going to make BIG claims about how the contract bulks up Seattle’s fledgling dual dispatch and alternative response program, the Community Assisted Response and Engagement team (CARE Team). 

Admittedly, the Harrell administration does get to claim a couple wins here. The program is no longer a pilot, it's permanent, and there is no cap on how big the team can grow. The contract also now allows CARE Team members to respond directly—and alone in some cases—to three kinds of calls: Calls about a person showing signs of crisis, as long as they aren’t threatening anybody and no drugs are present; calls from someone asking for resources, as long as they’re an adult; and calls that ask for help with a person’s physical well being, such as someone sleeping on a bench in the cold. 

However, the SPOG contract continues to act as a strict limiter of the program. Dispatch may not directly send CARE responders if the location is anywhere other than a public space or a public building, so if someone has a mental health crisis in a grocery store, the cops and their guns will still show up to respond. 

SPD sergeants can also still override whether CARE team members can go to a call. And if CARE team members arrive on the scene and see drug paraphernalia (like a piece of foil), that’s a crime, so they have to call the cops and tell them to come with their guns.

Police Union Wins on Hiding their Bad Driving

This close to election, Harrell probably doesn’t want to spend much of his precious air time dwelling on the biggest fuck-up in the contract. SPOG scored a major win to make investigations into police misconduct less transparent, and actually expand how often cops will be investigating cops. 

The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) previously steered decisions about when cops should face investigation and discipline for stuff such as driving excessively fast when responding to a 911 call. Now, that power returns to the command staff at SPD, allowing more complaints to be investigated through opaque frontline investigations by SPD supervisors. In the previous contract, OPA could review these investigations by command staff and provide some oversight to supervisors. The new contract takes OPA out entirely from review of these investigations, and now only the OIG will audit these cases.

It won’t even be automatic that these cases will be reviewed by OPA in situations with repeat offenders. SPD supervisors will still decide whether those cases go to OPA and we’ve already seen how SPD handles repeated misconduct by cops. For example, Officer Nana Appiah-Agyekum had 10 collisions in his seven-year career at SPD, eight of which were found to be preventable. But despite these repeated crashes, SPD did not send Appiah-Agyekum to the OPA until he literally hit a cyclist while running a stop sign. 

In that case, OPA recommended a suspension for Appiah-Agyekum, but Barnes reduced that discipline to a written reprimand and retraining, despite Appiah-Agyekum already going through similar retraining after a past crash.

This whole contract is a major success for SPD, who has desperately tried to regain control over what OPA investigates in the past several years as more stories of their officers' misconduct cluttered the news. In particular, SPD has complained about the way OPA polices their driving. Cops complained about having to “needlessly” explain why they violated traffic laws on their calls, something they felt was not worthy of their time, even after SPD Officer Kevin Dave hit and killed Jaahnavi Kandula in 2023. 

Civilians Probably Won’t Be Investigating Termination Cases

Another dubious win Harrell is touting is the expanded role of civilian investigators in police oversight. On paper, that looks like a victory for accountability because it means that it won’t always just be cops investigating cops for serious misconduct. But there are lots of reasons to doubt the effect that this will have on accountability in practice. 

For years, OPA’s handful of civilian investigators were only allowed to handle minor policy violations, like times when a cop called someone a “motherfucker” or forgot to turn on their body camera. Now, if you take Harrell’s claims at face value, they’re heading for the big leagues. The new contract lets them work on cases that could result in termination—with a sworn SPD sergeant looking over their shoulder. 

The new contract expands (“doubles” if you want to hype it up) the number of civilian investigators allowed from two to four. At the same time, the bulk of the work will be done by nine sergeant detectives, who also happen to be SPOG members. If a civilian does work on a termination case, the sworn investigator must be the lead or co-lead, meaning there’s a good chance they’ll be relegated to insignificant investigative tasks or busywork. 

Civilianization has always been a red herring at SPD because of how the police union undermines or neutralizes civilian employees. In the past, SPOG signed MOUs with the city to let civilians do flagging at events and review automated traffic cameras. These MOUs set aside positions reserved for a specific number of officers while extracting large bonuses. A year later, cops are still almost entirely in charge of those tasks. The same goes for the CARE Team, which has been virtually sidelined by SPD officers.

If SPOG won’t give up its right to direct traffic at Mariners games or write tickets for people running red lights, the guild probably won’t give up control over cases that end in its members getting fired.