SEATTLE — A Seattle Police Department special order shows that dozens of Seattle police officers and detectives in specialty units are being trained to go back on patrol as part of what SPD calls a “contingency plan.”
The patrol refresher, which started on Tuesday, has the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, SPOG, predicting problems.
“It is a Band-Aid at best,” Rich O’Neill, former Seattle police sergeant and current SPOG director of labor and media relations, said. “An analogy I used was, you can’t move the furniture around in the living room and think you have more furniture.”
O’Neill said the move stems from a large need for more Seattle police officers on patrol.
“We are incredibly understaffed,” he said, “and it is a crisis.”
The special order lists employees who are required to attend the training, including officers and detectives from public affairs; the city’s homeless navigation team; auto theft; burglary and theft; robbery; homicide; sex offender detail; and fugitive and felony warrants.
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“You know, our detectives all carry very heavy caseloads,” O’Neill said. “Those reports will pile up, and that will lead to many frustrated community members who want to know, well, what happened to my burglary?”
The move comes as Mayor Jenny Durkan has proposed hiring bonuses of up to $15,000 to entice recruits from other police departments, known as lateral hires.
O'Neill said his hope is the training would make detectives potentially available for overtime shifts, not lead to a change in their regular assignment.
“The way you’re talking, it sounds like you expect in some way these detectives will have to work patrol,” KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon said.
“I think in some way they will, unless the new lateral bonus program just takes care of the problem,” O’Neill said.
Wednesday’s nine-hour training session covered the use of body-worn video, dash camera video, searches and seizures, and writing up use of force reports.
Seattle police spokesperson Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said that the training will be helpful for officers, including him, who haven’t worked patrol in years.
“The idea, naturally, is that should the need arise to backfill patrol, everyone will be at that same level of capability,” he said, “and while I do say that, there are no plans to do so at this time.”
Whitcomb said the department has two recruiters working hard to hire more officers. He said the training decision was part of a contingency plan, preparing the department for any kind of future emergency need for more patrol officers.
“Using the WTO example, using a Seahawks victory parade example, it could be a one-off event or it could be something where unexpectedly you've got more officers -- everyone goes and leaves and works for Bellevue,” he said.
The training consists of three different nine-hour classes that also cover handcuffing, prisoner control, use of force decision-making, building searches, crisis intervention, and other topics. It’s designed, Whitcomb said, to ensure that all SPD staff “feel comfortable doing the primary function of policing, which is 911 emergency response.”
“Holy cow,” Pat Murakami, president of the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council, said when KIRO 7 showed her the list of detectives attending and their units.
Murakami had mixed feelings. She said Seattle needs more officers on patrol and calls the training a “good idea,” but said the idea is also scary to her.
“Because some of these people, for example, the community police team, do preventative work and that's essential for avoiding crime in the first place,” she said. “It’s a Catch-22 right now for the Police Department.”
The officers' union said any schedule changes for these officers or detectives would first have to be bargained through the union.
O’Neill said he feels officers would be more inclined to stick around if they received more support from the community and certain city council members.
“Every time we have a serious incident, a newsworthy incident, if they’re not so quick to criticize the officer, not so quick to assume there was wrongdoing, I think it would go a long way to boosting morale,” he said. “And it would go a long way to officers becoming recruiters [for the department].”
O’Neill said he’d like to see the city roll out a public relations campaign to build up the department as an attractive place to build a career for young people with many options in a booming economy.
Cox Media Group
