Public Safety Committee 3/12/2024

9.31 a.m.

March 12th, 2024. I'm Robert Kettle, chair of the Public Safety Committee.

Will the committee clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Hollingsworth.

Present.

Council Member Moore.

Present.

Council President Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Saka.

Here.

Chair Kettle.

Here.

Chair, there are five members present.

And my understanding, we may have other council members join us.

They're welcomed, of course, at all times.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Good morning, everyone.

I really appreciate you being here this morning.

I wanted to extend a welcome to the Public Safety Service Civil Service Commission.

say that slowly, that's well represented here.

Also to members of the Office of the Mayor and the Seattle Police Department.

Today's meeting is about SPD staffing.

This is a central issue as we face our public safety challenges.

It is a pillar of our strategic framework to address the permissive environment.

While just one pillar, its effects are felt far and wide.

It's important.

Today's meeting is also about a primary mission area of the committee, of crime and security, but also a foundational responsibility of oversight, accountability, and transparency.

We do this in the spirit of engagement and seeking to understand what factors are crucial to make progress in staffing and specifically recruiting and retention.

We, as a council, should also look at ourselves in this look for accountability and answers.

My father, who passed just over three years ago, had many sayings he would use, such as, he who hesitates is lost.

He would also say as well, don't go where you're not wanted.

Clearly, the Seattle City Council gave mixed messages over the past years at best that sadly communicated police officers were not wanted.

The defund pledge created an environment where the message was one of you're not wanted with tragic consequences.

We could have achieved public safety reform, needed reform, not just for the consent decree, but also for real progress in public safety so that it wasn't placed so squarely on SPD without the massive loss of officers and the resultant troubled public safety posture we see today on the streets.

So today we acknowledge the impacts of the defund pledge and draw a line under it and move forward together.

With that comment, I just wanted to now ask that we're open for hybrid comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda or within the purview of the committee.

There is no additional Clerk, how many speakers are signed up for today?

Currently, we have one in-person speaker and one remote speaker signed up.

Thank you.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

We will start with in-person speakers first.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of their time.

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comment within the allotted time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open and we'll begin with the first speaker on the list.

The first in-person speaker is Julie Rawls, MD.

Hello, good morning.

Okay, years ago I just read an article that summarized if an ambulance turns on the siren and speeds through lights versus not, how much quicker do you get the patient to the emergency room?

It was 30 seconds.

Bring this up because of what happened with Giovanni Candula and how the concerns have gone elsewhere versus what are the basic policies and procedures that are being followed.

And in light of an adverse event, how do you address that situation?

This morning, I just did a search and found that NIH research on the same subject If an ambulance or someone goes with sirens and through lights, how much quicker do you get to where you want to be?

It's 43.5 seconds.

And I bring this up because as a family physician, I once called police to help me out with something and ended up with an officer who had been brainwashed to believe that if he saw lateral nystagmus, which he did in me, that person was impaired by opiates even if no opiates were on the drug screen.

I was shocked.

Who on earth is training these people?

Now I'll run out of time, so I'll bring up real quick.

Manny Ellis and Wayne Albert Fredrickson both died in the hands of police.

That went to court, and trainers came to defend the police officers and their practices as part of policy and procedure.

Therefore, the officers weren't accountable.

So I think we need to look at in an adverse event.

Take a look at your policies and procedures.

Don't just dismiss the whole issue.

I would like to see someone look at the schools who's training our officers and perhaps move those academies to other institutions of higher education where there's some oversight and I could go on and on and on on this.

Try to get through to my federal reps. They won't really give me time.

Thanks.

Thank you.

The first remote speaker is Kevin Moore.

Please press star six when you hear the prompt.

You have been unmuted.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

My name is Kevin Moore.

I live in District 3. I'm calling in to comment on officer recruitment and retention.

For the past couple of years, SPD has been involved in multiple high-profile controversies that have almost certainly affected recruitment and retention.

To name a few, there are two lawsuits from female members of the department regarding discrimination in the workplace.

One of them targets the chief directly.

There was a lawsuit regarding carbon monoxide levels in the workplace.

The officer who made this complaint was repeatedly mocked by colleagues for making this complaint, as reported by The Stranger.

There was a tombstone in the break room marking the death of a young black man killed by SCD, found only by body cam footage, and an officer, as referenced by the last speaker, an officer driving over 70 miles per hour without running their sirens killed a pedestrian, and union leadership joked about her death.

The leadership of SCD, who are responsible for creating the workplace environment in which all these things happened, are now coming here later this morning to tell you that the reason they can't hire or keep officers is primarily low pay.

I urge the council to consider how all these other factors might prevent some of the best candidates, the exact people we want staffing our police department, to not even consider applying to a department with such deep cultural issues.

You're going to hear the low pay reason is based on recruit survey results, right?

What about the people that didn't apply?

Because they saw these stories and they said, I would never work for this department.

It looks so broken.

This culture is so poisonous.

I would never want to work here.

And they go apply.

some other department that doesn't have these problems.

Please consider these.

Please dig into why this is happening.

Don't take SPD leadership at their word for this.

Thank you.

There are no additional registered speakers.

Okay, thank you.

And thank you for the comments, both in person and online.

And I have my glasses.

So I know where I am in my, in my, my listing here.

So we'll start with the first item of business.

Please clerk, will you read item one into the record?

Public Safety Civil Service Commission briefing and discussion with director Andrea shiel.

Sheely.

Welcome, Director Sheely, and also thank you for the other members of the commission joining you and both on the commission itself and staff.

Please introduce them when you start.

Thank you.

Once the clerk helps with the presentation.

Thank you, Council Members.

Thank you, Council Member Kettle, Chair Kettle, Vice Chair Saka, and all of the Council Members who've invited us to be here today.

It's very nice to see you.

My name is Andrea Scheele.

I am the Executive Director of the Civil Service Commission and the Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

I have with me today, Chair of the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, or we call it the PSCSC, Richard Green.

Chair Green is a retired prosecutor who worked for, is it 30 years?

33 years.

33 years in the Law Department for the City of Seattle, and we're really grateful for his service.

I have also here with me Sarah Butler, who is the Policy and Operations Advisor for the Civil Service Commission.

I just want to point out in the audience, we also have Commissioner Stacey Knoll, who's joined us here today from the PSCSC.

I'm going to try to move quickly through my presentation today, but any of you should please reach out to me at any time if you have questions or any follow-up to today's presentation or anything else you'd like to discuss.

Thank you.

Please proceed.

I'm going to start broad today and get narrow, and I want to thank you for this time.

to introduce you to the Civil Service Commissions.

Today's main topic is police recruiting and retention, and I'm going to talk a few minutes about the Civil Service Commission's role in the city of Seattle ecosystem and Public Safety Civil Service's role in hiring police officers.

Oh, are you having trouble?

Brent, could you help us flip through?

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right.

You've seen our org chart before, but it's a really helpful illustration for me when explaining where the civil service commissions sit.

So the civil service commissions is a small non-executive department.

We reside here along with other independent departments.

And it houses the two civil service commissions, as I mentioned, Public Safety Civil Service and Civil Service.

In Washington, similar to the federal government, hiring and promotional processes are supposed to be insulated from political influence.

And so the city of Seattle, the reason civil service processes are not inside the executive branch is for several reasons.

to instill public trust and confidence.

Citizens are more likely to have faith in the impartiality of public servants when they perceive that recruitment, promotion, retention, and disciplinary decisions are based on objective and nonpolitical criteria.

We also believe that it promotes professionalism and merit-based assessment for hiring and promotion, accountability and transparency, and promotes equity.

EEO law requires us to administrate valid, equitable assessments.

What that means is that we monitor all phases and pieces of our process to ensure that there is no evidence of discriminatory impact.

We have two civil service commissions here in the city of Seattle.

One is a creature of the Seattle city charter and the city code that is the civil service commissions.

I won't talk to you about that very much today, but it is an important part of our city accountability processes and how we employ people in the city of Seattle.

The other is the Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

Both commissions hear disciplinary appeals for employees in their system.

That is if an employee chooses not to pursue a grievance under the collective bargaining and they're a member of the civil service, they can appeal to the civil service or public safety civil service commission.

Both commissions investigate political influence in hiring.

Both systems make recommendations about the city's personnel system to the city council and the mayor's office.

The public safety civil service system also administrate civil service exams, entry and promotional for most ranks in the police and fire and police departments.

The Public Safety Civil Service Commission is also charged with oversight of the public safety civil service system and classification of public safety positions within that system.

We do that in partnership with the Seattle Human Resources Department.

I find it helpful to have an illustration of our employees and where they sit in the city of Seattle employment system.

This is a pretty self-explanatory chart, but most positions and employees are in the civil service system.

The gray portion is our fire and police departments.

There are also civil service positions, the civilians within the civil service system.

The Seattle Public Library is not part of either civil service system.

And the bright blue section represents exempt employees, and a large proportion of that is also temporary employees and exempt regular employees that are not in the system.

I'm going to talk more about public safety civil service.

It is required by state law, specifically chapter 4112 and 4108, that set out a model civil service system for city police.

State law requires that cities either utilize the state model or adopt their own model, which is what the city of Seattle did.

Any Washington city system must substantially accomplish the goals of the state statutes.

And civil service is so central to Seattle's public safety responsibilities and how it employs workers that the system was incorporated in the city charter at Article 16, Section 3. That article sets out that there should be a separate civil service system for police and firefighters alongside the regular or civil service system.

Some of the excluded positions, actually all of the excluded positions are set forth in the Seattle Municipal Code.

Those are elected employees, appointed employees, assistant city attorneys, and some other positions with certain characteristics described in that portion of the code.

SMC 4.08 is our Public Safety Civil Service Ordinance.

You can sit on that slide.

In relation to police officers and firefighters, and specifically to hiring and promotion, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission makes and enforces rules for examination, appointments, promotions, transfers to motions, reinstatements, suspensions, layoffs, discharges, and connected matters.

The Public Safety Civil Service Commission also directs development and administration of merit based entry level civil service exams for the Seattle Fire and Police Departments.

The commission creates and maintains hiring registers and promotional registers, including applications of veterans preference and service credit and other types of preference.

And we certify eligible candidates names to the appointing authority when they wish to fill one or more vacant positions.

I've listed or described the civil service merit principles here, and there are more, but these are the most crucial ones in my view.

Fair and open competition for promotion and hiring.

Fair and equal treatment for applicants and employees.

That our exams are based on the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to do the job that we're hiring or promoting to.

Proper regard for employees and applicants' privacy and constitutional rights, right to appeal serious discipline to the commission, independence of the commission, and a one-year probationary period for new employees before they are vested in those civil service rights.

Most of those civil service rights, I should say.

The commission is independent.

That is required by state law and has been affirmed by the Washington State Court of Appeals.

In the case that I cite here, Seattle Police Officers Guild, the city of Seattle.

That is a case where the city or I'm sorry, the Court of Appeals voided The city of Seattle's transfer of certain functions to the personnel department housed in the executive branch.

The Court of Appeals instructed the city to go back and remedy the situation and restore those independent functions to the Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

That was in 2004. We also play a role in the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

I won't go into the details, but the Public Safety Civil Service Commission is called out as the preferred venue for disciplinary appeals for police officers.

And the ordinance set forth that the commission shall establish programs for multi-language preference points and community service preference points for the entry-level police officer rank.

And the commission has done those things.

What does the commission do?

You've met two of our commissioners.

They're here today.

And the commissioner who could not make it is a firefighter paramedic, and he's currently training.

Couldn't be here today.

I think he wanted to be.

We are subject to the Open Public Meetings Act when conducting business.

And the commission wears two hats at times when they're conducting appeal hearings.

Those are quasi-judicial administrative hearings, appealable to a higher court, the King County Superior Court typically, and higher civil service cases, public safety civil service cases have gone up to the Washington State Court of Appeals.

The commission also has a legislative or rulemaking role, which it conducts often.

A little bit more about their duties.

They're required to conduct monthly meetings to conduct business.

They hear appeals of alleged violation of Public Safety Civil Service Commission rules.

Oversee the merit-based testing system that I'll tell you a little bit more about.

Oversee other functions such as classification, probationary periods.

This is work that primarily I and the staff of the commissions do on a day-to-day basis and their oversight of that system.

And jointly with the civil service commissioners, of which there are three, they supervise me, the executive director.

They are my appointing authority.

I'm going to hone in on public safety exams.

I won't list all of the ranks here, but I won't list them all verbally, but these are all of the ranks for which our small team conducts, develops, and maintains scores for all of these ranks in the Fire and Police Department.

In addition to entry level, the promotional exams are required by law.

These exams support thousands of candidates and hundreds of oral board examinations annually.

Promotional exams are required to be administered at least once every two years, sometimes more frequently, especially in the past few years where we have lost so many folks and our lists have been shorter than in past years.

Promotional lists, I mean.

Entry-level exams are administered based on departmental need, staffing, and resources available to conduct exams, driven, I would say, primarily by need.

PSCSE plays an important role in mitigating risk for the City of Seattle.

When you're managing risk well, there are fewer or no headlines like these.

Our testing team has kept Seattle out of the news for a very long time.

These are links, and hopefully you have the live links.

If you don't, I'll make sure that you do because they're worth reading.

These are links to articles from other jurisdictions who have had problems in their public safety civil service processes.

Poor quality exams and processes can result in discriminatory adverse impact.

usually to women and minority groups, which can result in costly lawsuits, can result in damage to an agency's reputation or trust within community.

They certainly can harm employee morale.

And ultimately, poor tests or processes can undermine Public Safety Department's ability to staff adequately and fulfill their missions.

This is a big part of why our team holds itself to the highest standards and why the commission is firm about following rules and laws that apply to it.

Throughout the exam processes, the fire and police exams unit worked diligently to ensure the quality integrity of our police safety exams.

I encourage you to read just the brief descriptions attached to this slide, but we really have a robust system for ensuring that our tests are developed, administered, and assessed at the highest levels.

We center equity and transparency in our work, and we are continually reviewing and improving our processes to find efficiencies and to comply with changing laws.

Excuse me, can I ask a quick question at that point?

As you go forward on this, in terms of the continuous process analysis improvement, you're laying out things as they are.

Also, you know, consider it like a wish list or, hey, this would be great to have, like, the ask.

Like, what do, what can we do to help make you do your job better, quicker, faster, in terms of responding to the departmental needs?

That may be in different parts, but I just like, you know, hey, this is what we're doing, and at the same time add hey, this would be a avenue that you as the councilors, the city government overall can help us do our job better.

What things would you like to change that you cannot change yourself or anything along those lines as you're going through this part of the briefing?

Thank you.

I will be sure to add that into where I think it's appropriate, and I'll sort of give you a preview.

We've been in talks with the mayor's office and the police department about how to, an entry-level police officer, how to process candidates more quickly to get the names of passing candidates to SPD speedier.

and you and I have talked about that council member, but we are in talks with the mayor's office and the council plays a crucial role, but additional resources will allow us to do that to increase the speed by which we are able to produce the names of passing candidates to SPD from seven times a year to approximately 26 times a year.

And I'll talk a little bit about that in just a few minutes.

And thank you for the question.

All right, thank you.

Did you have another question?

No.

Okay.

The things that our unit does not do, and SPD will be able to speak to all of these.

I won't read them to you, but we are not the recruiting arm of this function.

And there are additional pre-hire assessments that SPD conducts themselves.

And they are listed here.

They are also the hiring authority for the Seattle Police Department, obviously.

That leads me into police officer exams.

Council members, I know that you're particularly interested in knowing where each of the entities that showed up here to talk with you today was what their role is.

And here is an illustration of ours.

And if I were to improve this slide, I would use those chevrons to represent the funnel of candidates as they move through the process.

So the recruiting chevron would be the largest.

And that is now SPD, recently transferred over from the Human Resources Department.

But they are responsible for recruiting.

My team manages one portion of this complex hiring process, and we are their point of contact during the exam process, so we handle the exams.

We currently process exam candidates in cycles.

This is getting on what your question was, Chair Kettle.

Candidates apply and complete the testing process during an approximately six to eight-week cycle, and at the end of that cycle, we publish a hiring eligibility register with passing candidates' names to SPD.

We call it publish, but we send it to them.

So currently that's happening every six to eight weeks.

And as I said, we think we could speed, we know we could speed that up given appropriate resources.

This is just one more illustration of where we reside.

Following recruitment, civil service testing and SPD pre-employment screenings occur.

and they follow the civil service testing necessarily.

A little bit more about what Public Safety Civil Service does for entry-level police officer hiring.

We handle candidates from application until we pass their name to SPD, certify their name to SPD as having passed the exam.

We have many contacts with candidates, applicants during this period, six or more.

Candidates can reach out to our team for help at any time.

We have consistent clear messaging, including a message created by Chief Diaz.

Candidates can easily opt in to Interview Now, which you'll hear about later from SPD.

They can attend a workshop by one of our Seattle police recruiters, or they can be in direct contact with a recruiter.

And we notify candidates whether they passed or failed, transition to SPD for next steps.

Just a few words about the exam that we do administrate.

In 2012, the Seattle Police Department entered a consent decree with the DOJ to implement certain reforms.

In the wake of the investigation and consent decree, Seattle made it a priority to help develop an exam that would assess the knowledge, skills, and abilities required of Seattle police officers.

The exam was tailored to assess candidates' cognitive abilities, but also to evaluate candidates' skills and abilities related to judgment, appropriate human interactions, and integrity and ethics.

Seattle invested heavily in this exam's development, partnering with Ergometrics, also called the National Testing Network, which is headquartered in Lynwood, Washington.

Significant city resources were invested in development of this exam, including staff time.

The testing unit was involved and project managed the project in partnership with NTN, and SPD paid $250,000 into the test development, supplied a lieutenant a sergeant, and two officers to serve as subject matter experts in developing exam questions and scenarios.

SPD resources, facilities, staff were used in development of the exam.

City of Seattle made a tremendous investment because there was a very clear understanding among SPD that we needed to robustly evaluate our candidates so that they would be able to function as a Seattle police officer.

And since we have begun using this test, it has been enhanced to more deeply evaluate candidates' integrity and group bias.

The test is used by many of Seattle's...

Can we ask a question from the council president?

Yeah, could you go back to that previous slide there?

Sure.

So from what you just said, is this exam, first of all, for entry level, or is it for...

Did you develop specific exams for...

moving from sergeant to lieutenant, et cetera.

Thank you for the question.

The frontline national exam is what we, and it is a national test.

We are not the only agency that uses it, but Seattle uses it only for entry-level police officer.

All of our promotional exams for ranks in the fire and police department, we develop in-house in partnership with other consultants, but primarily developed by city staff including subject matter experts from the Seattle Police and Fire Departments at the rank that is going to be tested or higher.

So that's a long answer, but this is just the police officer exam I'm talking about today.

So you develop the questions and then the vendor or the testing service administers it?

Is that what I'm understanding?

The test was developed in partnership with this testing company.

That is what they do.

They're a public safety...

a personnel assessment and testing development company, NTN, which is either a subsidiary of Ergometrics or they're the same company essentially.

They are the experts in test development.

Seattle Police Department was the expert in what is the job of a Seattle police officer.

Those subject matter experts participated in helping NTN develop this exam and also in validating this exam.

Since that time, additional components have been added to further evaluate integrity, use of authority, et cetera.

So basically, they have a test, and then you help develop specific questions that that are appropriate for our context and our department and our values.

Questions and scenarios, yes.

So you basically give those questions to the test giver and then they administer the exam?

We did not develop the questions on our own, but in partnership with those testing consultants.

essentially, I think the answer is yes to your question.

Okay, I'm just trying to figure, because it says develop new and I just wanted to understand what is specific to Seattle's work in, what questions are from, were developed by this process that you're describing and which are just given by the testing service?

That's all I was wanting to know.

I think it was that, so police officers and, gave information about what tasks, it's called a task, job task analysis.

So they give information about what tasks, the frequency, and other factors of the tasks that they perform to perform a task analysis.

And the vendor, NTN, worked with Seattle police and exam staff to develop questions and scenarios that would test the competencies and dimensions that are necessary to perform the job of a Seattle So it is very much a Seattle test, but it is also used by many other cities across the United States.

But, you know, it is not...

I'll strike that thought.

I don't know where I was going with that.

Well, could any vendor use the questions that were developed?

No.

It is a product that belongs to the National Testing Network.

Okay.

And I was reading the notes, the minutes of...

And I'm sorry to belabor this, but...

I was reading the minutes just for fun of some meetings and I noticed that the minutes of March 23rd, 2023 say that of the 27, now I don't know if this applies, but 27 sergeants who participated in the exam for police lieutenant, there were 21 protests filed.

So I guess that means that maybe they didn't pass and they're protesting that result.

Is that what that means?

I'm just wondering how many people don't pass our tests and if that is usual.

Okay, well, the sergeant exam is not this exam that I'm talking about today.

But if your question is how many people pass the entry-level exam?

Yes, that and also, sure, go ahead.

What is the percentage of people that pass the entry-level?

The percentage of people that pass.

You can get that information later.

I just want to make sure that

Well, in 2022, I have applications and pass.

So I don't have those exact statistics for you, but I can get them for you and send them to you after this meeting.

Thank you.

Yes.

Can I just quickly follow up?

I like this slide a lot.

It's an important slide.

Obviously, developing it with respect to the consent decree and also the priorities that are listed.

Obviously, these are priorities that we need.

And I should highlight important to the oversight pieces, the accountability pieces.

We do have the executive director of the Community Police Commission here.

And obviously, this goes to the reform that we're looking to do.

And so, like the, you know, the exam and what you're looking to do with it, the question sometimes comes, and I think this is somewhat to this, is, you know, understanding, like, was this our exam?

So you're clarified that, and so it's like a dual proprietary, I guess, of NTN.

And...

What is your assessment of NTN?

And I ask because it's my understanding is that only Seattle and one of the other jurisdictions uses, in the region, uses NTN exclusively.

And there's five jurisdictions that use it but in combination with another testing service.

And then every other jurisdiction uses a separate testing service.

Since this is a question out there, I would like to, you know, get your thoughts, your opinion on NTN.

and the question of using it slowly versus others, and then why do other jurisdictions not use NTN?

Is there anything along those lines specific to the testing service that you can speak to?

Seattle has had a very good experience working with the National Testing Network.

They are extremely responsive.

We think they have a very high quality product.

All of these kinds of testing companies and all types of companies and agencies have had to pivot and modify their processes as we go through you know, the pandemic and everything that has happened since then.

So they've been very accommodating and flexible with us.

I do not believe that it is only one other jurisdiction that uses NTN.

I believe it's a longer list, and I don't have it with me.

There are five in Washington.

Say that one.

Five in Washington, apparently.

Okay.

I think it might be closer to 10 or 11. And I'll follow up with both of you about the list.

But Seattle has had a very good experience with NTN.

As I said, I think it is a very high quality product.

I was approached by the mayor's office about a month and a half ago to consider either adding or switching to the other major vendor of entry level police officer exams in Washington.

They're a Washington company.

as is NTN.

And so I am conducting a due diligence into both exams.

I have not concluded that.

And so I really am not prepared or it's not timely for me to speak to the outcome of that due diligence today.

But I will share that with you when it is complete.

All right.

We'll definitely follow up on that.

If you can, once you're finished, I appreciate that.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Next slide.

So many of Seattle's large peer cities use the NTN exam, including San Francisco, Portland, San Jose, Oakland, Denver, Orlando, Baltimore, Cleveland, Sacramento, and others.

This exam conforms to legal and professional standards for test validation, including those established by the EEOC and the Office for Federal Contract Compliance.

It meets the American Psychological Association standards for content and criterion valid tests and the ADA's requirements for job-related testing.

I've already mentioned that the exam components are based on the core knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the job of a police officer.

But it is important to note that candidates do not need prior experience or education in law enforcement to perform well on the exam.

I'm nearing the end of my presentation, but I wanted to address a couple of the questions that I thought you might have or that I get fairly frequently.

Why don't all applicants schedule or complete the exam?

Well, we do maintain dashboards on candidate flow through our civil service exam processes.

And maybe this answers a question I was asked earlier, but approximately 60% to 65% of applicants do not make it onto the eligible list, meaning they either remove themselves from the application process or they do not pass the exam.

Dave Wright, manager of the exams unit, is going to speak a little bit about this in the presentation next.

But the candidate pool for every hiring process necessarily decreases as candidates move through the phases of the process.

We only want to hire well-qualified candidates to do the very important job of policing.

And the testing phase is the ideal point to screen out candidates who are not well-suited to the job or remove themselves from consideration.

Our data is consistent with the experience of other large departments across the United States.

When we look back at the last 10 years of data, we know and we can see that despite changes to make the exam more accessible, increasing the number of communications to candidates, fluctuating application numbers, and other external factors impacting the public's interest in the policing profession, Approximately one in four Seattle applicants schedule, complete, and pass the civil service exam.

Most people who complete the exam do pass.

Those who pass are headed over to SPD for additional pre-hire screening, and approximately one in 10 of those folks who pass the exam are eventually hired as a Seattle police officer.

As more people apply to the Seattle Police Department, we will have more people passing the exam and getting hired as police officers.

Can applicant data be shared?

Folks ask about confidentiality of the applicant data.

To ensure a fair and consistent exam process, civil service provides candidate support between the application and hiring register.

Applicant data in Washington is private for public employers.

It is exempt from public disclosure.

And as an independent entity, PSCSE takes applicant privacy very seriously.

We transmit applicant data to SPD when a candidate is placed on a hiring register or when a candidate gives us permission to share that data with SPD.

We have six and oftentimes more contacts with applicants as they move through the testing process, and we encourage them at all of those phases to sign up to speak with a recruiter or participate in interview now.

Applicants rely on us to protect their privacy.

It is a best practice and reduces risk to the city.

I've already addressed the question of can registers be published more frequently.

The short answer is yes, given necessary or appropriate resourcing that can be done.

I must note that this will not increase the volume of applicants, but it could shorten the hiring process by three to six weeks for some candidates who are successful.

Testing vendor, we did talk a little bit about that.

And I mentioned the in-depth due diligence that I am conducting.

Some of the values that are important to us in that process are equity, accessibility, validity, competencies assessed.

And in regard to why don't more people pass the exam, The goal of any assessment exam, I should say, is to strike a balance between a selective hiring process and being able to fill the vacancies within an agency.

A higher pass rate.

During the testing phase will lead to more candidates up front, but may not net more candidates towards the end of the process.

Some of those candidates or perhaps most of those candidates would be screened out by other more costly screening processes such as psychological tests or backgrounds.

Police jobs are very difficult and require a combination of skill and abilities that the majority of people do not have.

They have a significant responsibility with high stakes if their performance is poor.

And so hiring standards should reflect the high stakes nature of their job.

Entrance exams are only part of the entire selection process, but they are a good measure to show how people will perform once they are on the job.

And that concludes my presentation.

Actually, no, I'm sorry.

I have key takeaways, which I'll just leave up here and take any of your questions.

Thank you very much.

Any questions here on the dais?

Vice Chair?

Do you have any questions?

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you for this overview presentation.

Very helpful.

Let's see.

Jotted down a couple questions throughout this, but let me see.

Where do I start?

Okay.

So...

The testing process, you mentioned that it currently published a list of qualified candidates to SPD seven times a year, which equates to be about every six to eight weeks or so.

Can you help me understand the format of the test?

Is it a multiple choice exam?

Is it a short answer exam, combination of both?

Whatever, yeah.

Sure, yes.

The exam consists of Between 60 and 70 video scenarios, well, one part of the task consists of between 60 and 70 video scenarios that the candidate watches and then answers questions based on what their reaction would be to the scenario if they were a police officer in that scenario.

Additionally, there is a writing component, a report writing, observation and writing component.

So they watch another...

a couple minutes long scenario of a crime or just an event that you might encounter as a Seattle police officer, or as a police officer, I should say, and you write a report that's testing recollection, writing skills.

It's really an interesting exercise, and I encourage all of you to sign up and take the police officer exam.

See it for yourself.

There are also components that answer or that post statements, and you agree.

So you say whether you strongly agree, medium agree, disagree, that sort of one to five scale with the statement.

I have taken the exam, so I'm trying to recall all of the different components.

There are some additional comprehension sections.

And the video exam component takes about, I would say, two hours.

And then there are subsections that are shorter than that.

And those are the more ethics, integrity, group bias focused sections.

So it sounds like there is one section that is the video scenario-based questions that is short answer.

The rest are essentially multiple choice.

Is that fair to say?

Well, the writing is a writing test.

So you're actually writing a report.

Yeah.

So yes, there are multiple components of the exam.

And I think you have generally describe them as I recall them as well.

Sure, sure.

Okay, and let's see here.

So I know there's this sort of handoff period.

You don't handle, you don't manage the entire hiring process end to end.

It's really the testing, the developing, administering, and assessing the tests, and then publishing that list and handing it off.

How would you rate...

Seattle's current capability in that specific area relative to other jurisdictions.

And I heard a lot about how we have high standards, which is great.

I mean, I personally have high standards of excellence and professionalism for everyone, myself included.

And I think that's terrific.

And the last thing that we need to do as part of this process, we have a critical need to hire more qualified officers But the last thing I think we wanna do is sacrifice our standards in any way, because any small incremental gains that we'll get in officer numbers in the short term is gonna be offset and gonna do more harm longer term than good.

So I don't want us to at all sacrifice standards.

How would you assess our current standards here in Seattle in this process?

Relative to other jurisdictions.

Well, I only am the executive director of Seattle's Public Safety Civil Service Commission, but I think we have the most appropriate standards for our city.

We have high standards.

I hope and expect that other departments do too.

I cannot speak specifically to them, But I know that I think that we hold our officers, our potential officers, our candidates to a very high standard.

And I think we do an excellent job.

We are also, and you're a council member in the city, so you know that it is, you know, the very largest jurisdiction in the state.

So it is sometimes difficult to compare us to other jurisdictions.

We don't have a good comparator in the state of Washington, which is why, you know, on occasions when it is appropriate, we look to other large jurisdictions around the United States and especially on the West Coast.

But I think that Seattle has very high standards and should continue to have those.

Do you have a point of view on how we stack up against peer jurisdictions with our standards?

I don't.

I'm really focused on Seattle.

I do think, and I agree with what I heard the chief say at this committee a few weeks ago, we are not the most competitive jurisdiction right now for hiring.

for reasons of which you all are very aware, I know, and very concerned about.

But pay is the red light that I think keeps many candidates from applying with Seattle.

So we publish every six to eight weeks.

What do other jurisdictions do locally?

I think that is an instructive, informative data point, regardless of...

It's clearly not going to be an apples to apples comparison, Seattle to Bellevue, but what cadence and frequency do other jurisdictions publish?

Oh, I appreciate that question, Council Member Saka.

Yeah, it is difficult to compare Seattle and what I am learning as all of the agencies in the state, you know, in the United States are responding to this police officer staffing crisis, you know, still feeling the impacts of the pandemic and the protests in 2020. We've had particularly devastating consequences to our police department as a result of all of those events.

I am understanding that smaller jurisdictions are able to process folks more quickly than we are.

That has come to my attention and been raised by the Seattle Police Department as well as the mayor's office, and I hear your concern about that as well, which is why we have proposed to increase the cadence of testing to approximately 26 times per year.

Given the adequate resourcing, we would be able to do that.

Is that what the best...

For some of these smaller jurisdictions, is that the best that you've seen, that frequency that you just described?

You know, it's pretty anecdotal.

I have contacted a number of other jurisdictions.

And what I've actually heard, what I heard from Spokane, which is a large city as well, though not, I think, maybe about the seventh or a fifth the size of Seattle, is that they do it once a month.

So they do it 12 times a year.

And a lot of jurisdictions do it based on the department's request.

So they'll build up a bank or a list, and when the department requests it, they're able to send it over.

But I've heard different things.

Some people have told me they do it weekly.

When I've gone to verify with some of those jurisdictions, I'm finding that that's not really the case.

that it's more, you know, less frequently, but really, you know, in communication with their department.

So every few weeks or every month, probably more quickly than Seattle.

And we are processing a greater volume of candidates than they are as well.

But as I mentioned, I think that we can, I know we can do it more quickly.

And hopefully we'll see a great increase in applications as well.

Okay, so that makes sense.

I do think it is really important that we understand we don't have to solve these problems in a silo, and we don't need to reinvent the wheel, and there's always going to be resourcing constraints and challenges, but understanding high-level best practices and what other jurisdictions, and collaborating and sharing out best practices is, you know, I found to be personally very helpful.

So the language hiring preference, I think on slide, your slide 11 there.

So it sounds like there's a hiring preference of some sort for people with different language proficiencies and skills, which makes a lot of sense.

I heard when Chair Kettle and I went to the West Precinct last week, an officer pulled me aside and mentioned they thought that was a great thing, but they thought there was an opportunity to either create or expand like a specific hiring bonus.

for people with these different language proficiency skills, and so it's one thing to get them in the door and better make sure they're able to get in the door, and it's another thing to pay for that skill and incentivize them that way.

So have we thought about that at all?

Like, what is our current approach to compensating not just giving preferential treatment in the hiring process, but actually specifically compensating for that skill?

That is a great question.

And I think it is something that the Seattle Police Department would be better able to speak to than we are.

But I like your idea.

I'm sure it'd have to be bargained, but I'll defer to the police department on that one, on pay issues.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Vice Chair Saka.

I've got two hands raised right now.

Council President?

Thank you very much.

So I'll just cut to the chase.

You're hearing so many questions about process and getting into the minutia of the recruitment practices and steps because we're frankly, I guess, this council is extremely worried about staffing levels.

And in fact, it does look like commissioners are too.

I note that in the meeting minutes of September 21st, 2023, it looks like Commissioner Nark asked that the year to date separations and hires and the number of sworn budget authority positions and current number of sworn staffing would be presented at Commission meetings.

And so it seems like internally you're also concerned.

But, however, the minutes for the October 19th meeting do show that you did report on the year-to-date staff separations and hires, but not the overall staffing number of deployable officers.

And so that is what we are looking at, is how many people do we have out there responding to 911 calls, et cetera.

So that's where this...

this concern is coming from.

And so when we are asking questions about, just to follow up on Council Member Kettles and my questions about the test, the reason that we were wondering about how many jurisdictions use this one testing service is if the questions can be co-developed with any service, then using a service that is used by a lot of other jurisdictions could be easier because that means that potential applicants don't have to take the test again.

It's just like, you know, you sign up to take the SAT and then it's on record and then you can have that sent to a bunch of different colleges.

And so that is just one part of your whole, of the whole funnel that you described that we're interested in seeing, that we're doing our absolutely best to to get people in the door, qualified, appropriate applicants that end up getting hired.

You mentioned that you're working to improve the registry that could...

quicken the registry by three to six weeks.

That's really important because in that amount of time, that recruit could get offered a job by a neighboring jurisdiction.

And so it's all hands on deck to improve these processes.

And so I think that that's where we're going.

So my question is, do you look at the best practices of neighboring jurisdictions?

For example, do you look at what other police departments, the recruiting practices of Bellevue or Renton or Auburn or other, the cities that we're competing with, do you see what they're doing and then try to match the efficiency or the processes so that people aren't falling through the cracks in our process to go to other places?

Because you're right, salary is a huge, That's a huge issue.

So is workplace environment.

And we're working on that at this council.

But at the same time, just cutting through red tape, making sure that people have a human connection, et cetera, and that they feel wanted at this police department by sort of having those being shepherded through the process quickly and efficiently.

That's also something that we can use to our advantage.

So how do you survey what other jurisdictions are doing?

Well, we look at their websites.

We call the other systems and talk with them.

We look not just in Washington, but we look at jurisdictions up and down the West Coast.

And, well, eastern Washington is obviously part of Washington.

So, yeah, we're in conversation with a lot of those jurisdictions.

And I share the council's concern about matching and doing better than our competitors.

This is an extremely competitive market.

with a smaller pool of candidates than we've seen.

Probably maybe in my lifetime, maybe in 20 years, I just I'm not sure, but an extremely small pool of candidates.

So we want to make and we are on your team to make every improvement that we can and make this not only the best place to work, but the best place to apply and go through that pre-hire phase.

So I agree with you.

Okay, I'm glad to know that since January, you've been thinking about this, but this, I've been in office for a couple of years and it's, if there's anything that we can do to ramp up that process better, because it seems like we're gonna keep falling behind.

We're still operating at a, I believe it's a net negative hiring trajectory.

Yes, well, it is definitely a question of resources.

We think that it would take one additional full-time FTE to go from seven to 26 per year.

There's actually quite a bit of legwork.

I mean, it might seem like a process that could be automated, but there's a lot of matching people up between their application and their exam, we would increase the number of contacts to people in the testing funnel with an additional position and really ensure that people are moving smoothly and efficiently through that process.

Okay, thank you, Council President.

Council Member Moore.

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you for this presentation, and I think I'm going to echo a lot of the comments that my colleagues have made.

I just think we're moving way too slowly, and basically what I see here is a bureaucracy that's clunky, and so You know, we went from six months to 90 days, and that's great, but we need to go faster.

There's no reason that we should be waiting to send out a list of eligible candidates every six to eight weeks.

Other jurisdictions, as my understanding, they're notified, like, within 24 or 72 hours that somebody is eligible or has passed the test.

So I personally think that we need to have...

I don't get a sense of urgency Frankly, when I'm listening to your presentation, and that's not acceptable, I need to know why exactly do you need one additional person to process these exams?

And what are the actual concrete obstacles in your office to speeding this up?

Thank you for your question, Council Member Moore.

The reason it will take one additional employee, the way we did it prior to 2020 was in four batches per year.

When you batch processes, you can do them very efficiently.

We have increased that by almost twice as much, and I'm hearing you, the message is clear and received that that is not sufficient.

But we have continued to batch, but seven times per year.

In order to speed up the cadence of testing, we will have to unbatch those processes, which will decrease efficiency on our side, but maybe, and hopefully, I think it will, increase efficiency on the candidate end and the transmission of passing candidate names to SPD.

So that is why it will take a lot of legwork.

It will take a lot of phone calls.

It will take a lot of processing.

Okay.

That isn't really a satisfactory answer.

I think that we need to come back here in 30 days and hear concrete steps that you've taken, because this is just too slow.

And I recognize that there's a bureaucratic process, but we are losing people.

To your point, it is a very, very competitive market.

We cannot afford to lose people because of...

basically bureaucratic obstacle and delay and process.

We need to be more flexible.

We need to be more nimble.

We are in the 21st century.

So if you need one additional person to create that kind of flexibility and nimbleness, then we need to know that.

But just adding staff doesn't satisfy for me the fact that we're actually going to be more productive and faster.

So I guess I would like to hear back from you.

I would like to hear what sort of conversations you're having with the mayor's office to really expedite this and to really work and to view, I mean, you're here to serve the citizens of the city.

And the citizens of the city deserve to have police officers put on the streets as quickly as possible.

Obviously, they need to be qualified, and we need to go through this process.

Although there's some question about whether we actually do need to, but nonetheless, this is where we are.

So we have to light a fire under our civil servants' feet because you are here to serve the city of Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Moore.

We have our guest panelists here today on the dais, Council Member Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

I don't sit on the Public Safety Committee, but as you know, I represent District 4, and public safety is a huge concern for the constituents in the D4.

And so I just want to really lend my voice to my colleagues.

I understand and we hear a lot about the salaries and the issues with salaries, but there is an administrative component here that we can definitely be doing a lot better on.

And that's the piece that I feel like the public doesn't understand.

And we're trying to get to the heart of right here.

And we don't want to lose officers to other cities because we're not working fast enough.

Salary is one piece, but getting it done quickly so folks don't leave is another equally important aspect in my mind.

So I echo the sentiments and the frustration of Council Member Moore and Council Member Nelson and Council Member Sacca I think we're all aligned here and I wanted to lend my voice to that.

And so I really would be interested in coming back and hearing more on what you have done between now and 30 days to really get to the piece on how can we do this more quickly.

Thank you.

Council President.

we received 1,948 applications last year and ended up hiring, I believe, 56 or so, which ends up being, I believe, these are the numbers that I received.

They might not be accurate, but that's a 2.6 applicant conversion rate.

That is less than the national average of 10%.

That is what we're talking about here.

We can do better.

And not all the, you know, I...

It doesn't all fall on the scope of work that you do, but I do believe that we do need to understand your job so that we can know how best to appropriate resources and ready to work as partners with you.

But that is, I just wanted to quantify that that is what we are concerned about is not I'll just stop right there.

I'm just trying to make you understand where some of our concern lies when it comes just specifically to the body of work that you are doing.

So look forward to additional conversations and perhaps changes that we can have on the horizon.

Your data is correct that you just reported for 2023. And I thank you all for your comments.

If the council, the mayor's office or the Seattle Police Department wants to talk with the PSCSC about changing its hiring standards, its testing standards, then we should have that conversation.

I am always listening to stakeholders, and we will do work and come back and speak to you again about the process.

But if the city is interested in changing its hiring standards or its testing standards, we should have that conversation.

I think that that's something that the CPC needs to weigh in on because I don't hear any of us talking about standards.

We're just talking about processes, bureaucracy, administration, speeding it up, that sort of things, and how we can compete with other jurisdictions that, for example, pay their people to pay for the exam for the applicant.

Those sorts of little things add up to making a big difference.

Sure.

Yep.

Definitely.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you so much, Director, Commissioners, other team members for coming.

A few things.

As Vice Chair Saka mentioned, we were at the West Precinct last week, and I said there, like I said at the East Precinct, that we have high expectations and high standards, so that's not gonna change.

Those points, the Executive Director of the CPC is not here, but we'll continue on those.

And so, moving forward, two other points.

Obviously, there's some urgency in your review of NTN and PTN, you know, and that question and who's using what and if there's any advantages one way or the other.

So that's going to be a question and, you know, or lack of a better word, do out.

And the other thing is what your resources.

As you can tell, the council's ready to move on resources.

I believe the people sitting behind you are probably ready to move on resources.

So please look at that.

I think you already have the answer, but as part of this response to this council, please come to us and then we'll get you what you need in terms of to to assist you in carrying out your duties as the executive director of the PSCSC.

And so again, thank you so much for coming.

Very informative, really appreciate it.

Also appreciated the pre-meeting that we had.

And I'm sure based on this discussion, we'll have follow-up meetings as well.

So thank you so much.

Thank you to all the members of the committee.

Appreciate it.

We will now move on to our second item in business.

Will the clerk please read item two into the record?

Seattle Police Department Recruitment and Retention Briefing and Discussion with Brian Maxey, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Adrian Diaz, Chief of Police, and Mike Fields, Executive Director of Human Resources, Seattle Police Department.

Sarah Smith and Tim Burgess, Deputy Mayor from Mayor's Office.

Andrea Scheele, Executive Director, and Dave Wright, Workforce Development Manager, Public Safety Civil Service Commission.

Okay, welcome, everyone.

I really appreciate you joining us today.

Clerk will assist in setting up your presentation.

I'm done talking.

Sorry, we're looking for one without arms for the uniformed officers.

The gear takes some extra room.

Something that I noted last week in our meeting, our presentation at the West Precinct, all the chairs had very wide bursts, and we understand why, so thank you for joining us.

I think the presentation's all lined up, and this next group is already primed because we've already had a lot of questions, and I suspect the same questions will be one way or another presented to you as well.

Deputy Mayor Burgess, are you going to lead?

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Council members, we're delighted to be here today and look forward to this discussion.

I think I'd like, if I may, ask each of our panel members to just quickly introduce themselves and tell us the position.

We'll start here with this gentleman.

Okay.

Adrienne Diaz, Chief of Police.

Sarah Smith, Mayor's Office Policy.

Gretchen Hughes, Employment Services Lieutenant with the Seattle Police Department.

Dave Wright, Workforce Development Manager, Seattle Human Resources.

Mike Shin, Sergeant, backgrounds.

Autumn Manning, part of the recruitment team.

You've met me.

I'm Andrea Scheele with the PSCSC.

And good morning.

Brian Maxey, Chief Operating Officer, SPD.

Thank you.

Council members, we're here today at your request to give you an update on police recruiting and retention of our officers.

And we share your desire for urgent action.

Mayor Harrell has been very clear from the beginning of his administration that he wants a police force much larger than the one we have today.

We're going to give you some background on the mayor's recruitment retention plan.

We'll then talk about the hiring process, both the marketing that we're engaged in, the advertising, the recruitment, the applications, backgrounds, and then some final considerations.

Slide three of the presentation shows where we're at today.

The red line in the graph is the population of Seattle, which is continuing to rise.

I think the last time I checked, the second or third fastest growing major city in the United States.

And the blue line in the graph represents the number of police officers that we have today that are fully trained, not on extended leave, and fully deployable.

At the end of January, 913 officers are fully deployable, which is the lowest number since the early 1990s when the department began keeping that statistic.

I think the police chief and Sarah and I will then talk about the next couple of slides.

Yes, as the Deputy Mayor noted, and thank you Council Members and Council President that just walked out for allowing us to present on this, we know that we've lost 725 officers over the last five years.

That is over half the department that is gone.

And yes, we've hired quite a few officers.

We're still down 375 officers, which still makes a huge impact in our deployed resources.

But it also makes a huge impact in officers, even the morale, because officers, people come to this department because there's opportunities to go to specialty units.

And many of those specialty units are now gone.

You know, we had community policing teams.

We had anti-crime teams.

We had, you know, traffic units.

We had a variety of different units where people could still do police work, but not necessarily be in patrol and having new opportunities.

And that has changed.

And also, we get a lot of requests of identifying what our priorities are.

We know that our priority is violent crime and public safety overall.

But we also know that there are organized retail theft, We know that there's human trafficking and sex trafficking that occurs in many districts.

We also know that there is drug usage that is occurring in the downtown core and the CID and property trafficking and a variety of other different things that we all want to make sure that the department is still focused on and that they still have a mindful eye.

And those resources are really difficult when it comes to the staffing that we have.

When it also comes to a fully trained officer, it takes a long time to not only onboard an officer, but also make them a viable officer so when they become fully deployable.

So we have roughly about, we'll probably talk in the exact numbers, but you have 50 or 60 officers that are going not only through the academy to your phase two to your phase three components of the department, But it almost takes over a year.

So having an officer on board right now today will really not actually be effective until next year.

And so that is really some of the different challenges that we have when it comes to overall staffing.

And if we're looking at right now, having an officer now to next year, and then in two years we're in World Cup.

And we're going to need as many officers as we have.

And so we're really having to figure out how do we actually become a lot more nimble in different resources, not just police officers, but also parking enforcement, CSOs, you know, care department and other things.

So these are all things that we have to think about as we address some of the staffing challenges.

I'll turn it over to Sarah Smith.

So now we're going to move on to the next slide, and I'm actually going to pass back to the DM first, and then I'll go right into it.

Okay.

Slide number four talks about what the major focus was during 2023 and 22, where we focused on process.

And so we did a very thorough, with the police department, review of the recruiting process and made substantial changes.

For example...

If you were an applicant and you wanted to take the physical agility test, you had to come to Seattle at your expense to take that exam.

Today, you can take that at national testing sites around the country.

You had to come to Seattle for the oral board at your expense.

Today, that's often done online, virtually.

Lots of process improvements that led to a faster process of onboarding of individuals.

You and the previous council, some of you on the previous council, passed the recruitment and retention bonus, recruitment bonuses for new recruits at $7,500 and $30,000 for commissioned officers who were lateral transfers to SPD.

So a lot of process improvements.

In August of last year, we hired an outside advertising agency to come in and assess the messaging that the department was using for recruiting.

And then they did AB testing to test various messages.

In October, rolled out new advertising.

We saw an immediate uptick in applications on a daily basis.

That's continuing.

On slide five, we talk about the work with, and the recruitment team members can actually talk about this, but their presence at universities and colleges, career fairs, military bases, all of the outreach efforts that they engage in.

to interest individuals and coax them along in the process.

In fact, Sergeant Shin, if maybe you want to share a few comments about how that process works, or Autumn, whoever is appropriate.

Oh, the recruitment process?

If it's about the recruitment process.

And the outreach that you do.

And the outreach, yes.

So we've been a relatively new team that came together last year, but since then, we have made every effort to reach out in as many different diverse communities and events and so forth that we could.

I think last month in February, we went to 19 different events in a short month.

So we are going to career fairs.

We are going to universities.

We are going to upcoming Women in Trades Fair, Northwest Women's Show, a wide variety.

And we're open to any other ideas and suggestions.

We are a small team at this time.

We are going out of state.

We're identifying states and communities that we've always had a high draw from and trying to travel to those.

We're making every effort we can.

Interview Now, which they briefly talked about, has been one of the biggest blessings, I guess, improvements for us.

It is a text-based platform where if someone visits the website or they engage us in the community or at an event, they can opt in and say, request to speak with a recruiter.

And with the team, we have ensured that we are responsive within 24 hours to every message we get.

And on that platform, it is much more back and forth than say emails were because it's a constant text messaging.

That's what the next generation is all about.

And that communication might take place over a course of days or even weeks.

We help them through the whole process.

So we have had that in effect since May 15th of last year.

And I know we have the numbers, but we have had over 2,500 individuals reach out to us just on that platform.

And one of the things that we hear often from our candidates is, you know, I reached out to five different agencies.

You know, because most people do apply to multiple agencies at one time.

And you guys were the first one that got back to me.

And not only that, but we are, um, we don't just give Pat answers.

We don't just have a script.

We're very engaged with their specific questions and, um, And if they want a phone call, we take the time for a phone call.

We're on the phone with them for 45 minutes.

So I think for that, interview now went down for about five days on us one time, and I almost cried.

I just, it's so important to be in this competitive environment to do those things special.

So the process changes that were implemented, the beefing up of the recruitment team at SPD, Some of the cooperation from the Public Safety Civil Service Commission has allowed us to take what was a five- to nine-month process to onboard someone down to three to four months, which is a huge improvement in process.

And slide number six kind of shows that, and I'll turn that over to Sarah.

Yeah, and so I know in the previous presentation we actually walked through this, and so sorry to be redundant, but I'm going to go through it again.

The whole hiring process, to the chief's point, does take quite a long time.

So you may apply now, but you won't actually be on patrol for more than a year.

And so this above in this slide is showing kind of the steps and also who owns the work.

So as you can see at this very large table, there's a lot of nuance in who's participating.

We have the mayor's office, we have SPD, public safety, civil service, HR, all coming together to really work on this.

And so first I'll talk about kind of the roles.

Overall, when you first think about recruiting, which is our marketing, which is going to in-person events, we are, the mayor's office is a part of that, and SPD recruitment is a part of that.

So we are both doing the marketing virtually, online, in person, and then moving people to apply.

Once people apply, they go into the public safety civil service realm, and those are the green boxes on this timeline.

And so that is the public safety folks who are taking the application, checking people's qualifications to make sure they meet the minimums, going through the examination, reviewing the examination, and building the register.

So as we heard earlier, that can take six to eight weeks.

It then goes back to SPD.

So SPD is the blue boxes, and this is where we begin backgrounds.

So backgrounding, we'll have our psyche val, we'll go through that whole process, and then we hire someone, and then they come into the before the badge.

So that's the general timeline of folks and who is working in the different So as the Deputy Mayor mentioned, the first part of last year was really focused on getting this whole hiring process down to three to four months.

We still think that could be shorter, but that in itself is a significant decrease in time.

So the rest of this slide deck is going to follow the hiring process.

And so we're going to kind of piggyback to the different folks who are really leading.

So we're going to start with marketing.

And so just at a high level, just to understand what this is saying, is our media strategy with our marketing firm has two main components.

One is the awareness side, which is the bottom half in the blue.

And that is really about changing the brand of SPD and getting it out there broadly and widely.

So we are putting videos online through broadcast TV.

We did a lot of sports, including Husky games and Mariners last year.

We've been in print.

We'll be in transit soon.

And we're also going to be doing new branding campaigns where we're telling the story very differently.

And so this will be videos about what it means to be an SPD officer and really highlighting the great work that our officers are currently doing using real stories.

We want to share that so people really know.

So you have the awareness side.

And then you have like the true marketing know-how, which is the conversion.

which is where we're really getting people to actually click to apply.

And that is consistently happening throughout the year through we are sponsored Google Ads, and so our information is being pushed front and center to everyone.

We're on all the different social media platforms being boosted.

We are on digital display, and so you are seeing us on websites that allow for advertising, and they're also seeing us on over-the-top video, which means streaming platforms like ESPN Plus and Hulu.

So all those are the places that we are pushing people to really click and apply.

So those are our two strategies.

And here, sorry about that.

Here is kind of what we've seen.

So kind of going back to the deputy mayor's first point on when we brought Copasino in, they came in mid-August and they really started doing A-B testing.

So checking out our creative, seeing what works best, what messaging really speaks to people to convert.

And then they actually started amplifying that.

They tested and then amplified.

And since the time that they actually pushed out more spending and have now moved on their messaging, we've seen a dramatic increase in applications coming in.

And the hope is to continue that so we continue to see a dramatic increase.

So that is that blue line where you can see our entry-level new recruits applying.

The bottom line is our laterals, which have been fairly consistent.

These are folks who are coming from other law enforcement folks or areas.

And here are just some examples of different videos that we have, displays, they're on websites, social media clips that you can view later.

So that's the outreach side.

Now I'm going to pass it on over to our recruitment team to talk even more in depth to what we're doing for recruiting.

Thank you.

Some of the notes here is obviously the top is just the different events that we're going to.

We're also trying to make inroads with the different colleges.

Earlier last year, I sat on a panel of women in law enforcement.

at Central Washington University.

There's some really good strong criminal justice programs throughout the state.

So we're making outreach there.

We have some unique things at Seattle that other agencies don't have.

We're the only embedded EMT program.

And so we're making outreach to different EMT programs in the area as well to try to highlight that.

Most instructors aren't even aware that we have that within our PD.

So that's a big thing.

Interview Now, as I mentioned there, those are the stats for 2023, but we've already hit 2,500 up to date.

So February, for some reason, we had a huge uptick in people reaching out to us, which was great.

We are also hosting virtual workshops in conjunction with the testing team.

We do those twice a month.

We host one in the evening during the week and one on the weekend, and that covers everything from the beginning of the application to the very end.

So that is a way that we get applicants that we can walk them through the process and reach out.

And then this weekend we did our first kind of more, not so much an in-person workshop, but we had an in-person opportunity to help some people who had not, initially passed the physical agility test, but we give those people the opportunity to take it multiple times so that they can get through it rather than earlier.

They might have just been disqualified in the process because they weren't able to pass it the first time.

We're doing, oh, that's the part at the end there is the physical agility.

We had four people pass it just on Saturday.

So yeah, it's a great opportunity to work with it.

And then we do part of my role has been to look at other agencies and how they are doing their testing.

I obviously don't get to impact the Civil Service Commission's decisions, but I've certainly written several recommendations and from the evaluation of the other agencies.

Hi, good morning and thank you again for the opportunity to present today.

I'm Dave Wright and I work in Seattle Human Resources supporting the Fire and Police Exams Unit.

We are an operations unit that works under the authority of the PSESC.

As Director Shealy mentioned earlier, the city uses the National Testing Network Frontline Exam for our Entry Police Civil Service exam.

And to answer some of the questions earlier, and I want to thank my colleague Adelaide, who actually looked this up, currently 21 Washington state agencies use the National Testing Network Frontline exam, and six of seven of the West Coast seven use the NTN exam.

In addition, Denver, Minneapolis, Aurora, Cleveland, and Baltimore are on that list.

And I can follow up with additional information if needed on that.

And thank you, Adelaide.

Since Director Scheele covered the high-level details of that exam in her presentation, I'm going to focus on our recent process improvements and some high-level data.

Before I proceed to this slide, I did want to thank the Fire and Police Exams Analysts, Rachel Schade, Yoshiko Grace Matsui, Adelaide L. Dirks, and Amy Jo Chamberlain, who truly worked tirelessly to manage this and the 10 other entry and promotional exams.

I'm truly grateful for their dedication to the community and public safety employees.

It's amazing what they do every day.

Many of the items that I'm going to discuss today are the direct result of their hard work.

With that, I'll walk through our recent process improvements that are listed on this slide.

First, we've reduced multiple barriers to testing.

Historically, candidates could test four times a year and would need to travel to Seattle to test.

Now candidates can test almost any day of the year and can do so from anywhere where they have access to a computer and the internet.

This is in addition to candidates still being able to participate in in-person testing at testing centers across the United States.

The PSCSE has also recently shortened the retest window from six months to three months for candidates.

Second, we've made significant updates to our job bulletins and websites, increasing content clarity and accessibility.

Third, by offering more continuous testing, we're sending lists of eligible candidates to SPD almost twice as often as we have in past years.

Where we used to send eligible candidates lists to SPD every 12 weeks, we are now doing so every six to eight weeks.

In terms of candidate experience, many of our candidates do apply towards the mid and end of our cycle, so their experience on the testing side may be a little bit shorter than six to eight weeks.

Fourth, we've increased our communications with all applicants, including the addition of text messages and approved email messages from Chief Diaz.

On this bullet, it's also important to note that many of the messages encourage candidates to reach out to recruiters via the new InterviewNow platform that Autumn mentioned, which is fantastic.

They encourage candidates to attend police applicant workshops, and they provide our team's email and contact information should they have any questions regarding the exam phase.

Fifth, we have created new and comprehensive dashboards that monitor short and long-term data related to entry civil service police exams and these dashboards are shared with all of the colleagues here at this table.

Sixth, we have co-created the police applicant workshops and we present that information with SPD about twice a month.

And finally, we recently implemented a community preference points program as part of the police accountability ordinance that adds 10% to a candidate's passing score if they have verified experience providing direct social or community services.

When looking at the funnel at the bottom of this slide, we had 1,948 candidates apply to be a police officer in 2023 with approximately 34% of those candidates scheduling and sitting for an exam.

I know Director Scheele mentioned this in her presentation.

I did want to let the Council know that we are continually looking at ways that we can better support applicants, and we're currently surveying this group to better understand why they applied for this role, but why they did not schedule or sit for the exam.

Thank you for, by the way, you mentioned your answer to the NTN question, so again, Any question that came up in the previous briefing, if you have something to add or answer that question, go ahead.

So thank you for your comment on NTN.

Thank you.

And if there's anything else on that front, please go ahead and, you know, highlight.

Thank you.

I just want to call out, and this is why it's really important, is really thinking about our exam funnel and this process.

100% of people come in.

You have 100 people apply.

25 actually make it to SPD in the end, and I just think that's an important point to point out.

Got it.

Thank you.

So this next slide moves us to data and that will give you a high level overview of our current state and how it relates to some historical data I'm going to share.

I'll take a few minutes to walk through each section of this slide.

The left part of this slide highlights applicant demographics in 2023 compared to city of Seattle demographics.

The first section of the chart focuses on race and our applicant pool is incredibly diverse with approximately 60% of our 2023 police applicants identifying as BIPOC.

This number is up from 35% of applicants identifying as BIPOC in 2013. The second section focuses on gender, and this number has remained relatively flat over the last 10 years.

In 2023, 13.6% of police applicants identified as female.

In 2013, this number was 14%.

The last section of the slide highlights the number of candidates who reside in state versus out of state.

In 2023, about 68% of applicants were from Washington state.

This number has hovered between 62 and 68% since 2018. Moving to the right side of this slide, you can see our pass rate for candidates who complete the exam is around 73%.

I believe this is a question earlier.

And this is a slight increase over our 10-year average of 68%.

The next two boxes with the green text highlight applicants per day in this current exam cycle and the year-to-date average applicants per day.

We're currently in the second cycle of this year.

We've seen a recent uptick in applicants in this current cycle, which is cycle two of 2024 compared to the last cycle, increasing from 6.81 applicants a day to 9.35 applicants a day.

And this data is a bid last week.

Lastly, you'll see information about the applicant to eligibility ratio that Sarah mentioned in the bottom two boxes.

This is the percentage of all applicants who in each cycle schedule, complete, and pass the civil service exam.

What you can see here is that four to one applicant to eligible ratio has remained relatively consistent in 23 compared to our 10 years of data.

As Director Scheele also mentioned earlier, this number is most impacted by those candidates who apply but don't schedule or sit for the exam.

One important note around this four to one applicant to eligible ratio is that has remained consistent despite the ebb and flow of applicant numbers through all of the increased accessibility changes we've made to our exam and through other external factors that might influence candidate interest in the profession of policing.

I do want to add that our team closely monitors these demographics throughout every stage of the exam process to ensure there's no discriminatory impact or any potential barriers to any specific candidate group.

This concludes our update on the process improvements for the civil service exam, and I can pass the presentation over to my colleague, Sergeant Shin, for the pre-employment screening process.

Thank you again for your time.

And just before Sergeant Shin starts, I just want to comment on the left side here, the demographics.

I think the fact that we're seeing approximately 60 percent of our applicants as people of color is because of two reasons.

One, our messaging is reaching them and they're applying.

But perhaps more importantly, they are indicating that they would be proud to become Seattle police officers as they look at the department where they potentially are going to serve.

They're saying, yes, I want to be part of that department.

And I know that the mayor is very grateful for the fact that Chief Diaz and his team and all the officers working on the street are communicating a message through their actions and their behavior that is attracting people of color to join them.

And that's a good, positive outcome that we can realize here.

Sorry, Sergeant Shin, but I wanted to share that.

So in November of 2022, we transitioned over to ESOF, which is a digital program.

So we went from a paper system that was probably as thick as a Bible to this digital system, which sped us up.

It made us way more efficient.

It dropped our process almost in half immediately.

After that, we transitioned to more virtual again, because we're having 30% of our applicants coming from out of state, and it was a big burden on them to have to fly here, because before we were doing our written and physical testing in person.

With NTN taking over the digital testing, virtual digital testing, now our out-of-state applicants can now virtually test on the PAT, and then we still offer in-person testing in Seattle.

And then our recruitment team is also following up with any of those that do not pass that first time.

We put them in what I've recycling program, basically, to get them into the next testing cycle.

One of our other bottlenecks in 2022 that we saw is there's just not enough cardiologists in Washington or in the nation right now.

And we have to do a stress test where you get on the treadmill and verify EKG.

So on that one, we were not getting responses for three to four weeks.

So we brought on Kaiser as well as a second vendor to get our candidates through.

And then, again, we've moved over for virtual on everything from our oral boards to our in-person interviews, if they are not local, our one-on-one interviews with their backgrounders.

And then with our eSoft, now almost all of our records checks and everything is all digital.

Okay, that takes it to me, but I think, Council, you said that we might be able to come back to a question that you asked earlier, so before I go into pay, I'm not sure exactly where the testing team got it, but when we did our research a month ago, there was only five agencies that exclusively used NTN, and those were Seattle, Eatonville, Napa, Vine, Monroe, and Chehalis.

And I don't think that Seattle belongs in that category with those agencies.

So I know there are other agencies in the state that use both PST and NTN, but as a recruiter, that is one of the questions that often comes up When I'm engaging applicants, as we have many applicants who have already taken the PST test and are interested in working for Seattle and will call and say, I couldn't find Seattle on the PST list and I'd like to submit my scores.

And that is the time that we explain our process of using a whole different exam cycle.

So that is at least the research that we have found in our research.

Back to the salaries, I think you're already well aware.

I'm sorry to interrupt.

That completely makes our point that we should consider broadening or changing that vendor.

I agree.

You have already heard often about the pay.

It is one of the things that kind of we, when we especially go out of state, part of the reasons we have previously gone out of state is because the Pacific Northwest pays so well in policing.

And so we could really compete when you go to somewhere like a Florida or an Arizona and talk about that.

We are finding in some of the more recent cases at recruitment that we have gone to, that obviously we have fallen behind in that regards and even when we're out of state.

So I know the council is working on that and I know that the contract negotiations are existing, but with the last few years and the inflation, I think the disparity has really, has really grown and that 83,000 mark is what they make after graduation from the academy.

They actually make less than that prior to that.

So applicants can see that and are making decisions accordingly.

We have two of community service officers that work here in the city that would like to apply to the police department, but they said they can't afford the pay cut right now.

So that hurts.

The next slide.

during the academy.

Yeah.

One other note I will add to this, and I think it's important to kind of just mention, is that, so we just released our incentive evaluation report last week, and so that is in all the council members' emails, and so you can review the work that the innovation and performance team did.

I will note that, as you can see across the Washington State and our local agencies, that folks are receiving incentives.

This is a common practice across, um, Washington state and other states as well.

I would also just note that in 2022, Seattle police officers were making the same amount that they are making in this current year, just as an additional note.

And on that, I think I've been involved in police recruiting and hiring for many, many years.

And in the last three to five years, I've seen more changes in departments in their processes, but as well as their incentives in order to be competitive with everyone else.

You have seen numerous agencies, you know, I'm not part of the contract negotiation and I'm not a police officer, so I don't benefit from any of this, but the take-home cars, the Port of Seattle, Redmond PD now have medical after retirement.

They are really getting creative with the incentives in a way that I've never seen in my 30 years of law enforcement.

So I think that just highlights the environment that we're all in and the competition for good candidates.

So I'm sorry, I'm reading upside down.

They did a survey of the new hires last year.

And it's not surprising that salary was the most important factor in an applicant's decision to become a police officer.

It's a buyer's market right now for good applicants, for good quality applicants.

And so they're doing more due diligence now than I think they have in years past.

So they can really compare.

We are often getting the questions of, do you pay for tuition reimbursement?

Do you have incentives for bilingual speakers?

Do you have the take-home cars?

And that kind of stuff matters to the applicants now who can pick and choose, who can get a little picky about where they work.

Do we?

Do we have any of that?

No.

No.

So basically what you're highlighting is retentions become part of recruiting.

a very big portion.

Yes, yeah.

And, you know, I retired from Bellevue PD last year, and I would have sworn in my lifetime that they would never get take-home cars, and they got take-home cars six months ago.

So, you know, it just shows how dramatically the last two to three years have been in changes in law enforcement and hiring.

And I just came back from a national...

police convention about retention, and they're saying they're having the same difficulties.

Year two to five, they're losing the vast majority, so retention is a bigger issue even than recruitment is right now for most national agencies.

I attended with Chief Diaz there the PERF Conference on Recruitment and Retention in Washington, D.C.

about two years ago, and every agency there is facing this same challenge.

And it was really highlighted that agencies had to basically go big or go home if they really wanted to compete out there in the marketplace for the best quality candidates.

Do any jurisdictions offer subsidized housing?

That is something that I've voted a little bit.

L.A.

talked about it at the conference that we were at.

L.A.

has a two-year pilot project.

I mean, I know there's many other agencies, but...

L.A.

had a two-year pilot project where they were providing $1,000 a month for the first two years of employment as a housing subsidy.

Now, some of that was funded from their police foundation, and they specifically cited that it was actually pretty easy to get that money because everybody, the businesses wanted more policing.

They wanted...

you know, an improved environment.

And so they cited at the conference that they went to those, some of those businesses to ask for donations.

And those businesses said, if this works, just come back and we'll give you more.

So, but there's agencies in Utah that I'm aware of that have housing.

Baltimore just did a $6,500 as long as you're within 50 miles of their jurisdiction, they wanted you to be close.

Yeah, there's many agencies in the region that provide, you know, all the tuition reimbursement for you to get, you know, your education and degree while working without any kind of commitment to stay or anything like that.

So it's really challenging and it is hard sometimes as a recruiter to continually say, no, no, we don't have that.

No, we don't have that.

No, we don't have that.

So I am passing, I forget.

Chief.

Back to the chief.

Chief Diem.

No, I think it's you.

Slide 17 to close out our persuasive presentation here.

Several steps going forward.

Obviously, we want to finalize the labor contract with the officers' union.

We've been negotiating in good faith, and we think we're very close.

Hopefully, fingers crossed, that we will see...

conclusion there that's favorable very soon.

We will obviously continue to do our advertising and marketing to recruit additional officers.

We will work with our team internally in the department and also with the Public Safety Civil Service Commission to shrink the time.

We appreciate Andrea's offer to do that.

We're going to maybe press her to do it even more, but...

The importance of an officer or a candidate, when they take the test, they can specify several agencies.

Where do you want your results sent?

So they might check Seattle, they might check Portland and Spokane and Denver and who knows.

That is sent out within a day or two of the candidate taking the test.

It's critically important that our recruiters know that on the same timeline because we're competing with all those other agencies that that recruit checked that they want their results sent to.

So we'll continue to work on shortening that process.

We are working with some external recruiters.

We invited some of our city's major corporations to lend their chief recruitment staff to sit with us and review what we are doing in recruiting of Seattle officers.

they instantly stepped up and said, yes, we'll sit and participate in that process.

So Nordstrom, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Russell Investments, Expedia, and others will be sitting with us in early April to analyze and critique what we're doing to see how we might improve.

And then we're talking to the private sector headhunting firms in our city.

There's approximately 12 of them.

who've also agreed to help us with that critique and that review to see how we can improve.

As the police department is a learning organization, continuously improving, we want to be able to do that with recruitment as well.

Finally, our last slide here.

The department has been talking about other ways that they could recruit.

I think an interesting one is the Department of Defense has the Skills Bridge program, where someone who would like early dismissal from the military can sign up as an intern in a government agency.

We don't do that yet here in Seattle, but we're exploring that.

The Explorer program that we have, I think it's 14 to 18-year-olds.

21.

21 can be in that program.

We'd like to beef that up and expand that as well.

The department has increased their presence at recruitment events, not only at colleges and universities, but also at our military bases in the region and conferences that are held around the country, specifically looking at hiring police officers.

The problem of recruitment is not just a Seattle problem.

The department is developing their 30 by 30 initiative, which is the desire to have 30 percent of officers be female officers by 2030. We don't have a lot of time yet to accomplish that goal, but they're working on that program.

And then we are working on mentorship programs so that New officers can be assigned a buddy, essentially, as they move through their career in the police department.

So I know the mayor is committed to his goal of hiring more police officers.

You have been committed.

We appreciate that enthusiasm, and we'll continue to do this work.

Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor Burgess and the team chief, everyone at the table.

Thank you for your time.

Speaking of time, we're coming up close to our time.

I say that as I look to my fellow council members for questions, and I could tell by the Vice Chair's look that he has a question.

So, Vice Chair Osaka.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Always questions.

I'm a curious mind.

Well, thank you, Deputy Mayor Burgess, Chief Diaz, everyone at the table, really appreciate the insights shared here and the work that's been done to date to address this very, very pressing, urgent challenge.

I want to kind of highlight what I think is a low light.

That is, on your slide three, states that, and there's a nice graph that visually depicts this thing.

As of January 2024, SPD had only 913 fully trained and deployable officers, the lowest level since the 1990s.

I am personally alarmed and dismayed to see that.

I think if rock bottom was ever a thing, we're probably here.

And there, despite some I think this is the public is demanding us to do better move quicker.

This is a call to action these these low numbers is is a really a call to action for us to significantly boost our hiring.

For got better ways to reach Tain officers.

streamline our hiring processes and also better address ongoing officer morale challenges and you know we heard a lot about a number of dimensions that is as part of this broader work uh including marketing and i'm glad we're we're investing in addressing the critical marketing component marketing in my view is a is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

We're just not going to market our way out of this.

But let us continue that work and build upon it and improve that even more.

I think the greater opportunity that we all have here to address the hiring challenges, high level lies in two things, process And we identified some key components of that, not only in the earlier presentation, but here now as well.

And then morale, officer morale.

And we're delighted to be joined here by SPD's Chief Morale Officer.

That's you, Chief DS.

You can choose to delegate that role and function however you see fit from my perspective, but I will be looking to you in partnership with you in the mayor's office to figure out how we can better increase morale in addition to knocking down some of those unnecessary bureaucratic barriers and better simplifying and streamlining our hiring processes.

But I would just be curious to understand, because we're not going to, as we learned, it takes over a year from frontline net new recruit applying today over a year before they're on the force on the street.

And even then, do we want, and how many people are we able to hire a year?

Last I heard, it was like net new rookie recruits, 60 or something, 60 to 70 potentially.

That's what we hired last year, but we actually want to hire about 125 a year.

Net new rookies, correct?

Net new.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so including laterals?

56 Elfos, and then we had a total of 62 hires last year.

62 hires, but what, so you have also, so your academy space, so there's amount of people that you can hire as far as your academy space.

And that's, I think in the 84 range, I think it is.

And then you also have lateral as ability.

So there's, there is, but our goal is also if we could start hiring at a higher rate, we actually are working with the State Academy to be able to potentially have SPD run classes where we're not affecting other departments in their space in the actual pool of candidates.

And so our goal is to get to the 125 so we can actually be able to have SPD on it.

It actually streamlines on the back end the post-PLIA phase as well.

So there are things that if we can actually see this hiring actually increase, at a higher rate, that there are actually, it creates a little bit more efficiencies.

It's gonna be hard, it would be difficult at the very front, just initial, but then it'll actually streamline the whole process.

Yeah, so it sounds like, so thank you for that.

I don't know if we're gonna get to the staffing levels we need by hiring rookies only.

And so that's why it's increasingly important for us to hire more laterals, more from other agencies and jurisdictions.

We are competing.

We are both collaborating with our neighboring cities and jurisdictions and also competing with them.

And it's a race to the top and the public wins.

And that's why this is so urgent and so important.

And so, yeah, we're just not gonna get to the staffing levels we need with these rookie hires alone.

That's always gonna be important for helping us build the pipeline.

But would love to learn more about, The opportunity we have to specifically drive recruitment with our lateral hires, how are you thinking about that now and how are we approaching that?

And then what more work is there to be done?

So, and I'll start off.

We actually just had, I swore in a young man from Jackson, Mississippi.

came from the Jackson Police Department, said that he had about half an agency ready to come over because the pay is higher here.

And I said, okay, like, how can we actually utilize you to potentially recruit?

Now, he is going through the Latin Academy, and he'll also be going through our SBD before the badge.

But how can we utilize that skill set and those relationships as well?

So maybe it is being that nimble force that if he feels that there's some candidates there that we can actually go and target, we send our recruiting team to be able to do that.

And also figure out some of these agencies that, like Jackson, Mississippi, also can be highlighted about some of the things that we're moving towards.

We're doing call prioritization, so we're adjusting our workload and our call loads, and that's one aspect.

We're trying to make sure that we don't put all of the work on our patrol officers.

We're also doing...

One of the things that becomes sometimes a morale issue is that we have such a huge, robust level of accountability that it becomes...

As soon as they see an OPA confidential, it's like this...

thing that comes around, even though where they feel like they haven't done anything wrong, it is an emotional drain on them.

And, you know, taking, we've actually been working on the consent decree and the monitor and and others to say, hey, some of our complaints are actually such low-level complaints.

Is there a process that we can move it back to the sergeants?

And actually streamline it so it actually makes the officers feel like they're actually part of a solution of actually restoring that officer if there's some sort of minor issue.

And the big issues, they'll still go to the OPA and that still won't change.

But We're looking at trying to figure out also how do we streamline our use of force reporting mechanism.

We're not rolling back our consent decree stuff, but how do we actually streamline it so that way it makes it much easier so our officers can get back in the streets quicker.

So they're answering more 911 calls.

So there's all sorts of things that are just internal that we are creating those efficiencies to hopefully help build that morale internally, but also be able to, because really I need those officers to be able to go to other agencies and say, yes, look at what we've done to change it.

We have the best policing type in the country and come here.

And so that's that increase of morale that you need, but also the increase of laterals that we also need to be focused on as well.

On the issue of, on the slide 15, there's a local agency comparison chart.

I note that Everett currently has a $15,000 incentive and where Seattle today we have a $7,500 incentive.

Do you think matching that Everett's hiring incentive would materially move the ball, move the dial in any way?

I think that, you know, as Mannion actually suggested, some of the different incentives, education is a huge incentive.

Vehicle, take-home vehicles is also another, but there are costs to those.

One of the things that we're actually looking at is creating a potential master police officer program.

And maybe those master police officers are the group that we end up offering take-home cars to because they've gone through extra training and they've taken extra steps to to better themselves in there.

So we, I think really, and sometimes pay is a good thing, but it's those extra incentives that show that we're investing in our people.

And sometimes it's education.

Sometimes it's the vehicle.

Sometimes it's a master police officer program where they feel like that helps them in their career movement as well.

We talked a little bit about the incentive of housing subsidies and other jurisdictions like L.A.

potentially using those and the efficacy of that.

What about relocation assistance?

I think it's a good...

worthwhile goal to get as many officers in particular to live here in Seattle or as close to Seattle as possible.

Have we thought about that as a potential incentive and how would you assess that incentive stacked against other possibilities?

We do have that.

We have that.

We have that in place today.

It's up to $5,000 for entry level and $7,500 for out of state.

Reimbursable moving costs.

that.

That's great.

And, and, but then paired with an actual, uh, housing subsidy, I think that that will be the most impactful.

Um, but that's good to know.

We have relocation assistance in place today.

Uh, and council member also, uh, one of the things that some agencies are doing or investing in sometimes it's childcare.

Um, they're not willing to, uh, go and try another, um, job because they've got it, you know, they, they struggle with childcare issues and, uh, And I know San Diego and other different agencies are actually looking at, you know, how do they use their foundation to potentially be able to help subsidize some of those costs.

But these are all things that have to be put on the table because we have a workforce that, you know, over the last couple years has worked from home.

And now that we're trying to get them out of working from home and into the field, those struggles of childcare, the struggles of trying to maintain certain things at home, are all something that we had to pay attention to.

Well, you know, our police professionals and all of our first responders have been on the front lines the whole time.

And, you know, putting their health and safety on the line to protect us.

which I appreciate, but as a dad of three young kids, elementary school kids, that challenge and that opportunity of childcare incentives is something that's really near and dear to me and I see as a huge potential game changer.

In any event, let me close by saying thank you again.

Really appreciate this overview, the partnership, and I share your commitment, and I'm glad the mayor is thinking about this seriously, and I share his commitment to making progress on this.

It's not...

one person or one party or one branch that's solely responsible for it.

It's a shared responsibility.

And certain branches are slightly less empowered than others to make me.

But this is going to take all of us an all hands on deck effort.

And I appreciate the work that's been done.

Now it's time to ratchet it up.

Now it's time for us to roll up the sleeves and get busy even more.

And I welcome that opportunity.

And the final thing I'll say, final plug I'll say is like, on the marketing piece, I know there's been some great promo and marketing videos with the mayor and others, but...

We have a new city council here, and we have, to the extent, political leaders and elected officials and their priorities and how that may impact recruitment and retention or not.

I think it does a little bit.

That's why I try to prioritize showing up and visiting folks.

But yeah, I'm glad there's some existing marketing promotional materials with the mayor.

Look, we have a council here where council member Hollingsworth is laser focused on parks and youth.

We have a council president who's really, really focused on small business issues and impacting small businesses.

We have a chair of our public safety committee who is focused on addressing the permissive environment.

I'm just a dude that is laser focused on being the king of potholes.

So just the little nitty gritty things that I think collectively really help make a difference in people's everyday lives.

It's unglamorous, unsexy priorities and focus.

Some of the things I called out just now, but to the extent it matters to some rank and file officers, let them know that this is what their council is focused on.

Well, I just want to say thank you to all the members that have gone and attended roll calls.

It does make a difference.

Hearing and listening to the officers makes them understand that this council is engaged in their work and believes in them.

And so I really appreciate that.

We have been discussing about including the city council in some of the potential videos because this is the first time that I can tell you our recruits know each and every one of your city council priorities.

And I can tell you during my time when I was coming into the police department in 1997, I didn't know one city council member.

I didn't care about what their priority is.

I just wanted to do the job.

And so they pay attention to this.

They're much more engaged in this.

And so it matters with your support.

You could be very happy to run screening applications, Council Member Saka.

I was just going to say you can use this video for that.

Excuse me, what the police chief said, because police officers are very sensitive to what the elected leaders of their city are saying and doing.

We certainly saw that in 2020 in a negative way.

So everything you do, the statements you make, the roll calls you visit, The support you show for officers is critically important, and that message is communicated really fast through the ranks of the police department.

It's true of the fire department as well.

The uniformed services look to the political leadership of the city for their direction, and so that's a huge responsibility that you all hold.

The mayor is keenly aware of that.

That's why he had police officers standing with him when he started his campaign for mayor.

It's why he goes to roll calls.

It's why he meets with officers on a regular basis.

So thank you for what you're doing.

You're changing the tone.

You're changing the atmosphere for officers and how they view the political leaders of our city.

Thank you.

not just the two departments, all nine that fall under the committee's jurisdiction.

And probably the best move I can make now is changing the face of this council from Vice Chair Saka to Council Member Hollingsworth.

Do you have a question?

I do, thank you.

Thank you, Chair Kettle.

I WANTED TO REITERATE WHAT DEPUTY MAYOR BURGESS SAID FOR SLIDE 13. JUST BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, COMMUNITIES OF COLOR LIKE BLACK PEOPLE WERE 6% OF THE POPULATION, YET WE WERE 25% OF THE RECRUITS.

I THINK THAT SPEAKS VOLUMES THAT, YOU KNOW, WE WANT TO BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION.

WE WANT TO BE IN OUR COMMUNITY.

WE WANT PEOPLE THAT you know, look like us, connecting with us.

And I think that just speaks volumes to the recruiting efforts that you all have put and looking forward to that.

The second thing I wanted to note And I've talked to the chief about this, and I think I mentioned it to DM Burgess, is this is my plug for athletes.

Enterprise, Alamo, and National do a phenomenal job.

They are one of the top companies that recruit the largest amount of college athletes that come into their company.

And right now, there's 520 athletes in the country.

Of those, 226,000 are women.

And women's college basketball has taken off.

It has probably the best storyline this year.

The Final Four are phenomenal places to do recruitment just because it brings so many types of amazing people there.

And just being a former athlete myself, knowing about teamwork, knowing about being a self-starter, knowing about commitment, and just having a high level of integrity those are like the main things that are embedded in athletes.

I think they would be phenomenal police officers in our community as well.

So I just wanted to give that plug as well for athletes.

I agree with you 100%.

Student athletes, we are definitely trying to get our foothold more in that.

We find that they have the work ethic, the teamwork, that exactly is what we're looking for.

They're obviously physically fit already.

Many of them may have not been so laser focused on what they were going to do after college because potentially thought they were gonna go pro or leaving their options open.

So there seem to be much more open to a career in law enforcement.

We're trying, if anyone has any footholds into any of those athletic departments at universities, please feel free to pass them away.

I know they're very protective of their time, but we would love any opportunity to get five or 10 minutes before a team practice or anything like that, just to tout the benefits of this career.

No, absolutely.

There's a thing called Athletes Network.

It gives you access to over 500 athletic departments across the country.

And it's what Enterprise and National use to get into athletes.

They're also a partner of the NCAA, but they also really do a great job of marketing and connection.

And I think that would, I've been doing my part.

Could you give me that name one more time?

Yeah, it's called Athletes Network.

Okay.

and offline to the colleges and they protect their athletes.

Like it's, it's a hard barrier to get through that.

They're very protective.

We're thinking like off season, we're like just five or 10 minutes in the summertime when you're just doing a practice or something.

I'm more than happy to help.

I have a lot of women's college friends.

They are phenomenal additions to the department for sure.

And this network is also targeting specific like former college athletes.

So it's people who are not currently as student athletes, they're former, so like one or two years steps away.

And yeah, I just wanted to give that plug.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council President, thank you.

Council President Nelson.

Thanks.

Just to take us back a little ways, in March of 2022, I put together some legislation.

It was a resolution 32050 calling for another hiring bonus program and also calling for the lifting of a budget proviso on the salary savings of unfilled police officer positions.

And that finally passed, that was in May of 2022, and it was followed by the passage of Ordinance 126654, which was put forward by the mayor, it was executive generated, which appropriated $1.8 million to implement the mayor's recruitment and retention plan.

which included bonuses as one component.

So that was the good news.

But the bonuses were never advertised.

And I understand that a $3,000 or $30,000, whatever amount of a bonus we're offering is a small amount, but we had to do it because every other jurisdiction around was doing it.

And so...

it was something to keep us or make us more competitive, but it only matters if people know about it.

And so that was one of my disappointments that those were not aggressively advertised on, I don't know, local papers or in community college listservs or whatever.

By the end of 2022, only 328,000 of those salary savings was spent.

with the rest going into the general fund.

So from 1.8 appropriated, only 328 was spent, the rest going into the general fund at the end of 2022. That was, and I understand that there are some reasons for that, but I was starting to get frustrated about the sense of urgency to actually spend the money that was available.

In 2023, council appropriated $3.8 million and 1.5 million of that was for the ad campaign that which you've discussed.

And then on May 23rd, central staff gave a presentation showing that only 228,000 of the 3.8 million allocated had been spent by the end of March.

By the end of last year, I do believe that most of it except barring maybe 600,000 or so had been spent of this appropriation.

But my point is that an advertising campaign is one component and it is important, but we've also talked about all the process improvements that can be made and, you know, council and its oversight function could be working on something to make sure that those are implemented.

But at the same time, part of the retention plan was to, the recruitment and retention plan was to hire somebody to help tell you what to do in terms of improvements.

And the public safety recruitment innovation manager had great ideas that were presented at various points, including in March of 2023, that maybe the testing service should be changed.

And it's been slow to recognize some of the value of those ideas.

And I think that part of that is because we've got so many different entities in charge of this whole thing, right?

I mean, there's the HR department, Public Safety Civil Service Commission that has independence, then there's the mayor's office and the police department, et cetera.

And so who owns this?

And that is something that I do think that there should be an entity, a person, somebody who's in charge of making sure that the funnel of applications to hires is going smoothly, that we're using all the...

innovations in recruitment at, you know, at JBLF or Bremerton or whatever.

I mean, there are so many ideas that were presented, and they're sitting on a shelf.

And I'm glad to know that we have the expertise of some great recruiters on the corporate side helping us.

I think that we should start with what we have and move quickly with the recommendations that we've got before us.

And hopefully...

It's a new day, obviously, with the folks you've got up here on the dais to really make some change.

So looking forward to that.

Thanks.

Councilmember Moore.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for this presentation.

I guess it falls on me today to be somewhat grumpy, so I want to bring up the 30 by 30. And I read it and was very, very, very troubled.

So clearly, and also looking at the numbers that we have of women who are applying, 13.6 percent out of and we make up 49.6 of the population versus 84.6 for male identified out of 50 basically so and when you read the comments it's very clear that a significant piece of this is child care and chief you mentioned that and i guess what i would like to see is an actual plan for how we're going to how the police department is going to address providing child care And there's talking about looking at other jurisdictions where they do provide childcare, particularly in the evenings.

But a corollary to also providing childcare is having more, and I don't, I apologize if you're already doing this, but it appears that there isn't necessarily the same sort of flexibility in scheduling and creating schedules around the childcare needs of the women patrol officers.

So it seems like there's some very concrete steps that can be taken there.

And then additionally, in talking about mentoring, that is incredibly important, but you also have a gender imbalance in the department and it's It can be, there are gender dynamics in that mentoring that can lead over into things that are not necessarily helpful.

So I think it's important in how you set up the mentoring program to be very mindful of that.

And I imagine I'm not telling you something you don't already know.

But also truthfully, there was some serious concern on my part about potential sexual harassment and harassment and discrimination in general.

My lawyer hat was ding, ding, dinging.

So that really, really need to take a hard look at that as well.

So just making that plug that we have a golden opportunity now to bring in significant numbers of women who are going to make it a better force because we represent half of the population out there.

And as we said on the bench, we need people who look like us.

And we know that across the spectrum.

So my plug for that.

Thank you.

No, and thank you for that.

And I think it was important as a person of color growing up in this department that I know from my own experiences that sometimes we don't always report things that should be gone to EEO or other issues that people find that don't feel right or that aren't right, you know, explicitly.

So we, you know, I wanted to order that report to be done because focus groups, you can get a lot of information out.

And from that, actually, Lieutenant Hughes is actually working on a woman's work group that is actually going to end up helping us be able to come up with some more ideas from it.

You know, we had a part-time program that we created for officers thinking that people would utilize it, and it hasn't been utilized.

So we've got to figure out why aren't people utilizing that program, as sometimes people will end up Having children and a part-time program would be that good idea to potentially go to, but why doesn't it fit within the dynamics of what people are hoping for?

So mentorship was a component of that.

Childcare, obviously, is a component of it.

We're also looking at, you know, we didn't just create just a women's work group, but we've actually been meeting with some of our black commanders, as well as we are gonna be expanding that into the LGBTQ officers as well, to just get different assessments from our different work groups, from our different personnel.

And then also, The department actually is interesting because over 57% of the civilian side is actually female.

And so when I actually talked to the Iceland police commissioner, their department is almost, I think it's like over 40% are female.

They really have expanded out the amount of female officers.

It's a department that doesn't have, many of them don't carry firearms, but it is interesting about just how many women are engaged in that country in the policing profession.

And so what can we learn from sometimes the international agencies that are seeing high rates and we wanna make sure that we take that information and figure it out.

Last year I attended a woman's conference and you looked at anything from childcare to, you know, to parental leave and to, as people transition back in, what are accommodations that we also can make?

And so I know in all of our precincts, we're able to make accommodations for mothers, for nursing and different other aspects of this.

But again, we still have a long road to go in this area.

And that's the reason why we're really trying to make sure that we take those steps to learn.

Thank you.

And, Chief, if you don't mind, if I might add, in reference to the 30-30 initiative, so SPD has a 30-30 work group, and we are in the process, as we meet biweekly, of building out some of the recommendations of the 30-30 initiative and addressing some of the key themes that arose in the SPD report.

And just a generalized sampling of some of the programs underdeveloped were under...

programs we are working on developing are some of the things you talk about, mentoring for female officers.

There's a great city plan that our collaborators have told us about, and that's going to be one of the main focuses of our next meeting.

It's an existing mentoring plan that SPD can plug into, that the employees can plug into, where they are mentored by other SPD employees or other city employees as well.

the other option or the other program, you talk about childcare, and that is a huge issue.

That was a very overwhelming issue in the 30-30 Initiative reporting and in Seattle's reporting.

And like the Chief mentioned, San Diego does have a model program that they're using.

It took them four years to get that off the ground.

They are also working with LAPD to develop a program as well, and we'll be looking at that as well.

There was some information that Sergeant Shen brought back the forum that they went to that talked about options of getting that off the ground.

So that's a big piece of the puzzle.

We talk about other ways to support families with employees knowing about family medical leave, knowing about the part-time program.

For males and females, I only know of a couple of women in my 27 years that have actually used that part-time program, and it was an amazing program.

They maintained their benefits.

You know, they come to work happier because they had a better work-life balance.

But we're going to be having a cadre that goes out and talks about some of those things so that everyone in the precinct knows about that.

Also a cadre that talks about awareness of some of the challenges and the issues and the things that have come up in the plan here.

So that's just scratching the surface on what we're working on right now.

Excellent, thank you.

Pleased to hear that.

And thank you, Lieutenant Hughes.

I think that's a huge amount of work, and thank you for your leadership and all those that have been involved.

I also wanna note something that's actually kinda unique that is just coming out in this legislation session as well, that also impacts people of color.

The legislation was actually to be able to hire DACA recipients as police officers.

And I'm a big proponent of it.

I've actually been working nationally.

There's only a few states that are doing this.

California, Colorado, Virginia is actually going through their legislation.

We've been going through our legislation.

But we're very few states in there.

We've actually been working with the ATF in the process because there are some gun things that they are making rulings on that we're working with them.

to be able to transition and make sure our policies fit in line.

But this is also another added benefit to increasing not only our ranks and our people of color, but we know that a lot of females fit in that DACA category as well.

And so this is something that we want to make sure that we're highlighting, that we're a part of the inception.

LAPD had 12 in one of their last classes.

The Sheriff's Department in L.A.

is also experiencing it, and they've also said this is some of the best candidates that they have in their academy classes.

And so I think that we want to highlight that we're also appreciative of the state taking on this issue and figuring out ways that we can also be able to increase our candidate pool that traditionally we haven't looked at.

Thank you.

Thank you, and thank you for everyone at this table, plus the members of the commission here in the audience as well for this in-depth look at recruiting and retention.

You know, as I mentioned at the beginning, we as a council should also look at ourselves in this look for accountability and answers to SBD staffing.

Clearly, the Seattle City Council gave mixed messages at best that sadly communicated that police officers were not wanted.

The defund pledge itself specifically created that environment where this, again, the message of not being wanted.

So today we acknowledge the impacts of the defund pledge and also, you know, draw a line under it because we need to move forward and that's what we're going to do.

And there's so many variables at play here.

First is the question of salaries, which is so key, but obviously three of us are not just on the Public Safety Committee but also on the Select Labor Committee, which will be working this.

There's other impacts on morale like the King County Jail, but this is about leadership.

And when I say that, this is not about being a cheerleader or cheerleading, but rather acknowledging the role of SPD has in our public safety posture and how central SPD staffing is and about being supportive of it.

So I again call for all those that are looking to retire or transfer to another jurisdiction this year to give us one year.

I add to that, too, that I call on those serving in other jurisdictions, particularly within the three counties, to join the police force where you get the greatest professional challenge.

I think that's very important.

And being a former naval officer, military, I call on those serving in uniform in the military or other organizations, not within Seattle itself, to consider joining Seattle PD.

And I echo my colleague, Colin, Council Member Hollingsworth on the call for athletes to join the Seattle Police Department.

Referencing Council Member Moore's point, I call on women to apply.

The 30 by 30 may have an ESPN ring to it, going back to athletes, but it's vitally important to reach out to women and make the ask.

It's so important to make the ask.

and ask them to make a difference because they can and she can.

And I close by saying I especially call on our young leaders who want to serve in public safety and public service overall and especially policing to look, perhaps paired with other programs like the Seattle Promise Program, to look into a career at the Seattle Police Department because we need our young people to look to serve and so I ask them to, across all districts of our city, to join the Seattle Police Department.

because it's important for our city.

So thank you.

We have reached the end of today's meeting agenda and actually gone once again over.

I apologize to my fellow council members.

I tried to go under two hours.

Is there any further business to come before the committee?

No.

So we have reached the end of today's agenda.

So having no further business to come before the committee, we are adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you.