AN ORDINANCE relating to the Seattle Police Department; creating an incentive program for hiring police officers; and repealing obsolete Sections 4.20.530, 4.20.540, and 4.20.550 of the Seattle Municipal Code.
You take these new Americans and Education Committee agenda item six cancel 119468 relating to the Seattle Police Department, creating an incentive program for hiring police officers and repealing obsolete sections 4.20 point by 30.5 40 point end point 557. As Speaker, the committee recommends the bill passed as amended. Thank you, Madam Clerk. May I Chair. Thank you. Bill. So I need to move to amend this bill with a substitution version. So I moved to amend Council Bill 119468 by substituting version three for version to. The. Library. That has been moved and seconded that the substitute may be adopted. Any comments? Hey. It's not a disaster. I think we need to vote on the substitute version. Is that correct? The amendment. I mean, I'm just not getting the scripting down, man. That's okay. I am here to help. And I know you are. Giving you some gentle prompt. You are? Okay, so there we go. Those in favor of the substitute vote, I, I suppose. Vote no. The motion carries in. The substitute is adopted. All right. Now I will speak to the substantive no substitution bill 119468. So council bill 119468 creates an incentive program for the hiring of new police officers at the Seattle Police Department. My committee and this council have closely watched the hiring and separations data coming out of the Seattle Police Department since the middle of 2018, when it became apparent that the department was lagging far behind their hiring forecasts. Department has continued to encounter hiring struggles in in recent months, and this is, as we heard in my committee hearing, a reflection of a very challenging landscape nationally in which police departments across the country are struggling to recruit new officers. The Seattle Police Department and the mayor originally proposed this legislation to offer lateral hires from other departments and jurisdictions a signing bonus of $15,000 in total. We have a through my committee process following the initial hearing on this bill in my committee identified several ways that I thought we could strengthen and expand this incentive program, creating additional accountability measures to ensure the strategy's success. So I proposed four changes in total to this legislation, which were adopted unanimously in committee at our last committee hearing on the 27th of February. The first is that my amendments would expand the incentive program to new recruits. The executive's proposal would have authorized a $15,000 hiring bonus exclusively for lateral hires. My amendment, passed in committee authorizes the Seattle Police Department to extend hiring bonuses to new recruits of up to $7,500 per recruits. Lateral hires only make up 20 of the 104 new officer positions in the Seattle Police Department's hiring forecast. So considering that the bulk of new hires, approximately 84 out of 104 the department is seeking in 2018 our new recruits. I believe it's important that Department direct its efforts and resources towards the new recruit strategy, as well as the lateral hiring strategy. In addition, a hiring bonus for new recruits can help reduce barriers to pursuing this profession and could enhance the department's efforts to recruit and hire women and individuals of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds consistent with our police accountability ordinance and in connection with some of the progress that the Department has already made in terms of increasing the number of diverse folks to become police officers. Secondly, the Second Amendment that I advanced in committee was a new data collection, analysis and reporting requirement that will help the Council and the public determine if this program is successful, including data regarding the demographics of new hires and the lateral hires. Third is a sunset date, which would require the executive to seek the City Council's affirmative reauthorization from excuse me that it would seek our reauthorization before renewing or continuing the incentive program. And then lastly, a clause that ensures that new hires who receive the bonus serve the department for three years before leaving the department. Otherwise, they would be required to pay back the bonus to the city of Seattle if they depart before the end of those three years. So following some additional discussions with the Department and the City Budget Office, we agreed on several other updates to my original amendment, which is why I needed a substitute version. Most of that was wordsmithing and technical language, and that's all I have. Happy to answer any questions, but would urge my colleagues to support the passage of this Council bill, which is, as I mentioned this morning, revenue neutral and will be supported through salary savings as a result of ongoing vacancies at the police department in terms of its hiring forecast. Thank you, Councilman Gonzales. Councilman Muscat, I believe you raise your hand. Thank you, Madam President. And thanks to the good chair of public safety for her really intense work on this bill. I think when I initially came to your committee, when we discussed this, there was a lot of skepticism that I held about whether or not this was the right way to go, because I know many of us are interested in continuing to ensure that any additional dollars and efforts, programmatic strategies, go into community policing and trying to figure out how we can share some of the funds with our community partners. And what I heard in that committee, because of your leadership, was really about how do we create stability? The numbers spoke for themselves and having a chance to hear directly from the department and community members at large. I think you've really struck a nice balance here. It's important, I think, to underscore what you just ended with again, which is that this is not new money. There's three additional components for me that really make this a powerful piece of legislation in terms of accountability and transparency to ensure that this mechanism works for creating greater stability for our police force. One is the sunset on the duration of the hiring incentive. Two as the reporting requirements that you championed and included here, so that we could actually see whether or not the new dollar or the dollars were truly bringing in new recruits and lateral hires, and that we maintained our commitment to race and social justice by not just focusing on lateral hires, but also recruits for new hires. That would be hopefully younger folks, women, people of color. So thank you for your work to incorporate all of these components into the revised version, and I'll be supporting you in this effort. Okay. Casmir Johnson Just briefly, as a third member of that committee, I wanted to offer my support for the recommendation and highlight two things that we covered in committee that I thought are worthy of repeating. The first of which is the proposal is very consistent with what hiring bonuses are offered by jurisdictions are directly neighboring locales, whether that's the county or the city or Snohomish County or other neighboring cities. So this not having this puts us at a competitive disadvantage. By instituting this, it will put us at least on a level playing field with those other jurisdictions and the kinds of signing bonuses that they offer both to new recruits and lateral hires. And then the second is, I think it's very appropriate for us to highlight that oftentimes there is a rhetoric out there about this council not doing enough to ensure the hiring of new officers. It is a national challenge for the departments around the country to bring in new people into the world of policing. Some folks attribute that to the challenge of constitutional policing, some attributed to the low, historically low unemployment rates. Regardless, I think this council is doing our part to make sure that we are providing all kinds of incentives to ensure that not only are we doing fair and appropriate constitutional policing, but putting the resources necessary to make sure that we have the appropriate level of officers that are necessary to do that work. So I want to thank the Chair for a commitment to this, and I look forward to enthusiastically voting yes. Okay. Anyone else, councilman or herbal? Thank you. I just want to highlight a different element of this effort specifically related to meeting our staffing goals. The mayor's office is convening a hiring workgroup regarding relating to recruitment and hiring, and I know that the Council is a part of that hiring workgroup. I want to raise an issue that I've raised before. In 2017, the Community Policing Commission or the Community Police Commission published a report about specifically this subject. It was entitled Recommendations of Community Police Commission for Recruitment, Hiring and Training. It includes numerous recommendations that can inform this work, and these recommendations have never been implemented. And they serve, as, I believe, as a starting point, including comparisons to policies and studies in other cities, outreach to diverse communities. I've requested that the workgroup not only consider the recommendations of the study, but also find a way to incorporate the involvement of the CPC. They are specifically chartered to advise the city on issues related to recruitment. In addition, I want to highlight some other work. Related to. Recruitment that Councilmember Gonzales and I have done. Over the last. Couple of years after the accountability ordinance adopted by the Council included a section on recruitment and hiring related specifically to preference points. The two of us worked to get implementation of language related specifically to preference points to expand the pool of applicants and make it clear that their skill sets are valued. It is true that for all of the qualified applicants who who meet the requirements in the preference points policy, those folks are all being hired. But my hope for the preference points policy is that it will actually send a message to our diverse communities that their skills are valued and actually increase the size of the pool applying . In addition, I've, you know, also had concerns that we're spending a lot of time, although I absolutely support the addition of bonuses for four lateral hires. And I appreciate Councilmember Gonzales, his expansion to the new recruits. I really want to have a laser sharp focus on what our approach is for new recruits of our hiring plan for 2019. I believe 20 of those are supposed to come from lateral hires, whereas 80 or. Most to come from new recruits. And to me, that is a real signal that that's where the lion's share of work really needs to be done. And again, it needs to be done in a way that we do not lose the ground that we've gain on. On hiring a diverse workforce. In 2013, 14% of all police hires were from racially diverse communities. In 2018, we're up to 42%. So again, we want to make sure that we're not losing losing ground in these efforts as as we move forward. But we really want to come up with, I think, new and innovate new and innovative ways to encourage people to want to be a police officer in our city. And then finally, one of the things that we've heard from the Budget Office is that the cost, the reason why there's this discrepancy between. What we're. Offering new recruits in a hiring bonus versus what we're offering lateral recruits is because there are more costs associated with new recruits. I would really like to see that those costs actually, you know, sort of calculated and put on paper. So we're not just seeing the total academy costs, which I understand we receive, but what the costs are for training, including field training. Understand that this includes overtime. I think that will help guide us on where we want to put our emphasis in, in developing with the department. The staffing plan. Thank you. Thank you. Counselor's one. Thank you. During the budget last fall, I proposed 11 amendments to increase what the city of Seattle spends on affordable housing. One of those amendments was to slow the hiring of new police officers and to free up approximately $12 million to build an additional 75 to 130 affordable homes each year. Studies over decades consistently have shown that decreasing inequality is far more effective in reducing crime and improving public safety than increasing policing, as the majority of the Council did not agree at that time. This Council bill would invest in, rather than investing more money, more funds in addressing inequality by, for example, expanding affordable housing is going to spend more money to speed up officer hiring. And I don't think there's any data to support that. Actually hiring more police officers reduces public improves public safety or reduces crime. It's actually addressing inequality that does that. And for that reason, I will be voting no. And on a side note, I will also mention how come we have not seen hiring bonuses for educators and emergency medical technicians and social service workers or any of the numerous other public jobs that do nonviolent life saving work. And I constantly ask to do so on some of the lowest wages in the city. Okay. And what else? I'm going to wrap it up. I'm going to try to make some closing remarks here. And so I think I wanted to just respond to Councilmember Herbals suggestions about some of the additional work that can be included as part of the work group. My office will be able to have a seat at that work group, so we'll make sure to loop in your feedback, Councilmember Herbold, to make sure that we are capturing some of that additional data that you've highlighted that I think is absolutely important and critical to this. I also just want to note that in terms of the hiring bonus for laterals versus new recruits, part of the reason why I was motivated to expand this to new recruits and not just be hyper focused on laterals is because laterals are are a very small portion of that of the type of officers that the police department has historically been able to hire to address the the hiring shortage and the staffing issues. And so my my hope is that by offering the new recruit hiring incentive, we will actually see a significant increase in bump of hiring in that particular section, in large part because we're the only jurisdiction that I'm aware of that will be offering a hiring incentive for new recruits. And then lastly, I just wanted to clarify one last fact that I think I, I, I think was misstated by Councilmember Swamp, which is that this is not a budget action. We are not allocating additional dollars to the Seattle Police Department for them to fulfill this hiring bonus. This is a policy shift in the policy change that would allow them within their existing appropriated budget to utilize the dollars that they currently have in their budget for staffing to also include this hiring bonus as a strategy. And if the hiring bonus doesn't work, we won't be paying out any money and there will be absolutely no dollars spent in this space. So the dollars that are going to get spent within existing budget authority of the Seattle Police Department will only be spent if there is success in this area. And if there is not, then that means we need to take corrective action and the data that we are requiring that the police department provide to us and the long term work of the work group to address the ongoing issues of hiring and the staffing models and the forecasting will need to be informed by any lack of success or success in this space with this strategy. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Gonzales. Okay. I think that wraps it up and we'll move. So we already did. The substitute bill was adopted. So right now I move to pass council bill 119468 as amended. Second. Are there any further comments? No. Seeing none. Will the clerk please call Raul O'Brien? I so want know by John Gonzalez. I herbold. I Johnson must get a I. President Juarez. High. Seven in favor one. Opposed the bill passes as amended and the chair will sign it. Okay. So let's go on to o cancer. Gonzalez, you have another matter for us? An appointment. I'll let you go ahead and tee that up. I would love for the clerk to read this again. Agenda Item seven Appointment of 59 Re-appointment of Maya Butler as Member, Immigrant and Refugee Commission for Term two January 31st, 2021. The committee recommends the appointment be confirmed.