June 2026

SPD’s overtime spending has more than doubled in four years due to SPOG contract

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Local News:

I wrote a piece last week about new data out of King County’s DCHS showing that permanent supportive housing in the area is reducing jail bookings…and I attended the opening of DESC’s newest permanent supportive housing building, Birch Grove, located in Lake City. DESC isn’t moving forward on future building projects due to federal funding uncertainties. 

Lime is going to equip their scooters in Seattle with cameras. About half of their scooters have been fitted out with cameras so far, and all of them are planned to have cameras by the end of the year. The idea is it will make scooter riders behave better, but it also ups the surveillance on Seattle streets. 

HardPressed News reported that SPD was waiting for the mayoral election results last year with the belief that if Bruce Harrell won, he’d greenlight a police drone program. 

For more than two years, the Seattle Fire Department has been using an artificial intelligence program to listen to 911 calls and decide which callers won’t receive a rapid response and instead be routed to a nurse line located in Texas. What’s really amazing about this story, broken by The Seattle Times, is that the program has had no public review, wasn’t disclosed to any 911 callers, and has no apparent mechanisms for measuring how well it’s working. It also didn’t go through a surveillance impact review process.

“SFD will be open from now on about its AI use, said Lombard, the assistant chief.” This sentence in the article carries a lot of weight. It implies SFD will be open about their AI use in the future because they got caught. Not exactly the sort of thing that builds public trust. 

DivestSPD reported that SPD Chief Shon Barnes has received 47 OPA complaints since he began his job as Chief early last year, which is a very large number. Most of the complaints appear to be nothing burgers. They sometimes have interesting timing, suggesting a possible SPOG-coordinated attack against the Chief. 

Barnes is on track to receive more OPA complaints than his predecessor, Adrian Diaz.

Seattle City Council’s public safety committee received their SPD 2026 Q1 sworn staffing, overtime, and call time report on Tuesday. SPD’s Q1 2026 actual deployable number of officers is 939, only 13 officers more than in Q1 of 2025. 

The rate of hiring, along with the slow-down of officer separations, means SPD might be on track to overspend their salary budget by $1.7 million this year. Chair Bob Kettle said he and Councilmember Dan Strauss had told SPD not to slow down their hiring to account for this potential overspend. I reached out to Strauss’s office, and he said he has no plans to introduce an item in the mid-year supplemental budget to account for the $1.7 million. 

We also got to see how expensive SPD overtime has become due to the new SPOG contract. In 2022, SPD spent $26.3 million in overtime. In 2026? Their overtime budget stands at a whopping $55.8 million. 

King County’s new Point in Time Count for 2026 came out this week, showing that the region’s homelessness numbers continue to grow, albeit not as rapidly as they did between 2022 and 2024. While the overall number of homeless people grew by 9% in the last two years, the unsheltered population of homeless people grew by 21%, highlighting the urgent need for more shelter spaces. 

Finally, The Economist, that bastion of progressive thought, published an article this week entitled “American police killings are rising, even as murder rates fall.”

From the article: “Killings by police have yet to reignite the broad outrage that followed Mr Floyd’s death, but each day, unfortunately, brings the chance of a grisly event that might. Shootings by sheriffs, who operate mostly in rural areas, have risen especially fast in recent years, countering improvements in some big cities.”

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Surveillance cameras don’t prevent violence, or why I feel like a broken record

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Seattle News:

Yesterday several elected officials – Mayor Katie Wilson, Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Councilmembers Debora Juarez, Bob Kettle, Maritza Rivera, and Dan Strauss, and Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans – along with SPD Chief Shon Barnes, held a press conference about the gun violence along Aurora Ave N. 

Mostly those named above talked about solving the problem with police and prosecutions, as well as by the strategic blocking of certain streets. Kettle touted the importance of the real time crime center and license plate readers, although there is no evidence that shows these technologies prevent violence. Interestingly, Aurora Ave N is one of the zones where CCTV cameras have been installed and operational in Seattle, and yet somehow there is still gun violence happening there. Hmm. 

Kettle also spoke of the importance of hiring more police officers. 

Evans said her office has asked for funding for a dedicated Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) prosecutor, which she says would help get guns off the streets. Her office is also aggressively pursuing businesses and properties that break chronic nuisance laws. 

Lastly, her office is working to have a dedicated, dually-deputized prosecutor in their office that will work on felony trafficking cases on Aurora in partnership with the King County Prosecutor’s office. I’m not really sure why having this prosecutor work in the Seattle City Attorney’s office (CAO) versus the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office (KCPAO) makes a difference. Traditionally CAO only prosecutes misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors, while the KCPAO handles all felonies. It could be that this might improve collaboration between the offices or it might be solely an issue of money (who’s going to pay for this prosecutor’s salary). 

Evans stated unequivocally that SOAP and SODA orders do not work and that she will be pursuing other strategies. 

Not mentioned were the environmental changes made to Aurora Ave in Shoreline that seem to have helped deter violence there. Solutions such as increased social supports, a coordinated gun violence prevention strategy, and legalized sex work were also not emphasized. 

That being said (see below), Wilson is reportedly working on a gun violence prevention strategy, but unfortunately the details still haven’t been announced. 

Meanwhile, The Seattle Medium reported that Black girls represent between 44% and 52% of child sex trafficking victims in King County. 

Earlier this week, the Seattle City Council passed the one-year data center moratorium and related resolution, after which Washington AI resistance (WA-AIR) held a press conference announcing a new campaign for their People’s AI Bill of Rights, which will be a package of bills regulating AI introduced during the 2027 state legislative session. The campaign will begin with a state-wide listening tour. 

Wilson announced that the City would be turning on the CCTV cameras located in the Stadium District due to “general but credible threats to security during the games” provided to her during briefings with SPD and the FBI. Two days before the announcement, she publicly defined a credible threat in more narrow terms, that being the standard she had originally announced she was planning to use to inform her decision as to whether to turn on the cameras. To read more about it, check out the op-ed by Phil Mocek published by PubliCola.

The Seattle Auditor’s Office released a status report on implementation of their recommendations covering the time period through December 2025. Of note:

  • Re their 2024 Annual Surveillance Technology Usage Review (released in September 2025), SDOT has implemented two out of eight recommendations.
  • Re their Four Recommendations to Better Understand and Address Current Gun Violence Patterns in Seattle (released in March 2025), all four recommendations remain pending: “The Mayor’s Office reported that they have begun development of a comprehensive gun violence reduction strategy that will build on work begun by the Human Services Department and be led by the Mayor. Specifically, the Mayor’s Office has begun to assess existing gun violence reduction programs, identify gaps, and build a comprehensive strategy sponsored by the Mayor.”
  • Re their Addressing Places in Seattle Where Overdoses and Crime are Concentrated: An Evidence-Based Approach (released in July 2024), two out of eight recommendations have been completed: “The Mayor’s Office reported that components of the Downtown Activation Team’s (DAT) work, including its place-based problem-solving methodology, are moving forward under the Stabilize, Activate, and Invest (SAIL) Subcabinet. The Mayor’s Office indicated they will tailor crime and overdose strategies, and the corresponding deployment of resources, to more specifically defined and localized problems, beginning with implementation of the Phố Đẹp safety plan in Little Saigon and the expansion of the Seattle Police Department’s Neighborhood Resource Officer program to 12th & Jackson and 3rd & Pine. The Mayor’s Office also indicated that the current administration does not intend to evaluate the preceding administration’s work of the DAT and Seattle Restoration Framework, but will instead collaborate with public health, public safety, and community partners to establish agreed upon metrics for success for each location and reporting expectations.”

A quick update on an earlier item regarding the possibility of a special fire district tax: PubliCola has reported that the firefighters’ union is opposed to the idea so the Mayor’s Office isn’t pursuing it this year. This means one fewer tool to address the $175 million deficit for 2027.

In SPD lawsuit news, two gay SPD officers are suing the department alleging discrimination and being passed over for promotion. The City of Seattle is paying a $2.6 million settlement in the lawsuit of four female SPD officers alleging sexual harassment from former Chief Adrian Diaz. The Seattle Times reports that three of the four women remain employed at SPD. 

For more uplifting news, I wrote about the soil-turning and future plans for a new health center in Rainier Beach. If you want to read about community members coming together to make a difference, this is the article for you. 

Other news: 

I wrote about an inmate who died of an overdose last year while in custody at SCORE jail. I really encourage you to check this one out because the ongoing issues at SCORE are for the most part not being covered by mainstream media like The Seattle Times or the local news networks. I dove deeper into the quality of healthcare being offered by jails and prisons in general, and it’s an ugly story that has parallels to how people detained by ICE are being treated. 

I also dove into last year’s King County DCHS audit with an update on what’s been found and what measures are being taken to ensure accountability and transparency as DCHS goes about their work. 

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay gave his State of the County address this week and committed to investing “nearly $5 million” in the Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention. I’m not clear on how much of this is additive, but as an important office that is perennially under-funded, this is good news. 

The City of Edmonds unanimously voted to cancel the City’s contract with Flock Safety for automated license plate readers.

Finally, Jeff Asher wrote that large police departments are beginning to grow their ranks again, after a contraction after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020. 

Asher wrote, “The hiring environment still isn’t great for police officers, but it is far improved from where it was three or four years ago. Most medium and large police departments will likely be stuck at considerably smaller levels than they were pre-COVID, but the evidence suggests they might see slow and steady growth over the next few years.”

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