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

/ King County, Seattle, Surveillance / By

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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