Seattle Crime Reports : Seattle Crime Blog : Seattle, Washington

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In a move that surprised no one, Seattle Police officers just approved a resolution that will make them the highest paid police department in the state.

The measure got 90 percent approval from those returning votes and now just needs to be ratified by the City Council.

Some highlights of the new pay scale:

•  An 8 percent base increase for 2007, 4 percent in 2008 and 5.5 percent in 2009. Entry-level officers would get an immediate 8 percent pay raise on top of the overall pay raises. In 2010, the increase would be between 6 percent and 9 percent, depending on cost-of-living increases.
  
• Back pay of $6,807 for 2007.
  
• No changes in officers' health care. The city covers about 95 percent of the costs.
  
• A $5,000 hiring bonus, a $2,500 stipend for equipment and compensation for up to $14,000 in moving expenses for new recruits.
  
• A new 10-hour patrol shift for officers to help meet the new neighborhood policing plan, which would deploy more officers at different times of the day and in certain neighborhoods.

Sounds like a pretty nice time to become a cop. Besides, of course, all the whispers of corruption and lack of public trust.

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The City of Seattle has finally figured it out.

After a couple years of decreased interest in police careers within the city limits, a new collective bargaining agreement would give officers in the  Seattle Police Department a hefty raise - making them the highest paid department in the state and the fourth-highest on the West Coast amongst comparable departments. From the P.I.:

The four-year contract offer would boost an entry-level officer's annual base pay from $47,340 to $64,312 by 2010 -- an increase of about 36 percent.

A 12-year veteran's base salary would increase at least 25 percent -- from $72,072 to $90,516 -- by the contract's final year.

The Seattle Crime Blogger and I have been arguing this point for months: if a police force is having trouble recruiting new officers, let's look at the reasons why. By and large, SPD has a horrible reputation in the city...and they are one of the lowest paid police forces on the West Coast. Take a look at some of the other cities the P.I. mentions and their base salaries for entry-level officers:

• San Francisco: $71,526
• San Jose: $70,307
• Oakland: $69,162
• Sacramento: $50,400
• Portland: $40,980

While the reputation may be harder to repair - claims of corruption, police abuse and related activities are impossible to snuff out entirely - the pay problem isn't nearly as difficult to tackle.

Entry-level officers stand to be making about $64,000 dollars a year by 2010...nearly a $17,000 a year increase from the current wages. That's like the difference between owning home and renting, or the difference between accepting a job in Seattle and looking at San Francisco (where entry-level officers already make $65,000 a year, according to the Chronicle).

With Seattle's crime rates hovering above the national average and high-profile cases drawing attention to the need for more cops on the streets, this can only help the city's futile recruiting process. After all, if you want the best and the brightest, you need to be willing to pay them as such.

The agreement still needs to be voted on by the Police Guild (though I don't see this vote failing) and ratified by the City Council. But judging by the giant monkey that could leap off of Mayor Nickels back if this does help recruiting, I think it's safe to say this will have all the support it needs. Kudos to the city for figuring this one out.

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While I may not necessarily agree with the Seattle Crime Blogger's take on legalizing prostitution, we are in agreement that the SPD's insistent focus on staking out Rick's Cabaret is beyond ridiculous.

This 2006 article from the P-I details one of the biggest raids ever conducted in Seattle, when three paddy wagons (does anybody still use that term anymore?) showed up to arrest 14 dancers at the Lake City club. Three paddy wagons? For years, police have claimed that they don't have the resources to effectively clean up the city's many open-air drug markets, but they seem to be willing to do whatever it takes to stop lonely old men from getting some extra love in a poorly lit back room.

Outside of that, many have forgotten what happened after the infamous "Strippergate" story started to develop. A 2007 report, also from the P-I, details some of the bizarre reports filed by undercover officers involved in the sting:

"One Seattle cop reported that he grabbed an exotic dancer's breasts several times as she gyrated in his lap."

Why that officer did this, and why he would ever write this in his own report, remain an unexplained mystery.

Another cop details having spent $100 on consecutive lap dances with the hopes that the stripper would eventually offer sex for money. Don't get me started on the entrapment problems here...but $100? Something tells me that wasn't the only time such a situation arose.

One detective reported that he had purchased 300 lap dances while working undercover.  With a dance running $20 to $40, we're talking $6,000 to $12,000 of taxpayer money being spent to bust a dancer for a misdemeanor crime.

According to the P-I, I'm not alone in my assessment:

[Some defense attorneys and legal experts] question the department's priorities: why undercover cops need to be so aggressive in cases that rarely rise above a misdemeanor, and that are frequently dismissed as the result of a court diversion program.

And after all the money, time, and resources spent, we end with a grand conclusion of Frank Colacurcio Jr, whose father has long been linked to local corruption, agreeing to pay $10,000 in fines and spend a year on probation.  All said, the city came out with a $55,000 settlement.  I'm guessing more than that was spent on the "investigation."

Greg Nickels and members of the City Council have these types of cases a priority, because a headline including the phrase "Strippergate" is sure to illicit more attention than almost anything else.  But listen to the radio sometime: Rick's is still advertising, and guessing by the packed parking lots I see when i drive home every day, business is doing just fine.

We don't have to make prostitution legal. Just stop wasting the taxpayer money and the Seattle Police Department's resources on silly cases that aren't helping to stop serious crime.

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Either I'm in a laughing mood, or local crime news has been particularly hilarious lately.

There's a piece in today's Times about the latest weapon to assist Seattle meter maids in their valiant quest to enforce parking laws: Segway scooters.

I always thought SPD's contempt for parking cops could not be more apparent than it already was: after all, having to ride the city streets in those euro-boxes they use now seems like the ultimate humiliation. "No, you don't get a gun, rookie...and what's more, you'll be making your rounds in one of these." 

I was wrong. Good work, Seattle: if you really wanted to find a way to make people respect parking enforcement even less, then the six Segways - which according to The Times cost $5,000 a pop - were a worthwhile use of our city's funds.

Luckily Seattle isn't the parking enforcement laughing stock of America...turns out the machine that even our country's president couldn't handle is popping in law enforcement circles everywhere. Segway says that their "personal transporters" are used by "more than 100 police agencies worldwide," from New York to Texas to Chicago (as pictured at right).

Locally, cops seem to like the battery-powered scooters:

"I love it. You can get around town nicely," [Officer Minh] Doan said. "You don't have to fight traffic, you don't have to find parking, and it saves a lot of gas. You cover a lot more ground than you do on foot."

Or maybe Doan is just making the most out of his embarrassing situation.

Perhaps the best part out of all of this is the fact that the Segways have flashing red and blue lights on them.  I mean, seriously. You know those police videos where a cop tries to ram a car and ends up spinning out himself? Just picture that...but replace the fleeing vehicle with a running bum and the cop car with a Segway. Comedy gold.

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Whether he likes it or not, Mayor Greg Nickels has had to deal with a lot of questions regarding neighborhood safety lately.

As Nickels continues to insist that the Seattle Police Department will meet its recruiting goals, several high-profile cases have vaulted the problem into a major concern with community members.

To many, SPD has always had a reputation for being too rough and ridiculously unfriendly (a case of a few hotheads ruining the good name of a ton of others...check out the Amy S. story at the link above) but now they are being faced with a bigger public relations problem: high profile cases.

The random beating of a UW student and the now-infamous Shannon Harps murder have put up a curtain of fear over certain neighborhoods in Seattle.

Perhaps the most disturbing sub-plot to these horrific local crimes is the idea that the city may start to panic when it comes to their expectations for new recruits (this article from last year details some of the difficulties faced by SPD). Sadly, this situation will be determined a winner or loser based on numbers alone, with little to no focus on the quality of those recruits.

We have to put trust in Nickels not to panic on this issue, but if we've learned anything about Seattle politicians it's that they have no backbone and will do whatever they must to avoid bad press. Throw in the fact that the Seattle Police Guild has more power than Nickels will ever hope to, and we could have a serious problem.

I think those of us who possess logic can agree that these cases do not tell of an epidemic waiting to happen. But if new recruits are being hired with less stringent requirements, these high-profile cases will be the least of our concerns.

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As violent crime continues in the Central District, the Seattle Times this morning wrote on an interesting new method of stopping criminal activity around 23rd & Union: giving the Seattle Police Department a micro-office near the intersection to take care of business while keeping an eye on the community.

It would be a place where Seattle police officers assigned to the Central Area could write reports, use restrooms and take breaks instead of trekking back to the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. [...] The building's owner may be willing to provide the space rent free for the next six to nine months, though the department will have to cover utilities, Greeley said. The department just needs to sign a lease, but must wait for the owner to return from vacation, he said.

Finally! People thinking with their brains instead of their hearts. This sounds like a good solution to us at SCB, and a long-overdue one at that. While folks in the rest of the city seems to be targeting police officers for their supposedly over-aggressive tactics, we're now witnessing the complete opposite in the Central District. A strange turn of events, especially because many of the criticisms against police officers reported in alternative weeklies like The Stranger report on unfair treatment of African Americans (who at this point still make up a good portion of the C.D., and who we'd suspect are largely instrumental in bringing this new "cop stop" to fruition).

But the media's cynicism appears to be absent around 23rd & Union, a community fed up with criminality who are doing all they can to encourage a greater police presence. The end result will benefit all parties: the Central District will likely see 23rd & Union return to a pleasant intersection, the criminals who threaten our community will be apprehended or drop under the radar to keep a low profile, and the SPD will develop closer ties with individuals and businesses in the community. A win/win/win situation.

The question now is: where will this push the drug dealers, loiterers and thugs? As we noted on Wednesday, these people only congregate at 23rd & Union because after the Chocolate City Club's closure they were no longer welcome traversing their old haunts near 21st & Madison. Our suspicion is that this activity will not go away...instead, as gentrification continues, it will move further and further into the C.D. and the South End. The "cop stop" is a temporary solution, and a great one at that. But it would be naive to expect that it will end violent crime completely.