Officers Describe SPD Under Diaz as a “Dictatorship” Where Retaliation was Routine
"Dissenting voices are immediately silenced," one high-ranking officer said.
By Andrew Engelson
Two weeks after Mayor Bruce Harrell announced he was removing Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz and replacing him, on an interim basis, with former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, several current and former Seattle Police Department officers say Diaz established what one called a “dictatorship” at the department in which officers who speak out against the chief and an inner circle of leadership have been demoted or subject to retaliatory investigations.
Several women have sued Diaz, along with others in the department, alleging gender discrimination and harassment.
Harrell announced that Diaz would take a new role as head of “special projects,” which were rumored to include work prepping for the FIFA World Cup in 2026. A spokesperson for SPD said “it has not been determined if he is working on the logistics for FIFA World Cup.”
The spokesperson said Rahr has not decided what rank Diaz will have when he returns or what his salary will be; currently, Diaz’ salary is around $340,000 a year.
One SPD officer who used to be part of SPD’s command structure spoke at length with PubliCola and asked to remain anonymous because of an active lawsuit. She said she was the subject of at least five complaints to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) in a period of two months, which she claims were in retaliation for speaking up against Diaz and his circle of advisers.
“The chief surrounds himself with very, very loyal subjects who will not question any of his activities or any of his decisions,” she said. “Any dissenting voices are immediately silenced.”
Though Diaz is no longer chief, that core leadership circle remains. The high-ranking officer said that without further staffing changes, the pattern of retaliation and frivolous OPA investigations will continue.
“OPA is supposed to be for serious misconduct,” the officer said. “And it has been weaponized by Adrian [Diaz], by Jamie [Tompkins], by John O'Neil, and by Dan Nelson to punish people that speak up. And to put the atmosphere of fear into everybody so that nobody will speak up,” she said.
Tompkins, a former evening news anchor for Q13 FOX, is SPD’s chief of staff; John O’Neil is communications director and co-defendant in a discrimination lawsuit filed by four female officers; Dan Nelson is an assistant chief appointed in 2023.
Tompkins and Nelson declined to comment for this story and O’Neil did not respond to a request for comment.
In response to a question about whether a climate of retaliation exists at SPD, interim chief Rahr recently told PublCola, “I am spending time talking with as many SPD members as I can to learn why these perceptions exist so I can take steps to address them.”
Diaz and the department are currently facing at least three lawsuits by six SPD officers. These include a lawsuit former assistant chief Eric Greening filed against Diaz in May, alleging racial discrimination and retaliation; a $5 million tort claim four female officers—Valerie Carson, Judinna Gulpan, Kame Spencer, and lieutenant Lauren Trucsott—filed against Diaz, public affairs director John O’Neil, and SPD human resources director Rebecca McKechnie in April; and a gender discrimination lawsuit against Diaz filed in January by former assistant chief Deanna Nollette.
SPD and the city of Seattle are also the subject of of a race and gender discrimination lawsuit filed by detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a 43-year SPD veteran.
In addition, Steven Hirjak, a former assistant chief, sued Diaz and SPD for discrimination and retaliation, and SPD settled with Hirjak for $600,000 last December.
Although interim chief Rahr told reporters at press conference announcing her appointment that she didn’t plan any changes to SPD leadership, she made it clear to PubliCola that she could make other personnel changes in the future. “If I need to make a staff change, I will make it,” Rahr said. “The mayor was very clear. He said you will have the ability to change staff as you need to.”
Rahr did act quickly to undo one recent high-profile Diaz decision, reinstating assistant chief Tyrone Davis, whom Diaz put on leave a week before Rahr’s appointment because of an open OPA complaint. The King County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that it is conducting a criminal investigation of Davis, putting the OPA complaint temporarily on hold, but declined to share details about the investigation. Davis declined to comment on the investigation.
In addition, the Pierce County prosecutor’s office confirmed that the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office is conducting a criminal investigation of assistant chief Eric Barden based on at least one OPA complaint. The office would not confirm what the allegations against Barden are. OPA declined a public records request for details on the complaint against Barden, saying, “the contents of an active investigation are categorically exempt in their entirety.”
Tammy Floyd, a former SPD lieutenant who thought she was on a path to become SPD’s first female assistant chief responsible for patrol, says a climate of misogyny and infighting among leadership pushed her out of SPD.
Floyd says she was transferred out of patrol, where she had spent her entire career, into investigations—a department in which she had no experience—soon after Diaz became interim chief in 2020. She was sent to the chaotic East Precinct, which was still recovering from the 2020 protests. “We felt abandoned in that building in the East Precinct,” Floyd said. “Nobody knew what the mission was, what the vision was. You knew that nobody in [Diaz’s] inner circle cared, that he didn't care.”
Floyd, who is now an assistant chief with the Tacoma Police Police Department, was among the 10 women at SPD who spoke to KUOW about discrimination in the department. She says after the article was published, SPD’s public affairs office released confidential information about her in a lengthy response to KUOW’s story, including the fact she applied for an assistant chief position at SPD in 2023.
“It's confidential, unless you become one of the finalists, and then that goes public,” Floyd said.
Floyd filed an OPA complaint regarding that release of information, claiming SPD broke the law. According to an email from an OPA investigator Floyd provided to PubliCola, an OPA attorney didn’t think SPD’s press office broke any laws but did express “concern that your OPA complaint contained an implied accusation that the department released this information for your speaking out about gender discrimination within the department. If that is a correct assessment, then that would warrant an OPA investigation.”
Floyd agreed with this assessment and said OPA is still investigating.
The high-ranking SPD officer said she believes OPA’s investigation system has been “completely weaponized in the last couple of years” to create false narratives about employees who question SPD leadership.
“Over the last couple years under Adrian [Diaz], when people speak out or when people do something that displeases him—usually drawing attention to potential ethical, moral or fiduciary misconduct—they immediately begin receiving OPA complaints,” the officer said. “A number of these complaints are anonymous and they're just vague, somewhat shocking complaints.”
“To its credit, OPA often does not send these for a full investigation,” she said.
The officer described five different complaints against her over the past several months that she considered retaliatory. These included an investigation Assistant Chief Dan Nelson filed against her when she failed to show up to a Special Operations Center activation (she says she was on leave at the time); a case claiming she failed to report criminal activity by a fellow detective, which was later dismissed; a complaint accusing her of publishing false information about Diaz on social media, which was also dismissed; a complaint of insubordination that’s still under investigation; and an anonymous internal complaint accusing her of bias.
OPA spokeswoman Jessica Schreindl confirmed the five complaints along with their basic details. Nelson said he couldn’t comment on the complaint he filed because the investigation is ongoing.
PubliCola has reported previously on Lt. John O’Neil’s complaints against other SPD employees.
Rahr told PubliCola she’s aware of accusations that the OPA investigation system is being “weaponized,” but that “I have not seen that among the upper command staff. I’m certainly not going to cover my ears, if I hear of it.”
“I have heard people say: It feels like there’s a target on my back,” Rahr said. But, she added, “I also have been around long enough to know when an adverse personnel action happens, it’s a very common human response to assume that somebody’s retaliating against me. I haven’t seen evidence of that, but I haven’t had enough time to really dig into it.”
The high-ranking officer said she was skeptical but hopeful that a new chapter will open under Rahr and whoever follows her as the permanent chief. “The time under Diaz was a complete moral and ethical vacuum,” she said. “Hopefully we can now move forward with new leadership who will have the best interest of the department and the community at the forefront.”
Floyd said keeping Diaz from SPD will continue to discourage officers from speaking up. “My concern with where Diaz is now is that it's a distraction, “ she said. “In all this chaos, nobody's talking about public safety, nobody's talking about crime. We're only talking about this soap opera. It creates this incredible distraction, and you didn’t remove it. It’s all still there.”
While I totally believe all of the misogyny accusations are true, I also have to take any statement from any faction within SPD with an extremely large grain of salt. It can be true that the misogyny and retaliation from Diaz happened AND that the charges were used as a cudgel against him by forces with interests beyond those of the accusers. It seemed to me at the time that Chief Best was run out of town, not by the City Council, but by SPOG itself…and maybe even O’Toole before her was thwarted by SPOG. It almost seems like there are forces within SPD that see turmoil within the department as serving their broader goals. Sometimes I think we won’t have a stable SPD leadership until Solan himself is Chief. Of course, he would never accept that demotion. And have we ever checked his texts from July’20???