Pay Records Show Diaz Still Listed as "Chief," With $338,000 Salary; SPD Won't Respond to Records Requests Until 2025
Your late-afternoon Friday Fizz.
1. Former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz has not been at work since the announcement, in May, that he was stepping down from his position to take on unspecified "special projects."
However, according to internal payroll documents, as well the city's public-facing salary database, Diaz has retained the official title "chief of police" along with his previous salary of just under $163 an hour, or $338,000 a year. Sue Rahr, the interim police chief, makes just under $168 an hour, or $349,000 a year, . Between Rahr and Diaz, the city is paying a combined total of just over $687,000 for the interim police chief and her predecessor.
Diaz resigned after more than a half-dozen women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and retaliation by Diaz, communications division director Lt. John O'Neil, and others at SPD. Earlier this week, four of the women filed a lawsuit against the city and SPD after the department failed to respond to their previous $5 million tort complaint.
SPD referred questions about Diaz to Mayor Bruce Harrell's office. Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said Diaz remains on personal leave, and could not confirm reports that Diaz has turned in his SPD vehicle, a 2023 Chevy Tahoe. Asked about Diaz' salary and title, Housen said, "While the former chief is on leave, we are working with Chief Rahr to determine appropriate title, responsibilities, and salary." If Diaz was bumped down to his previous rank of lieutenant, his top possible pay would be around $95 an hour, or $197,000 a year—a more than $140,000 pay cut.
2. SPD informed PubliCola this week that it will take them until January 17, 2025 to provide camera footage showing what happened when former deputy mayor Monisha Harrell, who is the mayor's niece, was stopped by an officer in Greenwood in June. According to Harrell, the officer, Jay Mackey, said he was checking plates for stolen vehicles and couldn't read hers because it was under a plastic cover; a photo Harrell provided PubliCola, which we blurred for privacy in our original post, showed that the clear cover did not appear to obscure the plate number.
In 2022, then-police chief Diaz said the department would de-prioritize traffic stops for low-level offenses such as having expired tabs, part of an effort to reduce opportunities for racial profiling and avoid the kind of conflict between officers and drivers that can escalate to violence.
Harrell, who is Black, told PubliCola she believes Mackey, who is white, was profiling her. The video will help flesh out what happened and reveal exactly what Mackey said when he approached Harrell's car.
By making the public wait seven months or more to see it, SPD is withholding public information for what is, by any measure, an excessive amount of time.
SPD's slow responses to records requests have long been infamous, but the time they take to fulfill records requests has become increasingly extreme. Last year, for instance, it took SPD eight months to provide PubliCola with audio of a single 911 call; in contrast, back in 2016, it took SPD two months to hand over detailed information and audio from every 911 call made from a specific address over a period of more than two years.
PubliCola is still waiting on installments from a request I made about parking enforcement officers back in 2022, and we just got the first batch of emails from a request about body cameras from 2023, with the second installment due to arrive late next March. Those aren't cherry-picked examples; they're typical response times for SPD, and would be shocking from other city department.
During COVID, the police department added a lengthy "don't blame us" explanation for slow responses to its automated records request response, which said that due to "an extreme backlog of requests, staffing shortages, the redeployment of supporting units to SPD’s frontline COVID-19 response, and, pursuant to CDC recommendations and City direction, reassignment to remote access," it could take SPD between 6 and 12 months to respond to requests.
Starting in 2022, this emergency warning was replaced by a generic explanation for any delays: "At this time, the Seattle Police Department’s Legal Unit is operating under a backlog of over 2,000 open requests."
In 2023, the Seattle Times signed a pre-litigation agreement with SPD that was supposed to stop excessive records request delays by amending SPD's practice of "grouping" requests made from the same news organization and responding to them in order. The agreement was silent on the more broadly applicable problem of excessive delays for single requests, which have continued unabated since the newspaper settled with SPD.