Barnes' New Hires Top $1 Million, SPD Will Pay $30,000 for Training on "Stratified Policing"

Today's Afternoon Fizz.

1. New police chief Shon Barnes brought on five new SPD staffers last month, including a second deputy chief, Andre Sayles; a new assistant chief, Nicole Powell; and three new executive-level staff—Chief of Staff Alex Ricketts, Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction Eleazer Hunt, and Chief Communications Officer Barbara DeLollis.

Most of these roles, including the second deputy chief, the executive director of crime and harm reduction, and the chief communications officer, are new; the chief of staff role was revived by former chief Adrian Diaz when he hired Jamie Tompkins into the position, but before that, the most recent SPD chief of staff was Clark Kimerer, who left the job in 2001. All five are direct appointments, meaning they did not involve an open hiring process, and none of the new hires are replacing people who currently hold jobs at SPD.

All those new top-level positions won't come cheap.

DeLollis, most recently the head of communications for the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society at Harvard, will make $221,562 a year, according to publicly available records.

Hunt, previously a strategic planning and analysis administrator at the Greenville, South Carolina Police Department, will make $302,016.

Powell, previously the lieutenant commander over the New Orleans Police Department's Recruitment and Applicant Investigation Section, will earn $294,757, assuming her salary is the same as that of all four of the current assistant chiefs.

And Sayles, currently the police chief in Beloit, WI, a town of about 36,000 about 50 miles south of Madison, will most likely have a salary on par with the city's current deputy chief, Yvonne Underwood, who makes $302,016, the same as Hunt.

Ricketts' salary is not publicly available yet, but the other non-administrative members of SPD command staff make between $260,770 and $294,757, so his pay will likely be in that range. Ricketts was previously a community engagement specialist working for Barnes in Madison.

Barnes was previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin; deputy chief in Salisbury, North Carolina; and a captain at the Greensboro, NC police department. His salary is $360,485 a year.

All told, the salaries of Barnes' five new hires add up to at least $1.38 million, and that's not counting the cost of benefits, such as health care and retirement, and moving costs, since all are coming to Seattle from other cities.

The city is facing a $150 million budget deficit, and most departments are under a hiring freeze; even SPD, which has been on a spending spree, has been asked to temporarily freeze spending on consultant contracts and civilian hires.

Mayor Bruce Harrell has asked executive departments have been asked to shoot for a 5 percent underspend this year, directed all non-public safety departments (except for "homelessness," a broad category that cuts across multiple departments) to come up with 8 percent cuts going into the upcoming city budget cycle. Even the police weren't spared entirely from the budget-cutting exercise (which is theoretical until the mayor proposes the budget); they've been asked to come up with 2 percent in potential cuts.

2. Speaking of expenses, SPD spent more than $5,000 on drinks, snacks, and lunch for the officers who worked at the anti-trans "Mayday Seattle" event in Cal Anderson Park, PubliCola has learned. That's the rally where police arrested 23 counterprotesters after pepper-spraying the crowd en masse and Mayor Bruce Harrell blamed "anarchist" infiltrators for "prompting SPD to make arrests."

SPD would go on to provide security for the same group when they held another rally and concert, for which they did not have a required permit for amplified sound. Police closed down Fourth Avenue and other major bus corridors during rush hour and set up barricades to prevent counterprotesters from accessing the event, which was in held in the public plaza outside City Hall.

Barnes also got approval for a $30,000 department-wide training in "stratified policing," a concept he implemented in Madison. As far as I can tell, the idea is that police should "stratify" different types of "problems," such as immediate, short-term, and long-term issues, and apply different strategies to each type of problem. This four-pager from the Madison Police Department goes into more details about the approach, which appears to involve a very large number of meetings.