Changing Seattle's Police Hiring Test Won't Fix SPD's Recruitment Issues, City's Test Administrator Tells Council President

The city's test has been in place since 2012.

A demographic chart shows SPD is losing out on a huge potential hiring pool: Women

By Erica C. Barnett

The head of the city commission that administers tests for new Seattle Police Department recruits, the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, pushed back against several of City Council President Sara Nelson's claims about police hiring and recruitment at a meeting of the Community Police Commission this week.

Nelson has proposed legislation that would push the PSCSC to switch to a test called the Public Safety Test (PST), which has a 90 percent passing rate and is used by smaller jurisdictions around the region.

In contrast, about 75 percent of applicants pass the test Seattle uses, which was developed by a company called the National Testing Network in response to a federal consent decree that required SPD to implement policies to reduce biased policing and excessive force. The test, which the city has used since 2012, is designed to eliminate applicants who are biased, dishonest, or unable to react appropriately in various scenarios, including crises.

Switching to the PST test, Nelson argued, would mean that applicants would no longer have to take a different test to apply in Seattle—an extra step Nelson said is preventing "highly qualified [people] that we think would be great candidates for our force" from applying. "We are competing against" other cities like Bellevue that use the PST, Nelson said. "That is why there is an interest [in using the same] exam so that you can just order the scores to be sent to the several jurisdictions at the same time."

PSCSC director Andrea Scheele, who addressed the CPC after Nelson wrapped up, said the NTN test has never been a deterrent for applicants in the past, suggesting that the test is not the problem. Just a few years ago, she said, thousands of people took the test during each testing cycle, and the test has only become more accessible since then—for example, applicants can now take it online. "Personally, I don't believe that the problem is that people can't find us or people don't want to take our test, or that people don't know that Seattle Police Department is hiring," Scheele said.

Scheele and police reform advocates have noted that the NTN test was specifically designed for Seattle in response to the consent decree, and tests for specific qualities that may not be captured by the more generic PST.

Addressing those concerns, Nelson argued that it would be a straightforward and relatively speedy process to add new questions to the PST that would effectively make it as rigorous as the NTN test. This would occur, she said, through a "validation study," which Nelson described as "about eight weeks in which the people that design the test meet with stakeholders, the accountability partners, the chief, and ... anybody [else who] wants to be involved in the formation of this exam, and they figure out what do we want to test for, and then then design the test around that."

But Scheele told PubliCola that "customizing" the PST exam, which Public Safety Testing licenses from another company called Industrial/Organizational Solutions, would probably take much longer than eight weeks. "My estimate is that to do a full validation study would take six to 12 months," she said—and that's if the company cooperates by providing information about the test itself. Scheele said she's already  "due diligence" to determine if there are other tests that would work in Seattle, but that process has been hampered by the fact that the president of Public Safety Testing, Jon Walters, has refused to participate or respond to any of the PSCSC's questions.

"I sent a list of 44 questions to each of the two companies, and NTN got back really quickly with what appeared to be complete and thorough responses," Scheele said. In contrast, Walters "said 'I'm not going to answer your questions."

"I don't think I'm going to persuade them to participate," Scheele told the CPC, "but I'm still going to complete my due diligence process."

Nelson also said she hoped her bill would encourage applicants to stick with the process by funding a new PSCSC staffer to do outreach and engagement to applicants, something she claimed the PSCSC doesn't do. "Think about if you've ever applied for a job and you hear nothing from the from the prospective employer," Nelson said.  "Most jurisdictions acknowledge that application within 48 hours and invite the candidate to be able to ask some questions and be guided through the next steps. We don't do that."

Scheele said Nelson is misinformed. "Of course their application is acknowledged," Scheele told PubliCola. "They receive an email almost immediately from us, they get at least six messages throughout the application process, and they can call us at any point if they have a problem with the actual test," an opportunity Scheele said many candidates take full advantage of.

One recruitment opportunity Nelson and the CPC did not discuss was hiring more women, by addressing SPD's culture of misogyny; recent articles in PubliCola and on KUOW have shone light on the issues faced by female officers, from overt sexual harassment to getting passed over for promotions and opportunities because of their gender.

Last year, according to a slide Scheele used in her presentation, just 7.4 percent of the candidates who passed the test were women, while to 90.1 percent were men (another 1.8 percent declined to identify their gender, and a handful were trans or nonbinary)—a fraction of the percentage of women SPD has pledged to hire by 2030 as part of the "30 by 30" initiative.