Almost No One Is Showing Up to SPD's 'Before the Badge' Dialogues

They're touted as an opportunity for new police recruits to "meet the communities they serve," but what happens when the community is MIA?

Seattle University Criminal Justice Professor Jacqueline Helfgott presides over a Zoom meeting for Before the Badge.

On Monday, Seattle U professor Jacqueline Helfgott was fretting over attendance as she convened the South Precinct community dialogue for SPD’s Before the Badge program over Zoom. A half-dozen community members had signed up, she said, but only two were there.

By the time the meeting started, a grand total of three people living in Seattle’s South End were in attendance (four, including the author of this piece).

More than 70 percent of the attendees were paid to be there:

• Four research assistants ($17.27 per hour)

• SPD Sgt. Ron Campbell ($69 per hour)

• SPD Ofc. Aaron Lucas ($57 per hour)

• SPD’s African-American Advisory Council Chair Victoria Beach (Beach has two consulting contracts with the city totaling $21,500)

• Seven SPD recruits ($33.44 per hour each)

Of course, the highest-paid participant was Dr. Helfgott. The criminal justice professor has a $57,000 contract with the city to run the dialogues and a $77,000 contract for a follow-up evaluation of Before the Badge. Helfgott is paid at a rate of $650 per day.

Helfgott made $7,400 in January 2023 alone and averaged about that much per month in 2022. That’s roughly the average salary of a full-time city employee.

The city contractor’s database shows that Helfgott has received $416,000 since 2016 for various research and consulting services, including the annual SPD Public Safety Survey and the Micro Community Policing Plans.

It adds up to about $1,500 to pay cops, future cops, and police-adjacent researchers to sit in a Zoom room for two hours talking to a handful of representatives from neighborhood watch groups.

That’s only a fraction of the program’s initial $1.5 million price tag, about one-tenth of which is covered by a Department of Justice grant. The program is budgeted for roughly half a million in 2023.

Before the Badge, Beyond the Hype

The reality of the program is a far cry from the fawning coverage it’s gotten in the local press. In October, the Seattle Times ran a piece headlined “Before all else, Seattle police recruits study the people they’ll serve.”

It reads like ad copy from an SPD publicist.

In glowing terms, Seattle Times police reporter Sara Jean Green describes the “first-of-its-kind training program” as a “response to the racial reckoning ignited by the murder of George Floyd” and the “resulting demands that police nationwide reimagine how they interact with their citizenry.”

Green recounts the proceedings of one of the Zoom dialogues, focusing on the statements of police officers and recruits. She writes that “about 35” people showed up but doesn’t give a breakdown.

The only community member she quotes is Victoria Beach (who, again, is paid to attend).

At each meeting, Beach gives a canned speech about the Road-to-Damascus moment she had about policing in the 1980s.

Green paraphrases it in the article:

Beach, who is Black, said she witnessed Seattle cops beat up members of her family as she was growing up in the Central District and as a result, she came to hate the police. Her opinion started to shift after she became a Block Watch captain in the late 1980s and met officers in her neighborhood.

“I thought, ‘You know, they’re not all bad.’ It just slowly started changing me,” she said.

The Before the Badge community dialogues mirror other forms of ersatz community engagement that Helfgott has a hand in.

The professor established the African-American Advisory Council and seven other SPD demographic advisory councils through a Countering Violent Extremism grant from the Dept. of Homeland Security.

These demographic advisory councils have little buy-in from members of those groups who aren’t employed by the city or a non-profit that does business with the city.

DivestSPD @DivestSPD

Screenshot of @SeattlePD’s African-American Community Advisory Board meeting.

Before the Badge and similar community policing initiatives are pitched as solutions to systemic issues—they’re supposedly mechanisms of that “culture change” we’re always hearing about.

For example, in his obligatory statement about the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, Mayor Bruce Harrell included the program on a bullet list of steps the city is taking to ensure “public safety for all communities, including equitable and accountable policing.”

However, the community members who attend the dialogues tend to be people who call the police, not the folks being policed. The people most likely to find themselves staring down the barrel of a department-issued Glock won’t be available for a two-hour Zoom call at 5:30 p.m. on a work night.

Most of the people SPD officers interact with daily are poor, mentally ill, and/or homeless, and the department is under a consent decree for disproportionate force and discrimination against those groups.

By and large, the participants in the community dialogues are people with whom SPD already has a solid relationship. They’re neighborhood watch captains, obsessive Ring camera-watchers, and Safe Seattle types. In other words, they’re the hallowed “homeowners” and “taxpayers.”

One person who attended the South Precinct meeting was from the non-profit Seattle Neighborhood Group, which works with SPD on crime prevention plans. There was also a member of the Rainier Beach Block Watch, an SPD program.

Another was Rudy Pantoja, a former Republican candidate (and meme) who lives in Ballard and regularly plays the “concerned neighbor” in sensationalist KOMO crime stories. Pantoja is also a member of the Ballard community policing council established under the MCPP.

The annual SPD Public Safety Survey, which Dr. Helfgott also handles, is a decent proxy for how “community” is defined in the Before the Badge Community Dialogues. More than half of respondents had incomes over $120,000, and a quarter earned more than $200,000. Nearly 87 percent were white, but only 3 percent were Black.

DivestSPD @DivestSPD

Less than 3% of the survey respondents were Black (7% of Seattle’s population). 86% were white. 86% had college degrees. 1/3rd had Grad degrees. (3/11)

Most of the outreach for the survey and Before the Badge is done via NextDoor, which is where people go to work themselves into a frenzy about crime and “suspicious” people in their neighborhoods. That tends to generate a certain kind of response (no doubt intentional).

Marginalized people, the primary subjects of policing, are excluded from these dialogues because they are not even considered members of the community.

Needless to say, any “community policing” program that doesn’t include the community the department is actually policing is destined to fail.