SPD says ‘bye-bye’ to bonuses
No more bonuses for recruits—at least not for the immediate future. Citing a tight budget, Seattle police officials told local media yesterday that the department would suspend its incentives for new hires, starting in September. The money to pay the incentives comes from a pool of salary savings created when officers quit, but not enough cops are leaving. Retirement-age officers at the top of the pay scale are sticking around and racking up massive overtime (often fraudulently) on the way out to jack up their retirement benefits. The hefty raises in the 2025 police guild contract give them another reason to stay (and phone it in), since their police pensions are calculated as the average of their top five consecutive years.
Meanwhile, the department is lowering standards to hire at an unprecedented pace, and SPD is expected to exceed its hiring budget by nearly $2 million. This situation with the hiring bonuses has AM radio bottomfeeders and unemployed council presidents sounding alarms. My Northwest painted a dire picture in its headline “Seattle Police Department scraps $50K hiring bonuses Sept. 1 as staffing crisis deepens.” Calling it a staffing crisis is a stretch, to begin with. SPD is about 175 cops away from its peak levels, and it’s hiring officers faster than it can train or pay for them (they don’t have enough field training officers), so it’s hardly “deepen[ing].” SPD is on track to hire nearly as many cops as it did last year. What’s more, the added value of the bonuses is dubious. When they were first implemented, the incentives didn’t yield a significant increase in applications. The department only saw a flood of applicants after the police guild negotiated raises in 2024 and 2025. The city is already facing an estimated $175 million deficit this year, and SPD costs, including raises, back pay, and around $60 million in police settlements, account for the lion’s share of that.
DivestSPD Protest Pack now on sale
In perhaps the biggest news to come out this week (or any week in the history of weeks), DivestSPD announced the latest and greatest edition of its award-winning* baseball cards. The Protest Pack features 10 baseball cards depicting officers from the Community Response Group, the Police Outreach and Engagement Team, and SWAT. Each card summarizes the highlights from the officer’s disciplinary record and basic stats like hiring date, salary, rank, and overtime. Wait, there’s more! Every Wednesday we’ll release a companion post for each card with more details about every incident as well as videos, pictures, and documents.
Buy a pack today at our online store.
*DivestSPD baseball cards have never won any awards, as baseball card awards don’t exist.
Sheriff Swank to become podcast crank
After he was run out of the Seattle police department for extremist posts, Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank said God spoke to him in a hot tub and told him to run for sheriff, so he did. Now, it appears the Lord has a new calling for Keith: podcaster. The podcast is Swank’s latest stunt in response to SB 5974, which would allow the state to remove sheriffs and police chiefs who fail to meet professional standards. No wonder a bigot like Swank is sweating. He would lose his position if any number of complaints against him to the state police certifying body resulted in his decertification. Governor Bob Ferguson signed the bill into law in April, but a group of sheriffs challenged it in court, and a Thurston County judge issued a temporary injunction. However, it may not be enough for Swank to hold onto power. Pierce County voters will decide in November whether county sheriffs will be elected, as they are currently, or appointed. At least it’s something to keep him distracted from his other project of going after state sanctuary laws.
Spokane Anti-ICE activists appeal convictions
Three activists convicted earlier this summer for their roles in an anti-ICE protest are asking the courts to throw their sentences out. Known as the Spokane 3, Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II were arrested last June for blocking an ICE vehicle from exiting a detention facility in Spokane. Six others arrested took non-cooperating plea deals, while the Spokane 3 went to trial, maintaining that they did nothing wrong. The federal charges spun mundane protest actions, such as linking arms and speaking through a bullhorn, into grandiose conspiracy charges. This trial represents Trump’s authoritarian NSPM-7 directives in practice. It follows a disturbingly familiar pattern of rushed, falsified, and exaggerated accusations, with implications for dissent across the board, running parallel to the cases against Prairieland defendants and the Minnesota 15. This week, Trump’s State Department also announced sanctions against several international organizations it deemed “foreign terrorist organizations,” including Autistici/Inventati, the maker of tech tools, including the noblogs platform commonly used by antifascists and anarchists across the United States.
Follow the Spokane 3 Support Committee to stay updated and plug in. If you are unfamiliar with the Spokane 3, The Final Straw Radio released an interview with the support committee this week as well!
DivestSPD scores another W over SPOG
The Seattle Police Officers Guild and its idiot lawyers have once again failed to stop DivestSPD’s work. Earlier this year, SPOG appealed a lawsuit over a DivestSPD records request, hoping to bypass the legislature and expand exceptions for police officers under the Public Records Act through the courts. SPOG filed a lawsuit in 2023 that sought to redact Seattle Police Detective Ashley Fitzgerald’s name from documents related to frivolous complaints. As SPOG’s lawyers acknowledged, protecting Fitzgerald’s identity was secondary. The ulterior motive of this lawsuit, however, was to establish a precedent that officers’ names would be redacted in all future cases involving four types of allegations —racism, retaliation, corruption, and dishonesty — if the misconduct was determined to be unsubstantiated.
While the King County Superior Court argued that withholding Fitzgerald’s name was justified, it declined to make what amounted to sweeping change to the PRA. SPOG appealed and lost. The court held that it would continue to decide these claims on a case-by-case basis. This is good news for us, and bad news for police guild gangsters who want to keep serious police misconduct anonymous. The SPOG contract imposes an unusually high standard of proof for so-called stigmatizing offenses. The perverse reality is that many of the most serious offenses are never sustained even with significant evidence. If SPOG had its way, these things would never come to light.
Hey, before you go…
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