The Seattle police are lowering hiring standards—and we can prove it.
In June, a city analyst presented a quarterly report showing that the Seattle Police Department is on track to hire more cops than it can afford under its current budget. After several years of lackluster hiring, it seems that SPD’s cup is finally running over.
Local media outlets are breathlessly reporting on this “hiring surge,” but few seem to question exactly how it came about or what the consequences might be. The closest that anyone has come was Fox 13’s Hana Kim.
Last August, Kim asked Chief Shon Barnes if the department’s hiring standards had been lowered to hire more officers. She claimed to have heard this from “several” police sources.
Barnes brushed the question off, saying, “With over 4,000 applications…and we take only a hundred people. What does that tell you about the…quality of people that we are taking?”
Without context, that sounds pretty convincing. Kim seemed satisfied enough to move on. However, when you compare those numbers to SPD’s hiring practices in the past decade or so, they represent an alarming drop in quality.
The sheer volume of officers hired is unprecedented, which makes it suspect. In a typical year, SPD hires between 80 and 105 officers. In 2025, the department hired 165 officers out of around 4,400 applications.
It hired only 84 the previous year, with around 400 fewer applicants. In other words, 10 percent more applications yielded nearly 100 percent more hires. On its face, that is evidence of drastically lower standards.
Moreover, when the department receives more applications, it tends to become more selective. Under Barnes, SPD is much less discriminating.
For example, Sue Rahr hired about 2 percent of applicants. In 2013 and 2014, the only other years with a comparable amount of applications, the department hired an almost identical number of officers.
In Barnes’s first year, SPD hired at a rate of almost 4 percent. That’s similar to 2019, when SPD was desperate to increase its ranks because the city was projecting a large cohort of 1990s hires would soon retire.
It’s also a year when we have concrete examples of SPD relaxing its hiring standards. In 2019, the department hired a French-Canadian high school dropout who was running a real estate scam with his wife. The same year, it hired a former Tucson police officer with a “checkered history” and a suspended license who would go on to run over a college student while driving nearly three times the speed limit.
Though Barnes claimed all of his recruits are of the “highest caliber,” a few have already been sacked for serious misconduct. One was fired for cheating using AI glasses. Another was terminated for threatening to punch his wife and lying about it.
In his rush to get SPD to “full strength” in two years, Barnes is hiring 50 to 70 officers who wouldn’t pass the department’s very low bar under normal circumstances.
To put that into sharp relief: He’s hiring 50 to 70 Kevin Daves a year.
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