Harrell's Hundred Million Dollar Spending Spree Got Us ONE COP

Zero, actually

Fiscal Incontinence

Bruce Harrell has positioned himself as a fiscal hawk. When even a centrist like Jean Godden says of Harrell’s recent budget that it “contemplates 159 layoffs at the city, a minimal housing commitment, and dedication to the business-friendly ‘no new taxes’ mantra” - you know you are warming up for the greatest hits from the Reagan era.

Beneath all this is a claim to some kind of fiscal responsibility. After all, Harrell demanded department heads hunt for “efficiency” gains.

So how efficient has Harrell been?

Well, his one big “plan” was to hire 500 more police officers. To aim for this, he has spent like Softbank at the peak of a tech bubble. (That’s tech-bro for the over-used “like a drunken sailor”). Let’s see how the return on tax dollars invested worked out when it came to police hiring in 2024.

At the end of 2023, the Mayor wrangled $21 million in extra money for SPD in the 2024 budget. Then in April, he rolled over and played dead on a contract with SPD when it came to police accountability. In return, we the people got an obligation to write a check to our officers for $57M in retroactive raises, with an increase in our annual bill for SPD salaries of $39 million.

If you add the $21M increase for 2024, plus the freebie $57M backward-looking pay increases, and the $39M annual salary increase pro-rated for seven of the twelve months of 2024, that is $101M extra dollars in $2024 to entice officers.

What did it get us?

The department grew by one officer.

One!

Actually, zero!

It was zero if you merely fast-forward to just January 6th, when SPD finally fired officer Kevin Dave two years after he ran Jaahnavi Kandula over in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour in a 25 mph zone. You might recall that her horrifying and entirely preventable death inspired chuckles from Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Officer who was second in charge of Seattle’s police union, in a discussion with the union’s MAGA President Mike Solan.

And, in case you have forgotten, that reckless driver was hired (and received a hiring bonus) despite the fact that Seattle Police knew he had a history of reckless driving. It was obvious many months before his firing that he was going to be fired–and in fact waiting until January 6th may have even been politically motivated so SPD could claim it was growing again.

In any case, I think we can safely say that $101M got us a net gain of zero officers for the year.

A More Generous Interpretation?

Now, to be fair to Harrell–the department was shrinking before.

Right-wing jackass Jason Rantz reports that in 2023, we lost 35 net officers. Since Harrell dropped a jackpot on getting us up to treading water, maybe we should credit him for 35 officers! Of course, that’s $2.9 million per officer–which is still stupidly bad.

But Did The Money Even Help?

And the rate of loss had come close to leveling off anyway—so it’s unclear how much of the improvement had to do with the huge influx of money. And anyway, police hiring is up all over the country and all over Washington—so Bruce’s big bet may have nothing to do with even our meager gains.

I’d like to note that it is nice to see the Seattle Times finally acknowledging that police hiring has something to do with police labor markets, and isn’t entirely determined by the statements of city councilors! The Times spent the entire time I was running for office pretending this wasn’t a thing and demanding that candidates like me TAKE A STAND on whether we “supported” the mayor’s “plan” to hire 500 officers. When candidates like me said we supported full staffing but we thought 500 was a pipe dream, they refused to print it. At Harrell’s current efficiency rate—we should get there in 500 years and after spending $500 billion.

It also just so happens that right when all the salary increases showed up, the Mayor finally demoted a scandal-ridden and abusive Chief. It is tough to know how much this was what impacted hiring.

(As a reminder, Mayor Harrell had stood by Chief Diaz for way too long when he was clearly unfit. Among the many harassment and toxic workplace scandals that bubbled up, Diaz also refused to fire the guy who laughed about the young woman killed by a police officer in a crosswalk—keeping him on the payroll for his remining 18 months in power. And in fact, even after demoting Diaz, Harrell continued to pay that ex-Chief top dollar until December when it became politically untenable.)

At the time of Diaz’' demotion, Sue Rahr took the reigns as interim chief. Rahr is a real reformer and a strong leader, so she may have played a significant role in the turnaround too.

On the other hand, SPD does appear to be recovering a bit more quickly than other big departments and it’s applicant pool (hires are not mentioned) is growing faster than other Washington cities. But this is all at great expense. And it could be due, as said, to Rahr’s presence, the bonuses, or just the simple phenomenon of “regression to the mean.”

Whatever the case, Harrell’s obscene spending spree has not got us much, and it has done so with defense-department levels of inefficiency.

The Money Came Mostly from the Poor and Workers

Now, if Harrell wanted to treat money like kindling, he could have at least tried taxing the rich, something we do a very bad job of in Washington State. (I’d prefer he tax the rich and spend the money efficiently and effectively myself). But he did something worse–he took the money away from poor people.

Where do did he get that $100M?

Harrell has primarily gone after vital services in the housing sector, including scaling back planned investments in affordable housing by nearly $100M a year, something polls showed voters adamantly opposed, and our recent nearly two-to-one vote for taxing the rich to fund social housing clearly confirms. Homelessness is increasing each year on Bruce’s watch, and these cuts came shortly after Washington State’s Commerce Department sounded the alarm regarding our acute shortage of affordable housing. Bruce topped all this off with cuts for relatively cheap, high yield programs that keep people housed who are at risk of falling into homelessness–like gutting rental assistance and tenant services.

That’s not all of course–there are the layoffs, and Harrell’s cuts to the office of labor standards, which catches companies stealing from workers or abusing employees, and much more.

Pretty much everything that was cut was taken from working class or poor people.

If Martin Luther King JR said that “budgets are moral documents,” I wonder what that says about the morality of our Mayor and the City Council that ratified his budget?

At the very least, I think we the people deserve better than this.

For Seattle Budget Info:

2025 Adopted and 2026 Endorsed Budget
2023 Adopted and 2024 Endorsed Budget