POLICE STAFFING: Southwest Precinct rebounds from last year’s low, and response times speed up

Tomorrow morning, the City Council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee gets its latest periodic briefing on Seattle Police staffing. Here’s what we learned from the briefing presentation, which was posted today:

The Southwest Precinct (West Seattle and South Park) ended the first quarter with 54 officers and 10 sergeants. That’s up from 50 and 8 a year earlier, one fewer than the 56 and 9 from a year before that. (Those two charts were shown here.) Overall, the entire department ended the quarter with 1,029 fully trained officers, and 949 in service; SPD had projected it would make 31 hires during the first quarter and actually hired 26, while they projected 27 more officers would leave, and separations totaled 28. They’re now expecting the year will end with 33 officers fewer than they have budgeted for, and they expect that money will instead have to be spent on overtime, 80 percent of which SPD says goes toward meeting minimum staffing levels. Meantime, most of the $3.8 million budget for recruiting and retention has remained unspent; the meeting presentation attributes this mostly to the mayor’s office working on a “new marketing plan.”

Other numbers of interest in the presentation slide deck include response times. For the Southwest and West Precincts, they improved in all categories, though other precincts saw response times increase in some categories. For Southwest, the average response time for a “Priority 1” call is now 10 minutes, a full minute faster than a year earlier, though still well above the department’s 7-minute goal. Average response times for “Priority 2” calls in the SW Precinct fell from 44 to 41 minutes.

Tomorrow’s meeting is at 9:30 am, at City Hall and online; you can see the full agenda, and commenting info, here.

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