(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) In the face of skyrocketing crime and a crippling police officer recruitment and retainment crisis, Seattle Democrat Mayor Bruce Harrell’s administration faced intense backlash for a directive that the city’s already-beleaguered police department hire fewer white men and those with “military bearing.”
Harrell’s office originally refused to turn over the document in response to a public information request. When it was released by a whistleblower to The Jason Rantz Show, the administration tried to cover its tracks, according to report coverage from ZeroHedge.
After Ben Dalgetty, a digital media-spin wonk in the mayor’s office, took control of the Seattle Police Department’s marketing efforts, he fired off a memo in March to SPD’s human resources staff.
The directive, titled “SPD Marketing More and Less,” demanded “less” images and videos of “officers who are white, male,” and “officers with military bearing,” reported KTTH radio. “In their place, Dalgetty asked for more ‘officers of color,’ ‘officers of different genders’ and ‘officers who are younger.’”
The language in the memo that the mayor’s office initially disclosed, however, didn’t match the language of the original memo and contained multiple significant edits.
According to KTTH, “In one edit, Dalgetty removed language asking for fewer images and video of white men. In another edit, he removed references to officers with military bearing. Finally, Dalgetty removed: “This doesn’t mean no officers who are white or male or only young officers of color, but guidelines to shift the proportions of our photo/video collateral to more of some things and less of others.”
The mayor’s office eventually turned over the original memo and claimed the edited one that was provided resulted from an error having to do with an alleged glitch in the department’s cloud-based service for “online collaboration, editing, and storage.”
The original memo attracted immediate controversy, with one Seattle Police Department source telling Rantz, “I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? You put this in writing? It shows not only a lack of respect for officers, but a lack of respect for the military,” the source said.
“They have no understanding of someone willing to put their lives on the line for their fellow man. They don’t have respect.”
While the memo “does not appear on its face to contain rules for hiring or promotion. The narrow focus of the memo could potentially inoculate the SPD from legal liability, at least based solely on the creation and distribution of the memo,” Joshua Brittingham, a labor and employment attorney with Carney Badley Spellman, told Rantz.
At the same time, Brittingham said, “the memo might be used as evidence to demonstrate illegal discriminatory intent” if anyone tried taking the city to court over claims of discrimination.
Regardless of the memo’s legality, SPD officers were furious with its seeming intent.
“What I condemn and will forever continue to push back on is the verbiage within the recruitment document that calls for less of white male officers,” said Officer Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, who called the memo unnecessarily divisive.
“Less of people in leadership positions, and less of humans with military backgrounds. This is flat-out discrimination. Period. It is an affront to decency, reasonableness and further divides our communities,” Solan wrote in a statement to The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH.
“When politics is intentionally inserted into the public safety policing conversation, we all lose. It is embarrassing, shameful, and detrimental to a healthy functioning society.”
