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Rantz: Mayor’s office demanded fewer white men, military in Seattle
police recruitment
Jul 31, 2023, 5:55 PM | Updated: Aug 1, 2023, 9:57 am

Seattle Police Recruitment...
(Seattle TV)

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BY JASON RANTZ
The Jason Rantz Show, 3pm-7pm on KTTH
After taking over recruitment efforts for the Seattle Police Department
(SPD), Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office demanded the department show
fewer white men and “military bearing” in recruitment materials,
according to a memo exclusively obtained by The Jason Rantz Show on
KTTH. The document was seemingly destroyed and the Mayor’s office did
not initially turn it over through a public disclosure request, as
required by law.

Ben Dalgetty, a Digital Strategy Lead from the Mayor’s office, took
control of SPD marketing efforts. In a March 2023 memo to SPD human
resources staff titled “SPD Marketing More and Less,” Dalgetty asked for
“less” images and videos of “officers who are white, male,” and
“officers with military bearing.” In their place, Dalgetty asked for
more “officers of color,” “officers of different genders,” and “officers
who are younger.”

The memo was part of a larger effort to hire fewer white men, according
to a source, and it may be illegal.

‘You put this in writing?’
The memo caused a stir and the demand was seen by some at the SPD as
discriminatory.

“I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? You put this in writing?'” one source
inside the department tells The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH on the
condition of anonymity. “It shows not only a lack of respect for
officers, but a lack of respect for the military. They have no
understanding of someone willing to put their lives on the line for
their fellow man. They don’t have respect.”

The source said the intent of the mayor’s recruitment team was to hire
fewer white officers and military veterans. After learning that the memo
raised significant concerns, Dalgetty edited the file of the memo,
effectively destroying a record that the city was obliged to maintain
for public disclosure.

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Mayor’s office looked for non-white officers
When Harrell announced his recruitment and retention plan in July 2022,
vowing to hire 500 cops by 2027, he committed to a police department
with “diverse racial and immigration backgrounds.” He called for a “new
kind of officer.” This meant the recruitment strategy needed to evolve.

The intent, it turned out, appeared to mean hiring fewer white men and
military veterans, which represent protected classes, at a time that the
department is dangerously and desperately short of police officers. The
department lost 61 officers through June 30, 2023 and only recruited 41.
As exclusively reported by The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH, some 70% of
recruitment (and retention) initiatives and programs the mayor promised
to complete by 2020 are either incomplete or abandoned.

Still, the Mayor’s office focused some SPD marketing efforts on outlets
meant to exclusively reach black, Hispanic, Asian Seattleites. There
were no white people featured in any of the photos the city turned over
as part of the marketing.

In March 2023, Dalgetty worked with SPD human resources staff to create
marketing materials for an April recruitment initiative. They planned to
advertise with the Seattle Medium and Urban Contemporary station KYIZ
(both are promoted towards the African American community in King
County), classic regional Mexican radio station El Rey, and the
International Examiner, a newspaper focused on the Asian American community.

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Editing out the controversy
The memo offered “guidelines … for relative terms compared to previous
SPD marketing efforts.” He said that he wanted to “shift the proportions
of our photo/video collateral” away from featuring white male officers,
and towards the younger officers of color with different genders.

He clarified to staff that the guidelines “doesn’t mean no officers who
are white or male or only young officers of color,” but that’s how it
was taken. The police source tells me it also revealed how little
Dalgetty and his team understood about police recruiting.

“This was not their area of expertise and they didn’t understand the
police department or what it took to recruit police officers,” the
source explained.

After complaints from SPD, Dalgetty edited the memo several times.

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.”

(Memo obtained by The Jason Rantz Show)

Legality of memo
According to the police source, several within the SPD were livid with
the memo. Their jobs were already hard enough and they were
uncomfortable with race-based hiring. As maddening, one said, the “less”
portion was completely unnecessary. But did it describe illegal
discrimination?

Joshua Brittingham, a labor & employment attorney with Carney Badley
Spellman, said the memo could haunt the city of Seattle should anyone
make a legal claim of discrimination.

“The SPD Marketing More and Less memo focuses on images for marketing
purposes. It 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,” Brittingham tells The Jason Rantz Show on
KTTH. “That said, employment laws prohibit refusing to hire,
terminating, or discriminating against any person in wages or in other
terms or conditions of employment based on race and veteran/military
status. In the event of such discrimination — for example, an officer
demoted or fired because he was white or a veteran — the memo might be
used as evidence to demonstrate illegal discriminatory intent.”

Police union weighs in
Officer Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild
(SPOG), calls the memo unnecessarily divisive. He notes that “95% of
what is listed in this recruiting document SPOG fully supports.”

“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. 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.”

The Seattle Police Department, via a spokesperson, did not deny the memo
caused a stir for staff. Instead, the spokesperson said in a statement
that the department is committed to hiring staff that represents “the
full diversity of our city.”

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Memo was seemingly destroyed
It took the Mayor’s office months to supply the memo via a public
disclosure request. In the initial disclosures, the original memo was
not provided. Instead, the updated memo was supplied.

“After speaking with Ben [Dalgetty], my understanding is that the record
you’ve referred to was shared as a ‘live’ OneDrive link and was not
attached to an e-mail,” the public disclosure officer emailed on July
10, over three months after the initial request. OneDrive is a
cloud-based service for online collaboration, editing, and storage. “As
with OneDrive documents shared out for collaboration, edits were made to
the ‘live’ OneDrive link that was still in draft form on March 22, 2023
and March 23, 2023. The only version that we have of that record is the
version that has already been provided to you.”

It’s unclear if Dalgetty knew that OneDrive files track the history of
edits made to a document. After The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH informed
the public disclosure officer of the OneDrive history feature, the memo
was belatedly turned over.

Staying silent
Though there’s no indication Dalgetty willfully withheld the document, a
point the public information officer made in a statement to the Jason
Rantz Show on KTTH, it doesn’t matter.

The memo edits weren’t properly saved to be turned over for a request
that clarified, “The [Delgatty] emails should include all documents
attached or linked to.” This incident begs the question: how often is
the Mayor’s office withholding information (or not traditionally saving
them) by using “live editing” on documents that they are legally
obligated from maintaining for public records? If asking for “all
documents” attached to emails isn’t interpreted as desiring all
documents prior to being edited, what requests haven’t been properly
fulfilled?