New Contract Will Give Seattle Police Officers Significant Raises

Seattle and its largest police union have agreed on a new contract that will give officers significant new raises while clearing the way for a more independent nonpolice crisis response team.

The contract, which still needs to be ratified by the Seattle City Council, ticks off a major priority for Mayor Bruce Harrell just two weeks before an election. After years of restrictions, imposed by previous labor agreements, on the city’s new alternative police response, the new document frees crisis responders to answer calls without the assistance of armed officers. It also lifts restrictions on how many responders the city can hire.

In exchange, Seattle officers, who were already the highest paid in the state, can now earn nearly $120,000 in their first year on the job — an almost 13% raise from last year and nearly 40% over the previous seven years.

Those raises include retroactive increases for 2024 and 2025, plus additional raises for 2026 and 2027. The officers' union ratified the contract over the weekend.

The agreement, first reported by Publicola on Tuesday, marks a new era for the city’s Community Assisted Response & Engagement department. Formally established in 2023, the department aims to fill the gaps between police and fire 911 calls and other incidents that demand a response, but are neither life-threatening nor criminal. Often, this includes people in mental health crises, who’ve fallen and can’t get up or who need any number of welfare-related checks.

There has always been space between, 'Round everyone up and arrest them' and, 'Do nothing and call it compassion,'" said the chief of the department, Amy Barden.

Harrell called the agreement "groundbreaking," and said it moves the idea of a police alternative "from a promise of public safety to a complete paradigm shift."

The CARE department, arguably the most prominent byproduct of the George Floyd-era protests, has never fully spread its wings. Initially imagined to be an independent branch, it has been tethered to police since its founding.

That’s because the Seattle Police Officers Guild, representing rank-and-file officers, has insisted on negotiating its impact on the scope of the team's work. Many individual officers frequently express displeasure at responding to the kinds of calls the new department would assume; nevertheless, union leadership seized the leverage it had over its operations.

As a result, the CARE department has been functioning on a temporary agreement for the past two years that limited its size to 24 responders and required crisis responders be dispatched alongside police.

That understanding has caused some conflict. Police were documented as subverting the new crisis responders by either canceling dispatches or closing calls before the responder arrived.

In theory, this new agreement should clear away some of those hurdles, though the officers and crisis responders will still likely work closely together.

Negotiations between the city and the police union have been protracted and intense for years. As the city has sought new accountability measures, in part to free itself of federal oversight, the officers union has held out for more money.

A 2024 agreement between the two sides catapulted Seattle officers to being the highest paid in the state, in exchange for some modest improvements to increasing the jobs that can be done by civilians and processes to hold officers accountable.

At the same time, that agreement left untouched some of the primary concerns of the accountability process, including the arbitration process, which often overturns disciplinary decisions imposed by the police chief.

That had been a major frustration of U.S. District Judge James Robart, who was overseeing the federal consent decree over the department. Robart, however, lifted that oversight over the summer.

The contract does give more flexibility around the 180-day timeline for the Office of Police Accountability to complete its investigations into complaints against officers and opens up new paths for settling low-level complaints.

But as with the 2024 contract, it leaves open many questions around police accountability. Harrell's chief of staff, Andrew Myerberg, said the two sides reached an impasse on the issues of arbitration, the standard for overturning a chief's disciplinary decision, and the burden of proof for proving that a misconduct finding was done properly.

"We were not willing to compromise these accountability provisions," he said.

Eci Ameh, executive director of the Community Police Commission, said she was disappointed the two sides couldn't agree on more accountability measures.

"This has kind of been the history and it’s really unfortunate," she said. "We think that (Seattle Police Officers Guild) has this huge opportunity to build and garner trust by showing that police accountability is just as important as everything else that we’ve seen them advocate for in these negotiations.

The pay raises to officers seem to have juiced hiring to the department. After years of losing more officers than the department could hire, it's on pace to add as many as 90 net new hires this year, though not all of those will make it through all of the training and probationary steps.

That pace has led to the Seattle Police Department receiving the largest boost of funding from the city's general fund in the mayor's proposed 2026 budget, even as other departments were asked to scale back.

To help fund an expansion of the police alternative, City Hall recently signed off an a 0.1% additional city sales tax that is projected to raise $40 million.

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