Chief Carmen Best announced yesterday she would be resigning effective September 2nd in a message to Seattle Police Department (SPD) employees after conservative radio host Dori Monson leaked the news. Chief Best blamed the Seattle City Council for her early departure, saying she felt personally targeted by their proposal to cut executive pay and fire officers out of seniority order to weed out the worst offenders for excessive force and misconduct.
Earlier in the day, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to cut the Seattle Police Department’s $409 million budget by 7% or the equivalent of 100 officer positions as part of a Covid-triggered re-balancing package. Many of the cuts likely will be achievable by attrition, but some may need to be layoffs.
Docking the chief’s pay by 40% for the remainder of 2020 had been in the package until Councilmember Lisa Herbold introduced an amendment pulling back the paycut to a modest 6.5% cut (or 2% averaged out over the year). The amendment passed on a 5-2 vote–with only Councilmembers Kshama Sawant and Tammy Morales opposed.
The paycut means Chief Best’s 2020 salary would have worked out to $287,754 had she stayed on all year–this is based on the police chief’s new salary of $275,000 plus the payments she had received on her previous $294,000 salary. The paycuts only apply to 2020, although the council may choose to make them permanent during fall budget deliberations.
Best was the first Black women to lead SPD, which led some commentators, such as former HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims and Vox‘s Matt Yglesias, to frame her resignation as a blow to racial justice.
Some protest leaders pushed back on that framing.
“How many Black people in Seattle wanna fill in Matt on how this was a Black-led effort from our Black-led movements have been organizing for MONTHS?” said Kamau Chege, director of the Washington Census Alliance, in a tweet.
