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.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.”
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.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.”
