WA cop shortage persists statewide as lawmakers gear up in Olympia

Governor-elect Bob Ferguson wants an extra $100 million in the state’s upcoming biennial 2025-2027 budget to hire more local police officers throughout a state that has the lowest cop-to-citizen ratio in the nation.

“We rank last per capita in the United States. Unacceptable,” Ferguson said at a Thursday press conference.

“He will not sign a budget that does not include this policy,” wrote Ferguson spokeswoman Brionna Aho in an email.At a Thursday press availability, House and Senate leaders sympathized with Ferguson’s stance, but were unsure where the extra money will come from.That’s because the upcoming legislative session has to overcome a $12 billion budget shortfall over the next four years that will require program cuts and new revenue. “I love to see how he balances that $100 million in the budget he proposes,” recently retired Sen. Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, told Cascade PBS. Padden is a longtime GOP leader on crime and justice matters.Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond and chair of the Senate’s Law and Justice Committee, made a similar observation, saying that balancing the $100 million for extra officers with the major budget shortfall will be tricky.A year ago, Washington’s officer/civilian ratio was 1.12 per 1,000 people, down from 1.23 in 2019, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. The national average is 2.3, according to the FBI. No one really knows why Washington ranked dead last. But experts can generalize about why officers are dropping out of the profession here and elsewhere. Reasons include job pressures, burnout, frustrations, the fluctuating stigmas of being a cop, bad hours for raising a family, sometimes long commutes because an officer cannot afford to live in the city they are protecting and a lack of local money to hire new law enforcement officers.Washington’s law enforcement agencies have added more than 100 officers in the past year, but the state’s population has grown at a greater rate, said Steve Strachan, the Association’s executive director. “We did not keep up with population growth,” Strachan said.Washington had 10,393 sworn officers a year ago.“The shortage of officers is so severe that it’s not gonna be addressed in one year or two,” Strachan said.For the past couple of years, both Republicans and Democrats have pointed to Washington’s cop shortage as a major problem. The extra $100 million was part of the Democrat Ferguson’s gubernatorial campaign.However, with each local law enforcement agency handling its own staffing shortages, no one really knows how many new officers are actually needed, which hampers setting specific statewide hiring and retention goals as well as raising much of the cash. Also until recently, there has been a training bottleneck. Another obstacle: Increased training capacity and greater hiring requires money, and lawmakers differ on where it should come from. In fact, the Legislature punted last year on raising money to hire new officers. Attempts included Senate Bill 6076 and Senate Bill 5770, which would have allowed increases in some local taxes to go to police. Both Democratic bills died. Another proposal by Rep. Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn, to appropriate $90 million from the state’s general fund to hire more officers, House Bill 1446, died in committee. It is unknown yet whether any of those bills will be resurrected this year.At this time last year, Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle and the new Senate majority leader, said that most legislators did not want to increase taxes in the 2024 election year, but the landscape may have changed. In November, the public rejected two antitax initiatives, plus a third initiative that would have repealed a law that charged polluting companies in a carbon cap-and-invest system to pay for projects aimed at mitigating climate change. Voters overwhelmingly decided to keep the two taxes and the charges to polluters, apparently swayed by arguments that the benefits from those programs justified the extra costs to the public. In recent weeks, Pedersen and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, said those initiative ballot results indicate that the public might be open to new taxes in the upcoming legislative session. If $100 million is added for hiring new officers, the money is expected to be distributed as grants to individual police and sheriff’s departments to hire and retrain officers. “I hope it doesn’t lead to bidding wars between agencies,” Strachan said. Meanwhile, a major obstacle to increasing the number of Washington’s cops appears to have been fixed.For years, Washington’s Criminal Justice Training Center in Burien — the state’s police academy — has been able to handle only 600 police and deputy trainees a year, limiting the flow of new officers to the state’s 275 police and sheriffs’ departments. Another barrier is that Burien is a long distance from southern, northern and eastern Washington. A trainee spends four and a half months at the Training Center. This is a hardship for single-parent or even two-parent families from most of the state. Often, new hires at many departments have had to wait up to a year to get trained.Over the past three years, the Training Center has added satellite campuses in Vancouver, Pasco and Spokane — with a fourth opening soon in Arlington. These campuses largely solved the backlog and travel-time issues. The entire training system graduated 844 new officers and deputies in 2024.“To add that many training centers in a short time is notable,” Strachan said. The one-year waiting times are now down to one month, said Training Center head Monica Alexander. In fact, a new major problem is that not enough trainees are coming to the campuses to operate them at 100% capacity, she added. “I have the seats. They don’t have the people. … I’m still waiting to fill in my classes,” Alexander said.Alexander’s biggest frustration is that no one knows many new cops Washington needs, which handicaps the Training Center’s long-range planning. Each police and sheriff’s department has their individual shortages, staffing standards, hiring goals and budget problems.The Training Center sent questionnaires to all 275 law agencies about their needs and plans, and received 128 responses. Alexander’s best estimate is that those 128 agencies are short roughly 900 officers in all. Her input from the Seattle police department says it alone needs 400 new officers.Another wrinkle is that the 36-acre Training Center is too small. The Burien campus needs more firing range space, a bigger space for a mock city of buildings to train for entering and clearing rooms, and more dormitories. About 72 acres will be needed, Alexander said. A study looked at expanding the Burien site or building at places in Federal Way or Auburn. The July 1, 2024, report recommended the Auburn site. The price tag: $958 million.Outgoing Gov. Jay Inslee was legally required to unveil a proposed 2025-27 budget in December. That proposal — guided by the projected $12 billion shortfall— did not include the $100 million for extra officers nor money for a new training center. But other than being a preliminary map of budget issues, Inslee’s proposal has no teeth.What counts are what Ferguson and the Democrats, which hold majorities in the Senate and House, want. So far, despite Ferguson’s stated priority, they have not released any specific plans. Alexander cannot predict if and when the Legislature might appropriate money for a new main training center. She expects it to be allocated in phases across a few years. But delaying the allocations will mean the construction and materials costs will increase.“The more we kick the can down the road, the more expensive it will get,” she said.