Seattle considers changes to police hiring tests and gig delivery worker pay

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice. In this corner, the editor and publisher of Publicola, Erica C Barnett, Erica Crank Barnett because the C is for Crank and in wrestling we have to give people nicknames. Erica, how are you doing?

[00:00:25] I'm great. How are you doing, David? I'm good. And in the other corner to Erica's right, political consultant Sandeep Kaushik Do you have a nickname? No. No, no, no. All right. Listeners write in if you've got one. It's real Seattle Nice at gmail.com. Only flattering.

[00:00:44] If you're asking listeners, my nickname is going to end up asshole. Don't do it. That's not true. OK, on today's podcast, we've got sizzling hot Seattle City Council topics, the debate over gig worker pay for delivery drivers.

[00:00:59] But first, a proposal that would make it easier to become a police officer in Seattle by moving to an easier test for applicants. Erica's got the story up on Publicola about that. Erica C Barnett, what's the story?

[00:01:14] Well, the story, I mean, is basically as you described it, there is a test that cops have to take and it was developed in collaboration actually with SPD, which was under a consent decree at the time over things like bias and use of force.

[00:01:29] That test is pretty selective. I think only about 65, 68 percent of people pass. Sarah Nelson, City Council president is working on legislation that would require a independent commission that administers the test to switch to a different test that 90 percent of people pass on the first try.

[00:01:49] So I mean, it's essentially a test that almost everyone passes and goes on to the next stage of hiring. The implication was essentially that the test that most of the agencies in the region use is easier and more appealing to police applicants.

[00:02:04] And so we need to get in line with the rest of the region. And of course, this is a controversial idea. The head of the commission told me this week that the City Council doesn't really have

[00:02:14] the authority to do that because they are a completely independent commission that was created by the state. And so I think there's going to be a battle about that if and when Sarah Nelson does proposes officially.

[00:02:24] Sadeeb Khashoggi, does it make sense for Seattle to move to a system where only the bottom 10th percentile of applicants get rejected? Well, the test is just one piece in what is I hear from folks in city government,

[00:02:40] not just at the council, but in the mayor's office and at SPD, think is an overly cumbersome and convoluted process. And so the reality is even right now, something like more than two thirds of the people pass the tests that's administered currently, only a very tiny

[00:02:57] fraction of applicants who apply end up becoming officers. Like it's a really, really minimal number. And the concern is that there are a number of unnecessary bureaucratic loopholes that don't actually have much to do with the quality of the, you know,

[00:03:15] of the people that end up moving their way through the process that is really curtailing the ability of SPD to meet its recruitment targets. Right. So Erica's story about the test, I don't know much about the comparison between

[00:03:28] these two tests and maybe there's an argument here that it's really not the tests that's a problem. It's other stuff like I hear there are delays between when somebody, you know, kind of takes the test and does the initial vet and when they get

[00:03:42] forwarded on to SPD for the next stage, weeks and weeks go by and people drop out of the process. So there may be other issues that are more front and center about why there's bottlenecks in this process.

[00:03:53] And it's not really the test fault here, but nonetheless, it does seem like the internal processes of how they're doing recruitment isn't working and it's kind of fucked up. You know, you're describing basically the Sarah Nelson view of the world and the Kathy Moore view of the world.

[00:04:07] And I would say that the head of this independent commission, which is called the PSCSC pretty convincingly put the light to that. One thing that she pointed out is that if they process these tests, you know, and move applicants forward faster, that is not where the bottleneck lies.

[00:04:24] There are bottlenecks in the process for sure. But doing this on a two week cadence rather than a six week cadence is going to mean that they're forwarding, you know, a handful of applicants rather than, you know, a larger handful of applicants.

[00:04:39] So we're talking about very small numbers of people to begin with. And I think that that very small fraction of people who apply is for a whole lot of other reasons. I mean, the largest being that people apply to jobs all the time

[00:04:51] and drop out because they get other jobs. This is not just true of police. This is true of literally any job. So I think that we're placing a lot of the blame for the fact that the city has failed to hire police on these sort of civil

[00:05:04] service bureaucrats and other elements of the process when the real problem is, you know, they are not getting qualified applicants. And the test just real quickly to respond to that point was developed specifically to test for things that we as a city want in police officers.

[00:05:22] Things like, you know, are they going to be biased against certain racial groups? Do they have judgment? Are they likely to, you know, snap and use force? And again, this test was developed in collaboration with the Seattle Police Department, which paid for a lot of it.

[00:05:37] I don't know that Spog, the police union or SPD is dying to have a less competitive test where, you know, they're going to get potentially colleagues that don't pass muster, that maybe would pass muster in a small town

[00:05:51] where, you know, you don't have the same kinds of issues and problems. But, you know, are not really suited for big city policing. So the test is the test for a reason. Maybe the other test is fine too.

[00:06:02] But I think the real problem is that people don't want to be police officers in Seattle. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Erica, is this test sort of a hybrid where the city got some input

[00:06:14] on to what is ultimately this national testing exam that's a standardized test of some sort? Because I'm seeing cities all over the country have something like this, this national testing network test. Or is it just something that was developed locally?

[00:06:29] It was something that was developed locally and is used by other West Coast cities. So it was developed very much locally with SPD. Right. Though, as David mentioned at the top of this, most of the other police

[00:06:41] departments in the state use this other test that the mayor's office and the council seems to be desiring to switch over to. But again, even with this current test, something like 68% of people are passing this test.

[00:06:53] But the numbers I'm hearing are the people that are actually kind of making the process of those 68%. Like only 3% of applicants are actually or something like that is a number I'm hearing are actually making it through the process. And they were about... Again, not making it through.

[00:07:07] People are dropping out. Let's be clear. It's not like the Seattle Police Department and the bureaucrats in the process are like weeding out 97% of people because so incredibly hard to become a police officer. Right. And there's a question about why they're dropping out.

[00:07:23] And is this because of bureaucratic stickiness in some cases? I mean, do you really think that, Sandy? If you keep saying what is the bureaucrat... So the Public Safety Civil Service Commission is a three-member body.

[00:07:35] There are three staffers in the entire city that are working for this organization. And do you believe that that is really the bottleneck? It is a bottleneck. Of course it's a bottleneck. I mean, I don't know about the commission, but there is a significant bottleneck in this

[00:07:51] way, especially if you're trying to do non-traditional police recruitment. We want to have a police force that is more reflective and representative of the city. That's a red herring, Sandy. Why would a more diverse group of people be more impacted by having to take a competitive test

[00:08:07] that tests for things like empathy, racial bias? Why would a more diverse group of people be impacted by that more heavily than your typical white male group? I think that's a red herring. Plenty of other departments are using this other test.

[00:08:22] Maybe it's really terrible and blah, blah, blah. But again, the test itself doesn't seem to be the problem here. The problem here is the broader process seems pretty fucked up. It takes months and months and months. It takes months to hire for a young person.

[00:08:36] You're coming from a non-traditional background. You're interested maybe in becoming a cop. But you can't wait around for months and months and months to figure out whether they're going to like give you a role. Have you ever applied for a government job? It takes a long ass time.

[00:08:51] I just think that you're talking at your ass a little bit here. Well, I think they had more than 2,000 applicants to be a Seattle police officer last year. Now that is way down from where it used to be. It's about half of what it used to be.

[00:09:05] But it's still a pretty large pool of applicants. And the fact that only a tiny, tiny fraction of that is making through the process because many people are dropping out. Many maybe most of those people should be dropping out. But I don't think it's a bad idea.

[00:09:18] It'll kind of say like, hey, maybe we can figure out ways to make this process a little more welcoming. Yeah, and I think this point in the process that you're looking at is not the problem.

[00:09:29] And I also think the issue with police hiring, I mean, the 2,000 applicants in a whole year is not very much, frankly. And this kind of goes to, is this this huge bottleneck? I mean, they're getting like six to nine applicants a day right now. That's not very many.

[00:09:46] And processing those is not the area of the process where they're falling short, where they're falling short is qualified applicants on the front end and diverse applicants. And I will point out that KUOW has been doing some good reporting

[00:10:01] and Publicola has also reported on the misogynistic and hostile work environment that many, many women in the department are describing. And so when you talk about do you want to work at a place? So you look at the culture.

[00:10:14] And I have not seen any movement beyond this Before the Badge program, which tries to recruit more racially diverse applicants or tries to prepare people to work in a more racially diverse environment and diverse in other ways.

[00:10:29] There's not really a lot of visible efforts to change the culture. And I think that is where they need to make changes. And it's not, you know, in these piddly little bureaucratic quote unquote bottle necks that they keep kind of nibbling around the edges of.

[00:10:43] And I think if they change this test and if they somehow force the commission to start forwarding names more quickly, they'll find very quickly that it doesn't solve the problem. So, Andeep, I don't know for sure based on this,

[00:10:54] because I don't know enough about it, I haven't done the reporting, how much they're actually lowering standards here. But I do think there is some irony about a more conservative for Seattle City Council contemplating doing that if that's what's being considered here with this test.

[00:11:11] And I will say there was a story in 60 minutes a few years ago in the late 90s. So this is more than 20 years ago. But I remember it because it was about an officer who was suing the New London Police Department

[00:11:24] because they had implemented an IQ testing program there for cops, you know, IQ testing, they wouldn't do that today. But this guy had scored like above 120 on the IQ test. And he was rejected because what they found in New London was routine police work is super boring.

[00:11:43] And so that people with higher IQs get bored and tend to move on. So their recidivism rate was really high. And New London is this kind of decaying, you know, Connecticut town that couldn't afford that. And at the same time that this was happening

[00:11:56] according to the 60 minutes episode, I think it was like Aspen, Colorado was only hiring cops who had advanced more advanced degrees or college degrees. I can't remember just like number of years ago that I saw it. But it was illustrating this contrast what they found in Aspen,

[00:12:12] you know, which is a Shishi Colorado ski town was that their citizenry preferred to interact with these better educated cops or whatever. My only point by bringing that up is you could solve a lot of problems potentially by lowering standards when it comes to police recruitment and retention.

[00:12:29] But if that's what they're doing by moving away from this test, even if it solves one problem, have they fully thought through? Do you think the other problems that it might create shouldn't a city like Seattle, if anything be raising standards?

[00:12:41] I mean, 2020 isn't that far in the past. And sure, we've got a problem with crime, but we still have ongoing questions about policing and police reform. Those issues haven't gone away. This council said it was concerned about accountability. So how does lowering standards lead to higher accountability

[00:12:57] if that's what's going on here? I that's not what's going on here. So short answer, right? I don't think I think at least the intent of what I'm hearing from folks at the city is that there is a strong feeling.

[00:13:10] And I think there's some contrary to what Erica is saying, there's some pretty good evidence for it that the intake application and intake process for becoming a Seattle police officer is overly cumbersome and bureaucratic in ways that are not about maintaining

[00:13:28] high standards but are just about the normal sort of stuff that can happen with governmental processes where it becomes just incredibly cumbersome and not very user friendly and all of those sorts of things. And that there's a desire to try to fix some of those bottlenecks,

[00:13:45] whether they should switch tests or not. I don't really have an opinion on it. It doesn't seem to me like the test is the big bottleneck here, but there's other stuff going on that does seem to be really,

[00:13:56] really reducing the number of people that can kind of express initial interest but then fall away from the process. I think there's no evidence that this batching versus sending names through to SPD every two weeks, which is the change in the process that we're actually talking about here.

[00:14:16] I think there's no evidence whatsoever that that is going to remove some giant bureaucratic bottleneck. I think it's something that the council seems very keen on, but I think again they're defaulting to the things that they feel they have control over.

[00:14:30] There's questions about whether they actually have control over this, but those can be sorted out I suppose later. I think they're grasping at straws here when what they need to do is, A, wait for the contract because I do think that there is some question about

[00:14:47] police officers looking at competitive agencies in the region and saying, their starting pay is higher so I'm going to go there. So that's one issue. And the other issue is again the culture. And I think just sort of discounting and poo-pooing that and saying,

[00:15:00] I would know it's these three bureaucrats working for this commission that are causing all the problems. As Kathy Moore seemed to be suggesting last a couple of weeks ago, I think that's really losing sight of what the actual issues are with police siring.

[00:15:16] And I did not say that because I actually agree with you. I think there are ongoing cultural issues at SPD and I think you're right. Those there needs to be more effort put into addressing some of those things, not the stuff you raised about women on the force.

[00:15:34] And yeah, I think that that reporting is important and good. But there's been a series of things that continue to raise flags about the internal culture of SVD and things that need to happen here.

[00:15:48] And I mentioned this, Eric and I were on a panel discussion last night about the New City Council. And I pointed this out former Mayor Jenny Durkin, who was US Attorney before becoming mayor and was instrumental in first developing the consent decree that SPD operates under,

[00:16:04] used to say that police reform is not a destination. It is an ongoing continuous process. And what you meant by that was it wasn't like, oh, we do these three things and rub our hands together and say, oh, now police is great. Our police operations are great.

[00:16:23] Our culture is fine. We don't have to worry about it anymore. That police reform is something you got to work on continuously because we're talking about an armed quasi military force that has a lot of authority.

[00:16:35] And so you've got to constantly be vigilant about working on that culture and make sure it continues to uphold the standards we want as a city. And I don't know, I think there's definitely room here.

[00:16:49] We're definitely seeing some signs that there needs to be some greater focus on cultural issues as well. I don't think that's quite the same as the, I don't know why you're so hung up on defending these

[00:16:58] three bureaucrats who have this love waiting six weeks to send the names over as opposed to two weeks. I mean, it doesn't seem like the end of the world if we try it the other way. Right? I mean, that's fine.

[00:17:10] But I think that I was responding to your statement that this is some huge bureaucratic bottleneck when I think, you know, I mean, for one thing, there are massive bottlenecks at the other end of the process that we can't do anything about.

[00:17:22] Like the fact that the State Academy takes five people from Seattle at one time every month. So there's hundreds of people on that waiting list right now. And so, you know, they're just there bottlenecks all the way along the line.

[00:17:35] I don't think this is a very significant one if it's a bottleneck at all. And again, I think there's a real question about whether the city council has the authority to be bossing around a completely independent entity that, you know, exists because of state authority.

[00:17:50] And again, I don't know that. I mean, they've gotten sued over this before. It's been a while, but Spock, the police union sued when the city council tried to pass an ordinance that took a lot of the PSCSEs authority away and gave it to the HR department.

[00:18:05] And guess what? Spock won. And that is one reason that this commission has the power and authority it does now. So, you know, I would imagine that the police themselves may not be happy about these changes.

[00:18:19] I don't know what the impetus was for going after this organization or this commission, but it's just a pretty weird thing to focus on when you've got a bottleneck at the far end and you don't have a lot of applicants coming in the door in the first place.

[00:18:35] I just want to point out while we move on to a different topic that last year, one or both of you in response to my saying, well, if the city is serious about wanting to hire

[00:18:44] more cops, they should offer more pay. Both of you said, oh, has nothing to do with pay. Every city in the country is having a hard time with cops. We were already paying too much. And now just in this episode...

[00:18:53] I don't think you're nervous that we're already paying too much. Yes, you did. I could go back and find the receipts for that, whatever the word is. In any case, so we're moving on to gig worker pay.

[00:19:01] There is a... I wouldn't say there's a hot debate on the council over gig worker pay, but there's a range of views on the council from Tammy Morales on the left to, I don't know who on the right, over gig worker pay.

[00:19:14] Sandeep is actually working on this issue. So he's a pretty invested source in the interest of full disclosure. But Sandeep, what did we learn this week about gig worker pay proposals and this issue being revisited?

[00:19:27] Yeah, the council president Nelson, her economic development committee held a hearing on this yesterday, an initial hearing with the idea that this council wants to develop legislation that revises the earning standard legislation that was passed by the previous council.

[00:19:48] And the reason they're doing that is the earning standard passed by the previous council went into effect on January 13th. In response to it, some of the companies, Dordache, who I consult for and other companies,

[00:20:04] raised the cost of delivery and said basically the earning standard you guys set is so rich that we can't afford to do delivery at the previous rate, so we have to add a surcharge delivery. And that has caused an immediate consumer backlash that has significantly reduced demand

[00:20:23] to the point that drivers, instead of earning more money, in many cases they're actually earning less money and they're waiting three times or more longer between deliveries. And so it's basically disrupted the market to a significant extent that this council seems

[00:20:40] interested in revisiting that earning standard and saying what can we do to fix this so that we can get the market back into equilibrium, restore the demand, and hopefully actually increase the pay of drivers as was intended. And I would say, and again I'm a consultant for

[00:20:55] Dordache here but the companies warned the previous city council that this was likely to happen if they went with the earning standard that they ended up imposing, right? This was sold as saying that drivers net income for drivers in many cases in Seattle was not meeting Seattle's

[00:21:14] minimum wage which is 1997 an hour. And that was true in some cases though in the vast majority of cases drivers were already making more than 1997 an hour net. But we, the company said

[00:21:26] to the council if you want to align it with to make sure that everybody earns at least the Seattle minimum wage and gets before tips and before mileage, we can do that without blowing up the market. But if you want to set net compensation at something approaching north

[00:21:44] of really $30 an hour which is really what they did, then that's going to cause us to raise prices and there could be some major downstream negative impacts of that. And that's exactly what happened

[00:21:56] right? Uber Eats has announced that they've seen a 30% reduce in order volume. This just went into effect. Drive forward a driver organization says that driver earnings are down significantly. I forget the exact percentage they presented to the council yesterday on a survey they did

[00:22:13] of 550 drivers. So the market seems to have disrupted, drivers are complaining, restaurants are complaining, customers are complaining. There's actually a lot of talk about repealing the earning standard entirely but it's looking like the direction it's more likely headed

[00:22:28] is they'll revisit the standard and try to adjust the inputs into it to bring it to a place that the companies can get back much closer to where it was before in a way that hopefully will restore demand, increase the number of deliveries and raise driver pay.

[00:22:46] So I guess the one or two points that I'd respond to from Sunnip's soliloquy, there's a real nice gig job you got there would be a shame if something happened to it attitude from these companies. You say that they said this was going to happen. Well, it doesn't

[00:23:03] just happen. I mean the companies decide that if the council takes the action that they took of increasing wages then they will impose a fee of I believe it's $5 per order

[00:23:17] that they know will depress demand and cause pain for drivers. And so I think that there hasn't been a lot of transparency around that $5 amount and whether that is actually necessary, I would say being doughied and believing corporations that say that they had no choice but to

[00:23:38] pose a job killing fee is naive. You know, Sunnip you work for DoorDash I understand that that is the perspective you're paid to promulgate. But yeah, I mean I'm very skeptical of this fee as necessary and you know frankly these gig companies are unnecessary middlemen in a process

[00:23:58] that they make a tremendous amount of money off of at the expense not just of these workers but also at the expense of restaurants. They take a giant cut out of restaurant earnings and

[00:24:11] the only thing that they provide as far as I can tell is basically an app. And so, you know, I don't use these companies I think that they are bad for our society. I think they're bad for

[00:24:21] restaurants and I think they're bad for workers. But I also think that the council, you know, green as it is could use a little more skepticism on when listening to these companies plead poverty because it is in the country's company's interest, you know,

[00:24:36] whatever the true costs are to say that they don't have any choice other than to kill people's jobs and to essentially pull out of the market. And I think that should be greeted with a lot of

[00:24:46] skepticism. Well one company did entirely pull out of the market shift right? They stopped operating in Seattle after the law wouldn't affect other companies impose a surcharge and because again, just really quickly like if the Seattle City Council announced tomorrow that

[00:25:02] we're raising effective immediately the current minimum wage of 20 bucks an hour to 30 bucks an hour. What do you think would happen to the price of a Big Mac on Saturday? Right? It would

[00:25:11] go up a lot and that's what happened here. They set an earning standard that was too high for the companies to be able to meet unless they raise the cost of delivery and that's just

[00:25:23] the reality what happened and it's had all these unintended consequences. And the complaints they're hearing are not really with a company, they're hearing complaints from drivers and from restaurants and from customers. Right because the company made a decision to impose a fee that is not

[00:25:38] transparent in any way and say, oh, throw up our hands we had no choice. And all I'm saying is, you know, if you were applying if you did not work for DoorDash, I think you would apply

[00:25:48] a more reasonable amount of skepticism to a corporation's claim that they had no choice. If it was Netflix and they suddenly doubled your Netflix charge, I think you would say, does it really need to be that high or are they just trying to maximize their profits

[00:26:04] at the expense of their users? Yeah, I've seen the internal numbers which I'm not allowed to share but so which is why I'm not skeptical about it but be that as it may. That is the

[00:26:14] debate that we're having right now about it. There is I think on the left people saying we don't trust the companies and they could have absorbed this cost without raising the cost of delivery.

[00:26:24] I will say from the company's perspective there was no way you could create an earning standard as rich as the previous city council created without raising the cost of delivery and it wasn't 100% clear how big the impact was going to be once this went into effect but

[00:26:38] it's obviously had a bigger impact on the negative side and the unintended consequence side than even I think we were expecting. Here we are, it's kind of I think the situation seems

[00:26:50] kind of messed up. If it's so clear that Uber Eats cost and DoorDash's costs went way up, why wouldn't they be more transparent with the numbers? Why not share the numbers? Well, they've shared some numbers first of all but this is an incredibly competitive

[00:27:05] market. This information is closely guarded proprietary business information that if you reveal a bunch of this stuff your other companies are going to figure out what you're doing internally about stuff and so there's a lot of reluctance to explain their internal policies because then

[00:27:23] the other, your competitors are going to start picking that apart and trying to figure out how they can take advantage of it to get a competitive advantage of it. That's what drives

[00:27:31] that concern. On the other side, Erica, my question for you, I mean if you raise wages like this of course costs are going to go up. That's what the council was doing here and that's what consumers

[00:27:41] should essentially expect. I don't know if it's five bucks but it's got to go up somewhat, doesn't it? Or is your contention that these companies should just absorb that cost? No, of course

[00:27:52] I'm not saying that. I'm saying that my contention is that these companies and frankly I don't think their business model is so fabulously complicated that they can't figure out how to make a margin on each other. But these companies operate their business model and the same thing

[00:28:08] with Uber which made similar excuses about proprietary business information. Their business model is to come in, charge less than it actually costs, take over the market and make restaurants dependent on them or in the case of Uber they made people who took cabs

[00:28:23] dependent on them put the cabs out of the market. And then once everybody is sort of using DoorDash or using Uber Eats to jack the prices and that is just the business model. Of course,

[00:28:36] if they have to raise rate wages it's going to increase costs. I guess my question is why do we keep allowing these companies and this is my radical proposition. I don't think we should be

[00:28:49] coddling these companies and allowing them and welcoming them into our cities when their entire sort of MO is to come in, destroy a market and make people dependent on them for basic stuff like getting food delivery. We used to have food delivery from restaurants and now everybody is

[00:29:09] dependent on these mega corporations that come in and say how could we possibly pay people a living wage? Sandeep keeps using the word rich. I don't think anybody's getting rich off this and sort of putting the council in a position where they feel like they have to roll

[00:29:24] back basic minimum wage standards. So I say fuck these companies and don't use them. That is my little hobby horse. I think it's very unlikely that'll ever happen but I do think that- I think it is what's happening with this fee because people are like it's too expensive,

[00:29:40] I'll go pick it up myself. That's true and I think that you see the market responding to things like this with, for example, Scooter Share. Scooter Share started off very cheap and now it's very expensive and a lot of the companies are getting out of the market because

[00:29:54] people aren't interested in paying massively high prices to go a couple blocks on a scooter. So maybe it's the business model that's the problem and not greedy drivers wanting to get rich off of a living wage. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice. She's

[00:30:13] Eric C Barnett. He's Sandeep Koushik. I'm David Hyde. Our editor is Quinn Waller and you are our listeners and supporters on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Seattle Nice if you want to join our supporting troops and thanks everybody so much for listening.