Seattle Mayor Bruce Harnell's office demanded that the Seattle Police Department (SPD) hire fewer white men and those with "military bearing," according to a memo obtained by the Jason Rantz Show.
While the Mayor's office initially refused to turn over the document through a public disclosure request, it was provided to Rantz by a confidential source.
The memo, part of a larger effort to hire fewer white men, may be illegal according to the source.
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.” -KTTH
"I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? You put this in writing?" one source told the Jason Rantz Show 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."
Contained in the memo were "guidelines … for relative terms compared to previous SPD marketing efforts," designed to "shift the proportions of our photo/video collateral" away from featuring white male officers, and instead showing younger officers of color with different genders.
After the controversial memo began attracting negative attention, Dalgetty, the digital strategist, edited the memo - effectively destroying the record that the city is obligated to maintain for public disclosure.
In one edit, Dalgetty removed language asking for fewer images and video of white men. In another edit, he removed references to officers with military bearing. Finally, Dalgetty removed: “This doesn’t mean no officers who are white or male or only young officers of color, but guidelines to shift the proportions of our photo/video collateral to more of some things and less of others.” -KTTH
Edited memo:
More via KTTH (emphasis ours):
Legality of memo
According to the police source, several within the SPD were livid with the memo. Their jobs were already hard enough and they were uncomfortable with race-based hiring. As maddening, one said, the “less” portion was completely unnecessary. But did it describe illegal discrimination?
Joshua Brittingham, a labor & employment attorney with Carney Badley Spellman, said the memo could haunt the city of Seattle should anyone make a legal claim of discrimination.
“The SPD Marketing More and Less memo focuses on images for marketing purposes. It does not appear on its face to contain rules for hiring or promotion. The narrow focus of the memo could potentially inoculate the SPD from legal liability, at least based solely on the creation and distribution of the memo,” Brittingham tells The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “That said, employment laws prohibit refusing to hire, terminating, or discriminating against any person in wages or in other terms or conditions of employment based on race and veteran/military status. In the event of such discrimination — for example, an officer demoted or fired because he was white or a veteran — the memo might be used as evidence to demonstrate illegal discriminatory intent.”
Police union weighs in
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.”
The Seattle Police Department, via a spokesperson, did not deny the memo caused a stir for staff. Instead, the spokesperson said in a statement that the department is committed to hiring staff that represents “the full diversity of our city.”
Memo was seemingly destroyed
It took the Mayor’s office months to supply the memo via a public disclosure request. In the initial disclosures, the original memo was not provided. Instead, the updated memo was supplied.
“After speaking with Ben [Dalgetty], my understanding is that the record you’ve referred to was shared as a ‘live’ OneDrive link and was not attached to an e-mail,” the public disclosure officer emailed on July 10, over three months after the initial request. OneDrive is a cloud-based service for online collaboration, editing, and storage. “As with OneDrive documents shared out for collaboration, edits were made to the ‘live’ OneDrive link that was still in draft form on March 22, 2023 and March 23, 2023. The only version that we have of that record is the version that has already been provided to you.”
It’s unclear if Dalgetty knew that OneDrive files track the history of edits made to a document. After The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH informed the public disclosure officer of the OneDrive history feature, the memo was belatedly turned over.
Staying silent
Though there’s no indication Dalgetty willfully withheld the document, a point the public information officer made in a statement to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH, it doesn’t matter.
The memo edits weren’t properly saved to be turned over for a request that clarified, “The [Delgatty] emails should include all documents attached or linked to.” This incident begs the question: how often is the Mayor’s office withholding information (or not traditionally saving them) by using “live editing” on documents that they are legally obligated from maintaining for public records? If asking for “all documents” attached to emails isn’t interpreted as desiring all documents prior to being edited, what requests haven’t been properly fulfilled?
Dalgetty did not respond to a request for comment.
The Mayor’s office, via spokesperson Jamie Housen, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The mayor’s strategy, according to a source, is to ignore requests for comments as they wait to see if other outlets pick up a controversy. But given the allegations, it’s the reaction of police officers that they should pay attention to.
Listen to The Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). He is the author of the book What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities. Subscribe to the podcast. Follow @JasonRantz on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Check back frequently for more news and analysis.
