Cops for $1,000 a day: How Seattle spends millions hiring off-duty police officers but does little to monitor their moonlighting – By Daniel Gilbert (Seattle Times) / April 11 2021
Among police departments, Seattle pays the highest wages in Washington state. But within city government, the electric utility pays even more for their services.
Seattle City Light pays $90 an hour for cops to direct traffic, a rate earned by only the top 2% of the Seattle Police Department’s payroll. On Sundays and holidays, when City Light pays $139 an hour, not even the interim police chief earns more.
But City Light is not paying the officers directly. It is hiring them off-duty through Seattle’s Finest Security and Traffic Control LLC, a for-profit firm that has collected $13.7 million from the utility over the past decade. It isn’t clear how much Seattle’s Finest pays officers but it is likely a premium over SPD, where most officers make less than $60 an hour.
The city of Seattle’s practice of hiring its own cops for off-duty work is the visible tip of a much larger market, where officers equipped by the public wield their police powers to serve private clients.
