SEATTLE — Seattle’s Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr revealed that she was poised to put a police officer in Garfield High School just before the city and Seattle Public School’s new safety plan was announced on August 22.
“We were talking about what that would look like,” Rahr said. “We talked about what the officer would wear. I mean, it was pretty granular what this would look like.”
Rahr said conversations with SPS that month had her optimistic.
The plan, she said, was a pilot program at Garfield, a school still reeling from the shooting death of 17-year-old Amarr Murphy-Paine. He was killed in the school’s parking lot while trying to break up a fight in June.
“We thought, if we can put an engagement officer in Garfield, we could demonstrate this is how this program can work,” Rahr said.
But then something changed.
“I don’t know what changed but the plan shifted away from that,” she said.
Instead, what was announced on August 22, was something different.
“Students may see a police presence around school perimeters and this is part of strengthening our collaboration between our schools and the police,” SPS Superintendent Dr. Brent Jones said in a news conference.
The city said in a statement that “the Seattle Police Department (SPD) will focus patrol officers, during critical times such as before school, during lunch, and after school, as staffing allows for the five focus high schools: Rainier Beach, Garfield, Chief Sealth International, Franklin, and Ingraham.”
But it turns out, that did not mean patrols circling the school during those times or parked and talking to kids as KIRO 7 spotted one day in October.
KIRO 7 showed you the numbers from SPD: zero patrols logged for Garfield, Franklin, Rainier Beach, and Ingraham. Chief Sealth had six.
“Why haven’t officers been logging their patrols?” reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.
“Because we have other ways of capturing the data,” Rahr said.
Rahr is talking about GPS data showing officers nearby. SPD provided data showing those instances did go up once the school year started.
“When they’re able to, they try to stay in the area where the schools are,” Rahr said. “The challenge is, they’re handling multiple other calls.”
These are officers driving by when possible—not staying in front of the school for extended periods. The exception, SPD said, was for Garfield for about a month after school started.
“In my experience, just patrols in the area don’t really prevent things from happening,” she said. “Our preference is to do something that’s going to prevent a tragedy.”
And that’s why Rahr said she was talking to SPS about a ‘school engagement officer.’
“The goal of having an officer in the school is not to substitute for security,” she said. “It’s not to arrest kids… they’re there to become part of that family inside the building.”
It’s something two Garfield parents told KIRO 7 in October that they want.
“As a parent… I want to know that somebody is there all the time, not just doing patrols there, here and there,” Appollonia Washington, whose son attends Garfield, said. She is also Co-Vice President on Garfield’s Parent Teacher Student Association.
But putting police officers back in Seattle Public Schools is a delicate undertaking.
The school board removed officers from Seattle Schools in 2020 during a national reckoning with police violence spurred by George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed.
“We’ve got superintendents, school board, building principals,” Rahr said. “And then you have parents and students, and they are not on the same page.”
Rahr said she’s waiting for a signal from the district.
“We want to hear from them,” she said.
“If SPS were to prioritize this, how soon could you get an officer in Garfield?” Sheldon asked.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“That fast?” Sheldon asked.
“Yes,” Rahr said.
KIRO 7 reached out to SPS on Monday, November 25th to ask why the plan suddenly changed.
As of December 5, SPS had not provided a response to the question.
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