(WSB photo by Patrick Sand)

By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

“We need our community.”

Southwest Precinct commander Capt. Krista Bair says that’s truer than ever while SPD works to rebuild its ranks.

We talked with her earlier this week at the precinct, our first opportunity for a sit-down conversation since she took over more than three months ago as leader of the officers assigned to West Seattle and South Park.

Before getting into how the precinct works – and how the community factors into what police do – we asked about how she found this profession, which has her now serving as the first woman to lead this precinct, in a department where women comprise only about 15 percent of the sworn staffing. This month marks 29 years since Capt. Bair started her policing career. In very early adulthood, she worked in her family business – an Arizona restaurant – for a while. “It was great preparation for interacting for the public, time management, customer complaints …” She might have stayed in the family business but she didn’t want to stay in Arizona: “I’m just not a hot-weather person.” Her interest in Seattle was piqued by movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Singles.” Her interest in police work traces to TV shows like “Cagney and Lacey” and “Charlie’s Angels.” (The Angels were private detectives, close enough.) In the beginning, she says, police work wasn’t what she expected – she looked younger than her early-20s age, so “I thought they’d put me in schools. Didn’t happen.” But she found fulfillment in the work anyway. “I’ve always wanted to help people. … I’m a very optimistic individual.”

Her first 15 years were spent in patrol work, mostly in the West Precinct, then some time in the South Precinct, and then, she started climbing the ladder that brought her to where she is now: “When I got on the sergeant list 2008-2010,” she spent some time as an acting sergeant at the Southwest Precinct. Then she moved to the Office of Police Accountability for five years, and that’s where she “really realized how important the community is to our job … who we’re serving … we can’t do it without them. That was lost on me in younger days.” After OPA, she served as a sergeant in the unit that investigated sexual assault and child abuse, as well as dealing with registered sex offenders. She was there for five years, then took the test for promotion to lieutenant, which returned her to patrol – first at the East Precinct shortly after SPD reoccupied that building. “I was super ecstatic to be back (in patrol work).” After a year and a half, she became the administrative lieutenant at SPD’s biggest precinct, North, a role that included reviewing “use of force” reports. A year and a half later, she moved to the Force Investigation Team, which investigates the most-serious “use of force” reports. Eight months into that, she took the test for promotion to captain, gained the rank last December, and spent half a year coordinating criminal investigations until SPD assigned her to her first precinct command role

Running a precinct in this short-staffed time requires creativity, Capt. Bair says. Getting to the decreed staffing “minimum” for a given patrol shift requires what the department calls “augmentation”; she says that goes for all five precincts – “a lot of overtime is needed for us to supplement lack of staff.” That’s generally voluntary, but there are some assignments for which “if we don’t get enough volunteers, we draft.” Yes, OT can be lucrative, but, she says, “Folks are getting tired,” after about a year and a half of intense augmentation, and she doesn’t see it lightening up soon.” The recent change to four-day-a-week, 10-hours-a-day schedules was meant to be appealing – as well as resulting in some staffing overlap between shifts – but it leaves officers without much turnaround time between workdays.

Another staffing point, which has been mentioned by some SPD reps at community meetings – there are no precinct-based detectives any more; they’re “mostly from headquarters, eight or 10 for the whole city.”

We ask her about a point of confusion among community members – is or isn’t the precinct lobby open to the public? Depends, Bair says. There is an officer assigned to be the “clerk,” but the “priority is (911) staffing, so if we have to move from the desk to a (patrol) car, we can.” They’re trying to work on a more permanent, consistent schedule, she says, as right now the desk officer is on the same four-10s as the rest of the staff, and while that works while they’re in the group that works Mondays-Thursdays, it will be trickier to cover when that group switches to Fridays through Mondays.

If you want to report a non-emergency crime by phone instead of online, she adds, they do have a Telephone Reporting Unit (TRU) that will take your call centrally rather than you needing to call the precinct. Some people say they’d rather visit the precinct to talk to someone in person, we observe. Bair acknowledge it can be frustrating if you expect to find someone there at all hours. At that point, the precinct’s Crime Prevention Coordinator Jennifer Satterwhite, who sat in on our interview, interjected that you can contact her if you want to be sure someone’s there when you visit.

(WSB photo, Sept.25, Capt. Bair and officers at Triangle homicide scene)

With staffing challenges, how do they handle covering the area when there’s one big incident – say, a homicide call (with which the precinct has dealt twice in the past two weeks – our interview was conducted between the two)? The department has implemented “innovations” to reduce the responses for which an officer is required, she notes, including a recent rule change regarding alarm responses. They also handle “containment” of major incidents with fewer officers. And of course, there’s always “cross-precinct dispatch” – if a precinct is out of people but a “Priority 1” call comes in, officers can be assigned from another area of town (given that the Southwest and South Precincts share a dispatch frequency, scanner monitors hear about that almost daily)

What about areas of “focus,” like Alki in the summertime? Capt. Bair says they were dedicating two officers toward the beach when staffing allowed, but it “took people away from 911 response – they’d have to leave for ‘Priority 1’ calls, and would get back (to the beach) as soon as they were able to.” Lately, she says, they’ve been particularly short-staffed on third watch (swing shift), so those “focus” officers had to be pulled off more often than not. With the start of school, “focus” patrol has moved to local high-school campuses.

What about Westwood Village? So far, she says, the encampment removal on SW Trenton “has assisted quite a bit – some of the people living there were (involved in) retail theft.” And some stores have beefed up their own security.

The conversation turns back to staffing – not just the current need for hiring – “This is still a wonderful profession – we are trying to recruit people who want to do good things – we need to get more people here for us to do our job well” – but also her job as a manager, leading a staff of ~100. Bair says in her view, “the best job in the department” is that of sergeant – they coach, they mentor, they “remind officers why they’re doing this job.” She sees herself as a “communication channel” as much as anything. “I’m lucky that the Southwest Precinct is sought out” as a destination for assignments – “it’s a smaller precinct, has a homier feel than larger ones, our community supports us fairly well over on this side.”

That’s when she said, “We need our community,” the realization that hit her during her time in internal-affairs work. Timely reports – even if it’s a non-emergency call to which officers aren’t available to respond immediately – and attendance at community meetings, it all matters, she insists. “The community is needed.”