Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz is being removed from his post as the city’s top cop, sources said Wednesday morning.
Mayor Bruce Harrell has called a news conference for 1 p.m. Wednesday at which he will make “a major public safety announcement,” according to a news release.
The shake-up is the culmination of months of internal strife and a parade of allegations that Diaz’s police force was unwelcoming and even discriminatory toward women and people of color.
Though Diaz forcefully denied those allegations, several of which are being reviewed by an outside investigator, his hold on the department at a crucial time for the city was growing tenuous.
With Diaz’s ouster, the Seattle Police Department is now without a leader as it continues to lose officers and struggles to emerge from the oversight of a federal judge, parts of which ended last year. For Mayor Bruce Harrell, the task is to find someone who can balance between politics, law enforcement and community expectations.
Diaz held the position for nearly four years — the first two as interim chief.
His ascension to the post came out of the chaos of 2020. Diaz took over when former Chief Carmen Best quit amid controversy over her handling of that summer’s protests and her opposition to the City Council’s policy goals, which included cutting the size and scope of the department.
Harrell launched a search for a permanent chief when he took office in 2022, but ultimately opted against a leadership change so early in his mayoral term.
Diaz joined the police department in 1997, was promoted to assistant chief in 2017 and became deputy chief in July 2020, a month before becoming interim chief.
He was born in Santa Ana, California, and grew up in Anaheim, California, then moved to Mercer Island while in high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Central Washington University and a master’s in public administration from the University of Washington.
Diaz spent his early years in the police department doing youth and community outreach work. He began his career in patrol and was assigned to a bike unit before working as an undercover officer with the Anti-Crime Team. Later, he joined the Investigations Bureau. As an assistant chief, Diaz was in charge of the department’s Collaborative Policing Bureau.
While chief, Diaz oversaw the rollout of the department’s Community Service Officer program — a team of civilians tasked with taking on jobs that don’t require sworn officers.
Since Diaz took over, his tenure has been defined by declining numbers of deployable officers in the department. Though the trend began before he took over, the total size has shrunk to below 1,000 officers from a high of nearly 1,400 before the pandemic.
Diaz triaged resources, cutting specialty units in favor of patrol. Those decisions often courted controversy, as when the department’s sexual assault unit stopped investigating new cases.
The department pledged its force would be 30% women by 2030, but those efforts have stumbled. A report, commissioned internally, found women in the department are broadly unhappy and see their opportunities as much narrower than those of their male colleagues.
That damning report, combined with recently filed lawsuits from longtime female employees, increased the demand in City Hall for change.
As for replacing Diaz, the tension is often whether to hire internally or externally. Best and Diaz both came up through the department, a positive in the eyes of some, but restrictive of their ability to make change in the eyes of others. Before Best was selected by then-Mayor Jenny Durkan in 2018, some on the search committee — including current Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess — pushed for an outside hire who could help overhaul the department’s culture.
The last outside hire was Kathleen O’Toole, who was brought in to help comply with the longstanding agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to overhaul the department’s use-of-force practices. She stepped down in 2017.
Despite much of federal oversight ending, the overhaul of the department’s use-of-force practices remains unfinished, largely because the judge overseeing it is unsatisfied with the city’s systems of officer accountability.
The next chief will also be tasked with turning around recruitment. The mayor recently signed a new collective bargaining agreement with the officers’ union, giving large raises to most workers.
David Kroman
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