Police Chief Adrian Diaz discusses ‘relational’ policing and building public trust

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to the Seattle Magazine podcast.

I’m Jonathan Sposato, the owner and publisher of Seattle Magazine.

We are very honored to bring to our listeners the next guest, which continues our tradition of diving deep into some of the most important and interesting issues facing our city today.

Here at Seattle Magazine, we have an unwavering conviction that Seattle is a world-class city and perhaps sometimes we just don’t know it yet.

Our next guest has been a dedicated member of the Seattle Police Department for more than 25 years, known for having an intangible chemistry with other city leaders.

He began his career in patrol, the mountain bike unit, and the anti-crime team before joining the Investigations Bureau as an undercover officer.

He is also a master defensive tactics instructor at the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission.

He served as assistant chief of a newly created collaborative policing bureau prior to being promoted to the deputy chief.

He is now serving as the chief of police.

Please welcome Seattle police chief, Adrian Diaz.

Thank you for having me on.

I’m also here to introduce two of my other colleagues, executive editor and chief of Seattle Magazine and Seattle Business Magazine, Rob Smith, a veteran journalist who will be leading the charge in asking thoughtful and incisive questions of the chief today.

And we’re also joined by Seattle Magazine’s chief of opportunity, the most exciting job at the magazine, Linda Lowry.

And she has been a prolific booster and lover of our city for so long, committed to elevating Seattle Statue across a wide spectrum of activities, among which is giving Rob and I the honor of collaborating with her.

Really just excited to have this conversation, chief Diaz.

One of the things that Rob and I and Linda are very proud of was that the very first rebooted issue of Seattle Magazine, we put former chief Carmen Best on the cover.

And the idea there was that we wanted to humanize her.

We really wanted to show the whole person that this was not just someone that you commonly see in uniform on the news, that she was also a mother and a grandmother, a woman and strong and all of these great things.

And so in some ways we’re continuing a tradition by speaking with you today.

And I want to say, Rob, you have some questions as it relates to former chief Best, right? – Chief, thank you for being here very much.

So what did you learn from Carmen Best? – You know, actually I had, she was my lieutenant when I was working on anti-violence gang issues with youth in our investigations bureau.

And we hit it off.

We really got to know each other, spent a lot of time learning and when I made a push with our chief at that time, Chief Diaz, to create a community outreach unit.

And I suggested that Carmen Best be moved over to the community outreach unit.

And he took that information and actually made that happen.

And honestly, I think it was the best development for her and it was also the best development for me on just really understanding community issues and really the changing dynamics of our city.

And I think we’ve really became almost like brother and sister and we’ve learned to just kind of develop our skills together.

It was a great mentor.

And I’ve had a lot of good mentors in the past, but she’s one that will always be forever at the top. – Now, when she resigned in the summer of 2020 and you took over on an interim basis, that was a pretty tense time.

What was going through your mind once you realized you were gonna become the interim police chief? – Yeah, I had been the deputy chief for one month and I was thinking that I was gonna, she was gonna end up being a chief for a couple years.

I was gonna end up learning how to fill that role.

And when she decided to retire, I would hopefully make a case that I could be the next chief.

But it was gonna be a two year process away from then.

And she decided she was going to retire.

And that weekend before I was announced, which was August 12th, she said, “You’re taking over.”

And I’ve talked to the mayor and you’ve got this.

And I said, “We had already had a little bit of conversation beforehand.”

So I said, “Okay, I’m ready.

And I know I can do this job.

I’ve been mentored by some amazing chiefs.

And I knew the hurdles that I was gonna be faced with.

It was a discussion of 50% reduction of the department.

It was already losing officers and staffing.

We were experiencing a violent crime.

It was starting to increase.

So I already knew the challenges ahead.

And then that wasn’t including, we were still dealing with protest and riots.

And we were also challenged with a consent decree.

I felt like I had a lot of understanding and knowledge that was going to make me ready for to take under these immense challenges.

And, but I, you know, initially you think, “Okay, I got a plan for the next six months.”

And gosh, everything just continued to unfold and really try to adapt to the new changes.

And I knew that at that point, I was gonna wanna do this job for longer till I fixed the department, until I get to the department where people feel like we’re serving the community in the best manner. – Are you at that point right now? – We still have a long way to go.

And honestly, it’s the stuff that impacted us in 2020.

You know, we had to, I had to publicly come out and acknowledge that, you know, we created great impacts in the community and I had to apologize for those impacts.

It’s also being able to say, you know, “Look, we’re gonna learn from this and really change the direction of where we’re going.”

And we’re already putting innovative stuff in the department.

We created the SBU before the badge.

We’re doing an equity accountability and quality initiative.

It’s all focused on relational policing, which is really my kind of baby is really about how do we build relationships?

‘Cause everything that we do in life is always about relationships.

And that’s really probably what propelled me into the chief job because I had had it’s long established relationships in the community.

I had been invested in it.

It wasn’t like, “Hey, I want this job.

I’m just gonna apply and make myself known.”

It was, I had these relationships and I really think that that’s what’s really helped us through the challenging times.

People have had that trust in me to lead the department. – That’s great.

You know, one of the things that I often do when I’m walking around town is that I do, if the opportunity is right, I will go up to a police officer and actually tell them how much I appreciate their service.

And I say that completely knowing full well that, you know, maybe I don’t know much about the person and the officer may not know anything about me.

But I do think it’s important to understand that we’re actually neighbors first and that we’re all living in the same community.

Forgive my editorializing, but there’s a lot of good and bad with the way that we all communicate these days with social media, how ideas get viral and how memes happen.

And I think that sometimes that context collapse can be very harmful to all of us and our ability to see the real person.

And so I always take an opportunity to say to someone, you know, “Hey, I appreciate your service and we appreciate your chief DS.”

You know, you mentioned to me before that you’ve been to other countries to learn more about their policing practices.

Can you please share your experience and what you learned? – Yeah, so I had an opportunity around 2004.

I was just starting my time as a Latino community liaison for the department.

And I went to my first meeting, the consulate of Peru was at the meeting and said, “Hey, if you want to learn about my community, you need to learn and understand the policing that happens in their community.”

I didn’t think anything of it ’cause I didn’t think like I would get to go and opportunity to go to Peru.

My boss at the time was Gil Kralikowski and he said, he called me into his office and said, “Hey, the consulate asked a question, would you like to go?”

And I said, “Are you serious?”

Like I didn’t think that that would be possible.

And it actually was a trip.

So I spent a little bit about a, almost a five week period of time in Peru.

It was actually a life changer for me.

Really gave me a whole different perspective on how to look at policing just differently.

And what’s fascinating is I worked with the anti-drug units and anti-terrorism units in Peru.

And got to travel all throughout all areas, the Amazon to the Andes to Montipichu and Wana-Pichu.

And it was really just such an eye-opening experience.

And I got to be involved in a program called Calabria.

It was named after a bird and it’s actually their foster care system.

And in that experience, I was wondering like, why is the police department running their foster care system?

And they explained to me that, hey, they said, “What we find is our youth are getting picked up by the terrorism groups or the drug runners to work for them.”

And so for us, it’s really about engaging them early on, giving them an opportunity to help educate them.

And then eventually get them into a job into the police department.

And their academy for a lot of the officers is three years long.

It’s almost given them a college education.

And so hearing that was like, I didn’t ever think of it in that manner, but it really just opened my eyes up to this prevention and intervention work that I had not thought about.

‘Cause I really, in my career, was focused on arresting the bad guys, doing the tactical work and trying to make sure that we’re going out and doing and making a difference in the kind of enforcement cycle.

And this was actually a completely different approach.

It was the start of, when I came back from that experience, I had gone to Forth and Pike and I was driving around ’cause that’s where I was spending most of my time patrolling, come around a corner and I see a couple of people in a drug transaction.

And I had them come over to my car, they knew me.

I was always treated people with respect and dignity.

And so they said, “Oh, Officer Diaz, you know, “what’s going on?”

I said, “That’s great.

“Why don’t you open your hand?

“I know what’s in your hand.”

And they did.

And it was a 0.2 grams of raw cocaine.

And I had just gotten done working in anti-drug units in Peru.

So you’re dealing with like close to billions of dollars worth of cocaine in the fields, literally, of cocoa plants.

And you’re having this whole experience and you’re wondering like, I have got this person that’s probably gonna end up doing more jail time than the person that’s actually distributing it.

And it was in this idea that I can actually make a difference in a different way.

And so that really helped me just change the dynamics of what I do and how I do it.

And it really embraced community.

It wasn’t that I didn’t embrace community before, it just made me look at community differently.

So it was the best experience I ever had.

I apply those principles every single day from the time that I started doing youth work, started doing community work to all the way as I went up in the chain of command to be an assistant chief, to being deputy chief and the chief.

You know, I feel like it’s just something that you have to live by.

And it’s always about service and helping others.

It’s always about making sure that, you know, you treat people with just respect.

And it’s just humanity, it’s compassion.

So. – I agree, exactly, exactly.

And you were just in Ireland as well with Carmen Best. – I was and I, you know, it’s actually interesting ’cause I spent time with the different commissioners from different agencies all across the world.

And that experience actually changed a couple of different thought processes in my head because many of these agencies have an academy that’s one year to three years long.

And these are agencies that don’t give their personnel a gun either.

And our academy is roughly about four and a half to five months long.

And we give a gun hoping that we’re gonna have better outcomes.

And so it’s really about changing the dynamics of how we train and how we give the people the tools in our department, the skill sets that we want to police in our city and safely.

And so just listening to those other commissioners also talked about the same challenges that we’re facing.

But, you know, one of the things that I do get is that they provide just better, really, really more inclusive training.

And so that’s really what we’re trying to do.

It’s really what we’re moving forward with some of my initiatives on our SBD before the badge as well. – Chief, you had mentioned that morale was pretty low when you took over.

What’s the morale like now?

And what have you done?

And what can you do as a police chief to fix that? – Yeah, so, you know, when you look at, when we started over, I don’t think we could go any lower than where we were at.

I mean, we had lost our precinct.

We had gained the precinct back.

Everyone was losing officers.

Many of them lost their squad mates, their friends to either other agencies or to leaving the profession completely.

Retirement.

We’ve lost 525 officers.

And that was a really, really big challenge to hurdle because you’re having officers having to do really more work with the less resources.

And a lot of units had to be abrogated.

I had to put people back into patrol and really kind of just say, look at it.

What are our core functions that we need to do?

But when I look at just the evolution of where we’re at, I still feel like we’ve got a low morale, but we’re 10 times, just a hundred times better than what we were in 2020.

You know, I look at the, when we have special events, we bring in all the officers for roll call.

They’re laughing, they’re joking, they’re having a good time.

And it feels more in that, where they’re not in this kind of solemn just look of just kind of the deer in the headlights kind of look where they just don’t know what’s going on and what’s impacting them.

And so I think that that is, that’s a step in the right direction.

But one of the things that we’re really focused on is wellness.

You know, one of, so I’ve actually have, you know, we’ve got contracts with clinical psychologists that help actually at each of our precincts.

Sometimes they’ll do ride-alongs with some of the officers, they check in with some of the officers.

We have also have three wellness dogs.

So I have two in an operations side and one in that, it works in an investigation side.

So they’re there for support.

And you know, what better place to work in and have an environment where you have dogs, four legged creatures that are literally wanting to just butt it all up to you.

And we do a lot of stuff on fitness and wellness, nutrition, because we know all of those are having a good impact on people’s careers.

But it’s really simple to what we’re pushing.

My simple thought is, is that if we have a healthy officer, we’re gonna have healthy outcomes in the community.

And it’s really about kind of building that resiliency up in an officer that from day one, we know that they’re passionate about serving people, that whenever they end their career, that they have that same passion that drives them.

We’ll spend a lot more time investing in wellness.

And in fact, I’m gonna hire a person at a command level position to be an executive director of wellness.

And we’re already working with some of the best people in the around the country that have done this work and really trying to figure out how we’re gonna evolve this position into what we want in the city. – Okay.

You have said that you wanted to hire 125 new officers ever.

I think you and the mayor said that every year for the next five years.

Is the wellness piece a legitimate recruiting tool in that?

And how difficult is it to hire 125 officers given the last few years of law enforcement? – Well, our highest hiring year was 110.

So even before 2020, 125 officers was a pretty extraordinary feat.

But we’ve actually streamlined our processes.

We’re in the process of really doing a really good job of recruiting.

We have the incentives, we worked with the city council on getting incentives to help us out.

But when we look at hiring 125 officers, we actually built a program called SB Before the Badge that is actually the front end of an academy before the academy actually starts that actually is focused on that wellness and resiliency.

And I do think it is a selling point.

People wanna know that their company or their organization values their wellness.

And it doesn’t mean that that’s the sole reason why somebody’s gonna go to a police department.

But being a major city, being that we have major city crime issues, those are also factors that draw people into it.

Yes, you do look at, sometimes people look at agencies that have got take-home cars, they’ve got some of the other little perks that we might not have.

But I think that when we actually care about people, care about their wellness, and that’s the reason why I encourage people to just say thank you to officers.

Because at the end of the day, those are things that when you feel appreciated, people will value. – I wonder if I could follow up with that.

Oftentimes Rob and I will talk about on the more business side in private industry.

We’ll talk about company culture, we’ll talk about sometimes the differences in generation between say Gen X employees versus millennial employees or Gen Z and how they value different things or things around whether people wanna work from home or remote, or being in an office and aggregate together.

Clearly policing is a slightly different segment.

But overall, maybe I think some things are common, which is probably in your position, you can almost predict by how well a certain candidate or a cadet is doing.

What are some insights on what causes a police officer to be exceptional long-term?

What are some of those attributes? – You know, that’s a good question because I don’t know if I have a good answer for what actually makes somebody exceptional.

I look at my career when I started out in the job, I was 21 going in 22 years old.

So I was a young officer.

And how I looked at the world then is completely different than how I look in the world now.

And it was actually different than I looked just 10 years into the job.

Somebody who said, well, would you have hired yourself back then?

And I said, you know, that’s the million dollar question. – That’s right. – That, you know, is that the exceptional candidate that you were?

And I might not have been.

And I might not have hired myself, but I feel like now as I’ve evolved and I was thinking more like policing is on the tactical side to now being more community driven and really, you know, understanding and being more inclusive with everything my thoughts, there’s no right candidate.

There’s no right, but what you are looking for is number one, somebody that comes in with passion, somebody that’s respectful, someone that has high level of integrity, someone that understands equity and making sure that they provide that to the community.

And so you’re looking at really that compassion, that empathy that most aren’t necessarily graded on when you actually look at a candidate.

And so you have to see beyond what, you know, the application says, you have to look at what they’re doing and who they are as a person.

And that’s really what we’re hoping to see out of somebody that wants to do this job. – And it goes back to when you were talking about relationships.

So how important is it for you and the police department, for you to have outstanding relationships with the city council or the mayor? – For me, it’s extremely important.

And I think that’s where Chief Best has noted that, you know, she felt like no one was listening to her.

And it was a time for me to really work and try to understand the city council’s dynamics and really spend a lot of time building those conversations up.

And many of them knew me because of my work in the community.

And so I did have a little bit of, you know, savings, I guess you could say, with the city council because there was a lot of understanding of just how community oriented I was.

So that was important, but it’s also taken a couple of years to also establish that level of credibility as well.

You know, when they ask about stuff and I’m able to answer it and be able to establish like what direction I’m moving to the department, that matters as well.

As the mayor has evolved too, like that’s a relationship with the mayor and I’m having constant conversations with the mayor.

I’m having constant conversations when not only city council, you have accountability partners.

So you have the community police commission, you have the office inspector general and the office of police accountability.

And so you’re consoling, trying to nurture the relationships just to make sure the department is moving in the right direction. – I was really excited to hear that you talked about bringing on someone to help manage self-care within your police force.

But what I wanna know is what do you do for your self-care? – You know, that’s interesting.

I was just talking to our morning recruits on SBD Before The Badge about just taking care of themselves ’cause this is what I do.

I actually, I get up in the morning, I typically will read, brought 10 to 15 minutes, usually it’s on some level of stoke philosophy and I go and work out.

And routine doesn’t matter if I got a late call out to a homicide scene, no matter what, that is my morning routine.

And then I get up for my day, do my day.

If there’s any things or any issues in my day, I’ll go back to reading a little bit.

And at the end of the day, I usually read another five to 10 minutes, usually some sort of daily roundup on philosophy.

I always carry a coin in my pocket that is related to philosophy.

The one right now is a Morafati.

And so it’s just a philosophical saying.

And the other things that I like to do is, is I have three kids.

So I spent a lot of time at their sporting events and I didn’t wanna be that dad that was yelling at his kids.

So I learned to take up photography.

And so I wanna capture them, like making them think that they’re, winning a Super Bowl or winning some MLS World Cup or whatever it is.

And so I started taking photos for them and I started, I just loved it.

I really just started understanding and embracing it.

And so in my free time, I will spend time taking photos.

I love doing moonshots.

I’ve got to do some for the sporting teams in the local area.

So the UW Huskies, I got to do some of their football games that I’ve gotten to do, some of the sounders games.

It’s exciting to be on the field, in the action, and still feel like you’re capturing things.

And just that one moment in time where you just wanted to see people’s expressions.

And I think that’s been a nice healing part of my daily life.

And I still don’t, people go, “Gosh, you have a really good photography.”

And I’m like, “I’m just a beginner.”

Like I really just, it’s just that moment.

‘Cause I tried to shoot the Super Moon and it came out so bad.

And I was like, that just tells you, like it doesn’t matter.

Like you, even if you try, sometimes you just, you’ll fail.

And I was like, that’s a once in a lifetime shot.

I couldn’t get it. – I actually think it’s really great.

Number one, your vulnerability and able to share that about your personal life.

But number two, I love this idea that someone who’s highly successful or exceptional, I think it’s always good to have something that you’re sort of failing at.

And that’s a horrible reminder to keep you grounded that there’s still a lot to learn.

So yeah, I appreciate that answer, Chief Diaz. (upbeat music) – Thank you everyone for listening to part one of our conversation with Chief Diaz.

We hope you’ll stay tuned for part two, where you’ll hear his thoughts on alternative police strategies, including his views on unarmed police officers, the surprising drop in violent crime, the shift in culture of the SPD, Chief Diaz’s reactions to national news concerning police brutality, as well as our perception of safety in Seattle and how it might not be rooted in the data.

Thank you for listening to the Seattle Magazine podcast.

You can always find us on seattlemag.com.

Look for new episodes approximately every two weeks on our website.

A special thank you to the entire Seattle Magazine staff and to podcast producer, Nick Patrie.

Contact Lisa Lee at lisa@seattlemag.com for partnership opportunities.

Until next time, let’s keep celebrating Seattle. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]