Seattle Police spend 2.25x as much per officer as Boston, which has similar pay.

$486k v $214k

Bruce Harrell’s latest budget proposal raises the police budget by $33 million, bringing the 2026 Seattle Police Department operating budget to $486M. 

We have roughly 940 officers in-service, with about 1000 paid officers on staff. That’s a head-spinning $486,000 per paid officer. 

Boston, on the other hand, has 1671 deployable officers, with 2228 sworn on staff. Their budget is $477M, or $214,000 per officer. 

We spend 2.25x as much as Boston per officer.

Officer pay can’t come close to explaining this. 

The median pay for the Boston Police Department is $142,336. However, this is for all personnel, not just officers. It is probably higher for the police. BPDs starting base pay is in the low eighties, about $20k lower than Seattle. But Boston’s overall wage distribution looks similar. For instance, at 3.5 years of service, SPD officers make $127k. Boston hits $126.5k in 5 years. 

(To figure this out, I looked at the raw data (click on “get the data”) but it is tough to tell who is part-time. Using the starting salary data above, I determined that median probably lands above $170k.)

Maybe the difference is overtime? Like Seattle, Boston has also been criticized for its overtime pay abuse. Perhaps it’s not quite as widespread, but that is not the read I get. I see 450 Boston officers making more than $300k per year. 

In other words, the salary ladders aren’t exactly the same, but the differences seem to explain perhaps $5k to $20k for each officer, a tiny fraction of the $270k per-officer gap. 

Where the hell is our money?

I know I don’t have confidence in Bruce Harrell’s oversight. He frittered away millions on recruiting while both ignoring hiring market realities and refusing to fire a scandal-a-day chief who drove SPD officers into absolute dismay. He spent an extra $100M in 2024 on two big things:

1. Extra hiring and salary which netted one officer

2. Back pay as part of a labor contract where Harrell gave everything and got nothing, so Seattle Police continue to lack any real accountability for unwarranted violence or for abuse. 

(Yes, officer hiring has finally picked up, and I’m sure the pay helps. But it only sped up after the national hiring market turned around and after we finally got a new chief. Before that, Bruce Harrell and the City Council more or less threw money into a bonfire).

So what is it? I don’t think it is hidden costs tucked somewhere else in Boston’s budget compared to ours. Seattle has a separate department that covers benefit expenses, so it not as if Boston can be differentiated from Seattle that way. Seattle even has an extra $20M line item outside the department for an older subset of officer pensions. 

It’s certainly possible Boston separates out some line items that are in Seattle’s budget—I’m not saying these are absolute, perfect, apples to apples comparisons.

But they look pretty comparable. And I don’t like the look of what I see.

Where is our money?