The Seattle City Council's public safety committee just unanimously passed legislation concerning how the assistant chiefs at the highest levels of the Seattle Police Department are hired. And what's really interesting is what didn't make it into the bill: a compromise with the police unions.

As I wrote back in December, Council Members Bruce Harrell and Tim Burgess are looking to correct what they see as a big problem at SPD—and a big obstacle to finding good police chief candidates from outside the city. Under current law, a chief can only hire their senior command staffers—the six assistant chiefs who report directly to the chief—by promoting from within SPD, never by hiring from outside the department. That remains the case even if a new chief comes from outside the city and wants to bring along senior staffers they know and trust, something Burgess says has been a problem in the past when the city's gone chief-searching. This new legislation says chiefs can hire from SPD or go outside the department.

But the two police unions, representing both rank-and-file officers and higher-ranking management-level cops, took issue with the change, saying that it limits the promotion opportunities for their members and they consider it a mandatory subject of bargaining. Harrell, in a December interview, said he thought there would likely be some compromise between the union position, which was that one external hire was okay but no more than that, and his original bill, which said all six positions would be open for external hires. Maybe they'd go with three, said Harrell, just to split the difference?

Nope. Today the bill passed out of committee with no restriction on how many senior staffers the chief can bring in from outside. And while it still has to go through a full council vote, it doesn't appear to have any opposition and is expected to easily pass. Why not compromise with the notoriously litigious unions? One scenario: It's quite possible that they would have been just as pissed off by the three-person compromise as they are by this version—in which case, why bother compromising? I have a call out to Council Member Harrell for comment, and to the police management union as well. I'll update this post when I hear back.

UPDATE 4:35 P.M.: I got ahold of Harrell to ask why, exactly, he ended up with this no-restrictions bill instead of a compromise version. He said, "I really started thinking about how you change culture. And I think you start it by saying, you put no restrictions in your policies that prevent you from getting the best person, and there's no entitlements to a job... If I believe that, then it makes sense to have no restrictions on the number." But the police unions have said they think this change is a mandatory subject of bargaining—is he afraid of a legal challenge? "We’ve had direction from our law department," he says, "that this is acceptable legislation." Well, okay, then.