by David Mendez

King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall met with the Shoreline City Council last week, in large part, to celebrate that the city’s police department is now the most-staffed of the agencies under her purview.

Shoreline Police Department, which is run by the sheriff’s office under a contract, has 88% of its positions filled. The staffing has allowed Shoreline Police Chief Tommy Collins to fill his traffic unit to cover both day and night shifts, though he also dreams of setting up a motorcycle unit in the city.

“With more deputies hitting the street where I’m able to staff patrol, then I’m able to fill those specialty spots,” he told the council.

Staffing has been a challenge for many police departments dating back to the COVID pandemic and protests urging policing reform.

Specifically, the King County Sheriff’s Office lost 54 deputies due to King County’s vaccine mandate. KCSO also has 22 vacancies that were added this year, as the county seeks to staff Metro its support and the recently-contracted North Bend Police Department. In total, King County currently has 92 deputy vacancies.

As a whole, the sheriff said that her department, like Washington as a whole, still faces staffing challenges.

That’s despite KCSO pulling levers to encourage and attract potential officers, including bonuses for laterals, experienced officers who transfer from one agency to another. Officers coming from out of state get a $25,000 bonus, while in-state laterals get a $40,000 bonus. Laterals also get 40 hours each of preloaded vacation and sick leave. The agency is also working to establish a pipeline between KCSO and military veterans on their way out of the service with the Department of Defense’s SkillBridge program.

KCSO has allocated $400,000 to contract with a law enforcement recruiting firm, Epic Recruiting, targeting “younger folks” nationwide, Cole-Tindall said — though a recent mock-up didn’t pass muster with the sheriff.

“To me, it looked too tactical. It looked like ‘Call of Duty’ or something,” she said. “They’re, we’re, gonna get it right,” she added.

That, though, seems core to the recruiting challenge: making policing in Washington an exciting, attractive proposition despite the perception that officers have their hands tied by policy.

“Part of it is police reform laws here. It is more restrictive to be a police officer in this state, so if I’m a young person and I wanna go run and gun, I’m not doing it here — but I can do it in Texas,” Cole-Tindall said. “While they pay a lot less — I’m talking half, less than half — what they can do there versus here, I think some potential candidates feel that it is restrictive here to be a police officer.”

Data shows that the number of reported violent interactions between police and the subjects they encounter has decreased in recent years. Total “use of force” incidents — a catchall term for when law officers use anything from control holds and strikes to chemical sprays to their guns when pursuing or subduing suspects — have declined in Washington State since 2022, and are on decline nationally.

That’s per policedata.org, which is run by the Police Data Archive, an advocacy group seeking to document “fatal police violence.” (By comparison, Texas’s 2025 data also shows a steep year-over-year drop in use of force…but it appears that many of the state’s law enforcement agencies — such as the Houston Police Department — simply have not reported any incidents to data collection agencies since July 2025.)

“If you work at this agency, we are very restrictive on our pursuit policy. [We] get asked all the time to open that up, but I think it’s a risky thing to do,” Cole-Tindall said. “It’s not pay, it’s not benefits. I think there’s just a different mentality about public safety in other places in the country than here.”