This morning, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes fired two of SPD’s top civilian staff, Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey and General Counsel Rebecca Boatright. The two were members of Barnes’ command staff, and both had worked under multiple police chiefs for a decade.
According to internal sources, Barnes relies heavily on a small, tight-knit team of staffers he hired from outside SPD, including chief of staff Alan Ricketts, crime and Community Harm Reduction Director Lee Hunt, and communications director Barb DeLollis, along with deputy chief Yvonne Underwood. Barnes’ decision to bring in a large cadre of executive-level staff has created a budget issue at SPD, because the chief only has a certain number of executive positions, or “pockets,” he can fill on a permanent basis; firing Maxey and Boatright potentially gives Barnes the authority to move some of his new staff into these permanent roles.
Barnes’ inner circle, which multiple insiders have described as reflexively supportive of the chief’s ideas, did not include Maxey or Boatright, who pushed back on some of his proposals as impractical or politically nuclear. Both were reportedly blindsided repeatedly by some of Barnes’ decisions, including some that blew up publicly for reasons that might have been obvious to people with longer tenure at SPD…