Semifinalist candidates for Bellingham police chief will answer questions from the public during a virtual forum on March 17.
City officials are conducting preliminary interviews of the 13 applicants for its top law enforcement job, city Communications Director Janice Keller said. The number of candidates who will appear at the March 17 forum is not set.
“Based on the candidate profile, and stakeholder and community feedback, we will bring forward as semifinalists the most qualified applicants for further consideration,” Keller said.
Flo Simon, a 33-year veteran of the Bellingham force, has been the interim police chief since Chief David Doll retired in January 2021. The city attempted to find a police chief in the first half of 2021 but ultimately chose not to hire any of the four finalists, including current Bellingham Deputy Chief Don Almer. Simon has delayed her retirement and will continue to lead the department through May.
The city’s job posting for the police chief position lists a salary range of $162,720 to $196,884. The ideal candidate, the posting said, would be a “transformational leader” who “will reimagine the way the department operates and serves the residents of Bellingham.”
“We are eager to introduce semifinal candidates as part of our commitment to involving the community in selecting our new police chief,” Mayor Seth Fleetwood said in a press release. “Like so many communities across the nation, we see the years ahead as transformational for law enforcement and public safety.”
Some members of the Bellingham community seek significant changes to the Bellingham Police Department, spurred by the calls for police accountability and “defunding” after law enforcement officers killed Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020.
Roughly two-thirds of the 66 comments the city collected last month supported progressive reforms such as eliminating racial biases, having unarmed mental health experts respond to calls involving behavioral problems, and creating a civilian oversight board to review police policies or complaints against officers.
A few commenters specifically wanted a police chief who would be open to cutting the department’s budget. The new chief should make a priority of “defunding the department to invest more in social programming that serves the community better than the police ever have and ever will,” one of the commenters wrote.
A lot of commenters, regardless of their politics, acknowledged a crime problem in Bellingham. Vehicle prowls have roughly tripled since early 2021, and auto thefts have increased about fivefold, according to the department’s crime statistics webpage.
Another commenter, who called for more behavioral health officers and a civilian review board, also thought police should pay more attention to property crimes. “Car prowls are out of hand,” the commenter said.
About a third of the comments received last month expressed a tough-on-crime attitude. “Ask anyone other than a handful of activists and the City Council, they will tell you that quality-of-life crime is reaching a crisis level,” a commenter wrote.
The city will post information about the semifinalists before the virtual forum, which starts at 5:30 p.m. on March 17. Questions posed to the applicants will be selected from those already provided during last month’s comment period. Register to attend the forum at cob.org/policechiefcandidateforum.
