Shoreline Police report progress recovering from staffing shortages

A photo from the city shows members of the Shoreline police department 

Shoreline’s Police Chief reported progress in hiring, improving the highest-priority 911 response times. Crashes hit record-highs last year without the traffic enforcement unit. 

By Oliver Moffat

On Monday, March 17, Shoreline’s Police Chief, Tommy Collins, presented the city’s annual Police Service Report to the Shoreline City Council. 

Chief Collins reported progress on hiring officers to fill vacancies after pandemic-era mass-resignations. Despite recent new hires, the Shoreline police department continues to be understaffed. 

“We are carrying as of today 8 vacancies… those vacancies are split up between our traffic unit, 1 detective, and then 4 vacancies on patrol,” said Chief Collins. 

The Shoreline police department ended last year with 9 out of 53 positions vacant, a slight improvement from 10 vacancies in 2023. And a big improvement from the 13 vacancies the department reported at the end of 2022 (a 25% vacancy rate). 

Chief Collins told the council the department has new recruits in training, “our staffing numbers are getting better. My hope is by April… that number will go from 8 to 6.”

Shoreline’s police staffing challenge is not unusual. Last year, the Sheriff reported 66 vacancies out of a total of 793 positions, an improvement from 2023 when there were 107 total vacancies. 

A graph shows 911 response times have increased since 2020 

Those police shortages have caused 911 response times to increase. Prior to 2020, the average response time to life-threatening emergencies calls (“Priority-X”) was around four minutes. 

In 2023, the Priority-X response time hit an alarming high of 6.21 minutes but decreased by almost a minute to 5.31 minutes in 2024. Lower priority response times continued to increase last year. 

Chief Collins attributed the 911 response times changes to staffing and hopes new hires will bring the numbers down this year. 

“We were able to reduce our response time by almost a minute. That's significant when it comes to police calls for service. There is… room for improvement in 2025 and I'm hoping to drop the response times for the other 2 categories, by the end of this year. We accredit a lot of this to staffing,” said Chief Collins.

Because of the pandemic-era staffing shortages, the Shoreline Police Traffic Unit was redeployed to cover high-priority 911 calls. 

A graph compiled from Shoreline’s Annual Police Reports shows twenty years of Traffic Citations and Traffic Collisions

According to data compiled from previous annual reports, prior to 2020, Shoreline’s traffic unit issued an average of more than 5,800 traffic citations per year. After the traffic unit was redeployed, that number dropped to 217 citations in 2023. The police department is now re-staffing the traffic unit, and traffic citations increased to 746 in 2024. 

Meanwhile, traffic collisions reached record highs in 2023 and 2024 in Shoreline—hitting 664 crashes last year, according to the police services report. 

More people were killed or seriously injured on Shoreline’s roads than ever according to the last year’s annual traffic report. 

While neighboring cities have turned to automated traffic enforcement cameras to slow speeders and ticket red light runners, Shoreline has not. Automated traffic enforcement cameras are now common safety measures in Edmonds, Lynnwood, Lake Forest Park, Bothell, and Seattle.

 
The council will discuss deploying automated traffic enforcement cameras on Monday, March 31.