Mike Solan, the president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild who won significant contracts for the rank-and-file while fighting efforts to bring more accountability to officers, has announced he will not seek another term.
Solan's hard-line leadership has made him a divisive figure in Seattle, particularly in matters of race politics, criminal justice policies and police accountability.
His opinions aside, his leadership of the police guild has buttressed members of a Police Department challenged by an exodus of officers and the target of public outrage in the wake of its violent response to the 2020 George Floyd protests. In two contracts, Solan and his guild board won significant raises for the rank-and-file.
The first contract, for the years 2021-23 — ratified in mid-2024 — gave officers a cumulative raise of 23% and distributed more than $57 million in backpay to guild members. That contract added two civilian investigators to the office of police accountability.
The second contract, ratified in December, covers the years 2024 through 2027 and included retroactive raises to officers of 6% in 2024 and 4.1% in 2025 and increased base pay for recruits by 13% to $120,000 — the highest pay rate in Washington and among the highest on the West Coast. Each new recruit also receives a signing bonus of $7,500.
Solan has been a vocal union leader and has used his podcast, Hold the Line with Mike Solan," to frequently criticize government, police leadership and the media.
On a podcast broadcast on New Year's Eve, in which Solan announced he would not seek another term as SPOG president, he called the latest collective bargaining agreement a "monster win" for both the city and SPOG.
Solan substituted the podcast, where he often has guests, for the guild's former newsletter, "The Guardian," when he was first elected by a landslide vote in 2020. Critics have complained that the podcast stifled dissent within the guild by doing away with officer op-ed comments formerly published in the newsletter.
Joel Merkel, co-chair of the Community Police Commission, one of three civilian-run Seattle police oversight bodies whose actions have been a frequent target of Solan, isn't sorry to see him go.
"I've been saying for a long time that Seattle deserves a Police Department that reflects the values of the community," said Merkel, who is a lawyer in the Washington attorney general's office. "Mike Solan, the current SPOG president, does not reflect those values."
Merkel said Solan's public persona conflicts with the city's progressive politics and that he has politicized the collective-bargaining process.
"His statements are out of step with this community," Merkel said.
Messages left at SPOG headquarters seeking comment from Solan were not immediately returned. In his Dec. 31 podcast, Solan — who lives in Gig Harbor and records his podcast there — also called the collective-bargaining process "highly politicized," remarking that "it's very difficult to try to get a contract passed in this city."
"SPOG is always under the activists' scope with the incessant calls for more accountability," he said.
Merkel said those politics apparently included SPOG agreeing to the latest contract offer by the city, under the auspices of former Mayor Bruce Harrell, after a primary election in which progressive candidate Katie Wilson beat Harrell by 10 points.
Merkel suspects that Solan agreed to a proposal SPOG had previously objected to amid concerns that, if Wilson were to win, the city would insist on further accountability measures and prolong negotiations.
Instead of embracing officer accountability demanded by the City Council and federal courts, Solan has publicly disparaged them, arguing that the Seattle Police Department is already "the most accountable agency in the United States of America, bar none."
"It's wild that SPOG has taken the position to resist increased accountability," Merkel said. "They should embrace and invite greater accountability," which is demanded by the public.
SPOG and Solan were defiant in the face of a federal consent decree imposed on the Police Department in 2012, after a Department of Justice investigation found that Seattle officers routinely used excessive force during arrests and showed troubling signs of biased policing.
The consent decree ended last year with Solan and SPOG mocking its passage. U.S. District Judge James Robart — who oversaw the settlement agreement — was a frequent critic of the guild and its leadership but ultimately conceded the courts had no jurisdiction over the collective bargaining process between the city and police union when it came to accountability issues.
Solan's outspoken manner has made him popular within the ranks of the Police Department, but has won the guild few friends in labor circles. Police violence in the wake of the video recorded murder of Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020 — and Solan's defense of SPD's behavior — led the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council to expel SPOG in the wake of Solan's refusal to acknowledge policing's role in institutional racism.
Solan was criticized again the following year after he accused Black Lives Matter activists, along with far-right extremists, for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. SPOG went on to support efforts to keep anonymous the names of SPD personnel who attended the insurrection. Seattle police had more known officers attend Jan. 6 than any other department in the country.
In 2023, Solan joked with SPOG Vice President Daniel Auderer about the death of 23-year-old foreign exchange student Jaahnavi Kandula, who was run down in a downtown crosswalk by a police officer speeding to a report of a drug overdose.
Auderer had inadvertently left his body-worn camera running, which recorded his end of the conversation, including laughter and comments stating that the city would argue that her life had "limited value."
He was eventually fired. Solan was interviewed at least twice by office of police accountability investigators and insisted he could not recall what he said and argued the comments were taken out of context and that what was being discussed was guild business.
Most recently, Solan has targeted a decision by the city attorney's office to refer low-level public drug use arrests to the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, known as LEAD, rather than jail. Solan said the program — which started in Seattle but has gained a foothold in other major cities — amounts to "suicidal empathy."
Solan made the announcement that he would step down in the last few minutes of his nearly 30-minute Dec. 31 podcast episode, which largely focused on Councilmember Rob Saka's opposition to ratifying the latest contract.
"Man, what a time we've had," Solan said. "I got elected about a month before the Floyd riots in 2020 and it has been a battle ever since," adding that there have been a lot of attempts to cancel me, get me fired, cancel this union.”
Solan said his podcast will continue after he leaves SPOG in February, although he wasn't clear what he intended to do professionally, or if he'd go back to policing. He was a gang detective and SWAT member when he was elected SPOG president and is still a sworn officer.
Seattle Times staff reporter Lauren Girgis contributed to this story.
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