Bellingham Police Chief Rebecca Mertzig took over a short-staffed department that was confronting high crime rates and struggling to find new recruits. Before Mertzig was hired last spring, some community members hoped the new chief would be tough on crime, while others, still reeling from a wave of police violence against people of color in 2020, wanted a reformer who might be open to defunding the police to make more money available for social services.
Progressives in Bellingham didn’t get their reformer, but Mertzig has earned high marks in most quarters for fitting in well with a department that is highly trained, officials say, to avoid violent confrontations with the public.
22 North
Crime in Bellingham began to drop around the time Mertzig arrived, on June 1, 2022. The chief credited fixes the state Legislature made in 2022 to police reform laws passed in 2021. But in one situation at least, Mertzig had a direct hand in improving one of Bellingham’s hot spots for crime.
In the first half of last year, 22 North’s neighbors felt besieged by ongoing drug activity and frequent assaults outside the permanent supportive housing facility on North State Street, for people who were recently homeless. Mertzig said credit for a decline in illegal activity outside the apartment building goes to a coordinated effort between city officials, including police, and Opportunity Council — the agency that runs 22 North.
Mertzig had a direct hand in that effort. Police cracked down on drug dealing outside 22 North last summer, despite being short-staffed. In an unusual move for a police chief in a city the size of Bellingham, Mertzig said she left her desk to help secure the scene near 22 North while a search warrant was issued.
“That’s not really what I should be doing, but because I was so passionate about making sure that turned around, I made sure that we had the staff to do it,” Mertzig said.
Mayor Seth Fleetwood hired Mertzig away from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, where she had served for 18 years. He chose Mertzig over two male finalists with more years of experience.
“Chief Mertzig has been an excellent addition to the City’s leadership team,” Fleetwood said March 27 in a prepared statement. “She’s doing a great job and demonstrating the qualities I sought for our police chief. She’s a gregarious, energetic relationship-builder who is attentive to regional and nationwide perspectives on policing. She’s a strong, compassionate leader who cares very much about the Bellingham community and our police force.”
In an interview, Mertzig said it had always been a career goal to work in Whatcom County. She attended Ferndale High School and Western Washington University before transferring to Eastern Washington University to complete a degree in criminal justice.
“I love the size of this agency because you all feel like family, you all know each other,” Mertzig said.
A top priority for Mertzig was to grow her right-sized agency by filling vacancies. She added a second recruiter to seek out prospective new hires and waived the two-year college education requirement for applicants. The department had 14 vacancies last fall, but that number is down to eight as of March 24. Among those eight are six recruits conditionally hired pending background checks.
“When I first arrived last summer … the numbers were extremely low and concerning,” Mertzig said, regarding recruitment. “We are not in that place right now. We are getting very highly qualified people as candidates.” Recent recruits include a former aerospace engineer, a social worker from the East Coast and a Whatcom County man with the distinction of being the department’s first Sikh officer, Mertzig said.
Mertzig on defunding
Police departments nationwide had difficulty attracting new hires after a rash of disturbing accounts of police attacking unarmed people of color — most notably George Floyd, a Black man who died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. In the nationwide protests that followed, “defund the police” became a rallying cry.
The attitude toward police has mellowed since the “powderkeg of 2020,” Mertzig said.
“I do think there is a philosophical change that’s occurred, where people are now looking at this job in a better light,” she said. “I think that the defund movement was proven to be not a good policy or methodology.”
“I think we are holding true to our roots, which is, this is a noble profession,” Mertzig added. “We are here to help people. Defunding us does not help people.”
After the deaths of Floyd and Tyre Nichols, a Black man who died in January after a police beating in Memphis, Mertzig said one of her immediate concerns was that these incidents would undermine law enforcement’s reputation.
“Both personally and professionally, you’re just so saddened because you know that not only was that a horrific and tragic incident in and of itself,” Mertzig said, “but we also know that that’s going to be what people think of law enforcement, which is so completely opposite of what most law enforcement are about.”
“So that’s where your heart sinks … This is now the brush that we’re going to be painted with,” she added.
In 2021, Kristina Michele Martens became the first-ever Black woman elected to the Bellingham City Council, after organizing marches and acting as a voice for people of color during the tumultuous months after Floyd’s murder.
One thing that stood out from her initial meeting with Mertzig, Martens said, was a disagreement over the “thin blue line” flag, a black-and-white version of the U.S. flag with one blue stripe. The flag was meant to represent solidarity among police and is often draped over the coffins of officers who die in the line of duty.
In an interview, Martens said she finds the flag divisive. White supremacists have adopted it as one of their symbols and have displayed it alongside the Confederate flag at rallies, as Politico reported in 2020.
“She seemed to take a little offense at me taking offense,” Martens said of Mertzig. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get past that.”
Mertzig acknowledged the flag has been co-opted by “some extremist groups, with the intent to change the original meaning.”
Mertzig also said she wasn’t offended by Martens’ position.
“I thought we had a constructive conversation, and it helped me to understand better why someone without my perspective would see it as a divisive symbol,” Mertzig said. “I think our conversation was an excellent example of two people having a productive dialogue and even disagreeing, but still able to have a positive working relationship.”
‘Status quo’ hire
Martens said Mertzig’s hire was not in the spirit of police reform but rather “maintaining the status quo,” adding that none of the three finalists for the job “would have been extraordinarily different.”
Skip Williams, newly elected in 2021 as the first Black man on the city council, had high praise for Mertzig. After meeting her, Williams said, he got over his initial reaction, which was that she was less experienced than the other finalists.
“Being as young as she is and having the experience she had down in Snohomish County, I think she’s a great fit for us,” Williams said. “And I know that the officers respect her a lot.”
Williams said he isn’t the type of person to lump the actions of law enforcement in Memphis or other sites of police brutality with the Bellingham Police Department.
“I look at what we do here, and it’s totally different,” Williams said.
Mertzig said she benefits from an outsider’s perspective when she compares the culture in Bellingham with that of other agencies. A key difference, she said, is Bellingham’s emphasis on training regarding the proper use of force and the use of trauma-informed approaches to people in crisis.
“These guys are committed to training,” Mertzig said. “And I think that’s what raises the bar in terms of professionalism here in Bellingham. It’s not like that everywhere else.”
“Bellingham does not know what they have in their police department,” Mertzig said. “They’re so compassionate, so good at what they do.”
