The City of Seattle has been touting its “green” credentials pretty heavily in the last few years, and often rightly. However, as with many cities, the pieces being addressed to date have largely addressed fairly standard, low-hanging fruit: working toward efficient/green building standards, improving street design to enhance non-automobile transportation options while mitigating rainwater, and improving recycling rates. However, a recent article in the Seattle PI was a bit of surprise to this writer: the Seattle PD is going green.

Specifically, the Police Department is replacing flares (which leave chemical residue after being burned) with rechargeable battery-fueled lights, reducing their use of paper (by saving public records on computer and CD-ROM, as opposed to printed paper), and replacing some (non-squad) vehicles with hybrids.

Interestingly, while the Department notes that they expect to save money over time with the hybrids, they also acknowledged that there is an environmental rationale behind the mission as well; said spokeswoman Katherine Schubert-Knapp, “We're not doing the green fleet just to save money.”