The Washington State Patrol is recruiting. But in this case it’s not for troopers. It’s for military veterans who applied to be troopers and weren’t hired.
The search for veterans stems from a class action lawsuit filed in 2014 that alleged the Washington State Patrol failed to give hiring preference to veterans as mandated by law. The plaintiffs are vets who applied to the agency or tried to be promoted.
The lawsuit is now on hold while the two sides work to reach a settlement. As part of that effort, Captain Monica Alexander said the State Patrol is launching a paid media campaign to find veteran applicants who weren’t hired going back to 1994.
“We have hired an outside agency to post newspaper ads across the state, to take out internet ad posts and to send out direct mail flyers,” she said.
This media blitz to find additional veterans who applied to the patrol but weren’t hired will last three months. After that, the parties to the lawsuit say they will work together to determine the number of people involved and calculate the economic damages.
One of the plaintiffs’ lawyers said this lawsuit could affect thousands of individuals and cost the state tens of millions of dollars.
