As we noted yesterday, in his State of the City speech, Mayor Mike McGinn said he would support recruiting more Seattle Police Department officers from Seattle, with the goal of having "a police force that looks like Seattle."

"It's hard to have a good local police force that isn't local," McGinn said.

That's going to be an uphill battle. According to data compiled by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee at SeattleCrime.com, fewer than one in five Seattle police officers actually live in the city; the rest are scattered in suburbs and beyond---as far away as Gold Bar, Bellingham, and the Olympic Peninsula.

Cops tend to prefer to live outside the cities where they work, not just because the suburbs are cheaper but because they want to avoid encountering people they've arrested or had run-ins with. Although some cities in other states do require cops to live within city limits, Washington State law prohibits telling law enforcement officers where they can live.