Legislative District 46

Public safety must mean freedom from fear, whether it is fear of being victimized by a criminal or someone acting in the name of the state. The knee on George Floyd’s neck was the knee of the state, of our government. He was being arrested in the name of the state like countless Black, Brown, Native Americans subjected to fear and disparate policing. He would have been prosecuted in the name of the state – in your name and my name. So, it is up to us to dismantle racism, not to be comfortable in privilege we benefit from.

I’ve been committed to working, throughout my adult life, to undo systemic and institutionalized racism.

Public safety includes every single Washingtonian’s right to be healthy. Gun violence and our allowance for military weaponry and failure to prevent the epidemic of death by gun suicide undermines public safety and greatly contributes to the mental health crisis – especially among youth.

As a Public Health faculty member at the UW, I know that public health has to include responding to people in mental and behavioral health crises with trained crisis responders and treatment capacity, not with armed responders. We need to dramatically increase our funding for educating, training and paying those crisis responders to meet the need for crisis responders and a full-range of treatment options (from community to in-patient for the most serious immediate crises). I’ve been a leader and will continue to lead on funding for educating, training and deploying professionals rather than armed police when people need mental / behavioral health interventions. Crisis response teams need to have the ability to have police support when they have professional reason to call for assistance.

It's necessary to measure and report all police uses of force, with reporting by race and ethnicity. It’s unacceptable that some jurisdictions do not effectively track to require their officers to report. Without data, we can’t show disparities based on race and we can’t intervene to reduce the effects of longstanding institutional systemic racism. Just as with pedestrian safety, we need to have a zero fatality rate goal. Body cameras are an easy mechanism to assist in this effort, which is why I call below for the State to require every police agency in the State to be required to wear them.

I led on ending police unions from hiding records of police misconduct from the public, media, defense attorneys and investigations of disparities in policing. I led on efforts to allow the Criminal Justice Training Commission to permanently end a police officer’s commission for violence and discriminatory policing – regardless of what their employing police agency does. These are provisions which we did not, thankfully, roll back.

I will support codifying in law the standard adopted by our State Supreme Court that determining reasonableness of force must objectively include consideration of institutional and systemic racism.

I will continue to push for readoption of those provisions that we rolled back in 2022 that allow for discriminatory searches and use of force without any reasonable suspicion and which go beyond ensuring reasonable care to avoid force has been used, especially for minors. I led the legislative effort to ban use of physical force, planned restraint or isolation of our children in schools. The rollback opened the door to allowing police serving as misnamed “school resource officers” to use physical force on children. We know that long-term harm done to youth from physical force used against them by police or others in authority. That doesn’t diminish when it is moved outside the school building. Indeed, it increases.

I will continue to be a legislative champion to end gun violence! Public safety means living without fear of harm from guns, including both in a school or other public setting or in the home where they may be used in domestic violence or self-harm.

Body cameras must be required by the State to be worn by every commissioned police officer. We can’t let police unions and recalcitrant local officials continue to block this tool of justice, which has been proven to greatly reduce police violence – and to reduce violence against police!

I will continue my legislative work to ensure that the State may end a police officer’s career for discriminatory policing or violence (including sexual misconduct) regardless of local decisions.

I will continue to do the lifting to greatly expand training of mental and behavioral health specialists to fill the huge needs ranging from crisis responders to community practitioners to in- patient settings.

I truly believe that everyone, and not just a select few who have historical power, deserves to feel safe in their communities. To me, this means investing in upstream solutions to reach root causes of crime in our neighborhoods. When peoples' needs are met and they have deep bonds in their community, they can thrive where they live, in peace and safety.

The most frequently cited measures of public safety are rates of reported crime, but by the time a crime has been committed it is too late, the safety of the victim and the public have already been violated. While we have a goal to reduce the crime rate, the way we will do so is by focusing on the indicators which show whether we are taking care of everyone or if we are letting some fall through the cracks. How many people are we forcing to live on the street because they can’t afford a home, making them more vulnerable to crime? How many kids are failing to graduate from school because we aren’t providing funding for teachers and support staff? What is the unemployment rate and are we providing a jobs guarantee so that no one is forced into poverty due to the lack of employment opportunities? Specifically, what is the rate of unemployment among those released from prison? If we are not providing opportunities for incarcerated people then we are setting them up for failure and hurt our own communities. These are all more tangible measures of our success in building public safety than looking at the crime rate alone.

I also want to call out that our conception of public safety must include our jails and prisons as well. According to the Washington State Department of Corrections, only 55% of people in Washington State prisons are currently vaccinated against COVID-19 compared to 74% of the general population. Many prisons have remained in lockdown due to COVID-19 outbreaks, which means that prisoners are confined to their individual units for 22 hours a day and are limited from family visits and other activities. It is well known that prisoners face elevated rates of physical and sexual violence. This violence harms the victims, traumatizes witnesses, and results in extended sentences for the perpetrator. When combined with the fact that people of color are massively overrepresented in our prison population this becomes a racial justice issue as well. We must do more to protect the health and safety of our prisoners in order to help them survive and reintegrate into society.

● The way we approach policing must be addressed and changed. So much justice-informed work went into HB1054 and HB1310 to improve interactions between police officers and community members with these bills, and HB 2037’s passing to undo all of that work was disappointing and continues to put our marginalized communities, who are more likely to be subject to police violence, at risk. Included in that demographic are our houseless neighbors, who are subject to horrific sweeps and the most recent legislation coming from Edmonds which has made sleeping outside illegal.

● We must invest more in upstream solutions that will address the root cause of crime in our communities. That means aggressive investment in things like mental health and addiction services, housing, and jobs that allow people to be productive members of society. It also means scaling up investments in the community based programs that are known to prevent crime, but are chronically underfunded.

● I support passing Tara Simmon’s HB 1282 which would modify earned release times for prisoners with good behavior. This would provide the Department of Corrections with more tools to incentivise good behavior from prisoners and would reduce our prison population by shortening sentences for those prisoners who have demonstrated they are ready to be released. The money saved by doing this could then be invested into funds for victims and the sorts of upstream supports which prevent crime in the first place.

I do not believe that police accountability measures should be subject to collective bargaining. The trust that we place in the police must come with the condition that they will be accountable to the people and we must be able to get bad cops off the street. The recent $1.5 million settlement Kent paid to get a Nazi police officer to resign was outrageous, and shows that current contracts protect police officers who are dangerous to the community.

I support the recommendations of the “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” Seattle Neighborhood Greenways workgroup to eliminate the need for armed enforcement for most traffic violations through the use of street design and engineering. We can modify streets such that drivers are forced to travel at safe speeds, which will protect drivers, pedestrians, and other road users while eliminating the need for traffic enforcement.