As the state Legislature convenes following a summer of upheaval, Cityvision asked three stakeholders with deep experience in policing and state government to discuss some of the biggest issues legislators will face with respect to police reform—and to share their perspectives on achieving trust, enhancing service, and ensuring public safety for all in Washington. These interview responses have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
What do you think is driving the current state of unrest as it relates to law enforcement in Washington and the nation as a whole? Why are the protests continuing more than five months after the killing of George Floyd?
Jamie Pedersen: I think what’s happened is that after decades of trying to raise awareness about this, the folks who are advocating for change in the way that we do policing have broken through to a significant number of people who were just not aware—and I’ve got to be honest that I count myself in that number of people. Once you are tuned in, it’s shocking to realize how many people are killed by police every year and how we just accepted that as part of the inevitable landscape of law enforcement. The fact that many people were in a state of frustration and anger about the pandemic probably helped fuel the numbers involved in the protests or gave them time to engage in a way that they hadn’t before. But I think the fundamental thing is people’s consciences have been shocked at the injustice that African-American people have faced.
“I think the fundamental thing is people’s consciences have been shocked at the injustice that African-American people have faced.”
– Jamie Pedersen
Jacquelin Maycumber: When you saw what occurred, you knew it was wrong, right? The George Floyd killing triggered emotion. The incarceration of millions of young men is a reflection of the failure of the system as a whole, of our education system, our judicial system, and our criminal [justice] system. Law enforcement is that initial encounter with the system when it’s not working. Law enforcement officers are making millions of contacts a year, and there’s not a lot of negative encounters, but when it’s wrong and unjust, that warrants an emotional response.
Monica Alexander: One of the big differences is social media and videos. When we saw the Rodney King beating, it was unusual for someone to have a video camera and use it for something like what we saw that night. Now it is not unusual at all: people videotape everything. In law enforcement, we often say, “They [the public] didn’t see the whole thing.” But when something like the killing of George Floyd happens, where we saw 8 minutes and 46 seconds of video, that was a game changer. Then it was revealed the reason for the original arrest was the alleged forgery of a 20-dollar bill! People feel betrayed, and they feel angry. We as law enforcement have to try to put ourselves in the shoes of our community members. We must try to understand what it feels like for someone who does not carry a gun and a badge and have the ability to take away someone’s freedom—what that must feel like from their perspective.
Given that policing happens at the local level, what role do you think the state should play in the conversation about how to address police reform?
JM: I believe the state as a whole has really failed in creating a community policing model. People want to have local policing, they want to have community-oriented policing—it’s one of the number-one polling issues in the state of Washington. What they don’t want is a state police. A policy I got passed last year was increasing academy classes so we could have more officers on the street, increasing mental health services for law enforcement officers who go through traumatic events, and peer-to-peer counseling. Those are the things that the state should be working on. [Last session I introduced] a diversity in law enforcement bill to make sure that we cultivate the next generation in these communities and have a more diverse law enforcement group. That’s the part where the state has a role in really valuing the recruitment and the future for local communities as we move forward, but not taking the control away from the local citizen.
MA: Just like we have to build relationships with our community, we have to have relationships with our law enforcement, state government, and local government. We have not seen that real connectivity, the connection to the importance of having those relationships. One of the many things I admire about my boss [Sue Rahr, executive director of the WSCJTC and former King County Sheriff] is that people call and ask her questions: “Hey, we’re thinking about this legislation. Give us your thoughts.” She provides thoughtful, complete suggestions. She knows she cannot tell lawmakers what to do. I don’t think there’s one legislator in Olympia who wants to destroy law enforcement. If so, I did not meet them while I was there. Legislators have a responsibility to the communities that they represent, and they have to see how they can make things better for everyone. Law enforcement has a difficult job; I will never undersell that. However, the complexity of the profession is why it is so important to have accountability measures in place.
“Just like we have to build relationships with our community, we have to have relationships with our law enforcement.”
– Monica Alexander
JP: It is interesting because for the most part, we are not the ones who fund [policing]. However, the state does certify and decertify police officers. We set minimum standards for conduct of law enforcement, and we also are the ones who establish the tort regime for the state. Under the National Labor Relations Act, public employees are excluded—they don’t have any collective bargaining rights—so the scope of what can be bargained between public employees and their employers, including law enforcement, is set in state law. In this next session, in light of what we have learned about systemic racism in the criminal justice system, we are going to be re-examining all of those things, from the proper boundaries of police tactics, such as whether police officers can use neck restraints or tear gas or no-knock warrants on people, to questions about the minimum qualifications and what the conduct is that might cause an officer to lose certification to be a law enforcement officer. There’s a substantial question about whether we should be more aggressively using the tort system to provide incentive for those governments that employ police officers to control their behavior.
What are your thoughts about draft legislation concerning the state’s role in the decertification of police officers?
JP: The bill does a few big things. Number one, it expands the basis on which someone could lose or have a certification suspended. Second, it decouples that process from any discipline that’s happening at the local level and recognizes that the state’s decision to certify or not to certify has got to be based on facts on the ground and not on some separate legal process under a collective bargaining agreement. That’s similar to what happens with nurses or with teachers. They’ll continue to have their rights to have grievances adjudicated, but that doesn’t mean that they keep their certification at the state level. Third, it changes the makeup of the commission and of the panels that decide these cases so that they are majority community panels. A fourth significant piece is that it dramatically changes the transparency mechanism so that records cannot be destroyed: they are not only preserved, but are made publicly available through a public-facing website that allows searchable public access to disciplinary records for activities that come before the commission.
MA: I have read some of the proposed legislation, but I’m not a scholar on it. One of the things that I talked with my boss and my colleagues about is that decertification, the law itself, seems to be very confusing internally and externally: internally with the people who have to enforce it, and externally our community doesn’t understand what it takes to decertify a police officer—and they have some fairly good examples they have raised as to why a police officer was not decertified after a particular act. I hope that the Legislature really looks at that so we can make sure the community has confidence in the WSCJTC and our law enforcement stakeholders. We want to have a law that we all understand and know how it is applied. I hope the community and police agencies will also be excited about the clarification and the transparency that the legislators are trying to create.
JM: I have not been given that review yet. I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around police reform, and I keep hearing this buzzword “reform,” but I’m not hearing what policing should look like in the end. As a [former] law enforcement officer, I believe that the end result should be community-oriented policing, where police are part of the community where they can walk around and get to know the kids, the business owners, and are part of these families in these communities. What I’m seeing is these constant penalties for what I’m hearing are bad officers, and yet it’s very rare to have one of those.
In 2017, voters passed a citizens’ initiative, I-940, requiring de-escalation training, independent investigations into officer-involved shootings, and other reforms, which the Legislature adopted into code with SHB1064. Why do we keep seeing high-profile examples of these reforms not working? Was I-940, and the resulting legislation, SHB1064, a failure?
MA: WSCJTC has spent many hours building training, and we will continue until all of the training requirements are fulfilled. I think the timing has been really difficult on our staff, especially with Covid-19, which has affected our ability to conduct mandated trainings. Police agencies’ representatives have called regarding training, and I believe they are eager to get the training that they need—they want to get on the right side of this thing, and they want their people to apply the law correctly. Anytime a law is new, it can be complicated, and I-940/SHB1064 is no exception. There are a lot of moving parts to it, and that may be why it is taking a little longer to get it done to everyone’s satisfaction.
JP: If there’s anything that you learn being part of the Legislature for a while, it’s that reform is an ongoing process, right? Sometimes you’re lucky on the first try and you solve the problem, but when you’re dealing with very complex systems and complex societal problems, it’s rare that there’s one bill that will suddenly fix everything. I think Initiative 940 was very well intentioned, and it made some changes that absolutely needed to happen in our law, but it’s not enough. And now with the benefit of additional time and additional learning, and unfortunately additional killings by police that have happened since the initiative went into effect, we realize that there are defects in the law—and that’s why it’s time for us not to stop but to continue to work to make improvements in the system.
JM: This process is not even fully finished, so I don’t look at I-940 as a failure. I look at I-940 as leading the nation in de-escalation training and independent investigations, but it has to be implemented before we can even say the word failure.
What are your thoughts about establishing police accountability and discipline standards into state law?
JM: If you say you want the state to run accountability and discipline, you’re sending those officers out there, and you’re telling them this is what I want you to do. But there are different standards in different areas; every jurisdiction has different standards because the community expects different responses. And so really looking at it as a whole, we need to make sure that we’re still responsive to the local community. I would like to see a change in the civil service hiring practices statewide so we can really open up the hiring practices, getting a lot more applicants and diverse hires. I think that would be more effective than talking about removing the local accountability and discipline standards.
JP: I am very hopeful that we will be doing that work this session. I think that there is now broad agreement that there are some kinds of discipline standards that ought to be established at the state level, and whether there should be a duty of officers to intervene when they see misconduct by another officer and report that misconduct up the chain. Those are all minimum standards that we can establish. And then of course you can establish a standard, but if you don’t have a way of enforcing it, it isn’t going to do anything.
MA: I am never against taking a look at what idea might be better than the one that we’re currently using. We’re going to have to see how cumbersome it might be for the state to dictate one way of doing things for every police agency when it comes to accountability. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I’m definitely open to seeing what they come up with and how that impacts the WSCJTC.
Are you in favor of repealing the state law that gives police officers special appeal rights after they’ve been disciplined?
MA: I believe in an appeal process just like we have in the court system. Why would the system work differently for law enforcement? A police officer should have the right to appeal a ruling. If they lose their appeal, they have worked the process all the way through. I don’t think that right should be taken from anyone.
JM: Well, my understanding is that we only have a handful, maybe 5 or 10, appeal arbitrations statewide in a year, and 50 percent of those are overturned. So that would show that the appeal process is working. You even have an appeal process with a speeding ticket, right? You can go to the judge and say, “Let’s review this by an independent arbitrator.” In the same case, so now you’re saying that officers in some pretty major issues can’t have an independent appeal process? I am concerned with removing that.
JP: I think it’s a tough question, as you’re adjusting essentially the line between labor and management, so that has implications for the broader labor movement you don’t necessarily have in a lot of the other measures that we’ve been talking about. I would describe myself as open-minded and willing to listen to all sides about how to strike the correct balance there.
What investments do you think the Legislature should make to assist communities with providing services for mental health and behavioral issues that contribute to instances where police get involved?
JP: This is a huge, expensive societal problem, and the state and the federal government need to be taking a much bigger role in helping local governments. There’s no way that even a city as big as Seattle has enough resources to handle it all by itself. It’s also true that using the criminal justice system to deal with issues that, at their core, are mental health issues is not very smart. There are a lot of crisis situations that could be better handled by other kinds of professionals, like social workers or designated mental health providers, that actually may be less expensive in some cases than a police response—and certainly have a better chance of getting at the underlying problem than the police do. I do think part of the conversation is not just about hoping for a large infusion of new resources, but it’s also a conversation about redirecting the substantial resources, both in terms of money and people, that local governments already have.
MA: I like the conversation around having mental health workers embedded into police agencies. They could provide valuable guidance and information that could make us much better at our jobs. The goal should always be for every call to end safely. Having people who have been trained to work with people with mental health issues would be a big step in the right direction.
JM: I’ve written a bill to have mental health providers paired with local [police] departments, and I believe they should be. I tried to do a statewide funding mechanism where every department had access to a mental health counselor, and I could not implement it because we have a current pilot project occurring until 2021. I do believe that is the role of the state Legislature: that is where we assist, that is where we come together, and that is where we fund.
What do you think it’s going to take, ultimately, to restore or improve public trust in law enforcement?
JM: That diversity in law enforcement bill is a good place to start, and I believe trust occurs when there is successful leadership, and that starts at the local level. I am concerned that we will create reforms without an end goal. I don’t want us to create a less-desirable job and then we get less-desirable candidates. I want to create a successful peace officer–oriented law enforcement. And that starts with successful leadership and supporting the good officers who are on the ground.
”I want to create a successful peace officer–oriented law enforcement.”
– Jacquelin Maycumber
JP: People are going to judge us by our results. I think it can help to pass bills and let people know that we are focused on this and trying to solve the problem, but ultimately people are going to have their confidence restored when we stop having regular shootings of unarmed black people. It’s a funny thing about trust, right? Trust takes years and years to develop and can be destroyed in seconds. So we should not fool ourselves that it is going to be possible overnight with the passage of a few bills to restore public trust and confidence that law enforcement is happening in an antiracist, unbiased way that should inspire community trust. It’s going to take a long time to restore that trust.
MA: One of my favorite captains told me a long time ago that you want to talk to people when you want to, so that when you have to talk to them, it’s a good conversation. They already know you. They already trust you. They already believe in the work that you are doing, because you’ve already laid it out. They have your phone number. They can call you if something goes wrong. That’s what you want to happen. When we start bridging those gaps and stop being so far away from our communities and earn their trust, I think we’re going to do so much better. Also, word of mouth is a powerful tool: When something bad happens, it doesn’t take long for it to filter through the community. The same thing occurs when something good happens. We have to make those good things happen. I think that we can do this as a community, as a state, and as a nation. It is just a matter of how hard do we want to work at gaining the trust and how much effort do you want to put into bridging those gaps. We should ask ourselves: Where will our egos land? If we put our egos in our back pocket and sit on them and just come into conversations open, honest, and transparent, it will help us heal and bridge some of the gaps that exist.
About the speakers
Monica Alexander is a 23-year veteran of the Washington State Patrol, where she achieved the rank of captain and served as the legislative liaison from 2015 until her retirement in 2019. Monica is currently the Deputy Director at the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission (WSCJTC).
Jacquelin Maycumber, a former law enforcement officer with the El Paso County (Colorado) Sheriff’s Office, was elected to the Washington State House of Representatives in 2017 (and in 2020), where she represents the 7th District and serves as Floor Leader for the House Republicans.
Jamie Pedersen, vice president and general counsel at McKinstry (a Seattle-based construction and engineering firm), was elected to the Washington House of Representatives in 2006, where he served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee for five years. He was appointed to the Washington Senate in 2013 (and elected in 2014 and 2018), where he represents the 43rd District and serves as the chair of the Law & Justice Committee and on the Ways & Means Committee, the Early Learning & K-12 Committee, and the Rules Committee.