Tag: Jesse Johnson

Cops, legislature, Police

State Senate Considers Expanding Program to Provide Legal Counsel to Youth Interacting with Police

By Paul Kiefer

Following the guidance of youth rights advocates, the Washington State Senate is considering legislation that would require police officers statewide to connect young people to attorneys before questioning them or asking them to consent to a search. The bill, originally introduced in the state house by Rep. Jesse Johnson (D-30, Federal Way), would prompt Washington’s Office of Public Defense to create a hotline to connect young people to legal advisors.

The Seattle City Council and King County Council passed similar legislation at the end of last summer, requiring law enforcement officers to connect young people to attorneys from the King County Public Defender’s office after reading their Miranda rights or asking them to consent to a search of their belongings. Both ordinances were named for Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens, a Black teenager from Des Moines shot while running away from King County Sheriff’s deputies during a disastrous sting operation in 2017. Though deputies never read Dunlap-Gittens his Miranda rights—he ran away from the plainclothes deputies after they burst from the back of an unmarked van—the ordinances were named to honor his aspirations to work as a youth rights attorney.

“If a police officer knows that there’s going to be someone available to represent the youth, they’re not going to be able to use their position of power to bully or coerce a child into having a conversation with them or making a statement.”—Kendrick Washington, youth policy counsel for the ACLU of Washington

The bill before the state senate, HB 1140, would not only expand the same protections statewide, but require that young people speak to an attorney before answering any questions during so-called “Terry stops”—a brief detention based on an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that someone has committed a crime. Because “Terry stops” are not arrests, the Seattle and King County ordinances don’t address the rights of young people to speak to attorneys in those contexts.

Specifically, the proposed law would require Washington’s Office of Public Defense to hire a team of six attorneys who would provide brief legal advice to young people in person, by phone or over a video call, after a stop; the attorneys would work in shifts and respond to calls from youth across the state. If a police officer stopped a young person in any circumstances that would require them to waive their Fifth Amendment rights, the law would require officers to connect the young person to an attorney—typically by providing the number for the state-managed hotline—before asking any questions or searching the young person’s belongings. The legislation makes an exception for searches done in the interest of an officer’s immediate safety, including searches for weapons.

According to Kendrick Washington, the youth policy counsel for the ACLU of Washington—which played a key role in shaping the bill—young people are typically unaware of their rights during encounters with police. The point of requiring young people to consult with attorneys before responding to police questioning, Washington said, “is not to tell [young people] what they have to do—it’s about telling them what their options are, because they usually don’t know.”

In practice, the law might look like this: An officer searching for a burglary suspect in a green sweatshirt stops a teenager wearing a green sweatshirt. Before the officer can ask the teenager any questions, they would have to call the Washington public defender’s office and put the teenager on the phone with an attorney. The attorney would explain the teenager’s options—asking whether they are being detained, answering the officer’s questions and risking self-incrimination, refusing to answer questions and walking away—allowing the teenager to make an informed decision about how to respond to the officer.

Law enforcement spokespeople voiced their opposition to portions of the bill during a hearing before the Senate Ways and Means committee on Tuesday. James McMahan, the policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, criticized the legislation for prohibiting young people from waiving their right to counsel, and he called into question the proposed budget for the program, which assumes that the Office of Public Defense would field only 4,000 phone calls from young people per year. Continue reading “State Senate Considers Expanding Program to Provide Legal Counsel to Youth Interacting with Police” →

criminal justice, legislature, Police

Police Accountability Agenda in Legislature Narrows as Deadline Passes
State Rep. Jesse Salomon (D-32)

By Paul Kiefer

Tuesday marked a crucial deadline for bills in the Washington State legislature: the final opportunity for bills to pass from the house to the senate, or vice versa. The cutoff date thinned the herd of police accountability bills introduced this year, though most key proposals—including bills that would impose stricter guidelines for police use-of-force and lower barriers to de-certifying police officers—are still moving forward.

Proposals that won’t move forward include a bill (HB 1202) sponsored by Rep. My-Linh Thai (D-41, Mercer Island) that would have allowed victims of police misconduct or their families to sue police officers and police departments. The bill would have effectively eliminated the ‘qualified immunity’ protection that prevents individuals from suing government employees unless the plaintiff can prove that the employee violated a person’s “clearly established” rights.

The bill, originally introduced in the House Civil Rights and Judiciary Committee, received support from several statewide and national police accountability groups, including the ACLU of Washington, but faced opposition from both the Washington State Association of Counties and the Association of Washington Cities, which raised concerns that increasing the liabilities of cities and counties—which would bear the costs of civil suits against their police officers—would strain their budgets and limit their insurance options.

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Enoka Herat, the Police Practices and Immigration Counsel for the ACLU of Washington, told PubliCola that the cities and counties that opposed the bill have misplaced priorities. “Cities and counties should play a role in reducing misconduct and ensuring that there are good policies in practices in place,” Herat said, “both in order to avoid liability and to do the right thing.” Herat added that the proposal “added teeth” to other police accountability bills that are moving forward in the legislature.

Rep. Jesse Johnson’s (D-30, Federal Way) HB 1203, proposing the creation of “community oversight boards” to investigate police misconduct in jurisdictions across the state, also failed to move forward to the state senate. The bill would have required all existing civilian-led oversight bodies in Washington—including Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability—to civilianize their investigative staff and relocate out of law enforcement agencies. The bill’s prospects dimmed when some police accountability experts raised concerns about the proposal’s impact on existing police oversight bodies, and about the 120-day cap the bill would place on misconduct investigations.

A third bill (SB 5134) that would have drawn a distinction between law enforcement unions and other labor groups, sponsored by Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline), lost momentum long before the March 9 deadline. The proposal would have prohibited law enforcement unions from using the collective bargaining process to limit police oversight, and it would have effectively eliminated the ability of police officers facing discipline to appeal their case to an arbitrator—a specially licensed attorney who can approve of, reduce, or overturn a department’s disciplinary decision. Continue reading “Police Accountability Agenda in Legislature Narrows as Deadline Passes” →

legislature, Police

State Proposal Creating Community Oversight Boards for Police Could Have Unintended Consequences

By Paul Kiefer

A bill that would create a framework for civilian oversight of law enforcement agencies across Washington state is making its way toward a vote on the floor of the state house, but police accountability experts say that the bill needs refinement to avoid unintended consequences.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jesse Johnson (D-30), would require every jurisdiction statewide that employs 15 or more law enforcement officers to create a “community oversight board” to receive and investigate civilian complaints about police misconduct. It also sets some rules for board membership, barring people who work for or have close ties to law enforcement and reserving seats on each board for community members.

Unlike most cities in Washington, Seattle already has a trio of police oversight bodies: the Office of Police Accountability (OPA), which investigates individual cases of misconduct; the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which reviews Seattle Police Department policy and tactics and issues recommendations; and the Community Police Commission (CPC), which mostly plays an advisory role for SPD. In its current form, the bill would allow Seattle to keep all three bodies, but with some significant changes, including requiring the OPA to rebuild an all-civilian investigation team and potentially move outside of SPD, limiting its access to department records.

When the House Public Safety Committee fielded comments on the bill on January 26, OPA director Andrew Myerberg told the committee that he could not fully support the proposal. In its original form, the bill didn’t create a clear exception for accountability agencies like the OPA. “I do agree with the bill insofar that I believe civilians can do the work of police accountability and do it well,” Myerberg said, but he worried that the framework for community oversight outlined in the bill would require jurisdictions like Seattle to dismantle their existing civilian oversight structures and replace them with a single board tasked with both misconduct investigations and policy advising.

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Being fully independent means that we cover the stories we consider most interesting and newsworthy, based on our own news judgment and feedback from readers about what matters to them, not what advertisers or corporate funders want us to write about. It also means that we need your support. So if you get something out of this site, consider giving something back by kicking in a few dollars a month, or making a one-time contribution, to help us keep doing this work. If you prefer to Venmo or write a check, our Support page includes information about those options. Thank you for your ongoing readership and support.

After the first round of testimony, Johnson worked with representatives from Seattle and Spokane, which also has an existing police oversight agency, to amend the bill with concerns like Myerberg’s in mind. The most notable adjustment was the inclusion of a clause allowing jurisdictions with “multiple similar oversight bodies” to retain those agencies if they comply with the rest of the bill’s contents. One of the goals of the changes, Johnson told PubliCola, “is to preserve the functions of the OPA as long as the membership rules for community oversight boards are implemented within the OPA.”

To do so, Johnson said, the OPA would need an all-civilian investigative team by January 2023. Currently, nine of the OPA’s 11 investigators are sworn police officers—a consequence of Seattle’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which limits the number of civilian investigators. If passed, the bill would supersede Seattle’s agreements with its police unions. The bill would also require the OPA to reserve some of its civilian staff positions for people representing impacted communities. Continue reading “State Proposal Creating Community Oversight Boards for Police Could Have Unintended Consequences” →