You’d think that a Washington task force called “Use of Deadly Force in Community Policing Joint Legislative Task Force” would be discussing the use of deadly force by police.
But that’s not what’s been happening since the task force was formed in April by the state legislature. Instead, in the seven hours of discussion spread across two meetings so far, Washington State’s law on police killings has not been on the task force’s agenda once.
In a statement to The Stranger, Governor Jay Inslee said he’s “disappointed” the task force has not yet taken up the issue. And at the last meeting, in Burien, Snohomish County prosecutor Mark Roe described the unaddressed law on police killings as “the elephant in the room.”
What’s happened is all too common: A life-and-death problem comes before state lawmakers in Olympia. It’s a problem with controversial solutions. Lawmakers, seeing this, duck. They create a study committee and tell it to report back a year from now.
And this is exactly what happened when Representative Luis Moscoso, a Democrat from Mountlake Terrace, tried in January to change Washington State’s law on police killings. The current statute is one of the most restrictive laws on police killings in the country, making it virtually impossible to bring charges, let alone convict, police who kill civilians without proper justification.