You are being too emotional.
You are being unreasonable.
You are being irrational.
You have no reason to fear for your safety.
You have no reason to fear for the safety of your family, your children, or your community.
That is the message State Senator Manka Dhingra sent to Washingtonians Tuesday – suggesting that concern over a controversial law limiting police pursuits is rooted in feelings, not facts.
“I think this policy has become so politicized that people are no longer looking at data or best practices, they’re having an emotional reaction to it,” she said.
Dhingra, who chairs the Senate Law & Justice Committee, was responding to a bipartisan effort to reform HB 1054 – a law passed by Democrats in 2021 as part of a suite of police reforms in response to the murder of George Floyd.
The law dramatically limits when officers are allowed to engage in vehicle pursuits, setting a near impossible standard to pursue suspects who flee from law enforcement, even if there is reasonable suspicion to believe the person just committed a violent crime.
“We don’t have any data indicating there is a rise in crime because of this policy,” Senator Dhingra claimed.
Come again?
After HB 1054 became law in July 2021, the Washington State Patrol said it started tracking situations where a pursuit was not authorized by statute and, thus, troopers did not pursue. Those instances were coded as "FLED."
In the last five months of 2021, there were 744 FLED incidents.
In 2022, the number jumped to 3,110.
"Prior to that, fleeing vehicle situations would have likely resulted in a pursuit of some sort and duration and we simply did not have a need to have a specific coding for pursuits that did not happen," said Chris Loftis, a WSP spokesperson.
For anyone who cared to listen, state troopers who'd been working the road for years knew what was happening was completely unprecedented.
“People are not stopping right now,” Sgt. Darren Wright, a 32-year WSP veteran, said in May 2022. “It's happening three to five times a shift on some nights and then a couple times a week on day shift.”
In Snohomish County, deputies saw a dramatic spike in attempts to elude – from 177 before the law was passed in 2020 to 307 in 2022.
“I have never seen or heard (radio) anything like it and that’s not an overstatement,” Snohomish County Sheriff Adam Fortney said in an email Tuesday.
How can Senator Dhingra claim there is no data “indicating there is a rise in crime because of this policy”?
Fleeing from a traffic stop is, after all, a felony crime, and common sense tells us you only flee from a traffic stop if you’re worried about going to jail for something even worse.
What kind of data does the Senator need, exactly, to prove that the pursuit law has eroded respect for the rule of law?
Perhaps she hasn’t heard the 911 call from a man accused of holding his girlfriend hostage. Indignant that he was being pursued by Seattle police, he directed operators to tell officers to back off, citing the limits put in place by House Bill 1054.
I ask again: What kind of data does the Senator need to prove that the pursuit law has negatively impacted public safety?
If you look outside and it’s raining, do you need to collect the drops and have them tested to make sure it is indeed H20?
Of course not.
We don’t need data to tell us what our eyes are showing us.
It is not just raining in Washington state – we’re in the middle of an unprecedented storm.
Thankfully, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is offering us a life raft.
We need to grab ahold of it before rescue is out of reach.
House Bill 1363 and Senate Bill 5352 are bipartisan proposals that would give officers more discretion to determine whether pursuing a vehicle is in the best interest of public safety. The bills read:
A peace officer may not conduct a vehicular pursuit, unless there is reasonable suspicion to believe that a person in the vehicle has committed or is committing a criminal offense and the safety risks of failing to apprehend or identify the person are considered to be greater than the safety risks of the vehicular pursuit under the circumstances.
It doesn’t mean officers will pursue more suspects, or that individual agencies can’t adopt stricter polices, but the change would stop criminals from assuming they can drive off from a traffic stop without consequence.
The proposals reflect a reasonable effort to restore law and order to our roadways and address the concerns of mayors, police chiefs, and sheriffs across the state who have spoken out about the challenges created by HB 1054.
Or are all of them being too emotional, too?
Unfortunately, Senator Dhingra said on Tuesday she will not hear the proposal in her committee. Her opposition is all but a death knell.
In general, the recent rise in crime has been a national phenomenon, so we have to attribute it to larger national forces, not to specific laws passed in Washington. While there are anecdotes about the increase in people fleeing law enforcement, we don’t have the historical data on that to make strong comparisons. But the most important point to consider is that we have to weigh the costs and benefits of this new policy. The benefit is the lives saved – the innocent bystanders who will not be taken away from their families suddenly and violently, simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are many ways of catching people who flee the police, and I’m hearing from law enforcement that they are often catching those people in other ways without a dangerous high-speed chase. And there are lots of innovations we can invest in to help with smarter approaches than pursuits – technologies like GPS trackers, license plate readers, and others. I’m very open to investing in solutions like those. And again, we need to invest in data tracking as well, so that we can have better fact-based conversations about the best ways to keep the people of Washington safe on the road.
“I don’t believe that the legislature is the best body to now make changes given the politics around this issue,” she said.
Convenient.
She clearly believed that the legislature was the correct body to make changes to the pursuit law in 2021, but now that those changes are in question – let someone else deal with it.
Instead, Senator Dhingra said she thinks the Criminal Justice Training Commission should spend time studying best practices across the country, then come back to the legislature with recommendations. She called it “the only thing” she would entertain.
If she were so concerned about studying best practices, why didn’t she call for that in 2021 before Democrats thrust our state into a public safety crisis based purely off emotion?
You know, emotion. That thing you’re accusing the rest of us of using.
Feelings are apparently a fine tool for crafting bills – but a silly tool for fixing them.
If you would like to email Senator Dhingra, you can do so here: [email protected]
