The moment has arrived for all of Thurston County to consider police reforms

There is broad agreement that we need to rethink how police forces work. Locally, much of that thinking has been focused on the Olympia Police Department, because as Thurston County’s downtown, and the state capital, that’s where the protest energy has been centered.

But Olympia is just one part of a multi-jurisdictional system. Across Thurston County, police forces and the Sheriff’s Office frequently work together.

That’s why, though we start this conversation in Olympia, it must broaden to include all our local law enforcement.

Olympia has an opening for a police chief

Olympia has an opening for a permanent police chief. City Manager Jay Burney hopes to launch a public hiring process in late fall.

Preparing for the hiring process will be a great opportunity for community conversations about what changes we want in our police, and what qualifications we think a police chief should have.

We think being a leader in combating racism and other forms of bigotry should be at the top of the list, along with strategies to reduce officers’ use of force. To add to that list, we need to know more about the police union contract, accountability to citizens, and more.

Residents also will need to learn about reforms the department already made in the last few years under the leadership of retired Chief Ronnie Roberts — some of which would fall under the current calls for defunding the police. The Crisis Response Unit and the Familiar Faces Program, for example, now handle calls involving people with mental health and other emergency needs, rather than police officers.

Even before the hiring process starts, we need a community conversation about how police and demonstrators interact. Sometimes the presence of the interagency SWAT team, led by the County Sheriff’s Office, seems to provoke the behavior it intends to suppress. Acting Chief Jelcick and other city leaders seemed to understand that when officers’ presence at protest was scaled back more recently.

But when some protesters vandalized Mayor Cheryl Selby’s house, and when downtown business windows were broken, we don’t understand why the police seem to under-react.

Burney says the police department is launching new website features in the next couple of weeks that will make OPD more transparent and accountable. We hope it will include a space for citizens to ask questions and get candid, public answers to questions like these.

The public should also get a chance to learn more about how police think about crowd control, and whether it would be feasible to make the city’s decision to ban tear gas permanent.

But that will only make sense if the law enforcement agencies OPD calls for back-up agree to the same rules. And that ought to lead to community conversations about policing in Tumwater, Lacey and the county.

Lacey has a police chief opening too

Lacey is also operating with an acting police chief, and waiting for the pandemic fog to lift to conduct a hiring process. Deputy Police Chief Bob Almada became interim police chief May 1, when Lacey Police Chief Ken Semko, who served in that role for about 14 months, retired because of health considerations.

Lacey, too, has a logical forum for new thinking about policing.

We encourage Lacey to include a broad swath of its diverse residents in conversations about what they want from their new chief, and what reforms that department should pursue.

And there’s Thurston County

Our independently elected County Sheriff John Snaza isn’t up for re-election until 2022.

The County Commission has no authority over what he does, but it controls — or tries to — his budget. Last year Snaza overspent his budget by $475,000; just recently, the Commission voted 2-1 to exempt the Sheriff’s Office from making a full 2 percent budget cut as other county departments were required to do.

It may well be true that the Sheriff’s Office is underfunded, and that any cuts would make emergency response times longer for people in distant parts of unincorporated Thurston County.

Nonetheless, we wonder about a possible bias toward law enforcement in the county, since two of the three County Commissioners are former law enforcement leaders. It does seem that law enforcement interests are over-represented.

Still, the lone non-law enforcement commissioner, Tye Menser, sees hope for restarting the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which is similar to the OPD programs that connect people with the services they need – usually mental health or addiction treatment – to keep them out of jail. He’s also dreaming of a re-entry center that would help released inmates get connected to jobs and housing.

Will the activists sit through meetings?

We hope all those passionate protesters will stay in the fight for racial justice for the long haul. Protesting is cathartic; sitting through the meetings where policies get changed often requires the patience of Job.

And on police reform, that’s where the real action will be.