Washington's leading candidates for governor agree on one major public safety priority, saying the state must work to hire more cops.
But they differ on details — and on who can be trusted to get it done.
In TV ads running before the Aug. 6 primary, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, the leading Democrat in the race, solemnly points to Washington having the lowest number of police per capita of any state.
"That's unacceptable," he says in the ad, looking directly into the camera. "As governor, I'll fix it. Public safety is my top priority."
As part of his public safety platform, Ferguson has proposed a $100 million grant program that would help cities and counties recruit more local cops.
That pledge has drawn derision from Ferguson's chief political rivals, who call it an audacious and belated pivot on a subject on which he has not previously led the way.
"I think he has tested the political winds, and he has discovered that people want to have safe communities, and so now because he wants to be governor so bad, he has decided it's a good thing for him to say cops are needed," said Dave Reichert, a Republican candidate and a former congressman and King County sheriff, in an interview.
Reichert also says he'd work to hire more police officers, in part by ensuring police are shielded from lawsuits and prosecutions over "reasonable" use of force needed to do their jobs.
He argues reversing the staffing shortages in police departments will depend less on grant proposals and pay incentives and more on showing police the community — and top politicians — have their backs.
The other two top gubernatorial candidates, state Sen. Mark Mullet, D-Issaquah, and former Richland School Board member Semi Bird, the state GOP-endorsed candidate for governor, also criticize Ferguson and have laid out their own ideas for helping communities hire more police and fight crime, with Mullet pointing to a bill he has proposed to gradually shift cannabis tax money to pay for local police.
In all, there are 28 candidates for governor on the primary ballot. The top two vote recipients will advance to the Nov. 5 general election. As of Friday, voter turnout in the primary was low, with about 16% of ballots returned, compared with about 22% at the same time four years ago.
Police agencies throughout Washington have suffered from attrition and recruitment problems over the past few years amid public backlash against biased policing as well as the firing of officers who refused to get COVID-19 vaccines.
Washington's governor does not directly control most police hiring in the state, which is done by cities and counties. The exception is the State Patrol, whose chief is hired by and reports to the governor.
The Patrol, like local police agencies, has struggled with staffing deficits. The agency has about 1,100 authorized commissioned positions, with about 200 to 250 vacancies, according to Chris Loftis, a Patrol spokesperson. That includes more than 150 vacant trooper positions.
In his public safety plan, Ferguson says one of his first actions as governor will be to hire more Patrol troopers, dedicating them to combating auto thefts and child predators and creating new units to investigate cold cases and hate crimes.
Ferguson, who has served as attorney general since 2013, declined to be interviewed for this story. He issued a statement through campaign spokesperson Erik Houser saying his cop hiring stance "is entirely consistent with the way Bob ran the Attorney General's Office."
The statement pointed to Ferguson increasing the size of the office's criminal division and the creation of new units targeting organized retail theft and solving cases of missing and murdered Indigenous persons. Houser also pointed to a list of dozens of meetings Ferguson has had with law enforcement officials, including several photos of him with police leaders.
The local police hiring grant proposed by Ferguson would be devoted to cities and counties that employ fewer than the national average of 2.33 commissioned officers per 1,000 residents. (As of 2022, Washington's average was about 1.36 officers per 1,000 people.)
Ferguson's critics point out similar proposals have been introduced in the Legislature for the past two years, with no apparent backing from the attorney general. One bill offering up to about $90 million in grants to cities and counties to hire police didn't receive a hearing in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
Another proposal, which would have given cities and counties a sales tax credit to help pay for more police, received a public hearing in 2023. Ferguson's campaign says he supported that bill, but legislative records indicate no one from his office testified in support of it.
Ferguson's public safety platform also touts the $1 billion his office has recovered from opioid manufacturers, and calls for using that money to implement a statewide "crisis response unit" to tackle the fentanyl crisis. His plan also favors more aggressively going after fugitives with active criminal warrants, including by hiring 40 additional corrections officers.
Reichert's own public safety plan, which he's dubbed his "9-1-1 Blueprint," is more of a sketch of priorities that does not outline any specific grant proposal to boost hiring of police.
"It's not about the money," he says.
The staffing shortages and recruiting problems for police forces won't improve, Reichert said, until officers feel like they're backed up by the public and politicians.
"From the governor's bully pulpit I would start to use my voice to say support mayors, support your police officers in enforcing the law," he said.
Reichert's public safety blueprint says he'd make it a priority to recruit qualified officers across the state, in part, by protecting officers who are "acting in good faith" from criminal prosecution or civil liability.
His No. 1 priority though, is simply to get police to enforce the law again.
Reichert says he'd encourage police, including the State Patrol, to resume previous levels of basic law enforcement, including traffic stops that have plummeted in recent years, whether due to staffing problems or the fear of encounters going bad.
"Why do we have so many road-rage incidents? Part of that is there is a lack of enforcement," Reichert said, recalling seeing people "whizzing by" him on the freeway at 90 mph, with little fear of police stops.
Mullet also has relentlessly criticized Ferguson for what he argues is a failure to emphasize public safety, including rampant public drug use in cities like Seattle, or police hiring until his recent campaign-driven shift.
"Bob never weighed in on any of those ideas," Mullet said in an interview.
Mullet proposed legislation this year that would shift hundreds of millions of dollars in state cannabis tax revenues to cities and counties to attract and retain police officers. The proposal did not advance in the Legislature.
Mullet also points to Ferguson coming out in 2021 for decriminalization of possession of small amounts of drugs — similar to an effort tried in Oregon — following the state Supreme Court's Blake decision, which ruled the state's felony drug possession law unconstitutional.
More recently Ferguson has backed off that stance, saying he supports the Legislature's compromise law, signed by Gov. Jay Inslee last year, which made drug possession a gross misdemeanor and criminalized public drug use.
But Ferguson kept largely quiet during the Legislature's heated debate on that drug possession law fix, Mullet says, in contrast to he and other lawmakers who wrestled with a difficult compromise.
"I was the one in the middle of that bill, finding a lane to make sure we had accountability for public drug use," he said.
Bird also has called for more aggressive prosecution of crimes, including juvenile crime, and says he'd create a public rating system to call out prosecutors and judges who release criminal suspects back into the community where they commit more crimes.
As for police hiring, Bird says he'd work to recruit new officers from out of state and internally, including by creating a "recruitment pipeline" at high schools.
Like Reichert, Bird agrees the "root cause" of the state's policing shortage is morale for current officers eying other careers.
"You have to take care of who you have," he said, suggesting financial bonuses to retain officers, while aggressively marketing the state as a destination for potential recruits around the country.
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