SEATTLE — As Washington lawmakers began wrapping up their work on an ambitious package of police accountability legislation in the past week, reminders of the cause were not hard to come by.
In Minneapolis, prosecutors were concluding their murder case against former officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd, the Black man who died after Chauvin pressed a knee to his neck for more than nine minutes. A few miles away, a white officer shot and killed Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, after he was pulled over reportedly for having expired license plates. In Virginia, a police officer was fired for pepper-spraying a uniformed Black Army medic after a traffic stop.
“I am angry, I am sad, I am hurt,” Rep. Debra Entenman, a Black Democratic lawmaker from Kent, said Tuesday. “We are trying to do this work, and it seems like we take one step forward and two steps back.”
But Entenman and other Democratic lawmakers and activists say the slate of bills the Legislature is sending to Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk do indeed represent many steps forward when it comes to police accountability and public safety in Washington.