Pierce Today

The shooting death of Said Joquin on May 1 by a Lakewood Police officer who had been found liable for the death of another Black man by a jury seven years earlier has activists concerned that the police reform voters approved in 2018 as Initiative 940 has not moved forward nearly enough.

 Annalesa Thomas knew Lakewood Police Officer Mike Wiley because he was on a team that blew off the back door of her son’s home before a police sniper killed him, Crosscut reported.

Initiative 940 requires police to undergo a new de-escalation training regimen, but the Criminal Justice Training Commission has yet to publish all the documents the independent investigators of use of force incidents need. Another hold up is communities failing to name community representatives for the Cooperative Cities Crime Response Unit.

Thomas said the failure to follow the new law reveals deep cultural problems police department will find difficult to fix.

Some activists say reforms like what Initiative 940 mandated are failing to slow killings by police. They want money typical used to fund police departments to shift to crisis-intervention units and other social services, Crosscut reported.

The deadlines set for Initiative 940 were not achievable, Sue Rahr, the executive director of the Criminal Justice Training Commission, told Crosscut.

Training the state’s 10,000 officers in de-escalation has been slow as developing the training has not been completed. Only 24 of the mandated 40 hours of in-service training has been developed by the Criminal Justice Training Commission. Training instructors was slowed even more by COVID-19, which stopped in-person training.

An increase in the speed of reforms and adoption of additional reforms has been demanded. The governor created a task force to propose more reforms to the Legislature, Crosscut reported.