In the last decade, Washington has enshrined some of the most progressive cops reforms in the nation. And yet years into the implementation of a dozen police accountability laws passed in 2021, some officers still routinely kill, injure, surveil and sexually assault civilians.
Aside from the rare resignation, those misdeeds usually go unpunished. The officers involved are sometimes placed on paid leave and later brought back to the same beat they worked before they committed violence. They are rarely prosecuted or punished — sometimes they are promoted. That’s because even with some of the strongest policing restrictions in the US, there are still massive holes in the web of justice.
In Spokane, the city’s police department has been among the top 10 deadliest agencies in terms of police violence since the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence started collecting data in 2013, yet not one cop in Spokane County has faced local prosecution for killing a civilian. (In 2012, officer Karl Thompson was convicted of murdering Otto Zehm, but that was a federal prosecution.) Though police killings decreased in 2025, with one compared to six from 2024, Spokane police and county deputies brutally squashed a protest of federal immigration officers June 11, sparking national headlines and inflaming distrust between activist communities and police.
Despite this, Washington sits at the vanguard of police accountability in the US: it bans cops from choking suspects, tracks all uses of physical force, pulls unfit officers’ credentials and has an independent authority to investigate police killings. But activists say the continued violence shows more is needed.
In this year’s legislative session, one of the broadest slates of bills since the 2021 reforms is in the works. Some of the policies, like new regulations on surveillance technology, are still being written. Others, like one that would create an independent state office to prosecute officers who kill civilians in ways that violate law or policy, have taken several spins through the legislature without being adopted.
The organizers pushing these laws are people who know firsthand the pain that comes when a loved one is killed by police.
Activists with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability (WCPA) on January 5 announced the package of legislation it is pushing during a press conference at the Central Library. All the speakers live in Spokane and work constantly — protesting outside the Spokane County Courthouse, meeting with police officials and lawmakers to press their cases and investigating cases of police violence on behalf of the broader public — to strengthen that web of state regulations.
It’s a treacherous path for bills like this to get through the state legislature. In years where there isn’t much appetite for reform, they often just die in committee (the legislative bodies where lawmakers hash out the details of the laws before sending them to the full chamber for a vote). Budgeting agencies can attach heavy price tags to the bills, making it hard for lawmakers to justify during years the state has a large budget deficit — like 2026.
Need a refresher on how a bill becomes a law? Check out our explainer on it all here.
“I don’t know if it’s gonna pass this year,” said Debbie Novak, who leads the Eastern Region of the WCPA, of the independent prosecutor legislation. She mentioned powerful lobbies in Olympia as obstacles to the bill. “They speak of the dollar portion of it. The coalition speaks of the human piece of it, the sanctity of life. We will keep working on that independent prosecutor bill until it passes, however long it takes.”
RANGE asked the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC), a prominent police lobby, if it had a stance on any of these proposals. Steven Strachan, executive director of WASPC, did not comment on the individual legislation, but sent the following statement through a spokesperson: “We look forward to working with legislators and community leaders in the upcoming session on thoughtful and bipartisan public safety legislation that focuses on keeping people safe.” (WASPC’s legislative agenda focuses on jail standards and helicopter operations funding.).
There’s no way to tell this early which bills are likely to pass, but much depends on the price tags state agencies and organizations assign (which they do via a legislative mechanism called a “fiscal note,” an analysis of a bill’s cost that does not account for any money a bill would save the state).
With all that in mind, here is a rundown of what you may see in Olympia this legislative session, which will begin on January 26. (The WCPA organizes them in two categories: priority bills and support bills. We’ll do the same here.)
Priority bills
Independent prosecution
One of the most prominent 2021 reforms created a state-level office that investigates police killings: the Office of Independent Investigations (OII). The office is still ramping up, but is beginning to investigate a few cases, potentially including the killing of Novak’s son, David, in 2019 by Spokane police.
The OII investigates and then it sends its finding back to the local prosecutor. But former Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell already declined to prosecute Officer Brandon Rankin for David Novak’s killing, meaning that whatever OII’s finding, it’s unlikely that Novak’s case would be prosecuted here. The city of Spokane settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Novak in 2022 for $4 million, but not only is Rankin still on the job, he was promoted to detective.
The independent prosecutor legislation, filed as Senate Bill 5584 and House Bill 1740, would create another state-level Office of Independent Prosecutor, charged with prosecuting local officers referred by the OII. Novak said this would alleviate perceived and actual conflicts of interest between local prosecutors and local police.
“I did not understand, and I’m sure there’s not any family in this room today that understood, that when their loved one was killed at the hands of police, the local prosecuting attorney is the one that decides if charges will be filed,” Novak said during the WCPA press conference. “These prosecuting attorneys work on a daily basis with those police officers. There is an inherent conflict of interest, and this has been proven time and time again.”
The AG’s power to probe police agencies
Washington state residents can request documents from police agencies just like any other public body, but the records often take months to come back and can be heavily redacted.
You might think that the top cop in the state would have better access. They do not. When the state attorney general (AG) wants to investigate police who use force in ways they’re not supposed to, it must use the same process that journalists, activists or the average citizen use to get records.
Senate Bill 5925 and House Bill 2061, would give the AG the authority to demand those documents on an expedited schedule, making it more nimble in holding police accountable for violations of law or policy.
“We need the attorney general to have the right to go after systemic problems,” Novak said at the press conference. “An example of a systemic problem would be our agency here in Spokane: we have a high number of deaths. … The Attorney General would be able to step in and say, ‘Hey, Spokane Police Department or Spokane County Sheriff, we have authority and we have the right to access your information.’”
Certifying wild-west chiefs and sheriffs
Almost all law enforcement officers must be certified by the state Criminal Justice Training Commission, which sets standards for and trains Washington police (CJTC), to work in Washington. That certification is bestowed after an intensive training process that is rare in the US — few other states have a similar state-level requirement.
The only exception to the certification requirement: sheriffs and police chiefs. The top brass at any agency can be sworn in without undergoing the training required of all their employees. Senate Bill 5364 and House Bill 1399 would require the leaders of police agencies across the state — including popularly elected sheriffs who, under current law, are given badges, guns and the authority to commit state violence against citizens without any law enforcement training or certification required — to do the CJTC training. It would also bar volunteer police — like posses, or deputized civilians commissioned for specific police work — from arresting people or exercising state violence.
“‘Posse’ is a term that we heard from the Wild West Days, not something that we need in modern-day policing,” said Anwar Peace, who has decades of experience organizing against police violence and is a member of the WCPA, at the press conference.
Support bills
Masked people — police? — rounding up civilians
Most police are required to identify themselves by name and badge number and show their face when doing normal police work. There are few exceptions, including for undercover work and work in environments that necessitate gas masks. This is not true of some federal agencies, including ones that enforce immigration law. You’ve probably seen videos or heard of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other supporting officers wearing civilian clothing and masks (or their impersonators) nabbing people off the streets and carting them away behind tinted windows, supposedly enforcing federal immigration law.
Senate Bill 5855 and House Bill 2173 would ban federal agents from covering their faces in the field.
“It is reasonable for the public to be able to identify if they are talking to a random vigilante, kidnapper or a law enforcement officer who is employed by and who represents the United States,” said Cynthia Manycolors, who introduced the bill at the press conference. (Manycolors’s son Bjorn Manycolors was gunned down by Spokane County Sheriff’s deputies in 2023 as he fled.) “It breaks trust when we, the public, experience officers covering their identity.”
Reining in rampant surveillance
Washington, like 48 other states in the US, is being flooded with automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which snap a photograph of every car that passes them and translates that photograph into searchable data for police agencies. A RANGE investigation found ALPRs in Spokane County, manufactured by Flock Safety, were accessed by federal law enforcement and local agencies as far away as Texas to search for immigrants and at least one woman who was seeking reproductive healthcare.
The WCPA is asking lawmakers to support a law that would limit the amount of time agencies can keep ALPR data, bars them from sharing it with federal law enforcement, limits which departments can access that data to Washington law enforcement agencies and requires them to report how the cameras are used. The law is filed under Senate Bill 6002. It does not have companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
“ Most of us never consented to this, and many of us don’t even know it’s happening right now,” said Jim Leighty, a police accountability activist, at the January 5 press conference. (Leighty’s close friend Craig Johnson was shot and killed by a Bonner County sergeant in 2017.) “There are very few laws in Washington that regulate how this data can be used or who is allowed to access it.”
Turning the body cams on
Most police in Washington wear a body camera on their uniform designed to record their interactions with civilians when they’re in the field. But there is no state law that they actually record those interactions. Family members of people who’ve been killed by police, journalists and activists who file requests for body camera footage frequently receive video that cuts off in the middle of or just before a police contact in which someone is harmed or killed. For example, RANGE requested body footage taken by Spokane Sheriff’s deputies before they killed Donald Hegel, culminating an hours-long standoff. The video we got back was about 10 minutes long and shows deputies pulling up to the scene, but the feed was cut off after they exit their vehicles. In other footage we requested from the Cheney Police Department that supposedly depicts a contact with a minor, the entire video is redacted to protect their privacy — even though the minor had died by the time the request was made..
WCPA is asking lawmakers to require police to start filming and recording audio on their cameras from the moment they get a call to the moment that call is over. This law is also still in the drafting process and does not yet have a bill number.
“We can no longer afford to have officers in any municipality, in any part of our state and really in the United States think that it’s okay to just turn your camera off or turn your mic off,” said Kurtis Robinson, a member of the WCPA, at the press conference.
The WCPA will host a series of lobbying sessions in Olympia starting January 19 to convince lawmakers to support these bills.
Now what do you do? Call your representatives and tell em’ what you think of these laws! Learn how here.
