A proposal to give police more leeway to engage in high-speed pursuits has passed one legislative hurdle, but faces a tough path ahead in the House.
The debate in Olympia has received extra attention in Central Washington following the death of two children in a Sunnyside crash on Feb. 28.
In 2021, as part of a package of police reform bills passed in the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the Washington Legislature passed a bill that barred high-speed pursuits unless police have probable cause to believe the person has committed or is committing a violent or a sex offense, or is an escapee.
Probable cause means that something is more likely than not to be true. It is the same standard of evidence used to arrest someone. The law allows for police to pursue someone they reasonably suspect of being a drunken driver.
In the Sunnyside case, Washington State Patrol troopers tried four times to stop a speeding driver before he collided head on with a car on Interstate 82, killing two children, according to a court document. Troopers said they couldn't stop the driver under current law because he was suspected of speeding only.
Senate Bill 5352 passed the Washington State Senate on March 8, the deadline for bills to clear their originating house. Supporters anticipate opposition in the House of Representatives, where an identical bill was mired in the House Rules Committee.
"It is not going to be put on the floor and not come up for a vote, and it will die," Yakima County Prosecuting Joe Brusic predicted, based on discussions with other prosecutors around the sate. "The House has been very contentious this year."
One of the bill's opponents said the crash that took the lives of Delilah Minshew and Timothy Escamilla would likely not have been prevented under the standards in SB 5352, as it does not cover speeding.
"This individual was not going to stop, and I think that is obvious," said Leslie Cushman, spokesperson for the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability. "We are very saddened by those deaths."
Yakima police Chief Matt Murray and Capt. Jay Seely, YPD's patrol division commander, said their experience suggests the law has only emboldened people to run from police.
"What we saw with the changing of the law in 2021 is we taught the public that if we initiate a traffic stop, we will disengage if they run," Seely said. "However, what we experienced in Yakima is that the offender would continue driving in a reckless manner because they feared if they slowed down and obeyed the law, they would get caught."
Two weeks after taking over the patrol division in September, Seely said he tried to stop a speeding motorcyclist who instead just looked back at him and sped off, while Seely broke off the chase.
The motorcyclist, Seely said, eventually crashed into a vehicle pulling out of the McDonalds on North 16th Avenue.
In a 2022 incident, a YPD officer spotted a stolen SUV, and the driver sped off rather than pull over. The officer broke off the pursuit but watched as the driver sped through downtown Yakima before colliding with a minivan, injuring two children.
The driver, 33-year-old Travis James Stevenson of Kennewick, was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to vehicular assault, eluding police, felony hit-and-run and possession of a stolen motor vehicle.
On Feb. 28, two cars hit head on in a crash near Sunnyside that SB 5352's supporters said was an example of why the law needed to be changed.
In the course of an hour, four Washington State Patrol troopers attempted to stop Keith Andrew Goings, who was first clocked at more than 100 mph near Thorp, according to a probable cause affidavit filed by the State Patrol. Each time, Goings sped off and troopers stopped their pursuit, as the only crime they could attribute to Goings was speeding.
Goings is charged with second-degree murder in the deaths of Delilah, 8, and Timothy, 4, and vehicular assault for injuring their 5-year-old sister and the man who was driving them to a supervised visit with their parents.
A drug-recognition expert determined after the crash that Goings was likely under the influence of intoxicants, and toxicology tests of his blood are pending.
"This is a classic example of how the law has failed residents," Brusic said. "This is exactly the kind of crime the Legislature should know about."
Cushman, with the police accountability coalition, questioned why troopers didn't pursue Goings as a suspected drunken driver, or use spike strips to stop his car before he got in the wrong lanes in Sunnyside.
State Patrol Trooper Chris Thorson said earlier that, prior to the crash, there was insufficient evidence to justify a DUI stop, a view Murray and Seely concurred with, as speeding is typically not a sign of impaired driving.
Trooper Chelsea Hodgson said spike strips, which are designed to bring a car to a stop by deflating its tires, could not be deployed because Goings was not being officially pursued. Spike strips, also called stop sticks, require approval from a supervisor before they can be deployed.
This year, bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to restore the reasonable suspicion standard, as well as another bill that would have left the current rules in place while the Criminal Justice Training Commission assembles a task force to study police pursuits.
Of the three bills, only SB 5352, which restores reasonable suspicion for pursuits involving suspects in violent crimes, sex offenses, escapes and domestic violence cases, made it out of its originating chamber before the March 8 deadline. It also maintains the reasonable suspicion standard for drunken driving.
In the House, Republicans failed to get the bill moved to a floor vote before the deadline, Rep. Gina Mosbrucker said. Rep. Eric Robertson, R-Sumner, invoked Delilah and Timothy's deaths in his argument to force the bill to the House floor for a vote. Mosbrucker is hoping that the crash may help with support in the Democratic-majority House for the bill.
"Without this ability to pursue safety, we are a less safe state," said Mosbrucker, a Goldendale Republican.
State Sen. Nikki Torres, a Pasco Republican whose district includes parts of the Lower Valley, said Delilah and Timothy's deaths, as well as the story of another child killed by a stolen vehicle, appeared to have had an impact in the bipartisan vote to pass the bill out of the Senate.
One of those who voted against it was Sen. Judy Warnick, a Moses Lake Republican and co-sponsor of the bill with Torres.
While Warnick said the bill was needed, she withdrew her support after amendments that would have allowed police to pursue if they had reasonable suspicion the driver was reckless, was in a stolen vehicle or was suspected of any crime likely to cause pain or injury failed.
Another deal-breaker for Warnick was an amendment by Sen. Manka Dhingra, the Redmond Democrat who also sponsored the bill requiring a task force study of police pursuits, that would enact the bill immediately and render it impossible to amend through referendum.
Dhingra's amendment also required police, at the start of the pursuit, to notify supervisors and find ways to end the pursuit.
"The amendment that was adopted on the floor of the Senate that night changed it to the point where I could not support it anymore," Warnick said. "I thought it was a good first step in solving the pursuit issue."
Brusic said the requirements that police have a plan for ending the pursuit practically at the moment it starts is too burdensome for police in a situation where they have to make split-second decisions.
"Prosecutors are going to see this as one step forward, two steps back," Brusic said.
Hurdles ahead
Warnick is hoping that her colleagues in the House will be able to fix the bill, but she and others are bracing for the bill to possibly not make it to the floor before the end of the session next month.
Torres hopes that the bipartisan support the bill received in the Senate will sway the House to vote for it.
Even Cushman said the bill's odds are not good in the House at this time.
"The House is a different situation," Cushman said. She said it is even possible that Dhingra's study bill could be resurrected through suspending legislative rules or inserting it into the must-pass state budget.
Mosbrucker said she and her colleagues will try to get the bill to a vote.
"We're carrying that Faberge egg of vehicle pursuit through the session," Mosbrucker said.
