Dear friends and neighbors,
The 2024 Legislative Session is now underway, and we are working hard on a host of important issues like supporting overburdened communities, addressing the housing crisis, medical and behavioral health, reforming the tax code, strengthening education, and combatting climate change. As Chair of the Community Safety, Justice, and Reentry Committee, I am committing a lot of my time to improving community safety and making important headway on reforming the criminal legal system.
Community engagement is vital for our democratic process. We need feedback from people from diverse communities and with a wide range of lived experiences. Bills must have this input to make sure we are reducing harm and improving our laws in the ways we intend. We need your engagement.
Fortunately, we have some great options for you to participate. You can always contact my office by email or call (360) 786-7878 and we will get back to you. More importantly, committees are always looking for robust testimony. We have written, remote, and in-person options for testimony. Please visit to find out more.
Protecting community members from deceptive police practices
For effective community safety, there must be a level of trust between law enforcement and the community in which they work. Police departments should work to promote investigations that deal honestly with the community, and with persons of interest. This is the only way to ensure that investigations yield and accurate result, reduce harm, and begin to build trust with community members.
My colleague, Rep. Strom Peterson, has introduced a bill to end police deception during interrogations. House Bill 1062 was heard in committee on Monday. There was a lot of compelling testimony that you can stream on TVW, but I want to highlight the testimony of Amanda Knox. You may recall that Amanda was arrested and convicted in an Italian court of the murder of her roommate. The evidence clearly shows she didn’t commit this horrible crime. However, Italian police interrogated her for 50 hours, without a lawyer, using deception and leveraging the language barrier. She has since been acquitted, but similar tactics are used across the United States and even here in Washington.
I am glad Rep. Peterson and stakeholders are bringing this forward so we can keep the conversation going. We must continue to work to end this inappropriate practice that furthers the ongoing degradation of trust of law enforcement among many communities in our state and stands in the way of finding the truth of a case. We can and must do better.
Thank you and please reach out with questions, concerns, or comments.
Sincerely,
Rep. Roger Goodman