Local law on police quota bill

A bill in the Washington State Legislature intended to make the number of citations for traffic incidents issued by law enforcement officers as separate from an officer’s performance has been introduced in the legislature.

The house bill, HB 2399, which calls for officers to not be allowed to issue citations based upon a quota, last week passed in the house with 95 yea votes to two nay votes. It now moves to the senate, and if it passes there, it will wind up on Governor Jay Inslee’s desk for final approval.

The bill was sponsored by 35 representatives, though none of the ninth district representatives put their names to it. The sponsors did include a former Spokane policeman.

“The legislature finds it is essential that the citizens of Washington state trust both the integrity and the intentions of law enforcement officers with whom they come in contact regarding traffic violations and that law enforcement agencies avoid the appearance of impropriety in the way they evaluate the performance of law enforcement officers,” the bill reads.

Colfax Police Chief Rick McNannay told the Gazette that citations are part of an overall evaluation of his police officers, but he does not enforce quotas.

“We do use that as a portion of the evaluation, but it’s molded into the overall review of the officer,” he said.

He said that using citations as a measurement of performance can indicate to him what an officer is doing on duty.

“There has got to be a certain percentage of enforcement there,” he said. “We’re not in the business of generating revenue, but you’ve also got to have officers do their jobs. If you’re out there for 10 hours, you should be doing something.”

McNannay did say that there is no quota to meet at the Colfax Police Department.

“I don’t tell my officers they have to write tickets,” he said.

McNannay said that he uses a formula to evaluate an officer’s performance, which include hours worked, cases, parking tickets, traffic stops and traffic citations.

“Basically any activity you get gets a score, divided by the hours worked,” he said. “I use that to compare it across the board.”

He said the data collected from that formula can show him if officers are high or low compared to others, and he wants the data to be “somewhere in the middle.”

Sheriff Brett Myers with the Whitman County Sheriff’s Office said that there is no quota for his officers either, but it is important to know what an officer is doing.

“On the one hand, it is kind of hard to track everyone’s work if you’re not measuring things,” he said.

He said it is important to evaluate that the work of an officer is being done.

“Are we out there doing our job? We don’t say you have to have 30 tickets or this many stops, but we look at proactive policework,” he said.

He said that proactive policework includes things such as public contacts, investigations and traffic stops, among other things.

“We just try to look at our overall numbers, our overall work,” he said. “There’s so many different things we do besides stop cars.”

Speaking about Colfax’s “speed trap” reputation, McNannay said he does not believe Colfax is a speed trap.

“I think that some people think it’s a speed trap because they have to go through Colfax to get to Pullman, so they feel trapped,” he said. “But we do our job, and we do it fairly.”

McNannay shared that in 2012 WSU’s newspaper The Daily Evergreen was writing about the speed trap reputation and collected data from 2011 that showed that the Colfax Police Department had issued 11 tickets in a year’s period on Main Street.

“And we were still considered a speed trap,” he said.

The number of tickets issued on Main Street now is higher, though. A Colfax PD report indicated that 22 traffic infractions were issued on Main Street in 2015. However, when the report includes figures that indicate an infraction occurring on a cross street with Main, such as Cooper, North, Golgatha, Upton and Wawawai, among others, that figure goes up to 228 traffic offenses. In total, that amounts to just less than half of all traffic-related tickets issued by the Colfax PD in 2015, which total out to 486.

McNannay said that he is not sure how the legislation preventing traffic citations from being used as form of measurement in an officer’s performance would affect the Colfax PD, but indicated that he does not think it will affect much.

“There are probably other ways to work it,” he said. “They’ve got to justify their existence. How do you gauge it? How do you measure a person’s performance? I do expect them to do their jobs.”

The Colfax PD is also in the process of obtaining new radar guns, which McNannay said will allow the officers to be in parking lots rather than being forced to sit parallel with traffic, which can sometimes lead to dangerous U-turns.

The radar guns will be purchased with a $5,600 grant from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. The department will purchase four handheld radar units, two laser radar models and two less expensive radar units.

HB 2399 last week moved to the senate and was refereed to the Department of Commerce and Labor at the first reading. From here, it can move from that department, which will study the bill and can hold public hearings on it before being read in open session in the senate and referred to the rules committee.

After the rules committee, the bill can be placed on a second reading for debate, or the senate can choose to take no action. At the reading, it will be subject to debate and amendment before the third reading for final passage. If any amendments are made, it will be sent back to the house for approval before landing on Gov. Inslee’s desk.

If the bill becomes law, Washington will join California and Illinois as the only other states with a specific law against police quotas.