In 2021, Washington state lawmakers created the nation’s first state-funded office to investigate killings by police officers, providing an extra layer of accountability for deadly use-of-force incidents that disproportionately impact Native Americans but that are rarely prosecuted. Three years since the legislation passed, however, the office still hasn’t officially launched any investigation. The office has put five cases under review, including the police killing of Stonechild Chiefstick of the Chippewa Cree Tribe in 2019. That means little to Trishandra Pickup, who shared four children with Chiefstick, Investigate West reports. The 2021 bill passed in a spate of police reform laws after the killing of George Floyd It created the Office of Independent Investigations, and tasked it with reviewing past fatal uses of force, then conducting full investigations in some cases, as well as investigating new cases involving serious use of force. The office was meant to use civilian investigators to add transparency and accountability in cases where people challenge the use of deadly force and subsequent investigations by law enforcement and prosecutors.
Reform advocates are criticizing the office’s slow pace in opening investigations, its focus on hiring investigators from within the world of law enforcement, and its failure to begin monitoring uses of force in the three years since the law was passed. The agency will begin investigating current use-of-force complaints for the first time in December, in just one of six regions in the state. “Families affected by police violence have been waiting too long for independent investigations,” said Dominic Campese of he Washington Coalition for Police Accountability. Three of the five cases under review involve the deaths of Native Americans. Native Americans encounter disproportionate police violence, with statistics showing they die at the hands of law enforcement at a rate five times higher than whites nationally. After Chiefstick’s death, Pickup filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Poulsbo, alleging negligence, excessive force and inadequate training, which it settled for $2 million in 2021. The shooting caused outrage in the Indigenous community and strained relations between the city of Poulsbo and the Suquamish Tribe, where Chiefstick had kinship ties and long resided. Poulsbo, a predominantly white town of 12,000, abuts the Suquamish Tribe Reservation. Pickup sees the shooting — and the response — as representative of systemic racism against Native Americans.
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