Legislators Going Overboard On Crime, Police Say Law Enforcement Officials Claim Many Of The Proposals Won’t Work, Cost Too Much

Legislators love to sponsor crime-fighting bills, especially in an election year. But the volume of “lock ‘em up” measures is so great this election year that even police are telling lawmakers to cool it.

Law enforcement men and women told a joint legislative panel Wednesday that the Legislature is cranking out anti-crime laws even before local police and prosecutors have been trained or have found the money to carry out laws passed the previous year.

“We’re saying, ‘Slow down a little bit and let us catch up,”’ Mike Patrick, head of the Washington State Council of Police Officers, told a hearing of the House Law and Justice and House Criminal Justice and Corrections committees.

The Republican-led Legislature, meeting in a 60-day session, has proposed about 300 crime-related measures, about a third of them related to sex crimes. Many others would boost penalties for a variety of crimes, and a flurry of bills aims to crack down harder on drunken driving.

“I have six pages of sex crime bills alone here,” Patrick told the panel, holding a sheaf of papers aloft.

Then there are the proposals that just plain won’t work, said Larry Erickson, former Spokane County sheriff and now head of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

He singled out now-dead measures in each house that would have barred sex offenders from living within a mile of a school.

He said his organization looked at a map of Washington and figured out that under the restriction, the only town where sex offenders could live would be “in a small area outside Yelm” in Thurston County.

Erickson also faulted lawmakers for considering proposals to make county sheriffs, instead of social workers, handle child abuse cases, which number nearly 50,000 a year.

“Please,” he said, “we don’t want to be worrying about whether they (children) are getting their diapers changed on time. We have enough to do.”

Seattle police detective Bob Shilling blasted a recent proposal to do away with sex offender treatment as an alternative to prison for first-time sex offenders. He said the program is valuable because “the vast majority of sex offenders do not reoffend” when they get treatment.

The proposal, made by Senate Law and Justice Committee Chairwoman Pam Roach, R-Auburn, came after convicted child-rapist Mary Kay Letourneau, 36, recently violated a no-contact order and was found with her 14-year-old male victim. Roach said it proves the program is fatally flawed.

The Letourneau case is an “anomaly” in an otherwise sound and valuable program that sets many first-time offenders on the road to permanent recovery, Shilling said.

The law enforcement officials, along with a panel of detectives and prosecutors from around the state, told legislators that criminal law must be written more carefully and with a clearer grasp of its financial impact on local government.

“If I’m overwhelmed, … I can’t do the job for children,” Aberdeen police detective Mike Bagley said. He has a huge caseload of sex offenders and still is expected to single-handedly make sure the community is notified each time a sex offender moves into a neighborhood.

Without the financial help to enforce them, more laws will make his job even more difficult, he said.