Judge Erik Price of Thurston County, Washington, describes how building relationships and collaborating with law enforcement has been critical to pretrial advancement.
Judge Price: Our mission is to “enhance public safety while simultaneously maximizing court appearances and maximizing pretrial release.” For our community, it was essential to acknowledge that improving our pretrial system should include public safety and accountability while upholding the legal principle that pretrial release is the norm.
Our mission statement was also important to engaging law enforcement in this initiative. During our kickoff meeting, several justice system stakeholders discussed the importance of law enforcement’s involvement. Sometimes, when law enforcement hears “improvements,” they think that means reforms that will lead to everyone being out of custody, and no one is in. That results in public safety concerns. By including public safety in our mission statement, our law enforcement partners are able to see that community safety is part of our focus, along with legal, research-based policies and practices that would improve pretrial outcomes.
Judge Price: The “aha” for me was having law enforcement at the table. They have been with us as we mapped our current system and studied the law and research. As we all do, they understand that improving our pretrial system won’t lead to less safety but more safety. Without having them at the table, that would have been a more complicated message.
Today I am optimistic. My main concern from the beginning of this project has been the long-term sustainability of our pretrial advancements. I knew that to succeed, we needed to build on our relationship with all involved agencies, including law enforcement. Over the past year, there has been increased participation of these agencies in our advisory committee meetings.
With that process came a couple of other “aha” moments. First, we have two of our four police chiefs—from Olympia and Lacey—on our policy team. These individuals are critical thinkers, but they are also pragmatic thinkers. This gives us a huge advantage when it comes time to convey information to line officers, who may be open to hearing some of the messages that historically law enforcement wouldn’t even consider. Second, the progressive building of research, such as our state legal analysis, has been eye-opening for all of us, including the police chiefs. We didn’t have to force anything; we built our understanding brick by brick, which has significantly enhanced our prospect for success.
Judge Price: COVID has made how we operate as a team more problematic…more complex. We can’t all get around the table and create relationships. It’s more challenging to do that using Zoom.
We didn’t have to force anything; we built our understanding brick by brick, which has significantly enhanced our prospect for success.
COVID-19 has also impacted our decision making. From my perspective and the perspective of many other judges, a “failure to appear” is different now than a year ago. And, because of booking restrictions at the jail and more people being released, prosecutors are not charging as many people as they usually would because they know there is no “room at the inn.” Law enforcement increased the use of citations instead of arrests. And, more discretionary decisions are being made about what we need to enforce.
I think our experience during the pandemic will provide us an opportunity to generally rethink where we put our attention and resources in terms of the justice system. Do we really want to put it toward “nuisance” crimes? Would it be more suitable to find alternative resources, services, or interventions that are not judicially based? I’m hopeful law enforcement, prosecutors, and the defense will willingly participate in a conversation about how we can deal with these things in a way that doesn’t involve using the jail.
Judge Price: We are looking forward to reviewing our data and examining how we match up with failures to appear and disparate results for different communities. All of this is important in terms of having conversations about where we are going to go. We are also looking forward to implementing the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Developing the Release Conditions Matrix [a local policy that matches the PSA score with services and supports] will be huge because it will require cross-agency discussions about what options are available and what’s appropriate for conditions of release. Those discussions can’t effectively happen in a busy courtroom but can occur as a result of this initiative. That conversation will be valuable to identify more tools, other than jail or money: the more tools we have to promote pretrial success, the better. The matrix will not be a magic wand that will change decision making, but it will provide options. And, as judges, that’s what we are looking for in the context of pretrial release conditions.
Judge Price: My observation of our work in Thurston County is the importance of building trust and understanding among stakeholders, including law enforcement, brick by brick. Everyone sees a different part of our pretrial system. We are coming to understand, through our system mapping, the challenges—and opportunities—each agency faces.
In addition, going back to our mission statement— “public safety” includes victims, too. This project will be successful in Thurston by recognizing that victims are a big piece of the justice puzzle.
At the end of the day, while we may not always agree, the participation of all of our agencies, including law enforcement, is indicative of widespread buy-in. That is critically important for the success of the project.