WA lawmakers hear initiatives on parents’ bill of rights, police pursuits

OLYMPIA — Legislators have now worked their way through public hearings on the three citizen initiatives they’ve agreed to hear before the legislative session ends March 7.

Legislators held joint hearings on two of the initiatives Wednesday: one that would establish a bill of rights for parents with children in public school and another to lift some state restrictions on when police can chase suspects. The day before, legislators heard testimony on a measure that would bar the state and local governments from imposing an income tax.

Altogether, six initiatives have been filed to the Legislature, but majority Democrats have agreed to hold hearings on only these three. All six could end up on the November ballot.

However, Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, said he expected the Legislature to pass the three initiatives that had hearings before the end of the session.

He described them as “diversionary tactics” that would hardly change state law and were meant to distract from three other “more consequential” initiatives: one that would repeal the state’s carbon market, another to repeal the capital gains tax and a third to make optional a payroll tax to pay for the state’s long-term care insurance program.

If the Legislature doesn’t act on those three — as leaders said they wouldn’t — they will head straight to the November ballot.

“I think we will clear these three away,” Pedersen said of the initiatives on parental rights, police pursuits and income tax.

Meanwhile, Brian Heywood, the Redmond hedge fund manager who poured more than $6 million of his own money into the signature campaign to get the six initiatives before the Legislature, described the week’s hearings as “a little bit of theater.”

“I believe that they’ve seen the same polls that we have, which means they know that these three, that they chose to do, are wildly popular, that they would pass in a vote in November,” Heywood said.

Parental rights

To start Wednesday off, a joint meeting of the House and Senate education committees considered Initiative 2081, which would create a “parents’ bill of rights” spanning 15 issues, such as the information parents and guardians are entitled to about what their kids are taught in public schools

Sen. Lisa Wellman, D-Mercer Island, said the breadth of the rights already afforded to parents under state and federal law could be confusing. A Senate committee compiled a list of parents’ rights in a report released by Wellman’s office last year.

“I think this initiative can just be one more tool to help parents better understand their existing rights,” Wellman said. “And if the language of this initiative creates any new confusion related to these rights, we stand ready to work to clear up any ambiguities.”

Dawn Land, who filed a referendum last year to challenge Senate Bill 5599, which exempted shelters and host homes from a requirement that they notify a child’s parents within 72 hours of the child coming into their care if the child was seeking gender-affirming or reproductive health care, testified in favor of the initiative.

When the effort to put Senate Bill 5599 before voters failed, “we fought twice as hard to reach the goal for this initiative,” she said. Land said putting Initiative 2081 into place “would put control back in the hands of families, where it belongs.”

While the initiative would put together a list of rights, those wouldn’t change or supersede existing laws, including Senate Bill 5599, or laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, which protects individually identifiable health information.

If a student told a counselor that she was pregnant and needed reproductive health care, then that information is likely private health information, and the language in the initiative wouldn’t trump existing privacy laws, Pedersen said. But he added that the language in the initiative is ambiguous enough that it could be read to mean even providers who don’t have anything to do with schools could be required to talk to parents if they verified that the child was a student at a public school.

Local school districts would need guidance on implementing the initiative, said Matt Schultz, chief legal and civil rights officer of the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Nasue Nishida, of the Washington Education Association, said the way the initiative was written was “vague, confusing and duplicative.”

“In working with our parents and partners, we are concerned that this proposed initiative is already causing LGBTQ+ students to feel anxious, vulnerable and targeted,” Nishida said. “School districts will need to be careful as they consider this legislation so that no student or group of students is harmed as it is enacted.”

Heywood maintains that the initiative says “parents are the primary stakeholders and you shouldn’t keep secrets from the parents.”

“There’s this game that’s being played, like, let’s make this guy look like he’s anti-LGBTQ or whatever,” Heywood said in an interview. “I’m not about the issue. It’s not the agenda to me. It’s the secrecy that I’m really upset about.”

Police pursuits

At a joint hearing of the state Senate and House public safety committees Wednesday morning, lawmakers heard testimony from supporters and critics of Initiative 2113, which would loosen restrictions imposed by the Legislature on when police can engage in car chases with fleeing suspects.

It’s a debate that has been raging for the past few years over the balance to strike on police chases, which have led to death and injury for officers, bystanders and suspects in Washington and across the nation. Lawmakers in 2021 imposed new statewide rules limiting such pursuits, only to roll them back somewhat last year amid fierce criticism from police chiefs, mayors and others who pointed to a rash of suspects fleeing crime scenes with impunity, knowing police could not pursue them.

I-2113 would further undo the Legislature’s restrictions, allowing police to give chase if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person they’re pursuing has violated the law and poses “a threat to the safety of others.” That would alter the current law, which says officers can start car pursuits only for people suspected of specified serious crimes, including violent offenses, sex crimes, vehicular assault, domestic violence assault, DUI and escapes from jail. The current law also says police can only start pursuits if there is also an “imminent threat” to the safety of others.

Both the current law and the initiative require officers to start car chases only after deciding the risk of failing to catch or identify a person is greater than the risk of the pursuit itself. Local cities and counties are free under current law and the initiative to adopt their own, stricter policies as many have done for years.

The list of people wanting to testify on I-2113 was overwhelmingly in favor, with more than 5,300 signed up to testify in support compared with 177 opposed, though lawmakers limited the hearing to one hour, calling on a few panels of opponents and supporters to give comments.

“We are at a critical point in this state’s history and the public safety of the people of this state,” said Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, who also serves as state Republican Party chair and who sponsored the police-pursuit proposal along with the other five initiatives now before lawmakers. He said I-2113 “takes a very narrow touch to do the one thing, the single action we can take to most effectively fight crime in Washington state.”

Heywood also testified Wednesday, saying the current standards have encouraged “an increasing disregard for the law” and demoralized police officers.

Lawmakers also heard from Amber Goldade, whose 12-year-old daughter, Immaculee, was killed in a hit-and-run crash in 2022 in Pierce County by a man who’d stolen a landscaping truck. Police had spotted him as he was fleeing an earlier crime but couldn’t pursue, Goldade said.

“If they could have he most likely would have been in jail on Jan. 15 of 2022. My daughter would be alive and I wouldn’t be here, speaking today,” Goldade said.

Critics of the initiative warned legislators to heed studies showing the widespread dangers of allowing police to freely engage in car chases.

Joshua Parker, senior counsel at the New York University School of Law’s policing project, testified through a video feed, pointed to a newly published investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, which analyzed police pursuits nationwide and found more than 3,000 people died in police pursuits over the past five years, including more than 500 bystanders. The vast majority of people killed in such pursuits were being chased for nonviolent crimes.

Law enforcement agencies and governments across the country have started to enact restrictions on pursuits because of their inherent hazards, Parker said, often incorporating the “imminent risk” standard in Washington’s current law.

“These jurisdictions recognize what the data bears out. That, generally speaking, when given little guidance on when to pursue, officers far too often engage in risky pursuits for low-level offenses and infractions, needlessly putting their own and others’ lives at risk,” he said.

Sonia Joseph, a Kent woman whose son, Giovonn, was shot and killed by Kent police in 2017 after a chase with officers, urged lawmakers to keep in place the “balanced” policy on police pursuits, arguing they needlessly escalate confrontations and lead to more deaths.

“Allowing pursuits for any infraction makes the streets more dangerous,” Joseph said. “Voting no on Initiative 2113 is the right thing to do.”