No, we shouldn’t make it easier to charge Washington police

A proposed bill in Olympia would make it so that it’s easier to bring criminal charges against police officers who use deadly force in Washington. While it reads like a good idea in print, it would be a wrong and dangerous move.

Right now, 12 Democrats are leading the charge to change the current law. As it stands, state law says you can’t prosecute police officers for killing someone on duty if the officer acted in good faith and without malice. That law went into effect in 1986.

Related: The maddening revision of the Olympia shooting

We’ve frequently heard complaints that it’s too hard to charge officers in Washington and part of me is OK with that. If it’s too hard to charge a cop because you can’t show he or she acted with malice or evil intent, that bar is at a good height because this “fix” doesn’t change anything in a meaningful way.

It should be a high bar to punish a cop who didn’t act maliciously.

Look what we’re asking cops to do: we’re telling them to go to trouble. Every day an officer puts on a uniform, they’re putting a target on their backs and we’re asking them to go to where the bad guys are. Sometimes, they will have to defend themselves using deadly force; they should not be punished if they acted without malice.

Now should we be able to punish cops who acted wrongly even if they did so “in good faith”? Yes. That is sometimes warranted. This seems like a reasonable concern. Unfortunately, I don’t think this bill addresses that scenario.

This bill claims deadly force is justifiable if “The officer reasonably believes that there is an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or to a third party and that the deadly force is necessary to prevent it.”

Who defines what’s reasonable? A prosecutor under pressure from the loudest activists who claim cops are always the bad guys? Haphazardly loosening this protection could be abused by ideologues who still think trying to bash in the head of a cop with a skateboard isn’t deserving of the cop protecting himself.

As you can imagine, this doesn’t have much support. Detective Ron Smith, president of the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild, told my show (weeknights 7-10 p.m.) that this bill is a game changer for law enforcement.

“If it wasn’t hard enough to go out in the streets of Washington State and perform the mission of law enforcement, this would make it even harder,” Det. Smith said. “That just changes the game.”

But more problematic, this might negatively impact how safe officers can help make the streets:

When you hesitate in the field, you get hurt. You have to make decisions based on what you know, from a reasonable officer standard, in order to take any step. If you’re constantly having to second guess yourself, a second here or a second there, could make the difference between the officer living or an innocent civilian who they’re trying to defend with the application of force. It’s just misguided. It is driven by the Left spectrum of politics.

He’s not alone in his feeling on the bill.

“Our association will oppose this bill,” Mitch Barker, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC), told The Seattle Times.

Look, I have a clear pro-cop bias. But bad cops should be punished and I won’t stand in the way of reasonable, meaningful legislation that goes to valid concerns. This doesn’t do that in my view. Disagree? Let’s have a civil dialogue in the comments section below.