Monday, the City Council is set to hold its final vote on a 2021 budget for Seattle that will leave both #defundSPD and pro-police spending activists along with Mayor Jenny Durkan mostly unsatisfied. That is the nature of compromise.

In the city, this will bring a nearly 17% cut to the city’s 2021 policing budget along with important changes to reduce the size and power of the department by moving 911 and traffic enforcement operations outside of Seattle Police and spending more money on social, community, and BIPOC services and programs. Even amongst the loud cries of concern from business groups and pro-policing organizations like the Seattle Police Officer Guild, 2021 will actually see new SPD officers hired as the council is on its way to rejecting “No New Cops” proposals.

Looking forward, more progress in changing policing in Seattle could come from Olympia. Seattle-area state lawmakers say they are working on a suite of legislation that would look to improve police accountability across Washington through a more stringent officer decertification process, a public use of force database, and several other bills.

Local legislators, including Capitol Hill’s Sen. Jamie Pedersen, have been working since the summer and the protests over the police killing of George Floyd on the package that includes an overhaul of a rarely-used mechanism to decertify officers. The state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission decertifies 13 officers per year on average, according to a Seattle Times investigation. Across Washington, there are over 11,000 officers.

“When people violate that trust that we have placed with them, then we’re going to say ‘You no longer have the right to carry a badge and a gun on behalf of the taxpayers and enforce our laws,’” Pedersen, a Democrat who chairs the state senate’s Law and Justice Committee, said in a virtual panel last week.

The new legislation Pedersen is floating would remove roadblocks for the commission to take away officers’ certification, which he calls the “death penalty.” One of the biggest aspects of the bill would be changing the makeup of the commission, from one dominated by law enforcement officials to one with more citizen representation.

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There would additionally be many more categories of misconduct that could lead to decertification and there could be mandatory decertification for excessive force that leads to death.

The bill would also give the commission sanction power of officers that could serve as a warning for misconduct.

This marks a departure from the work being done in Seattle to cut funding for the local police department since state lawmakers have little jurisdiction over the purse strings of municipal law enforcement.

Other pieces of legislation that could come before the Legislature would create a publicly-available statewide use-of-force database and create a statewide civilian-led body for misconduct investigations.

Sen. Manka Dhingra, the Democratic vice-chair of the Law and Justice Committee, said she also wants to see legislation that would train officers in peer intervention so that if a colleague is engaging in misconduct, they would take action.

“We have to make sure that when they see something happening that violates the law, that violates policy, not just the use of excessive force, but prior to that, that they feel empowered to step in and stop that,” Dhingra said in the panel.

Even if the officer doesn’t step in, they would be obligated to report what they saw. Dhingra, who works as an attorney in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, said she sees this as crucial in the decertification process since the testimony of fellow officers is relied upon in many investigations.

“It really is about making sure we’re closing all the holes so that everyone has complete information as to what has been going on with this individual,” the Redmond senator said. “We have to make sure we’re creating a culture where there is that understanding that each of them are going to hold the other to a very high ethical standard.”

Nearly 60% of voters statewide approved I-940 in November 2018 to create more uniform rules around police use of force. That initiative was then amended by legislators in Olympia in early 2018, setting out a test for police using deadly force: whether another law enforcement officer acting reasonably in the same circumstances would have believed deadly force was necessary. This new bill passed unanimously in Olympia.

But these are just proposals so what are their chances come early 2021 in the Legislature? Pedersen is optimistic that many pieces of legislation on accountability could be passed next year, but recognizes that some won’t be accepted by police unions, which could be a major hurdle to success in the capitol.

Collective bargaining, generally, could be an obstacle for many proposals legislators are aiming for.

Meanwhile, legislation frequently takes multiple years to make its way through Olympia, Dhingra notes, so the more difficult reforms, such as altering how collective bargaining works with police, could take longer.

“This is not a one and done.”

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