WASHINGTON, D.C. — As Congress considers police reform proposals from either side of the aisle, Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, announced Tuesday that he had formed a group of regional police chiefs and sheriffs to discuss pending federal legislation.

“Restoring peace and delivering justice for all are ideals inherent to our nation’s founding that I fully support, and it starts by engaging with our local communities,” Newhouse said in a statement. “In response to the events and discussions happening on the national stage, I established the Law Enforcement Working Group to hear firsthand from these leaders in our communities.”

Called the Central Washington Law Enforcement Working Group, heads of law enforcement agencies throughout the 4th Congressional District were invited to attend. Chiefs from the Moses Lake and Othello police departments and departments in Kennewick, Union Gap, Twisp, Yakima, Pasco and Sunnyside, as well as the Okanogan County Sheriff, attended the first meeting Tuesday, according to a press release.

While Republicans in both the House and Senate jockey to present their own plan, national attention has turned to the Democrats’ Justice in Policing Act, which proposes a number of major reforms to policing in the United States. The slate of reforms would create additional requirements for bias and de-escalation training and would make it easier to prosecute officers whose actions contributed to the unjustified death of a suspect.

The legislation would also establish a national registry of officers’ discipline records and misconduct complaints, among other things, grant the Department of Justice more information and more power to investigate use of force and misconduct by police, ban chokeholds and similar holds, end no-knock raids in drug cases and limit the transfer of military hardware to police.

Among the most controversial proposals, the legislation would also end qualified immunity as it is currently interpreted, which protects officers from being sued when they violate an individual’s constitutional rights. The act would also reduce the legal standard for use of force from a “reasonableness” standard to “only when necessary” to prevent serious harm and would allow deadly force only as a last resort.

During Tuesday’s meeting, officers discussed recent reforms made in Washington state, including the compromise legislation that law enforcement and reform activists agreed to after heated debate in 2018 over Initiative 940, which modified the law regulating police use of force.

I-940 removed the requirement to prove that a law enforcement officer acted out of “malice” when filing criminal charges such as manslaughter, which activists said was a near-impossible standard to prove in court and allowed officers to act with impunity. Instead, the standard was changed to a “reasonableness” standard, which asks a jury to determine whether a “reasonable” officer could have made the same decision given the circumstances.

The measure required law enforcement officers to receive additional de-escalation, first-aid and expanded mental health crisis training. The state legislature revisited the initiative in 2019 with House Bill 1064, further tightening requirements on how a use-of-force investigation is conducted and increasing the amount of training officers must go through.

While some critics have argued that these standards aren’t airtight, officers in Newhouse’s workgroup Tuesday noted that they are much stricter standards than are enforced in many places across the country.

While many officers, including Moses Lake Police Chief Kevin Fuhr, are skeptical about some of what he believed to be unintended consequences of the reforms proposed by Democrats, a uniform rulebook based on Washington’s requirements might be a good place to start, Fuhr said.

“If you look at all of the changes in our profession that came out of I-940, we are head and shoulders above most of the rest of the nation,” said Fuhr, who has previously worked with police agencies in Idaho. “The requirements on our officers here far, far outweigh the training that the officers in Idaho had to go through.”

“We should all be living by the same rules and guidelines — that’s the first thing you look at,” Fuhr added.

While Newhouse is still reviewing the Justice in Policing Act and listening to stakeholders in his district, he is actively looking at ways to take the lessons learned in Washington state and inject them into the conversation in Washington, D.C., said Communications Director Elizabeth Daniels.

Though only law enforcement officers were included in Newhouse’s workgroup, Daniels said the congressman is also taking note of feedback he is receiving from constituents calling his office or emailing him. One way to send him an email is to start at https://newhouse.house.gov/contact.