Another Olympia mother grieves as police reform inches along

We offer heartfelt condolences to the family of Timothy Green, the 37-year-old Black man suffering from mental illness who was shot and killed in an encounter with Olympia police on Aug. 22. We also recognize the trauma that the officers involved experienced in the line of duty.

Since then, it’s been a month of grief, and of too many unanswered questions.

It’s been over two years since the murder of George Floyd set off a reckoning about racism and police killings of Black men. It’s been seven years since the Olympia police shooting of Black brothers Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin, which left Chaplin paralyzed. That shooting arguably gave Olympia a head start in its work to reduce police violence against Black men.

So why, after all this, is the Olympia City Council still confronted by a grieving mother looking for an explanation for why the police took her son’s life during what was clearly a mental health crisis?

How did all the training in de-escalation fail? Where was the mental health crisis responder who should have been there?

We evidently have not yet created a world where Black people don’t need to fear the police, and where guns and badges don’t confer power that can be used without timely accountability.

“Wait for the investigation to be completed” seems heartless to the grieving family and friends of the deceased. And it’s stomach-churning to all who doubt the integrity of investigations of police done by police.

Sometimes we think the city of Olympia talks too long and accomplishes too little. In February 2021, the city council approved a “community-led process to re-imagine public safety.” That process is led by a Community Work Group of nine members. It is just now holding “listening sessions,” and is scheduled to deliver recommendations to the City Council sometime between October and the end of the year.

That’s not a speed that matches the urgency of a life-threatening problem.

State government also is agonizingly slow. In 2021, the state Legislature voted to create the Office of Independent Investigations, which will be composed of mostly non-police-affiliated citizens. It was supposed to be operational by July 1, but so far they have hired just 14 of their anticipated staff of 80.

That office is intended to relieve the police of investigating each other. We wish it had been operational last spring, when Thurston County Sheriff John Snaza’s twin brother, who is sheriff of Lewis County, was assigned to investigate an incident in which a man died while in the custody of Thurston deputies.

We never expected that a systemic problem so deeply embedded in our history could be resolved quickly. But we did think that there had been more progress than this.

We thought that when Timothy Green was clearly having a mental health crisis, mental health specialists would be called to the scene. Instead he was confronted only by multiple people who were trained, dressed and armed like warriors.

And now the investigation is being conducted by the Capital Metro Independent Investigative Team, the same old practice of police investigating police.

We will be glad when investigations are finally out of the hands of police. But we only need those independent investigations because we have so many police shootings that cry out for investigation.

So while we wait impatiently for the Office of Independent Investigations to open for business, we need to keep our eyes on the prize: eliminating police shootings of Black and/or mentally ill people who do not deserve to die.

Olympia may not be speedy, but it is right to focus on “re-imagining” public safety. We need to imagine police who are not trained, dressed and armed like warriors. We need to imagine police with degrees in history, psychiatry, or theology rather than military experience. And we certainly need to imagine a more robust mental health system that works in tandem with law enforcement.

We need to imagine a world where mothers no longer grieve for sons like Timothy Green.