This Week: Do You Feel Safe Calling The Police?

The Week in Review panel covered many issues on this week’s show: what this presidential race says about us, Whitman College’s mascot debate and 405 tolls.

But one segment got particularly heated when KUOW’s Bill Radke, Seattle Channel’s Joni Balter, Washington Policy Center economist Paul Guppy and writer Ijeoma Oluo discussed whether Washington state should make it easier to charge a police officer in the use of deadly force.

Guppy argued that there was concern that officers would be less likely to engage in situations if they were always afraid of prosecution.

“I want the cops to be scared,” Oluo countered. “I don’t know if anyone in this room knows what it’s like to watch over and over again, dozens of times in these last two years, to see my people murdered in the street, gunned down in the street in the blink of an eye, without an ounce of hesitation from the officers. I want that hesitation. I want them to think, ‘If I screw this up I may go to jail.’ Because right now they know they won’t.”

Guppy said that he doesn’t think police officers feel “entitled and protected.” But that the larger problem had to do with crime, and the police’s ability to respond to it.

“There is a huge crime problem in many communities in America, mostly involving minorities. And the victims of crimes are often minorities as well, and I think that needs to be addressed,” Guppy said. “We need police to keep people safe.”

This segment begins at the 28:30 mark and elicited a lot of comments on our Twitter. We’ve compiled some of that feedback below: