As WA police rethink hogtying, Pierce County’s sheriff stubbornly refuses to evolve | Opinion

Pierce County deserves a law enforcement agency that shares the community’s values — one that’s a leader, not a follower, and one that’s consistently working to eliminate abuses of authority while improving safety and best practices.

Instead, as we’ve seen time and time again in recent years, we have a sheriff’s department that, when moments of reckoning arrive, refuses to answer the call. If we’re lucky, it gets dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

Under elected Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer, it feels like every reasonable reform is stiff-armed and politicized. Every attempted correction to the way things have always been done — most of all efforts to address long-standing bias and racial disparities — is met with stubborn indignation and good-ol’-boy resistance.

Frankly, it’s getting embarrassing and tiresome. More importantly, it’s a dangerous and divisive trend that only further undercuts local trust in Troyer’s Sheriff Department, at a time when trust in local law enforcement is in short supply.

The latest example of the agency’s rigid defiance and refusal to change comes via its defense of hogtying — or maximum restraint — a practice that allows deputies to connect detainees’ handcuffs to leg restraints behind their backs through the use of an adjustable “hobble” cord.

It’s a risky, unnecessary and dehumanizing technique that’s out of step with the state Attorney General’s new model use-of-force policy, and one that law enforcement agencies across the state, including in Tacoma and Puyallup, have abandoned — for good reason.

But not the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, where as an elected official, Troyer has sole authority to initiate changes to the department’s use-of-force policy.

Of course not. That would be too easy.

As The News Tribune’s Jared Brown reported last week, Troyer’s Department is instead digging in its heels — refusing to let go of something that, in our view, would be best left in the past.

As Brown reported, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office controversial stance on hogtying restraints entered the spotlight in December, when the agency delivered its response to the Attorney General’s new model use-of-force policy.

As part of a host of 2021 reforms, the state legislature tasked the AG’s office with developing a model use-of-force and de-escalation policy by July 2022, and required every police agency in the state to enact policies consistent with it by the end of the same year. Specific to hogtying, the AG’s new model use-of-force policy explicitly states that, “Officers shall not connect a hobble restraint to handcuffs or other types of restraints.”

Agencies that chose not to enact consistent policies — like the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department — were required to explain why, and describe how their current policies comply with lesser state laws.

So what was the Pierce County’s explanation for its continued use of hogtying?

Simple: Deputies will continue to use the controversial technique — because they can.

“There is no statute that prohibits its use. Provided the individual is monitored and placed in proper position after application of the restraint, the restraint can be safely used,” read a strongly worded memo from the Sheriff’s Department to the Attorney General. “The 4 point restraint in and of itself has not been proven to cause death.”

Given the stakes, and the growing recognition that longstanding law enforcement must change, that’s not nearly good enough.

This isn’t about politics or the misguided belief that police are under attack. It’s about decency, common sense, safety and doing what’s right.

Can reasonable people disagree about the safety of hobble cord restraints? Sure. And the same goes for reasonable law enforcement professionals. Policing is dangerous, messy and essential work, and trying to paint the job as black and white fails to appreciate the complexity of the task we ask officers to undertake. The Lakewood Police Department, for instance, also continues to allow hogtying.

Still, here’s what else we know to be true:

The King County Sheriff’s Office has banned hogtie leg restraints. So has the Spokane County Sheriff’s Department and the Seattle Police Department. Washington’s Basic Law Enforcement Academy doesn’t teach it, and now the state Attorney General’s Office has developed use-of-force standards that seek to prohibit it.

Between 2016 and 2021, Pierce County Sheriff’s Department use-of-force data reveals that deputies reported using hobble cord restraints about 60 times a year, and about 28% of the time it was a Black person on the receiving end — even though Black residents make up only about 4.8% of the Department’s service population. The same report found that, overall, Black people experienced more than five times as much force as white people, and Native Americans or Alaska Natives endured about 3.6 times as much force as white people.

When Manuel Ellis died in police custody, records show that officers from Tacoma and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department employed a hobble cord to hogtie restrain him.

Despite all of this, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office — under Troyer’s watch — simply refuses to budge.

We deserve better.

We deserve more accountability — and an overdue transformation — from a department responsible for protecting and serving more than 450,000 people across a diverse county.

The News Tribune Editorial Board is: Matt Driscoll, opinion editor; Stephanie Pedersen, TNT president and editor; Jim Walton, community representative; Amanda Figueroa, community representative; Kent Hojem, community representative.

This story was originally published February 16, 2023 at 7:00 AM.