Eyebrows were raised last week when 45th District State Senator Manka Dhingra D-Redmond said she would not introduce the senate version of a pair of bipartisan bills addressing police pursuits (HB 1363 and SB 5352) in the Law & Justice Committee for a hearing.

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Recently I laid out the changes in the pursuit bills and how they would change the laws passed in the 2021 session that impeded law enforcement.

Sen. Manka Dhingra, Senate Democrats
Sen. Manka Dhingra, Senate Democrats
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During a legislative Session press conference, Dhingra defending not bring up the bill for a hearing, essentially killing it in her chamber. "And so it really is how you balance property versus protecting innocent Washingtonians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." 

The Senator then cited a study, done by retired University of Washington Professor Martina Morris to further defense of her position, that stated 3 people have been killed during a police pursuit in the 18 months since HB 1054 was passed versus 11 people in the same time frame before the bill passed...a 73% decline in fatalities from pursuits.

Rep. Alicia Rule, D-42, Washington House Democrats
Rep. Alicia Rule, D-42, Washington House Democrats
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42nd District Rep. Alicia Rule D-Blaine, a co-sponsor of the House version of the pursuit bill, sent an email to legislators involved in this discussion disputing the study put forward by Dhingra and commissioned one of her own.

Rep. Rule presented a review of the study cited by Sen. Dhingra, done by Professor Matthew J. Hickman, chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Criminology & Forensics at Seattle University.  Prof. Hickman has a long history of research regarding law enforcement statistics.

Prof. Hickman's thoughts on the study were summed up by this statement "If this analysis was submitted for peer-review, it would be summarily rejected as it does not satisfy threshold criteria for quantitative scientific work.  The analysis should be disregarded in its entirety and should not be used to inform legislative decision-making."

Carolina K. Smith,M.D./Getty Images
Carolina K. Smith,M.D./Getty Images
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While the future of the Senate Bill is in doubt, the House version, HB 1363, had it's first reading and was referred to the Community Safety, Justice, & Reentry Committee with a hearing date yet to be set.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

Gallery Credit: Sophia Crisafulli

 

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