Best Practices for Homicide and Officer-Involved Use of Force Investigations in Washington State
After much procrastinating and 30 proof reads, I have published the Homicide Best Practices document endorsed by WHIA. As we all know, CJTC has a best practices document for WAC compliance but this document goes further in guidance and was written by persons in the field, doing the work. It is not meant to be a replacement but to augment what is currently out there.
Please remember that this is written as guidance for everyone from agencies big and small. Some with involved prosecuting teams and others with non-involved PA’s. It is meant to provide a foundation for all. Since we work in a state that has unique WAC requirements for Officer Involved incidents, WAC requirements were included to create one document which can be referenced for both Homicide and Officer Involved UOF investigations.
This has been a long process which started with I-940 in 2019. I want to specifically thank Chief Dan Christman, Captain Brian Chance, Commander (Ret) Randy Maynard, Detective Brian Cestnik and Forensic Manager (Ret) Brian Johnson for remaining engaged over the years while this was being created. I also want to thank all of you who informally looked at past drafts and threw your ideas and suggestions our way.
The plan with this document is to put a committee in place to review and update it annually. Right now I’m thinking the review should occur in the fall, after CJTC’s WAC process has ended so we are not in conflict with any new changes when we update.
Any questions, please let me know.
Mike
Click HERE to download the document