The Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce hosted a debate between candidate Tracy Murphy and incumbent Rob Snaza for the office of Lewis County sheriff on the second floor of O’Blarney’s in downtown Centralia on Thursday.
Candidates were each given two minutes for an opening statement, then two minutes to respond to each question posed by the moderators, Chris Thomas, spokesperson for Providence Centralia Hospital, and Todd Chaput, initiatives program manager for the Lewis County Economic Alliance.
Each candidate was also given two “rebuttal” cards that when played granted the candidate one minute to respond to a comment by their opponent.
Opening Statements
In his opening statement, Snaza reflected on the accomplishments the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office has had in eight years he has been sheriff, acknowledging ongoing issues such as homelessness and mental health. He addressed the impacts of recent law enforcement reforms and COVID-19, specifically the employment impacts.
“How do we get people to come to our community? How do we recruit in Lewis County? Those are the issues that not only you as business owners, whether you're in the chamber or part of the Economic Alliance, are trying to figure out,” he said. “Part of the sheriff's office, that is our same philosophy, to be able to have a place where we can work, raise our children and our family, and be together.”
He concluded his opening remarks by ensuring Lewis County residents that the sheriff’s office is part of their community.
“We’re there when you’re hurting, we’re there when you’re hurt, we’re there when you’re going through issues, we’re there if you’ve been the victim of a crime, we’re there when you're going through issues. If you've been a victim of a crime, we’re there,” Snaza said.
After thanking the Chamber of Commerce for the invitation and acknowledging the “friendly faces” in the audience, Murphy spoke on his 28 years with the Centralia Police Department and his decision to run for sheriff.
“Law enforcement is my passion. I have made the decision to run for Lewis County sheriff because not only am I a police officer here in this county, but I'm also a resident, and we need to be safe,” Murphy said. “I need to be safe, you need to be safe, our families need to be safe. We need to be able to enjoy life here in Lewis County without fear of being victimized by the criminals. And so, after a lot of prayer, discussions with my wife, we decided that this was the route that we needed to take to help the citizens of Lewis County to be able to come here and live, work and play without fear of being victimized. To the best of our abilities.”
The candidate questions and answers were as follows:
What do you feel should be the top three priorities for the sheriff’s department?
Murphy said his number one priority is improving staffing issues both in the jail and on patrol. The second priority, he said, is “partnerships and being able to work with both the other law enforcement agencies within our county, as well as the support services that we have in our county. Building strong relationships with them is vital.”
Murphy leads the Joint Narcotics Enforcement Team (JNET), a group the sheriff’s office no longer participates with.
Both priorities stemmed from a focus on safety, he said.
“We’re safer when we work together,” he said. “We’re safer when we have staffing to deal with the issues.”
His third priority is the infrastructure in the jail, which he said is operating under the capacity it was built to house in 2004.
“In order to keep up with the changing of the laws, we need to be able to house criminals. When people commit crimes on our streets, we have to be able to arrest them and put them into the jail,” he said, citing the jail’s daily average as hovering around 181 inmates per day, while the jail was built to house 356 inmates.
“Our criminals haven’t gone down, they've actually gone up,” he said.
He ended by saying his top three priorities all revolved around safety.
“In order to keep us safe, these are the things that we need to focus on,” Murphy said.
Snaza said he agreed staffing issues are the top priority, saying the sheriff’s office employed 37 full-time employees when he started in 1990 but that number has only grown to 41, despite the county’s population growing from 54,000 in 1990 to almost 84,000 today.
The jail, he said, was another priority.
“We do have a jail system. In fact, our jail was the only one open during COVID. The only one, and still open on the I-5 corridor. We do have work to do. The jail is older and we need to continue to repair that. Getting a brand new jail is not going to happen. That's $100 million, plus, that’s going to be paid by the taxpayer,” Snaza said.
For his third priority, he spoke on the need to change the police reform laws that went into effect last year, specifically the 2021 State v. Blake supreme court decision, which ruled the felony drug possession law unconstitutional because it allowed individuals who didn’t know they had drugs in their possession to be convicted.
The new laws also restricted the conditions in which an officer can engage in a pursuit.
“We need to change the laws,” Snaza said. “We need to work with our legislators to ensure that this does not happen anymore. And we need to change the Blake decision, it’s very vital.”
Murphy used one of his two allotted rebuttal cards for a one minute response.
“Regarding the Blake decision first, that really doesn't affect law enforcement and how we do our job, that affects the court system,” Murphy said. “Currently, possession of drugs in the state of Washington is a misdemeanor, it is an arrestable offense, and it is an offense that we can book people into jail for. Our problem is we don't have the space. The current sheriff has had eight years to address this problem and work on this problem to make sure that we're not in the position that we are right now. When officers with the Centralia Police Department arrest somebody for a crime and are told that they can't put them into the jail because there's no room, that's unacceptable. We have to be able to book our people in jail. Several incidents come up with COVID as being an excuse … COVID is going to be here with us. We're going to have to figure out how to overcome it and address it.”
Snaza then used one of his two allotted rebuttal cards to respond to Murphy’s rebuttal.
“I'm gonna reiterate, Lewis County Jail was the only jail open on the I-5 corridor during the COVID pandemic,” Snaza said. “There were times when you bring inmates in, and they’ve got COVID. You have to isolate them. This is not an easy step and to say that we haven't done anything is absolutely absurd. The Lewis County Jail and the people that work there do everything they can. Staffing is an issue. It’s an issue across the board in the state of Washington. But when you look across all the counties surrounding Lewis County, there's only one jail local where you can actually take somebody in for a criminal trespass, a disorderly, and that's the lowest guarantee and there have been times where we had to shut down because of COVID pandemic. Those are the only reasons, but it was very short and the Centralia Police Department knows that and so does its admin staff.”
The past few years have been tough on law enforcement nationwide. How has this affected morale among county officers locally and how would you address the issue?
Snaza called the question “a million dollar question” and said Washington ranked at the bottom of the list for lowest number of law enforcement officers.
“In 51 states, including D.C., we’re the lowest in law enforcement,” Snaza said. “And how do we get that? How do we get those recruiting, when you're facing the challenges of other agencies offering $10, $20, $30,000 bonuses. Those are the challenges that we face.”
What his office has been able to do, Snaza said, “is recruit people from around the state that want to come work here in Lewis County. I think we've done a pretty good job of recruiting.”
He added that the sheriff’s office is currently down two deputies, but looking holistically, he said “the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office is doing great.”
The challenge, he said, “is continuing to work with legislators to change law enforcement reform back to the way it was, to get that morale. Because if you're a deputy, and there's a couple of deputies in here, and officers who have chased somebody down the road, they've been after somebody, and then they have to turn around during the pursuit to let that person go, to let that individual who just burglarized a family's house go, those are the things that we cannot allow anymore. And we have to work with our own legislators to change this.”
Murphy said that, for county officers, “there's been a lack of direction and a lack of leadership for the guidance of these officers with the changes of the new laws. Our job is to enforce the laws and uphold the Constitution. And our job is not to dictate which laws that we're going to enforce. It's not our job to dictate what the Legislature enacts.”
Murphy said the Centralia Police Department has “adapted and changed our training and our tactics” to fall in line with the parameters of the new laws.
“If we fail to do that and we continue to go down this hole, we start losing the trust of the people we're sworn to serve,” Murphy said.
Once they’ve done that, law enforcement can get with legislators and show them the ramifications of the new laws.
“But for us to say that our hands are tied and we can't do anything, what that does is, these men and women who join law enforcement, they do it because they have a heart for service and they want to do right … But if we in leadership do not give them the direction, then they're left to do nothing,” Murphy said. “So what we have to do is our leaders in law enforcement have to stand up and they have to come up with the right training and the tactics to help these officers do their job and that’s where we’ve failed.”
The cities of Centralia and Chehalis participate in the Joint Narcotics Enforcement Team, JNET, but the sheriff’s department has chosen to opt out as a JNET participant. If you approve of this decision, why? And if you don’t approve, explain why.
Murphy, who is the current supervisor of JNET, said “I can tell you 100% without a doubt, I do not agree with that decision. It's flawed in many ways. Number one is drugs are such a problem in our society, in our communities, that that has to be a focal point. It affects every aspect of our society. It affects our crime rate, the mental health, it affects families, kids, you know, being exposed to drugs because their parents are on drugs. It has to be a priority.”
Murphy added that JNET’s job is to go after the source of supply rather than the individual users.
“The whole idea is that we can dry up the source of supply, then these users have the ability to get clean, get clarity of mind,” Murphy said. “We can't give them any other help if they just live their life high and impaired the whole time.”
Regarding the sheriff’s decision to leave JNET due to staffing issues, Murphy said, “Well, staffing levels are back up. We know that the prosecutor's office offered to help fund part of a position and it was denied.”
Murphy added that JNET is a valuable and beneficial part of drug investigations due to its federal and state partnerships.
“We have so many more tools, investigative tools that are at our fingertips,” he said. “The sheriff's office does not have the tools by themselves to do that. So, yes, it was a poor decision to remove themselves from JNET.”
Snaza said he helped establish the group that led to the creation of JNET and continues to take pride in the work officers have done within the program.
“I'm not taking that away. But the difference is that Centralia is 8 square miles. Lewis County is 2,400-plus square miles,” Snaza said.
With the sheriff’s office short staffed as it has been, Snaza said deputies’ main priority is responding to calls. The need for deputies to respond to calls is intensified by how short staffed some of the city police departments are, Snaza said.
“Toledo has no police department right now. Who’s responding? Lewis County Sheriff's Office,” he said. “First and foremost, our priority is and always has been that when you call, we're gonna go.”
Snaza said that being part of JNET in the future “is an option. But you see across the state that there are counties that are changing from drug task forces to a different type of a street crimes modification or something else. Now I do agree … drug issues are huge in our communities. We need to address it, and we have detectives that do address those issues when they arise.”
He added, “What I'm telling you this at this point, if I don't have deputies responding to calls for service to come to you when you need us, you're asking me to give up one position. That's one position I don't have because we're down three detectives already.”
Murphy used the second of his two allotted one-minute rebuttals to respond to Snaza’s comments.
“(For) the cost of one detective, because that was the footprint that the sheriff's office had at JNET … you get the resources of 10 additional detectives,” Murphy said. “So when you're talking about a force multiplier, everything that's going on and the amount of drugs that are going on, and the other crimes that are being caused because of drugs or drug addicts … for the price of one detective, you get 10 additional and the resources are way more.”
Murphy additionally claimed the reason the sheriff’s office was short on staffing and funding was because of a $1.2 million budget issue “where you're supposed to fund the position for the road department because they're paying for it and then you haven't been funding it that will cause you to have to move people around. So unfortunately, that was the reason.”
Snaza used his second rebuttal to respond to Murphy.
“The average cost for a deputy sheriff is about $225,000. This last year, we had sent six deputies into the police academy. It takes a year from the time that they start their interview process to the time they complete,” Snaza said.
He added that typically, one or two candidates out of a batch of six that go to the police academy don’t end up finishing.
“So if we're down six … putting somebody into a specialty position is challenging for us,” he said. “That's a whole squad of folks. Six people is a whole squad for the sheriff's office.”
Snaza clarified that the funding Murphy referred to was given to the sheriff’s office by the County Road Advisory Board in 2008.
“That was meant for traffic safety and that is still being utilized to its full potential,” he said.
Do you feel Lewis County has adequate jail capacity? If yes, are there improvements you would like to see? If not, would you like to see this issue addressed?
Snaza began by clarifying that while technically the jail’s capacity is 356 inmates, “That’s if you throw mattresses on the floor.”
Snaza said the jail’s average daily capacity was in the 160s when he became sheriff and went up to 250 pre-COVID.
“But back in 2008, we have to remember too, that the (county) commissioners took away eight corrections deputies. Now that's a squad in of itself. So now you have to have the staffing available to take this on. We've asked for additional staffing,” Snaza said.
On average now, Snaza said the jail’s average capacity is in the 180s. He reiterated that the Lewis County Jail is the only one in the I-5 corridor that is open for bookings.
“We are working on issues, whether it's a HVAC system, whether it's the video system, all those things are being taken care of,” Snaza said. “All of us pay 1/10 of 1% into this, but the idea of taking this jail, taking it down and rebuilding is absolutely ridiculous. That cannot happen. We as taxpayers can't afford this. But I tell you, there are systems in place through the county commissioners and our staff that we continuously work and find ways to improve that we can make our facility the best facility in Washington.”
Murphy said he didn’t think “the jail is at the capacity that we need it to be.” COVID and mental health are among the reasons for that, he said, as both can limit how many inmates can be placed into one cell.
Murphy also agreed that tearing the current jail down was unrealistic.
“What we need to focus on is how can we make sure that we have the ability to put people into jail that need to go to jail. If that means having a secondary facility that we built on the east end, that's something that needs to be looked into,” he said.
He added that, while the Lewis County Jail has been open aside from a couple of COVID closures, there are restrictions on bookings only allowing those accused of felony crimes, domestic violence or driving under the influence to be booked.
“We need to look at it and address how we keep us safe, and we can't keep us safe if we're constantly going on restrictions,” Murphy said. “If we're going on restrictions for bookings, then there's a reason why. If the jail can't hold it, we have to come up with another plan. There has been no plan. The current sheriff has had eight years to deal with this and there is no plan.”
Closing Statements
The candidates each had one minute to make a closing remark.
Murphy thanked the Chamber of Commerce for hosting the debate and said, “Law enforcement is my passion. Law enforcement has been my life. We have things that we can do better in this county. We have to start having a strategic plan for the future to keep us safe. We have to start working together and forming these partnerships that are going to be lasting, not just temporal. We have to have the focus, you know, all of us in government. We have to be on the same page that we are here for the people. We serve the people. We have to get together and come up with ideas. And in law enforcement, it's keeping us safe. Criminals need to be in jail. Homeless need to be helped. But if they're committing crimes, they need to be in jail,” Murphy said.
Just as he’d finished, he added, “Oh, vote for me for Lewis County sheriff. My wife said that I had to do that.”
Snaza thanked the attendees for coming to the debate and said, “These are interesting times that we're all facing, whether it's law enforcement reforms, whether it's issues that we're all facing: homelessness, mental health, substance abuses, the Lewis County Sheriff's Office has been there. We've been there with you. When your families are hurting, we’re hurting. We have done everything. When I first started, we had one mental health counselor in our jail. Today we have eight. Our goal has always been to find a pathway to success to people that are in our facility. People don't choose to have mental health issues. Substance abuse is challenging. Working with our veterans. Those are things that we do on a daily basis. We've been talking about the jail a lot. The jail is not closed, folks. It may be on restrictions during COVID times. But I'm telling you this, your Lewis County Sheriff's Office men and women are here each and every day to provide the best service to you.”
