Q&A: Newhouse, White discuss views on public safety

Republican Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside is defending his U.S. House seat against Democrat Doug White of Yakima in the Nov. 8 general election.

The Yakima Herald-Republic asked each to talk about their views on Public safety:

Public safety

Yakama Nation and Yakima County law enforcement leaders recently sent a letter to federal officials requesting more public safety resources, including funding to support hiring more officers and support for a regional crime center. Violent crime, property crime, gangs and drug activity continue to rise in the county and on the reservation while both governments face resource shortages, the request said.

Do you support the proposal for a regional crime center in the Yakima Valley? Why or why not?

White: I absolutely do support the regional crime lab. I’ve been following this for quite some time and I’ve been able to have some good conversations with people that are very close to bringing it here. I think it is absolutely a benefit to the district. Right now, it takes months and sometimes years in order to be able to get information processed, and that’s not acceptable. It even defies our Constitution, guaranteeing a timely trial. Anything in order to expedite the process of getting people behind bars that need to be and getting sufficient services to those people that might otherwise have a good life and keeping them on that path, (I support).

Newhouse: As far as the regional crime center, I think anything that we can do to improve coordination, sharing of intelligence, the cooperative effort to solve crimes throughout the Valley and throughout Central Washington, it behooves us to do that. That will make all of our communities safer. We have to address the increasing crime issues, not only in Central Washington but throughout the country.

How would you go about addressing the crises of missing and murdered Indigenous people and other violence in the community?

Newhouse: This is exactly what I’ve been working on in Congress to address some of the issues that we have locally. From discussions and roundtables, we came up with the idea of improving the Parity for Tribal Law Enforcement Act between tribal agencies and local agencies to improve recruitment and retention of officers on reservation agencies. Not only can we train and keep high-quality officers on reservations, they can then address some of the glaring issues that we have such as the MMIW issue, the drug issues, the gang issues, the crime issues that we’re seeing, not only on reservations, but everywhere. If we can keep our tribal communities safer, in turn, we’re going to keep all of our communities safer.

We also need to make sure that our law enforcement agencies have the tools necessary to do the hard job to keep our community safe. We need not only resources but the support to make sure that they continue to be held in high regard by communities. They need the physical and the vocal support of government officials throughout the country in order to be successful, and I want to make sure that they can do their jobs.

White: One of the biggest challenges right now is basically line drawing between sovereignty and local, state and federal jurisdictions on so many things. There seems to be a lack of desire to lend that help, step over that line when people ask, when people really need help. Everybody’s so concerned about staying ring fenced right now.

Missing and murdered Indigenous people right now is probably one of the greatest tragedies facing us, and the fact that it’s been going on for decades and it isn’t isolated just to this district should tell the federal government and the state and local authorities, as well, that this isn’t something where we can stand back and start disputing whether or not it’s our problem, your problem, their problem. This should be an all-hands-on-deck effort in order to be able to do whatever we can, any way we can in order to solve this problem. So I would be stepping in to help see if I could mitigate some kind of solution to where all these organizations and entities could work together in a way that made them feel comfortable, but ultimately provided some results.