time once again for community forum and we're very lucky to have back with us live in the studio this morning kate brown brown is a professor of history at un b c university of maryland baltimore county she is the author of several books including a biography of no place from ethnic border lander to soviet heartland put topia nuclear families in atomic cities and the great soviet and american plutonium disasters dispatches from histories of places not yet forgotten and she's currently finishing her book a manual for survival on the environmental and medical consequences of the chernobyl disaster to be published by norton and twenty nine eighteen kate thank you very much for coming in spending time with us again this morning thanks it's great to be here so you're are in washington state you were just over the a day or two back regarding a letter that you had written to the washington department of health regarding a study they released in october of this year can you talk about that yeah the washington state department of health noticed in two thousand and twelve two thousand and thirteen a nurse in processor washington alerted them that there was a spike in babies born with a rare birth defect insufferably that's when babies are born without brains it's a fatal and pretty awful birth defect and it's it's part of a category of birth defects called neuro tube disorders which also include sp and you know i started tracking these birth defects and found that between two thousand and ten and two thousand and seventeen there were sixty seven neuro to birth defects  this area around in central washington and forty five of them i think i now it's the numbers by january of two thousand and eighteen will be forty eight were these babies born with and  insufferably that's a really high rate especially the three county area around the hanford plant that's eight point two babies per ten thousand born the normal you know standard in the united states is about two per ten thousand words so that's you know four times higher so that was very alarming and rightly so the department of health put together a team and did a study investigation of this problem and they published the results of the investigation just this fall and they said they looked at we know what's causing this problem it's clearly a spike it's significantly statistically significant and they looked at you nitrate know aids and said you know the studies don't show that there's a real link we don't see these women control and the women who were affected were all not taking folic acid a very high rates and so they think they sort of like finish the study and a draw saying we don't know where causing these problems and that's when i got i myself got upset about it because i thought you know there radiation seems like an obvious avenue to explore further in this case you know we find you know that hanford how much that is there was an accident one hundred eighty seven in brazil a thousand curies were spilled and two four people died two hundred people were hospitalized and two villages had to be raise that was a thousand curies and we're talking about four hundred sixty million curies chernobyl was about fifty million curious mean there's a lot of damage there so there's a lot of you know much of that radiation is still can somewhat contained underneath the hanford site in those big underground tanks that are leaking and they're trying to fix but a lot of that as you know short term and long term radiation that left the area in terms of gas and in front of water and forms you know going into the aqua for or just in in soil you know in dust and soil so i was surprised  the department of health in just one paragraph quickly raised the topic of radiation in the dismissed it saying you know radiation levels have been decreasing over time radiation isn't leaving the site and it isn't like there isn't ample evidence from other facilities of the tie between the neural tube issues and nuclear reactors yes you know if we find you know and i hooked up with  allergist to write a letter to the state of washington that neural tube disorder is bike in areas around the world that have had significant doses of very few active isotopes so there is a place the areas around chernobyl and the researcher vladimir very lucky has been following neuro tube disorders since two thousand and he's been tracking them every year he finds that there are twenty four  western australia where the british tested nuclear weapons big spike there that occurred you know in the one thousand nine hundred sixty to one nine hundred eighty you know the brits tested nuclear weapons there throughout the fifty's so there is a reason to suspect that there's a correlation between radiation and these new neural tube disorders and there was a texas study in two thousand and fifteen that looked at thirty eight thousand mothers who were working in the radiation industries  wore radiation monitors so they knew these women had been exposed and they found that they had a risk of having for congenital anomalies including and insufferably that's just a recent study from two thousand fifteen i don't see it cited in the washington state study two thousand and sixteen study found that women work in medical fields where dosimeters had a significantly increased prevalence for babies with congenital anomalies thirty percent of the mothers in the study who had exposures had babies with congenital birth defects six percent of the controls and we see there are five times difference so there is there's a lot of evidence to that makes me suspect that we could look a little bit more  in a more concentrated fashion at these the spike in central washington and one thing that you know i was wondering about is why not just not just you know they when they talk to these women they ask them questions about their lifestyle and what they where they drink their water but why not look at their bodies you know there's something called the whole body counter you put a person in it they sit there for fifteen minutes there is you know it's just like sitting in a dental chair nothing happens and then you can count how many how many gamma rays are coming off of a body that would be a good place to start yeah it would seem like an obvious thing to do if you were at least you know invested in getting this with any depth did they have anybody on there they made the special committee did they have anyone who was an expert in nuclear issues on the committee not that i can see you know so that you know that another an epidemiologist at duke university suggested that they take the tissue from the s a very very tricky and difficult field because there are so many balls in motion there is the climate there is the vagaries of different radioactive isotopes that act differently both in different environments and in different and people's bodies there is historic monitoring of historic releases of radiation of which we don't have a very good fix in washington state they they monitored over the decades on site  when i was out there last week there was an inversion of that so there was a fog big heavy fog and eastern washington there was a band burn as medics weren't supposed to go outside because the ceiling of air covers the columbia basin and sir traps air inside and then it just circulates slowly what you know in stays so any kind of smoke or smog or anything coming out of those decks over the years would just stay and fall into that area  so there's heavy concentrations in certain places but i don't see a lot of monitoring food and wine and products that are coming from that you know our new california north is essential washington in radiation in our food it's twelve hundred fifty bankrolls a kilogram but i'm not sure that i don't know it to what extent food is getting much or that's produced on those fields out there perhaps a program we can look into so there was any testing done and hanford i know it was spotty i mean you just said it was just during the times when production was wasn't at its peak which doesn't really make sense in a certain aspect you know how much you didn't want that information testing for these same neuro to disorders yeah yeah yeah yeah what they found there was a study done and this is also congenital anomalies near zero to disorders among hanford workers when he did a retrospective study from one hundred fifty seven to nine hundred eighty and he found that there was a link between the exposures those individual workers received and the rate of neural tube disorders among the offspring and you know he looked he said well this is really strange but i don't i think this is a false positive result because he compared it to the rates hiroshima the atomic bombs and then they they follow these people they still are following these people tracking them for disease and so these this study didn't find these new road trip disorders and so seaver concluded this didn't you know this isn't really a thing because the gold standard is is russia may not get saki but there's a major difference between hiroshima and hanford and that is that russia was exposures was one big blast it was like getting one big x ray and it lasted for less than a second and then the radiation for the most part dissipated now hanford is like a slow drip of people out there in chronic low doses of exposures for four decades of production and then long lasting isotopes continue to expose people plutonium has a half life of twenty four thousand years so these kind these choose nuclear inciden incidences are really very relatable but that's what we've been doing in terms of radiation medicine for the last five decades is if it doesn't track with the russian studies it's not a verifiable you know radiation medicine alert or you know  categorize of all disease and so seaver in the one nine hundred sixty s missed his findings they did a new study found the same results those were also dismissed as false positive but i think we should maybe think that this isn't just an epidemic that began in two thousand and ten that if we look back retrospectively we might see a longer pattern or series of spikes we we might actually find out more and you know what's pretty fascinating about hanford is that they ran a program in the tri city area in the  hundred fifty s and sixty's where they took whole body counters they put them in buses they drove them out to schools and they tested kids they ran kids through these whole body counters and they gave him a comic book and a lollipop and sent him back to class well this data i haven't found this is medical data but it's hopefully it's still there somewhere and if researchers could go back and look at that they would have a pretty good set of records that gave people gave researchers data doses and bodies and then we could go and follow them up just like that in russia and see what happened to their reproductive lives to follow their health patterns to follow what surprises me about the whole hanford case is that as i've researched this for the last decade is that there has been a surprising lack of curiosity among scientists to ask open ended questions not like this is what we find in hiroshima we don't find it here so let's not look those are too small let's not look but rather ask the questions of what happens to people when they're exposed over long periods of time to low doses of radiation is there and in fact just asked that question without any kind of assumptions behind it and didn't the soviet lake dale and russian and the same kind of city like richland it was a close city just for nuclear workers and the russians ran out of underground storage tanks for the highest level radioactive waste in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine and they're in a big race with the united states to build nuclear weapons because they felt like they needed a nuclear shield so they had two choices shut down production to they could build more underground ways tanks or just dump the high level radioactive waste into the local river and hope that nothing bad happens and because they are in a hurry and because they don't care much about the local population they did exactly that they've done three point two million curies into the ditch a river and then three years later they went down river where people lived on the river drank from the river fished in it swam in it bathed in extra and they found highly contaminated communities everything was taking you know cooking pots and kids stomachs so  they evacuated the area except for a couple of villages they left in place they were either too large to move or or if they did get curious and so they started a medical file and everybody who lived in a village of muslim of a and for four generations they've been tracking these people who still live in this town and that radioactive river and they yes have found a similar spike in birth defects and a whole you know cancers problems with people's auto immune  three percent are healthy so the soviets actively and willfully did did testing on their people with the understanding that they thought that the results of never get out and they just you know what they wanted the info then here in the us at hanford they it was a subject that came up but they didn't want to pursue it because of p r issues is not right yeah i mean i think you know unfortunately one of the problems of an open society  that you've always going to have some kind of leak to the media somebody at some point starts to talk and then it's a huge liability issue so what i find in contrast to russia is that united states scientists you know there's a big la it and for all these years but scientists really didn't ask these questions then they went out and they would go to even follow it far as well and they would pick up milk samples and they'd test them they'd find radioactive iodine in the milk and they'd come back and say well it's not so bad and then they would twenty people to participate in a study and they did a whole body counts and they looked at the whole medical complement of this community of you concluded adults and children and they found two kids with really high counts of radioactive iodine in their thyroids and in their bodies and they said actually that's not bad two out of twenty but that's the that's the biggest you know sort of local study of population i've been able to find is twenty people out of you know several hundred thousand who lived in that area is evidence available if you go to things like the cemeteries over in eastern washington walla walla and other ones where there's incredible  spikes in the number of babies that died in during certain periods of time yeah yeah there is and you know these are you know these are in the realm of what scientists would call anecdotal and granted yes this is anecdotal  in light of the fact that we don't have you know serious study these are good clues to look at to draw our attention to places so reporters found the one nine hundred ninety s when the story broke that and you know spokane county there was so what we find is that when we have high rates of infant mortality it tells us something and historically until about nine hundred fifty babies who died infant infants who died and add to this infant mortality rate were mostly  kids who died from disease complications of birth malnutrition but after nine hundred fifty and that number dropped over time as as you know northern europe and united states got more affluent fewer and fewer babies are dying until nine hundred fifty when that rate starts to decline at less steeply and researchers went back for instance in northern england where they have public you know socialist medicine so they have public records and then they track almost everybody when you have a socialized medicine system and in england they you know and all throughout northern europe in the netherlands in germany and in united states as well and australia and so they started to wonder what could be that b and then after nine hundred eighty those rates decline of congenital malformation so why would that be nitrates you know pesticides right after nine hundred fifty we have green farming you know industrial agriculture that adds a lot of toxins into the food chain into the air but the other big weapons that were blown up around the world every nuclear event is global in that radioactive gases take to the air and they circulate the globe and then they you know lots of that actually tends to go north one place one that scotland we think in wales got hit so hard is that it's windy place and it's a wet place so when the rain falls it brings down precipitation and with the precipitation comes radioactive particles and gases so we do see these this ris there's there's reasons why we should be looking more closely at these trends and there's amazing reasons why historians should get involved you know in new your letter you say in one hundred fifty two richmond doctors noted that in richland schools twenty five percent of children had some kind of birth defect right it's a phenomenally high phenomenally high number and you know i don't have any more and that's just the report you know i read no more details what did that mean what i find and this is what when he did his study is that he couldn't look at ridgeland workers medical records until one nine hundred fifty seven that's because the catholic hospital out there was a government run run by the atomic energy commission until you know why that was not incorporated state it was a it was a i mean city it was a very strange city and that was run by the corporation the contractor which is dupont and general electric it was owned by the federal government and managed by the atomic energy commission so there was  medical records from the local hospital which was also administered with you know federal funds seem to be little seaver who worked out there didn't have access to those records in the one nine hundred fifty so we don't know much about you know that twenty five percent of the kids in the public schools had birth defects i mean they're healthy enough to get to school but they still have birth defects at the high rate what's that about i think we should be asking more questions you're also mentioning previously about doing collecting milk samples and testing those again i know from doing interviews with don winters that one of the programs they also had at least for people who worked at the hendrick facility it was regular urine testing where it wouldn't be uncommon to put your urine out you know in a milk type bottle out on the porch that would get picked up let's say once a week or whatever and tested so there must be some significant data there own right yes and so we're you know we're in it in terms of epidemiology we're not a gold mine and you know this is a very political you know conflict in the one nine hundred ninety s here in washington state between you as they were doing the dos reconstruction you know program the head or progress program that was you know took years millions of dollars and was issued saying you know we don't find anything i write problems no spike in tire problems and people out there got so upset th that that the the center for disease control came in and did a review of that study the review is actually it's marvelous to look at the two there was a small original document and then there was a review of it is about four times the curve listing all the problems with this original dose reconstruction project so it ended in a draw right the first one the first study said we don't see any spike in problems the second one said that the first study was was flawed in many many many ways but then there is no third follow up government so the u s government the taxpayers paid for this these legal fees which mounted to be sixty million dollars meanwhile the the plaintiff's lawyers went broke they got to retirement age and beyond and the plane just were sick  and many of them died and the ended up having you know less than a six thousand dollars in a payoff suddenly out of court at the end of that twenty five years so we haven't really seen much in the way of of i would say you know approved radiation result you know that from human exposures and so all kinds of other possible problems that people were talking about there were discounted right off as you know something you could never that would never hold up in court so without a court case unfortunately the states we don't tend to have examinations of these you know potentially very explosive and politically very sensitive medical problems related to our you know our exposures so for instance we just had the big hurricane and used in big you know oil processing plants chemical plants flooded exploded fires explosions flooding demand it you know and we don't have some kind of automatic accounting in this country for rights biological rights to say we should have the right to live in in a healthy environment and if not we should be able to figure out why and and clean it up and our exposures and it's not helping the media the corporate media doesn't cover these issues it's really regularity or serious vocus i was just talking to someone this morning who had never heard of hanford so it was i mean here in seattle yeah yeah that's the yeah but not unusual so we just were actually out of time time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning andrea taylor andre taylor is founder of the organization not this time and chair deescalate washington also known as initiative nine forty and he's here to talk about his organization and his work with the initiative under a thank you very much for coming and spending time with us and you for having me so start out tell us about your organization not this time and your motivation for founding it i started my organization not just time which is a five a one c three and also level one c four after the killing of my brother say taylor from seattle  police department last year february twenty first i hadn't been home in seattle for wow i was living in los angeles and i got a phone call from my brother's mom saying that she believed that he had been shot and i told her before we begin the jump to any conclusions about that let's get some clarity on exactly what happened she was in dallas at the time about three hours later we little brother is almost like a son you know when you're growing up you wrestle him down and him hold him down and it was very devastating for me in the family and so i moved back up to seattle  a day later which was february twenty first and twenty second and did not leave move my wife back my mother in law my son and and  and started not this time you know i had looked at some of the insistence of police involved shooting around the country and and normally what you see is a reaction  because there's historic trauma in communities of color when dealing with police officers and so there's always an immediate reaction and you know sometimes those reactions aren't the most positive things and so i felt like you know i didn't want to react i wanted instead to respond to a situation because i wanted to control the narrative understood that it was a narrative fight sometimes when people are reacting and i understand why because of that pain at trauma there's the flexion it happens from the very incident of the police involved killing to the actions of of the community or people acting outside of that and so people can deflect from the actual shooting and i don't want to let that happen so i remember when i first got here within the first week i said down what the chief of police kathleen o'toole and i told her that you know i know i can't bring my little brother back but that i'm willing to work with hugh to reduce the incidences of filings in our community i know that shocked her because she probably was a expecting a reaction instead of a response and it was important for me to control the narrative so that there could be some real positive dialogue so we created not this time my wife and i and we started giving these meetings weekly and underneath that same narrative adam smith in lorain a gonzales in many police chiefs and so it was important for me to create this space you know spaces a new word you want to create a space so we created this space for real dialogue without disrespect you know and we were able to bring the law enforcement and bring politicians to the community so that they can let community know their responsibility to them and that to communicate the community could also understand how the system works i'm a proponent of rallying and marching i just don't believe that that by itself can change things  i think that educated in the community on legislation and policy is it's quite more effective to bring forth change so during the process of having not this time i thought about what my family had to go through when my brother was killed and we did not know what to do it was a very very troubling time even we started to attack one another because of our pain in and i just felt like if if i could help it i'd never want to see another family have to go through what my family has gone through you know when your loved one is killed because you're trying to fight for your family because the narrative is put out there that they're the worst person in the world responsible for their own death while you're trying to grieve at the same time which is a very impossible situation so that was another reason why create an artist time was very very important i wanted to make sure that families and we did when charley in allows us family called us the evening that she was killed we were able to put a legal team around her  support from other families that have gone through exactly would they were going through and allow them space to grieve and a platform that if they wanted or when they were ready to speak about charlie you know they could but that immediate you know covering was very very important for this family going through these these these trials and this trauma and we've been able to that the several families that have  experienced their loved ones been killed like days and weeks after charley in a as well and as tough as a tough process because i realized that wow we were helping these other families i start feeling the of my own brother's death while i was trying to help them it's a real real tough process and as we say people that have lost loved ones that this is a group no one wants to be a part of so during that time you started working on or with an initiative i think it was a seventy three first generation talk about give some history on that how did that come about there was a process going for before i moved back home that people were concerned about what i did not know the law that we have in washington state amnesty international says is the most restrictive law in the nation that we are an actual outlier there is no state that has the language in the law like our state that gives a de fact immunity for law enforcement officers if they use deadly force once i found out that there were individuals that educated me about the law here lisa do guard leslie cushman gave me an education of why arlo is the worst because we actually have to prove in this state before we can hold a police officer accountable that he had malice and malice almost an impossible thing to prove because you in essence you're saying that you have to prove what was in an officer's mind what he was thinking and so when when  when it was traced back to when this law was instituted in one thousand nine hundred six it was supposed to be an improvement for the law before nine hundred eighty six which was an officer can actually shoot a fleeing felon in the back so this was supposed to be an improvement and actually it's not an improvement because it gives a de facto immunity so there were individuals that were working on this before do the legislation process and it failed and so one of the individuals that lived limpia her name was lisa she got in contact with me because she had this idea about this initiative process which i knew nothing about and and so we s created eight seventy three and i was one of the main supporters of it and the people of tribe as well and we try to build this coalition together with native church with with black churches native communities and latino communities as well and it was unsuccessful we didn't have the amount of support or the understanding of how initiative was post operate but from that experience we learned and at the end of the year last year we started again but it was led by me and lisa do guard leslie cush an and no allowing and gave meyer who was working in continue to work with me to this day and we spend about five months creating this initiative based upon information that people had had over several years to make sure that it was tight to make sure that the initiative was not anti police but pro community and once we were sure about that we did a statewide poll and if you to stay by poll and the pollsters say that you have sixty percent yes you have a viable initiative while the pollsters came back with a seventy five percent yes around the state eighty nine percent of democrats eighty five percent of democrats and sixty nine percent of republicans said yes to our initiative and we knew we had something that was extraordinarily viable so we went and  back to these communities that we were working with the year prior the native tribes and particularly the tribes that were really the ones that got things rolling as far as the financial support and  help organize ations and black community members and and i when say you know we we've been working separately on this for a very long time and and we've had the same problem and we need each other more than ever now everyone agreed we built this coalition led by people of color and thus far has been extremely successful yeah it still surprises me the wide range of endorsements and support sheriffs indorsed it the mayors has and or stood black law enforcement officers of washington have indorsed did senator mary call me personally several weeks ago and that's what's going on through this initiative so break down specifically what will initiative nine forty change what's important to us is that which has been proven that  escalation is paramount so why officers sometimes push back and say well you know we already have deescalation training some eight hours or maybe even forty  hours at the most and i respond to them and say i understand but if you have an officer that has been training for some five ten fifteen twenty years to shoot center mass and a situation happens that officers going to as predisposed to go back to a behavior that he's trained she or he is trained with which is shooting center mass and those eight hours or forty hours are not going to even play out so you want to give an a their career so that it's easy for them as easy for them to deescalate as it is for them the pull out their guns we also want to make sure officers have mental health crises training you know it's not fair to in my opinion that officers are on the street and do not have mental health crises training because a lot of these police involved shootings are due to an individual having a crises and if an officer is not aware of what he's looking at he will automatically feel  underneath threat and refer back to his training where this individual could have been top down or whatever the training will show that it's necessary to deescalate an individual that's having a crises we need to give officers that trainee i'm not saying they could fix everything but you can never downgrade training training is necessary we need them to be over the house on mental health crises training so they can know what to look for and what they're looking at also you would think that this is already a law that for an officer to render first aid we don't want him to be an m an e m t but if he's first on the scene and the situation happens they need to be able to have basic training to be able to render first say to my brother's case a tailor they shot my brother handcuff them and let him bleed out for around eight minutes and you know that is i can't even bear thinking about that but we want to make sure that an officer renders first say that that preservation of life is paramount and it also offers independent investigations and this is very very important because if an officer is investigating someone as their friend or they know of when they know their family you know their children have gone camping together and the lie then you know it's not going to be a fair process if you x me to investigate my best friend it's going to be very difficult and to prevent those things from happening we need independent investigation and  we want to change the use of deadly force laws and take out malice in the law and we've defined what good faith means that a reasonable officer what a reasonable officer would do giving the circumstances at the time  there is no definition of good faith in the current law so we defined what that means when senator frocks r b i he said i wish i would erode it for the item about independent oversight do you have a specific organization in mind to do that or create a new one well we purposely left that in till after the initiative is pass because what this initiative does is it allows people at the table that have never been at the table before communities of color l emigration immigrants it allows people to be at the table that wasn't there before so that they can be working together on what that looks like for the future and i like that i don't think that's happening nowhere in the country so we're very excited about that part of it i also see that you have included it's important to include tribal governments in investigations as i talk about that exactly well you know when jackie sawyer was killed january i believe twenty eighth of two thousand and sixteen the t y did not even know that jackie was pregnant they was never informed and we just believe that when incidences happened that the tribes council all should be involved in understanding exactly what's going on right from the beginning and they shouldn't be isolated from issues like that going on with their population so that's very important right and where are you now in terms of signatures and what happens after you present to the state we need around two hundred in sixty thousand signatures by the end of the year we have now around two hundred and seventy already we will turn in around three forty six to three fifty by the end of this month and we have raise some nine hundred seventy thousand dollars amazingly they don't make this process any easy one but because that amount of support we have i think we're right on track to where we need to be that doesn't mean we slow down we're still go have our volunteers out there for fledge you know we're still  doing parties for fund raising and we want to make sure we get the job done and not slack at the inn we're not there all the way but we're right there at the door and then  once you present the signatures and the state acknowledges that you have enough what happens next well then it goes to the legislators they have an opportunity to actually make it a law they have an opportunity to present an opposing something opposing on the ballot or equal with it which i don't believe to be equal weight i think we've done the best job that can be done or they could just pass it to the ballot we're hopeful that there could be some type of movement but we are preparing for the ballot so if it goes to the ballot do you anticipate any significant pushback from any national organizations because this obviously has significant impact as a precedent for the other forty nine states  always want to expect that there's going to be some pushback you know there's a saying in a time of people pair for war so we we are expecting we just don't know that individual group that might be you know the one says do to push him back but we are expecting that there could be an prepared so one of the major hurdles in  current police procedures is the inquest that is carried out by whichever police force is the one yeah does the shootings i know that  incomplete process right now there are two families that are not this time as spokespeople for giovanni de who was killed in can't and eugene nelson who was killed and can't the one of the problems on the inquest as one of them has as there's a plethora is that they don't provide counsel for victims so some eighty eight percent  is that it happen the victims have never had any counsel and that is extremely problematic right now we're fighting to see some type of sea change in that because we think the process is already incomplete and unfair so on top of that a person goes through this inquest without counsel when law enforcement has counsel and come in there and just sweep the table  when i went to the inquest with my brother and there's this idea that the jurors exonerated the police officers were that's not true law enforcement said that the reason they killed my brother shea taylor is because he did not comply with him well in the inquest jerry all jurors unanimously agreed that that was not true that my brother did comply with police officers right but it's such an incomplete process that there are certain things that you can't even bring into play the gun that they said my brother had that they found the next day in a car that wasn't his they said it was he is he didn't have a gun at the time of the shooting they said he did but he did an inquest jury found that when we found out that he didn't have a gun which i knew all alone they found some gun the next day i'm just trying to show you show you how incomplete the process is  seattle times came out with an article saying that the gun that they found was traced back to a sheriff's deputy we couldn't bring that into the inquest process so it's a very bad an incomplete process and  organization is going to do whatever it can the try to challenge this process or boycott it altogether while i'm fighting for these particular two families that have inquest within the next several months is the inquest process is changes to that would that be implemented by a state like the state of washington is that implemented at the local level it's the county level as county level is county level so matter of fact there are some talks going on right now as we speak  about changing not being able to provide attorneys for families this conversation going on right now i spoke with lisa do guard a few days ago and there is actual conversations going on i hope something is introduced for real fast because you know these families need at least at least the families need an attorney at least you know so seattle police is departments inquest procedure would also be change at the county some type of conversation about this process we haven't heard back from him yet but there are some counts so people i don't know the full details so i don't want to try to get into it  in deliver some false information but i do know something is going on on the county level right now that's being discussed about some legislation being passed about changing some things about the inquest process so as if you didn't have enough already to focus on then assuming nine forty six of the bout you'd be it'll take what six months to a year to bring it to a  have to watch over this process some two years or some three years just to make sure everything is implemented properly you know keeping our hands on things real closely so it doesn't stop for us after it's passed we need to be engaged in the process for several years to make sure that it is going according to the law at the one with which we implement it is because it would appear that legislatures generally don't add teeth to things they tend to water them down yeah but they can't water this down if this is passes passed the way that it is they can only present something else to the ballot but they can't water this down this is this is a people's initiative and i'm very happy about that process once this is once we passed this on the ballot it becomes law and it's our responsibility the community members and people at the table to make sure that it is implemented and we will making sure that it is because we'll be at the table and that be a law for us to be at the table saw is different this is different this is leading i often compare this initiative to massachusetts did in two thousand and three when they brought force marriage equality whether someone believes in it or not is inconsequential the genius of it is what i'm talking about the beauty of the leadership that massachusetts took  and set a precedent and once they did you see states around a around the country that followed suit it is the position that we are in right now as a state washington has the same opportunity as massachusetts had in two thousand and three we need to also be courageous we need to also lead and that's what the country needs right now some leadership so watched and stay we must show them that so just about a minute left so how can people find out more about your work and deescalate washington well my website for not this time is not this time w w w dot not this time da global and the website for anyone who wants to contribute or volunteer for d s clay washington is deescalate wa w a dot org we still need volunteers and we still people need people contributing i think we can see a we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for having me mike appreciate you