EVERETT — A public forum on police accountability led by Washington’s attorney general brought a contingent of Snohomish County law enforcement leaders and lawmakers together in Everett on Thursday evening.

Attorney General Nick Brown guided a panel featuring Snohomish County Sheriff Susanna Johnson and Everett Police Chief Robert Goetz in discussion about a new statewide tool designed to improve transparency surrounding certain arrests that often receive the most scrutiny.

The Washington State Data Exchange for Public Safety (WADEPS) debuted in September 2025 as an evolving online database to track every use-of-force incidents reported by police officers across the state.

At the direction of the state Legislature, academics at Washington State University partnered with law enforcement agencies to develop and maintain a centralized, publicly available website detailing all use of force arrests reported by each department.

“We all know how important this is and how important it is to get right,” Johnson said during the panel on Thursday. “The public trust is what we depend on in order to serve you, and if we don’t have that, we don’t have anything. I think the amount of work that we’ve seen in the past year, we’re all hopeful that things are going the right way. I know our deputies have got the rhythm of it and we’re excited to start seeing how we use this information.”

In 13 months, police officers have reported just over 1,200 instances where force was used across the state, according to the dashboard. The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office accounted for 76 of the incidents, while the Everett Police Department contributed another 13, the data reported to WADEPS said.

Everett police and the sheriff’s office are part of more than a dozen law enforcement agencies in the county currently adding to the database. So far, about 77% of Washington’s 301 law enforcement agencies are contributing to the data collection.

“We try to pull the curtain back wherever we can in our agency,” Goetz said as part of the forum. “We think that’s important, because policing your community should not be a mystery. You should know what your police department is doing. You should know what to expect from your police department.”

The goal is to present a neutral set of standardized information, based only on statistics, for stakeholders to reach their own conclusions. The site includes eight separate dashboards to view the information from a high-level, statewide view, down to each individual department.

“Data helps us examine patterns and support demands for change with evidence, but missing information can leave those patterns invisible,” said Nickeia Hunter, an activist with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability. Before WADEPS, Hunter said gathering these numbers from police was like putting together a puzzle in the dark. “Now it’s kind of a way to have at least the foundation, the perimeter. It’s a way to start filling in the pieces much faster and to understand what happened.”

State Sens. John Lovick, D-Mill Creek, and June Robinson, D-Everett, joined state Rep. Julio Cortes, D-Everett, among a crowd of about 50 community members gathered to learn about the database during a 90-minute event on the campus of Everett Community College.

“By having these checks and balances, it starts to prove more to the community on a different level now, what we’re actually doing and that uses of force are actually very rare,” Johnson said.

The database remains an unfinished product. In addition to the fact that not all departments have begun contributing data, there’s also no common definition for police use of force during an arrest, so what Everett police reports as a use of force incident may not be the same as what the sheriff’s office reports.

Attorney General Brown acknowledged there may be skepticism associated with the numbers since all the data is self-reported by each individual department.

“There is a reason that the State moved forward with a program like this, because it provides more opportunity for everyone, for law enforcement and community members, to look back and see that data in much more real-time efforts than we’ve ever had before,” Brown said during Thursday’s forum. “It does give that tool to the community members to look closely at that data and make sure that what was initially reported or the news reported is actually backed up by data and done so in real time.”

Police departments are expected to update the use-of-force data as internal investigations occur and new information comes to light.

Everett police has a five-layer internal review process for incidents involving use of force, Goetz said. The sheriff’s office’s review is three steps, according to Johnson. Along the way, both leaders said their departments add whatever additional context they can to the WADEPS database.

“Those numbers are people and humanizing the data is the most important thing that we can do when we look at WADEPS,” said David Makin, a WSU criminal justice professor who serves as the executive director and principal investigator for WADEPS. “Each number on there is an officer that applied force and someone who experienced that.”

Still in its infancy, the lessons from this data collection are continuing to develop.

Goetz and Johnson said they look forward to a future where trends can be captured and reviewed for opportunities to improve. Both leaders mentioned comparing their department’s numbers with other agencies across the state to see who’s been successful at lowering instances of use of force and find out what’s being done differently that could be adopted locally.

“WADEPS is a work in progress and we believe in Everett that we can help make this process and website helpful to our community members,” Goetz said. “We’re gonna do everything we can, both now and in the future to do so.”

Ian Davis-Leonard: 425-339-3097; ian.davis-leonard@heraldnet.com