King County Sheriff John Urquhart visited the Mercer Island Chamber of Commerce on Jan. 5 to give a local perspective on policing issues currently in the news, from navigating the differences between state and federal law on marijuana to recruiting officers that represent the county’s diverse communities.

Urquhart, a 38-year Mercer Island resident, was elected to serve as the county’s 33rd sheriff in 2012. He is the chief county-level law enforcement official for 1.9 million people and oversees more than 1,000 employees, including 714 deputies, and a $170 million budget.

Urquhart said that he’s been hearing a lot about the “militarization” of police forces. He said that though SWAT teams are still necessary, his goal has been to hire officers who want to serve their communities, not just shoot guns.

Urquhart said that when he was first elected, few of the recruits he swore in were women or minorities because in the state of Washington, veterans get an extra 10 percent on their civil service tests.

“Everybody I [was] swearing in had one thing in common, well several things … They’re white, they’re male, their haircuts are all high and tight, which means they’re coming out of the military, every single one of them. And what that means is I’m going to have a police department full of ex-military white guys, who look just like me,” he said.

He set out to diversify the sheriff’s office. His chief of staff’s wife had an idea: give that same 10 percent bonus to people who speak a second language. He continued that by offering the extra credit to people who had served two years in the Peace Corps, which is 70 percent female.

He said it’s important to have a police force that’s reflective of and responsive to its community, and to make sure his department is attracting the right candidates.

“Four-and-a-half months and we give them a gun, and a nightstick, and a taser, and pepper spray, and a really fast car, and the power to take someone’s freedom away, take someone’s life,” he said. “If you want to cut someone’s hair, that’s a year of training.”

Urquhart said he believes the department is headed in the right direction. His next goal is to change the Washington state law that says that non-citizens cannot be police officers or firefighters. He discussed the idea with the Legislature last year, and it passed the Democratic House, but not the Republican-controlled Senate. He said he will try again this session.

Urquhart said he is a proponent of body cameras and the legalization of marijuana. He served as a narcotics detective, and said that the “bottom line is that the war on drugs didn’t work.”

“We incarcerated a generation of African Americans, and to a large extent, unjustly,” he said, along with spending billions of dollars.

He supported Initiative 502, which made recreational marijuana legal in Washington state, because of his background as a “foot solider in the war on drugs” and because he said it was “clear what the public wanted.” He said that his department still makes marijuana-related arrests, though, and that he doesn’t know what will happen to the law under incoming Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President-elect Donald Trump.

He also discussed emerging technologies in policing, including his desire to equip all of his officers with body cameras. Urquhart said cameras “make the deputy behave better and the citizen behave better,” but that they are “prohibitively expensive.” It’s not the cost of the equipment, but of the evidence logging and public disclosure.

The sheriff’s office has already experienced recent budget cuts. Urquhart said that the county does not have the same taxing authority that a city does, though the King County Sheriff’s Office contracts with 12 cities, as well as Metro and Sound Transit. The county executive had planned to cut the sheriff’s helicopter and marine rescue units before the funding was restored by the County Council.

Urquhart also talked about the use of deadly force, saying that it depends on the situation and the officer’s judgement. When Urquhart was first elected, he inherited a department that had been criticized for how it responded to officer-involved shootings. Urquhart said he would bring more accountability and leadership to the sheriff’s office.

“We’re not trained to shoot center mass, we’re trained to stop the threat,” he said. “I would hope that my deputies, and I would hope that I, would wait as long as I possibly could until that person took some overt act to hurt me or to hurt somebody else.”

For more on the sheriff’s office, see www.kingcounty.gov/depts/sheriff.aspx.