Tacoma's community policing on chopping block

Community policing has saved some of Tacoma’s worst neighborhoods, say the residents who no longer dive to the floor when they hear a backfire.

The gunfire is down. Ditto assaults, prostitution and drug dealing.

None of that, they say, could have been accomplished without their community liaison officers. Those residents consider themselves the CLOs’ partners in a program that works in tandem with the city’s traditional patrol model.

Patrol officers respond to calls for help. CLOs eliminate the persistent problems behind many of those calls. Together, they have brought crime rates down.

Crime Index data show homicides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts, arson and motor-vehicle theft fell 31.9 percent from 1985 to 2010, though Tacoma’s population increased.

According to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, “As Tacoma Police Department instituted community oriented programs and increased the number of police personnel, the Crime Index decreased as well.”

The CLO program will be gutted in a month if the City Council

adopts the city’s proposed response to a $31 million budget shortfall. That proposal stands to kill 167 jobs city-wide.

Eighty-two Police Department jobs would be cut, 56 through layoffs. It strips the force back to patrol and detective work. Community liaison officers, as well as those in gang, traffic and high school units, will fall back into jobs held by less-senior officers who will be laid off. The force will shift to responding to crime, rather than preventing it.

Of the 16 CLOs – four assigned to each of the city’s four police sectors – 13 would go back to patrol. The remaining three will cover the city’s three Community Based Services areas and be paid for by the Public Works Department.

That would leave organized anti-crime volunteers all over Tacoma without ready access to the police support that has helped them clean up their neighborhoods.

“It’s just devastating that we’re not going to have that. I’m just, I’m mad as hell, actually,” said East Sider Edwina Magrum. “In about two years’ time, First Creek Neighbors working with the CLOs helped get rid of two meth labs, a marijuana-growing operation and 17 drug houses.”

Tilinda Grote helped organize the Edison Neighbors to work with CLOs when they came to South Tacoma.

“Our crime rate was down the first year by 48 percent,” Grote said. “That was with the help of CLOs and Code Enforcement. It’s going to be hard on us. We don’t want to see them go.”

Their CLOs are working with the gang unit to bust up activity near Tacoma Mall and prevent it from migrating south to the Edison neighborhood, she said.

“Our CLO is working with Code Enforcement on getting five houses in our neighborhood closed up because vagrants are living in them,” she said.

Patrol officers don’t have the time and contacts to shut down that kind of blight, said Ron Joslin of the Stewart Heights Neighborhood Coalition.

“Last year we had a problem house, with three kids running around all hours of the day and night busting the sprinkler heads in the park and the windows at the school,” Joslin said.

CLO Don Williams assembled a task force from the Fire Department, Code Enforcement and Tacoma Power. Together, they had the authority to close the house for safety violations, including exposed wiring, filth and rats.

“We asked him, ‘What about the family? Did they get any help?’” Joslin said. “He gave them the address of a place to go to, and a list of services they have access to. Patrol doesn’t do that. If the CLOs disappear because of the budget cuts and we go back to patrol, we will revert back to the 1970s.”

It was the violence of the late 1970s and the 1980s that prompted the formation of the CLO program, said police Capt. Pete Cribbin.

Los Angeles gangs saw Tacoma as a soft target and moved into the most vulnerable neighborhoods. They rotted out the Hilltop with drugs and bullets.

Hilltop residents wanted to fight back, and Police Chief Ray Fjetland assigned two officers to help them. The officers could pull in help from other city departments to, for example, light up streets and shut down businesses and houses that contribute to crime.

It worked. Over more than two decades, the Hilltop has become one of the most organized communities in Tacoma, with one of the lowest crime rates.

Without CLOs gangsters come back and slumlords persist, and the residents who make up Hilltop Action Coalition can’t tackle them alone. They spot the soft spots in neighborhoods otherwise hardened against crime. They take pictures to document the problem, and they call for help.

Shutting down one drug house, getting the dealers out of the neighborhood, can reduce patrol calls by 30 to 40 a month, Cribbin said. If they let it go, they’d be headed back to the 1980s.

“Bad guys may not have high IQs, but they are cunning, predatorially cunning,” Cribbin said. “They will see the vacuum, and they will fill the vacuum. It will be pretty quick.”

On McKinley Hill this week, detective Chris Coulter and CLO Shelbie Brown spoke with Dome Top Neighborhood Alliance members at their monthly meeting.

“The most effective component in community policing is you,” Coulter said after she passed out a “You Can Be a First Responder!!” flier.

She and Brown were there to update residents on criminals caught and those still at large.

They’d busted a chop shop Nov. 30, thanks in part to citizen tips that also alerted them to evidence of additional drug, weapons and theft felonies.

Brown has a warrant ready for another bad guy, but she wants to get him for as many crimes as possible to give him a nice long vacation from freedom. She asked for extra eyes on him and, right there in the VFW hall, got two tips.

She’s collecting complaints about a slumlord, she said, and has a new $95 fine to levy for every violation.

“Raise it!” Teri Wood called out. “Make enough money to hire some police officers!”

Call the numbers on the flier, Coulter said, if anything, anything at all, looks fishy. Call about people taking shortcuts through yards, casing the neighborhood. Call if you hear owls, Brown said. On McKinley Hill, the hoots are crooks signaling one another.

Call, they said, for the health of the neighborhood.

Without those calls, criminals have their way.

Without a CLO, those calls just pile up. With a CLO, they make patterns.

Calls alerted Brown to drug and gang activity at a home. She set up a team, including a  building inspector, to red-tag the sty of a house, and Lakewood officers who had dirt on the occupants.

She had the network of patrol officers to go after the drug-dealing mother who, when the cops arrived, dropped her three small children out the window and into the cold in their pajamas.

Because she’s a CLO, Brown said, she could focus on the whole situation, not a single incident. She could get the problem out of the neighborhood.

As a CLO, she had the time and tools to put a creep in jail, unable to bail out and hightail it back home to keep on dealing and stealing.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/street