The third time wasn’t a charm for Tacoma police.
The department and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department teamed up last year to apply for a $500,000 federal grant to create a joint, cold-case unit to investigate homicides and suspicious missing person cases that have lost steam and run out of leads.
Each had applied separately for the cold case grant in previous years with no success. The joint request also was denied.
The National Institute of Justice doled out more than $4 million nationwide for cold-case investigations in 2011. None of the money went to law enforcement agencies in Washington state, according to the agency’s website.
The amount of grant money was the lowest in six years. In 2010, the institute handed out more than $11 million in grants, including $544,147 to the King County Sheriff’s Office.
The grant is not being offered for this year, according to the National Institute of Justice’s website.
Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum said the agency will apply for the grant again, if it’s offered.
In the meantime, the department continues to have one homicide detective assigned full time to study and investigate cold cases. He works with a Pierce County sheriff’s detective, who has been working on cold cases part time.
The drive to create a cold-case unit within the Police Department was fueled in 2009 when detective Gene Miller solved the 1986 slayings of two Pierce County teens. At the time, the department had applied for a federal grant for a cold-case squad. The request – and another in 2010 – was turned down.
The Sheriff’s Department previously applied for the grant once.
In their 2011 joint request, the agencies asked for $500,000 to fund two full-time detectives – one from Tacoma and one from Pierce County – to work unsolved homicides throughout the county.
Stacey Mulick: 253-597-8268
stacey.mulick@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/crime
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