Tacoma spending related to ex-police chief topped $6M. Here’s what drove costs
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Former Tacoma Police Chief Avery Moore's crime plan cost taxpayers more than $5 million.
- City and police officials say the violent-crime reduction strategy was a success.
- Nearly $1 million in other spending was tied to Moore's exit and issues under his command.
Former Tacoma Police Chief Avery Moore’s tenure was marked by the roll out of an ambitious crime-fighting strategy, internal controversies and an exit payout, topping $6 million in city spending, according to a News Tribune analysis.
Tacoma’s Violent Crime Reduction Plan cost more than $5 million, almost entirely due to increased overtime pay for a short-staffed Police Department, city spokesperson Maria Lee said this month.
The plan, a partnership with the University of Texas at San Antonio, debuted in July 2022 as a Moore-led response to addressing a surge of violent incidents occurring in the city. It coincided with a drop in violent crime during its nearly three-year run, city and police officials say.
Tacoma spent roughly $5 million in police overtime and $274,000 in university contracts to implement the strategy, according to Lee.
It amounts to an average of roughly $1.9 million per year in overtime pay over the course of the plan. For context, the city set aside $3 million this year to support all police overtime and spent $2.2 million in 2020.
For some city lawmakers, it wasn’t entirely clear whether the decrease in violent crime was attributable to the plan or if it was instead a product of national trends in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mayor Victoria Woodards, who acknowledged that uncertainty, said she still believed the initiative was effective.
“When you are in crisis mode and your community is calling for change ... in that moment, you trust the experts and you support something that seems like it has absolute promise,” Woodards told The News Tribune in an interview June 18. “For me, we had success.”
The plan was the signature initiative of Moore’s administration but not the only expense that could be attributed to his time as the city’s top cop, excluding typical sums for salary and benefits.
Nearly $1 million in city spending could be tied to Moore’s exit from Tacoma and internal controversies that emerged during his tenure, including conflict involving hires in his administration, according to an analysis of previously reported payouts.
The city spent about $992,000 on Moore’s separation agreement, to settle litigation involving TPD’s ex-chief of staff and on outside investigations into Moore and a former high-ranking police official who had followed Moore to Tacoma from Dallas.
Woodards told The News Tribune she questioned the fairness of evaluating the taxpayer impact of Moore’s administration without also comparing expenses of other police chiefs. Woodards said she hadn’t studied it to determine whether the costs being attributed to Moore, excluding the price tag for the crime plan, were unusual.
“Is it concerning? Absolutely. We should be concerned when those kinds of things happen,” Woodards said.
Moore was paid nearly $480,000 as part of his employment separation agreement when he resigned in February. Not long before, the city spent more than $11,000 on an outside investigation into personal charges Moore racked up on his work phone. The probe found Moore didn’t deliberately mislead city officials about his knowledge of the $1,082 bill that he incurred using GPS navigation while on an overseas family vacation. He repaid the bill.
The City Council agreed to pay $500,000 in April to settle a hostile work environment and racial discrimination lawsuit filed by Curtis Hairston, the Police Department’s former chief of staff who Moore hired in 2022. The complaint alleged that Moore, who wasn’t a named defendant, didn’t appropriately intervene to address problems. Former deputy chief Paul Junger, who also wasn’t a named defendant, was accused of making racist comments toward Hairston. Tacoma denied the allegations but finalized the settlement last month, court records show.
Junger previously worked with Moore in Dallas and was briefly the interim leader in Tacoma while Moore was on paid administrative leave. Junger was fired in March after a hostile work environment investigation related to his treatment of an assistant chief and other women in the department. The city spent at least $1,703 on an outside probe into the matter involving Junger, according to one invoice obtained by The News Tribune. It wasn’t immediately clear if there were additional invoices.
Attempts to reach Moore were not successful through two phone numbers believed to belong to him or through his new employer in Topeka, Kansas, where he serves as assistant city manager.
Upon his hiring in Topeka last month, Moore said he took accountability for his mistakes but did not offer specifics, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported.
“Number one, you can’t believe everything that you read,” Moore said, according to the outlet. “Number two, I’ve been in law enforcement for 35 years. I have an impeccable record, not perfect. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve owned every mistake I’ve ever made, and I’m proud of that. I don’t make excuses.”
Moore said he had committed to leading the Tacoma Police Department for three years and had been tasked with three main goals: crime reduction, community engagement/trust building, and organizational health, according to the outlet’s video of Moore’s introductory news conference.
“I was successful at all three of those,” he said.
Crime plan paid off, officials say
While workplace issues within the department caused controversy, the Violent Crime Reduction Plan has largely been applauded by Tacoma officials for accomplishing what it set out to do.
The plan undertook a phased and data-driven approach to shrinking crime in the city’s highest-prone areas, including through increased police presence and a pledge to address underlying issues. The city is no longer working with the university, and the plan was declared to have concluded in February, but elements and learned lessons from the strategy will continue to be incorporated into police operations, according to city and police officials.
Crime consistently declined year over year throughout the duration of the plan, Tacoma Police Department spokesperson Sgt. John Correa said in a statement, noting that the initiative ended on Feb. 28.
“The dedication required to staff and support this effort demanded significant time, coordination, and resources,” Correa said. “However, the impact of these investments is immeasurable when weighed against the effectiveness of the plan in reducing violence, improving public safety, and fostering stronger relationships within the community.”
Between 2022 and last year, the number of homicides in Tacoma dramatically declined from 45 to 22, although a spike in homicides this year, particularly among young people, has alarmed city leaders.
There were 13.2% fewer violent street-crime incidents citywide in the second half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, including a 39% drop in murders, according to a February report from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Violent crime in so-called “hot spots” declined by about 36% between the same periods but rose about 12% in surrounding areas used to assess potential crime displacement.
The Police Department’s union, which had criticized TPD’s leadership for misleading the public on the plan’s early results shortly after the launch, did not return a message seeking comment for this story.
Woodards praised Moore for leaving Tacoma better than it was when he arrived, including via adoption of the violent-crime reduction strategy. Moore was engaged in the community, and Tacoma police continue to be engaged, she said, adding that the city had learned from Moore and hadn’t dropped everything he had been involved in just because he left.
Woodards also disputed that the plan had ended, saying its longer-term strategies would continue without assistance from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Asked about the plan’s cost, in relation to its results and against the backdrop of the city’s current financial struggles, Woodards responded with a question: “How do you put a price tag on something like a life saved?”
During a February presentation on the plan’s latest outcomes, Council member Olgy Diaz said she wanted to know how Tacoma’s downward trend of violent crime compared to other cities without such a plan.
“I’m struggling with how we are better today having implemented this crime plan versus had we not,” Diaz said at the time.
In a recent interview, City Council member John Hines acknowledged having a similar question about whether declines in crime were driven by the plan but ultimately felt that the initiative showed success and served its purpose. Like Woodards, Hines said it was difficult to assess an appropriate value of reducing violent crime.
“It has a cost, but you really can’t put a price on the people who weren’t killed,” he said.
Other cities likely implemented some type of plan or strategy to address crime over the past few years, according to Woodards, suggesting that downward trends elsewhere hadn’t occurred without intervention. She said it was natural to wonder, but impossible to determine, whether local results stemmed exclusively from city actions or a combination of factors.
“What I do know is we had a crime plan, we focused on the near-term goal of hot-spot policing and we saw a decrease,” Woodards said.
This story was originally published June 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
