Pierce County data agreement aims to improve how homeless deaths are tracked
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Chaplain Jacobs escalates campaign to state after two years of unmet local reporting.
- County agencies cite new death-certificate system and privacy limits for data gaps.
- Council members plan to press state lawmakers for legal changes to enable sharing.
After years of difficulty, Pierce County has made a change aimed at overcoming bureaucratic hurdles public health agencies said prevented them from reporting the number of individuals who died while experiencing homelessness in the region.
On Jan. 29, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD) amended its data-sharing agreement related to death records with Washington State Department of Health to now include information on homelessness status at the time of death.
“This is a big step forward for our team, as local health jurisdictions did not previously have access to this data. We expect this new data to help improve the accuracy, coordination, and transparency of mortality data reporting related to people experiencing homelessness,” Kenny Via, a TPCHD spokesperson, told The News Tribune about the agreement.
Via said TPCHD’s Assessment, Evaluation, and Epidemiology team is reviewing and validating 2023 and 2024 data.
“We don’t yet have the 2025 data,” he said. “We anticipate completing our preliminary analysis within the next three to four weeks. We will share more information with the community once that work is complete.”
Efforts by public health agencies in Pierce County to improve the process of recording the number of people who have died on the streets while experiencing homelessness had not made much headway before the data-sharing agreement was made.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has said it relies on reports from the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office when counting how many people were presumed to be homeless as the time of their death.
Advocates say tracking the number of homeless deaths and the cause of those deaths is important to recognize public health patterns and to secure federal funding to address those issues.
Tom Langdon Hill is a medical sociologist with Certified Community Health Specialists (CCHS), a national network of healthcare clinicians focused on improving access to healthcare for individuals experiencing homelessness.
In an interview with The News Tribune, Hill said the homeless death data gap is not unique to Pierce County. He said it is a metric that was not tracked at all a decade ago, and tracking only ramped up around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Accurate data is crucial—we need to fully understand how homelessness is impacting our most vulnerable residents so we can develop effective responses and allocate resources appropriately,” Pierce County Executive, Ryan Mello, told The News Tribune in a statement regarding the new agreement.
A local man had been pushing Pierce County officials and agencies to collect and report the number of people who were believed to be homeless at the time of their death. At the same time, medical examiner officials told The News Tribune it was “likely impossible” to confirm with certainty that a decedent was unhoused at the time of death and that it was not necessarily the role of the Medical Examiner’s Office to determine whether a person was homeless when they died.
With other jurisdictions, including King County and the state of Oregon able to report the number of individuals who were presumed to be unhoused at the time of their death, one local advocate was asking: “Why can’t we?”
A chaplain’s efforts
For years Chaplain Ed Jacobs has organized a quarterly memorial service for all those who were believed to have been homeless when they died in Pierce County.
In 2022, he read the names of 167 people who died on the streets of Pierce County — at the time the largest number he had recited. The next year, he memorialized nearly 300 people.
He relied on a quarterly report from the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office as well as the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department to inform him of the number and names of those who died. In 2024, something changed as the number of reported deaths began to shrink drastically beginning in March.
At the beginning of 2025, a registrar from the health department told The News Tribune a new death-certification system did not allow officials to easily identify who was unhoused at the time of their death.
“They are all doing their job,” Jacobs said prior to the data agreement,” But people are falling through the cracks.”
During the Pierce County Council’s Public Safety Committee meeting on June 23, officials with the Medical Examiner’s Office and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department presented new data and strategies on homeless death data. One strategy was a data sharing-agreement between the health department and the Pierce County Human Services Department to cross-reference the names of those who have died with the names of people who had recently tried to access homeless services.
Jacobs told The News Tribune recently that the data reporting has not improved.
“We have not changed the way we record deaths of individuals living unhoused,” Luke R. Vogelsberg, director of operations for the Medical Examiner’s Office, told The News Tribune on Jan. 5. “We do our best based on circumstantial and witness information to assess each decedent’s housing status, and then record them in our case management system as ‘presumed to be homeless’ if applicable.”
How do other jurisdictions handle it?
Other communities have begun collecting and reporting the number and names of individuals who have died while presumed to be living unhoused.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office records a field titled “no fixed address” during its death-certification process. According to public health documents, death investigators determine housing status based on information inferred from place and circumstances using testimony from witnesses or next of kin.
“Given the complex nature of human remains investigations and the intricacies of homelessness, the term ‘presumed’ is recommended,” county documents state, “KCMEO’s working definition of ‘presumed homeless persons’ is individuals without permanent housing who lived on the streets or stayed in a shelter, vehicle, or abandoned building at the time preceding death. Decedents who were living in transitional or supportive housing, or a doubled up/couch surfing situation are not likely classified as homeless in this data set.”
Multnomah County in Oregon, where Portland is located, has used “domicile unknown” reports for over a decade. In 2022, the Oregon State Legislature made it state law for all counties to develop their own domicile unknown report.
In an interview with The News Tribune, Multnomah County health officer, Dr. Richard Bruno, described the process as “marvelously collaborative” between different health agencies and officials, who use hospital charts notes, family interviews and investigations into registered addresses for those who perished.
While the process is not perfect and can require extra work for death investigators, Jaime Walters, an epidemiologist with the Multnomah County Health Department, said public health officials believe the work is important to identify public health trends and to develop strategies to prevent deaths.
“It wasn’t that difficult to get a variable added to the system,” she told The News Tribune.
Multnomah County also publishes testimonials about those who have died while experiencing homelessness based on evidence collected and interviews with their families.
When asked why the issue is so important to him and why he fought so hard to bring visibility to those who have died on our streets, Jacobs said the measure of a society is how they treat the dead.
“These people were invisible to most, and they deserve justice when they die,” he told The News Tribune. “I am not worried about those who have passed, I am worried about those who are still living, and we have to send a message that they matter.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2026 at 5:30 AM.
