Pierce County has grown rapidly. How has that changed rural policing?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Pierce County growth outpaces rural deputy staffing, stretching patrol coverage.
- Rural detachments report longer response times and deferred low-priority calls.
- Vacancies and pay gaps drive lateral moves, fueling burnout and staffing loss.
Austin Nolan-Copple wasn’t about to go near a stolen vehicle on her own.
The vacant property she was driving to on Sept. 11 was supposed to be her mother-in-law’s new home, the 33-year-old Raft Island resident told The News Tribune. They didn’t have a house built yet, but they did have a shipping container on the property full of building materials. It was where her mother-in-law planned to retire, close to family on the Key Peninsula.
A few weeks prior, her mother-in-law called her with alarm. She had found unfamiliar vehicles scattered across the lot. It appeared that someone had cut the lock on their gate and broken in. Nolan-Copple reported the incident to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and detectives later found a stolen Subaru hidden inside the shipping container, the lock to which had also been cut.
On Sept. 11, Nolan-Copple wanted to secure the property with new locks. Nervous about going to the property alone, she called the non-emergency number for the sheriff’s office and asked if deputies could accompany her.
“Enroute to that location, the deputy actually called me and said, ‘Listen, I’m the only deputy in all of the KP right now and I have two other calls ahead of you,’” Nolan-Copple said.
In 2024, there was an average of 1.38 police officers for every 1,000 residents in Washington state — the lowest rate among all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a July news release from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. The national average is 2.31 officers per 1,000 residents.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office had an estimated 0.57 officers per 1,000 residents in 2023, according to the county’s 2024-2025 biennial budget. Their target for 2025 is 0.63 officers per 1,000, the budget says.
County data shows that, as the region’s population has grown, staffing levels haven’t changed significantly in over 20 years, The News Tribune’s Peter Talbot reported.
Rural areas like the Key Peninsula have particularly borne the burden of short-staffed policing. Growing populations and vast geography add to the difficulties of responding quickly to calls in the farmlands and forests ringing the county’s edges.
When Nolan-Copple spoke with the deputy on Sept. 11, he said that the type of call required more than one deputy and that she might need to wait an hour or more.
With a baby at home, Nolan-Copple told him she couldn’t wait that long. The deputy stayed on the phone with her while she secured the gate from the road. She told The News Tribune she was planning to try again another day, though it’s difficult with a job that includes working weekends and taking care of her baby. The deputy recommended giving them a call early on a Sunday morning, she said.
The incident made her worry about other property owners on the Key Peninsula.
“I’m obviously not going to put my life in danger,” she said.
Pierce County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Carly Cappetto confirmed that the sheriff’s office has records of calls regarding the stolen vehicle in the shipping container and a request for a “stand-by” in the afternoon Sept. 11. A stand-by call is lower priority than incidents that are in-progress, are life-threatening or could escalate, but deputies will respond when they are available, she explained.
The thin staffing is taking a toll, both on the deputies working long shifts to cover the gaps and the residents who put out calls for help, they told The News Tribune.
A lot of ground to cover
Deputy and investigator Nathan Betts has been working for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office for the last nine years. He’s been enforcing the law in the Peninsula Detachment, the patrol district that includes the Key Peninsula, Fox Island and parts of unincorporated Pierce County surrounding the city of Gig Harbor, for the last six.
Limited staffing means deputies have to prioritize the most urgent calls, according to Betts.
“Sometimes it feels like you put a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” Betts said. “It’s like, you know this isn’t going to work, but it solves a problem for a minute. And I got 50 other problems I got to go slap Band-Aids on.”
Some lower-priority calls he may never get to, or he’ll arrive hours after they occur, he said. For example, some calls require two deputies to respond, such as domestic violence calls. That means if both deputies on duty are tied up with an incident, they might not be able to make it to another call that comes in.
“It has to be pretty drastic if you’re going to leave a domestic violence call,” Betts said. “You’re not going to go to a burglary that happened three hours ago. That’s going to have to sit and wait.”
He noted that the sheriff’s office can pull deputies from other parts of the county to respond if necessary or even team up with law enforcement in other counties, especially if the incident is near the county border.
For example, a sergeant came from South Hill to respond to a fire that engulfed a home in the Gig Harbor area April 8, he explained.
“We got cops and deputies living all over the KP (Key Peninsula), so there’s a lot of eyes and ears,” he said. “So we tend to communicate with each other when we see things that stand out.”
Sheriff’s office data in 2024 showed that deputies take longer on average to respond to priority one calls, which are calls with the highest level of urgency, in the rural detachments than in the Central Patrol division. Sheriff’s office spokesperson Carly Cappetto confirmed in a text message that priority one calls tend to be emergency situations in progress, typically incidents like shootings or aggravated assaults.
Though it fluctuates significantly month to month, in 2024 it took deputies an average of 5.3 minutes to arrive to a call in the Central Patrol service area, compared to 9.2 minutes in the Foothills Detachment, 10.6 minutes in the Mountain Detachment and 11.6 minutes in the Peninsula Detachment, the data shows.
The News Tribune spoke with several Key Peninsula residents about their perceptions of public safety. Most said they understood that living in a rural area comes with longer response times for law enforcement.
Shaun Darby, the sheriff’s guild president who worked for the Peninsula Detachment in the early 2000s, recalled that he once had to commandeer a boat to get from Home to Raft Island “because it was such an emergency that (he) could get there quicker by water than by driving all the way around.”
Minimum staffing hasn’t changed in years as population grows
Minimum staffing is two deputies in each of Pierce County’s rural detachments, per a sheriff’s office presentation to the Pierce County Council Public Safety Committee in July. That means that a minimum of two deputies are required to be on-duty at any one time, though the numbers fluctuate across three shifts.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office has three rural detachments. Besides the Peninsula Detachment, the other two are the Mountain Detachment, which serves areas near Graham, Roy, McKenna, Elk Plain, Kapowsin, Eatonville, Elbe and Ashford; and the Foothills Detachment, which serves areas near Lake Tapps, Bonney Lake, Prairie Ridge, Orting, Buckley, Wilkeson and Greenwater.
The office also has a Central Patrol Division responsible for patrolling mid-county areas including South Hill, Parkland, Spanaway, Frederickson, Midland, Summit, Waller, Browns Point and Fife Heights. That patrol division serves the smallest area but covers a population greater than all three rural detachments combined at about 246,400 residents based on 2020 U.S. Census data.
Minimum staffing in Central Patrol is seven for day shift, eight for swing shift and six for graveyard shift, according to the sheriff’s office presentation in July.
Deputies also serve two contract cities: Edgewood and University Place, according to a May 2024 presentation to the Pierce County Council Public Safety Committee.
Pierce County, the state’s second most populous county, grew by about 16% from 2010 to 2020, data from the state Office of Financial Management shows. The current county population is pushing close to 1 million, reaching about 960,000 residents in 2025, the county’s public data portal indicates.
That growth includes the county’s rural areas. County planning documents estimate that rural areas of unincorporated Pierce County had a population of about 144,080 people in 2000. That number increased by about 17% to 169,250 people in 2020. In 2044, the rural population is predicted to reach about 177,190 people, according to the county’s comprehensive plan.
Meanwhile, the county’s minimum staffing levels haven’t changed since the 1980s, said Darby, the president of the Pierce County Deputy Sheriff’s Independent Guild. He’s worked for the department for the last 26 years, including stints as a deputy in the Peninsula Detachment, and now works as a sergeant in the traffic unit. The traffic unit is based in Parkland but responds to calls across the county, he said.
“So when I used to come into work, there might be four or five 911 calls that are pending that need to be handled in my district,” he said. “Now, there are 911 calls that are pending for days, days before a deputy can get to them.”
Pierce County budget documents suggest calls for service countywide have actually fallen over the years. Recorded calls for service fell nearly 14% from 139,606 calls for service in 1998 to 120,403 calls in 2019.
The sheriff’s office estimated total calls in 2023 at 126,183, according to the 2022-2023 Pierce County budget.
In the Peninsula Detachment, calls for service fell about 10% from 2018 to 2024, according to numbers provided by sheriff’s office spokesperson Cappetto. The sheriff’s office believes part of this could be due to underreporting after the department began diverting people to an online form to report certain crimes, she wrote in an email.
A sheriff’s office spokesperson told The News Tribune in 2022 that the online form was instituted to help free up deputies to prioritize in-progress and violent crimes and follow up on investigations.
Deputy Betts and Key Peninsula residents who spoke with The News Tribune also described anecdotally an inclination among residents not to report certain incidents.
“Honestly, our (crime rate) numbers are pretty low out here all across the board,” Betts said. “And I don’t know if that’s due to lack of reporting, because we know there’s a ton of that.”
The issue is that even if deputies can’t respond or solve crimes they don’t have evidence for, they still need people to call in crimes so that they can track hot spots and repeat offenders, Betts said.
The Key Peninsula Council has a Public Safety Committee that meets regularly to discuss incidents in the community and foster communication between residents and law enforcement. One member, Stan Moffett, told The News Tribune that he feels “there’s still an underlying feeling among some people that there’s no point in calling it in because nobody will come, which is not true.”
“We’re not fat with deputies out here, pretty damn lean,” Moffett said. “But I think we try to get across to everybody to call it in, regardless of what it is.”
Betts said that it’s “extremely helpful” when residents look out for each other and alert deputies if they notice something different in their neighborhoods.
Sheriff’s office allocates staffing based on call volume
In an interview April 9, Pierce County Undersheriff Cyndie Fajardo said any additional staffing would go first to Central Patrol because that’s where deputies get most of their calls for service. The sheriff’s office does its best to send reinforcements to the rural detachments on an as-needed basis, she said.
“And if I could do it today, I would love to have 24 to 30 in each one of the (rural) detachments, but it’s just not feasible at this point,” she said. “So it’s making do with what you have. And we’re spread thin all over.”
“ ... there’s a lot of sacrifice that’s going on in the department to make sure we can give the best service that we can with the number of people that we can,” she continued. “It’s not ideal.”
She said she’s observed a general decline in people interested in working in law enforcement over the years. Some officers “decide they don’t want to be a police officer anymore because of the changes in how we can police,” she added.
She joined the sheriff’s office in 1988, and remembers things were different then.
“When I first hired on, there (were) over 10,000 people that showed up to take the test” to become an officer, she said. “We’re lucky if we can get a hundred people to come and take the test.”
Council member Robyn Denson said in an interview April 8 that the county council’s role is in budgeting. The independently-elected sheriff is the one who sets the number of deputies in each of the rural detachments, she said.
“I have consistently advocated for more deputies in District 7, but realistically, additional staffing is unlikely until vacancies across the county are reduced,” she wrote in a Facebook post Sept. 17. “Fortunately, our Peninsula deputies are outstanding, many live in our community, and they are deeply committed to keeping us safe.”
Deputies leaving for other agencies
Filling existing vacancies remains a challenge for the sheriff’s office as a whole.
Several Pierce County deputies recently left to join the Tacoma Police Department, The News Tribune reported in early October. Darby, the sheriff’s office guild president, cited the compensation offered by other agencies to explain why deputies are leaving.
The Tacoma Police Department began offering $50,000 signing bonuses to experienced in-state hires, The News Tribune reported. These hires are known as “lateral” hires, meaning they come from another law enforcement agency and already have on-the-job training.
Pierce County currently offers a $25,000 hiring incentive for lateral deputy hires from both in-state and out-of-state, according to a budget presentation to the Pierce County Council Oct. 8.
Out of 14 new hires highlighted in a Tacoma Police Department Facebook post Sept. 30, nine came from the sheriff’s office and four were from the Peninsula Detachment, Darby told The News Tribune via email. Public records requested by The News Tribune confirm that three deputies and one sergeant assigned to the Peninsula Detachment resigned in September.
Besides earning lower salaries, Darby said deputies are also having to work long shifts to cover vacancies.
“... it’s sheer burnout,” he said. “There are deputies that are working back-to-back 10-hour shifts, 20 hours a day … any human being is just going to get exhausted from that continual day in, day out, day in, day out, right?”
Darby maintained that the county can choose to pay deputies a higher wage. The sheriff’s guild has been in negotiations with Pierce County for over a year.
County spokesperson Libby Catalinich, asked about sheriff staffing and how shortages are impacting service in the rural detachments, wrote in an email Oct. 6 that the county values their sheriff’s office employees and “has presented multiple proposals that reflect our strong commitment to fair compensation, retention, and public safety while being fiscally responsible to all Pierce County residents.”
“We respectfully disagree with the Guild’s public statement suggesting that the County has failed to act in good faith or offer meaningful compensation,” she wrote.
She also noted that it’s important not to compare county sheriff staffing to city police staffing, particularly in smaller cities like Bonney Lake or Gig Harbor which do not share the same operational, staffing or financial background.
“Pierce County uses statutory comparators consistent with state law and bargaining practice to ensure that compensation decisions are made equitably and objectively,” she wrote.
Arbitration on the collective bargaining agreement between the county and the guild is scheduled for March 2026, though that timeline depends on the mutually agreed upon arbitrator’s availability, Catalinich wrote.
An Oct. 8 presentation to the Pierce County Council Committee of the Whole indicates that the sheriff’s office oversees a total budget of about $414 million.
“Our goal remains clear: to reach a contract that supports our law enforcement workforce, reflects our shared values, and strengthens public safety for all Pierce County residents,” she wrote. “We remain open to continued discussions and are hopeful for a resolution.”
This story was originally published November 18, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
