What FBI data says about Pierce County crime in Sheriff Keith Swank’s first year
Violent crimes and property offenses declined in unincorporated Pierce County during Sheriff Keith Swank’s first year in office, according to FBI data, continuing a trend of slowing crime rates after pandemic-era highs.
The county has seen disturbing acts of violence in the last 14 months, events that have rattled some of the area’s smallest communities and left families with deep emotional wounds.
Headlines about shocking crimes can make it difficult to see the bigger picture. After five people were killed in a stabbing attack and police shooting on the Key Peninsula last month, a commenter on an article on The News Tribune’s website said the county had experienced a “historic spike” in violent crime since Swank took office in January 2025.
The data tells a different story.
Taken as a whole, violent crimes in unincorporated Pierce County declined in 2025 by 17 percent from the previous year, and property crimes declined by 22 percent. The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System defines violent crimes as aggravated assaults, homicides, rapes and robberies. Property crimes include arson, burglary, larceny/theft and motor vehicle theft.
The county’s violent crime rates — the number of violent crimes per 100,000 people — also appear to largely fare better than violent crime rates for Washington and the United States.
FBI data for 2024 and 2025 show that crime rates for robbery and rape consistently remained below the state and national rates. For the most part, the same was true for aggravated assaults and homicides, but those offenses occasionally spiked above the state and national crime rates.
In March 2025, for example, Pierce County’s homicide rate per 100,000 people shot up to 1.11, more than triple the national crime rate for homicides that month (0.34) and more than five times Washington’s homicide rate (0.21)
It was a particularly violent month in unincorporated areas of the county. The News Tribune’s homicide records show the Sheriff’s Office investigated six killings in Roy, Summit View, Parkland, Waller and Spanaway.
FBI data says homicide was the only violent crime that saw a slight increase in 2025, with 14 reported compared to nine in 2024.
However, The News Tribune reported in January that unincorporated Pierce County recorded a decline in homicides in 2025. The Sheriff’s Office investigated 17 homicides last year compared to 19 in 2024.
The reason for the discrepancy is unclear. The FBI says it uses data reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program from more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies. In response to a question from The News Tribune, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, Carly Cappetto, cautioned that there could be a number of reasons the FBI’s numbers are different, and she couldn’t provide a clear reason for the deviation.
“For example, each agency codes things differently,” Cappetto said in an email. “We include each victim in our count and other agencies may only count it as a homicide when in reality it was a double or triple homicide.” As an example, Cappetto pointed to the March 12, 2025 killing of 41-year-old Joshua Clemens, southeast of Roy. He died after being intentionally run over by his neighbor, but Cappetto said the Medical Examiner’s Office listed him as dying of hypothermia.
“In reality, he was beaten to death and left for dead, but his death was not deemed a homicide due to his injuries being deemed not enough to cause imminent death so he died from hypothermia instead,” Cappetto said. “We still treated it as a homicide case.”
The county is off to a bad start for homicides in 2026. So far there have been eight homicides in unincorporated areas, including the fatal police shooting of Aleksandr Shablykin. There were zero as of March 10 last year.
Drug offenses also declined in 2025 by about 25 percent. There were 386 drug crimes in unincorporated Pierce County last year, classified as either drug-equipment violations or drug/narcotics violations. In 2024, there were 513 such offenses.
Swank also promised to crack down on human trafficking when he was sworn into office last year. When he was campaigning for sheriff in 2024, the latest data from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs reported an increase in those types of crimes in Pierce County from 2022 to 2023, but the number of offenses was low — the increase was from one offense to five.
Those numbers don’t appear alarming, but former County Executive Bruce Dammeier wrote in a county blog post in January 2022 that Tacoma was ranked as the seventh-worst city on a list of where traffickers found and exploited victims.
In 2024, reports of human-trafficking offenses fell back to one. Last year, according to the FBI’s data, there were two reported human-trafficking crimes, categorized as either a commercial sex act or involuntary servitude.
This story was originally published March 11, 2026 at 5:15 AM.
