Patti Jackson’s pitch to be Pierce sheriff is about accountability, working with others
Patti Jackson wants to use her decades of experience working in the Pierce County Jail and willingness to work with others to make the Sheriff’s Department a law enforcement agency that supports its deputies and is accountable to the public.
At a campaign fundraiser on a Friday evening in late September in Tacoma’s West End, Jackson told a group of supporters that she recognized if she was elected sheriff, she would need to work to bring back public trust in law enforcement while also addressing violent crime, homelessness and addiction.
Former Tacoma Deputy Mayor Anders Ibsen warmed up the crowd of about 40 people before Jackson spoke. Ibsen’s real estate office hosted the event in its canopied courtyard. In attendance were others running for local office, including deputy prosecutor Scott Peters and Superior Court arbitrator Rebecca Reeder, along with old friends of Jackson, her ex-husband, other community members and City Council member Jamika Scott, to name a few.
Ibsen praised Jackson’s experience and judgment while he set her up to speak. Without saying her opponent’s name, Keith Swank, Ibsen said the election was between Jackson, whose broad appeal had built bridges between different groups, and “the very literal opposite of that.”
Jackson, 59, is making her first run at public office after working for the Sheriff’s Department for 34 years. She said she’s worked every job in its Corrections Bureau, including chief for eight years, a task that she believes has prepared her for the work of running a large department, like creating budgets, doing contract negotiations, running programs and pushing staff to grow into future leaders.
“I am proud, proud to wear the uniform of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department,” Jackson said in a recent interview with The News Tribune. “I am equally and probably more proud of the woman who I am when I take that uniform off. The community trusts in me.”
Swank, 56, is a retired Seattle Police Department captain who lives south of Puyallup. He’s made four prior bids for office in U.S. Congress as a Republican and hasn’t won an election. He ran to unseat Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell in the Senate in 2018 and has run three times for positions in the House of Representatives.
The elected sheriff provides law enforcement services to the hundreds of thousands of people who live in unincorporated areas of the county, along with Edgewood and University Place, cities that contract for police services. The sheriff also runs the jail and wields a budget of more than $377 million. The sheriff is a nonpartisan position and is elected for a four-year term, limited to three consecutive terms.
In her brief fundraising speech and on her campaign website, Jackson frames the issue of safety in Pierce County in less dramatic terms than her opponent, asking voters if they are tired of seeing an armed guard at Target or having to get someone to unlock a cabinet to get some Tide detergent.
Jackson recently told The News Tribune that her priority was tackling violent crime — which saw declines in the county in 2023 — but also said the department needs to look at root causes and lower-level crime that she said can lead to more violent incidents.
She said her message has been that the department will arrest people engaged in criminal activity. She doesn’t see much value in writing reports without taking a suspect into custody. Making arrests means getting fingerprints and photographs along with setting a court date.
“My priorities are holding people accountable,” Jackson said. “And, yes, there are also individuals that are suffering from mental-health crisis, drug-addiction crisis. Let’s get that under control as well, using experts that are already versed in that field.”
She brings with her a list of bipartisan endorsements, including both candidates for Pierce County Executive, County Council Chair Ryan Mello, a Democrat, and state Rep. Kelly Chambers, a Republican. She’s also been endorsed by current Sheriff Ed Troyer and his predecessor, longtime Sheriff Paul Pastor, along other law enforcement officials. U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer and state Rep. Yasmin Trudeau, both Democrats, along with other state and federal officeholders have endorsed her.
Mello said in a statement to The News Tribune that Jackson’s leadership across multiple bureaus in the Sheriff’s Department was “unmatched” and that she had gained a breadth of knowledge from overseeing diverse teams. He said she has developed innovative programs to support inmates with addiction or mental health challenges, and he admired her commitment to transparency and building partnerships.
Chambers said Jackson’s endorsements from law enforcement, as well as current Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier and governor candidate Dave Reichert meant a lot to her. Reichert’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
“And when I talk to other members of the Sheriff’s Department, both in leadership and deputies, they trust Patti and prefer Patti,” Chambers said.
Neither Jackson or Swank have been endorsed by the unions that represent the patrol and corrections deputies of the Sheriff’s Department. Before the August primary election, the Pierce County Deputy Sheriff’s Independent Guild endorsed candidate Lt. Cynthia Fajardo, but she did not advance to the general election. Swank has since said he would appoint Fajardo as his undersheriff if he is elected, but the union has not made any further endorsement.
Jackson running on accountability, administrative experience
If elected, Jackson would be the first woman to be sheriff in Pierce County. She doesn’t want to lean on that as a reason she should get the job, but she believes it could help women in the department see their potential as leaders.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the department hired a woman, according to Jackson. Women now make up 26 percent of its workforce, county data shows. Jackson sees room to improve how welcoming the workplace is to women. Last year, the department settled a female lieutenant’s sexism lawsuit for $200,000. The suit alleged that she and other women were discriminated against for their gender, and that Undersheriff Brent Bomkamp had made demeaning comments, which he denied.
Whoever is elected to lead the Sheriff’s Department, there will be changes coming to its top brass.
Swank’s pick for his second in command, Fajardo, now leads the Foothills Detachment. She has expressed concern about Jackson’s lack of experience working the streets, something Swank has seized on in his campaign while touting his own tactical know-how.
Eric Robertson, a Republican who represents much of East Pierce County in the state Legislature and who has endorsed Jackson, said her years of work for the Sheriff’s Department has earned her the trust of many of the County Council members. Four of the seven council members have endorsed her. He said he wanted a sheriff who could work with Democrats, Republicans, Independents and everyone else.
Robertson is a former State Patrol trooper and a former U.S. Marshal for Western Washington. He said he was sure Swank had some administrative experience working as a police captain in Seattle, but that Swank had run on his tactical abilities, and that’s not the sheriff’s role.
“I don’t care how many arrests you made. I don’t care how many doors you’ve kicked down. I don’t care how many protests you’ve been to,” Robertson said.
“The principal role of the sheriff is to oversee all that and pick the best people to lead those different functions within an organization,” he added.
Jackson has not made any announcements about a potential undersheriff if she is elected. She told The News Tribune both Bomkamp and Chief of Administrative Services Nick Hausner would retire sometime after the election. She said she’d be looking for leaders who care about the department, but who also understand that they work for the communities of Pierce County.
“We want to make sure that we are not being somebody that’s biased based on our friends or who our supporters were,” Jackson said.
Recently, Jackson has been chief of patrol in the Sheriff’s Department, a position she was appointed to in January while Chief Micah Lundborg was at the FBI academy. She remained in the position after he returned in April, about a month after the Pierce County Corrections Guild voted 150-14 that they did not have confidence in Jackson as their longtime chief.
Guild members were primarily concerned with a lack of training to keep corrections deputies fresh on defensive tactics, but they have also complained of a lack of firearms training and insufficient services for inmates, such as religious services and visitation.
Jackson told The News Tribune she knows that concerns about training have been addressed, citing the creation of a training sergeant position, the construction of a defensive-tactics training room in the jail and a new requirement from the state Legislature that will take effect next year that mandates 24 hours of training for corrections deputies each year.
Guild president Bryan Buckingham said recently that after the no-confidence vote in early March, the guild primarily worked on the issues with current Corrections Chief Kevin Roberts, and training hasn’t improved to the guild’s satisfaction. Buckingham still sees issues in the jail as the work of Jackson, such as deputy radios with transmission problems and outdated manuals for procedures.
Buckingham said he believes Jackson cares about corrections deputies and the jail, but he said she has an unwillingness to put procedures in writing, and he described her as a “toxic” leader. He recalled a heated conversation before the no-confidence vote.
“I remember her standing at the table, slams her hands down, she says there’s no law that says I have to train you,” Buckingham said.
Jackson told The News Tribune the comment was from a meeting to discuss defensive tactics training with Buckingham and other corrections staff after a lieutenant who was their expert on the topic became injured and couldn’t develop the program himself.
She said it wasn’t a heated conversation, but the meeting turned into bargaining over how many hours the training would be and who would have to teach it. Jackson said she told Buckingham she wanted training, but there was no state mandate to provide it beyond de-escalation training.
“Do I think that corrections needs more training? One hundred percent,” Jackson said. “They need more recognition. It’s a unique branch of law enforcement that I believe the public needs to be made aware of, of the sacrifices that these men and women are doing on a daily basis.”
She referred to the jail’s previous staffing crisis as a factor in deputies’ frustration over training. In September 2022, the jail was so short staffed that there was a limit on how many people could be housed there, and deputies were putting in hundreds of hours of mandatory overtime. A presentation to the Pierce County Council at the time also showed an increase in assaults between inmates and on staff.
“I think it’s important for community members to realize when you are 87 positions vacant, you can’t take 14 people off of a lineup and say, now you’re going to do this training,” Jackson said.
The Corrections Bureau has since filled many of those vacancies. Jackson said there are now about 40 unfilled positions. Sheriff Ed Troyer has attributed the staffing gains to Jackson, who said she has sped up the hiring process.
From Chula Vista to Tacoma
Jackson, who was born in Chula Vista, California, said part of what motivates her work in law enforcement is a desire to make Pierce County safe enough that families can be comfortable letting their children play in their neighborhoods the way she did.
“I’ve got grandkids now and they live here,” Jackson said. “And I don’t think it’s specific to Chula Vista, California, or Tacoma, Washington. Our children are not able to get out there and enjoy the outdoors without the parents being right there.”
Jackson’s family went on to live in Alexandria, Virginia, and Japan before moving to Pierce County in the late 1970s. She attended Bethel High School in Spanaway and lived in a mobile home park in Graham called The Estates.
“I thought that meant we were really up there,” Jackson said.
After high school, Jackson attended the University of Puget Sound, where she studied psychology and communications. She completed her undergraduate studies online through Bluefield University, which is based in Virginia.
In 1989, Jackson got a job at the Pierce County Jail. Her now ex-husband was working for the Tacoma Police Department at the time, and a friend asked her if she’d considered working for the Sheriff’s Department.
“I said, ‘Well, how hard can it be? Right?’ Turned out it was, is, incredibly hard. It’s incredibly challenging,” Jackson said. “People don’t wake up saying I want to go work for a jail.”
Jackson’s rise to Chief of Corrections
Jackson liked using some of her understanding of psychology to get inmates to listen to what she had to say and comply with the rules. She isn’t a large and imposing person at 5-foot-2, but she said people knew she was tough.
It was just one building in downtown Tacoma when Jackson started working there. Connected to the County-City Building where Superior Court is located, the facility can hold 1,700 inmates. It resembles an ax from above, with a blade made up of nine nearly windowless, octagonal cylinders. The new jail, built in 2003, abuts the main jail.
“I was able to walk into a unit at the time that would have 30 to 45, you know, hardened criminals,” Jackson said. “And I was under 100 pounds. And so being able to walk in there and having individuals listen to what it is that I was saying was pretty, it was pretty exciting to me.”
It wasn’t until after a fight with cancer 16 years after she battled the disease as a teen that Jackson began to pursue supervisory roles in the jail on a trajectory that eventually took her to the position of corrections chief.
As a sergeant, Jackson said she built a program that allowed inmates to get credit for community service hours by doing services such as working in the kitchen and general maintenance in the jail. As a lieutenant, Jackson played a large part in writing policies for the Sheriff’s Department as a whole. She said she was motivated to become chief.
She became chief in mid-2015.
Mark Gosling, a retired Sheriff’s Department detective who worked in the jail for a year in 1998, said he remembers her as one of the few people who was welcoming to new hires. He moved to patrol in 1999 because that’s where his real interests were, but about 20 years later he ended up working for Jackson for six months, helping her reduce overdoses in the jail.
Gosling commended Jackson for her lack of ego and ability to put together teams of people with complementary expertise.
“She was willing to get as much information as possible and see different sides,” Gosling said.
He said he thinks Jackson’s experience running the jail has made her a good administrator to run the entire department, and he said she wouldn’t have trouble surrounding herself with good detectives and deputies to run patrol and help her fix problems.
Of the complaints the Corrections Guild have brought against Jackson, Gosling said he doesn’t think it’s uncommon to have some disgruntled people in a jail, which he described as a toxic environment for inmates and employees.
“If Patti’s been working there 25, 30 years, and the worst thing they can come up with is that she’s made some decisions that made people mad. Through everything that’s happened, I think that’s pretty damn good,” Gosling said.
Gosling and several others who spoke to The News Tribune about Jackson described the jail as the department’s greatest liability and lauded her ability to run it well.
Policing ‘clashing’ with community
In her campaign, Jackson’s strength has been an ability to earn a wide range of support.
At her campaign fundraiser in September, Tacoma City Council member Jamika Scott spoke to ask for donations, and she joked with the crowd that she was probably the weirdest person to see speaking up for a sheriff candidate.
Scott co-founded in 2015 the Tacoma Action Collective, which aims to end “systemic oppression and systemic violence,” and she has been a vocal supporter of the family of Manuel Ellis, who died in police custody in 2020. She has also sued the Tacoma Police Department, claiming she was wrongfully arrested in 2021.
She told The News Tribune that Jackson introduced herself to her at an event for a nonprofit in Tacoma earlier this year and offered to meet up with her to talk further. Scott was skeptical at first, but they later talked over the phone. Scott said she found an openness about Jackson and a willingness to take feedback and incorporate it into action.
“We’re at a point now where the culture of community and the culture of policing is clashing,” Scott said. “She’s open to figuring out where are we clashing and how can we start to ease that tension so we can build bridges.”
Jackson said she thinks it’s “imperative” that everyone realizes there has been a huge loss in public trust in police work, and she believes she has the relationships with Pierce County communities and an understanding of the internal workings of the Sheriff’s Department to shift that mindset.
“I don’t find reasons to bash and tell people what’s wrong with other individuals,” Jackson said. “I find reasons to tell our community members what we’re going to do as a police agency and how I’m going to be held accountable to doing that.”
This story was originally published October 24, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
