Amid summer violence, true city leadership means helping all Tacomans feel safer
If you’re feeling like Tacoma is reeling from a surge in violent crime and that police are under-equipped to deal with it, you’re not alone.
A group of more than 30 downtown Tacoma business owners and other stakeholders wrote a recent letter to the mayor and City Council, pleading for a stronger public safety plan. They pointed to a string of brazen killings this summer — a man shot in Wright Park, a man stabbed in broad daylight in the Theater District, a woman beaten and dragged like a rag doll in the lobby of the building where she worked as a security guard.
North Tacoma resident Kirsten Carlson tells us she walks up to 10 miles a day in the city and has never felt more unsafe in 27 years. Her experience may be anecdotal, but compile enough stories like it and you get a double whammy of public fear and declining faith in law enforcement.
The same goes for reports of people calling 911, being stuck in a pending file and sometimes waiting hours for an officer to respond. That’s unacceptable when someone is seeking help in perhaps the worst moment of their life, says council member Lillian Hunter.
Cops leaving the force are up, new hires are down and $5.2 million in funds to fill vacant jobs was frozen last year. Meantime, arsons and car thefts are up and homicides have zoomed to their highest level since 1994.
Against that backdrop, City Council members will review the daunting problems and potential solutions at their Aug. 24 meeting.
The discussion, and what we hope is prompt implementation of an action plan, can’t come soon enough.
We’ve seen too much time wasted in endless studies, protracted negotiations and deferred promises. A police body camera program, first embraced by the council in 2015, didn’t finally get off the ground until this year; it took the death of an unarmed Black man, Manuel Ellis, at the hands of Tacoma cops to break through the inertia.
Now is the time for elected city leaders to come together and show real leadership to make all Tacomans feel safer.
Three City Council members who met with our Editorial Board last week — Hunter, Robert Thoms and Conor McCarthy — wrote their own letter to Tacoma leadership this month. In it, they called out their colleagues for “failing our entire City,” saying they’d let the police presence atrophy over time and now stood idle while patrol cops drop to their lowest numbers in years.
When we asked about the approach, McCarthy called it “a strategy of desperation to address really bad things happening in Tacoma.”
Among other requests, the three aim to immediately remove obstacles that prevent TPD from filling budgeted vacancies.
The department now has only 261 patrol and detective jobs filled, though budgeted for 38 more, according to a council presentation last Tuesday by Interim Chief Mike Ake. Unusually high attrition has compounded the problem; by Aug. 31, TPD will have lost 34 cops this year while making just nine hires.
“We are not looking for hammer time on the streets,” Hunter told us; rather, they want improved police visibility and a timely response to all 911 calls.
The three are distressed by what they hear from crime-weary constituents, particularly downtown. They’re alarmed to live in a city where street racers felt free to perform car tricks just blocks from City Hall, and hostile bystanders swarmed the vehicle of a responding cop, as happened in January.
Accountability for such disorder starts by looking in the mirror. “You’re either managing something or you’re not,” Thoms told us, “and too often we in government give ourselves a weird pass.”
Can the city put more cops on the streets while transforming public safety practices and conforming with new state police reform laws? We think so. So does Thoms; he compares it to being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Meantime, Tacoma Police Union Local 6 sent us a statement Thursday, saying Tacoma need not limit itself to “binary choices.” It can boost police presence while creating civilian teams that would provide mental health support and other services to people in crisis.
As we see it, here’s what should be on the immediate to-do list:
Explore options to increase patrols soon, such as by unfreezing funds and expediting the hiring process.
Address concerns about mandatory double shifts that stretch cops to the breaking point by working 16 hours straight.
Get off the half-million dollar hamster wheel of public safety studies and implement key recommendations already in hand.
One of those recommendations deserves high priority: creating a new community service officer (CSO) classification that can field non-emergency calls. This could relieve commissioned officers of up to 9.4% of the calls they now handle, according to a May study by Matrix Consulting Group.
CSOs would be unarmed civilians and might even wear different uniforms than sworn officers — but they’d provide a non-lethal alternative.
Launching this by early next year would be a good down payment on the goal of police transformation, which city leaders pledged to do after the Ellis homicide. America’s history of systemic racism and disproportionate use of force against people of color can’t be ignored, even as the city augments its traditional police presence in the short term.
Mayor Victoria Woodards says the city is up to the twin challenge. “We’ve got to balance what safety looks like for everyone in our city plus the reality of being able to respond to calls,” she told the council Tuesday.
Or as one of her colleagues would say, walk and chew gum at the same time.
Tacoma ought to get busy walking and chewing without further delay.
News Tribune editorials reflect the views of our Editorial Board and are written by opinion editor Matt Misterek. Other board members are: Stephanie Pedersen, News Tribune president and editor; Matt Driscoll, local columnist; and Jim Walton, community representative. The Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom and does not influence the work of news reporting and editing staffs. For questions about the board or our editorials, email matt.misterek@thenewstribune.com