Is chief Moore’s crime plan right for Tacoma? Local experts, police union are concerned

The authors of Tacoma Police Chief Avery Moore’s violent crime plan have painted a rosy picture of their strategy and called its first three months a success, but the union representing the city’s rank-and-file cops alleges top brass is spreading a false narrative and local experts say the plan is fundamentally flawed.

“TPD’s artificially narrow focus on statistical improvements in crime rates in specific locations misleads the public into believing crime is down citywide. That is far from the truth,” Local 6 Union president Henry Betts, a TPD detective, wrote in a letter to the City Council and department leaders this week calling for increased transparency and dialogue among decision-makers.

In addition to concerns about incomplete data, two University of Washington Tacoma criminologists told The News Tribune the plan puts addressing the root causes of violence on the back burner in favor of short-sighted police tactics that could exacerbate historical inequities linked to crime. They also questioned TPD touting the three-phase strategy as customized to the city’s unique needs.

During interviews with The News Tribune, City Manager Elizabeth Pauli has maintained that the strategy is progressing as planned. City officials did not address criticisms from the police officer union and University of Washington Tacoma faculty in response to a list of questions from reporters.

A crime plan that’s ‘unique’ for Tacoma

A review by The News Tribune determined the plan authored by faculty members at the University of Texas at San Antonio is effectively a hand-me-down of what they developed for the Dallas Police Department, Moore’s former employer, in 2021. Dallas is about six times bigger than Tacoma by population and land area, and its police department has about 3,100 officers compared to TPD’s 118 available to answer to calls.

Emails provided to The News Tribune through public records requests show Moore reached out to the UTSA criminologists in late January – his second week in Tacoma. The researchers then met with city officials in early February. In March, they agreed to a one-year, nearly $96,000 contract.

The first phase of the plan has been for officers to drive to 16 addresses with high rates of violent street crime — defined as non-family violence aggravated assaults, murders and robberies — at peak times and activate their patrol car lights for 15 minutes, in hopes of deterring potential criminal activity. TPD launched pilot hot-spots patrols in March and officially implemented the tactic in July.

Because the city is short about 40 officers, TPD has largely relied upon officers volunteering to work overtime to cover hot spots, according to Moore. City spokesperson Maria Lee said the city paid nearly $395,000 through the end of September for hot-spots policing overtime.

Moore has said the two later phases of crime plan would address root causes of crime, though the details remain unclear due to a reliance on collaborations with other city departments and community organizations. Police leaders have declined to estimate the cost when asked publicly by city officials and volunteer committee members.

Phase 2, projected for early next year, calls for blight abatement and disrupting crime networks in select hot spots once TPD garners buy-in from city department heads. Phase 3 focuses on deterring so-called “known offenders” through social programs and increased investigative resources. Moore has suggested deploying a violent crime team could be a part of the final phase.

The city did not solicit bids to develop its violent crime plan, instead relying on Moore’s endorsement to address imminent concerns about rising crime. Pauli, Tacoma’s city manager, told The News Tribune that Dallas data showing a reduction in street violence and reports of crime across the board was promising to Tacoma leaders.

Dallas entered the second year of the plan in May and remains in Phase 2 of three, the Dallas Morning News reported. Recent crime data show the tally of robberies and homicides is up slightly citywide compared to last year, while aggravated assaults are down about 4%.

Dallas paid about $50,000 for the first contract year, according to documents and emails obtained by The News Tribune. The city of San Antonio was slated to receive a “replica” this fall for more than $100,000.

Tacoma officials intend to extend the one-year contract with UTSA to continue assisting with the crime plan, which was initially slated for a three-year implementation, according to Lee.

Pauli acknowledged that Tacoma’s plan is similar to the Dallas plan but said the approach differs from TPD’s past efforts to reduce crime.

“It’s academically and data-driven,” Pauli told reporters during an August video call. “That’s what’s unique for us.”

More than half of Tacoma’s published plan document is substantially lifted from the one implemented by the Dallas Police Department, according to an analysis from Copyleaks, an online tool for evaluating plagiarism. Nearly 29% of the text is identical, particularly in sections describing the plan’s prescribed tactics. Another 27% of the text is paraphrased or contains minor changes from Dallas’ plan.

To inform the Tacoma plan, UTSA criminologists conducted two focus groups with 12 people chosen by city officials. Many of the participants spoke about looking beyond law enforcement for public safety solutions and reframing the role of TPD. Moore convened an advisory cabinet with some of the same people for two meetings this spring.

Emails, documents and interviews with two cabinet members suggest the bulk of developing the crime plan was devoted to determining where to place hot-spot patrols.

Two University of Washington Tacoma criminologists told The News Tribune that crime is a nuanced issue and identifying effective solutions requires the expertise of residents who are most impacted by it. They said TPD’s crime plan doesn’t include enough of that perspective.

“It should be tailored to the needs of the community, not cut-and-pasting something from Dallas. It’s really unfortunate, to be honest,” said Ken Cruz, a University of Washington Tacoma assistant professor who researches community-based crime prevention. “Where’s the voice of the people who are actually affected by this?”

“(The plan) seems out of order and neglectful to really change crime and its reality, rather than perception,” said Cruz’s colleague Janelle Hawes, who also specializes in data analysis. Recently, she’s worked with local police departments on evaluations of their workplace climates and community engagement efforts.

Cruz and Hawes are uniquely positioned to assess TPD’s strategy. They and three other UW Tacoma faculty delivered a report on preventing local youth gun violence to city officials in January and presented it to a City Council committee in May. Their proposal, which has implications beyond youth, calls for extensive public engagement up front to spur the development of community-led programs that intervene in violence and counteract the economic desperation that often fuels crime.

“If we truly want to make communities safe, that’s what we’ll do,” said Cruz, the lead author. He added, “It seems as though we’re looking to police to solve the larger problems of society, and they’re just not equipped to do it.”

Hot spot policing results ‘paints a pretty picture’

TPD’s crime plan set a dire stage when it was published in July: Violent street crime, which excludes domestic violence and sexual assaults, had nearly doubled in the past 12 months; and the 2022 murder tally of 25 at that point was on pace to eclipse the historic total from 2021. That number is now 39, five more than last year’s total, which was the highest in decades.

Earlier this month, the UTSA researchers had good news during a 90-day update to City Council: the average number of monthly violent street crime incidents dropped about 20% citywide and just over 30% in hot spots compared to the preceding 12 months.

Officers went to their assigned hot spots 92% of the time and eight of the locations “cooled” enough for TPD to move on to new ones, according to the UTSA researchers. They said their data showed hot-spot patrols didn’t displace violence to surrounding areas; rather, the researchers said numbers around hot spots decreased as they had hoped.

“With something like (hot-spots policing), you will see that change quickly,” Hawes, the UW Tacoma professor, told The News Tribune. “But that doesn’t mean that trend will then be a longstanding one. That doesn’t mean you can count on that reduction to last.”

“At the end of the day what hot-spots policing is addressing is where violent crime takes place, but it’s not addressing why,” said Cruz.

Hawes said she wants to see more of the underlying crime data, particularly because the charts presented to City Council showed the average number of violent crime incidents in hot spots nearly doubled from August to September.

September saw five homicides and more aggravated assault offenses reported than any other month in the past three years; its 95 reported robbery offenses were second only to this February during that period, according to crime data from South Sound 911 published by the city.

The UTSA data “paints a pretty picture, yet I’m not convinced,” Hawes said. “This isn’t necessarily preventing crime. We may be seeing a reduction in reported violent crime in these areas, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not happening still.”

In its letter to city officials this week, the police union pointed to the rate of property crime, frequency of shootings and lagging response times as evidence of the gap between department talking points and the public safety experiences of residents and officers.

Lee, the city spokesperson, wrote in an email that 911 response times saw “minimal reductions” due to hot-spot patrols. She said TPD will continue to monitor response time data.

Except for incidents involving an imminent threat or active violence, TPD data show 911 callers on average wait more than 30 minutes before an officer is dispatched, according to the department’s 2023 budget presentation. Wait times across all call categories grew from last year.

The union specifically critiqued TPD’s recent move to categorize as vandalism some shooting incidents where people aren’t injured.

Lee said TPD accounts for noninjury shootings as a part of its hot-spots patrols.

“The truth is often an uncomfortable reality,” the union letter read. “Hiding behind selective statistics does not change the experience of our community — an experience that is unacceptably riddled with crime.”

Some City Council members have questioned the reliability of local violent crime data because of a growing reluctance to call 911 in Tacoma. Deputy Mayor Catherine Ushka said in July she was concerned TPD’s hot-spot patrols could miss some areas experiencing violence since she’s heard from people who have given up reporting crimes to police. Council member Olgy Diaz raised similar concerns during the 90-day update earlier this month.

“Non-reporting is generally less of a problem with serious violent crime than it is with lesser offenses,” lead UTSA researcher Mike Smith said in response to Ushka. “That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist. We call that the dark figure of crime, that there’s some percentage of shootings, for example, or robberies that go unreported.”

Hawes said the fact that a large amount of crime goes unreported is an inherent weakness of police data.

“Your crime rate comes from where crimes are reported, it doesn’t come from where crimes happened,” she said. Disadvantaged areas tend to see more crimes reported, and “if you’re going off data that is already flawed, that has bias, then your approach can’t be devoid of that same bias.”

Hawes also said the 90-day update on TPD’s crime plan didn’t note the pilot hot-spots patrols that began in March, nor this spring and early summer’s abnormally high violent crime rates.

TPD’s pilot hot-spots program this spring was separate from the UTSA crime plan and consisted of officers patrolling areas identified by the department’s crime analysis unit, according to Lee. Lee said UTSA researchers did not analyze those patrols as a part of its update to the City Council.

“It can be very misleading to just have these numbers without some more context because crime is a very nuanced event. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Hawes said. “Residents want there to be clean solutions, and residents at large aren’t going to need to see, or even want to see, data that contains nuance.”

“There’s not anything here that definitely tells me this is great or this is horrible,” Hawes added.

Deputy police chief Paul Junger told the Community’s Police Advisory Committee in August that the presentation by the UTSA researchers was TPD’s “way of staying transparent” regarding the impact of its plan.

Pauli, the city manager, said a data-driven approach prevents biased evaluations.

“If they were telling me that things were getting better, but the numbers were going up, then I would say, ‘I wonder where your conclusions are coming from.’ But right now, their conclusions are matching the data,” Pauli said.

Crime plan focus on race-neutral strategies

Developed in the wake of a national reckoning with race and policing, Moore and the authors of TPD’s crime plan emphasized their strategy is a departure from law enforcement tactics associated with racial stereotyping and over-policing.

“It doesn’t rely on aggressive and divisive practices like stop and frisk that have been used in other places,” Smith, the UTSA researcher, told the City Council in July. “It doesn’t rely on discretionary practices of the police that have been shown to be problematic in some other places as well.”

Rather, the plan relies on crime data, visibility and “repeat offenders,” which Smith said means the plan is race-neutral. The racial makeup of Tacoma’s neighborhoods did not inform TPD’s tactics, according to the published plan.

Cruz, the UW Tacoma criminologist, said TPD’s crime plan doesn’t include enough evidence to support that conclusion.

“I question whether they did their due diligence,” Cruz told The News Tribune.

Areas with higher levels of street crime tend to have been harmed by a history of racism, over-policing, housing discrimination and under-investment, according to Cruz. Hot-spot patrols can create a self-fulfilling prophecy where an increased police presence leads to greater criminalization of a community.

“What they’re saying is it’s neutral in their intent, but not necessarily race-neutral in its impact,” Cruz told The News Tribune. He said UTSA should have included further study of the impact on residents because “if you are focusing on a place, you are focusing on the people in that place.”

Cruz said neighborhoods and suburbs labeled as “safe” have benefited from a greater level of investment, compared to historically disadvantaged communities.

“We have yet to reckon with that,” Cruz said.

While drafting the plan, two UTSA researchers raised questions about the “race-neutral” claim because “some minority groups/areas could be disproportionately exposed” to high visibility policing, according to documents provided to The News Tribune through a public records request.

TPD has declined to disclose the hot-spot locations publicly, citing the safety of officers and the integrity of the plan, but researchers have said a number are near commercial properties, such as strip malls, hotels, and convenience stores.

After the 90-day update presentation, several City Council members asked Moore for more information about the hot spots, such as racial demographics, education levels and whether they are on the city’s equity index, which maps community access to social services or lack thereof.

The Dallas plan did not make the same assertion about race but used arrest rates to counter concerns about over-policing. Arrests increased 6.4% citywide and 2.7% in hot spots during the plan’s first year, the Dallas Morning News reported.

What happened in Dallas?

The story of rising violent crime and Dallas police’s response in 2021 mirrors that of Tacoma this year in a number of ways.

In 2021, Dallas hired a charismatic police chief, Eddie Garcia, from outside the state to revitalize a department struggling with a deflated staff, an image problem and a historic uptick in homicides.

Within a few months, Garcia announced a modern plan developed with criminologists to tamp down violent crime.

The initial results from hot-spots patrols at 50 addresses were promising in Dallas, and city officials were quick to declare victory.

While many of the country’s largest cities saw rising numbers and historic homicide tallies in 2021, violent crime in Dallas went down 9% compared to 2020, according to the Dallas Morning News.

“Remaining humble, our city has done a great deal to reverse that” trend in crime, then-Dallas police Maj. Paul Junger, who monitored the plan’s effectiveness, told the City Council in December, according to a Dallas Morning News report.

Junger is now Moore’s deputy police chief in Tacoma.

After the first full year, UTSA researchers said violent street crime, which excludes domestic violence and sexual assaults, dropped 11.5% citywide from May 2021 to May 2022, The Dallas Morning News reported. Violent street crime in hot spots dropped 10.7%.

Dallas police selected two out of the 50 hot spots to pilot the second phase of its plan, which was focused on disrupting environmental conditions tied to crime, The Dallas Morning News reported. While violence decreased in one hot spot targeted by police and other city departments, such as code enforcement, the other area saw an increase.

In some parts of Dallas, crime appeared to spill out from some targeted hot spots to adjacent areas, according to the Dallas Morning News. UTSA researchers have said so-called “displacement” is uncommon with hot-spot policing, and that there is evidence the strategy has a sustained effect on areas immediately outside hot spots.

One hurdle for Dallas has been buy-in and collaboration from outside stakeholders. Tacoma officials also have indicated their plan will rely on buy-in from other city departments, community organizations and business owners to succeed.

Dallas police announced a plan in March to engage with residents of apartment complexes – which see the largest share of the city’s murders, robberies and aggravated assaults – and ask owners to invest in upkeep and security. Garcia complained in June that some hadn’t done so in response to questions about an increase in homicides

“Reinvesting in places and people is extremely important,” Garcia told the Dallas City Council in September, according to The Dallas Morning News. “When crime goes up, it’s not just a police issue. And when it goes down, it’s a collective effort.”

Tacoma’s long-term plan – and its critiques

The second phase of TPD’s plan focused on reducing visible disorder associated with crime — such as graffiti, poor lighting, open drug use and homeless encampments — is slated to begin by the end of March, according to city officials. TPD plans to convene and train members of contributing city departments, such as code enforcement, early next year.

That sort of place-based policing strategy often is associated with the controversial broken-windows theory, which draws a direct connection between visible disorder and crime. The UTSA researchers also cite routine activities theory, which posits that crime requires opportunity, a motivated offender and a lack of supervision.

Neither theory as applied by TPD addresses the root causes of crime, according to Hawes and Cruz. Hawes said in her experience routine activity theory is more associated with property crime than reducing violence.

“It’s all about deterring folks from engaging in crime but not addressing the underlying reasons,” Cruz said. “They’re kind of shallow theories.”

The UTSA researchers wrote in their plan that place-based policing is proven to reduce fear of crime, corresponding with TPD’s goal to increase the perception of safety among residents. On the other hand, one study the UTSA researchers cited said increased police intervention in an area can have the opposite effect and increase the probability that people feel unsafe.

Moore has said perception will be the toughest battle for TPD, though the crime plan does not suggest how the city would measure success.

“It does seem like Tacoma, this area, definitely has issues with the perception of crime and crime occurrence being pretty far off the realities,” Hawes told The News Tribune.

She said she examined recent and historical local crime data for the City Council youth gun violence report and came to the conclusion that the panic about rising overall crime rates during the last few years was part of a false narrative.

“Crime wasn’t experiencing this huge uptick the way people thought it was,” she said.

The police union said in its letter to city officials that reducing crime will require fewer restrictions on booking suspects into jail, increased staffing and changes to police reform laws that limit the authority of officers.

“We must be honest that TPD’s crime plan is not the only answer,” the letter said.

Cruz and Hawes said the city should prioritize investment in social services and violence intervention programs called for in Phase 3 of the violent crime plan. They said some regional models already exist.

Cruz mentioned local gun violence organizations Tacoma Cease Fire and King County-based Choose 180. Hawes noted Safe Streets, which facilitates youth programming and neighborhood organizing groups.

“It’s not like we don’t know what works,” Cruz said.

TPD plans to begin Phase 3 in the next 18 months to two years, according to Lee, the city spokesperson.

Recently retired Safe Streets executive director Priscilla Lisicich said she advocated for TPD to start Phase 3 sooner during Moore’s advisory cabinet meetings. She said the police chief has since recognized how Safe Streets’ efforts resemble the crime plan.

“We were talking about a particular project, and (Moore) looked at me and he said, ‘We’re kind of doing Phase 3, aren’t we?’ ” Lisicich told The News Tribune. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m just really glad you said that.’”