Tacoma came together 30 years ago to stop a deadly crime wave. Can we do it again?

Tacoma has been here before.

In 1984, the city won its first of three “All America City” awards from the National Civic League. But it didn’t have long to celebrate. In a matter of a few short years, Tacoma was making national headlines for a spike in crime and homicides that put the city on the map as one of the most dangerous places in the country.

Sparked by the arrival of crack cocaine and gang activity that spread up the West Coast from California, turf war battles for drug-sale dominance between rival gang members seemingly transformed the City of Destiny overnight. By 1989, crews from the TV news show 48 Hours were in town to document for a national audience the notorious Ash Street shootout, during which a group of roughly 20 fed-up residents and U.S. Army soldiers exchanged 300 gunshots over a 30-minute period with a brazen neighborhood drug house in a fight for control of the neighborhood. Somehow, no one was hit, but the high-profile gun battle fueled the city’s growing reputation as an epicenter of violence, urban decay and tragedy.

Lyle Quasim, now 79, remembers it well. At the time the longtime director of the Tacoma-Pierce County Black Collective had just been hired to lead the upstart Safe Streets program, which had emerged as a community response to the crime and violence gripping the area.

Then, like now — as was evident during the recent memorial peace march shortly after the senseless shooting death of 14-year-old Iyana Ussery on Hilltop — Quasim said Tacoma and Pierce County residents had reached a breaking point.

Quasim’s perspective and the perspective of others who were on the ground during the early days of the Safe Streets campaign remain resonant, providing both a blueprint and a challenge for all of us:

To expunge violence and crime in our communities, it takes everyone, Quasim said. It’s not a job law enforcement can do alone, he said.

“What we learned in the Safe Streets campaign was that you had to have a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, community-by-community strategy,” Quasim told The News Tribune on Wednesday. “And it has to be one where people set the tone for what their communities look like.”

To be certain, the factors that led to the crime spike of more than 30 years ago are markedly different and easier to diagnose than what we see today. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was drugs, gangs and drive-by shootings fueling the surge. The roots of Tacoma’s current crime wave, which includes a rise in homicides and violent crimes that’s not unlike increases seen across the state, are much harder to pinpoint.

Still, Quasim, who led Safe Streets from 1989 until 1993, said there’s plenty for present-day Tacoma to learn from what it took to turn the city around three decades ago. The emergence of Safe Streets and other community responses like the Hilltop Action Coalition, both of which remain active today, started with concerned residents coming together to say, “Enough is enough.” The game plan included grassroots efforts to listen to people and respond when they explained what was ailing their neighborhoods, even as the remedies were as simple as fixing broken streetlights and responding to code violations. The approach relied on a coordinated effort between police and Tacoma residents to foster a relationship that had been badly frayed, requiring cops to build trust through the tenets of true community policing.

Sound familiar? Quasim says it should.

It wasn’t easy, he acknowledged — telling stories of early-morning graffiti cleanups staffed by volunteer nuns and working 14-hour days only to discover that the drug dealers down the street were clocking longer hours — but it eventually succeeded, Quasim said, and it can happen again.

Former Tacoma city manager and current News Tribune Editorial Board community representative Jim Walton also recalls the fledgling beginnings of the Safe Streets campaign. He agrees with Quasim’s assessment.

Walton was one of hundreds who joined the July 8 peace march in honor of Ussery. He said that one of his biggest frustrations, having been active in Tacoma since the civil rights movement, is how hard-fought progress is often lost over time.

Lasting change, Walton suggested, can only truly be achieved by remaining dedicated to solving the “front end” challenges that contribute to crime, like poverty, a lack of opportunity and the racial disparities that have long plagued Tacoma, Pierce County and the entire country.

“To me, the development of cities is a continuum. It’s circular. These things seem to have a season, and if we’re not able to put in place real, substantial solutions, the similarities come back. To me, that’s pretty much where we are now,” Walton said of Tacoma’s current crime spike.

“Each time we do this, it seems to me that we fail to put the proper fixes in the system that will minimize these kinds of things.”

Thirty-two years after it was launched, Priscilla Lisicich leads Safe Streets today, having been involved with the campaign since the very beginning. She said she’s seen plenty of ebbs and flows over the years and acknowledged she’s alarmed, like all of us, by current crime trends.

A program like Safe Streets, Lisicich said, is only part of the solution. While the campaign is still connected to thousands of residents across the county, there’s more to it than putting up signs, meeting with concerned citizens and holding community cookouts. The successes of the past were slow and required cooperation across multiple sectors of government, law enforcement and the general community, Lisicich said.

Like Walton, Lisicich also believes that long-term crime prevention efforts must include solving the societal shortcomings that eventually lead to crime.

“In our society, we like quick fixes,” Lisicich said. “This is a marathon we’re running.”

Quasim, for one, believes the tools are there if we’re prepared to come together and use them.

While Tacoma and Pierce County have changed over 30 years and many of the problems we face are larger than a city can solve alone, this isn’t our first rodeo either.

“We’ve got to be smarter today than we were yesterday, but many of the old approaches work, they have worked, and they continue to work,” Quasim said.

“We know the way home. The question is: Are we willing to take the trip?”