Your Safety and the Charter Review

When a call for help goes out on the Key Peninsula at midnight, there might be only two deputies on duty to cover more than 140 square miles of the Peninsula. Two people to protect every home, every family, every road stretching from Fox Island to Longbranch.

That’s not alarmism. It’s math. And the math says Pierce County is running out of deputies.

For years, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office has been understaffed, underpaid, and undervalued. The national standard or law enforcement staffing is roughly two officers per 1,000 residents. Pierce County has operated at less than half that, and now it’s getting worse.

In the past few months, 11 trained deputies left for the Tacoma Police Department, lured by a $50,000 signing bonus, better benefits, and up to 33% higher pay. That’s more than 100 years of collective experience and millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded training gone overnight.

The real failure here resides inside Pierce County government, where leadership seems more focused on budget gamesmanship than public safety.

Residents from Gig Harbor to Lakebay already feel the strain. With so many deputies gone, most patrol shifts in our detachment will operate at the minimum staffing of two. Families are learning to live with the knowledge that if something happens after dark, help might be an hour or more away. Residents should not have to live in fear that law enforcement is not available. That is not an acceptable way to live, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

The Pierce County Executive controls the purse strings. The sheriff, by law, is elected by the people. That separation exists for good reasons: to keep law enforcement accountable to the public, not politicians. But when the executive branch starves the sheriff’s office of funds and morale, it forces the elected sheriff into failure. Then, when response times grow and coverage collapses, those same voices claim the system is “broken” and float the idea of making the sheriff appointed instead of elected.

That’s not reform. That’s erosion. Slow, quiet, and deadly serious.

When public safety becomes a bargaining chip in a political strategy, everyone loses: deputies, residents, taxpayers, and even the politicians who believe they’re winning a longer game. Because once trust in local law enforcement collapses, rebuilding it takes decades.

Let’s be clear about the scale of the problem. According to national averages, the United States maintains roughly 1.8 - 2.5 officers per 1,000 residents. Tacoma operates at 1.6 per 1,000. Pierce County? Just 0.67, and the Peninsula area is even worse at 0.25. That’s a staffing level barely one-eighth of what’s considered safe. Yet the sheriff’s office is told to “do more with less” while surrounding cities actively recruit away our deputies.

So how did we get here? The answer lies in the Pierce County Charter, the document that defines how the county government works, who holds the power, and how it can be checked. Over time, the charter has given more control to the executive branch while weakening the independence of other elected offices, including the sheriff. What was meant to be a balance of powers has quietly become a concentration of power.

That’s why this year’s charter review matters more than most people realize. The charter review process is where we, the people, can restore accountability and make sure the sheriff’s office can protect our communities without being strangled by politics or budget maneuvering.

The charter review isn’t some remote procedural task. It’s our opportunity to set things right, to make sure no single politician or department head can undermine public safety for political gain. It’s where we can strengthen the independence of the sheriff’s office, protect taxpayer investments in training, and ensure that every community, urban or rural, has access to consistent law enforcement.

But a process like that only works if citizens send people they trust to do the job. That’s why the upcoming election for Charter Review Commissioners is so important. The people we choose will decide whether the system continues to drift toward centralized control or turns back toward citizen accountability.

As citizens, we can no longer sit back and hope things get better. Now it’s our turn to act. Call your council member. Write to the county executive. Show up at meetings. Ask tough questions. Support candidates who are committed to fixing the system, not benefiting from its brokenness. Public safety can’t survive on slogans or spreadsheets; it needs citizens who refuse to stay silent.

Some of you may remember me. I worked for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office for 25 years, 13 of them on the Peninsula. Voters in cities in our district are covered by their own patrol officers. They don’t have much reason to break from party voting. I am one of them. I don’t have to worry like you should. If you don’t galvanize as a community to overcome that voting bloc, it will be you who face the results, not me, and not city residents.

So, before more deputies turn in their badges, before another resident wonders whether to even bother calling 911, we need to ask and answer one simple question:

If help can’t come when we call, what kind of county are we becoming?

Rich Folden is a retired Pierce County Sheriff’s Department detective. He lives in Gig Harbor.