August 23, 2026
On August 18, Tacoma Police Chief Patti Jackson presented a new 18-month Tacoma Public Safety Partnership to the City Council. The pilot emphasizes education, transparency, relationships, and sustained dialogue among residents, police leadership, and employee representatives. Nonprofit organizations, faith communities, and youth organizations are among the groups the department expects to involve. Its stated idea is disarmingly simple: build relationships before people need the police in an emergency.
That idea is valuable. It is also incomplete. Community-police programs often measure meetings, attendance, and favorable testimonials while leaving unanswered whether trust changed, complaints fell, residents felt safer, or police behavior improved. Tacoma has an opportunity to design the pilot as a serious public intervention rather than a public-relations series.
Trust is relational and institutional
Procedural-justice theory identifies voice, neutrality, respectful treatment, and trustworthy motives as central to public judgments of legitimacy. A community member may disagree with an outcome yet view the process as legitimate if authorities listen, explain decisions, apply rules consistently, and communicate respect.
Dialogue can support those conditions, but trust is not produced by proximity alone. Residents evaluate institutions through stops, calls for service, complaint handling, response time, use of force, traffic enforcement, crisis intervention, and the distribution of protection across neighborhoods. A partnership that never affects those encounters risks becoming symbolic participation.
Collective-efficacy theory adds a community dimension. Safety improves when neighbors possess social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene for the common good. Police can support collective efficacy by sharing information, responding predictably, and helping residents solve recurring problems. They can undermine it if engagement displaces local leadership or treats community organizations as extensions of enforcement.
Build the evaluation before the meetings
Tacoma should publish a baseline before the first partnership cycle. Measures should include confidence in police, perceived fairness, willingness to report crime, satisfaction after contact, complaint rates and resolution time, use-of-force patterns, response times, repeat calls at problem locations, and residents’ sense of safety. Results should be disaggregated by neighborhood, race and ethnicity, age, disability, housing status, and prior police contact while protecting privacy.
The city should then distinguish outputs from outcomes. Number of meetings, participants, presentations, and translated materials are outputs. Changes in knowledge, trust, reporting behavior, complaint experience, police policy, and safety are outcomes. Both matter, but they are not interchangeable.
A comparison design is possible without turning neighborhoods into laboratories. Tacoma can survey participants and a representative city sample at baseline, six months, twelve months, and eighteen months. It can compare trends in neighborhoods with different levels of program exposure and combine quantitative data with confidential interviews.
Who sets the agenda?
The department’s published description centers police leadership and employee representatives. Community governance must be equally explicit. An independent steering group should include youth, crime survivors, civil-rights advocates, behavioral-health providers, neighborhood leaders, immigrant and refugee organizations, people with disabilities, and residents with negative police experiences.
Participants should be able to place topics on the agenda, request data, recommend policy changes, and receive written responses. Police should explain which recommendations are accepted, modified, or declined and why. Without that feedback loop, dialogue becomes consultation without power.
Safety beyond enforcement
The partnership should examine problems that cannot be solved by patrol alone: behavioral-health crises, youth conflict, unsafe public spaces, domestic violence, traffic danger, abandoned property, gun access, and repeated victimization. Each problem requires a theory of change and partners beyond the police.
For example, a cluster of repeat calls at an apartment complex may reflect lighting, landlord neglect, interpersonal violence, or lack of youth space. The appropriate intervention might combine code enforcement, victim services, environmental design, and community mediation. Success should be reduced harm, not merely more police contacts.
Safeguards for a credible pilot
First, Tacoma should publish the program charter, budget, selection process, meeting calendar, and decision authority.
Second, an independent evaluator should report at six, twelve, and eighteen months. Police may supply data but should not be the sole judge of success.
Third, the city should protect dissent. Participation must not expose residents to intelligence collection, retaliation, or pressure to endorse department positions.
Fourth, meetings and materials should be accessible across language, disability, transportation, child-care, and work-schedule barriers. Stipends should be available for community members whose expertise is otherwise unpaid.
Fifth, the partnership should produce policy artifacts: revised procedures, training changes, public dashboards, neighborhood safety plans, and documented problem-solving agreements.
Sixth, Tacoma should state in advance what would justify continuation, modification, or termination after 18 months.
The strongest feature of the Tacoma proposal is its timing: relationship-building before crisis. Its greatest risk is substituting conversation for institutional change. If Tacoma couples dialogue with shared agenda-setting, transparent data, independent evaluation, and visible policy response, the pilot could become a model. If it counts attendance and calls that trust, it will reproduce the weakness of many community-policing initiatives that came before it.
Selected sources
City of Tacoma, Police Community Support and Engagement Programs, current August 18, 2026: https://tacoma.gov/government/departments/police/community-support-engagement-programs/
City of Tacoma, Public Safety news archive: https://tacoma.gov/news/topic/public-safety/
National Academies, Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/24928/proactive-policing-effects-on-crime-and-communities
