Pierce County Sheriff candidate: ‘We’re not a reflection of our community’

The Pierce County Sheriff’s race has come down to two candidates, Detective Ed Troyer and Lieutenant Cyndie Fajardo, a 32-year veteran of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. She’s worked in patrol and narcotics, commanding the Parkland Spanaway precinct and multiple community programs, and is currently a task force leader for the Washington State Urban Search and Rescue Team. Fajardo joined the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH to discuss her vision for the department.

“My vision is diversity, always has been. When I wrote my voter pamphlet back in mid-May, it was well before all of the issues that arose in the last few months, and I specified right in that voter pamphlet that I saw that we needed a new vision for the department. And that vision included bringing our department into the times of what the community looks like. We’re not a reflection of our community,” she said.

“That has always been something that has been bothersome for me, especially when I go to community meetings and we’re trying to relate to specific neighborhoods and can’t because we don’t have anyone in our community that has either rose through that area or can reflect that area,” she added.

Fajardo says this perspective was not brought on by activists, but from the need to better reflect the community.

“This is nothing that was brought into my perspective by activists. It was just that when you’re out there on the road and you’re out there in the streets and you see the lack of diversity, it makes an impact … We’ve been much better on the corrections area of showing diversity in the way we hire, not so much on the law enforcement. I should have 25 African-American officers in uniform on the streets. We have about seven or eight,” she said.

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“In Pierce County, the African American population is about 7%. So if even if we use the Census Bureau demographics, we have some work to do, and I think that’s very, very important for the credibility of the department, especially if people start pointing at us and saying that we need to defund or we need to change because we’re predominantly white police department. Then I can say, ‘Well, that’s not the case.’”

Her perspective on defunding

As Jason asked, what if activists come forward in response and say that they appreciate the diversity but that it’s not enough and funding still needs to be significantly cut?

“Well, I feel for Carmen Best up in Seattle and what’s happening there. Defunding the police is such an interesting concept. Because there is this perception that if we did defund the police that all of these community programs are going to miraculously just pop up — the fact of the matter is when we had all of these significant cuts in the early 2000s to 2008, where all of these mental health programs, all of these shelters, all of these homeless programs were shut down because of economic hardships on government — the only thing that was left was 911, and so we began handling those calls because no one else could,” she said.

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“But guess what we didn’t get in return? We didn’t get any corresponding funds to deal with that. So when I personally hear we need to defund the police and take those programs and money and start elsewhere, well, take the programs but don’t take my money, because I haven’t got any other money to run these programs, when the only thing that was left for the citizens was 911. So that is my position on that, and I’m going to stick very, very strong to that.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.

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