Pierce County Sheriff staff ‘could double in size’ and still be short
Jan 14, 2018, 8:12 AM
According to Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor, the county sheriff’s department is significantly understaffed.
“We don’t have a quiet little rural county. We have a highly urbanized county,” Pastor said during a press conference with Detective Ed Troyer. “I think that there are news outlets on the East Coast who have Detective Troyer speed-dialed. There are probably more national news stories that come out of this county than probably any county its size in the United States.”
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The statements come days after the fatal shooting of Deputy Daniel McCartney.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department patrols about 1,800-square-miles of land in a county that holds just over 800,000 people. A total of 430,000 of those people live in unincorporated regions of the county, Pastor said.
The department staffs less than one deputy per thousand residents. Other agencies have two or more deputies for the same amount of people, Troyer said.
“Manpower is an issue for us. Resources. Our detectives are spent. They’re working four times as many cases as other agencies. We just kind of hit our limit,” Troyer said during the press conference. “We literally could double in size, our whole entire staff, and still be behind a lot of larger agencies.”
“We’re not asking to double in size, but we are asking that everybody take a hard look at what we’re doing, what our guys are doing nightly, and what we need to do to keep people safe,” he added.
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As the sheriff’s department continues to investigate Deputy McCartney’s death, deputies are still carrying out their daily duties, Pastor said.
“It would be nice if we could say, ‘Gee, give us two weeks and no other crime because we are in the midst of that.’ That doesn’t happen. We are still doing what we do day-to-day, and I admire, I respect, and frankly I am humbled and rocked back by the kind of effort and heart our people show,” Pastor said.
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