It’s been almost a year since city officials announced their intention to clean up Tacoma neighborhoods and cut crime within the city by 50 percent under an aggressive new program called Safe & Clean. Let’s just say it. They didn’t hit 50 percent crime reduction. But they did manage to mobilize dozens of citizen/city staff teams, who have cleaned up nearly 250 tons of trash in Tacoma neighborhoods. And prostitution is down 77 percent. Car theft is down more than 20 percent. But overall, crime is either down 5 percent, or up 1.5 percent, depending on which data set you’re looking at.



Officials commenting on the effort, not surprisingly, are careful to emphasize the positives of the effort. Assistant City Manager Tansy Hayward, who is delightfully candid, says the program will continue, despite not having hit its seemingly unachievable goals. 

“It really helps to put out something big for people to believe in,” says Hayward. “If you make the statement that we shouldn’t have created the (50 percent crime reduction) goal, and that it’s not attainable, I disagree. I do think it’s attainable.”



The goal of a 50 percent crime reduction in 14 months was never really expected to be achieved if you ask most people. Rather, it represented an expression of hope. Tacoma Police officials were handed similarly aggressive goals before the Safe & Clean teams were formed, and the enlistment of citizen volunteers was expected to help change some alleged environmental crime contributors — such as blight — while the police went after the criminals. Teams with names such as Extreme Neighborhood Makeover, Code of Conduct, IMPACT, and Improving Livability Through Home Ownership have tackled a range of community issues.



Tacoma’s program is an innovative one, fashioned after pioneering efforts in other cities where citizens and city staff were asked to team up to tackle a typical list of neighborhood concerns. Reaching out to citizens is a way for city officials to recruit extra help without expending a huge pile of tax dollars — asking people to invest time in their community in exchange for improved quality of life. For people asking “What do we pay taxes for?” the answer is simple — taxes, and the programs they fund, just aren’t cutting it anymore. In an age when citizen initiatives are cutting millions of dollars from city tax allocations, city officials are forced to get creative.



A whole year of creativity in Tacoma hasn’t cut crime much. Maybe it’s the growing number of desperate, hungry people — burglary is up nearly 20 percent since May of 2007. Maybe its bored suburban teenagers — vandalism and similar property crimes are up by more than 10 percent.



On the bright side, sex offenses, the non-forcible kind, are down by nearly 30 percent. Forcible sex offenses are down too, by nearly 20 percent. Drug offenses are down a little, as are robbery statistics.



And while program participants may have fallen short of some admittedly long targets, city officials are already moving forward with assessments that will guide the development of the coming year’s efforts. San Jose, Calif.-based research firm Management Partners is set to conduct a full evaluation of the programs and their effectiveness, and deliver results by May. Program coordinators will re-launch efforts, guided by the report recommendations, by this summer. Hayward expects to call for more citizen participation in the clean part of Safe & Clean, and a narrowed emphasis on reducing crimes that are of the most concern to local residents.



“We want all crimes to be reduced, but we think we can be a bit more strategic about the team effort,” says Hayward.