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Sheriff Derek Sanders, the 24th elected sheriff of Thurston County, appeared before Yelm residents on Oct. 5 and discussed topics related to the sheriff’s office, including plans to boost staffing, the upcoming public safety levy and more.
It was the first of four scheduled events Sanders will host in the coming weeks. He noted, however, that he can’t run the Sheriff’s Office alone.
“This is not a one-man show. It takes a collective effort from people that are a lot smarter than me,” Sanders said. “Thank you to my administration. I might be the outward-facing view of the Sheriff’s Office, but they’re the people doing a lot of the administrative work and making sure that all the different missions and goals in the office are being met when I’m not there.”
New to TCSO
Shortly after Sanders took over as Thurston County sheriff on Jan. 3, he sat with his administration to discuss staffing and crime reports, only to learn that Thurston County Sheriff’s Office did not keep track of crime statistics. Upon learning that, the office posted a job listing for a full-time crime analyst, which Sanders said sat vacant for a while before it was recently filled.
“We’re a sheriff’s office that doesn’t keep track of crime,” Sanders said. “How do we monitor anything we’re doing? How do we know what’s working and what isn’t working?”
As well, Sanders said that due to recent fentanyl overdoses in the Thurston County Jail, the Sheriff’s Office introduced a program to bring the first-ever narcotics dog into the jail. He said the fully dedicated narcotics dog will sweep the facility routinely to ensure drugs aren’t entering the jail and to prevent future overdoses. He added funding from Thurston County Commissioners also paid for a device to detect fentanyl, which will also be used to sweep the jail.
Sanders also mentioned several new policy changes within the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, including permitting deputies to once again pursue drivers presumed to be under the influence. He noted that 2022 was Washington’s deadliest year for traffic fatalities since data was first recorded in 1978.
“We’ve continued to see traffic fatalities increase,” Sanders said. “This is important for me and our deputies. They’re out there pursuing those drivers and getting them off the roadway as quickly as possible and into custody. As soon as I took over, we’ve seen an increase in DUI arrests amongst our deputies.”
Thurston County Sheriff’s Office has also banned the practice of deputies asking for consent to search vehicles if they don’t have reasonable suspicion of a crime, Sanders said. He said it’s important for deputies to follow this new procedure and use the trust that citizens have in the police in a productive way.
“One of the things that’s important to me is I recognize that not everyone in the community is comfortable with telling the police no. A lot of people, if I asked you to do something with my red and blue lights going in the background, would probably just comply.
“We want law enforcement to rebuild trust with our community, and we can only do that through policy and procedure, truthfully,” Sanders continued. “I can come out here and talk to you guys all day long about how nice I am and that I have nice administrators, but, really, the change is done in policy and procedure. That’s what dictates what’s going on in the streets when I’m not awake.”
Sanders added that, while the new changes and additions to the sheriff’s office have been useful, law enforcement needs “more tools” to do their jobs effectively.
“The pursuit law has been a huge damper on a lot of those efforts. Not many people truly recognize that if you start driving up and down this street at 100 miles an hour, if we pull you over, there’s really no reason to stop,” Sanders said. “As long as you have no plates, you can keep going as fast as you want. These drivers are getting away on a routine basis.”
Sanders said he was once told that “every time law enforcement turns off their lights for someone committing a criminal offense or driving recklessly, the cancer grows.” He said he believes this statement to be true.
“Every time we get behind someone, and they know law enforcement can’t do anything, that cancerous mentality grows. I’m not advocating that we chase everything until the wheels fall off, but I am actively lobbying our government for a balanced pursuit law to try and fix some of this mess we’re in,” Sanders said. “I don’t think our Legislature clearly thought about all of the ramifications of when people can drive into the front door of your business, destroy the business, steal everything inside and drive away without being pursued, even if we find the car that did it.”
Sanders said he will continue lobbying at the Capitol in Olympia.
Thurston County Proposition No. 1
On November’s ballot, voters will see Thurston County Proposition No. 1, which proposes an additional two-tenths of 1 percent sales — not property — tax that would generate a $6.5 million increase in funding per year for the Sheriff’s Office, Sanders said.
He said 75% percent of the revenue generated would go to the Sheriff’s Office for additional deputies and to build the Sheriff’s Community Outreach Utilization Team to 24-hour coverage. The other 25% would go to prosecution and defense, and to revamp the election security building.
“When I was elected, I came into the office and everyone said the same thing: Your agency is underfunded,” Sanders continued. “That was the county commissioner, county manager, assistant county manager, everyone said ‘Your agency is underfunded, and we can’t fund it. We don’t have the funding mechanisms to get you to where you need to be.’ I said, ‘That’s not good news. How do we address it?’ and they said the only thing they could do, with your endorsement, is put a public safety tax on the ballot.”
Staffing
Sanders said when he took office in January, he knew the Sheriff’s Office needed to increase staffing.
“I’m here to report to you today that it’s not that great, still. We started with eight vacancies on the patrol side, and we still have eight vacancies,” Sanders said. “We hired a bunch of people, but people also retired, moved because of family and things like that. At the jail, we started at 11 vacancies, and now we’re at 31.”
One of the big challenges Sanders faces is the Sheriff’s Office only has one part-time background investigator to fill the openings. He said it takes 12-18 months to get one candidate through background checks, the academy and proper training, and he has come to the realization that the Sheriff’s Office needs 10 to even 20 background investigators to “dig themselves out of this hole.”
“You can see the challenge with one person retiring, and they give me two weeks’ notice, it now takes 18 months to get that position filled and ready to serve the public. Needless to say I knew one background investigator was not enough, so we’ve been ramping up the amount of background investigators with funding we don’t have to basically get more people hired,” Sanders said. “It keeps me awake at night thinking about how we’ll get the funding to expand our background services so we can get 10 applicants in front of the chief each month instead of one.”
Another issue Sanders sees with the staffing troubles is officers can’t be hired until they’re 21. He said he had two proposals to potentially fix this issue, including lowering the minimum age of corrections deputies to 18 or by introducing a “cadet” position for those 18 years and older.
Sanders said he didn’t receive the best of reactions when he proposed lowering the minimum age of corrections deputies to 18 but has been communicating with the union about the possibility.
The cadet position, which Sanders doesn’t expect to be introduced this year, would allow for those 18 years and older to drive a patrol vehicle and do transports between the courts. He noted the cadets would also be unarmed, and that the cities of Tumwater, Lacey and Olympia are already offering cadet programs.
“If you look around the county at some of our best law enforcement, it’s riddled with cadets, people that started at 18, 19, 20 years old, learned the job and got a taste of it before they committed to going to the academy and into the force,” Sanders said. “It’s something you truly have to learn and you figure it out really quickly.”
Sanders said, though it’s hard to get out of this mindset, he often determines his success in the office based on how many laterals, or police officers transferring from a different agency, are applying.
He noted, while it’s nice to bring in laterals, it can often mean two things. He said it typically means a police officer is looking for a better department to join, or that an office is running away from something in their files. He said Thurston County Sheriff’s Office had four laterals apply this year, however none passed the background check.
“We have one lateral who applied and looks promising, but I’m not going to jinx myself,” Sanders said. “We also have three people who acknowledged they’re just waiting to finish something out, and they’ll be lateral-ing as well. There is some hope for the future.”
Sanders said the Sheriff’s Office had four people pass the academy this year, but they immediately went to another agency. With this posing a big issue in the Sheriff’s Office’s staffing situation, Sanders said he’s working with the prosecutor’s office to introduce three-year contracts to prevent instant laterals to other agencies.
Rochester Sex Offender House
Sanders expressed his displeasure when asked about a potential Less Restrictive Alternative (LRA) house in Rochester for sex offenders. He said the Department of Corrections wouldn’t provide the address of the home, nor the name of the offender to the Sheriff’s Office.
“I’m so tired of sex offender houses. I was just getting over the Tenino one. The DOC reached out to us, and they were extremely vague,” Sanders said. “It’s really embarrassing that county government has to submit public disclosure requests to state government to find out what’s going on in our county, but I guess that’s where we are. Things didn’t end that well during the last sex offender house, but at this point in time I have no other info. We’ll be waiting for a public disclosure request.”
Sanders said, as he continues to learn more about a potential Rochester LRA, he’ll keep the public informed.
Sanders’ biggest issue with LRA housing is that, up until 2021, they were state-run facilities. He said the state would buy a piece of property and would properly staff it. After 2021, however, the state decided to pay private companies to run LRA-housing facilities and paying companies $35,000 each month per offender housed.
“With all the shortages after COVID, obviously a lot of people got fired. They couldn’t do that anymore but had a bunch of money left over. The state came up with the idea of privatizing sex offender houses in a for-profit model,” Sanders said. “Here’s what happened, take Tenino for instance: If you’re one of these people that think they could really profit from this, would you buy a two bedroom, one bathroom in Olympia to house two offenders, or would you buy a seven-bedroom house in Tenino to house seven offenders? That’s the problem with a for-profit model.”
He added the reason that LRA-housing options are coming to Thurston County is because the old model wasn’t “fair,” either.
“Because McNeil Island is a part of Pierce County, all of (inmates) went to Pierce County,” Sanders said, adding eventually Pierce County officials went to the Legislature and said it wasn’t fair the county had to house every sex offender from McNeil Island. “That created the fair share act, which means as sex offenders go to McNeil Island, the state can’t just leave the offenders there forever. They have to create an avenue for you to have a less restrictive alternative. We have a lot of people go to McNeil Island, and we have to take our fair share of sex offenders back in our county, where they’re housed. I think with this system, the biggest solution is better community notification, and we need to go away from a for-profit model and back into the state’s hands.
“If you’re making $35,000 a month for an inmate who commits a violation, are you going to report that to DSHS so you lose that $35,000 a month? That’s a pretty big hit,” Sanders continued. “My concern with a for-profit model is that (they’re) not concerned about what’s right. [They’re] concerned about what will make the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time.”
Facilities
Sanders said TCSO is facing issues with its facilities, as well. He said, currently, he monitors three different buildings that Sheriff’s Office employees work in, including the jail, the courthouse and a field operations bureau.
“One of the biggest things I’m trying to lobby the county commissioners for is to buy us a building, get us under one roof,” Sanders said, adding he’d like to at least have all the detectives and patrol units in one building. “We don’t have anywhere that’s a police station. It doesn’t exist. That’s why we revamped our cars. You gotta have something nice to give people.”
Sanders said since deputies are already using their vehicles as an office, the sheriff’s office wanted to boost morale by upgrading vehicles and creating better “offices” for deputies.
“We want nice offices obviously, and, for us, our office is our car,” Sanders said.
Sheriff’s Office Training
After a civilian employee with the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office was fired on Aug. 31 following complaints they sexually harassed two female employees, Sanders asked Thurston County commissioners on Sept. 12 to fund sexual harassment training. The request was approved, and TCSO employees are set for training in late November.
“We’re using Gracie University to do a hybrid sexual harassment and defensive tactics training. We’re not going to be able to get every person in the agency, but we’re shooting for 90% of the department to get trained,” Sanders said. “That was funded by the county commissioners. There were several instances that came up in a row, and we wanted some funding to get impactful training.”
Next Stops
On Oct. 11, the 29-year-old will head to the Kodiak Room, 225 Sussex Ave. W. in Tenino, for his second of four town hall events. Then on Oct. 17, he’ll head to the Swede Hall, 18543 Albany St. SW in Rochester, for his third installment of the meetings. His final town hall is scheduled for Oct. 18 at The Hub, 676 Woodland Square Loop SE in Lacey. All are scheduled from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
