Compared with the message he shared with residents in 2023, Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders reports a much better state of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office in 2024.
In his first community town hall meeting of the year Wednesday, Oct. 2, at the Yelm Community Center, Sanders reported higher morale, more deputies on the way and a proactive attitude at the department.
It’s a message attendees of upcoming town hall events in Rochester, Tenino, Olympia and Lacey are likely to hear repeated.
“We are an agency of doing things. We are a proactive agency,” Sanders said. “It’s not an agency that encourages people to sit around and make it to the end of their shift because, quite frankly, it’s a disservice to our citizens.”
When Sanders was elected to the position in 2023, the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) faced adversity as it lost a number of its “best deputies” and was the lowest-paying agency in the region. Sanders said TCSO was also the second-worst staffed sheriff’s office in the state with .6 deputies per 1,000 people.
“How am I going to get anyone, A., to stay here, and B., to want to come and work here if they’re at a different agency? Last year really set off a journey of trying to change the culture of the sheriff’s office both internally and externally,” Sanders said. “We had a number of things that were ailing us, but a number of really good strengths at the sheriff’s office. I still believed in the staff that stuck around. Everyone who was still working there, I felt like was extremely competent and could be leaned on during tough times.”
He also expressed the importance of increasing accountability for deputies and holding them accountable for committing crimes or illegal offenses while in uniform.
“I’ve been an extreme proponent of increasing accountability for police officers. I’ve witnessed it myself — both at my agency and other agencies, where police officers are doing things and committing crimes that other citizens wouldn’t get away with. With me, that’s the one thing my command staff knows irks me. We cannot go out and police our communities if we can’t police ourselves,” Sanders said. “If you’re going to work for me, you don’t get to commit crimes — period.”
Department morale and culture
Sanders said that creating a better culture and a positive morale within TCSO was a priority when he took over. He points to several reasons, including meeting with the union, for an uptick in morale and a boost in department culture.
“The first thing I had to do was address that internal culture issue and get to the point where we’re raising the morale of our employees internally because I know that’s going to impact the customer service, if you will, that’s externally being brought upon its citizens,” Sanders said. “A lot of it had to do with taking care of the staff.”
He added that little changes, such as allowing support staff to leave on their lunch break and creating “telework” opportunities for staff, have also served as morale boosts. Sanders noted that the No. 1 competition for support staff was the state of Washington due to slightly better pay but mainly due to the telework option. Now, TCSO has begun to offer periodic telework for support staff. The agency also brought back comp time for deputy sheriffs, noting the importance for deputies, often working continuous and strenuous schedules, to take time off work.
“The ability to work from home and not have to pay for day care was doubling the wages of most of (state) staff, compared to us,” Sanders said. “We had one staff member whose entire paycheck every two weeks went to child care.”
Public Safety Tax
When the Thurston County Public Safety Tax appeared on ballots as Proposition 1, Sanders constantly expressed the importance of residents passing the proposal in order for the department to get back on track.
During the town hall, Sanders expressed that with Prop 1’s passage, TCSO will be able to increase its total number of sheriff deputies over the next several years. The tax also allowed the agency to create a detective position for cold cases in Thurston County.
“We get nine new deputy sheriff positions this year. We’re already in the process of filling those. Next year, we’ll get 18. This will get us 27 new deputy sheriffs on the roadway. It’s important for a couple of reasons,” Sanders said. “We also created a new detective position in anticipation of the public safety tax money arriving. When you’re running on fumes as an agency, there’s not a lot of opportunity for auxiliary work. Therefore, cold cases in this county and office have sat for a really long time. We now have a detective whose only job is to go after missing persons and cold cases.”
Sanders added that he’s given his cold case detective the green light to go anywhere in the country to develop leads on potential suspects in the cases.
Due to grant funding and the generosity of local communities, TCSO has also been able to increase its K9 unit to five dogs.
“We’ll have a lead K9 and four deputy sheriff K9s under them. Those dogs are pretty special,” Sanders said. “Citizens have been extremely generous with donations to our K9 unit. We’ll be to the point next year, once these dogs get trained up, we will have a K9 on duty almost 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
Minimum staffing
Although Thurston County is on the smaller side geographically, the region houses over 300,000 residents with limited staffing to cover the agency's five districts.
The northwest region of west Olympia, Tumwater and more has just one deputy in minimum staffing to cover the entire district. The southwest district corner, including Rochester, Tenino, Grand Mound and other areas, has just one deputy in minimum staffing for the region. Central county district, which covers east Tumwater, south Lacey, the Nisqually Indian Tribe and more, has just two deputies for the region through minimum staffing. The Lacey district, which Sanders said is the busiest, covers everything north of Pacific Avenue from downtown Olympia to the Nisqually Indian Tribe and has just two deputies in minimum staffing. The southeast district, including state Route 507, Rainier Road, Yelm Highway and state Route 510, has just one deputy in minimum staffing.
“With the new public safety tax, what we really pushed for was to get every district up to two deputies. The most rural areas in our county are going to go from one deputy to two deputies, which is a pretty big increase. We’re on pace to achieve that by hopefully 2027,” Sanders said. “We’ve seen a massive explosion in applicants, which is good. We want to be able to pick from the best applicants possible. That’s actually helped us speed up our process. This year, with our existing positions, we’re completely full. There’s no vacancies.”
Drugs and trafficking
Sanders said that his deputies are encouraged to go out and make traffic stops and to “find things that don’t want to be found.” Over the last several years, Thurston County and all America witnessed and experienced the fentanyl epidemic sweep the nation and take the lives of thousands.
“One thing you’ll find is the state changed the Blake Decision, which was criminalization of drugs again. We went a couple years there where possession of drugs was totally decriminalized,” Sanders said. “We saw a pretty big explosion in overdose deaths at the time, but it’s hard to track directly because fentanyl was introduced right around the same time. It’s easy to draw a correlation, but it’s impossible to know just because that drug is so bad and it’s killed so many people.”
Sanders said he read a study about fentanyl use that claimed use of the deadly drug was beginning to decrease. However, the reason for that is because of the drug’s high fatality rate and due to the alarming number of overdoses throughout the last several years.
“Heroin is dead. Our narcotics task force isn’t really reporting anything for heroin seizures. Methamphetamine never really died. It’s kind of sticking around, but keep in mind that methamphetamine and fentanyl are completely different. One is a depressant and one is a stimulant,” Sanders said. “I was hearing on the street when I was out working patrol that there’s no supply. There’s no fentanyl to get a hold of. Then I’m reading the news about how Oregon intercepted a massive shipment of fentanyl, which has all of these direct impacts on criminal behavior inside our community.”
Sanders will host four more town hall meetings as part of his series:
• Rochester: 6 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 9, Swede Hall, 18543 Albany St. NW
• Olympia: 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 16, Griffin School, 6530 33rd Ave. NW
• Tenino: 6 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, Kodiak Room, 225 Sussex Ave. W.
• Lacey: 6 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 30, The Hub, 676 Woodland Square Loop SE
