Third Homicide of 2006

Next week a baby boy in the 3500 block of South M Street would have turned one. Instead, his mother’s boyfriend is in police custody under suspicion of killing the baby. Neighbors say they often heard the baby crying over the past year. It wasn’t until last week that one of the neighbors called the police. This isn’t surprising. Nor is it surprising that nothing stopped the baby from being killed last night.

I’ve lived in most parts of Tacoma in my 31 years in this city and the one thing I’ve noticed is that more often than not, I haven’t known my neighbors and they haven’t known me. Tacoma isn’t the friendliest city in the world. It’s why lately I’ve been going to Seattle to meet new people.

Reading my blog you may get the idea that Tacoma is a place plagued with crime and that the police are useless in this town. This isn’t true. Last year there were sixteen homicides in the city of Tacoma. Twelve of these were solved. That’s a 75% clearance rate. This is above the national average. It means if you kill someone in Tacoma, you’ve got a one in four shot of getting away with it.

On the other side of that, in the outlying Pierce County area there were fifteen murders and all of them were solved. This isn’t the norm. Though Pierce County’s clearance rate has been over 90% since 2003 whereas Tacoma has been between 75% and 86% percent in the same amount of time.

So far this year Tacoma is one for three. I’ll keep posting the homicides and whether or not arrests are made throughout the year. Hopefully I won’t have to do this too many times.

UPDATE:

The Pierce County Medical Examiner was unable to find evidence that the baby died from trauma and the man arrested has been set free. At this time they have yet to determine the cause of death. So this may not be a homicide after all.

-Jack