Tucsonans want a broader approach to criminal justice issues, more affordable housing and wider access to medical-and-mental health care services, according to results of a recent survey.
Just Communities Arizona, a Tucson-based abolitionist organization released the findings from their “Reimagining Community Safety” survey this week. More than 1,200 people took the 69-question survey. Each of Tucson’s six wards had at least 100 individuals take the survey.
Each respondent had to be at least 18 years-old and were asked to disclose the cross streets of where they live, to more accurately express voices from each corner of the city, said Caroline Issacs, the group’s executive director. Surveys were collected from November 2021 through August 2022, she said.
Homelessness and affordable housing were, by far, the greatest concerns shared by respondents, Isaacs said, with over a fifth of those surveyed identifying the topics as a primary concern.
“What I think is heartening and instructive, is that Tucsonans by-and-large understand that the social issues we face are nuanced and they’re ready to start addressing root causes,” she said. “Recognizing that, yes, unhoused folks and housing affordability is an issue, the responses to that are not only do we need more accessible housing, but we also need to look at what makes people end up on the street in the first place.”
Access to affordable housing worsened over the previous two years, 63 percent of respondents said in the survey. And access to both medical and mental health care was rated as “very poor” or “poor,” by 66 percent of the people surveyed.
The next largest concern shared by respondents was the concept of “inequality,” something that Isaacs and the JCA did not necessarily expect.
“It’s kind of hard to say [what respondents meant] by that, but what I believe, is that this reflects a widespread acceptance that (a) there is inequality and (b) that that’s a problem,” she said. “I think that speaks to just a wonderful aspect of our community, that we care about each other and recognize that there are some shortcomings in our system and that we need to do something about that.”
Forty-three percent of Native American respondents reported having interaction with the police when they had not committed a crime. That’s more than 1.5-times higher than the survey’s general response, the JCA said.
The rate of people in the survey who said they had been questioned by police at least once: black, 55 percent; white, 25 percent and Latino, 31 percent.
“We’ve been doing this one approach, which is to criminalize and punish these social problems for decades. If that worked, we would have the safest communities anywhere, and we don’t,” she said. “We’ve been fed this narrative that safety is law enforcement, it’s arrests, it’s incarceration. But we’re seeing that there’s serious limitations to that.”
Over a third of all individuals surveyed reported that they or a family member has experienced some form of incarceration. According to the survey, about half of respondents in Wards 1, 3 and 5 said that either themselves or a family member, or both, have experienced incarceration. That figure drops to a third of all respondents in Wards 2, 4 and 6.
When asked for solutions to reduce racial and socio-economic inequities, the most common answers given by respondents were:
Community-centered alternatives to incarceration (44 percent)
More accessible mental health and substance abuse services (39 percent)
More affordable housing (36 percent)
Funding originally came from Microsoft and the Urban Institute. Initially, due to the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with a lack of funding, surveyors had to remain online for the first part of the data collection process, Issacs says.
“It started during the pandemic and the Urban Institute has very strict human subject research guidelines, so we had to be online. We could not be physically sending people out into the community at that point,” she said. “We did hire what we call ‘community co-researchers’.”
These community co-researchers, Issacs says, were individuals that were “trusted” and “connected” within their own communities They were assigned to their own communities in Tucson and surveyed those who “may have not been asked to take a survey before,” she said.
A spokesman for Mayor Regina Romero did not respond Thursday to questions about the survey and what happens next.
As part of the original funding agreement with Microsoft, Isaacs said, the JCA was given access to Microsoft’s “Power BI” software. This allowed them to open-source their data, which you can find here, allowing users of the site to fine-tune their data as specific as they want.
