Tucson launches safety initiative to fight homelessness, opioid crises

Tucson is starting a citywide initiative aimed at improving public safety and inter-governmental responses to the ongoing homelessness and opioid crises affecting residents.

The “Safe City Initiative” is in response to the “palpable frustration” that city residents, first responders and local officials have voiced in recent years because of ongoing homelessness, drug and crime issues, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said Monday.

The initiative, she said, aims to put the city and other local jurisdictions’ efforts under one umbrella, identify gaps in local efforts and “leverage” law enforcement action and treatment options to address those gaps.

The initiative will also look to guide local ordinances, policies and resources to disrupt criminal behavior and address root causes via mental and behavioral health care, as well as substance abuse treatment, Romero said in an open letter penned to Tucson residents over the weekend.

City officials have been working to create this initiative since January, Romero said. She said a key goal is to identify areas where “we need the appropriate jurisdictions to step up and do the work that the city has been doing for some time.”

“We’re feeling frustration (in) all of the work that we’ve been focusing on, and yet there’s still a very tangible, public crisis happening in our streets,” Romero told the Star Monday. “It’s a public health crisis, and the partners that need to come to the table and act now, I feel, have been kind of taking a back seat. So this is a call to action.”

In her letter to Tucsonans that was printed in the Star’s Sunday newspaper, among other places, Romero noted that Pima County’s Health Department “is responsible for providing health-related services, such as mental health care and substance use treatment for people in jail, as well as overall public health services for County residents,” and that those responsibilities don’t fall to the city per its charter.

And although the city has been “aggressively” funding services like the Violence Interruption Vitalization Action (VIVA) program or low-barrier shelters with wraparound services, “there are still gaps in effectively addressing the lack of services and connections for people with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorder,” Romero said in her letter.

On Monday, she said that although the city has been working on these issues with local jurisdictions such as Pima County, the Safe City Initiative is a call to action “to act with the same urgency that we are, because there is frustration.”

“I want our jurisdictional partners in the county and the state to feel the urgency ... and do something now. There are ideas they have talked about, but they’ve talked about for four years, and really have not been active participants in addressing it, and addressing the issues that, by the way, they are responsible for,” she said Monday.

County board chair rebuts claim

Pima County Supervisor and Board Chair Rex Scott said later Monday, “I don’t think that would be a statement that would stand up to scrutiny, and it’s not something that she said when we were meeting today. What she said today is that she was looking forward to finding different opportunities to have further collaboration with the county, based on what we’re already doing, and we are always going to look for those opportunities to partner with the city.

“We can have a conversation about who has what statutory responsibility,” Scott added.

Action on further collaboration between the city and county governments is moving forward. Scott requested an agenda item for the county Board of Supervisors’ meeting Tuesday to discuss what a potential joint meeting between the board and the Tucson City Council could involve, and when it could happen.

“I think the county has been a leader in addressing issues of unsheltered homelessness. And we’re always going to look for ways to partner, not just with the city, but with all of the other jurisdictions in the county,” Scott said.

“I realize that somebody reading that (Romero) letter could think that it was being critical of either the county or the state. I didn’t necessarily take it that way. I took it as a call for greater partnership between all levels of government. And I also think that Mayor Romero knows very well all the work that the county has done ... in that space, and most of that work has been done in partnership with the city.”

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As part of the initiative, the city will create a “Safe City Task Force” that will look to guide future city ordinances and policies to “leverage law enforcement action into drug recovery options.”

This year, the Tucson City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting camping in city-owned washes.

Targeting public drug use

The council is also weighing an ordinance aimed at prohibiting public drug use.

While it’s currently a felony offense to use drugs publicly in the state of Arizona and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the Pima County Attorney’s Office, oftentimes cases referred to the county have gone unprosecuted, Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar has said. Looking at how to craft this ordinance will fall under the task force’s purview, with the goal of filling gaps and using law enforcement as a tool, he said.

“I’ve not been shy about being more public about some of my frustrations and some of my challenges with the Pima County Attorney’s Office,” Kasmar said. “So, when it’s the mayor and council, and community, and we’re having public conversations about that, that’s very different under the Safe City Initiative than just the chief of police trying to fix the system.”

“We are not aiming, at TPD or under the Safe City Initiative or under city leadership, to criminalize addiction. We’re looking to be responsive to the community and enforce existing laws within Arizona Revised Statutes,” he said. “We’re also not looking, on the other end, to decriminalize and take that felony charge of public possession of narcotics to a misdemeanor. What we’re saying is, we’re looking to fill the gap. ...

“Just by sheer volume, we’ve overwhelmed both the Pima County Attorney’s Office and City Court on these specific issues. If we can get the county attorney to come up and say, ‘these are the cases I move forward,’ that allows us to fill that gap of cases,” the police chief said.

That ordinance, while still being considered, could be a useful tool for the city’s attempt to disrupt criminal behavior under this new initiative, Romero said.

‘Leveraging’ law enforcement actions

Kasmar said the city’s initiative will first look to “lay a foundation” of what the city and its first responders have been doing while “also evaluating the data and the impact, and community feel.”

“There is a reality of what the data shows, but we still have to take the perception of the community, which is folks who are living, folks that are traveling through, and folks that have businesses in the community, and how they feel about what’s going on in Tucson,” Kasmar said Monday.

That echoes what he said during the City Council’s Oct. 8 meeting, that while Tucson’s violent crime is down 12% on a five-year average and its property crimes are down 23%, “if our community is driving through an area and they don’t feel safe, it doesn’t matter” how promising the data is.

An instance of local law enforcement action being “leveraged,” Kasmar said, was a Tucson police sweep of the Rillito River and the Chuck Huckelberry Loop on Oct. 7, near the site where a Tucson cyclist was stabbed and killed in late September. Police have said the stabber ran into a nearby wash after the incident; a 26-year-old suspect was later arrested.

It was the fourth such deployment this year, Kasmar said, and resulted in Tucson police contacting 55 people, 50 of whom were sent to jail and processed through pretrial services and the Pima County Transition Center.

Future deployments are not an attempt to arrest the city out of the crisis, Kasmar and Romero both said, but it’s one area where law enforcement can be used to fill gaps.

“(The initiative) helps us focus, helps us prioritize, and helps us create public space for these conversations so the community actually knows the complexity of the problem that we’re trying to solve, and that the city can’t be the only partner at the table trying to solve some of this,” Kasmar said.