Collaboration key focus of Tucson's multi-million public safety plan

Collaboration is essential among Tucson’s public safety agencies and programs to ensure the right work falls into the right hands.

That was the overall message from a recent two-hour long discussion between city leaders and public safety teams that covered a swath of community safety topics.

The conversation came more than two years after a high profile death of a Carlos Ingram-Lopez, who died in police custody, and nine months since the Tucson City Council appointed Chad Kasmar the Police Department’s chief.

“Hopefully we’ll get to a point where we have a co-response or an alternative response model. If ever a Carlos Ingram-Lopez situation were to happen again, hopefully, we would have the appropriate people there to help navigate that situation,” Mayor Regina Romero said.

Kasmar’s first task from City Council after taking on the job in December was to engage with the community to find out what Tucson needs from its police department.

He held more than 90 public listening sessions across a nine-month span. Community members said they want to know more about what the police department does, transparency in its operations and more resources for mental health, addiction and homelessness, Kasmar told the council.

The new chief acknowledged that mistrust in the department remains an issue. Kasmar took over in the wake of several high-profile use-of-force incidents by TPD, including a former Tucson police officer who shot and killed a man in a mobilized wheelchair last year and was recently indicted on one count of manslaughter.

“When the community is upset, or we’re getting feedback both good and bad, that helps drive organizational resource deployment,” Kasmar said. “As we’re getting all this information, whether it’s direct, or it’s through council, or it’s our own observations out in the community, it requires us to have a plan, it requires us to deploy strategy.”

After approving the budget for this fiscal year, Tucson is identifying some strategies by making investments in programs to further its goal of creating a holistic community safety plan that delivers appropriate responses.

This year, the city has allocated more than $17.6 million of its federal American Rescue Plan dollars to address community safety needs. The city received $136.2 million total as part of the COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress in March 2021, and plans to spend about $36.1 million in ARPA funding this fiscal year.

Tucson also has nearly $150 million in excess funding it plans to invest throughout the next five years. This year, the city’s putting an extra $22.6 million into its three main community safety departments: the Public Safety Communications Department, Tucson Police Department and Tucson Fire Department — which totals about 46% of this year’s planned spending for the surplus funds.

“I think the situation that we’re in today is we’ve got great leadership in the public safety realm. How do we partner to utilize and take advantage of this moment in time where we have investment money … and we have ARPA,” said city Manager Michael Ortega. “How do we take advantage of all of those pieces by working together to make the biggest impact in the community?”

The right hands

Tucson has several public safety programs and departments, but the entryway starts at the city’s Public Safety Communications Department, which houses the city’s 911 call center and dispatches calls for service to Tucson’s police and fire departments.

But some calls for service the 911 center receives aren’t best suited for an armed officer or fire crew to respond to — such as calls dealing with mental or behavioral health crisis. Dispatchers at the 911 center can direct such calls to crisis call takers, which are trained behavioral health specialists from Arizona Complete Health that can provide assistance to people experiencing an emergency that doesn’t involve criminal activity.

“There are multiple pieces of that are really great,” said Sharon McDonough, the public safety communications director. “One is that we didn’t send a cop to a call that could be escalated into something with a negative outcome. We didn’t send a fire apparatus who, really, their option is to take them to a hospital … but instead, we put them with a trained professional.”

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At best, only two crisis call takers are physically present in the call center from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. When crisis call takers aren’t present, dispatchers can direct calls to a crisis phone center.

And not all calls the center receives are for genuine emergencies. McDonough said many calls the center receives start with the phrase: “It’s not an emergency, but.” The center’s received calls reporting thefts that occurred weeks ago, requesting apartment maintenance for a backed-up toilet and inquiring about electricity outages, the department said.

To further address calls best suited for response from a mental health professional, as well as calls that aren’t emergencies, the city plans to spend $1.1 million this fiscal year to launch a new 311 program in March that will free up resources for constrained dispatchers to focus on calls for life-threatening incidents. Tucson’s putting $600,000 of its ARPA dollars toward the program.

The city plans to hire more staff to take 311 calls at the call center, and care coordinators currently embedded in the city’s Community Safety, Health and Wellness Program will follow up with callers to identify potential solutions through city resources and nonprofit agencies.

The Community Safety, Health and Wellness Program is an overarching approach to addressing the root causes of violence and crime such as poverty and lack of economic opportunity. In January, the city hired Sarah Launius, the former chief of staff for the Ward 3 Council office, to run the program.

“(Care coordinators) have really been designed to be able to provide a person-centered approach to help individuals in the community access the resources that they need,” Launius said. “Part of (the 311 system) is saying we don’t necessarily need a highly trained police officer to respond to this call, but actually, maybe having someone who is able to help connect someone with a behavioral health provider.”

The program currently has five care coordinators who already follow up with high-volume 911 callers to identify service gaps in the city. Eventually, the 311 system will establish infrastructure to track the reasons for non-emergency calls to identify solutions to recurring issues, Launius said.

Addressing “root issues”

In his community listening sessions, Kasmar said he didn’t hear much about “defunding the police,” a narrative that’s circled amid calls for more police accountability in recent years.

“When it came up on rare occasion, the concerns expressed centered on proportion rather than abolition, on how the TPD budget compared to other City funding needs,” Kasmar wrote in a report to City Council.

The police department’s budget is $204.7 million this fiscal year, which covers costs such as firearms, ballistic vests and body-worn cameras, but also other initiatives such as post-traumatic growth training for officers and violence reduction programs.

“I think you can apply ‘right work with the right hands’ to a lot of different things, including our budgetary process,” Kasmar said.

Ultimately, Kasmar’s approach to policing centers on collaboration. Community safety is like a watch, he said, “there’s a lot of gears in that mechanism that all have to rotate and move together to make the arms on a watch move.”

“I am absolutely impacted by a lot of other systems that I don’t have control over. So what that requires me to do as the chief is to develop relationships,” Kasmar said. “I can attempt to build connections and build influence so those other systems better understand how their decisions are impacting us or contributing to a less safe community.”

The chief emphasizes that community safety is a collaborative process — the holistic approach Tucson’s mayor and council is calling for involves programs and buy-in outside of law enforcement’s control. While the community remains concerned about key issues such as homelessness and gun violence, it will take an all-hands-on-deck effort to come up with long-term, meaningful solutions.

“The general public is frustrated, understandably so, with a lot of different things. It’s like treating a sick patient, you know, how do we have some quick wins and make you feel a little bit better?” he said. “We’re making some progress by addressing the immediate symptom. But the root cause issue is a much more complex thing that takes other stakeholders to be involved in having meaningful change.”