Jonathan Hoffman: Defund police? Take a look at TPD today

The following column is the opinion and analysis of the author.

It is a trendy thing as of late to talk about “defunding” municipal police departments. Tucson is not just ahead of the curve in this regard, we are already there.

Last January, Chief of Police Chris Magnus decided that the Tucson Police Department would withdraw from its Operation Stonegarden grant, citing the inability of the program to divert 20% percent of the funds, earmarked for law enforcement relating to border security, to humanitarian aid. He also made vague references to “TPD’s mission and the expectations of the community we serve.” Mayor Regina Romero supported the decision.

Operation Stonegarden is a federal government grant program of the Department of Homeland Security, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and administered by the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, that provides money to local and state law enforcement agencies for equipment, travel expenses, and officer overtime, to facilitate interagency operations to improve border security.

In an article by Justin Sayers that ran in the Arizona Daily Star, the president of the Tucson Police Officers Association, Tony Archibald, stated, “For years, this federally funded grant has paid for officer overtime to do proactive, on-site activity in high crime areas ... Without these federally funded overtime deployments, an already understaffed police department will have a hard time addressing these crime issues.”

So that begs the question, is TPD really understaffed?

Magnus, referring to the staffing levels at the time, was quoted in a 2018 article by Joe Ferguson in the Star saying, “I’ve already called it a crisis, I think this is very serious right now. This is well below where we should be as a city,”

Magnus was appointed to be police chief for the city of Tucson, in January of 2016. In that year the ratio of officers per 1,000 people was 1.6, a drop from 1.8 in 2015. By 2018, it had dropped further to 1.5 per 1,000 according to FBI statistics. The national average has held steady at 1.8 per 1,000.

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Community Oriented Policing Services is a Department of Justice grant program that subsidizes the hiring of new officers for an initial three years.

Pima County Sheriffs Department is getting $1.25 million, Nogales PD $700,000, and Sahuarita PD $250,000.

TPD did not apply because it would have to pick up the tab after three years.

Now, if I had a crisis of low staff and I was offered a deal in which I could hire a few more officers and have someone else pay for the first three years, I think I would take it.

I am not alone in this conclusion. Zach Yentzer, host of “Tipping Point,” a radio show that “shares the stories and strategies of the people and ideas shaping Tucson’s future”, recently compared the TPD budget to those of police departments in two comparable American cities.

He noted that TPD’s proposed budget for FY 2021 is $165,324120, while the Albuquerque police budget for FY 2020 was $209,848,000, and the Milwaukee police budget for FY 2020 was $297,366,419. All three cities fall between 548,00 and 591,000 in population.

Stepping back and looking at the overall TPD budget situation he concluded, “If 94% of the budget is going to personnel costs, and we are at 1988 staffing levels, where we are hundreds of police officers away from even the thousand count, and we are $50-120 million dollars under peer communities of our size, I want to submit that we’ve done the defunding. I don’t know what you could cut from that.”

All this points to a TPD culture that would avoid increasing resources and opportunities to increase community engagement in its jurisdiction. TPD has already been defunding itself.