Tim Steller's opinion: Tucson police handling of death seems suspicious, but council should keep working

The Bighorn Fire’s smoke is filling our air.

Hospital intensive-care units are filling with COVID-19 patients.

And President Trump spoke to a house full of maskless supporters Tuesday in Phoenix.

Most of us have probably had our fill of hard news in Tucson and Arizona lately. Now this?

The Tucson City Council made a shock decision Tuesday morning to cancel a study session and regular meeting, each with substantial agendas, scheduled for that same afternoon and evening.

The reason: A man died in police custody in April, and throughout this period of protest and ferment over police issues, nobody outside the department learned of it till last week.

The story only became public Tuesday morning when reported by the Tucson Sentinel. By that time, Mayor Regina Romero and the six council members had a chance to view the body-cam video of the incident.

And by that time, the three officers involved in the incident had resigned.

The deceased man’s family still had not seen police bodycam video when some council members started saying they wouldn’t show up for the meeting, meaning there would be no quorum. Council member Lane Santa Cruz started the dominoes falling when she said the council shouldn’t meet while the family and public still lacked information about this death.

“I let folks know that if it couldn’t be postponed, I wasn’t going to attend,” she told me.

She explained in a Facebook post she wouldn’t attend the meeting “because of the tragedy and death of one of our community members at the hands of Tucson police officers.”

“I do not take my responsibilities as a council member lightly, and I cannot, in good conscience, sit by and conduct business as usual without addressing this tragedy.”

The incident came as a shock in part because local police are generally quick to report when they kill someone in the usual scenario — a confrontation that leads to a shooting. In-custody deaths have also occurred at the Pima County jail, and the Sheriff’s Department reports them relatively promptly.

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So it’s strange that this police case, an in-custody death, took two months to come to public attention. It’s especially eyebrow-raising because two weeks ago Police Chief Chris Magnus spent an hour at the council’s study session extolling the department’s record of progressive reforms.

It wasn’t till a week later that City Manager Michael Ortega and the council members were informed of the in-custody death.

On Wednesday, the city is set to reveal the details of the death at a news conference. Tucson police spokesman Sgt. Pete Dugan included a few of them in a news release late Tuesday: That the three officers involved resigned in lieu of termination, that the deceased died of cardiac arrest and had acute cocaine intoxication, and that no significant force was used.

But the explanation in the release of why the department sat on the story doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, because we are able to learn about other police-involved deaths:

“Information about a pending personnel action cannot be released before an internal investigation is completed or it jeopardizes any potential discipline involving the officers. Information on this case was not released earlier this week to accommodate the family of the decedent so that the chief could meet with them personally prior to sharing information with the community.”

Among the questions the mayor and police chief should answer are:

• Why this death was not revealed to the public or the council until around two months after it occurred.
• What specific violations of police procedure officers committed.
• What role, if any, the use of force played in the death.
• What new reforms, if any, are needed to try to prevent deaths like this.

It’s a mysterious and, for now, suspicious situation that those questions should help clarify.

That said, I’m still not convinced Tuesday’s meetings needed to be canceled. It happens pretty often that an individual item on a council agenda is postponed to a later meeting. The council could have put off deciding on extending the contract with the Tucson Police Officers Association, for example, while still doing its scheduled two hours discussing the city budget at the study session and hearing public testimony on the budget at the regular meeting. In fact, the time for public testimony, an hour, was almost certainly too short to accommodate everyone who wanted to speak.

Approval of a mask ordinance was also on Tuesday’s agenda, along with many other items. Now that will all be packed into next Tuesday’s special meeting.

In this period of smoky skies and full hospitals, evictions and unemployment, we need to show we can work on our many problems, not get sidetracked on just one.