It’s official: There’s a new sheriff in town.
Chris Nanos took the reins Saturday as Pima County sheriff, and says he’s ready after working decades for the department. The county Board of Supervisors appointed him to replace Clarence Dupnik, whose retirement after 35 years as sheriff took effect Friday. Nanos will serve out the remainder of Dupnik’s current term, and will have to stand for election in November 2016 to keep the post.
Community involvement is one of the many things Nanos has planned for his time in office; he says he even gives his cellphone number out on a regular basis.
Nanos sat down with the Arizona Daily Star to talk about his plans to help keep kids out of the system, efforts to create alternatives to jail for the mentally ill, his belief that the job shouldn’t be political, and his department’s performance.
- On his transition to sheriff:
“The biggest key for me will be to the public, in that they see the changing of the guard and it’s seamless. That they really don’t recognize that there’s a change here at the top. That they still continue to get the things they get, that response times continue to be as good as they are, if not get better. But it’s hard to improve on four-and-a-half minute response times on priority-one calls when you have a county that’s 9,200 square miles large. But we’ll continue looking at those numbers and making sure we’re doing everything that we can to keep that where it is, if not make it better.”
- On crime in Pima County:
“I have a pretty good agency; I think it’s one of the best in the state, if not the country. When you talk about property crimes in the county, I think we’re 180 per 100,000 people where others in the state, are at 500 or 600. Our violent crime rate is the best in the state. I think Scottsdale edges us out by a little bit, but if you look at the service area, the number of people served and our deputies, we do very well. We probably have just under 1.2 deputies per 1,000 residents, and the national average is 1.7. We’re doing really well in a lot of regards as far as what the public considers to be crime fighting.”
- On what he plans to do differently:
“What I’d like to improve on is our ability to be more accessible. That means not just responding to 911 calls — we do a good job there. But also attend a number of community events: Not just my staff, I mean myself.
“I think you’re going to see a lot more of me in the community. I will get out and about. I will make meetings, I’ll attend neighborhood watch and homeowners association gatherings. I believe it’s important to be accessible if I’m the leader of a large law enforcement agency. Someone ought to be able to get ahold of me.”
- On the department’s performance:
“We do a good job in not just hiring, but in training. With that training comes management and discipline issues sometimes, but we set a standard from our staff of what we do and don’t tolerate around here, in terms of your performance, behavior and conduct.
“I think it shows when you get a 10-year average of 250 complaints per 150,000 contacts or greater. That’s important. We look at those things because if you see a spike, you need to look at it and find out why that is and what we’re doing to counter or prevent it. My young correction officers and deputies do a great job every day, but they can’t do it without the community support, and they can’t do it without my and my staff’s support.”
- On mental illness and substance abuse:
“It’s easy to go and arrest the bad guy and investigate the case, but are there some things we can do to make a bigger impact? We talk about recidivism all the time. We have a number of people at our jail who are mentally ill or suffer from substance abuse, and we’re talking about if just locking them up is the way to deal with this. It’s quite a cost, not just on the human side of things, but it’s also a big cost on the taxpayers. Budget issues are big to me now, and I’m starting to learn that as well.
“How do we deal with those who are nonviolent, who suffer more from an illness than an actual criminal state of mind? Maybe that’s gotten them to a point where they need to be dealt with in a courtroom. But in the same sense, what are we doing to prevent them from coming back? That’s key. We’ve got a lot of the players in Pima County’s criminal justice system working on that. We get together in a room and talk about how we can make things better. I also look at the causes of crime in particular. I don’t want to stop you from going back to jail, but rather keep you from getting there.”
- On the importance of education:
“I’ve seen studies now that are saying if you complete high school, your chances diminish by 70 percent that you’ll ever be arrested.
“Basically, only three out of 10 high school graduates get arrested in their life. But if you don’t get that diploma, it’s seven to eight out of 10 that get arrested. It’s so hard to get these kids and keep them in school.
“We’ve got to find some incentive and there’s some great programs out there. I’m looking into them. They don’t know it yet, but I’m looking.”
- On how he came to Tucson:
“I was in El Paso in 1976, working as a young police officer while going to college, and my buddies and I always saw the same three deputies coming out of the diner.
“One day they told us, as they were walking out, that the department was testing tomorrow. We all went down to test, and three out of four of us made it.
“After that, three of my brothers also ended up going into law enforcement, and they’re all over the state of Texas. I stayed in El Paso until 1983, and I met my lovely wife who was at NAU at the time. She got a job offer at Hughes Aircraft, which is now Raytheon, and I thought I could be a cop everywhere, so we moved here. I applied everywhere, and of course Pima County Sheriff is the first to hire, so I took them up and never looked back.
“It’s been a great career, and I’ve been married to the same woman for 32 years.”
- On the most difficult beat he’s worked:
“In my career, I’ve worked sex crimes, homicide, community problems, narcotics, racketeering and organized crime, fugitives, and I think the hardest job was being a corrections officer. I’ve really come to appreciate those gentlemen.
“As a deputy, I think the hardest job I had was in sex crimes and child abuse. You’d see so many little kids that suffer some horrific things. You may be able to arrest the bad guy, get them to court and sentence them to jail, and this is good in some ways, but the real shame is that there’s a lot of broken babies out there that can’t be fixed. But you have to think about those you’ve helped, and if you never see them again, that’s okay. You just have to know that you did something good and maybe that person has passed that on.”
- On politics in his role as sheriff:
“I don’t think the sheriff’s job should ever be a political job. I understand it’s an elected position, but I don’t think it should be political. What I see wrong with the political world is somewhere along the way, we lost our ability to compromise. It’s either my way or not at all, so you have this extreme right and extreme left, and they can’t sit back and say, ‘Maybe I’m not right. Maybe somebody’s got a better way and maybe we could come together and agree on some things.’
“We’re a great country, that’s what we were built on, so I really struggle with that part of this new job that I’m coming into. So when we talk about political issues that really aren’t crime-related, I just completely stay away from them. My view on abortion or gay marriage should have no bearing to anyone about my running this office.”
- On the marijuana issue:
“When it comes to medicine, if my doctor says take this or take that, I take it. But I just don’t get the medical marijuana or marijuana thing. What I do understand is this: I don’t write the laws. I just enforce them. And so the people will have the opportunity in the very near future, as it sounds, to either vote for marijuana to be legalized or to minimize its legality or decriminalize it — whatever they do. When that happens, whatever it is, they’ve given us the rulebook to play by, and that’s the rule we’ll use.
“It’s like body cameras. I just thought there’s so much out there being tested, we don’t need to rush to that. Let’s just sit back and watch. Same with the marijuana issue — you have Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and you can hear numbers either way, good or bad. I say let’s sit back and watch it, what’s our hurry? Let’s see the real numbers.
“You’re not going to know by a year, six months, 18 months. Let’s see what it really is. I don’t know that this should be a money-making thing. I don’t think we want to legislate by how much money we can make doing certain things. This is more to me a health issue when it comes to medical marijuana. Let real doctors decide those things; cops don’t need to do that. But when it comes to decriminalizing it, that’s for the people to decide. We’ll support whatever way that vote goes.”
