Tim Steller is the Star’s metro columnist. A 20-plus year veteran of reporting and editing, he digs into issues and stories that matter in the Tucson area, reports the results and tells you his opinion on it all.
Someone rips off your bike.
Or takes tools from your truck.
Or takes the truck itself.
You pause before calling police — is it worth it? But then you go ahead and call. Then you wait, and wait, and wait for an officer to arrive and take the stinking report until it feels like it’s really not worth it.
This is one of the things that drives people crazy about living in the city of Tucson. It’s not just the low-level crime, which is annoying enough, but the seeming lack of response to it.
The Tucson police know about it. The candidates for mayor know about it. They all have their plans for public safety, some of which mention Tucson police response time. All of them come at the problem a little differently.
The problem goes back to the depletion of officers. The number of sworn officers in the department peaked at more than 1,100 in 2005. Now, the department is down to 793 sworn officers, with 61 in the training pipeline, Chief Chris Magnus told me Friday.
The department simply doesn’t have enough officers to respond quickly to minor reports, as many people have found out when they’ve bothered to make that call to report a crime.
Candidates Regina Romero and Randi Dorman both told me that response times are not always at the top of voters’ lists of priorities, though Romero said it is one of “the biggest things I want to work on as mayor.”
“When I’m at the door, talking with voters, they want to talk about quality of life issues,” Romero said, and things like public education, which are not even a city government duty, may rank higher than response times.
But Dorman noted that often depends on the voter’s experiences with calling for police service.
“For people who have had personal experience where it has impacted them negatively, it’s a top priority, which is totally understandable,” she said.
The department knows the dimensions of the problem pretty well, Magnus said. Dispatchers rank the calls on their level of urgency, with Level 1 being true emergencies. On those, Tucson officers arrive in an average of 4 minutes and 47 seconds, Magnus said.
Responses to level 4 calls, on the other hand, average about one hour and 37 minutes. If officers are busy with an emergency, it could take hours.
Besides the obvious lack of officers to respond, another factor is that officers are trying to spend longer on calls that take time to resole the situation.
“We get so many calls about mental health issues. The solution is not to get in and out of those calls as fast as we can. If we do that, we’re simply inviting problems later on,” Magnus said.
Domestic-violence calls, too, may require a “lethality assessment” that takes time and may need follow-up, he said.
“I’d rather have officers spend more time on calls where it is necessary and taking a little longer to get to much lower priority calls,” he said. “For a lot of the lower priority calls, we’re working hard to get people to use other resources to report crimes.”
Among those is the online reporting tool, which is available for many non-violent crime reports.
Now, the City Council has done a few things to try to reverse attrition. Last year, for example, the council pay increases that could be as high as 15% for some more experienced officers. The idea was to keep seasoned officers, who are key to any police force, from leaving for other departments.
The department had lost as many as nine officers per month, but now is down to losing an average of five to six per month, Magnus said. A few have even returned to TPD from other departments.
A whole different solution to the problem has been emerging, and is part of Dorman’s and Romero’s plans: community service officers.
These are police department employees who are not commissioned officers but can respond to lower-level calls and take reports.
The city has 46 of them now, including 10 who are specifically assigned to the parks, and is aiming for a number in the 90s, Magnus said.
Beyond hiring them, Romero said she’s looking for a dedicated funding source for public safety, specifically to take care of raises for dispatchers as well as officers. That’s why she proposed making Prop. 101, the sales tax initiative for roads and public safety that voters approved in 2017, a longer term funding source that could also have covered police pay, she said.
Dorman has included hiring more community service officers in her public-safety plan, along with some incentives for officers to live in the city.
But her bigger thrust is toward economic development, which she sees as the broader solution to many of the city’s problems, including response times, because a better local economy will help pay for all kinds of needs.
Steve Farley, the third Democratic candidate, said, “I can’t wait till I get down in the details of the budget with staff.”
“I’m not drilling down in the details too carefully (yet) because you are one vote of seven as mayor. I don’t want to be the guy who says ‘do it my way or take the highway.’”
He didn’t make any specific proposals for reducing response times but said “it’s a matter of money” and that annexation of unincorporated areas would be one of the solutions.
Sgt. Jason Winsky, spokesman for the Tucson Police Officers Association, said a key is to ensure the next raises are planned in advance and with regularity, so officers don’t go a decade without a raise, then suddenly get a big bump.
“The pay adjustment was a huge step forward, especially on the retention side,” he said. “We want it to be more regular.”
That, of course, is going to take money. So, if you want the police to respond more quickly to your call, you should vote for the candidate most likely to raise the city revenue to pay for it.
