Pima County Constable Kristen Randall resigns

Pima County Constable Kristen Randall announced Monday she is resigning, citing her frustration with a lack of ability to keep people in their homes in a job that requires her to evict them.

Randall, who serves legal summons such as eviction notices from the justice courts to residents in midtown Tucson, wrote a letter to the Pima County Board of Supervisors announcing her resignation will take effect Feb. 13.

“There is a great divide between my vision of what a constable should do and between the accepted practice of others,” the letter said. “When a force for good can so easily be a force of pain and destruction, we should examine how this archaic position can better fit the needs of a changing community.”

Randall has taken a housing-first approach to her job, providing tenants advance notice of their evictions and informing them of available assistance.

Now, with the declining availability of housing and increasing rent prices, Randall said, “the kinds of supports that I had are just waning in the office.”

“At this point, it’s just becoming these inevitable evictions where I have pretty much zero ability to help mitigate it for people,” she said. “It’s a good time for me to go and find something where I feel like I’m actually helping people because I don’t feel like I’m helping people right now.”

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The county’s constables have faced recent scrutiny with county administration suggesting the elected officials take a pay cut or be replaced with county employees. A report from Assistant County Administrator Mark Napier found “citizens being evicted from their homes are treated differently based on where they reside within boundaries on a map.”

Randall said much of the county’s eviction prevention services she used to provide are now handled by Emergency Eviction Legal Services, a department the county created in July to address evictions as the CDC’s eviction moratorium was set to expire.

“I still think it’s important that you elect a good constable, but it’s not as dire because there’s this whole county department that will outlast an elected individual,” she said. “If you live in a precinct with a constable who doesn’t believe in providing these services, it doesn’t matter. You live in Pima County, this is a county department. It definitely balanced the scales.”

Randall was appointed to serve the remainder of former Constable Mary Dorgan’s term in 2019 and was elected to the office in 2020. Her term was set to expire in 2024, and now, the Board of Supervisors will have to appoint her replacement.

“I have collected fulfilling experiences as well as terrible, life-changing ones that I will carry with me for the rest of my life,” Randall told the board in her resignation letter. “I will always look back and remember how we demonstrated different ways to do things, how we could reach out and become a community resource in our generation’s most trying times and build bridges with others who share similar missions.”