It was news in 2021 when the Pima County Attorneyโs Office lost dozens of employees, hobbling the agency during Laura Conoverโs first year in charge.
There was hope then that timeโs passage, new hires, and a pay increase would change the trend. It hasnโt turned out that way.
Turnover and vacancies remain an intractable problem in 2024 as Conover runs for re-election. The Pima County Attorneyโs Office has 77 vacancies, according to a June 16 Pima County report, 32 of them open more than a year. The vacancy rate is 19.9 %, one of the higher rates among the departments of the broadly understaffed county government.
Critics and observers of the office point to a variety of impacts. They say plea deals are sometimes made in haste due to the volume of cases, victims sometimes treated inadequately, and more felony domestic violence cases are being sent to city prosecutorsโ offices as misdemeanors.
When I spoke with her Friday, Conover said sheโs being criticized unfairly by people who are making up facts to fit their narrative. Indeed, there was one egregious example โ the Goldwater Instituteโs May 1 op-ed in the Star claiming that crime is skyrocketing in Pima County. The data used in that op-ed was wrong, as pointed out in a May 19 editorial, and the opposite is closer to true than the posited crime wave.
โWeโre doing all the work weโre supposed to be doing,โ Conover told me. โThe county is budgeting us for 5,000 felony convictions a year. Itโs our job to prioritize violent crime, victim crime. The results are freaking fantastic.โ
Indeed, one of Conoverโs best arguments for re-election is that, despite the social disorder we see regularly in Tucson, reports of the most serious crimes, like homicide, have decreased sharply from their frightening peaks in 2021.
But if the department is so successful, why is turnover so persistent?
Surprising departures
Among the departures of 2021-22, a few were surprising because they were Conoverโs top advisers. One was Tamara Mulembo, who had left the Federal Public Defenderโs Office to become Conoverโs chief of staff.
She only lasted about 10 months and left with a relatively scathing internal email about Conover, her old friend. She accused Conover of tokenizing her as a black woman and subjecting her to microaggressions.
When I had lunch with Mulembo recently, I hoped she might shed more light on the flight from the office that she witnessed before joining the flow herself. But sheโd signed a non-disparagement agreement when she left the Pima County Attorneyโs Office. She limited herself to talking about generalities โ and the candidate she favors.
โIt doesnโt matter what kind of change you try to implement, the culture of a place will win out every time,โ said Mulembo, who was an intern at the county attorneyโs office while in law school, years before returning in 2021. โThe only way to change that is to consistently have that culture change, shepherded and modeled from the top down.โ
Mulembo is supporting Mike Jette, whom she says she grew to respect when she was a public defender facing him as a prosecutor. She sat in the front row Monday night at a candidate forum in the Donna Liggins Center.
โYou donโt know how somebody uses power until you give it to him, right?โ Mulembo said. โAnd so I had the opportunity to see him in action, using power responsibly and fairly and with integrity for nearly two decades.โ
Another early associate who left was Joe Watson, a former journalist and former prisoner who became Conoverโs spokesman. Heโs supporting Conover, arguing that Jetteโs candidacy represents a return to the past and a departure from Conoverโs criminal-justice-reform initiatives.
Many of the high-ranking officials from former Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWallโs administration are supporting Jette and have criticized Conover regularly in the pages of the Star and elsewhere.
โI support Laura for the same reason I supported her in 2020,โ Watson said. โI am very happy to see that we have two candidates who talk about their commitment to reform, but itโs only Laura whoโs worked on it, and she worked on it long before she became county attorney.โ
As to the flight from the office, Watson said โI think itโs great that we have a leaner office.โ
โPublic safety has not suffered as a result. Crime rates are down.โ
LaWall had turnover too
In the early months of Conoverโs tenure, when she lost many employees, she blamed the shakeout on allies of the former administration. As time went on, though, the turnover continued, at a fluctuating pace.
On Friday she noted that turnover was also a big problem during LaWallโs administration. It was: In 2011, for example, LaWall acknowledged that the percentage of attorneys with more than five yearsโ experience had dropped from 61 percent in 2008 to 38 percent in 2011.
Conover has made a point during campaign appearances, such as Monday nightโs forum, to note that she got from the Pima County Board of Supervisors the first across-the-board raise for county attorneyโs office employees since 1997.
But she said in the interview that it still hasnโt been sufficient to keep attorneys from entertaining job offers from private firms or even other agencies. Money and burnout have explained most of the attorneysโ departures, she asserted.
โThis is a multi-decade problem,โ Conover said. The county attorneyโs office is โalways going to be a feeder for the U.S. Attorneyโs office.โ
Jette, who has made his 17 years of experience as a prosecutor a main selling point, blamed Conover, though.
โI do think itโs the personality whoโs in charge,โ he said. โYou have people leaving in year 1, year 2 and year 3. You canโt say these are people (leaving) because they are from the previous administration.โ
No guarantees
The attorneys Iโve reached out to, those who left in the second and third years of the administration, have been hesitant to speak on the record about their reasons for leaving. Most will have to work with each other in the countyโs criminal-justice system when the election is over and some worry about taking a side.
The pattern I see is a broad one reflected by both Conover and Jette in their comments. Yes, people are leaving because they can find better-paid, less arduous work elsewhere. Yes, burnout from high caseloads is taking a toll โ meaning more vacancies lead to more people leaving.
But the departures also reflect some dissatisfaction with leadership โ either with Conover herself or with the sometimes inexperienced supervisors whom employees report to as the turnover churns.
Whether Jette would hold on to more employees, I canโt really say. He has the advantage of being a career prosecutor, which may be attractive to people who want to work in the county attorneyโs office. But his supervisorial experience is limited.
He has supervised attorneys for the Santa Cruz County Attorney's Office and the Arizona Attorney General's office, and most interestingly when he worked abroad for the U.S. Justice Department, in Pakistan and other countries, training attorneys and working in the embassy.ย
Thereโs no guarantee caseloads for prosecutors or other turnover pressures will go down with either of them in office.
