The Tucson Police Department is working hard to meet the safety needs of our growing city. We worked with the City Council to improve officer pay in the 2018-19 budget. This summer we will have one of the largest classes of recruits (40) entering our police academy in years. Public support last year for Prop. 101 is helping us update our fleet and replace outdated equipment. Your commitment to public safety is making these things possible.
Over the next several years, we hope to achieve a staffing level of approximately 950 officers (which includes some officers in various phases of training). This will take time since we now have 800 officers with approximately 80 more being trained.
About half our sworn personnel are assigned to the Field Services Bureau. Most of these personnel handle calls for service, but some have duties supporting important community efforts (traffic safety, neighborhood problem-solving, etc.), though they assist with calls as needed.
Response to emergency calls remains our highest priority. Despite great distances that must often be traveled to get to calls, we still respond to the great majority of these calls within five to six minutes or less. While national data on response times is often inconsistent and misleading, response times to emergencies in many cities are as high as eight to 15 minutes.
The calls our officers respond to involve situations that are more complex than what police officers dealt with in the past. Many calls we receive involve individuals in mental-health crises, overdose cases and homelessness. These calls typically require multiple officers, and the transporting of people from one location to another, often removing officers from service for extended periods of time.
Most calls we receive are not emergencies. They include crimes where the perpetrator is gone, quality-of-life issues and questions about civil disputes. Our response time to these calls depends on officer availability and the number of calls holding. Recent media coverage highlighted several delays in responding to lower-level calls, yet noticeably absent from this coverage were the reasons for, and possible solutions to, the delays.
The primary cause for these delays is more calls for service than the department has the capacity to respond to in a timely manner. To put this in perspective, the department responds to over 25,000 calls for service per month. This is a common challenge faced by most police agencies serving larger cities with more complex needs.
As the nature of policing and the resources we have to address public needs change, our response strategies must also change. We are taking steps to reduce delays and improve public satisfaction. These measures include expanding the options available for addressing lower-level calls with alternative responses, such as:
- Utilizing more non-sworn personnel to handle many calls for service over the phone. This includes various property crimes with no suspect or evidence (vehicle break-ins, minor vandalism, etc.), questions about civil disputes, various ongoing neighborhood concerns, and more.
- Reporting various lower-level crimes through the department’s redesigned, easier to use, internet reporting tool (https://www.tucsonaz.gov/apps/crime-reporting/)
- Reporting property damage accidents through the new Collision Reporting Center available at the Midtown Station, which allows individuals to avoid waiting at a crash scene and instead to quickly file a report with both TPD and their insurance company (https://www.tucsonaz.gov/police/collision-center).
- Coming to any TPD station and talking to front desk personnel to file reports, ask questions about crime-related matters, etc. Front desk service is now available until 10 p.m., seven days a week.
- Greater use of non-sworn Community Service Officers to respond to a range of non-urgent calls. We’ve been authorized to hire 11 additional CSOs this coming fiscal year.
- Appointment-based response for calls where it’s mutually convenient to arrange a police response at a later time when the call load is lighter.
Our growing population makes us almost as large as cities like Milwaukee and Baltimore. Yet our rate of economic recovery from the 2008-09 recession — while improving — remains behind many other cities. This made it a high priority for the City Council to pass a structurally balanced budget, which TPD helped make possible. To reduce costs, we reorganized how we do our work and reduced mid-management positions. That said, our resources and staffing are limited.
This means we have to be innovative about how we handle our demanding call load. Our goal is to provide quality service through real community policing that includes neighborhood problem solving and crime-prevention activities. We believe our alternative call response model will help us achieve this goal.
