Tucson Council candidates struggle with solutions to public safety issues

When Tucson Mayor Regina Romero unveiled her Safe City initiative earlier this month, she acknowledged that Tucsonans are unhappy with problems related to homelessness, drug addiction and petty crime.

“There’s palpable frustration from neighbors and residents in our city, there’s palpable frustration from our officers on the ground, our firefighters, even our Housing First navigators, our community safety, health and wellness care coordinators,” said Romero during a City Hall meeting.

At the meeting, Police Chief Chad Kasmar said there’s no silver bullet that will solve these entrenched problems.

“There’s no one simple solution,” he said. “There’s no way to just add more officers. There’s no way just to add more care coordinators. There’s no way to say, ‘OK, we’re only going to do one thing.’”

Tucson police have increased their felony arrests by 50 percent and misdemeanor arrests by 100 percent over the last five years, according to Kasmar, who added that last year, Tucson police made more than 17,000 arrests. Of those, about one fourth were drug-related.

Kasmar said he hopes to get up to 900 sworn officers on the force, which currently has fewer than 800 – a significant drop from 2010, when the city had 1,113 authorized positions.

He has also worked to expand the force with “community safety officers,” who are not sworn officers but who can respond to some calls such as traffic accidents, and “professional staff investigators,” who likewise are not sworn officers but who can help with investigations.

TPD has about 130 CSOs on staff plus about 30 professional staff investigators and hopes to expand that number to 300.

Romero said some of Tucson’s problems — such as mentally ill people on the streets who decline services, or people who are addicted to drugs — need the kind of services that the Pima County Health Department or state and federal programs should be helping with.

And while the City Council has moved forward with increasing Tucson’s number of affordable housing units by partnering with the private sector to build more apartments and rehab old motels, housing costs have continued to rise.

Assistant City Manager Liz Morales said it is “really hard” to find apartments or rental homes for people who are living in Tucson’s temporary shelters or affordable housing units, especially with the way that rents and home prices have increased.

“And so how do we get them into employment opportunities, workforce training programs?” she said. “We’re trying to figure out how to get them so that they can sustain their own housing.”

Meanwhile, the city’s drug problems have accelerated thanks to fentanyl, the synthetic opioid which is cheap and plentiful on streets. Kasmar said the city had seen minor increases in the price, but it’s not enough to dissuade most users from using it.

Earlier this year, Ward 4 Councilmember Nikki Lee suggested creating a new misdemeanor offence related to public drug use. Lee has said that by creating a misdemeanor offense, cases would be handled in city court instead of Pima County Superior Court, which requires County Attorney Laura Conover to press felony changes.

Romero, who joined the Council in voting to have city staff explore the idea, said she is concerned that Conover is not pursuing those cases and building a criminal record — even a misdemeanor one — could potentially give the city a lever to get people into drug rehab programs.

“We’re going to offer resources and try and leverage and arrest for them to take advantage of the resources there are,” Romero said. “But if someone is committing a crime, we are going to do everything we possibly can to arrest them and put them through the justice system.”

“Our officers have done an exceptional job with arrest, but there’s no prosecution,” Romero added. “We need our Pima County attorney to come to the table to tell us what she is willing to do in terms of prosecution.”

Here’s where this year’s crop of candidates for City Council stand on some of the city’s public safety issues. Voters will decide the races on Nov. 4.

Ward 6

Republican Jay Tolkoff, who is running to represent Midtown Ward 6, said he believes the city needs to hire more cops and pay them more.

“We need to have law enforcement,” Tolkoff said at a League of Women Voters forum in July. “Otherwise, we might as well not have laws. And we were at 1,400 officers at one time; we’re less than 800 now. We need to fully fund our first responders. Period.”

Tolkoff said he generally supports Lee’s proposal to create a new misdemeanor offense related to public drug use, but is concerned about potential unintended consequences, such as overloading Tucson City Court or the City Attorney’s Office.

Tolkoff said having more police officers is “the same idea of having chaperones at a school dance.”

“When there’s somebody there who oversees and has some authority, it keeps things in check,” Tolkoff said. “To have that few cops, if you do the math, that means there’s one patrol officer for every six square miles of this town. It just doesn’t make sense. … And it’s not about militarizing the police and jack-booted thugs and all that other kind of stuff. It’s just having people out there that can interact with the community and build relationships.”

While Tucson’s crime and homelessness issues inspired him to run for City Council, he conceded that he doesn’t have all the answers.

“You can’t know everything,” he said. “And sometimes, something’s thrown at you, and you just have to look at the facts that you’re dealing with and make the best possible decision on a moment’s notice.”

His opponent in the Ward 6 race, Democrat Miranda Schubert, said she supported “ensuring that staffing levels are appropriate and responsive to the city’s needs, and that certainly includes police and fire and public safety in general.”

But she added that she believes traditional policing methods need to change.

“We need to reduce our reliance on traditional policing methods in favor of proven strategies that focus on prevention and long-term solutions that address the root causes of crime,” she said.

A community organizer who is making her second run in Midtown Ward 6 after an unsuccessful bid to unseat then-Councilmember Steve Kozachik in the 2021 Democratic primary, Schubert said having more jobs and affordable housing would reduce crime.

“When it comes to crime, by and large, most crimes are crimes of desperation and survival, and we need to provide individuals with a way to thrive, with a way to be compliant to the system, to find jobs and employment that works for them and to find housing, and that’s how we prevent crime,” she said at the League of Women Voters forum.

Schubert said she thought Lee’s proposal to create a new misdemeanor offense related to public drug use was worth exploring.

“I was glad to hear the mayor and Council and police chief state that the goal is not to criminalize drug use,” she said. “It is important to approach this decision carefully and make sure we are setting ourselves up for success: drastically increasing the number of people in treatment and on the pathway to long-term recovery.”

Both candidates say they support the city’s efforts to hire more community safety officers and professional staff investigators.

Ward 3

Ward 3 Councilmember Kevin Dahl, who is seeking a second term, said he believes the Police Department is understaffed and he wants to hire more cops.

“I’d like to see more officers hired,” Dahl said. “We need a couple hundred more to be where we were at our peak. I would love to see more bike patrol units brought online.”

He said he supported raises for the police as well but added that the city is facing rough budget times ahead with the loss of federal funding under the Trump administration and a decrease in state shared revenues because Gov. Doug Ducey and GOP lawmakers instituted a flat income tax that sharply reduced taxes for Arizona’s highest earners and has reduced the amount of money flowing to Arizona cities and towns.

“I would love to be able to pay more but that will be a balancing act as we deal with the reduction of state funds due to the flat tax,” Dahl said.

Dahl supported the city’s Prop. 414, which was rejected by 70 percent of Tucson voters in March. The proposition increased the city’s sales tax by half a cent to hire more cops and firefighters as well as provided additional funding for services for the homeless and low-income Tucsonans.

If it had passed, the proposition would have provided an estimated additional 40 officers at a cost of $5.6 million a year as well as 40 more professional staff investigators and community service officers at a cost of $2.6 million a year.

Dahl has since proposed asking voters to approve two separate quarter-cent sales tax propositions: One to fund public safety and a second to address issues related to homelessness, affordable housing and social services.

His challenger, Republican Janet “JL” Wittenbraker, opposed Prop. 414.

Wittenbraker, a former assistant in the City Manager’s Office who has previous run unsuccessfully for mayor in 2023 and the Pima County Board of Supervisors in 2024, said Romero’s Safe City proposal seemed like “more of the same.”

She said that the City Council needs to increase funding for police so they earn more in order to improve retention as well as recruit new officers.

She said police should focus on drug dealers – “Those are the people who need to go to jail for a long, long time” – and not users.

“I don’t want to see our users hurt, and we see it far too often on our streets,” she said.

Wittenbraker said she wasn’t sure if Lee’s proposal to create a misdemeanor drug offense would do much good.

“What would be the result of turning it into a misdemeanor?” Wittenbraker said. “OK, you can run it through the city courts. So what then can city courts do?”