Tucson Police Captain lays out plan to address shootings in exclusive interview | News

TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) – It’s been a bloody August in Tucson after a series of recent shootings. There have been more than ten this month including a case where more than 180 rounds were fired near Speedway and Swan.

The violence has been a draw on the already limited resources at the Department.

Tucson Police Captain Doug Foster spoke exclusively with News 4 Tucson to explain what different steps they are taking to try and control the sudden violent outburst.

Foster said that crime overall remains on a downward trend but he is concerned that shootings are surging.

“No crime is acceptable in our community and when we think about these larger scale crimes like Speedway and Swan and the 5th street homicide where we have hundreds of rounds going down range, those we absolutely need to address aggressively,” he said.

Captain Foster said the department has recently been leaning into the philosophy of what’s known as evidence based policing, that could be part of a larger academic discussion but basically means policing should be based on a scientific analysis of what works best with heavy input from residents.

“What we did was look at what are those specific locations across town that are driving gun violence,” Foster explained.

He said in the past they saw success using a team approach of involving multiple other City and regional agencies, to identify what drives violence involving guns in particular neighborhoods.  

“When we applied this team based approach we saw a 75 percent reduction specific to those areas,” he said. So what we are trying to do now is apply that same team approach to different areas of the city to better address gun violence.”

News 4 Tucson spoke with City Councilmember Karin Ulrich who represents the area near Swan and Speedway where the 180 rounds were fired. She met with Capt. Foster and Chief Chad Kasmar last week to hear about their efforts to address the violence.

“They are doing incredibly good investigative work,” she said. 

But she believes there are still important steps to be taken.

“We need to understand what the triggers are,” she said.

Capt. Foster says gang activity in Tucson has seen many different evolutions. Today they are seeing the traditional type of street gang activity mixed with a social media influenced type of gang activity.

“It is definitely present and has contributed to some of these incidents recently,” he said.

Foster said that TPD has a good record of solving shootings and remains above 60%, more than the national average.

 

 

 

 

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