Among city initiatives, county programs and non-profit efforts, there are a kaleidoscope of different ways city officials are working to address the reality that many people are living on the streets in Tucson, and that the city is buffeted by complaints about trespassing and public drug use.
This year, buoyed in part by access to opioid funds received by localities around the country as part of a settlement against pharmaceutical companies, a series of new packages and initiatives are moving in the region.
Public officials from Tucson and Pima County discussed the initiatives at a joint meeting held Tuesday, March 3.
Data from Tucson’s safety initiative
Last fall, Tucson launched its Safe City Initiative that brings all of the city’s enforcement-related work together and couples it with resources.
Assistant City Manager Liz Morales laid out some key figures of the initiative which, since November, has seen 15 deployments that involved an effort to enforce rules against trespassing and public drug use while offering social services:
- Police have made over 360 contacts
- Those resulted in 328 arrests with 1,097 total charges that include 332 misdemeanors, 68 felonies, 345 misdemeanor warrants and 24 felony warrants
- Deployments also facilitated 29 shelter placements, 26 detox acceptances and 15 medical-assisted treatment referalls
- Clearance of 53 encampments
The Safe City Task Force, a group of community leaders brought together to develop ways to address the overlapping issues of homelessness, substance use and concerns about crime, has also met regularly since their first meeting in November.
See what the initiative looks like on the ground level from a Luminaria story in February.
“Incarceration is not the goal. Stabilization and treatment are,” according to the presentation shared by Morales.
Still, critics of the program have said they want to see more deflection and less arrest.
Keith Bentele, an associate research professor at the University of Arizona who studies homelessness, says deflection programs in which officers have discretion at the point of contact for lower-level crimes, offering resources or transportation to treatment instead of arrest have shown benefits.
“Folks who were deflected as opposed to arrested had better outcomes in terms of their mental health,” he said. “We also looked at housing stability and a bunch of other outcomes, but generally the pattern was the same.”
Read more about the Safe City Initiative Action Plan here.
New recovery center open
A new recovery center funded with opioid settlement dollars opened its doors in December.
The Pima County Board of Supervisors awarded a $1.8 million contract to addiction health support organization Community Bridges to start a new recovery center, called the Sobering Alternative for Recovery, or SAFR, at 250 S. Toole Ave.
The goal of the center is to bring people experiencing addiction or a substance use disorder to the center and offer them the opportunity to begin recovery. The center takes referrals from police, hospitals and people walking in.
“This is something new we are all trying,” Mayor Regina Romero said at the meeting. Before, she said, someone arrested by police could spend hours waiting at a hospital to be seen or be dropped off at the local jail. “It’s a warm handoff from a police officer to someone that works at SAFR.”
Pima County Public Health Director Theresa Cullen gave the presentation Tuesday. “When people go to the health care system that have a substance use disorder, it may not be the appropriate place for them,” Cullen said. “Our hope is to decrease some of the burden that we’re seeing on the health care system.”
There are a few ways that the SAFR center is unique, said Cullen and Morales. First, it doesn’t require people to have insurance to get treatment. “When someone comes in, that whole piece of eligibility is taken off the table,” Morales said.
The center has 15 beds, all of which are actual beds, rather than the recliners many sobering centers have.
People can also stay for 96 hours, up from the usual 48. “The reason for that is how difficult it is to get people into care,” Cullen said.
People are also allowed to bring pets, and there is storage space for their belongings.
Cullen said that having 15% of people come through a sobering center and stay for some sort of treatment was considered a success.
In Pima County’s center, those numbers were fluctuating so far, she said: the first two weeks saw no admissions. The week of Feb. 8-14, 17 people came in and three went to treatment. The week of Feb. 21 saw 14 people come in and seven transition to a behavioural unit.
“Some weeks we appear to be doing very well, other weeks we have very few people going into treatment,” she said. “That is not unexpected because there is not a control mechanism of who gets referred there and/or who elects to stay.”
New law enforcement training
Pima County Attorney Laura Conover’s office is training local law enforcement on what information to collect during arrests to help prosecutors move cases forward.
The new training aims to identify whether someone will cause ongoing harm to the community, and gives officers working on the ground tools for how to assess if that is the case.
“If we can improve who we are focusing on at that first hearing, and get better outcomes at the first hearing, we can go so far,” Conover said Tuesday.
Conover delivered a training to 80 regional law enforcement officers in early December, she told officials at the meeting.
“Prosecutors are already reporting tremendous success,” Conover said.
That is also part of an ongoing effort by the attorney’s office to move away from cash bail.
The new training from PCOA follows months of tension over how the Pima County Attorney’s Office prosecutes public drug use.
Possession of controlled substances is currently a felony, which means that while Tucson police can arrest a person, it’s up to the attorney’s office to prosecute the case through the courts.
City officials said that didn’t happen often enough, and moved to create a misdemeanor option that would use city of Tucson courts instead. Exploring that effort has since been paused for cost reasons amid an ongoing budget crunch.
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