Tucson program offers help to unhoused people — but if they say no, there could be consequences

The Tucson City Council on Tuesday will hear a presentation about a new pilot program called the Focused Deterrence Quality of Life Initiative. It’s a six-month pilot and appears to be focused on the city’s northwest side.

Yana Kunichoff, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria, has she’s written about this and spoke to The Show about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Yana, how will this program work? What is exactly the plan here?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, what we know so far is that the Tucson Police Department will be looking at their data to make a list of people who have had a high number of what they call quality-of-life offenses. So these are misdemeanor offenses, with examples like trespassing, loitering, drug paraphernalia, public urination.

And they’re going to figure out who is doing these the most. And then they’re going to send out a team, mostly Tucson Police Department folks, but also street-outreach people, to try to target those people, offer them services. Or if they say no, or if they don’t choose to go, if they’re a drug user, but they don’t choose to go to rehab, it sounds like there could be harsher criminal penalties.

MARK BRODIE: And what does the Police Department, and maybe the City Council, what do they say are the goals of doing this? What do they hope to achieve?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, it’s kind of an interesting place that after months of discussion, the city has basically wanted to be able to more harshly charge people who — I think it’s particularly who they see as using substances in public in a way that they’ve gotten a lot of public response or concern about.

And they’ve tried to work with the Pima County Attorney’s Office to encourage them to charge people and try to kind of make those cases stick, essentially. ... They’ve also tried to consider whether they would have a new type of charge that would come through the city of Tucson and the city of Tucson’s courts.

And none of those things have really been able to stick for reasons of whether the public bodies have agreed or the costs. So I think this is part of a larger effort to show residents that they are responding to what people perceive as concerns about visibly homeless people in Tucson.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so it’s interesting that instead of just doing that, they are first offering services. It’s almost like there’s a carrot and a stick approach, all in one here.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, and I think that that has really characterized Tucson’s approach to engaging with the reality of having — I think the numbers are over 2,000 unhoused people in the city. I think even under their Safe City initiative, when they send out street deployments of Tucson police officers, they will also send out street outreach to help people find housing, to maybe help people get into other supportive programs.

I think where it becomes a little bit more complicated is that the numbers show that most people that they’re engaging with end up with charges, more than they go into supportive programs. So that’s sort of the preponderance of what comes out of these efforts ... but they are doing both from what I’ve seen.

MARK BRODIE: Do the services exist? Like if they contact somebody and the person says, “Sure, I will accept assistance,” is there assistance to be had?

YANA KUNICHOFF: I think it really depends on what kind of assistance that person needs. There are options, in my understanding, for folks who are looking for support with substance use. The county now runs a safer center. So I think there’s opportunities for detox spaces, and there’s been an investment in that over the past year.

I think when we’re talking about housing, it gets a lot more complicated. There’s emergency shelter and different shelter options. A lot of those have very specific rules. There’s transitional housing, but there’s just honestly, there’s not enough of those services for everyone that wants them to get them.

And the reality is also that to access those, a person needs to often have a working cellphone, they need to be reachable in some way, they need to respond to messages. Or they’re going to fall back off that — not exactly that list, but off that sort of conveyor belt towards those services. So I think the reality is that to actually successfully receive them is just not happening as often.

MARK BRODIE: So Yana, you alluded to this, but I want to ask you more specifically about how this initiative fits into the broader picture in Tucson with how officials have been trying to deal with some of the issues that residents are facing —both those who are looking for housing or need help with addiction, and also the residents who are complaining about those people.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think there’s a real tension happening. Several years ago, a Supreme Court decision called Grants Pass allowed localities to say that they could restrict people from sleeping outside in public spaces, even if those people had nowhere else to go. And Tucson is among a number of localities that has used that to help drive their policy.

So Tucson over the past two years has passed ordinances limiting where people can sleep in washes and parks. They’ve also responded to kind of an ongoing level of concern about seeing people at bus stops and a sense that people don’t feel unsafe there.

I think at the same time, Tucson has worked to invest in affordable housing, in emergency shelter. But those are much longer-term projects. And I think those things have sort of, to me, created a conflation with the idea that everybody who is homeless is also suffering from drug addiction.

But I think there’s also just the reality that we have a huge housing gap. So I think there is a reality that there’s both not enough housing and that there are folks who are on the streets and not able to access it. And they are often met with enforcement tools as often as help, is what I am hearing from people who are living on the street.

MARK BRODIE: So you reported that neither the Tucson City Council or the Police Department responded to requests for comment. What do we still not know about this? What do you still feel like residents in Tucson need to find out about this?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think there’s some practical questions here, like when will this start? How the Tucson Police Department will report to the City Council about it. I think there’s kind of broader questions. The people that are going to be on this list have already had a lot of criminal legal system engagement, that is why they are on this list. And has that in other instances led to them changing their behavior or shifted how often they engage? And if it hasn’t, what will this pilot do that is different?

And I also think that what is different with this effort compared to several months ago when the city was trying to pass an ordinance that would have potentially changed how they charge people with public drug use, is that this is really the only time before this program starts, in my understanding, that it’s going to appear in front of the public.

So this isn’t going to go to a City Council vote. There’s no ... specific voting action that’s expected from mayor and council. So this is kind of like the public moment to engage before implementation. So I’m also just wondering how they’re going to bring public response in to a program like this.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Yana Kunichoff with Arizona Luminaria. Yana, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, thanks for your time, Mark.

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