Tucson city officials stressed their commitment to addressing public drug use and homelessness on Thursday by proposing targets to measure the success of their efforts.
The targets are in a draft action plan for the Safe City Initiative started by Tucson Mayor Regina Romero late last year.
“The goal is to connect individuals to resources that they need,” said Romero at a roundtable announcing the draft action plan on Thursday.
At the roundtable, city officials discussed policies undertaken in the past few months: joint deployments between police officers and social workers, new shelter and detox facilities such as STAR Village and the SAFR Center, a transit safety plan and a map of pedestrian deaths.
The draft action plan proposes metrics to measure the success of those efforts. By the end of the year, it aims to essentially triple the number of a post-jail transition center’s clients finding shelter from last year’s rate of about 10% to at least 30% in 2026. According to the center’s 2025 annual report, 260 clients were referred to shelters or medical treatment that year, out of 2,470 total clients.
The plan aims to reduce the amount of safety incidents on the public transit system compared to last year. It also aims to boost the rate of people accepting services from street-based homeless outreach workers by 10%. The current rate is just under 50%, according to Lane Mandle, the Tucson City Manager's chief of staff, who said the city doesn't yet compile all the data it hopes to track, but will begin doing so.
Tom Volgy, who was the mayor of Tucson from 1987 to 1991 and is on the task force that helped write the plan, said the metrics are something “very important that cities are often afraid to do.”
He also said Tucson's approach differs from past attempts to tackle public drug use and homelessness.
“Thirty, thirty-five years ago, virtually every city was looking for the silver bullet, the one that would address all of this overnight,” he said. “There is no silver bullet.”
While officials struck an optimistic tone at the roundtable, they said Tucson needs more low-barrier shelters and mental health treatment services. They also said the city has little ability to track long-term outcomes for people who pass through local shelters and drug programs.
“That is one of our directives to go work on,” said Assistant City Manager Liz Morales.
The draft action plan aims to have 65% of people staying in city-owned shelters “exit with a positive housing placement.” Morales said the new SAFR Center detox facility is working with the University of Arizona to track patients’ outcomes.
The draft plan also aims to deflect 20% more drug users from arrest compared to last year. Deflection is a Tucson Police Department program that allows officers to offer drug treatment for people caught with narcotics rather than arresting them. As street drugs have become more addictive, far fewer users have been choosing this option. Between Jan. 1 and Dec. 29 of last year, 280 people chose deflection, according to TPD, down from over 500 the previous year.
But the number of deflections has recently risen again. There were 95 deflections in the five months before the Safe City Initiative started in October, Romero said at the roundtable, compared to 188 in the five months since.
Under the initiative, monthly deployments of police officers and social workers have been able to arrest people, arraign them through a video call and introduce them to housing and rehab services at the same time. The units are deployed to different locations each month based on crime data and local complaints, said TPD Assistant Chief Stacie Schaner at the roundtable.
Social workers and officers did not work together as extensively before, said Brian Corcoran, a lieutenant with TPD.
“We have our lane. And the outreach workers have their lane. But when we put us all together, it kind of does make a giant unit that can do wonders out here,” he said at one deployment’s staging area behind a Dairy Queen store on Alvernon Way on Wednesday.
According to a Feb. 18 city memo, deployments in December and January have reached 54 people, with 27 accepting services and “multiple arrests.” Separate, TPD-centric deployments along river paths and washes yielded 67 new criminal charges, according to the memo.
The city has largely moved on from its past policy of leaving some minor encampments in place, according to Morales.
“We do a lot less leaving encampments in place if we are demonstrating it’s a nuisance or a safety issue. We really work hard to place people into shelters,” Morales said on Thursday.
In November, the Arizona Court of Appeals had ruled that Tucson is liable for public nuisances stemming from its encampment policy.
