On a Wednesday morning in April, police and community service officers circled up behind the Chuck-E-Cheese on Speedway Boulevard to launch the 18th Safe City deployment.
According to the City of Tucson, the purpose of these deployments is to enforce homelessness-related local laws and connect people with medical, justice and housing services.
For this deployment, AZPM joined Lead Patrol Officer Matthew Timpf, who has been with the Tucson Police Department for 18 years. After a quick briefing, the team was on its way to Alamo wash.
“We are going specifically to a shopping center at Broadway and Wilmot, where there's a bar called the Salty Dog,” Timpf said. “There's an underpass that's from Park Place Mall. A lot of transients and unhoused live underneath there. The business owners around there have had enough of them hanging out down there.”
Pulling up to the first location at Alamo wash, police were welcomed by a bike, a shopping cart, trash cans, a box full of magazines and an unopened box of a power scrubber kit — along with some drug paraphernalia. Soon after, eight people came out of the tunnel one by one.
Officer Timpf said the unhoused — including many familiar faces to him — have been told multiple times to vacate the wash, as the City of Tucson voted last June to make camping in city washes and parks a misdemeanor.
But the unhoused keep coming back, including a woman who told AZPM she has been living there for 13 years. Officer Timpf said she is mentally ill and is a known meth smoker.
Another resident of the wash who spoke with AZPM said he is looking for a job, but he finds it difficult without proper clothing, an ID or a cell phone.
After several people in the wash were arrested for trespassing, officers drove them back to the Chuck-E-Cheese, where they could schedule their court date and meet with service providers.
“People who use drugs are still people. You may see that person bent over or using at a bus stop, but that's still somebody's mother, that's still somebody's father, sister, brother, cousin,” said Desire Auge from Community Medical Services. “Once we start losing sight of humanity, that compassion and empathy start going away, and we're just treating the fellow human beings as if they're disposable, and nobody's disposable.”
Jodii Weiner represented the Primavera Foundation at the deployment.
“I always come with a minimum of two open beds at our men's shelter, and I have STAR Village, and also the Casa Paloma for women. I always put in a call to them and let them know we're going to be doing a deployment on this day so that I can have that information when we are out here,” she said.
The deployment also took officers to a wash near an east side Hampton Inn, where officers found an encampment along with its sole female resident. She told officers that while she has family in Arizona, she is staying on the streets because “it is free.”
Auge said while some unhoused people struggling with addiction are hesitant, kindness goes a long way towards steering people to treatment and housing.
“Coming out, giving them snacks, water, you know, giving them that little piece of humanity back then, it's going to make a little bit more of a difference. So even though they don't say yes right away, they'll say yes later on,” she said.
Timpf hopes these deployments help at least one unhoused person to find their way to a better life.
“I think what would be a success would be if one person gets the resources they need and is able to combat their addiction issues and maybe get off the street and their high-risk behavior,” he said.
By the end of the three-hour deployment, officers contacted 16 individuals and offered various forms of help, including being taken to Addiction Recovery Services or an emergency shelter, or receiving an ID voucher or haircut for a job interview.
