An increase in Tucson's homelessness, how Tucson police and social services are responding.

Is allowing them to camp there, are we being too lenient?

Are we going to enable more camps?

The need to find housing challenged by the ongoing pandemic.

These are folks who historically have stayed further out in washes, further in desert areas, much more afraid of detection.

It's that time of year, flu shots.

What public health officials want you to consider.

The reduced immunity that we have due to the lack of flu virus over the last year could result in early and perhaps severe flu season.

Hello and welcome to Arizona 360.

I'm Tony Paniagua, filling in for Lorraine Rivera, thanks for joining us.

An increase in homelessness prompted the Tucson Police Department to create a new unit dedicated to offering the transient population social services.

The homeless outreach unit began in 2020.

To date, its officers have contacted nearly two thousand men and women who live on the streets.

It is estimated at least eight hundred encampments are within city limits.

And every month, police and fire personnel are responding to thousands of calls related to the homeless.

Arizona 360 recently saw the homeless outreach unit in action.

So I'm thinking back here.

This is the Tucson Police Department's homeless outreach team.

Today, Officer Jacob Valenzuela and Josh Parrish are partnered up with Kelly Ross from Community Bridges Inc.

The effort unifies law enforcement and social services.

The trio is searching the Julian Wash.

So there's nobody up there a problem area.

This unit has been here four times in the last year.

The team fields calls from residents, neighborhood associations and businesses.

They've been bouncing around and there's been periodic issues with the businesses.

One, it's unsightly.

And we understand that nobody wants to go to a business that has a homeless camp in front of it.

So we we feel that stress from the businesses.

We try to help alleviate that.

But to help kind of deter some of that, a lot of the businesses have been starting to upgrade some of their facilities, whether that's increased fencing and barbed wire or lighting, just working on some sort of engineering options to help kind of protect their business while we're trying to get these folks off the street.

Further south, and east we traveled to Harris Park across from Davis Monthan Air Force Base, homeless encampments, dot golf links, road along aviation bikeway.

Hello, anybody home?

The tents continue west toward Freedom Park.

Hundreds of men and women call these makeshift structures home.

Shayna has been here for two months.

Boyfriend lost his job.

And we just kind of stand in hotels and then the hotel stay in for four years, go to expensive.

So that was the end of the road.

And I don't know where to go from here.

A mom, she's lost custody of all three of her children.

Every month.

She goes to her grandmother's house to pick up her disability check that she uses to feed her addiction to opiates.

Officer Parrish believes he can get Shayna into treatment.

Probably at this point, I might.

So I think she's fairly receptive to getting help today.

One of the issues I see that's going to be an issue is just how much stuff she has, whether or not she's willing to separate with some of that.

Typically with shelters, the biggest barriers we see for people willing to go into a shelter space is they can't bring their dog or, you know, animal with them.

They can't stay with their significant other and they can only bring a couple of bags of their property.

So when you're out here and you have, you know, your camp is, all of the property you own, you don't want to separate with that You don't know what's going to happen after you go to the shelter.

Maybe you don't stay there.

Maybe you move into an apartment after that and great, the systems work.

But now if something happens, you're back on the street.

For weeks, the unit warned these transients that even though they didn't have to leave, they would need to move out of sight.

It's so visible from the road, we finally got enough pressure that we got to come clean everything up.

Officer Parrish explained the process to this woman who came to help her brother.

So just leave the trash, grab the stuff you want to keep.

But we're hoping to be able to do is the folks on the other side of the pedestrian bridge.

They keep everything real small, real clean.

Right.

And hidden a little bit at least.

So it's not so visible from the road.

We're going to try and coordinate with environmental services to do periodic trash pickups.

The next morning, crews from Environmental Services cleaned up the site.

Shayna was still there.

We can move them over and over and over, but it just becomes someone else's problem.

And they're dealing with their own problems.

You know, they're they're people, too.

They have emotions, they have feelings.

And it's tough on them too, they're not out here just living the life.

It's it's a struggle for them as well.

And I think a lot of people don't realize that that until we find a long term solution where they can get off the street, that that's going to be our only out, because all they have is, is these camps.

These are their homes.

You guys are going to go to a Golf Links and Craycroft correct?

The homeless outreach team was the idea of Sgt.

Jack Julsing, at six foot seven, he towers inside of TPD squad room that houses specialized units.

Get them get them past that bridge.

Closer to Swann... a former U of A offensive lineman who stayed in Tucson following college.

Julsing joined the police department and after responding to many of the same issues with homelessness, he pitched an idea that partners public safety with social services.

For him, it's where enforcement incorporates compassion.

Little messy here.

But these are all kind of donations.

The unit began in January of 2020.

New and small, three sworn officers alongside five parks safety personnel who monitor the entire city's more than 220 square miles.

Officer discretion, Julsing says, plays a role in policing.

Part of it is, yes, there are offenses and we have to enforce the statutes when applicable.

But there's the letter of the law in the spirit of the law.

And I want people to really understand, like, does it does it really help the overall issue?

If you're going to charge every offense, every time you see a homeless person panhandling or loitering?

Maybe a better option would be to see what issues are you struggling with?

Can I take you somewhere?

You can't be panhandling here, but I do want to help you get in touch with somebody that can provide you some housing or maybe provide you some detox or mental health treatment.

And I think that's a better approach than just saying I see a panhandler, I'm going to just arrest them for panhandling.

The medians and frontage roads along I 10 are notable areas these days.

Traffic backs up there.

They know it takes forever to get on the freeway from Grant, right?

Even Speedway.

And so they know, hey, this is where I can make my money.

Although this area can be enforced by state and local authorities, it often comes down to resources.

Most homeless people would take a key to some form of permanent supportive housing.

And I know people say, well, of course they would.

That's free money for them.

But a homeless individual cost us on the streets.

Thirty thousand dollars a year through all the medical issues and criminal issues and all that.

That's what the cost on the streets.

It only costs ten thousand dollars a year to house them.

So it's actually a better spend of money.

Waiting for housing is another factor.

He might have done some risk assessment form to get in housing.

It just takes three to six months.

It doesn't happen just like that.

Certain people can get housing quicker.

Veterans, you know, women that are pregnant, people with children.

But if you're an able bodied individual and you don't you're not eligible for certain programs, you might be waiting three to six months or even longer to get some sort of housing matched for you.

It's an issue nearly every major city faces, and it weighs heavily on this officer.

It's something I still battle with, right.

Is allowing them to camp there.

Are we being too lenient or are we going to enable more camps?

There's a lot of times where I'm like, what's our complaint on this camp?

Is it just that they're there?

OK, well, let's get outreach to them and give them a shot and try to talk about, hey, they are in the wash or they are in that tunnel, but they're trying not to bother anybody and we're trying to get them outreach.

I have to have a balance.

And so I can't give you one side or the other.

It's a lot of gray for me.

It's not easy to know exactly how many people are chronically homeless in Tucson, but one estimate puts the number between two and four thousand.

Many of the challenges with homelessness can be attributed to the pandemic.

Shelters have to reduce services while certain jobs ended.

Those factors, in addition to housing market increases, created a new need the city of Tucson and Pima County have tried to manage.

Jason Thorpe oversees those efforts.

So when the pandemic first began, immediately, the city and the county and others began working together to move people out of congregate shelters, particularly those who were at high risk of severe medical complication associated with COVID 19 or people who had contracted COVID 19 and putting them into hotel rooms in other locations to reduce the number of people staying in any one congregate facility.

And so at that time, there were about 700 in 70 emergency shelter beds for people experiencing homelessness throughout Pima County.

And rapidly, the traditional shelter capacity decreased to about 25 percent of that over the course of two weeks.

We were able first to launch about 300 additional shelter spaces and hotels which ran for several months.

And then at the end of that hotel period, there's been an opportunity where congregate shelters have been able to begin to to increase their capacity, but not to the same level that it was before the pandemic.

And of course, we've reported in the past about how the city of Tucson has taken millions of dollars from the federal government and used some of that money to buy buildings to provide housing for people who are in homeless situations.

Yet we continue to see the camps, the encampments all around town.

What is happening out there?

So we do believe that there has been some increase in unsheltered homelessness so people sleeping outside over the last year, and we expect that's probably an increase.

Somewhere between 150 and 200 people based on the best data estimates that we had, unsheltered people are notoriously hard to count.

So where we know that there is some increase, we actually know that what we're seeing right now of more visibility of unsheltered people is actually a community awakening to the crisis of homelessness in Tucson.

So these are folks who historically have stayed further out in washes, further in desert areas, much more afraid of detection.

And so during the pandemic protocol, so law enforcement activity that moved people that were staying there were sleeping in places not meant for human habitation along into other areas.

Those activities were ended, right.

So they were paused throughout the pandemic to prevent the spread of the virus risk to people who are unsheltered, as well as their people contacting them.

And so then what we've seen are more homeless people being visible in our community.

And so what we're seeing right now is a crisis of visibility.

And it's a moment for all of us, I think, as Tucsonans to really band together to work to end homelessness.

These are our community members and they've always been here.

We're seeing them more regularly now.

You mentioned visibility.

The county and the city have been working on, quote, reducing that visibility.

But that's obviously not a solution to the long term problem, is it?

Absolutely.

So reducing the visibility doesn't change homelessness.

Right.

And the real the real tragedy here is homelessness.

And so the city and the county and others, I always want to acknowledge the incredible work that nonprofit partners are doing throughout the community, are working to reduce homelessness.

And we've seen gains in those areas.

So while the overall numbers are increasing, we're seeing pretty among people who are chronically homeless, for example.

So chronically homeless people are those the folks who are in sort of the most hard to serve, that the people that someone generally thinks of when they try to envision what homelessness looks like , someone maybe who has complicated mental health history, things like that, chronically homeless people.

About a year ago, there was a six month period where we did a study of our rates of housing that was really hard to serve homeless folks.

And we saw that we were housing about six of those people a month.

So while the homeless response system was providing lots of housing, it wasn't reaching the folks who had that most critical need or the people you see sleeping outside beside a tent or in a park.

And we looked at the same six month period this year and had made a number of changes in our system and how we prioritize people for housing over the last year.

So when we looked at that same six month period this year, we saw that we were housing about 23 people on average a month from that really high risk pool, which is an increase of about 280 percent in terms of our rates of housing.

Those folks who are the most the most at risk and those who have the greatest risk of complication and really fatality on the streets.

So currently, the federal government, through a recent allocation, has now released a home investment partnership funds through the American rescue plan.

And our communities are receiving about twelve point seven million dollars in that funding, which is really geared more at that long term housing stability, supportive services, those key elements you're talking about, and really building up the housing capacity.

So increasing stock through development or acquisition of properties.

Do we see an early pandemic, this response that was really short term focused and now pivoting with federal funds to a more longer term solution that really looks at how to build the housing capacity in the community to support low income and homeless people.

All right, Jason Thorpe from the city of Tucson Housing and Development Department, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

As you saw earlier, it is common for homeless people to frequent parks, a long time problem area was Anza Park near Stone Avenue and Speedway Boulevard.

After years of listening sessions, police investigations and finally voter approved funding, the park has been revamped.

This fall marks a new beginning for Anza Park on Speedway Boulevard, north of downtown Tucson.

A dog park with grass is a draw for pet owners like Jaylyla Buchanan.

She adopted Koko the day before we met.

I saw it on the Internet and it says small dogs and big dogs.

I was like, OK, why not?

So we had to get out of the house.

Today is also a first for Marco Celeya and Pluto.

I think this is my my new park of choice.

Yeah, stories like that are welcome news for Tom Fisher, a project manager for the city of Tucson Parks and Recreation Department.

In 2018, voters approved Proposition 407, a 10 year program earmarking one hundred and thirty three million dollars for improvements throughout the city.

One of the first priorities Anza Park, a Tucson mainstay since 1917.

This is the gateway, one of the gateways to Tucson.

So it's very visible.

It is it does have its issues because it is close to downtown.

And just like a lot of big cities in the United States, it's a magnet for trouble and homeless folks that don't have a better place to hang out during the day.

Fisher was on task to work with the West University Neighborhood Association and Tucson Police to revamp this historic park and its checkered past.

One of the things that we heard loud and clear during the master planning process, were concerns about crime and about cleanliness of the park.

And it wasn't just homeless folks.

There were some serious troublemakers.

There was a drug ring that was here that got broken up thankfully.

In the last six months, there was a prostitution ring that was broken up.

And once those elements were out of the park, then it got a lot more peaceful and safe at the park.

And so the residents were very appreciative of that effort.

But the second thing was for the Parks Department to activate the park with physical improvements.

One of the first fixes was the dog park.

Second on the list, plans for a new restroom, replacing the one that's been here since the 1950s.

The rough type, it's going to be a corrugated metal roof.

That's part of the historical character of this neighborhood.

We don't do solid doors on restrooms anymore because we want to have visibility over time.

Fisher says the city expects to improve walkways and out of basketball court.

And the homeless people continue to frequent the park every day.

It seems there are other new visitors, and that's exactly what Judy Sensibar had hoped would happen.

She's the president of the West University Neighborhood Association and has lived in the area for more than 20 years.

It wasn't just that the drugs, it was the illegal activity that comes with the drugs.

And so people were being preyed on, people who just wanted to be in the park.

Even our homeless population couldn't be here safely because of all the criminal activity.

A community effort that included Pima Community College and nearby businesses.

The hotels here were really instrumental to helping us get this project through the university in in the best western, attend all the meetings.

And they were very supportive because their quality of life, their gas, their their clientele would say that was the biggest complaint about people staying there was the park and how you could had to avoid it.

And with the bus stop right here, it really needed to be a safer spot.

And it's very high visibility for the area with a sort of a gateway right into town from the highway.

Still to come, improving the playground that's been here for 16 years and maintaining the sand volleyball destination.

Though growing pains are part of any development, Fisher is convinced this one is well worth it for the community.

Well, I want them to understand that when they vote on a particular ballot measure, that that it's going to get delivered on by the city workers, on the mayor and council.

That's our job, is to manage their their money and deliver on those facilities.

And I would like people to understand that this is one of our one hundred and thirty one parks throughout the city.

And it's actually a very beautiful park.

Just because you drive by, going 30, 40 miles an hour on the way to work doesn't mean that you can't stop here and enjoy what's here.

In Arizona, October signals the beginning of fall.

But in the medical community, it also marks the start of the flu season.

Last year, just over eleven hundred cases are reported throughout the state.

The year before that, the number hovered over thirty five thousand.

We got inside from Dr. Saman Nematollahi, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.

You know, the reduced immunity that we have due to the lack of flu virus over the last year could result in early and perhaps severe flu season this year.

In addition, the relaxed Covid-19 mandates so far with respect to, you know, relax, stay at home mandates and perhaps a little more relaxing with the mask mandates could also result in the increase in flu activity this year as well.

In August, in the state of Arizona so far, we've got a little over 40 cases of lab confirmed influenza.

And in the first two weeks of September, we've had about eight cases so far.

So the cases continue to be low.

But one thing to note, when I was just reviewing the CDC website over the last few days, there was a teen or a child in the state of Ohio that contracted the flu, the swine flu, but had no links to pigs.

And so they concluded that it might have been from a person to person transmission.

And this is important because the 2009 flu pandemic was due to the swine flu.

And so so far this year, across the whole country, none in the state of Arizona.

We've had about 10 reports and all but one, which is the one report in Ohio, have had some sort of connection to pigs.

And so this is likely nothing to worry about, but something that I'll be continuing to watch weekly on the CDC website.

There's been a coupling of terminology known as the Twin-demic.

What do you want to say about that when people are now worried about having the flu and COVID 19 at the same time, or not being able to differentiate between those two people that develop either COVID 19 or the flu like you're mentioning, they can have very similar presentations.

They can have fever, cough, shortness of breath.

They can have headaches.

They can have muscle pains.

And so the presentations can be very similar and it's not common.

But sometimes people can have both infections at the same time.

And still, your health care professional that you would be seeing for this will be able to order the test to know whether you have either Covid-19 or the flu.

And so given that the most prevalent virus right now is the SARS-CoV-2 the virus that causes Covid-19, it's really important to first rule out that infection.

And if that test then comes back negative, then the health care professional can then decide whether he or she will want to order additional testing, look for other infections , including influenza at that time.

And what about concerns as far as the vaccinations?

For example, somebody got both Covid vaccines and now they are wondering whether it's safe to get the flu vaccine.

You know, we don't have a lot of information about this, but per the CDC, the COVID 19 vaccine can be administered simultaneously with any other vaccine.

You know, when we were kids around the age of four, I just have my son is five and when he was four years old.

He had about four or five different vaccines given to him at the same time.

And we also do that for people that have weak immune systems.

We give them multiple vaccines at the same time, and they all do really well.

And so it's really important to get both vaccines.

And so if you haven't had a vaccine, I would really recommend getting both vaccines at the same time.

And you can get it in both the one in each shoulder and you should be fine.

You are obviously in favor of vaccinations.

You're encouraging everybody to get vaccinated for both the flu and the COVID 19.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I think it's they're both very safe and very effective in preventing illnesses.

And so in order to protect yourself and your loved ones, I think be really important to get both vaccinations.

Absolutely.

As long as there's ample SARS-CoV-2, the virus in the community, both locally, nationally and internationally, the virus has more and more opportunity to replicate and be able to develop mutations and other variants.

And so it's definitely possible that the more viruses out there, the more opportunity it has to make more variants, which is why vaccination is very important because if we were vaccinating everyone, then the virus doesn't have as ample opportunity to be able to replicate within us and be able to pass from person to person.

So that is why vaccination is very important, to be able to decrease the community virus spread in order to decrease the number of variants.

And same with influenza as well.

Dr. Saman Nematollahi, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Arizona continues to have its place in the national political sphere.

The 2020 election audit results are in, as well as a judge's ruling on mask mandates in Arizona schools.

Helping make sense of it all is AZPM reporter Andrew Oxford.

The legislature voted earlier this year to ban school districts from requiring students to wear masks.

The Arizona School Boards Association, parents, teachers union and a number of others filed a lawsuit challenging that requirement or challenging that policy.

And their issue was not so much with the substance of the policy, but with the way that it was enacted .

Arizona's constitution says if you want to make a law, you should make sure that each one deals with only one subject and that the title of the law accurately reflects that subject.

But this policy was squeezed into the state budget.

Legislators have been doing this for years, using the budget as a vehicle to advance policies they may not have the votes to pass otherwise.

And the lawsuit argued that that's ultimately unconstitutional.

That violates the rules that I was just talking about.

And they pointed this out with a number of other policies that were attached to the state budget.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper agreed earlier this week.

She said the mask law is void.

School districts can continue to require students wear masks if that's a policy they've adopted.

She also threw out a number of other laws that had been attached to the state budget.

Things like curtailing the power of the secretary of state.

Democrat Katy Hobbs, of course, has clashed a lot with Republican legislators.

So there were a number of different policies there.

And the judge really of rebuked the legislators long running practice of trying to pile a lot into the budget.

And how is the governor reacting to these decisions made by the judge?

Governor Ducey called this decision overreach.

Attorney General Mark Bernovich said they will appeal.

But I think this also raises some interesting questions about how the legislature does its business going forward.

Like I said, if lawmakers have been doing this for years, where a lot is piled into the budget that critics would say doesn't really belong in the budget, that ought to be separate laws.

And I think this will be, you know, have a question going forward.

Does the legislature change its practices?

Does it do a little bit more of this work in the open?

To be honest, I haven't heard a whole lot of confidence about that, because as one lawyer for the plaintiffs said , the legislators knew what the rules were all along.

They just hadn't really been rebuked by it by a judge like this in the past.

Another controversial, unrelated topic, of course, the election audit of 20, 20.

Final numbers were presented on Friday, September twenty fourth.

It seems like ancient history by now, but that was a major development as well.

Yeah, it feels like it's been going on forever, right?

I mean, the legislature had contractors working for months in Phoenix recounting each of the two point one million or so ballots that voters cast when last year's election there.

And the outcome didn't change Joe Biden, according to this count.

Also, won Maricopa County actually picked up more votes than the official tally suggested.

But the I think the thing to watch going forward is that the report makes a number of different recommendations to lawmakers about how to change Arizona's election laws.

And Democrats have said that they kind of anticipated that this was the whole point of the undertaking or at least one of the points, the undertaking that is to change how people vote in Arizona.

They're going, you know, changes proposed to voting by mail, for example, and that kind of thing.

So I think you can expect to hear a lot more about the election review in the coming legislative session and see some fights coming out of this around the future elections in 2022.

Andrew Oxford, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

That's all for now, thanks for joining us to get in touch, visit us on social media or send an email to arizona360@azpm.org and let us know what you think.

We'll see you next time.