Week 98

Promoting public safety and building alliances

It was another extraordinarily busy week at The People’s Office as we promoted public safety and built alliances to better serve all residents of Pima County:

The Pima County Attorney’s Office (PCAO) hands out gun locks almost every single weekend at various community events throughout Pima County. But our 88-Crime Unit (which if you did not know is a PCAO program) has turned the process of distributing free gun locks into a machine. They just recently handed out their 10,000th gun lock IN JUST ONE QUARTER of the fiscal year. Babette McDonald, our 88-Crime director is a force of nature! What’s more, she is training agencies like Casa de los Niños to take our gun locks out to home visits while her bilingual team is collecting anonymous tips to help law enforcement solve crimes.

PCAO is partnering with the Tucson Police Department, along with several federal law enforcement agencies and the Department of Justice to concentrate even more closely on violent crime. The feds are offering to be a force multiplier to TPD’s efforts, and we are hoping with their support we can target homicides using firearms in particular. The project launched Monday morning at TPD headquarters and is called the National Public Safety Partnership (PSP).

And last, but most certainly not the least, we had a truly historic morning on Tuesday at the Pima County Board of Supervisors. After our office visited the Pascua Yaqui tribe in July to begin discussions, Bobby Yu and Kyle Johnson, attorneys in our Civil Division got to work on drafting an extraordinary landmark IGA (Intergovernmental Agreement) allowing me to confer authority and specially deputize a tribal prosecutor to better serve Yaqui crime victims, to co-prosecute special cases, and allow our Office to be more accountable to the tribe and meet our promise of serving all our County residents, not just some. It is an agreement that Pascua Yaqui Attorney General Alfred Urbina predicted can serve as a national model.