There’s something almost movie-like about the Pima County Sheriff‘s Department, but not in a Hollywood-made way. That’s not quite right. The agency is in charge of one of the biggest counties in the US. It includes deserts, border areas, and rural outposts where, on a good day, the closest deputy might be twenty minutes away. It’s hard not to think that this department has earned a story worth telling after seeing how it has changed and grown over the years.
The department’s main office is on East Benson Highway in Tucson, Arizona. It has more than 872 civilian employees and corrections staff and about 516 sworn officers. There are over 400 volunteers who help with the operation. That’s a big staff for an agency that, not too long ago, only had six deputies working across an entire county.
Nine out of ten times, the department responds to emergencies in 4.3 minutes or less, which doesn’t seem like a long time until you think about how much land it covers. This isn’t a grid of cities with police cars on every block. Arizona is a big, open state where distances are big and logistics are important.
It’s important to take a moment to look back at this history because the Pima County Sheriff’s Department didn’t become what it is today by accident. One of the most interesting stories is about Ed Echols, a cowboy from Texas who helped his father drive cattle as a teen, toured with the Miller Brothers 101 Wild West Show with a young Tom Mix, and once went to Calgary to win the title of World’s Champion Roper. In 1936, he was finally made sheriff, but there were only six deputies working for him and the county jail needed a lot of work. By 1944, he had 24 people working for him. It’s easy to miss that kind of methodical, unglamorous building of institutions. It most likely shouldn’t be.
There is a lot to thank Clarence Dupnik for, though. He was sheriff for over 35 years, from 1980 to 2015, and was elected seven times. During that time, the number of people living in Pima County rose from about 191,000 to about 1.5 million. Dupnik not only oversaw that growth, he also seemed to see it coming. He was in charge when the department built one of the first direct-supervision prisons in the country, formed the Pima Regional SWAT team (which later became the only FEMA Type 1 tactical team in the southern US), and started a Border Crime Unit that became a model for how agencies across the country should work together.
Even by today’s standards, some of the technological moves are pretty cool. Everyone in the department was given a Taser, making it one of the first police departments in the country to do so. It gave out AR-15-style patrol rifles as standard gear, put in place GPS-based patrol monitoring, and gave each deputy a battlefield trauma kit. Some say these kits saved lives during the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords on January 8, 2011. That last detail is important to think about. A department’s quiet choice made during bureaucratic planning ended up being very important on one of the worst days in recent Arizona history.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department seems to have spent decades building things that aren’t seen until there’s a problem. A $92 million voter bond paid for the regional communications system. The Advanced Crisis Intervention Training program went above and beyond national standards by more than 10%. There are also over 400 volunteers who run fingerprinting services, neighborhood watch programs, and park patrols. On paper, none of these things seem very important. But it all adds up to something real.
Chris Nanos took over in 2015, but he had been working for the department since 1984. He took over an agency that had been carefully built up over generations. It’s still not clear if the institutional momentum will last and if the department will be able to keep adapting to the changes in the needs of a growing population and the pressures on its southern border. It’s still not clear how the following chapter is written. But the base, which was built up one stubborn choice at a time, is harder to throw out than it looks from the outside.
