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Trout has been on the Tucson streets for more than three decades, and suddenly the solitude of the life he chose is up for debate in the news and at city council meetings. Social woes surrounding homelessness across Tucson have more recently been addressed with politics and law enforcement.

“It starts with the medians, and the underpasses and it goes on from there,” he lamented about being tossed around Tucson.

Trout can’t be in a park, or a bus stop for shade. He can’t go to the river washes where he can remain out of sight or even enter a gas station, despite having never stolen from one.

But, he said, there’s a right and wrong way to do things. Kicking people out of their camps solves nothing, Trout says, but it makes the population that their life is seen as having less value. He lost the last picture he had of his late father during a police clean-out deployment.

He said his heart broke when his prized possession was tossed out as trash.

Kat Davis, who works for the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness, says she, too, recognizes the targets placed on the back of the city’s homeless population. Affordable housing, she said, is the backbone of homelessness in the community, and without a clear plan to put an end to this crisis, the homeless will remain on the streets without services that will help support them thrive.

“They need to be stabilized, successful, find employment and recover so they can be successful in their home,” Davis said.

The city points to a list of services it makes available to people living on the streets. But this month has also led to two police deployments. In a large one earlier this month, encampments were razed and several people were arrested. A smaller on Friday near West Grant Road and the Santa Cruz River, focused on getting people into treatment or services.

“Although we know arrest is a necessary tool, this alone will not solve the problems we are facing,” Tucson Mayor Regina Romero wrote in a statement to residents. “We cannot arrest our way out of this public health crisis. Clearly, the status quo is not sufficient. We must demand that our State and County governments step up to help Tucsonans with this public health crisis.”

A hammer and a scalpel

Tucson police said they plan to make things as uncomfortable as possible for homeless people here in a bid to force them into treatment.

Romero pointed out that the Pima County Health Department is “responsible for providing health-related services such as mental health care and substance use treatment for those in jail, as well as overall public health services for county residents.” She asserted that those responsibilities don’t fall to the city.

On Tuesday, the Pima County Board of Supervisors directed county staff to work with their city counterparts to find times for a joint meeting specifically on homelessness. Supervisor Steve Christy ultimately opposed the idea because he would rather see a meeting “that would include all the jurisdictions” countywide. To exclude jurisdictions like Marana or Sahaurita would result in the government’s “missing out on some great opportunities for great ideas,” he said.

As part of the board’s discussion on the county’s ongoing initiatives to address homelessness and public safety, the Oct. 7 arrest-focused deployment on The Loop was a topic of discussion.

Christy wondered if a multi-agency “Loop task force” could be created in partnership between various law enforcement agencies from jurisdictions that The Loop runs through.

“We need a police presence on The Loop at all times until this problem has gone away,” he said. “We need encampments removed, we need the garbage and trash cleaned up, and we need the absolute flagrant use of drugs and other illegal activities resolved.”

Supervisor Jen Allen, however, said she was worried about the county “falling prey to some of the hyperbole” about the loop that puts the county and other jurisdictions in a position where it’s likely that resources are wasted.

“The vast majority of that 140 miles of The Loop is well-maintained (and) highly-utilized,” she said. “The trick is figuring out where the concentrations are, because the reality is that there are issues, and they are concentrated, but it is not dispersed across the entire Loop. We can have the effect, when we rely on enforcement, that treating problems is like squeezing a balloon, where you squeeze it one place and you just push it somewhere else. And that happens when there is not meaningful solutions.”

“I just want to make sure that as we respond, as policymakers, that we respond with the scalpel, the precision that is needed to solve the problem, and that we are not fooling ourselves or anyone else (with) gestures that are not going to solve the problem,” she said.

Romero touted available resources, tools and services available to the homeless, including outreach, care coordination and housing navigation, but Trout said it’s not as easy to obtain those services as one might think.

It’s one thing to provide services, but it’s easier to just make an arrest, he said.

Behind the scenes, the government bodies have put together a series of safety services, including STAR Village, which will provide safe outdoor sleeping for 25 women and non-binary people. They are discussing bus safety, in reference to increased violence on free SUN Tran services. This is another service Trout said will greatly and directly target the homeless population, making it nearly impossible to navigate the city.

Democrat Kevin Dahl, who is running for his second term on the city council, said Thursday that while police sweeps are a tool the city can use, “we cannot arrest our way out of the problem.”

“I think The Loop deployment (in early October) was effective and needed,” Dahl said. “People break the law every day, speeding, whatever. It’s really, do you have the resources to effectively enforce the law?”

In the deployment earlier this month, officers swept through the area where Enrique “Kix” Mercado was fatally stabbed on Sept. 23.

Mercado, 44, was killed during an evening bike ride event with more than 100 people as part of the Tuesday Night Ride The Loop behind a shopping center on East Wetmore Road, following an altercation. Michael Francisco, 26, has been arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder in the stabbing, one of five homicides along the Chuck Huckleberry Loop in the past three years.

Dozens of law enforcement officers trudged deep into the washes along the Loop, leading to the arrest of 50 people and the displacement of dozens of unsheltered people living in the wash.

Just two people accepted treatment and were whisked off on the spot to start a recovery program, Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar said.

That deployment appears to be the first time police have held such an operation to enforce a city ordinance the council passed over the summer, which prohibits camping in city-owned washes. Violating the ordinance is a misdemeanor and punishable by up to 10 days in jail, a $250 fine and up to a year of probation and community service.

Of the 50 people arrested in the sweep, 13 felony charges were issued along with 62 misdemeanor charges. Some people faced multiple charges, police said. Charges ranged from trespassing, narcotic possession, possession of drug paraphernalia, littering, prohibited possessor, to having a shopping cart. Two firearms, one with an extended magazine and several look-alike weapons, were also recovered.

“I think the goal is to make it uncomfortable for people to continue to commit violations in that (loop) area and make it so uncomfortable that they become more willing to accept the resources that have been offered to them and we can get them into treatment,” TPD Sgt. Beau Wilson.

Kasmar noted that the single sweep does not address the wider community concerns.

“If our community is driving through an area and they don’t feel safe, it doesn’t matter that our violent crime is down 12% on a five-year average or that our property crimes are down 23% ... They’re driving through, they’re seeing what they perceive as crime,” Kasmar said.

“It is no secret that our town right now is overwhelmed, our community is overwhelmed, with substance use and mental health disordered folks, and that’s driving ... shopliftings, robberies, low-level thefts, sometimes violent crime incident.”

Kasmar said that in the more than five hours it to complete the sweep along the Loop, two people who had been jailed had already been released.

They used the city’s free public transportation to return to the area.

Public transit safety

Dahl says bringing back fares to use the city’s buses and streetcars won’t equate to safety.

“Bringing back fares is not a panacea for safety. I’ve talked to a lot of operators of the buses, and they have all sorts of legitimate concerns about safety for themselves and for the riders. But when I talk to bus drivers who were driving before COVID, they said there were fights all the time, and more often or not, the fights were about fares,” Dahl said. “Given the state of people and drug use, people who will do bad things on buses are not going to be deterred by a fare, is my thinking. It’s a solution for funding the buses, and that when we need to look at it, we should.”

But his opponent, Republican Janet “JL” Wittenbraker, says she has seen a “direct contrast” on the public’s sentiment on homelessness, and the city’s strategy to address the issue, from when she ran for Mayor in 2023 to now.

She called the Loop deployment on Oct. 7 a step in the right direction “at bare minimum.”

“People are seeing that all of our efforts have not paid off, so maybe it’s time to take a different approach ... (Deployments) need to continue until the problem no longer exists, that’s what needs to happen,” she said. “I think it was a good start. Unfortunately, it was too late for one man. Others have been harmed on The Loop as well, and so the city and the county need to work together and clean up that mess they’ve allowed to be created.”

Wittenbraker, opposite to Dahl, says Tucson’s crime “seems to be directly linked” to the city’s continued push for fare-free transit service.

“Our transit drivers, men and women, should be protected and should have the ability to be trained to respond to a hostile situation,” she said. “I know with our airplanes, you know, you don’t know when you are sitting next to an agent or not. Perhaps a similar situation, where you could be on a bus with an undercover agent. (But) those conversations need to be decided on together, which includes the bus rider and bus drivers and their union representation, but not in a silo, and far too many times, the Mayor and Council are making decisions in a silo.”

Open-air drug use is “probably the number one challenge that we’re experiencing right now,” said Sam Credio, director of the city’s transportation department.

There are just over 25,000 “incidents” per year on average within the Sun Tran system, according to a presentation by Credio during the City Council’s Oct. 8 meeting. The “most common challenges” have been open-air drug use, large groups loitering and vandalism, according to Credio. Less common incidents, Credio said, have been calls for fire or medical personnel, as well as assaults.

Through the first five months of this year, there have been 15,394 “incidents,” Credio said, 80% of which occurred at bus stops or on buses and the remaining at three Tucson transit centers.

Earlier this year, Jacob Couch was killed when he was attacked with a hatchet at a bus stop near downtown.

Earlier this month, an elderly man was assaulted at the Sun Tran bus stop at the intersection of Pantano and Stella on Monday, Oct. 6, TPD said, noting several bystanders stopped to help the victim, who was bleeding from his face.

Police say officers responded to another incident on a Sun Tran bus on Oct. 14 near Irvington and 13th Avenue. Ian Julius Tenario, 19, was arrested two days later and is facing three felony charges for allegedly punching the victim with brass knuckles before pulling out a gun and firing shots at them.

Romero said she’s feeling frustrated that “all of the work that we’ve been focusing on, and yet there’s still a very tangible public crisis happening in our streets,” she told The Star. “It’s a public health crisis and the partners that need to come to the table and act now, I feel, have been kind of taking a back seat.”“So this is a call to action,” she said.