Dianna M. Náñez

The Republic | azcentral.com

Tempe City Council candidates address public safety at election forum

Arrest of ASU Professor Ersula Ore sparks outrage

Candidates seek public-safety changes

An angry audience member fed up with Tempe public safety sparked a fiery moment at the two-hour Tempe City Council election forum Monday.

A crowd of more than 100 had filled City Council chambers to capacity for the evening of civic engagement.

The clock registered just before 9 p.m. Time was running out on a forum that had kicked off two hours earlier.

The seven candidates running for three seats looked a bit peaked after being quizzed on a myriad of city issues that measured their stance on taxes, public transportation, business and development, Town Lake's dam and candidates' conflicts of interests. The forum was co-hosted by The Arizona Republic and the Tempe Chamber of Commerce.

Moderator Vic Linoff, a longtime Tempe business owner, said there was time to squeeze in one more question from the audience.

The crowd wanted more.

The decorum that had marked the mostly congenial candidate forum was disrupted when two spectators began calling out their questions, competing for the last chance to grill the politicians seeking to represent them on the Tempe City Council.

As would-be voters angled for a chance to be heard, a man in the front row who did not identify himself shouted louder than the rest.

"Are we not going to talk about Tempe PD wasting money on anti-terrorism … ASU PD running rampant through our neighborhood beating up professors?" he yelled. "What are you going to do to rein in the police here?"

Despite the ticking clock, the candidates seemed eager to take on the public-safety issue. Policing in Tempe has made headlines as recently as last week when a viral video of Ersula Ore, an Arizona State University English professor, being arrested by a university police officer sparked national outrage.

The controversy comes in the wake of a string of high-profile violent crimes in Tempe and the real-estate website Movoto ranking Tempe as the eighth-most dangerous suburb in America based on FBI crime data.

The majority of candidates advocated for police officers using body and vehicle cameras to record law-enforcement interactions. All of the candidates except Robin Arredondo-Savage and Matt Papke stressed the need to improve the relationship between the Tempe Police Department and ASU police.

Kuby said Ore's arrest hit home given that they both work at ASU.

"Thank you for bringing up Professor Ore. I was horrified like many of you to see the video and the police brutality that we witnessed," Kuby said. "ASU police are about to hire a new police chief. We need to make sure that ASU police works really well with our city of Tempe Police Department."

Kuby was the only candidate to offer suggestions to improve Tempe's police-management system. She said Tempe should adhere more closely to the CompStat policing model. Short for computer statistics, the system includes the use of crime mapping and data to focus police on proactively fighting crime in communities, rather than just reacting to it.

Kuby said that the model would "engage the community in a lot of police monitoring and decisions."

Papke, whose father is a retired Tempe police officer, focused on Tempe leaders taking greater responsibility for the city's crime problems.

"We have the highest violent and the highest property (crime) rates in Tempe," he said. "They say, 'It's ASU fault, it's ASU fault.' We need to stop pointing fingers. It's Tempe's problem, Tempe needs to answer it."

Arredondo-Savage reminded residents that Tempe officers face the added difficulties of policing in a city that sees a huge population spike from residents who visit for work or school.

"I think we can all agree that any crime is really too much crime, but overall in the city of Tempe our crime has actually reduced," she said. "I know you want to compare us to other cities but the one thing you need to compare then is our daytime population increases. We have a population of 165,000 but daily our population increases up to 240,000."

Tempe officers should be commended for their service, she said.

"I will put our police force up against any police force. Those men and women are out there on the streets every day risking their life to protect us," she said.

Schapira advocated for changes to better serve residents and officers.

"Our city of Tempe Police Department needs to work more closely with ASU," Schapira said. "I think a great addition to our repertoire of law enforcement is having the cameras on each and every police officer because that will record each and every interaction that happens in greater detail than the on-the-hood cameras."

Fonseca said "technology will play a role to bring better accountability in place."

Foreman said dashcams are a "a very logical, good way to protect both the citizen and also the law-enforcement community to get as good and accurate a record as possible." Ellis took credit for the Tempe cameras.

"I was the one that asked that it be put on the (budget's) funded list," she said. "When body cameras were implemented in Mesa, ASU came in and did a study and complaints were reduced by 50 percent."

Key dates

July 28:

Last day to register to vote.

July 31:

Early voting for primary election begins.

Aug. 15:

Last day to request an early ballot.

Aug. 26:

Primary election day.

Nov. 4:

If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the six candidates with the highest percentage of votes will proceed to the General Election.

Check the Tempe-Ahwatukee Republic and tempe.azcentral.com for weekly installments, leading up to the election, of candidates' answers to residents' questions.