Southern Arizona law enforcement agencies form regional critical incident team

Caitlin Schmidt Nine Southern Arizona law enforcement agencies have teamed up to launch a countywide critical incident team, hoping to remove perceived conflicts of interest and improve transparency in incidents involving officers' use of force and in-custody deaths.

The partnership, which Oro Valley Police Chief Kara Riley said was more than a year in the making, is an effort to get ahead of proposed statewide legislation that would require departments to hand off some investigations involving their own officers to other agencies. "This is something being done across the nation, and we decided we're going to do it now," Nanos said at a news conference Tuesday."Transparency is really just that. It talks about our openness and our willingness to be honest with not just those that work within our organizations, but those we serve, particularly our community."

"It takes a lot of work for our criminal investigative staffs to figure out just how these things are going to work when they unfold," Kasmar said."There's a lot of moving complexities to these investigations where we have to protect crime scenes" while also"protecting due process for staff that's involved and being transparent to the media."

Cost savings predictedAnother benefit of regionalization is the cost savings it provides to the community, Nanos said. Nanos said the team will work as quickly as possible to get information out to the public following a critical incident. When it comes to critical incidents involving TPD and the Sheriff's Department — the two largest agencies on the team — those two departments will take the lead in handling investigations of one another, Sheriff's Lt. Luis Cornidez, commander of the team, told the Star in a previous interview.

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