The Desperation of Mark Napier, Part Tres

How desperate is Sheriff Napier to snag the federal money for Operation Stonegarden this year? Is it possible that he's desperate enough to lie on the grant application? Is it possible that he's desperate enough to conceal a portion of the application, withholding it from legitimate public review?

A couple of weeks ago, in Part Deux, we predicted that the grant application would be made public shortly. Now it has, and we've obtained it. Or at least we've obtained the portion that he chose to release. (More on the omissions below.)

One key question the sheriff had to answer was this:

Is your agency fully staffed?

Here's the answer he gave:

PCSD is sufficiently staffed to ensure all planned OPSG deployments are fully staffed.

First of all, notice that fails to answer the question. "Sufficiently" and "fully" aren't the same. Second, we're not even so sure about "sufficiently." Read on and decide for yourself whether this is entirely truthful.

Consider, if you will, this photo of a document obtained last week from PCSD via public information request.

Pima County Sheriff's Department Staffing Levels

As you can see in the Total column, the overall staffing level is 92%. That's exactly what Napier has claimed in public statements. That sounds reasonably adequate, right?

Let's take a closer look. Notice first of all that sergeants and command level ranks are fully staffed, 100% across the board. Now look at the SPEC RESP column. That's the Specialized Response Division, consisting of squads that do special missions, like Search and Rescue and SWAT teams. They are staffed at well above 100%, which brings up the total without adding to available staff for regular patrols or for Stonegarden.

Let's now look at the largest and most important divisions, the ones that do most of the actual community policing. First, CID, or Criminal Investigations Division. Those are the detectives who investigate crimes, and their staffing level is a miserably inadequate 77.78%. There are 28 unfilled detective positions.

Finally, there's the Patrol Division, and here's where we can see how truly misleading the 92% number is. We believe that most if not all of the deputies working Stonegarden are in the Patrol Division. The staffing level shown is 86.19%. However, looking below we find that of the 206 current deputies in the division (33 lower than quota), an additional 14 are unavailable for a variety of reasons, including 9 on military leave. That brings the 206 down to 192, meaning that the staffing level in Patrol is really 80.33%.

That is significantly lower than 92%, and it's low enough to call into question the notion that PCSD is sufficiently staffed to conduct Stonegarden operations without jeopardizing the Department's readiness to conduct its primary mission of assuring public safety for all Pima County residents.

So we ask, what is Mark Napier hiding, and why? His OPSG application confidently says his department has sufficient staff for all operations. Is it true? We can see that staff levels in the Patrol Division may be as low as 80%. That would be dangerously low even for ordinary operations.

What about it, Mark? Are you desperate enough to lie on an official grant application?

Below is a link to the portion of the OPSG grant application that Napier has submitted for public review. The question and answer about the agency's being fully staffed are on page 3.

FY 2018 Operation Stonegarden Grant Program (OPSG) Grant Application

We promised to talk about what Napier omitted from the partial application he submitted for public review. Here we go. The link below opens a page excerpted from the NOFO (Notice of Funding Opportunity) for OPSG in FY 2018. In other words, this is part of the instructions for applying for the grant.

FY 2018 Operations Order Instructions

And here's the FY 2016 version of the Operations Order Template referred to in the instructions. We don't have the FY 2018 version yet, but we're pretty sure it's the same. We do have that section of PCSD's FY 2017 application, and it conforms exactly to that template. It lays out in detail what PCSD understands its Stonegarden mission to be. When the Board of Supervisors denied the grant last year, that denial was partly because of what Napier wrote in the Execution section of the Operations Order.

FY 2016 Operations Order Template

That, the Operations Order, is the portion of the FY 2018 application that's inexplicably missing from what Napier submitted for public review.

What are you hiding, Mark, and why? The public has a right to know.