A hometown pick

The City of Tucson’s new police chief, Monica Prieto, will find that she won’t be alone in making the biggest decisions that shape the Tucson Police Department.

She inherits an established, complicated power structure where labor contracts are negotiated largely between the Tucson Police Officers Association (TPOA) and the city manager, a looming $40 million city budget deficit that will push elected officials to scrutinize every nickel in the city’s coffers, as well as a chronic challenge to retain veteran officers while recruiting the next generation of Tucson police officers.

City leaders have been clear that the budget crisis will not target TPD specifically — in fact, many have signaled they want to hire more officers — but the internal messaging inside Tucson City Hall suggests no department is immune from potential cuts to balance the budget.

As the deputy police chief for the last two years, Prieto now manages the day-to-day operations of roughly 1,200 people inside the city’s largest department. But the department’s resources are strained as it responds to public health and safety crises driven by open fentanyl use in public, as well as addressing public perception that the city’s transit system is dangerous.

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, in coordination with TPD and other city departments, launched the Safe City Task Force late last year. The new initiative is focused on the intertwined crises of homelessness, untreated mental health issues in the community and public fentanyl and drug use.

Prieto’s recent rise through the ranks after TPD Chief Chad Kasmar announced his retirement is less of a political shake-up and more continuation of the current administration — sans Kasmar.

The Tucson native has been Kasmar’s second-in-command since January 2023, overseeing operations and administration across multiple bureaus. Her 26 years inside the department included serving in multiple capacities, spending time in both the Eastside and Southside patrol divisions.

Back in 2015, the city carried out a nationwide search that took several months before hiring Chris Magnus as the new police chief.

This time around, Tucson City Manager Tim Thomure turned to a familiar face inside the department when looking to replace Kasmar. He wanted stability rather than a lengthy recruitment process.

Prieto’s first call afterward wasn’t to a colleague in the department or a council member — it was to her parents.

Long before she was tapped to lead the department, Prieto was a University of Arizona undergrad planning to become an accountant.

Somewhere between lectures on “cookie jar reserves,” “phantom revenues,” and “zombie companies,” she decided spreadsheets weren’t the future she wanted.

A visiting female Phoenix police officer speaking at the Eller College of Management changed that trajectory.

After graduating, she joined the TPD academy and soon found herself patrolling the Eastside behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Caprice police pursuit vehicle — one of only a handful of women in her academy class nearly three decades ago.

What she discovered quickly, she said, was that policing wasn’t just about arrests.

Her career moved through investigative assignments, including cases involving child molestation, before a promotion to sergeant and a stint in internal affairs — a role often reserved for officers trusted inside the organization.

The position of being the new police chief often carries the anticipation of major changes — moving the department in a new direction to address and resolve chronic issues inside Tucson.

The reality is that the position requires working with the built-in constraints of the larger city government.

Prieto will help write a budget for the department, but those budgets are tweaked as part of a larger budget process and eventually approved by the Tucson City Council. Labor agreements (not just with the TPOA) are negotiated with the Tucson City Manager.

Major policy shifts — like Romero’s Safe City Task Force — often require buy-in from the city manager as well as the Tucson City Council.

Even staffing levels are tied to relatively slow recruitment pipelines that take months between entering the academy and eventually patrolling city streets.

We’ll remind you that last year, we noted one council candidate’s call to hire 400 new patrol officers would have cost the city an estimated $40 million a year.

After voters rejected Proposition 414 last year, the city had to quickly revise TPD’s planned budget for the current fiscal year and leave it with virtually no additional funding when compared to the previous fiscal year.

Prieto is in a familiar spot for modern TPD chiefs: responsible for results, but operating within boundaries shaped by local politics, economic conditions and long-standing, concrete institutional agreements.

Prieto said a major focus of her first year will be meeting with rank-and-file officers and listening to what they are seeing on Tucson streets — a signal that her early tenure may lean more toward continuity than reinvention.

Whether that continuity holds may depend less on Prieto and more on the forces shaping Tucson’s next budget cycle — and how City Hall balances competing priorities in a year when the numbers are tight and expectations are high.

Prieto is the city’s top cop, but the system she inherits is still very much bigger than one person.