2024 election guide: Pima County sheriff candidates

When the two candidates vying for the job of Pima County sheriff faced off in a testy debate on Sept. 3 , they focused more on personal experience and style than substantive policy differences.

Both incumbent Sheriff Chris Nanos , a Democrat, and Lieutenant Heather Lappin , a Republican, agreed about the need for community policing and for developing (or restoring) broad levels of trust — both within the department and the community.

“You can’t police your community without community policing,” Nanos said during the debate. He later defined community policing in a conversation with Arizona Luminaria as “recognizing your community has bigger needs than calling 911. Sometimes your community needs to hear from you.”

“The power of law enforcement comes from the people,” was how Lappin put it during the debate, later emphasizing to Arizona Luminaria the importance of listening to your community.

Even their stance on border policy was similar: despite couching their approach to immigration and drug enforcement in slightly different language, they both advocate for leaving the majority of the work to the federal government and playing the role of collaborator or assistant.

“We do everything we can to assist border patrol when they need it. We don’t want to do border patrol’s job,” Nanos said.

Lappin, after having changed her stance on the issue since the Republican primary race , said she didn’t want the sheriff’s department to patrol the border.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department is charged with responding to emergencies and reported crimes, running and maintaining the jail and, according to the department’s website, working “relentlessly toward making our community safe for the people of Pima County.”

The department does all that work from as far east as Vail to Ajo, more than 150 miles away — a coverage area larger than the entire state of New Jersey. The county also includes about 130 miles along the U.S.-México border, more than any other county in Arizona.

The sheriff oversees a budget of around $170 million with a total staff of around 1,500 .

The parallel approaches and similar rhetoric from the two candidates may present voters with some difficulty when deciding who to cast the ballot for.

But while their models of policing may sound similar, the candidates verge sharply from each other when it comes to experience and background.

Chris Nanos

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Heather Lappin

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Candidate backgrounds

Nanos was first appointed to run the sheriff’s department in 2015 and served for a year. He ran for election the following year and lost to Republican Mark Napier.

Napier has endorsed Lappin in this year’s election.

Nanos ran again — again against Napier — and won in 2020, taking office in January of the following year. On top of his one full and one partial term as sheriff, he has a total of 40 years in the department. He regularly touts his diverse experience in the department.

“I’ve worked in every corner of this department,” Nanos told Arizona Luminaria.

He said he loved all the jobs where he worked and added, “I never left a job without them asking me to go somewhere else.”

Pivoting quickly to an attack, Nanos said of Lappin, “She has never been in a single job that she didn’t fail in and had to be moved.”

Lappin disputed that characterization. She said she was moved to work in the jail last November, and was shifted to a new post in the jail as part of a standard rotation that took place this June. Lappin noted that in 2023 Nanos selected her, before she filed paperwork to run for sheriff, to help run the department’s “ wellness section ” to address the health of department employees.

“I started off as a cash window girl in the jail,” Lappin said during the debate about her job accepting money for people’s commissary funds. She said she was pregnant when she was first hired, then came back from maternity leave and applied to be a deputy. She has since worked her way through various posts, including commander of the San Xavier district south of Tucson, training officer, and, currently, corrections lieutenant.

Bob Krygier works as a deputy commander at the multi-jurisdictional drug task force Counter Narcotics Alliance and is a 28-year veteran in the department.

“I’m a supporter of Heather’s, but more importantly I’m a supporter of the department.”

In response to Nanos’ critiques of Lappin, Krygier said “She’s a great employee. She has the best intentions. She is very much a person who isn’t in it for herself.”

Pima County Supervisor Matt Heinz, of District 2, said he was endorsing Lappin. “I can’t think of a better person to be sheriff,” Heinz said. “I want a competent person heading this law enforcement agency. I want someone I can trust. She ticks all the boxes.”

In total, Lappin has worked for the department for 19 years.

Lappin said she has rich experience, including a master’s degree in organizational leadership with an emphasis in criminal justice from Northern Arizona University.

“Education matters these days,” Lappin said. She added, pointing to a different kind of experience: “I’m a working mom, I’ve raised three kids in this community.”

Still, Nanos invoked his four decades at the department as setting himself off from Lappin. He emphasized he has 15 years of executive experience, noting there is a “big gap between lieutenant and sheriff.”

“I’m sorry, I have more of an education than she’ll ever know,” Nanos said during the debate.

Lappin shot back, saying Nanos had worked for 40 years in an “old-fashioned, antiquated way.”

“I’m a student of leadership,” Lappin said, saying there was a “troubling void in leadership” in the department.

“My experience in resiliency makes me the right choice,” Lappin said. She said she overcame poverty, helped support a child with addiction and more, and has found success as a leader in the department.

The border

On the border, Lappin’s stance on Proposition 314 — a Republican-backed ballot measure approved by the Arizona Legislature that would allow state and local police to arrest and jail migrants, and authorize local judges to order deportations, among other provisions — has changed since the primary race.

Lappin previously told Arizona Luminaria the bill is “only empowering officers and deputies.” She then added that it “allows our deputies to (with probable cause) enforce illegal crossings in areas other than ports of entry.”

During the Sept. 3 debate, Lappin was less supportive of the bill. “I have no idea if it’s going to pass but even if it does the likelihood of Pima County deputies making any arrests on this bill is very very low,” she said, adding “I don’t think it’s a good idea for the bill.”

That stance was a shift from just a few months earlier.

“I would say that I’m less supportive than I was before,” Lappin said. “However, if it were to pass I would be fully supportive.” Pressed, she hesitated and finally said, “I’ll just go with a no.”

She explained her shift by saying that she had multiple conversations, including with former sheriff Napier, and that the bill would have a “low impact for Pima County.”

Nanos has consistently been against the measure. And while he doesn’t want his deputies to enforce immigration laws, he has repeatedly touted his close relationship with local border patrol leadership.

“I work every day with John Modlin,” Nanos said during the debate, referring to the chief patrol agent of the Tucson Sector of Border Patrol. “We do everything we can to assist Border Patrol when they need it,” Nanos added.

Staffing

An issue that Lappin has criticized Nanos on is how the sheriff has been deploying his officers. She said that there were significantly fewer officers out on standard patrol than in past years.

Lappin gave the example of the San Xavier District, which she said had far more deputies when she was a commander there in 2019 compared to today. Arizona Luminaria has requested staffing numbers from the department to verify Lappin’s claim, but has not received a response.

Nanos, however, was adamant that Lappin’s criticism was misplaced. “We’re not taking away from patrol,” he said. Rather, he said deputies are dispatched in a way to concentrate on certain areas to build visibility and community trust. “Community policing augments patrol,” Nanos said.

He said school resource officers, directed patrol officers, and special enforcement teams all are regularly in schools, out on the streets or in the community in a more directed form of patrolling.

This is what community policing looks like, Nanos said.

But Lappin said having fewer deputies out on patrol is “a safety issue.”

She pointed out that “an unprecedented number of deputies are being shot” under Nanos’s watch. “I’m not blaming him,” Lappin said, “I’m saying it’s never happened before.”

In the last two years, at least four deputies have been shot while on duty.

She said she thinks part of the reason why so many deputies have been shot is that “they’re constantly on minimum staffing. It’s like they’re always on edge.”

The jail

Between 2017 to 2022 at least 49 people died in the Pima County jail, according to a 2022 Pima County memo . In December of that year Nanos wrote in a letter to the Pima County board of supervisors saying that the jail was in a “ full-blown crisis .”

Nanos said he was concerned with consistently low staffing levels at the jail and a crumbling infrastructure, prompting him to ask the supervisors for a raise for his staff and for the county to begin considering the possibility of building a new jail.

Nanos got the raise for his staff, but the conversation and controversy about building a new jail continues .

Still, over the past year, in a dramatic turnaround, there has not been a single reported death in the Pima County jail, according to statistics kept by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

Nanos said the jail is now near 100% staffed, which has helped avoid further deaths. He also gives credit to Chief Scott Lowing and his staff at the jail. “Those people work hard to save lives every day,” Nanos said. “It isn’t the sheriff, it’s the young kids who work hard every day to keep people safe.”

He said he’s unaware of a single year in the jail’s history where there has not been a death. “What we have done is pretty amazing,” Nanos said.

Lappin agrees. She currently works as the section lieutenant in the intake unit, also overseeing property management and the K9 program.

“The chief we have in the jail (Lowing) cares about the people, cares about the inmates, and he’s creating policies that reflect that,” Lappin said.

She explained that various changes in the intake process have limited the drugs that are able to get into the jail. She also said the staffing in the jail has increased. “(Lowing) has made these changes in policy that have affected the inmate welfare that have affected the ability for drugs to come into the facility.”

She acknowledged that Lowing is “Nanos’s guy,” but still pointed to other changes she would make if she were sheriff, including further increasing staffing. Lappin said she wants at least two guards in each pod instead of the standard single guard.

Nanos also sees room for improvement, but is focused more on infrastructure. “This jail is not a good jail, not a good facility. It lends itself to all the problems, and it also lends itself to the possibility of death,” Nanos said.

The future of the department

Lappin says she “has a vision for the department,” which is primarily focusing on “building bridges of trust.”

She said she plans to sit down with diverse members of the community and work hard to understand what they need, what they’re concerned about.

Nanos, for his part, said that’s exactly what he’s been doing. He said that after a spike in violent crime, both locally and across the nation, violent crime rates have since decreased in Pima County.

“We’ve done a lot, but we’ve got a lot more to do.”

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