Veteran Sheriff Dupnik faces Sahuarita candidate

Although they won’t be facing each other on primary day Sept. 2, the two candidates for sheriff will duke it out next November.

They’re Democrat Clarence Dupnik, Pima County sheriff for 28 years, and a veteran policeman and jail warden for 41 years, Republican Harry Shaw.

Dupnik has had more than 50 years in law enforcement, working with the Tucson Police Department for 19 years before joining the Sheriff’s Department as chief deputy.

After leaving the Marine Corps in 1967, Shaw has worked as police officer or warden at Kearny, Ariz, reached the rank of lieutenant in the state Department of Corrections, sometimes serving as warden and overseeing the farm run by the state.

One of his campaign promises is to help ease jail overcrowding with tent cities, which he has operated before. He ran the 4,100-bed prison complex in Tucson and was a facilitator at the police academy.

He later was in charge of Illinois State security of the state office building that housed the governor’s office, the state supreme court and court of appeals and other law enforcement agencies.

In 2002, he went to Spartanburg, S. C., County detention and later returned to Arizona where he is in the plant protection position at Raytheon.

He lives in Sahuarita.

Shaw said he wants to help make streets safer by putting more deputies on them that would cope with “an overabundance of top management.”

In an interview last year Shaw said, “Crime has been allowed to steadily rise to alarming levels and our streets have become more dangerous,”

Adding:

“It’s time to get tough on criminals and make our neighborhoods safer.”

As sheriff, he’d have a big area to watch over.

Pima County, with more than a million people, covers 9,000 square miles, and it shares 120 miles of international border with Mexico.

Dupnik has watched over a huge expansion of the number of people who call Pima County home.

The unincorporated areas of the county counts about 400,000 residents living in rural areas, along river banks, atop mountains and on lonesome farms and ranches where cows and sheep outnumber the humans.

The kind of crimes that are now common here were practically unknown when he started as chief deputy.

Deputies can’t arrest illegal aliens just for being found on Pima County streets and roads. But crime rates in some areas have increased. They range from such nuisance misdemeanors as leaving farm gates open to major mishaps such as fleeing illegals crashing during high-speed vehicle chases.

During his term, he has seen the rate of crime in the unincorporated areas decline, helped launch D.A.R.E., a program to help school-age children resist being drawn into drug crimes, provided deputies with state of the art policing systems and weapons and instituted the T.I.P.S hot line to elicit calls about crimes in progress.

But it’s not all rosy for the sheriff. For the past five years he has exceeded the Board of Supervisors’ budget, saying that public safety issues sometimes outpace the spending to control them. He also says the supervisors underfund the amount need to control crime here.

jlamb@gvnews.com | 547-9749