Sen. Chuck Gray

This Republican lawmaker has been at the forefront of many anti-crime measures.
For 10 years, Sen. Chuck Gray, R-19, was a police officer, a man trained not to negotiate with offenders on points of law. In fact, a cop has no say in what the law states at all. He enforces it, regardless of what he thinks.
Gray’s bills clearly show a bias toward tougher laws and stiffer penalties against criminals. In this interview, he talks about his efforts to save the prostitute from the pimp, his distaste for the judge who lets offenders off with a slap on the wrist, and the compromises that make a politician a politician.
Gray has been a church missionary and has worked as a stone mason, a family business that taught him the value of hard work.
You were a church missionary, a businessman, and a cop. How how did these prepare you for the job of legislating?
In many ways. No. 1, the part you didn’t talk about was my construction experience. I grew up in a family land-locked in the hot sun. I learned a good work ethic. Get up early, work long hours and go home and rest. And so that’s what I do down here. I come in early in the morning, about 7 a.m., and I leave in the evening somewhere between 6 and 9 p.m., usually around 8:30 or 9 p.m. And I was taught a good work ethic. Make sure that you produce, make sure that you do something, you have to be productive. Earn your keep, so to speak.
I did notice that many of the bills discussed and submitted during the first few weeks of session came from you and Senator Jim Waring.
And so that’s one aspect of it. The church missionary part of that brought in the spiritual side. You have to care about people. You have to care about what they say. You have to learn to listen. It also gives you the speaking ability to articulate what message you want to communicate. It also taught me, in my case, Spanish because I went to Spain and spent two years doing that missionary work.
As a cop, politically it taught you how to watch your back [laughs]. And take all the precautions to protect yourself. But go out there and do your job and don’t be afraid to do your job but take the necessary precautions. And so whether it was putting on a gun and a badge and watching your surroundings — or whether it’s coming down here and making sure that you are well versed on the issue and you understand what you are taking about and that you listen to your constituents and that you stay up on current affairs — those are all the protection and things that you do so you don’t have somebody try to attack you politically. If they do attack you, you are protected.
I think there was a third one you mentioned.
A businessman.
Well I think that No. 1, in my dad’s business he had a lot of employees. I’m a businessman but I don’t have any employees. But as a businessman he has to pay the payroll every week. He has to make sure he makes those commitments because those people and their families are counting on him to make sure that he produces enough work for them to do. And so it was a great preparation in coming down here and understanding what it is exactly that we need to do to make sure that we pass good laws.
There is a huge difference between being a cop and a politician. A cop walks the beat, and you walked the beat for 10 years; a politician talks and compromises. What adjustments did you have to make when you took off your badge and donned a politician’s shirt?
As a police officer you were told, we have a saying, “We don’t make the laws; we enforce them.” And now I can’t say that. We do make the laws but I don’t enforce them. But secondly, when you are a police officer, you have to keep your opinion to yourself. You have to go into a situation and be fair.
We would enforce laws, we would do things, we would make arrests. And sometimes the law told us we had to do certain things. Here I can have an opinion. Even in the department, in the administrative part of it, I couldn’t tell the chief I didn’t like that. I couldn’t tell because I was an employee. But now I can tell the chief I don’t like that or I do like that. And so it frees me up to actually express my opinion.
As a former cop, what do you find most difficult when making compromises, which is part of the political process?
The most difficult part about compromise is usually trying to get Party A and Party B to compromise. It’s not hard for me to compromise, unless we are talking about my core values, then it’s almost impossible to compromise those, because I won’t allow it.
But usually most of the bills that we have, you have somebody for and somebody against. And so if it’s not a key principle of my own, then we’re just negotiating between the parties. So the hard part is trying to get both parties to agree.
Acting as a bridge.
Acting as a bridge.
I’m trying to understand your view of man. You clearly believed in man’s capacity to change for the better. You helped kids leave the gang life, yet you also seem to want to lock up criminals even longer than current laws require. Can you explain this seeming dichotomy?
Well I think there is a difference in trying to help kids in a proactive way to stay out of gangs or stay off drugs or stay out trouble and taking those hardened criminals and making sure that they don’t go out there and commit the crimes. If you can rehabilitate someone and get them back into society, and I think you could see that with my bill last year with prostitution.
On one hand we don’t want prostitutes out there offering their services. On the other hand, some of those, many of those prostitutes, are victims of the pimps and drug dealers that market them on the streets. And so that bill actually, gave tougher penalties, jail time not prison time, and it was days not years, but it also allowed for [rehabilitation] so that they could get out of that debilitating lifestyle and part of that help was to keep them off the streets by jail time.
Arizona is a fast growing state. Usually a community that grows rapidly also experiences an increase in crime rate. Is that a correct assumption and based on your experience, what does a fast-expanding community need to do to keep the crime level low?
No. 1, you need to be proactive in the laws that you create and in the way that you take care of your criminals. No. 2, it’s a money issue. You have to allow enough funding to go to your law enforcement agencies so they can handle an increase in crime, plus you have to give enough money to the courts to handle the extra burden that the courts will get.
Many times we forget we’re a growing state and we’ll work on transportation and we’ll work on some other things. But then the social programs will also expand and the criminal justice system sometimes does not get the expansion that it needs up front and we are reactive in that way. We need to be proactive by funding it more up front.
And so I’m hoping that this budget will actually have some more things in respect to monies for law enforcement. For example the DNA bill. That may cost $3.5 million for the collection of all DNA for all arrestees that are booked, but if we don’t have enough money for that, then we’ll have to scale back. And when the next Baseline killer comes along, we may not have enough in the database to trace him and that comes back down to funding.
Talking about crime, we have had studies that suggest that stiffer penalties, such as longer prison terms, do not result in a decline in crime rate. A study in Florida for example showed that the prospect of longer prison does not deter young people from committing crime. But locking them up does prevent crime, incapacitating rather than deterring them.
Well I would have to agree. The young people of today don’t think. “Oh, I could get a long prison term so I’m not go along with my friends to commit this crime that seems fun at the time.” So that’s accurate. A longer prison term does not entice a juvenile to be good, but the longer prison terms keep those bad people that are committing crimes from getting out and making new victims. And we see this over and over again when we see someone who was let out of prison and then went out to kill somebody. And so we’re saving lives by these longer jail terms and we’re saving victims.
Based on (your comments during) committee hearings on bills that touch on judges, I take it you’re not a fan of judges. Is that a correct observation and why?
No, I think judges are a necessary thing. I think that judges can be good. There are a lot of good judges. What I’m not a fan of are those judges that are activist judges or those judges that want to impose their own viewpoint of the world. They don’t follow the law, they make their own law. I’m also not in favor of those judges who let people out with a slap on the wrist.
If there were just one bill that you would like to see become law at the end of this session, what would that be?
That’s a hard question because there are a lot of bills. I would say that the one that needs to be enacted would be the bill about child prostitution.