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Aug. 18, 2025

A rangy man and started raging about “gingers� — red-haired people.

“We got to choke every ginger in town,� said the man, Mark Brown. “We can’t have gingers running around Sahuarita. We can’t have gingers, and we can’t have people with a camera.�

Partway through the man’s comments, Mayor Tom Murphy realized it was satire, a tongue-in-cheek take on the recent arrest of a red-haired man with a camera by Sahuarita’s police chief, Murphy told me later.

by a man who uses a vulgar pseudonym were equally violent but not funny. He demanded that the town council take action against Chief John Noland. He said he was livestreaming to an audience of around 200 people and warned the council that a psychopath watching might look up their addresses and “attack you.�

“Figure your chief issue out please, or we’ll do it for you — the internet thugs will do it.�

The threat was the latest episode in an ongoing conflict between a Sahuarita pastor, supporters of his who run YouTube channels challenging police, and the Sahuarita Police Department. It started more than two years ago, in 2023, when the pastor was handcuffed at his home — or even earlier, depending on how you count.

Murphy shrugged off the threatening language when I spoke with him as “the yoke that we wear as public officials.�

Stepping back through this story, you can see how fine a line it sometimes is between the bullied and bullies, and how they trade places, like kids on a see-saw, a victim one minute, a perpetrator the next.

Aug. 7, 2025

What prompted the outburst at the town council meeting was an incident 11 days earlier, inside the Sahuarita Police Department.

James Springer, who , tried to walk into a room in the police department where a deposition was scheduled in a lawsuit against the town police. Springer, accompanied by companions taking video of the confrontation, as always, said he was helping the plaintiff, Pastor Stephen Aiken, by setting up camera equipment for him to record the deposition of Aiken’s wife, Deborah.

Aiken, pastor of , and his wife had sued the town of Sahuarita over the police forcing their way into the Aikens’ home and detaining him. The town’s attorney, James Jellison, blocked Springer’s path and said he could not go in without making prior arrangements. A hallway standoff ensued.

No video of the entire incident is available now — the Green Valley News reported that a video of the full incident by one of the witnesses was taken down, leaving only edited versions online. What is that Jellison repeatedly tells him he can’t go into the deposition, and Springer repeatedly insists on it.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, grabs him by the back of the neck and takes him to the floor, handcuffing him there. Springer’s allies called it a “choke-slam.�

“Why are you doing this? I’m in a public area! Guys, stop!� Springer said.

At the time, he was accused of assault, but Marana police were called in to investigate, recommended no arrests, and passed on their findings to the Pima County Attorney’s Office, which declined to file charges.

April 27, 2025

Most people go out of their way to avoid that sort of conflict with police. Springer and his colleagues seek it. They go out in small groups, armed with an array of cameras, regularly confronting police, mocking them and trying to provoke them.

Then they put the videos on their YouTube channels to the delight of their audiences. Springer, as James Freeman, . Brown, whose channel is called has 14,000 followers.

Springer has done videos around the country, but most of his recent work has been in Tucson and Southern ÃÛÁÄÖ±²¥. One of the tricks he often deploys is using police language and tactics against them, he told me in an email.

“I often do and say very similar things to them, that they say to the public,� Springer wrote. “I’ve found that sometimes this ‘script flip’ as I call it is very disarming. When I steal their lines their brains seem to short out sometimes and they don’t know what to do or say.�

In , Springer and friends showed up at a police action at a bus stop outside Mario’s Pizza, on First Avenue just south of East Fort Lowell Road. In the video, a second Tucson police vehicle pulls up, and an officer gets out and tells them to stay behind his car.

He also warns them to stay out of the road or he’ll arrest them.

“Bro, there’s no f—-ing road, you piece of s—-,� Freeman said in response. He went on, telling the officer: “Hey, I’m doing my job. Shut the f- — up, boy.�

And when the officer warned him again against going in the road, Freeman made the challenge explicit, asking, “You wanna fight?�

In his email, Springer wrote: “All I have is my words and my tone, because the truth is that I NEVER have the power, because I am not actually willing to use force and violence against them even if I KNOW that I am 100% right, but they are often willing to use force and violence against me, even when they are 100% wrong.�

April 9, 2024

The lawsuit filed by Pastor Steve Aiken and his wife Deborah, a year after his detention, tells a story of Sahuarita police who wouldn’t take “no� for an answer and hurt the person they were trying to help.

“As officers approached the house, the home was dark and the whole neighborhood was quiet,� the lawsuit says.

But a 911 call had come in, reporting angry voices in the house and a crashing sound. So officers went to the Aikens’ house. When Steve Aiken came down and talked to officers, he told them that they had been upset earlier in the night because of a hospitalized grandchild, but they were asleep in bed now and the police should leave.

The officers insisted on talking with Deborah Aiken and seeing her, separate from her husband. It took a half hour, but she came down to the door eventually, though she wouldn’t open it or come outside. She said she was OK. Officers insisted, though, on talking to her separately, and said that if she didn’t open the door, they would have to breach it themselves. She didn’t.

“After 38 minutes on the Aikens’ property, and while Sergeant (Oscar) Fruge still had visual and verbal contact with both Aikens, officers broke down the Aikens’ door with a breaching tool. When the door flew open, it struck Deborah Aiken, the very person whose welfare officers were supposedly trying to protect. Officers physically pulled Deborah from her home, though she was suspected of no crime, even pulling her hands from the door frame she tried to grab onto,� the lawsuit says.

Steven Aiken was handcuffed for 22 minutes but never charged with a crime.

April 19, 2023

This day, more than two years ago, wasn’t the first time Sahuarita police had heard of Pastor Aiken. He testified during deposition for the lawsuit that his daughter has accused him “easily� 100 times of abusing his wife, Deborah.

“There was a year or two in the beginning, and I’m talking like five, six years ago, where it was more that I kept her prisoner, I think,� Aiken said. But more recently, he testified, “90% of her complaints� were accusing him of domestic violence.

In fact, when he first heard police outside his house, he testified, “My first thought literally was did my daughter send an assassin to kill me, because somebody is lurking around my house, and I can’t figure out who’s lurking around my house.�

Later, he became convinced that his daughter had called 911 that night, not a neighbor. But he acknowledged there had been raised voices. And when the police went in the house, what they found raised suspicions.

“I noticed broken glass all over the floor, including the main bedroom,� Officer Eric Heath wrote in his report. “I also observed that the couch was apart, the rug was out of place, a broom and dustpan in the living room area, and several weapons (guns and knives) throughout the residence,�

But Deborah Aiken told officers she had not been feeling well and as a result went to bed early without cleaning up the broken glass. She said her husband drops glasses sometimes because he no longer has feeling in one hand, the report says.

Aug. 30, 2025

So, which is it? Has the pastor been the aggressor? Springer and his buddies? Or has it been an issue of police overkill this whole time?

In the aftermath of the arrest of James Springer on Aug. 7, the audio-visual operator at Southern ÃÛÁÄÖ±²¥ Community Church quit and called the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. She told a deputy Aug. 13 that Aiken “had been acting a little strange,â€� the sheriff’s department report says.

“She stated he had been coming to work with a bullet proof vest,� the report says. “He had weapons in his church he carried, and he also invited his parishioners to carry weapons. She stated he had the regular service, but after the regular service, he then started to have side services, in which he would start showing video clips, that she stated he edited, on the screens, showing the issue between him and SPD. She stated it was unfortunate that he was editing the videos, and not showing the parishioners the full true video, and she believed the individual was somewhat acting like a cult.�

When asked about the accusation, a spokesperson for Aiken said in an email, “The Pastor does not entertain tabloid-like inquiries that aim to smear him. Additionally, questions that pry into church matters are out of bounds and he will not comment.�

But his church services are posted online, shedding some light on how the drama is playing out inside its walls. In a recent bible study, Aiken said his fears that the church’s outreach would be hurt by turned out to be wrong. Instead, Springer’s arrest brought attention to his case.

“We’re reaching more people without an AV (audio-visual) team than we were than we had one,� he said. “That’s God!�