The Green Valley Sheriff’s Auxiliary Volunteers has grown from a band of CB radio enthusiasts who helped the Sheriff with search operations and home visits into a highly trained group of volunteers who assist the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in a wide range of services throughout Green Valley.

In 1978, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department introduced the Citizen Bear to Green Valley. The Citizen Bear was comprised of Green Valley volunteers using Citizen Band radios for communication. At that time, the role of the Citizen Bear was limited to assisting in search and rescue operations and home visits. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department was a national leader in using citizen volunteers.

With that in mind, it was no surprise that Sheriff Clarence William Dupnik decided to expand volunteerism even further. Sheriff Dupnik tasked a group of individuals to develop a larger more comprehensive group of volunteers. The focus was to develop a program which would model the Green Valley Citizen Bear group while serving all of unincorporated Pima County.

The department soon learned that the talent of the volunteers vastly exceeded its expectations of what the volunteers could do. The Citizen Bear program evolved into a new concept of volunteerism. This evolution prompted an eventual change in the group’s name to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department Sheriff’s Auxiliary Volunteers of the Green Valley District, Incorporated, or Green Valley SAV.

It did not take long for the responsibilities of this volunteer organization to expand far beyond what was initially anticipated. SAV now operates in a wide variety of areas, including