Arizona State and Local Government Documents Collection

In 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics awarded a State Justice Statistics grant to the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission’s Statistical Analysis Center to conduct research on homicide in Arizona. The Center, with assistance from local law enforcement officials, and researchers from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, collected homicide data from the following sources: Supplemental Homicide Reports, law enforcement homicide case files, and autopsy reports. The purpose of this report is to provide a general description of the scope and nature of the homicide problem in Arizona. Specifically, this report examines the general characteristics of victims and offenders, the circumstances surrounding homicide incidents, temporal patterns when homicides occur, and the geographic characteristics where homicides took place.

The year 2002 marked the largest outbreak to date in the world as the virus rapidly spread across the U.S. Maricopa County has been spared the burden of widespread WNV-illness thus far, however the area is home to a viable mosquito population, many species of migratory birds and a large human populace with a propensity for outdoor activities making arrival of the virus inevitable and advanced preparations invaluable.

Prior to developing and approving new ordinances that would further regulate sex- offender distance restrictions and clustering, the Phoenix City Council approved a study to examine the nature and impact of sex-offender clustering. Their overall goal was to use the study to fill in some important knowledge gaps about the issue of sex-offender residential clustering in order to inform the development of effective policy. To examine this issue on behalf of the city council, we relied on a multi-methodological research design. We wanted to incorporate information from several different points of view, giving policy makers a more comprehensive perspective from which to inform their decision making. For this study, we relied on four resources: official police data, offender interview data, citizen survey data, and key stakeholder interview data.

The Violence Prevention Academy was designed to train school-based personnel to develop comprehensive, integrated, evidence-based violence prevention plans tailored to the specific needs of participating schools. Using a combination of face-to-face learning and technical assistance, the training program enhances the skills of school violence prevention specialists and the capacity of the schools where they work to implement and sustain successful violence prevention programs.

If you ask people who do not live or work in Maryvale to describe the community, they are likely to say that it is crime-ridden and unsafe, with neighborhoods marred by graffiti and houses in disrepair. But what they don’t see, and what people who live and work in Maryvale experience every day, are the strengths and assets – in the people, programs and promising new initiatives – that give the community its distinct identity and define its future.

The general goal of this report was to collect data on citizens’ needs for information about neighborhood crime patterns and trends, terrorism, and public emergency planning and response in the western region of the Phoenix metropolitan area. There was particular interest in obtaining citizen feedback on data-sharing questions related to terrorism prevention.