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.

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 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.

As part of the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Smart Policing Initiative, the Glendale Police Department and the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University found that convenience stores -- particularly Circle K's -- disproportionately contributed to crime and disorder in the city of Glendale. The Center reached out to other law enforcement agencies in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and in June 2011, they authored a report based on 2010 data from four cities: Glendale, Mesa, Phoenix, and Tempe. The 2010 report revealed that, when compared to other convenience stores Circle K’s, were disproportionately responsible for crime and disorder, regardless of their neighborhood or city.

Over the past year anecdotal evidence from media reports has suggested disproportionate levels of crime and violence occurring at Circle K stores in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Criminal events depicted by the media often took the form of individuals engaging in some type of minor criminal activity at a Circle K, and the events spiraling out of control. As a consequence of these observations, and subsequent federally sponsored research examining problem places in Glendale, Arizona, faculty and staff from the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University reached out to several valley police departments and requested official data to more systematically examine this potential problem. This report presents our findings and our recommendations.

In 1996, the Arizona Legislature charged our universities, community colleges, and Board of Regents to collaborate to develop ways for students to seamlessly transfer from community colleges to universities. Meeting the higher education needs of our state was and is a priority of these three bodies. The Academic Program Articulation Steering Committee was formed as the cooperative body to carry out this charge. On behalf of the community colleges and Arizona Board of Regents, it prepares an annual report to the legislature on the progress toward improving articulation and transfer.

In the Arizona University System, research that leads to real innovations translates to technologies and products that improve lives and stimulate the economy. This report provides an in-depth and comprehensive review of Arizona's higher education research enterprise. It is designed to allow the reader to easily locate any single research metric for any of Arizona's three public universities and quickly compare each Arizona university's performance against those of its Board-approved peers.

In the 2009 report entitled "Vision 2020," the Arizona Board of Regents outlined the objective of raising Arizona to the national average of college graduates in the work force and moving Arizona to the status of a large scale center for academic research. This realignment plan outlines how both of these significant goals will be achieved in an era of more modest public investment.

The Arizona Board of Regents presents in this 2020 Vision a framework for the Arizona University System to improve the economic strength of our state and quality of life for Arizonans over the next 12 years. This plan lays out a series of touchstones for this ambition organized around four key themes: Educational Excellence, Research Excellence, Community Engagement and Workforce Impact, and Productivity. This plan builds on a foundation manifested in previous strategic planning efforts of the universities and the Board, including the establishment of a medical college in Phoenix, development of new health professions programs not offered by public institutions in the state, growth in the research enterprise, and increasingly intensive efforts to provide baccalaureate access to all regions of the state.