Healthy Families Arizona is a voluntary, home visitation program, aimed at the prevention of child abuse and neglect. This secondary prevention program is targeted to the parents of newborns with risk factors that make them vulnerable to child abuse and neglect, and at risk of parent/child relationship and child development problems. The risk factors that qualify parents for the program include parental history of abuse and neglect; substance abuse; mental health problems; poor coping skills; a lack of social support; unrealistic developmental expectations of infants and toddlers, difficulty with bonding and attachment; attitudes favorable toward harsh discipline; anger management issues; and a lack of resources to meet basic needs. Modeled on the Healthy Families America program, Healthy Families began in Arizona in 1991 with two sites. Administered by the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Healthy Families Arizona has realized considerable growth over the years, and is now available to families statewide. As with any considerable investment in cost and effort, the question of return is central to ongoing support of the Healthy Families Arizona program. Does the Healthy Families Arizona program (a) reduce the risk of child abuse and neglect; (b) lead to better health and development for children, and (c) does it enhance parent/child relationships? The longitudinal evaluation of Healthy Families Arizona was designed to answer these questions.

Maricopa County and twenty four incorporated cities and towns, two tribes and one other governmental organization participated in a cooperative effort to update the Maricopa County Multi-jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan. Hazard mitigation planning reduces the risk to people and property, and reduces the cost of recovering from a disaster. A hazard mitigation plan can help communities become more sustainable and disaster-resistant by focusing efforts on the hazards, disaster-prone areas and identifying appropriate mitigation actions. Effective mitigation planning and efforts can break the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated damage. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors officially adopted the Multi-jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan on April 14, 2010.

For a community to take full advantage of the opportunities provided in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, it must first prepare a Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Maricopa County, partner agencies, and participating communities wish to adopt a Plan to better protect their communities from wildfire risk, to better prepare citizens, and to become eligible to apply for and receive federal and other grant monies to implement wildland fire mitigation and programs.

This Protocol, initially developed in 1995, is offered to coordinate the involvement and interaction of each agency in Maricopa County involved with providing care, treatment, and assistance to all children, whether victims or witnesses, where criminal conduct is suspected. This Protocol serves to ensure each child is treated with dignity, fairness, and respect and protected from harassment, intimidation, or abuse, and to minimize the secondary trauma that can accompany investigations of criminal conduct.

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.

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.

This inventory includes emissions of coarse particulate matter <10 µm in diameter (PM10), fine particulate matter < 2.5 µm (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ammonia. Emissions are calculated for both Maricopa County and the PM10 nonattaiment area. Annual totals as well as typical daily emissions are provided for all source categories.

An Arizona drug control strategy was initially developed in 1987 with extensive input from local, state, and federal officials and agencies. Through the years, the drug control strategy was updated, refined, and expanded to include gang and violent crime. The first multi-year strategy was released in 2000 and continued for three years, followed by a four-year strategy developed in 2004 and a subsequent strategy in 2008. Drug, gang and violent crime continue to be a persistent threat to the public safety and health of Arizonans. Through granting millions of dollars in federal and state funds to address drug, gang and violent crime, the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission serves an integral role in responding to the problem. The Arizona Drug, Gang and Violent Crime Control (Strategy) is the Commission’s primary decision-making tool for the allocation of funds and to guide project activity for the Drug, Gang and Violent Crime Control program.