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 research study addresses the collection, preparation, and use of traffic data required for pavement design by the Arizona Department of Transportation, focusing on data required as inputs for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials "Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide" design procedures. ADOT’s current traffic data collection and preparation processes are not adequate to meet the needs of the MEPDG procedure, and improvements are needed. These improvements include enhanced volume, classification, and weight data collection for vehicles, processing data and performing quality assurance checks, and the preparation/analysis of the data for use in the MEPDG. Use of the MEPDG in Arizona will require (1) an annual flow of updated key traffic data and (2) the ability to collect on-site (MEPDG Level 1) data in a timely manner for key projects.

In the mid‐1990s, the Arizona Department of Transportation initiated the Maintenance Cost Effectiveness study (SPR 371) with the development of plans and an experiment design to evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of asphalt pavement maintenance treatments. During 1999 and 2001, ADOT oversaw the construction of hundreds of experimental sections throughout the state under the Phase I, Wearing Course Experiment (nine treatments and 82 sections at three sites), and the Phase II, Preventive Maintenance Experiment (24 treatments and 137 sections at four sites). Work continued in 2006 and 2007 under the Evaluation of Maintenance Strategies study (SPR 628) for ADOT with a yearlong program of pavement performance monitoring involving manual pavement distress surveys and automated skid, friction, and surface texture measurements at all the experimental sites. The project culminated with a detailed analysis of key pavement performance data to compare the performance of the individual treatments and determine their overall effectiveness. This report documents the independent findings of both the Phase I and II experiments.

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.

RTI International is working on behalf of the Arizona Department of Health Services’ Bureau of Tobacco and Chronic Disease to identify existing tobacco-related data and data needs. RTI interviewed ADHS-BTCD’s partnering organizations by telephone and conducted an environmental scan of existing public use datasets. This report describes the results obtained from the environmental scan and the partner telephone interviews, and it discusses recommendations for addressing the identified data gaps.

The Maricopa County Department of Public Health and the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center at Arizona State University initiated an evaluation of ASU’s Tobacco-Free Campus policy, which went into effect on August 1, 2013. The purpose of this evaluation is to assess the impacts of this policy on the ASU community and environment. This report summarizes tobacco consumption patterns, norms and perceptions surrounding tobacco use, tobacco litter on campus, and overall benefits of a tobacco-free campus both before and after policy implementation.