This report examines community concerns and challenges related to extreme heat during a typical year and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers which policies have helped address these concerns and challenges and identifies potential opportunities to further support community members with the challenge of extreme heat. The report focuses specifically on American Indian and Latino/a community members, given their disproportionate risk of experiencing detrimental impacts of extreme heat and overlapping risk factors for negative outcomes of COVID-19.

This report examines community concerns and challenges related to extreme heat during a typical year and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers which policies have helped address these concerns and challenges and identifies potential opportunities to further support community members with the challenge of extreme heat. The report focuses specifically on American Indian and Latino/a community members, given their disproportionate risk of experiencing detrimental impacts of extreme heat and overlapping risk factors for negative outcomes of COVID-19.

If Arizona is to prosper into the next century, our focus needs to turn to what is essential for our future: The preservation of our groundwater and our increasingly fragile aquifers. This analysis shows that Arizona continues on a path of unsustainable groundwater use that threatens the health and welfare of our state. It is not too late for a course correction, but that will require that Arizonans face the truth and make bold choices.

For a century, Arizona has pursued prosperity through outward expansion of its urban areas. In metropolitan Phoenix and elsewhere, “growth” has meant developing raw land with new houses, new shopping centers, and new industrial parks--and the metropolitan “frontier” has moved farther outward from downtown every year. This has not been uniformly true, of course. Some cities--Phoenix, Tempe, and Scottsdale especially--have been grappling with the question of revitalizing older urban neighborhoods for many years. But the “outside game” has been the predominant development pattern in the Valley of Sun for many decades. And the Phoenix region has played this game better than one might think, creating many high-quality master-planned communities, protecting lots of open space, using impact fees to build good infrastructure. In other words, Phoenix has used the “outside game” to create a region so attractive it continues to be one of the fastest-growing metropolises in America. But in order for cities to play a good inside game, Arizona must get serious about urban revitalization. And that will require big changes.

Many Arizona street-level police officers and sheriff’s deputies report that they are skeptical of the ability of Arizona’s “pro-arrest” policy to reduce domestic violence, frustrated by a perceived lack of follow-up from prosecutors, and often at odds with victims whose predicaments they may not fully understand.

Domestic violence is a major social problem throughout Arizona, and a major daily challenge for law enforcement officers. Every day in Arizona, domestic violence injures victims, damages property, destroys families, breeds further crime and anti-social behavior, and perpetuates itself in younger generations. Like most states, Arizona has "criminalized" domestic violence (DV) by adopting laws and policies that bolster law enforcement officers’ arrest powers and require them to arrest suspects under certain circumstances.

This brief, the third issue in the "Criminal Justice Issues for Arizona" series, reveals that Pinal County's specialized court for domestic-violence cases offers some promising results for dealing with this common and complex offense. This report contains an analysis of data collected in the Pinal County Domestic Violence Database, which as of April 2008 contained 666 case records of domestic-violence offenders who were processed by one of the three courts. The database also contained information on a comparison group of offenders; however, these offenders are not included in this analysis because of insufficient numbers. Court officials are currently developing a more appropriate comparison group for use in a subsequent analysis. Table 3 presents the frequency and percent of offenses by levels of education: 8th grade and below, some high school, high school diploma, some college, college graduate, post-graduate degree, and unknown. Key findings include: (1) Offenders showed a significant increase in their self-reported coping abilities and in their satisfaction with the criminal-justice system during their period of supervision; (2) Offenders showed a significant decrease in their self-reported propensity for abusiveness to an intimate partner during their period of supervision; and (3) Only 9% of offenders committed another offense while in the program.

The reality of an aging nation has been discussed so much that the statistics no longer shock us. The figures, though, can still prompt us to marvel at the tremendous effect that more people living longer is having on our communities. Our goal now for metropolitan Phoenix is to implement the ideas behind Life Options in real time with real people. Demonstration sites are the next logical step, and pilot planning builds on the significant accomplishments of the Maricopa County Commission on Productive Aging. Between September 2002 and January 2003, this group of 71 community leaders studied how aging and retirement are changing and how new ideas about service, community spaces, and choices might be put into practice. The Commission’s energy and insights began an exciting process of change in metropolitan Phoenix and set the stage for this Life Options Initiative.

In the early 1990s, the criminal justice debate in America was dominated by phrases like “three strikes and you’re out,” “juveniles who commit adult crime should serve adult time,” and “lock ’em up and throw away the key.” In the latter half of the 1990s, however, the dialogue has shifted. Recognizing the enormous social and capital costs associated with locking people up and “throwing away the key,” many – including some of the strongest get-tough-on-crime advocates just a few years ago – have turned to a different concept: prevention.

Many of the influential voices in Greater Phoenix have come to believe in the power of prevention. In late 1996, a diverse coalition of local leadership from the business community, law enforcement, city and county government, academia, and the court system came together to create the Phoenix Violence Prevention Initiative.