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The Mayor and City Council shall discuss and possibly take action to provide consent to submit a grant application to the Mayor's Challenge through Bloomberg Philanthropies in an amount not to exceed $5,000,000. Consent to submit a grant application provides the City Manager authority to sign all necessary documents to complete the application. Discussion and Action.
AGENDA ITEM DESCRIPTION
Bloomberg Philanthropies is inspired by the opportunity to find and spread innovative local solutions to national programs. The Mayor's Challenge was created to celebrate the creative problem solving and incredible innovation that is happening at city halls from coast to coast. The five boldest ideas with the greatest potential for impact will win funding as well as national and local recognition. The challenge is about identifying a need, solving a problem and sharing your knowledge so that other cities and citizens can benefit from your insight and action.
For the purposes of the Mayor's Challenge, a great idea is one that shows bold and innovative thinking, a solid strategy for implementation, and the potential to generate measurable impact not just in Maricopa, but in other cities too. The Mayor's Challenge aims to encourage cities to take an idea, make it bigger, better and more impactful.
Ideas must address one or more of these impacts:
· Serious social or economic problems
· Improve customer service for residents and businesses
· Enhance accountability to or engagement with the public
· Create efficiencies that make government work better, faster and cheaper
Ideas must also be:
· Brand new- never implemented
· Something that has been implemented elsewhere but is new and improved in your City
· An existing pilot or demonstration project you wish to expand
Five awards will be provided nationwide and award decisions are expected in spring 2013:
· One (1) $5 million winner
· Four (4) $1 million winner
The Maricopa Police Department is presenting an idea that has been implemented elsewhere but proposes to stretch the idea and concept.
In the City of Maricopa, a predominant percentage of our crime (approximately 70%) is property crimes (burglaries, thefts, vehicle crimes, etc
). Because of our transient population (winter visitor home owners and residents who work in Metro Phoenix), these crimes are most often delayed in reporting. Therefore, the suspect(s) have been gone for a while and even some of the evidence has been tampered with. Police Officers responding to these crime scenes is sometimes unnecessary and even more, most times not cost efficient. To compound the problem, the City of Maricopa currently has 1.17 police officers/thousand residents, far below the norms across the US in cities our size. To provide better service at a much more reasonable cost to the citizens the following solution is proposed:
1. Invest in an On-Line reporting system where citizens can report their loss or crime (only certain pre-determined crimes would apply, i.e., phone losses/thefts, fraud, thefts below a certain dollar amount, bicycle thefts, etc
) over the internet. These crimes historically have no evidence left behind, and because of this, officers often take the calls over the telephone.
2. Because of the low officer to resident ratio, Maricopa Police Department will create new positions in the police department called the Civilian Investigation Specialists. Between 3 and 6 Civilian Crime Scene Investigators will be hired and available 7 days a week. These employees will be trained to process crime scenes, take photographs, collect evidence and interview victims and witnesses. Because they are not responsible to handle violent crimes and they only respond to calls of delayed reports, they can take the additional time necessary to conduct very thorough investigations. The CIS's then write complete police reports that are immediately sent to the Criminal Investigations Division for further follow-up. They do not need to respond to emergency calls and do not carry weapons. They can even schedule the investigation to fit time restrictions of the customer (the victim) so as not to inconvenience the victim . This allows sworn police officers to respond to violent calls in progress. More importantly, this frees up those same officers to proactively go after career criminals and arrest them without being interrupted to respond to a delayed property crime where much time-consuming investigation needs to be done before an arrest is made. This will reduce all crimes as career criminals commit property crimes, violent crimes and also quality of life crimes.
To improve upon this idea, the Maricopa Police Department will be collaborating with Central Arizona Community College and the Insurance Agencies for education and prevention. This will tie into the existing block watch program and crime prevention efforts through CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) MPD is currently implementing.
STAFF RECOMMENDATION
Staff recommends submitting a grant application to the Mayor's Challenge through Bloomberg Philanthropies in an amount not to exceed $5,000,000.