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Building Bridges - Volume II, Number 3, 2003
The Phoenix Experience in Fighting Neighborhood Blight
City prosecutors’ offices are implementing community prosecution strategies in many neighborhoods across the country with tremendous success. The following illustrates the City of Phoenix’s success in handling one blight ridden rental property.
In late 1996, Phoenix City Prosecutor Kerry G. Wangberg selected Aarón J. Carreón-Aínsa, an experienced Assistant City Prosecutor, to develop a community prosecution unit. Before going out into the community, they both visited several jurisdictions around the country with successful programs and attended several APRI community prosecution trainings. Carreón-Aínsa then began attending neighborhood meetings and talking with school officials, apartment owners/managers, and business people to determine their concerns about public safety and quality of life.
The Westwood Neighborhood was one of a dozen areas that seemed like good candidates for community prosecution. The neighborhood, which encompasses nearly 200 apartment complexes, is only seven-tenths of a square mile. Many of the apartment complexes were in substandard condition. There was an existing infrastructure for community involvement: an association of residents, an association of business people, and an association of owners and managers of residential rental properties. City departments, particularly Police and Neighborhood Services, had good working relationships with the three associations. It seemed like a logical community to place a neighborhood-based prosecutor.
Carreón-Aínsa then convened a meeting with Neighborhood Services, Development Services, the Police Department, Planning Department, Fire Department, the Maricopa County Health Department, Public Works- Solid Waste Division of the City of Phoenix, representatives from the City Attorney’s Office and County Attorney’s Office, and neighborhood representatives. He soon discovered that all of these neighborhood stakeholders shared concern over building deterioration and an increase in crimes committed in residential rental properties, and each had been working independently on finding solutions to these problems.
The first rental property chosen for inspection was the Sundowner Apartments. This rundown apartment complex comprised 156 units on the main street in Westwood and was owned by an absentee landlord. It was selected because tenants had complained repeatedly of poor maintenance, and area residents believed that many Sundowner residents were involved in an inordinately high level of crime. It also received the highest number of calls for service of any other rental property in the area.
When the police department analyzed the calls for service to the Sundowner over a six-month period, it found that 100 calls for service were related to incidents occurring on the property. This was at variance with the perception held by the neighborhood, which was that the level of calls for service were four and a half times that level. Another factor that made a difference between perception and fact was that not all calls identified with the property were for acts on the property. For instance, a victim of a robbery may not report the offense until he/she arrived home. The police would be dispatched to the property, but for an event that did not occur at or on the property. This demonstrated that the first step in solving problems is to separate perception from fact. The next step is to analyze the facts. In this situation, the city police department categorized each incident and compared the level of incidents with similar properties in the area. This analysis revealed several deficiencies in the maintenance of the property that contributed to the numerous calls for service related to the property. One specific concern was a need to increase outside and common area lighting.
Can They Fix It?
The City of Phoenix Community Prosecution Unit organized a team including the Neighborhood Preservation Inspector, the Neighborhood Specialist from the City Neighborhood Services, the Community Action Officer, and the Bike Squad from the Police Department. The team eventually expanded to include members from City Development Services; Planning, Water, and Fire Departments; County Health; and State Department of Environmental Quality. For more than five months, the team worked to convince the ownership through its management company to comply with the Phoenix City Code Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance, but to no avail.
The Sundowner management was not interested in spending money to bring the building into compliance with the codes. During that time, the team requested a voluntary inspection of all units and common areas in the buildings from which a list of all violations, health and safety hazards would be prepared, followed by a plan with the management to fix the violations. Sundowner management refused the offer. Carreón-Aínsa arranged for the City Planning Department’s expert in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) to perform a complete study, including a “lighting study” of the property. There was no charge for this service, but still no positive response from the Sundowner management.
The team determined that the next step was a comprehensive inspection of the property, inside and out. Since the ownership refused to consent to the inspection, it required a court order. At this time, inspectors from the various agencies visited the property, and then wrote affidavits outlining numerous violations of specific city codes leading them to believe that if they inspected the rest of the property they would find other violations. The community prosecutor assisted the police in drafting a search warrant that was subsequently signed by a justice of the peace.
Inspection Day
Approximately 60 team members gathered at a “staging area” at the neighborhood school to take part in the inspection. This group included neighborhood association representatives; code, health, and fire inspectors; law enforcement; social services officials; and prosecutors, all representing a unified front to the absentee landlord and his apathetic building managers. With a dozen police cars parked in a vacant lot across the street, the building inspections started at 8:00 a.m. The building’s management arrived as the search warrant was being executed. This event also received print, radio, and television press coverage, including interviews on camera.
Eight teams of City of Phoenix inspectors and police officers spent the day inspecting each of the 156 apartments and every aspect of the property’s 13 two-story buildings. By evening, they had found 511 violations, including dangerous electrical wiring, faulty refrigeration leading to water accumulation in ceilings, lack of fire extinguishers and smoke alarms, and dangerous railings on second-floor landings. Charges were filed in the Phoenix City Court against the absentee landlord and management company.
As a result of this coordinated effort, the property was brought into compliance under court supervision. The property owner subsequently signed a settlement agreement. Since that time, the City of Phoenix Prosecutor’s Office instituted a new policy requiring the landlord to correct violations on their property as the first condition of any settlement agreement. The incentive for the principal owner in the Sundowner case to enter into a settlement agreement with the City was two-fold: First, he avoided being named publicly as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by the City. The property was owned by a limited liability entity of which the out-of-town person was a member. The City agreed to dismiss the citations against the principal owner after the ownership group and the management company accepted responsibility. Second, he received a reduction in fines for the 511 violations, which could have totaled $1.27 million. The owner of the Sundowner eventually sold the property. The current owner has agreed to maintain the property in compliance with all city codes.
Today, the police and community prosecutor maintain a visible presence at the Sundowner property and have also increased their activities in the Westwood neighborhood. More than 25 blighted multi-family properties have been brought into compliance since 1997, resulting in improvements to the exteriors and interiors of over 1,000 units. In addition, over 200 single family homes were brought into compliance; multi-family meetings were established; landlord/tenant training sessions were conducted on-site at complexes; and properties have been certified “Crime Free.”1 Overall, the community is enjoying improved public safety and an enhanced quality of life. The City of Phoenix Prosecutor’s Office has found that neighborhood and business people appreciate being included in the process of making their community a more livable place, gain a better understanding of the work of the City Prosecutor, and feel safer as a result of their neighborhood-based prosecutor.
The Future of Community Prosecution in Phoenix
City Prosecutor Wangberg’s office worked with the community for over a year on the Sundowner case. He believes that committing the prosecutor’s office for the long-term is the only way to truly solve long-term livability problems and thus gain the support and trust of the community. Neighborhood-based prosecutor Carreón-Aínsa believes that, “The key to successfully cleaning up rental properties is that you can never walk away once the initial violations are fixed. Maintenance and continual monitoring are crucial. If we have to go back 57 times, we will. We are in this for the long-term, we are committed.”
Originally launched by the City of Phoenix Prosecutor’s Office with no additional funding, today the City’s community prosecution initiative is a permanent item in the city budget. With supplemental funding from other sources,2 the community prosecution unit has expanded its services to four additional neighborhoods including the Garfield, Granada, Palomino, and most recently, the Sunnyslope neighborhoods and increased in staff from one to seven prosecutors. The unit continues to fight blight ridden rental properties while also addressing prostitution and drug and alcohol related problems. The community prosecution initiative also includes an education component for the residents of these communities about the services and agencies available to them. Their goal is to restore these neighborhoods to healthy and safe environments with a sense of community.
For more information about the City of Phoenix’s Community Prosecution Initiative, please contact Aarón Carreón-Aínsa or John Tutelman, Community Prosecution Bureau Chief, at 602-534-9801.
1 The Crime Free Multi-Housing Program is a national program. It involves educating owners and managers in ways to make rental properties safe, making physical improvements to increase safety (e.g., increase exterior lighting, solid core or metal exterior doors, dead bolts), and educating tenants in ways that they can contribute to increased safety.
2 The City of Phoenix Prosecutor’s Office has received two Community Prosecution Enhancement grants from the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance for Fiscal Years 1999 and 2001; and a HUD Safe Neighborhoods grant in 1998.
News in Our Community
- Ask the Experts—NCCP has a national list of experts who will answer your questions and provide advice with problems. To access these experts, click on “Ask the Experts” on our home page and email your questions.
- Video Library—NCCP offers a video library on our web site that can be downloaded for viewing from your computers. The first two presentations are Community Prosecution Office Organizational Issues and Getting Started. Subsequent videos will be available for viewing in the spring. All of these presentations are available on CD in a two-volume set. Please call NCCP to order a free copy of these presentations, or visit our video library on-line.
- Community Prosecution Census—Many prosecutors are engaged in community-oriented problem-solving, but few identify themselves as community prosecutors. To more accurately depict the number of offices utilizing the core principles of community prosecution, in October 2002, APRI’s Office of Research & Evaluation distributed a 9-page survey to all prosecutor offices across the country. Survey results will soon be available in a brief publication. To order a copy of the publication, please contact Patty Fanflik at 703-519-1673.
- Thank You, Tara Scully!—APRI would like to thank Tara Scully for her great work at the National Center for Community Prosecution over the last two years as Program Assistant. She has been an instrumental member of our staff while working on her graduate degree in Forensic Science. Although we are sad to see her leave, we are pleased that she has found a position in her field. She has accepted an Instructor and Lab Support position at the George Washington University, Department of Biological Sciences, effective February 17, 2003.
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