Tempe Town Lake

May 16, 2007
Tempe is new Valley crime capital
Garin Groff, Tribune

It doesn’t seem to add up. More than 100,000 people flock to Tempe for special events. Arizona State University attracts more students than any other in the nation. And home values have soared because the city is a desirable place to live.

View Tempe crime chart

Tempe remains a prime destination despite a dubious distinction — the city has the highest crime rate in the Valley.

Tempe has more crime per capita than even Phoenix, the nation’s fifth largest city.

What gives? How does a city with so much crime manage to be a magnet for events, students, night life and jobs?

Police suggest looking at the situation in another way, saying that all the visitors have distorted the statistics by committing crimes in a city that doesn’t count them as residents.

“We can come close to doubling our population in one night,” police spokesman Mike Horn said. “No other community locally deals with the population fluxes that we do.”

Events downtown, at Town Lake and at ASU make Tempe the events capital of the state, with attendance at some events swelling to more than 100,000. Also, the number of people in Tempe on any given weekday increases by roughly 60,000 — about 38 percent of the total population — because the city has more jobs than residents. And Arizona State University is the nation’s largest university, with 50,000 students on and off its Tempe campus.

None of those people shows up in Tempe’s official population, which every city uses to report its crime rate to the FBI. City officials said there’s no formula that truly captures the complexity of crime.

“When you’re measuring the rate of crime using permanent population as a base of people, it doesn’t give a realistic sense of the safety of the community,” Mayor Hugh Hallman said.

If the city could calculate its crime rate by including ASU students, it would rank among the Valley’s safest cities, Hallman said,

Tempe has made changes to cut crime, including:

• Hiring more police personnel. The department will receive money in July for 31.5 new jobs, from police officers to crime analysts.

• Reorganizing the police department. Police Chief Tom Ryff, who took his post in November, has named new assistant police chiefs and is studying ways to staff the department more efficiently. Changes should be announced within months.

• Raising salaries. Tempe is spending another $1 million a year to make police salaries the highest in Arizona. The city hopes higher pay will help them to retain the best police officers and attract top-notch recruits.

Elected officials hiked police pay in January as one way of trying to cut crime, Hallman said.

“The (City) Council moved very quickly this year, and this council said ‘we don’t like the trend here,’” Hallman said. “We want to make sure we have enough officers here.”

The department could ask for even more, Horn said, as police consider a reorganization and assess staffing levels.

Police also monitor trends and shift efforts when particular types of crime spike. Horn said police set up a task force in 2006 to address a surge in armed robberies. That led to nine arrests and a 40 percent drop in armed robberies, he said.

But police say the public needs to do more to prevent some crimes, especially auto theft. Horn said he’s seen some car owners all but invite thieves by leaving keys in the ignition.

“They need to take responsibility to address those areas in their own lives to reduce the likelihood of them becoming victims,” Horn said.

Tempe’s long-term crime outlook has shown improvement. The crime rate has dropped four years in a row and is 25 percent lower than it was at its peak in 2002.

Cities with more destinations usually attract more crime, police said. That will affect other East Valley communities such as Gilbert, where the Loop 202 Santan Freeway’s recent opening has triggered a wave of new shopping centers.

Crime rates climbed in Chandler when Chandler Fashion Center and two new freeways opened several years ago, police said.

Gilbert officials expect the pattern to repeat with higher rates of auto thefts, creditcard fraud and shoplifting, Gilbert police spokesman Andrew Duncan said.

“That’s a challenge we will have coming up very soon,” Duncan said.

Tempe Councilwoman Onnie Shekerjian has lived in both Tempe and Scottsdale and said she feels her city is as safe as Gilbert. During a seven-year stint in Scottsdale, she recalled twice finding intruders in her yard. The only thing to happen in Tempe was last Christmas, 20 years after she moved to the city.

After the initial frustration, she found humor in how selective the thief was. “You take my CDs that are all oldies and you leave my inspirational religious CDs that you probably could have used,” Shekerjian said. “I have to tell you, I got a big kick out of that.”