There are slightly more than 700 public housing units in the East Anchorage Weed & Seed Initiative target area. These units are scattered throughout this area in small clusters and not congregated in the large, high-rise complexes found in many cities. The Weed & Seed Steering Committee is faced with significant challenges when it attempts to address violent and drug related crimes in and around these clusters. First, the variety, size and proximity of unit clusters creates problems for boundary identification when implementing and evaluating programs targeted at a specific physical locations. Second, the police data have historically only been provided to the Weed & Seed as aggregate, “raw” numbers which did not allow desegregations. The third challenge is in the integration of all available data in a useful manner. There is not only a rich variety of useful police data to explore, but abundant census, Municipality of Anchorage (MOA) and neighborhood data exist albeit in differing formats, platforms and metrics. Given the expense and expertise required, East Anchorage Weed & Seed has not had the opportunity to develop the capacity to utilize this complex information for problem assessment, program implementation or impact evaluation.

The goals of the project are to create a capacity to assess the nature of violent and drug related crime trends in and around identified public housing within the Weed & Seed target area, to provide the capacity to monitor the implementation of Steering Committee initiatives addressing these issues, and to create a sustainable forum for the use of valid and reliable data which informs public policy decisions relating to crime and justice.