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.
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