Phoenix, Arizona
Crime

By the 1960s, crime was a major problem in Phoenix, and by the 1970s, crime continued to increase in the city at a faster rate than almost anywhere else in the country. It was during this time frame when an incident occurred in Phoenix which would have national implications. On March 16, 1963, Ernesto Miranda was arrested and charged with rape. The subsequent Supreme Court ruling on June 13, 1966, Miranda v. Arizona, has led to practice in the United States of issuing a Miranda Warning to all suspected criminals.

With Phoenix's rapid growth, one of the prime areas of criminal activity was land fraud. The practice became so widespread that newspapers would refer to Phoenix as the Tainted Desert. These land frauds led to one of the more infamous murders in the history of the valley, when Arizona Republic writer Don Bolles was murdered by a car bomb in 1976. It was believed his investigative reporting on organized crime and land fraud in Phoenix made him a target. Bolles was the only reporter from a major U.S. newspaper to be murdered on U.S. soil due to his coverage of a story. Max Dunlap was convicted of first-degree murder in the case.

Street gangs and the drug trade had turned into public safety issues by the 1980s, and the crime rate in Phoenix continued to grow. After seeing a peak in the early and mid-1990s, the city has seen a general decrease in crime rates. The Maricopa County Jail system is the fourth-largest in the country. The violent crime rate peaked in 1993 at 1146 crimes per 100,000 people, while the property crime rate peaked a few years earlier, in 1989, at 9,966 crimes per 100,000.

In 2001 and 2002, Phoenix ranked first in the nation in vehicle thefts, with over 22,000 and 25,000 cars stolen each year respectively. It has declined every year since then, eventually falling to 7,200 in 2014, a drop of almost 70% during that timeframe. The Phoenix MSA has dropped to 70th in the nation in terms of car thefts in 2012.
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