The AZGIA Board of Directors recently held their monthly meeting at Mesa PD. We have several things in the development stages that are coming your way. We are planning on several regional trainings over the next six months.
October 21, 2008 – Tactical Career planning (Suicide Awareness for Law enforcement / financial long range planning)
We are also planning on hosting a one day (evening) gang awareness / information sharing session for parents, educators, community members. Date TBD
Ken Lucas (CCA) and Jerry Dunn (AZDOC) are just getting started on developing one day training with the target audience of corrections, probation, parole, jail intelligence.
Conference update – Jeff Cutler is working on the final stages of selecting a hotel and dates for the 2009 AZGIA conference. The conference will be held in May – June of 2009 and the host hotel will be the Fiesta Inn in Tempe. We moved our dates so out of town attendees could obtain a room rate of around $80.00 dollars per night, instead of the $170.00 per night for a March conference. The Fiesta Inn is a beautiful facility with a brand new conference center. We think you will be very pleased with the new location, which is less than five miles from Sky Harbor Airport. (24 hour shuttle is provided)
We will be posting the 2009 AZGIA conference dates very soon.
Dominant gangs in El Mirage also tend to be the usual suspects in Surprise.
Criminals do not stop at city boundaries, and police with gang-enforcement experience say gang members work the same way.
"El Mirage and Surprise share the same gangs," said Surprise police Detective John Vance. "Our players are the same people. They just cross Dysart Road."
It is this type of intelligence that is important to share among police departments. And that kind of exchange is facilitated by the Arizona Gang Investigators Association, a not-for-profit group of law-enforcement officials who meet and share street-gang information.
The police departments of El Mirage and Surprise are active members in this 800-member group that provides training year-round. Vance sits on AZGIA's board, and the El Mirage Police Department regularly uses the group's affordable resources and training.
"It's about getting everybody working together," said Lt. Andy Vasquez, AZGIA's Central Arizona spokesman and a lieutenant with GIITEM, the state's gang task force. GIITEM stands for Gang & Immigration Intelligence Team. The team operates under the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Vasquez said the motivation to start AZGIA was to provide quality training to officers who work the gang beat, and to offer a "systematic approach to working gangs," he said.
The group is now working on key projects for its growing membership:
• Setting up a basic gang-enforcement school, scheduled to begin in September in Avondale.
• Establishing a gang-enforcement liaison program, which will provide patrol officers with supplemental training. The program will be based on Goodyear Police Department's program.
• Creating an information-sharing center to increase interaction between police officers across agencies.
El Mirage police have identified seven members who will take part in the liaison program, and they plan to send officers to the training school, as well, said Assistant Police Chief Bill Louis, a police spokesman.
Louis said El Mirage has benefited greatly from its relationship with AZGIA, particularly with GIITEM, which helped the El Mirage department nab two suspects in a May 5 gang-related shooting that wounded three teenagers.
"When you start sharing intel like that, it'll have a positive impact," he said.
Though there are gangs in both El Mirage and Surprise, police officials agreed it is not organized or rampant.
Vance, who has nearly 20 years of gang-enforcement experience, said he has seen a trend develop in the West Valley: Gang members skirting loyalties with their groups and joining enemy gangs as a means to make more money.
"They can cooperate with each other to make money," Vance said. "There is no organized push behind it."
Four main gangs share El Mirage-Surprise territory. Recently Vance has noticed groups from California entering the fray.
"We've passed the information to investigations and patrol officers, trying to maintain a handle on who these individuals are," he said.
Monitoring these groups is a lot easier now with the Surprise Police Department's participation in AZGIA.
"We send detectives to the annual conference, and those detectives come back with a lot of information," he said. "They also have quarterly training in different parts of the state, free to members, and we can take part in those, as well."
to the Arizona Gang Investigators Association website,
