The late Senator Barry Goldwater, from Tucson Citizen archive

Published in today’s Arizona Republic is an opinion piece with the late Senator Barry Goldwater’s 2/14/62 predictions in the Tucson Daily Citizen (predecessor to our Tucson Citizen newspaper) as to Arizona at age 100.

Here’s the online article
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2012/03/06/20120306goldwaters-crystal-ball.html

but the newsprint article has photos (on pages B12 and B13) of the actual 1962 article itself. Good to see our Tucson Citizen newspaper still being remembered, since its demise on May 16, 2009.

Senator Goldwater had 10 predictions, but the most interesting one for us in Southern Arizona is when he stated in prediction #8 (prediction # 7 online version which is lacking one prediction of the 10 printed in the newspaper):

Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because, sometime within the next 50 years, the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it were not there.

Under Senator Goldwater’s predictions are comments by legal scholar Jack August Jr. who is also the Executive Director of the Barry Goldwater Center for the Southwest.

But the Senator was mostly correct in prediction # 2 since Phoenix is now the 6th largest U.S. city:

The forests will still be protected, as well as our parks and monuments. But even they will have as neighbors the people who today enjoy hardships to visit them.

But it will be the deserts that will support the majority of the new homes. Phoenix will have a population of about 3 million, and Tucson will grow to about 1.5 million.

Phoenix and Tucson will remain the two largest cities in the state, with Phoenix being either the fourth- or sixth-largest city in the United States.

At least Tucson is not at the 1.5 million mark yet…

More information on Senator Goldwater (click here), who represented Arizona in U.S. Senate from 1953 to 1965, 1969 to 1987, and was the Republican Presidential nominee for U.S. President in 1964. He died at age 89 in 1998.

CQ Press has released “City Crime Rankings 2010-2011: Crime in Metropolitan America” and Tucson ranks at 127 of 400 cities for the most violent crime. See the KOLD Channel 11 news report from yesterday saying that “Tucson rated as Arizona’s most violent city” :

http://www.fox11az.com/news/local/Tucson-rated-as-Arizonas-most-violent-city-110171094.html

Per the press release from CQ:

The crime rate rankings of the cities and metropolitan areas are calculated using six crime
categories: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. These
categories have been used for determining city crime rate ratings since 1999. The rankings include
all cities of at least 75,000 residents that reported crime data to the FBI in the categories noted for
calendar year 2009. In the most recent survey, 347 metropolitan areas and 400 cities were
considered using statistics released by the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the FBI in
September, 2010. More information on methodology is available on the CQ Press Web site.

If you’re interested in how other Arizona cities ranked: 135 Phoenix; 182 Avondale; 204 Yuma; 205 Tempe; 254 Mesa; 276 Peoria; 343 Scottsdale; most of those cities are in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

The City of Tucson has about 547,981 people, and this study included only cities over 75,000 people. Perception of whether a place is “violent” is relative. Recently I read a crime novel about Arizona’s 1st mass murder in 1991 of nine people (Thai Buddhist temple monks and members) in a little town of Waddell, Arizona, an unincorporated community in Maricopa County (couldn’t find population statistics). For the people of Waddell at that time, they probably ranked very high in perception of violent crime.

Incidentally author Gary Stuart of “Innocent Until Interrogated” noted how the mismanagement/false forced confessions of that mass murder case lead to the election of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County (to replace Sheriff Tom Agnos).

For more info about this report: contact Ben Krasney, Marketing Communications
E-mail: bkrasney@cqpress.com,Tel: 202-729-1846.

Readers, do you think of Tucson as a “violent city”? Keep in mind that it depends where you live, and also that the criteria used by CQ Press was “murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft”.