Medical Examiner’s Office Presented Achievement Award

The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office was recently awarded the NACo Achievement Award for their Unidentified Persons Search tool. The Medical Examiner’s Office has taken advantage of existing resources and partnered with the Office of Enterprise Technology to utilize the Internet as a tool to help solve cases of unidentified deceased persons. They have created a webpage that enables law enforcement agencies and the public, at a national level, to quickly and easily access records that were previously stored and manually referenced on an as-needed basis. This webpage can be used in conjunction with Internet databases from organizations such as The National Center for Missing Adults and Doenetwork to help identify those people that had to be buried without a name and without closure for their families. In addition, the identification of a homicide victim is often a crucial step in solving a crime, which in turn can promote a feeling of safety and a positive outlook for the community of Maricopa County .

Program Background
Begun in 1970, the annual Achievement Award Program, administered by the Research Division of NACo, is a non-competitive awards program which seeks to recognize innovative county government programs called County Model Programs.  Created as a part of NACo’s New County, USA campaign, the Achievement Award Program continues to embody the grassroots and local government energy the program was designed to promote. The main emphasis of the New County, USA campaign was to modernize and streamline county government and to increase its services to its citizens; goals that are still the main emphasis of the Achievement Award Program today.

County governments across the country, working alone and in cooperation with other governments at the municipal, state and national levels, continue to develop innovative and successful programs in a wide range of service areas, including arts and historic preservation, children and youth, community and economic development, corrections, county administration, emergency management, environmental protection, health, human services, libraries, parks and recreation, transportation, volunteers and much more. The Achievement Awards Program gives national recognition to county accomplishments, and has enabled NACo to build a storehouse of county success stories that can be passed on to other counties.