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Children in the state’s lower-income urban communities suffer more serious bouts of asthma caused by dirty air and other pollutants – despite decades of state and local monitoring and repeated concerns that air in their neighborhoods is dangerous to their health.

Vulnerable and elderly adults have been the victims of abuse, neglect and fraud in nearly 14,000 cases in Arizona, with the number of cases reported in 2015 increasing 19 percent over the year before, according to a Cronkite News analysis.

Not far from a sewage treatment plant, a landfill and the Maricopa County jail annex are the four schools and hundreds of families that make up the Murphy Elementary School District in south Phoenix. More than 80 percent of its residents are Hispanic, most of them poor and many undocumented.