Valley dog bite hot spots: Is one in your neighborhood?

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PHOENIX -- Every day Deanne Snider hits the streets, she knows a dog bite call is almost a guarantee.

"In Phoenix, an officer can get 10 to 15 calls a day," she said.

Snider is an officer for Maricopa Animal Care and Control and for her department, dog bites are a big problem.

So big, it's almost impossible to imagine how many they see a year.

"For our county, we have about 5,000 bite reports every year."

That's five -- thousand -- bites.

To put that into perspective, that's more than one in the Valley every two hours.

And to find out just how bad it is, ABC15 took a pair of ride-alongs with two officers in the past month, patrolling the hottest areas and coming face-to-face with the Valley's most vicious dogs.

Dog attacks reach all corners of Maricopa County.

If you look at all the bites on a map, all you can see is a blur of dots.

But there are areas much worse than others.

Animal Care and Control has started identifying hot spots, clusters were dogs attack the most. They have pointed out four major areas.

"We have very heavy activity in central Phoenix and into Glendale," says Lt. John Reynolds, who helped integrate the computer software to map dog bites.

Glendale and central Phoenix are very hot areas, and the Maryvale region is considered the worst.

However, there was one area that seemed out of place, but somewhere were many bites occur -- the border of Chandler and Gilbert.

By identifying problem areas, Animal Care and Control can focus patrols, resources and special details in those neighborhoods, cleaning the streets of dangerous dogs that if left loose can be deadly.

The departments been compiling maps for about two years.

Officials said it's cutting attacks considerably. The most noteable decrease is in child bites with a 16 percent drop.

That's a difference that officers like Snider are noticing everyday out in the field.

"When we have the opportunity to go into a hot area where there's problems to go round up strays, then they aren't going to be there to bite anybody at all," she said.