North Mississippi Law Enforcement
Officials Hear Details
of Project Aimed at Reducing Crime Involving Firearms
More than 100 law enforcement officials from the 37
counties in the Northern District of Mississippi gathered April 24 at
the School of Law to hear details about a project to help stem crimes
involving firearms.
Project Safe Neighborhoods is funded through the U.S. Department of Justice
and coordinated through U.S. attorneys' offices across the nation. Its
aim is to reduce crime in America by creating task forces in a unified
offensive to aggressively investigate and prosecute persons who commit
crimes with firearms.
"It is our goal that the PSN program, in addition to reducing gun-related
crime directly, will create an unprecedented level of communication and
cooperation among various law enforcement agencies and between these agencies
and the public," says Marc Harrold, project supervisor and senior
research counsel for the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law,
located at the UM Law School.
The local effort, funded with two grants totaling $320,000, is headed
by U.S. Attorney Jim Greenlee, with oversight by Thomas Clancy, NCJRL
director.
The meeting in April included an introduction to the project and an overview
of its implementation. Details also were given about plans to conduct
a statistical study of gun-related crime throughout the district.
A Research Analyst Grant provides $150,000 over three years to support
strategic planning and accountability by the PSN Task Force. The second
grant, for $170,000 over a two-year period, is tagged for media outreach
and community engagement focused on increasing public awareness of gun-related
violent crime and cultivating support for the PSN program.
During the project's first year, statistics will be collected and analyzed
on the area's existing gun-related crimes. These statistics will serve
as a baseline for determining changes in the incidence of the district's
gun-related violence over the next two years.
During the second and third years, researchers will collect and analyze
statistics on currently occurring gun-related violent crime patterns of
selected reporting law enforcement agencies. Data will be analyzed to
determine changes in the frequency of such crimes and to assess the effectiveness
of the task force interventions.
To meet the grants' goals, NCJRL has partnered with UM's Center for Educational
Research and Evaluation, which has extensive expertise in collecting,
recording, evaluating, and utilizing the type of data that the PSN program
requires.