During my tenure as the Commander of the West Precinct of the Birmingham Police Department, the city’s largest precinct, I wanted to create more time for officers to proactively patrol. Even before, during my time as a shift lieutenant at the same precinct, I was frustrated that officers were consumed with service calls that allowed
EVANSVILLE, Ind. — A recent initiative to reduce homicides and other violent crime through a partnership with the National Network for Safe Communities is in its early stages here. The Evansville City Council voted unanimously on March 8 to commit $385,000 over three years to a partnership with the NNSC. Although it is a two-year contract, the NNSC agreed to take payments over
The US criminologist behind the anti-gang strategy designed to reduce the number of shootings and explosions in Malmö has credited the city and its police for the “utterly pragmatic, very professional, very focused” way they have put his ideas into practice. In an online seminar with Malmö mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, David Kennedy, a professor
Since this summer, calls for nationwide police reform have grown ever louder. But meaningful change has been slow to follow. Standing in the way in Wisconsin is a system where police departments are often insulated from accountability. And it has been that way for more than 100 years. A state law passed in 1885 gives volunteer citizen boards authority to hire and
Shortly after the city of Columbus announced a partnership with criminologist David Kennedy to dig deep into the rising tide of homicidal violence in Columbus, I spoke with him about his decades of work in violence prevention. Kennedy is a proponent of an approach to violence-reduction that first identifies precisely who is driving the violence.
“The theory is that there is a small percentage of individuals committing the large amount of violent crime that is taking place in our community,” says Ned Pettus, the director of the city’s Department of Public Safety. That is not a new theory, or one that is unique to Columbus. In fact, it was one
The walks are just one way to get officers out of police cruisers and into neighborhoods on foot, where they can build relationships and a rapport with individuals, “to get them to trust us enough and trust the process, and believe that justice can be obtained through legal channels and not on the street,” the
I was encouraged to read two pages later the Dispatch article “Violence prevention initiative to focus on shooter,” about the violence prevention initiative involving criminologist David Kennedy of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kennedy is well known for both his criminal justice research and his data-driven, successful approaches to addressing crime and violence.
Under Biden, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has been extensively hamstrung under Trump, will likely be funded in an entirely different way, giving it more power. David M. Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and director of the National Network for
A new strategy is changing the way Kingston, New York, addresses the harms of intimate-partner violence. “We had been putting the burden on the victim to remove themselves from an abusive relationship,” says Elizabeth Culmone-Mills, Senior Assistant District Attorney for the Special Victims Bureau in the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office, regarding the way law