Louisiana Gwen's Law Initiative

With funds awarded through the Smart Prosecution-Innovative Prosecution Solutions Grant, the Jefferson Parish District Attorney's Office will streamline our preparation for and prosecution of intimate partner violence and child abuse cases - also known statewide as Gwen's Law cases and Firearms Transfer proceedings.  We wil reduce individual caseloads by adding support staff and standardizing the multiple forms.  Additionally, we will hire an analyst/programmer to update our computer capabilities in three areas:

Enable auto population of the Gwen's Law hearing forms from data housed in our file management database;

Create a mechanism for collecting census data and producing a geographic illustration of crime trends with a concentration on high poverty tracts where intimate partner violence and child abuse occurs;

Create a mechanism for tracking gun divestiture data related to protective orders issued in Gwne's Law hearings.

Jefferson Parish, Louisiana encompasses a population of 432,493.  27%, or 116 thousand children 18 and  younger reside in high poverty areas of the parish as evidenced by the 2013 - 2017 data series from the American Community Survey of the Census Bureau.  The programmer/analyst provided through the grant will delve into current census data to geographically plot instances of crime.  We will then correlate that data to the demographic data currently collected in order to create a more global image of crime in the parish with a focus on intimate partner vioence and child abuse victim crimes in high poverty areas.  In addition to collecting census driven data wtih geographic tags, we will also amass firearms divestiture statistics related to protective order issues at Gwen's Law hearings.  With more sophisticated data collection capabilities made possible through our Gwen's Law Initiative supported by the Smart Prosecution Grant, we aim to lead the state in intimate partner violence and child abuse victim data collection with specific concentration in census defined high poverty areas.

The Jefferson Parish District Attorney's will create an instruction video and guidebook for managing the staffing, paperwork, data collection, and reporting functions associated wtih Gwen's Law hearing in the state of Louisiana and similar laws throughout the country.  As with other printed materials we have acquired with grant funds, the guidebook will be attributed to suport from the specific Department of Justice grant.