FY 2023 New Mexico Department of Public Safety Project Safe Neighborhood Grant Project

The New Mexico Department of Public Safety (NMDPS) is seeking $175,450 in federal funding from the 2023 Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN)– with the United States Attorney’s Office, District of New Mexico (USAO D-NM). The purpose of the project is to reduce violent crime, with a focus on gun crimes, in the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area, which is New Mexico’s largest population center. The PSN team has expanded the PSN Targeted Enforcement Area (TEA) from one quadrant of the City of Albuquerque to encompass the greater metropolitan area, as violent crime is ubiquitous throughout the metropolitan area, even though some parts of Albuquerque do experience consistently higher incidences of violence than other areas. Success will be measured by creating and maintaining strong and stable working partnerships with federal, state, and local stakeholders in an “all tools” approach to reducing violence, with the ultimate goal of establishing lasting and statistically significant reductions in gun homicides and non-fatal shootings. The USAO’s PSN program has three main components: (1) data-informed decision-making, (2) targeted enforcement efforts, and (3) targeted deterrence and intervention. PSN FY2023 funds will support the first and third components.  The USAO will be implementing its own version of the Tampa Violent Impact Player (VIP) Program in the PSN TEA. Albuquerque was also selected as a Public Safety Partnership (PSP) site in 2022. In concert with our PSN and PSP partners, we have re-coined the Tampa VIP scoring system as our Violent Crime Drivers (VCD) list.