Homestead Violence Intervention Initiative

The Homestead Police Department proposes to implement an enhanced Violence Intervention Initiative. The purpose of this project is to utilize crime data, crime trends and offenders’ profile in order to develop a strategic response to crime that is occurring and going unaddressed. This response will coordinate all the Homestead police departments’ current crime reduction initiatives and resources together to develop a seamless system of law enforcement and social services response. The department currently has a Gun Violence Initiative to address violent crime, shots fired technology, an in-house social service response team, and community-based family/youth coordinated support services. The current projects are successful in addressing crimes and individuals committing those crimes as well as their families and friends, but due to program constraints, these projects do not address all crimes or all factors influencing crime. There are programmatic constraints to each initiative allowing a gap in the response which allows for the crime to continue or relocate. This project will fill that gap. Activities will include enhanced crime analysis, the implementation of a project administrator/analysis who will bring together all initiatives to identify the current methods of response and the identification of those responses that are needed and not being deployed. The activities will include evidence-based policing and evidence-based responses to the criminal element. Expected outcomes will be a reduction in crime as determined by the analysis of pre and post strategic responses in the identified area.