Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2023, $400,000)
The City of Phoenix will capitalize on a comprehensive and expanding range of technologies for efficient and effective policing. The technologies and training funded will allow the police to respond to violent crimes, bias crimes and incidents, and large-scale events more efficiently and more deliberately, with improved operational intelligence and a proactive emphasis on officer, citizen, and community safety. The long-term goal will be to provide technical support to each member of the PPD Violent Crimes Bureau (VCB) to allow for this more efficient and effective policing, while also obtaining resources to allow PPD to protect areas in which bias crimes/incidents have been identified as being more prevalent.
The PPD is currently in partnership with twelve Citizen Advisory Boards, which represent various minority and underserved communities. The Phoenix Police Department’s Community Engagement Bureau (CEB) routinely attends and facilitates meetings with these groups to address and educate on areas of concern. Pre-pandemic, CEB facilitated an annual summit with all Advisory Boards. This summit has not been convened since 2020. Resources available through this grant will be used to assist in reconstituting this annual summit to provide a venue, resources, training, and educational material to allow for the full Advisory Board to meet and have a collective voice and dialogue with each other and PPD.
Resources available through this grant will be used for Bias Crimes personnel to attend a minimum of two conferences, with the possibility of a third, each year of the grant program. This training will enable these personnel to become a subject matter expert in identifying and investigating bias crimes/incidents and will assist in bringing that expertise back to PPD.
Resources available through this grant will fund overtime costs associated with updating the Phoenix Police Department website and properly reporting and identifying bias crimes/incidents. It will be updated to include information, resources and reporting options related to bias crimes/incidents and toward updating the records management system to improve reporting capabilities. Finally, funds will pay for digital advertisement, printed educational and outreach materials to be used at community events and distributed through traditionally marginalized and/or underserved community groups.