Project Safe Neighborhood 2024 Dover

Violent crimes have been steadily increasing in Dover, Delaware despite ongoing efforts to combat violence and 2024 is showing no signs of relief. The Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) funds will be used to augment and expand existing efforts targeting criminal activity in the City of Dover’s high crime and violent areas by increasing directed patrols using funds for overtime. The Dover Police Department will be supported in their efforts when needed by the Delaware State Police. Our community outreach effort with be driven by Neighborhood Partners who will work within the community to identify the reasons for certain areas to have a higher crime rate than others, to provide intervention to the community and to identify positive and negative influencers. As a result, this will foster better police/community relations to help reduce violent and gang related crime in our three target areas that are within the City of Dover; Downtown, Simon Circle and Manchester.   
 
Research partner Delaware State University DSU) provides real time crime analysis so we can know where and when crime hot spots occur and how they correlate with social indicators. However, budgetary restrictions made it difficult to target police efforts on hot spots on an ongoing basis. Although analyses will allow a better understanding of Dover hot spots, the question of why crime is clustering in a few specific areas remains elusive. By increasing police efforts through PSN funding and targeting those efforts at the drivers of crime through Risk Terrain Modeling in partnership with the DSU research team, we hope to demonstrate a significant reduction in overall violent crime and specifically firearms violence. The goal of PSN is to reduce gun crime and gang violence outcomes. PSN's success will be measured by a 10% reduction in violent/gun crime and gang violence. While focusing at least 30% of funding/interaction on gang related activities and violence intervention.