US/Mexico Border Open Source Knowledgebase

The Edward Byrne Memorial Competitive Program: National Initiatives, administered by the Office of Justice Programs' (OJP) Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), furthers the Department's mission by assisting state and local jurisdictions in improving the criminal justice system and assisting communities in preventing drug abuse and crime. In FY 2008, the program will focus on funding local, regional, and national efforts within five major categories: 1) preventing crime and drug abuse; 2) enhancing local law enforcement; 3) enhancing local courts; 4) enhancing local corrections and offender reentry; and 5) facilitating justice information sharing.

The Sam Houston State University will implement the US/Mexico Border Open Source Knowledgebase Project under Category 5: Facilitating Justice Information Sharing. They will create a secure, collaborative knowledgebase of violent activities, transnational criminal activities, and groups and individuals that perpetrate these acts along the US/Mexico border, hereafter known as the Border Knowledgebase. The Border Knowledgebase is a proposed pilot program that takes an existing secure, collaborative information sharing platform designed by the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups (ISVG) for the US Department of Defense's Pacific Combatant Command (PACOM) and redeploys it with a dedicated data collection and aggregation effort to support state and local law enforcement agencies working along the US/Mexico Border. The project will produce a secure, web-accessible knowledgebase for law enforcement communities working counter-terrorism, counter-extremism, and anti-transnational crime initiatives along the US/Mexican border. The Sam Houston State University will coordinate with the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas- El Paso (UTEP-CJ) and the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

CA/NCF