Clarksdale City Recovery Act JAG Project

This grant program is authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5) (the 'Recovery Act') and by 42 U.S.C. 3751(a). The stated purposes of the Recovery Act are: to preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery; to assist those most impacted by the recession; to provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health; to invest in transportation, environmental protection, and other infrastructure that will provide long-term economic benefits; and to stabilize state and local government budgets, in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases. The Recovery Act places great emphasis on accountability and transparency in the use of taxpayer dollars.

Among other things, it creates a new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and a new website ' Recovery.gov ' to provide information to the public, including access to detailed information on grants and contracts made with Recovery Act funds.

The Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program funded under the Recovery Act is the primary provider of federal criminal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions. Recovery JAG funds support all components of the criminal justice system, from multi-jurisdictional drug and gang task forces to crime prevention and domestic violence programs, courts, corrections, treatment, and justice information sharing initiatives. Recovery JAG funded projects may address crime through the provision of services directly to individuals and/or communities and by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of criminal justice systems, processes, and procedures.

The City of Clarksdale and Coahoma County have been certified disparate and shall share the aggregate of funds allocated to them through the Recovery Act Justice Assistance Grant Program ($112,522.) The two agencies plan to use JAG funds to further their ability to meet the needs of forensic and technology by increasing the quality and timeliness of forensic evidence by constructing and managing a local criminal database of known fingerprints and palm prints. They plan to use the data base for automated searches of latent fingerprints and latent palm prints recovered at crime scenes and to reduce the backlog of unsolved cases containing unidentified latent fingerprints and palm prints. Grant funds will specifically be used to purchase a Live Scan System and a Tracker System, which is fingerprinting software. These systems would allow investigators to immediately analyze latent prints at the Clarksdale Police Department and Coahoma County Sheriff Department, as opposed to submitting them to the Mississippi crime lab.

NCA/NCF