St. Louis County CARE Update

Strategies for Policing Innovation, Purpose Area 2: Responding to Precipitous Increase in Crime, provides resources to fund projects that implement technology-driven justice information-sharing solutions at the state, local, territorial, and tribal levels that result in significant cost and time savings and enhance criminal justice policies and practices that promote public safety and reduce crime.

Recipients must: 1) identify a crime that has precipitously increased within the jurisdiction; 2) identify the period of time during which the crime or relevant category of crime increased and provide evidence substantiating the claimed increase; 3) describe the law enforcement and/or justice information-sharing solution or technology to be implemented that will address the identified crime increase and drive its reduction; 4) describe how they will determine the effectiveness of the information-sharing solution; 5) describe how they will develop a comprehensive implementation strategy to reduce and prevent the identified crime(s); and 6) describe how they will assess and report the results to BJA, which will make the results publicly available.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to focus on law enforcement and/or justice information-sharing or applied technology initiatives that will provide information likely to be of benefit to other law enforcement agencies in the United States.

St. Louis County Police Department will be used to develop improvements to the Computer Aided Report Entry (CARE) system. The CARE system was built and is maintained by the St. Louis County Police Department to house police reports and produce basic reports on crime statistics. In addition to the St. Louis County Police Department, there are currently 40 other law enforcement agencies using CARE in the state Missouri. Of the 40 agencies, 36 are located in St. Louis County. In order for the system to reach its full capabilities, grant funding will be used to hire a programmer to develop and implement enhancements to CARE. The proposed enhancements include: an automated dashboard that utilizes crime statistics from multiple CARE agencies for real-time comparisons, preformatted reports for NIBRS style data, improved search functionality, and electronic report sharing among CARE agencies. These enhancements will aid law enforcement by providing a more comprehensive view of crime throughout multiple jurisdictions within the region. Ultimately, this will allow officers to connect local crimes to regional ones, which should reduce the fragmentation among local departments. Doing so will not only improve communication among law enforcement agencies, but provide a method to combat increased crimes throughout the region as a whole.

CA/NCF