ALBANY, Ga. – In an effort spear-headed by the Albany Police Department (APD) and provided at no cost to the city, a team of subject matter experts in policing from the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services’ (COPS Office) Collaborative Reform Initiative Technical Assistance Center (CRI-TAC) are conducting a comprehensive site visit to APD today and tomorrow, Nov. 2-3.
CRI-TAC provides a continuum of technical assistance services to the law enforcement field nationwide. Through CRI-TAC’s “by the field, for the field” approach, the Justice Department is able to facilitate customizable, short-term technical assistance on more than 60 topics. Those topics vary to include gun violence reduction and prevention, officer safety and wellness, and community engagement. Specifically, APD requested support around developing a community-based intervention and prevention unit targeted toward violent crime reduction and prevention.
“I applaud the Albany Police Department’s commitment to strengthening its tactical approach to policing in order to reduce violent crime in the community,” said U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary. “The Department of Justice supports our local law enforcement partners as they work to continually improve their approach in an ever-changing criminal landscape.”
“Addressing crime is a major community-wide concern. We’ve asked the Justice Department to help us create a community-based intervention and prevention unit aimed at lowering crime in our city,” said Albany Police Chief Michael Persley. “As we get our community partners onboard, the next step will be for us to hear directly from citizens. By creating this community-based team, APD will strengthen its ties to the community we serve, which will inform our policing.”
As part of the services CRI-TAC offers, subject matter experts from the field design tailored solutions in collaboration with each requesting agency to address its individual needs. Technical assistance timelines are established at the pace of the requesting agency, ranging from three to six months. Last year (2021), CRI-TAC worked with 171 law enforcement agencies.
Free to the community and managed out of the Justice Department’s COPS Office, CRI-TAC was established in 2017 and provides a wide range of targeted technical assistance services. Each level of the initiative’s assistance is completely voluntary and provided at the request of law enforcement agencies. The COPS Office is the federal component of the Department of Justice responsible for advancing community policing nationwide.
CRI-TAC involves a coalition of support and expertise from leading law enforcement stakeholder organizations. For more information about CRI-TAC, please visit https://cops.usdoj.gov/collaborativereform.
The CRI-TAC program is part of the Department of Justice’s broader resources addressing violent crime reduction, which is headlined by the joint federal, state, and local Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) Program. PSN is an evidence-based program proven to be effective at reducing violent crime. Through PSN, a broad spectrum of stakeholders work together to identify the most pressing violent crime problems in the community and develop comprehensive solutions to address them. As part of this strategy, PSN focuses enforcement efforts on the most violent offenders and partners with locally based prevention and reentry programs for lasting reductions in crime.