People With Mental Illness

This new COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) publication addresses problems associated with people with mental illness. This guide describes the problems and reviews factors that increase the challenges police face in relation to the mentally ill. It then identifies a series of questions that might help analyze local policing problems associated with people with mental illness. 70+ page pdf file.

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Revised DARE Program Shows Promise

 The revised DARE program is showing effective results in preliminary studies. Researchers found that students given the new curriculum were more likely to refuse drugs and had fewer misconceptions about how many of their peers use drugs, compared to students in a control group.

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Two New COPS Publications

Street Gangs and Interventions: Innovative Problem Solving with Network Analysis

A review of the range of gang prevention, intervention, suppression, and comprehensive strategies with examples of each type. 30 page pdf file.

Law Enforcement Tech Guide for Small and Rural Police Agencies

Intended to provide strategies, best practices, recommendation and ideas for successful IT planning and implementation. An 80 page pdf file divided in four parts: Preliminary Project Planning; Creating a Project Plan; Acquiring the Technology; and Implementing and Maintaining the Technology.

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The Role of Law Enforcement in Public School Safety: A National Survey

This report identifies the range of roles played by law enforcement in schools and factors related to these roles. The report also presents in-depth case studies of 14 schools and the law enforcement agencies that serve those schools.  I downloaded the executive summary, the first 19 pages of the report.  220 page pdf file.

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Raid of Drug Suppliers and Manufacturers Yields 400 Arrests

Operation Wildfire, deemed to be the first nationally coordinated investigation to target methamphetamine, resulted in more than 400 arrests and the dismantling of 56 clandestine drug laboratories. Police and drug agents found 30 children in the makeshift labs when they were raided. In the same week the Justice Department launched an anti-meth website for teens called Just Think Twice. The site features graphic pictures of drug users’ rotting teeth, before and after pictures of methamphetamine users and other warnings about the perils of methamphetamine use.

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Juvenile Arrests 2003

Summary and analysis of national and state juvenile arrest data presented in the FBI report “Crime in the United States 2003.”  Findings include the following:

• Juvenile violent crime arrests in 2003 reached their lowest level since 1980.
• The juvenile arrest rate for each of the offenses tracked in the FBI’s Violent Crime Index (murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) has been declining steadily since the mid-1990s.
• For murder, the rate fell 77% from its 1993 peak through 2003.

12 page pdf file.

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A Guide to Developing, Maintaining, and Succeeding with Your School Resource Officer Program

This new COPS publication addresses the difficulties SRO program have experienced in recruiting, screening, retaining, training, and supervising SROs. The report documents promising methods in use in selected SRO programs and is intended to allow new or startup SRO programs to benefit from the experiences of others. Downloadable as a series of pdf files. You might want to start with the Executive Summary which is 16 pages and gives you a review of the contents of each chapter.

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States act to get kids out of meth labs

Officials in Indiana and Kentucky are imposing strict rules meant to get children out of harm’s way and to make sure child protection caseworkers are safe too. 

• Only specially trained law enforcement officials are to enter meth labs and remove children.
• Children must leave their belongings behind, even their clothing and toys, and will be cleaned with wipes and sometimes wrapped in special blankets before riding in emergency vehicles.

 In Vigo County, Indiana, about 70% of children in the state system were rescued from meth labs or have been removed from parents who are meth abusers.

The new procedures were formally launched this week in Indiana and have been in place in Kentucky since late last year.

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Trigger Lock law help cut gang-related killings in San Francisco

The number of killings in San Francisco attributed to gangs in largely African American neighborhoods has dropped by more than 50% so far this year from 2004, thanks in part of intervention by federal law enforcement. Police say the most important factor in the decline is the federal Trigger Lock law, which provides for prison terms of 10 years or more for convicted felons who are caught with a gun.

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In Brazil, Police Stations for Women Staffed by Women

More than 300 women’s police stations have opened in Brazil in the past 20 years. In the first year of operations, the number of charges filed by officers in women’s stations was more than double the number of charges for similar crimes against women filed by the predominantly male officers in regular precincts. Brazil’s innovation has grown into an international phenomenon with at least 10 nations in Latin America and Asia having similar systems for registering and investigating charges of domestic violence, threats, child abuse, sexual assaults, and other crimes often perpetrated against women.

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