VIOLENT CRIME RATES DOWN IN 17 COUNTIES PARTICIPATING IN THE GIVE PROGRAM
The program provides additional funding to law enforcement agencies to perform additional patrols in gun related violence hot spots as well as other proactive programs to reduce gun related crime.
The GIVE program is definitely in part responsible for the 1-year and 5-year drop in violent and property-crime in all 20 GIVE jurisdictions. The cities of Newburgh and Kingston in particular showed reductions in homicides, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults, and it was the first time that property crimes dropped below 1000 in Newburgh since 2005. Police were able to achieve these results through confiscation of guns, better crime analysis so that they could pinpoint specific city blocks of high activity, cross-agency programs to help with the sharing and coordination of information about criminals and locations of crime, and increased quantity and hence visibility of police patrols by reducing the number of officers in a patrol car to one.
Despite the progress much work is still needed to reduce violent crime in the most affected cities. One area of crime that is still high in Kingston is larceny or the theft of personal property, in particular from vehicles. Police caution that vehicles should always be locked and that valuables, bags, or other items that might appear to have value are hidden from view or not kept in the vehicle. If there doesn’t appear to be anything of value the perpetrator may move on. Other ways to reduce your chances to be involved in a crime include remaining aware of your surroundings at all times and staying out of known crime hot-spots whenever possible.
The GIVE program shows that violent crime rates can drop when police jurisdictions are given the proper funding to aid in their work.