In dual news conferences in Oakland and Washington D.C., Congresswoman Barbara Lee and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday that Oakland and Richmond have been named by the Justice Department as part of a new national program that Holder called an “all-hands approach to curbing endemic violence” in five U.S. communities with high violent crimes rates.
“If we want to reduce violence in our East Bay communities, we must work together,” Lee (D-Oakland) told reporters Tuesday morning, alongside other officials including Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in downtown Oakland. The program, called the Violence Reduction Network, is an “effective way of using resources to achieve a comprehensive regional approach to violence reduction,” she said.
The two-year program calls for specialized regional training for law enforcement officers and ready access to Justice Department resources, including technical help from federal agents for police and public safety leaders. The Violence Reduction Network is expected to hold several federal summits based in Washington, D.C. that will bring the partnered cities together to discuss how to improve the safety of their communities.
This week’s inaugural summit, which began Monday and will run through Wednesday, will address issues like using new technology to reduce violence, targeting repeat victimization and domestic violence, developing local and federal prosecution strategies, using smart policing and evidence-based policing strategies, and more.
The five sites are supposed to communicate with each other about their efforts as well, Quan said. “They want us to share our experiences within this network of five cities—what’s working, what’s not working,”Quan said.
Each community will have one Department of Justice contact person, a “Strategic Site Liaison,” who is supposed to help coordinate each city’s existing anti-violence strategies, suggest new approaches, and help identify new agency grants the city might not know about.
Louis F. Quijas, who previously headed the Office of Law Enforcement Coordination for the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, was named Strategic Site Liaison for the cities of Richmond and Oakland. His career in law enforcement spans 29 years.
Lee said the Violence Reduction Network is part of an effort to direct more federal resources to public safety. Last Wednesday, Quan also announced that Oakland would receive a $1.8 million federal grant from the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). Part of the COPS Hiring Program, which Holder said allocated $124 million to support select police departments across the country, the Oakland grant will be used to hire 15 new police officers. “In the age of shrinking federal dollars, state and local budgets, we have to leverage every dollar we can to develop, innovate and implement the most effective strategies to reduce violence,” she said.