Recommendations

LAW ENFORCEMENT INITIATIVES

• Exercise leadership to develop community-wide murder reduction strategies. 
   
• Intervene against all forms of violence as early and decisively as possible. 
   
• Intensify use of community policing and murder-specific problem-solving 
  strategies.
   
• Intensify use of tactical teams and task forces to regain control of high crime and violent environments.
   
• Maximize substance abuse prevention and enforcement programming.
   
• Use emerging technology to improve homicide clearance rates.
   
• Enhance ability of police to conduct field-based (patrol car) record and warrant checks.
   
• Supply responding officers with enhanced domestic dispute and violence history information.
   
• Improve witness protection in violent crime cases.
   
• Acknowledge and reward successful efforts by officers to reduce gun-related violence and murder.
   
• Intensify use of gun buy-back programs.
   
• Intensify efforts to improve physical plant security (target-hardening) for community businesses and facilities. 
   

COMMUNITY AND GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES

• Create crime advisory committees to assist law enforcement agencies with murder reduction.
   
• Involve all segments of the community in violence and murder prevention and control, including the business community.
   
• Augment detention capacity by adapting existing available facilities such as closed military bases.
   
• Intensify alcohol consumption reduction programs.
   
• Provide cash and other incentives to citizens for information on violent crimes and crimes involving use of guns.
   
• Provide safe havens for youth after normal school hours.
   
• Increase use of risk factor assessments for children by schools and health professionals.
   
• Provide additional shelters for abused women and children.
   
• Expand use of electronic monitoring of domestic/intimate violence and other offenders who are granted intensive probation.
   

LEGISLATIVE INITIATIVES

• Increase sanctions for gun-involved crimes, particularly robberies.
   
• Allow police to seize weapons during domestic/intimate violence calls.
   
• Prohibit gun ownership by stalkers and intimate and domestic violence offenders.
   
• Reorient the juvenile justice system to promote swift and sure intervention against career juvenile offenders. 
   
• Allow police to photograph, fingerprint, and document criminal behavior of career juvenile offenders.
   
• Allow interagency and interstate sharing of juvenile information among police and other agencies.
   
• Require a 72-hour cooling-off period in domestic violence cases.
   
• Expand mandatory hospital and medical personnel reporting of suspected violence caused injury.
   
• Require states to enact "responsible beverage service" laws.
   
• Raise the minimum drinking age, increase state or central control of alcohol sales, and limit prevalence of liquor stores through stringent store/population ratios. 
   

EDUCATION AND TRAINING INITIATIVES

• Intensify programs to teach citizens how to avoid becoming victims of violent crime.
   
• Conduct symposia to promote and increase school administrators' support for anti-violence programs.
   
• Train teachers to identify, confront, and control violent and potentially violent students and situations.
   
• Conduct school awareness programs to deglorify violence and violent offenders.
   
• Train students in elementary, middle, and high schools in dispute resolution techniques.
   
• Train police officers to recognize and respond to different types of violence, including domestic and intimate.
   
• Provide comprehensive ethnic and cultural awareness training to law enforcement officers.
   
• Conduct nationwide public service announcement campaigns emphasizing family values, the dangers of firearms in the home, and targeting various forms of violence.