What’s New, What’s Happening

The primary purpose of the OVW Training and Technical Assistance Initiative (TA Initiative) is to provide direct training and technical assistance to existing and potential OVW recipients and subrecipients to enhance their efforts to successfully implement projects supported by OVW grant funds. OVW's TA Initiative is designed to strengthen and build the capacity of civil and criminal justice system professionals and victim service providers across the nation to respond effectively to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking and foster partnerships among organizations that have not traditionally worked together to address these crimes.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics seeks applications to provide funding and technical assistance to local law enforcement agencies to increase and enhance their reporting of crimes in general and hate crimes specifically to the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System, as authorized by the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act (34 U.S.C. § 30507). This program furthers the DOJ’s mission by advancing the rule of law, integrity, good government, public safety, and criminal justice through improved police reporting of hate crimes.

This two-day in-person interactive training focuses on providing attorneys, law enforcement, prosecutors, and advocates strategies for strengthening their understanding of legal and victim services options for and best practices when working with immigrant survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. This training offers diverse learning experiences delivered by a faculty of multi-disciplinary subject matter experts from a wide range of legal and victim service backgrounds including judges, law enforcement, prosecutors, advocates, and attorneys. Immigrant victim related training topics will include: stalking; immigration, public benefits, and family law case options, case strategies, and advanced issues; prosecution best practices; primary aggressor determinations; VAWA confidentiality and discovery; police officers as witnesses; multi-disciplinary collaboration; effective outreach; and improving language access. Participants will learn and share practices and strategies to improve immigrant victim safety, increase participation in the justice system, and enhance community safety.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) seeks applications for funding to develop a survey instrument regarding postsecondary student experiences with domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and stalking.

Consistent, rigorous measurement of community perceptions provides police, city managers, advocates, and community members with a quantitative assessment of performance (Rosenbaum, Lawrence, Hartnett, McDevitt, & Posick, 2015) and is an essential ingredient in building community trust in law enforcement (La Vigne, Dwivedi, Okeke, & Erondu, 2014). Accurate measurement of community views can inform the development of new and more effective strategies for improving both police-community relations and public safety, as well as provide important feedback related to changes in policy and practice. Traditionally, law enforcement agencies have primarily relied upon largely subjective, qualitative input from community meetings or convenience sample-based citizen satisfaction surveys to obtain community feedback. However, people who live in places where crime and police presence are most intensive are less likely to participate in community meetings and surveys than those who reside in lower crime areas. As a result, general community surveys typically “over represent the views of affluent, educated, white people and underrepresent the experiences of people of color, particularly those residing in impoverished communities” (La Vigne et al., 2014, p. 1). Additionally, community surveys are often expensive, time-consuming, and unable to provide estimates at smaller geographies within municipalities. At the same time, there have been significant advances in data availability and use to model human behavior and quantify preferences and attitudes. However, these advances have yet to be widely applied within the criminal justice realm. To address these issues, the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ) Measures of Community Perceptions Challenge (the Challenge) invites innovative methods for measuring community attitudes, perceptions, and/or beliefs about public safety.