What Happened?
The U.S. Department of Justice is allocating grants to states, municipalities and organizations embarking on new strategies to combat crime and accelerate forensics work.
Goal
The state of Alabama recently received a $21.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to be divided up among agencies and municipalities statewide. The goal of the grant program is to ensure state and local law enforcement agencies are able to purchase the necessary tools to vigorously combat crime and protect citizens. The Alabama Political Reporter reported.
The $21.6 million federal grant will be used to support a variety of law enforcement technology programs including but not limited to:
- $125,000 to the Alabama Attorney General’s Office to assist in solving cold cases using DNA analysis
- $13,930,417 to the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs Law Enforcement and Traffic Safety Division to:
- Enhance the safety of women incarcerated in correction facilities
- Boost crime victim’s services
- Support drug and violent crime task forces
- Address violence against women
- Improve the juvenile justice system
- Provide substance abuse treatment in correction and detention facilities
- Upgrade forensic and medical examiner services
- $499,166 to the Department of Corrections to enhance the safety of women incarcerated in correction facilities
- $1,940,629 to the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center to improve background checks and collect better data on sex offenders
- $1,263,414 to the Alabama Department of Forensics Sciences to update equipment to process DNA samples
- $1,057,176 to the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles for reentry and supervision programs to reduce recidivism
Furthermore, the Alabama Administrative Office of the Courts received $509,112 to launch the Alabama Family Drug Court Statewide System Reform to provide services to families in the child welfare system that have been impacted by substance abuse, The Alabama Political Reporter reported.
Incident Response Technology
In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice is offering federal funding for the development of new tools that can accelerate forensic processes in the wake of a cyberattack or other similar criminal activity. The funding is focused on allowing law enforcement agencies to access digital evidence faster and more efficiently, as well as protect key data information from being tampered with during analysis. The goal is to expedite the process of cyberattack and other digital forensics investigations so state and local governments – with limited resources - can eliminate case backlog and close cases more effectively, Dark Reading reported.
The new technologies enabling a more expedited forensics process will also help transform the way state and local law enforcement approach digital criminal investigations. Rather than collecting every piece of information and sifting through the results on drives, law enforcement will understand what key pieces of information on the backend will have the greatest impact in the investigation, Dark Reading reported.
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