April 16, 2020—The National Police Foundation (NPF) is pleased to announce it has launched a Law Enforcement and Public Safety Corporate Caring Resource Center. Through this Center, companies can donate personal protective equipment (PPE) and other needed supplies that will be distributed to public safety personnel.

Visa, Inc. is the first major corporation to make a contribution to the Corporate PPE Sharing Center—donating 10,000 pairs of disposable gloves.

Distribution of PPE is being coordinated in partnership with Axon Enterprise, Inc., who recently launched a global campaign with the NPF to provide masks and other PPE to first responders. To date, 8,195 agencies have asked for help through Axon’s COVID-19 Support Center, representing 1,148,819 public safety officers. Axon has received requests from all 50 states and 9 countries. The Corporate PPE Sharing Center will complement this initiative to meet the demands of more agencies.

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Axon announces campaign to provide 1 million masks to first responders

Partners with National Police Foundation to launch #GotYouCovered crowdfunding initiative

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 9, 2020/PRNewswire/ — Axon (Nasdaq: AAXN), the global leader in public safety technologies, today announced that it has committed over $1 million for personal protective equipment (PPE) for first responders, including a partnership with the National Police Foundation and will match up to $500,000 in community donations. 100 percent of funds will go directly towards helping reduce first responder exposure to COVID-19 by purchasing medical masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. Donations may be made to the #GotYouCovered campaign through May 31, 2020: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/got-you-covered.

Axon Announces Campaign to Provide 1 Million Masks to First Responders

“We are extremely proud to be partnering with Axon on this incredibly important initiative to supply PPE to first responders,” says the National Police Foundation President, James Burch. “We are working through an unprecedented time in modern history, but times like these are a good reminder of the positive impact we can have when we work together. We are thankful for Axon’s support and are motivated to help our first responders and communities as much as possible over the coming weeks.”

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MARCH 25, 2020—In response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its impact on law enforcement and other first responders, the National Police Foundation (NPF), in collaboration with the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS (NAPSG) Foundation and Esri, has developed a real-time COVID-19 situational awareness tool for law enforcement agencies. The tool, featuring a real-time dashboard, provides critical insights for executives, commanders, administrators and other decision-makers to better assess and monitor the impact of COVID-19 on our nation’s first responders, including officer exposures, diagnoses, workforce impacts, and personal protective equipment (PPE) needs and projections.

The interactive tool allows agencies to provide confidential, real-time updates that are instantly incorporated into the national dashboard and map. The dashboard identifies the number of officers exposed, officially tested with a positive diagnosis, placed in off-duty status due to exposure, and that are self-isolating due to symptoms or off-duty exposure. The dashboard also estimates the availability of necessary PPE, the most critical PPE that agencies are lacking, and current and projected shortages of PPE. The data is then aggregated and mapped at the state-level in order to show impacts across the country. Individual agencies will not be identified. Law enforcement agencies can then compare impacts in their state with those of other states.

Screenshot of the National Police Foundation’s COVID-19 Law Enforcement Impact Real-Time Surveillance Dashboard. (Photo by: National Police Foundation)

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MARCH 12, 2020—The National Police Foundation extends heartfelt condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Hubert Williams, who passed away earlier this week on Tuesday, March 10, 2020. Williams served as the president of the National Police Foundation (formerly Police Foundation) from 1985-2012—becoming the longest serving president in the organization’s 50-year history.

Williams—a Harvard Law Fellow, Graduate of Rutgers Law School, a founding member and former first President of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement (NOBLE), and the youngest and first African American to serve as Police Director in Newark, NJ—was a trailblazer and influential leader in the policing profession.

Williams was appointed Police Foundation president in 1985, following the retirement of NYPD Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy. Prior to his appointment as president of the Police Foundation, Williams served as police director in Newark, New Jersey, from 1974 to 1985, and under his leadership the Newark Police Department served as the laboratory for two groundbreaking Police Foundation studies pivotal to the evolution of community policing—The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment and the NIJ-funded reducing fear of crime experiment.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued the following guidance for law enforcement personnel regarding the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19):

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/guidance-law-enforcement.html

Law enforcement executives from several local agencies gathered to learn about tactics, model policies, and best practices for roadway safety.    

The National Police Foundation, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR), recently held the first training session as part of the newly launched National Law Enforcement Roadway Safety Program (NLERSP), one of three programs launched under BJA’s National Officer Safety Initiatives (NOSI).

The NLERSP provides a suite of no-cost training, technical assistance, and resources to local, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies with the goal of reducing the number of officers seriously injured and killed on the nation’s roadways.

The NLERSP offers in-person, interactive courses for executives, patrol officers, and trainers that teach attendees about the risk factors for officer-involved collisions and struck-by incidents and identify a variety of interventions and technological innovations that can reduce the likelihood of their occurrence. The evidence-based courses—developed by a national working group of subject matter experts from law enforcement, government, and academia—draw heavily from the success of the Las Vegas Police Department’s comprehensive crash prevention program, as well as widely-recognized traffic incident management (TIM) principles, to provide attendees with actionable steps, skills, and resources to improve officer safety on the roadways.

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MARCH 2020—The National Police Foundation, with funding support from Arnold Ventures, will conduct a new research study that will examine how small law enforcement agencies (10-70 sworn) respond to incidents involving persons with mental illness or substance abuse issues.

Persistent lack of community-based mental health resources available to people in crisis has resulted in frequent need for police intervention. Law enforcement agencies across the country are turning to Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) and other specialized police response models that focus on cross-sector collaboration between law enforcement, mental health agencies, and advocates. While these efforts have proliferated and show promise in meeting goals, they are largely typical of medium and large departments. However, the vast majority of police agencies are small and may not have the resources to fund CIT training, may not have mental health resources close at hand, nor receive the numbers of calls involving persons with mental illness or substance abuse issues to justify expensive programs.

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Dr. Cynthia Lum, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University and National Police Foundation Board Member, provides an overview of current research findings on police body-worn cameras.

The National Police Foundation (NPF) recently hosted a one-day conference: “Police Body Cameras: What Have We Learned Over 10 Years of Deployment?” The purpose of the conference was to share police body-worn camera research findings with practitioners, as well as to hear directly from practitioners whose agencies have deployed the technology and what challenges and opportunities body cameras bring to their agencies and communities.

The conference featured several presentations from researchers, including a presentation by Dr. Cynthia Lum, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, on an overview of current police body camera literature and findings. In addition, Sean Goodison, Police Executive Research Forum, Daniel Lawrence, Urban Institute, and Kalani Johnson, National Police Foundation, presented on findings from three recent Arnold Ventures studies that have examined how body cameras affect citizen satisfaction with police encounters and implications for law enforcement. David Makin, Washington State University, also presented on whether BWCs capture a true picture of events, providing an overview of research synthesized by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab, which has shown that different people view body camera recordings in idiosyncratic ways and that reliance on video recordings may not provide a full or accurate presentation of an event.

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