Weekly News Brief

Department leadership to meet with Defending Childhood grantees — Representatives from the Attorney General's Defending Childhood initiative's demonstration sites will meet for the first time in Washington, at the Washington Plaza Hotel from Jan. 25-27. On Tuesday Jan.25, at 9 a.m., Laurie O. Robinson, OJP's Assistant Attorney General, will join Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, COPS' Deputy Director Sandra Webb, and OVW's Director Sue Carbon in giving opening remarks. On Wednesday, Jan. 26, at 1 p.m., Attorney General Eric Holder will meet with the representatives to discuss ongoing efforts in their communities. The opening session on Tuesday, as well as the Attorney General's afternoon session on Wednesday, is open to the press. The Defending Childhood initiative included FY 2010 planning grants to eight demonstration sites to develop and support comprehensive community-based strategic planning and implementation of projects to prevent and reduce the impact of children's exposure to violence in their families, schools, and communities. For more information on the Defending Childhood Initiative, please visit: http://www.justice.gov/ag/defendingchildhood/.

Guam Implements SORNA — The Department of Justice recently announced that the U.S. Territory of Guam has substantially implemented the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), Title I of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. Guam joins the States of Ohio, Delaware, South Dakota, and Florida, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation as jurisdictions that have substantially implemented SORNA. Guam has been actively working with the Office of Justice Programs' Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) to meet the requirements of SORNA. The SMART Office has added staff, increased outreach efforts, developed resources and issued documents to provide further definition, guidance and direction to SORNA jurisdictions. For more information, visit the SMART Office's Web site at https://ojp.gov/smart/.

NIJ Papers on Policing and Public Safety — The Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) recently released two papers, Police Science: Toward a New Paradigm and Governing Science, both of which were a result of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety, a roundtable managed by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School's Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and funded by NIJ. "These two papers are a perfect reflection of the spirit of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety -- vigorous, thoughtful debate about fundamental ideas that will shape the future of policing in America and around the world," said John Laub, Director of NIJ.

The Police Science paper was written by Harvard Executive Session members David Weisburd and Peter Neyroud. The authors assert that police agencies should be less hesitant to adopt evidence-based policies and practices, and encourage police agencies to move toward a science-based policing paradigm. In contrast, Harvard Executive Session member Malcolm Sparrow argues that favoring evidence-based practices drawn from social science research frameworks will be detrimental to the practice of policing. Sparrow's paper, Governing Science, is a direct response to Weisburd and Neyroud's Police Science.

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