INDIANAPOLIS -- The non-profit that oversees Marion County's crime prevention grants program says it targets them to have the maximum impact on crime "hot spots" and at-risk populations.
Alicia Collins is the community collaborations manager for the Central Indiana Community Foundation, which has overseen the crime grants program since 2013. Every year, CICF distributes nearly $2 million in grants with the goal of preventing violent crimes, improving neighborhood safety and providing prevention and intervention services to at-risk youth and adults.
Collins says CICF takes a holistic approach to crime prevention.
"We define crime prevention as those organizations that have the best benefit of reducing risk factors and increasing protective within neighborhoods and in the city," she said. "We feel that the process we have has become more holistic in terms of fighting crime."
Last week, Democratic Indianapolis City-County Councilor Zach Adamson said he would like to see more of those dollars go toward directly preventing crime.
"I have been one who has been a big supporter of diversifying how we spend those crime prevention dollars to at least encompass a greater percentage of programming that actually prevents crime," Adamson said. "Currently an enormous portion of our crime prevention dollars goes to post-crime programming. So, recidivism issues – which is very important – dominate those crime prevention programs with a definite deficit going toward actually preventing crime. I would like to see us diversify that a bit more to spend at least half of our crime prevention dollars actually preventing crime. I think we would see a great impact on that."
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An RTV6 analysis of crime prevention grants distributed in 2015 and 2016 determined that recidivism has been the largest funding category, but that the overall percentage of primarily recidivism-focused funding decreased over that period.
In 2015, CICF distributed approximately $776,650 to programs primarily focused on recidivism, which represented about 41 percent of all crime prevention grants distributed that year. Those programs included the Boys & Girls Clubs of Indianapolis' evening reporting centers – an alternative to detention initiative for teens in the juvenile court system – and PACE, Inc.'s employment & transitional services program for ex-offenders.
That number dropped in 2016 to $550,000 spent directly on recidivism programs – totaling just less than 30 percent of all last year's grants.
CRIME PREVENTION GRANTS | 2015 | 2016
Collins said when CICF took over the grant program, it went on a listening tour to meet with non-profits and other organizations in the city.
"One of the lessons that we're learning through this process is that it needs to be a collaborative approach and it needs to be targeted within a particular geographic area," Collins said.
From those tours, CICF developed five criteria for distributing the crime prevention grants:
- Does the program meet crime prevention priorities?
- Does the organization use data to formulate its programs and have evidence-based programming?
- Do they have the capacity to do the work?
- Do they have the capacity to leverage crime prevention grant dollars and sustain them over time?
- Do they take a collaborative approach?
Collins said CICF distributes the grants at the discretion of the Indianapolis City-County Council, but that data shows those most likely to be affected by violent crime are those already in the criminal system.
"In terms of the data from IMPD, in terms of homicide and those individuals who are impacted by violent crime, it seems to be those individuals who have already had interaction with the juvenile or criminal justice system, so we know there needs to be some more intense intervention programming with that," Collins said.
The schedule to distribute 2017's crime prevention grants has yet to be set. CICF said information about this year's grant cycle is forthcoming.
Below: See all of the organizations that received community crime prevention grants in 2015 & 2016.
