“Families and communities in rural America have been hard hit by the crisis of addiction, and face unique challenges in developing effective responses to this disease. The Rural Community Action Guide empowers local leaders to meet these challenges head on with recommended action steps and best practices for local solutions that will create real change.” – Jim Carroll, Director of Office of National Drug Control Policy

The Trump Administration released a new tool to assist rural community leaders in building an effective local response to the crisis of addiction. The Rural Community Action Guide is based on lessons learned from roundtable discussions held in over a dozen states, as well as the experiences of several rural stakeholders. The guide includes background information, recommended action steps, and promising practices for a range of issues related to drug addiction in rural America.

The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) Training and Technical Assistance Center (TTAC) offers a variety of resources to support communities in their efforts to prepare a response to incidents of mass violence. OVC TTAC’s Mass Violence Toolkit contains information on best practices for responding to victims of mass violence and terrorism throughout each of the three response phases — the Partnerships and Planning phase, the Response phase, and the Recovery phase. OVC TTAC also features a webinar series that builds upon and supplements the information in the toolkit that is available to view anytime.

This webinar will discuss what it means to use evidence-based policing (EBP), explain how to apply research in the field, and what steps to take to design your own research study. Concepts will include the importance of comparison groups when evaluating a program, project, or intervention. After discussing these statistical concepts and criminological theory, the presenters will explain how CompStat — although a tool for its time — is now an outdated way of holding police executives accountable and most often leads to “whack-a-mole” policing.

Date: Thursday, February 13
Time: 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., ET

Criminals sometimes damage their mobile phones to destroy evidence, but forensics experts can often retrieve the evidence anyway. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tested how well these forensic methods work. To conduct the study, NIST researchers loaded data onto ten popular models of phones. They then extracted the data or had outside experts extract the data for them to determine if retrieval would be successful. The results are published in a series of no-cost online reports. This research was funded by NIST and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Forensics Project.

The eighth annual National Cyber Crime Conference (NCCC) will be held on April 21-29, 2020, in Norwood, MA. The NCCC has become the premier annual cyber crime and digital evidence training event for law enforcement, prosecutors, and forensic examiners. Instruction at the conference is designed to help attendees conquer the most significant challenges in investigations and prosecutions involving digital evidence.