Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative (SACSI)
In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice funded pilot projects in five cities, including Memphis, to test the assumption that crime is most effectively reduced by:
- Bringing together the various perspectives and capacities of community groups and agencies to address a major crime problem.
- Gleaning knowledge from street-level practitioners and working hand-in-hand with researchers to determine the exact nature and scope of a targeted crime problem and to design interventions based on the opportunities the analysis reveals.
- Adapting the strategy when ongoing analysis of information reveals failures or inefficiencies in specific aspects of the strategies.
To begin the process, the United States Attorney's Office invited a broad spectrum of community leaders and ordinary citizens to participate in the development of a local SACSI program. After some initial meetings, this working group identified sexual assault as the crime it would seek to reduce using the SACSI model and reformed itself into the Memphis Strategic Team Against Rape and Sexual Assaults (STARS). A significant factor influencing the group's selection of sexual assaults was an FBI crime statistic indicating that the five county, Memphis metropolitan area ranked first in the nation in 1997 in the number of forcible rapes (107) per 100,000 of population or a total of 964 forcible rapes. A research team partnership between the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Memphis and the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee-Memphis developed data for the Memphis SACSI working group establishing that a significant portion of sexual assaults involved teenage female victims and male perpetrators frequently 25 years of age or older. Furthermore, the research established that these crimes often occurred in vehicles.
With this research, the Memphis Strategic Team Against Rape and Sexual Assaults developed a multi-pronged strategy for reducing the incidence of rape and sexual assault that included the creation of an integrated sexual assault database, a 24-hour callout program initiated by the Memphis Police Department, increased supervision of sexual assault offenders by State Probation and Parole, a training module developed by the Memphis City Schools counselors and social workers for presentation to students, and public-private partnerships developed between MLGW, local businesses and apartment managers to explore lighting and other environmental tools to reduce the incidence of crime.
In January of 2001, the Shelby County Crime Commission assumed responsibility for coordinating implementation of the strategies developed by STARS.