New Grant To Focus On Court Security And Continuity Of Operations Planning
On June 23, 2009, SJI awarded a Strategic Initiatives Grant (SIG) to the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) for a court security and continuity of operations planning project. This project builds off of NCSC’s work in identifying the best practices, and steps to achieving those best practices, for court security. Specifically, the project will develop a companion piece on funding strategies for state courts to enable them to increase court security resources using sound performance data. NCSC will also develop an instructional DVD video for state courts so that they can better understand the threat level and ramifications of the H1N1 flu virus.
In order for state courts to improve their security, needs must be identified, spending guidelines must be established, and the associated costs and methods of measuring performance must be determined. Using NCSC’s best practices approaches to court security as a foundation, NCSC will develop funding strategies that will: 1) identify the costs of courthouse security improvements; 2) emphasize the priorities for spending limited funding; 3) develop strategies to build a coalition of stakeholders in order to make effective requests to funding sources; and 4) develop performance and accountability measures to be supported by comprehensive incident reporting systems. This information will be distributed to every state court administrator, and made available on the NCSC website. NCSC will work with a core working group/security advisory committee already in place to complete this project. This committee consists of administrators and court security managers representing 10 states in all geographic areas of the United States.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, H1N1 is a new flu virus of swine origin that was first detected in April 2009. The virus is infecting people at an increasing rate, both domestically and abroad. The state courts are generally unprepared to deal with a quick and rampant spread of the H1N1 virus; therefore it is critical that they learn how to prepare, in addition to fitting the pandemic response into their existing “all hazards” approach to continuity of operations. In order to assist the state courts, NCSC will develop a basic instructional DVD that will include a step-by-step process to respond to a pandemic event in their jurisdictions. The DVD will address issues such as the probability of an event occurring; the effect of the 1918 – 1919 Spanish flu; what existing COOP response plans should contain; how a pandemic event will alter those plans; as well as other sources of information.
As a national impact issue, SJI remains committed to improving state court security. This project, in addition to previous Partner Grants with the U.S. Marshals Service that focused on court security, will contribute to the ongoing efforts to improve court security across the United States.
