 The purpose is to break a shooting cycle, identify those prolific offenders that we know are there's just a handful that we know they're committing a lot of our violent crime and you know this unit through the analysts and the technical assistance that we're being provided we think is you know is going to further that endeavor on our you know goal to reduce violent crime in the city. Chief Holbrook and his team have been pushing really hard on a project safe neighborhood initiative over the last several years and this grant in particular helps as far as providing data, crime scene analysts, gun violence prevention with certain detection capabilities that they will have through the grant. I can't underscore how important that is to me personally because obviously as our city manager I am tasked with making sure that one of our most important functions public safety is adequately funded in our city our mayor and our council are always supportive of public safety initiatives and making sure that we are adequately funding and going beyond what we can do to make sure that all of the resources are in place for our officers and so when we can have complementary funding sources through grants that does make the job just a little bit easier we're able to complement whatever we can do with general fund dollars with grant funding and so certainly that aggressive creative approach to funding public safety is what we'll continue to do in the city of Columbia. This is a significant opportunity to pull together a number of great agencies that work together pretty well right now but a concentrated effort to focus on gun crimes and repeat offenders using data and also human intelligence this is going to help us dramatically decrease the number of gun crimes in Columbia and it's a big step forward very proud of our CPD leadership team and thankful for the wonderful partnerships we've been we've been able to enter into its state and federal agencies. Our council has taken very significant policy decisions and made those come to the forefront regardless of maybe nationally what the discussion is they are very clear that they are putting in place various ordinances whether banning bump stops or ghost guns or banning guns within certain perimeter of our schools that they are stepping out and stepping up on the issues of gun violence and trying to put things in place that put Columbia on the map as being a city of being prevention minded. You know we know gunfire has gone unreported 70 percent of the time and that data has proven been proven in our ShotSpotter results since the springtime when we brought it online so we you know we feel like that with each one of those calls that we show up where historically there hasn't been a police officer that's an opportunity for a citizen to see that the police do care they are going to respond and they're going to do something about this. We certainly want their help need their help but we understand that there you know there is some distrust and concern and we've got to keep building on that and we certainly know that community engagement piece is critically important but I don't think we can um overstate the importance of that officer being on the scene of a shooting immediately whether it's somebody's being hit property's been damaged or it's just been the sound of gunfire to me that sends a message to the to the public that you know we do care we're not going to tolerate this and we have an action plan to deal with it. Hey there Mayor Steve Benjamin here thanks for watching this video make sure you give it a like right below the video and don't forget to subscribe also while you're here be sure to check out one of our other videos or follow on our social media platforms thanks again and remember we are Colombia