History of the Organization

How we began

We have come a long way in Knoxville to keep our community safer. The origins of the Knoxville Public Safety Collaborative are rooted in the community and the community's desire to keep all of our residents safer.

For the last several years the City of Knoxville has sponsored meetings in which residents discuss public safety and establish the city's annual crime control and crime prevention goals. In 1996, a senior citizen of one of Knoxville's neediest neighborhoods asked a simple and straightforward question to the officials facilitating the meeting.

"What are you prepared to do to prevent repeat offenders who are put back into the city after being released from prison from committing new crimes and disrupting public order?"

This question resonated with those in attendance at the meeting. Officials were asking themselves, "what are we doing about prisoner reentry into the community?" The answer was that there was no established plan or organization to deal with repeat offenders coming back into the City of Knoxville. As a result of a community resident's question, it was identified by local officials that the city needed to do something about this issue - and the Knoxville Public Safety Collaborative was born.

What happened after the meeting

Shortly after the meeting in 1996, executives of the Knoxville Police Department (KPD) and the Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole (TBPP) met to discuss ways in which their organizations could establish a more formalized working relationship. Both organizations had shared a rich working history and had partnered on former projects including:

· The KPD assisting the TBPP with its parolee identification card system (a program which provides photo identification cards to all its parolees residing within the city).
· Joint "ride-alongs" of parole officers from TBPP and the KPD.

However, both organizations wanted to enhance and expand their existing partnership to include more formal, day-to-day relationships between line level staff. As their discussions and planning continued, it became clear very early in the process that other groups besides the KPD and TBPP needed to be included in the dialogue. The city's health and human service providers were then asked to join in the discussions.

Educational Forums and Organizational Collaboration

Initially, the parties coalesced around a pre-existing structure - The Adult Offender Work Group - which was a vehicle for interagency discussion of a variety of topics related to the handling of adult felons. Gradually, this group became a structured form in which community correctional officers, police and service providers met regularly to inform each other about how their organizations functioned and to discuss issues of common interest.

The Group educated itself about two topics of particular relevance to its members:

1) information sharing
2) intervention strategies

They also studied recent developments in confidentiality issues as well as information sharing protocols and laws. The learned about the "What Works" research which documents that certain combinations of sanctions, supervision, and services can have modest yet cost-effective impacts when they are properly delivered to select groups on moderate to high risk offenders.

Testing the concept

Following these educational forums, the Group conducted a simple experiment. Each agency involved in the Group was asked to determine if it had any recent contact with the offenders (or their immediate families) from a sample of cases identified by the TBPP. The Group found that the overwhelming majority of its members had recent contact with the offenders (or their families). This served to confirm for the groups that they all shared a common bond - they had an investment in the city's offender population. What disturbed them about this finding was that in the majority of cases, they did not know they were simultaneously working with the same clients. This revelation spurred the group to look more closely as ways in which they could collaborate and work together.

Where we are today

Today, community correctional officers, health and human service providers, and police routinely collaborate in developing case management plans for high risk offenders in Knoxville. They monitor offenders' compliance with supervision standards, monitor treatment progress or problems, and they share information on a regular basis to keep each other abreast of each offender's progress.

We have been developing, implementing and refining the Knoxville Public Safety Collaborative for over five years now. We have worked with over 600 serious criminal offenders during that time period, starting with a small number of parolees in a single district of the city and eventually expanding to include both parolees and probationers throughout the city of Knoxville. We specifically targeted those offenders with long and serious criminal histories, multiple treatment needs and a demonstrated inability to successfully complete supervision in the community. In short, the most difficult of a difficult population.

Our initiative has sought to make Knoxville a safer place to live by successfully restoring these chronic offenders to their families and their community, without compromising public safety. Our strategy strikes a balance between treatment and accountability.

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