A crime prevention "party" for police and community members in Sonsonate, El Salvador.
In 2009, ICMA was awarded a three-year project to help Central American countries develop innovative violence prevention programs, starting with El Salvador and Panama. Municipal Partnerships for Violence Prevention in Central America (AMUPREV), funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) seeks to establish networks that share best practices and lessons learned in crime and violence prevention and reduction throughout the region.
The formal objectives of the three-year program are:
- Promote comprehensive local-level violence prevention strategies and programs and foster development of regional peer knowledge networks that will be self-sustaining in the future
- Employing ICMA’s CityLinks™ model, provide training and technical assistance to local governments and community groups in coordination with police and other local-level programs.
The municipalities of Colón and San Miguelito, Panama, are partnered with Pinellas County, Florida; Panama City, Panama, is partnered with Arlington, Texas; and the municipalities of Sonsonate and Nahuizalco, El Salvador, are partnered with the city of Santa Ana, California.
Through a series of exchanges, staff and officials from the U.S. jurisdictions, including their police departments, have provided information and training on community-oriented policing and crime/violence prevention practices, including citizens' academies and school resource officiers, to their Central American counterparts.
Since its start, the AMUPREV program has:
- Established a website and a Facebook page (both en Español) to provide easily accessible information about the program and to share good practices on municipal-led violence prevention among a network of more than 1,500 local, regional, and national government officials, civil society representatives, and other stakeholders throughout Mexico and Central and South America.
- Supported municipal violence prevention committees (MVPCs) and councils in all five municipalities with direct intervention from the program.
- Exhibited at annual conferences of municipal associations in the region and presented at other national and regional conferences focused on public safety and security.
- Signed an MOU with SICA (Sistema de la Integracion Centroamericana) to share information and contribute to the promotion of strategies on crime and violence prevention at the municipal level in the region.
- Facilitated exchange visits during which the U.S. and Latin American partners have shared information about successful community policing practices—including the roles of the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, schools, the faith-based community, and other partners in violence prevention activities—and explored opportunities for adoption of similar practices in Panama and El Salvador. Trainings have been conducted in the development of police athletic leagues, police academies, school resource officer programs, and other topics related to promoting citizen-police interaction.
- Published a municipal-based Violence Prevention Toolkit that serves as a resource for local stakeholders. Available in print and electronic format, the guide presents the steps for creating, implementing, and regulating activities of municipal violence prevention committees or councils and introduces the role of community-oriented policing, citizen oversight and advocacy, and municipal planning, among other topics.
- Developed videos of successful municipal-led violence prevention initiatives. ICMA produced five videos highlighting the activities of San Miguelito, Panama; Puerto Cortés, Honduras; Santa Tecla and Sonsonate, El Salvador, and San José, Costa Rica, and two additional videos (Comacarán and Ataco, El Salvador) with the collaboration of COMURES (Corporation of Municipalities of the Republic of El Salvador), which are all available on the AMUPREV website.
- Provided small grants to the MVPCs for prioritized projects—for example, Nahuizalco launched a campaign called “No More Violence,” involving local media, public meetings, billboards, banners, and other outreach to encourage public participation in violence prevention activities. Sonsonate used the grants to conduct a public awareness campaign/event known as Las Noches de Convivencia. In addition, they were able to receive two new surveillance cameras and a new TV screen to expand their capacity to monitor certain areas in the city that have a high probability of crime.
- Actively sought opportunities to coordinate AMUPREV activities with those of Alcance Positivo, a separate USAID-funded program addressing factors that put Panamanian youth at risk of criminal activity, to the benefit of both programs.
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AMUPREV Brochure en Español