BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — With the Tops shooting still fresh in people's minds, more resources are coming to Western New York to stop targeted violence before it happens again.
This will also help agencies across the state.
Immediately after the Tops mass shooting, Gov. Kathy Hochul issued Executive Order 18, which requires each county in the state, including New York City, to develop plans to confront domestic violence.
The state's new Threat Assessment and Management (TAM) team is one of them, designed to interrupt targeted violence before it happens.
Additional funding was implemented in the state and local Western New York municipalities to combat these types of violence, Tuesday afternoon.
Funding for the project will help to hire an additional project manager, coordinate meetings, implement communications and plan to assist with threat and report training to
focus on behavioral approaches and violence prevention.
"This grant will help save lives. Let's be very clear about that," Buffalo Police Department Commissioner, Joe Gramaglia said.
The funding will support five different localities, four of them being local to WNY.
The Threat Assessment and Management (TAM) team is a team made up of law enforcement, mental health professionals, school officials and other community stakeholders.
"The goal is to get social services help, to get needs to wrap around this person before they commit a crime, to actually get them some help and the prevention before they get to a point where they can commit a crime," Commissioner Gramaglia said.
However, if they do commit a crime, the Department will make an arrest and work with the district attorney's office to continue to work on getting those services to the person.
Homeland Security and Emergency Services commissioner, Jackie Bray stated the Department is offering an additional $500K, which will be divided into Niagara County, the City of Buffalo, Monroe County, the City of Troy and the rest will go statewide. This means each location will get about $100K.
"We ask law enforcement to do so much and so often, we ask them to do things that's really outside of their lane, where they don't have the right tools," Bray said. "To really pull people in from different sectors to try to work before an event happens."
Congressman Brian Higgins, for the state's 26th district, stated this will go a long way into making sure 'bad things don't happen to good people.'
Congressman Brian Higgins said, "It's intervention, it's multidisciplinary. It has many aspects to it, in addition to law enforcement but there are mental health components. There are community components."
"We saw, on May 14th, the worst of human kind, the evil that was brought upon this community. That's why it is so important that this threat assessment teams be put in place," Erie County Executive, Mark Poloncarz said.
Bray added the public can no longer be bystanders and that we need to give public officials what they need to connect those dots.
Bray said, "In order to prevent attacks like that one, not only are we going to need the type of work we're talking about here, but all of us in public office are going to have to make it very clear that that type of hate, that type of radicalization has absolutely no place in New York State and in our personal communities.
It has no place in our dinner tables. It has no place at the bar when we socialize, it has no place in our workplaces."
