San Salvador, July 10th, 2017 - The Academy for Security Analysis concluded its first training session on June 30, 2017. Held at the Academia Nacional de Seguridad Pública (ANSP) in San Salvador, El Salvador, participants from government agencies and civil society groups from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras spent four weeks acquiring skills to produce evidence-based public policies on citizen security and violence prevention. The Academy’s first cohort featured a diverse group of 49 participants hailing from 12 institutions in the Northern Triangle region.
The Academy for Security Analysis offered 8 courses with a quantitative focus during the June session, which included Social Science Research and Quantitative Studies in Violent Settings; Gathering, Managing and Exploring Crime Data; Mapping Crime; Regression Analysis 1; Regression Analysis 2; Designing and Analyzing Public Opinion Surveys; and Principles of Program Evaluation. These courses were taught by Javier Osorio from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Reynaldo Rojo-Mendoza from San Diego State University, Michael Weintraub from Universidad de los Andes, and Viveca Pavon-Harr from the University of Texas at Dallas. International instructors worked in partnership with local professors from the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador, including Mauricio Gaborit, S.J., Lorena Rivas, Daniel Sosa, Alba Chávez, Metzi Aguilar, José María Velásquez, José David Morán.
In addition to course activities, the 12 participant teams worked each afternoon with the Academy’s instructors to develop and refine plans for pilot public policy interventions. The goal of these interventions—each of which use cutting-edge methods in program evaluation, including randomized controlled trials—is to capture lessons in citizen security and effective models of crime prevention, and to promote replication. A competition for funding for the implementation of these interventions—two projects per year per country will be funded, for a total of six per year—will be determined by a Policy Board, composed of experts from the United States Agency for International Development, the Organization of American States, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Regional Office for Central America and the Caribbean in Panama, and the Inter-American Development Bank. The Policy Board will release its funding decision at the end of July.
The Academy for Security Analysis will resume with its second round of training from January 8 to January 26, 2018 at the ANSP, where a state-of-the-art computer laboratory has been established for use by the Academy’s participants. Courses for the second session include Computerized Annotation of Text as Data; Drug Trafficking; Crime Prevention; Social Prevention; Courts and Prosecution; Corrections, Reinsertion and Reintegration; and Community Policing, each of which be offered to the first cohort by international and local professors. In addition, the institutions that received funding for their pilot policy projects will begin to analyze data gathered from the implementation of these interventions. Recruitment for the second cohort of the Academy for Security Analysis will begin in the coming months.
For more information about the Academy for Security Analysis, please send an email to infoaas@jjay.cuny.edu or leave a message on our website, https://www.aas.jjay.cuny.edu/contact.
