For the fifth year running the Law Enforcement Families Partnership, a vital part of the FSU College of Social Work’s Institute for Family Violence Studies, was awarded a Prudential Productivity Award. The partnership was honored, along with other recipients, at an awards luncheon on June 3, 2014 at Florida State. The awards recognize state employees and organizations for work productivity and innovation that improves state services and saves Florida taxpayers and businesses money.

The Prudential Productivity Award program is a joint venture of Florida’s Lieutenant Governor, Florida TaxWatch, The Florida Council of 100 and the state of Florida. Hundreds of individuals and work units are nominated for the Prudential Productivity Awards each year and the recipients are selected through a careful review process.  The IFVS Law Enforcement Families Partnership has been recognized for the past five years for saving more than a million dollars in public money by providing free professional development training to law enforcement.

“We’ve been so fortunate to have Judge George S. Reynolds, III, the chair of our Community Advisory Board, recognize the value of this project and nominate us,” Zachary Summerlin, the Institute’s Program Coordinator said. “His commitment to showing the state the success of this project and the collaborations that have come from it are the reasons the Law Enforcement Families Partnership has received such recognition.”

Since 2008, the Law Enforcement Families Partnership has been a broad-based collaborative effort of Florida’s statewide criminal justice agencies in an effort to prevent violence in the homes of our criminal justice officers. This effort provided the country’s first model at connecting statewide criminal justice agencies and victim advocacy groups in the efforts to end and prevent officer-involved domestic violence. The Law Enforcement Families Partnership uses an online domestic violence prevention curriculum and a model policy on officer-involved domestic violence as its foundational components in the effort to reduce and prevent violence committed by officers.

The Institute for Family Violence Studies Director Karen Oehme, JD noted that the success of the partnership is due to the commitment of preventing and eradicating domestic violence by three distinct groups: local criminal justice agencies, their statewide counterparts, and lead victim advocacy groups (the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence). The efforts of these groups have created a model for the rest of the country, with more than 40,000 officers in Florida having taken the training. Based on this success, the partnership was able to expand the training on a national level, creating the National Prevention Toolkit on Officer-Involved Domestic Violence. Last year alone, more than 17,500 officers nationwide have used this resource.

“We all have the same goal. That’s the key,” Karen Oehme remarked. “We owe a great deal of gratitude to each of the agencies who have joined this effort to make communities across the country safer and free from violence and we are so grateful to the Verizon Foundation for their partnership on this crucial venture.”