Remarks of U.S. Attorney David E. Nahmias at the Opening Ceremony of the 2007 PSN National Conference
Atlanta, Georgia – September 17, 2007

I want to welcome you again to the 2007 Project Safe Neighborhoods National Conference. PSN is one of the great achievements of law enforcement during this new century.

PSN is great in how it has brought together local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and officers, along with key community groups, to fight the common enemy of violent crime – forging relationships that benefit all of us in so many other areas of common interest and concern.

PSN is great in how it demands a focused strategy, not just throwing money or resources at a problem but concentrating efforts on the neighborhoods hardest hit by violent crime and on the worst of the worst offenders who commit such a large portion of that crime.

And most of all, PSN is great because it works – our efforts together to identify, investigate, prosecute, and lock up so many bad guys with guns, gang members, and other criminals who threaten our communities have produced clear and positive results.

All of these factors – partnership, focus, and results – are essential to so much of what we in law enforcement must do in this new century, a century of many challenges but limited resources, particularly when our resources are also stretched by the demands of homeland and national security.

I know that PSN works here in the Northern District of Georgia. Let me share this email that one of our AUSAs sent around our office just last week. He writes:

[We] are trying a Hobbs Act robbery case where the defendant and others targeted drug dealers as their victims. One of the victims is currently serving a 10 year federal sentence for being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. His was one of the [PSN] cases that we . . . adopted from Fulton County and prosecuted federally.

He testified in our trial that when he got robbed he was on pre-trial release on the federal case and that he had quit dealing cocaine and started getting his affairs in order to go to prison because the word on the street was that if you got indicted in federal court, you were going to be convicted and you were going to prison.

I told this to [another AUSA] this afternoon and she told me that not long ago she interviewed a cooperating defendant who told her that he quit carrying a firearm to his drug deals because he was afraid that if he got arrested, he'd end up in federal court and serve a lot more time because of the gun charge.

We have heard similar stories again and again in our district and around the country. Our efforts not only lock up bad guys, they deter them and others from crime and particularly deter them from carrying the guns that turn other crimes into aggravated assaults and homicides.

This is not easy work, and it is not fully successful in every place and in every year. After several years of steady progress in reducing violent crime rates and homicides, recently many cities – including Atlanta – have faced an uptick in violence and homicides, and some cities are facing a real upsurge. Youth violence, street gangs, drug dealing, unreformed offenders completing their prison terms and re-entering our neighborhoods, a culture that often glorifies violence and anti-social behavior – all of these put additional pressure on many of our communities. PSN is not by itself the solution to these challenges, but it can be an important part of the solution.

One of the things we need to do is to adjust our PSN programs to today’s challenges. We need to refresh our partnerships, because while the agencies may be the same, the names of our key teammates may change over the years. We need to refocus our programs on the challenges we face today in our specific, local neighborhoods, or even change our focus to new neighborhoods facing the new challenges. And we need to think about how we can continue to produce clear and positive results from our hard work.

This conference is a great opportunity to do all of that. Spend time with your teammates and others here to get reinvigorated about making this program work. Take advantage of the remarkable array of breakout seminars to learn about great ideas and best practices that others have developed and that you too can use to make your program better. And take a little time to think about how you and your team can keep the PSN Program the model of success and achievement that it has become during the last six years.

Of course, I want you to do all of this during the conference hours. After that, you need to get out and spend some time enjoying this great city – and spend some money here too!

Come see the Braves play tonight at the Ted. They are still in the playoff hunt – at least mathematically – and it should be a beautiful night for baseball.

Or walk a few blocks east to see the heart of Atlanta’s rich civil rights tradition, on Sweet Auburn Avenue and at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center. Or walk a few blocks west and visit Centennial Olympic Park or the country’s largest and best aquarium. Enjoy some of our great restaurants and do some shopping – and again, spend some money here.

You have a great conference staff here to help you, but if you need anything else, please feel free to grab me or anyone from our Atlanta PSN team and let us know what you need.

Now I’d like to introduce this year’s PSN video, a compilation of highlights from the past six years of PSN work and highlighting the work of the entire PSN team.

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