Press release from Washington Township Police Department
At the July 25th council meeting Chief Pat Gurcsik announced that our agency was awarded a $60,000 grant from the NJ Office of the Attorney General, Safe and Secure Communities Program. The grant was from fiscal year 2015. In February our agency was awarded an additional $120,000 from the Safe and Secure Grant from funding years 2013 and 2014. Lt. William Lee and Chief Financial Officer Collette Bachich were persistent in pursuing this funding by meeting several times with the Department of Law and Public Safety and spent hours preparing financial reports and programmatic reports required by the grant administrators. They currently are actively tracking and pursuing additional funding from fiscal years 2016, 2017 and 2018.
The goal of the Safe and Secure Communities Program is designed to provide municipalities with funding for additional law enforcement personnel to address crime in a focused community–oriented manner. Participation requires a town to agree not to reduce its regular complement of officers during any given grant period. Funding allocations are based on a formula that takes into account a participating municipalities police need or workload, the measurement of crimes per population and the number of given officers.
