Trenton's Shooting Response Team has shown that having multiple agencies respond to major crimes helps bring them to a swift resolution.
If two heads are better than one, then an entire squadron of law-enforcement professionals working together to combat crime would figure to be several orders of magnitude better.
And indeed, Trenton's Shooting Response Team is reaping the benefit of that conventional wisdom, with signs that the newly reactivated unit is registering a small but significant impact on the local crime scene.
The team, which is deployed for all non-fatal shootings in the city, investigated 103 cases last year involving 116 gunshot victims.
Forty-two percent of those cases resulted in criminal charges, the team's leader said, representing a slight increase over the 40 percent of cases cleared during the second half of 2014.
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The Shooting Response Team, which works out of Trenton police headquarters, is made up of deputy attorneys general, detectives of the Division of Criminal Justice and detectives of the State Police Major Crime Unit, as well as members of the Trenton Police Department.
The unit has had a rocky history in the nearly nine years since it was launched in 2007 as part of Operation CeaseFire, a state program that brought together local, county and state personnel to combat gun violence at all stages, from investigation to prosecution.
New leadership of the local force in 2007 and the layoffs of 105 Trenton officers led to the team's eventual disappearance. It wasn't until retired detective and captain Ernest Parrey, Jr. returned to the department in mid-2014 that the team was brought back to life.
The group's leader, Sgt. Carmelo Rodriguez, says members hit the ground running.
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"We started to see a decrease in shooting incidents, and once we got rolling, the number of incidents really started declining," he says.
He also estimates that that the clearance rate was about 15 percent in the first six months of 2014, when shootings were handled by the department's detective bureau.
Parrey points out that utilizing the combined experience of officers from other towns gives investigators insights into different perspectives on policing, and the extra cops on the street offer a much-needed boost to the understaffed force.
In recent years, academics and experts in law enforcement have taken an increasingly hard look at the criminal justice system, searching out weak points and areas where the system is failing us as a society.
When something is working, as the team approach to investigating shootings seems to be doing in our city, it's both encouraging and instructional.
We extend kudos to all the participants, and cross our fingers for their continued success.