Crime Prevention
During his tenure, Murphy has partnered with the Saratoga Springs City School District, the South Glens Falls School District, the Ballston Spa School District and other school districts in the county to combat school truancy. By identifying parents who need help with parenting skills, utilizing the Strengthening Families Program, and working with school truancy officers, Murphy has helped increase school attendance and participation in school activities by parents and students alike. The program has been successful in reducing truancy by enabling parents to take a more active role in their child's education, identifying issues and helping to solve them on a non-criminal basis, as well as fostering better family relationships.
The multi-step program involves an escalating series of responses to chronic truancy. The most serious cases result in contact with the DA's office, which informs students and parents about the possibility of prosecution. More than 225 families have complied without the need to file criminal charges. The program has resulted in marked improvement in student attendance and academic achievement and a reduction in the dropout rate. School truancy experts have called the program “one of the most non-traditional relationships we have seen between the district attorney’s office and school truancy,” the program is not about putting people in jail, but is instead about prevention.
Murphy has also led the Saratoga County School Violence Task Force to help ensure the safety of school children. He initiated an anti-gang collaboration among law enforcement, schools, and the community to keep gang violence from spreading to Saratoga County.
Locally, he collaborated with the Saratoga Springs City School District Superintendent in 2007 to co-host a first-of-its-kind Educational Summit. Together with the Partnership for Prevention, the summit helped the school community identify risks associated with substance use, learn more about the developmental reasons for risk-taking behavior by adolescents, and engage in ongoing conversations about youth and the challenges they face today.
At the post-graduate level, Murphy has reached out to area law schools to recruit interns to help assistant district attorneys with special research and writing projects, and to allow interns an opportunity to become certified by the appellate division to prosecute criminal cases as students while being supervised by the prosecutors.
Read more about this topic: James A. Murphy III
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