BUFFALO, N.Y. — Rochester's 'Rock' initiative started back in June, and now Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to bring it to Buffalo.
But here, the governor is calling it the 'Save Program.' It places people on parole who are at the highest risk of reoffending under electronic monitoring and higher levels of supervision.
In Rochester, they've had success. More Rochester Police officers now work with the U.S. Marshals' Violent Fugitive Task Force, and they also have at least one ATF officer on call for 24 hours every day.
Lt. Greg Bello of the Rochester Police Department says this program allows them to dedicate more time trying to find violent offenders.
If there's a firearms arrest, then the ATF can immediately file federal charges and hold a violent offender, keeping them off the streets.
Lt. Bello also said there were two weeks in September where they had no shootings at all, which is normally unheard of for the city.
"And what that allowed us to do was really target our specific known violent offenders that were wanted for shootings wanted for murders, really firearm-based," Lt. Bello said.
"So you can go through and from our our investigations unit, we might have 20 or 30 people wanted for shootings and not necessarily have the resources to go hunt them down and go find those people. This provided us those resources."
In 2021, Rochester had 419 shooting victims. Last year, the city got it down to 351 because of the Rock initiative.
Overall, 66 people have been federally charged, and so far they've taken 133 guns off the streets.