Triad is in its' twenty-first year of assisting law enforcement to keep seniors safe in their communities by utilizing senior volunteers and those within the private sector who have a vested interest in seniors.
This year NATI held its 20th Anniversary Celebration Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, where twenty-one workshops by more than thirty presenters delivered much-needed training on Triad topics to over 300 attendees.
NATI has a partnership with the 911 Cell Phone Bank to provide emergency telephones to senior citizens and victims of crime. This partnership provides an income stream for local Triad programs as well as financial support for NATI. This year NATI also formed a partnership with Cyalume Technologies to provide much-needed emergency lighting products to NSA members and Triads, while generating revenue to support the Triad Program. Through a prior grant with the Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services, NATI is able to make available a Resource Disc containing materials for communities, teaching them how to utilize senior volunteers before, during and after disasters, called STAR (Safety Training And Resources).
Triad Historical Overview
Triad was first conceived at the genesis of the community policing movement in law enforcement in the 1980s.
In 1988, representatives from the American Association of Retired Persons (now AARP), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) came together to attempt to define a way to help keep seniors safe from crime. The Triad model emerged from that effort.
Triad is not an acronym; it simply represents a group of three. Triad’s goal at its inception, as now, is to reduce crime against the elderly, and to reduce the fear of crime that seniors often experience.
The first Triad agreement was signed in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana in 1988. From that point forward, word about the Triad model spread and communities large and small adopted the concept. The three founding groups, AARP, IACP and NSA, promoted the idea at every opportunity. By the early 2000’s, more than 800 counties had signed Triad agreements.
In 1989, Louisiana signed the first statewide Triad agreement, a vehicle by which individual communities in a particular state could come together to share ideas and information. Since that time, 34 states have signed a statewide agreement at one time or another. At this writing, about 15 of those 34 state Triad groups are still active and meet periodically to pool resources and provide training and technical assistance to one another.
During the early days of Triad, the primary focus was to expand the concept as much as possible in order to ensure that seniors throughout the country would be safe. The outcome was that Triad agreements were signed in 47 states, and each constructed programs and activities that met the individual needs of that particular community.
Over time, the number and kinds of agencies that partnered with community leaders for form a Triad grew considerably. In the early days, only representatives from the three founding groups participated in Triad. Nowadays, most Triads have a large and varied number of partners from the community.
In 2000, the National Sheriffs’ Association created an affiliate not-for-profit 501 (c) (3) corporation, the National Association of Triads, Inc., in an effort to institutionalize the Triad effort, and to bring uniformity to the programs and activities conducted nationwide.