• Tiffany Vedder of Michigan's State Police Department is excited about the new grant.

UPDATE: LANSING - A $400,000 grant has been awarded to the Michigan State Police in partnership with the MSU School of Criminal Justice. The money from this smart-policing grant will go toward researching evidence-based policing, a strategy used to find hotspots for crime and traffic accidents.

According to Tiffany Vedder of the State Police, this technique is becoming increasingly widely-used.

"And the crime has gone down, so it has been shown to work," says Vedder. " We need to figure out where where we've done this before, look at the lessons learned, and what we have done to make it work, so that we can use those practices that we've already been doing to determine other areas to implement evidence-based policing."

According to MSU Professor Merry Morash, Michigan's State Police Department is unique because it increasingly allocates its resources to ways of being extremely effective and efficient.

"So for example they're getting away from geographically-based posts, where police are stationary waiting for something to happen, and instead looking at serious crime problems that they can best respond to and having a much more mobile kind of police," explains Morash.

Morash says the fact that the Police agency and the College were able to get this money speaks to the quality of ideas, because the process was very competitive.

ORIGINAL STORY: LANSING - A group of faculty at Michigan State's School of Criminal Justice will soon begin working with the Michigan State Police on a new project, thanks to a federal grant recently awarded to the police agency.