NATCHEZ — The Adams County Sheriff’s Office recently completed a 10-week course offered by the FBI to help the office elevate its interaction and support of crime victims.

Sgt. Ivori Campbell, who has been heading up the ACSO Crisis Intervention Team for approximately three years, recently completed the training known as Project ELEVATE that she said will be put in place immediately.

The training lasted from July 22 to Sept. 27 with the final week of training being live at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.

Adams County Sheriff Travis Patten said the FBI reached out to the ACSO recently to offer an invitation to participate in the 10-week training course.

“It is a pilot program,” Patten said, adding the training is based off of learnings from the Parkland shootings and other recent mass casualty incidents. “We were selected as one of 20 organizations out of the United States to participate in the pilot class.”

Patten said part of the reason the ACSO was selected to participate is because the office already had a Crisis Intervention Team in place, which only 15% of law enforcement agencies in the United States have.

With mass shootings occurring more and more frequently, Patten said, the FBI is leading an effort to help law enforcement agencies plan ahead by sharing learning from the aftermath of such events in other communities through project ELEVATE, which stands for Excellence in Law Enforcement-Based Victim Assistance Training and Enrichment.

The course offered specialized training in how to respond in the immediate aftermath of mass casualty events to provide assistance to victims, work with other agencies, communicate with the media and follow through with victim assistance.

As part of the training, Campbell and Patten recently spent the final week of training at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.

“Quantico was the capstone week,” Campbell said. “It was a week of graduate level studies and included 12 graduate-level credits.”

Campbell said she learned how to build a team approach to offering victims’ services by planning ahead.

“We haven’t had a mass casualty yet, but we are prepared,” Patten said. “Being hands on made us realize where we need to improve.”

Campbell said completing the course would help her improve the Crisis Intervention Team efforts, which already includes counseling victims of crime within 24 hours of the crime.

“The training helped us know what we need to be working on,” Campbell said. “We learned how to direct those resources.”