As Tarrant County’s designated domestic violence services provider, SafeHaven has multiple ways to assist at-risk individuals: an emergency shelter, crisis hotline, pro bono legal aid, counseling, and offender reform, to name a few. During the pandemic, the nonprofit organization has seen an increase in domestic violence cases, hotline calls, and homicides.
As of July, the number of homicides in Tarrant County had surpassed the total amount reported last year. Many domestic violence victims seek out the SafeHaven’s services, but according to Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Storey, some of the most high-risk cases are those who don’t reach out to the organization.
“The shelter is not for everybody. Not everybody is going to seek it out,” she says. “We look into it every time there’s a homicide, and most of the time, [the victim] has never accessed the shelter.”
Fortunately, SafeHaven has another life-saving intervention in play: High Risk Team. This arm of the organization is specifically for survivors that are at high risk for potential homicides, but unfortunately, the team is much smaller than the amount of high-risk cases that need to be addressed. Right now, they have two case managers, a team coordinator (who also assists with a smaller case load), and a director for the Crisis and Outreach Department (where the High Risk Team is housed). Both Storey and SafeHaven CEO Kathryn Jacob agree that there’s an immediate need for this team to have at least 10 case managers. The main roadblock? Funding.
Although SafeHaven recently received COVID-19 funding, not all of it can be used for personnel, and the funds that can be used for personnel must be spent within a short time span or only used for personnel associated with housing. This means that the COVID-19 funding can’t be used to develop the High Risk Team, despite the fact that many at-risk individuals in our community need the team’s helping hand right now. This skilled team’s comprehensive case management not only provides support for the survivor but also advocates for moving cases quickly through the system, securing survivors' safety and holding their offenders accountable.
SafeHaven’s High Risk Team is one of the key parts in Coordinated Community Response, a much larger initiative to protect victims of domestic violence. According to Storey, survivors often return to a relationship with their offender when the adjudication process is lengthy — which in Tarrant County, it is. From the time an offender is arrested to the time that they are tried can span up to a year on average. While a survivor’s case is in the legal system, they interact with multiple law enforcement entities, but the problem lies in the fact that these entities don’t always interact with one another. Throughout the course of Storey’s almost 30-year career assisting survivors, she has spent over half of it watching the system operate in silos.
“The first 20 years working in this field, I hardly knew anyone from the District Attorney’s office,” she says. “We weren’t thinking about how to stop this problem from happening, we were responding to victims. Historically, that’s just how it was.”
Even now, most of the survivors that SafeHaven meets are on the front end of their journey through the judicial system, sometimes calling the hotline immediately after crisis, even before filing a police report. The Coordinated Community Response approach works to bring together multiple disciplinary agencies, encouraging communication and collaboration between them to promote systemic changes and ensure survivor safety throughout the legal process.
Shortly after Sharen Wilson was elected as Tarrant County’s District Attorney, she created an Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Unit and asked SafeHaven’s CEO, Kathryn Jacob, to help them determine how they could pinpoint high risk cases. Jacob shared several qualifying indicators for extreme danger and potential homicide that she had seen in cases at SafeHaven, and when the IPV Unit assessed their cases with this list in mind, they discovered that over 400 of their cases were considered high-risk.
There are also a vast number of offenders in the probation system, says Storey, and Tarrant County’s Probation Department is working to determine which offenders in their case load pose the highest risk. SafeHaven regularly works with the department to carry out court-mandated enrollment in the Partner Abuse Intervention and Prevention Program, one of the largest offender reformation services in the state. Currently, 350 offenders are enrolled in SafeHaven’s 27-week program, but this does not necessarily mean that these offenders' victims are in contact with the organization.
“If we cross-referenced how many victims of those offenders are connected to SafeHaven services, I don’t think it would be a high number,” says Storey. “There are folks that we’re still missing. Connecting the dots and coordinating everything that’s happening is going to help us identify more victims.”
With more than 25 different law enforcement entities, it’s rather difficult to ensure that everyone in Tarrant County’s system is communicating and working together for victim safety. Although it may seem like a daunting task, SafeHaven has two plans in place to connect the dots across multiple municipalities: a vulnerability index, and Coordinated Community Response staff and systems meetings.
The vulnerability index is a longer-term project that will utilize data to determine which individuals in the community are at high homicide risk. Service workers in the homeless community use a similar vulnerability index to determine individuals who are chronically homeless and would most benefit from housing, but Jacob says that she has not seen anyone create an index that prioritizes domestic violence cases based on homicide risk.
The index will gather data from Danger Assessments (an evidence-based tool developed by Dr. Jackie Campbell that indicates a high risk for potential homicide) and ODARA scores (a risk assessment tool answered during a police report that indicates how likely a domestic violence offender is to re-offend). Overall, it will provide a more comprehensive understanding of domestic violence in Tarrant County, potentially revealing if any high-risk victims are in relationships with high-risk offenders, and ultimately helping determine which cases are in greatest need.
This project, again, is facing the hurdle of funding. Jacob estimates that the index would cost $250,000 and take three years to produce — meaning that the faster this process begins, the better. SafeHaven has already begun working with an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work to develop a general concept for the index, and when the project is funded, they will work even more closely together to build it.
“This feels so big,” says Storey, “but when I think about it in terms of the years that I’ve been involved, the amount of progress that we’ve made is huge. We have a long way to go, but we’ve also made some really significant strides in terms of coordinating together and communicating with the different entities that are — in some way shape or form — part of this work.”
While SafeHaven waits to secure funding for the vulnerability index, they are paving the way for a more collaborative approach to ending domestic violence in Tarrant County with Coordinated Community Response staff and systems meetings. During staff meetings, High Risk Team case managers share thematic issues that their clients have experienced, such as bond conditions or survivor arrests on-scene. Then, at systems meetings, these issues are discussed with the deputy chief, head of probation, IPV felony prosecutor, and other key players in the fight for freedom from domestic violence.
In a recent instance, case managers brought to light the trend of survivors being arrested on scene. When this was addressed in the systems meeting, it led to a deeper discussion in which the head of Arlington’s Domestic Violence Unit shared various on-scene factors that could contribute to this issue. He also acknowledged that further law enforcement training — which he would be willing to champion and encourage — is needed. The biggest benefit of having these meetings, Storey says, is “bringing all the parties together and opening everyone’s eyes with decision-makers at the table."
This October, Tarrant County will take its next big step in the initiative with Coordinated Community Response interactive training, which will help different disciplinary agencies gain a further understanding of ways they can work together to strengthen their overall response to domestic violence. SafeHaven has also discussed housing High Risk Team case managers in the county’s family courts building, so that it’s easier for personnel at the District Attorney’s office to connect survivors with SafeHaven advocates. In all of these efforts — Coordinated Community Response, High Risk Team, and the vulnerability index — SafeHaven is stepping back to look at the big picture, connecting individuals in the community and working as a county-wide team to protect at-risk individuals and prevent domestic violence homicides.
“The goal is that everybody is on the same page and agrees that our No. 1 goal is victim safety,” says Storey. “The No. 1 goal for everybody who is in this work, everybody that is contributing to holding offenders accountable, should be victim safety for our community.”
Want to help expand SafeHaven’s High Risk Team and develop a vulnerability index for our community? Support SafeHaven’s efforts by contributing a donation online.
