By Erik A. Nielsen
Assistant District Attorney in Travis County
Just a few short years ago, we were all looking forward to the “Roaring ’20s” as we entered a new decade after 2019. But very quickly, the State of Texas, and indeed the entire country, was hit with a one-two punch. First, the COVID-19 virus took tens of thousands of lives[1] and then almost immediately, there was a large spike in homicide rates, even as the rest of the crime rate remained steady or even dropped.[2] The reasons for this spike are myriad, but one thing upon which every prosecutor can agree: We should all do what we can to lower the prevalence of acts of violence.
In 2019, Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza released a four-part strategy to combat gun violence; it uses evidence-based strategies proven successful in reducing violent crime rates in other jurisdictions.[3] He is joined in this effort by many folks in our office, but specifically Amber Goodwin, an ADA and liaison to the City of Austin Office of Violence Prevention (OVP). I sat down with Amber, who gave me a lot of insight into these strategies, which I share with you in this article.
The four-part strategy[4]
1) Use both traditional and innovative prosecution strategies for sentencing people charged with gun crimes.
2) Work with community members to prevent gun violence by creating, supporting, and implementing intervention and prevention programs.
3) Take guns out of the hands of those at high risk for committing an act of gun violence, especially in intimate partner relationships involving violence.
4) Support programming to help survivors and families of the victims of gun violence.
Prosecution strategies
For the vast majority of people charged with gun offenses, our office prosecutes the case in a traditional manner: They are charged and sentenced, and the sentences are commensurate with the level of violence they have displayed.[5] In 2021, the Travis County District Attorney’s Office reprioritized our resources to focus our most experienced prosecutors on serious, violent crime.[6] Doing so opened up diversion opportunities for lower-level offenses, such as simple drug possession.[7]
The prosecutors who handle these violent cases are experts in the law, they are well-versed in forensics, they have previously handled complicated cases, and they involve themselves in the investigation of the case from the moment the crimes are reported, not just after police have completed an investigation.[8] As a result of this focus, our office has dramatically increased the conviction rate of those who commit violent crime: In 2018, our conviction rate for such crimes was 38 percent; it increased to 91 percent in 2022.
Speaking of law enforcement, we continue to work collaboratively with all law enforcement agencies to ensure the successful investigation and prosecution of serious offenses, which is another necessary strategy to combat this violence.[9] As part of this effort, ADA Victor Erbring was assigned as a liaison to regularly meet with other prosecutors and law enforcement agencies; he described it this way:
“As part of the violence reduction program, which integrates members of law enforcement (local, state, and federal officers) and local and federal prosecutors, we meet in groups on a regular basis to discuss developments in the investigation of crimes involving firearms. Our goal is to produce leads and eventual prosecutions of high-risk offenders or those who present an ongoing and present danger to the community. These regular meetings foster an atmosphere of trust and collaboration, and importantly they allow for continued communication between law enforcement and legal prosecution.
“Prosecutors help by reviewing search warrants in a timely manner, properly identifying high-risk suspects and offenders, and ensuring investigations lead to successful prosecutions by discussing strengths and weaknesses of cases as they develop. This multi-pronged team effort ensures that law enforcement can identify people committing dangerous or violent acts of crime, build the strongest cases possible by having early legal analyses of the cases as they develop, and ensure the integrity of the evidence.
“Additionally, trust is built so when a case is disposed of in whatever manner, members of law enforcement trust that it was handled in a way that ensures agreement in the process and outcome without the rift of the unknown coming between the two types of parties.”
Intervention and prevention programs
In 2020, the City of Austin funded the Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) to coordinate efforts with Austin Public Health, city leaders, and the community at large.[10] To strengthen our collaboration, the DA’s Office appointed a liaison to OVP (ADA Amber Goodwin, as mentioned earlier) to coordinate violence intervention and provide additional expertise, resources, and best practices to coordinate across jurisdictions, to better understand and capture local data.[11]
Travis County is also in the process of launching a hospital-based gun violence prevention initiative as a result of the Safer Travis County Gun Violence Resolution passed in 2022.[12] What is that, you ask? Well, many studies show that gun violence is concentrated on a very small number of people who have similar risk factors.[13] This retaliatory violence is predictable and therefore often preventable.[14] Community violence prevention programs target those areas and populations with “credible messengers” who have experienced gun violence and can intervene before any retaliation happens. These credible messengers are often employed by community-based organizations (Jail to Jobs or Life Anew are two Austin examples), or government agencies, depending on the city. These programs have been enormously successful.[15]
“This work is fundamentally relationship-based,” says Fatimah Loren Dreier, Executive Director for the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. “It leverages the credibility of workers to ensure that resources flow directly to those most impacted in the areas most needed. Studies show that these approaches are effective at interrupting cycles of violence, decreasing injury recidivism and incarceration, and increasing employment.”[16]
In practice, say a person goes to the emergency room with a gunshot wound. There, the “credible messenger” meets with that crime victim, discussing the facts and circumstances of the shooting, and communicating his own experiences with gun violence. But just like a good law enforcement investigator, that credible messenger follows up by going into the community where the shooting occurred and talking with the folks who witnessed the shooting and may still be affected by it. Different from a peace officer, however, this messenger may utilize cognitive and behavioral therapy and rigorous case management to both help the community heal and to ensure that the violence inflicted upon one community member does not lead to retaliation and another act of gun violence, and then another retaliation, followed by another, and so on, like lemmings over a cliff. These “wraparound” methods help communities feel safer sooner after a shooting, as the community feels seen and heard and is aware of visible steps being taken to forestall future violence.
“Utilizing proven methods, workers identify ongoing conflicts by talking to key people in the community about ongoing disputes, recent arrests, recent prison releases, and other situations, and they use mediation techniques to resolve them peacefully,” says Dr. Chico Tillmon, University of Chicago Crime Lab. “When a shooting happens, trained workers immediately work in the community and at the hospital to cool down emotions and prevent retaliations—working with the victims, friends and family of the victim, and anyone else who is connected with the event.”
This hospital-based program, which has been successfully implemented in Harris and Bexar Counties as well as some smaller jurisdictions,[17] will be up and running soon in Travis County. All the stakeholders are excited about its progress and hope to branch out soon.
This approach is most effective when a violence prevention system is deployed to ensure individuals at risk of crime or violence are engaged regardless of where they are in their life: healthy in the community, recovering in the healthcare system, or under the watch of the justice system. For those in the community, violence interruption programs and targeted trauma-informed care programs, such as READI in Chicago and ROCA in Baltimore,[18] are models. Hospital-based violence intervention programs are effective at serving those with a history of injury and at risk of reinjury or retaliation.[19]
Preventing high-risk suspects’ access to firearms
When domestic violence escalates, the risk of death to a female victim when the male abuser has access to a firearm increases by 1,000 percent.[20] According to the Violence Policy Center, over 90 percent of women killed by men were murdered by someone they knew, and the most common weapon used was a gun.[21] In order to address the ongoing threat that domestic violence poses to our public safety, our office is focused on accountability and prevention. As a result, we have significantly increased the conviction rate for family violence cases. In 2018, our conviction rate in family cases was 38 percent, and it increased to 75 percent in 2022.
When it comes to prevention, Austin is a part of a new federal strategy to collaborate with local stakeholders; one of the initial tasks this group will be working on is finalizing the family violence county-wide firearm surrender program.[22] Its goal is to remove weapons from people who pose an articulable threat to the safety of our community.
In Spring 2021, we enacted our own firearm surrender policy.[23] Prosecutors request that judges inquire, before a person is released from jail, whether that person possesses or has access to any firearms. If the answer is yes, instead of surrendering the firearms to a family member who may live in the same household (the previous practice), ADAs now ask the judge to order the person to surrender the firearms to the Travis County Constable of Precinct 5 and to provide proof of the surrender to the court.[24] Any violation of this order means that prosecutors will be asking for the person to face a revocation or modification of the bond.[25]
Services for victims of violence
Since the start of 2021, our office has prioritized ensuring that victims of crime are treated with dignity and respect.[26] Our elected DA, Mr. Garza, recently announced the creation of a stand-alone unit of trauma-informed counselors to work with crime victims throughout the criminal justice process. Moreover, there has been extensive trauma training for office staff and attorneys alike.[27] But if we are serious about preventing violence in our community, we must do more to address the harm and trauma it causes in impacted communities.[28]
For example, a trauma recovery center (TRC) serves victims of gun violence who are most at risk of committing crimes if their trauma is left unaddressed.[29] Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, along with the Alliance for Safety and Justice, have worked with communities to bring trauma recovery centers to more than 39 cities across the country.[30] They have been working hard to bring one to Travis County, and our office supported the effort to bring much-needed resources to victims of violent crime and their families.[31] To facilitate this process, our office committed to working with county and city stakeholders and pledged financial assistance toward getting a center up and running.[32] Over the last year, both the city and county officials came together to fund a pilot for the first trauma recovery center in Texas right here in Austin.
Conclusion
We aren’t saying all these programs will work, and we’re certainly not claiming they are a “silver bullet” that will eradicate gun violence across Austin, across Texas, and across the U.S. anytime soon. But we hope they have given other prosecutors new information to think about and perhaps spark ideas in your own jurisdictions for ways you can slow the rise of gun violence.[33]
Endnotes
[1] Track Covid-19 in Places Important to You, The New York Times (June 19, 2023), www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-personalized-tracker.html (data shown after setting filter to the year 2021 on website).
[2] Austin Police Dep’t Crime Search, Austin Police Dep’t (June 19, 2023), maps.austintexas.gov/GIS/CrimeViewer/.
[3] Memorandum from the Off. of the Dist. Att’y Josè P. Garza, to Travis Cnty., “Keeping our Community Safe: How the District Attorney is Addressing the Rise in Gun Violence in Travis County” (Nov. 16, 2021) (on file with author).
[4] Id. at 2.
[5] Id. at 3.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] Id.
[9] Id.
[10] Lina Fisher, Loc. Offs. Make Promises on Gun Safety, The Austin Chronicle (June 17, 2022), https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2022-06-17/local-officials-make-promises-on-gun-safety.
[11] Garza, supra, at 4-5.
[12] Austin, Tex., Safer Travis County Resolution (Nov. 1, 2022).
[13] NICJR, Effective Cmty. Based Violence Reduction Strategies, Nat’l Inst. for Crim. Just. Reform, at 2.
[14] Garza, supra, at 5.
[15] Id; NICJR, supra, at 2, 4.
[16] Fatimah Loren Muhammad, The Pandemic’s Impact on Racial Inequity and Violence Can’t Be Ignored, The Trace (May, 7, 2020), www.thetrace.org/2020/05/ coronavirus-racial-inequity-and-violence-cant-be-ignored/.
[17] Anna Bauman, Harris County to launch hospital violence intervention program at Ben Taub, Hous. Chron. (Feb. 14, 2023), www.houstonchronicle.com/ news/houston-texas/health/article/ben-taub-hospital-violence-prevention-houston-17781344.php; Cure Violence Global, https://cvg.org/impact/#evaluations (last visited June 19, 2023).
[18] Roca, https://rocainc.org/how-we-do-it/outcomes/ (last visited June 19, 2023); READI Chicago, www.heartlandalliance.org/readi/ (last visited June 19, 2023).
[19] See NICJR, supra, at 7.
[20] Corey Meador, Domestic violence shelters are swamped. Experts worry surging gun sales could make things worse, PBS (July 14, 2021, 11:18 AM), www.pbs.org/newshour/health/domestic-violence-shelters-are-swamped-experts-worry-surging-gun-sales-could-make-things-worse.
[21] VPC, Nearly 1,800 Women Murdered by Men in One Year, New Violence Pol’y Ctr. Study Finds, Violence Pol’y Ctr. (Sept. 29, 2021), https://vpc.org/press/nearly-1800-women-murdered-by-men-in-one-year-new-violence-policy-center-study-finds.
[22] Mike Marut, Austin part of new federal strategy to curb gun violence, KVUE (June 23, 2021, 11:18 AM), www.kvue.com/article/news/crime/austin-crime-violence-american-rescue-plan/269-607404fe-02d1-47ca-ab16-3fb5eba27f65.
[23] Garza, supra, at 6.
[24] Id.
[25] Id.
[26] Id. at 7.
[27] Id.
[28] Id.
[29] Terra Tucker, Opinion: To improve public safety, Austin must invest in trauma recovery, Austin American-Statesman (Nov. 7, 2021, 8:00 AM), www.statesman .com/story/opinion/2021/11/07/opinion-improve-public-safety-austin-must-invest-trauma-recovery/6301719001.
[30] See All. for Safety and Just., 2022 Nat’l Surv. of Victims’ Views on Safety and Just., Crime Survivors Speak, 2022, at 2, 14, 23, 25, 38, and 41.
[31] Garza, Supra, at 7.
[32] Id.
[33] Some articles to check out for more information on this topic: https://giffords.org/lawcenter/report/a-second-chance-the-case-for-gun-diversion-programs and https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago .edu/dist/2/1015/files/2017/01/SDP-PLGDP-Brief-Fall-2021-FINAL.pdf.