Victims testify to keep the S.F. Trauma Recovery Center

Who’s responsible for helping victims of violent crime heal? It can be a complicated question, and it was the topic of a hearing at City Hall yesterday afternoon. On the agenda was the proposed closure of the San Francisco Trauma Recovery Center, which attends to the city’s victims of violent crime.

The Center was supposed to be shut down in March, as part of the City and County’s mid-year budget cuts. On Wednesday, staff from the center, the police department, and district attorney’s office showed up at a special hearing. They were joined by crime victims who have used the Trauma Recovery Center’s services. KALW’s Rina Palta was at the hearing and has this report on the effort to keep the state’s only center of its kind open.

*     *     *

RINA PALTA: The Trauma Recovery Center started as kind of an experiment in 2001. Doctors at San Francisco General Hospital decided medical care alone wasn’t enough to heal victims of violent crime. Alicia Boccellari is the director of the Trauma Recovery Center.

ALICIA BOCCELLARI: When you think about what it means to be a victim of a violent crime, it means that someone has deliberately set out to hurt you. And most of us, we live our lives feeling that the world is a relatively safe place. But the whole idea that someone deliberately got a gun and walked up to you and shot you, or deliberately went and shot your son, and he’s now dead, that really shakes people up to their very core.

So the hospital’s psychiatric team opened a clinic specifically attuned to the needs of violent crime victims and their families. Clinicians started approaching patients who had been assaulted or raped or whose family members had been murdered. But the psychologists noticed that a lot of victims just weren’t interested in talking to them.

BOCCELLARI: And then we were realizing that these victims had a lot of additional things that made it difficult for them to get better. Post-traumatic stress disorder makes people have problems thinking.  They have problem paying attention. They have problems with their memory, they can get disorganized.  They may have trouble sleeping, nightmares, flashbacks.  A lot of people we see also become afraid to leave their homes. So we began engaging people around practical needs to help them get better.

So the Center staff adapted. Now, they help victims apply for disability or social security if their injuries cause them to miss work. They also visit people who are afraid to leave their homes. This flexibility has allowed Trauma Recovery staff to reach a much larger number of victims than were receiving help before.

BOCCELLARI: Before the Trauma Recovery Center was around for sexual assault victims in San Francisco, only 6 percent of them received mental health services and after the Trauma Recovery Center was created, we’re now serving about 71 percent.

Really, no one denies that the Trauma Recovery Center has done amazing work. The controversy is over who pays for it. Originally, the Center was funded through the state’s Victims Compensation Fund.  When a person is convicted of a crime and ordered to pay a fine, the money goes into this fund, which is run by the state. The state pays out the money to victims of violent crime, who can use it to pay for counseling or to make up for missed workdays. But, Boccellari says, there’s a problem. 

BOCCELLARI: Only 20 percent of victims actually have access to that fund, actually end up making it through the application process and being deemed eligible by the state of California.

Which, according to government reports, has left a surplus of tens of millions of dollars. So in 2001, in an effort led by then state Senator John Burton, the state took some of that money to start the Trauma Recovery Center.  But just six years later, the Governor decided the Victims Compensation Fund should no longer pay for the center.    

MITCHELL KATZ: And the State of California has not been able to replace the funding.

Mitchell Katz is the Director of Health for the city and county of San Francisco.

KATZ: The city and county has been replacing the lost state funding for the last two-and-a-half years.

Katz says, with San Francisco needing to cut 500 million dollars from its budget, the city can’t pick up the tab anymore.
   
KATZ: What have we already cut in order to save the two-and-a-half years that we have paid for the Trauma Recovery Center? We’ve had to lay off hundreds of staff. We have eliminated services at certain locations as to decrease rent. We’ve closed the managed care program. We’ve eliminated public health nursing for adults.

Katz says the Trauma Recovery Center has done great work, but it’s not an essential service in the city.

KATZ: We’ll be like other counties in California and we won’t have one either. That will be a shame, but I don’t think that we’re talking about drastic cuts to health services.

But to others, the Trauma Center’s proposed closure does seem drastic. San Francisco Police Lieutenant Dan Leydon heads up the city’s sexual assault unit. He says the Trauma Recovery Center is part of the city’s overall approach to safety.

LT. DAN LEYDON: You know, the crime of sexual assault, rape, in the United States and around the world, is a tremendously under-reported crime. I don’t think there’s any question about that. With the help of the Trauma Recovery Center, one of the things that they have is the ability to encourage and involve victims in reporting. And to us, that’s a very valuable contribution. 
   
Advocates of the Trauma Recovery Center say the center has increased victim cooperation with police and district attorneys by 69 percent, which, Leydon says, has led to more solved crimes. But to him, that’s not its only contribution.

LT. LEYDON: It is my experience that the victims of sexual assault, the comfort they get, or the satisfaction they get in seeing somebody get a long prison term, or any kind of a prison term, is really nothing compared to the effects that the crime takes on them long-term. So losing this component to our model would be a step backwards.

Trauma Center director Alicia Boccellari says despite budget problems at every level of government, someone needs to take responsibility for helping victims heal.

BOCCELLARI: So should the state pay for services for victims of crime, or should the city pay for it?  And all I know is that these are people who are being victimized on the streets of San Francisco, and I personally feel the city owes it to victims that have been injured here and deliberately hurt, to provide services for them.

Late yesterday, the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor’s office stepped in to prevent the Trauma Recovery Center from closing on March 1st.  It’s safe until June, when budgets come due, and the Trauma Recovery Center will likely be on the chopping block again. Meanwhile, Supervisor Bevan Dufty has started a fund for private donations for the Center, in the hopes that the extra money will help the Center weather future budget battles.

In San Francisco, I’m Rina Palta for Crosscurrents.