speaker-0 (00:17.398)
All right, welcome to everyone. We are so excited today to have a wonderful webinar where we're going to talk about insights on how to strengthen partnerships within law enforcement. My name is Ashley Romschlag and I am the National Director of domesticshelters.org, which is probably a program of Alliance for Hope International.

I am joined by Rachel Myers, our Senior Digital Services Specialist, and Hannah Craig, our Director of Content. Rachel and Hannah will be working behind the scenes today to monitor the chat and the Q &A box. Today's presentation will be 60 minutes, and as I mentioned, we'll feature an expert insight on how to strengthen partnerships with law enforcement. Just a couple of announcements before we get started.

This year we are committed to helping you find small but impactful ways to focus on self-care as part of our 2026 self-care webinar series. Next Tuesday we will focus on the lost art of connection. Rachel will drop a link in the chat if you're interested in registering for that. It's gonna take place next Tuesday, the 17th at 1 p.m. Eastern.

speaker-0 (01:36.192)
And a huge thank you to Verizon for making this series possible. We're proud to partner with Verizon as part of their Verizon Skill Forward Initiative, which provides free online courses through the edX platform. To learn more, again, there'll be a link in the chat. We hope that you'll sign up and take free courses through the edX platform.

Next, the Purple Ribbon Awards are hosted by domesticshelters.org and Alliance for Hope International. And they are a national recognition program honoring teams, individuals, and organizations making a significant impact in the response against domestic violence. With categories spanning advocates, survivors, law enforcement, medical and legal professionals, first responders, multidisciplinary teams, the list goes on and on, these awards reflect the coordinated cross-sector work required

to end violence. Nominations are now open through February 27th and you can go to purpleribbonawards.org to submit your nomination and learn more about the program. Winners will receive national recognition and be eligible for grants totaling up to $30,000.

DomesticShelters.org, as I mentioned, is a program of Alliance for Hope International. Our goal at the Alliance is to create communities of safety, hope, and healing. To learn more about our various programs, please visit AllianceForHope.org. There are tons of resources for you to utilize in your work to support survivors, and they're all free. Next, I just want to...

mention that we are in a webinar right now and we will be offering live closed captionings during this webinar. So if you would like captions, please just click the show captions button. We will also provide a transcript within a week of today's presentation. And again, since you're a webinar.

speaker-0 (03:36.586)
You will be in listen only mode. Your camera's turned off so you don't have to worry about anyone seeing you. But we hope that you'll take the time to be fully present while we're in this webinar today so you can really understand and gather all the information we're presenting.

Please use the Q &A box to ask your questions. We will be organizing those and if there's time, we will have a Q &A portion of this webinar. And then of course, we encourage you to interact with one another in the chat, say hello, introduce yourself, and of course, any reactions that you have throughout the presentation are welcome there. And within a week, we'll send you a certificate, transcript, webinar playback recording, and additional resources.

So with that, please welcome our presenters. We are so excited to be joined today by Sonia Desai, who is the interim director of the Guilford County Family Justice Center. Detective Greg Lehman from the Crime Gun Intelligence Center at the Greensboro Police Department. Detective Paul Mustian, Detective at the Special Victims Unit at High Point Police Department.

Thank you all so much for being with us today. We are so excited that you took the time to be here with us.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having us today.

speaker-0 (04:55.246)
Of of course. All right, I know you've got some slides to share, so we'll give you a moment, get those pulled up, and then I'm excited to share we have a great group of people here today. have almost, well, just about 750 people tuned in. So we have, this is obviously a very important and very hot topic that people are interested in learning on. So, all right, I can see your slides just fine.

Great, great. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for having us today and joining this webinar. We are excited to present our work from Guilford County. I have to say we do have a claim to fame here in Guilford County. The current CEO and president of Alliance for Hope International is Katherine Johnson, and she is our founding director at this FJC.

My name is Sonya Desai. I am currently the interim director at the Guilford County Family Justice Center.

have been working in the field of violence and abuse for the past 20 years. I have been doing advocacy work through the police department and the community. I have been with the Family Justice Center since we first opened our doors in June of 2015. Pictured in this photo is Sergeant Dale Nix. He fell in the line of duty two years ago and he

You know, our webinar today is called partnerships with law enforcement and he is the definition of what it means to be a law enforcement officer in a family justice center.

speaker-1 (06:46.85)
Hello, my name is Paul must in the domestic violence coordinator with the high point police department here in high point North Carolina. I've been a cop since 2002 served on numerous different position in numerous different positions. Patrol FTO SWAT canine. I was a robbery homicide detective. In 2017.

and they asked me did I want to move over to the special victim side and I did and in 2018 the High Point Family Justice Center opened so I have been here since day one and looking forward to closing out my career working at the Family Justice Center. Excited about the work that's done, best place in the world to work.

And I'm Greg Lehman. I am a detective currently with our Crime Gun Intelligence Center here in Greensboro, but for several years, up until very recently, was with our Violent Crime Reduction Team, which I'll talk all about later. But I've been here for about eight years and have not worked in Family Justice Center, but worked very closely, obviously, with it.

Alright, so just to give you a little bit of a background. So Guilford County, we have two family justice centers. So we have a family justice center in Greensboro and then a family justice center in High Point. You know, we are a one stop center for domestic violence, sexual violence, child abuse and elder abuse.

Guilford County, we always call it the tale of two cities, right? We have Greensboro and High Point, just for context, our population sits at about 560,000 people. So in saying that, stats wise, 47 % of our population,

speaker-2 (08:46.926)
Caucasian or white, 35 % are African American, 10 % Latino and 6 % Asian. 37 % of our population is currently on Medicaid and 14 % of the population live in poverty. Both of our family justice centers are extremely busy. We opened in 2015 and have served approximately over 100,000 people.

So again, we're very busy. We do believe in the multidisciplinary approach and we'll talk a little bit about that. So what is the importance of FJCs collaborating with law enforcement? Of course, co-location of services.

You know, we want to reduce as much trauma to our survivors so they do not have to tell their stories multiple times. That's why all of these different partners are co-located in our Family Justice Center. It's everyone from law enforcement to social workers to advocates to counselors to medical providers. We wanted to improve access, so we wanted one place for people to come.

in order to get services, right? We didn't want people to go from place to place to place because when people are victimized, it's hard enough to reach out for services. So let's just say that we wanted to make sure that people came to that one place. And then we wanted to increase safety planning.

Everyone within our FJC is required to safety plan. That includes our law enforcement partners, our social workers, everyone. And that way we can immediately reduce risk. And then strong evidence and case outcomes. The more partners that are involved in a client situation, the better their case will be. We know that when people come into a family justice center,

speaker-2 (10:51.33)
their likelihood of survival goes up and that is statistically proven. We also believe in the trauma informed approach. Our cops recognize the emotional impact of violence. We do that through working alongside advocates and family justice center providers.

and all of the other people involved in the center, that is also key to it. There's a deep understanding of trauma response, such as delayed reporting, fragmented memory, or reluctance to cooperate with the investigation. So we wanna make sure to be as trauma-informed as possible and teach the providers within our center what that truly means.

And then of course the collaborative model that is the Family Justice Center. We work together. Violence does not exist in silos and neither should our response. We have a shared accountability to keep our community safe.

speaker-2 (11:54.636)
We have two main goals at the Family Justice Center. One, we want to make sure to keep victims safe. And number two, we want to hold offenders accountable for the crimes that they're committing. I remember when I started out as a victim advocate over 20 years ago, we were of course very victim centered.

We still are today, but now we have really transitioned into working with law enforcement as far as holding offenders accountable. So that is something that has definitely changed over the years. And so we're excited to see what will happen in the next 20 years as far as this goes.

So one of the things that we do in our Family Justice Center, when a person comes into the center, they meet with a navigator. in that navigation, we call it, it's the process of navigation. In that navigation, the navigator gets a brief story from the client. They talk to them about all of the resources within the FJC, and then they sign off on releases and different things like that.

We always do a danger assessment that's based on Dr. Jacqueline Campbell's research. We always ask these six questions that appear on the screen. When we are finished with that assessment, we then do our warm handoff to whichever partner that client wants to see. In saying that, we will.

Hand this danger assessment along with the synopsis of what why the client is here. A brief story and then we hand that off a lot of times and I'm going to turn it over to Detective Mushton. We will go and get Detective Mushton and bring him in to meet with the client, but we will hand off this danger assessment to him.

speaker-1 (13:54.508)
Hello again, I just before we get started in this, we want to let you know that as one who.

began with the High Point FJC when it opened. Coming into that, I thought I was a pretty good cop. I thought I knew what I was doing. And shortly after coming to the Family Justice Center, I realized quickly that I didn't know anything. And so I had to get out of my law enforcement silo. I had to realize that I...

was no longer the savior that I thought I could be. And it was through the partnership at the Family Justice Center that I realized I didn't have to be. There were numerous other partners sitting under the same roof that was able to help. And once I realized that, it was then that I felt like I could.

fully do my job and then begin to complete the circle of helping victims like they needed to be held. So with that being said, as I looked at this job and now even today, after doing it a while, I realized establishing trust was something that I had to figure out and I had to accomplish with every client that I met. And it's difficult because everyone's different.

And I'm different and I'm just a country boy and I don't always speak elegantly like some of you guys. just, I'm a redneck. And so when I go into these rooms, I have to figure out a way to establish this trust. One way that I have learned automatically helps is an introduction.

speaker-1 (15:40.53)
you know, as a cop, we are always known by our title and our rank.

And here at the Family Justice Center, if you see me walking around, I try not to be known as a cop. I try to be known as Pauler. So when the navigator or the advocate is going to introduce me or hand something off to me, they walk in the room and they say, this is our friend Paul. They do not say, this is Detective Mushton with the High Point Police Department. They say, this is our friend Paul, and he wants to help in any way that he can.

So I've really learned that this humanizes you. This keeps you down on their level. They realize that you are a human. You put your pants on just like they put theirs on that morning. And I think that helps. Number one, establishing establishing the trust that is there. Also in establishing trust, there has to be an open dialogue. Most victims, most most clients initially would tell you they do not want law enforcement involved.

And I know a lot of the cops here in High Point and I don't know if I would want them involved either. So I can agree with them in some senses, but they must learn through me establishing trust and just talking with them that I'm not a cop, I'm a resource.

And I'm just trying to point them in a better direction so they can make better choices as far as resources that are available to them, educated choices that would help them moving forward. I have learned that establishing this trust and this open dialogue is listening more than.

speaker-1 (17:24.436)
speaking. I will walk into a room normally in an interview room here and introduce myself and then I'll just listen. I will let them vent. I will let them tell me how bad it was, how bad the officers were, and I just listen and try to try to let them know that I am interested in their story. We have to hear the negatives so we can then focus on positives.

I think it's easy to focus on the negatives, but my goal is to the end to focus on the positives.

And again, I constantly reassure the victim that they are in control of anything in that room. They're in control of all their services. They're in control of every decision. And no matter what decision they make, whether it be one that I wish they would make or I wish they wouldn't make, that no matter what, I will support them and I will fight for them all the way up into the court system.

With the open dialogue comes active listening and and here here's a problem that I've had as a cop for a lot of years I talked with my face People say to say things that I know are not true and my face is obviously telling them that so I had to quickly learn that talking with my face was was a no-no and and The way I learned to do that was just try to be more informed of that

that community, that situation, and I needed to be more interested in their story. I know that their story may not mean much to me in the law enforcement realm. It may be quote unquote small, but to that person, that is a large

speaker-1 (19:13.174)
large situation. know, to me it's just a misdemeanor charge, but to them it was a life-changing event. And so I have to be interested in their story. I have to let them know that I understand that that was a detrimental thing in their life, probably one of the worst days they've ever had.

And then also in this act, sometimes they're going to want the navigators and or advocates to remain in the room. And that's no problem with us here at the PD. In fact, the more the merrier because we're just trying to help people. We're just trying to point them to resources. The last thing in establishing this trust is an opportunity for me as a policeman to show and support the client. This is done in many ways. First and foremost, I try to speak to them directly. try to

to be cordial and polite. I always try to shake their hand and let them know that I am interested. But this often takes a turn. we end up sometimes maybe going to the store and buying diapers for somebody as a PD or a unit or we'll go get a of groceries. There's been times I've bought, thankfully I have a great team and we have a little.

petty cash box that we all just put some change in every so often. And so when we have a client coming in, we realize that we can help. We have no problem emptying that and go spending that petty cash money that we've all just donated on those clients. it's quite eye opening to see.

when their face when a cop presents them with something because they've never had a cop kind of get involved with their life. And so as we do this, I just try to support the client through any ways necessary. As I'm establishing that trust or trying to establish that trust, I begin to explain the investigation. Many cases, the patrol response the day before, the night before,

speaker-1 (21:21.548)
was was quick, often patrol officers and I don't know how your cities are, but here in High Point we are short and so patrol officers main goal is to get to the next call.

And as a prior patrol officer, understand that. Now as a detective who interacts with a lot of victims, I realized that often we speed through things and we don't explain what we're doing. So usually in this, always sit down with them and I explain the patrol response.

We have a, I'm not going to go into detail here, but we have a specific general order for our patrol officers in responding to domestic violence events. State law and our policy is if they arrive on scene and there's allegations of an assault and then there's injuries to corroborate that allegation, we are required, we must, we shall make an arrest.

And then we also have a line in our general order that requires our officers to refer them to the Family Justice Center. And so, and other things involved that they have to do. So usually I sit down and I explain that the officer was not necessarily just being.

forward or being ignoring them when they said they did not want to press charges or what have you. I explained to them that that officer was simply following the North Carolina state law and or High Point Police Department policy. They had no choice in it. And many times after you explain that thoroughly, the client's attitude will change and they'll understand, okay, it wasn't personal. It wasn't that they were ignoring me, that they were literally just doing their job. So I do try to go through the patrol response.

speaker-1 (23:06.926)
in these interactions. And I've learned that most clients have no clue what happens after the call. I just, as one who's been a part of the court system all this time, I just assumed everyone knew. And I realized here that they don't. The average person doesn't know. And that's just because they don't do it every day like I do. And so I usually will then

After explaining the patrol response and what's required for them by our general order, I'll then explain what happened the night before. Hey, you know, he or she was still on scene and officers were required to make an arrest and they made the arrest. Or he or she was not on scene.

But yet there was an injury that you showed. You had a black eye. You had a busted lip, what have you. And they were required to take a charge out. So they have taken a warrant out for the other party. But we have not located them yet. I then go into what's next. Once they're arrested, once the warrant's served, or if they have been arrested, there will be a first appearance coming up. I explain to them that this is not a trial. This is no presentation of evidence. It's just their legal right to get a bond

because in North Carolina, we have a automatic hold for domestic violence crimes. And so I explained to them that this is just their right to get some release conditions in place. And then I always tell them that they are more than welcome to be present in court, but they're not required to be present in court for first appearance. We as a unit, as a...

Family Justice Center, we are very good about going into first appearance and advocating the best we know how for these people. And then the pathway to court is just we often escort. I tell our client, always come to the Family Justice Center. We'll get them to the appropriate courtroom. Then as a law enforcement, as usually as I exit the room,

speaker-1 (25:17.71)
I usually go back and begin to do some background checks for my own sake. I usually go on a criminal background on the unsafe person, whether it be a local file or through a national database. But I want to see what kind of history of violence this person may have. Is there a pattern that needs to be identified? Are there other people that have been hurt in the past? We have unsafe people here at the family

justice center who have been unsaved people for three, four, five, and six clients. So we try to determine is there a pattern there.

And this is done, number one, for general information for me to know maybe a next step. Do I need to take out more charges, what have you? But it's also done to determine what we need to try to address come first appearance. I also go back and reread the report, try to confirm or deny anything if children were there. Here in North Carolina, and our policy is if a child's present, whether they witness it or not, but if a child is present during a domestic violence,

incident, we are required to refer that case to Child Protective Services. Our patrol officers are pretty good at it, but I always confirm that that has been done. If a child was present, we want to make sure that we get that extra partner in here, number one, for resources for the client, but also to ensure that the child is safe and not been a victim as well. I always go check to ensure that the warrants have been served and are still pending.

and check to see if there's any active protection orders against the unsaved person. As I'm doing all that, we're putting, I am putting.

speaker-1 (27:03.726)
the lethality of it together on the law enforcement side. You know, we have alerts in our system, so if this person has a prior gun charge, a convicted felon, a gang member, or something like that, all that begins to weigh in on the law enforcement side for me. And then once we get that, depending on what is said from the client.

Whether there was strangulation involved, whether the children were hurt, whether a weapon was used and many other things. We will often sit down as a team and and to decide together. Do we need to high risk this case? And if so, we'll have a high, a high risk team meeting, which is a basically a.

collaboration event where we pull every partner in who had contact with the client and we all discuss what we need to do to make sure the client is protected better and the unsafe person is prosecuted to the fullest. So we'll be doing that. And then lastly in this, just additional interviews. If children are involved and they're of the appropriate age, we'll do a forensic interview or maybe there was an adult witness there that no one got to speak to and then I'll determine if we

need to go re-interview people. We do take extra photos if injuries are present, even if they were photographed by officers, but we also know that sometimes injuries don't appear immediately. Everybody bruises differently and everybody's injuries show up in a different way and then it's good to track

the healing process of these injuries as well. Now the FJC staff will often take pictures, but I also take pictures. I usually use my phone. We use Axon evidence capture for our department, and I can use my phone. And as soon as I snap the picture on my phone, it automatically drafts it over or puts it over into that case file. So it's automatically being shared with the district attorney. We are constantly looking for marks, corroborating the original assault,

speaker-1 (29:06.068)
and or new marks that that maybe the the victim just in in haste did not mention. We're looking for PPI, bruising and

and marks and scratches around the neck, just so we can make sure that all of our bases are covered, all our eyes and teeth, our eyes are dotted and our teeth are crossed. We don't want someone to get away with something where we have extra, we could do something more. The last thing, and Sonja's mentioned it earlier, is we do safety plan along with everybody else. I know law enforcement safety planning is a little different than advocacy or the navigators. I tell every client,

If you need me.

by all means you have my contact information to call me. But I also say if it's an emergency, please do not call me. I live out in another county and I've had this phone call before in the middle of the night where they've called me and it'd be an active situation and I am no help. am a 45 minutes to an hour response time there. So I explained to them if they are in danger, they call 911. And when they call 911, High Point's policy is to dispatch two uniformed police

officers immediately. That is a priority call. And then I explain that if they are not in danger but they have questions or they need something, maybe it was a protection order violation where they sent a text message, but they are in no danger. That's when they can reach out to me and we can establish the plan to seek further charges and or actions from the course system.

speaker-1 (30:42.346)
So the big thing of this for me is I just want to be a person. I want to walk into the room. I don't want to be a old crusty detective. I want to be a human being. And I want them to understand that I just I want to help in every manner possible. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Paul. You definitely have a fan club if you look at the chat later on, just naming that.

All right so advocacy within the court. So something that we all like to do together at the Family Justice Center is we like to attend first appearances if we are able. In true Family Justice Center life or even if you don't have a Family Justice Center a lot of times when you go to court when they're setting bonds and conditions of release it looks a lot better if you can go together. So oftentimes especially where

where Paul is Detective Mushen is and high point. They go to first appearances together with advocates and the social workers and FJC staff. I think it's really important for judges to see that because they see you know partners coming into court as a group and they're saying wow all of these people came in in order to support this client. This is really serious, so I think that's important.

We oftentimes we will request high bonds through our district attorney's office. Typically the law enforcement officer gives the facts of the case and then the advocate may talk about the victimization. What we know a lot a lot of times is that clients can't come to court. They're dealing with a lot and typically first appearances happens within you know 24 to 48 hours after the

speaker-2 (32:38.662)
incident and survivors have a lot going on. And so if we can take that from them, take that. Burden off of them and us do it for them, we will go to court and advocate on their behalf and tell the judge, you know, our client couldn't be here because they had to go to work. and so,

We can go ahead and talk about the victimization. It's always important to have the offenders history available just as Detective Mushin named. That is something that he researches. We want to give that to the courts as well. We want we also want to make sure that the courts understand that if the offender has multiple victims that we need to tell.

the courts that or he may have he or she may have re victimized the same, you know, victim again. So we want to name that to the courts. One of the things that we always we kind of pretend this we pretend that the court doesn't know anything. So we try to share as much information as possible in order for the courts to make good decisions around bonds and conditions of release. We oftentimes will request ankle monitors

for our defendants that they get out of jail. We do have a program here in Guilford County where offenders before they leave jail and ankle monitors put around them and then a stalker alert goes to the survivor so that she knows if he or she is coming around. I think that's really important and if that is a condition of release so if that is violated we take them right back into court.

And then we want to follow the case through the court system and we show up when we are able to. We never make promises because oftentimes our caseloads are bursting at the scenes. We only have so much staff, but what we try to do, we have a program with court navigators. They're volunteers in the community and oftentimes if we don't have an advocate available, we will send one of our volunteer court navigators. We truly, truly want our survivors.

speaker-2 (34:57.744)
to feel supported.

speaker-1 (35:02.374)
I brought it.

speaker-3 (35:07.2)
Alright, so I'm going to jump in and talk for a moment about the violent crime reduction unit that I said I'm part of. So unlike Paul, I don't work in a family justice center. I'm what I will. You'll hear me refer to myself as a street detective or as a violent crimes detective. All that means is that unlike the traditional detective role, I don't get assigned cases. My job is to go and make cases against violent offenders. So our goal with the.

violent crime reduction team is to reduce crime through successful prosecution. Here in Greensboro, we have four different violent crime units. They all do the same job. There's a night shift and a day shift and then two rotations. So we have coverage on holidays, weekends. There's only several hours where there's not overlap during the day, but 365 days a year, we have violent crime detectives out there working.

Here we've been doing this for about three years and we've had about a 30 % reduction in gun related crimes, such as shooting in occupies and aggravated assaults. And we do that because we're focusing on the offenders and actually prosecuting them. Because you don't get assigned cases, it gives you a lot of freedom to work with other units, other police departments, and then also with a family justice center. So hopefully that gives just a little bit of context when I'm talking about.

street detective or violent crime unit. So for example, this is my unit in 2025, we got 215 guns and about 25 % of those are what we would call crime guns where we can actually point to the actual crime, the violent crime that that gun was used in. So we're trying to target not just anyone. We are specifically trying to reduce crime by getting the right people and the right weapons.

So what, obviously I'm here talking about a Family Justice Center program. So what does that have to do with working in a Family Justice Center? So in order to be successful coordinating between a violent crime detective and a Family Justice Center, I would argue first that you have to have personnel or personal relationships between Family Justice Center advocates and the actual violent crime detectives. The reason why is because we want our

speaker-3 (37:29.108)
street detectives to have a high level of buy-in of the FJC system, right? I personally got that buy-in because I am a distance runner and so is Sonia and so is Katherine Johnson. And so they happen to be in my run group and I am not as strong of a runner and so I could not breathe and they kept telling me all about Family Justice Centers and how they work. And so I got that buy-in naturally. But

I often get the question like, how can you build that buy-in? And I would argue that the connection between a victim advocate or somebody else who is not a law enforcement officer that works in the Family Justice Center, we want them to have that direct connection to a street detective so that they can communicate and build that trust.

And so then the other thing that I often bring up is that if you are connected between your violent crimes detectives and your FJC personnel, then we can really foster the belief with our violent crime units that domestic violence is violence. I know that sounds a little silly, but what we see is that people get excited about having a gang unit. They get excited about pulling people over and getting guns.

They enjoy that and especially our younger police officers, that's what we get a lot of focus on. What we fail to do in many cases is recognize that if we're trying to reduce violent crime, domestic violence is the most crime that we have in our community. And so we should be putting the same kind of attention, time and attention into our violent domestic offenders as we do with other violent crime.

The other thing the violent crime unit can do is expeditiously serve low level warrants on high risk defendants. One of the things that we do here in Greensboro is I have it tagged so that any time one of those ankle monitor violation comes in and a detective like Paul takes out that misdemeanor warrant, it flags in my system and comes to me. So typically we don't go after a

speaker-3 (39:34.004)
low-level warrants like that, we just take them out, wait for that offender to get served. But I believe that the Family Justice Center model works. And therefore, when advocates like Sonia are going to court and getting somebody put on an ankle monitor, I know that they've already done the research. They've identified this person as a violent offender, high risk of lethality. And therefore, I want to hold them accountable, even if it's a misdemeanor charge, right?

And so we will go, the same day it's sworn out, we'll go and start an apprehension effort so that this offender gets the message that we're not, even though it's a misdemeanor charge, it's not on the back burner, right? We're trying to hold them accountable quickly to prevent the future domestic violence. And then finally, the pursuing cases against violent offenders. One of the things that we do as a violent crime unit is that we focus on the offender, right? The Family Justice Center is,

model is so wonderful because it focuses on the victim. The victim can show up and get services from all the providers at one place. But a violent crime unit identifies an offender and then tries to reduce their impact on violent crime in the community. What that means for us is that it's, I'm perfectly willing to go after the violent offender, pull them over for

for example, speeding, get a gun on them and prosecute them in the court system without the victim ever being involved, right? It is just as successful for us in reducing violent crime if we prosecute this offender on a firing by felon charge versus a strangulation charge. And so it allows us, especially in cases where a victim may not be able to make it to court or may not want to continue through the prosecution process if...

Sonia and Paul have identified this as a high lethality situation, then it may be worth us going and building another case on this violent offender, prosecuting them on that because whether they're out of play because of an assault charge or a gun charge, they're still not committing violence in our community. The other thing that we advocate for is for our detectives to understand

speaker-3 (41:43.566)
the court system very well so that when we go in there, we can also advocate for charges that that meet our goals. For example, in North Carolina, we have six misdemeanor assault charges. Every single one of them can be used in a domestic violence situation. However, only one of those six actually prohibits somebody from possessing a gun under federal statute. So it's without getting too into the weeds. It's the case law says that five of those do not.

prohibit them from having a gun. So when I go into court, I want to advocate for that charge, even though the sentencing is the same, because we understand that that's how we reduce the future violence.

speaker-2 (42:26.062)
All right, so we're just gonna do a quick case example, just to kind of, sometimes that helps a little bit as far as what we do. We had a case a while back and we calendared it for high risk. And basically, and I'll make a long story short, because there's a lot of different things going on with this case, but we had an aging adult who was in the home.

and he was being exploited by his grandson or maybe it was his nephew, nephew something, something in that realm. But the home became really unsafe because they were selling drugs out of the house, there were guns and the grandson was supposed to be taking care of the aging adult and he was not. This adult, this aging adult was,

in a wheelchair, so he really, really needed assistance and providers, like support providers would not go into the home because it became really dangerous. So adult protective services would not go into the home, any care team wouldn't go into the home because it just felt really dangerous. And then we realized that he was a veteran and...

He apparently the grandson was taking his veterans check. And so we sat down and we discussed his case and you we kept running into roadblocks. We couldn't figure out you know our main thing was we just want to get into the home and make sure that he's OK and he's getting what he needs like his medications and all of that. And so we. We were sitting at the table and.

we were just lost and all of a sudden I had this aha moment and I was like, am going to call. I am going to call my friend Detective Lehman and so we were able to contact Detective Lehman and he did a workup of the case and he found some interesting things.

speaker-3 (44:39.054)
Yes, I get an email from Sonia essentially laying that out and that what stuck out to me was that she identified and the FJC identified him as a high-risk offender and they pointed out that their goal was first and foremost to get help to these aging adults that lived in the in the house with him. So I run his information and with that that email alone

I already have the buy-in that the FJC model works, and so I'm willing to work it and put the time into it because I know that there's a goal that we need to reach. So I run him. see he is a validated gang member. He has pending charges. He is alleged to be an offender in a shooting from the previous year. He's a habitual convicted felon, which in North Carolina means that you have at least three felony convictions prior. And I also see that he's on active probation.

So the same day get the email, I start the investigation, start doing surveillance, and then ultimately compile everything I can put together and send it to my contact at the probation office. Probation is willing to set up a home visit. And as they do that, he allows them to come inside.

and they see narcotics and a gun in plain view. They call us because I made it clear that we were right up the street waiting for if something happens. This individual actually denied consent for us to come in. We apply for a search warrant and end up searching the entire residence. Because I knew that the goal was to document the neglect that was occurring in the home and to get access to them,

We were able to go all out on the investigation, end up getting three guns out of the home, distribution amounts of ecstasy, and place him under arrest. We also heavily documented the neglect and had adult protective services in contact with the two adults the same day.

speaker-3 (46:46.88)
Ultimately, we ended up having a successful prosecution two and a half months after he was arrested. I got the email from Sonia at the start of February of 2025. We were able to conduct the investigation, place him under arrest within two weeks, and then he took an active sentence plea deal two and a half months later. I saw someone just said, that is fast. That is incredibly fast.

But the reason that it went through the court system so quickly was because we had that goal in mind. We had the prosecutors LinkedIn. We had everybody understanding that we needed to get that assistance to the aging adults.

And so when you see he took a 53 to 102 month active sentence plea deal, that was actually about two and a half years lower than what we could have gotten had we taken it to trial, even if we got the minimum based on his sentence structure. But what we communicated with the ADA or the attorney was that we didn't, obviously we want a long prison sentence for someone who is.

committing these acts in our community. However, it was more important for us to get him out of the picture quickly than to go for that extended sentence. So in this case, we actually pushed for the 53 months so that we could get him out of the home, adult protective services could step in and we could get the help to the folks that actually needed it.

So just real quick and then we'll we'll leave room for some questions. You know one of the things that I just want to say is your partnerships with law enforcement are really important. You know I typically when I started my career many years ago, I typically always worked with the family victims unit detectives or the special victims unit detectives. It was very rare. I didn't even really quite understand what Detective Lehman squad did. I still I

speaker-2 (48:48.292)
ask him about it. And, you know, I'm always like thinking through like, this is how we can use them. So I think it's really important to establish those relationships. So for advocates that are on the call, advocacy is my heart. And I think a part of what our job is, is to, you know, educate our law enforcement, try to get in front of law enforcement and tell them what you do, figure out how we can connect.

advocates, know, we want to make sure that we make sure that survivors are safe and OK and law enforcement officers, they want to hold offenders accountable. But at the end of the day, we both hold those goals. It's just how we do it. And so working together really helps. I'm just going to name this real quick story because it involves.

A lot of our Greensboro Police Department. We had a survivor come in. She was 26 years old and she had a one year old baby and she was assaulted severely by her husband. And he strangled her multiple times and he rendered her unconscious at one point so.

That happened the previous night. The next morning she gets in the car and she drives. She doesn't know where the Family Justice Center is. She doesn't. She doesn't really, you know, she doesn't know what to do, so she drives to the police department.

And there happens to be one of our command staff. One of our assistant chiefs is standing outside of the police department and she just sees this guy in uniform and she's like I need help. I really I really don't want to talk to you because she didn't want to talk to police, but she knew like they could help her in some way. And so this assistant chief says you know what? I know a place you can go. You don't need to worry. Everything will be confidential.

speaker-2 (50:51.66)
You know, go on down to the Family Justice Center. They will help you. So she drives over to the Family Justice Center and she comes in and she does not want to talk to law enforcement. And that's OK. That is OK, because we never want to like force anybody to do that. But once we started talking to her, she had a lot of a lot of needs and we were really concerned about her situation as her story came out and.

we were concerned that he was going to kill her. And so the more we talked to her, we established this like relationship and we really got her to trust us. She was like, you know what? I do want to talk to a law enforcement officer. So we brought in one of our amazing detectives.

Detective Ocampo, she comes in the room and she expresses how concerned she is. She says, you know, don't need to take out charges or anything. It's okay. I'm just here about your safety. If you want to take out charges, we will do that. And so the, and the client says, you know, he's always told me that.

You know, no one's ever gonna help me. You know, I don't have, I don't have resources. I need diapers for my child. I need food. I need everything.

So the advocate and the FJC member and the law enforcement officer, we all came around and we sat with her and we came up with a safety plan and that safety plan included do not go back home. And right, sometimes clients don't have an option, but she did in this case and she went to her friend's house, but we felt so strongly about it. And she took out a restraining order. They went to go serve the restraining order on the defendant and they tried.

speaker-2 (52:42.768)
to serve it for the for a couple days and on that third day.

law enforcement realized that he had had shot himself he had killed himself so he was in the doorway waiting for her we believe that he was truly waiting for her but she never came back home so he ended up killing himself. So I tell this story because it's important about how we work together it started from an assistant chief so everyone needs to know where to get resources in your community it doesn't matter if you're the chief the assistant chief whatever area of

the PD that you work in, you need to know resources. And so as advocates, we need to like really, you know, explain that to our law enforcement. And so in saying that, you know, trauma informed, we talked about that, right? In the very beginning, we really worked around her to make sure that she understood she was safe. We supported her and we were gonna try to do everything we could.

And so certainly that story, mean, you know, it's a really sad story, but I'm really thankful that we have such a good working relationship with law enforcement in Guilford County.

speaker-2 (54:03.15)
Right, and we can take some questions. Ashley, I didn't know if you were gonna name them to us or.

Yeah, I have a couple queued up here that I think are kind of a great way to kind of tie everything together. The first one you actually kind of touched on the end, but just wanted to see if there's anything further you wanted to add to it. many of the questions centered around this idea that, you know, when do survivors have choice over whether law enforcement is involved? Do they know, are you, you know, are people that they've given the okay to involve? Are they behind the scenes talking to law enforcement? What is the survivors, you know, in the family justice system?

center model, what is the survivor's ability to control that?

Absolutely. We are client centered. So clients, it's our job to give our clients or survivors as much information as possible. I know that I know this sounds cliche, but knowledge is power. And so the more information that a survivor has, the better of a decision that they will make. We do not make anyone, you know, speak to law enforcement or anything like that. They are given a choice. And if they sign

off, we do consents and all of that. That is when we will bring in a law enforcement officer or I mean, it could be any other partner. Confidentiality is taken really serious in family justice centers. And so we definitely honor that.

speaker-0 (55:33.654)
Yeah, thank you. The other or the next question that I have is is something that I think is a

common experience for advocates when they're watching untrained law enforcement, that, you law enforcement that aren't really steeped in the complexities of domestic violence, which is, you have any, do you have any recommendations on how to deescalate interactions with law enforcement when they become frustrated with a survivor's trauma system, such as, you know, delay reporting, difficult recalling information, kind of those baseline reactions that a survivor is going to have.

How do you overcome that? You're the advocate. You understand that maybe the law enforcement officers in the area don't. What's your advice for that?

You know, and Detective Mushroom, in just a minute, I want you to also answer that question. But in saying that, I really think it's about relationships. It's about being together. It's about educating each other. We're not always going to agree. I mean, there have been several times, like, I've had a law enforcement officer say something that I was like, that's not cool, but.

And it's not being like harsh and calling them out, it might be saying, hey, that's not cool. Don't say that. Like think about this, you know, and really trying. And I think working so closely with them, they, lot of times law enforcement realizes like, wow, advocates, know, advocates matter.

speaker-2 (56:59.85)
we really need this. We want the advocate to go out on a scene with us. We want to ride out with the advocate. We want to you know do as much as we can. But I always say and I mean you know

Obviously I'm a huge proponent for family justice centers. But I did start my career working in a police department and it was about showing up. I used to have to go to these lineups with all these cops and I was like, what is happening here? But I showed up for...

like things that they were doing and then I would kind of turn it back on them and be like okay I went to I went to your lineup y'all need to come with me to our training so we would really try to do things like that.

And one of things we try to do is have all of our training coaches bring our new officers to the Family Justice Center. Because I always say your patrol officers don't have to be advocates. They just have to have buy-in for the Family Justice Center system because we need them to be pushing anybody they come in contact with to come to the Family Justice Center. So the goal is always just get them in the door.

but you have to have the patrol officer buy in to the system in order for them to push that idea.

speaker-1 (58:13.772)
Yeah, and I'll even say quickly. If even if the client does not sign off and want to speak to law enforcement, often the advocates will come back here and just say, hey. You may want to look at this case number. And I will go pull body cam footage from the original response. And whether I speak to the client or not, if I realize the officers had done something. Wrong or.

Maybe just rudely. I will call the I will have these officers come up here and I will sit down with them face to face and explain to them how they hurt the situation, even though they thought they were trying to help the situation and then provide options for the next one that hopefully will keep them a little more open and a little more.

compassionate while handling the initial call. And I do a lot of body cam review on domestic violence response from patrol officers.

That's fantastic. Yeah, thank you.

for that insight. It sounds like it's a lot of trust building, right? You have to build those relationships. You have to go for that long run with the police officers and the advocates and kind of find any way that you can find that common ground. And yeah, thank you for pulling back the curtain and kind of sharing that perspective from law enforcement and advocates. think it really just highlights how effective a collaborative model can be, right? When you can actually have that two-way street, understand each person's perspective, it really changes the

speaker-0 (59:49.616)
So we're coming in in our final minute here. So I want to give everyone a chance if there's anything else on your mind that you want to share and then we'll wrap up for the day.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I can close us out by just saying, you know, we're so thankful we saw how many people were on this webinar. We were a little nervous about that. We told you that Ashley, but what it makes us really happy and excited about is that people are interested in it. There is a way that we can really, really like nourish relationships with advocates and law enforcement. And we believe that to be the best practice in America. And so, you

anything we can do if you have questions, definitely let us know and we'll be happy to get back to them. But thank you all so much.

appreciate that. And is okay for us to share email addresses with our attendees today?

We will allow it.

speaker-0 (01:00:45.518)
Ashley. will allow it. Wonderful. So we'll share slides. We'll share their contact information that will all be in kind of the shared resources folder that we'll send out here the next week. But thank you everyone so much for coming today and being so engaged in the chat. It means so much to everyone on this call to know that people care about this subject, understand how important it is in getting better outcomes for survivors. So let me make sure I have anything else I want to share with you all. I think that's everything I mentioned. We'll send you an email within a week. again, thank you so much.

Thank you, Sonia. Thank you, Paul. Thank you so much to Greg as well. We're just so grateful that you spent the time sharing more information about this. So have a wonderful day, everyone. Take care.

