County Center Groups Services Under One Roof

By Emmett Berg

After enduring the trauma of domestic violence, victims are hardly in any shape for the trauma of shuttling between emergency-room doctors, police investigators, and district attorneys?while still in shock from a beating and often with children in tow. But thanks to federal grant money, some of that anguish is being eliminated in Oakland, where a single county facility houses all the services that domestic-violence victims need.

"Before we came together, a domestic-violence victim with children might have to visit 25 different locations," recalls Nancy O'Malley, Alameda County's chief assistant district attorney.

In 2004 Alameda County was the only California jurisdiction on a national list of 15 to receive federal start-up grant money for family-justice centers. Today, the Alameda County Family Justice Center (ACFJC) helps some 750 domestic-violence victims each month, says Executive Director Nadia Davis-Lockyer. And it may even be inspiring others. For example, while Solano County was completing a feasibility study for its own center, officials and advocacy organizations visited Oakland to learn from ACFJC's model. Carolyn Thomas-Wold, Solano County's director of the Office of Family Violence Prevention , says the county hopes to model some aspects of its center on ACFJC's approach.

ACFJC, which opened in 2005, was itself patterned after a citywide justice center in San Diego . It offers domestic-violence victims access to witness advocacy, translation, child care, medical treatment, the Oakland Police Department, and eleven nonprofits. Bringing together so many service providers, it turns out, also simplifies the job of helping victims.

"It's amazing what proximity can do," says Linnea Forsythe, a Bay Area Legal Aid attorney who works at ACFJC. "The relationships I have built with other ACFJC partners make it easier to ensure that if I refer a client to an agency at ACFJC, my clients will get the services they need."

During a recent visit to the center, Senior Deputy District Attorney Kim Hunter showed off a "wall of shame" in her office, where photos of domestic-violence suspects are arranged in three columns-for those at large, in custody, and convicted of crimes such as attempted murder or kidnapping. A good day, Hunter says, is when she moves a photo ahead from one column to another.

"The difficult thing is helping [a] victim to come in and say what happened," Hunter says. "We want to let them know they're not alone, now that they've had the courage to call the police."

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