COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY Room 400, City Hall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tuesday, December 9, 2025 10:18 a.m. PRESENT: COUNCILMAN CURTIS JONES, JR., CHAIR COUNCILWOMAN QUETCY M. LOZADA, VICE-CHAIR COUNCILWOMAN KENDRA BROOKS COUNCILWOMAN JAMIE GAUTHIER COUNCILMAN JIM HARRITY COUNCILMAN ISAIAH THOMAS COUNCILMAN JEFFREY YOUNG, JR. ALSO PRESENT: COUNCIL PRESIDENT KENYATTA JOHNSON COUNCILWOMAN NINA AHMAD COUNCILWOMAN CINDY BASS
Good morning, everyone. We will now call this hearing to order. Ms. Stack, can you read the title of the resolution please.
Resolution 8 250927, authorizing the Committee on Public Safety to hold a hearing to examine the City of Philadelphia's strategies, laws and policies for protecting victims of abuse and domestic violence within the justice system, including the courts, the Sheriff's Office, the District Attorney's Office and the Philadelphia Police Department.
Thank you. Ms. Stack, can you now call the roll so that we can establish a quorum.
In addition, we have established a quorum. In addition, we have President Kenyatta Johnson with us, who is the author of the resolution. And we have Cindy Bass and Nina Ahmad also in the chambers. We will recognize them. At this point, I want to recognize the author of the resolution, President Kenyatta Johnson.
I want to first and foremost thank Member Jones for convening this public safety hearing and all of our members for joining us as we examine how the City of Philadelphia responds to domestic violence, but most importantly, violence against women here in our city. This hearing follows the heartbreaking murder of Kada Scott, a beautiful young woman whose life ended far too soon. The criminal justice system is falling short of protecting the people it is meant to serve. Far too often, individuals who courageously call the police in moments of crisis do not or cannot come to court when it's time to testify. As a result, cases are dismissed or withdrawn. And while we uphold the principle of everyone's presumed innocence or proven guilty, we also recognize domestic violence, and violence against women in particular is a very real issue. When cases are withdrawn due to the victims failing to appear, the accuser's released, creating the risk of continued harm. The purpose of today's hearing is to understand the barriers that prevent the victims of violence as well as appearing in court to explore what supports policies or interventions might help ensure that they can safely do so. Not only are we here to explore issues of violence against women and domestic violence as a whole, but also to confront the broader pattern of violence against women in our city. While the tragedy involved in Ms. Scott will undoubtedly be discussed today, I want to emphasize this here is not an investigation into an open case. I want to extend my deeper condolences to Kim Matthews and Keith Scott, the parents of Kada Scott, who are here today. Could you stand and let's give him a round of applause of support? (Applause.)
Mr. Kevin Scott. I also want to thank District Attorney Larry Krasner, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, our Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer, Office of Victim Advocate Adara Combs and several domestic violence and women against abuse organizations such as Women in Transition, Women Against Abuse, Congreso de Latinos, Lutheran Settlement House, Women Against Rape, She is Us, Inc., She is U, Inc., the National College of 100 Black Women, Philly Self Defense and all other advocates joining us. Your dedication to this work does not go unnoticed. We also want to take a moment to thank all of the city agencies who are working day-in and day-out to address this issue. But most importantly, want to make sure that this discussion around how we can all work together comprehensively, the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing. And when I got up this morning, I was looking at my remarks. I clearly understand that for the Scott family, this holiday season is a tough time, but she's also representative of other young girls who have lost their lives either to domestic violence or some level of violence here in our city. So this is about us talking about strategies and ways for us to come together and figure out how we do a better job of protecting women as we move forward here in the city of Philadelphia. I have an extremely, extremely busy schedule, but this is important to show up and make sure that we're putting our best foot forward and addressing this issue. And I do know that today in this single hearing we're not going to solve everything, so there will be additional follow-up, personal conversations with the various agencies that are here to make sure we continue to make this a priority here in the City of Philadelphia. So to Kevin and Kim, as a member of this body we will always be here to be supportive of your efforts as we go through this process. And I relinquish my time back to the Chairman of Public Safety.
Thank you so much, Mr. President, for putting this resolution forward, and more importantly, stating the intention to figure out how we can get this right as opposed to just pointing fingers. That is an important approach and shows true leadership. As Chair of Public Safety, I thought about what we would talk about as we open this important hearing. And the cases of domestic violence, particularly against women, are so numerous that you can't pull out one to say this one was above the other. Right down the hallway, there's a plaque to Linda Rios, who was one of our employees who was murdered due to domestic violence. But one that comes to mind over the decades is a lady that many of you won't even know who I'm talking about. Her name was Mame Shamsadine(ph). She worked for the City of Philadelphia too, the Mayor's Office of Community Service at the time. And she was at work taking a break right outside of the office where her assailant came up and tragically took her life. And for years, we could not apprehend that individual Justice delayed is justice denied. And one of the things that we need to consider in the continuum of violence is how do we get it better, how do we get it right, how do we prevent it versus just being there after the fact. So with that in that spirit, I look forward to the testimony that we're going to hear today. Are any other members of the committee interested in giving a statement? And I know Kendra Brooks has joined us. (No response.)
Seeing none -- Nina or Member Bass -- no? Member Bass. Chair recognizes Member Bass.
Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't have a microphone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My condolences on the loss of your beautiful daughter. I just wanted to say a couple things. And the first is that I think that this is a case that really resonated with all of us because Kada Scott could have been any of one of our daughters, our nieces, our cousins, you know, our little cousins, you know, the girl down the block. She was someone who just really connected in some way, shape or form with each and every one of us. And I thank the Council President that we're here today to have this conversation. I really wish we weren't having to have this conversation, but we want to make sure that Kada Scott, that her name lives on, her legacy lives on and that she's not remembered as being anyone's victim, but that she is remembered as the young, vibrant woman that you raised her to be and that who contributed mightily to the city of Philadelphia. And so, I just really wanted to say thank you so much to the sponsor of the legislation. And as we ask some difficult questions, bring up some uncomfortable topics, that we keep at the forefront of our mind, that Kada Scott and many other victims of violence, women who are victims of violence in the city, that we do something to get in front of it, that we're not just having a conversation today, that that conversation is actually going to lead to some action. Most of the women I know have at one point or another felt uncomfortable, felt threatened and we need to really look into that. Black women and Brown women in particularly, in my opinion, go without protection on a level that is just unprecedented. People don't hear our cry. And when we say something is wrong, someone is bothering me, the reaction too often is get over it. I've been told this by someone who threatened me, get over it, move on, just don't worry about it, you're making something out of nothing. And so, these are the kind of things that are said to us when someone has been threatening, and we need to put it into it and put it into it now. So I just want to say thank you so much for the resolution today and looking forward to the hearing. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you, Member Bass, for those comments. And it's always good when we change pain into purpose, and that's one of the reasons we're here today. Ms. Stack -- Dr. Ahmad. Chair recognizes Dr. Ahmad.
Thank you, Chair. And thank you very much to Council President for this resolution and for everybody to show up today. We need a culture change in our city, our state, our country and the globe. But I first want to begin by saying the name Kada Scott, the name Kada Scott. She will not be forgotten. I want to extend my deepest condolences to her parents, Kevin and Kim. This is devastating. This has shaken us all to the core, but we know there's a lot of this happening across the board in our city. Her death forces us to confront some very uncomfortable truths, like my colleague here said, about how fragile safety can be for survivors of domestic violence. Those who survive it are still at risk continuously. And the reality is that there's more than in women who will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Here in Pennsylvania the number is even higher, over 37%. And last year alone, 106 people were killed in domestic violence-related homicides across the state, most of them women. As chair of the Public Health and Human Services Committee, I have seen how violence, trauma, housing instability, economic dependence and fear of retaliation all overlap. That is why it is incumbent on all of us to take this extremely seriously and go beyond the hearing to make sure we have actual change. And it needs everybody in our city to work together to make sure that this happens. I'm very grateful to the advocates, service providers, law enforcement leaders and prosecutors who are here today. You see these realities every day. Your testimony is critical as we look honestly at what is breaking down, what we must fix if we are truly, truly serious about preventing the next tragedy. As a mother of two girls, my heart goes out to you. My children when they were growing up, when they took the bus, they would get off on a stop before their stop, so no one -- if they were followed or heckled on the bus, they didn't see where they were getting off. The other one used to wear an engagement ring on her finger when she was not engaged so people would not bother her. This is what leads into all of this when we don't stop it at the root. And this is our society, this is our culture that as my colleague said, get over it. There's no getting over it. This is accountability, consequences so we can stop this. So thank you very much for giving me a moment to really share how deeply impacted we all are. And we're not going to be done until we're done, until we have some change in our city. So thank you, Chair, for giving me this time.
Thank you so much, Member. It's important to put these things on the record. Ms. Stack, can you please read the first panel's names to testify on Resolution No. 3 250927.
District Attorney Larry Krasner. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Good morning, District Attorney. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Good morning.
Please take a seat and state your name for the record and please begin your testimony. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, members of Council. My name is Larry Krasner. I am the elected District Attorney in Philly and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to come here and to speak with you and answer your questions on this incredibly important topic. I share your deep, genuine concern for the lives and safety of women and girls in the city of Philadelphia and for addressing domestic violence with best practices and with the best possible results with a very, very difficult and challenging issue. I do want to start out by thanking Council President and also thanking Public Safety Chairman Curtis Jones for convening this session. I want to thank all members of Council who are here. Councilmember Harrity, Brooks, Lozada, the two I've already mentioned, Gauthier, Young and then of course we also have with us present Councilmembers Bass and Ahmad. It has been my privilege to serve this city for a couple terms on the cusp of a third, and I'm deeply grateful to the residents of Philadelphia for the chance to lead and work with some great and talented attorneys and nonlawyer staff at the City's prosecution office where we focus on trying to make everyone in Philadelphia safer and freer. At the same time, I am joined by several colleagues on my executive team and a number of subject matter experts from my office, but let me just state that the two who are seated with me right now are to my right, your left, Katrina Wadas, who is the Chief of our Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit. And then of course to my left, your right, we also have Robert Listenbee, whose long and distinguished career included being Barack Obama's Chief Officer for Juvenile Justice in his second term and whose career has embraced caring for and taking care of children and families from the very beginning. We did a press conference yesterday in relation to a recent conviction and sentencing that I think relates slightly. I'll just touch on it, if I may. A man named Horace Battle was convicted, and rightly so, of the rape of an 11-year-old child and of abducting two 11-year-old sisters off the street, taking them through a variety of deceptive forms of trickery and coercion, taking them to his home, where one of these girls was lured into entering the house. The other one remained in the car. After she disappeared into the house for an extended period of time, the other one, sensing danger, got out of her vehicle and in difficult circumstances made her way through the streets to try to find help, found someone on the street who was kind enough to pick up a cell phone and call police who then responded. And what started then was a process of about hours of 8 work on the part of Special Victims 9 Unit of Philadelphia Police as well 10 as other police in relation to the story she was able to convey, and that, of course, is a crucial issue with all of these cases when people are traumatized, when they are terrified, when they are coerced, when they are abused. Conveying the entire story sometimes is not easy. And so, it took a little while, but through the excellent work of the Special Victims Unit, enough of the story came out to permit police to track a car with no license plate, but by color, make and model and one distinguishing characteristic to track a car to a house. And the house of course was where the second little girl was still imprisoned. By the time police arrived there and rescued her, she had been raped, but she was alive and she was saved and she was brought back to safety and to a place where everyone was concerned, but everyone concerned to try to do what they could to help her with everything that comes after that kind of a horrific experience. Protecting girls and protecting women is essential in any society, but especially in Philadelphia where we truly care about our residents here.
We are honored to join our colleagues in government and law enforcement and criminal justice system to discuss our collective commitment to seek justice for families and individuals impacted by domestic violence, including intimate partner violence at the DAO. Our fight to protect victims and survivors of domestic violence includes the work of our Charging Unit, which also handles bail matters, our Municipal Court Unit, which is the court where misdemeanors and preliminary hearings are done on more serious domestic violence cases and where less serious domestic violence cases are actually tried or otherwise handled, our Juvenile Unit, our Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit and our Homicide and Nonfatal Shooting Unit. Because, yes, sometimes these cases, as you are well aware, involve rape. Sometimes these cases, as you are well aware, involve homicide or shooting or other horrifically violent things. The work of the Philadelphia DA's Office starts through our collaboration in the investigation process in support of our partners at the PPD. Investigators at PPD's Homicide Unit and Special Victims Unit frequently communicate with our prosecutors for support with obtaining warrants, with forensic evidence, social media and other technology in preparation for the criminal justice process and also in order to make sure that the evidence that is gathered is usable in court, because technical mistakes can have very big consequences, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to play that role and to assist our partners in PPD at charging prosecutors review affidavits and investigative evidence to make integral charging decisions based upon probable cause, including appropriate bail requests at Arraignment Court. At the Municipal Court Unit, prosecutors trained by senior prosecutors within the DAO's Training Unit prosecute some cases at the preliminary hearing level, and prosecutors within the DAO's Family Violence Sexual Assault Unit prosecute domestic violence, intimate partner violence and sexual violence cases often from the preliminary hearing through the trial and the sentencing. And our most experienced prosecutors within the Homicide and Nonfatal Shootings Unit handle extremely complex cases that include stabbings, fatal and nonfatal shootings and other violent crime cases. These units mentioned above work with determination and vigor to ensure defendants in domestic violence and sexual violence cases are held accountable and face serious, just and appropriate consequences for their actions. One of the most important elements of our work at the Philadelphia DA's Office is the critical and necessary, direct and referral services that we provide to victims, survivors and co-survivors of domestic violence through the work of the DAO's External Engagement and Government Affairs Division, which includes our Community Engagement Unit, Relocations Unit, Victim Services Unit and CARES Unit, which many of you know, provides intensive services during the first 45 days to the family of a homicide victim, to the survivors. Our office provides compassionate support services to witnesses and victims navigating the criminal justice process. This advocacy is supported by the DAO's nine contracted victim services providers, and those providers include Victim Services of South Philadelphia, WOAR, Women Against Abuse, Northwest Victim Services, just to name a few. These victim advocates provide court accompaniment, VCAP support, trauma care, therapy, relocation support and additional support as is needed. We work very closely with faith-based partners and community-based organizations to ensure communities impacted by domestic violence have full access to the support of the Philadelphia DA's Office as well as our partners. As we reflect upon our administration's two terms, we're looking to build upon success and continue to evaluate areas of opportunity. Make no mistake, we can do better. Every day we can do better.
The question is not just to do different. The question is how do you do better. So once again, I want to thank you not only for convening this group in a way that is reminiscent of what you all did at the height of the shooting crisis, the gun violence crisis, when you convened hearings that led people to do data, to do research, to think things through and to change, and we have seen the power of that kind of an effort collectively to make things better. We will note it once again when we cross the threshold into 2026, having set the 50-plus year record for the lowest number of homicides that Philadelphia has experienced basically since I was old enough to watch the news. Well, that kind of success is possible here. And we want to be a part of that, and we want to work with all of you. Today is not necessarily the day for every nut and every bolt, but we are happy to talk through every nut and every bolt in our office and outside of our office that presents an opportunity for us all to do better. There are several new initiatives that we will be launching in January 2026 to improve our, meaning the DAO's protection and support of victim services and survivors of domestic violence, in order to get at these best practices, in order to do better and do the best we can. And by the way, I do want to stop to thank you once again for the support that all of you provided to these victim services organizations I referenced, all nine of them. These organizations had not seen, as you know, any kind of financial increase in about years, and you 10 answered the call. 11 We were able through 12 your efforts to give $90,000 13 increases to nine organizations. 14 Is it all they need? I'll be 15 honest, no, but it's a great start. It makes a huge difference and it confirms the value of what they do with too little resources all the time. There are three particular initiatives I just want to reference, and of course we're happy to give more detail as needed. The first is, once again, building off of the experience that we all had in trying to deal with gun violence in Philadelphia. In collaboration with the Philadelphia Police Department and also with Women Against Abuse, we have already started a weekly domestic violence law enforcement review. Now, what does that mean? What that means is that sitting at the same table, we are going to look at the most serious categories of intimate partner domestic violence, specifically new cases. We will be looking at the cases where there was an arrest this last week or perhaps where there was a report and there's an ongoing investigation. But at any rate, we will be looking at those cases for the purpose of saying, is there more that could be done, is there something systemic here that needs to change, is there a lesson we can learn. We went through this process and continue to go through this process with a weekly shooting review. And we think that it has definitely guided our office into doing things differently that have been constructive. I say respectfully to my colleagues at the Philadelphia Police Department, and especially to Commissioner Bethel and also Deputy Commissioner Stanford who's here, we have made tremendous progress together. And I have seen the Philadelphia Police Department also be open-minded and innovative in how they approach gun violence. We are seeing the consequences. It's not just homicides. It is numbers of shootings going down, down, down, number of victims going down, down, down. And that's how it has been now for four consecutive years. We can do that here. So Part 1 is the weekly domestic violence law enforcement review that is already underway. And I do want to take a moment to personally thank Women Against Abuse, whose leader, Joanna Otero-Cruz may or may not be here today, but I can tell you they were very serious when we all met to talk about a variety of technical issues with the Philadelphia Police Department and with our array of subject matter experts on this.
That first meeting was last week and they will be going on regularly. Point of is we are going to advocate for increased funding for WOAR, Women Against Abuse, and other service providers. I won't dwell on that because I've already spoken about it. By the way, I do want to say a good morning to Laquisha Anthony, Senior Manager for Advocacy at WOAR, and also Gabriella Fontan, who is the new Executive Director there. And then Point 3, in our FY27 budget we will be requesting funding for a prolific or serious domestic violence offender unit. That's a lot of words. It kind of boils down to this specialization, one of the things that we have seen, both in PPD and in the Philadelphia DA's Office, is that where it becomes possible, if you can take the really serious stuff and you can assign senior prosecutors from beginning to end to take the case from the very beginning, to handle it at every phase, through the preliminary hearing, to have all of that direct contact with the families, to understand the dynamics in the family or the dynamics of a victim, when you can do that and the same attorney is able to guide that case all the way through trial and all the way through sentencing, the chances of better results increase. That is something that we saw when we combined our Homicide Unit with our Nonfatal shootings, and we did this during the pandemic, on the theory that you'd have better sharing of information, you would have better specialized handling, better mentorship, better apprentice learning. And the data supports that that works. We saw something similar, and I hope PPD won't mind my favorable comments on something they did. But the Philadelphia Police Department at a similar moment, a little bit after we did what we did, set up the Shooting Investigation Group, which had not existed recently. Like us, they realized the only difference between a homicide by gun and a shooting is aim, or its medical care, or it's how quickly the police car gets there to scoop and go. And so, they followed a similar pattern, setting up a unit of detectives who could share information, who could certainly support each other, train each other in different ways to deal specifically with shooting investigations and you see the results we have, in terms of positive developments with the clearance rate, a reduction in shootings, fewer shooting victims. PPD deserves a lot of credit for that, but I raise it here just to say specialization in some context can be crucial. And so, in our FY27 budget request for funding for a prolific Domestic Violence Offender Unit, it is our hope to be able to do more of that, to have more attorneys who can take it from beginning to end, and I'm speaking now the more serious domestic violence cases, and to engage in what we call vertical prosecution. Vertical prosecution, of course, is what happens with defense attorneys. They get the case at the beginning and they take it to the end. It is not what often happens with big city prosecutor's offices because it's expensive. It requires more people. You have to go to a lot of courtrooms. It's easier to put one lawyer in a courtroom and have them stay there all day than it is to have a bunch of lawyers running from room to room, right. Well, we can do better and we will be asking City Council to consider, and you have always carefully considered our request, to consider supporting that. I will say we did also request that in 2026, did not receive it. But I am excited to have the opportunity to try to persuade those who do have control over the purse strings to consider that as one of our initiatives. Fighting for justice and protecting the rights of victims of domestic violence is a top priority of this administration. We look forward to continuing to work with Philadelphia City Council, with Mayor Cherelle Parker and her team as well as our partners in law enforcement to continue to prioritize public safety in 2026. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today.
My team and I are available to answer any questions you may have as we work collaboratively to address the important issue of protecting women and protecting girls and addressing the scourge of domestic violence in our community. Thank you.
Thank you for your testimony. I want to for the record recognize Member Isaiah Thomas who has joined us. And I want to take this opportunity to recognize the author of the resolution, President Kenyatta Johnson.
Thank you very much. And there's a couple questions and then I'll let my members ask questions as we go through this process. Thank you, Larry, for being here today. Could you just give us an overview of at least for 2025 the number of domestic violence/violence against women cases that have come before the District Attorney's Office. And then also give me an idea in terms of statistics and numbers, also how many have been withdrawn. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, the good news, Council President, is that I have a nine-page report here that talks about many of these issues. The bad news is it would actually take 10 hours to go through. But let me see if I can summarize a few points. And we are available, as I said before, to provide all the nuts and bolts and get into these specifics. So what I'm reviewing now on and of the report is a review of the time period between January of 2024 and December 5 of 2025, so this is actually not a one-year window. This is a 23-month window. Also, the same time period on the following page, Graph 1 is about cases that are disposed at the Municipal Court level. So again, that's where misdemeanor trials happen, but it's also where preliminary hearings happen. And as anyone familiar with domestic violence cases knows, there is often a high rate of dismissal or discharge of cases at the preliminary hearing level. The second one refers to --
Explain that to us who don't know why there possibly could be a high level of dismissals at the preliminary -- DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I'm happy to do that. And I want you to know that I say that with no joy because that's really not how it should be. Obviously, this is the type of crime that is often underreported. We don't even hear about cases that are not reported. And then there are the ones that are reported where in some instances the victim does not wish to follow through. Then there are the ones where an arrest occurs and for a variety of reasons, the case does not go forward. Sometimes the reason is a failure on the part of government. Sometimes the reason is we're not getting it right with our relocation or with taking care of people who are suffering from trauma or there's just a general distrust that anything good will come from this process. Sometimes it is coercion and fear. It is the sense that this maniac has already done stuff to me. If I go to court, this is only going to get worse. And sadly, there are occasions across the country and in Philadelphia where that can be. Sometimes it's a very different dynamic. It is someone who reported an event but has on their own independently had second thoughts and they don't want to follow through. Obviously, there's a complexity to having an intimate relationship with someone you are prosecuting in court. And sometimes there are reasons that frankly are not our business, that are known perhaps to victim services, but victim services will often engage with people who, for their own reasons, reasons they may or not share with victim services, but they're certainly not going to share with us, do not wish to proceed. I mean, it could be frankly something as simple as a concern that the breadwinner is going to lose their job, that the children are going to lose their health care. That can happen. And of course, we are speaking of a field in which some of these cases are horrific. Some of these cases are at the other end of the spectrum. They involve a defendant who has had no criminal record whatsoever, has been in a stable relationship, is developing a drinking problem and does something unacceptable, but it's a slap. It's not strangulation, it's not a beating. We're not talking about blood and bruises and shooting. These cases cover that entire spectrum. That is the nature of how they are. So those are some of the reasons. Let me get back to your question though. You asked specifically about rate of dismissal of these cases. I can tell you we've looked at this. And I say this with no joy. We're doing better than the national average, but that ain't good enough. I mean, I'll be straight up. We should be doing the best we possibly can, not just saying we're doing a little bit better than other places. That doesn't do it. If we look at cases at the Common Pleas level -- now, these will tend to be the cases that are most serious, cases where there are felony charges, cases where the preliminary hearing has been conducted successfully. When I look at this 23-month period, and we're happy to share this graph with you, what I see at the number of guilty -- well, the number of dismissals for felony cases at the CP level and that 23-month period was 272. The number of guilty after trials was 96. The number of guilty pleas or no contest pleas, in other words, people pleading guilty was 561. And then there was a number of people who at trial were also acquitted. That's about 98. So if we look at just the ratio of guilty pleas, let's forget the trials, look at the guilty pleas as compared to dismissals, you're looking at 561 guilty pleas, 272 dismissals. If you add in the number of guilties at trial, that's 96, about another 100. So you're looking at about 550 -- excuse me, 575 guilties. About 272 dismissals, but with another 98 not guilties after a trial. We're winning these cases in the CP court at a rate that is more than 2 to 1, roughly.
But in full candor, and we should be full of candor, that's not the whole story. The story is that a lot of cases do not make it to the Court of Common Pleas. They're dismissed earlier. They're dismissed because witnesses do not show up repeatedly or because as we in some cases, we try to put on the case with nothing but body-worn camera from police or with pole cameras. We try to put it on with technology where we have reluctant witnesses, and those can be extremely potent, important weapons for us to have. But I will also be honest, the law wasn't written for body-worn cameras. The law wasn't written for pole cameras necessarily. The law was written and the rules of evidence were written at a different time. So there are occasions when we believe we have a good case to put forward, but the law is not ready to accept the technology that we have.
Just a follow-up question, and I see those stats. When a victim doesn't want to come to court, right, what's the role of the DA's Office in terms of reaching out? And we've dealt with this in the past when it comes to specifically gun violence, right, to make that victim feel supported, protected so they do come to court. And then also, it begs the question, particularly with this particular case I have to ask, when a person doesn't come and you have a certain level of evidence, how do you determine if you should move forward or not? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Understood. So you do raise once again a very important point, which is that these cases run the gamut. They run from multiple homicides to a much lesser type of a situation. This is a situation where there needs to be very individualized and careful consideration of the case. But in general, the obligation is to do everything you can to subpoena in the witness so that the witness has notification. A subpoena is effectively a court order. It is a legal order to come to court. It is to be in contact with them both through victim services and the prosecutor does this themselves.
So the victim services team works with the prosecutor to reach out to the victim to get them comfortable to follow through with the initial, I guess I'll say, complaint that the actual victim started this whole process off; is that correct? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I would say that's correct. Obviously, these cases are prioritized. You know, there's going to be more time and effort put in on where the defendant has a record, where there's serious violence, where there are other reasons for concern. That will get a higher priority. But it is always the case that our lawyers should be reaching out to victims, even on the less serious cases. And they should be doing so in advance. They should do so by telephone where they can or cannot do that by email. There are occasions when we get DA detectives, and we do need more of them by the way, but we get DA detectives to take a letter to the door, to bang on the door, so we tried to reach them in multiple ways at our best. That's what we do. And the office some time ago instituted a process of carefully recording all of the efforts that are made, so there's no question later about whether we called four times, left voicemails, didn't leave voicemails, sent emails, sent a detective with a letter. There's no question about that. And --
And if they -- DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I'm sorry, sir. Go ahead.
And if they don't come, and obviously that's a key component to the case, how often do you refile, right, cases against individuals when you have additional evidence as you decide to move forward? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: A refile determination --
Who makes that determination? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Refiles are very common. The way that determination has been made historically is that the attorney who is handling the preliminary hearing will go to their supervisor. This is often the supervisor of Municipal Court. And the supervisor will look at the reasons, evaluate the case and decide whether it is worth doing a refile. And when things are running properly, hopefully, those are good decisions. Similar process when you have a case in the Court of Common Pleas and there's any hope of reviving later, that there will be supervisory review of the case to figure out what are the chances of success if we do this again, what are the underlying reasons why this case could not be put on, is it fixable or is it not. And then a determination is made.
Thank you, Mr. President. I'm going to recognize Member Lozada, Member Harrity and Member Gauthier. But I just want one point of information. It's not a question. Kick me, stop me if it is wrong. For purposes of everyone's common understanding, a complaint can originate at a household by a police officer, it can originate at CJC for protection against abuse that has a 24-hour office intake or it can be a protection order that is long-term, 9:00 to 5:00 during the weekday; is that correct? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I think that's a fair statement. Let me make sure I have my subject matter expert weigh in, in case I forgot something.
And good morning, Council, again. My name is Katrina Wadas. I'm the Supervisor of Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit. That is correct, so there are various avenues in which a complaint can come through, one of which would be a 911 call or call out to law enforcement, which they would respond to a home. Another avenue is if a victim or witness were to walk into a police district, so perhaps their efforts for a 911 call did not provide relief. They could always walk into their local district, and those are the ways in which PPD would get involved. However, you did raise a point as to protection from abuse orders which are actually not through the DA's office. Those are civil remedies. But, yes, the victim could in fact go obtain emergency protection from an abuse order and then follow through with additional hearings in family court in which they would obtain a temporary and then ultimately, hopefully a final.
So I want to quickly go through the continuum so I can turn over the mic. Correct me if I'm wrong, at that point of CJC they may issue a temporary restraining order, which has to be heard in a status hearing within three to seven days; is that correct?
As far as I'm aware, that is correct. Again, those are civil remedies. And so, those are not things that come through the District Attorney's Office for purposes of -- we handle the violations of the protection from abuse orders. But as far as issuing of them, that comes as a civil remedy.
So if there is no physical evidence of violence, it doesn't rise necessarily to the occasion where the DA and the defense attorneys are put into the mix. It is just held before a judge to determine whether and what the level of protection needs to be, correct?
Well, both could be true. It could be the fact that a victim or witness wants to pursue going to law enforcement making a report and criminal charges could in fact be referred to the DA's office while simultaneously they are also seeking a protection from abuse order. And that's not uncommon for us to also recommend a protection from abuse order to victim witnesses who come through. Because while we do implement typically as a condition of bail as a stay-away order in a criminal case, we also advise the additional level of protection from abuse order. I mean, that's something that we do so that law enforcement out on the street if there should be an incident or an occasion where there is an offender who wants to go back to that person's location, the PFAs are something that PPD can actually pull up from the streets, whereas a stay-away order they're often not seeing from the streets.
So at the point that the status hearing happens, the judge then determines if there's enough there, there to say we want to continue this protection order for up to three years; is that correct? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Councilmember, I have rudely interrupted my subject matter expert here just because I want to make one thing clear. The process that Chief Wadas is describing and the process that I believe you're asking about is the PFA process. That's the protection from abuse process in which an intimate partner is going to seek an order to keep somebody away from them for their safety. That begins as a civil --
Civil matter. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: -- remedy. However, there are stay-away orders that are issued -- when someone is arrested, there are stay-away orders that are issued by a bail commissioner at the time of setting bail on that case. And what Chief Wadas is referencing is a huge flaw in the system that has existed for a very long time, which is when a bail commissioner says you got to stay away, at that first hearing it's effectively unenforceable because it's not placed in any sort of a database where police are able to see it. So if they have someone who just got, heaven forbid, beaten up by the boyfriend or the husband who follows through, there's an arrest of the boyfriend or the husband. And then as soon as his bail is set, he's coming around. And she is saying, but there's a stay-away order. Police officer shows up, has no way to see that. And those "stay-away orders" are issued by bail commissioners, some of whom are not lawyers, and for the ones who are, none of them are elected. I say that because it's a problem. It's the kind of nutsy- boltsy problem that is big and it's something that I think collectively the city can find a way to address, and the courts working with us, PPD working with us, we can find a way to address so that there is protection from the moment of arrest as well. And now, I apologize for stealing the mic.
No, that's okay. That's informative. My last issue is at what point is there an intervention by law enforcement or the Sheriff's Office to remove firearms, red Flag, kind of laws to remove firearms from a house where there is a domestic abuse issue and/or protection order or PFA?
So if the PFA specifically does come with an attachment or an addendum specifying that a firearm should be relinquished, those PFAs are immediately being sent to the Sheriff's department, and there is a brand new committee within the Sheriff's department to specifically address domestic violence PFAs, and they're actually going out and seeking relinquishment of those firearms. So it can be facilitated by PPD, but they're most often times now being facilitated first by the Sheriff's department who are going out to the homes and actually trying to obtain the firearms. One of the things I'll say about that process is when they do go out to the home, they're showing the PFA orders, they're either obtaining the firearms or alternatively, what's happening is there may be an individual who says, I don't have a firearm despite what that court order says, in which case they're required by the Sheriff's department to sign a no-firearms verification in which they are verifying, they're swearing within the affidavit that they do not have a firearm. And that's our way of saying that if we find out later that that's incorrect, we then can follow up with additional charges for failing to relinquish a firearm in violation of that order.
Thank you and thank you for being with us. This is obviously a complicated issue. Are there any plans to reevaluate the DA's bail recommendation practices for defendants in domestic violence cases, especially those with histories of excessive control, repeated violations or threats to better protect victims during the critical stages of their cases? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Thank you for the question, Councilmember. We evaluate our bail process all the time. Very important, and I know you're familiar with this and of course all the Councilmembers are, but very important to understand we do not set bail. Bail is set at the time of arrest by bail commissioners and then later by Municipal Court judges and judges of the Court of Common Pleas. In general, when we have someone with a seriously violent domestic violence act or we have someone with a significant history of domestic violence in a new case, we're going to seek very high bail. We're going to be seeking a bail that is $1 million, sometimes more in those cases. And the truth is, and I don't say this to blame anybody, but the truth is we don't always get it. This has obviously also been an issue with shooting cases. I won't go deep into the woods. But we don't always get it. And in one way, that's good. We should have independent determination of bail. But in another way, it's bad when you see a pervasive pattern of giving bails that are inadequate. And you see things like this, once again another nut or bolt that matters. It used to be that when bail commissioners were giving out bails, they would either say you can just pay 10% of the amount I said or they'd say you got to pay it all. Well, there was a rule passed by the Municipal Court in 2019 that says every single bail is 10%. That took away from bail commissioners who are looking at a little chart to suggest how much they should charge. That took down their ability to detain someone 90%. Okay. These are changes that can happen and they can happen collectively, and they can make a really significant difference. However, it is clear that our practice is to seek appropriately high bails when we are dealing with a situation where we think that there is significant endangerment. And while that policy has been good at driving up bails in the most serious cases and driving down bails for the mentally-ill person who blocked the sidewalk, while it has succeeded in pushing bails that direction, because Pennsylvania by law requires cash bail for all these offenses rather than a no cash bail system, there are occasions when we disagree profoundly with what we believe to be an inadequately low bail for a situation involving domestic violence.
You don't set bail, but do you make bail recommendations? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Correct.
Okay. And we have heard time and time again where some of these very dangerous individuals have been let go as a result of a bail not being set or not set appropriately. Are we looking at that? And are we learning from our past mistakes to ensure that these individuals who have a pattern of domestic violence, that we are doing everything we can to ensure the safety of the victim? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: We are looking at that. Obviously, the control over the bail commissioners is in the hands of the Municipal Court because they are not elected. They are selected by the leadership of the Municipal Court. That leadership has changed recently, and in my opinion, in a very positive direction. I believe that leadership of the Municipal Court, which includes Judge Joffie Pittman and also includes Judge Karen Simmons, both of whom I speak to and meet with regularly, I believe they want this to go the right direction, not just in terms of picking the right people to be bail commissioners which is very important, but also I believe there's an openness to modifying rules, to changing things. For example, the two issues I raised, one of them being there's no capacity for a judge or a bail commissioner to say you got to pay all the bail. Well, that's very fixable. That's just a local rule. The other one being the fact that these stay-away orders are ineffective, the ones that are issued right at the beginning when there's an arrest. I believe there's ways that we can work with the Municipal Court and I believe both of those judges really would like to do the right thing in this regard.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a point of information, because I do remember this was a key component of the very public discussion around this particular case. And so, we know -- well, you're on record as saying you don't want to call a judge in the middle of the night because more than likely if you appeal a bail, they won't be supportive because that goes contrary to them getting a phone call in the middle of the night when you're trying to actually do your job. How do you address that moving forward, because in us doing our research around this particular issue, in this hearing? And on the topic in general, I was told that there are emergency judges that's on standby, separate from the initial judge, that they can call -- they're on call. I was told their responsibility is to be on call to answer that call if the initial judge don't pick up the phone. So just clarify that for the overall public. And then I just ask, did you make the call? Did you even attempt to make a call? I have to ask that question. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Thank you for the question. I think it's an important one. So let me be clear. I just sang the praises of two judges and judicial leadership. There's a lot of great judges. My wife was a judge for 19 years. Judges are like the rest of us. They're wonderful and they're also not perfect. I mean, that's just how it is. So it really depends on who the judge is. But because we set bails, meaning the system sets bails hours a day, 7 days a 5 week, there is a track record for 6 which emergency judges, and those 7 are the ones we appeal to in the 8 middle of the night, there's a 9 track record for which emergency 10 judges are just going to keep 11 saying no. 12 There's a track record 13 for which ones are going to lower 14 the bail when we're calling to ask 15 for a higher bail. And, yes, that 16 happens. When we have a judge who 17 we think is going to listen to an 18 appeal and things will at least not 19 get worse, might get better, we're 20 going to make that call. And when 21 we're dealing with an emergency 22 judge who has a long record of 23 frankly not appreciating that phone 24 call and is going to make the bail even lower, then we would be completely negligent if we tried to appeal it at that moment.
Did we call on this -- did we make the call as it relates to this particular case? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: When you say this particular case, you're speaking of?
Mr. Keon -- well, the Kada Scott case. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: You're speaking of the prior case involving Keon King?
Yes. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, I'm joined by a subject matter expert, Amanda Hedrick, who is our Chief of Charging and who, among other things, handles the initial bails and supervises what bails we are requesting for the --
We work with you. I'm just asking, either I called, I didn't call, here's the reason why I didn't call or who I called -- DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: And I'm not trying to deflect at all --
And you're giving us the theory. And it's just yeah, I called or I didn't call. I didn't call and here's why I didn't call or, well, I called and this is what happened. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: And the only reason I'm referencing Amanda Hedrick who's sitting next to me is so I can answer your question to make sure I have my information right, because we're not speaking about the new case. We're speaking about the prior case and I just want to make sure we have that. Do you know the answer to that?
Sure. Good morning. My name is Amanda Hedrick. I am Chief of the Charging Unit at the District Attorney's Office. To my knowledge, the bail for Mr. King in the matter that predated the incident with Ms. Scott, his bail was set at $200,000. That is not a bail that we often see from Arraignment Court on non-shooting cases. The charges, the lead charge in that matter, I believe was a kidnapping charge. That is not the kind of bail that we would appeal given his prior history and the information that we had in that case. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: And just so I'm clear, it's relatively high. I mean, relatively high. It might not be what we were after. But even at 10%, it means that he or his family had to come up with $20,000 in that case. So that is the reason, I just want to be clear. That's relatively high. I can't --
The reason y'all called or didn't call? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: We didn't. I think what is being said is we did not call because --
You did not call because it was at $200,000? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Because relatively speaking, it was a pretty high bail.
So 200,000 is a high bail for a kidnapping? And I don't know. I'm not an expert in the criminal justice field. That's why I'm asking. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Look, the truth is --
If there's a strangulation on top of kidnapping, does it make it even more serious than a slap? And I'm just asking. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Look, these are cases where I would love to see the judge follow our recommendation, which was a lot higher than that. But what I'm saying is it was better than we usually get. And calling when you have better than you usually get, running the risk that it will get lowered is ordinarily not what we're going to do. Obviously, one of the huge problems with cash bail is you never know who's got the money. You never know whether there's $20,000 in some back pocket somewhere. As it happens, there was the ability on the part of this defendant and his family to pay that at that time. But the short answer is, no, we didn't answer -- we did not appeal because the bail was relatively high compared to what we often get.
I will relinquish my time back to Member Lozada.
Thank you. I appreciate that. At the beginning of your testimony, you mentioned some things that need to change. Those changes are obvious, right, I think based on what has occurred in our city as it relates to many of the domestic violence cases that we've heard of. Can you share with us what some of the formal mechanisms are that currently exist for real- time information sharing between the DAO, the PPD and the courts when new threats, violations of protection orders or escalation indicators are reported? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: We can, but I think, Councilmember, you've hit on a very important issue. I won't get real deep into it, because once again it could go on quite a bit. But we are dealing with a city where there are these Legacy computer systems that have a lot of information on them, but they don't talk to each other and it's a real concern because some of these systems are years old. 4 We, for example, would 5 love to be in a position to back up 6 our partners in PPD when there's an 7 outstanding arrest warrant 8 somewhere and a defendant is coming 9 to court. No, we can't arrest 10 them, but at least we could be in a 11 position to be supportive there. 12 And yet, we don't have easy access 13 to whether or not there is an 14 arrest warrant out there somewhere. 15 It's not in a public database for 16 good reason, because you don't want 17 someone you're trying to arrest to 18 know you're coming and it's just 19 not readily available. 20 The information sharing here is crucial. It is significantly behind the times. This is something that we actually tried to address a few years ago, without success. We ended up going to get grants in order to try to help us with a case management system that would bring all this information together. But it is really important that as we move forward with this, we take a close look at the Legacy computer systems to see if we can get them all to put the data, the information in one place where we can do as well as possible. And I also think it would be a tremendous plus for PPD to have these systems improved. COUNCILWOMAN LOZADA So I guess there are no real formal mechanisms, right? That's what you're saying. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I'm not saying that. I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstood the question. The question is are there?
What formal processes are in place for you all to communicate with each other? Aside from we know that we have antiquated systems, we know that our departments don't talk to each other, what processes are in place for PPD and the DAO to have conversations about what is happening in our city? Are there meetings? Do you all meet on a regular basis? Do you all sit down to review cases that we know are challenging? Everybody, you know, we always talk about all of the things that we need to improve in the city, right, in order to be a better government or to be a safer city. We all know that. What are we doing currently to be -- what systems are in place currently to discuss those, aside from depending on the technology that we know needs to be better?
So part of what we're doing currently and what has been in place includes various collaborative efforts between various organizations, one of which would be the Domestic Violence Law Enforcement Committee. That is a committee that meets once a month currently. And that is hosted typically at the District Attorney's Office once a month, and it brings together collaboration between the District Attorney's Office with Women Against Abuse, Women's Law Project, the Sheriff's Department, Probation. There's representatives from all of the key organizations in which we do discuss monthly the trends that we're seeing, we do host various training opportunities where we talk about the issues that are most pertinent and we talk about how we can fix those issues. And that's why bringing together the minds of the various organizations, beyond just with the goal of law enforcement, but beyond just law enforcement organizations, by including those organizations. We're bringing together voices from all of the relevant players to be able to address those issues. And that's just one example of one monthly meeting that I do on behalf of the DA's office attend. There's also Act 33 reviews which happen on all child fatality and near fatality cases, where similarly representatives from the DA's office, Office of Domestic Violence Strategies -- or, excuse me, the ME's office, there's various key players on those kinds of calls as well. And so, in terms of meetings, there's numerous different meetings that bring together the right people, and it's really just a matter of what we can address at a given time based off of what we're seeing going on in the relevant month that we meet.
And at these meetings, they're more of an information or resource sharing or is it a session where you are talking about these very serious offenders who consistently break the rules, right, and who should be on everyone's radar?
So the different meetings have different agenda items. So for case conference, for example, is one meeting I attend in conjunction with the Philadelphia Children's Alliance. That is an actual individual case review. So we're looking at actual real cases that have either come in or potentially where we're looking at why hasn't a case come in for referral for charges. Act 33 is another example of a case where we're doing actual case reviews as opposed to just having theoretical and trend- related conversations. So we do have a combination of both. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Councilmember, let me also add that you're entirely correct. Concern about looking at individual cases and looking at people who are committing more than one offense, that's the kind of work that is being done by the table we have convened with PPD and Women Against Abuse, where we're taking cases every week that were filed that week and we're looking at them to see what it is can be done, very similar to the shooting review in terms of having multiple people there who can help to wrap their arms around it from different perspectives to try to deal with it, but that is something that we're trying to address by having convened this table. And I have to tell you, Commissioner Bethel and my conversations with him, I hope you don't mind that I say this, but he was doing this same thing before we spoke. He was headed down the same direction. I think both PPD and DAO recognized the power and importance of looking at these cases, these cases over a period of years, every week or every couple weeks, as it gets more comfortable to try to make sure that we really understand not only the cases and systemically what we can do, but the offenders and which ones of them have to be addressed in different ways.
And my final question, you mentioned the creation of the Dangerous Offenders Unit and asking for an allocation. I've talked to some people. And I mean, I think it sounds like a great unit, right, but some folks say that this unit already exists. Does the unit already exist? Have we been using it to its fullest potential? If it exists, why do we stop using it and what are we trying to do different in that unit? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: So the short answer is, no, this unit does not exist. There certainly are very talented people in the office who, on an individual basis, handle the most serious cases that have existed, but not as a separate unit as a component of the Family Violence Sexual Assault Unit or as a subgroup within homicide, non-fatal shootings, people who specialize in these kinds of cases. But the point of trying to have a unit would be to expand the number of troubling cases that are handled beginning to end by very experienced and very specialized attorneys. That --
Can I have another point of information, Mr. Chair?
And it's just along the same line of questioning that Member Lozada asked with the new unit. So how do you identify what would be the most serious cases if in the prior case that most of us believe, and we can't say it definitively, but preceded the Kada Scott case, right, with the accused Keon King? If strangling and kidnapping is a $200,000 bill type situation, and the reason we do a gun violence you do a million 99.99, that's what we worked with you in the past, how do you go about identifying what's serious to be classified as a case around domestic violence, violence against a woman, and it goes to like a senior most-experienced attorney high priority, and that case is strangling and kidnapping? So what determines what's a red flag, hey, this will go in this category as we move forward? We're talking about preventative measures, right. And so, I'm approaching it from that way because we want to get the system right. And I said publicly before, and I'm not shy about it, that's why we have everyone here, so it's not just DA Krasner, we have everyone here, because I do believe that we failed, right. And as a public servant, I take ownership in that as well because all of us are here together to work on this issue and we want to do a better job. But if strangling and kidnapping is a $200,000 bail and then you have this new system that you're putting together, and it's along Councilmember Lozada's line of questioning, because you still have a new unit that I'm put together and I want y'all to fund it next year under budget, how are you and your team going to identify what's the priority of red flag? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Thank you for that question. That's something that we are doing now and we have revisited recently. The criminological science around this has to do with what is called a lethality analysis. In other words, what factors do you see in a case that indicates in the future this defendant might kill somebody. It's a lethality --
But when did you have the video, and it spooked me out, when he jumped over a fence and peeking inside somebody's window? And I know I talked to my own lawyers. They said, well, that's just looking in a window. Okay. Something's wrong with that picture. But does that seem disturbing? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Yes, it does seem disturbing. I would point out that in many of these cases the information comes in over time. It doesn't necessarily come in at the moment when you're seeking a bail. There may be a phone call later that's threatening. There may be video that shows up later. There may be new factors. But, yes, I consider that video -- and I know the video, I've watched it repeatedly -- extremely troubling --
It spooked me out. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: It spooked me out too. It's extremely troubling, extremely disturbing. The way this is ordinarily done though is with what's called a lethality analysis. Traditionally, there have been about questions that have been 17 used I would say more than others 18 in this country. And depending on 19 the answers to the questions, a 20 level of risk is assessed. That has been updated more recently and reduced to the 11 that seemed to make a difference. What we are doing at this time is we are using those questions to analyze a new case. And if we see, you know, enough of them, if we see two of the serious ones or three of the less serious ones, then that case will go directly to someone in the office who is expert. One of those people is Chief Katrina Wadas, who's sitting right here, who will then review the case in light of the fact that we flagged it because of the lethality analysis and will decide whether this should get some kind of special assignment or it can be handled in a different way. That's what we are doing now. We have already spoken to the Commissioner's representatives in that last meeting because they follow a lethality analysis as well. And often -- I'm not saying in Philadelphia necessarily, I'll leave that to them -- but often police, who are the first responders, are well placed to ask those questions of a victim while the victim is there, present, responsive to ask those questions to try to assess what else is going on. Just one of those questions, for example, that is ordinarily used is, was a gun present. There's a different version of that: Was a threat made with a gun. There's a different question having to do with whether or not there was strangulation, things of that sort. So that definitely is an important part of the process, because we do as much as possible. We want to steer the heavy cases to the lawyers who are going to have all the background, all the ability and make no mistakes with handling those heavy cases.
And if I may 6 just say, just to the point that 7 was just raised about whether there 8 is a unit that already exists, I 9 believe what you would be referring 10 to is the Family Violence and 11 Sexual Assault Unit. But I do want 12 to say that typically, the cases 13 that are originating in municipal 14 court right now for preliminary 15 hearings, there is a vast number of 16 those cases that aren't 17 particularly serious. 18 The Keon King case is an 19 example of that where they're not 20 being specially assigned at the 21 moment, and that is because there 22 is such a volume of these cases. 23 When you talk about the fact that 24 family violence and sexual assault is specifically specially handling certain amount of cases, I can tell you right now about a week ago when I ran our numbers, we are a unit of ADAs. That might sound like a 6 lot or a little depending on your 7 opinions on this, but that's 8 actually a very low number of ADAs 9 to handle the volume of cases. 10 We are handling 11 typically cases only after they get 12 held for a preliminary hearing, 13 because we're the ones that are 14 taking those to the trial. And my 15 unit currently stands with 20 ADAs 16 handling over 1000 open cases right 17 now. And so, you can imagine the 18 caseload of those attorneys. So to 19 also be doing all of the 20 preliminary hearings, our unit would implode. It just wouldn't be possible. We have DV courtrooms specifically open seven days a week with very full lists of doing these cases Monday through Friday in two different courtrooms. We can't possibly staff at our current staffing without specializing additional people, which is what the repeat DV offender unit, or the highly validity DV offender unit would be specifically targeting.
Thank you, Chairman Jones. To the Scott family, I apologize because, as my colleague said, the city let you down. I have a daughter and a granddaughter now. I can't even imagine the pain you're going through right now. So first, I'd just like to say that you're in my prayers and my office is here for you. Mr. DA, Keon King had a history of violent behavior towards women. How did he remain free long enough to harm Kada? And what can your office change about its approach to repeat domestic violence offenders? Clearly, this young man was an abuser of chronic, and not considering his other records. How do we not -- passing any blame to anybody, just trying to figure this out as a body on how do we stop this from happening again because this is not acceptable, especially not with a guy like this that we had? I know my friends in the law enforcement community, nothing drives them crazier than having somebody in custody and then not being able to hold them. How do we fix the process first? That's my question. I had some questions about the bail, but you pretty much were answering that. So just want to know how do we deal with guys like this so that we don't have a repeat of this happening? And then also, I always love how you always manage to throw a little play in there for the budget money thing. But as you said, Women Against Abuse is very underfunded. And we have a limited resources here in the city. So for me, can you explain to me why we would put more money into your department in order to work this instead of putting that money to the people boots on the ground, Women Against Abuse who actually needs the money? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Thank you for the question. I appreciate it and I appreciate the spirit in which it was intended, which is that we all care deeply about doing better. Women Against Abuse and the other eight organizations that we work with do need more money, which is part of the reason that we advocated for them to get even more than you all gave, and thank you again for what you gave. I agree with that. But I don't really see this as an either-or. Our Family Violent Sexual Assault Unit handles more cases than our Homicide Non-Fatal Shooting Unit. And when I come here and I say we'd like to have a little crew of additional lawyers who could just specialize in this, I'm not saying give me 100, I'm not saying give me 1000. 5 lawyers, 5 to 10 lawyers specializing in this could have a tremendous impact. It could make a huge difference without necessarily costing the city a ton of money. As we all know from our constituents, they're well aware that there's a difference between saying you care -- and I know you all care, I know it -- and showing the money. There is a difference. When we make decisions in our office about where are we going to put our attorneys, how far can we stretch this, how much can we do with what we have, when we make those decisions, we're making a statement about what matters to us too. So that's the spirit in which I asked for it. Women Against Abuse does vital work. As I already mentioned, we have included them at the table to look at new cases and to give all the recommendations because we value their work. We value what they and the other victim services units do. But they're not going to be the ones in the courtroom in terms of -- well, let me rephrase that. They will be in a courtroom but not standing up to speak to the judge to say, judge, I didn't ask you for 200,000 bail, I asked you for a million bail and we need the million bail. There's a difference when that comes from a talented second-year attorney, and when that comes from someone who has specialized in this work for 12 years has attended all the special 13 trainings, has a whole slew of 14 victories, has a level of 15 credibility with judges who know that they're not going to seek high bail unless it's appropriate. There's a difference there.
So I hope, because I know that we are all deeply concerned by this, this will not be an either-they-or-you situation. I hope -- even if the lease resources are limited, and I know they are, I hope that it will be a holistic approach in which we're looking to invest in the places and things where a real difference can be made. Let me be clear. A lot of what we've done here doesn't cost anything. Setting up this table with PPD, dedicating the personnel to that, I'm not coming looking for money for that. But when it comes to having people who could take an important case from beginning to end to make sure that there is an extra 10% of effort, that there is an extra 10% of knowledge and expertise, I respectfully assure all of you that that is money well- invested. That is money that comes back. We'll talk about it at a later time. And I'm happy to speak to you any time, Councilmember. But we do so in that spirit, because we, like you, want things to get better.
Okay. But didn't answer my question about the Keon King and how we stop a habitual offender, somebody who we had in custody for kidnapping and strangulation and this guy was able to be back released on the street. That's my concern. How do we change that -- DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: And I'm happy to --
I'm not trying to be confrontational -- DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I know you're not.
I'm just asking for your honest opinion on how do we make sure this doesn't happen again? I'll rephrase. Can you give us any recommendations of what could be done in order to not have this situation done again?
Point of information. Along Member Harrity's line of questioning, Mr. Krasner, you said at the press conference we could have did some things differently. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Yes.
That's what you said publicly -- DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I did.
-- for the record. So that follows up the exact line of questioning that he's talking about, what could we have done differently that we will work on in the future to the best of our ability to prevent such a thing happening? That would be in direct line of questioning of exactly what Member Harrity is saying. Thank you, Chairman Jones.
It's a difference between somebody who has a record of this and somebody who this is their first time going in front and you don't really know who the guy is, you know what I'm saying. This is a guy we know who he was already. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, first of all, can we do better? Yes, we can do better in many different ways. But just so we're clear on this, my recollection, and I'm not staring at it right now, is that at the time that Keon King had his bail set on the prior case, he did not have adult convictions. He had serious charges against him, but he did not have adult convictions. Bail commissioners look at whether or not you have a record, whether or not you have a record of convictions. They look at those factors. So in fairness to the bail commissioner, whose bail to my mind was low but still was higher than we usually see in these cases, in fairness to that person, the backward-looking knowledge we have with a video and all kinds of other evidence, our knowledge of his heinous, horrific activity afterwards, not everybody that was known at the point where the judge is doing that. What could we do better? Well, number one I've already been clear that even though we did not have the complainant in that prior case showing up for court, and we have that situation on more than one occasion, even though we did not have that, we do have the opportunity sometimes to be able to put on a case with body-worn camera with other video. Yes, there are technical requirements. I'm not going to bore you all with them. There are technical requirements and it might not have worked. But I believe that that is something that could have been tried and I believe it's something that we should always try in a situation like that. This however is how I get to the point of saying specialization matters. Having people who are more expert doing these things means you're not just getting an A-minus job or an A job. You're getting an A-plus job. You're going to have people who are going in there with a wealth of experience and a certain amount of gravitas that the judges hear and see because of the years when they have appeared before these judges. That's why I'm talking about can we get specialists, can we get specialists, because I think that that would work better. Now very quickly, because I understand time is essential, there are other things there that would have made a big difference, and we're happy to talk about the nuts and bolts moving forward. I referenced the Legacy computer systems that need to talk to each other. I've also referenced the fact that a stay- away order issued by a bail commissioner is not enforceable. That's something that we can change. The situation with bail, understand things like this, those bail commissioners are working off of a little matrix, a little guideline. Well, those numbers haven't changed since about the 1990s. There is this thing called inflation, folks. It has happened. I can tell you. I go to the grocery store, there is a thing called inflation. How is it that we have not changed them? Who has looked at them criminologically and said these make sense or these don't? That's something that needs to go on. And we could talk about how. Obviously, we talked about victims group funding, which would really help. And another thing we haven't talked about is that there are efforts under way, very important ones, to improve the bandwidth of our forensic capacity in this city. Well, they're going to make a big difference.
If we had, collectively we, had social media analysts who are not just going after shooting groups, and they've done great work doing that, but they are forensic social media analysts and they are going to go after social media in domestic violence cases to see what exactly is going on with this defendant, that could be one of many powerful tools that could enable us to do a better job at winning these cases, a better job of being able to get them past a preliminary hearing. It might be reassuring to certain victims who are reluctant to go to court, to feel like they know they can win if they go to court, because losing is not something they really want to contemplate when they have to walk out the same door the defendant has to walk out. So those are some of those things. But I want to assure you personally and professionally that we are in conversation and I am happy to talk to all experts in this field, and I'm happy to talk to members of City Council about how we can do better. That should be what we try to do every day.
Thank you. I just want to -- I thank you for explaining that because that's the part that I was disconnected from. So I get it, innocence until proven guilty. How do we walk that tight rope of we can see -- maybe not the bail commissioner, but as law enforcement we can see that a person has eight pending, say -- I'm making up numbers -- eight pending charges violent that are all not in trial yet, but you can see it that this guy has a pattern of -- what can we do to kind of bring that in? Because I know it's a tight rope. I know you got to walk that line without trying to violate somebody's rights that hasn't been found guilty of a crime yet. But again, it goes back to where there's cases pending that may also be violent, to show that history of why this person should be held maybe. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, that kind of research is part of the bail process. The Philadelphia Police Department is working with us better and better in terms of getting us all the intelligence information that should be used to argue for a high bail where high bail is appropriate. The existence of any open cases is something that we know, the defense knows and the bail commissioner knows. I cannot imagine a world where someone who has multiple open violent cases, I cannot imagine a world where we would recommend less than basically a million bucks on that case, and it might be or it might be 10. 4 That's what we do. 5 But as stated previously, we don't set those bails. I think some of these bail commissioners do a fabulous job. I think some of them, you know, are staring at a little matrix that somebody came up with 35 years ago and never adjusted for inflation. They're looking at a rule that shouldn't be that says every single defendant gets to pay 10% of bail. And, you know, making the donuts ain't good enough. What we need here is to make justice.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thanks to you and Council President Johnson for convening us for this very important conversation. Thank you for your testimony, DA Krasner. I am in agreement with a number of the ideas that you put out. I hope that we can support them as a Council. But the part that hurts when I think about our success as a city on this issue, and when I think about Kada Scott and others who lost their lives or who were victims of domestic violence, is that this has long been an issue in the city and it's long been time for us to step up and do more and better. I can even remember back in 2020 during the height of the gun violence epidemic when we would come together and we would look at the main causes of shootings, domestic violence was up there. I don't remember what the full chart said from back at that time, but I do remember that some of the top categories for why we saw so many shootings, it was domestic violence and I think arguments was another category. But it's long been an issue as it relates to shootings and just public safety in general in the City of Philadelphia. And I believe in what you said earlier, that any issue that we bring the full resources of the city to focus on and do that in a sustained way, we will see a positive impact. I've never thought that we had to be helpless on gun violence. C. is doing, if we as a city come together to tackle our challenges, we can make a difference. We saw that with gun violence. I wanted to talk about prevention. Obviously, your main job is enforcement. Enforcement mostly happens after the fact, but I also know that you're a believer in prevention. We've worked hand- in-hand together to develop a better system in this city under the leadership of the Council President for prevention as it relates to gun violence. We've set up whole initiatives like GVI, Group Violence Intervention, to stop shootings before they occur. I believe that if we take any public health issue and any public safety issue and we study it, why it's happening and the people involved, we can take a similar prevention approach and see success. So I want to hear what you think, and I'm interested in hearing this from the other testifiers if there's time, as this discussion moves along, what do you think from a prevention perspective are the top three things that we should be doing as a city? And I'm not talking about bail once we have someone. I'm talking about before these cases come. What can we do as a city from a prevention perspective to better protect women and other would-be victims of domestic violence? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, thank you for that question. And I truly do want to applaud you and all of Council for having understood the preeminent importance of prevention, the significance of preventing the victimization in the first place. Obviously, we have to react and hold people accountable when these things occur. But there's no 2 question in my mind, no question at all, that this city's efforts toward prevention have saved a lot of lives. And if we can do the same thing with domestic violence and prevent a lot of victimizations, well, that is a really good thing. I'll get specific in a second, but I will say that there's plenty of criminology to suggest that when people's basic needs are met, you have less crime. This is true all over the world. It's true in the United States. When you are dealing with situations where the husband, the boyfriend, which is usually what it is, is dealing with addiction and you don't have adequate treatment for addiction, then you see more of this. When you are dealing with situations where there's deep deprivation, frustration, you have more of this.
When you're dealing with a moment in our cultural history when we actually have people in elected office saying they should take away the vote from women, when we have a president being investigated in the Epstein files, there is a culture out there of treating women and girls as if they are second class and unimportant, and that is repulsive and that is utterly unacceptable. So I think that there's a lot that can be done in terms of prevention to try to deal with some of the underlying issues that are going to drive this. And I think the real victory is when the crime never occurs. Now, having said that, I would like to introduce another one of my subject matter experts, someone you may have known a little bit. His name is G. Lamar Stewart, our Head of Community Engagement.
Good morning, everybody. As the DA mentioned, and it's good to see our colleagues here in the city as well as those who are with us in law enforcement, my name is G. Lamar Stewart. I'm the Chief of External Engagement Government Affairs at the DA's office. And prevention is one of the things, Councilmember, that falls under my leadership. And to really get to the issue of prevention, I think it's important to touch on three things in how we address that, particularly around the issue of violence and domestic violence, helping families heal. One of the things that we've seen is that when we're addressing trauma, either before or after an incident, and addressing it quickly, particularly with the impacted party in their family, there are times we've sat in the room with families and we've had therapists and trauma-informed professionals there helping families navigate and process that harm, that hurt, preventing retaliation, preventing that cousin or that son or that brother who's hurting from their loss from going out and committing another crime, part of that is prevention for us. One of the things that we're doing as an office right now, we have a team of advocates both in community engagement and CARES and victim services and relocations who are going to families houses. This project is called Hope for the Holidays, going to help families who right now are grieving because there's somebody missing from a chair, there's an empty chair for this holiday season. And what we see in those conversations are moms and dads, there have been young people who are part of that family, who have thanked us for coming just because of where their head space was at the particular time, so helping families heal for us is a part of the process. But in that who we have at the table doing the work, I know the DA has done much of the responding to the questions here, and we're addressing the issue of women who have been harmed in our city. If you have noticed, many of the people who have sat around the DA as supervisors of these units are people who are mothers, who are aunties, who are grandmothers, who understand the pain of loss and the pain of trauma, but who also have a vested interest because they are residents here in the city of Philadelphia. To the left of the DA is a young lady named ADA Christian Wynne who you know, Curtis Jones, who is a West Philadelphia resident, grew up in West Philadelphia. She's the Assistant Chief of our Homicide and Non-fatal Shootings Unit. You met Katrina Wadas, who again is vested in women being protected here in the City of Philadelphia. Our Victim Services team, head of -- I'm going to ask you all to stand, but Head of our Relocation Unit, Director Donna Wood, who has been working with the family of Kada Scott from the very beginning, Mariel Delacruz, who's the Director of our Victim Services Unit, who's there as well, as well as Tracy Washington who is one of our Assistant Directors of our Victim Services Unit. These are women who care deeply about protecting women who find themselves as victims of crime. And finally I'll say this, the DA mentioned our grant program, the DAO's Violence Prevention Grant Initiative. We have been able to give out $7.7 million over the last few years to community-based organizations who are boots on the ground through a micro grant program, through our Forfeiture Fund, providing grants to organizations who are helping to prevent, who are getting to young people before they pick up a gun, before they cause harm, before they do something that can create harm within our community. And so, prevention is our work. We deeply believe in it. Thank you for raising that question and we're here to answer any more questions you may have.
I'll close with this, Mr. Chair. I am so proud of what we've been able to do as a city on the issue of gun violence, particularly around prevention. I was a part of this Council when we stood up and we said we weren't going to pass Mayor Kenney's budget unless the City invested millions more in on-the- ground gun violence prevention programs. And we won that fight, and I firmly believe that's a part of why we're seeing such low numbers today. Data is powerful. I remember Councilmember Jones doing the 100 Shooting Review, where he looked at all of the factors that go into shootings in this city, and that's been a part of what's informed our prevention programs. We can do the same thing with domestic violence. We know who the victims are. We know who the perpetrators are. We know what the circumstances are. There's no 5 reason why we cannot use that to drill down further on what would have happened from a prevention standpoint. And the same way that we took a stand on gun violence and said that this is not going to be what our city is, we can do the same thing with domestic violence. And I encourage us to do that if we -- I know we care about women and girls. But investing in prevention that's based on the underlying factors of these cases I think would go a long way. And I hope to be a part of us doing that as a city. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you so much, Member. I remember you sitting ten toes down to say this is a crisis, this is a health crisis and brought that level of attention to gun violence. And I agree with you, agree with the President and all members here, that if we focus on any one thing, there's not much we cannot do. And irrespective of what was said, if you care about something, you pay for it too. Budgets do matter. So it's duly noted. Member Young, Chair recognizes.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And good afternoon, DA Krasner. Good afternoon. I guess throughout your testimony this morning it seems like you've been alluding to -- I mean, this is just my interpretation of it, an issue for our cash bail system that we have here, you said stay-away orders aren't enforceable. Can you tell us a little bit about why they aren't enforceable? And if you believe that, if there was some type of monitoring in these types of intimate violence situations, would that prevent some of the things that have been happening in our city? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Thank you for the question, Councilmember, and good afternoon. I guess, good noon, at any rate. So the really short version, and our Chief of Charging, who also supervises initial bail, can give you the details on it, but the real short version of it is because you have a bail commissioner system where they tell defendants there's a stay-away order, but there is nowhere for that order to go in terms of a database for the police to see. And also, because they are not elected judges, they are appointed bail commissioners with very limited powers, that's where the problems exist. I will give it now to Chief Hedrick to give you a little more detail on that.
Hi. Good afternoon. As DA Krasner said, when a stay-away order is issued in preliminary arraignment court, it is simply a verbal order to a defendant that says you must stay away from this person. There is no 16 docket that reflects from whom that person is to stay away, from where that person is to stay away. And there is no mechanism by which a magistrate in preliminary arraignment court can hold a contempt hearing if someone violates that order, unlike a protection from abuse order which is entered into NCIC, right. If police officers stop a person, if someone says this person is supposed to stay away from me, I have a protection from abuse order, this is a civil order that is issued by a judge, police can see that. They can look at that order and they can see that a person is in violation of that order. They can simply see that the order exists. That does not exist for a stay-away order that is issued in preliminary arraignment court. We need some mechanism by which these orders can actually be enforced. There needs to be a way in which these orders are recorded, that they are presented to a defendant in a meaningful way, from whom do I have to stay away, from where do I have to stay away. And we need a way in which victims can communicate to the police, to the district attorney's office when these orders have been violated, and then a way in which to hold people responsible, either through a contempt mechanism or something like that where we can actually enforce those orders and give meaning to them, give teeth to them.
So what agency or entity or department can give you that authority to do that?
Frankly, I think that there's different ways we could go about it. Some of this is legislative, right. This is the way that the state has created the courts. It's the way that the system has been created. That isn't something that we can just change instantaneously in Philadelphia. Some of the same things that DA Krasner has said about the bail system, right. I mean, at the end of the day we exist in a cash bail system because that is statutory, right. That is what's been legislated. So I don't want to suggest to you that this is a simple problem that we can change overnight. I think that it would take, and I will defer to DA Krasner, but I think that there is going to have to be collaboration between the DA's office, between the courts, between the Sheriff's office, between the Police Department in order to create a way in which we can record these orders and have a system in which they are enforceable and can keep people safe.
So if I'm involved in a domestic abuse situation and I don't file a civil order, then the same person who knows my routes, my habits and all that stuff, they still are able to come in contact with me, legally essentially, if they are granted cash bail and are essentially out free in the world?
I don't want to suggest to you that that is the case throughout the pendency of a criminal matter. The problem that I am speaking to specifically has to do with the stay-away orders that are issued in preliminary arraignment court. Once a case has an initial hearing, a municipal court judge can issue a stay-away order and thereafter, if that stay- away order is violated, we can ask a judge to hold a contempt hearing. However, the same thing applies with regard to those orders. Unlike a protection from abuse order, that is not going to be in the police system. So that is not like something that somebody could be arrested for. That would be something where they would report that to victim services, to the police, to the DA's office and we would have to bring the matter in front of a municipal court judge. So I don't want to suggest to you that there's simply no way that those orders are enforced. I'm specifically talking about the preliminary arraignment orders.
But I mean, I think that's important, because in a preliminary stage when you are still conducting your investigation and gathering data and information on I guess the suspect I'll call them, right, so what is it that I guess we can do as a body, as a City Council, to help bring or shed some more light on this particular issue? Because again as I mentioned, if I'm a victim of someone who has kidnapped me and strangled me in their preliminary stages, right, like that person can then once they bail out come knock on my door and say fix me some breakfast, which is what my dad did to my mom back in the day, right, so that's essentially what happened, right? How do you protect those people? How do we protect that during those stages before they get to court, right? After the preliminary stage, what protections are in place for the victims? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Councilmember, I just want to make sure that we're clear. We're lawyers, so sometimes we speak in legalese. When we talk about preliminary arraignment, as you well know, because you are an attorney, that means when you first get arrested. So bail commissioners don't set you bail through the whole process. They just set you bail at the very beginning. The first time you go to court, you're going to go to municipal court. Then there will be a judge who has a docket, who has a record, who has the ability to issue an order that will be in a database, and there is the ability of police to show up, find out what is going on and act upon it. However, let's remember those first several days before you go to your first court hearing are often crucial. That's a very dangerous period of time. If you have an enraged defendant who has been arrested as a result of a complainant saying what was done to her, that's an extremely important point. I think there are several ways that we can deal with that. I don't actually think it's that hard. I don't think it ever was. But the most important approach, I believe, would be to collaboratively, with Philadelphia Police in the mix, with Women Against Abuse in the mix, with our office in the mix, and with the judiciary, the Municipal Court judiciary in particular in the mix, it's to talk about how we change that system so that there are enforceable orders that can be seen by police from the very beginning.
So I just want to put on record that I am a supporter of at least changing our cash bail system, understanding that if we are able to monitor people, then they can prevent them from committing other crimes while they are awaiting trial. I'll leave it there. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Member Young. Truth be told, cash doesn't make you safe. Either a person is a danger to themselves or others or not, and we have to figure out a way that in Washington, D.C., which we went down and took a look at, they said everything has to have a consequence. So if we release you, then you have to take anger management. You have to stay away. You have to do these things so that when we come back for the status hearing, if you've complied with them, that means one thing. If you have not complied with them, then that means quite another level of threat that you present. And we have to modify our thinking to either a person's a danger to themselves and others or they're not. And that's a difficult equation. I get it. It's not easy to quantify, but we better start evolving to that. Because right now, quite frankly, my granddaughter ain't safe. Member Landau is here, I'm recognizing, and we're going to recognize Member Bass at this point. Member Bass.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to just pick up where you just left off. We have to modify our thinking around this. Because, Mr. District Attorney, I heard you say that if you had just five more folks that you think that that would have made a difference. It would have made a difference if the ideology of violence against women was, in my opinion, changed, not just in the District Attorney's Office and the court system. It's not taken seriously. There is no way that anyone who strangled and kidnapped a woman, anyone should have just been out. And then not only was he out, but we didn't appeal when we had the opportunity to get him back. We have to think about this whole thing very, very differently than it has been thought of. Because right now as a citizen of the city of Philadelphia, if I was looking at this, I would say, I don't feel safe. It doesn't sound as if there are tools in place to protect me. That could be me. That could be any one of us. And I'm not hearing anything different. My colleague Councilman Harrity was asking, you know, what would you do differently. Because we all heard it when you said that some mistakes were made or during the case that there were some mistakes made. But I really don't have a clear understanding as to what you would do differently based on the tools in your toolbox, not what the state, not what the Commonwealth is doing, not what the court system is doing, not what we're doing here in City Council. But based on the tools in your toolbox, what will be done differently? And I apologize in advance, but I have to leave. I really wanted to get my questions out before I left, but I have to leave for other Council business. But I don't think that people are hearing what will be done differently from your shop, not from everybody else's shop. Because it's easy to say, you know, listen, if you had an unlimited budget, if you had this many staff, if you had this, that, the other thing, you could operate differently. Based on what you have today, how do you make the citizens of Philadelphia feel safe? Because the idea that this guy strangled, kidnapped and God knows what else that we don't know about that he didn't get caught for, how do we address that? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: And as always, I appreciate your questions, Councilmember. So obviously, everything has to be collaborative. But just focusing on our office, we have convened a table, no extra money, but we have convened a table of people, most of them from our office, but others, including Women Against Abuse, including PPD and other subject matter experts, including criminologists and data people, even data people as I understand it from PPD moving forward, to try to look at what we have with the resources we have and to see what it is that we can all do better. The way to do that is by looking at cases as they exist right now, perfect, imperfect or whatever they are, and figure out who, including my office, can do better with anything about the case, whether it's better forensics or it's charging in a different way or it's seeking a bail adjustment where we have information to indicate that we can and it's going to do something other than go the wrong direction. That is one of the things that we are doing. Within our office, we have advocated strongly for more funding for outside organizations, not because it's all about the money, but because they do really important work that we consider crucial and we don't want to see that wither away. I can tell you that on our list of things that I intend to be engaging in, in the next year, and we haven't done it yet, once again I'm just going to be transparent with you, but there is a process that is followed when there are problems in the airline industry.
There is a process that is followed in hospitals when there are outcomes that are troubling, when there has been a mistake or maybe there was a mistake, where you bring together people with a lot of knowledge to look at the case and say, what can we do better here, how could we all have done this better. That is something that we will be instituting with our current resources in the office at my direction, not just for domestic violence cases, but for any cases where we feel like the outcome isn't what it should have been for whatever reason. And I do believe that that will bring a lot of expertise to the table and a lot of introspection. I think that there is more that we can do with training. We face a unique challenge in these times. And in many ways, it's very positive that we have so much technology to try to prove cases. We have body-worn camera. Thank goodness. We have pole cameras. We have a lot of other resources there. But as I referenced a little bit earlier, we have to be able to use them in court. And there are occasions when you're dealing with law that has been written for a time before the technology and judges are reluctant to let you use body-worn camera in certain circumstances, we have to work on that. And that's something we can do internally, either by trying to change the law, through our appellate attorneys trying to change it by advocating with legislative or legal bodies to try to do that or just by trying to put together the memos that can be persuasive with a judge. So even if you have, as we had here in a prior case involving Keon King, a situation where witnesses are not showing up, and more than once not showing up, you can take all the resources that are available and you can try to put on the case with the resources that you have successfully. I'm sure that there is more that we can do. And I do want you to understand, and all of Council to understand, we consider this a conversation. There may be some things we have no idea about that PPD is going to illuminate us, a way that we could do a lot better with something that we don't even know has gone sideways. But we intend to use the resources we have. And if there is an opportunity for additional resources, we would use them as well.
I do but, you know. Okay. I'm going to let it ride. I'm not going to get the, you know, sort of like the closure that I think that I'm looking for, I hear what you're saying, but we're speaking specifically to this case. I don't see the relevance of body-worn cameras in this particular instance. And I have had very spirited conversations in the past about when someone is charged with a crime and when someone is not, and I feel very strongly that some reforms from you as the District Attorney, as the head of the office, would serve us well here in the City of Philadelphia, and I'm just going to leave it at that. Because again, we've had numerous conversations about this particular topic and other topics related to when someone is charged and whatnot. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Please I hope you understand I think some reforms in our office would do us well. In fact, I'm --
Well, you're in charge and you're the guy to make them happen so I'm glad to hear that. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: -- and I appreciate our spirited conversation. That is how I feel. We're about eight years in on reforms, but I know there's a lot more to do. And I truly appreciate that. I mean this. I truly appreciate those spirited conversations. I think they've been helpful. About the body-worn camera, the point there is when witnesses do not show up, sometimes there is a record of what they said at the time. And even though there are reasons why you can't always get that into evidence, sometimes you can. So body-worn cameras are a real asset and real resource in a case, you know, even a case like this where you had more than one witness not showing up for the hearings.
It's important that we look in the mirror and are able to look at ourselves and say I can be better, I can do better, we can do better. And this hearing is not intended to point the finger at anyone. It's to point the finger towards solutions, and that's the spirit in which it's intended. Chair recognizes Dr. Nina Ahmad.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the issue, as I said in my opening remarks, culture change. And when I hear $200,000 bail was sufficient for someone who strangled and kidnapped someone, tells me that we're not viewing these crimes, particularly against women and girls, in the same light as we're viewing some other crimes. This is just a point to make, just like my colleague Cindy Bass was saying, that we need to actually take these things seriously. We need to actually prosecute these people. If the judge is not setting the bail appropriately or the bail bondsman, we need to challenge that. There was no challenge of that. And the reason we're using a specific case is because that's how you make structural change. Use real examples to say this is what didn't work here. This is what we're going to change. I have a quick question about the man who was arrested for violating the 11-year-old, the two 11-year-olds he kidnapped and then violated one of them. He previously served time. So if you take that example of someone who had done the same crime before, served time, was let go and did it again, when you look at that, what would your office recommend we do with a perpetrator like that? What can we do now looking back? That's why I want to use specific cases, not generalities. What would we have done to avoid that, if we could at all? Maybe we couldn't. We have a justice system the way it is because we devalue women and girls. I just want to make that point abundantly clear, that this country's justice system does not take our crimes against us seriously. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Thank you very much for your comments, Councilmember. So the case that I referenced and that you are referring to is the case against Horace Battle. Mr. Battle in 2013 was convicted of sexual assault of a similarly-aged young girl and he was sentenced by a judge to three and a half to seven years for that crime. He did, as I understand it all, seven of those years in jail. He came out after that. And I think everybody knows when I started in office, it was well after 2013, but he came out having maxed out his sentence, in other words, completed the maximum possible sentence or close to it, and then he commits these crimes later. These crimes are heinous. What should we do with him? Well, I think we should do with him what we did with him, which is prosecute him and get a very, very lengthy sentence because he is a menace to society. And he, as far as I'm concerned, is a danger for as long as he's around. The sentence that he received, the sentence that he received, I would expect to have him in jail for close to 34 years. He's in his late 40s. It is extremely unlikely that he will be exiting jail at all. So I think that that case, you know, nothing's perfect, but I think that case, the second case, was handled well by our office. Obviously, we can go back and we can say they should have done something else, the prior administration with the prior case. We can say that with our current knowledge. But we also have to be fair. We have to look at it in terms of what the judge knew at that time when the judge set the sentence, what the prosecutors knew at that time. I mean, let me be clear though, I consider the violation of an 11-year-old to be absolutely heinous, and the notion that someone would do it more than once should result in what is happening here, which is an extremely lengthy and appropriately incapacitating sentence.
Thank you for that because that sentence should have happened -- I know you weren't there, but should have happened in 2013 because these two girls would not have had to go through what they went through. But I just want -- this was just to make the point that the culture shift that needs to happen so that $200,000 bail is found to be sufficient for someone strangled and kidnapped we should never hear again. I'm just putting it out there. That is not -- for me to hear that and say, oh, we didn't challenge that because it seemed appropriate. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, that's not quite what I said, Councilmember. I said we didn't challenge it because we didn't want it to go the other direction. We didn't want to appeal it and have it turn into a $50,000 bail or a $10,000 bail, and that does happen with regularity. I agree with you it's not enough bail. We sought $1 million. That's what we sought. But obviously, we don't control the bail. That's a determination made by judges. And even when we really don't like what they do, we still have to try to keep the bail as high as possible for someone like this. Am I telling you our judgment was perfect? No. I mean, who knows. Maybe we would have seen something different than we see. Maybe we would have had an appeal and it would have gone up, but those decisions are made in light of long experience with some of the judges who make their decisions.
Thank you so much, Chairman, and thank you to the whole committee for having me here. Rue Landau. Don't serve on this committee, but certainly wanted to be here for this incredibly important subject. It's very simple. Actually, when you look at it from the outside, we've got an entire system that is not working together to the best benefit of victims, of people who have been harmed by domestic violence, sexual violence, in the case of what was just being discussed. And at the end of the day when there's a will, there's a way. And to hear you genuinely say -- I fully believe you, that we need to get the courts and the DAs and the police together and we need to figure this all out. I look around this room and I see people like Carol Tracy here, who's been working on this since the beginning of time, since the beginning of her career. There's others who've been working on this for decades. Not the beginning of time, Carol, sorry, since the beginning of her career. I really don't understand how we could have literally what is an epidemic of domestic violence here in Philadelphia, around the country. We know what this is about. This is about misogyny. This is about people not respecting and holding up and really treating women as equals and the flip side of actually having hatred of women, and there is an epidemic in society of this. And the fact that we're still talking about we all need to get together to figure out systems to make this effective and work better is heartbreaking. It's 2026. This isn't going away. We've seen this in our careers. We've been doing this for a long time as well. Domestic violence and the horrifying end results of it have been around for so long. And if we don't raise it up from a city level to the absolute emergency that it is, we will never, ever be able to focus on it properly. I'm sorry I didn't get to hear all of the technology glitches in this, but I will certainly listen to -- I know I have a staff member watching this and I heard part of it. I'm the Head of the Tech Committee. I will absolutely work on the issue of body-worn camera footage being utilized in the courts and any other technology issues that we need to make sure that when you have someone who's super dangerous, that the PPD and the DA's office can see that immediately and anybody else. It's 2026. We're going to get this forensics lab. We need to have the technology available for this. You guys have always told me for my whole career on all sides, you know who the bad guys are. You kind of know the real bad guys. Let's go get them. We can do this. Let's make this happen. Let's make the streets safer. Let's make it safer for everyone and we're all in on it. And again, from tech you've got my pledge. I will be here for you, but I don't want to have another hearing next year, 10 years from now, years from now, 20 saying, oh, yeah, we have to all get together and get on the same page to make it the emergency that we all know it is. And thank you for your part. I know you're doing it at all aspects. From inside of the administration and from the police department, I know you're working on it. But let's call it the emergency and just make it happen. You guys are all very smart people and I know we can come up with the solutions. Thank you. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I will briefly say agreed.
I appreciate it. I have to run over. We have some visitors from Germany and the U.S. talking about tech real quick across the way, so I'm going to jump over there.
I want to thank you for your initiation of the Tech Committee. Because one of the issues raised by DA Krasner was integration of systems so that by the time something happens and the coordination comes our way back, the person's gone and we didn't know that they did this, that and the other, because the silos exist. That is something I'm glad you jumped head first into. Chair recognizes President Johnson.
Just last question, Larry Krasner, and thank you for your patience throughout this process. I know it's been a long morning. We still have other panels to go through after the break. But just give me an idea, the procedural history, of the Keon -- what's his last name -- King case during the kidnapping case, and what was done to try to bring the victim to court? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: I'm happy to do that. As it happens, we have the prosecutor for the murder of Kada Scott, who is prosecuting Keon King, Ashley Toczylowski, one of our senior attorneys in our Homicide Non-fatal Shooting Unit. She also has some familiarity with the docket in the prior case. That prior case has been reinitiated. You may be aware of that as well. So with your permission, I will let her address it for you.
T-o-c-z-y-l-o-w-s-k-i, common spelling. So as DA Krasner said, I'm the prosecutor that's prosecuting the active case. I got involved initially with a kidnapping. Now, it's a homicide. I was not involved in the previous cases. However, in my role as looking into his current case, I also looked into his previous cases. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have about that to the best of my knowledge, with your understanding that it was not me at the time, but I have looked into it. I believe what your question is, is that kind of just the chronology of what happened in that previous case. So what I can tell you from the dockets that I looked at is that the initial case, the arrest happens, the initial case comes up, both our victim witness team and the prosecutor on the case made phone calls to both the witness and the eyewitness. The witness there was not the -- I'm sorry, both the victim and the eyewitness. There was maybe some initial contact with the victim however, but it was ultimately unsuccessful in terms of who I'll call the surviving victim on that case. There was some direct contact with the eyewitness. However, it quickly became clear that she was reluctant to come in, but she did kind of offer to help perhaps get the victim to come in a little bit. Ultimately, all of those contacts were what I'll call negative, in the sense that then the first listing of the case, neither the eyewitness nor the witness came to court. After that, the same thing applied. Attempts were made by both the Victim Services Department as well as the assigned -- not the assigned because there was no assigned prosecutor, but the prosecutor in the room assigned to that day. That prosecutor also made efforts via phone call. Again, those all resulted in both the victim and the eyewitness failing to appear at court. After the first listing, over objection from the Commonwealth, the defense attorney asked to mark the case what's called must be tried. And there's been a lot of talk about that. It's a bit of a court lingo --
I was going to say it reminds me of my life. But, yeah, I know it must be trial.
Yeah, it's a bit of a court-ism, right, definitely a Philly-ism. But it's basically kind of a marking on the docket to the next judge to say, hey, this case needs to be tried at the next listing. I will say I found it to be unusual that that happened after the first listing, not unheard of, but unusual, given that it was a preliminary hearing. Typically, we do get more than one try to get the must be tried marking, but it happened. And it's my understanding that it happened because perhaps there were certain representations made by the defense attorneys basically saying, this is a domestic, she's never coming to court, which unfortunately for a lot of us on our side is something we hear all the time. Sometimes judges take that. Sometimes they don't. In this case --
The first listing, it was Judge Hope. Judge Hope is the judge who marked it must be tried. Again, this is not completely unheard of. Perhaps I'll say it's unusual, but not unheard of. It happens. It did happen in this case. So that essentially is a marker then to the next judge to say, hey, this case must be tried. I made that ruling, meaning the judge, this case must be tried. So then when we get to the second listing, the DAs, on any case and in this case in particular, are dealing with, well, the judge marked it must be tried, I either have to be ready. In this case, they were not. So then they are --
Was the video, right, we've all seen this video. Did that video come up any time during this or did we get the video after the withdrawal and everything was moved on?
So the video certainly was part of the discovery. It's part of the discovery. Meaning, the evidence packet that we have.
So I think that's a really difficult question and one that we've kind of been grappling with this entire hearing, the parts that I've heard at least. Because it -- and I've said this before. It's one thing for me to sit here and say that, yes, maybe I feel like I could have gone forward on the video, having years experience and having done 5 those types of cases before, but 6 perhaps that's not an easy thing to 7 do. 8 And so, while I think 9 sure -- and I think that's 10 ultimately what the DA is saying, 11 that maybe that's something we can 12 do, is training on maybe trying at least. It may not have worked, but perhaps we could try to use body- worn cam or that surveillance video that you're talking about to try to get the case held for court. Again, it may not have worked. Depending on the judge, the video may or may not have even been admitted, but it is something that we can try or that we could have tried and that we can try in the future.
Thank you, Mr. President. Seeing no other questions, we're going to take a brief -- thank you for your testimony and we'll take a 15-minute break for the stenographer's sake and then we will have our second panel to testify. Thank you all. 13 minutes. 14 (Brief recess.) 15
All right, everyone. We are going to get started and thank you for your patience. Ms. Stack, can you read the next panel to testify.
Commissioner Kevin Bethel, Philadelphia Police Department; Sheriff Rochelle Bilal; Adam Geer, Chief Public Safety Director of the Office of Public Safety; Nyisha Chapman, President of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women; Adara Combs, Victim Advocate from the Office of the Victim Advocate; and Azucena Ugarte, Director from the Office of Domestic Violence. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Thank you. Thank you all for your patience and listening to this worthwhile testimony so that we can figure out some of the things that we as a government can do better. So we'll start with Commissioner Bethel. You know you're not new to that table. State your name and please begin your testimony. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: So good afternoon.
Good afternoon. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I started with morning. Had to change it up there, my friend. So good afternoon, Council President Johnson, Councilman Jones, members of the Committee and distinguished guests. My name is Kevin Bethel. I serve as Police Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. First, I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak today in response to Resolution 15 250927, which calls for a critical examination of how our city protects victims of abuse and domestic violence within the justice system. As you know, domestic violence is one of the most complex and dangerous public safety issues we face each year. PPD responds to over 100,000 domestic violence-related calls. These are not just numbers. They represent lives impacted by trauma and fear. While we've made progress, we know more must be done. Domestic assaults account for nearly 40% of all of our assaults in Philadelphia. As of November 23rd, we recorded 33 domestic homicides this year, involving homicides. 9, a trauma-informed 13 policy, that addresses all forms of 14 abuse, physical, sexual, 15 psychological, financial and 16 technology. Officers complete a 17 7548D domestic violence report, 18 which was developed by our 19 department for every incident that 20 says the need for protection of 21 abuse order. All cases are 22 referred to our victim assistance officers who follow up within 72 hours, provide safety planning and coordinate with courts and services provided. I do want to make a note. I made a note in my testimony. We talked about technology and body-worn cameras. com, which is accessible to the Defendant Association and the DA's office. So that technology, I believe, is set and in play now. To strengthen the city's response to victims of violent crime and improve coordination across the services, the Philadelphia Police Department is in the process of centralizing our victim assistance officers under a newly-established Office of Community Advocacy and Engagement. That is led by Director Ayanna Green Davis who is back there, stand up, who came on our team. The mission is ensure that every victim and survivor receives equitable access to support, information and justice, while fostering trust between the community and law enforcement. The unit consists of three key roles: a community initiative specialist, who lead engagement and prevention programs; victim advocates who provide emotional and practical support for victims; and our victim advocate officers, sworn personnel who ensure timely compassion response, coordinating with investigators. Together these components work to strengthen public trust, improve our case outcomes and promote healing across impacted communities. And we have started this work last year when I returned back to the department, really leaning into our victim advocacy work. And so, it is bearing fruit. And that also is bearing fruit from the investments the City Council and the Mayor did in giving me the positions. So Savanna has, I think, positions now, where nine 7 police positions personnel come 8 from the community who are 9 supporting us in this work. 10 In June 2025, the Office 11 of Community Advocates brought in 12 9 -- I said 10, so it's 9 -- victim 13 advocates assigned to investigative 14 units such as homicides, shooting 15 investigation, crash investigation 16 and special victims unit. Victim 17 advocates deliver trauma-informed, 18 culturally-responsive support by 19 guiding victims through crisis 20 interventions, safety planning and essential services, while helping them understand their rights and overcome barriers to recovery. I pause there, Councilman President, because we know we've talked about that. The work that that group is doing with our homicide and our shooting victims and our crash investigations, building that bridge between the communication as you know was always a challenge, between conversations between the investigators and the family.
They're filling that void and doing an exceptionally great job in accomplishing that. In October 2025, the Office of Victim Community Advocacy and Engagement expanded by hiring 12 community initiative specialists to support the work of the Office of Community Advocacy Engagement. These liaisons strengthen connections between the Philadelphia Police Department and the community most affected by violence, ensuring that victim voices are heard and their needs are dressed promptly and compassionately. I think part of what we're making a connection here is partly about building trust in the community. If we are constantly hearing victims not wanting to come forward, the more we embed into the community, the more we use these men and women on the ground, we think we will have significant inroads in that. Through Director Green's leadership and in collaboration with the Women Against Abuse and the Women's Law Project, the department will be implementing a standardized tool to assess domestic violence and imminent danger at the scene. This tool, the danger assessment for law enforcement, has an 11 question evidence-based tool that helps identify victims at highest risk of homicide. High risk cases are flagged for immediate intervention and enter into a lethality database for tracking. This initiative will begin in February of 2026 with a full launch by July. It includes officer training, policy development and data analysis. And I know you heard the conversation around that earlier. Ayanna brought this to us earlier when she arrived into the position working with the team to be able to start walking through. And what is unique about the lethality tool is as it goes through 11 questions, but if the top three questions are, is there a gun, has he threatened you with a gun, that immediately scores it and moves it into a contact from our victim advocates.
(Inaudible). POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Go ahead.
I'll let you continue, but Member Jones and I, Chairman Jones and I was just having this conversation regarding the lethality approach, right. And I asked before, but I want to reiterate again, so everybody knows gun is top priority. Even if you call 911 and you want to make sure y'all show up -- I'm not saying y'all don't show any other time but -- POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Come on now. We're on video too. Be nice.
We know a gun is a top priority -- POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Yes, sir.
-- right. So where does strangling and kidnapping come in at in that rubric? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Yeah. I'll allow Ayanna to come up to kind of walk you through what that -- after I complete it, if it's okay with -- or she can do it now.
No, take your time, Commissioner. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Okay. I'll finish and she'll come up and walk you through what that looks like.
Take your time, Commissioner. All the time you need, Commissioner. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Our Detective Bureau also plays a vital role in our responses with domestic violence. Each division has a domestic team, ADOM as we call them, with two or four detectives trained in trauma- informed practices and Act 79. They handle all domestic cases, consisting of victim/witness interviews, evidence collection, conduct repeat call analysis, search warrant and expedite arrest warrants. Domestic warrants are flagged for the District Attorney's office, but approval can take three to five days and sometimes longer, and that's what part of the group when we meet we'll start talking about accelerating that timeline. Detectives notify victims within hours of 23 arraignment and provide information 24 on the Pennsylvania SAVIN, which alerts victims to an offender's release or transfer. Victims also receive a domestic abuse rights card, a PFA resource list and referrals to our partners like Women Against Abuse and Women's Law Project. We're working to expand language access to ensure all victims can navigate the system safely. When it comes to interagency coordination, in 2022 we formalized a memorandum of understanding with the Sheriff's office to clearly define respective roles of our two agencies and enforce Act 79, which mandates firearm relinquishment from individuals under PFA orders. The Sheriff officers PFAs with assistance from the PPD when requests are by the petitioner. The Sheriff always accepts relinquished firearms during business hours. PPDs divisional detective units accept them 24/7 and PPD detectives document and transfer firearms to the Sheriff's office. Our Gun Permits Unit tracks all fire relinquishments, investigation for noncompliance and coordinates with the courts, the Sheriff's office and the District Attorney's office. As of December 2, 2025, over 1080 PFA orders require firearm relinquishment. And PPD follow up on 945 of those cases, recovering or documenting hundreds of weapons. We're also launching a weekly domestic violence partnership case review, which you heard the DA talk about earlier, and to replicate the success of our partnership with the DAO or Nonfatal Shooting Review. The goal is to ensure law enforcement, prosecution and victim advocacy are in lockstep to better serve high- risk domestic violence victims in Philadelphia. We support this resolution because we believe in accountability, not just for offenders, but for ourselves. We believe in prevention, not just prosecution. And we believe every survivor deserves to be heard, protected and supported. On behalf of the Philadelphia Police Department, thank you again for your leadership and commitment to a safer city. This concludes my testimony. I'll have Ayanna come up and walk you through what the lethality model looks like. She's nervous, but she's going to make it work. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Do not be nervous. We're friendly people, most of the time. Can you state your name for the record and please --
Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Ayanna Green Davis. I am the Executive Director of the Office of Community Advocacy Engagement with the police department.
My question was, regarding the lethality -- did I say it correctly?
For red flags, because again based upon the testimony we just heard, we're still trying to wrap our minds around if a person is strangled and kidnapped, and I say particularly a woman, right, no 11 matter how people want to look at it, it's just a little different, women and a guy, right. We don't want no one being kidnapped or strangled. I just want to say that for the record in case folks start calling me, oh, he's separating people. But the reality is, it's a little different if it's my niece versus my nephew, right, how they're going to respond, right. And so, we're trying to wrap our heads around how do you flag a kidnapping and a strangulation in terms of ranking?
So within the lethality assessment, there's questions and the score 5 is based off of 30% of high risk. 6 So it's already -- within the tool 7 is a built-in scoring system. So 8 strangulation, any type of injury 9 is going to flag our officers that 10 is at high risk. If she says, oh, 11 he choked me last year, high risk. If he choked me today, high risk. So that's going to flag our officers right away to say this is a high risk case. This case needs to be looked at today. That's how it's built in. It's built in to only do the high risk, because we know that those are the individuals we need to get to as soon as possible. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I just want to make sure we're clear, Council President. For those jobs, we're locking them up. I mean, so to make sure to be clear this is a tool to give us some kind of alerting. But what you described as what was described earlier this morning, if we come into a home where somebody has been strangled and we see the marks on their neck and we have body-worn cameras, we have conditions that show that there was domestic, we're locking that person up and/or we don't have them on site, then we're now going to go back, they're going to take all that information back to the detective to get a warrant. This is just another tool as it relates to connecting them to services and making sure that we're elevating it from the very beginning from the police officers' perspective, but all other things are still happening in a criminal way.
When that assessment form is done, what happens? Does the assessment of the form, the results of the form then go to -- that's submitted with the charges? How does that work? Does that file 8 travel from Philadelphia Police Department to the DA's office that, okay, now, it's in my hands? And part of it is about our criminal justice system, not one department. So now, I'm going from the police. I just got an assessment, strangled, kidnapping, high on priority, red flag. Now, I'm giving it to this next department. Does it come into the DA's office before they make the charges, they have a form that comes from the Philadelphia Police Department that says this is high risk?
So that's why we're implementing this tool because this tool can be --
This tool can help with the court proceedings. It can go from one entity to the next entity.
Okay. To start tracking, so this is what we're going to do in the future? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Yeah, but you don't need that for what you described. I don't mean to be flip, but someone who's been strangled or the conditions that we see, I don't need a lethality tool to let anyone know that that person should be at a higher level and that the court should be addressing that equally. This will enhance that work. A lot of what we're describing here, Council President, is our efforts -- we get thousands and thousands of domestics that are just going into a queue. So we elevate those out of that number --
Point of information. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Yes, sir.
So take us -- let's take a step back. The lethality issue is one. Tell me the standard operating procedure when an officer is called to a home and at the arrival, they hear about domestic violence or abuse, because there are several ways that this winds up in the system? You can go down and file a PFA, all that stuff, but what happens when you are called on the scene? What are your officers trained to assess and do? Take me through it. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I'll ask Commissioner Frank Vanore to come over who oversees all of the investigations and allow him to walk you through not just the beginning, but all the way through the continuum as the investigation moves through that process. (Witnesses approached witness table.) DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Good afternoon, Councilman.
State your name for the record please. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: My name is Frank Vanore, V-a-n-o-r-e, Deputy Commissioner of Investigations within the department. So to start off with a domestic incident, it'll come out -- that could be a bunch of different categories. We categorize some domestics as an argument. So the officers will come to the scene, they'll assess what's happening. They'll speak to -- if there's two parties, if there's just a victim, find out what occurred, if a crime occurred, if there's an assault, like some of the things we're hearing about today, there's going to be some evidence of that. There could be an injury. There could be property damage. There could be other witnesses. They're going to gather all that, and especially in today's world they're going to have that on their body camera, so that's going to be recorded. They're going to create a report and they're going to take all that into the detectives, depending on what division, what part of the city they're in. The divisional detectives will pick up on that case. All right. And if it's an assault, they're going to interview that complainant and they're going to photograph their injuries. All right. All that is done the same as it was done -- I was a detective over 30 years ago. All right. I had a Polaroid, no video, there was no body camera. When I got a domestic victim, I interviewed them and took a picture. Many times when we take that case to court, if it was an arrest and the victim somehow doesn't show up, they allowed me to show those pictures and testify to what I knew, also the officer that responded. Same thing happens today, but we got better evidence. We got a lot better technology, so we're able to do that and show those pictures, show those videos.
So take me -- All right. So argument is probably something that would be diffused, right. At what point does it elevate that I need to remove this person from the house? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Well, it's going to be the level of violence that's occurring. If a crime occurred, then we're going to arrest the person. We're going to arrest the person and we're going to take them in if they're present. All right. If that crime occurred and not in our presence, due to 2711, the statute in Pennsylvania, we could take them into custody, gather the evidence and charge them, and that's what we do in every case. That's why over 30 years ago we developed domestic violence detectives. We gave them special training. Every division has them. Depending on the volume --
That's a standard procedure that a police officer understands? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Yes. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: There's a policy. I mean, we have a very lengthy policy, around pages, that outlines 13 specifically what the roles and 14 responsibility of those officers 15 are, and they're held accountable if they don't follow that process.
Thank you for being with us this afternoon. Very quickly, what happens in a situation when the victim does not call immediately for fear that that individual is still in the house, right. And so, there is not -- they call the next day, for instance, or they go to work and they tell their colleague the situation that happened at home and they are encouraged to report. What happens? There's no pictures. She's no longer marked, right. There's no damage that you're able to witness in the home. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: So in those cases, it's not quite clear. We're not going to have enough evidence to proceed with an arrest, but we're certainly going to document the case. We're going to interview that victim and we're going to attempt to build a case of probable cause. We're still going to have the allegation. If it's an assault of some kind, we're still going to do everything we can to get that affidavit to the District Attorney's office to look at. If it's approved, we'll have an arrest warrant. Now, some of the issues you heard in the Commissioner's testimony is when we do apply for an arrest warrant, we put a priority on this already. We have special detectives handling these cases. What I'm finding out from my people is anywhere from two days to five days is the average, and there's some that go weeks until we get it back. So that is a problem. It's not a priority. In the early 2000s, we created an electronic warrant system, which we use in our arrest system. All right. In that system, we built flags. So when our detective is typing up the affidavit, they check domestic violence. When the DA is looking at that, it's flagged, but we're still not seeing these back. There was a time -- and I'm going back years -- when those cases rose to the top and came back very fast. I'm told if a phone call is made, it comes right back. So a lot of times, the detectives, the supervisors, they jump on the phone and make those phone calls. If phone call's not made, it takes a while to get that warrant and that's frustrating.
What do we need to do so that a phone call is made? Because I think what we heard earlier today is that there's a lack of communication, right. You just said you guys are using technology to be able to better improve. The DA said earlier that we need better technology to be able to better improve. And so, whatever happened to the old school, hello, let's have a conversation, right? There is a victim whose life can be at risk here, right. And maybe she called the next day, but maybe that's not the first time she's called. And so, at what point does somebody say there's a possibility that this is Kada Scott No. 25, right? Because I've heard many, many stories of women who have said, I've talked to police, I've got to get a PFA, I've talked to the detective, I've talked to the courts. I've done everything and my abuser is still free. So at what point do we prioritize the victim? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I mean, I think what you -- I appreciate you having -- it's about prioritizing all of it, right. I mean, it just can't be we make this a priority. I tell people, you know, it's okay when it's somebody else's child. I got three daughters. You put your hands on my daughter --
You're not going to need the court if you touch my daughter. Keep it real, right. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: You know what I'm saying. I mean, part of that is, you know, and I think I shared with somebody before when we were doing the school diversion work and I do a video of my daughter walking through the process of getting arrested. You're sitting in that robe and you say it was okay for somebody else's daughter, a child be arrested, until you see yours, even though we see what's going through that process. And that's where we are here. This process doesn't work if everybody doesn't make it a priority, right. For it to work perfectly, for it to work to the best, it's never going to be perfect, but everybody has to be in sync. If I'm sitting there putting my men and women into these positions and saying, you will, if you work with our Director that says you will do this. It's not an option for them. You will take this action. Because at the time, back in those days cops would walk into a room, house and walk back out the door. They don't get the choice to do that. The rest of the system also has to align as well that, yes, you will put these cases before -- it's not an option for you to sit there and say, I see some pictures, I may see a video, but I decide I'm not going to move that case. That's not how it should operate, right. It should operate everybody's aligning. So we do hope as we reset and we go have this meeting, this weekly meeting, that we will be able to bring all those things into the conversation. But every time we put our foot on the gas, then we come off halfway. I tell my folks every day you put your foot on the gas, there's no brake pad. If you really want to address this issue, you just got to keep pressing. Because again, it's easy to sit there and just bungle people into this space. We have a lot of cases, 12,000 or more of those cases that come through. I mean, we have a lot of work to do, but we got to make sure that everybody is aligned and see it from the same scope.
But what do you need to do in collaboration with the District Attorney's office and the courts to be able to ensure that what you're doing right now, prioritizing and meeting weekly and doing all these things that it goes beyond -- we don't know if you're going to be here in four years. We don't know if we're going to be here in three, right. We don't know if the district attorney is going to be the district attorney. What do we do to put things in place so that women in Philadelphia who are victims of domestic violence know that the system that was put in place in the City of Philadelphia will infinitely protect them? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Listen, we're going to do, my team and I are going to do everything we can, the things that we have control over. There's no 5 question. We've been doing that, right. And I don't have control over the courts or the DA's office. But I think what also has to happen is if there's going to be accountability, then it has to be a continuous level of accountability, right. Then we should probably be back here in four months asking us what have we done. And we should be back here again, right, and saying, what is the level of accountability. Yes, we want to do this intergovernmental approach. But we -- I mean, Commissioner Vanore does a phenomenal job of really pushing his men and women. Because we know, we work with Carol, we work with Molly, we work with the team to make sure that we're on set training and doing all those things it's supposed to be. But as I shared with you before, some of those things we don't have control over. We get equally as frustrated to see somebody when you describe, Council President, like we sit there and shake our heads like really. I mean, we've always been at times frustrated by the system because they often times don't see what we see as much as we try to present them to them. So, Councilmember Lozada, we're doing our best, I mean, to follow our policy, to work with many of the partners that are in this room today to make sure we're meeting the charge that they give us, and oversight that they're doing each and every day when we're sitting down with Women Against Abuse and walking through what we want and what they see us doing, reviewing our work. But all parts of the system, often times we have to make sure everybody's aligned. And I don't think I answered your question. I apologize for that. But I can push the system and we're going to push them. Our team will be there Thursday saying, hey, here's a guy or lady, whatever it may be, that we think you should be focused on, right. We're going to use our lethality tool, because some we will bring to the top that won't have those top things that you described, Council President. But still, there's something going on here. We're going to work to try to internally create a database so we can start to track some of those individuals and the team is going to start working through that process now, but it's going to require a level of accountability. I hold my team accountable. The Mayor holds us accountable for the work that we do. The key part is -- and that's why I appreciate when you bring us into this room because it makes us because it makes us all accountable for what needs to be done to service this community. And we're going to keep doing that and we're going to get this aligned.
I appreciate that. We heard earlier that the District Attorney's teams have very large caseloads. Based on your current structure, how many cases does one investigator have per domestic violence incident? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: I don't have an exact number, but some areas of the city they're higher than others. So that's how we try to structure our domestic teams. Some divisions have four detectives that do it nonstop, and then other detectives will catch a case. They will then be responsible for the follow-up. So they'll ensure that everything's moving along the right way, that right resource lists -- the right- to-know information to the victims go out and that we're following up with the victims when court comes around. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I mean, to what Frank described the numbers are significant. So I'll give you Southwest Detectives: 1877 incidents of simple assault with 247 arrests -- I mean, I'm sorry. 1913 incidents of simple assault for domestic, 257 arrests, 711 aggravated assault domestics with almost 300 arrests. 479 PFAs with 143 arrests. So I mean, that's just Southwest Division. And so, the numbers are significant. And that's why it's important to try to use these tools. They are not perfect, we know that. But working in collaboration with investigators and others to be able to -- we have to work harder now to figure out when we're looking at this sheer number, how do we pull those individuals up that are often times being marginalized or not being seen. You know, I can see the person, I can see the ag assault. But I can't see that young girl or that young lady who's being abused each and every week and not reporting it. And then when we get to the home -- so that's why we hope the lethality tool may -- she may not have been choked that day. She may not have a gun on her. But if we do the tool right, it may flag something and the scoring may flag where now Ayanna's team can now take the victim advocates and engage that person to see if they want to get supports and get them to report and get them the supports that they need.
Are the courts a part of the conversations that you all are planning to have in the future? Because I can't be the only one frustrated when I hear, yeah, we're talking, but the courts are really the ones that make the decisions and they're not at the table. So will the courts be and do you have a firm commitment from court, the court's leadership, that they will be at the table and will be in the process of changing how we respond to domestic violence? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Commissioner Vanore attended the meeting. It was an initial meeting last week, but I expect that that partnership is going to grow. And to your point, the courts have to be at the table to have that conversation. We would expect to be asking that. I'm sure my colleague here, Adam Geer, will be asking for that as well, that there is court representation. They have to be. You can't have a conversation without them being on the same that we are and seeing it from the same lens. So it won't be successful without them.
I appreciate that and I agree, right. But we've seen how challenging some of the things are that we're doing in the city of Philadelphia where we need the courts and they're not there. Regardless of whether we need them or not, they choose not to be there. And so, I want to know what we need to do and how do we ensure victims in our city that the way we're responding to domestic violence today is not how we're going to respond to it tomorrow and, that is, because everyone that needs to be on the table is at the table now? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Yeah. I feel pretty confident our relationship with the courts is going extremely well. As you know with our community court, working with the courts to stand that up and now expand that, I think working with the team there, we will be able to bring them to the table, explain all of what we are dealing with, I'm confident, Councilwoman Lozada. And if we cannot, but I don't believe that to be the case, we would definitely bring that back to the committee to have a larger conversation, particularly in CJAB, where we have the ability to bring these conversations into a much more formal setting. But I'm confident that they see what we see. I think they are also probably asking the same questions, you know, what are you doing, what are you focusing on. And I think there's a lot of synchronizing, it has to happen. We got to get more in sync, right. The better in sync we are, the better we're able to deliver to them exactly what is needed. And I think if we do that an effective way, we can have an impact.
Thank you. Chair recognizes President Johnson and then Jim Harrity.
Thank you, Chairman. And, Member Lozada, there will also be a follow-up behind -- I don't want to say closed door meeting, but there'll be a follow-up meeting with all of the different criminal justice partners to have a fuller conversation as a follow-up to this hearing. Commissioner, can you talk about -- and I want to go to the Keon King case, the one regarding, you had the kidnapping and strangulating and then you got the Kada Scott case. And it was reported that the warrant process, it was a warrant out for the person and they were actually in the court during the same exact date, so it's like the officer is going this way, this person going that way, how do we fix that? Is there any truth to it? And how do we come up with a system in the future when a person could be flagged, they out there with a warrant for something and they do run across law enforcement? I know normally if you're detained, you get a dipsy(ph), you try to go home. How does that work in this context? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: So I'll let Commissioner Vanore, who led the investigation in the Kada Scott case. The only thing I would caution, and we're very respectful of this body, but as you know we still have an open case. I know you know -
Ongoing investigation. Say less. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: -- that. So there's some things that Frank may be able to share. I think in this case he can. But if you hear him stop and say, I can't do that, it's because of the ongoing case, but I'll let him walk through the timeline as we had it in our space. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: So looking back at what you're referencing, there was a warrant signed and put in the system. However, the court date came up. For us to know that someone has court, we got to go -- if we don't get that notification, so that's in the court system, different system, if it's not checked and there's other documents that the courts have access to, the DAs and the detectives do, but if that wasn't checked in the right time, you're not going to see that warrant. So we missed that. I wish we wouldn't have. We would have grabbed him that day. But he was in for eluding police which was a chase he was in, got caught, got arrested, and that was a court case he's in for a few minutes and he walked out. But it wasn't checked by anyone in the court system or the detectives. And I don't believe the detective was in court that day either. So we would have had to find it and go there together.
Is there a way we can come up with a system, like a computer system to bring everybody together? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: So we've been looking at some technology that could potentially do. It's very, very expensive. I mean, we're talking $2 million a subscription a year.
How much you say? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: 2 million.
You know the City of Philadelphia's budget, your boss, has a budget of $7 billion that's appropriated through Council, at least a discussion. Just letting you know. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I'm just giving you the cost.
I know. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I just was letting you know the cost involved with it. I mean, it is that technology and other technologies we're evaluating now that will make, potentially enable us to take those systems that you're describing, potentially create a database specifically around domestic. So we are walking through that process now to see what that looks like for us to purchase.
Any other states have the similar technology that you saw that has been very, very successful as a blueprint or best practice? POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: So it's an all encompassing database though. So it's not just domestic. The system takes all of the systems and then brings them into a space, depending on what you're looking to pull out. So if I put in Kevin Bethel, that would -- and everything, as long as we have access to the systems, the court system, any of those systems that we have permission can bring that information forward. So a detective sitting at the desk could hit a button or someone in the courtroom who wants to know what Kevin Bethel looks like, could hit that or my colleague here at Office of Victims Safety, if their team wanted to look at that, there's certain permissions you can have because of CHRIA and some of the limitations what they can see. So we are looking at technology that we think could help us in that process. In our interim though, we believe internally our team could develop something that could pull the domestics and those types of cases, particularly on the offender side, a little harder on the victim side, but particularly on the offender side. So we are looking at some technology that could be able to help us bring and harness this information and make it more expedient. And so, we're doing that, on that path now.
We will be willing to support it the same we supported the drones, so -- POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: It's an and, not an or.
It's an and. We won't make you pick. But in all seriousness, this is something in terms of us, I guess, being able to have our criminal justice system talk to one another in realtime, right. And it's so important that had we been talking to each other in realtime, there's a strong possibility, at least we could have been on the front end of taking a look at this particular issue. And so, if that means that's the investment that we need to do in the future to better our system, then we are willing as a group, as a body, to step up to the plate to make that happen regardless if it's 2 million or 10. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: No, no. I just want to say thank you. I mean, this is the work, right. It's about the things that we need to get it done, to accomplish the job that we're tasked to do. And so, I just want to say I appreciate that statement because we do believe we have something. I've talked to Adam Geer about it. He saw it as well, and other team members saw it as well. We believe this is a product that could help us address the issues that were raised here, not just domestics though, but across the board as it relates to being very in tune in what's going on with particular individuals.
Thank you, Mr. President. Chair recognizes Member Harrity.
Thank you, Chairman Jones. Commissioner, thank you for coming in today. Actually, thank you to all of you. It takes a very special person to run towards the gunfire when everybody else is running away. So I hope you know all the respect I have for you guys. And very sorry for the loss of Officer Chan, one of our Philadelphia heroes for sure. Just talking about the links, it seems that what we've been hearing is as everything else, it's about the data and it's about being linked to each other so there's no blind spots, as we would say, right. As far as domestic violence cases, when an officer goes to an address for domestic violence, right, and they go in there, because we've had the question asked before, because if something's pending, it's not a charge, right? You can't use that against them because there's no, you know what I'm saying, pending case or something like that. But is there a way that we can look into, say, Women Against Abuse system to see, all right, we're here today for domestic abuse for this guy. Look in the computer, all right, the Women Against Abuse says that this guy's been in three times, but every time the complainant didn't press charges, but it's still there because that's a history. That's what I'm trying to get at. How do we stop things from falling through the cracks? Because especially with domestic abuse, there's always a history of it, whether it's a history with the person that's being abused right now or if it's a prior history of abuse. Now, knowing the court system, that might have been dropped as we say, or hadn't been followed up because the couple agreed to stay away from it, they broke up, they finally got their thing to separate, whatever. But we should be able to see in realtime, like, this guy's been accused four times. That means that we got to take this a little serious. Even if he might not have been convicted those four times, the charges may have been dropped for whatever reason that is, we can see that through the computer that this guy has -- this isn't the first time he's been brought up on this stuff. He's most likely done it before and gotten away with it because for whatever reason they decided to not see each other or not go around each other anymore. But the fact of the matter is, what happens is what happens in this case where this guy was in on another case, his case wasn't even going through the system yet, and here he goes again with another case. How do we stop those blind spots? How do we get this information? And everybody, because the courts and police and the district attorney coordinating too is great. But for me, Women Against Abuse, that's the front line. That's the boots on the ground, the first people they see when they're coming to get help. I want their information because they know they have a record. It might not be, you know, complete, but they have something. They can say, hey, listen, this person's been in here numerous times, nobody just didn't press any charges on him. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: So I think walking backwards, and as it relates to coming to the courts, they have that. When they come in, they have that information in front of them. They can go into the system and see everything you described. Whether the person has been arrested, their history, so they used to be able to see that. I'll move ahead of that. We have certain triggers that we have in our process that if we're seeing in, you know, the district, the victim assistant officer is tracking that information. And so, I'll let Frank talk about what that escalation looks like. And then all of that information is being shared with our colleagues at WOAR -- I mean, not WOAR, but Women Against Abuse, to be able to walk through.
And we work with them on a regular basis where they're constantly calling us, you know what I mean, Gallagher -- where's Gallagher, here, somewhere, he's back there, but Molly and her team are constantly, you know, reaching out to us as to what they're seeing as something is amiss. But I'll let Frank talk about that escalation. And I assume my colleagues may come up to testify and can share with you more what they do with the data on their side. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: So when the district --
State your name. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: I'm sorry. Frank Vanore, Deputy Commissioner. I'm sorry. The districts, the victim assistance officers, part of their routine duties is to look for the locations that are problematic. And if they see a location, and we have a pretty advanced computer dispatch system now that it makes it pretty easy to do that, so if they have a repeat location coming, that's going to be the first flag that the Commissioner's talked about. It's going to escalate things, especially when it gets to the detectives. We see what's happening. Now, we can go back, look for -- we have video. So technology is going to play a part in this too because everybody has a Ring camera. So whatever was going on in some of those other incidents, we're going to get some evidence of that and it's going to escalate what we have. So that's important. The other part of this is the court system. Like he said, in the cases that you keep referring to, there were other cases with Mr. King and that same previous complainant, not the victim, the decedent, but were not prosecuted because she was obviously afraid and didn't go to court. So can we hold that against them legally? No. But it's definitely an indicator. It's a flag. And looking back on it, it's a scary flag because there was some of the same language in the first one as in the second one. Strangulation, broke in, she didn't show up to court and he was released and case was withdrawn.
Member Harrity, can we let the other people on the panel --
Good afternoon, President Johnson, Chair Jones, esteemed Committee members. I'm Adam Geer, the Chief Public Safety Director for the City of Philadelphia. I thank you sincerely for convening this vitally important hearing. It is our shared responsibility to do more to prevent and intervene in domestic violence and intimate partner violence, which is quite simply a matter of life and death. I have been close to this work throughout my career, including as a prosecutor in the Family Violence Sexual Assault Unit at the DA's office. I also oversaw for a time period the domestic violence cases in the Municipal Court Unit and also as a Board member of Women Against Abuse, perhaps the finest organization in the nation doing this work. They're also here to provide testimony later on. Too often, women experience stalking, harassment, manipulation, coercion, verbal abuse and physical abuse and sexual assault. Such crimes frequently repeat and escalate over time. Access to firearms makes it all more likely that the escalation becomes fatal. I'm privileged to testify here today with my colleague, Victim Advocate Adara Combs. Thank you, Council President, for your wisdom in her position. This duly-appointed and confirmed victim advocate is the right person for the right time, and she can get into a bit of her background, which brings her here today. She leads the Philadelphia Office of the Victim Advocate, which was established via Charter change legislation championed again by you, Council President, and overwhelmingly approved by Philadelphia voters. OVA is still relatively new and small, but it is mighty in punches above its weight. It fills a wide array of roles, from convener, to trainer, to subject matter expert and of course, as an advocate giving voice to the voiceless. It also quite often catches those who would otherwise fall through the cracks of a big, complex, busy system. It was not created to provide direct services, but Adara and their dedicated team always do their utmost to help those who don't know where else to go. That's why they sent the resource letters to families of homicide victims, manage relocations for those in imminent danger, oversee our crime scene cleanup program after shootings and so much more. They also collaborate closely with the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies within the city, Suzanne and her team, whose public health approach complements our public safety approach. I should note that 211, the Violence Prevention Hotline that is managed by us, they now currently have DV resources. So the citizens of Philadelphia should know those DV resources are available via 211. That's 24/7, 365. Also, if you have the app, download it. There's a pillar section and DV resources is one of the top pillars. Beyond OVA's great work, the Office of Public Safety is also working on addressing violence against women in other arenas. For example, we are working with our Division of Safe Neighborhoods, led by Shondell Revell, the newly minted doctor, to integrate this work with community violence initiatives, right. So our GVI teams will also be leaning into domestic violence strategies when they're engaging with folks, because we know that folks have these multiple issues. And so, we want to address them all, including this very important issue. We've also developed a project led by our Deputy for Grants. We brought in the Office of Public Safety and Deputy of Grants Debbie Allen, to implement systemwide data integration relating to crimes that disproportionately affect women, including domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, dating violence, human trafficking and sexual exploitation. That's a $200,000 grant opportunity that we've applied for and we are hopeful that we will receive that so we can do that work. Bottom line, our approach is all hands on deck at the Office of Public Safety. It is everyone's responsibility to do what we can do to advance this lifesaving work.
I want to say that earlier, and it's not in my written testimony, but Council testified to this culture change. We've been doing this work for some time now. For context, when I started out as a DA in early 2000s, they called the domestic violence courtroom, love court. It was openly called love court, right. Molly, I'm sure you remember that. We've come a long way and we have more work to do. There was no --
They called it love court. So it was known as love court, the domestic violence courtroom. And we fought really hard to change that, to call that out for what it was, despicable, frankly. And so, that was a vestige, right. We have more work to do though. There was also no DV waiting room. So there was a time where in the domestic violence courtroom, the accusers would have to come into the same courtroom, sometimes days or weeks after the assault and sit there. And so, that was intimidation. They would not come in. There was open intimidation. When I was a supervisor in the DA's office, we worked with the courts. They gave us a special place where our domestic violence victims report to so they no longer have to sit in the same courtroom waiting for their cases. So we can do this work. We can make these changes. We've talked a lot about strangulation. Again, I want to give some context to strangulation as a former prosecutor of these cases. When you hear strangulation, Molly and Joann and her team will talk to this, that is a big red flag when it comes to DV cases. Strangulation is a strong indicator of lethality, as we've spoken. So I want to provide that additional context and I want to provide hope. Because as I've said, we've come a long way. We've got great teams here. I've got great colleagues. We've got great advocates. We're going to testify. I thank Council for this opportunity. We've got work to do and we're going to do it. I'd like to turn it over to I believe Victim Advocate Adara Combs, so she can dig in a little bit more, unless there's a schedule change, with your permission.
Thank you. Please state your name for the record and begin your testimony.
Good afternoon. My name is Adara Combs and I'm the Victim Advocate for the City of Philadelphia. Good afternoon once more, Council President Johnson, Chair Jones as well as the other members of the Public Safety Committee. My name is again Adara Combs and I'm the Victim Advocate for the City of Philadelphia. Today we gather to discuss how we as a community, not just a city, not just city government, not just law enforcement, not just the courts and not just the District Attorney's office, we, as a community, protect victims of domestic and intimate partner violence. How we prevent the loss of life, by interrupting the cycle of escalation that has claimed far too many. It's quite interesting that today is the day for this hearing. I was looking at my phone earlier as I was on my way in. And today actually marks my years 8 with the City of Philadelphia. And 9 I came into this work much like 10 Adam Geer to be a prosecutor, which 11 is what I was for a number of 12 years. And I particularly went 13 into this line of work to prosecute 14 sexual assault and family violence 15 cases because I have an utmost passion for this work. So it's quite significant to me to be testifying today on this topic before you all. And while I sit here in my official capacity as the city's Victim Advocate, I do use that word community with great intention. Government, city systems, law enforcement, all of us can only do so much. However, it's the survivor advocates and the community-based agencies who truly provide that meaningful bridge to services, to anything that we have to offer. I echo Councilman Harrity's sentiments when he stated that quite often before any survivor comes to any of us, they're going to these organizations that are trusted in the community. It is those very individuals who provide that road to protect victims to become survivors. So to everyone in this room who has used their pain and turned it into power, who has spent their career giving it to this work, on behalf of myself and the Office of Public Safety and I believe everyone in this room, thank you for that work. Domestic violence is inclusive of more than just intimate partner violence. It engages with family violence, anything where someone is a member of a family, anywhere there is a romantic partnership. All of those things encompass domestic violence, and more specifically, intimate partner violence. It's when there's a pattern of power and control that unfolds along a continuum. It really begins with just physical abuse. Instead, it often starts with smaller acts that I think we can't ignore. Those are those red flags that DC Vanore was mentioning, those acts of intimidation, that boundary of infringement, that manipulation that often escalates to more serious things that often become lethal. Domestic and intimate partner violence is an issue that statistically impacts us all. I mean, if we look in this room and quite honestly any time this esteemed Council is convening, there is more than one person in this room that has been impacted by domestic violence, either directly or because you know somebody that has been impacted by domestic violence. So it is truly something that impacts us all. Nationally, in women and 1 in 4 men have experienced intimate partner violence. In Pennsylvania, almost 40% of women and 30% of men are impacted by this. And there are statistics that have been provided in the city where we have 33 domestic violence homicides, 22 involving guns. Commissioner Bethel mentioned that domestic violence accounts for 40% of the assaults in the city of Philadelphia. So our numbers are on par and quite scary, if I'm honest.
We also have to keep in mind that while these statistics are alarming, there are a number of people who don't come forward, either because they're fearful, because they're shamed, because they're fearful of retaliation, coercion, manipulation, and sometimes because their very life, their very next breath is hinging upon them, their ability to closet some of the things that are happening to them so they can survive to the next day. Domestic violence perpetrators often harm more than just their intimate partners. Their behavior often extends to anyone who challenges their control. And I think that's something that we need to remember as we're looking at cases and we're looking at lethality. We're not always talking about violence towards an intimate partner. We can be talking about violence towards a number of people within relation to the person that can send us red flags and signals that we need to be watching this person a bit more. They engage in stalking, harassment, threats, property damage, firearms offenses and many other acts. And while on the face those things might not appear to be domestic violence as we conceptualize them, I think it's important that we think outside of the box when it comes to these types of situations, because it can prevent tragedies. And also, when we create hierarchies based off of these types of cases, we have to keep that in mind as well. If you're going to look at cases and create a system of identifying which cases you're going to "pay more attention to," you have to think outside of the box or else you're going to miss a number of cases that could have sent up red flags within your system. Protecting domestic violence survivors in Philadelphia does mean recognizing behaviors and understanding their interconnectivity, taking meaningful steps for early intervention and paying attention to those early warning signs, even though they may not be traditional. In the context of keeping our community safe, we have to understand that domestic and intimate partner violence may not fit into categories that we think about them in. At the Office of Victim Advocate, we are currently working with a number of community members, mostly women, who have not even been in romantic relationships with individuals who have violated them, but the red flags are absolutely there. They experience escalating threats, escalating violence, and then we learn later on that there was domestic violence in that person's history. I'm grateful that through our collective work with the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies and organizations like Women Against Abuse, Lutheran Settlement House, Women in Transition and every other organization that does this work, we're able to capture those individuals and advocate for them daily, because otherwise their voices and their lives very well could have been lost. Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in court, and I was quite honestly alarmed by the amount of cases that were dismissed -- there was no contact with individuals -- that were not successfully handled in that given day as we sat there because the red flags were missed. Quite honestly, one of the cases I was there to help someone with was one of those cases actually. As we've heard from our cross-departmental colleagues, we know that there's many layers to listening, seeing, validating and protecting domestic violence survivors and other members of our community that are harmed by this predatory behavior, but there's much more we can actually be doing. Too often when lethality becomes a headline, we rush, we offer prayers, condolences, our well wishes, our support on the back end of things. But the real question is, what could we have done to prevent this from ever happening.
What could we have done to recognize those early signs, to respond to those quiet outcries, provide nonjudgmental, accessible, protective support, make meaningful investments in survivor safety and dismantle the way that our system quite honestly is weaponized often against the individuals it's meant to protect. In the very simplest form, just listening to what was said today, a few things that I've identified and I've jotted down in my notes are, you know, we can equip complainants with a copy of their stay-away order. There's no 23 reason for us to have a stay-away order on record with three triplicate copies. I used to be a prosecutor. I know that we signed three of them. Why we can't give somebody a copy of that to empower them with at least that one document that is meant to keep somebody away from them. There is a way to provide power behind that. How do we increase the likelihood of court attendance? By meaningful communication. I don't think I just speak for myself. I think I speak for a number of people in this room when I say that meaningful, effective communication goes a long way when ensuring someone comes to court. If they're constantly called by somebody different and their case is constantly assigned to somebody different, what trust are they building with anybody? When I come to court and I don't even know who's going to represent my interest that day because the person I spoke to yesterday is not that person. There are things that we can do to increase the likelihood of people coming into court. How do we ensure that victims are getting their questions answered? You know, one of the phone calls we frequently get in our office, and I actually feel bad for our Deputy Director Heather Arias back there, because she's often the person fielding those calls, is people saying I've been calling, no one is answering. What is the use of a phone number on a website, on a pamphlet, on a business card if no 20 one is answering it? I've had members from my staff, just as a social experiment for lack of other words, or I guess a professional experiment really, call numbers that are listed on certain sites, and there's often no one on the other end of that phone call. How do people get their questions answered if no one is answering the phone? How do we use the resources that are heavily available to us to empower victims? Because there are certain resources that go underutilized within our system that could be utilized to empower victims if we utilize them and actually train people to use them. How do we ensure that cases that have a likelihood of lethality that could lead to something more serious, that have those red flags, even if they're not gun cases, even if they're not something where someone was shot or anything like that, how do we ensure that those cases are being handled by people that actually know how to handle them? When I was in court yesterday, I was actually quite alarmed at, I guess I'll say, disequal advantage on the sides of the courtroom, just based on the lack of training that was apparent to me. How do we dismantle some of the fictions that exist in our courtrooms? As an attorney, and anyone who's in this room that is an attorney, we know that the legal fiction that exists in Philadelphia where cases mark must be tried after the first listing is not rooted in anything real. It is something we do in Philadelphia, and quite honestly, it disenfranchises victims from ever coming to court. Why don't victims come to court on that first listing? It's probably because they're afraid, retaliation, fear coming into a courthouse, shame. Sitting in a courtroom with the person that hurt you can be a very scary experience. I might not want to do that either. And I think I'm a pretty strong person.
But when I don't come to court that first time, and maybe I want to come that second time, to hear that my absence that first time, which could be conceptually explained if we think about the trauma that domestic violence survivors face, to hear that my case was marked must be tried based on absolutely nothing can be quite disparaging. So what can we do to continue to change the culture? While we might not call it love court anymore, there are practices at play that disenfranchise domestic violence survivors each and every day in our court system. When we talk about keeping domestic violence survivors safe and preventing them from becoming homicide victims, we are sometimes required to provide literal safe places for those individuals to be. And I'm very proud to say that my office has created a relocation program in order to do that. We work with a lot of our city partners. We work with the shelter system. We work with the District Attorney's office to provide relocation support, so that when victims are in situations where they're in imminent danger, we're able to relocate them to safety. To date, in 2025 we've relocated 45 domestic violence survivors to temporary safe spaces. That's actually a 246% increase from last year. We relocated 31 survivors to permanent housing. And that's an 82% increase from last year. Now, those numbers are increasing because of awareness and training among agencies. I'm proud to say that my office, Heather Arias, as well as our relocation coordinator, because we do have a dedicated relocation coordinator for this purpose, have trained almost all of the domestic violence organizations that are in this room 12 and beyond. But beyond relocation, we partner daily with city and community-based agencies to ensure that this work is done. Our work recognizes that our public safety strategies have to complement the public health strategies that are coming out of my colleague Azucena Ugarte's office, the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies, and quite honestly, they can't be separated. If you're talking about public safety, you have to be talking about the most intimate type of violence we see in our community. So we couple our approaches to make sure that we're being as holistic as possible. Through our work, we connect survivors to domestic violence organizations like Women Against Abuse, Lutheran Settlement House, Women in Transition, Congreso and WOAR. We work with other city agencies in the implementation of a lot of different policies. To name a few, we've worked with the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies, the Police Department, the Sheriff's Department and the First Judicial District as well as Women Against Abuse on the implementation of Act 79, which I'm sure you've heard a number of times today and you'll hear more, but it's essentially to make sure that when a PFA is in place, that the firearm is relinquished. Now, I know there are some obstacles through talking to our partners at the police department with the implementation of that. There are other jurisdictions that do things a little different and quite honestly could be more effective, but we do partner to make sure that we are getting as many firearms as possible. We identify systemic barriers within the police department and we work with them daily. I think I've called every single Deputy Commissioner up here, including the Commissioner, with issues relating to domestic violence. And every single time we make that phone call, there is something that comes of it, both short-term and long-term. We work with them and the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies to identify training opportunities and we support those opportunities whenever possible. We've worked with the First Judicial District and the District Attorney's office and Probation on Act 71 implementation, which is essentially the act that allows for a more robust opportunity for victims to be heard at certain hearings, including bail.
Now, we've been talking about bail a lot today. And I think it's important to note that for domestic violence cases specifically, if there's a bail adjustment that's going to be made, that person needs to not only be aware but have an opportunity to be heard, because who better to know what type of coercion, what type of threats, what type of fear, what type of safety concerns exist outside of the person who's on the other side of the case. Nobody's more equipped to know that information, and they quite honestly might not have had an opportunity or an avenue to share it with anyone outside of being in that courtroom. So the implementation of that program has been instrumental, and I'm very proud of the work that we were able to do. We've increased the amount of victims that received notification of offender release. So just a point of education, the state Office of the Victim Advocate has a system where if someone is released from prison or they escape, they make notification to victims so that way they know. You can't imagine how empowering it is for specifically a domestic violence survivor to know that their offender is getting out or that their offender escaped. And you also cannot imagine how disparaging it can be and how frustrating it can be for those things to happen and they not receive notification. It was brought to our attention by the state OVA office that quite honestly Philadelphia's numbers were dismal. For whatever reason, we were not registering individuals at the level in which we should have. I'm proud to say that through our partnership with the District Attorney's office, we were able to clear a backlog of 1200 cases since 2023, I believe, to get those individuals registered, and also make sure that there are systems in place so that moving forward, they continue to be registered. Also, we've worked with the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies for a number of years to make sure that our Sexual Assault Response Center is funded for the first time through city dollars. And that investment was made in this fiscal year. And that is the only Sexual Assault Response Center in the City of Philadelphia that provides medical care, treatment and evidence collection for sexual assault responses. Prior to this year 2025, the City of Philadelphia has never made an investment in that vital lifesaving program. Through our own office, we provide a resource guide to individuals to make sure that they are equipped with the actual information as they walk through the world. So if they do want to reach out to any of those organizations I've mentioned, they have that information at their fingertips. We support individuals seeking address confidentiality, specifically vital and domestic violence cases through the state Office of the Victim Advocate. And through my work as a commissioner, I'm able to make sure -- a commissioner on the state level, I'm sorry, I'm able to ensure that resources are continuing to be poured into Philadelphia as it pertains to this issue and any issue related to the criminal justice system. Now, all of this -- I know I've said a lot. All of this reflects our commitment, but our work is far from complete. Every single day we hear survivors tell us stories about how the system wronged them, how they talked to somebody and their words fell on deaf ears. We cannot wait until life is lost to decide that we want to act. And while I appreciate this body convening today, we are far too late. We have lost too many people to this issue. And again, I am appreciative to each and every Councilmember that has pushed this through. And, Council President Johnson, I am appreciative for you putting this legislation through, but we're too late. We have a lot of work to do. And I do believe that there are a number of things that we can do to ensure that we continue to uplift the needs of domestic violence survivors and we continue to underscore, highlight, bold, italicize their needs.
I think that a collaboration with accountability attached to the points of earlier testimonies would be vital. I'm encouraged by the initiatives that have been discussed through the District Attorney's office. I'm encouraged by the lethality assessment that's going to be implemented next year by the Police Department. But I will say that some of our initiatives are still operating in silos. Councilmember Lozada, my ears perked up when you mentioned if the courts would be included in certain conversations. I know that my office has not been included in certain conversations. And I don't say that in a way to point fingers or anything of the sort, as much as it is for me to say that we cannot continue to talk about how we're uplifting things and we're doing this and we're doing that if we're not bringing everybody to the table. There is no one entity funded by the City of Philadelphia or any other entity for that matter that can do this work alone. So the question is, how will we come together, to bring our resources together, to talk about what the issues are, to talk about what we can share and what we can't share. Councilmember Harrity, you mentioned sharing information. And while certain information can't be shared due to confidentiality and the sensitivity of victim information, we can certainly do a better job. So how do we get those MOUs in place so that we can talk to each other. How do we get those conversations started so we can work on collaborative solutions. And also, this conversation would be remiss, to be quite honest, if we didn't talk about the lack of resourcing to our agencies that do this work. I've heard over the course of the day people talking about the need for money for city agencies. And while I appreciate that, there is a need for money in this corridor of the Council chamber that cannot be overstated at all. The fact that we continue to lean on and call and pick up that phone, Councilmember Lozada, to say, we need, we want, can you do, but we do not properly resource these organizations is quite honestly embarrassing. The fact that some of these organizations, and you'll hear from them themselves so I won't necessarily state them directly, have had to lay off staff, have had to close their doors, have had to put out statements saying that if we don't get X, we will have to close. It's embarrassing for a city that claims to want to uplift the needs of domestic violence survivors. So the unpredictable nature of funding is something that we have to address if we want to properly resource these organizations. And we cannot sit here and we cannot claim that we want to do everything if we're not doing something for them as well. )
So we up here, we listen for a living. And you can always tell in the testimony people who know their stuff, who are closest to the pain. And we could tell. You didn't look down at your paper for the last seven minutes. It came straight from the muscle, from the heart --
It was 15. And we can tell the difference. If people have pie charts and all of that but haven't committed it to their very essence, we know the difference. So you do realize that we're going to ask President Johnson to voluntold you to be a part of whatever work group that we have. Because, no, really we heard more solutions in the last minutes. 13 It's not -- you could 14 tell you're weaving in between the 15 silos and you're seeing what is needed in each. And we realize we got hit over the head with the fact that, you know, it's going to cost us some more money. President is okay with it, but every one of you weaved it in like you want us to solve this, we need more money, and rightfully so. If we care about a thing, we need to fund a thing. But I appreciate it. So did I hear you say that you are a part of some of those silo group meetings to figure this thing out or not?
So there are some that my office is represented in, but there are some that we are not represented in. So I think it's a mixed bag. In case you didn't hear, my office works with the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies almost every single day. I think I talk to Azucena every day. And outside of that, we work with the organizations that do this work on a very regular basis. However, there are some, unfortunately, city-based convenings that are not as inclusive. And I hope that through this convening we're able to break down some of these silos. Because again, I do believe that that's the only way we get this work done. But also, I do think that there does need to be some accountability to make sure that that happens. While my office may not be the office to create that accountability, we will certainly be willing to work with Council to make sure that happens. And also, to go back to what you were saying, Councilman Jones, Council President Johnson doesn't have to voluntold me. I will volunteer myself because this work is very meaningful to me. And as I stated, I started my career 15 years ago to do this exact work. So whatever it is that you need from me, my staff and my office, and I think I speak for Adam, our Chief Public Safety Director, we stand ready to do whatever is needed.
We appreciate your testimony and have taken that into account. Councilwoman Lozada.
Thank you so much for your testimony and thank you for sharing some of the examples of what we can do right now. I think that often times the commonsense stuff is the stuff that is the most challenging, right, because not everyone is capable or not everyone has some common sense, right. I just want to say this for the record, right. I know this is going to cost us money, right. And often times we allocate dollars for certain programs and we ask some of these groups to do some of this very important work and then we fail to pay them, right. And so, Council President, I say that because I need us to understand, because there are some groups here who I have advocated for myself, right, who say we can't continue this way, we need to do this important work, right. We have departments that are saying they recognize that things have to be prioritized differently, but we need to be a government that prioritizes paying our providers to be able to help us do this very necessary work so that there is no Kada Scott in the future, right, so that there is no 14 Linda Rios in the future, right. Yes, communication is extremely important. Everyone needs to be at the table, but everyone needs to be able to get paid for the work that they're doing in order to make it happen. Who serves PFAs and how are they served? And what are some of the challenges that we experience when they're being served? And who protects the victim when the PFA is served? Because I have heard many times that victims have challenges getting PFAs. I've heard I'm afraid the PFA is going to be served today, but it wasn't served today. It was served two days later. I don't know what my situation is. No one is talking to me or the PFA is served and there is no safety mechanisms in place, and I'm walking around here in the city, trying to get to and from work and trying to live my daily life, but my perpetrator is still out there on the loose. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: I mean, PFAs, some are done right there in the courtroom, right. But many of them will come into our space where they will call for a police officer to serve that PFA and then we will put forth a significant level of effort to serve that PFA. Sometimes it can be very challenging, depending whether the person is transient where we're not able to serve it, but we work diligently to make sure that those are accomplished. I don't have any specific data on that. I can follow up with you, but -- Fran wants to come and add more context.
If we can in the future, I'm just curious to know how many PFAs do we serve annually, right? What are some of those challenges? You just mentioned, Commissioner, that some of them are challenging. What's challenging about them, right, other than this person, you know, I'm just going to assume, right, that the perpetrator is a person that's kind of transitional? He transitions from one neighborhood to the other, depending on what his, profession, other profession is, right. And so, I'm just curious to know. Because when I've talked to victims, and I have friends who have domestic violence organizations, I have friends who work in domestic violence organizations, and PFAs are one of the things that have often come up that are challenging. And so, I'm just curious to know how many and why is this so challenging? And what do we do as part of this prioritizing? What do we do to make that better, make it easier and make the victim feel safer? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER HEALY: I'll do the best I can to answer all those questions. Fran Healy, Deputy Commissioner of Chief of Staff. With respect to the PFAs, the individuals have to go get the PFA. And then there's two ways they could be served. Normally, the primary service is through the Sheriff's Office as part of their function. But the victims can also come to the police department to have their PFA served as well. When we serve a PFA, what you mentioned is very much the problem, trying to get the body. You got to really touch the individual so you can get it. But under the Civil Rules of Procedure, I don't necessarily have to touch the individual all the time. If I give it -- their house where he lives and it's an adult there, I can serve it there. The issue for service is incredibly important for the victim because that's what allows the case to move forward. So the issue is if they can't serve it, then that next hearing has to be continued until service can be made. So we go to great length to make sure the service can be made, either by in person or by one of the alternate means that are in the Rules of Civil Procedure. So we do the best we can. But that is some of the problem. The issue, the problem, they see us coming down the street, they run away. So it's very hard for us to serve that order, but we do our best to try to get the -- like I said, we don't have to actually grab him to have the service if we know where he lives, we know where he works. I mean, those are other alternate ways that we can do service. But that is the problem we see from a lot of victims. They'll come to us and like I said, we've always served orders. But under Act 79 just recently passed, it mandates that the Philadelphia or local police will serve orders as well, but we've always done that in addition with the Sheriff's Office. So that's never been a big problem for us. But the issue is getting the individual -- often times they're not there by the time the victim comes back.
Thank you. Is language access an issue, play an issue in serving PFAs in helping victims in the court systems, in helping relocate -- is language access an issue? And if so, what are we doing to respond to it?
So while I can't speak to the language access issue in terms of serving PFAs, in terms of providing victim services, both in court and outside of court it can be challenging in the courtroom, I will say. Outside of court, we do have a language line, and a number of our organizations do have bilingual advocates. But with that being said, resourcing would allow us to hire more. But in courtrooms, it can be quite frustrating. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the fact that there are interpreters that are paid by the court system to come in and provide interpretation services. However, there aren't enough of them. So when I was a prosecutor, there's very common where you can be in one courtroom and have the interpreter, and then the other courtroom can be waiting for hours. And by that time, people have to leave, people have child care issues. The police may have to do something, etc. So it does cause a lot of delays. And then there's also issues in terms of accessibility to certain languages. Our most commonly spoken languages of course are available. For our less commonly spoken languages, there can be barriers, especially when you're talking about in the actual courtrooms. I've had cases continued because the interpreter was not available. And how discouraging is it to have a complainant come to court ready to testify, mustering up that strength to do so, only to be told because of an administrative thing, nothing to the fault of them, the case can't go forward because no one's there to interpret in their language. POLICE COMMISSIONER BETHEL: Just a follow-up to your -- I think we do have to take a look though based on what you described. And when we're talking about this continuum and all of it, we'll take a look on our side as it relates to PFA, how well we're doing with that, are there some issues. I'm sure we can talk to some of our partners in the room 6 who can give us some insight as well. So we will take a look at that as well.
I appreciate that. It's one of the things that most often comes up when talking to the victim, especially in my district office. They're afraid to go to the police district. They don't know when or how or who's going to protect me when this person is getting served, right. And so, it's just another one of those things that we need to look at as we try to prioritize and make the system better. We need to make sure that we remember to include that part of the puzzle. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER HEALY: Just to touch on that very quickly, some orders come with just a protection or abuse order. Some of them also come with an eviction order. Sometimes the judge will say the individual has to be removed from the house and those orders there will assist in removing the individual from the house so the victim becomes somewhat safer. But you raise a very good point. Once we're gone, there's nothing stopping individuals from coming back. So, yeah, we will see what we can do better on that back end aspect.
Does the PFA expire? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER HEALY: Pardon me?
Does it have an expiration date? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Yeah, it expires. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER HEALY: Oh, yes.
Up to three years? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER HEALY: Well, let's clarify. There's an emergency order, there's a temporary order and then there's a final order. The final order goes for three years. That's after you've had the opportunity to go to court, see the judge, they can issue a final order. If you go down tonight, late night, you'll get an emergency order until the next business day. And then you can also get a temporary order, which I think is five days. And so, hearings will be set out differently. So it's not three years automatically. You'll get an emergency order if you go down there in the middle of the night, on the holiday or you can go down on a normal day, you may get a five-day order, I believe. That may be a little wrong, but it's a shorter term until you get to court. And then once you have that hearing, you can ultimately get a three-year PFA order.
Thank you, Member Lozada. Before I turn it over to President Johnson, you might want to be prepared for the ICE issue as it relates to domestic violence, people in fear of being deported and almost captive to the violence. And we need to have interpreters and people who understand different cultures and racism to be able to be prepared for that level of domestic violence. Chair recognizes Member Johnson, President.
No. I just want to thank everybody for their testimony on the panel. And then also, Adam Geer, I want to make sure we will follow up on next steps in terms of making sure all the partners are at the next follow-up meeting to this hearing to talk about a long-term strategy and making sure what we can do to make sure everybody at least is on the same page. And I know it's tough, as you mentioned, Commissioner. When you work in silos, it takes more work for everybody to be rowing in the same direction, right, because it takes a certain level of coordination. It takes a certain level of I would say even philosophical approaches being on the same page, to be quite frank with you, right. But we're going to make sure that at least we get everybody inside the same room and we have to focus on the reset in terms of how we move forward. So just want to say thank you.
Thank you all for your testimony. It has been insightful, to say the least. Thank you. Ms. Stack, can you please read the next group of witnesses to testify.
Nyisha Chapman, Azucena Ugarte and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Thank you for your patience. Please be seated. We're going to go with Ms. Chapman. Can you state your name for the record and begin your testimony.
Thank you. Greetings, Chair, members of the Committee and distinguished guests. My name is Nyisha Chapman and I serve as the President of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.
Our organization is dedicated to advocating on behalf of Black women and girls through leadership development, education and economic empowerment and the advancement of equitable public policy. At the core of our mission is the unwavering commitment to protect the lives, the dignity and the well-being of the women and girls we currently serve. Today's hearing strikes at the heart of that mission. We are here because far too many sisters are living and dying at the intersection of violence, vulnerability and systematic failure. Domestic violence is not just a private crisis, it's a public safety issue, a public health issue in a matter of justice. And when the systems charged with protecting victims fall short, the consequences are devastating. And as we've noticed recently, sometimes even fatal. The truth was heightened due to the tragic murder that was recently captured of Ms. Kada Scott, a young woman whose life was stolen way too young. This does not reflect an isolated incident. It reflects a pattern of missed signals, delayed interventions and gaps in coordination within the justice system. As an organization that stands for advocacy, accountability and empowerment, we cannot allow this story or any other countless stories to be in vain. Ms. Scott's story will serve as a catalyst for meaningful change. Domestic violence victims often rely on the courts, the Sheriff's Office, the District Attorney's Office and the Philadelphia Police Department to keep them safe during their most vulnerable moments. Yet when these systems are fragmented, underresourced and inconsistent in their response, the very institutions that are meant to protect them yet -- excuse me, meant to protect them become yet another barrier to their safety. Our chapter has heard from other survivors, has supported families and stood with communities that have been traumatized by domestic violence. And the message is very clear: Our systems have to do better. We are calling for stronger protections, more efficient coordination between agencies, timely enforcement of restraining orders, trauma-enforced responses, improved victim communication and greater investment in prevention and support services. Every department that is represented in this hearing today plays a critical role in protecting lives and every lapse can cost a young woman her life. To improve safety outcomes for victims of domestic violence, we're urging the committee and all partners to prioritize stronger interagency coordination and information sharing, timely enforcement of protection from abuse orders and warrants as well as consistent trauma-informed responses across all departments, clear proactive communication with victims throughout the legal process, increased investment in prevention and survivor support as well as community-based services. Each agency represented today plays a critical role in preventing tragedies like the one the city recently experienced. Strengthening these systems is not only a matter of policy, it is a moral imperative. On behalf of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Pennsylvania Chapter, our members and our Board, I urge this committee to take bold, immediate action to strengthen the policies and practices that safeguard victims of abuse. We must honor Ms. Scott by ensuring her death leads to meaningful change, accountability and a renewed commitment to the safety of Black women and girls in the city of Philadelphia. I want to thank you all for the opportunity to speak today and your willingness to address this issue.
Thank you for your testimony and thank you for your advocacy from your organization. I tell some of the male organizations all the time we got to keep up. You're running circles around us on the issues. And it's not just traditional issues. You are moving outside of your comfort zone to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves. So thank you for that. Madam Sheriff. SHERIFF BILAL: Good afternoon.
Good afternoon. SHERIFF BILAL: Good afternoon, Council President, Chairman, Councilwoman Lozada and distinguished guests. I am Sheriff Rochelle Bilal for the City and County of Philadelphia. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the City of Philadelphia's your response to domestic violence, No. 250927, and the critical role played by the Sheriff's Office in protecting victims and enforcing accountability. Domestic violence is not simply a private matter. As a survivor of domestic violence, it is a public issue. Every protection from abuse order served, every weapon lawfully removed and every offender held accountable represents life potentially saved. The Sheriff's Office stands on the front line of that responsibility. Under Pennsylvania Act 79, the Sheriff's Office is charged with enforcing firearm relinquishments in domestic violence cases. This means our deputies are not only serving protections from abuse orders, they are also ensuring that individuals who are legally prohibited from possessing firearms actually surrender those weapons. That responsibility is serious, complex and often dangerous, but it is essential to preventing future acts of violence. Over the last year, we have taken major steps to strengthen how the Sheriff's Office fulfills that responsibility. I want to recognize the outstanding leadership of Inspector Nobles who is here with me today. And let me apologize because I didn't introduce everybody that's here with me today. We have Tyriq El-Shabazz, who is Head of my Legal Unit, Chief of Staff Jamison Rogers, Deputy Sheriff Sean Thornton who is over all the courts, Inspector Hans, Inspector Nobles, Warrant Unit; and Special Events Inspector Perez. Now, I'll get back to this. Under Pennsylvania Act 79 the Sheriff's Office is charged with enforcing firearm relinquishment in domestic violence cases. This means our deputies are not only serving protection from abuse orders, they're also ensuring that individuals who are legally prohibited from possessing firearms actually surrender those weapons. That responsibility is serious, complex and often dangerous, but it is essential for to preventing future violence. Over the last year, we have taken major steps to strengthen how the Sheriff's Office fulfills that responsibility. After recognizing who is over the Warrant Unit, the Warrant Unit is tasked with all the PFA enforcement, from serving protection orders to also gun relinquishments. That used to be under our Civil Unit, but we actually made it the Warrant Unit and Inspector Nobles is all of that, and in particular Sergeant Robert Hunisch, who was tasked with building and leading our Domestic Violence Task Force from the ground up. Since its launch, the Domestic Violence Task Force has handled more than 3500 protection from abuse orders, executed thousands of warrants connected to protection orders, completed over 200 court-ordered evictions tied with domestic violence cases. These are not just numbers. These are families, protected survivors, supporters and dangerous individuals removed from the situations where further harm could occur. Within the task force's first month, Sergeant Hunisch implemented major operational reforms to ensure full Act 79 compliance, improve efficiency and strengthen integrity and coordination. These improvements include this: Creating teams to manage workload and increase accountability, establishing a dedicated task force email to streamline communications with law enforcement and judicial partners, assigning liaison deputies to both the Philadelphia Police Gun Permit Unit and Family Court Domestic Violence Unit to close their communications gaps, coordinate directly with Managing Director's Office and the Department of Domestic Violence Strategies to improve firearm surrender and weapon relinquishment procedures.
Joining the Act 79, Council, where our deputies now assist in training Philadelphia police officers at headquarters on proper PFA service and firearm surrender, implementing new inperson service procedure for final protection orders involving firearm relinquishment, conducting monthly After Action Reviews to assess performance and identify improvement opportunities, developing a full domestic violence task force training curriculum available both virtually and in person to ensure our deputies have specialized expertise in this work. These reforms have transformed how the Sheriff's Office engages with domestic violence enforcement. We are no 9 longer operating as a passive service agency. We are now an active coordinator, public safety partner in the city's domestic violence response network. Our deputies see firsthand the fear victims live with, the danger of unsecured firearms and the emotional toll these cases carry. This work requires precision, compassion, unwavering commitment to public safety. The men and women of the Sheriff's Office perform this duty every day with professionalism and courage. Let me be clear. We do not view Act 79 as a paperwork requirement. We view it as a lifesaving law and we are committed to enforcing it fully and consistently. The Sheriff's Office stands ready to continue working with City Council, the courts, police department and our domestic violence advocacy partners to strengthen enforcement, expand training and improve outcomes for survivors across Philadelphia. Thank you for your time, for your continued support and for your shared commitment to protecting the most vulnerable members of our city.
Thank you for your testimony. But in addition, I want to thank you for your team's involvement in the law enforcement continuum of the city. You go way above and beyond what your mandate is and I've seen you -- I won't go into -- in the city's worst day, and I won't go in specifics, you and your team stepped up and volunteered to be a part of the solution. And I'll never, ever forget that, and I appreciate what you do. A couple of questions before I turn it over to my colleagues. So when you guys serve these PFAs, it is a highly-charged emotional time, one of the most dangerous times because people are acting out on emotion, acting out on kind of compassion. I asked this of the police, I asked this of you, what is your standard operating procedure as you serve a PFA? And how do you determine if a firearm is to be removed? And what processes do you go through to take that firearm? SHERIFF BILAL: Nobles. Inspector Nobles is our inspector over the Warrant Unit and all the special units. And because we took the PFAs from just the civil part, the Warrant Unit is the ones that are now serving and getting gun relinquishment. And she'll tell you what we do professionally. INSPECTOR NOBLES: Good morning.
Good morning. State your name for the record. INSPECTOR NOBLES: Inspector nobles of the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office around all the specialized units. When we first get a PFA, the first thing we do is run it through NCIC and all the other particular things that we have. CLIR(ph) tells us where someone is living, where they're using their Social Security number, things of that nature. We also have access to courts where we can look up their court history. So we do all this work before we even go out. We make sure we go on JNET. We get their picture, we get their driver's license, history. Once we get to the location, we usually have two deputies if it's not an eviction. If it's an eviction or if they need to get a weapon, then we send more deputies. Every PFA don't come with weapon relinquishment. Once we get there, if the person is there, then we're serving the individual. Usually it's not an issue because they've already left their house and they're giving us a different address to go to. If we don't have that address where they moved to, then that's a different story. If it's a gun relinquishment, we go through NCIC and we look up to find out have they had any weapons, was any weapons sold, where could they have been before we go there. Once we get there, they have to hand over the weapons to us right then. If they're saying that they don't have any weapons even though we know they do, then we'll have them sign some paperwork and we send it over to PPD where they'll handle and investigate any weapons.
When you say investigating, so we arrived at the house, allegedly there are supposed to be weapons within the house. They say there's not. You hand it off to? INSPECTOR NOBLES: PPD.
And they come back and search the house? SHERIFF BILAL: When we get the weapon, when we go there and they say they don't have any weapon, they have to sign an affidavit basically stating that they have no weapons, and then we go back and we find out that they do have weapons. Then PPD starts a criminal investigation, because now they done violated the law by signing the affidavit that said that they have no weapons. So now it becomes a criminal investigation. And under the Philadelphia Police Department Detective Division, they will start that investigation to arrest them for lying on an affidavit in reference to the weapons. And if they need to, they'll go back in and search the place with a search warrant.
So there is a gap at times from the affidavit to the investigation, that a weapon might still be in the house, not to mention not registered weapons, stolen weapons and things like that -- we have to tighten that up, guys. There's red flag laws that when someone makes a threat that we should be able, with a judge's sanction, go right in, search the house and remove any threat of weapons because these things happen often spontaneously, out of emotion. And so, yeah, you came by, he signed an affidavit. He didn't get evicted and she's still there -- SHERIFF BILAL: But that's in the case where there's not an eviction order, because most of the time PFAs are served -- it don't ask for a gun relinquishment or it doesn't include an eviction. Because most of the time the person has already left, and now, we have to locate them to serve them that PFA. But if they have a gun and they sign that affidavit, now it's a criminal investigation and then the detectives will take it from there. Now, if we had a warrant to search the property, we would go in and search the property. But we don't have that warrant right then and there, because evidence has to be that there is actually a gun on that property. Because somebody says it doesn't make it so. So there needs to be enough evidence for us to get a warrant to go in to seize whatever guns, and normally that's under the investigation of PPD.
Thank you, Sheriff Bilal and to your team for being here as well. You mentioned that when you get the order for the PFA to be served, you run this person through a system and you check to see if there are potential weapons in that home. Why do we wait to get to that home and ask the individual to sign the affidavit before we actually request paperwork, right, to be able to say, okay, I'm going to go to this house, this system says that there's weapons in this home, in this residence, I'm getting ready to serve a PFA. I'm going to offer this individual the opportun -- I'm going to ask him, do you have weapons in this home. And if so, what happens, I don't know but I'm asking you, right. But if this person says no to you at that point, why are we not proactively prepared to search the home if the systems in the past have told us that there are warrants there? I'm not really sure. I'm asking the process. INSPECTOR NOBLES: That would be a law that needs to be changed with a PFA. We don't have a search warrant with it. So if we need to enter someone's home, we need a search warrant.
I understand that, right. What I'm saying is if you went into the system and the system is telling you that this individual has a history of abuse, has a history of gun charges or there's weapons in the home, right, why don't we go to that home prepared, right, and not necessarily execute the warrant if the person says, yes, there are weapons here and I'm honestly responded to your affidavit or to your question? But if the person says no to you and he signed the affidavit why are we not ready? SHERIFF BILAL: That's a legal question.
I don't know if that's a legal -- SHERIFF BILAL: That's a legal question. That means we'd be going in a whole lot of your houses and you don't want us there. That's a legal question. UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: First of all, good afternoon. I'm Tyriq El-Shabazz. I'm the UnderSheriff. Very interesting question. However, that question is protected by the Constitution. In order to go into someone's house, we have to provide factors or facts to a magistrate or to a judge. That judge reviews it and finds out or determines whether or not there is what they call probable cause. That means whether or not there's enough in those facts to allow you to get a warrant to go into that person's house. The fact that someone says someone has a gun, it doesn't make the gun illegal and it doesn't, in fact -- let me be clear, we confiscate legal and illegal guns if we get illegal guns. But normally, there are guns where people have them registered or they have a license to carry. If a person has that and, in fact, they tell us we don't, we use the affidavit. But because someone makes the allegations that someone had a gun and that part is checked on the affidavit for probable cause or the affidavit that has us serve the PFA, it doesn't mean that we have enough to go into the house. So it sounds like there's a break, but the computer checks that Inspector Nobles is talking about are not checks that take a long time. In fact, we get it, we run those checks and then they design how they're going to go in. The computer checks are two ways: One, to see if, in fact, the person has a gun. If they have a license to carry a gun, then we know that we're going to go and ask for that gun. If, in fact, they say they don't have it or they gave it to a friend -- and part of the PFA in a gun relinquishment, for lack of a better term, the person doesn't have to give the gun to the Sheriff. The person can actually, if they're licensed to carry a gun and they had no reason not to possess a gun, they can give a gun to a member of their family, they can turn the gun into the police department. And in some instances, they can turn the gun on loan, into a gun shop. They don't have to necessarily give it up. They have to get rid of it so that they no 6 longer have possession of that weapon. All of those are factors that go in. And in fact, the hardest part of PFAs, the hardest part of gun relinquishment, the hardest part of the protections is trying to balance between constitutional rights, trying to balance between statutes that don't allow certain things to happen and those protections that people need. So we just don't have enough at that stage to get a judge to sign a warrant to have that search warrant done.
Understood. And what is the time lapse between the fact that the system said that there was a gun, I went to serve the PFA, he signs he doesn't have the affidavit and then you come back and turn it over to the police so that the police can then get the search warrant to then actually enter the home to search for the gun? What's the time? UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: It's hard to say that. Because once we give it to the police, the detectives start to work on it. That investigation can be swift or that investigation could be a little bit long. In fact, I would submit that the police department is probably the better agency to ask that. But it doesn't happen as quickly in that regard because the investigation has to yield facts that will allow a judge to feel comfortable enough that constitutional rights are protected and that person's right to be safe is protected and therefore give that warrant out. That part of the law, unfortunately, we're not going to have that changed, as it's constitutionally. But there are parts of the statute that we can ask to be changed. And part of the partners, one of the things that the Sheriff wanted to submit as a good ask is a relationship with state legislators. See, there's state statutes that prohibit certain things in the protection of the Second Amendment. Once you talk about taking people's guns, everybody go crazy -- not everybody, but some people go crazy. At the end of the day when you begin to address that particular issue, there are nuances that you can have in the law, in a statute, returning guns, for example. If a PFA is withdrawn and it's withdrawn without prejudice, which means somebody can bring that PFA back, there is no 6 reason in the statute to prevent the person that's accused of being a violent person from getting their gun legally back. We run it, we make sure that there's no warrant so there's nothing on it that will prohibit that, but that person is then, based on the statute, allowed to get their gun back. We are trying to work right now with the judges, because the judges are following the statute, we are following the judge's order. And we're asking them you know factors that may have occurred in that courtroom, you know factors that occurred in that PFA, things that we don't know. We can search for the things legally, but what happened in the courtroom is something different. Sometimes a victim will say I want to withdraw. But if she's standing there by herself and somebody is standing there with an attorney and she accused that person, I don't know why she's withdrawing. The judge is then looking at those factors. And if a judge says, I'm going to allow you to withdraw that PFA but without prejudice, it seems to me in my legal intellect, there are some things that maybe he's not sure about. Because if he says with prejudice, that means you can't bring it back again. If he says without prejudice, that means you can bring it back again. Well, what were the things -- flags, I hear this red flag -- what were the things that had you say without prejudice. Was it because she wasn't represented, was it because there was something said, was it because of what you saw. But the statute would not allow the judge of his own admission without factors in the record to tell us not to give that gun back. That's the law. That is not going to be changed by any action of our office or any action of PPD and respectfully, I don't think any action of a particular judge. It only is going to be changed when that nuance in the law has changed. When people see that you're not stopping people from having the Second Amendment right to possess a weapon, but you're looking for public safety issues. And those things can happen if City Council is -- again, we're widening the pot of everybody that's involved in this, this One Philly thing. If we're really doing that, then we need to sit with the State Reps from Philadelphia and talk about how we can do that.
That's another problem with relinquishing guns. So we can't take it upon ourselves to search the property without judicial authority nor can we take it upon ourselves to keep the weapon without judicial authority. SHERIFF BILAL: But one of the things we are having a conversation with the judges with, that if you order us to take the gun, once the PFA is resolved however, you give us an order to give back the gun. The statute says that they don't have to do that. But because of they knowing more what happens in that courtroom than we do, then we are asking them to basically give an order for us to give them the gun back. Because if they know -- like he said, if there's something going on that they can say without prejudice -- UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: With prejudice. SHERIFF BILAL: With prejudice, that means there's something going on in reference to that situation of domestic violence, that they can bring that back. So for us if there's something going on, then we need a court order to give them the gun back and not just go by the statute that because it's over, we just automatically give it back. We're just trying to make sure that what they know we should know. UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: And to be completely honest, and sometimes I get in trouble when I'm being completely honest, it seems to me that a lot of times the partners, and I'm including the bench in this, don't want to take the responsibility of giving the gun back, and that's with respect to the bench. I don't have any problems with the bench. We've been working together with them and we're going to work on this issue. But it means that you would say return the weapon, you can return the weapon. Well, suppose they say you can return the weapon and that's in the order. Well, if they say that and the person gets the weapon back and then they go and do something, then the next day the paper is going to talk about the person got the gun back and that was subject to an order. So our position is it isn't about the responsibility, because obviously that's the responsibility of the system, not just one person. But it's about what you know that we don't know. We can give an example or examples of individuals where guns are returned after a hearing. And then we run something and we see something or, in fact, we run and we received threatening letters from the individual talking about, you know, his gun and what he's going to do and things of that nature, but no one ever asked us about that, no district attorney or assistant district attorney ever called us about that. We just know that the guy got an order to get his gun back and he came over and I wouldn't give him the gun back. And we wouldn't give him the gun back because the judge didn't have that hearing. See, at the end of the day, all that information -- at the end of the day, the communication has to be together, because there are times where the PFA is dismissed, withdrawn, etc, but there's still some danger there that based upon all the information you was given in the original PFA. And if you have an inkling or you see that red flag, you have to have the authority as a judge to say, we're not going to give that back. And they can get that only through legislation or through changing that statute.
Just a quick question, because we have 12 other witnesses to get through, red flag laws. The purpose of red flag laws is when someone states that a threat, a hostile, terroristic threat, that we then can go in and seize a gun because they constitute a real danger. Do you guys take that into account when you are entering these kinds of confiscations of firearms? UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: With all due respect, that's not the purview of the Sheriff's Office. We're responding to an order. The person that's supposed to be responding to the law to that particular red flag, that should be in the order --
Because we put it in the order. UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: If it's put in the order, then it should be accompanied by a search warrant. Because the red flag law, as you're putting it, those circumstances, those elements, it seems to me that the law is saying it elevates the probable cause to get a search warrant to go in someone's house and search it. Without that --
If I understood you correctly, that if on the level of -- what was it, fatality? What's the term?
Lethality, that if we determine that this person is a known doer, shooter, kind of thing, that what should be included in the order to the Sheriff's Office is that red flag provision with a search warrant? UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: It has to be a search warrant.
Okay. UNDERSHERIFF EL-SHABAZZ: We don't have the authority.
Okay. So we have to figure that one out. All right. I appreciate that. So are any other questions because we got 12 more to go? SHERIFF BILAL: Can I finish just some remarks?
Yes, ma'am. SHERIFF BILAL: When everybody comes together in reference to what we have at our disposal, the Sheriff's Office is the only law enforcement office that budget was cut. We're the only office that after a pandemic and the fact that everywhere around the country are having the problem hiring people to do the job, we're the only office that got a judge's court order to mandate that we hire people with a budget that's cut. We're the only office that is in an apartment complex. And if we could hire the people, where would we put them? We're the only law enforcement office that when it comes to actually having an academy, every police department across this state has an academy. We only have one. It's up State College. And in order to hire people here to go, leave their families five days a week for 5 weeks is the difficulty in 6 reference to hiring, even under a 7 court order. 8 So we're like a pot a 9 soup, and I say this, and we got to 10 feed everybody in this pot. Now, 11 everybody may not get filled, but 12 they will get something. So with 13 the little people that we have, we 14 are under budget, we have less 15 people. We are doing the best that 16 we can. But when it comes to 17 domestic violence, because I'm a 18 survivor, we had these 19 conversations to come up with what we can do as an office, and we're doing the best that we can.
In my opinion, you're doing better than your mission calls for, because I've heard it, seen it, seen you do it. So you're right, we should -- the one recurring theme up here is that every department that we've dealt with says that if you want more, you need to be willing to put your money where your mouth is. So thank you for your testimony. SHERIFF BILAL: Thank you.
And I'm sorry. Just really quickly. I know we have our domestic violence service providers, sexual violence service providers waiting since 10:00 a.m., but my office has been mentioned several times throughout the day so I wanted to have the opportunity to introduce myself. I'm Azucena Ugarte. I am the Director of the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies. Our office sits under the Managing Director's Office for the Health and Human Services. So we work with Health and Human Services to help them get better at identifying and responding to domestic violence, sexual violence and trafficking. Through our work, we have realized that it's not only a public safety response or a health and human service response. We need to have a continuum of responses to survivors our perpetrators. We look at training providers, changing organizational practices, doing community education as much as we can. We can collect data to try to identify where our interventions should have the more impact. About Act 79 for example, with the Office of Public Safety, we have been coordinating monthly meetings with the Sheriff's Office, Police Department, Gun Permit Unit, the District Attorney's Office. As part of that work I know we've been mentioned a lot about recovering the firearms. Part of the state law requires that we notify petitioners about the service of the PFA and the relinquishment of that firearm. We've been working with the systems through almost two years now trying to figure out how we can implement that piece. And one of the solutions that started last August with a partnership with Women Against Abuse, they receive a federal grant, and they actually hire us as a subrecipient to have one position. It's called the Act 79 Coordinator. That's a position within our office. She sits in Family Court at the PFA Unit, and she's contacting petitioners, especially for the PFAs that have a relinquishment firearm, asking for their consent and their contact information, and she's following up with petitioners about the status of the service of that PFA. She's also reading the allegations on the protection from abuse order and flagging that information with the Sheriff's Domestic Violence Task Force, with the Gun Permit Unit so the Gun Permit Unit can get information and send it to the detectives. So I wanted to add that piece. I also wanted to be clear the defendants or respondents. From the moment that they are served, they have hours 18 to relinquish that firearm. So 19 they could tell the Sheriff, yes, I 20 have a firearm, but I have 24 21 hours. And then we need to follow 22 up after, what happened after that. 23 Also, the state law. 24 One of the good things about the state law is that petitioner can -- or defendant and respondent can relinquish a firearm with the Sheriff's Office, with the Police Department or with an (inaudible) or with their own attorney. So it kind of tightened the idea of just give it to anyone, and that's really important and safe for survivors. I'm not going to say that much more. I just wanted to let you know that we are here. We are doing work with the Health Department about maternal mortality and intimate partner violence during pregnancy. We have a free, supervised child visitation program that receives direct referrals from family court. We are collecting data with our data. We know that people who commit violence in the home are committing violence in the community. People who commit violence in the community are probably committing violence in the home, and that we need a coordinated community response that is not public safety, it's not only health and human services, but it's a continuum of the two of them. Thank you very much.
Yeah. I just want to thank all of you for your testimony. And thank you, Sheriff, for taking time out of your schedule. I do believe we need to have an academy here in the city of Philadelphia as opposed to trainees going out to Penn State College to be trained to become sheriffs. And so, wish you good luck on that. And how I can do to be supportive of the future of that becoming a reality, I'm here because we definitely should have a training facility here in the city of Philadelphia. To the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies, and when we have these type of hearings, it's an opportunity to reset. I had no idea that we have an Office of Strategies here in the City of Philadelphia. And so, it's great to have you at the table. Looking forward to working with you as well. And that's also the good thing that came out of this particular hearing is additional information. So thank you very much.
Thank you so much for your testimony. Ms. Stack, can you read the next panelist to testify.
David Chiles from the Lutheran Settlement House, Kira Bellolio from Congreso de Latinos Unidos, Joanna Otero-Cruz from Women Against Abuse, and Melissa Landsmann from Women in Transition. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Thank you all for your patience. Please come to the witness table. Have a seat. Thank you. Please state your name and begin your testimony. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon, Councilmembers, Curtis Jones and Quetcy Lozada, all members of this Committee, and of course, Council President Johnson. Gracias for this resolution and thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Women Against Abuse. My name is Joanna Otero- Cruz, the Executive Director and President of Women Against Abuse. I'm accompanied here by partners at Women in Transition, Congreso Lutheran Settlement House, and our state partners at PCA, DV Coalition, Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. So I just want to give them a shout-out. Our hope is that today's conversation leads to real, lasting change and that Kada Scott's legacy becomes a safer future for all survivors. Philadelphia must strengthen its response to domestic violence because people's lives depend on it. Based on Women Against Abuse's 50 years of expertise, we call for six reforms to enhance survivor safety and hold perpetrators accountable. Due to the time- restraints, we've submitted a more detailed outline with many suggestions and recommendations on file. I'll highlight six today. Most of these recommendations aren't new, some of which we've heard today. Much of this is about doubling down on what has always been the expectation, but isn't happening consistently. Before our list of recommendations, I'd like to acknowledge and thank both Police Commissioner Bethel and the District Attorney for launching the high risk case review late last week. And here are our recommendations: First, prioritize survivor-centered safety. Safety looks different for every survivor and it changes over time. It's not stagnant. Our systems must be survivor-centered, informed and nimble. Second, strengthen domestic violence prosecution. Domestic violence cases are uniquely complex. They require expertise, experience and skill. We strongly recommend assigning all DV cases to experienced prosecutors within the Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit. The victim should have the same ADA from the preliminary hearing through sentencing and prosecutors should use evidence-based prosecution whenever possible so that the burden doesn't fall solely on the victim to testify. Victim intimidation is a huge barrier to domestic violence cases, so ADAs should routinely screen for this and immediately charge the defendant when it's occurring. Third, improve victim engagement and communication. Survivors must be notified of every court date and have direct, timely communication with their ADA. ADAs need manageable caseloads so they can review evidence, meet victims and build trust. Strong communication strengthens cases. Survivors also need wraparound support like child care, transportation and time off to participate. And when it comes to victim participation in court, it is imperative that the Sheriff's Office increase security in civil and criminal courtrooms and work with police to improve the process for detaining a defendant who has an active warrant. Fourth, address systemic barriers and strengthen accountability across systems. The police department must thoroughly investigate each case and collect evidence quickly, not just at the time of the crime, of the scene, but examining the context and the patterns that occur in intimate partner violence. We know this is not a one-and-done. There's often times multiple texts, multiple harassment, stalking. All of those things need to be looked upon. We need rapid execution of domestic violence warrants, strong supervisory oversight and a deputy commissioner level or high-level leadership position to be dedicated to domestic violence cases to truly reduce the silos so that we can work across the continuum. And because guns are the leading cause of domestic violence death, the Sheriff's Office and Police must improve coordination around the PFA service and gun relinquishment, including exploring a better technology to track compliance and notifying survivors.
The survivor's office -- I'm sorry, the Sheriff's Office should also establish a clear, publicly available procedure for these critical protections to help petitioners and defendants understand the process and enable survivors to take informed steps to protect themselves and their safety. Fifth, enhance collaboration with victim service providers. We welcome continued partnerships for trauma-informed training and technical assistance. We look forward to working together to explore new programs such as embedding social services within the police department to work on domestic violence cases and the risk assessment programs at every stage of the justice system. As always, we are ready to connect survivors to full continuum of services like shelters, safe housing, economic stability and access to behavioral health care to remain safe long term. And lastly, use data to drive accountability. Philadelphia needs timely, consistent, citywide data across all systems, from 911 calls through sentencing, to identify breakdowns and measure improvement. We are continuously scrambling for data only to receive pieces of it months or sometimes even years after the fact. That limits our ability as a city to spot trends and identify interventions that can save lives. We urge the creation of an annual State of Domestic Violence Report for transparency and accountability to come to this committee. In conclusion, each of the systems before you today have opportunities to improve. When law enforcement and prosecutors perform their roles thoroughly and consistently, our community is safer. We hope City Council will call for a database, plan on ongoing collaboration to ensure our suggested reforms are put into place. We are committed to working collaboratively with the Police department, Sheriff's department and the District Attorney's to implement any changes needed. Thank you so much for your commitment to making Philadelphia safer.
Thank you so much, but you've reiterated what was said all day, that there are gaps in information that put people at risk and we have to -- if we take nothing else, we want to take that out to kind of be able to break down silos, share information in realtime so that we can kind of tighten things up.
Thank you. State your name and begin your testimony. Thank you again for your patience. Whatever order.
My name is David Chiles. I'm the Executive Director at Lutheran Settlement House. Thank you very much for convening this today and for having us here and for the work ahead. We're all members of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, PCADV. And so, working in coalition, working in partnership, recognizing that none of us can do this work alone is at the core of our DNA. And so, we're here, prepared to partner, prepared to work. Ideally, it would not be me sitting here today. It'd be one of our survivors from our survivor network talking with you. So I went to our advocates in lieu of not having one of those survivors, and I said, what are the stories you hear most often. So I want to give some examples of how the breakdowns in accountability and the breakdowns of partnership are impacting the lives of survivors. So Sarah, not her real name, called the police during an incident and she was arrested along with her abusive partner. Now, when the police found out that Sarah was defending herself, they released her, but not before an officer lectured her about the fact that she should not be staying with someone who abuses her. When our advocate then worked with Sarah, later she expressed that she was very unlikely to reach out to the police again because she felt blamed as the victim, first from being arrested for defending herself and then from being lectured without the officer recognizing the personal risks that she would have to take to leave that relationship. I have no doubt that officer was intending to support and help that victim, but the lack of training or the lack of an officer or a unit that is especially designed to work with survivors or the lack of an embedded person from Social Services who works with survivors led that victim to feeling like she was being blamed by the very system that's supposed to be there to protect her. A lack of consistent communication comes up all the time as well, as was a client in our emergency placement program. We were working with her to create a safety plan in the weeks before she was supposed to testify. But despite numerous calls from her and from her advocate, she was not given information about how the case was proceeding until she was asked 48 hours before her testimony to come in. Because of that lack of communication, she felt like she wanted to withdraw from the case because it was increasing her anxiety, increasing her trauma. These also happen. These communication breakdowns happen in the PFA serving and in the confiscation of weapons. Too often, our clients tell us they don't know when the PFA has been served. They don't know if the weapon has been removed from the house. You can imagine what it's like to try to safely plan with someone when they don't have that information, knowing that their partner is going to have been triggered by those actions. So that kind of communication needs to be consistently provided. And finally, I want to highlight Lena, who was a German- speaking client whose partner violated her protective order and abused her when she was picking up her kids from school. Lena went to court three different times and each time the case had to be postponed because there was not an interpreter available. Finally, she decided to withdraw from the case because she just couldn't continue taking time off of work, and her abusive partner was sending death threats to her. Our immigrant community, is uniquely vulnerable to domestic violence and they often have complex fears about working with the criminal justice system. So we must ensure that they are safe and to work with law enforcement in the courts. And when they do work with law enforcement in the courts, we have to respect the significant personal risk and sacrifice that they're putting forward in order to testify against an abusive partner. Stories aren't meant to shame anyone. All of us know that we have fallen short and can do better.
And I could also give a lot of stories about how these systems have supported and comforted and helped survivors, but the key is that we need to do better. And we as advocates are here ready to partner, ready to roll up our sleeves. I don't think it's going out on any limb to say there's not a single person in this room who does not know someone in their family, friends or work group who has been a victim of domestic violence. And if you don't know anyone, it's only because you don't know. It's not because they haven't been victims. And so, we are all committed to working with survivors and we're committed to doing the work together. Thank you.
And immigrant population, ICE issues, deportation issues get involved in that at all?
I mean, absolutely. Abusive partners can use someone's immigration status as a means of control. And especially in the climate that we're seeing right now, the comfort that an immigrant is going to have going to the police or going into the court system, not sure whether they are going to meet an ICE agent there, those are all chilling factors on anyone willing to come forward. I'm sure you all seen this too.
Thank you. Can we finish the testimony and we'll then engage.
My name is Kira Bellolio. I'm the Vice- president of Family and Parenting Services at Congreso de Latinos Unidos. We've been providing domestic violence services for over 30 years. And in 2013, we also received funding to provide legal representation to DV victims seeking PFAs with weapon relinquishment specifically. So that's all we do, because we know WAA does an amazing job at regular PFAs and there's just not enough support there. This is also what we know, reporting 911 calls are handled differently depending on where you live in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia and North Philadelphia, victims often need to make multiple 911 calls before police respond. This is something that our victims are telling us and this is something that even our police district partners are telling us. They are not in charge of dispatch. They tell us, tell them to call, keep calling. This makes survivors feel disbelieved and puts them in further dangers. Victims deserve to be believed and receive consistent and timely police response. At response, our police officers are distributing information such as victims rights, the DV hotline number, but they lack the capacity for follow-up. Their intervention is often limited when there is no physical abuse. But domestic violence is more than just physical abuse. Every form of abuse can be dangerous and should be screened for lethality. When victims fear retaliation, they need assurance that their abuser will not walk free the same day. When police make an arrest, they expect that the prosecutor will follow through diligently and prioritize their safety. That partnership is essential. And in Kada's case, it failed. At hearings, prosecutors have tools to keep victims safe, even when cooperation is difficult. They can proceed using video evidence, requesting higher bail and working closely with police and service providers to ensure that victims feel secure enough to participate. Again, none of that happened here. We urge PPD and the Prosecutor's office to work collaboratively to ensure justice for Kada and all victims. In the aftermath, even when PFA with weapons relinquishments are granted, enforcement often feels impossible. I'm going to read an account from our attorney. This is a seasoned attorney, 30-years of experience, former prosecuting attorney. The legal services attorney is encountering considerable difficulty reaching sheriffs responsible for weapons relinquishment and affidavits swearing to no possession of firearms. The same is true for police detectives responsible for fire license relinquishments. The attorney repeatedly calls one office within the Sheriff's Office and is transferred to another, only to be told he is calling the wrong place. The same occurs when contacting detectives supposedly responsible for fire license relinquishments. Again, this is with all the resources available. So what are we asking? We're asking that you invest in services that link victims to support. The DV hotline for Philadelphia is underfunded. It has consistently been underfunded. We ask that you invest in services that respond to victim safety, invest in workforce services, invest in housing, flexible emergency housing options for survivors, that you invest in prevention services so that we can intervene in school, medical and workplace settings, and that you strengthen systems coordination, that you make the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies a permanent office that has resources allocated to it. The ODVS has successfully implemented systemwide change in offices such as DHS and OHS, which has streamlined responses and improved long-term safety networks that are inclusive of different systems. So we have already a mechanism that can work. It's just not accessing. And then we ask that you mandate stronger coordination between police and prosecutors, including bail motions at high-risk DV cases.
And for Act 79 weapons relinquishment, we need additional support, additional coordination for enforcement to ensure that victims also have safety plans and the resources so that they can seek them confidently and safely. Thank you so much.
Hello, everybody. Thank you for having us here today. My name is Melissa Landsmann. I'm the Executive Director of Women in Transition, and we've been around for nearly 55 years, a leader in the movement to end domestic violence in Philadelphia, along with my sister agencies here providing free, confidential and trauma-informed services to the city's most vulnerable residents. Our programs include crisis counseling, peer support groups, individual empowerment counseling, prevention and education initiatives and a clinical therapy program, all of which are designed to help survivors rebuild their lives after abuse and prevent future violence as well as help survivors in crisis achieve safety. A cornerstone of our work is also substance abuse, because often survivors are using substances as a way to self- medicate or their abuser is using substances as a way to control them. I'm going to skip through a bunch of my testimony because I feel like I've submitted it and I also feel like my colleagues have very eloquently talked about it. Gender-based violence is a widespread issue in the United States. As we talked about earlier, in women will experience domestic violence, sometimes in their lives, at some point in their lifetime. In Philadelphia, the impact of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence is particularly pronounced and has deeply eroded the fabric of our families and communities. While domestic violence affects all communities, its impact is especially debilitating in our city with its high rates of poverty and shortage of affordable housing. These issues are closely associated with an increased risk of domestic violence and create additional challenges for survivors to leave their abusers, find housing and become financially independent. We were asked here today -- one of the questions we were asked is, why don't domestic violence victims come to court. It's a really straightforward question, as you've heard today, with a really complicated answer. In addition to psychological stress of facing your abuser, it's also emotionally difficult to have to retell your story, and some of my colleagues recounted that, as well as some solutions for that. The very real and often times paralyzing fear, these fears are shared with us by our clients, I got these from our hotline and intake managers, fear of a system that has let them down too many times before and that they won't be believed or that their testimony won't lead to meaningful consequences for their abuser, fear of facing their abuser and the possible retaliation against them, their loved ones, even their pets if they participate in the abuser's prosecution, fear of losing their jobs. Despite job protections in our city, taking time away from work for multiple court appearances is still risky for many individuals. There are frequently continuances with little notice, often after the victim and their support system has already arrived at the courthouse. Employers are not always understanding, and survivors risk their livelihood impacting their ongoing struggle to maintain or establish financial independence, fear of losing their children in custody battles and of the emotional impact on children if they testify against the other parent, fear that testifying could to loss of income, housing or stability, and they can feel very overwhelming or most importantly, fear of being revictimized or retraumatized, having to retell your story multiple times, especially if their experience is denied or minimized by the process or if they're blamed for their victimization. We talked about what we can do during court procedures. I'm going to highlight -- again, I submitted my full statement, trauma-informed training. We need mandatory training for judges. I've heard way too many stories from our survivors, our client survivors that the judges yelled at them for how they showed up in court, meaning, how they were dressed or they were upset or they were in crisis.
I have a friend who went through this, who the judge didn't believe her statement even though she had letters that the person had violated the protection from abuse order from the jail for the record. That was not in Philadelphia just so we know. Victim advocates, we've already talked about that. We talked about assignment of consistent, experienced ADA staff, protective orders, enforcement, flexible scheduling, remote testimony options, anything we can do to protect the victim while they're in court, and the cornerstone of that is probably communication around making sure that the victim is consistently communicated with. It's very nerve-racking to go to court and it's even more nerve-racking if you're the victim in the situation. We talked about the projection from abuse. It needs to be proven that the system is making victims safer, not making them more exposed or only recognizing their importance when their testimony is needed, so we need you to show up next week, but I haven't talked to you in months. The words of one of our councilors who has spoken to hundreds of victims over the years: Victims who seek a PFA often face more obstacles. We've talked about that with the firearm removal. We've talked about it, that the police sometimes when they show up, and again I know we're all trying -- nobody's pointing fingers, I think everybody's doing this with good intentions, but the PFA, they call 911 and maybe the call isn't responded to. The police show up, they tell them there's nothing they can do because maybe the perpetrator has left the scene at that point. A warrant isn't issued if the police do show up. If the warrant is issued, the accused abuser isn't ever arrested. This is multiple times. If the accused abuser is arrested, they're let out on bail or if they're found in violation, they're released in a short period of time. Remember that each of the above things that I just mentioned drastically increases the victim's risk of repeat victimization and worst, lethality or mortality. They risk being murdered. None of these statements are intended to demonize any of the above parties. We're all trying to work hard to protect domestic violence victims. But ask yourself, would you risk your life for a system that hasn't yet proven that it can protect you? We talked about mandatory training. We talked about resources. I'm going to skip ahead because I know everybody's had a long day. Recent events have highlighted the importance for protections for domestic violence survivors. However, make no 20 mistake, that these recent events are the lived realities of what's going on every day in our city in the lives of victim survivors throughout our beloved city. And behind each case brought forward is an individual who's trying to live their lives free of the fear of their abuser and domestic violence. Thank you for bringing this issue forward for an examination of how we can protect all women and survivors of domestic violence, regardless of their gender or gender identity. After you're done listening to all of us today, you've had a very long day, my recommendations implement the solutions you've heard. Protect victims of crime, truly protect them. May today's conversation lead to real, lasting change, and may Kada Scott's legacy become a safer future for all survivors. We know that every victim matters to each of you and we are glad to work alongside the City of Philadelphia and its various resources in finding solutions that work to empower survivors, hold their victims accountable for their actions and ultimately create a safer community and city for all of us. Thank you and we welcome your questions.
Thank you. Thank you all for your testimony. Are there any questions? Member Lozada.
Thank you. First of all, thank you so much for your patience. Thank you for sitting through what has been a really, really long day. I just think that in the future we should consider bringing them on first, right, because the people that need to hear them are already gone from the room. (Applause.)
I appreciate the fact that many of you who testified today actually came with some actionable items that we need to look at when considering protecting victims and responding to this very serious public safety issue that we have going on and that has been happening for many, many years. I think we need to do a better job at consistently talking about domestic violence, what the resources are, how to go about certain processes. I can't tell you the number of times that I get calls late in the evening or early in the morning or on a weekend from a victim that says, I really don't know where to go, what to do, and mostly around that whole PDF process, right, and being afraid of how do I go get it, do I go by myself, and what happens once this person is served, and am I at more risk than when I was in that person's space, right, or when I was sharing that person's space. And so, I just want to say thank you to all of you for the work that you do every day. I know it's challenging. But if it's not for you, we could potentially have had many more or can have many more in the future Kada Scott situations, so I'm grateful for all of the work that you do. Sometimes we don't take the opportunity to say thank you to the advocates enough. So I just wanted to share my appreciation.
I'll be brief. I just want to thank you for your hard work and dedication and being on the front line day-in and day-out and how we can continue being supportive. We will make sure we will -- I am talking to Member Lozada regarding any contractual vendor mishaps with the City of Philadelphia, that you have our public support that we will work with the Office of Finance to make sure that you always get paid in a timely fashion because you're out there doing the hard work. So I just want to state that for the record publicly. Thank you.
Thank you for your testimony and I really appreciate the enlightenment. And I'm going to take it under advisement that we need to change the order and get some of the people closest to the pain in first and then allow some of the institutional departments to respond to that pain. I got it. Thank you all. Ms. Stack.
Davina Scott from Women's Law Project; Jamie Miller from Philly Self Defense; Shakina Rush from She is U, Inc.; and Gabriela Fontan from WOAR. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Thank you all for your patience and sticktoitness. Please in any order state your name and begin your testimony. Please don't be shy.
Good afternoon. My name is Gabriela Fontan. First, I'd like to thank City Council President Kenyatta Johnson for inviting WOAR to participate in this domestic violence investigatory hearing. I'd also like to thank the members of City Council for your time today. City Council's continued recognition and support of victim services organizations within the City of Philadelphia is essential to supporting victims and survivors within the city. Again, my name is Gabriela Fontan. I am the Executive Director of WOAR, Philadelphia's center against sexual violence. WOAR is the only rape crisis center here in Philadelphia and has served survivors of sexual assault within Philadelphia for 53 years. WOAR provides critical services such as therapy, 24/7 hotline crisis counseling, medical and court accompaniment as well as prevention and education services to the community. Through these services, WOAR encounters people who have experienced trauma, and they come to us at some of the most devastating times in their lives. While WOAR specifically provides services to those who have experienced sexual violence, what many of the other panelists know is that there is an intersectionality between sexual assault and domestic violence. Abuse and intimate partner relationships manifest in a myriad of ways, including emotional abuse, physical abuse and coercion. That coercion may appear in the form of sexual coercion. For perspective, in women experience sexual assault, 1 in 6 men experience sexual assault, and 1 in 10 children experience sexual assault. Individuals who experience sexual assault at times also experience domestic abuse from that same individual, someone who is intimately related to them and in close proximity to them, which leads me to why we are here today. When survivors come in contact with the criminal justice system through no fault of their own, they experience a flood of emotions. Survivors experience the anxiety of facing their abuser, the fear of retaliation for leaving the abusive cycle, mistrust in the criminal justice process and distress due to having to relive the event or events over and over again because they continuously have to recount their experience at various points in the litigation process. They experience confusion because many of them have never come in contact with the criminal justice system outside of a traumatic event and are unfamiliar with what the criminal justice process entails. And lastly, among other emotions, the fear of not being believed by those from whom they seek help. To that end, the criminal justice system at times fails to handle survivors with care. As such, areas of improvement would include trained court staff who are aware of the dynamics of survivors and their abusers during court proceedings, which looks like attention to the separation of the parties and proper safety measures implemented by the respective entities to ensure the safety of those who appear to testify, an increase in trauma-informed and culturally competent police officers, prosecutors and even judges who understand the experience of domestic violence survivors, while working in partnership with victim advocates to ensure equal access to justice for those survivors. The survivor experience is why organizations like WOAR are critical partners in the criminal justice system. WOAR's court and medical advocates help survivors by providing emotional and physical support during stressful, traumatic and confusing times. They provide support to survivors who otherwise might not have anyone else to lean on. Our counselors and therapists help survivors process these traumatic events so that they may have the strength and courage to navigate life again as well as navigate the criminal justice system. I work for WOAR because I believe in empowering those who feel disenfranchised, marginalized and unseen. 14 years ago I was a victim advocate. From there, I became an attorney and now I am the Executive Director of WOAR.
And through all of those experiences, what I know is when people survive trauma, whether domestic violence, sexual assault and the like, they experience a common sentiment of feeling unseen and unheard. The workers within victim services organizations empower, support and protect survivors within the criminal justice system by being a voice for someone who feels voiceless, a listening ear, a buffer and a source of strength and so much more. To that end, the most critical support that legislators can provide to victims and survivors is through recognizing the hard work of victim services organizations. Continued support through consistent and abundant funding is essential to the survival of organizations like WOAR throughout the city. I am hopeful this hearing is the beginning of many efforts to protect and support the victims and survivors within the city of Philadelphia. Thank you for your time. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.
State your name for the record and begin with your testimony.
Good afternoon, Councilmembers. My name is Davina Scott and I am here today representing the Women's Law Project. The Women's Law Project is a public interest legal organization that defends gender justice in Pennsylvania and beyond. We've been doing this work for over 50 years. I thank you for this opportunity to testify today. I serve as WLP's client advocate, and every day we hear from people whose sense of normalcy and safety have been completely shattered by domestic and sexual violence and the systemic failures they encounter along the way. In 1999 and again in 2001, WLP testified before the same committee about this same issue Philadelphia's insufficient response to domestic violence. More than years ago, 11 we shared that people experiencing 12 domestic violence in 13 Philadelphia -- 14
I'm sorry for 16 interrupting. Be patient with me. 17 Can you repeat that last statement 18 regarding when WOAR came -- when 19 your organization came here to 20 advocate on the same issue, how long ago?
More than 4 years ago, we shared that people 5 experiencing domestic violence in 6 Philadelphia had dangerously 7 inadequate access to legal support, 8 logistical help and emergency 9 housing to keep them safe. These 10 longstanding challenges still 11 persist. 12 Now, we are here again 13 because of the horrific and 14 preventable murder of Kada Scott, 15 whose family and loved ones we send 16 our condolences. I'm sorry that it 17 has taken a tragedy for us to take 18 action. This should not be the 19 case. The City and the system 20 failed Kada Scott. Had we acted on the systemic issues we know are present, Kada might be alive today. Today I asked how can we improve our response to domestic violence in Philadelphia. My core message is that we must take a comprehensive and holistic approach. To improve citywide response to people experiencing domestic and sexual violence in Philadelphia, we must take a holistic approach and address a range of intersecting issues. Race, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, disability status, immigration status and prior experiences with police and the courts all influence the likelihood of experiencing interpersonal violence and whether survivors feel safe reporting a crime or seeking services. Intimate partner violence is not limited to physical abuse. It can manifest as emotional or psychological manipulation, financial control, religious or spiritual abuse and commonly sexual violence and reproductive coercion. What does this look like? Abusive partners may control reproductive choices by restricting contraception and/or sexually abusing their partner, thereby increasing the risk of unintended pregnancy. Pregnancy in turn increases the risk of violence. In the United States, homicide remains one of the leading causes of death for pregnant people. A holistic citywide approach to addressing intimate partner violence must include strengthening our response to sexual violence and expanding access to reproductive health care. Specifically, Women's Law Project has three recommendations for the City to undertake. Our first recommendation: Invest in Peace Arch to keep its doors open. The Philadelphia sexual assault response center is Philadelphia's only dedicated center for conducting rape kits, providing 24/7-hour care to more than 300 patients annually. Peace Arch is a holistic model program that Philadelphia can be proud of. However, Peace Arch's future is at risk due to uncertainty about its administrative oversight and funding. We urge the City to ensure Peace Arch remains fully funded and operational. We heard earlier today that the funding and resources for these DV organizations that serve Philadelphia does not match the need. Our second recommendation, release data on case outcomes. I echo Councilmember Gauthier's earlier statement that data is powerful. Hundreds of cases involving sexual assault, stalking, strangulations and other forms of intimate partner violence are referred for prosecution in Philadelphia every year. But what happens after that is not clear. We know prosecutions are often declined, charges are dropped, dismissed or reduced to plea agreements. What we don't know is how many, how often or under what circumstances. We call on DA Krasner to make data on the outcomes of domestic and sexual violence cases referred to his office available to the public. We also hope that we can have access to DA Krasner's earlier report. Our third recommendation: Establish annual trauma-informed training for all SVU officers and detectives. There is so little trust in the system that most victims do not report sexual assault. When survivors do report, there are many reasons they stop participating in the process. They may be disbelieved and disrespected. They may be told their case isn't strong enough. They are exhausted and retraumatized from retelling their story or they lose faith that their assailant will be held accountable.
These are stories we just heard that are similar to what PCA DV advocates talked about. However, when officers conduct victim-centered interviews, avoid perpetrated harmful myths and make survivors feel safe and respected, victims are more likely to stay engaged in the case. Survivor participation decreases the likelihood of dropping serious charges, such as the previous charges against Kada Scott's alleged murderer that were dropped after the victim stopped participating in the case. We also echo Woman Against Abuse's push for thorough investigations. We must also recognize that lacking access to reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion, increases the risk of domestic violence. While we applaud the recent Philadelphia City Council resolution recognizing reproductive rights as human rights as well as the ongoing work of Philadelphia Reproductive Freedom Task Force, we were disappointed that the city refused advocates request to fund reproductive health care that would have expanded local access to contraception and other critical services. Actualizing Philadelphia's commitment to defending reproductive autonomy requires investing in access to reproductive health care. Kada Scott's murder was senseless and preventable. Only a comprehensive citywide strategy that recognizes how interpersonal violence, intersexual-related issues and invest in holistic support will effectively reduce domestic and sexual violence. Women's Law Project remains committed to working with City Council and officials to advance these recommendations. Thank you for listening.
Thank you so much for your testimony today. Please state your name for the record and begin with your testimony. And we'll hold all questions until all of you have spoken.
Good afternoon. Thank you, Council President and Councilmembers, for convening this important hearing and for inviting me to share my story. I sincerely appreciate it. My name is Jamie Miller. I am a survivor advocate of domestic violence, a mother, a former professional MMA fighter and the founder of Philly Self Defense, a trauma-informed program created to help women, youth and survivors reclaim safety, confidence and autonomy. I survived over six and a half years of many types of abuse, physical abuse before during and after my pregnancy, mental and emotional, economic and litigation abuse. I escaped with my daughter and left everything behind, only to find myself homeless, staying in a domestic violence safe haven operated by Women Against Abuse, where I was able to rebuild our lives from the ground up. And even then, the system did not protect us. The system believed his manipulation and lies while I had to repeatedly bend over backwards just to prove the abuse we endured and how unsafe we were. We only wanted safety and protection, and the courts made that nearly impossible. And sadly for us, our situation got a lot darker before anyone started to believe me. Even with proof of evidence, the stalking, harassment, online abuse, child abuse and documented evidence, the court still granted my ex temporary full custody because he made it seem and they believed that I was homeless on the street, even though I had letters from my case manager verifying my residency at a safe haven and DHS documentation showing that a social worker had visited both locations, standard protocol for shelter placement. The judge still tried to bully me into revealing the address of the confidential safe haven. And because I refused to violate the very confidentiality laws meant to protect us, I lost custody of my daughter on that day. The courts made me jump through hoops unnecessarily. Parenting classes, supervised visits just to earn back time with my own child. Meanwhile, my ex was still meeting me in public places and asking me to babysit my daughter, not only violating the court order, but showing his confidence and using the system to manipulate abuse and destroy. He lied to the courts, lied to anyone who would listen and manipulated our daughter. And despite years of reporting his behaviors, especially the mental health concerns, no one believed me. In his care, my daughter suffered severe neglect and just out of sheer respect for her privacy I won't go into all of those details, but it was pretty severe what she endured while in her father's care. And it took nearly four years and several failed petition attempts before we finally got in front of a judge for an emergency hearing. And just to give a little bit of context, by this time, because this is sort of on the back end of those four years, up until that point it was I believe I've counted at least 23 hearings in those four years. And 24 it was just a matter of him filing and refiling things. He would come to an agreement in one hearing just to at the very end of it say, no, I don't agree to that, just to maintain that control and to continually drag us through the system. So once we got before a judge for an emergency hearing, my abuser had been sending my mother photos of holes he had cut in the walls because he was hearing voices. He had trash bags over his windows of his apartment because he was paranoid that drones were flying by his windows and spying on him. And finally, one judge, Judge Daniel Sulman, did what any judge should have done from the very beginning. He took one look at our case, and in his own words, I can't believe it's gotten this far, and he canceled his entire docket for the day.
So after eight hours of testimony, interviews, reviewing evidence of past hearings, I was granted temporary full custody, because Sulman on paper -- because my ex was considered an involved father, he also wanted to put everything in place to give him the opportunity to get the help that he needed. He ordered mental health assessments and things along those lines as well. So during that time, I was granted temporary full custody and my ex chose not to take advantage of those things that were put into place for him to get help. But during the final hearing, it was confirmed what I had been saying for years regarding his mental health. He was diagnosed with psychosis and schizophrenia and abusing heroin, methamphetamine and prescription medication. I was granted sole custody and legal custody of my daughter that day. And thank God. If the right people hadn't stepped in, in that exact time, the system would have continued to perpetuate itself and I believe my daughter -- I'm sorry. I truly believe that our story would have ended in tragedy. And he was right. It shouldn't have gotten that far. It should have not have gotten that far. And former judges, decision- makers and positions of power repeatedly ignored the blatant signs, dismissed the truth and placed us in danger over and over again. And by the grace of God, we survived. And so, this is why I'm here, because the system is flawed to its core. And I say this with love because I know that the very resources and things that we do have in place to support survivors, they are helpful because they helped me, they saved my life. But I truly do believe that on its surface it's helpful, but the real work is within the system. And I think that no 9 matter how many of these initiatives and programs we put into place, again which are great, I think that if we continue to -- I will say it almost feels like we're fighting against the system. I feel like we're doing all of this work, the boots on the ground, supporting survivors and I feel like the system is against us. And so, it feels like we're just constantly butting heads. And so, I feel that -- yeah, the system itself must change. And my story is not unique. Many endure far worse, as we know with Kada, and some won't make it out. When you look back on domestic violence cases where someone is killed, it's almost always because the system failed to protect them. And through my work with Philly Self Defense, I work with women, teens, community organizations, law enforcement and youth in high violence districts. In all these spaces the same truth echoes, people are desperate for trauma-informed, realistic, accessible, prevention and healing resources, not months later, not after mountains of paperwork, but in the moment when they reach out for help. And I want to be clear. My belief in the transformative power of empowerment through movement is not theoretical. I lived it. While living in the safe haven, reclaiming my power meant reconnecting with the things that made me feel alive, chasing the dreams and goals he tried to take from me. I found forgiveness, not just for him but for my own freedom. I knew that I truly had to cut the emotional ties and free myself from his control. I needed to release the anger, pain and resentment. Forgiveness allowed me to step into the woman and mother I was always meant to be. So I quietly stepped back on the mats at my MMA gym and began to train again. And it truly brought me back to life. I was just over 90 pounds. And through training, I regained my strength physically, my confidence and my identity. MMA gave me everything I needed to fight the battles happening outside the gym. And on the mats, we say the mats don't lie. Because if you quit, you're exposed. But then you're forced to confront your limits and your weaknesses so that you can become stronger, just the beauty of it all. You're surrounded by a team that battles beside you, lifts you up and holds you accountable.
I always knew there was something to that, the healing through movement, but MMA proved it. I knew immediately I wanted to give other survivors the same chance to become stronger from the inside out because true healing starts internally. Programs and resources matter, but what sustains you is the inner work when you shift the framework from why me or look what they did to me, to who do I need to become. That's where true healing begins. A year after leaving the safe haven, I took my first professional fight back. I was 1-0 and hadn't fought in years. It was a short notice title fight in California, where I was brought in as a true underdog. Clearly expected to lose -- we like to call that tomato can, to lose to the number one contender who was on the cusp of the UFC. I knocked her out in the fourth round and brought the belt home to Philly. )
Thank you. Thank you so much. In that moment, I knew I was undeniable. And I knew I could not be defined by my trauma. And I knew if I could do that so could other survivors. My advocacy began in 2015, 2016 where I reconnected with Women Against Abuse with a proposal to bring a self defense program to the safe haven where my daughter and I rebuilt our lives. Since then, you can find me everywhere from Harrisburg to speaking to legislators about my lived experience to events, stages, caucus rooms, sitting at my desk helping survivors who message me online, and my favorite place of all, on the mats teaching self- defense and helping people heal through movement. I now sit on the Board of Directors for Women Against Abuse, becoming the first former client to do so in 50 years. And I serve on the Shared Safety Survivor Advisory Board, thank you, for the Office of Domestic Violence Strategies as well as the Mayor's Office of Women Engagement Committee. I am partnered with the Philadelphia Police Department, including officers who were on my case years ago in my most critical moments. I speak with PPD leadership about the importance of police response during domestic violence calls and the resources survivors should receive. It's all about collaboration and partnership. None of this work was done alone. It takes collective dedication to create meaningful change. I believe that with the right policies, especially as it relates to Family Court and real systemic reform, we can set survivors, families and communities up for success. We need to build bridges, create partnerships, collaborate within the system, deploy new advocacy initiatives, place boots on the ground, fill in the gaps and provide resources that meet survivors where they're at, at every stage, not just in their most critical, most of all, create safe spaces where people can truly heal. I believe in this work because it's the exact formula that helped me become who I am today. Because it hap -- excuse me, it happened by luck, by the right people appearing at the right time, but that should never be the case. We need advocates and decision- makers placed intentionally throughout the system, along with new trainings and policies for judges in Family Court. Philadelphia is full of survivors who are strong, resourceful and resilient, but that should not have to be resilient alone. Today I stand here because I made it out. But survival should not depend on luck, strength or knowing the right people. It should depend on systems that work. Thank you so much for listening and thank you for committing to a safer, stronger and more trauma- informed Philadelphia.
Good afternoon, Council President. Thank you so much for being a man of your word and following up and supporting the City of Philadelphia. Good afternoon, fellow Councilmembers. I'm so grateful to be here. I have a mix of emotions. I'm grateful. I'm frustrated. You know, I just have a lot of different emotions, but I just want to -- let me introduce myself again. My name is Shakina Rush and I serve as the Founder and Executive Director of She is U, an organization that supports overcomers of domestic violence, sexual abuse and sexual assault. Unfortunately, I have overcome all three instances. So She Is U, we support overcomers within the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding counties. So the systematic issues discussed in the hearing are not theoretical. They are harming victims every day. At She Is U, we receive messages, requests and crisis reports that reveal how deeply the criminal justice system is failing to protect individuals feeling abuse. One individual recently asked, are there shelters specifically for women who used to be with people involved in the criminal or judicial system. I myself have to speak on that. I myself am in fear of that. I dated a Philadelphia police officer who, because I told him no, decided to drug me and then sexually assault me. So out of fear of being retaliated and out of fear of someone not believing me, I did not report the assault and I left it in my faith in the divine's hands. So I know from experience that I am not the only person that feels that way. How do you turn to a system that is corrupted and broken to support you? So as I was stating, the systematic issues discussed in the hearing they are not theoretical. They are harming victims every day, and we receive reports that reveal how deeply the criminal justice system is failing to protect individuals fleeing abuse. So one individual recently asked, are there shelters specifically for women who used to be with people involved in a criminal judicial system. This question reflects the fear and uncertainty survivors feel as they navigate systems that do not appear equipped to safely support them. Another woman reported to our contact, I called his probation officer and reported that he's calling me from blocked numbers and he called and harassed me while he was in prison. I was met with a sarcastic response. So what you want me to do, call him, the probation officer responded. This response illustrates a troubling lack of trauma-informed practice and a failure to recognize the seriousness of retaliatory contact and harassment. Another survivor shared with us, I called victim services and they promised me a resource and now, I can't get through to anyone. A broken line of communication should never determine whether a victim receives safety, support or intervention. The most alarming example in the case of a survivor, whose name I cannot share, is referred to as Jane Doe. Her testimony demonstrates multiple systematic failures. Jane Doe was incarcerated until early this year. After her release, she married the father of her youngest child believing she was entering a stable home. Instead she experienced escalating verbal, emotional, financial and psychological abuse. Her abuser threatened to have her sent back to prison, manipulated her access to money, controlled her movements and used their child to keep her from leaving. When she reached a breaking point, he accused her of stealing his gun and had her arrested. The charges were dismissed when he failed to appear in court, but the case was refiled upon her return. Meanwhile, he hacked her account, stole her funds, took her belongings and forced her into homelessness. She wrote that she has been living in her truck, struggling to stay warm, unable to access housing, mental health support or consistent protection while managing ongoing threats and coercion. She expressed suicidal thoughts driven by fear isolation and systematic abandonment.
She reached out to our organization for housing, which we do not currently have the funding to provide, so we referred her to the domestic violence hotline. These incidents show how survivors are repeatedly failed by law enforcement, probation, victim services and the courts. But another major systemic issue requires urgent attention, child custody and interstate safety barriers. Victims with children often express fear about leaving the state to seek safety because of the legal procedures required before they are permitted to do so. Under current custody laws, a parent generally cannot relocate with a child, even for safety without risking accusations of kidnapping or custodial interference. Survivors are often told that they must file custody petitions, attend hearings and obtain a court order before relocating, even when the threat to their life is immediate. These requirements place victims in impossible situations and are frequently used by abusers to maintain power through legal intimidation. Furthermore, there must be a mandatory system of intervention when domestic violence is reported, immediate, accessible and enforced. Intervention should include psychological evaluation, trauma counseling and ongoing therapeutic support for both the abused and the abuser. We cannot continue to treat domestic violence solely as a criminal issue. It is a public health crisis with a long-term emotional, psychological and generational consequences. I speak not only as an advocate, but also as someone who was failed by the system. Again, when I was in my 20s, I thought I was being loved. I believed that fighting was just something couples go through, that it would just pass. But when things got really out of control, even though they already were and the police were called, I was never handed any information, no 10 referrals, no resources, nothing. I didn't even know I needed help. I couldn't even identify with an organization or an agency. I thought they were just for married women, White women, people who were, you know, I don't know that lived in the suburbs. This was the impression that I had. I wasn't looked at as an individual with trauma. I was treated like just another call dispatch. That moment defined everything that followed. Had there been mandatory trauma screenings or a policy that ensured the officer paused to ask, have you considered therapy or counseling, would you like someone to talk to, my path might have been different. To truly protect victims and change outcomes, I respectfully offer the following recommendations: Strengthen trauma-informed responses across law enforcement, probation and the courts, survivors must be met with urgency, respect and protection, not sarcasm or disbelief, improve shelter and housing options. There are not enough housing and shelter options. I get hundreds of emails about housing. The criminal issue can be prevented how -- going through the legal system can be prevented if they were offered safe, protective housing. So again, for survivors who are just as involved or navigating probation and custody restrictions, improve shelter and housing options, ensure consistent and reliable follow-up from victim services with accountability and funding tied to performance. You cannot do anything without any money. I am a believer and the word of God says that money is the answer to all things. Reform child custody and relocation procedures to prioritize victim safety and allow emergency interstate relocations when needed without punitive legal consequences, expand legal support for survivors facing retaliatory or coercive charges filed by abusers, and reform laws that allow abuse to continue through legal means. Implement mandatory intervention protocols. Meaning, our schools need to have domestic violence and services and organizations built within their systems. It needs to be incorporated into the curriculum, into the training and everything. Workshops need to be provided.
This needs to be mandatory. So implement mandatory intervention protocols that include psychological evaluations, counseling and therapeutic support for both parties, as I mentioned earlier. Early intervention should be a legal requirement, not a personal privilege. Treat domestic violence as a public health issue across all departments, health, housing, criminal justice and human services that victims are no longer siloed, blamed or forgotten. Survivors deserve a justice system that sees them, believes them and responds to their trauma with care, clarity and consistency. Now, I've had the pleasure to meet the Scott family. And before there was a Kada Scott, there was a Sykea Patton. She Is U stands ready to support this effort and I personally remain committed to advancing solutions that break cycles of violence and restore dignity and hope to every overcomer. As I sit here, I sit next to one of our advocates and also a surviving family member of a victim of domestic violence, Sykea Patton. She's going to have a chance to introduce herself. But I thank you all for your time. I thank you all for hearing my testimony, and I thank you all for your support and let's continue to work together. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Please proceed.
Hello, Council President and Councilmembers. Thank you guys for taking the time out to listen to us all today. Firstly, I just want to commend the ladies that I'm sitting next to because all of them gave such great testimony and sound like such strong women, and I know when I'm in good company. So I just want to commend you guys. My name is Samaya Patton. I am the younger sister of Sykea Patton, who was a victim of domestic violence. My sister was years old. She was my older 18 sister. When she passed in 2021 19 November 19, she was murdered by 20 her boyfriend while walking her 21 children home from school. It was 22 a very known case in the city of 23 Philadelphia. 24 But before she was murdered, we were living together in her house and her boyfriend was living with us. She asked him to leave. She no longer wanted to be in a relationship. Things began to escalate. They got into a big fight. He ended up putting his hands on her. We called the police, and the police told us there was nothing they could do because they did not witness it themselves. He was sitting outside of the house when the police arrived. They told her to file for a PFA and to take all the necessary steps to obtain the PFA and things of such. It was late at night so she said she would do it the following morning. We changed the lock. She got a new number. That same night actually he came back. My dad was also living next door to us, so we were next door at my dad's house. He used his key, went back inside the house and destroyed all of her belongings, her TVs, her clothes, furniture. He destroyed everything. The cops came back and told us again there was nothing they could do until they saw him themselves hurt her, even though we, her sisters, had witnessed him physically hitting our sister. We had to fight him to try to get him out of the house. Two days later he came back as she was walking her kids home and he shot her. I heard a lot of testimony today about what we can do to keep people in jail after doing such things, but I don't think I heard enough about what we can do to prevent it from getting to that point. I think we talked about the word prevention a lot, but we didn't actually talk about what we could do. The steps to get a PFA are important and I do agree in that notion. But what is a PFA when there's someone who knows your daily routine, who knows where you live, who knows where you work. What is a piece of paper going to do to a person with a gun. And I think that it's just ironic because the day that everything occurred that Wednesday night, Friday after school when she was shot, the same two officers came back and they had, for lack of a better term, dumbest look on their face, because you guys were just here and you told us it was nothing you could do, and now there's nothing we can do to bring our sister back to her children. I think that a lot of the testimony today also speaks to Kada Scott and her family, to which I also want to offer my condolences. But Kada is not the first nor will she be the last to experience something like this. And I hear a lot of testimony about what we can do to prevent it, but we need action behind it. It's not just about a conversation because a lot of conversations just die at the end of the conversation. We need to put action behind these things. A lot of accountability is being taken, but what are the actions that are going to come after it. My sister died four years ago and this is the first time I'm being invited to something like this. And I've been very acclimated with Ms. Rush. She would have warned me if there was something of the sort. But the fact that it took for Kada to go viral, and you know, thank God that it is gaining traction to the topic of domestic violence, but it shouldn't have taken for her to lose her life either, because these steps should have been taken in many other years, especially in 2021.
Because the day after my sister died, another woman was shot around the corner at her baby shower. Her name was Jessica Covington. So I just think that we should just take time to not only recognize the victims and their stories, but just think about the fact that this stuff doesn't just die with the conversation we're having in this room. The PFAs are important, the court dates, being arrested is all important, but a lot of these people aren't being arrested until a life is taken. We have to find a way to arrest these people before it gets to that point. And I'm not specifically saying men, because domestic violence can be between same sex couples or any kind of couple or not couples. But I think that there needs to be somewhere in between the PFA and death. There has to be another step before we get to that point. Because if someone is -- I'm also hearing a lot about proof of abuse. Oh, she wasn't marked anymore so we couldn't tell. It shouldn't take proof. I shouldn't have to have a bloody nose or a battered face for me to prove that I'm being abused or that I'm in danger or my children are in danger. There has to be something to fill in that gap. And I don't speak for just me and my sister. I speak for a lot of women when I say these things. I also just want to highlight that there are a lot of companies and organizations, nonprofit organizations, who are trying to do the groundwork and don't have the funding, and we need to support those companies also. We really need to support those companies. Because after my sister passed, there were a lot of nonprofit organizations, Ms. Rush is being one of them, that reached out to us to help us fund the funeral and pay for her tombstone and things of such and send us on weekend trips to try to recoup. But although it could never bring my sister back, it was nice to have that support. But they can't support us if no one's supporting them. So I just want to highlight that also, and just take a minute again to thank you guys for hearing my sister's story and everybody else's who was shared today.
So I don't know about my colleagues, I can speak for myself, some of the bravery and the stories and the truth that people most closely associated with the pain has kind of enlightened us. And some of the tragedy has to turn, as you said, into something positive. And I remember the exact moment when Member President Johnson and Bill Greenlee came and pulled me aside and said, we need to put 300 more beds in the Women Against Abuse. And he went through it and highlighted why. And I kind of understood why he did it, but Greenlee it kind of shocked me, so it caught my attention and we did it. I remember the exact moment when we put more money into anti-violence money. They wanted to give I think it was like 300,000 and we said, no, this budget ain't getting passed until there is a seismic shift in the priority of this. I'm telling you today, today your testimony has sent that kind of shock wave through all of us. And some of the takeaways are that there are gaps in the system and it's people that are falling literally through those gaps. And the distance between the time the PFA and the time that the guns are removed and the time that it takes to get a court order is too long. Too many people fall between those gaps. And the fact that you mentioned we need more beds, we need reliable housing, there should be an interstate kind of exchange that people can be relocated safely, and those things just aren't happening. A well-meaning agency, I won't call out what department it was, talked about all of the things that went wrong, talk about the computers don't talk to each other. My colleague said, well, why don't people talk to each other. I mean, pick up the phone, put the files. We got Zoom. You can all go through the files and see who constitutes a greater threat we are missing. We are missing the margins. And what you pointed out, it was almost like common sense, like what were we thinking. And so, I want you to know how impactful all of you and your testimony is. And one thing about us, we argue with each other. But once we all decide that we want to do something, it's getting done. Ain't no air to that.
Can -- I'm sorry. Just to mention, even while I'm sitting here I am getting a message from someone: I'm currently searching for some assistance and finding shelter transitional housing after recently leaving a domestic violence relationship. Now, I heard you mention Women Against Abuse, but there is an organization by the name of She Is U, which I am the founder of. And I connect with other organizations, but there's really not like a system where we can kind of directly communicate with each other. We do communicate through the Office of Domestic Violence Strategy. But say if someone reaches out to me and they're looking, it's always housing, they're always looking for safe shelter. They're not even really asking about a PFA because they're concerned about their shelter first.
Yeah, but they're concerned about their shelter first. And like I said, there's not just Women Against Abuse. There are so many other organizations. They are in the living rooms, at the funeral, at the hospital bed, at the court dates that really need the support. And also, if there's a way that there could be like a -- I don't know. This is just an idea, like a public shelter where we all can kind of feed into that shelter, like, okay, someone called me and say, I have my children, it's three of us, we need somewhere to go. And I have a direct number that I can call. I'm not directing them to someone. I have a direct contact that I can call and say, you know, you can go here. I'm going to have an escort meet you. I mean, it is a danger so I can't really personally go. I mean, I can, I will. But, you know --
What I'd like to do is sit down and Prez is good at creating these special committees with a finite mission. And he's going to pick and choose and do that so we can get the best of your thinking. But just so that you know, don't think -- shelters, it better be a separate system because that's another system we're looking at. We went out in Code Blue. 30 people on the grates. And they looked up and they said, you know what, we feel safer in jail than at those shelters. So we got to find a safe place to house people.
I seen two vacant buildings across the street from the school that Kada Scott was found that can house people for shelter; a warehouse and I think it was previously an independent living home or something like that. And it seems like it's already equipped for rooms or some type of housing situation, two surrounding the building where she was found.
So we just need to look at the resources we got, come up with the ideas you have. And once again, I'm confident once we get pointed our ship in a direction, we're going to reach shore. So we just need -we're only limited by what we don't know. This is your area of expertise. You have to enlighten us on how to be helpful. All right. Member Lozada.
It's been a long day, but I just want to say I thank the providers for hanging tight and being here. Thank you all for sharing your stories with us. It's been an educational day, a long day but a very informative day. Thank you. (Applause.)
Thank you for your strength and thank you for your advocacy for others despite what you all have experienced yourselves. As Mr. Chair here mentioned, I think that we're in a different place. You mentioned that in 1999 and in 2001 you were having the same conversation that we're having today. It is frustrating. It is absolutely frustrating. And it's absolutely unacceptable that we're still here having the same conversation. I'm hopeful, right, that we hold ourselves accountable as a government to be able to ensure that there not be another victim at the hands of an abuser. And so, I'm looking forward to continuing the work, looking forward to continuing the conversation and that the work and the conversations actually turn into action. Thank you.
I just want to thank all of you for your testimony. And also, Jamie and Shakina -- say your name, young lady.
And, Samaya, for giving your personal testimony and your life-lived experience. And so, I know that takes a lot of heart and courage. And so, I definitely just want to acknowledge that. And on the Women's Law Project, say your name please.
Davina Scott. So as Chairman Jones talked about, we may debate on various different issues amongst ourselves, but we also form like Voltron to work together on issues as well. And I put pride in getting things done. And so, I know you talked about being in front of this body on two separate occasions and we're still here. And so, I want to be able to look back from the future to say, here's the key things that we have implemented to make sure we change the system, most importantly, change the culture, through policy, through legislation, but also most importantly, through the co-coordination of the various agencies, which I believe will change the actual culture of how we address this particular issue. And so, we do thank all of you for just being patient throughout the day. But most importantly, just encourage you to stay empowering as you have been thus far. I left a lot of information I had no idea about today. And so, we're definitely committed to actually getting things done. Thank you.
Thank you for your testimony. Ms. Stack, who do we have left to testify?
That will conclude our panels, but we do have one more signed up for public comment, Deborah Butler.
I don't think so. She went home. I don't blame her. But let me just say in closing, thank you to my colleagues for sticking it out, listening intently and taking really good notes and feeling what needs to be done next. I was thinking about this hearing. And I go on deep dives on YouTube. And some of the things when you Google, like in India domestic violence is what the boys do, like it's okay for a dozen guys to attack a girl, a lady on a bus and nobody gets charged. That is unacceptable. And if you look at how in this country, things have changed for the better to some degree, all you got to do is watch reruns of Lucy and Desi and the way he used to disrespectfully talk to her and literally put hands on her. And you're raising boys. You know, I got sons. And we're raising them differently, to respect women, to protect women and to not abuse their authority because they have none. They're equals.
Absolutely, Mr. Chairman. And also, why our resolve must be stronger now more than ever. Because the head of, the most powerful person in the world, in the world, is showing how you can disrespect women rather if it's at a press conference and say different things, have been convicted and somehow still become leader of the free world with specific acts of disrespect and sexual violence against women and somehow folks turn a blind eye after being convicted and say, this is the guy who we want to run our country, that trickles down into the culture of what's accepted. We're having a real conversation about the actual system. Because if the leader of the free world can act that way, then we know we have a hard fight to make sure we're breaking that type of mentality. When you talk about in a court system and the judge may say, well, you can't come in here and dress like A, B, C and D without having a sense of compassion and empathy about what a person is going through or a police officer may say, well, it's your fault because you put yourself in that predicament as opposed to offering support, right, and a safe place to talk to someone. But I believe we're up to the challenge. I also want to acknowledge the father, Kevin Scott, who actually stayed throughout this hearing. And again, we're here to be supportive of him and all families. I just want people to know this happened to be a catalyst. But we have also been addressing the issue in various times throughout City Council. But now, our resolve is even stronger as we move forward to work together as a unit. Thank you.
So this concludes the business of the Committee on Public Safety. Thank you all for your participation. (Committee on Public Safety concluded at 5:50 p.m.) C E R T I F I C A T I O N I, hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence noted are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me in the foregoing matter, and that this is a correct transcript of the same. ________________________________ TANEHA CARROLL