The Renton Police Department will continue to use the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant to support training for supporting victims of domestic violence.
At the Jan. 6 Renton City Council meeting, the council authorized the acceptance of $29,013 in grant funds for the Renton Police Department to use for its domestic violence victim advocacy program. The Renton Police Department has been awarded the grant for the past 20 years. This year the funds will assist with the victim advocate overtime costs, training conference for crimes against women, peer support, force science certification training and improvements for soft and hard interview rooms.
Victim advocate Tina Harris said the program offers advocacy services to victims of domestic violence, which includes offering safety planning, community resources, explaining the judicial process, getting orders of protection, assisting with crime victims’ compensation and linking them to community-based programs, such as YWCA or the Domestic Abuse Women’s Network.
“There’s a lot of moving parts in victim services, but it’s really meeting the victim where they are in their journey, if you will,” Harris said. “I am not a police officer, nor am I the prosecutor, so I can advocate with them for what they want and explain how they got to this point.”
Harris said she has cases where she has been working with a victim for several years.
“My services are to provide them a safe place to tell their story if they want to, to assure them that I believe them and to help them navigate a very complicated and confusing part of the legal system and the criminal justice system,” Harris said. “It’s not my job to tell victims what to do. I offer them suggestions. They get to decide. They get to choose what it is they feel is important to them.”
Harris said she has worked in this capacity for Renton for 22 years and the city has had the grant each year she has worked. She said the grant was previously only used for victim services but the city has absorbed those costs because they saw the need.
“What it funds currently is the advocates and law enforcement’s ongoing training on the topic of domestic violence,” she said, adding that they take a team of the advocate, prosecutor, detectives, patrol and the sergeant to attend a collaborative approach training to bring back information on how to better their department for their residents.
“The reason it’s important to keep law enforcement, prosecution, advocates and those of us in the system updated is because our laws are changing, our community is changing,” Harris said. “So things have to evolve and change. We evolve and change to get better.”
Harris said it is beneficial to hear from like-minded people focusing on the topic of domestic violence and to see what people in other jurisdictions and states are doing that’s working.
An example Harris gave was the recent Renton municipal code that creates a new code for children exposed to domestic violence based on research that shows the long-term effects being exposed to domestic violence as a child can have on a person.
“When we’re changing policy, we are looking at how it works in other jurisdictions and how it works in other states and is that something we can adopt in our own state to make it better for victim services and hold defendants accountable,” Harris said.
Harris said she appreciates the support she receives from the city and is glad to be working alongside the police department.
“I’m very honored to be working in the police department for the city of Renton. There’s a few other agencies that have an in-house advocate within the police department and I think that is very, very important because the officers respond to these calls and then I get the cases and I respond to the victims,” she said. “Whereas the officers are out looking for suspects and doing all the investigation, I am servicing the needs of the victims and their families.”
