Violent crime victims drive change to programs
Vanessa Martinez was finishing preparations for her daughter’s second birthday in September 2021 when her ex-boyfriend broke into her Mesa, Ariz., condo and shot her in the head as she frantically tried to shield their three young children.
Doctors had to remove a third of her skull, but Martinez survived.
She left the hospital facing a fight for custody of her kids, who had been placed in state care after the attack. She needed a new place to live after much of the house was damaged in a standoff between police and her shooter. Her 4-year-old son needed trauma counseling.
Arizona has a state safety net — local victimcompensation programs — for victims of violent attacks such as Martinez. But she was denied help because she was behind on about $900 in court fines from unrelated incidents, including one dating back nearly a decade. Program officials told Martinez she could reapply if she got current with a payment plan, but every dollar she made was needed for finding a place to live, work scrubs for her home-care job, after-school day care — and the list grows.
Across the country, victims such as Martinez are using their stories to advocate for changes to state victim compensation programs, where thousands of crime survivors turn for help with medical bills, relocation, funerals or other expenses. The programs disburse millions of dollars each year, but AP found racial inequities and other barriers in how claims are denied in many states.
Crime survivors have organized rallies, testified at legislatures and met with dozens of lawmakers — with much success.
Legislatures in more than half of U. S. states have passed measures to improve their programs in recent years. The changes vary widely: A victim’s criminal history is no longer an automatic disqualifier in Illinois. The time limit to apply for help was increased from three to seven years in California. In Michigan, the cap on aid will nearly double to $45,000 this year, andmore people like caretakers of victims will be eligible for survivor benefits.
States have cut back on their denials to families based on the behavior of homicide victims and loosened requirements that crime victims must have cooperated with or reported the crime to police.
In Ohio, denials are no longer automatic for crime victims who have felony convictions or for surviving family if a murder victim had drugs in their system. Those reasonswere used to deny help for a handful of victims in the 2019 mass shooting at a Dayton bar where nine peoplewere killed and 17 others were wounded.
Dion Green was at the bar that night with his father, Derrick Fudge, who was killed. Green helped fight for the changes to Ohio’s program after being denied help because his father had an almost 10-year-old felony conviction.
“I told them that I miss my father every day, but the survivors, the people left here, are the ones still moving through their pain,” Green said.
Changes have rolled through states incrementally over decades as more is learned about victimization. Mental health treatment wasn’t a commonly covered expense when the programs started in the 1960s and 1970s but now is covered widely. Pennsylvania passed a law to allow eligible victims access to counseling whether or not the program determined the victim contributed to their own victimization.
At the state level, hundreds of advocacy organizations are working for reforms, and with more than 100,000 members, Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice is one of the largest. Bernice “Tammi” Ringo is one of those members.
After a lifetime living around Detroit, Ringo had plans to move to Alabama with her 23-year-old son, Natalian, to get him away from the crime she had feared most of his life. Those plans were shattered in 2019, when Natalian was fatally shotwhile sitting in his parked car in an enclave of Detroit.
Ringo applied for funeral and counseling aid. Shewas denied because the program said she could rely on life insurance instead. She appealed, and although the program overturned its initial decision, it denied her again, saying her son had committed misconduct related to his own murder. The state commission provided no details, Ringo said, and Highland Park police were little help.
Overwhelmedwith grief, Ringo, 64, later spoke before the Michigan Legislature about the trauma of being told her son had somehow caused his murder.
“They put me through more hell,” she said of the program denial. “I’mheavily involved because I couldn’t leave and go to Alabama and take my son with me and... just start a new life.”
After she and other victims testified, lawmakers passed legislation that makes numerous changes, including increasing money available to victims, eliminating police reporting deadlines and increasing eligibility.
Data are not available for the handful of states that passed recent sweeping reforms. But New Jersey, which overhauled its programrules in 2020, saw an immediate change.
In 2018 and 2019, Black victims accounted for about 44% of applications but received nearly 60% of the denials, according to data obtained by the AP. After the overhaul, that disparity dwindled, and by 2021 it had disappeared.