§12513 Demonstration Program on Trauma-informed, Victim-centered Training for Law Enforcement

Summary

The Attorney General, through the Office on Violence Against Women, must run a competitive grant program that gives money to state, local, territorial, or Tribal law enforcement agencies. Each grantee must work with a victim services partner. The grants pay for testing trauma-informed, victim-centered ways to investigate domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. The goals are to avoid re-traumatizing victims, use evidence-based investigative practices, improve communication between victims and officers, boost teamwork in the community response, and measure how well the training works. Grants should go to a mix of places, like urban, suburban, Tribal, remote, rural areas, college campuses, and underserved communities. Grantees must train people who deal with victims, such as officers, school staff (including campus police and school resource officers), and emergency or medical workers. Training must cover victim interviews that get useful information without re-traumatizing, current best practices for investigations, culturally and linguistically appropriate methods, handling complex case types (for example, cases involving drugs or alcohol, strangulation, non-strangers, same-sex incidents, people with disabilities, male victims, or LGBT victims), working with response teams and the community, and how to identify and classify reports. The Attorney General will pick existing trainings to use and will consult the Office for Victims of Crime. Each grantee must hire a research partner (preferably local) to collect data, run evaluations, and share preliminary results and recommendations during the grant. Up to $5,000,000 is authorized for each of fiscal years 2023 through 2027. These requirements must not interfere with anyone’s due process rights.