Community Spotlights
Birmingham, AL
January 17, 2025
A Federal-State-Local Coordinated Criminal Justice Approach
In October 2020, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama (NDAL) announced the launch of “Operation Safe Families,” inspired by “Operation 922” in Oklahoma City, OK led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Oklahoma.
Modeled after the Oklahoma City initiative, Operation Safe Families takes the form of a federal-state-local criminal justice partnership with the goal of robustly enforcing federal firearms laws to ultimately reduce domestic-violence derived gun violence. The partnership involves active participation by law enforcement, prosecutors, domestic violence service providers, and culturally specific organizations, including:
- Northern District of Alabama United States Attorney’s Office (federal prosecutor)
- Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office (state prosecutor)
- Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) (federal law enforcement)
- Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (county law enforcement)
- Birmingham Police Department (local law enforcement)
- One Place Family Justice Center
- YWCA
- ¡HICA! (Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama)
How the initiative took shape
The initiative was born of the Birmingham, AL partners’ collective dedication to determining an effective approach to addressing violent crime in their community, particularly domestic violence with a high risk of lethality. The shape the initiative took was driven by data. The partners understood the body of research across the United States that clearly demonstrates the dramatically increased risk of lethality to domestic violence victims when firearms are accessible to their abuser and the connection between domestic violence-related gun violence and other community gun violence.
Setting out to get a picture of the scope within their own community, the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office undertook an extraordinary effort to collect and analyze case records. The District Attorney’s Office handles the prosecution of felony charges, which are handled in circuit court. They recognized that domestic violence, when it is prosecuted, is most often prosecuted as misdemeanor charges. In Jefferson County, which encompasses the city of Birmingham and dozens of additional municipalities, the adjudication of misdemeanor charges is scattered throughout multiple district or municipal courts. With no centralized repository of criminal justice court records, collecting these records required a manual effort as the various municipal court records are not universally collected and some do not even maintain electronic records. After collecting case records across the county for several recent years, they observed that more than 70% of homicide offenders in Jefferson County have previously committed acts of domestic violence. As a result of this intense effort, the District Attorney’s Office revealed the undeniable connection between domestic violence and community violence. This data helped energize federal partners that historically did not have much involvement in responses to domestic violence to join in local efforts.
As the initiative took shape, its foundation was built in One Place Family Justice Center. With its onsite partners, including Operation Safe Families participants ¡HICA! and YWCA, One Place offers survivor-centered wraparound services to all survivors regardless of whether they choose to navigate the criminal or civil justice system. Within the Operation Safe Families initiative, One Place and its partner agencies keep the initiative partners informed of the real life needs of victims and survivors of domestic violence—within the bounds of privacy and confidentiality obligations—and are uniquely positioned to inform the law enforcement and prosecution partners of the real barriers that victims and survivors in their community face to maintaining their safety and engaging with the justice system.
Rooting the initiative in One Place ensured that the heart of the initiative was to connect every survivor with access to wraparound and culturally responsive services. One of the One Place onsite partners, and a participant in the Operation Safe Families initiative, is ¡HICA! (the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama), a culturally specific organization serving Latino and immigrant families in Alabama. ¡HICA!’s programming has grown directly to meet the needs of the Latino and immigrant families in the Birmingham area who have sought their services, including their Strong Families Program through which they provide a range of services for survivors.
¡HICA!’s holistic, culturally responsive approach has built incredible trust with community members—some of whom will not see the criminal justice system as a viable option for them. Because of this deep trust, the local Latino and immigrant community entrust ¡HICA! with honest insight into the barriers they face. Their reach within the community provides them the unique position to identify systemic issues and barriers which they then voice within the Operation Safe Families partnership, providing the system partners with a view of the Latino and immigrant communities’ unmet needs that they would not otherwise have (e.g., inadequate language access in local courts).
The federal, state, and local prosecution and law enforcement agencies learned from one another about the barriers each face to addressing domestic violence, community safety, and offender accountability. This perspective enabled each to see what gaps they could fill for one another that would have an overall impact on the ability to better address high risk domestic violence.
The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office in Birmingham developed a dedicated high risk domestic violence unit within the office. Within the unit, prosecutors focus on criminal accountability for domestic abusers under available state offenses, while engaging their community partnerships to connect survivors with the supportive services they may need.
The focused nature of the unit allows prosecutors to devote their attention to seeking out critical information in order to identify high-risk offenders, such as civil domestic violence protection orders, dismissed charges, and misdemeanors cases. This unit, with a designated point person, is a direct liaison to the NDAL federal prosecutors, also with a designated point person, to help identify cases ripe for federal prosecution under Operation Safe Families. Simultaneously the NDAL developed criteria for the sort of high-risk domestic violence-derived cases they could prioritize for a federal prosecution considering the gaps in state law and the tools available in federal law.
Similarly, the ATF observed concrete ways their authority filled gaps in local law enforcement’s authority to hold accountable some high-risk domestic abusers.
The Operation Safe Families partners also collaborated on public awareness and outreach efforts aimed at increasing the community’s knowledge about domestic violence and the risk of firearms, the laws that prevent abusers’ access to firearms and how the initiative prioritizes holding armed abusers accountable, and the resources and supports available for victims and survivors. This has included the dissemination of a brochure and the production of a public service announcement featuring leadership from the Birmingham Police Department, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Jefferson County District Attorneys, NDAL U.S. Attorney’s Office, the ATF, One Place, and YWCA.
Resources
The Operation Safe Families partners leverage a variety of funding sources and resources to support the work to achieve their ultimate goal of a federal-state-local coordinated community response to domestic violence and domestic violence-derived firearm violence which leads to a reduction in homicides. NDAL got the initiative off the ground through Project Safe Neighborhoods funding by identifying and prioritizing domestic violence and domestic violence-derived community firearm violence as a significant crime issue to be concentrated on in their community.
One Place and ¡HICA! received funding from the Improving Criminal Justice Responses program administered by the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice (OVW) to address barriers faced by survivors seeking assistance, including culturally and linguistically appropriate legal services, and key indicators for lethality in partnership with the Jefferson County department of Health.
One Place received funding from the Firearms Technical Assistance Project administered by OVW to facilitate and implement a coordinated community response to the intersection of domestic violence and firearms in the community.
The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office received funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the U.S. Department of Justice to enhance the response to domestic violence by local law enforcement and prosecutors.
Beyond devoting financial resources, the Operation Safe Families partners devote personnel capacity to ensure the collaborative work progresses. The top leadership in every participating entity is personally involved in the work which demonstrates the commitment to, and importance of, the effort to address domestic violence through a coordinated community response to all those throughout their agencies. Additionally, each entity has prioritized the initiative’s work within their office by designating point persons, including a domestic violence prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office to review and refer cases, a federal prosecutor reviewing referred cases and handling or assigning the ones accepted, an ATF agent working cases with Birmingham detectives and federal prosecutors.
A unique aspect to Birmingham’s collaborative model is the role played by NDAL’s Project Safe Neighborhoods Coordinator, Jeremy Sherer. He devotes extensive time and effort to understanding the role and perspective of each initiative partner and lending support to each of them individually. His coordination keeps a large, varied group communicating regularly, helps identify issues that need to be addressed, and has built a rapport with every initiative partner.
Benefits realized
Each initiative partner’s commitment to the effort is demonstrated by the energy they expend to share knowledge and perspective from their work with the other partners. The federal partners, who historically have little involvement in domestic violence cases, have been inspired and energized by the perspective they gained that gave them insight into the very real impact the effort has on survivors’ lives and community safety as a whole. In turn, state and local partners were re-energized as the partnership gave them new tools to address domestic violence and domestic violence-derived gun violence, relieving some of their frustrations.
Committing designated personnel to the effort within each entity has the benefit of allowing people to build expertise specific to domestic violence and derivative gun cases so that both survivor safety and offender accountability are fairly and effectively promoted, gives them a vantage point to identify trends, and the rapport built between the point persons in the federal and state/local agencies increases the efficiency of the case evaluation and referral process.
In addition to devoting their resources to fulfilling their promised role within the collaborative, the initiative partners have also stepped up to fill other partners’ gaps that would threaten continued progress of the initiative. The clearest example of the multidisciplinary, multilevel commitment to this effort came during a period of transition at One Place. For several months, NDAL’s Project Safe Neighborhoods Coordinator was embedded at One Place to serve as their Acting Executive Director between the departure of their former ED and recruitment of their next ED. Without this federal-state-local coordinated community response that places victim services at the center, it would be highly unusual for a U.S. Attorney’s Office to expend the personnel and financial resources to detail a federal prosecutor to a local victim services agency for several months. But because NDAL U.S. Attorney Prim Escalona understood the importance of the program and was willing to do so, One Place—and Operation Safe Families—remained a constant for survivors in the community.
The coordinated community response embodied in Operation Safe Families has many other benefits for survivors, including:
- A connection to wraparound services whether a survivor navigates the state or federal criminal justice system, or no system at all;
- For those who do interact with the criminal justice system, they are more likely to encounter system professionals who are better trauma-informed and survivor-centered as a result of One Place’s reach;
- The co-location and partnership of various service providers and multilevel agencies relieves some of the burden on survivors to navigate so many offices and systems and re-tell their trauma over and over.
- By prioritizing federal domestic violence-derived firearms cases, some survivors feel their abusers are held accountable in ways they otherwise would not because either there were inadequate options in state law to hold them accountable or the survivor faced other barriers to participating in the criminal justice process, which often is not required in a federal prosecution for a domestic violence-derived firearms offense.
- In this community, the cases suitable for federal prosecutions reach a resolution much faster than those in state court, which has such overwhelmed dockets that a trial for a charge other than homicide is likely to take two years or more.
- With the meaningful inclusion of culturally specific organizations in this coordinated community response the unique barriers faced by a particular community are illuminated for the entire partnership and cultural competence is increased, which lessens barriers for some marginalized survivors engaging with services and/or systems.
The dedication of the agencies and service providers, which seemed to gain energy as they observed how their collaboration could have real impact on survivors’ lives, produced time sensitive, creative solutions to address survivors’ acute needs.
Overall, these benefits are felt by the community as a whole. As local data revealed, in the Birmingham community more than 70% of homicide offenders commit domestic violence. When local, state, and federal criminal justice agencies can leverage each other’s knowledge, resources, and authority to more effectively address domestic violence, particularly as it is facilitated by firearms, a derivative impact is felt by the entire community.