Efforts to provide financial assistance to crime victims and their families are being supported by San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Mayor London Breed.
The Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice announced on Wednesday a $100,000 grant program that would assist victims and their families. “These are individuals on both sides of crime and punishment by healing those who have been harmed we can prevent the next crime, Boudin said.
Financial Compensation for Victims
The announcement comes amid public scrutiny of the apparent surge of crimes in the region and the country as a whole. The pretrial diversion program which aims to interrupt the cycle of crime supervises inmates released from jail while they wait for their scheduled court date. The program has observed that more than half of its clients are suspects in reoffenses.
San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani is requesting more frequent updates regarding the issues from the program. She is also calling for more thorough reports on why the involved inmates who are considered high risk are eligible for the program and being released.
First, she asked for data after incidents where inmates involved with the program committed high-profile violent crimes. Recently, Stefani also voted against renewing the multi-million-dollar contract.
“What I find so alarming and frustrating is pretrial diversion program has had this information and refused to share it with this body when I asked for it,” Stefani said, NBC Bay Area reported.
On the other hand, Boudin supported the program but noted there were still areas that could be improved. “While that number is disturbing, and we’d like it to improve it is in fact, lower than state prison and if prison could do as well as pretrial diversion we’d be moving in the right direction,” he said.
