A Bit of Comfort for Victims
It’s taken nearly three years, but there finally will be automated warnings for Los Angeles County rape, stalking and domestic violence victims before their assailants are released from jail. As billed, the Victim Information and Notification System (VINE) will alert a victim up to several days before the release.
The program should help victims to relax and recover by having some assurance that they will be kept informed. It can also give them time to mentally prepare for the release date, perhaps through counseling or by making sure they have access to a shelter.
VINE employs an automated telephone notification system that redials the phone numbers of victims or their families every 30 minutes for 24 hours or until they are reached.
“This is another tool in the arsenal of self-defense for the public and law enforcement,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca in announcing the program on Tuesday.
Supervisor Gloria Molina has pushed for victim notification since 1996. Now, a 1998 amendment to the state’s victims rights law has made notification a requirement.
This is a sound concept, but there are concerns. Gail Abarbanel of Santa Monica’s Rape Treatment Center, for example, notes that it’s one thing to have a press conference but quite another to make sure victims are given information on what specifically they can do for protection. She’s right, and the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office should be pressed to announce just how they intend to pass on the information.
Unsurprisingly, there are questions about VINE, its capacity and its expansion. The system is operated by Interactive Systems Inc. of Louisville, Ky. According to several published reports, all the victim-notification calls are generated from the Louisville headquarters, and the company is upfront in saying that it wants to handle victim notification for all 50 states. New York, for example, recently became the seventh state to use VINE throughout its prison system. The number of U.S. communities served by the system grew from 100 to 500 in 1998 alone.
Los Angeles officials should take caution on what this breakneck expansion might mean for crime victims here. What happens if the system bogs down or fails under its increasing size? The county should have a contingency plan in place. The time to think about that is now, not when the first failure results in a tragedy for a victim who should have been informed but wasn’t.
