Paraplegic shooting victims can languish for weeks in city-owned hospitals without counseling, their public insurance insufficient to get them a bed at a rehabilitation clinic. Others recovering from injuries return home with dim job prospects and a heightened fear of going outside. Distrustful of the police, they sometimes decline the entreaties of detectives seeking to solve a crime, leaving them on their own to work through the pain and anger that follow.
To address those deficits, the Police Department said on Wednesday that it would bring advocates for crime victims into each of the city’s 77 precincts, opening a door to a range of therapeutic and financial services that people in poor, minority neighborhoods have lacked.
The program, financed by the department and staffed by Safe Horizon, a nonprofit that places domestic-violence counselors in the city’s police precincts, is the first since at least the early 2000s to provide victims of crimes like assault and robbery access to services within a station house.
The move reflects a growing recognition across the country that the people who disproportionately bear the brunt of serious crime — mostly young minority men — are also the least likely to get help. The federal budget for the Victims of Crime Act, passed in 1984, grew in 2015 by $1.6 billion, part of what advocates say is a broad shift toward recognizing that money for social services needs to flow into high-crime neighborhoods, just as resources to support law enforcement have for decades.
