Event raises awareness of crime victim rights

Moses Lake has normal crime rate

MOSES LAKE - Toward the end of his presentation, an audience member asked Moses Lake Police Chief Dean Mitchell what worries keep him up at night.

"How much time have you got?" Mitchell asked with a wry chuckle. "I've got a lot of concerns of the community, but I feel very fortunate we live in the community we do live in. The positive things going on in our schools, our parks and in our city. The things that have me really concerned are the property crimes, the graffiti. But these are issues communities nationwide are facing right now."

Mitchell also pointed to a resurgence in gang violence.

Mitchell and Families and Friends of Violent Crime Victims representative Jim Huffman spoke before a small group of people early Wednesday evening during the North Columbia Community Action Council's meeting to raise awareness of crime victim rights.

About two or three people were in attendance who were not already connected to the council, law enforcement, victims' rights or the meeting itself.

"Obviously, I would have liked to see a larger turnout. That's a matter of, we're going to have to learn how to better reach our audience," council Community Services Director Thomas Bonnington said. "People are still equating us to a domestic violence-sexual assault program and a lot of people don't want to be associated with that. It's too 'girlish,' it's too 'whiny.' So that may turn them off from coming to something like this: 'I don't really care about rapes or whatever. I want to know about if my house got broken into.'"

The council may have to change how it presents the meetings or the wording, he added.

"I don't know," Bonnington said. "Learning process."

During his presentation, Mitchell provided an overview of Moses Lake's crime statistics in 2007.

"Moses Lake is not a unique community," he said. "We do not have an extremely high crime rate. Our crime rate is fairly normal for a typical community of our size."

Mitchell believes a gradual increase in calls for service from 2004 to present coincides with the growth in the Moses Lake community.

Huffman spoke about his experiences with the Families and Friends program, in which he got involved after his ex-wife and daughter were murdered.

Huffman spoke of his rage and grief following the murders. It wasn't until someone who had gone through a similar situation told him his feelings were survivable that he began to move toward the process of forgiveness, he said.

"We do a lot to provide second chances for offenders, but we do virtually nothing to give second chances to the victims," he said.

Society's view of justice for violent crime victims is based on a number of misconceptions, Huffman added, including the idea victims want revenge.

"The anger they're feeling is absolutely natural and will become manageable for them over time, but it takes a lot of time," he said.

When Huffman speaks to families, he tries to keep their expectations lowered during a trial so they aren't disappointed with the system.

"I tell them there's three things they really can't have," he explained. "First thing they likely will never get is the answer to why the crime occurred. Oftentimes the offenders themselves don't understand why, they don't have a clue. The second thing they're not going to get is closure. The third thing I tell families they would really like to have but likely won't get is justice."

The concept of "closure" for a family stemming from conclusion of a trial is a misconception typically generated by television, Huffman noted.

"That profound loss of your life, you can't compensate for, there is no way of providing restitution for," he said. "If it's a not a loss of life, at minimum it's a loss of innocence, it's a loss of dignity. Those kinds of things you can't bring back. But we should try, we should do everything we can to move in that direction."

Big Bend Community College criminal justice instructor Ryann Leonard wanted to find out about the resources available locally, so she would be able to inform her students.

"I liked that it included law enforcement perspective as well as the victim's perspective," she said of the program. "It answered a lot of questions about resources in this community I wasn't aware of."

Recent community college graduate Jessica Ramm plans to attend Western Washington University in the fall for a human services degree.

"I will be hopefully doing victims' advocacy in the future, so I wanted to see what resources were around this area," she said. "I didn't know there were so many people that had this much information, so it was really nice to see all the different people."