Beyond Fighting Crime, FBI Reaches Out To Victims : NPR

Beyond Fighting Crime, FBI Reaches Out To Victims : NPR

"When FBI agents arrive at the scene of a shooting or a terrorist attack, there's often someone else standing in the background. It's a representative from the FBI's Office for Victim Assistance, there to help people suffering in the aftermath of a disaster.

The planning for those unfortunate days starts here, in a windowless conference room in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building, where seven serious-looking people are sitting around a table.

They're talking about how to pick volunteers to serve on five elite teams of victim specialists they deploy when something really bad happens: what they call a mass casualty event. That means a bombing, a massacre or a terrorist attack.

Dr. Steve Porter is a clinical neuropsychologist who used to work with special forces in the military.

"It's a very demanding process," Porter says of the victim-assistance rapid-deployment teams. "These people who volunteer to be on this have to be able to leave in a moment's notice, almost. ... They have to be on call 24/7. They never know when they're going to get called."

They need to be able to help with basic needs, Porter says, such as safety, food, shelter and clothing.

In cases they know about in advance, such as raids on brothels where young women are trafficked, FBI social workers say they plan ahead: buying T-shirts, sweat pants and flip-flops for women inside who might need them.

"There are so many things we can't do for them — we can't alleviate their loss — but we do try to provide for those practical needs and a lot of that starts with information," says Kathryn Turman, who created the victim-assistance office at the FBI 10 years ago this December.

Sometimes that means a little something more. In the early days, not long after Turman started the unit at the FBI, she reached out to a woman whose husband had been killed in a bombing in Iraq.

"I said, 'I wanted to say how sorry we are about your husband's murder,'" Turman says. "And she said, 'You're the first person who's used that word.' And that's what it was: It was a murder."

Turman and the FBI office she leads represent a pioneering philosophy, says Mai Fernandez, who directs the National Center for Victims of Crime, a nonprofit advocacy group."