Sandy Bromley came to Memphis nearly seven years ago to lead the Crime Victims and Rape Crisis Center, a county-run department that serves nearly 4,000 crime victims every year. In May, she was tapped to oversee the county’s division of community services, a vast portfolio that includes pretrial services, the aging commission and behavioral health, among other services.
Bromley’s work also places her in the middle of the government’s response to gun violence. She met with members of the National Offices of Violence Prevention Network at an event at the White House in May to collect insight from other cities.
“The work that I’ve done working with victims of crime over the years has really led me here,” Bromley said during an interview with MLK50 in late May. “I know that it’s possible to heal from trauma. I know that with validation and support and help, it is possible to heal.”
This Q&A has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Most of your background is in domestic violence. How did that prepare you for the job that you now have?
I wanted to be a sports agent when I was in law school, but I ended up working for a public housing authority. And I saw women, mostly women with their kids, come into the public housing authority, and they said, ‘Hey, I’m getting evicted because a crime happened here last night, but I was the victim of that crime.’ That just made no sense to me whatsoever. Why would you hurt somebody who’s already hurting? That has since changed with the Violence Against Women Act. And so that’s really what sort of directed me into the victim services world. And I’ve been doing that ever since.
How’d you make your way to Memphis?
I worked for Fairfax County in Virginia, and I was like their domestic violence systems coordinator, working with everyone from the chief of police and judges. I got a little burned out doing community work, to be honest. So I went to work for a national organization, and I was contracted to do violence prevention training across the world with the U.S. Air Force.
Then, I really missed working in a community. I was on the road all the time, traveling, and I was just looking for jobs. Memphis wasn’t even in my plan whatsoever. I applied to lead the Crime Victims and Rape Crisis Center and met with Dorcas Young Griffin, who was then the director of the community services division. She can talk anyone into anything. We had one conversation, and I was moving to Memphis.
Last year, there were nearly 400 homicides in Shelby County. Where does the office or the Division of Community Services work overlap with that issue?
Our Crime Victims and Rape Crisis Center is one of our agencies under the division. They serve about 4,000 victims each year. One part of that work is working with homicide survivors. So friends and family of those who were lost to homicide, but also they work with people affected by aggravated assault, which is gunshot survivors, too. Gunshot survivors actually have very few resources in our community. You’re oftentimes sort of fixed up very quickly by the hospital and then asked to rebuild your life when your entire life is, your entire assumptive world is shattered.
We have a Youth and Family Resource Center in Raleigh that works with young people who commit low-level stuff, like trespassing or breaking curfew. We want them to come to our Youth and Family Resource Center and not go to juvenile court. We do an assessment and figure out what resources that family may need to put them on a different trajectory.
Also under the division are pretrial and behavioral health services for justice-involved adults. Pretrial is when we’re trying to figure out the background and other information of the person who’s accused of crime so that the judicial commissioner can make a good bail decision. And then we also do lots of programming to make sure that we’re getting the classes that these folks might need, again, to change their trajectory, and also making sure that they show up for court. So things like text messaging them, making sure that we’re just helping folks get through the criminal justice process.
Mayor Lee Harris chose you to go to the White House recently for a gun violence summit. Any insights gained from meeting with other communities that are similar to Shelby County?
The National Offices of Violence Prevention Network hosted us with the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. There were about 50 total offices from across the country that went there. I’ve been working with them since last fall to learn from the national folks, but then also other folks in other communities that have these types of offices because we want to create some sort of office of community safety or office of violence prevention. We’re not sure what it’s going to be called yet, but we’re actually working towards that with the city of Memphis and with the health department to try to build out some infrastructure around a holistic response to violence and community safety.
There’s a lot of research in support of taking what people call a public health approach to addressing gun violence or firearm injuries. Do you feel like the county is on that path; is the government using that as a guide, or are you all guided by something else?
The approach that we are taking is certainly similar to a public health approach. It’s a little bit a combination of everything. I happen to be on Mayor Paul Young’s public safety transition committee also and we created for him this community safety continuum. And so there’s very much a lot of public health principles throughout the plan. So it’s public health-informed, but also a whole government approach. That’s what we were hoping this new office will do, pulling together all of those different government agencies that have touched on those things and do it better.
Most people may think, well, when will we be able to see this at work? Maybe not the impact, but when will they be able to call on this office of violence prevention for help?
Both city and county mayors are on board and understand its importance. We are actually hiring a director for the office right now and working with the city to figure out whether that’s going to be a shared leadership model and how that’s going to practically work.
The community safety continuum is the idea that we cannot just rely on traditional approaches to public safety. It’s broken up as prevention and intervention, suppression and enforcement, and transformation. The prevention and intervention is really what this new office is going to be working on and that is mostly things like group violence intervention. The office will also have a role in the transformation part.
We’re just trying to convene people, have them learn from one another, collaborate and apply for more funding. Right now, funding is a really big issue. We got an influx of money early on in the pandemic around this issue, and now it’s trickled out and we’ve got some sustainability issues right now. A lot of this work has been set up using American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, dollars. And so now we’ve got to think through how we are going to truly sustain this.
Why is it hard for folks to get funding for community violence intervention?
It’s a paradigm shift. We are saying that public safety is not just your traditional public safety. I know all of our budgets lie in traditional public safety, and we certainly don’t want to cut budgets from the work that’s happening. And so we’re asking for more money to go towards public safety, but for a different project. That is just going to take some time for folks to wrap their minds around — yes, it’s important to fund our courts and our law enforcement. But it’s also important to fund people doing outreach work and stopping people from retaliating in the streets.
Michael Finch II is the enterprise reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact him at mike.finch@mlk50.com