 Let's give our escorts a round of applause. Good evening. Good evening. It is my pleasure and honor to welcome you and our viewing audience to the 17th Annual Women's Forum in recognition of Women's History Month. I'm Beverly Thompson, Public Affairs Director for the City of Durham. Our theme this year is visionary women, champions of peace and nonviolence. We couldn't have selected a better panel of women to talk about this timely and powerful subject tonight. But before we get to the panel discussion, I'd like to introduce Cheryl McDonald. Cheryl is with the City's Neighborhood Improvement Services Department. Good evening. My name is Cheryl McDonald, Executive Assistant to NIS Director, Constance Stansel. It is my honor to bring you greetings on her behalf and to welcome you to tonight's event. NIS Stansel sends her apologies for being unable to attend due to a previously scheduled out-of-town function. She would like to thank the panelists and moderator for sharing their words of wisdom and inspiration. They are truly visionary women and champions of peace and nonviolence. As Sir Gerner Truth stated, if the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again. During National Women's History Month and every day throughout the year, we must come to realize that all of us together can do wonderful, miraculous, world-shaping things. Not only are we champions of peace and nonviolence, we are nurturers of life, the consciousness of truth, the inspiration for perseverance, and just flat out bad to the bone. On behalf of Neighborhood Improvement Services and Director Stansel, thank you so much for coming. Next, it is my pleasure to introduce Durham City Council member, Vernetta Alston, who will bring us greetings from Durham City Council and talk about our purpose here tonight. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. It's great to see you all here tonight. There's a big gap in the middle here in the front. I hope that gets filled in. So thank you again, Beverly. The theme of this forum references peace. For far too many, peace is just an idea. It's an idea that we hear about in song, that we learn about in our faith communities, and that we beg for in our darkest hours. For too many, peace has yet to cut through the tragedy, loss, fear, or hopelessness that they experience in their own lives. And for many, the desire for peace that I think we all feel in our hearts is often overcome by turmoil and the lack of opportunity that we see around us every single day. Here in Durham, led by the women you'll hear from tonight, we're working to make peace a reality for everyone. In Durham, we are eliminating barriers to reentry for thousands of justice-involved residents, many of them women and mothers. We are investing in economic initiatives for historically disenfranchised communities, and we are fighting for the kind of inclusion that this event celebrates. These champions are moving mountains in this community on your behalf. And they're doing so using their unique and diverse voices as black women. In doing so, they are also charting a path towards real progress and lasting change. So to all the panelists, I just wanna say, thank you for everything that you're doing for Durham. And to all of you here tonight for this event, on behalf of the mayor of Durham and the entire city council, welcome. Welcome to this exciting event, and I hope that you will use the lessons of these leaders to bring peace to the lives of everyone in Durham who deserves it. So thank you. Enjoy the discussion. Thank you, Sheryl, and thank you, council member Alston. Now it's time to have a conversation with our panelists. As we mentioned earlier, our theme tonight is visionary women, champions of peace and nonviolence. Each of these women has walked different paths to be here tonight, to talk to us about how we can make each other better and at the same time make our city a better place to be and to live now and in the future. These women weren't just selected haphazardly. The committee that selected them gave a lot of thought about what each could bring to our panel discussion tonight. Now, if you know me, I like quotes and doing my research about these women, I found quotes, where else but on the internet, that seem to match their inner spirits and drive their drive to overcome obstacles, some very personal obstacles to make our city a better place to live. So let's start with Satana DeBerry, Durham County District Attorney. Her quote that I found that matched her the most to me, you live only once, you might as well be a bad ass. Now, I mean that in the most positive way, okay? I was afraid of what my quote was going to be about. DeBerry is a native of Hamlet, North Carolina. She left home to pursue her undergraduate studies at Princeton University. She moved to Durham, earned her Juris Doctorate degree from Duke University. Later, she received her Master of Business Administration from Duke's Fuqua School of Business. That alone qualifies her as a bad ass in my book. Okay. Okay. D.A. DeBerry, tell us a little bit about yourself, your other accomplishments and how you set your sights on becoming the D.A. of Durham. Sure. Well, one, thank you for having me. This is like a really great honor. And when I was invited to be on this panel, I was like, well, I don't know what I'll be doing next year. And they're like, be here anyway. I think for a really big challenge in my life and other than being the District Attorney of Durham is that I am the mother of three teenage girls. And to parent children in this day and age, especially the parent black children, I think is both rewarding and challenging. And we live in a time where, I mean, we have probably always lived in a time where it's been challenging to be a black woman, right? But we live now in a time where it is every day visibly people in your face making it challenging for you. And part of what I do, the reason I do what I do is, so there really no other little black girl has to fight the obstacles that I've had to fight. When they see me, they see the opportunity for themselves and who they get to be. When they see these women up here on the panel, people like Council Member Alston, they see the wide range of things you can do as a black woman. I see so many of you out there who do so many different things. I see educators and real estate agents and folks who are entrepreneurs and running their own business. And for me, that's really what I do, why I do what I do. Okay, all right, thank you. So next is my pleasure to introduce to you, Grace Marsh. She was recently named the Director of Community Engagement for Durham County Sheriff's Office. Her quote, and she's sitting on the edge of her seat, I just love bossy women. I could be around them all day. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term. It means somebody's passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn't mind leading. As a trained facilitator and mediator with 20 years of experience helping others resolve conflict, Grace is a true leader. After years of providing conflict resolution training and mediation in a variety of venues, including Durham Public Schools, Durham County, Duke University and AmeriCorps, she took the helm as Executive Director of the Elna B. Spalding Conflict Resolution Center. It's formerly known as Women in Action for the prevention of violence and its causes. There, she successfully garnered political support and state funding to establish a Community Mediation Center to offer alternative dispute resolution processes to Durham community. Grace, you've helped to develop some impact programs to help people work together to solve conflicts. Tell us about your journey and what brought you to the Sheriff's Office. Well, I was thinking about what I wanted to say and I have to first mention Mike Wint and some of you may know Mike Wint. Back in 1994, he had the Dispute Settlement Center and I saw a PSA announcement in the paper that they were training volunteer mediators and I signed up and I took the course and about five years later, Mike hired me as his assistant and I was so blessed to sit under him because he was the guru of mediation and I learned so much from him and a few years later, we lost the Dispute Settlement Center because it merged with an agency in Raleigh that had promised that it would help find money and help sustain the organization. The Wake County Dispute Settlement Center also merged with this organization and within two years, they were all unhappy and the Durham staff left and Wake left and took Durham's money and their presence in Durham was two days a week in District Court. So long story short, I went through a couple of jobs. I actually went to work in HR at UNC when I left the Dispute Settlement Center and it was while I was away that this happened to the Dispute Settlement Center and a few years later, I found myself unemployed and women in action was looking for a director and they told me that the board had met the summer before they hired me and they decided that we need to remake this organization because it's old and we're not relevant anymore and given our emergency assistance is really not what we had planned to be doing and so I immediately thought of re-establishing a mediation center here and so they hired me and sit here, you know and so it was a journey and I didn't do it by myself. I was able to garner several people, Mark Trustin and Nona Scamanage and Eileen McEvoy and our Durham delegation I went to them and said, we need some money and they actually got us around $100,000 to re-establish the center. So, you know, the next thing was I was told you need a juvenile program and so each time I needed something there was someone there to help. Arnold Dennis said to me, Campbell College has a great program, let's go look at it and we went and looked at their juvenile program and we applied for the same funding that they had and we established our program to address the disproportionate minority contact our children were having with the court system and so they were diverted to our program and they learned conflict management and sometimes we mediated between them. So as the years went on, we kept establishing programs and I just wanna give a shout out to Representative Mulvray who's not here who played a big part in us establishing a People's Court in Durham and People's Court, many people don't know about it but it is a court that operates every other Friday and the mediators from the Conflict Resolution Center actually are there to mediate any cases that get referred to them and the cases are citizen-generated warrants not police-generated warrants and so if the parties successfully mediate their case it is dismissed. So that's a service that we don't talk enough about it. Ms. D.A. But it really is helping people to stay out of the court system to have a record. They still have to have it expunged even though they didn't get a conviction it still says that you were charged with something. We did all of that with mediators and the way I ended up where I am now is Sheriff Berkey had called me when he was running because I worked with him on some committees and said, Grace, I need some help on my campaign and I was like, okay, that'll be fun. So I started helping with the campaign and the longer I was with him and heard his vision for someone to help to keep the community engaged with our law enforcement to hear from the community on a regular basis, not just during the campaigns. I thought that it would be good. And I also had hope that I would be the citizen's voice among law enforcement. And so sometimes I'm told, shut up. Well, we don't wanna do that. And I argue the point and we end up understanding each other. So I think I'm where I need to be at this point in time. I'm happy that I'm there. I appreciate all the help that I got from people who help get the Mediation Center established. It is run now by Raquel Dominguez who has 22 years of experience as a mediator and it's in capable hands. So I also wanna just give another shout out that if you have a conflict, whether it's a family issue, whether it's divorce, whether it's roommate issues, the Conflict Resolution Center is a nonprofit and you can get help there and they use a sliding scale. So keep that in mind. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Next we have T. Diane Jones. As chapter leader of the Durham Parents of Murdered Children, Diane has a title that I'm sure she never wished on her worst enemy. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing her for City Life, which is now airing on Durham Television Network. So I am thrilled, just thrilled that she's here to tell her story. Her quote, life will test you, but remember this, when you walk up a mountain, your legs get stronger. What do you think? Okay, her mountain, as she will tell you, often seemed like Mount Everest, but she made it to the top following the murder of her son. Her story, her painful battle to live again, to help others living through the same situation is a story that only she can tell. Diane. Hello everyone and I would like to say thank you all for your presence here tonight. And I would like to say thank you to some of my members for coming out and supporting. And another thank you to all of you who helped persuade me to be a part of this panel. And I would like to say I am very honored to be sitting amongst such amazing women. Thank you all for inviting me to be with you. When I became a part of the group called Parents of Murdered Children, I had lost my son to gun violence. It had been a year and the pain is so undescribable. I remember thinking that I would just drive out in front of a truck and just end it all because the pain was so devastating. And thankfully there was this organization called Parents of Murdered Children ran by Nellie Taylor-Jones who was a funeral home director. She saw a need in the early 90s to start this chapter when she saw violence taking the lives of a lot of our youth. Nellie passed away November of 2017, but believe me, she still is a big presence because she encouraged me and pushed me and she told me that I had something to say. And I was telling her I don't have anything to say. And she said, oh, yes, you're doing, you're gonna say it. So I do this in honor of Nellie for having faith in me and believing and telling me that I was gonna make a difference because all I thought I was was just a crying mom. What could I do? But being a part of the group, learning about how to deal with my grief helped me to understand that I wasn't going crazy. Being a part of the group got me answers to questions that I wasn't getting answered. My son's case has never been solved and it bothers me some, but I've learned that there's a process and the police can't make a case if the people don't talk. My son was killed in a room and house with 50 people there and nobody would talk. And that bothers me because here it is 20 years later and we have a remembrance booklet with 866 names in it of murder victims right here in Durham, North Carolina and people are still not talking. So I'm here tonight, not for me, but for all the victims of violence, for all the families that attend our support group. And I'm here to ask that everyone understand that this is not just our problem, the victims' families. This is everybody's problem. And I do believe if we all pull together and stand together that we can make a difference, that we can come up with ideas to combat the violence, to get our youth on the right track. One of the things that happened when my son died was I looked around, my eyes became open and I saw that about 20 of his friends had already been killed. And until it knocks on your door, you don't understand. And when it knocked on my door, I got an understanding and I knew I had to get out here and try to give back, get out and try to tell people that our youth are dying. They're dying at an alarming rate. Just the other day on the news, there was a news report that said 39,000 kids have been killed since 19, I have it here because I wanted to bring that fact to you all that 39,000 kids have been killed between 1999 and 2017. Of the 39,000 deaths, 61% were the result of assault, 32% were from suicide, 5% were accidental and 2% undetermined. But the saddest part of that whole article was, it stated that black children are accountable for 41% of all deaths and 86% were boys. That touched my heart because just about every family that comes through there, the majority of the murder victims are young men, are boys. And I'm just asking tonight, please don't think that that's just their problem. This is all our problem. Thank you. All right, thank you. So thanks to all of you for telling us about your inspirational journeys to where you are now. We're gonna take about 10 minutes to ask a few more questions and then we're gonna open it up to the audience. And I'd like to start with you, Satana. Why is it important, do you think, to hear from women about how to be a champion of peace and nonviolence? Do you think that women can relate in a way that men can't? So I wanna first say thank you to Ms. Jones because that was really powerful. Thank you. And I have made it a habit since I've been in office to talk to the families of homicide victims before we resolve the cases, whether they be by trial or by plea. And the first thing is that there's no justice in any of these cases because justice will be your son coming back home. But the really scary thing is that every mother that I've talked to is a mother who looks like me, every mother. And so I say that to say, I think women are particularly, especially black women in this community, are particularly well suited to talk about peace and nonviolence because to the extent that the criminal justice system, which is where I work currently, has a customer, that customer is black women. And whether black women are the mothers of victims, whether they're the people who make bail for folks, whether they're the people who are left in the community to raise children, to make money, to keep the household going, to make sure everybody has an education. So I think women are particularly well suited to understanding what we lose when we don't have peace in our community. And I think every woman, it doesn't, every woman, whether she's a mother or not, has some interaction with violence in her life just from being a woman. We're afraid sometimes to walk down the street at night, forget about what happens to the other people in our lives, we have to worry about our own safety. So we really are the people who understand what we could all gain from having a more peaceful community. Okay, thank you. Grace, would you like to comment on that? Yeah, I was thinking about as mothers, or sisters, or cousins or whatever, we all have family members growing up as children that we argue and we fight sometimes about things. And it's the mother or the women that tend to be the ones who wanna make the peace, who bring kids together and try to resolve the conflict, whether it's with a weapon or a punishment, but we're the ones trying to early on. No weapons, no weapons. She told my mother that. Mine too. So I think we are, we're uniquely, it's in us. It starts out very early that we hear our parents trying to make us get along better. And so we get that from our parents whereas boys are expected, it's almost like you expect them to fight sometime. Let them rough it up a little bit and you ignore it. But we as girls, our parents don't want us to get hurt. And I know if you're, I don't know how your family was, but my mother told my father, don't she spank her? Your hands are too heavy to spank her. So we're used to being peacemakers early on. Hurry Diane. And again, going back to what I do with my mothers and my group, women, moms, and I tell the men that come to our meeting, you guys are wonderful, but ain't nothing like a mom. There ain't nothing like a mom. We've had mothers who've grieved themselves to death over the loss of their child. And moms like myself will be fighting to the day I die for justice for my child. Men have a way of wanting to make it get better quick or whatever and if they can't fix it, they get mad and they just go on and whatever. But women, women, we sit around, we talk about it, we cry about it, and we try to come up with solutions. And the moms that are in my chapter, they are some amazing, amazing women. Even though that they're hurting, they still have compassion and caring and wanting to do something to help stop the violence. So women are just amazing. Guys, you're wonderful too. How many women are in your chapter? We have a mailing list of about 200, but actively coming with murder, you never know who's gonna show up. Some months we may have 15 people in the room and then some months it may only be three or four. But we're always there the second Tuesday of each month at the Emily case center from six to eight. So we're there whether there's one person or 20 people. But with murder and the grief, it takes a while for families to really say I'm gonna reach out for help. And for the ones that do come earlier, they are troopers because it took me a year before I saw help also. So all three of you come from very unique positions of being peace and non-violence champions, survivor, law enforcement mediator, and district attorney. Is there another voice that you think is missing from this conversation? I think it'd be good to have some women who themselves have committed crimes or have committed violence against other people and can talk about where to cost them to do that. And that reminds me of restorative justice. Restorative justice is, if you're not familiar with it, it's really a philosophy that says that when a crime is committed, when an offense is committed, the stakeholders, all of the stakeholders need to be involved in figuring out what happened, how did it make people feel, what needs to happen to make things right? And so all those voices need to come together in a realistic way to resolve or repair the harm and then restore the offender back into the community. That would be wonderful. And I know that our DA is very much interested in restorative justice and is doing some things in that area, but it also takes volunteers. And so the community can step up and volunteer and find organizations that are doing this kind of work and volunteer with them. And they need a diverse group of volunteers as well. People from every walks of life, every race, every social, economic class, religion, because culture is real and restoring people to the community also requires kind of understanding their cultural context and how they even came to the violence or to the offense in the first place. If you get a chance, there's a video called Meeting with a Killer, I think it's on YouTube. And I don't know if you're familiar with it, Diane, but it's a conversation that a mother and sister had with the man who murdered her daughter. And it's very, very powerful. The woman who is on that video came to Durham once and she was at First Prez. Marsha, you may, you're out there somewhere, you may remember that meeting that we had. I thought I saw Marsha here, Owen. So if you get a chance to look at that video and it was this conversation about why, why did you do this and where are you now? Just asking questions that, like I'm sure you had lots of questions that you would love to ask of this person, right? And having that opportunity can help bring a little closure to understand why. And I think if we can get to the point where we are using these processes to help heal as well as to help restore, because eventually a lot of these people who commit crimes are gonna come back into our community. So how can we, they need to heal too. And they need to hear how the victims are doing and figure out how they can at least do some, and in a small way, because they can't repair that home. I know that can't help, but I have a son. I can't imagine what you went through. But again, just having answers and holding people accountable for what they do to harm us is important. And I don't just mean the justice system. And I know Satanna agrees with me. It takes more than just putting them behind bars. In some ways, I'm not quite there yet. And I know a lot of the families that's been affected by violence are not quite there yet. We talk about it at our meetings. We talk about our anger. We talk about our hurt. And we always say that we don't wish this on our worst enemy. So in our hearts, we want justice. And we don't want more violence. We want justice. And so I say, I believe in peace, but I also believe in justice if you commit a crime. I think that we should have more young people involved in panels like this. They are out there. They know what's going on. They know what's triggering the violence. We need to hear from the young people. Every time I go to a vigil or a meeting or whatever, it's all older people. We have no clue to what's causing all the violence. We need to figure out ways that we can reach our young adults and get them involved and having discussions and talk about what's going on. And women, our young ladies, we need programs for them because they are being affected too. Their kids' fathers are dying in the streets and they need help. And women may not realize that they are the key to helping make that man a better man. So getting something together to get young women involved, I think it's very important. So how do you do that? How do you open that door to young people and other people who need to be at the table and who takes the lead in that? I think Durham is rich in resources, very rich in resources. We have a parks and recreation department that has different opportunities to bring kids together. We have our schools. Durham County has just recently, I think the city's in collaboration with them to address these adverse childhood incidents that cause some of the PTSD or the kids to, it's toxic stress. It's stress that's related to the environments that they live in. And I think that we have to do a better job at providing mental health, one, for our children. And two, we have to provide outlets for them to get rid of some of their energy, to learn new things, to understand what a future means. Because I think a lot of our kids live in an environment where they don't see anything outside of their environment. I've met kids who say they haven't been outside of Durham who are 14 years old. And Chapel Hill is what, 10 miles away. So we have to do a better job of serving our kids with mental health, with exposing them to different things. And I wanna give a shout out to Thomas Mentoring Leadership Academy whose boys were here and escorted us. Because that's a program that's doing a wonderful job with young boys and helping them in so many ways. But we need a program for girls like that. And I don't, then they have money, then it takes money too to run these programs. So, and recently Durham County decided that they're gonna use a new model for funding programs and they've cut the funding to some of these programs. The little $16,000 that we got from Durham County, the Comfort Resolution Center don't get anymore. And that funded the youth part of our program. So, a teen court, which is a great program. Teen court doesn't know what's gonna happen after June 30th because Durham County decided that they were going to do something different similar to what United Way did several years ago. And then they'll come back and they'll say, oh, we're gonna go back to what we used to do. But while these things are happening, there are kids who are languishing, who need these programs. Community-based organizations here in Durham with young people doing work around nonviolence. There's a transformative justice league. I saw Ashley in here earlier. There's all of us or none. There are all of these community-based groups that go out and talk to young people and are advocates themselves. And are always, I think, available to be on these type of things. Isn't that right, Ashley? Absolutely. And we just met with Bull City United. Great program that's out there in Medugal Terrace and Southside, they're violence interrupters. They're out there helping people, not discouraging them from committing crimes. And we need more money because they're only in Medugal Terrace and Southside right now. We need to expand that. They're working to address the gun violence and trying to discourage kids from doing that and trying to help them find jobs, replace that boredom that they have that causes them to get into trouble, but trying to help them look at how they can work somewhere and be productive and give up that life of violence. And I really appreciate that program. It's a model of best practice across the country. It has worked in larger cities and Durham decided that it would reproduce that model. It's called Cure Violence. And you also can Google that to look up the program, but we need more of those programs because they are reaching those young people on the street. And they're out there on the street with them. And I think that if we could have more programs like that, that would help us also. All right, so before I ask my next question, I want you to know that you're gonna have a chance to ask questions as well. So think about your questions and I'm gonna ask you as soon as I finish this one to go to the mic at the podium. And if you would keep your question to a minute and we can go from there. But my final question is, all three of you are in positions that touch the justice system somehow. You often hear that the justice system is broken. Is it? And if so, what can be done to fix it? I'd argue that the justice system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was created to do, which is over incarcerate poor people and people of color and the people that we don't wanna deal with in our communities. People who have significant challenges and rather than provide opportunities, we wanna pathologize people. I think the way to reform the criminal justice system, at least to me, is I'm a constitutional junkie, right? I love the Constitution of the United States because I take it for what it, to me, it is one of the greatest documents ever created. And if it's applied correctly, think about all the amazing things that we could achieve as a society. And for me, I think if we actually take the Constitution seriously, if we only use the justice system to protect us, to hold people accountable who have broken the social contract. So people who have created violent crime in our community, people who have taken property from each other. If we use it for that purpose, as opposed to the purpose of, well, I don't like to see people sleeping on the street or it bothers me that there are people shooting up at Walmart when the real answer is that they need substance abuse services, not to be in the Durham County Detention Center. And so I think if we think differently about what we use the criminal justice system for, if we use, I think most people think that we're using it for accountability and we're not. I believe like Miss Jones says, I believe in justice, I believe in accountability and I believe that's what we should be using. Grace? I don't think that the criminal justice system reforms rehabilitates and I think that's one thing, just one thing that's missing from the system. And I don't think that there's justice and there needs to be reform around our system. Diane, what is your perspective on this? I think that our laws are all outdated. We need different laws to apply to the situations that are happening today. For instance, drive by shootings. We need laws that speak to those issues of kids getting shot by somebody drive by shooting, people dying from somebody drive by shooting, somebody's house getting shot up and the police come and says there's nothing that we can do about it. The laws need to be looked into and the laws need to change. Okay. Would any of you care to, either of you care to comment on that? Okay. All right. So we're gonna open it up to the audience. If you have a question, please come up to the podium. You have us your name and if you would like to ask all three panelists, that is fine. Or if you'd like to ask one panelist a specific question, you may do that as well. Good evening, everyone. Good evening, ladies. I'm Brenda Howard to the one of the county commissioners and Diane, my questions to you and to the rest of the panel. But for you, as you were talking, my thinking lies about the children. Do you have a program for the children of the victims that you see? Do the children ever come to see you? And for the DA, do you ever see those same children to come end up in your arena? So the children that have been victimized, do you see them or do we have a program for them? There's no program for the children. Sometimes family members will bring their children but they're not supposed to bring them to our group. We need something for the children because what we've seen, and I've been doing this for 20 years, is the children of the murder victims are turning into the criminals or the children of murder victims are listed in our books, our remembrance book, either their father was killed or their brother was killed and here years later, they're killed. So it's a circle. So we do need help for the children. We need help for the whole family. The number one indicator of involvement in the criminal justice system is previous involvement in the criminal justice system. That means whether you were a victim of crime yourself or somebody in your family was a victim of crime. If you've been exposed to violence, as you were growing up, whether you were, if you have a murdered parent, your chances of becoming involved in the criminal justice system go up. And so yeah, we see every day here in Durham, we see people who have been victims as defendants. But do you have any stats on that? We don't. So we are working. One of the things that my office is working on, historically prosecutors offices have been black boxes. There hasn't been really any data gathered or released. And so one of the things that we're working on is a data project to really understand who we prosecute and why and what their issues are. Thank you, ladies. Thank you. Can you please give us your name? Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Marcella Skrillog-Jones. I'm the current chair of the mayor's committee for persons with disabilities. I have a two-fold question. Number one, my main concern is domestic violence against the women. If you had a nonprofit that's willing to come up with money to help build a transitional housing for women and children of domestic violence, could you give me some advice on where we should start? Yeah, I think I stopped the panel. Maybe coordinating with the current program that's out there, Durham Crisis Response Center. They've been really lucky, well, I shouldn't say lucky, but successful at getting grants. Right, I know Ms. Wilson. Right, thank you. And they've just recently over the past, I guess three or four years, built the Family Justice Center. Okay. So, and it also funders like collaborations. Okay, thank you. So that might be a start. My next question is, when we have men that are beating up on women, domestic violence, it seems as if it is a revolving door with the men, they're in and they're out and they're back doing the same thing. Is there anything that we can do to hold these men responsible, keep them incarcerated longer, or get them help, or maybe do we need more mental health to help these people? I'm just curious. Well, we definitely need more mental health services. The issue of domestic violence is ancient. I'm talking to the wrong one. The issue of domestic violence is ancient. We haven't solved it yet. I see the effects of that every day. We really only have two types of homicide in Durham County. Gun violence and domestic violence. Every one of our victims was somebody who was shot in some kind of violent interaction or somebody who had been a long-term victim of domestic violence. And so we know where this ends. Okay. And like Ms. Morris says, we have a multidisciplinary team that's working with the Durham Crisis Response Center to identify these cases for law enforcement to be able to go through a checklist and see who's in the most danger. It is a very hard, it's a very hard issue. Because we have helped out there for some of the females and for the children. Many of the men need help also. I agree. Okay. Thank you. All right, thank you for coming forward. Please give us your name. Benita Perkins and I'm with Durham County Public Health and also working with Durham County Libraries in getting wellness into the library's wellness content. And in that journey, I've become more aware of the term of PTSD in the community. And so I've been trying to get a better understanding of is that something that's being dealt with in a systemic way because I think we so underestimate, we say what happens to veterans in a war and we know the violence they see. But I'm trying to understand, I think we really underestimate just the total picture of what people are dealing with that end up in the system or end up kids not having the basics they need or whatever. Is that something that's part, are we thinking more about maybe post-traumatic stress disorder as an issue in the Durham community? I don't know. I think we're calling it now. I think it's been named the toxic stress. And Durham County just, I don't know if the city's involved in that too, but I know that Durham County just took on the issue of toxic stress out there. You'll hear it called ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, but I like the toxic stress because it basically talks about, it's a PTSD. I mean, if you live in a community where they're shooting all night long and you wake up in the middle of the night and mom says, get on the floor or get in the bathtub. And then you go to school the next day and you're half asleep and the teacher yells at you and you react in a certain way and then you get sent to the office. I mean, it is a serious condition that we've ignored for a long time. And it escalates when it's not addressed to people committing crimes such as murder. So I understand that there's a committee that's been started. We didn't hear about it till late today and I'm sure if I know when. And he's assigned me to come to that along with about four others from the Sheriff's Department. So there is an effort. And if you wanna get involved in that, I would say C Commissioner Howerton who's sitting here because I missed the meeting today so I can't exactly show you how to get involved. Okay. Next question. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Denise Ray and I'm a member of the Parents of Murder Children Organization and my question is for Ms. DeBerry. As the new district attorney of the city of Durham, how do you plan to do something different with the victims of homicide? Such as keeping the families intact with the cases and not letting the cases sit like four or five years before they're brought to trial? That is an excellent question. I inherited 95 open homicide cases. What the first thing I did was I had I hired experienced homicide prosecutors. We've reviewed every case. Our plan is to, we have talked I think to maybe all of the families in the oldest cases. We inherited some cases from 2013. And I recognize that we were talking about toxic stress and vicarious trauma. There is nothing more traumatic than having to come back and forth to the courthouse for families and to see bond hearings and hear the evidence over and over and over again and not feel like anything's died. So we have fast tracked those homicide cases. We have disposed of, we've had two first degree murder trials already this year of two of the oldest cases. We've pled out some other older cases. We transferred some cases to the attorney general's office so that they could get those cases to trial or to plea earlier. And so we've used, we've used several different tactics so that we make sure that we address the oldest homicide cases first and from those homicides that have happened. Unfortunately, we've had several since I took office on January 1st that for those that happened during the time that I've been in DA that we talk with those families immediately and move those cases forward more quickly. What about the cases in 2018 because I have yet to talk to anyone other than the detective? Will you leave me your name and the name of your child? Okay. And we will talk to, I will make sure somebody talks to you. If it's not me, it'll be somebody. Okay, all right, thank you. All right, thank you so much. This is my escort, y'all. My name is William Green and I have a question for Ms. Satana and Ms. Marsh. I am a high school student at Northern High School and I have a question about SROs as in why do a lot of my classmates and or friends, I see a lot of times get arrested for simple things as maybe self-defense or like they will report an incident as in like maybe another student put his hands on another student but like nobody was around to see it so they reported but like nothing happens but like when it happens out in the open and there's for example, a fight but the person that finishes it or like the person that finishes it they will often get charged with assault and might even go to jail and I'm wondering like why is the person that is defending themselves or like why does a student so young in high school even need to go to jail where something as small as this? Thank you so much for asking that question. I'd like to address that. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'd like to address that. Having worked at a nonprofit and taught conflict management and whatever first sergeant can tell you that I do have some knowledge of SROs and have been really concerned with some of the things that SROs have done and which is another reason I wanted to go work with the sheriff and I have actually talked to the captain who is over SROs about some of these incidents and have talked to her about training for the SROs but more importantly, Sheriff Burkhead said that he was going to reimagine the SROs position so I think that that process is going to take place in the next three months so that when the new school year starts it will have changed. We are planning to come when I say we the sheriff's office will be there including the sheriff at the panel forum. You guys are having a forum, are you part of that? They're having a forum during public school students are having a forum at W.G. Pearson the old W.G. Pearson middle school April 6th and so we will be there and Captain Lane will be there who's over the SROs and the students are going to be holding posts accountable and asking questions they'll all be kicking butt and taking names that day because I'm sure the students are going to speak up so if you don't know about that I can send it to First Sergeant to make sure that he can get you guys out but I think he knows about it. But I'm on your side I agree that we should handle students in not the same way that we handle a thug on the street and I had gone to Mike Andrews last year the former sheriff and said to him that our children do not need to be thrown on the ground and handcuffed like a thug on the street that there are ways that you can handle people who are mentally challenged those classrooms where those kids really don't throw chairs and tables and stuff the people who work with them don't slam them on the ground and put handcuffs on them they learn ways to restrain them and what I want to see with our SRO officers is that they learn how to restrain kids when they are sort of have lost control without throwing handcuffs on them and treating them that way so I hear you okay I've been public and saying that I think SROs are problematic I think the community should think about why Durham Police Department pulled itself out of having SROs in the schools I think I've been very public about my reluctance to accept referrals in school based incidents I've had... I met at last this month's principal meeting with all of the DPS principals and talked with them about my concerns about SROs and gave them the opportunity to talk to me about their concerns I often hear well how are we going to deal with violence in our schools if we don't have SROs but I will tell you that is not the type of case that we get referred from the schools we don't get violent and since we don't get sexual assaults and gun violence referred to us from schools what we get referred to us are the things that this young man is talking about fights, really kind of petty things that we feel are better resolved within the school and so I hear you and we are working together on how we deal with that with our prosecutors spend some extra time with any case that is a school based incident to make sure that it's been investigated to make sure that we have it right Thank you so much for asking that question we're going to take two more questions for you Rapida Thank you and please speak into the mic so that we can hear you testing how are you I'm Shirley Williams and you talked about two issues that I'm very passionate about and one is domestic violence and the other one is ACES Adverse Childhood Experiences and actually I wrote a book on my painful memories from my traumatic childhood and it was through writing that book that I learned about ACES so I'm so glad to hear that Durham has taken the initiatives and hopefully it's not something that's just done on a community level but something that's taken into the schools as well because there's a lot of programs on resilience that's been quite effective and they have a lot of case studies who justify that as well and in regards to the domestic violence thing is there any type of initiative to educate women and young ladies especially about domestic violence because statistics are showing that young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are high risk for domestic violence as well so is there anything that's being done at the school level as well to educate the young ladies and women about domestic violence Well I'm working right now with our DV officers our domestic violence officers for us to set up a schedule of going out to the schools to talk to kids to give an overview of what to look for and what is domestic violence because some kids believe it or not don't quite know what it is Also the colleges we're talking about going to the colleges this is going to be part of the community engagement is informing the community about issues that affect them so yes we will be doing that and we will be doing it in conjunction with the domestic violence Durham Crisis Response Center Thank you for that Great thank you There another question Miss McDonald Yes my name is Cheryl McDonald and this question is for D.A. DeBerry D.A. DeBerry we see on TV all the time about prosecutors and the power that they have and I know I heard you say that you inherited 95 cases so what is your goal as I know you're coming into this position is new is your goal to solve these cases by you know offering Clee bargains like how does that work I know it's a big question to ask but like how do you how do you operate with solving cases or how do you determine when to make a deal or when to offer a deal how does that work I don't have an easy answer for that in addition to the 95 homicide cases that we inherited we also inherited thousands of other felonies everyday we have hundreds of misdemeanors on the court calendar one of the things one of the things that we're trying to do in the office now is evaluate cases earlier so we talked some about homicides we now do pre-charge conferencing with law enforcement on homicides so that we have enough information before they even charge that helps move the cases forward more quickly because we're not doing investigation after somebody's been arrested that the majority of the investigation takes place beforehand and we can evaluate a case and know how to charge a case some of it's about charging appropriately if cases are charged appropriately they move more quickly we do do plea bargains we yesterday or day before yesterday we had a defendant who pled to second degree murder in a a vehicular homicide where he killed a detention officer from the sheriff's department and so in pleas we really we talked to the victims we talked to victims families where there is no living victim and we try to come up with what is how can we hold somebody accountable for this again like I said I don't like to say that we're trying to do justice because justice is a very lofty goal we don't often reach it but what we do try to do is reach accountability and for some people that means going to trial for other people that means accepting responsibility for what they've done and entering into a plea but there are a lot of moving parts into going in to decide who gets a plea and who doesn't okay we're going to wrap it up now and in doing that I'm going to ask you each one final question and feel free to bring any other information you'd like to share into that question and answering that question what can we do you take a minute or so to answer this what can we do to make non-violence a way of life in our community and you can go in in order you want I had something I wanted to read because when I teach conflict management and so excuse me I'm trying to pull it up on my phone when I teach conflict management um and we talk about mediation I always say words words are what creates the conflict so I brought this little thing on words that I would like to read it says words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity we can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement or destructively using words of despair words have energy and power with the ability to help to heal to hinder to hurt to harm to humiliate and to humble so I say we can start today by watching our words right thank you for me I just believe that we don't have enough love anymore and it may sound crazy but I think we've lost touch with what's important to keeping the family together and I think we really need to go back to having the family reunions and bringing families together you know we find out that sometimes when we go to court with people that they realize that the person that killed their loved one is their cousin so this is a simple thing but I think it really needs to start happening more we need to start coming back together doing some of the old school stuff and showing our children that we love them and introducing them to their other family members I think it's a simple thing but I think it would make a big difference I think that's a good point I think it's Martin Luther King who said justice is love and action and this is going to sound controversial because we're southerners and it's certainly going to sound controversial with my children sitting in the back but when we whip our kids we teach them that violence solves things and I think we have to really be careful how we act in our homes towards each other that doesn't mean because you got whipped you're going to go out and murder somebody and that's not what I'm saying but I'm saying when we use and in this culture we use violence in many ways to solve problems and when we start teaching people that it is not okay to use violence to solve problems we'll all be safer Thank you all for joining us tonight and I'd like to thank the people watching from home as well on Durham Television Network it's so important that we celebrate women like this as much of a difference in our community every day let's give them a round of applause so as we're escorted from the dais by the Thomas Mentor Leadership Academy I'd like to ask Nana Asante Smith to come forward she is with the Mayor's Council for Women and make closing remarks Alright, thank you Good evening everyone as Ms. Thompson mentioned I'm Nana Asante Smith and I probably serve as a member of the Durham Mayor's Council for Women we are a group of women who were selected by our city council to serve Durham in the capacity of representation advocacy and other issues that are in dire need of being addressed here in Durham this is a wonderful event that brings to light one of many issues that women in Durham and around the world face every day and while this is an important conversation I hope that as we all make our way out of this city hall we continue to remember the importance of having and continuing these conversations and that we continue to remember the sacrifices that women make especially women of color as we work to be visionaries and promote peace and nonviolence in our communities so we thank you all sincerely for participating in this discussion and we hope this is just the beginning of many efforts to come on behalf of the women in Durham and beyond. Thank you