ASJ Program Saves More than Six Lives per Month, Study Finds
· ASJ’s Peace and Justice project has seen “an effect of enormous magnitude” in Honduras, says study by the Violence Analysis Laboratory (LAV)
· Interventions in target communities lead to nearly ten times more convictions. While only 4% of homicides in Honduras result in arrest, 38% of homicides in target communities in San Pedro result in an arrest
· Decreasing impunity has led to sharp declines in homicide rates — homicides in target communities in San Pedro Sula fell by an astonishing 101 per 100,000.
Interventions by the Peace and Justice Project of the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ) have resulted in approximately six fewer homicides per month in high-risk communities in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the Violence Analysis Laboratory of the University of Janeiro reported in a recent study analyzing the results of the project.
ASJ launched Peace and Justice in 2004 as a response to high levels of violence and impunity in the community where the directors of the organization lived with their families. They found that community members and victims of violence seldom reported crimes, and even when they did, rarely cooperated to give testimony because of fear of retaliation and a lack of trust in police and judicial systems.
Peace and Justice supports both individual victims of violence and actors in the criminal justice system itself. To the families of homicide victims and witnesses of crime, the program offers psychological, emotional, and material support, including trauma counseling and relocation if a family is at immediate risk. Investigators and lawyers working for the project also accompany police and public attorneys throughout the process of investigating and trying the case.
“Both beneficiaries and public defenders and police interviewed shared the vision that Peace and Justice had successfully reduced homicides in their areas of intervention,” the report noted, “As a matter of fact, when asked which aspects of the project could improve, the most common response was to request expansion to other communities.”
The project currently covers five communities in Tegucigalpa, home to approximately 141,000 people, and two regions of San Pedro Sula with approximately 43,000 inhabitants. These seven target communities were selected because of particularly high rates of violence and impunity.
After ten years of intervention in Tegucigalpa, and three years in San Pedro Sula, reduction in violence in these communities has been “of enormous magnitude,” the report notes. Homicide rates in target communities in Tegucigalpa have dropped by 32 per 100,000, and in San Pedro Sula, by 101 per 100,000. To put these numbers in context, in 2016, Honduras’ national homicide rate was 59 per 100,000, and El Salvador, the country with the highest rate in the world was 104 per 100,000.
Nationwide, only about 4% of homicides will result in a conviction, a study by the Alliance for Peace and Justice found. By contrast, 21.5% of homicides in target communities in Tegucigalpa, and 38% of homicides in target communities in San Pedro result in an arrest — nearly ten times as many.
Police officers and public attorneys, interviewed by the authors of the LAV report, expressed high praise for Peace and Justice.
“It’s a good project,” said a public attorney from Tegucigalpa. “We’ve obtained convictions. They’re well-trained and discrete. What ASJ does should be the State — it makes one ashamed to accept, but we need it,” the attorney continued, adding, “They should work all over.”
“They don’t lose cases,” said an attorney from San Pedro Sula. “There’s a lot of difference between a case with ASJ and a case without.”
“The logistics are the principal difference,” said a police investigator assigned to San Pedro Sula. “Their relationships with the victims and witnesses are also very important because that’s what helps to resolve the case. The majority don’t trust the police. The people at ASJ are available for more time than we are. They are very good. We’ve taken on high-impact cases together, and they are always willing to help us.”
“They’re like my family, they are always attentive — they have never told us no,” said a beneficiary from San Pedro Sula who was interviewed by the report’s authors, “They help us without asking for anything in return. They are always in contact. The psychologist helped me a lot, and my mother as well.”
Peace and Justice’s presence as a “bridge” between victims, witnesses, and the criminal justice system, facilitates a dramatically higher number of criminal reports and convictions for cases of homicide.
In the past four years, Peace and Justice has directly contributed to the arrest of over 342 individuals, 82 of whom have been convicted, and many more of whom are currently on trial, a process that can take between two and two-and-a-half years.
These high rates of both arrests and conviction, “not only reduces impunity for attackers, but is also a form of prevention,” the report notes, “The existence of an adequate criminal response can, for example, dissuade other potential criminals and break cycles of revenge by people close to the victims.”
“Peace and Justice is an example that without armed confrontations, with legality and intelligence, it’s possible to confront the problem of lethal violence,” the report’s authors note, “The work of Peace and Justice together with functionaries of the justice system shows that professional and committed collaboration is possible.”
“Without ASJ, my case wouldn’t have been resolved,” said a witness in one Peace and Justice case, “They convicted the culprit. I didn’t believe it, but justice was done.”
October 20th, 2017
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
