The bill mandated that each county commissioners court form a SART composed of people whose work is beneficial to sexual assault survivors, something that already existed in a number of Texas counties. At a minimum, according to the state law, each county should enlist someone from a local sexual assault service, a prosecutor with jurisdiction over sex crimes in the county, a member of a police force from the largest city in the county, a sexual assault nurse examiner, a rep from the largest health care provider in the county, a staff member from the county’s largest behavioral health provider, and possibly other individuals with positions that the county deems relevant.
Also spelled out by the law is that the SART file “a biennial evaluation through sexual assault case reviews of the effectiveness of individual agency and interagency protocols and systems.” In other words, the team is legally required to file a report every two years.
The required elements of SB 476 are clear, but some counties are not adhering to the law. The first SART reports were to be filed with each county commissioners court before Dec. 1, 2023. As of this writing, Dallas County and Collin County have yet to complete theirs.
As defined by the state, the biennial report “is a crucial document that provides an overview of the activities, achievements, and challenges faced by SARTs in Texas. This report should include the team’s progress and gives the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of individual agencies as well as the interagency protocol.”
The Denton County SART report, a 62-page document provided to us via email mere minutes after our initial request, includes all that and more. It also provides “data and findings” that make note of trends in 2022 and 2023 relating to a number of factors, including the race and ethnicity of survivors as well as how many survivors endured strangulation during their attack, knew their attacker intimately prior to the assault and more.
Both Dallas and Collin counties are among those that already had a SART in place prior to the state mandate. But after our calls and emails over the course of a few weeks, one fact is obvious: the Dallas County Commissioners Court isn’t clear on what the SART is, let alone that it was obligated to file a report before December last year.
When reached via email recently, Lauren Trimble, the chief of staff for Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins, told us she would check with “some internal folks for additional information” and get back to us. A few days later, we checked back with her. She didn't have any information to give us regarding whether the report had been completed or who was on the Dallas County SART.
We reached out to each of the county commissioners with the same questions. And again, more confusion and non-answers from the offices of the officials tasked with overseeing the SART. Tom Ervin, chief of staff for District 2 Commissioner Andy Sommerman, referred us to the Dallas County district attorney. He said that SART was “under their purview.”
The required elements of SB 476 are clear, but some counties are not adhering to the law.
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We had already done that, however, and Claire Crouch, a spokesperson for the DA’s office said simply, “This is not a report our office files.” She’s correct about that.
When we clarified to Ervin that the SART differed from the sexual assault division, which is, in fact, under the DA’s purview, he replied that he was “doing a little research to find out the members of the team” but that he didn't have names at that point.
Blanca Torres, the deputy chief of staff for District 4 Commissioner Dr. Elba Garcia, had a familiar reply to our SART query when she informed us that she had copied Amy Derrick, division chief with the Dallas County DA on the email. We received no replies to our calls or emails from the other county commissioners, John Wiley Price (District 3) or Dr. Theresa Daniel (District 1).
By the time we heard from Commissioner Garcia’s office, however, we had finally received an update from Trimble.
“The report is currently being finalized by the Sexual Assault Response Team,” Trimble wrote two days after our initial request. “Once that report is received by our office, I’d be happy to let you know so that you can file a records request. The report should contain the information you are requesting.”
We reached back out to Lewis Jenkins' office to ask why the report was not completed by the Dec. 1 deadline, but the answer didn’t come from there. We finally gained some insight into why the Dallas County SART report has yet to be completed when we got in touch with Courtney Underwood, a current member of the Dallas County SART.
Underwood was one of two individuals specifically listed by name as possible SART members when the county issued a resolution in March 2022, outlining its intent to continue the county’s SART as required by the new state law. The other, Dr. John Buruss of Metrocare Services, told us through a spokesperson that he had not been involved with SART in more than four years.
“I think because our SART is so aware of how easily data and statistics can be misconstrued and misinterpreted, we’ve probably had significantly more discussion than other counties, and there are other groups who feel much more comfortable providing an incomplete picture,” Underwood wrote in response to our questions.
She also described the difficulty involved when it comes to collecting data from myriad agencies and departments, especially ones over which the commissioners have no jurisdiction. She later added: “While we have taken a bit more time in putting together our report, it’s because we had so much discussion and back and forth between team members to ensure that the report was done to our standards and again not simply to check a box.”
As of Wednesday, Feb. 14, Underwood expected her team’s report to be complete by the end of February. When asked why she thought we had been greeted with only confusion and silence from the county commissioners, Underwood described the nuances involved between the local SART, which has operated since 2009, and a County Commissioners Court that has just been told to get involved in the SART with this new law.
As a sexual assault survivor herself who has advocated for other survivors for more than 20 years, Underwood isn’t keen on how SB 476 placed so much responsibility for SART in the hands of county commissioners.
“So, if you read the legislation itself, it really does not do a good job of outlining or even explaining the role of Commissioner Courts with SARTs, and again what it asks them to do is, in my opinion, a bit nonsensical,” Underwood explained. “However, the commissioners did work with us on ‘formalizing’ our SART per the statutes guidelines and have been very responsive. Since there really wasn’t anything for them to step in and actively do, there really hasn’t been a reason for their staff to be up to date on the SART.”
Given that Underwood has been passionately and productively active in her advocacy mission for so long is more than enough reason to take her concerns about how the law was written into serious consideration. In her words, SB 476 “does not do a good job of outlining or even explaining the role of commissioner courts with SART.”
It’s rather common for the politicians writing the bills to not exactly be the top subject matter experts in the areas for which they’re drafting legislation, but SB 476 wasn’t written merely by elected officials. Advocates and policy specialists helped shape the language as well.
But the bill is the bill, and the law is the law. And to that end, other large counties with concerns similar to those of Dallas County did manage to compile and submit their reports on time, or at least well before Dallas.
Tarrant, Travis, Harris and Denton counties all met the deadline, according to Haleh Hekmat, the systems change strategist for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault (TAASA). TAASA is a collection of survivors, advocates, rape crisis centers and associated professionals who assisted in getting SB 476 written and passed and continues to be a resource and hopeful partner for county SART teams statewide.
According to Hekmat, the association has “taken on the initiative of supporting communities as they develop SARTs and fulfill the requirements.” She says that Dallas and Collin counties are far from the only ones to have failed to turn in their SART report at this point. But Hekmat did note that the main reason the bill put the SART ball in the county commissioners court is because every county has one. Not every county in Texas has a rape crisis center or even a hopsital, for example. Naming the commissioners court as the lead entity helps provide a uniformity to a statewide scenario that has long lacked streamlined efficiency.
Underwood, understandably, doesn’t view the report’s tardiness as a sign that her group is lagging behind other counties, nor as an indicator that Dallas County doesn’t take sexual assault as seriously as it should. To her, getting it right is more important than turning it in first, which might have required cutting corners or putting less than 100% into the effort. But not everyone has the same impression. State Rep. Dr. Lynn Stucky, a Republican from Denton, was a sponsor of SB 476, and when reached for comment, he pulled no punches.
“While some hurdles in implementation are to be expected, I am not shocked to see that Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins is continuing to fail from a leadership perspective,” Stucky said in an email. “The Commissioners Court is authorized to create the response team, but the County Judge should be the one driving these accountability and transparency measures. It is concerning that Judge Jenkins is not giving an issue as serious as sexual assault and resources for survivors the respect and attention it deserves.”
It might be easy to suggest at least some of Stucky’s reaction can be tied to political differences. After all, Democrat Lewis Jenkins has been a favored target of the GOP for years, especially since 2020 when the judge served as the face of the county’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay-at-home orders and mask mandates made easy enemies out of those on opposite sides of the political divide even more than before.
But there are people without any political battle to fight or office to run for who are troubled by what they feel is another alarming sign that Dallas County doesn’t treat sexual assault reports with the dignity and consideration such allegations deserve. Laurie Chandlar, a noted mystery author from New York, was in Dallas for a writers conference in 2019 when she says she was drugged and sexually assaulted by a fellow author and conference attendee.
What followed for her was a harrowing series of frustrations, letdowns and unanswered questions from Dallas police and the DA’s office as her case was closed in relatively short order, even in the face of evidence and witnesses.
After her efforts were quashed by investigators, Chandlar wrote about her disconcerting experience in a series of posts on the website Medium. She sounded the alarm on X in December that she had doubts that Dallas County would have its SART report completed anytime soon. Now, in February, she continues to have questions about just how serious Dallas County law enforcement personnel are about fighting sexual assault.
"... but there was a gap with adult sexual assault, and it was seen in how survivors were treated in the process and how they often just fell through the gap.” – Haleh Hekmat, Texas Assoc. Against Sexual Assault
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“I am disgusted by the disregard of SART reporting in Dallas,” Chandlar wrote in an email to the Observer. “The citizens of Dallas deserve a law enforcement and attorney’s office that don’t see themselves as above the law and mandates of the Texas Legislature. Unfortunately, this feels very consistent with the handling of my case and the lack of regard for oversight and protocols that I experienced both with the DPD and the District Attorney’s Office. I believe people that are proud of their work and have nothing to hide, don’t mind sharing their work. If someone is unwilling to do that, it should raise the question, ‘Why?’”
But for now at least, such a violation won’t result in any penalties, and no mechanism is in place to track which counties have and have not submitted their reports to their respective county commissioners courts. Stucky suggested to us that perhaps legislation for “accountability measures” should be filed.
A member of the Collin County SART told us that its report had not yet been completed, but explained why and updated the report’s progress.
Wendy Hanna, the executive director for The Turning Point, a Plano-based advocacy center for survivors of sexual assault, told us her organization has taken the lead on preparing and submitting the biennial report. In an emailed statement provided to the Observer, she noted that her hope is to have the report submitted in March..
“We have been working on the report for months,” Hanna wrote. “However, we recently had a major change in SART leadership, namely our SART Program Manager departing just prior to December, so we were unable to submit the report by the end of the year (2023). Our new SART manager, Jen Betts-Williams, is working diligently to pull together the data requirements … for the report, which has been a challenge, but we hope to submit it to the Commissioners Court no later than March 2024.”
The intent of SB 476 and the SART report is to make it easier for municipalities to attend to areas that may have been lacking attention. In some ways, one can say that progress has been made in that SARTs across Texas are working toward a unified goal. But the stakes are high enough that slight improvements in processes aren't good enough for those sexual assault survivors who feel they are not being heard.
“When we worked to pass this law, our policy team was very intentional of the problem that no, a lot of communities do not have an organized way to really streamline and address adult sexual assault,” Hekmat said. “In particular, there are laws that are in place for child sexual assault. There are things in place for domestic violence, but there was a gap with adult sexual assault, and it was seen in how survivors were treated in the process and how they often just fell through the gap.”
