Illinois Crime Victim Compensation Program failures: Complex process gets little money to few it’s supposed t… - Chicago Sun-Times

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A few days after the Fourth of July in 2018, Zay Manning was shot outside his neighborhood corner store in Bronzeville — the one he grew up going to for a bottle of lemonade and a bag of hot fries.

He was 19 and loved helping his younger brother produce music — picking out beats, tweaking the sound one bar at a time.

The one bullet that hit him nearly killed him.

During his hospital stay, police officers and doctors told him about the Illinois’ Crime Victim Compensation Program, which uses state and federal dollars to reimburse victims of violent crime and their families for injury-related expenses. Manning applied, hoping to recoup some of the costs of his medical bills and replace clothing destroyed and bloodied in the shooting. But he found the program difficult and confusing as he also was navigating back-to-back hospital visits.

“It was a lot of documentation I didn’t really understand,” Manning says. “I got discouraged.”

More than a year after submitting his claim, Manning faces a similar situation as most of the program’s applicants.

He hasn’t gotten a single penny of compensation.

The nearly 50-year-old government program that’s supposed to help ease the blow of being a crime victim largely isn’t doing that, an investigation by The Trace has found.

Few people apply to the program. Even fewer end up getting financial relief. Those who do face long waits.

Using records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, The Trace analyzed nearly 15,000 claims processed by the state’s victim’s compensation program between 2015 and 2020. Fewer than four in 10 applicants got any reimbursement.

And that’s out of those who even applied. Many people aren’t even aware the program exists, The Trace found.

In Chicago, just one application was filed for every 50 violent crimes during the period reviewed.

The majority of claims were denied or categorized as “award no pay” — a designation that means someone is eligible to get the money but, in most cases, that an analyst hasn’t been able to verify all of the necessary details of the application.

To examine how the program is working, The Trace interviewed nearly 50 survivors, family members, researchers, advocates and government officials and found that the problems stem in large measure from three factors:

The strict eligibility criteria.
Burdensome application requirements.
And not nearly enough outreach from government agencies.

The program has a small staff, and advocates and researchers worry that the application process can re-traumatize victims by making them prove that they have suffered.

John Maki of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, “If the best thing we have is crime victim compensation, then we don’t have very much.”

Beyond that, it can take years for the state to decide whether to pay a claim, which in some cases leaves crime victims in debt for things such as medical care for their injuries.

Victims’ needs spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, as violence in Illinois and across the country soared to historic levels alongside a rise in unemployment and housing insecurity.

“If the best thing we have is crime victim compensation, then we don’t have very much,” says John Maki, a director with the Alliance for Safety and Justice who’s a longtime advocate of reforming the reimbursement program. “It’s a service with a lot of potential, but the potential is far, far, from realized.”

Earlier this year, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill that ultimately will make more people eligible for compensation and also raise the cap for reimbursement.

Advocates say the changes can’t come soon enough but still could leave big gaps in the people the program reaches.

Sharrise Kimbro, a division chief for Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s — whose office runs the program with the Illinois Court of Claims — said the agency can’t answer for problems with victim’s compensation before Raoul took office in 2019 and points to changes that the office has instituted that might not be reflected yet in the data on the program’s success.

Flawed from the start

Every state has a program to compensate crime victims, and each operates differently. Under the federal Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, Congress disperses millions each year to help fund such efforts.

A decades-old federal report on victim services shows the philosophy that influenced this approach, saying: “The innocent victims of crime have been overlooked, their pleas for justice have gone unheeded, and their wounds — personal, emotional, and financial — have gone unattended.”

When Illinois lawmakers passed the Crime Victim Compensation Act with bipartisan support in 1973, they made the state among the first to do so.

A few years later, a report in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal blasted the “inadequate draftsmanship” of the law, noting that few claims had been filed in the program’s first two years.

A 2019 report by 11 advocacy and anti-violence groups echoed this and pointed out that Illinois had one of the lowest application rates in the country.

Illinois’ victim compensation program has a roughly $6 million yearly budget, funded mostly by the state. To receive compensation from the state program, people have to be a victim of a crime that happened in Illinois and must apply within two years of the incident. They also must have reported the crime to police and cooperated with law enforcement and the victim compensation program.

Family members, including spouses and children, can apply to cover related expenses they covered as well.

People have to spend their own money before seeking reimbursement. And the program won’t reimburse what insurance covered.

Applicants can be found ineligible if the program’s staff determines they were hurt or killed while committing a crime or otherwise contributed in any way to their becoming a crime victim. And those who are on probation or in prison can’t be compensated until they’re released.

As of late June, the attorney general’s office — which vets the claims — had just over a dozen analysts who focus on processing the thousands of claims filed each year. They interview the victims, confirm expenses related to the injury and gather reports from law enforcement to determine whether they qualify.

Once the analyst makes a recommendation, the application is sent to the Illinois Court of Claims, which rules on monetary claims against the state. If the application is approved, the state comptroller’s office issues a payment — usually by check.

There are multiple points at which applicants might be asked to provide more documentation. The analysts usually send these requests by mail, and applicants have 30 days to respond.

For survivors of violent crimes like Manning, waiting for the analysts to make a decision can feel like peering into a black hole.They can’t go online to look up where their claim stands, as is done in Indiana and Tennessee. The process is largely done through the mail, unlike in some states that communicate with applicants by phone and email.

Though the attorney general’s office is the key agency, four state agencies are involved in the application process in Illinois, rather than one as in other states.

A lag in payments

Reports to the federal government show that, of Illinois applications for compensation that included information on the victim’s race, half were Black, and a smaller percentage were white or Latinx.

Raoul has said he first noticed problems with the victim compensation program about a decade ago, when he was a state senator.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. — Attorney General Kwame Raoul.

“There was an inability to answer the question of, to what extent, were resources going to the most victimized communities,” Raoul said earlier this year. “There was a sense that there was a small likelihood that someone who was a Black or Brown male would qualify for resources. There were rules — written and unwritten — with regards to what would disqualify you from compensation.”

According to his office, the agency under Raoul has relaxed some of the state’s strict rules for who qualifies. He also has required analysts to undergo trauma-informed training and hosted listening sessions on where to make improvements.

The changes his office touts are reflected in a sweeping criminal justice reform law passed earlier this year. The reforms broaden the rules on who can apply for victim compensation, increase the total possible reimbursement per person to $45,000 and extend the application deadline to five years after the date of the crime. The reforms also shift more responsibilities to the attorney general’s office.

But expanding the cap doesn’t necessarily mean survivors will get more money. The average reimbursement under the program has been about $4,400 — far below the current financial cap of $27,000.

FEW RECEIVE THE MAX

The average reimbursement from 2015 to 2020 has been about $4,400. Just 2% got the maximum possible $27,000.

And it has taken increasingly longer for the state analysts to begin reviewing claims, even as the number of applications has fallen. Since 2015, the wait time has grown from a few days, on average, to nearly 50 during the pandemic, as the analysts worked from home. It’s then taken eight months longer, on average, to decide whether to approve any reimbursement.

“I’ve rarely seen a case that gets their funding in three to six months,” says Edwin Martinez, a mental health coordinator on the city’s Southwest Side.

Martinez likens the process to having to argue a case in court.

“You have to explain how this injury affected you,” he says. “You have to submit supporting documentation. That really depends on the stability [of an applicant’s living situation] and how informed that client is. Do you have your police report? Do you have your incident report?”

A lack of public awareness

In North Lawndale this summer, an elderly man, shot in 1981, spoke about how the bullet that hit him four decades ago remains lodged in his spine. He estimated his medical bills have come to about $80,000. He didn’t know that he might have been eligible to get reimbursement from the state to help cover that.

Down the street from him, another man, who’d been shot about a decade ago, also was surprised to learn the state might have helped pay the resulting bills.

For each, the deadline to apply for victim compensation has long passed.

Hospitals and police are required to inform victims about the possible compensation. But The Trace surveyed victim advocates and sampled people living on the South Side and the West Side and found few know the program exists.

Only about 3,300 people apply each year. The largest numbers of applications had come from Chicago neighborhoods that experience the most violence — majority-Black and Latinx communities including North Lawndale, Little Village, Austin, West Lawn, Roseland and Chatham.

But the percentage of crime victims seeking compensation is low. Since 2015, about one application has been filed for every 50 violent crimes in the city.

Beyond awareness, applying can be difficult.

Teyonna Lofton is still trying to grasp the process. She started looking into how to apply soon after she was shot last year, just days before her high school graduation, as the city erupted in riots after George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer.

“I don’t understand how the application works,” Lofton says. “I don’t know if I submitted it or not.”

She says she recently called the attorney general’s office’s helpline to confirm whether her application was submitted but was told the information wasn’t available due to a ransomware attack that affected the agency.

Once someone does apply, the likelihood of being approved depends heavily on the type of crime. Reimbursements related to sexual offenses are the least likely to be approved compared to battery and murders, The Trace found.

AWARDS BY TYPE OF CRIME 2015-2020

The Illinois attorney general’s office “awards” nearly two of three crime victim compensation claims in murder cases. For victims of sex offenses, it’s fewer than one in five. “Award-no pay” means a claim was deemed eligible for compensation but, in most cases, that an analyst hasn’t been able to verify all of the necessary details of the application.

The low rate of approvals isn’t surprising for Mariá Balata, a director with Resilience, a support organization for sexual assault survivors. Balata says her team tries to set realistic expectations with survivors about the program’s limitations.

“It’s just become such a convoluted system for us to navigate with victims,” she says. “Typically, it’s the bureaucracy of it that makes it feel like it’s inaccessible.”

The reason people end up not getting any compensation often is because an analyst couldn’t “substantiate” a crime victim’s claim.

Susan Catania, who was one of the sponsors of the crime victim compensation law: “I am really appalled that not enough people know about it and use it. Plowing through the bureaucracy has to be excruciating.”

Claims are more likely to end up being designated “award no pay” than being denied outright. This means that thousands of applicants are still eligible to receive financial support — but might not realize that.

Susan Catania is one of the last living sponsors of Illinois’ law. Today, nearly 50 years later, the former Republican state representative from Chicago says, “I am really appalled that not enough people know about it and use it. Plowing through the bureaucracy has to be excruciating. A victim of any crime does not need that added as a burden — especially if ultimately they’re going to be told there’s some bureaucratic reason they’re not going to get any money.”

Covering funeral payments

On a recent morning in Austin, Nhemya Ward sat in a conference room at the Johnson Funeral Home as she went through a copy of the crime victim compensation application — a five-page document that has more than 100 information fields. The attorney general’s office made the application available online last year, but Ward uses the paper version.

Part of her job is helping the funeral home’s clients fill out the forms. She says most of them can’t afford the unexpected costs of burials resulting from violent crimes.

Since 2015, about a quarter of all claims to the state program have been to cover funeral costs. The state’s long lags in processing applications makes Ward’s job harder.

Nhemya Ward is a funeral director at Johnson Funeral Home, 5838 W. Division St. She helps clients with the paperwork for claims to the cime victim compensation fund. But her funeral home has had to start capping the number of clients it will take who rely on the state program to help cover funeral costs.

She says her funeral home requires families to pay upfront for half of funeral and burial expenses. The funeral home defers the rest of the bill in hopes the family’s reimbursement request is approved.

If it isn’t, the survivors must find another way to come up with the money.

“The reason why we do the 50/50 split is because crime victim compensation does not pay for up to two years,” Ward says. “Right now, our 2018 crime victims files are just being reviewed.”

To combat the uncertainty, Johnson and other funeral homes vet potential applications customers might file.

“I had one family who wanted to apply,” Ward says. “I asked them the details of what happened.”

A mother told Ward her son “went to defend [a relative], and, in the midst of that, he was shot and killed. That unfortunately is a risky case to take because he went to the person’s house.”

Austin funeral director Nhemya Ward holds a paper copy of the Crime Victims Compensation Application. It’s five pages long, with more than 100 information fields

Ward says that, based on her experience, the attorney general’s office probably would view the man’s actions as “contributory misconduct” — meaning his own actions played a role in his death. Since 2015, more than 600 claims have been denied for this reason.

Ward’s funeral home began capping the number of clients this year that it will take who rely on crime victim compensation.

“It’s just not financially sound,” she says.

‘Blessing in disguise’

Zay Manning, now 23, got a lot further than most applicants — though, until recently, he wasn’t aware of just how far.

Last year, weeks before the pandemic hit, he got a letter from the attorney general’s office asking for more information about his medical bills.

“They wanted everything, like literally everything,” he says. “I’m going in and out of hospitals as I’m still healing, taking out staples and stitches. They wanted me to keep the paperwork from the time I was having surgery and basically my whole situation up until when they released me.”

Manning was juggling dozens of hospital visits and learning how to walk again after his injuries and says he struggled to reach people to get the information he needed.

“I didn’t get back to [the attorney general’s office] in enough time,” he says.

The process left him frustrated and disillusioned.

“It’s basically a hit or miss,” he says.

As a result, for nearly half a year, Manning and his mother Natalie believed his application had been denied. It wasn’t until a reporter searched for his claim and found that the attorney general’s office had marked his case as an “award no pay” that they realized his application still has a chance. He just needs to turn in more paperwork.

“It’s just confusing,” Natalie Manning says. “They need to have better communication.”

Isaiah “Zay” Manning and executive director Debra Gitter during a Zoom meeting at Contetos, the nonprofit she runs, where he works, Contextos. | Brian Rich / Sun-Times

Much of Zay Manning’s life since the shooting has focused on moving beyond the trauma. He still lives in Bronzeville, where he grew up. As part of his recovery, he started working for ConTextos, a nonprofit organization that helps young people in Chicago process trauma through storytelling.

Now the father of an almost 1-year old baby with chubby cheeks and enough hair for bantu knots, the opportunity to finally receive reimbursement offers a sliver of hope.

“I’m kind of shocked,” he says. “I was just looking past it and to forget. The fact that I might be able to obtain it — I feel like that’s a blessing in disguise.”

This story was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2020 Data Fellowship.

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