Last spring, Randy White was shot in the stomach when he was caught in the crossfire of a gunfight at an Atlanta gas station. The injury kept him in the hospital for a week, but his mental state was paid little consideration. Discharged with no meaningful plan to deal with the psychological fallout that would inevitably come, he found himself adrift.
A few months later he was still struggling, so he moved back to Coney Island, where he grew up. “I did bad stuff in New York, but I never got shot,” he told me recently. There had been several arrests on drug charges, time spent in jail, a baby at 19, all preceded by a difficult childhood. “I didn’t have a family, like, with love,” he volunteered.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, returning to New York did not bring him the serenity he had hoped to find. Soon after he arrived, he was in a car accident. It was at this point that a friend suggested that he see a therapist.
As it happened, there was a place in the neighborhood called the Trauma Recovery Center, operated out of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, a longstanding social service organization. T.R.C.s, as they are known, came into being more than 20 years ago and have spurred something of a movement — a means of helping victims of violent crime, specifically in low-income communities where a distrust of traditional mental-health treatment can be pervasive. A 2022 survey from the Alliance for Safety and Justice found that 74 percent of victims did not receive counseling to help them process what had happened, a matter both of reluctance and inadequate service.
Since the first T.R.C. opened in San Francisco in 2001, 52 programs across 12 states have followed, and they have largely received bipartisan support on the grounds that they function both palliatively and preventively. The structure allows counselors and case managers to deal with the emergency and whatever practical concerns might arise from it, and then allows them to stay with the victim to help manage the emotional effects: anger and turmoil that can result in dangerous acts of recrimination, or anxiety and depression that can spiral toward unemployment and homelessness.
In addition to the Coney Island facility, two other trauma recovery centers have opened in New York over the past year, one in East Flatbush and another in the Bronx. Their foremost evangelist is the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, who was central to establishing them. But the funding — $5 million, which has come entirely from the Council’s discretionary funds over the past two budget cycles — is not enough to sustain them.
The Council wants the city to provide long-term funding as a matter of commitment in its budget, and not have the recovery centers’ survival dependent on the support of Ms. Adams, whose second and last term ends on Jan. 1, 2026.
Ensuring their survival has been perhaps the speaker’s biggest rallying cry, even at a moment of intensely competing interests, when so many services have been threatened with cuts. There has been no state funding so far.
In her district in Queens, Speaker Adams said, she has spent a lot of time around victims of gun violence. “I’ve met the mothers of these people and the grandmothers. I have sat in their homes,” she said. “And what do we do for them? These families want to retaliate. Siblings want to retaliate. But we’re looking at crisis intervention, legal advocacy.
“We have some place for folks to go where they can find comfort,” she continued. “These centers are absolutely the answer.”
At the Coney Island branch, Mr. White began to see a therapist and unpack himself. He was 38 and had never sought counseling; it was hard work. “I was not opened up at all,” he said. “I was just giving her bits and pieces.” But when he began to deliver a fuller picture of himself, the progress came quickly.
Within three months he had a job that the center had helped him acquire — at a homeless shelter on Neptune Avenue — and he found release from various anxieties and temptations. “My mind is a straight path: I just want to go to work and go home,” he said after speaking at a ribbon-cutting ceremony this week for the new dedicated space the center now occupies on Mermaid Avenue.
In 2006, a randomized trial was conducted to study the effectiveness of the first trauma recovery center, in San Francisco. The research looked at people in hospitals in the aftermath of serious physical injuries resulting from violence. They followed up with patients referred to a T.R.C. and with those referred to a standard community mental health program, and found that those who had gone through a T.R.C. were far less likely to become homeless or suffer from depression.
Another study looked at women at a rape-crisis center and found that those who went on to a T.R.C. were much more likely to file police reports than those who did not. The trauma recovery centers were also cheaper to run than the less effective community mental health programs. Subsequent studies out of Long Beach, Calif., and Cleveland reached similar conclusions.
The approach is successful in part because it does not ignore the importance of satisfying immediate material needs. Getting someone in the door to address a housing issue, for example, can build the trust that smooths the path to receiving therapy or other forms of help. Alicia Boccellari, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and the founder of the trauma recovery model, offered an example of how the system works.
She described a case in which a woman had lost her daughter in random gunfire, an incident in which her son and one of her grandchildren were also injured. She was left to raise that grandchild and the child’s siblings, but she was tormented and afraid to send the children to school. As a result of the crime, her car had been impounded as evidence — a seemingly trivial problem by comparison but one with a profound impact. The trauma recovery center connected her with the local child welfare agency and with an auto dealership that donated a car.
“The model is not about one clinician,” Dr. Boccellari said. Rather, it is designed with the goal of shifting a powerful worldview that victims of serious crimes can carry with them: that the world is defined by violence and cruelty.
In recent years, the idea of “trauma” has been cheapened in the popular discourse, having attached itself to what was once imagined as mere inconvenience. That a “trauma recovery center” might breed skepticism in certain circles is hardly inconceivable. But a political and media apparatus that puts victims on display as a means of justifying punitive criminal justice policies, without committing to helping these victims, is harder to endorse. The proposed city budget would also cut $3 million from a Safe Horizon program that places a victim advocate in every police precinct in the city.
A trauma recovery center aims to bring someone not necessarily back to a former self, but to a better, more whole one. As Randy White put it: “If I didn’t do this, I’d be on the streets. I’d be dead.”
