Humboldt County Grand Jury
• 2021-2022
• Agency Response
Office of the District Attorney*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Note: Missing finding numbers detected: F3
Findings and Recommendations 3 findings
F1
Reporting elder abuse is needlessly difficult, which results in underreporting. (R1, R2) The Humboldt County District Attorney's Office agrees with this finding, which provided one of our motivations for creating the Elder and Vulnerable Adult Services Team (EVAST). EVAST has greatly facilitated the process of reporting elder abuse; we will continue to work to improve the reporting system.
No recommendations for this finding
F2
We can better protect seniors by making it as easy as possible for the public at large, and seniors specifically, to understand what elder abuse is and how to report it. (R1, R2) The Humboldt County District Attorney's Office agrees. To address this issue, we have run a series of Public Service Announcements in partnership with Area 1 Agency on Aging to educate the public on types of elder abuse that occur and how to report it.
No recommendations for this finding
F4
The Elder and Vulnerable Adult Services Team (EVAST), funded with Measure Z dollars, has significantly improved the prosecution and conviction rates for elder abuse cases. (R3) We agree. The graph below documents the increase in filing and prosecution of cases following the formation of EVAST beginning in 2017. # of Elder Abuse Cases Prosecuted 30 20 Elder and Vulnerable Adult Services Team (EVAST) formed 10 0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2021 2020 2022 (1st half) Calendar Year
No recommendations for this finding
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.