Victim Advocacy is a broad new category of legal representation that the Law Office of Brian Michaels is innovating in response to massive deficiencies in Policing in California since the Covid Pandemic of 2020.
In the Spring of 2020 attorney Michaels put aside his law practice for a month and went to work as a photo-journalist covering the civil unrest up and down the West Coast in response to the death of George Floyd. (www.brmphotos.com)
Michaels spent a month in Los Angeles embedding with both protestors and law enforcement to cover these historic events. Through these initial experiences in the streets we began to understand that one of the results of these protests along with certain counties response to Covid 19 left many law enforcement agencies ill equipped moving forward, due to attrition, to continue to investigate particularly low level criminal offenses.
A combination of other factors, including a reduction in misdemeanor arrests and prosecutions have left many people to fend for themselves without the assistance of law enforcement who are increasingly advising members of the public to seek self-help through restraining orders instead of conducting criminal investigations.
The other long term effect is that some cases are left un-filed with prosecutors due to a lack of resources or a lack of will. What we now call victim advocacy involves not just the use of Restraining Orders as an arm of law enforcement but also, we are assisting clients build up their criminal cases through investigation and documentation in getting their criminal cases seen and filed by prosecuting agencies.
Attorney Michaels spent years as a prosecutor and working with law enforcement building and trying criminal cases as a Los Angeles City Attorney. He was a filing deputy as a prosecutor and generally knows what information police and prosecutors would be looking for to file a case.
We have partnered with several outside private investigators with significant law enforcement who act as our own in house detectives to investigate your criminal case. With 30 years in the criminal courts attorney Michaels lends his own tenacious research abilities to the cause of filing your criminal case.
We do not hold ourselves as law enforcement nor do we hold ourselves out as prosecutors and it is their judgement that results in the filing of a criminal case. We help you to get them to exercise their judgement for you. We are primarily working these cases in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Diego Counties but are amenable to other geographic areas.