San Diego Family Justice Center — the Original One-Stop Model for Domestic-Violence Survivors

The San Diego Family Justice Center (SDFJC) opened in 2002 under then-City Attorney Casey Gwinn, bringing police, prosecutors, civil legal aid, medical staff, shelter and social-service advocates into a single building at 1122 Broadway so that survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, elder abuse, strangulation and gun violence could obtain a restraining order, speak to a detective, meet an advocate and plan for safety in one visit instead of navigating a dozen separate agencies.
The model proved highly replicable: the U.S. Department of Justice's President's Family Justice Center Initiative (2004–2006) funded 15 further centres nationally based on the San Diego blueprint, and the non-profit Family Justice Center Alliance has since supported the opening of more than 100 centres across the United States and centres in more than 20 countries, making SDFJC one of the most widely copied victim-services models in the field.
The U.S. National Institute of Justice separately commissioned a formal evaluability assessment of the national Family Justice Center Initiative, reviewing site logic models and data systems — a sign of sustained federal research interest, though the assessment itself concluded that rigorous outcome evaluation had not yet been carried out consistently across sites.
As context (not as a causal claim about the Center specifically), San Diego County's domestic-violence homicides fell to a 30-year low of five deaths in 2023, a 50% year-on-year decline, in a county now served by two Family Justice Center-model sites (Your Safe Place and One Safe Place) alongside broader prosecution and prevention efforts credited by the District Attorney's office.
Limitations: no controlled or comparison study isolates the Center's own causal effect on victim safety or case outcomes from the county's wider domestic-violence response; the NIJ assessment found evaluation infrastructure was still developing, and no published cost-efficiency analysis was found.

Read the full analysis: https://www.sandiego.gov/sdfjc