Angela McCown, LMFT

Angela McCown, LMFT | National Crime Victim Service Award
Director, Victim Services Division
Texas Department of Criminal Justice 
Austin, Texas

Angela McCown is director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Victim Services Division (VSD), has more than 30 years of experience in the victim services field, and has helped hundreds of thousands crime victims participate in the criminal justice system and thousands of the professionals who serve them.

Under Ms. McCown’s direction, the TDCJ VSD has implemented a variety of innovative strategies and programs to better meet the needs of crime victims, including—

• a modernized notification and case management system;
• the expansion of the victim-offender dialogue program to include all violent crime-types and targeted assessment tools for sexual assault and domestic violence cases to assist trained facilitators in meeting the participating victim goals; 
• the creation of a division section to support agency staff that are assaulted on-duty or respond to critical incidents; and
• the expansion of notifications to victims by email and text message.

Ms. McCown began her career with the Austin Police Department, where she conducted over 400 forensic interviews with child abuse victims and over 100 death notifications. She went on to become the founding director of victim services at the Texas Department of Public Safety, where she developed a statewide program for victims served by state police and Texas Rangers. While serving as the Texas Crisis Consortium Co-Chair Ms. McCown provided crisis response to 15 state-declared disasters. In each of these roles, she supported victims, their families, and the professionals involved as they navigated tragedies.

Ms. McCown also teaches others how to support victims. She has served on the National Victim Assistance Academy faculty, as the lead faculty member of the Texas Victim Assistance Academy, and as a subject matter expert for the National Organization for Victim Assistance. Ms. McCown has co-authored the training manuals, Compassion Fatigue, Response to School Violence, and an OVC curriculum for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and is coauthoring the training curriculum for the Office for Victims of Crime Model Standards, and helped update the Standards for Victim Assistance Programs and Providers.

Her devotion to the families of fallen officers is extraordinary. Ms. McCown has assisted the Concerns of Police Survivors for 25 years during National Police Week, working with over 75,000 survivors and providing counseling at kids camps and over 175 family retreats. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist and specializes in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.