When former Harris County, Texas, district attorney Devon Anderson jailed a rape victim as a material witness, screams of outrage were heard. It wasn’t that the witness, the alleged victim, wasn’t needed to prosecute the defendant, but the callousness of treating the victim as a criminal. It reflected a failure to grasp her relative role in the system, that Anderson’s desire to convict overrode any sensitivity to the needs of the person who suffered the harm of the crime.

But this outrageous handling of a victim gets taken a step too far when the victim assumes that it’s now her system, to do as she wills it, to accomplish her goals. Crimes are prosecuted in the name of the people, not the victim. The victim is not the client, the complainant, the boss. She’s a witness to a crime. She should be treated respectfully in the process, but not because it’s all about her, but because prosecutors shouldn’t be monsters. And most aren’t.

Deborah Cotton was the victim of a crime, shot in the stomach at a New Orleans parade. She has since died of her injuries, but left behind an essay explaining why she refused to cooperate.

Recently it was reported that the office of the district attorney of Orleans Parish is arresting and incarcerating victims who get scared and refuse to come to court to testify. Court Watch NOLA, a community group of volunteers who monitor New Orleans’s criminal courts, issued a report showing that in 2016 alone, our prosecutor arrested and jailed six victims after they refused to come to court to testify for the prosecution. Four of these victims were survivors of attempted murders, one victim was a rape survivor, and the last survivor had a gun aimed at her. Our district attorney’s office tried to arrest nine other crime victims for failing to cooperate, but could not find them.

Was she afraid to cooperate because she feared incarceration? Did she refuse to cooperate in protest of the handling of these “survivors?” The Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, is a piece of work on many levels. But for better or worse, he’s the DA, and the DA’s job is to prosecute people who commit crimes.

Cotton was shot in the stomach. It’s not much of a stretch to say she was the victim of a crime. A violent crime. There’s no spin to make this into an understandable crime, a sympathetic crime, one of those Jean Valjean-type crimes for which you would hope a prosecutor would exercise discretion. This was a bad crime, and the person who committed* the violence was not a person for whom any rational person would feel much sympathy.

Still, Cotton didn’t want to cooperate. And whatever feelings she had toward Cannizzaro failed to explain it.

The outrage caused by perpetrators opening fire into a crowd of innocent New Orleanians on Mother’s Day broke down the community’s reluctance. Additionally, our United States attorney, not our local district attorney, prosecuted the case. That made a difference, too.

Despite her condemnation of Cannizzaro, her case was being prosecuted by the United States Attorney, not the District Attorney. So while her complaints about Cannizzaro may be valid, they were completely irrelevant, gratuitously thrown in despite having nothing to do with her case. So what then was her problem?

When it came to my own cooperation with the prosecutor, I was reluctant. I’d finally clawed myself out of a pit of grief, despair and PTSD and I wanted to live again. Why should I risk my health to testify for the prosecution?

It’s a good question, and there’s a similarly good answer. If a guy who would shoot into a crowd isn’t prosecuted, then he remains free to shoot again. Having already shown that he will commit violent crime, there is a good chance that he will do so again. One of the reasons a victim might put herself at psychological risk to cooperate in the prosecution of her perpetrator is to prevent someone else from taking a bullet to the stomach. Or worse. It’s understandable that she cares deeply for her own welfare, but what of the welfare of the next “survivor”? Or that person’s children, if she doesn’t survive? So they don’t matter as much as her feelings?

In Cotton’s case, there were other witnesses, which alleviates the burden of her testimony. If the perps weren’t going to walk anyway, then maybe it’s not such a big thing for her to refuse to cooperate. Then again, if all the witnesses feel as she does, then the prosecution falls apart. No witnesses means no prosecution. But that too wasn’t her only motivation to refuse to cooperate.

I also didn’t want to be part of the machine that sent men from my tribe to prison. As a black woman working on criminal justice reform, it breaks my heart to watch scores and scores of black and brown men in orange jumpsuits going into the tunnel of no return.

This is a very principled concern on certain levels, but this wasn’t a guy who stole bread to feed his kids, or smoked some weed on the street corner. These guys shot bullets into people. Much as it might be a political statement about a racist system, it’s irrational to conflate the vagaries of racism with the individual commission of a violent crime.

This isn’t about sending scores of black and brown men into the tunnel of no return. It’s about sending shooters, the people whose bullets take life and inflict pain, to prison. Is she suggesting shooters should get a free pass based on skin color? Is that her end game?

We need our prosecutors to be community prosecutors. We need prosecutors who will work with us so that we can build trust. We must believe that our prosecutors see lasting public safety as the end goal, not jail. District attorneys must promise to listen to the needs and desires of crime victims and never ever arrest a survivor who is too scared to testify.

Deborah Cotton has passed away since writing this. The New York Times published it, perhaps as a paean to her, perhaps because it’s just a sucker for anything that aligns with its politics, no matter how insanely irrational. Or maybe they just love anything that tugs at the heartstrings.

But the criminal justice system doesn’t get reinvented to suit every victim’s feelings. Let’s do away with due process because it makes the victim scared. Let’s do away with cross-examination because it could re-traumatize the victim. Let’s have no system except whatever makes the victim feel valued and respected. Screw rules of evidence. Screw the requirement for proof. Screw everything but the victim’s feelings. Is that the message?

That prosecutors have jailed victims as material witnesses as a matter of their own convenience is one thing, an impropriety that stands alone and need not happen. But the rest of this was utterly irrational and irrelevant. Where it leads, however, is dangerous to everyone. There should be, and is, sympathy for the victims of crime, but that doesn’t mean they get to reinvent the system in every case to match their feelings, or that prosecutors should take their marching orders from victims. Crimes are prosecuted on behalf of society. It’s not all about you.

*Despite the current trend to substitute the word “enacted” for “committed” when it comes to acts of violence, I will stick with the old way despite whatever feelings as to the use of “committed” to refer to insane asylums it evokes.