In June, the Canyon County Sheriff's Office is being honored by the National Sheriff's Association.
The association's Crime Victim Services Award is handed out once each year to one sheriff's department in the country.
The Canyon County Sheriff's Office's "Start by Believing" campaign kicked off last year.
The effort is aimed at making victims of a crime feel as comfortable and believed as possible right from when officers first respond on scene.
One survivor says she's alive because of this effort.
“We will believe you and support you as you go through this,” says Canyon County Sheriff's Office Victim Witness Coordinator Aleshea Boals.
A lot of Boals' work is done in the "Start by Believing" room, a warm and inviting place where she listens to victim testimony right after a violent crime and helps prepare the victim for court throughout the judicial process.
“Some of our victims have reported things that are almost unbelievable, and they think they will never believe me so they don’t want to report it,” says Boals.
Stephanie Johnson was one of those victims.
“The violence was just horrific, things that you wouldn’t even see in a movie,” says Johnson.
Johnson spent the last half of a six-year relationship being brutally beaten at the hands of her then-boyfriend, Max Gorringe.
“It was things like I was stabbed and lit on fire, and locked in a crawlspace, and beaten over and over again with metal pipes, and spray cans and fists and anything that he had really,” recalls Johnson.
Johnson says it took months, in multiple different interviews to tell her story, and was only possible because staff at the sheriff's office believed her from the get go.
“They always made me feel safe and I knew that they meant it when they said they were going to protect me.”
When asked where Johnson would be if she didn’t feel like the sheriff's office believed her, she said: “I would be dead. There’s not a doubt in my mind that if I didn’t feel believed, I would have gone back and he would have killed me.”
“I think that sometimes cops and law enforcement get a bad rap because we aren’t just here to arrest bad guys, we are really here to help victims become survivors,” says Boals.
Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue says seeing Johnson become a survivor is a silent thank you and means more than any award.
“Just looking at that woman and knowing her thoughts and what she thinks, she’s going on with a very healthy and productive life, and healthy relationship," Donahue said. "That’s all the thanks I will ever need."