October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Reprint "Revisiting intimate partner violence/murder"

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

-- Domestic Violence Awareness Project

Thinking about this in the context of "Defund the police" or at the very least, re-articulating better and more comprehensive responses to community public safety needs, it's worth reprinting this piece from July 2017, which outlines a very specific and focused way to address this problem, in ways that reduce the likelihood of death and the risk to first responders.

High Point, North Carolina's police department, working with other agencies, has created a model program that in the first few years of operation, experienced zero deaths.

Like how I argue for rigorous reviews of pedestrian and bicycle crashes to identify systemic and structural urban design issues, the same goes for crimes:

-- "Increasingly, criminal justice professionals and other practitioners are using a tool that may help reduce the many deaths due to intimate partner homicide. It’s a fatality review.," National Institute of Justice Journal, 2003

Systematic reviews of fatalities, and police-involved fatalities especially, would enable significantly more effective community safety responses than is typical of the current system.

Some cities, like DC, have Deputy Mayors with responsibilities greater than for the police department specifically, including emergency management, emergency communications, and fire and EMS.  But I wonder how many of these positions/offices look at the agencies as parts of a whole focused on "public safety" and organize their efforts accordingly?

In this vein, I wish the book The End of Policing was titled something like "Beyond Policing: Creating a Broader and Better Approach to the Realization of Community Public Safety."

That's a mouthful, and not as punchy, but that's where we need to be moving towards. 

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Original Link, July 22, 2017

The CDC reports that "Half Of All Female Homicide Victims Are Killed By Intimate Partners" (NPR). From the article:

The report was meant to find information that could help prevent such homicides — for example, by focusing programs on women who are at the highest risk of being killed.

For example, the researchers note that patterns of nonlethal domestic violence — referred to as IPV, or intimate partner violence — could be used to prevent homicides.

First responders could assess risk factors for violence to "facilitate immediate safety planning and to connect women with other services, such as crisis intervention and counseling, housing, medical and legal advocacy," the report says.

It happens that I wrote about this last year, in "The state of "broken windows" versus "problem oriented policing" strategies in 2016: Part 1, theory and practice." The article examined the issue, reacting to a speech by noted criminologist Ronald Clarke ("Criminology and the Fundamental Attribution Error").

High Point, North Carolina shows the way forward. From the piece:

Nothing works vs. problem-oriented policing.  I think how we learned the wrong lesson in the 1980s that "nothing works" when the real lesson was that patrol-car-based reactive policing was not effective in reducing crime and that we needed to change how police officer time and related resources were being deployed in order to have significant effect, the same goes with "Broken Windows" versus "Problem-Oriented Policing." ...

"Proving Broken Windows wrong."  Unfortunately, a focus on "proving Broken Windows wrong" has diverted attention from what "Problem-Oriented Policing" got right, that if you want to reduce crime, put your energies in addressing those "situational and opportunity factors" that support criminal activity.

Recently, the Washington City Paper reported ("The Thinned Blue Line") on discontent among DC police officers. 

Frankly, because the labor union has traditionally taken the "management is always wrong" approach for a long time I've had a hard time finding their positions credible.  But maybe the officers and management are both wrong, and the police department focus is not systematic enough when it comes to addressing [and developing] crime reduction strategies in focused ways.

Problem-oriented policing and crimes of violence.  Similarly, a few months back Governing Magazine ran a great piece, "How High Point, N.C., Solved Its Domestic Violence Problem," about the approach a city has taken to reducing "intimate partner violence" in particular murder around domestic violence cases. 

Since High Point developed their program, they have reduced the number of murders in this category to zero.  I think about that every time I see a story on the tv news about domestic violence related murders in the DC area, which are never-ending:

-- "Man Sought After Killing Estranged Wife Outside High School," NBC4
-- "She helped bail him out of jail. Days later, police say, he killed her," Washington Post
-- "Identifying 'Red Flags' Could Prevent Domestic Murders," NBC4

Adopting situational-opportunistic factors approaches to non-property crimes is clearly needed, now.

*With regard to the significant drop in crime experienced in many cities*, what has happened is the "low hanging fruit" opportunities have been harvested and now much more nuanced strategies are required to keep crime and crimes of violence down, as super-predators may be less resistant to simplistic situational strategies, and police departments-cities haven't responded adequately.

* This clause has been edited from the original.