Inter-Agency Response to Domestic Violence in a Medium Sized City

Inter-agency work is a key feature of many crime prevention and community safety efforts and part of the foundation of modern policing. No longer is crime control viewed as solely the purview of the police, but rather as an outcome for which many agencies share responsibility
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As acceptance of this idea has increased, inter-agency collaborative efforts have multiplied. Nowhere have these coordinated community crime control efforts been more fully recognized and advanced than in efforts to address domestic violence.

The present study examines one city’s efforts to reduce domestic violence through the coordinated work of the city police department and a wide range of criminal justice, social services, and community agencies. The city (here, and throughout this report, anonymous) is in the mid-Atlantic region of the country, has approximately 200,000 residents, and a police department with approximately 700 police officers. This research entailed study of an interagency domestic violence coalition, the Domestic Violence Coordinating Committee (DVCC), as well as two separate exploratory analyses of the city police department’s domestic violence data.

After presenting the methodology and literature review, the findings of this study are presented in two parts. The first part pertains to the history and current state of the DVCC and includes Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 is a description of the inception of DVCC and its evolution up until the year 2000 when the field research for this project began. Chapter 5 is a description of the DVCC at the time of the field research, a description of the domestic violence service community of which the DVCC is a part, a discussion of the perspectives about the police department expressed by members of the domestic violence service community, and a list of recommendations for improving police response to domestic violence developed by the Police.

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http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/Inter-Agency_Response_DV.pdf