Behind Broken Doors: Domestic violence summit exhibits local progress

Dvert is a partnership between Cincinnati police and Women Helping Women, a social services agency that puts domestic-violence survivors in touch with an advocate from the moment they report abuse. Advocates can provide for survivors' immediate needs, including childcare and safe shelter. They provide counseling and support to survivors throughout the prosecution of a case, should the survivor choose to pursue that remedy. More women have found the strength to pursue prosecutions, which advocates hope will ultimately keep more women safer than if they drop a complaint and reconcile with an abusive partner.

Partnering cops and clinicians has led to a cultural change in New Haven's police department. Their definition of a victim extends past the person with physical injuries in order to help children from violence-stricken households, a more comprehensive approach.

Embedded in Denver’s police department is the Homeless Outreach Unit, dedicated to building relationships with and providing access to services for the city’s population experiencing housing insecurity. They work closely with social workers and nonprofits in the city to work against the criminalization of homelessness, instead, taking a solutions oriented approach. The unit has helped build trust between those residents and police and has seen a 30% increase in referrals to homeless shelters.

After charged discussions and protests around racial injustice within police departments, Baltimore set out to find a solution to bridge the divide created between the city's police force and the kids that lived in stereotyped neighborhoods. Using nature as a common ground, the Outward Bound Police Youth Challenge was born to bring the two sides together and teach them that they have more in common than they may think.

Since moving to a county-run police department, Camden, N.J., historically one of the nation’s poorest and most dangerous cities, has altered its culture to overcome years of mistrust by developing a personal relationship with and empowering the local community.

In the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles,the Crips and Blood gangs have violently fought each other for decades. By 2013, the LAPD has enforced new measures including community policing with an emphasis on fairness rather than deterrence. The Community Safety Partnership has significantly reduced crimes in Watts and has built trust between residents and the police.

The Violence Against Women Act was billed as a way to make a patriarchal society, and policing profession in particular, take domestic violence more seriously. It encouraged policies making arrest of alleged abusers mandatory, even to the point of punishing victims who refused to cooperate in prosecutions. This has backfired on many victims, especially women of color who distrust police and their punitive approaches to solving family problems. The law also prioritizes punitive approaches in its awarding of federal grants, thus denying victim aid to women who do not wish to cooperate with arrests.

In southern Louisiana's Lafourche Parish, sheriff's deputy Valerie Martinez Jordan used her history as a domestic violence victim to create a countywide program to legally seize the guns of people convicted of domestic violence or whose gun rights are suspended under a protective order. The program, since expanded statewide by legislation she inspired, took more than 200 guns out of circulation in her parish alone since last year and is credited with preventing any domestic homicides by people disarmed through her program's efforts.

Since filing for bankruptcy in 2012, at a time of high unemployment, spiking homicide rates, and deep alienation of the public from its police, Stockton, California has served as an experiment in involuntarily defunding of a police department. The city’s police chief championed a rethinking of policing’s role, seeking community partnerships with a police force whose ranks had been reduced to one of the lowest per-capita in the U.S. Serious problems remain, but public trust is up, crime is down, and homicides are solved at a much higher rate than in most cities.

Human trafficking has become an increasingly prevalent problem, especially in states such as Florida that host a large tourist population. To better serve the victims, Miami-Dade County has created a trauma-focused court that directs adolescents to support services rather than prostitution charges.