Law Enforcement Strategies for Addressing Domestic Violence August 2014 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:05 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Jacqueline Picard 00:14 Hello and welcome. My name is Jacqueline Picard, and on behalf of the COPS office, I would like to introduce you to Rachel Braunstein, an attorney at Her Justice. Rachel is here with us to discuss the topic of domestic violence and to provide helpful tips, strategies, and tools for law enforcement on this topic. Rachel, can you tell us a little bit about the work Her Justice does on domestic violence? Rachel Braunstein 00:35 Sure! Thanks for having me. Her Justice is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. At Her Justice, we believe that all women with urgent safety and financial needs deserve legal representation. So we recruit volunteer attorneys from big law firms to stand side by side with women who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer, giving them a real chance to obtain legal protection that transforms their lives. Approximately 80% of our clients are survivors of domestic violence. Attorneys with Her Justice provide legal advice to women in need of civil legal assistance, in family law, matrimonial, and immigration law, on the phone and in person at walk-in centers run by New York City. Finally, in addition, to all of that, we engage in policy work around issues that affect our clients, including domestic violence, court reform, and immigration law. Jacqueline 01:38 Why is it important for law enforcement to know the signs of domestic violence? Rachel 01:42 Well, I’ll say initially, undoubtedly many of your constituents listening to this podcast receive excellent training through their offices in the area of domestic violence. Today, because I am speaking from the client’s perspective, which is something we always try to maintain at Her Justice, I’m going to emphasize some reasons for the importance of continued training around domestic violence. One reason is empowerment of the client. It could be a client’s first interaction with the authorities when she calls the police for help. Having a positive experience with law enforcement could empower her to call for help in the future or even leave the situation for her and her children’s safety. We’ve heard so many positive stories from clients about their interactions with law enforcement, but we’ve also heard some few troubling ones. Recently, I met a client in New York City who had long been married to a very abusive husband. One day, he became intoxicated, as he often did, and hit the client in the face with a coffee mug, causing very serious injury to her. While she was in the hospital recovering, her husband fled the marital home. Once she returned home, he would come to the home daily, banging on the door to be let in and threatening to “finish the job.” She filed a police report, fearing for her safety, and then petitioned for a family court order of protection against him. She repeatedly asked the police for help in serving him with that order of protection so she had the protection of the courts. Despite that fact that the husband kept showing up around the martial residence, the police could not serve him and really dismissed the client. On one occasion, she was even told, again dismissively, by the police, that the court order was “not a golden ticket” for her. The situation escalated to the point where, as the client was walking the dog one day, her husband approached her in person, began yelling angry threats and followed her as she ran home. After this incident, again the police were unable to find him besides the fact that he was in the area of their home. Finally the client, out of desperation, went to another precinct, not her local one. That precinct was able to dedicate the resources and time to serve her husband with the protective order. Taking the client’s perspective here, it was her view when I spoke with her that police weren’t taking her concerns seriously. Even given the serious assault he had committed against her, the fact that he was repeatedly in the vicinity of their marital home, they kept telling her they couldn’t find him. Undoubtedly, they tried, but the question is from the client’s perspective—were they dedicating the resources to getting her the protections that she needed? This ultimately left the client feeling disempowered by the system and that her husband had all the power and control, which is, of course, the fundamental aspect of domestic violence. On the topic of empowerment and a victim-centered approach to law enforcement’s handling of domestic violence issues, in 2007 I had the opportunity to do some work with the New York City Bar Association on training law enforcement and judges in the country of Rwanda on domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence. It was really an opportunity to participate in the early stages of a system in training of these issues in a country that had progressive laws on the books but less well-established infrastructure and coordination around a response to correct the violence than we do in our U.S. cities. The focus of the training was to explore a victim-centered approach to addressing gender-based violence. The experience for me really hit home the point that we all have biases that can affect the way we see these issues. For example, I heard in that training experience that rape or domestic violence within a marriage is not criminal behavior. It was also a reminder how far the U.S. has come in refusing to tolerate those biases within the system and to taking a victim-centered approach to addressing domestic violence. Our second reason, in our experience at Her Justice, that we find it’s important to really know the signs of domestic violence is because many of our clients are undocumented immigrants who have a particular experience with domestic violence with the legal system. Many of our undocumented immigrant clients report their abusers use their immigration status as a tool of control. Many of those clients had stayed under the radar about their domestic violence experience for fear of being reported to the immigration authorities with the threats being made against them. So this, combined with the fact that undocumented immigrant women often have more limited access to social or legal services than U.S. citizens, makes it more difficult for them to escape abuse and puts them at greater risk of violence for a longer period of time. Finally, there’s another issue that comes to mind in terms of why it is important for law enforcement to know the signs of domestic violence, and that concerns dual arrests and cross orders of protection—what we in New York call restraining orders, we can them orders of protection. Better education and training around the signs of domestic violence could help to avoid situations where victims of abuse are arrested without a basis. We see clients in dual arrest situations where both the aggressor and the victim are arrested, and sometimes even prosecuted, for assault or other crimes. In those cases, a court may have issued cross orders of protection, each party having an order of protection against the other. The court may ultimately have to determine which party is the abuser. This issue is certainly not new. It’s been more recently bought to the forefront among advocates and law enforcement. There is increasing recognition that physical abuse does not always cause visible signs of injury. For example, strangulation. I know many jurisdictions, including New York, have amended their laws to include the crime of criminal obstruction or bleeding or strangulation, where there is no evidence of physical injury. This is a step toward recognizing that even though the police don’t observe physical signs of injury, abuse may have occurred. Of course, the consequences of these dual arrest situations or cross orders of protection, is that victims distrust the police and become reluctant to even call the police at all. There are even farther reaching consequences. One of our clients who survived years of abuse at the hands of her husband filed a family court order of protection against him, and he filed one against her. She had a job where she was working with children. As a result of this order of protection that ultimately was found to be baseless against her, she was put on unpaid leave from her job, which had devastating consequences financially and emotionally for her and her children who she was supporting. It also gave him leverage to try and pursued her to withdraw her petition against him in exchange for dropping his against her. So there are many complex reasons why dual arrests occur that go beyond the scope of this podcast. It seems to me that continued training in this area would help law enforcement resolve a more keen understand of domestic violence dynamics to minimize the occurrence of this traumatizing situation for victims of violence. Jacqueline 10:04 Absolutely. What strategies should law enforcement use so as to not re-traumatize the victims? Rachel 10:11 In addition to what we just discussed about enhancing training to better identify the aggressor and minimize dual arrest, a major area that comes up for us is the area of cultural competency. I’ll describe what I mean by that. The better trained law enforcement is, in our view, as advocates in cultural competency, the better our client’s experience of reporting abuse and engaging with the legal system and the more efficiently and effectively the process works for all. So what is cultural competency? Of course, culture has many different definitions. I think we can all agree that the influence is, for all of us, the way we interact with others and experience our surroundings. Cultural competency can be viewed as one’s ability to interact effectively with people of different backgrounds and social groups. One of the major things we see as a way that law enforcement could improve cultural competency, and we, of course, as attorneys focus on this as well, is to enhance language access for the victim or the complainant. We’ve heard many stories from clients where the police, for example, left the scene of a domestic violence incident to which they were called because they could not understand the complainant, and there was no effort to translate or translation resources available. Or they allowed the abuser to translate for the victim. Or the abuser spoke English, and the victim didn’t, so she got arrested because his story was more clearly told. Or she didn’t get a domestic incident report or police report, which carries immigration implications for those seeking immigration relief on the basis of being crime victims, because the police wrote “refused” on the statement portion of the report when, in fact, there was no translator available to help the victim make a statement. These are all ways in which, in particular for our immigrant or non-English speaking clients, language access at the point at which they contacted authorities to report abuse and get help is extremely important. We emphasize this for our own practice, and with the pro-bono attorneys who handle our cases, to improve the clients experience and ideally the outcome of the process itself. Jacqueline 12:45 What initiatives are you aware of to enhance law enforcement partnerships with advocates against domestic violence and to improve victim’s experiences in the New York area that may be available elsewhere in the country? Rachel 12:56 Well, to highlight a couple of examples, one is the Family Justice Centers. In New York City, we have Family Justice Centers in four out of our five boroughs. The family justice center is a model. It’s the co- location of a multi-disciplinary team of professionals who work together in one setting, one office, to provide coordinated responses to victims of intimate partner and family violence. We at Her Justice are on site at those family justice centers, and so we are attorneys handling civil matters for clients on site, and we work along with prosecutors’ offices and police officers handling domestic violence issues. Often, there are training sessions available through those family justice centers that are multidisciplinary about domestic violence, cultural competency issues, among other issues. In our New York Family Justice Centers, we are also doing some innovative work around regarding human trafficking. We legal service providers are collaborating with law enforcement, police, and prosecutors to better identify trafficking survivors and to provide services that are necessary because we recognize that there is a common link between domestic violence and human trafficking. It’s my understanding that there are currently over 80 operating Family Justice Centers or similar models and over 100 communities that are in some stage of planning for a Family Justice Center or similar model. If you’re in a similar site for collaboration between law enforcement, legal service providers, social service providers in your community, it would be a great resource for law enforcement to get enhanced training around domestic violence issues. The second initiative I’ll note is another initiative that is aimed at improving victims’ experience with the legal system and that concerns language access, as I highlighted before as a big concern. In New York this spring, legislation was introduced that would require police to translate domestic incident reports if they are filled out in a language other than English and to also require victims are notified of their rights in their native language. I’ve highlighted some examples before. Clearly, such a law would greatly enhance the experiences with law enforcement and empower them to know their rights. Learning about the existence of such laws or similar initiatives your community would be valuable in enhancing the work that law enforcement is doing with survivors of domestic violence. Jacqueline 15:45 Rachel, thank you so much for your time and expertise. Rachel 15:49 Thank you for having me. Voiceover: Beat Exit 15:50 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 16:07 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.