Police Tool Assesses Domestic Abuse 'Lethality'

Maryland organizers say the new practice is a vital counterpart to the domestic violence fatality review teams that many counties and states have started in recent years. Such reviews look at what went wrong after a domestic homicide.

"For so long, dealing with domestic violence has been reactive," said Michaele Cohen of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, which launched the program with the researchers' help. "This is not a panacea by any means, but we hope it is one way to be proactive with this issue, which can be incredibly deadly."

Not everyone has signed on, however.

In Montgomery County, police are staying with their current practices, which do not include lethality assessment. Instead, they require connecting victims with counselors by phone in cases of arrest and encouraging such calls generally. This approach "is maybe a step better," said Officer Melanie Hadley. "We feel our officers aren't going to the scene and given the added pressure of assessing within minutes."

In all, Maryland police have conducted 3,384 lethality assessments since Jan. 1, 2006, when the program started in Harford County and on the Eastern Shore.

An analysis done on the Eastern Shore, looking at 354 victims who were assessed, showed that in 90 percent of cases, the victims had not received domestic violence services in the past. Among the highest-risk victims, 86 percent had never before sought help, according to the report by the Mid-Shore Council on Family Violence.

"I think the most important thing is that we are reaching people that would not have contacted us," said Jeanne Yeager, the Mid-Shore group's executive director.

In some places, police have grumbled about additional paperwork on the scene of volatile conflict. But Hall, of Prince George's, said: "It's just one sheet and it's just 11 questions. It's not a big deal at all."

In Calvert, where the program started in May 2006, Lt. Bobby Jones said that although deputies have long made "internal assessments" about victims' safety, the research-based questionnaire "makes it more glaring and obvious."

Jones said the practice also frees up deputies to focus more on their investigation while the victim talks to the counselor by phone.

Since lethality assessments started, Calvert has not had a homicide involving spouses or other intimate partners, he said. In the past, the county has had one or two homicides a year, many of them domestic, he said.

"There is no way to know whether it is directly related to the program," he said. But it could be, he said. "The thing about crime prevention is that it's a hard thing to measure."