Longstanding implementation in High Point has made the city's partnership experts in a variety of National Network developments. The city has seen major reductions in violent and drug crime over 20 years of using the strategies and conducting call-ins. It was the initial pilot site for the Drug Market Intervention and has helped to develop innovations such as racial reconciliation and custom notifications.
The community arm of the city's effort, High Point Community Against Violence (HPCAV), founded by Reverend Jim Summey and directed by Greta Bush, has provided a template for community partnership in violence reduction efforts across the nation.
High Point is currently using the National Network's strategic model in a groundbreaking effort to address domestic violence that has seen promising initial results.
Central Florida should be looking to High Point, N.C., a town of just more than 100,000 people outside Greensboro, where police have come down hard on perpetrators of domestic violence and sharply reduced the number of related killings. In the five years before starting the crackdown strategy, High Point saw 17 domestic violence-related murders. In the five years since the program has been in place, that number dropped to six.
One local police department has spent the past six years pioneering a strategy that can help identify domestic violence abusers. High Point, N.C., had a problem. From 2004 to 2008, one-third of the city’s murders were related to intimate partner violence, well above both the state and national averages, according to former police chief Jim Fealy. So in 2009, the police department, in partnership with the National Network for Safe Communities, began to take action. Its approach tracks alleged abusers and intervenes accordingly depending upon the severity of the violence. From 2012, when the strategy was implemented, to 2014, there was just one intimate partner violence homicide in the city, compared with 17 from 2004 to 2011. Calls to police in High Point to report intimate partner violence declined by 20%, as did arrests, and the percentage of victims who were injured also dropped from 2012 to 2014.
The National Network's Intimate Partner Violence Intervention that was first piloted in High Point, NC helped drive dramatic reductions in the lethal intimate partner violence in the city, nearly eliminating IPV homicides.
"The High Point Police Department held a community forum Thursday night so Chief Kenneth Shultz could explain how the department hopes to avoid the issues that others have faced."
"In 2011, [High Point PD] decided to reinvigorate its approach [to domestic violence]. Through an array of positive incentives, community engagement and warnings of jail time, it sought to deter first-time abusers from assaulting their partners again and to dissuade chronic offenders from continuing or escalating their pattern of assaults.At the core of High Point’s approach is an intervention known as focused deterrence, a crime reduction strategy developed in Boston in the early 1990s as a way to stop gun violence among gangs."
"Among the mountains of programs devoted to addressing the plague of domestic violence, the police initiative in High Point, N.C., stands out for it bold approach to holding offenders accountable.Big Mountain Data will showcase the High Point Model in a documentary debuting this fall. “Turning Point” will tell the groundbreaking story of the program’s success so far. In three years, the city has nearly eliminated domestic violence homicides and decreased repeat offender recidivism."
"The High Point Police Department’s initiative to deter domestic violence is grabbing the attention of law enforcement across the nation, and even the globe."
The High Point Police Department has been applying the evidence-based focused deterrence approach to the problem of intimate partner violence (IPV).
In this Huffington Post article, Susan Scrupski discusses the culture shift necessary to reduce a community's domestic violence. For several years, High Point, NC, has been working with the National Network's model to effect just such a shift, insisting that abusers change their behavior rather than victims. The results have been dramatic. High Point Police Chief Marty Sumner says, "The best way I know to make her safe is to make him stop."
High Point Community Against Violence (HPCAV), founded by Rev. Jim Summey, is the community arm of High Point's long standing effort.
