The Intimate Partner Violence Intervention (IPVI) employs the National Network’s approach to identify and deter the most serious domestic violence offenders, reduce domestic violence, and reduce harm to victims. Through a partnership between law enforcement, community members, social service providers, and domestic violence victims’ advocates, the IPVI strategy intervenes early with low-level domestic violence offenders, puts them on notice of community intolerance for domestic violence and that further and more serious offending will be met with a meaningful legal response, and takes special steps to remove the most dangerous domestic violence offenders from the community. The strategy includes close partnership with domestic violence victims’ advocates to ensure that victims have access to safety and support structures and are not exposed to unintended harm. Tracking data for a pilot implementation of IPVI in High Point, NC, show very encouraging reductions in domestic homicide, reoffending among notified domestic violence offenders, calls for service, and victim injuries.
The Intimate Partner Violence Intervention (IPVI) is an offender-focused, victim-centered approach
that addresses the most serious intimate partner violence. This issue brief provides a succinct summary of IPVI strategy and its history of implementation.
The Intimate Partner Violence Intervention (IPVI) uses the National Network principles that have informed effective interventions against homicide, gun violence, drug markets, and other critical public safety problems and applies them to intimate partner violence.
This PowerPoint presentation is a useful guide for practitioners to how the High Point Police Department used National Network for Safe Communities' framework to reduce intimate partner violence.
Sechrist, S., Weil, J., & Shelton, T. (2016). Evaluation of the Offender Focused Domestic Violence Initiative (OFDVI) in High Point, NC & Replication in Lexington, NC.
High Point Police Department (2014, August 1). Offender Focused Domestic Violence Initiative: The First Two Years.
Kennedy, D. M. (2004). Rethinking Law Enforcement Strategies to Prevent Domestic Violence. Networks 19(2-3): 8-15. National Center for Victims of Crime.
Sechrist, S. M. & Weil, J. D. (2014, June). The High Point OFDVI: Preliminary Evaluation Results. In D. K. Kennedy (Chair), Using Focused Deterrence to Combat Domestic Violence. Symposium presented at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice International Conference: The Rule of Law in an Era of Change: Security, Social Justice, and Inclusive Governance, Athens, Greece.
Sechrist, S. M., Weil, J. D., & Sumner, M. (2014, May). Offender Focused Domestic Violence Initiative in High Point, NC: Application of the Focused Deterrence Strategy to Combat Domestic Violence. Presentation at the Biennial Conference of the North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Greensboro, NC.
In communities across America, the relationship between the public and the police is deeply fractured, and researchers believe this can lead to more violent crime, and to fewer crimes being solved.
Join us for the 2019 Mastrofski Lecture featuring Professor David Kennedy for his talk on "Closing the Book on the President’s Crime Commission: Toward a Theory and Practice of Problem-Oriented Public Safety".
Instead of incentivizing police to go after the money and property of people they merely suspect of having drugs, they should be incentivized to pursue dangerous abusers.
Over 70% of sheriff's offices serving 25,000 or more residents participated in a drug task force in 2007, the most recent year for which data was available. Imagine if those sheriff's deputies were assigned to a domestic violence team, investigating abusers, serving protective orders, and following up with the most dangerous repeat offenders.
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.
For years, she slept with a gun under her pillow, living in fear of a boyfriend who beat her, controlled her life and threatened to kill her and her children. Domenica, who came to this country illegally from Mexico in 1995 and became part of the booming immigrant community in Houston, said her partner was a United States citizen, and often reminded her that she could be deported if she went to the police.
“He told me nobody would help me, because I don’t have papers,” said Domenica, 38, who has a son and daughter with her boyfriend, and asked that her last name not be used in order to protect them. “I was with him like that for a pretty long time. I felt like there was no help for me.”
Baton Rouge law enforcement, community and human services leaders met Wednesday with academics from the National Network for Safe Communities, beginning a partnership aimed at decreasing youth gang violence and domestic violence in the capital city.
Representatives from the New York-based John Jay College of Criminal Justice shared their violence intervention framework, hoping to jump-start the same strategies used in the now-defunct BRAVE program — which Baton Rouge leaders hailed for years as a success before its disgraced end in 2017 and have since revived in the Truce program — but also to pilot a revolutionary way to address domestic violence offenders.
The National Network for Safe Communities’ Intimate Partner Violence Intervention (IPVI) was introduced during a press conference Tuesday afternoon at City Hall. Ulster County District Attorney Holley Carnright, flanked by cardboard silhouettes representing 11 local women killed by their partners, said the initiative uses statistical analysis and data from different agencies to identify people who might commit intimate partner violence.
“Once we’ve identified a person who we think is going to commit domestic violence again, we have personal contact with them,” Carnright said. “In addition to the personal contact we have with the offender or potential offender, we have a parallel process where we engage the victims. We do what we’ve been doing for a while. We try to educate the victims, make sure they understand about services that are available to them.”
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.
In this op-ed for Governing Magazine, IPVI Director Rachel Teicher explains why victims of intimate partner and domestic violence don't trust the criminal justice system, and outlines how procedural justice can improve victim perceptions of law enforcement. "This trust could provide the foundation for a new vision of public safety: safer communities that are empowered by positive, ongoing and successful cooperation with law enforcement. Increased confidence in criminal-justice practitioners improves victim participation and offender accountability, and it provides law enforcement with the resources it needs to address and ultimately reduce these violent crimes."
Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, published a study this week showing that states that require people with restraining orders to relinquish the firearms they already own have a 14 percent lower rate of intimate-partner gun-related homicides than states that don’t.
