A Better Response to Domestic Violence

On a recent Sunday night, a drunken man shouts as police handcuff him and lead him away from a house in Van Nuys. In the doorway, a woman with mascara streaked down her face and a 2-year-old boy balanced on her hip lets in three women.

One, a plainclothes officer, has a badge and a gun. The two others are counselors, armed with teddy bears and crayons.

“Look at what he did,” says the woman, pointing to a broken computer. Clothes and boxes are strewn around the small room. “Is he gone? He’s not coming back, is he?”

The visitors calm the woman and begin their work. They belong to the Domestic Abuse Response Team, a Los Angeles Police Department program that pairs civilian counselors with police officers.

Team members give out toys and can accompany victims to the hospital--even change locks, if necessary. They help gather evidence as they counsel family members, freeing up officers who often get a dozen calls on a single night.

The woman told counselors her husband had come home drunk and asked to use the phone. When he found it was busy because her 11-year-old daughter and a friend were using the computer, he stormed into the bedroom and grabbed the child by the hair. Then he smashed the computer, which the woman had bought for her daughter only the day before.

The woman revealed a history of black eyes and bruises suffered at the hands of her husband. In another room, one of the counselors gave crayons to the two girls and asked them to draw what happened that night.

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The program was created in 1994 in the LAPD’s Van Nuys division to fight family abuse. That year, said Gail Pincus of the Domestic Abuse Center in Northridge, she noticed difficulties prosecuting growing numbers of violent men.

Her concerns grew a year later when the county grand jury issued a report on family abuse. The number of domestic violence cases in Los Angeles County between 1991 and 1994 increased 24%, from 35,683 to 44,252, the report said. Felony cases went up 89% during that time. And nearly all the victims were women.

“I had been noticing that in the cases coming into the center from Van Nuys, horrible things were happening,” Pincus said. “Officers were yelling at the women, saying things like, ‘He’s got rights too,’ ‘Don’t get so hysterical,’ and threatening to arrest her. Cases were constantly falling apart.”

Pincus approached LAPD Capt. James McMurray with the idea of having counselors accompany officers on domestic violence calls. Within weeks, LAPD Det. Mitch Robbins, along with Pincus and McMurray, created the Domestic Abuse Response Team.

In addition to helping victims, they hoped to improve the number of successful prosecutions.

Alan Yochelson, a deputy district attorney, said that until recently, “There seemed to be a prevailing attitude that this was solely a family problem . . . that it was up to the victim to prosecute.”

Battered women, he said, face pressure from family members who “want to prevent her from pressing charges. Family members lay guilt on the victim. Often the batterer is the breadwinner for the family and there are tremendous economic pressures.”

So the program is designed to build cases even without the testimony of abuse victims.

The teams are taught by lawyers from the district attorney’s office about the kind of information necessary for a successful prosecution. Often, team members are subpoenaed to testify as witnesses; their notes from on-site counseling sessions are sometimes used as evidence.

“In cases where the team has been active, we get more and more complete evidence from the victims,” Yochelson said.

Pincus recalled how team members assisted a woman who had been thrown through a plate glass window by her husband--an attack witnessed by the woman’s 7-year-old son.

While riding in the ambulance with the mother and child, one of the team members asked the son to draw what he had seen that night. Those drawings were used as evidence after the victim recanted her original version of the events.

The husband was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Learning to gather such evidence is part of the training given the volunteer counselors from the Domestic Abuse Center. They also learn how to work with police.

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“Typically and traditionally, it’s been an adversarial relationship,” between police and counselors, said counselor Kristin Hall. She counseled battered women in Michigan before moving to Los Angeles two years ago. Officers with limited training in domestic violence, she said, are frequently criticized by civilian counselors for being insensitive.

“Men who batter are extremely manipulative,” Hall said. “It’s surprisingly easy for a man who’s thrown a woman through a plate glass window to snap back into being calm and rational. The woman is in shock and the batterer is able to use that. Which version of events would anyone listen to?”

Det. John Edwards, who responded to a domestic-violence call at O.J. Simpson’s house in January 1989 and testified at Simpson’s criminal and civil trials stemming from the 1994 slaying of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, said weak laws used to make the officers’ job more difficult.

“It used to be the DA wouldn’t file a case without the victim’s consent. You would rush out there and do your job and . . . the whole case would evaporate,” Edwards said. “After a while, officers got conditioned to family violence and nothing being done about it.”

Now, domestic violence cases in California can go to trial without the consent of victims, said Jim Provenza, legislative counsel for the district attorney’s office.

Before 1991, victims faced fines or jail for refusing to testify. Now, victims who refuse to testify are sent to counseling. The current law, said Provenza, “takes the pressure off the person who has been abused.”

Prosecutors also got a boost from a 1996 law that allows past acts of domestic violence to be allowed as evidence, even if charges were never filed.

Joanne Brown, now a volunteer counselor, was a victim of domestic violence before the new wave of laws. During the 1970s and 1980s, Brown said, she distrusted police. “They terrified me,” she recalled. “They weren’t on my side.”

The North Hollywood resident said her former husband beat her over a 10-year period. She called the police only once during that time, she said, and officers would not help her get the locks changed or inform her when her husband was released from jail.

“I kept on calling and they wouldn’t tell me anything,” Brown said. “I didn’t hear from them. Then one day I called my house and he answered the phone.”

Her husband, she said, was convicted of misdemeanor domestic assault in 1989.

“Now, I hear officers say, ‘If you don’t do something about this, we’re going to find you dead somewhere,’ ” Brown said. “And it’s true.”