Coming up on the 1-year anniversary of its implementation, Prevail executive director Susan Ferguson is pleased with how the Lethality Assessment Protocol is working.
Starting Nov. 1, 2016, Prevail partnered with each of Hamilton County’s eight law enforcement agencies to implement the protocol with first responders who are likely to meet victims of domestic violence on a scene when a crime occurs.
“It’s not new to the world, it’s new to Hamilton County,” Ferguson said of the protocol. “It comes out of a model in Maryland.”
It provides a defined protocol for when to do the assessment and what to do with the results. The intent of this screening is to connect victims at high risk of danger to service providers.
“If the police respond to a domestic violence incident they have a paper with 11 questions on it, and those 11 questions define what screens in what has a high risk of lethality,” Ferguson said. “There are three primary questions, and if you answer yes to one of those questions, it’s a high risk. If you didn’t answer yes to any of the first three, but if you answer yes to four of the rest of the questions, it screens as high risk.”
The first three questions are: Has he/she ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon? Has he/she threatened to kill you or your children? Do you think he/she might try to kill you?
For those at high risk, the police would call an advocate while they are on the scene.
“So they would call Prevail or another advocate,” Ferguson said. “It gives the victims an opportunity to speak with an advocate there on the scene before the police leave. Our roles as advocates is really talking about safety planning, what are you going to do for the next 24 hours to give you the best chance of being safe? Because if they screen in as a high risk, it really is a high risk of homicide or further injury. So we want to make sure they have a safe plan available, whether that is going to a shelter or going to a friend’s house. Sometimes the police on the scene are arresting the offender, so that would eliminate the offender from the equation.”
Ferguson said there is a Prevail advocate on call 24 hours every day. Prevail has a staff of 18 with nine rotating on the crisis line.
In the first six months of 2017, 61 LAP screens were completed and an advocate was called 21 times.
“The police see far more victims of domestic violence than we do at Prevail,” Ferguson said. “We count on them to be our voice in the community, to let people know these services are available.”
