Violence, yes, but soon it won’t all be ‘domestic’

By Abigail Goldman (contact)

Monday, Oct. 6, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Chris Morris

They were old and tired and terminally ill, so they made a deal: murder-suicide, goodnight, goodbye.

The husband shot the wife or the other way around. In any event, police called it a case of domestic violence, and one of their first names was memorialized on a plaque honoring victims of fatal domestic violence in Clark County. An infant’s name also is etched into the plaque, a baby shaken breathless added to the list of last year’s domestic violence deaths.

There are 25 names on the plaque but not all are victims of what the average person would consider domestic violence.

In Nevada, the law on domestic violence is broad enough to cover many suspects under its umbrella. You’ve committed an act of domestic violence if you physically harm any of the following people: a spouse, a former spouse, any blood relative, any relative by marriage, a roommate, a person you once dated, a person you are dating, a person with whom you’ve had a child, your own child, the child of any of the aforementioned people, or the legal guardian of your child.

Nevada’s sweeping definition of domestic violence muddies the statistics and confuses the public’s understanding of the scope of the problem. Metro hopes by changing the way it reports those numbers it can paint a more accurate picture of domestic violence in the community.

Nevada isn’t alone. In many states the legal definition of domestic violence is quite different from the layman’s definition. To most people, domestic violence usually means boyfriends and husbands who beat, and sometimes kill, the women in their lives. This is also known as “intimate partner violence,” and it makes up the vast majority of domestic violence cases Metro handles. It’s a monster of a problem in the Las Vegas Valley, authorities say, and one that can be tackled only if we understand its real scope. Because so many kinds of crimes fit into the domestic violence definition, the statistics can be misleading.

How many of the 61,000 domestic violence calls that came into Metro’s dispatch center last year fell into that classification because of a legal technicality? How many were acts of intimate partner violence? How many were feuding roommates? How many of the 23,000 calls that were serious enough for an officer to write up a report about were what the crowded battered women’s shelters know as domestic violence?

Police just don’t know, which means the public doesn’t know how bad the problem is. One study said Nevada was fifth in the nation for domestic violence homicides, but as the memorial plaques show, not all those deaths seem like domestic violence to the average citizen.

Next year, that should become clearer. Metro Police will change the way they tabulate domestic violence data starting in January. Detectives will separate cases of intimate partner violence from the bulk of domestic disturbances. They hope these sifted-through statistics will be easier to understand and help them tackle the problem of domestic violence.

The change, however, presents its own set of problems. The total number of domestic violence cases probably is going to drop — not because of any reduction in the crime but because police will no longer be disseminating inflated numbers.

So here is the dilemma: How can police present these new statistics without making the public think there’s less of a problem?

The onus is on Metro to make it known that domestic violence isn’t magically disappearing. How the department accomplishes this remains to be seen. Metro’s advocate for victims, Elynne Greene, is almost certain there will be fewer names to add to the plaque next year even though the problem is as bad as ever.

There’s a lot riding on this distinction: funding for policing programs, public support, perception of the department.

“The statistics are now a little bit misleading,” Greene said. “What does that mean in terms of awareness? It devalues what we are doing in terms of looking at domestic violence and the dynamics that go into it. It dilutes the value of what we are trying to get out.”

On the front end, this change is simple for police: Read reports and sort accordingly. Parents accused of beating their children will, as always, go to the abuse and neglect detail. Roommates who spar will go to violent crimes specialists. Actual incidents of intimate partner violence will stay squarely in the domestic violence department. And everybody’s numbers will jibe. In the past, police from the homicide and the domestic violence teams have compared their numbers for domestic violence deaths and come up with different data, not because their counts were off but because there was a discrepancy between what each division was considering a domestic violence homicide.

So, the numbers will add up for police, who still don’t know how they’ll explain it to the public.

Metro has no intention of lobbying to change the state’s existing domestic violence law — its broadness is an asset when you’re looking to charge someone. Instead, it will lobby the public to look at the bigger picture: We’re not better off than before, but we’re trying to be.