by Jess Hill
It’s what’s known as the Al Capone approach, explained District Attorney Walt Jones. Capone was once the biggest mobster in Chicago, but police couldn’t arrest him, because there were never any witnesses to his crimes. Capone never got prosecuted for his violence, but he did end up dying in prison – as a convicted tax evader. ‘Starting tomorrow, the folks sitting in front of me are special – special to the prosecutor’s office – if they choose to reoffend,’ Jones said. ‘The status quo no longer exists. We are waiting on you to reoffend. We have the paperwork filled out; we only have to put in the name of the victim and the date.’ Then a dark-haired, heavyset man with a chiselled jaw introduced himself as Doug Retz, special agent with the FBI. If the local prosecutor couldn’t get them on a state crime, he said, the FBI would step in, and would try to make a federal case against them – even if that meant setting them up. ‘I can pay informants, buy guns, buy dope, all day,’ he said. ‘Plenty of resources to do it … So please take the advice, go to these people in the community. I wish you the best of luck.’ Each official seemed intent on sounding more terrifying than the last. To the would-be fugitives in the front row, US federal marshal John Olson was stern and clear: run, and you’ll be caught. ‘Traditionally you haven’t been flagged and you have been able to run to another city, another state, and it’s been no big deal. Now that you’ve been flagged, that ends.’
Finally, after each official spelt out exactly how they would ruin these men’s lives if they abused again, it was Chief Fealy’s turn. Domestic violence was no longer regarded as a misdemeanour crime, he said – police now regarded it as High Point’s biggest threat to public safety, and would treat any incident as a major event. ‘As of today, you’re flagged in our record management system,’ he said, explaining that if they got stopped for as little as a traffic ticket in a neighbouring town, his police officers would know about it. ‘We’re not asking you, we’re telling you – control yourselves with your women. That’s all we’re asking. That’s how you avoid us.’
High Point police department had long had a serious problem with domestic violence. ‘We were spending more than 6000 hours [a year] just on domestic violence calls, not even counting reports for arrest,’ Sumner explains over the phone from High Point. Like most police departments across America, High Point had a pro-arrest policy: if an officer had reason to believe an offence had been committed, they were obliged to make an arrest. But that was as far as they went. Domestic violence was mostly a minor crime that just needed to be managed – or so the thinking went, until the summer of 2008. In one fortnight, two men – both known offenders – murdered their partners and then killed themselves. To a city of just 100,000 residents, these two murders, so close to each other, were a huge shock.
This was a catalytic moment, and Sumner knew he had to seize it. Since 2004, the city had seen sixteen domestic homicides.22 That made domestic violence the leading cause of homicide in High Point, accounting for one in three murders. When Sumner suggested to Chief Fealy that they devote the next year to reducing domestic violence, Fealy baulked. That was like setting the department up for failure, he said. Family violence was just a sad fact of life, something that was ‘always going on below the surface in any community’. Nothing worked. Everybody knew that.
Sumner wasn’t deterred. He kept thinking about a paper he’d read, some years back, from a New York criminologist, David Kennedy, who had pitched an entirely new way to police domestic violence. It was based on the strategy that made him famous – ‘focused deterrence’ (or ‘pulling levers’). Focused deterrence was first introduced in Boston in the 1990s with Operation Ceasefire, a city-wide push against youth gun violence. The strategy hinged on a simple premise: that a small group of people commit the majority of violent crimes, and their criminal records can be used as leverage to convince them to stop offending. That might not sound particularly radical, but in the ’90s, the popular wisdom was precisely the opposite: it held that you couldn’t bargain with violent criminals, because they were fundamentally irrational. Under advice from Kennedy, Boston police identified their most dangerous criminals and sent them a message – delivered by former gang members, church leaders and other respected locals. It said: we want you to change, because we care about you, and we will help you change your life, if you let us. But if you insist on continuing your violence, you won’t get away with it, and the penalty will be swift and severe. The harshest consequences possible would be engineered by a formidable coalition of law enforcement – police, prosecutors, judges, federal agents – who vowed to fast-track trials and request maximum sentences. The impact was not only immediate, but lasting. Operation Ceasefire achieved a 60 per cent reduction in youth homicide and a 25 per cent decrease in gun assaults in the decades since. It has also led to reductions in homicides and gun violence all over the country, and is now one of the United States’ most celebrated crime reduction strategies. It’s even been described as ‘the only tactic proven to reduce gang violence’.23
By the early 2000s, Kennedy began to think: if focused deterrence had worked on gun violence and drug-dealing – without fixing the root causes of poverty, racism and inequality – could it work on domestic violence?
In proposing this, Kennedy was challenging a fiercely held idea: that domestic violence was predominantly the crime of ‘nice guys’ with no history of offending. In fact, crime statistics showed that many of the most serious abusers were known to police – or to colleagues, neighbours, friends or family – who could have intervened. The statistics painted another disturbing picture: in the vast majority of domestic homicides, police had clear opportunities to act to protect the women who ended up dead. When Sumner dug out the files on the city’s seventeen most recent domestic homicides, he found that every single perpetrator had a criminal record.** More disturbingly, their abuse had not been a secret: each of their victims had asked police and advocates for help before they were killed.
Focused deterrence wasn’t going to eradicate all domestic violence in High Point. There was a cohort of perpetrators who would never show up on a 10-79 call (the code for domestic violence callouts). Those abusers were, in the short term, beyond the reach of police. But there was a group of seriously violent perpetrators, some of whom had abused more than one woman, who were known to police. If these offenders could be stopped, police could at least do something about the violence they could see – while using them as an example to deter first-time offenders.
When Chief Fealy saw the list of known offenders behind the rash of domestic homicides, he was persuaded that focused deterrence might just work. Fealy made a bold call: he publicly vowed to reduce the domestic homicide rate. He also wanted to see a drop in repeat victimisation, and fewer calls involving the same people. Success wouldn’t, however, mean a drop in calls generally: on the contrary, he hoped more victims would feel encouraged to report.
None of this could happen quickly. It took two years for a working group of police, academics, prosecutors, victim advocates and community members to agree on how the program would work. Digging deep into the data on offenders, they identified four categories – from the most violent to first-timers – and came up with strategies to confront each one.
The A-list – the city’s most violent abusers – were targeted for immediate prosecution. The conviction needn’t necessarily be for domestic violence: if a victim was reluctant to testify, police would look for an unrelated charge against her abuser and, if possible, prosecute him for that instead. ‘In one case,’ explains Sumner, ‘we had a man with two larceny charges pending, so we had the prosecutor fast-track those charges and got him 150 days for both charges. Then we told him, “Hardly nobody goes to jail for larceny at that level, but you are, because of your domestic violence offence.” That started really sending the message.’
D-list offenders were those who had come to the attention of police via a call, but hadn’t committed an arrestable offence. They would get a visit from a police officer, and a lett
er that told them they were now being monitored.
If a D-lister was arrested, they became a C-lister. A detective would visit C-listers, either at home or in prison, and would explain the new consequences: longer prison sentences, harsher probation conditions and so on. This was their chance to realise that consequences would be certain and swift, and to make the ‘rational choice’ to stop offending. Their name would be placed on an alert system so that if they offended again, judges would know to impose tougher bail conditions. The victim would also get support: contact from a safety planner, and a visit from police.
A C-list offender who reoffended moved to the B-list. They would have to attend a public call-in at City Hall, as the twelve B-list offenders had in February 2012. The victim, now identified as high-risk, would be consulted on a letter police would give to their abuser, to make sure it was phrased correctly. Police would also seek out a ‘proximity informant’, a neighbour or a friend, to keep an eye on the couple and report signs of trouble.
Before the twelve B-list offenders left City Hall in February, they were handed one of those letters, which spelt out their likely sentence should they offend again. When High Point police contacted their partners to see what happened when they got home, Sumner said their response was clear. ‘Oh, he got the message,’ they told him, ‘and he didn’t like it at all.’ For these women, the most important element was that it was clear this was being initiated by the city, not by them. As they told Sumner: ‘That’s what had the most impact on him.’ As for whether these call-ins are basically public shaming, David Kennedy says it’s ‘nearly the opposite’. ‘This type of police response treats them as rational, responsible adults.’24
A strong justice response is exactly what domestic violence perpetrators least expect. As a later evaluation would find, weak justice responses lead perpetrators to believe they are ‘immune to consequences’ and make the victim feel ‘incapable of seeking help’. When this belief is reinforced for offenders time and again, they feel free to abuse with impunity. As one High Point police officer said, when you ‘see some [offenders] with eight or nine [protective order] violations against them … you are like, how can that happen in our court system? How can someone be charged eight or nine times with different victims, not just one victim, and they are still on the street?’
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When the High Point working group was refining its strategy, they considered two nightmarish hypotheticals. The first was that perpetrators might be enraged by the crackdown, and take revenge on their victims. The second, as Kennedy described it, was ‘that he would have her chained in the basement … That would look to us like success, because she [wouldn’t be] calling anymore.’ But Shay Harger, the working group’s lead victim advocate, wasn’t afraid of the strategy going horribly wrong. ‘Things were already going horribly wrong,’ she told me. ‘We were not even coming close to preventing domestic violence fatalities.’ Was she worried that victims would be too afraid to report? ‘No,’ Harger replied in her North Carolina twang. ‘She’s already not reporting, for any number of reasons, and he’s dangerous and unmonitored. At least this way, somebody has eyes on him … [and] the community is saying we’re not going to put up with your violence or your bad behaviour.’ In the past, Harger said, she had to devise safety plans with women with no clear sense of how the system would deal with the offender. At least now the response would be consistent.
The working group devised six clear goals:
1To protect the most vulnerable victims from the most dangerous abusers
2To take the burden of addressing abusers from the victims and move it to the state/police
3To focus deterrence, community standards, outreach and support on the most dangerous abusers
4To counter and avoid the ‘experiential effect’, in which the weak criminal justice response teaches perpetrators that they can get away with it
5To take advantage of opportunities provided by the offender’s variety of offences (and prosecute on those grounds, if there was no better option)
6To avoid putting victims at additional risk.25
To achieve this, service providers and police had to come out of their isolated silos and cooperate. This result was ‘stunning’, says Susan Scrupski, a tech entrepreneur and documentary film-maker who witnessed it firsthand. ‘The role High Point Police Department played, particularly Chief Sumner, in herding cats and negotiating agreements to make a workable, effective system was nothing short of heroic.’ This became the secret to High Point’s success: an inter-agency working group of police, prosecutors, probation and parole, victim advocates, family services, social service providers and community members who would meet every fortnight and communicate daily to workshop individual cases and discuss how the system was working. ‘The value of that I can’t even quantify, because there were so many things they figured out and fixed,’ says Sumner. ‘You get the right people at the table regularly enough and you can make something happen.’
Long-term cultural change is important, says Harger. But the act of calling out domestic violence in public and bringing consequences for offenders is a huge cultural change in itself. ‘In my opinion, psychological and culture change is calling a domestic violence offender into our City Hall and having all of these people say, “Your violence is unacceptable. She may love you and she may be afraid of you, but we are not. She may feel like she is powerless against you – we are not. This is no longer about her – this is about us and you.” That is very powerful.’
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When the High Point program was evaluated in 2017, the results were impressive: intimate partner violence arrests were down by 20 per cent, as was the percentage of victims injured. In the six years before the strategy began, from 2002 to 2008, there had been eighteen domestic homicides, averaging three per year; in the decade since, there have been nine, bringing the yearly average to less than one. Of the nine offenders, eight had not come to the attention of police, which shows that where High Point police can see and engage offenders, they are able to prevent future homicides. As High Point police captain Timothy Ellenberger says, ‘We feel better about preventing offenders from escalating if we can “get in front of them”.’ More than 2300 perpetrators have been put on notice and, incredibly, only 16 per cent of those have been reported for a repeat assault (in cities using the traditional approach, the recidivism rate is between 45 and 64 per cent26). ‘This low re-offence rate indicates that what was previously believed about intimate partner violence – that the violence could not be prevented and the offenders could not be deterred – is, in fact, a myth,’ says Ellenberger.
The High Point model is already being replicated in other American cities. In South Carolina, the city of Spartanburg – which is three times the size of High Point and saw fourteen domestic homicides in 2015 alone – a program adapted from High Point began in 2017. At the end of their first year, the domestic homicide rate was down to three. Where focused deterrence is applied, domestic homicides drop: that’s why the federal US Office on Violence Against Women is providing funding for the High Point model to be replicated in three cities.27
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So, could the High Point model work in Australia?
Don Weatherburn, from the Bureau of Crime Statistics in New South Wales, is the guy for crime statistics. As I explained the High Point model to him over the phone, I could virtually hear his attention sharpen. ‘That’s effectively what police in New South Wales are trying to do at the moment. Look at what they’re doing in Bourke,’ he said. ‘For the first time in years, the domestic violence assault rate has dropped. That’s kind of unheard-of. You really need to offer the carrot and the stick. If you increase the cost of offending, while at the same time increasing the rewards for not offending, you get a better outcome than if you just wave the stick.’
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Home to 2600 people, Bourke lies on the banks of the Darling River, at the edge of the Outback. In summer, the heat gets so extreme the bitumen sticks to your
shoes. Then the rains appear, and the dry, barren red becomes lush with green, and carpeted by spring wildflowers. But Bourke is a troubled town. In 2013, The Sydney Morning Herald ran the headline ‘Bourke tops list: more dangerous than any country in the world’.28 It may have been overkill, but it wasn’t total fiction. Bourke had the highest rate of domestic violence, assaults, break-ins and car thefts in New South Wales. If you ranked Bourke’s crime statistics, the article warned, this little town had the world’s highest per capita crime rate.
Bourke’s problems are hardly unique, but they have a particular history. A third of Bourke’s population is Indigenous, and hail from more than twenty different language groups. Back in the mission days, Frontier War survivors from dozens of tribal groups were forced to live in missions in and around Bourke, all under the absolute authority of the Protection Board. When the missions closed in 1966, many former inhabitants moved to Bourke, and formed communities that soon divided along family lines and language groups. As one local described it, generations had been taught, ‘We don’t get on with those people; you stay away from them.’29
Local elder Alistair Ferguson feels these ‘legacy issues’ in his bones. He grew up in Bourke and saw his community shattered time and again, with families destroyed by violence, kids removed, and parents and children sent to jail. All of this was happening in a feedback loop: as one study found, children in Bourke were often out in the streets at night because it felt safer than being at home – but that’s when they were committing criminal offences. Said one community worker: ‘People say, “Why don’t the police get those kids off the street?” But if you knew where those poor little buggers slept, you wouldn’t be saying that.’30 The urge to escape home lives of chaos and violence was also driving young girls into relationships with older men, and starting the next cycle of dependency and violence: ‘The young girls are getting tied up in relationships at an early age and … [when] they say they want out he’ll just stand over her,’ said another community worker. ‘Next thing they’re pregnant … and then it goes from being a small problem to a huge one … and she feels there is no way out.’