Public Safety Grant Awarded
to MU Generates Domestic Violence Project
JEFFERSON CITY, November 9, 2006-Director of the Department
of Public Safety,
Mark James announced today the department awarded $136,647 grant over
a 3-year
to the University of Missouri-Columbia Law School to assess Missouri’s
justice system in
response to violence against women.
“Domestic violence is a dangerous crime that damages innocent
lives in their own home, a place where they should feel safest,”
James said. “This great work by University of Columbia professors
has afforded an educational tool that will provide great community
awareness and empower victims to take action and be heard.”
As part of this project, Law Professor Mary Beck and
her students have collected data on protective orders, criminal charges,
and police calls in each county in Missouri. This information was
collected over a two-year period. Psychiatry Professor Niels Beck
and his associates analyzed the data from the first two years and
data analysis from the third year is underway. With data analysis
in hand, Journalism Professor Kent Collins and his students investigated
why some counties had higher or lower numbers in their responses
to domestic violence.
The study found that some counties had higher numbers
of civil protective orders, prosecutions, or reported domestic violence
incidents than others and that smaller counties with fewer resources
tended to report lower numbers. Additionally, lower numbers were associated
with idiosyncratic county practices such as rejection of civil protective
order filings without setting hearings, charging fees to petitioners,
and allowing victims to participate in criminal or civil proceedings
but not both.
The study also found that higher numbers were associated
with multidisciplinary domestic violence response teams and no drop
prosecution policies of domestic violence crimes where the victim
did not testify.
A detailed listing of each county’s data is available
on the DPS website http://www.dps.mo.gov.