Abuse Program Serves Needy Areas Least

The Los Angeles neighborhoods with the highest rates of domestic abuse get disproportionately little attention from a program in which civilian counselors assist officers on abuse calls, police records show.

The Domestic Abuse Response Teams program began six years ago as an effort by abuse workers to temper what they regarded as police insensitivity and to quickly tell victims about services such as court restraining orders and shelters for battered women.

But because the counselors are provided by neighborhood nonprofit groups, rather than by the Los Angeles Police Department, levels of services are uneven. They tend to be higher in more affluent areas.

“Poor neighborhoods don’t have strong or well-funded community-based operations that the police can tie into,” said Police Chief Bernard C. Parks.

Experts who study the role of community groups that work with abused women cite two other reasons for the disparity:

* Some inner-city community organizations that work with battered women are reluctant to participate in a program affiliated with the police.

* Several of those inner-city organizations run domestic abuse shelters. Although they say they admire the response teams, they are unwilling to divert money from their shelters to pay for them.

The per capita rate of domestic abuse calls is nearly six times as high in some areas of South Los Angeles as in some neighborhoods on the Westside.

In the LAPD division with the highest rate of calls, the Southeast Division, DART counselors work with officers just once a week.

By contrast, in the Wilshire Division, where the rate of domestic abuse calls is half as great, DART counselors are available 24 hours a day thanks to a grant from a children’s aid organization.

The disparity in services from one region to another depresses abuse workers, said Ann Marie Lardeau, a member of the city’s advisory Domestic Violence Task Force. “It’s like completely different cities.”

The Wilshire Division’s DART funding comes from the Children’s Institute International, a Mid-City-based nonprofit organization specializing in the treatment and prevention of child abuse. The agency also contributed enough money to run DART programs four days a week in the neighboring Rampart Division.

In some neighborhoods, community groups must rely on volunteers instead of professionals. The 77th Street Division’s response team operates only six days a month on a shoestring budget provided by Project Peacemakers, a nonprofit group that focuses on abuse prevention. It pays its response team coordinator, Bobbye Gooden, $220 a week for the 35 hours she spends training volunteers, coordinating their schedules and following up with victims. The volunteers are given 40 hours of training in counseling abuse victims before they begin riding with officers.

The Police Department helps neighborhood organizations apply for grants to fund the response teams. But advocates are now pressuring City Hall to have the department help pay the bills. They hope the department will strengthen DART by using part of a new $1-million federal grant for family violence response programs.

Michael Thompson, a criminal justice planning official in the mayor’s office, said the city hopes to use the grant for a program to coordinate the way the police, the city attorney’s office and shelter operators respond to domestic violence cases. Whether DART figures into those plans remains unclear, he said.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department started a similar program two years ago with counselors in its Lancaster, Carson and Industry stations. In October, it added squads in East Los Angeles, Norwalk and Lynwood, with a goal of having civilian counselors riding along with officers in 20 of its 21 stations by 2001, a spokesman said.

The DART program started in the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division in 1994, when female abuse victims complained that police treated them brusquely, said Gail Pincus, director of the Domestic Abuse Center in Northridge.

Pincus offered to have her counselors ride with the officers on domestic violence calls, arranging to get social services to battered women and taking statements for potential court cases. The results, say police and prosecutors: more convictions in such cases.

“We learned details that [police] did not turn up in the original investigation because [the counselors] were able to spend a little more time with the victim,” said Alan Yochelson, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney.

But that isn’t happening in neighborhoods with the greatest need, according to a Times review of police calls and interviews.

There are no response teams in half of the city’s 18 police divisions, including areas of largely poor and minority neighborhoods such as South-Central and eastern Los Angeles.

The uncovered divisions include Newton and Southwest, which rank within the top five divisions in domestic abuse. In 1998 and 1999, Southwest recorded 46 calls per 1,000 residents and Newton recorded 32. West Los Angeles, which has a response team program, recorded nine calls per 1,000 residents during that period.

In the Southeast Division, which had 52 calls per 1,000 residents, the Carson-based Peace and Joy Care Center is able to provide two civilian crisis counselors to work with officers on Wednesdays. The counselors don’t ride along to crime scenes; they make follow-up telephone calls from the station.

In abuse-plagued neighborhoods with minimal response team coverage, civilian counselors have their work cut out for them.

On a Friday night earlier this winter, police and a team of two counselors arrived at a dingy apartment complex in the 6500 block of South Hoover Street in South-Central. A woman named Maria was waiting inside.

Maria had called, she said, because her boyfriend, the father of her child, had grabbed her by the neck and slammed her face into a wall. He didn’t want her to go out to the movies with her friends.

Under questioning by the counselors, Valerie DuBois and Henry Redd, she said her boyfriend had “popped” her in the mouth at a party a month before. Another time, he smashed the window next to the front door because she didn’t answer fast enough.

“You’re in danger,” DuBois told her. “If he doesn’t get help, you and the baby will be at risk.”

At DuBois’ prompting, an initially reluctant Maria agreed to seek a restraining order against the boyfriend. DuBois gave her a bilingual list of shelters and counseling centers, all the while giving comfort by holding Maria’s hand.

As obvious as the assistance seemed, to veteran abuse worker Pincus it was a revolutionary change. “We have relied on the strength of the woman to call us, but now we’re going out to her in a time of crisis,” she said. The woman who takes proactive steps “is not the same woman who calls our hotline and comes into our shelters. This [stage] is years earlier.”

As with many preventive programs, there is no hard evidence about the effectiveness of DART, merely anecdotes. But most experts support the concept. “They are a very good first step at breaking the cycle of abuse,” said Dr. Deirdre Anglin, an associate professor of emergency medicine at USC.

Anglin and other experts said some community organizations do not participate in DART because they fear being seen as linked to law enforcement, rather than purely as advocates for victims.

“Some providers don’t want to give the impression they’re an arm of the police,” said Sharon Wilson, director of client services for Jenesse Center, the first domestic abuse center in South-Central.

There is tension between groups that provide counselors for the response teams and a group of nonprofit organizations that run shelters for battered women. They have found themselves competing for grant money. Some shelter organizers are reluctant to participate in the response teams, arguing that the program’s effectiveness is unproved.

“What works in one community may not work in another,” said Jenesse Executive Director Karen Earl, whose group is considering participating in the teams.

Patty Prickett, the program director for the Safe Women’s Project, which sponsors the West Los Angeles response team program, says it is crucial to reach victims before they need shelters.

“They never make it to a shelter and they never get out of the cycle of abuse,” she said. “A lot of women would be lost.”