While cops face a daily struggle to get street violence under control, Boston police and advocates say the city has had success in preventing domestic homicides.
Gang violence is behind most of the city's 628 murders in the past 10 years, with domestic homicides accounting for just 23 murders, or 3.6 percent of that number. All of the domestic cases have been solved.
"My thing is this: Any domestic violence case should be 100 percent clearance," said police Superintendent Robert Merner. "Domestic assaults, they're not who-done-its. The boyfriend, the girlfriend, the husband, the wife."
Boston -- the state's most populous city with about 10 percent of the state's population -- accounts for just under 10 percent of the 264 domestic killings statewide in the past decade. Toni Troop of Jane Doe Inc. said Massachusetts has the third-lowest domestic homicide rate in the nation, and she said that Boston police do a great job working with an array of services that reach out to women in crisis.
Former police Commissioner Edward F. Davis credited the "multidisciplinary" approach taken by police, service providers, prosecutors and others to tamping down on domestic violence. A move toward "mandatory arrests" in domestic violence situations may have also helped prevent killings.
"When I first came on the police department, we were trained to mediate the dispute and leave people in the house. With these mandatory arrests ... there is no discretion. They have to arrest the assaulter," Davis said. "Those things make a difference."
Merner said, "One of the biggest things we do is track all of our domestic violence cases. We look at all types of situations, but the biggest thing we look at with domestic violence are the repeat calls, repeat offenders ... we talk about those if not daily, at a minimum, weekly."
Copyright 2014 - Boston Herald
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
