SANTA CRUZ COUNTY DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COMMISSION

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT/ANNUAL REPORT COMMITTEE

MINUTES

11/4/02

 

  1.  The meeting was called to order at 2:08 pm.

 

  1. There were no additions or deletions to the agenda.  The time of the meeting was changed from 2:00 am to 2:00 pm.  The approval of the minutes was for the 10/9/02 meeting not the 9/25/02 meeting.

 

  1. There was no oral communication from the community.

 

  1. The minutes of the 10/9/02 meeting were approved as submitted.

 

  1. Feedback received from agencies re: evaluation tool.

 

    1. Batterer’s Intervention Programs (Paula)

1.      Question 1a.  Does it refer to vacancies or total capacity?

Our committee discussed this issue and reiterated that it referred to total program capacity.  We will make changes to ensure that this is clarified.

2.      Question 1a.  Does the R & D committee want agencies to differentiate between Santa Cruz and non Santa Cruz residents?

Our committee would like that differentiation and will modify the questionnaire.

3.      Question 1a.  Does the R&D committee all program enrollees including those that convicted of violating restraining orders even though there is no physical violence?

Our committee wanted only DV cases.  We will make changes to ensure that this is clarified.

4.      Question 1a.  Does the R&D committee want non-DV cases counted or differentiated?

Our committee wanted only DV cases.  We will make changes to      ensure that this is clarified.

5.      Question 5.  Does the R&D committee want the reasons clients have terminated from the program?

Our committee wanted the reasons but felt that it would add to the complexity of our questionnaire.  Therefore, we are NOT adding this additional question.

6.      Question 5.  Does the R&D committee want to know the number of batterer’s that have been granted a leave of absence?

No, the committee did not want to know the number of batterer’s that have been granted a leave of absence.

 

           

    1. Law Enforcement Agencies (Kim)

1.      The Chief’s Association thought that the questionnaire was much too complex.

Our committee decided to eliminate the request for demographic information and the breakdown of arrests by charge.  Murder information will be obtained from the Death Review Team and Emergency Protective Orders will be hand counted and provided by the LEAs.  Information about children will be obtained from another source.

 

    1. DA (David)

1.      The current DA case management system can provide relatively little information.

Our committee decided to eliminate the request for demographic information and the breakdown of arrests by charge.  We authorized Chair McWhorter to contact DA elect Lee and discuss our information needs and determine the best ways to work with the ODA to incorporate our request for information into the new, DAMION, case management system.  Vice Chair Hiromura is also available to assist in this matter.

 

If it is possible, we will group charges by felony, misdemeanor and murder.

 

    1. Courts (David) No information

 

    1. Hospitals (Linda)

1.      Hospitals and clinics do not have ethnicity.  We can obtain that information from the police report.  The hospitals and clinics only have information on “children living with the victim”.

 

    1. Advocates (Laurie)

1.      DA Victim Services said the questionnaire was too cumbersome.

2.      Family Matters said the questionnaire was great.

3.      Defensa stated that they have the demographic information but that the information is not collected.  Our committee may want to revise our questionnaire to use the advocate agency reporting format.  In addition, Defensa provides quarterly not monthly statistics.

 

Final Recommendation

 

Our committee decided that calendar year 2003 should be a pilot program in which we attempt to gather basic DV statistics and eliminate for now the demographic and per criminal charge information that we initially wanted to collect.  Depending upon our ability to collect data and the usefulness of the information to describe the status of domestic violence in Santa Cruz County the questionnaire may be expanded to include more information.

Before making any final decisions, we will also wait to receive feedback from What Works and may incorporate their suggestions into our instrument.

 

In addition, we are going to clarify and reiterate the purpose of the questionnaire.

 

  1.  The time and place of our celebration commemorating the completion of our project will be deferred until January 2003.

 

  1. Our plan of action is to meet with What Works on Thursday, 11/7/02 from 11-1 pm.  Based upon What Works’ input and the discussions that we had at our 11/4/02 meeting, we will decide on our course of action.  We plan to have a finished product to present to the 11/13/02 DV Commission meeting.

 

  1. There were no announcements.

 

  1. The next scheduled meeting is 11/7/02, 11-1 pm at the DA Conference Room.

 

  1. Meeting was adjourned at 4:03 pm.