TAMPA, Fla. — According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced some form of intimate partner violence.
To stop that violence from becoming deadly in 2005, the folks with the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV) helped create the Lethality Assessment Program or LAP—which is now used by advocates and law enforcement agencies across Maryland and across the country.
LAP Effectiveness Position Paper by ABC Action News on Scribd
"These are the questions are that deemed, through research, to be most identifiable with intimate partner homicide," said Darrell Holly, the LAP Administrator for MNADV.
For Holly, the group said the assessment is so much more than the 11 questions that make it up.
"The life-saving measure is connecting a victim to services. What we found is that the sooner you can connect a victim to services, the likelihood of the violence or the potential for homicide decreases significantly," he said.
And now, the state of Florida is looking to mandate a lethality assessment of its own for first responders through Senate Bill 610 or the Gabby Petito Act.
The evidence-based form would have to be approved by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). It would also need to be created under the guidance of the Department of Justice, Florida Department of Children Families (DCF), state advocates and state and local law enforcement.
It would also require officers to be properly educated on how to fill it out before its use—which Holly said is paramount to a successful program.
"Training is an important component to this piece because if we're just giving people questionnaires to read, they're not understanding what these questions mean," he said.
But amid the positives, there is at least one section of Florida's current proposal that gives Holly some pause.
As the bill currently stands, it doesn't include any provisions to help beef up staffing and resources for domestic violence support groups in our state, which he said may have the opposite effect of the bill's purpose.
"Because when you have an assessment tool, the likelihood of an increase in calls is significant, right? So, you have a DV program that may not have the capacity to field the calls that they are already getting. Increasing that volume of calls can be problematic to the DV agency as well as detrimental to a victim/survivor," he said.
