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Byram Police: A Model for Domestic-Abuse Response? by Nick Judin
ask her. “You can’t go home to your family with these kids.” It was nonsense, gaslighting, a deception piled up on all the other cruelties he inflicted in their years of living together. But a lie, repeated enough, can come to resemble the truth. “Even though I knew it was wrong, they’ll say it so many times that (you start) to believe what they’re saying,” she said.
‘We’ve Just Arrested Everybody’ Chief Thompson realized at an April 2017 conference on interpersonal violence in Seattle that his force was handling domestic-violence disputes with the same heavy hand as they did other crimes. The conference introduced him to the “lethality assessment,” a tool academic nurse Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell developed to direct responders to assess the imminent danger to victims at the scene of domestic disputes. Thompson acknowledges that the typical method of responding to a domestic call fails both the victims and the community at large. Before the new approach, the difficulty of communicating with victims and aggressors in a domestic dispute—as well as the dangers of entering a home in a volatile situation—frequently led officers to treat everyone involved as a potential threat, whether aggressor or victim. “Domestic violence is the only time in state law that I, as a police officer, am absolutely mandated to make an arrest if I determine a domestic-violence incident has occurred, and if I can determine a principal aggressor,” Thompson said. But that mandate is easily misunderstood, he warns. “So unfortunately what happens is officers go on the scene … and this is the statement that gets made: If I come back out here, I’m going to take everybody to jail.”
Joyce Sartin, founder and director of Daughters of Baca, survived years of domestic abuse before finding freedom from the isolation and control. Now, she works to provide resources to women struggling with the same issues.
“And that’s the way we’ve done business for a really long time. And unfortunately in the Byram Police Department, we did business that way for a few years.” Reviewing the numbers from Byram’s 2017 domestic-violence responses, Thompson called in a patrolman to discuss the numbers. “What does this number say to you?” the chief asked. “In 2017, we took 26 reports, and arrested 40 people.” “It means we’ve just arrested everybody,” the patrolman responded. ‘A Criminal Offender Approach’ Back in Mississippi, Sartin had the support of her family again. But freedom from her abuser was short-lived. “He was dishonorably discharged from the military. I’m at my mom’s house one day, and I turn around … and he’s at the door,” she said. They never lived together again. But the abuse continued to escalate. Sartin’s exhusband became a truck driver, sweeping in
and out of town without her awareness. “We never knew when he was in town,” Sartin said. “So he would do things like come to the house and leave the door halfway open, to make us think someone had broken in. I’d have to call the sheriff for a walk-through to make sure it was OK for me and the kids to go in.” As the abuse Sartin suffered grew, she eventually involved the police. Brookhaven is a small city, and she considers herself unusually fortunate that she knew the police, and that they understood her situation. Both times Sartin called law enforcement, they arrested her abuser. Sartin’s experience is an outlier, and Chief Thompson has statistics to show that not all victims are so fortunate. Of domestic-violence homicides nationwide, “a third of the victims have had some sort of contact with law enforcement in the year prior to their killing, yet only 4% of more ABUSE RESPONSE, p 10
June 10 - 23, 2020 • jfp.ms
courtesy Sandy Middleton
Sandy Middleton, executive director of the The Center for Violence Prevention, says a lack of social services makes it harder for police to help victims of domestic violence.
Sartin was utterly lost, afraid to call the police and without confidants to share her fears with. “Well, where can I go?” she asked herself at the time. “Nobody wants to try to help me, and I’ve got these kids. Nobody wants to get involved.” Her abuse took place in the early 1990s, coming to a head when her ex ordered her out of their shared apartment with her son Marcus, locking them out. Sartin can’t remember what angered him that day. “You don’t know what you’re going to say that’s going to set him off,” she said. She contacted his superior officer and begged him for assistance. Soon Sartin was on a bus with her son, headed back to Mississippi. There, in her hometown of Brookhaven, she encountered law enforcement from her own community who knew her, and helped protect her, even when her abuser followed her across the country. But Sartin’s experience is an outlier, and few understand this better than Byram Police Chief Luke Thompson.
courtesy Joyce Sartin
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or Joyce Sartin, it started with a shove. An argument in the car ended with her then-boyfriend pushing her roughly against a door. It was the first warning sign of many, but Sartin put it out of her mind. “When you’re 20 years old, you don’t know that maybe a push can turn into full-blown domestic violence,” she told the Jackson Free Press. The violence escalated the moment they left the orbit of her family, moving to Fort Bragg, N.C. Her abuser took full advantage of the separation the move provided. “Isolation is key,” Sartin says, adding that it is one of the strongest control methods that lies at the heart of partner violence. Her ex decided what Sartin was allowed to do. She couldn’t drive—he would drop her off at work. When he saw her laughing with a male coworker, he forced her to quit. He would interrogate her friends about their conversations. Sartin found a journal he kept about what she said to him. The paranoia stopped her from reaching out to others. Sartin needed a support network to break out of the abuse cycle, but it was back in Mississippi. “Where you gonna go?” he’d
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