Coordinated Community Responses to Domestic Violence in Six Communities: Beyond the Justice System. Other Community Context for Domestic Violence

The Kansas City metropolitan area has many layers of systems to coordinate. The geography and multiple jurisdictions in Kansas City present serious challenges for collaboration among agencies. For example, the Kansas City Police Department serves all of Jackson County and parts of several other counties. Since Circuit Court jurisdictions correspond to counties, the police must interact with multiple county prosecutors, and the county prosecutors often work with police from different municipalities. Thus, coordinating the law enforcement response for the greater Kansas City area requires bringing many different agencies together. Since the area's shelters serve the community-at-large, these issues are somewhat less of a problem for coordination among these providers, although the multiple jurisdictions influence the coordination between service providers and criminal justice agencies.

The Kansas City criminal justice response, in which domestic violence is typically a violation of a city ordinance and prosecuted in Municipal Court, differs from many other communities. Prior convictions in the Municipal Court cannot be used to "enhance" cases to a higher charge. In the past several years, the community has emphasized prosecuting domestic violence as a misdemeanor or felony, but the overwhelming majority of offenses continue to be prosecuted at the city level.

The statute for protection orders in Kansas City is fairly broad and allows the judge to include custody and child support as part of the order. A number of people viewed this as an invaluable tool in the community's response. Violations of an order are charged as a misdemeanor for the first offense and as a felony for the second offense. However, several people noted that because of this broad scope, there have been cases of a parent filing for a protection order simply to gain custody of a child or to obtain child support. As a result, protection orders have received a "bad rap" among some people in the community.