Violence survivor advocates say N.C. city has the right idea to curtail murders.
Central Florida leaders rejected monitoring as untested in larger city
Long before four young children were shot and killed in an Orlando apartment this week during a gunman’s nearly daylong standoff with police, Central Florida advocates for domestic violence survivors already had enough.
On an April night in 2016, Aleah Brown, a 1-year-old girl with a head full of curls, and her 4-year-old brother Henry, who was wearing a Batman shirt, were shot and killed by their father in neighboring Seminole County. He also killed his children’s mother that night, stabbing her and running her over in the parking lot of a Chili’s Grill & Bar in Lake Mary.
That case followed other highprofile domestic violence-related killings in Central Florida, where between 35 and 48 people were murdered as a result of domestic violence each year for the last five years in the seven-county region of Orange, Osceola, Lake, Seminole, Volusia, Brevard and Polk, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
A man gunned down his girlfriend and another woman, and shot a third person, in a shooting spree through two hotels near International Drive in 2012, the deadliest year of the last five years for the region. Another man had opened fire that same year in a Casselberry hair salon — his target was his girlfriend, but he killed three other women.
The men in those cases all had histories of domestic-violence charges, just like Gary Wayne Lindsey Jr., who killed the four children — two of them his own — this week after his girlfriend called police to say she was battered. Lindsey also shot and critically injured an Orlando Police officer and later killed himself.
“This could have been prevented,” said Carol Wick, a longtime advocate for domestic violence survivors. “There’s absolutely no reason why this should have happened … this guy [Lindsey] was a classic A-list offender.”
Wick said Central Florida should be looking to High Point, N.C., a town of just more than 100,000 people outside Greensboro, where police have come down hard on perpetrators of domestic violence and sharply reduced the number of related killings. In the five years before starting the crackdown strategy, High Point saw 17 domestic-violence-related murders. In the five years since the program has been in place, that number dropped to six.
The model works like this: People suspected of being violent toward their intimate partner are classified into one of four types of offenders based on their criminal histories. The lowest-level offenders receive a letter notifying them that they are now being monitored and additional offenses will result in stiff consequences. The offenders who are deemed the most potentially dangerous are immediately targeted for prosecution — meaning that even if the victim of the abuse won’t testify, the police will still pursue a case or look for other charges that will stick.
Offenders in High Point are also ordered to attend a face-to-face meeting where police and prosecutors make clear that their “secret” is out — domestic violence is often hidden behind closed doors — and the behavior will no longer be tolerated whether the victim cooperates with police or not.
“We all behave differently if we know someone is paying attention to us,” said Capt. Tim Ellenberger, who oversees the program in High Point. “We’ve kind of shifted the burden to the offender.”
The program also provides help with job searches or mental-health counseling to offenders willing to accept it.
Since 2012, High Point has put 2,300 offenders on notice. The repeat offense rate is about 19 percent — considered a success by people who study recidivism. Only one notified offender has committed murder since 2012, Ellenberger said.
Wick and others tried to push the High Point model in Central Florida back in 2016.
Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs held a meeting in November of that year with a small group of other power players such as State Attorney Aramis Ayala and Chief Judge Frederick Lauten.
But the idea didn’t gain traction with local law enforcement, including Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings. The discussion was eventually dropped.
Demings said he didn’t have enough information about the program at the time and was concerned about whether it would work in an urban county with more than 1.2 million people, a place more than 10 times the size of High Point. He said he was open to looking at the program again.
A spokeswoman for Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer also said there was worry that such a program could create “unintended enhanced danger for the partner of the accused.”
But the man credited with creating the model known as “focused deterrence,” first for gang violence in Boston, home to nearly 600,000 people at the time, and later for drug offenders, said the model continues to show promise and has moved elsewhere, such as Spartanburg, S.C., a region three times the size of High Point. A similar model is also showing results in Hollywood, Fla., a city of about 150,000, according to a February article in the International City/County Management Association magazine.
“We don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be taken to scale,” said David Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “There’s no reason why the size of the jurisdiction alone would make that impossible.”
He said the model is designed to prevent just the kind of horror Orlando witnessed this week.
Under the High Point model, there’s a greater chance that a return to probation would not have been considered an appropriate consequence for Lindsey, who had multiple domestic-violence offenses in different counties.
“Multiple contacts with the criminal justice system teach people they can get away with it,” Kennedy said. “The structure we designed does a number of things — a tightening web of certainty around abusers like this to let them know from the very beginning that they will not get away with this sort of thing and they should stop.”
He said the burden also shifts to law enforcement rather than relying on the victim of the abuse to come forward and testify.
“Maybe the victim does not want to testify but the man who is abusing her faces an assault charge against somebody in a bar, or a violation of probation,” he said. “Those legal vulnerabilities can be used to incapacitate him or otherwise slow him down.”
High Point found that such an approach did not increase the danger to victims.
“If we’re worried about making him mad, then we’re giving him the power and control,” said Ellenberger of High Point Police. “He’s already putting her in jeopardy.”
Ellenberger said that when he talks to other police officers about the strategy he also emphasizes enhanced safety to law enforcement because the small number of the worst domestic-violence offenders often pose the greatest danger to police
In addition to the Orlando officer seriously injured this week, Lt. Debra Clayton was shot and killed last year. Her accused killer, Markeith Loyd, was wanted on a domestic-violence homicide and had a history of intimate-partner violence.
“This is who is killing us,” Ellenberger said.
Such a system in Central Florida would require cooperation across city and county lines and must be driven by local sheriffs and police chiefs, said Wick, former president of Harbor House, a group that advocates for and provides shelter to survivors.
“We need to do something big and bold and we can,” said Wick, now a consultant for nonprofits. “We just need law enforcement to lead it. They have never been in the spotlight because everyone always turns to the domestic-violence center when these things happen to fix it. They can’t stop the abuser … Stop the perp, stop the violence. Create a community where you can’t just intimidate the victim into to not testifying to get off. Where it’s not tolerated.”