Domestic violence study says Ariz. fails victims
A national guncontrol group is criticizing Arizona for failing to do enough to protect domestic-violence victims, particularly those who seek orders of protection against their attackers only to have police fail to enter the orders in a criminaljustice database.
A study conducted by Everytown for Gun Safety found that 62 percent of Arizona women who were killed by an “intimate partner” in a five-year period were shot to death, and that the state’s rate of intimate-partner gun murders was 45 percent higher than the national average. The study period ran from 2009 through 2013.
Part of the problem is that nearly 40 percent of the protection orders issued by Arizona judges
in 2013 and 2014 were never entered into the National Crime Information Center, said Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission.
The database of crime information is administered by the FBI, and officers are required by law to enter the information into the system, but an antiquated paper system that is badly in need of modernization is largely to blame, LeFevre said.
“Right now, the protection-order system is a paper system,” he said. “Anything that is paper-based is rife for getting lost.”
He said a police officer should be able to press a button on a computer in a patrol car to automatically send the order to the NCIC. That would enable the order to pop up when a licensed gun dealer does a background check. Currently, an officer has to mail a copy to the court and another copy to the sheriff’s office, which then sends it to the FBI.
In 2013, 29,257 orders of protection were issued in Arizona, but only 17,998 made it into the NCIC. The problem continued unabated in 2014, with 29,073 orders issued and 17,918 entered into the NCIC.
“It’s shocking how antiquated some of the systems are, how the systems don’t talk to each other,” LeFevre said. “Legislation is a good first step to remove roadblocks. I don’t think anyone wants (more than) one-third of the orders not getting into the system.”
That flawed system is partly to blame for Arizona’s high domestic-violence homicide rate of 5.77 per million compared with a national rate of 3.96 per million, but officials caution that even streamlining and overhauling the reporting system for orders of protection is far from a cure-all for the problem of domestic-violence gun deaths.
Everytown, the gun-control advocacy group that conducted the study, also pointed to the ease with which prohibited possessors can get firearms through unlicensed dealers, gun shows and the Internet.
The Everytown study identified 105 homicides in Arizona in which an intimate partner murdered someone with a firearm; women were the victims in 89 percent of those cases. In addition, 13 percent of the suspects in Arizona domestic-violence homicides were prohibited from having a firearm because of their criminal record or because they had an order of protection against them.
In addition, 41percent of shooters had a previous arrest or conviction, or they had been the subject of an order of protection.
“We see a large share of these crimes are committed by a person banned by law from possessing firearms,” said Ted Alcorn, Everytown’s research director.
He said national studies have found about 60 percent of guns in the U.S are bought from licensed dealers, but the data is dated and it is difficult to arrive at an accurate figure.
“There are millions of firearms available online,” Alcorn said.
Researchers recommend that Arizona pass a law that would require anyone who is the subject of an order of protection to surrender his or her firearms, rather than leaving it at a judge’s discretion. The organization also wants orders of protection included in federal background checks and all gun sales subjected to background checks.
“I think Arizona has to do a much better job of taking the gun prohibition seriously,” said Allie Bones, executive director of the Arizona Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, which worked with Everytown on the study.
“I think we need to make sure that procedures are in place that if someone is a prohibited possessor, there is a mechanism to turn them in,” she said.
Mesa police Detective Steve Flores, a department spokesman, said judges in Mesa routinely order guns seized when they issue orders of protection and officers regularly collect the firearms when they serve the orders.
But Flores said police can never be sure that they have seized all of a defendant’s guns. It helps when victims give police a list of guns before officers serve the order, but even then, a defendant might lie to an officer, claiming to have sold a gun when he or she is actually hiding it somehow.
That situation presented itself in February when a Scottsdale woman’s estranged husband killed the woman and himself four days after officers served an order of protection and confiscated guns from the home.
Officers collected weapons from Douglas Drewer, 46, when they served the order of protection in late January at the home near 68th Street and Chaparral Road, but on Feb. 3, a construction worker wrestled a weapon away from Drewer after witnessing a struggle between Drewer and his wife, Sarah. Police said Douglas Drewer later came out of the house with a second gun and used it in the murder-suicide.
William Rosen, legal counsel for Everytown, said judges did not order defendants to surrender firearms in 58 percent of Arizona orders of protection.
“Leaving it up to a judge is not good enough,” Rosen said.
Jon Eliason, division chief for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office Special Victims Division, which includes handling domestic-violence cases, cited the problem with reporting orders of protection as an obvious example of how the system can do a better job of protecting victims.
He said it is not surprising that violent felons would obtain firearms somehow, despite background checks. But Eliason said many domestic-violence offenders have never been convicted of a misdemeanor, much less a felony.
“Too many of them reached out for help,” Eliason said, referring to domestic-violence victims. “It’s a tragedy.”
He said the Everytown report is “a good reminder for everyone. When we have domestic-violence cases, they must be handled with the utmost care and seriousness.”
“Right now, the protection-order system is a paper system. Anything that is paper-based is rife for getting lost.”
ANDREW LEFEVRE SPOKESMAN FOR THE ARIZONA CRIMINAL JUSTICE COMMISSION