New York Debuts Domestic Violence Database

A new state database will, for the first time, allow police statewide to share information about domestic violence incidents, the Division of Criminal Justice Services announced Wednesday.

Law enforcement will now be able to search for incident information regardless of which police agency responded to a call or filed a report, a statement on the new database reads.

"Domestic incidents can be volatile and as we have seen in communities across the state, too often deadly," said Elizabeth Glazer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's deputy secretary for safety.

The database aims to help police and victims by chronicling details about past calls involving the same individuals, including the nature of each incident and risk factors like the presence of firearms.

The database gives police officers, prosecutors and probation and parole officers the ability to search domestic incident reports filed by agencies in the 57 counties outside of New York City. Those agencies file approximately 175,000 domestic incident reports annually, according to DCJS spokeswoman Janine Kava.

They include the names of the individuals involved with each call, among other details.

"Before the creation of this secure database, those paper (reports) were typically filed chronologically by the agency that took the reports, and the information contained in them couldn't be searched, shared or analyzed across jurisdictions. Now, the reports received by the state are scanned and stored in a database that is searchable by name and address and can generate a summary of all domestic violence activity at a specific location, including the number of reports filed and if there are any "red flag" indicators -- threats that were made and or access to a weapon -- for example," Kava's statement reads.

The project began in 2009 using $1.5 million in federal money through the stimulus fund.

Police have already used the system to search approximately 244,000 records.

Erie County is home to one of the state's four Crime Analysis Centers, which are responsible for conducting in-depth analysis of all county crime data.

The crime center staff creates a packet for prosecutors that detail the individual's criminal history and criminal incident reports, and can use the new database to do so.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service