By Thomas Tracy
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — The NYPD is creating a new citywide domestic violence unit that the department hopes will curb the rise in family and intimate partner violence, which has accounted for about 40% of felony assaults in New York over the past five years.
The domestic violence unit will be the largest unit of its kind in the nation, with 450 NYPD domestic violence investigators working with advocates to create a “holistic approach” to tackle the pervasive crime, Mayor Adams and NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced Thursday.
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“The full force of the law is coming after those who perpetrate these crimes,” Adams said during a press conference at City Hall. “With this new unit, we will have more resources to help victims and more cops to bring abusers to justice.”
Beginning next week, domestic violence investigators will be assigned to each police precinct to handle cases involving family and intimate partner violence. The new investigators, who will work out of each precinct’s detective squad, will be coordinating their efforts with neighborhood groups that help domestic violence survivors.
The new unit will streamline investigations between advocates, patrol officers and investigators so that victims of domestic violence won’t need to be reinterviewed and, in effect, be retraumatized, Tisch said.
“It erodes survivors’ confidence in the process,” Tisch said about multiple police officers and investigators asking victims the same questions. “From now on, filing the complaint through prosecution will be handled by one team and every step will be coordinated.”
Tisch said that these new units will give domestic violence cases “the same focused attention as gun violence and hate crimes.”
“This is just common sense that is long overdue,” she said. “These incidents don’t happen because someone was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and they are not whodunits. Ninety-eight percent of domestic violence victims know the offender, and the violence happens at the hands of people the survivor knows, loves and trusts. These complex cases require specialized training.”
Intimate partner violence in the city rose by 29% last year, Adams said. Overall, domestic violence incidents have jumped 41% since 2020, Tisch added.
“And that is based only on the survivors who came forward,” the police commissioner said of the troubling statistic. “The true impact is far wider. This harms people in every community in our nation.”
Domestic violence happens in every borough in the city, and sometimes bleeds out into the streets.
On Oct. 2, Wei Sheng Chen , 27, killed his mother-in-law and wounded his brother-in-law following a domestic spat at their Flushing, Queens, home, which he then tried to set on fire before trying to take his own life. He’s currently facing multiple counts of murder, attempted murder, arson, assault and weapons possession.
Last month, police said Franklin Batallas stabbed his girlfriend of six years, 30-year-old Anthonella Contreras Linarez, repeatedly in the face and neck after pulling her car over in a Bronx park, then claimed that she was killed by two muggers on a scooter who attacked while he was relieving himself by some bushes.
This is the first time the NYPD has altered its handling of domestic violence cases in more than 30 years, Tisch said. Besides having a dedicated unit of investigators that will streamline investigations, each borough will have a domestic violence warrant team looking for suspects who have jumped bail after being arrested for these offenses or are being actively sought by the department.
The NYPD will also hold DomStat meetings which, similar to CompStat meetings for overall crime trends, will focus on using computer statistics to tackle domestic violence cases. These meetings will not only track statistics about this crime category, but also focus on cases and brainstorm about solutions and resources that can be offered to victims, Tisch said.
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