News
P age 4
S tre et R oots • January 16-22, 2015
Truth
and
trauma
/Tow understanding the
neurohiology o f trauma is helping
Portland police officers work with
domestic violence survivors
B Y E M ILY G R EEN
2013, out of a total of 8,179 domestic
STAFF WRITER
violence reports, only the 586 most serious
cases were assigned to the domestic
violence unit.
About 3,000 of the calls were categorized
“ I f > ecky” was in a state of disbelief. One
r ^ Z w e e k ago she told her boyfriend she
J —X was pregnant. Now he was handing
her a hat, insisting, Becky says, that she
cover up the bleeding wound he had
allegedly inflicted to the back of her head
only moments earlier. She needed to get
herself together. A neighbor had called 9-1-1
during the commotion, and now two
Portland police officers were waiting for
someone to answer the couple’s front door.
“It happened so fast. I was in complete
shock,” says Becky, who asked that we not
use her real name.
“Iju st did what he said. I didn’t realize
how bad it was,” she says. In that state of
shock she told the officers at the door that
nothing had happened and that she was OK.
“They left without even taking my name,”
she says. “I thought for sure he was going to
get arrested, but he didn’t.”
Domestic violence cases are often a
challenge. From victims who don’t want to
testify to a lack of witnesses and physical
evidence, they are uniquely (difficult to
prosecute.
In 2013, the Multnomah County District
Attorney’s Office pressed charges in less
than half the domestic violence cases it
reviewed.
And over the past decade, resources to
the Portland Police Bureau’s Domestic
Violence Enhanced Response Team
(DVERT) and Domestic Violence Reduction
Unit (DVRU) have been reduced. They now
have about half the manpower they did 10
years ago - five officers assigned to the
DVRU and two officers plus a Multnomah
County Sheriff Office detective assigned to
DVERT. With this staffing level, they have
the resources to investigate only about 7
percent of domestic violence reports
received by the department each year. In
as non-crime reports and required no
further action. Sgt. Ronald Mason, head of
DVERT and DVRU, says that the call from
Becky’s neighbor was most likely
categorized this way.
The cases the domestic violence team
cannot take on fall to other PPB officers.
However, Portland’s domestic violence team
has an advantage that other officers, and in
fact the majority of police across the
country do not. They underwent a
specialized training last summer on what
some are calling a revolution in the way
investigators interview violent crime victims
— which can be key to ultimately closing a
case.
ehind the shock and confusion Becky
was feeling, as she talked to officers at
her front door, is the neurobiology of
trauma. In the event of a traumatic
experience, chemicals released in the brain
impair a victim’s cognitive functioning,
making it difficult to think logically, says Dr.
Christopher Wilson, a psychiatrist who has
trained law enforcement across the country
how to interact with people who are
experiencing this phenomenon. He says
traditionally, most officers are trained in the
Reid technique of interviewing — the
systematic who, what, when, where and why
line of questioning - which can be very
effective when trying to extract information
from a perpetrator. But when officers take a
similar, controlled and direct approach to
interviewing someone who has just
experienced a violent attack, it can cause
anxiety and fear, causing the survivor to
shut down and feel unsafe answering
B
PH O TO ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTINA W R IG H T
questions truthfully.
The traditional practice of interviewing
has been known to perpetuate self-blame in
domestic violence survivors. (Why did you
stay with him if you knew he was violent?) It
can also result in police reports containing
insufficient and contradictory information.
To the un-trauma-informed investigator,
many behaviors exhibited by someone who’s
just experienced a traumatic event double as
signs of lying. Behaviors such as an inability
to remember the chronological order of
events, nervousness, avoiding eye contact or
of recalling sounds and smells with more
ease than physical details about his or her
attacker, are all the result of effects trauma
has on the brain.
In the days that follow, the survivor can
often remember details of the violent
episode with more clarity. Discrepancies
between the initial report taken at the scene
of the crime and follow-up interviews can
strengthen the abuser’s defense and lead
police, attorneys and, in high-profile cases,
the public, to blame the victim.
Experts agree it would be ideal to wait a
couple days before interviewing the victim
at all because it’s difficult for someone who
has just experienced trauma to give a
coherent account of events. The Portland
Police Bureau is aware of this phenomenon,
citing it as the reason for delaying
interviews with its own officers for 48 hours
after they’ve been involved in a shooting.
While the police bureau isn’t delaying
victim and witness interviews, Mason says
that a couple days have usually passed
between the time the initial report on a
domestic violence case is taken and when
his unit follows up. He says the initial report
is like a snapshot, and by the time his
investigators contact the victim, it’s easier
to get a cleaner and more accurate picture
of events.
Mason says that while his officers already
had a basic understanding of the dynamics
of domestic violence, his squad got a better
understanding of the physiology of trauma
and has incorporated things they learned
from attending this unique brand of training,
created by Russell Strand, in August PPB’s
Sex Crimes Unit will receive an abbreviated
version of the same training later this
month at a seminar put on by the Oregon
attorney general’s office.
Strand is a former military police
investigator and current chief of Behavioral
Sciences Education and Training Division at
the Military Police School at Fort Leonard
Wood, Mo. He has turned an approach
See TRAUM A, page 5