The Lethality Assessment Program (LAP) for domestic violence will now be mandatory for all police departments in the state of Connecticut after the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) announced the program’s inclusion into the Statewide Model Policy for Police Response to Crimes of Family Violence.
“Domestic violence is a preventable public health crisis and CT LAP is a key element of our work to save lives and increase survivor safety,” said Meghan Scanlon, President & CEO of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and co-chair of the CT Domestic Violence Criminal Justice Response and Enhancement Advisory Council, in a press release. “An innovative partnership with law enforcement, CT LAP implements nationally recognized risk assessment strategies to better serve intimate partner violence victims in the greatest danger.”
LAP is basically a checklist of eleven questions a responding officer will ask a domestic violence victim to assess the level of danger that the individual may face, and depending on the answers, the officer will inform the victim that they are believed to be in danger and contact the local domestic violence shelter to speak with the victim to discuss safety planning. The officer will also follow up on some of those answers to determine if additional crimes may have been committed.
While the addition of LAP to the Statewide Model is new, police departments throughout Connecticut have been using the assessment since 2012, and by 2017, “100% of Connecticut cities and towns are utilizing the lethality assessment program,” according to the CT LAP website, part of the CCADV.
Between 2012 and 2024, police conducted 102,365 LAP screenings, with 54 percent of them “identified as high danger,” with 53 percent of those victims speaking with a domestic violence advocate while police were still on the scent, CCADV wrote in the press release.
“CT LAP creates a structure for law enforcement to assess the level of danger and quickly get survivors connected to local domestic violence advocates,” said DESPP Commissioner Ronnell Higgins. “It has become central to our training efforts with law enforcement to help them better understand the coercive nature of domestic violence and see how those behaviors can escalate.”
According to DESPP’s family violence summaries, in 2023 there were 25 homicides due to domestic violence, accounting for 19 percent of the state’s total homicides for that year, and there were 16,023 family violence incidents that same year. Although the number of domestic violence homicides is relatively unchanged since 2010, when it was also 25, the number of incidents reported to police has dropped from 21,134 in 2010 to 16,023 in 2023.
According to CCADV’s numbers, between 2020 and 2021, 38,789 domestic violence victims received aid through one of CCADV’s eighteen member organizations throughout the state, with housing needs topping the list of concerns. The organization indicated their shelters ran at 156 percent capacity that year.
CCADV and other victim services, however, face funding issues due to a reduction in federal grants from a trust fund financed with fines for white-collar crime. The trust fund has begun to run low on funds, thus reducing its annual distribution to victim-services organizations, leaving them to reduce services and clamoring for state funds to keep them afloat.
Meanwhile, a recent audit of the Connecticut Division of Justice found the department “did not comply with statutory requirements for family violence treatment referrals,” and lacked documentation for tracking domestic violence offenders’’ participation in those diversionary programs. DCJ said in a statement that it had updated its practices to ensure offender compliance and documentation.
The audit also found, however, that the Domestic Violence Advisory Council had been approving domestic violence treatment programs without statutory authority and without properly vetting the programs.
Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Windham, who serves as co-chair on the Domestic Violence Advisory Council, said Connecticut was a leader in implementing the LAP program, becoming the first state in the country to achieve 100 percent police department participation.
“I am proud of the work of CCADV and law enforcement agencies across our state who collaborated to put this life saving system in place,” Flexer said in the press release. “Their leadership led our Council to include it in the statewide model law enforcement policy, ensuring its continued use in our state’s efforts to increase victim safety and offender accountability.”
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