King County Council Committee receives update on new Domestic Violence Initiative

A regional coalition of community based victim advocacy groups and criminal justice organizations are part of the new effort to reduce domestic violence in King County. County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg briefed the Metropolitan King County Council’s Law, Justice, Health and Human Services Committee on a new Domestic Violence Initiative (DVI) that includes human service agencies along with the prosecutor and sheriff working together to identify barriers and find realistic solutions to improving domestic-violence response.

“The challenges of preventing domestic violence are truly regional, so our response to the problem must be regional,” said Satterberg. “Our goal in initiating the DVI is to identify concrete problems faced by victims, law enforcement and community advocates across our region and then finding concrete, workable solutions to those problems.”

One in three homicides in King County is a domestic-violence crime and police agencies in King County handle more than 12,000 incidents annually. In addition, it is estimated that 60,000 children in King County are exposed to domestic violence in their homes.

“This is a serious community problem that affects all levels of our society,” said Councilmember Reagan Dunn, Chair of the Law, Justice, Health and Human Services Committee. “Domestic-violence cases plague our criminal justice system and affect future generations. I applaud our prosecutor for proactively tackling this difficult issue.”

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