LOCAL FATALITY REVIEW DATA ANALYSIS FIVE-YEAR SUMMARY FROM 2009-2014 22 FACES OF FATALITY / JUNE 2017 www.fcadv.org In 2008, FCADV and the Fatality Review Steering Committee, which was funded by the federal Office on Violence Against Women Grants to Encourage Arrest award, outlined several goals for the implementation of Florida’s Statewide Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team. Key representatives from state and local agencies convened to enhance the statewide delivery of services and increase communication and coordination between law enforcement, the court system, and other partners involved in the response to domestic violence homicides and review of these fatalities. These initial Steering Committee meetings were the genesis of Florida’s current Statewide Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team. Since 2009, the Statewide Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team has been co-chaired by the Attorney General and FCADV. This five-year summary includes data collected by local fatality review teams from 2009 through 2014. The data was combined to provide a long-term examination of the risk factors and characteristics of domestic violence homicides in Florida. The summary presents an overview of descriptive statistics to identify patterns or changes that occurred during a five-year period, with the purpose of revealing trends that were developed over time and illustrate the importance of the recommendations for systemic and legislative changes, as well as the ongoing need for training. The summary data outlines the prevalence of risk indicators presented in the previous statewide team annual reports, up to 2015. The status update for the 2015 and 2016 recommendations are included in Part One of the 2017 Faces of Fatality VII report. There were 207 reviewed deaths that were recorded in prior statewide team annual reports included in the summary report. The reviews included both intimate partner homicides and other domestic violence related deaths, such as sibling or parent homicides. As with the statewide team annual reports, the summary data is generated from both quantitative and qualitative sources. The local teams gathered information primarily from public records, media reports, and conversations with proxy informants, such as family or friends of the deceased. The information gathered provides a contextual view of the perpetrators’ behaviors and the survivors’ experiences leading up to the homicides. The local teams utilize a uniform data collection tool to gather and report information regarding the characteristics of perpetrators, characteristics of decedents and their relationship with perpetrators, known domestic violence histories, criminal records, and a range of observable evidence-based risk factors. The five-year summary parallels findings from individual statewide team annual reports with 90% of perpetrators being male and 85% of decedents being female. Several risk indicators from individual annual reports were also similar in the five-year summary: 54% of perpetrators were known to carry a weapon and 52% of perpetrators were using substances at the time of the homicide. Forty-nine percent (49%) of perpetrators had a known history of prior domestic violence and 46% had a history of known non- domestic violence criminality. A total of 71% of decedents had children at the time of the homicide and 57% of those children were from the decedent’s previous relationships (not the perpetrators’ children). There were known child witnesses in 19% of the deaths. Twenty-seven percent
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