Why didn’t she leave? No bed available for 84% of KC domestic violence hotline callers

If it was as bad as all that, then why didn’t she leave?

That’s the question that’s always been asked about domestic violence. And it’s always been the wrong question.

Maybe a new report from the City Manager’s Office can clear up the enduring mystery. It found that domestic violence has spiked to stratospheric levels during this coronavirus pandemic, as we fully expected and already knew.

But the ugly surprise in the report that Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas asked for and just got back is that even in the year before COVID-19 hit, 84% of those who called a local hotline to request emergency housing were turned away.

Of those who did find a shelter bed in 2019, 80% were discharged without ever having secured “safe, independent housing.” Why? Not enough affordable housing and not enough of the affordable child care that makes getting a job possible, the report said. You have to have a job before you can get into some government-subsidized housing, which is all part of the dizzying runaround for people in serious danger.

Then we shake our heads and ask why these women, and they are mostly women, aren’t trying harder to get away from their abusers. Who rarely go to jail no matter how many times the police are called, or how many times protective orders are ignored.

Lucas is asking a better question: Why isn’t the city, with all of its heartbreaking, domestic violence-related homicides, doing more to help? While we’re — no, not defunding the police but are reimagining what policing should be — we need to be a lot less ho-hum about the intimate partner violence that is a still underacknowledged part of the problem.

About one in five Kansas City murders is believed to be related to domestic violence, though the lack of better statistics is telling, too.

“People talk about how to address murders in this city,” Lucas said in an interview, but this is how. “This is what the public safety conversation should be about.” Absolutely.

With a $350 million a year criminal justice apparatus in this city, we’re still failing victims, their families and our whole community by thinking of this as some side issue, and one that nothing can be done about. You know, because women don’t try harder to leave.

The issue of law enforcement officers who are themselves abusers is surely a factor, too. Research has shown that the partners of police officers suffer abuse at rates two to four times that of the general population. With whom do officers empathize when they go out on a call?

“We’ve allowed ourselves to live in this spiral,” the mayor said. “And I don’t think we care enough.”

What the new report told the mayor, he said, is that “we are failing pretty significantly. We were failing before” COVID-19, “and are doing really badly now.”

He also found the staff recommendations included in the report “boilerplate,” and wants something a little more creative and concrete than the no-kidding acknowledgment that we need more subsidized housing and services.

“This isn’t CSI,” Lucas said. “This is ‘We’ve been to this house 20 times before’’’ and still haven’t meaningfully intervened.

To change that, we need resolve, resources and a whole different attitude.

“We continue to have incredible victim blaming,” Lucas said. “I saw that in the chief’s blog.”

Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith often writes about “uncooperative victims” in his blog, though the no-snitch ethos he bitterly complains about is so rampant among police that it’s at the very heart of why even the most abusive cops have been protected and enabled.

Is Smith up to the change that’s needed, on either domestic violence or the absolutely related questions of race and brutality?

“He’s our captain of the ship now,” Lucas said. “Our de-escalation” at protests “last week showed a chief more open-minded than I knew him to be,” even if it was also incredibly frustrating to have “spent a good deal of time with protesters, only to have them tear-gassed 15 minutes later.”

We have our doubts, too, but would love to see Smith surprise us.

This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM.