After your report was presented to the Centervale chief of police, he realized there is a need for training for law enforcement officials. Using the Simpson case as the basis, a proposal was presented and approved by the mayor to fund a special project.
You have been asked to produce a written training curriculum to educate the trainers of Centervale’s law enforcement officials about dealing with crime victims. The chief has asked you to cover both stranger violence and intimate violence. Your curriculum will supply trainers with information that would assist them in training new recruits, first responders, and detectives.
Here’s What You Need to Do . . .
• Prepare three short scenarios that could be used as training material. In the training material, include the three areas of stalking, intimate violence, and stranger violence.
• Following each scenario, generate questions that the trainers could present. Be sure to offer answers to these questions, with support, as a handy guide for the trainers.
• Finally, design a summary for the trainers that they can use to end their training. The summary should:
o Highlight the differences between criminology and victimology and why it is important for law enforcement officials to have a basic knowledge of both. Use examples from your created scenarios as support. Identify the relevant theories that pertain to violence against women. How can law enforcement make use of these facts?
o Explain the importance of law enforcement learning more about proper treatment of victims in order to ensure the system does not revictimize them. Consider how interviews, order of protection service, time until arrest, safety planning, and lethality assessments play into this treatment.
• Create a curriculum:
o Develop three to five questions for each scenario. Focus on relevant victimology or criminology theories, victims’ rights, lethality assessments, and proper treatment of victims.
o Develop potential answers for those questions, including the reasoning behind those answers. Hypothesize how past inadequacies in victims’ rights, as they pertain to law enforcement, might have led to different endings to the scenarios.
o Predict the danger level for each victim and connect to the necessary actions of the advocate or the detective that will come from this alert.
o Create a solution that would properly treat victims in order to ensure the system does not revictimize them. In creating a solution, consider these questions:
What can you recommend should be done for the victim?
What can you recommend should be done to the suspect?
What resources are available to assist law enforcement in working with victims?