Family harm team members in Tasman District are getting new visibility of who’s at risk on their patch.
Last month the Nelson Bays team switched from weekly to daily meetings with counterparts from other agencies, allowing them to discuss cases in greater detail and respond with greater urgency.
“A weekly three-hour meeting discussing 50-70 family harm incidents over the past eight days wasn’t really working,” says Sergeant Steve Midgley, of the family harm team.
“If there’s an incident on Wednesday and it’s not discussed until the following Wednesday it’s a lost opportunity for engagement.”
Since the early 2000s, the Family Violence Inter-Agency Response System (FVIARS) has brought together police and staff from the Ministry for Social Development (MSD), Oranga Tamariki, Health, Corrections, Women’s Refuge, Barnardo’s, SVS Living Safe and other agencies.
In April they began meeting every weekday morning at a hub at the MSD offices in Nelson, with a handful of cases on the daily agenda. Last week Whakatū Marae joined the hub, bringing an iwi service provider into the partnership.
From 1 July, the hub will be a permanent fixture, with police and partners from Health, Corrections, Oranga Tamariki and MSD working from there full-time. It is hoped it will eventually be staffed for seven-day operation.
Daily meetings bring a new degree of information sharing, and responses from all agencies.
In one case, police were called 348 times to one family with 211 family harm episodes over a number of years - but after interventions from other agencies, there have been no more calls.
“With two cops going to each incident, that’s the equivalent 422 going there for no change,” says Steve. “Then one went and addressed the issue, asked the right questions and got the right help.”
Area Prevention Manager Senior Sergeant Scott Richardson says apart from being able to respond with more urgency, police now have greater visibility of which families are at risk.
“Families that would once have been low risk for us, we’re now looking at as high risk because of the information available,” he says. “We’re looking more deeply into those families.”
Steve says the visibility extends beyond family harm. “There are many families who haven’t had a family harm event but they’re still under stress.
“That’s why the ‘Eyes wide open’ approach of the new approach to family harm is so good. If staff do a good job at the scene we can feed all that information into the process.”
District Prevention Manager Inspector Tim Crawford says they looked at the Integrated Safety Response and Whāngaia Ngā Pā Harakeke pilots in other districts when considering how best to align with Police’s Safer Whānau approach.
“I was really keen to ensure the hub wasn’t run out of the police station, otherwise it devolves to being police-led,” he says. “In another location it’s seen as a true joint agency partnership.”
Staff in Marlborough and West Coast areas are also looking at how to boost service delivery – but there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
“The hub approach lends itself to a city environment but not a smaller provincial centre where services are more scattered and we can’t have all our resources in one location,” says Tim.