The Daily Bulletin Archive

Buffalo State's Violence Intervention and Victim Advocacy (VIVA) will sponsor the webinar "Trauma Survivors and Law Enforcement: Unintended Consequences and Righting the Ship" on Thursday, October 25, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. in Bulger Communication Center 120.

Trauma survivors interact with law enforcement in one way or another on a daily basis. The logical question, therefore, is, Are officers prepared to effectively deal with trauma survivors as a subset of their daily encounters with the public? The contention of this training is that they are not. To be clear, this is seen not as a lack of desire to protect and serve, or a lack of wanting to do the right thing. Rather, it is viewed as a lack of knowledge or training as it relates to trauma and its potential affect on those who have experienced it. This session will (1) review some of the basic professional goals that both law enforcement and other community stakeholders have in the performance of their duties; (2) discuss the relationship these stakeholders have to one another as well as the overlapping goals they share and possibilities for collaboration; (3) discuss who it is that goes into law enforcement, as well as why, and how what they bring to the table might affect the way they ultimately do their job; (4) explore how law enforcement is trained to respond to calls for service; (5) analyze how officers are trained to interact with the public and investigate crime(s); (6) look at the power of knowledge, as well as the fact that we know what we know, but we don’t know what we don’t know; and finally (7) discuss ways in which the existing base of knowledge, in the area trauma and effectively dealing with trauma survivors, could be used to augment training.

The presenter will be David R. Thomas, M.S., program administrator for domestic violence education in the Division of Public Safety Leadership at Johns Hopkins University School of Education. He is retired from the Montgomery County (Maryland) Police Department, where he co-founded the Domestic Violence Unit. His responsibilities included investigations and case review as well as departmental curriculum and policy development. Thomas served as chair of the law enforcement committee assisting in drafting the 2012 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization Act. Now at Johns Hopkins, he is an expert in the field of response to and reduction of domestic violence, strangulation, stalking, and sexual assault investigation. Thomas trains at the state, local, national, and international levels and considers combating violence against women his calling in life.

For more information, please contact Liz McGough, ext. 4029.