MERIDIAN —     Lauderdale County Sheriff Billy Sollie joked Thursday that when he first heard about Care Lodge Domestic Violence Shelter's effort to create a CCR, he immediately thought about the classic rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival.

    The CCR they were talking about is actually something much more serious — a Coordinated Community Response to domestic violence. With the new coordinated response, announced Thursday, different agencies from around Lauderdale and the surrounding counties will work more closely to combat and deal with the problem of domestic violence.

    The agencies, which include the Lauderdale County Sheriff's Department and the Meridian and Newton Police Departments, among numerous others, will meet once a month to discuss domestic violence and develop strategies for dealing with it.

    "More minds create a better approach," said CCR Coordinator Adele Williamson. "The more ideas at the table, then the better the solutions can be. . . It's just getting everybody that's involved from the beginning to the end at the table."

    When domestic violence occurs, any number of agencies might deal with it. Along with domestic violence shelters like Care Lodge and law enforcement agencies, domestic violence is a problem encountered by emergency response workers, social workers, courts, and community aid charities, to name a few.

    With the CCR, these agencies will be working together to combat a problem that they all deal with, and will be able to talk with one another about cases of domestic violence without breaking confidentiality rules.

    "Domestic violence runs the whole gambit of everyday life," said Bob McBride, training coordinator for the regional counter-drug training academy. "It is one of those crimes that runs rampant through every community. It affects everybody."

    "We all know the statistics about domestic violence; one in four families are affected by domestic violence, every nine seconds a victim is battered," said Care Lodge Executive Director Leslie Payne. "But when you look at our community here, since 2008 we've had a 24 percent increase in domestic violence arrests."

    The new CCR, Payne said, "is all about collaboration, all about protecting victims, all about holding the offender accountable, and it is the entire community."

    The two primary goals of the CCR are to keep victims of domestic violence safe, and to make sure abusers are held accountable. Doing that takes the work of all the participants in the CCR, from the ambulance workers who are often first on the scene, to the domestic violence shelter that gives battered women a safe place to stay, to the courts that decide what consequences a batterer will face.

    Partners in the CCR are hoping that their new, organized approach will help all of those agencies do their jobs better.

CCR Participants



Agencies participating in the local Coordinated Community Response:



Care Lodge Domestic Violence Shelter

Rhea Darsey, attorney

Lauderdale County Sheriff's Department

Lauderdale County Youth Court

City of Marion

Bob McBride, Regional Counter-drug Training Academy

Meridian Fire Department

Meridian Police Department

Metro Ambulance

Mississippi Department of Corrections

Mississippi Department of Human Services

MSU-Meridian Social Work Program

Newton Police Department

Wesley House Community Center

Domestic Violence Facts



    • Mississippi ranks second highest in the nation for domestic violence.

    • Mississippi ranks ninth in the nation for rate of females murdered by males in single victim/single offender homicides.

    • One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime.

    • An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.

    • 85 percent of domestic violence victims are female.

    • Historically, females have most often been victimized by someone they knew.

    • Most cases of domestic violence are never reported to police.

    • Boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults.

    • 30 to 60 percent of perpetrators of intimate partner violence also abuse children in the household.

    • The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $5.8 billion each year, $4.1 billion of which is for direct medical and mental services.



(Source: Care Lodge via the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence).