The Monroe County Sheriff's Office, in collaboration with other law enforcement agencies, social service providers, school districts and many others, is announcing a new community-wide threat assessment and management advisory team.
The Rochester Threat Advisory Committee, or ROCTAC, was inspired in part by the murder of seven year old Hunter Resch by his father in Greece back in 2010.
Sheriff Todd Baxter says this idea has been discussed for several months now, with area law enforcement and other agencies trying to find better ways of stopping violent incidents before they happen.
“In a lot of those instances, people have done their job real well, whether it’s law enforcement, or family court, or school districts, and they did their own jobs in their silos, but as we look in hindsight of a horrific incident, if we put those things together ahead of time, we might have been able to intervene in someone’s life,” Baxter told WXXI News.
There are a number of local law enforcement, school districts, colleges and universities and service agencies all part of the new effort.
Among them is theWillow Domestic Violence Center. Its President and CEO Meaghan de Chateauvieux says her organization was asked to be part of ROCTAC to help identify high risk cases or potentially violent situations.
``That we as a community might see a piece of individually, and then come together as a group to be able to fully address the risk and to assess the risk to a particular individual."
de Chateauvieux says ideally all the ROCTAC members help create a safety net around those people who are most vulnerable in the community, and to see where there might be a higher risk of death.
She emphasizes the importance of confidentiality, however, and Willow will never share any information that hasn't already been cleared to share with the survivor.
Sheriff Baxter says this effort is about more than just trying to put more people in jail.
“It’s not about arrests, it’s about, can we get enough information together to come up with a care plan and intervene in this person’s life?”
The new ROCTAC group will meet twice a month.
