Maybe $400 grand will get their attention

... because a court-designated threat leaving a note for his future victims reading "I will kill you" was apparently too subtle.

A domestic abuse survivor who sued the Jonesville, N.C., police department that she claimed failed to enforce a protection order has settled with the city for $430,000. Unfortunately, the settlement doesn't require the city to admit any wrongdoing, which - bureacratically speaking - means they aren't compelled to actually change anything about how they handle DV cases.

The comments to this article on the Journal's Web site bring up victim-blaming (thankfully shot down promptly) and also a sort of defense of the husband/father in the case. He was "a hard-working, respectable and loving father" while the wife/mother (who filed the protection order) was "bitter" and "unfriendly," according to this commenter. Sure, he/she's right that none of us were there. But the facts show that a judge thought there was enough cause to issue the order in the first place, and that Richard Ellerbe DID stab to death his own daughter and wound his wife before killing himself.

In cases of alleged sexual assault or DV, I freely admit that I'm biased toward the alleged victim. And I have to be aware of that bias, especially since I also personally know men who've been falsely accused of abusing their partners. While I can cite a handful of cases where men were railroaded, the overwhelming tendency is for law enforcement to blow off cases that involve violence against women (something I know both from personal experience and from national trends).

Any case involving intimate partner violence can be difficult for a cop to understand, because of their (the cases') nature. Why didn't you leave? Why did you talk to him? Why did you let him in your house? What was it that made you so scared of him? The answers to these questions can be impossible to articulate, and I can sympathize with police officers who are asked to build a case with only those answers as evidence.

But in this case, that wasn't all they had. I say again, a judge (a Yadkin County judge, at that) thought that the danger to Ms. Cockerham was real enough to warrant a restraining order. The Jonesville police failed to enforce that order even after repeated threats from Ms. Cockerham's estranged husband - whatever their reasons. (And trust me, it's not like Jonesville is the crime capital of the universe. Next to DV, their biggest problem is 15 year-olds shoplifting beer.) And now two people are dead, and a family devastated.

Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call to law enforcement agencies that seriously need to re-evaluate how they handle cases of partner violence - including DV and sexual assault, almost 90 percent of which are committed by someone known to the victim. They need to be educated that most of these cases aren't going to be as clear-cut as, say, a robbery. But they're still crimes, and their victims still deserve justice.