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Advocates of Lake County asks commissioners for $5,000 to relaunch violence-prevention team
Summary
Advocates of Lake County told the board their 24/7 crisis hotline logged 830 instances of support in 2025 and asked commissioners to place a $5,000 supplemental request on a regular meeting agenda to help relaunch a countywide Violence Prevention Team focused on rural training and primary prevention.
Kristen King, co-executive director of Advocates of Lake County, briefed the Lake County Board of Commissioners on May 26 about the nonprofit's services, recent local violent incidents and a plan to relaunch a countywide Violence Prevention Team.
King said ALC operates the county's 24/7 crisis hotline and provides emergency shelter, legal advocacy and homelessness prevention. She told the board the hotline recorded 830 "instances of support" in 2025, a raw count that reflects multiple contacts by the same callers and anonymous calls.
King described recent local violence, including two domestic-violence-related homicides and other firearm incidents in 2024—25, and she summarized national and state research showing firearms substantially increase the risk of intimate-partner homicide. "Domestic violence homicide is highly preventable," King said, "but we had two domestic violence homicides in this community in an eight-month period." She emphasized that the highest risk for fatal violence is when a partner attempts to leave a relationship.
The heart of King's ask was funding for prevention. She said ALC seeks a county contribution of $5,000 to help buy rural-focused training materials and support a structured relaunch of the Violence Prevention Team, which would coordinate public-health, law-enforcement, school and community partners on upstream prevention work. King said ALC already receives some federal funds through the Office on Violence Against Women and other grants but that a modest county supplement would accelerate the relaunch.
Law-enforcement officials in the session described operational limits in compiling local domestic-violence statistics and urged greater cross-agency information-sharing. Heath, a local law-enforcement representative, said dispatch and records systems often list a single call type even when multiple offenses are present, which complicates efforts to track patterns and target recurring high-risk cases.
Several commissioners praised the prevention focus and asked staff to move the $5,000 request through the county's supplemental process so the Board can consider it at a regular meeting. A county staff member confirmed work sessions cannot appropriate funds and said staff will place the item on the next regular-meeting agenda for formal action.
What's next: staff will prepare the funding item for the Board's regular meeting (the presenters requested Q2 supplemental consideration) and ALC said it will provide additional data and materials to justify how the money would be spent and what training resources would be purchased.
This report is based on the May 26 work-session presentation by Kristen King and the subsequent discussion. The Board did not vote on the request during the work session; commissioners directed staff to place the item on a regular meeting agenda.
