Domestic violence is Marin County’s most common violent crime. This month, the Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence, a team of over a dozen agencies and nonprofits that meet four times a year to improve the county’s response to family violence, is embarking on a three-year plan that will improve information sharing between agencies and investigate in particular how to better respond to cases involving sexual assault. Though law enforcement has regularly updated the response team on their own trends—the number of domestic violence calls, types of abuse, weapons used—the response team is now training liaisons to bring trends, data and outcomes from all involved sectors, including shelters, medical and mental health professionals, legal agencies and county government. Reports of domestic violence referred by Marin’s police departments to the district attorney’s office have risen in recent years to over 800 referrals in 2012-2013, up 15 percent from five years earlier. For Kate Kain, the deputy executive director of the Center for Domestic Peace, the rise could simply mean victims are more willing to call for help. When she started the precursor to the response team, the Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, about 15 years ago, victims wouldn’t call police because they feared retribution from abusive partners, who were rarely arrested, she said. Over the next three years, Ms. Kain said the response team will more closely examine how law enforcement responds to domestic violence calls that also involve sexual assault, which account for about 40 and 50 percent of cases, based on national statistics. Ms. Kain said there is an emerging belief in putting greater control of police investigations into the hands of sexual assault victims themselves, so they don’t feel powerless and regret having sought out help. When the idea was brought to the response team recently, many wondered how it would work, Ms. Kain said. “Everyone reacted—how do you do that? What’s that about? People have biases they have to work through, professional and personal biases.”