Arizona’s courts are making some big changes aimed at making it easier for victims of domestic violence to get orders of protection against their abusers.
For a long time, if you wanted to get a protective order, you had to go to a court to ask a judge for it and then figure out how to serve it yourself. As a result, courts were issuing more than 42,000 orders a year, and only about half of them were actually being served.
The new system — dubbed the Arizona Protective Order Initiation and Notification Tool, or AZPOINT — allows victims to fill out all of the paperwork online, and then the court passes it on to a serving agency automatically.
To find out more about how this changes things for those facing domestic violence, The Show spoke with ASU Social Work professor Jill Messing. She sad that while we might have heard them called “restraining orders” on TV, an order of protection actually does many things.
