Omaha Domestic Violence Police Experiment

• NCJ Number: 119528
• Date Published: 1989
• Author(s): F W Dunford; D Huizinga; D S Elliott
• Length: 67 pages
• Grant Number(s): 85-IJ-CX-K435
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Program/Project Description; Program/Project Evaluation

Annotation

The Omaha Domestic Violence Police Experiment, presented in this report, was designed, along with five other projects funded by the National Institute of Justice, to determine if the findings reported for the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment could be replicated elsewhere.

Abstract

The Minneapolis experiment determined that arrest of the perpetrator was more effective than separation of the parties or some form of advice or counseling in reducing a repeat of the violence within a 6-month followup period. The Omaha experiment focused on eligible domestic assault cases reported to the police throughout the city between 4:00 p.m. and 12:00 midnight over the study period. Domestic assault cases were randomly assigned to "arrest" (109), "separation" (106), or "mediation" (115). Data on assaults for 6 months after the intervention were obtained from police reports and victim self-reports. Arrest, by itself, apparently did not deter continued domestic conflict any more than separation of the parties or mediation. 16 tables, 37-item bibliography.