NCJ Number
153859
Date Published
1994
Length
103 pages
Annotation
Between 1985 and 1990, police departments in Omaha, Milwaukee, Colorado Springs, Charlotte (North Carolina), and the Metro-Dade (Florida) area conducted experiments to test the effectiveness of three responses to domestic violence -- arrest of the abuser, mediation between the parties, and physical separation of the parties.
Abstract
These experiments have been popularly cited for the propositions that arrest does not deter abusers who are either employed or unemployed. This analysis reviewed those experiments and found that they were fundamentally flawed by failing to consider that domestic violence, if left unchecked, usually escalates in severity and frequency and by failing to account for the impact of decisions by prosecutors and courts subsequent to arrest. Additional design flaws, in which investigators included cases of self-defense and assigned bad-risk perpetrators to the arrest category, further undercut the validity of the results. This analysis notes that other published studies show that arrest is generally the superior method of deterring future violence. Furthermore, these police replication studies did not recognize that arrest in domestic violence situations allows the victim a window of opportunity to secure safety and to contact appropriate services. 278 notes and 1 appendix