Legal Response to Woman Battering in the United States (From Women, Policing, and Male Violence: International Perspectives, P 155-184, 1989, Jalna Hanmer, Jill Radford, et al., eds. -- See NCJ-127406)

• NCJ Number: 127413
• Author(s): K J Ferraro
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 30 pages
• Sale Source: Routledge
• Publication Type: Best Practice/State-of-the-Art Review
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This study of policing battering has found that decisionmaking criteria and rationales are not changed by the adoption of a presumptive arrest policy.

Abstract

Officers will continue to respond to battering based on their implicit assumptions about battering and policing and their explicit evaluations of the characteristics of individuals and situations. A policy of nonintervention that encourages police to treat battering as a civil rather than a criminal matter has been the cause of much suffering and harm to battered women. Immediate protection to individual women may be enhanced by more arrests. The data in this observational research suggest that some offices operating under a presumptive arrest policy are apt to take family fight calls seriously and may arrest in cases that are only marginal justifiable on strictly legal grounds. Still, the vast majority of family fight calls do not result in arrest due to the fact that family fight situations are not uniform and often lack clear-cut legal grounds for arrest, even when arrest power is expanded. 9 notes