NCJ Number
173814
Date Published
1996
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This chapter focuses on the past, present, and future police response to domestic violence.
Abstract
First, the authors present a case scenario typical of the year 2010, when technology has greatly increased the efficiency and speed of police and judicial response to injured battered women. The next section reviews the literature on police responses to domestic violence, with emphasis on the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment and the recent replications in Milwaukee and Omaha. The authors then examine a large data set of domestic-violence complaints and arrest rates from a populous, ethnically diverse city in the northeastern United States. The study covered six large police precincts during 1987-91. Based on the study's findings, the authors conclude that the city's pro- arrest policy in domestic-violence cases was a more effective deterrent in white communities than in African-American and Hispanic communities. Because the police department's pro-arrest policy was so strictly enforced throughout the agency's jurisdiction, there is no basis for supposing that officers might have enforced their mandate to arrest more strictly in one neighborhood than in another. Given the limitations of the data set, an alternative but currently untested explanation for this disparity in complaint rates is that the minority communities selected for this study experienced social problems and conditions that were not as prevalent or as extreme in white communities; these problems may have been contributing factors in the incidence of domestic violence. Further, it is possible that batterers in predominantly white communities had the financial resources to access effective counseling programs and that the social stigma associated with arrest in these communities discouraged future family violence. 6 tables, study questions, and 34 references