Police responses to battering in a progressive pro-arrest jurisdiction

This study was conducted in Boulder County, Colorado, a jurisdiction with a pro-arrest policy in place since 1986 and with a progressive agency, the Domestic Abuse Prevention Project (DAPP), designed to oversee systemic responses to intimate partner battering. The data for this study consist of the 1,521 incident reports of intimate partner battering submitted by Boulder County police in 1994. In addition to examining the types of police responses, we employed multivariate analysis to examine legal and extralegal characteristics potentially related to police responses to battering, using two dependent variables: (1) whether any formal police action was taken, and (2) whether the defendant was taken to jail (the most extreme police response). Overall the findings suggest a far more serious police response to batterers than found in prior studies. Moreover, extralegal factors appeared to play a less prominent role in police decision making than reported in previous studies. The findings indicate the signifi...

[1]  C. Bowman The Arrest Experiments: A Feminist Critique , 1992 .

[2]  The Myth of Sexual Symmetry in Marital Violence , 1992 .

[3]  J. Belknap Law Enforcement Officers' Attitudes about the Appropriate Responses to Woman Battering* , 1995 .

[4]  Franklyn W. Dunford,et al.  The measurement of recidivism in cases of spouse assault , 1992 .

[5]  Lawrence W. Sherman,et al.  Policing Domestic Violence: Experiments and Dilemmas , 1992 .

[6]  Nan Oppenlander,et al.  Coping or copping out: police service delivery in domestic disputes , 1982 .

[7]  Edna Erez Intimacy, Violence, and the Police , 1986 .

[8]  Frances P Lawrenz,et al.  Time series analysis of the effect of a domestic violence directive on the number of arrests per day , 1988 .

[9]  R. Bachman,et al.  Police Involvement in Domestic Violence: The Interactive Effects of Victim Injury, Offender’s History of Violence, and Race , 1995, Violence and Victims.

[10]  E. Pleck Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present , 1988 .

[11]  V. Kappeler,et al.  Contributory factors affecting arrest in domestic and non‐domestic assaults , 1996 .

[12]  L. Hoff Battered Women as Survivors , 1990 .

[13]  Douglas A. Smith,et al.  Police Control of Interpersonal Disputes , 1984 .

[14]  R. Gelles Constraints Against Family Violence , 1993 .

[15]  B. Hart Battered Women and the Criminal Justice System , 1993 .

[16]  Kathleen Daly Structure and Practice of Familial-Based Justice in a Criminal Court , 1987 .

[17]  Edward W. Gondolf,et al.  Handling Battering Men , 1989 .

[18]  B. Balos,et al.  Enforcement of the Domestic Abuse Act in Minnesota: A Preliminary Study , 1988 .

[19]  Eve S. Buzawa,et al.  Determining Police Response to Domestic Violence Victims , 1993 .

[20]  Kathleen J. Ferraro,et al.  How Women Experience Battering: The Process of Victimization , 1983 .

[21]  Robert E. Worden,et al.  POLICE ARRESTS IN DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES: A FURTHER LOOK , 1984 .

[22]  L. Bowker Police Services to Battered Women , 1982 .

[23]  R. Dobash,et al.  Women, violence, and social change , 1992 .

[24]  L. Sherman Influence of Criminology on Criminal Law: Evaluating Arrests for Misdemeanor Domestic Violence , 1992 .

[25]  Ellen G. Cohn,et al.  The variable effects of arrest on criminal careers: The Milwaukee domestic violence experiment , 1992 .

[26]  J. Belknap,et al.  Woman battering and police referrals , 1994 .

[27]  Donileen R. Loseke,et al.  "HANDLING" FAMILY VIOLENCE: SITUATIONAL DETERMINANTS OF POLICE ARREST IN DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES , 1980 .

[28]  Richard A. Berk,et al.  A Bayesian Analysis of the Colorado Springs Spouse Abuse Experiment , 1992 .

[29]  Delbert S. Elliott,et al.  THE ROLE OF ARREST IN DOMESTIC ASSAULT: THE OMAHA POLICE EXPERIMENT * , 1990 .

[30]  Joanne Belknap,et al.  The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice , 1995 .

[31]  N. Websdale,et al.  Rural Woman Abuse , 1995, Violence against women.

[32]  R. Berk,et al.  The specific deterrent effects of arrest for domestic assault. , 1984, American sociological review.

[33]  E. Stark Mandatory Arrest of Batterers , 1993 .

[34]  Lisa A. Frisch RESEARCH THAT SUCCEEDS, POLICIES THAT FAIL , 1992 .

[35]  Stuart M. Keeley,et al.  Police decision making in wife abuse: The impact of legal and extralegal factors , 1985 .

[36]  Kathleen J. Ferraro Policing Woman Battering , 1989 .

[37]  Byron R. Johnson,et al.  The policing of domestic violence in rural and urban areas: The voices of battered women in Kentucky , 1997 .

[38]  Lynette Feder Domestic Violence and Police Response in a Pro-Arrest Jurisdiction , 1997 .

[39]  Stephen Brown Police responses to wife beating: Neglect of a crime of violence , 1984 .

[40]  J. Hirschel,et al.  Female spouse abuse and the police response: The Charlotte, North Carolina experiment , 1992 .

[41]  Richard A. Berk,et al.  Does arrest really deter wife battery? An effort to replicate the findings of the Minneapolis Spouse Abuse Experiment. , 1985 .