Policing domestic violence

Domestic conflict is the largest single cause of violence in America, yet police have traditionally been reluctant to make arrests for such assaults. In the past decade, however, that reluctance has been overcome, with a 70% increase in arrests for minor assaults, heavily concentrated among low-income and minority groups.

Spearheading this nationwide crackdown are the 15 states and the District of Columbia which have adopted unprecedented statutes mandating arrest in cases of misdemeanor domestic battery.

In Policing Domestic Violence, criminologist Lawrence Sherman confronts the tough questions raised by this controversial approach to a complex social problem. How should police respond to the millions of domestic violence cases they confront each year, when most prosecutors refuse to pursue them? Why does arresting unemployed batterers do more harm than good? What approaches should police adopt when arrest has totally opposite effects upon "haves" and "have-nots"?

Sherman, a leading police researcher, is the architect of the 1984 Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment - the first controlled test of the effects of arrest on repeat crime. Here he describes what was learned from a multi-year federal research program to repeat the experiment in Milwaukee, Miami, Colorado Springs, Omaha, and Charlotte. The results are both surprising and provocative.

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In fact, arrest deters selectively. Sherman found that it effectively inhibits some offenders, but incites more violence in others. It may also deter batterers for a month or so, only to make them more violent later on. Under this policy, therefore, some women exchange short-term safety for a longer-term increase in danger. Sherman also shows that compulsory arrest reduces violence against middle-class women at the expense of those (often black) who are poor.

Some advocates of the policy have endorsed this moral choice, but Sherman argues that domestic violence will continue in spite of, and sometimes because of, our attempts to stop it. Further, while it is possible to predict which couples will continue to suffer abusive behavior, it has been difficult to find effective ways of preventing chronic violence, even when arrests are made.

Relying on arrest as a "fix" for domestic abuse only underscores the long neglect of underlying social problems, and Sherman calls instead for more flexible policies - such as "community policing" - that more adequately reflect the diversity of American society.