Police and Domestic Violence

All states have enacted mandatory or preferred arrest statutes that require or encourage officers to arrest the batterer in domestic violence incidents when probable cause exists. Mandatory arrest laws still allow officers much choice about when to arrest, because the criteria for whether there is enough evidence to meet the standard of probable cause are ambiguous. Officers use several legal and extralegal criteria to make arrest decisions and also rely on stereotypes to form inferences about specific cases. This entry describes findings from numerous studies that have examined how officers interpret, investigate, and respond to domestic violence situations. A focus on how officers infer and interpret information is important to design effective academy training that addresses the unintentional effects of stereotypes and improves police decision making so that equal protection is provided to all victims of domestic violence. Although research shows that academy training has little effect on police arrest decisions, prior training has not focused on how officers arrive at decisions.

How Police Officers Think About Domestic Violence

Decision frames are a set of rules about how to make arrest decisions; they guide what questions are asked, what inferences are drawn, and what criteria receive the most consideration in arrest decisions. Decision frames derive from socialization and are connected to officers’ values, attitudes, and worldviews. Officers may use three decision frames to investigate and interpret information: legal, normative, and efficiency.

The legal frame assumes that officers apply policies or statutes using only legal criteria and a strict interpretation of the statutes. The legal frame assumes a rational decision maker who does not use attitudes or stereotypes to interpret information. Much research shows that the legal frame is not an accurate portrayal of officers’ decision making.

Officers typically give greater consideration to the normative and efficiency frames in asking questions during an investigation and making decisions about arrest. The normative frame emphasizes the following questions: Who is responsible? Was his or her actions justified or not? Using the normative frame, officers examine what happened in the past and evaluate the moral appropriateness of each party’s actions and their moral character. In the case of domestic violence, officers using the normative frame would arrest both disputants if the parties are equally blameworthy. However, when the normative frame is used, battered women may be blamed for the violence when they deviate from social gender-biased norms.

Officers using the efficiency frame do not attempt to unravel the past but assess the credibility of each disputant to determine whether an arrest is likely to lead to a successful conviction. To avoid mistakes that cause lawsuits or unfavorable media publicity, they assess the likelihood that each party will commit further violence. In the efficiency frame, officers focus on the present and future ramifications of their decisions and are concerned with how an arrest will affect their time, raises, and promotions. The efficiency frame also allows departmental and system procedures to influence officers’ decisions. Officers are less likely to make an arrest if more paperwork is required when a suspect is arrested, and this finding has led to policies that require officers to complete a report irrespective of whether they arrest or do not arrest a suspect. Research has found that arrest rates did not increase after mandatory-arrest state laws were enacted; however, arrest rates increased if the counties had coordinated responses, whereby the prosecutors and courts followed through with certain sanctions for arrested batterers. Research has found that when departmental policy is to arrest both parties when both claim self-defense, officers will follow this policy even when state laws discourage the arrest of both parties.

Research also has found that novice and experienced officers employed different frames for making decisions. In making arrest decisions, novice officers focused on the blameworthiness of each party, whereas experienced officers focused on their ability to substantiate claims and the risk of future violence. The shift from focusing on normative to efficiency issues occurs relatively swiftly, after 1 year of service.

Officers also use stereotypes of domestic violence, social class, mental illness, race, gender, and other salient categories. Stereotypes help officers complete missing information, interpret conflicting stories, and make assumptions about likely outcomes or responses. Research has found that experienced officers considered their stereotypic beliefs about battered women’s propensity to use self-defense in arriving at their arrest decision. Moreover, individual officers have different stereotypes about domestic violence, especially regarding how much women provoke the violence or react in self-defense. Officers inferred that men who abused wives who were hallucinating or drunk were less dangerous and that wives were more responsible for the violence, suggesting that stereotypes about mental illness also guide their interpretations when suspects or victims exhibit mental illness. These stereotypes thus affect officers’ inferences about the situation and may lead officers to provide unequal protection for victims who have a mental illness or violate social or gender norms.

Criteria Used by Police in Arrest Decisions

Legal criteria that have been found to consistently increase the likelihood of arrest include a disrespectful attitude toward the police, the presence of witnesses, the presence of a weapon, the presence of the perpetrator, and a violation of an order of protection. Officers typically make an arrest only in 20% to 50% of the cases where there is clear evidence of a violation of an order of protection. This finding indicates that officers use their discretion and interpret the dangerousness and risk to the victim in determining whether to make an arrest when a perpetrator has violated an order of protection. Several studies have found that a violation of an order of protection increases the incidence of arrest, but its effect on arrest is no greater than that of other situational criteria.

Several criteria have been inconsistently related to arrest decisions: the suspect’s gender or race, victim’s or suspect’s use of alcohol, marital status of the suspect and the victim, presence of children, presence of injuries, victim’s preference for arrest, and suspect’s gender. The influence of these criteria depends on other environmental and situational characteristics. For example, research based on police reports found that substance use or the presence of children decreased the likelihood that the batterer would be arrested if the victim was African American but increased the chance of arrest if the victim was Caucasian.

Research has found that arrest rates for cases involving visible injuries vary from 30% to 73% across police departments. Across archival and vignette studies from the early 1980s until 2005, the presence or seriousness of visible injuries is not sufficient to invoke arrests, and its influence on arrest decisions depends on other situational characteristics. For example, visible injuries increased the chance of arrest when the perpetrator is present but had no effect when the perpetrator has fled the scene before the police arrived. Officers also were more likely to use the presence of visible injuries in their arrest decisions when departments had a clear policy to arrest when the victim has injuries or when the jurisdiction had a coordinated response to domestic violence.

The importance of the victim’s preference in arrest decisions clearly varies across departments, studies, and cases. Police officers often do not include the victim’s preference in the police report even when it is a standard part of the police form, which suggests that it often is not an important criterion. Studies generally find that the victim’s preference for arrest has a modest impact, accounting for 4% to 5% of variation in officers’ decisions on whether or not to make an arrest. Officers often are not persuaded by the victim’s preference for arrest because they think that most victims will drop charges, do not know what they want at that time, or are not providing an honest account of what happened. Officers’ stereotypes about battered women and domestic violence also may affect how they interpret the victim’s preference for arrest.

Police officers do not provide all battered women with the same protection. Several studies have shown that police officers are less likely to arrest perpetrators who attack women who are drunk or having affairs. Officers who use a normative frame are more likely to arrest the husband if the battered wife is mentally ill because they believe that he is more blameworthy for hitting someone who cannot control her actions. In contrast, officers using an efficiency frame are less likely to make an arrest in this circumstance because they see the mentally ill wife as less credible and more dangerous. Interview studies have found that police officers are less likely to make an arrest in cases involving minority victims than when Caucasian vic-tims are involved. Thus, the guiding decision frame and stereotypes determine which victims who violate social norms are more likely to receive protection.

Domestic Battery versus Stranger or Acquaintance Battery

Are officers less likely to arrest perpetrators of intimate partner violence than perpetrators of violence against strangers or acquaintances? Mixed findings from research indicate that this question has not been resolved. Research in the 1980s found that both intimate partner and other violent crimes had similar arrest rates. Research conducted after mandatory arrest statutes were enacted has revealed inconsistent findings. Although several studies found that arrest is less likely to occur in intimate partner battery, these studies did not ensure that domestic and acquaintance battery cases were similar and thus were unable to eliminate alternative explanations. Other research indicates that whether officers treat acquaintance or stranger battery cases and domestic violence cases differently depends on situational characteristics. For example, when the suspect has fled the initial scene, officers are more likely to investigate, find, and arrest stranger or acquaintance batterers than domestic batterers. This bias occurs even though both types of victim request arrest as often and intimate partners are more likely to inform officers where the suspect can be found. Conversely, when the victim is the only witness, as in a typical domestic violence incident, officers are more likely to arrest domestic batterers than stranger or acquaintance batterers. Thus, officers under some circumstances may respond to domestic violence differently than to stranger violence, but further research is needed to obtain a more complete understanding of these circumstances.

Police Officers’ Personal Characteristics and Decision Making

Several studies have investigated how police officers’ race and gender shape their interpretation and handling of domestic violence situations. Officers’ race has not been shown to influence their decisions.

However, men and women officers do have different stereotypes about domestic violence, have different responses, and consider different criteria. Compared with men, women tended to perceive that wives more often acted in self-defense and were more likely to be the only party injured and that husbands had committed intentional and unjustifiable violence. Men were more likely than women to support gender-biased attitudes. Male officers who held gender-biased attitudes were more likely to believe that few cases of domestic violence involved battered women committing violence in self-defense.

Despite these differences in beliefs, male and female rookie officers typically recommended marriage counseling and only in one out of five cases referred the battered woman to a shelter. After probationary status, experienced women officers acted more in accordance with their stereotypic beliefs. Experienced female officers were less likely than males to recommend marriage counseling and more likely to refer battered women to shelters.

Male and female officers, regardless of experience, had similar arrest rates but used different criteria. Both men and women were more likely to arrest when injuries were visible or they perceived that severe future injuries were likely to occur. However, women were less likely to arrest if the battered woman was willing to settle the argument, whereas men did not consider the victim’s preference. Thus, through professional socialization, women and men developed similar perceptions about their law enforcement role. However, when women officers had achieved greater job security and could defend their views, they were more likely to act on their different beliefs about domestic violence and received higher satisfaction ratings from victims. Thus, although women officers do not arrest perpetrators more often, they are more likely to provide support and information to victims and are less likely to hold gender-biased attitudes or stereotypes.

References:

1. Eigenberg, H. M., Scarborough, K. E., & Kappeler, V. E. (1996). Contributory factors affecting arrest in domestic and non-domestic assaults. American Journal of Police, 15(4), 27-53.
2. Finn, M. A., Blackwell, B. S., Stalans, L. J., Studdard, S., & Dugan, L. (2004). Dual arrest decisions in domestic violence cases: The influence of department policy. Crime & Delinquency, 50(4), 565-589.
3. Hall, D. L. (2005). Domestic violence arrest decision-making: The role of suspect availability in the arrest decision. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 32(4), 390-H1.
4. Kane, R. J. (2000). Police response to restraining orders in domestic violence incidents: Identifying the custody-threshold thesis. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 27(5), 561-580.
5. Stalans, L. J., & Finn, M. A. (1995). How novice and experienced officers interpret wife assaults: Normative and efficiency frames. Law & Society Review, 29(2), 287-321.
6. Stalans, L. J., & Finn, M. A. (2000). Gender differences in officers’ perceptions and decisions about domestic violence cases. Women and Criminal Justice, 11(3), 1-24.