Is Anyone In Washington Paying Attention To The Studies They Fund?
July 3, 2005
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. - Carl Rogers
The National Research Council was organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy’s purpose of furthering knowledge and advising the federal government.
On page 72 of Advancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women, the National Research Council Committee on the Assessment of Family Violence Intervention concluded that “…no standard existed for conducting research on the immediate effects of legal reforms or on levels of subsequent abuse by offenders” and “… policies and procedures reflect ideology and stakeholder interests more than empirical knowledge.”
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Research in Brief report, The Effects of Arrest on Intimate Partner Violence: New Evidence From the Spouse Assault Replication Program www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/188199.pdf, concludes that, “This suggests that policies requiring arrest for all suspects may unnecessarily take a community’s resources away from identifying and responding in the worst offenders and victims most at risk.
The same report also notes, “Future research in this area needs to assess the benefits and costs of arresting all suspects before there can be a systematic conclusion of preferred or mandatory arrest policies.”
Ignoring the advice of the National Research Council Committee and the authors of the NIJ report and despite the fact that studies provide only limited and mixed results concerning the deterrent effects of arrest on any crime the majority of states have in place mandatory or preferred arrest policies for any and all domestic violence incidents regardless of the context of the incident.
In 1999 as many as 35% of domestic violence arrests in Concord, New Hampshire were of women, 23% of those arrested in Vermont were women and 25% of the arrest in Boulder County, Colorado were women.
Most of these women are not being arrested because the police have not been “trained right.” Some domestic violence advocates actually claim that officers should arrest the person who is “bigger and stronger” than the other person. Those are not to subtle code words for “be sure to arrest the man and not the woman.”
Many women, similar to many men, are being arrested because mandatory arrest demands strict enforcement of statute law. A push is the same as a pummeling; a verbal battle is the same as a battering. Statute law makes little to no distinction between “battering behavior” in some families and the “family conflict behavior” that can be found in most.
Most of these women, similar to many men, are not being arrested for “battering behavior.” Many women and men are being arrested for minor violations of the law that do not involve any type of assault. Often there are no injuries and no one [often including the police] wants an arrest to be made.
Hot Of f The Press
As of June 2005 there is now available an extensive longitudinal study that documents that while some police intervention has an effect on the deterrence of repeat assaults by the same person, the effect of arrest is small and statistically insignificant.
This report, Police Intervention and the Repeat of Domestic Assault, can be found here. Perhaps someday some public policy makers may actually read the reports they fund and then they might come to understand that mandatory arrest denies officers the ability to consider the context of an individual event, is not a good idea.
Almost each and every law enforcement officers in this nation understands that mandatory arrest is a bad idea. The fact that it is a bad idea is the reason that mandatory arrest is used no where else in the criminal justice system. More and more studies document mandatory arrest is not a good idea. An ever increasing number of domestic violence advocates now understand mandatory arrests that deny law enforcement officers the ability to act on the context of an individual event, is not a good idea.
A Feminist Majority Foundation has now recognized that the criminal justice system and mandatory arrest harms some people while helping others. The report is Safety & Justice for All: Examining the Relationship between the Women’s Anti-Violence Movement and the Criminal Legal System.
The above Feminist Majority Foundation report also documents that even some gender feminist have now come to recognize that arresting people based only on unsubstantiated allegations is not a good idea. It is time that our public policy makers read first and legislate second.
It is time that our public policy makers recognize and act on the fact that mandatory arrest has produced some unforeseen and unintended negative consequences. Mandatory arrest can be found no where else in the criminal justice because it excludes the use of reason, logic and common sense. Why then does it continue?
