Police-Community Partnerships to Address Domestic Violence

A number of innovative criminal justice system approaches have been developed during the past 15 to 20 years in an attempt to reduce the number of incidences of domestic violence in the United States. Many law enforcement agencies now have policies mandating arrest, or stating a preference for arrest, for domestic violence. Prosecutors are also using a wider array of options to handle domestic violence cases such as no-drop policies, evidence-based prosecution, and special district attorneys assigned to domestic violence cases. As part of the adoption of community policing across the country, local law enforcement agencies are also forming partnerships with community organizations to address domestic violence.

Because there is limited knowledge about how such partnerships coordinate activities to improve response to calls involving domestic violence, PERF was funded by the COPS Office to explore the nature, function, and impact of these police-community partnerships to produce guidance for policy makers on partnerships focused on domestic violence. To learn how the police-community partnerships coordinate their activities and improve their responses to calls involving domestic violence, PERF studied a broad sample of local agencies that have such partnerships.

PERF investigators collected data in two phases. In the first phase, project staff reviewed existing literature on the connection between community policing activities and how calls related to domestic violence are handled, interviewed experts on domestic violence and police-community partnerships, and developed data-collection instruments. In the second phase, project staff used a mail survey and telephone interviews and case studies to collect data on actual police-community partnerships.

This report presents a discussion of the literature, describes project methods used and findings of the mail survey, telephone interviews, and case studies of eleven local law enforcement agencies that had formed police-community partnerships to address domestic violence. It highlights successful strategies, lists barriers to effective police-community partnerships, and offers recommendations for overcoming these barriers, as well as providing strategies that can be replicated by other agencies.

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http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/domestic_violence_web3.pdf