Background
Domestic violence historically has been viewed as a private family matter that need not involve government or criminal justice intervention. Before the early 1970s, police in the United States favored a "hands-off" approach to domestic violence calls, with arrest only used as a last resort. At the time, domestic violence cases were typically classified as misdemeanor assault cases. During the 1970s, many U.S. jurisdictions did not authorize the police to make arrests in any misdemeanor assault, whether it involved a domestic partner or not, unless the assault occurred in the officer's presence. A 1978 court order in New York City mandated that arrests only be made in cases of serious violence, thus officers instead made effort to mediate family disputes.
In the early 1970s, clinical psychologists argued that police should make an effort to mediate disputes.
Statistics on incidence of domestic violence, published in the late 1970s, helped raise public awareness of the problem and increase activism. A study published in 1976 by the Police Foundation found that the police had intervened at least once in the previous two years in 85 percent of spouse homicides. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminists and battered women's advocacy groups were calling on police to take domestic violence more seriously and change intervention strategies. In some instances, these groups took legal action against police departments, including in Oakland, California and New York City, to get them to make arrests in domestic violence cases. They claimed that police assigned low priority to domestic disturbance calls.
In 1978, the National Academy of Sciences published a report, Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates, which called for more rigorous assessments of policies and practices based on social control theories and use of deterrence for crime control. Based on the Academy's recommendations, the National Institute of Justice began funding studies of the deterrent effects of criminal sanctions and, in 1980, one of the sponsored studies was the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment.
Read more about this topic: Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment
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