What makes a domestic violence arrest unique and different from all other arrests is that officers do not need to provide any evidence that the accused person may [probable cause] be guilty.
Mandatory Arrest
Law enforcement officers have traditionally been given the authority to arrest or detain a person, with out a warrant, based on the two prong theory that (1) there is evidence that a serious crime occurred and (2) the belief that the accused person may have committed the crime.
What makes a domestic violence arrest unique and different from all other arrests is that officers do not need to provide any evidence that the accused person may [probable cause] be guilty. Officers need only to establish that some type of a domestic violence incident occurred.
Mandatory domestic violence arrest policies dictate that officers must make an arrest for all domestic violence incidents, regardless how minor the incident, without any evidence concerning who committed [initiated] the incident and it ignores the needs and desires of the victim. Mandatory arrest is unprecedented in the annuals of criminal justice because it ignores both the victim and the accused rights.
Placing the cart [an event] in front of the horse [individual rights] has no precedent nor is it replicated any where else in the criminal justice system. In the beginning domestic violence advocates demanded that domestic violence incidents to be treated similar to all other crimes and in the end they demand it be treated differently from any other crimes.
Who To Arrest
Officers some times respond to minor domestic violence incidents and discover that that the abuse is minor, mutual and no one is injured (http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf). Faced with mandatory or preferred arrest policies and being unable to provide any evidence concerning who may have initiated the incident, dual arrests were made.
Because of mandatory arrest policies and the fact that women can be as physically assaultive as men (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_11-12_52/ai_n15395182).
the numbers of dual arrests or arrests of women who did initiated
the assault rose to 35% in some communities (http://www.ms.foundation.org/user-assets/PDF/Program/Safety_justice.pdf).
One National Institute of Justice sponsored study, Analysis of Unexamined Issues in the Intimate Partner Homicide Decline, (http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/196666.pdf), documents that during the period of the study the number of arrests for females increased 446%.
Ignoring Diversity and Individual Needs
Other than for domestic violence mandatory arrest is avoided like the plague for many reasons. Mandatory arrest causes officers to ignore the complex context and circumstances of a specific event, it demands that officers ignore the multifaceted diversity of incidents and demands that officers do not listen to the needs and desires of individual victims.
Domestic violence advocates have somehow managed to convince our public policy makers to implement mandatory domestic violence policies and procedures that are blatantly biased, prejudiced and perhaps unconstitutional.
Ideological feminists [they are people,agencies or organizations who are more concerned with women's rights than victim or civil rights] ignore academic empirical studies in favor of their
ideological belief that domestic violence is caused by sexism and the oppression of women (http://www.caadv.org/about_us.html).
Faced with the ever increasing numbers of females being arrested these advocates failed to find fault with mandatory arrest, they simply blamed law enforcement for arresting the wrong person.
The Ideological Response
Domestic violence advocates and public policy makers implemented law enforcement domestic violence training programs that proffer that domestic violence is caused by male norms and mores and a societal belief system that allows men to beat, batter and oppress women (http://www.caadv.org/materials.html).
These primary or dominant aggressor training programs instruct officers to expect it will be the man who is guilty. Officers are also trained to ignore who initiated or began the violence.
Most troubling is that officers are trained that when there is little to no evidence
that an "incident" took place and little to no evidence concerning "guilt," an arrest
still can be made predicated on any of the following:
- Who appears to be at most risk of possible
victimization once you leave?
- Who appears to pose the most danger once you leave?
- Who is the most in danger of being injured?
- Who appears most capable of inflicting harm once you leave?
- Who appears capable of using the most violence?
If the above is not enough to convince officers who "should be arrested" the "primary or dominant aggressor" training model often lists the negative effects that an arrest could have on women. Apparently advocates believe that there are no negative effects for men.
Negative Effects
Criminal justice data documents that blacks are arrested and incarcerated in numbers far greater than whites for selling drugs. There are no empirical studies that document blacks sell or use drugs far more often than whites.
Would it be acceptable to have a training program that dictates when officers know that someone is selling drugs, however, when the officers arrive at the scene and there is little to no evidence of guilt, the officers should arrest the black person based on criminal justice data and the ideological held beliefs of a small group of people?
Mandatory arrest was instituted because more often than not, the victim of domestic violence will not press charges against the aggressor, be it a man or woman. I’ve experienced domestic violence first hand. For example, let’s look at one incident about 14 years ago when my dad and mom were arguing, and my dad took it to the next level and got violent (including screaming obscenities, hitting and spitting). My mom called the police, and by the time they got there nearly 45 minutes later, my dad was calm and collected while my mom was livid. In the 45 minute time frame between the “incident” and the “response”, my dad had locked my mom out of the house with me still inside (at 5 years old), and she had smashed out the window in the front door in order to open it up and get me out of the house. About 5 minutes after she had smashed the window, the police arrived. Who do you trust? The angry women who just put her fist through a window, or the calm, cool, collected man sitting in his living room chair like nothing ever happened? Okay, so the police “profiled” my dad, and trusted my mom in this instance. But she refused to press charges (out of fear that a far worse incident may follow if she had him thrown in jail) and the police had no choice but to tell her “you’re an idiot for staying here, but unless you press charges, there’s nothing we can do”. Hardly an ideal situation for the woman or the child. If there were a manditory arrest law, my dad would have spent that night in jail with no one to blame but himself and the officers who arrested him. The incident would have been resolved, the correct party would have taken the blame, and maybe learned his lesson. I’m 100% staunchly anti-feminist, and a staunch conservative who favors fair and equal justice, but the overall tone of your article really seems in favor of men who beat their wives and children. Judging by your article, if my mom in that situation had hit my dad back, then she would have been equally responsible for the “incident” and he would have been an equal “victim”. In fact, reflecting on it, I’m sure it was something my mom said or did that caused my dad to react that way. I guess in hindsight, she really shouldn’t have said the wrong thing, or looked the wrong way, or whatever it was she did in the first place, and the police really should have hauled her away. With the mandatory arrest laws, it seems you should be happier than ever, more women are now being arrested for domestic violence crimes! Go men!
I’m not necessarily saying I’m for mandatory arrest laws, but I can see their validity because they take the blame for the arrest off of the abused party so that they don’t have to fear retaliation by the abusive party. And I hardly think that domestic violence laws are causing undue harm to innocent men a majority of the time as you do. My dad was arrested ONE time out of a several-year history of very frequent violent outbursts, and on more than one occasion where police were called, the officers were very nonchalant about the matter, even rolling their eyes and laughing about it. Perhaps it’s different where you are, or maybe you’ve just never experienced domestic violence from a victim’s perspective, but either way, your article seems pretty hostile towards those who have, if they happen to be women, that is.
I could almost post the same thing as Pat but my mother was the aggressor constantly when I was growing up towards my father. Women commit domestic violence as much or more than men yet you wouldn’t know that from listening to our popular and average ‘joe’ media. Here is another fact: most young children are wounded are killed by mothers. Yet you don’t hear that when family violence issues are debated or reported on. Pat took a personal experience and compared it to the article which clearly states that not only does it go against what was supposed to be the ‘American’ way of law. “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and ‘equal under the eyes of the law no matter what.’ and compared it to his personal experience. Domestic violence laws and funding have grown from emotional based legislation and lack of logic and reason. Most of these slipshod laws are pansy pandering to screeching XX chromosonal enhanced vocal outbursts that happen to include large amounts of taxpayer dollars doled out to certain specific groups of American humans.
The real question I was trying to illustrate with my story is what is the ideal situation? In that particular instance, should my dad have been arrested? Should my mother? Should the situation have been neglected entirely? It doesn’t matter who the aggressor is, my story just used the male because that’s the situation that I experienced first hand. But for instance in your situation, were police ever called, and if so, did your father ever have your mother arrested? Probably not, I’m guessing, anymore than my mom would press charges against my dad. So is that the ideal situation? No one goes to jail, no one is held responsible for the “incident”, and a cycle of domestic violence perpetuates itself to the detriment of the victim and any children involved? I don’t know that madatory arrest is the cure, but I can understand how ideally, philosophically, it could seem like a way to put an end to that situation without endangering the victim.
I just would like to say that violence is usually defined in terms of men being physically aggressive towards women. Yet my dad’s and my personal experience are testimonies that women can be much more violent than men in terms of psychological manipulation and verbal abuse. Which can be just as if not more harmful than any other forms. But who would believe a man saying he has been constantly “psychologically abused” by his wife? Let alone seeing her arrested?
But it is when the law fails him time and again, that he thinks has no choice but take it in his own hands.
Just to become this time around mandatory arrested.
Until we look at the mutual responsibility of both players in the vast majority of domestic abuse cases, until we throw out the presumptions of the gender feminists and their social scientist thug squads, until we recognize there is more to inter-parent violence than false statistics used on the behalf of the professional gender warriors of NOW, in a word until we recognize that moral culpability entails individual choices made by both the abused and the abuser, there will never be any real chance to help the children — such as Patrick Mulligan — of these horrid men and women who engage in mutually abusive relationships at their children’s expense. I think both parents should be arrested when no charges are filed over and over and over again. Both parents who continue to create these situations of immoral violence are morally culpable. And morallity ought to trump psychobabble every single time. Domestic violence is not a problem with men it is a problem with weak immoral people, and women are indeed people.
Although I agree with the author regarding the disconnect between events, arrests, and the objectives for making arrests, I have to disagree with the conclusion that this is just some mistake in profiling and not a broader disconnect in how we target and deal with domestic disorder as a society. Implicit in his conclusion (and substantiated by his web references) is an acceptance that ‘policing’ of and ‘intervention’ in marital relations is a valid and constructive function of government. Theoretical argument aside, the history of this intervention and the consequences to society lead me to believe more harm is done by such regulation than is prevented; and, the more institutionalized it has become, the more dysfunctional we have become as a family based society.
Certainly, there are cases in which intervention is called for. The repeated or severe physical brutalities of one spouse on another represents a crime that affects an entire community, and is no different because of the special relation of marriage. However, where is the line drawn defining just intervention from meddling by a community; or, worse, by an agency established for the express purpose of meddling in the affairs of every family regardless of cause. Across America we have witnessed a sea change in the way family is regarded (or disregarded). I have had direct contact with more than one agent of government convinced that parents are little more than temporary guardians of children, that the greater title to children resides in ‘the state’, and who regard parents as provisional caretakers entrusted with them for the sole purpose of maintaining them while the state sees to their education, discipline, moral orientation, and happiness. This is socialist dogma brought fruition; built on a foundation of the latent capacity in any parent to abuse his/her child. The same guiding principle was, thereafter, applied to the protection of women; and with similar consequence in the redefining of the marital relation.
Where, before, a community would have hesitated to interfere in the affairs of any family until a clear case of abuse existed, today it is standard practice to ‘intervene’ at the least disturbance in order to pre-empt any possibility of abuse. The effect this has had is to preclude spouses ever working out their own problems at the most effective level (among them selves). A wife, knowing she can bring a supra-marital authority into the discussion, can intimidate to have her way. Believing she is in the right, feeling she is physically less endowed to have her way by resort to force, and indoctrinated into the common belief she is justified in using external authority to back her up, she does not hesitate to call in interventionists, nor does she consider the down-side to her marriage in doing so. To the contrary, she has been taught since nursery school to resort to outside intervention anytime things don’t go her way.
In my parents time (and even more so in my grandparents), there was an unequal relationship that gave men an undue advantage. That advantage was tempered, in most men of the time, by values and assumptions that women were the focus of the home and given deference in domestic matters. My father was somewhat dictatorial in relation to us kids, yet tender, deferential, and restrained toward my mother. Toward wife and children alike he was fiercely protective and loving (making the occasional fanning of our bottoms ‘tough-love’). Mom ran the house and decided our contribution; dad was the enforcer of Mom’s will, but also our moral guide. Neither of my parents were what I consider abusive, yet my father was clearly the disciplinarian in our family. My parent’s marriage lasted until my father’s death and my mom won’t even consider another to take his place (To my remorse, my own marriage did not survive so long – though I still maintain my vow). In other families I knew, the mother was the disciplinarian more than the dad, but they were the exception; and in almost no family I knew was either parent regarded as abusive. I have spoken to countless people who relate the same or similar experience growing up. All had parents who were strict, but none abusive, nor knew of any. Many of these same people believe the things their parents did then are wrong to do now, despite insisting their parents never did them any harm and were good, loving parents in every way who, likewise, loved and protected each other. How to explain this discrepancy? In my own time as a parent the paradigm has changed, rendering father’s more of a ‘second’ mother of lesser status and relevance. Anyone who raises a hand to a child is considered an inhuman monster, even when it is understood that not spanking the child may be the worst thing for his/her development as an ethical person. I see this as the direct consequence of too much government directed by the feminist dogma that is highly mistrustful of all men. The presupposition that men are abusive grew out the opinion of some women that men are too given to discipline, rather than seeing that the roles of men and women are not entirely the same.
The question becomes, since 1950 (when abuse was made into a major issue), has outside intervention made things better or worse. The statistics on spousal abuse are fewer than those for child abuse, but we can make some assumption that if the one has increased, so has the other. The Heritage Foundation reports (http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/BG1115.cfm) child abuse and neglect is up 134% from 1980 and the incidence of children of broken families has quadrupled since 1950. Furthermore, the report indicates sexual abuse of children is up a whopping 350% since 1980. Some of this increase I attribute to differences in reporting (less abuse getting under our radar) and differences in classifying what constitutes abuse (today we have vaguely defined ‘mental’ abuse lumped with other data). These changes in how we report and collect such data are on-going, making it problematic how to interpret the data. Regardless, let’s assume the data does represent a real increase in the amount of abuse going on. At the same time, there are sources that allege that while male-on-female and male-on-child abuse has decreased, the abuse by women-on-men has grown dramatically. What does all this say about our assumptions and unwavering solutions to abuse? Obviously, what we did before worked better than what we’ve been doing since. That much is certain. Yet does anyone suggest we are heading in the wrong direction and ought to turn around? Hardly. Anyone who does must be some kind of barbaric imbecile. So, instead, we look for minor flaws in a failed dogma we can plug to stem the hemorrhaging; rather than concluding the patient will die if we don’t stop this nonsense.
Wives are not children, and we should not go back to the model that says they are. At the same time, we should stop treating women as in need of extraordinary legal protections that destroy family, reduce men to slavish providers sans rights, and put children at risk more than they protect. This is the real disconnect, the one that puts a wedge between society’s natural partners (husbands and wives) by imposing non-vested referees and bureaucracy-bound agencies. We need to go back to trusting people to manage their own affairs in all but extreme cases. We need to trust local authority (as having a greater vested interest in community stability) to provide that minimal intervention over that of a heavy-handed and distant federalism.
Like many who deplore a given condition, the author (and at least one respondent) assumes a resort to government was (and still is) the best answer to this problem. Abuse is an evil that takes place wherever people live together. It has been demonstrated there is as much or more abuse in same-sex unions (including all female) as in heterosexual marriages, making the contention that abuse is a one-gender phenomenon a myth. The effect of government has been to cast one gender as the perpetrator and the other the victim, with the result of unequal treatment under the law. The effect of unequal law, as we all know, is to create injustice where justice was intended; and the combination of abuse and unequal justice is only to encourage and institutionalize victimization by those having the greater access to power.
This country was created with the idea that men (and women) are created equal. Underlying that philosophy was the presumption that people are perfectly capable of self-governance, and that government should be resorted to only in those cases where self-regulation does not suffice or is proved supremely beneficial. As our freedom is dependent on our good behavior, all who wish to remain free inherently recognize the need to self-regulate as key to that independence. Thus, we generally concede to government our common defense, regulation of our commerce, and the administering of justice. In all other regards, every concession we make to government is a diminution of freedom. If we prove incapable of self-regulation, there is some justice to circumscribing a behavior; otherwise it is an unnecessary concession to slavery. Do we collectively resign our freedom because of few bad actors, or do we rely on basic means to deal with them and keep our freedom intact? It has always been my contention that, unless and until the disorder is general, freedom should never be sacrificed to expedience simply to manage a few. The result is usually worse than the disease.
PS, those of you who think men abuse women more than women abuse men need to check up on your data. The latest findings indicate women abuse as much or slightly more than do men. Partly, that is because of the prevailing consequences that accrue to men more than women, but it also shows neither gender has any greater (or lesser) tendency to violence once all inhibitions are removed. The current legal situation appears to hold all to account, yet has no teeth in it and the inequalities built into it encourage women to take less care in their behavior than do men.
Back when small communities dealt with their own, justice was swift and effective. Every community was determined to maintain the family as the best protection for women and children, to the extent family was considered inviolable. An abusive husband may have gotten away with abusing his wife, then, but would have been hounded by his community to leave. Shelter was as readily given to an abused spouse then as now; often compromised by those defending some bad-tempered husband’s “rights” (today, we err the other way; treating men as guilty, even when they aren’t). An abusive spouse or parent tends to be nearly as abusive to outsiders; such that someone, sooner or later, would have had cause to put the abuse to an end. This was rough justice, but it served us well, kept things simple, and made community a real “village” that looked after its own. If, in the past, we turned a blind eye to abuse, today we grind whole families into the dust in pursuit of a justice that can never be perfect. Which is worse?
Does Davis claim to have a PhD or not? All of his bios seem to disagree. I can’t find dates for the degrees he variously claims he has.
Davis received what he thought was a PhD from an accredited program, however, it was far from it. He has attempted to remove any mention of a PdD from any site. He does appreciate the fact that this, similar to many others who disagree with him, attack him not the facts of his article.