Victims as Offenders: The Paradox of Women's Violence in Relationships

Chapter 4: On the Boat: The Police Ride- Along Study

The Police Ride-Along Study As the initial responders to a domestic violence call for help and as the “street level” interpreters of the law, police play an integral part in implementing domestic violence policy. Day in and day out, police are exposed to people’s problems and have to interpret people’s behavior, officially responding to it within the parameters of the law. While law enforcement strives to be nonselective and evenhanded, officers’ personal attitudes, beliefs, and priorities shape their actions. Given their exposure to the complexities of citizens’ private lives, police officers also make wonderful informants about social problems such as domestic violence. This chapter describes the police ride-along component of the research project and analyzes the content of the conversations conducted with police officers and the situations observed. Ride-along studies entail a systematic effort to record police-citizen encounters by sending a trained observer to “partner ” with a police officer during her or his shift. Observers are not randomly placed, but observe during a chosen time and day in order to increase the opportunity to observe the desired events. Since the goal was to observe domestic disputes, the focus was on the police shifts during which observers would potentially see the most action. Based on prior research findings, domestic skirmishes and violent eruptions were more likely to occur on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings and during the shifts from 4 p.m. to midnight and 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. The research team included eleven observers: ten advanced undergraduate students and one graduate student, seven females and four males. All students were trained in participant-observation skills and taught to recognize 50 On the Beat Chapter 4 various issues related to domestic violence so they would be able to discuss these issues with police.1 While some themes emerged independently from the observation process (an inductive approach), others reflected prior theoretical understandings of the phenomenon under study (an a priori approach). “A priori themes come from the characteristics of the phenomenon being studied; from already agreed on professional definitions found in literature reviews; from local, commonsense constructs; and from researcher’s values, theoretical orientations, and personal experiences” (Ryan and Bernard 2003, 88; see also Strauss and Corbin 1990). In particular, the study was designed to reveal how the police feel about responding to domestic violence compared to other calls, what officers’ perceptions were about whether women play a more active role in domestic violence than in the past, and whether women’s violence and arrests have changed over time. In addition, observers were trained to ask questions about the dynamics of dual arrests and how police are able to distinguish between aggressive behavior and self-defensive behavior. Observers carried a small notebook with them to document what occurred during their shift. They transcribed field notes from the notebooks into longer, more descriptive typed versions within twenty-four hours of the shift’s completion . I reviewed their field notes and maintained an ongoing dialogue with members of the research team to resolve any points of confusion. The fieldwork team met weekly to talk about situations that were unclear and to troubleshoot any problems. Each notebook had a checklist of questions for the students to address sometime during the shift. Generally, once the topic of domestic violence was raised, most of the questions on the list were spontaneously addressed by the officers in the course of their discussions. In order to best cover the demographic and geographic variation across the state, we solicited the help of the state’s three major police departments: the state troopers, the county police in the largest county in the state (County A), and the city police of the largest city in the state (located in County A). Within the state police department, we conducted ride-alongs with three troops so that all three counties in the state would be represented. The largest county, in the northern part of the state, and the largest city located within that county were over-sampled because of the larger volume of calls and the higher population density. (The county handles three times the caseload of the other counties and has the largest number of criminal justice professionals and social service providers dealing with women arrested on domestic violence charges.) For 1998, domestic violence incident reports revealed the following numbers of incidents counted by police: County A: 9,711; County B: 3,067; County C...