Essay on Officer Assaults During Domestic Violence Calls

Essay on Officer Assaults During Domestic Violence Calls

Abstract

This is an essay presenting a review of Richard,s article concerning physical assaults of officers/police during domestic assault calls. Domestic and family violence calls are one source of attacks on officers, and police employment is fraught with the risk of bodily injury. One source of officer skepticism and pessimism is the incapacity to anticipate what conditions may result in an assault correctly. Officers would be able to take necessary precautions if they could detect which suspects constitute the highest chance of attack. The current research examined batterer behaviors and actions with whether or not the batterers physically abused responding authorities using data gathered from 1,951 domestic assault calls among cities/locations. The results indicated five major batterer traits that effectively predicted police attacks (job status, typical home with abusive person, alcoholic intake, destruction of private property, and angry attitude toward authorities (police in particular)). These hazard variables may be included in officer safety awareness training for reacting to domestic abuse incidents.

Introduction

The author argues that there has been a great deal of discussion about the danger of police officers being assaulted when responding to domestic violence complaints over the past several years. While some researchers have established that domestic battery incidents account for quite a tiny fraction of officer strikes (Johnson, 2011), researchers in various groups have found domestic assault calls are among the three popular scenarios where police attacks occur (Johnson, 2011). Johnson poses that although other ticky-tack fouls have higher amounts of police violence, this does not imply that domestic assault calls are inherently “secure.” Just on the flip side, according to FBI data, more than 224,000 policemen in the United States were attacked while responding to family dispute cases between 1980 and 2003 (Johnson, 2011). Moreover, the author states that, although the lifetime risk for police attacks in the United States has been gradually rising over the past 30 years, the survival rate for officers assaulted during domestic violence calls has not increased. The failure to correctly anticipate what conditions may lead to an assault is considered to be a significant source of police negativity and officer suspicion of the public, prompting officers to stress the need to be constantly vigilant (Johnson, 2011). This makes a lot of sense since it may be highly beneficial to improve an officer’s ability to anticipate which domestic violence scenarios are most likely to result in an assault since they would take preventive measures.

Review

To strength this argument, the author brings forward different data analyses from researches conducted on this matter. The first was research examining the traits of attackers in 1,143 attacks on police officers across 37 local agencies in five U.S. states. The bulk of the attackers in these attacks were the youth (aged between 18 and 25 years), men, compressing of individuals of ethnic minorities, jobless, having consumed alcohol previous to the assault, and had exhibited an irate or aggressive attitude. Many of these people also had personal issues, such as a lack of upper secondary education, a criminal background, and home marital problems (Johnson, 2011). Similar research examined the assailant characteristics in all law enforcement officer killings reported to the FBI from 1985 to 1994. They discovered that most of the attackers aged between 15 and 29 years, male, belonging to ethnic-racial minorities, jobless, poor income level, unengaged, had been influenced by drugs or alcohol, and had a felony conviction.

Three other kinds of research were conducted in the western nations. The technique of data acquisition employed in all three of these research was the same. The data for the domestic violence event comes from official police records and surveys with domestic abuse victims performed by the study team within a week after the event (Johnson, 2011). There was additional information regarding the batterer’s actions before the arrival of the police acquired via conversations with victims of abuse, information regarding the batterer’s past convictions record was obtained from the government crimes database (Johnson, 2011). The attackers in all three of these English studies were found to be mainly lesser-income men who were jobless, had a felony conviction, and were consuming alcohol there at the occasion of the abuse. The majority were between the ages of 17 and 25, with an aggregate age of 22 (Johnson, 2011). However, these studies had some faults: there was no single effort made to forecast police assaults and to differentiate between assailants and non-assailants, and the studies also assumed that all occa