More Violence at the Door

The U.S. criminal legal system is facing an inflection point as the Trump administration champions tough-on-crime policing and “law and order.” In recent history, whenever we face a carceral turn like this, one group is frequently used to justify tough-on-crime policies: domestic violence survivors. Tough-on-crime proponents often argue that more aggressive policing is necessary to protect domestic violence survivors. Yet survivors are often the first to be failed—and punished—by the criminal legal system.

As an epidemiologist studying the public health consequences of the criminal legal system, with a focus on domestic violence, I consistently see through my research and experience working with survivors that our overly aggressive police response causes untold harm to survivors when they reach out to police for help. Survivors from marginalized groups face the harshest consequences, especially Black survivors.

Take, for example, Nakala Murry and her son Aderrien. In 2023 Murry’s abusive ex-boyfriend showed up unexpectedly at her home in Mississippi. To try to protect herself and her family, Murry gave Aderrien (then eleven years old) a phone and asked him to call for help. Police arrived at the scene and shot Aderrien in the chest within seconds of entering the home. After being shot, Aderrien reportedly said: “What did I do? I don’t want to die.” The child miraculously survived after four days in the hospital on a ventilator.

The pain and trauma didn’t end there for the Murry family. A year later, the county prosecuting attorney petitioned to remove Murry’s custody of her three children, accusing her of child neglect. The petition cites the police shooting of Aderrien in its claim of child neglect, blaming Murry for the violent acts of both her ex-boyfriend and the police officer who shot her son. This case is a particularly egregious failure of the government response to domestic violence, but it is also emblematic of a common problem: survivors, especially Black survivors, are often punished by the criminal legal system when seeking help from that very system.

While police are tasked with protecting survivors from violence by enforcing the law, officers also have the power to use force to achieve their law enforcement aims—and often exercise that power. This makes police poorly equipped to deescalate domestic violence incidents and can instead result in police violence against survivors and their families, especially for Black survivors.

Additionally, arrest is often a short-sighted response to domestic violence that fails to address and resolve its root causes. Indeed, Murry’s ex-boyfriend had previously been arrested multiple times for domestic violence, but those arrests did not prevent him from going to her home in that 2023 incident. The weaponization of the child welfare system against Black families, like the effort to remove Murry’s custody of her children, can be yet another punitive outcome of the police response to domestic violence.

Last year, I coauthored the first systematic review of the consequences of domestic violence policing for survivors. My coauthors and I identified multiple studies documenting that domestic violence policing can have harmful consequences for survivors, and that Black survivors are often disproportionately impacted by these consequences. We also published a new study showing that domestic violence policing may lead to increased surveillance of Black families by the child welfare system. Existing evidence clearly demonstrates that our current overreliance on police to respond to domestic violence consistently fails and punishes survivors, and an increase in tough-on-crime policing stands to make things worse.

Since the 1980s, the United States has steadfastly relied on policing as the primary response to domestic violence. About half of states have a mandatory arrest law, which requires police to make an arrest anytime they are called for a domestic violence incident regardless of the survivor’s wishes. If the police are unsure of who the abusive party is, they are still required to make an arrest—potentially resulting in the wrongful arrest of the survivor or both parties.

Many states also require survivors to file a police report in order to access crime victim compensation. This means that survivors may be denied relief money from the state, which is designed to cover medical bills or other expenses related to the abuse, if they don’t want to engage with police. This is a coercive policy that incentivizes police involvement even when it may be harmful to a survivor or against their wishes.

The latest reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) appropriated thirty times more funding for law enforcement than for community-based organizations. In today’s domestic violence landscape, survivors often have little recourse or avenues for support without involving police.

Even in the face of growing calls for criminal legal reform and increased recognition of the harms of criminalization and incarceration, domestic violence is often viewed as an exception that categorically requires intensive police response. The assumption underlying this persistent and singular focus on police as the best solution for domestic violence is that policing keeps survivors safe. However, after three decades of research, there is no consistent evidence indicating that policing and arrests reduce domestic violence.

On the contrary, there are often unmeasured harms of domestic violence policing for survivors. These harms, which have long been raised by survivor advocacy groups, include police arresting survivors during calls for help; survivors being discouraged from seeking services out of fear that the police will get involved; police coordinating with immigration enforcement to facilitate deportations; and—as evidenced through the injustice against the Murry family—police violence against survivors or their loved ones and threats to child custody.

Our recent systematic review summarizes all evidence to date on the generalized consequences of domestic violence policing and how these consequences can uniquely impact Black survivors. We identified multiple studies demonstrating that the police response to domestic violence, including mandatory arrest laws, has increased the risk of survivor arrest. Researchers posit that the rise of mandatory arrest laws and intensive police responses to domestic violence have contributed to the dramatic increase in women’s arrest rates over the past few decades, resulting from women calling the police for help and instead being met with criminalization.

We identified an emerging body of evidence suggesting that Black survivors disproportionately suffer from the harms of domestic violence policing. For example, a study of domestic violence incidents in the District of Columbia found that when police responded to couples composed of two Black people, they were significantly more likely to arrest both parties in comparison to couples with a white survivor. This should not be surprising. Policing, the criminal legal system, and the child welfare system share their roots in structural racism. Black women experience heightened rates of police violence, arrest, and incarceration compared to white women. Black mothers and families are also disproportionately surveilled, regulated, and punished by the child welfare apparatus. It follows, then, that the coordination of these systems would compound and exacerbate racialized harm for Black survivors and their families.

Another striking study followed domestic violence survivors in Milwaukee for twenty-three years after a domestic violence incident and found that survivors whose partners had been arrested had a 64 percent higher rate of death (by any cause) than survivors whose partners were not arrested. This suggests that a domestic violence arrest can result in serious, long-term health consequences for survivors, ultimately leading to premature death. But even that striking number—64 percent—undersells the reality of the impact of domestic violence arrests on Black survivors because it is an average across study participants. For Black study participants, the arrest of a partner was correlated with a 98 percent higher death rate. (For white participants, the study found a 9 percent higher death rate.)

Lastly, our recent study of domestic violence policing and family surveillance by the child welfare system showed that in large, predominantly white counties, the percentage of police-reported domestic violence incidents that resulted in arrest was positively associated with the Black child maltreatment report rate. These initial findings suggest that family surveillance may be a consequence of domestic violence policing for Black families in certain parts of the country, which could subsequently result in threats to child custody.

Considering all the available evidence, we know enough to follow the lead of survivor groups advocating for new approaches to domestic violence. The available evidence strongly challenges the notion that police are best suited to keep survivors safe and demands that we offer survivors alternative options and increased decision-making power, rather than intensifying the aggressive policing practices that have failed them.

Ever since the inception of the movement to increase law enforcement response and criminal legal penalties for domestic violence, Black feminist activists have been sounding the alarm that increased policing would not serve the needs of survivors, especially survivors of color. In 2000 movement leaders, including Angela Y. Davis, Beth Richie, Dorothy Roberts, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Loretta Ross, held a conference seeking to address all forms of violence against women of color, recognizing that violence in the home could not be solved using police violence. This led to the formation of INCITE!, a feminist network of women of color that challenges the criminal legal paradigm of the domestic violence response.

Mainstream domestic violence organizations had generally ignored or dismissed this decades-long organizing work grounded in Black feminist theory. However, in 2020, during the racial reckoning spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, more than forty domestic violence coalitions from across the nation released a joint “Moment of Truth” letter, naming how white leadership within the mainstream domestic violence movement had failed to listen to Black feminist leaders who “cautioned us against the consequences of choosing increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to gender-based violence.”

Despite this unprecedented, nationwide momentum to rethink the current police-centric response to domestic violence and elevate the voices of Black survivors, we have made little progress during the intervening five years and, indeed, now stand to lose ground.

There has been a persistent lack of political will and funding support for approaches that address survivors’ basic needs, such as housing and financial independence, and that promote survivor choice and agency without involving intensive police response. Such approaches include investments in a Housing First model for survivors, increased accessibility of survivor grants and victim compensation without requiring a police report, repeal of mandatory arrest laws, and elimination of restrictive criminal background check policies that may block survivors from securing housing and employment. And now we face a new carceral turn where tough-on-crime proponents are likely to call for more extreme policing and criminalization in the name of protecting domestic violence survivors, despite the clear damage this can cause survivors.

Perhaps policymakers are reluctant to prioritize interventions that enhance survivor choice and access to economic support because of an entrenched perception that increased policing is the most effective solution to domestic violence. However, stories like Nakala Murry’s demonstrate that the status quo is dire. If we continue with business as usual in our response to domestic violence, or intensify the police response, and fail to invest in alternative, survivor-led solutions that prioritize long-term safety and stability, we will continue to harm the very people we aim to help. This is especially true for Black survivors and their families, whose safety is often threatened by police involvement due to the same underlying racism in our criminal legal system that continues to devastate Black communities overall.

_{Image: WCN 24/7 / Flickr}

Contributors

Sandhya Kajeepeta Sandhya Kajeepeta is the Senior Researcher and Statistician at the Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• alternatives to policing
• domestic violence
• police violence