Author and forensic consultant Victoria Hargan reveals personality traits and characteristics that may be responsible for the high risk of domestic violence perpetrated by police officers. Police Personality and Domestic Violence offers a forensic psychological approach and review of literature on the scope of the problem when domestic violence is committed by a police officer. Research suggests that personality traits of police officers are similar to domestic abusers and that it is these very traits that make police officers effective at police work. Personality characteristics such as authoritative, aggressive, assertive, controlling and suspicious help the officer in his duties. These same personality traits are also negative traits in battering relationships. Domestic violence perpetrated by police officers is a result of multifaceted dynamics, including the individual police officer's personality, police culture, police training, and exposure to violence on the job, a sense of entitlement, and influence of the administration of the police agency. These dynamics may predispose police officers to domestic violence. This book offers suggestions for the pre-selection of police candidates, in addition to reviewing the psychological instruments used in police selection. A must read for forensic evaluators, the law enforcement community, and the medical and mental health communities.

Police Personality and Domestic Violence offers a literature review on the scope of the problem when domestic violence is committed by a police officer. Domestic violence committed by police officers is a result of multifaceted dynamics; police personality, police culture, training, exposure to violence on the job, sense of entitlement, and influence of the administration of the police department which may encourage or predispose police officers to domestic violence. The author reveals personality traits and characteristics that may be responsible for the high rate of domestic violence within the police family.

Winner of the American Society of Journalists and Authors' prestigious Arlene Book Award. In "Police Wife," award-winning investigative journalist Alex Roslin takes readers inside the tightly closed police world and one of its most explosive secrets: domestic violence in up to 40% of police homes, which departments mostly ignore or let slide.

This study examined the perceptions of officers with colleagues who perpetrate acts of domestic violence. This was a qualitative research design from a phenomenological perspective. The data was gathered by the use of face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions. The data was analyzed by the use of bracketing, horizonalization, clusters of meanings, textural and structural descriptions, and the invariant structure of the phenomena described by the study participants. Upon completion of the 30 interviews, the audio tapes were all transcribed, and loaded in to Atlas Ti for the purpose of coding the data for the major themes. A constant comparison method was used to analyze the data to help identify the similarities and differences between the study participants' perceptions with the phenomena. The five qualitative questions each depict a different area of experience with the phenomenon, to create a holistic picture of the perceptions of the thirty participants. The findings suggest that for some officers, the inability to separate their police role from their civilian role may be a factor in the perpetration of domestic violence by law enforcement officers. The findings also suggest that social workers may be able to play an important role in the remediation of the problem of domestic violence for those within and outside police social work settings.

"Domestic conflict is the largest single cause of violence in America, yet police have traditionally been reluctant to make arrests for such assaults. In the past decade, however, that reluctance has been overcome, with a 70% increase in arrests for minor assaults, heavily concentrated among low-income and minority groups. Spearheading this nationwide crackdown are the 15 states and the District of Columbia which have adopted unprecedented statutes mandating arrest in cases of misdemeanor domestic battery." "In Policing Domestic Violence, criminologist Lawrence Sherman confronts the tough questions raised by this controversial approach to a complex social problem. How should police respond to the millions of domestic violence cases they confront each year, when most prosecutors refuse to pursue them? Why does arresting unemployed batterers do more harm than good? What approaches should police adopt when arrest has totally opposite effects upon "haves" and "have-nots"? Sherman, a leading police researcher, is the architect of the 1984 Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment - the first controlled test of the effects of arrest on repeat crime. Here he describes what was learned from a multi-year federal research program to repeat the experiment in Milwaukee, Miami, Colorado Springs, Omaha, and Charlotte. The results are both surprising and provocative." "In fact, arrest deters selectively. Sherman found that it effectively inhibits some offenders, but incites more violence in others. It may also deter batterers for a month or so, only to make them more violent later on. Under this policy, therefore, some women exchange short-term safety for a longer-term increase in danger. Sherman also shows that compulsory arrest reduces violence against middle-class women at the expense of those (often black) who are poor. Some advocates of the policy have endorsed this moral choice, but Sherman argues that domestic violence will continue in spite of, and sometimes because of, our attempts to stop it. Further, while it is possible to predict which couples will continue to suffer abusive behavior, it has been difficult to find effective ways of preventing chronic violence, even when arrests are made. Relying on arrest as a "fix" for domestic abuse only underscores the long neglect of underlying social problems, and Sherman calls instead for more flexible policies - such as "community policing" - that more adequately reflect the diversity of American society."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved