- Many states have passed mandatory arrest laws, which require the police to arrest abusers when a domestic violence incident is reported. These laws were justified by a randomized experiment in Minnesota which found that arrests reduced future violence.
-
Using the FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports, Iyengar found that mandatory arrest laws actually increased intimate partner homicides. He hypothesized that this increase in homicides is due to decreased reporting.
-
Iyengar investigate validity of this reporting hypothesis by examining the effect of mandatory arrest laws on family homicides where the victim is less often responsible for reporting. For family homicides, mandatory arrest laws appear to reduce homicides.
-
This study provided evidence that mandatory arrest laws may have perverse effects on intimate partner violence, harming the very people they were seeking to help.
-
Finding that mandatory arrests deters victim reporting rather than perpetrator abuse provides valuable insight into the intricacies facing attempts to decrease intimate partner violence.
Source: Radha Iyengar “Does Arrest Deter Violence? Comparing Experimental and Non-experimental Evidence on Arrest Laws” in The Economics of Crime (2010) Chapter 12.
But see “Explaining the Recent Decline in Domestic Violence” by Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler in Contemporary Economic Policy (2003) who found that three important factors were likely to have contribute to the decline in domestic violence in the USA in the 1990s:
(1) the increased provision of legal services for victims of intimate partner abuse,
(2) improvements in women’s economic status, and
(3) demographic trends, most notably the aging of the population.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments