Article Summary
Shields, J. Winter 2008.
An evaluation of police compliance with domestic violence documentation policy reform: Improving the identification of exposed children. Best Practices in Mental Health 4(1):65–73. http://lyceumbooks.com/MentalHJournal.htm.
The author reports on a study of the quality of police reports on domestic violence and such factors as the characteristics of the families involved and whether children witnessed the violence. The study found that a large number of police officers in the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) were not keeping good records when it came to responding to domestic disputes. Furthermore, it was widely accepted that when these domestic disputes occurred, the children were not around to witness them. However, the author notes, children did in fact bear witness to these events fairly often. The study involved 3,000 violent domestic felony files collected by the SFPD between June 2003 and December 2004. The review found that while police documentation had increased significantly over the years, there still remained problems in the quality of the data collected. The study also showed that police files were much more likely to include required supplemental incident report forms when officers documented a child to be present at the scenes of the domestic dispute. The author concludes that child exposure to violence must be attacked from all angles, and police could play a bigger role by keeping better records of incidents that occur.
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