Domestic Violence Training for Police Officers: Effective Tips

By Scot DuFour  |  08/20/2024

Few calls for service frustrate police departments as much as repeated domestic violence (DV) incidents. It is why domestic violence training for officers is essential.

Why do so many victims keep going back to the same situation and allow more violence to occur? Law enforcement officers want to help these victims, but it can often be very hard for them to understand a victim’s actions and know how best to help.

Domestic violence calls can be a common occurrence for patrol officers. With each encounter, officers gain a richer and more nuanced understanding of the intricate complexities and formidable challenges these cases present. For example, officers may adapt a better understanding of the actions they should take when responding to a DV incident in order to help build the prosecution’s case.

The initial investigation into a DV incident is the prime opportunity to gather valuable evidence and form a relationship with the victim that instills trust and compassion. Building this relationship and understanding how hard it is for DV victims to leave their circumstances. As a result, officers are more likely to sympathize with victims and be less frustrated when they repeatedly encounter the same situation, which also goes a long way to gaining trust and cooperation from community members.

How Officers Can Help DV Victims

Officers must sincerely understand the monumental hurdles victims face when those victims try to leave a DV relationship. Ideally, they should ensure both victims' safety and well-being as well as public safety and officer safety.

Often, victims have been isolated, blamed, made to feel crazy through deliberate gaslighting, physically abused, and threatened. Sometimes, they’ve had their children used as leverage by the offender.

Victims may be financially tied to the offender and unsure how they’ll support themselves alone. The emotional, psychological, and physical abuse can make a victim feel helpless, worthless, and hopeless. Taking back control is a terrifying and arduous prospect.

So how can officers and investigators, including first responders, help domestic violence victims? These six practical tips for domestic violence calls may enhance police response to DV incidents while also maintaining officer safety.

1. Understand the Cycle of Violence

One way officers can better understand the actions of domestic violence victims is to recognize and learn about what is called the cycle of violence. Many DV experts now refer to this well-documented phenomenon as the “power and control wheel” because most DV relationships do not follow predictable patterns.

The power and control wheel displays the various ways DV offenders control and abuse their victims. Control can happen through:

• Coercion and threats
• Intimidation
• Emotional abuse
• Isolation
• Minimization of others’ feelings
• Denial
• Blame
• Use of children
• Economic abuse
• A set of entitlement or male privilege

2. Be a Patient, Supportive Ally

The most important thing an officer can do in the initial police response is sincerely want to help solve a domestic violence problem and not just treat the symptoms. Victims will need as much support as possible, and officers can help them gain access to local resources and plan how to leave a perpetrator.

Law enforcement officers must also have lots of patience. Only the victim can decide when she (most DV victims are female) is ready to break free from the cycle.

Knowing that a caring and empathetic officer or police agency is ready to help her will only increase the chance that she will take positive action. Officers who act irritated or inconvenienced by the victim may actually deter the victim from escaping an abuser.

3. Take Highly Detailed Notes and Record Victim Statements

Collecting evidence is paramount. After a DV incident, victims will often recount what happened.

Officers must take highly detailed notes and, preferably, record the victim’s statement. A recording is important because it’s not unusual for a victim to later recant or change her recollection of an incident. While this reversal can pose problems from a prosecution standpoint, statements taken by officers can demonstrate in court that the victim is scared or was intimidated by the perpetrator into changing her story.

Excellent documentation of the victim’s statements early in the investigation doesn’t only play a role when the victim changes her story due to intimidation. Prosecutors will often call experts in domestic violence and trauma to explain how and why the memory of trauma victims changes as time passes after the incident. Thorough documentation of how the victim’s recollection changes can help bolster the testimony of those experts.

4. Always Seek Medical Attention for the Victim

During every domestic violence call, it’s important for law enforcement officers to ensure victims get prompt medical attention and evaluation. That’s because many injuries aren’t visible to the naked eye or apparent to first responders without medical training.

For example, in the body camera footage of a specific DV case, a responding officer said he was not sure he believed the victim had been strangled because the victim did not have any visible injuries on her neck. Fortunately, the victim was taken to a hospital and evaluated by a forensic nurse.

The examination report described the strangulation suffered by the victim as “extremely dangerous with potential to cause death.” Officers cannot risk overlooking injuries, so it is of paramount importance that they take victims who claim strangulation or other injuries to be evaluated by a trained medical professional.

Officers are not trained medical professionals and are not qualified to identify many common DV injuries. For example, researchers have found that only about 50% of strangulation victims will have any visible injuries.

Not much pressure is needed to cause strangulation. It only takes about 11 pounds of pressure on the neck to close off the carotid artery and only 4.4 pounds of pressure to close off the jugular vein. Keep in mind that a handshake yields about 50 pounds of pressure.

One commonly misunderstood sign of strangulation is called petechiae. It forms as visible small red dots on the skin, which are the result of broken capillaries.

While this type of injury may be visible, it often doesn’t look severe, so officers may discredit it. Petechiae often results from strangulation that occludes (obstructs) the jugular vein, but strangulation that occludes the carotid artery may have no visible symptoms at all.

The bottom line is that law enforcement officers need to keep their non-medical opinion to themselves about whether a strangulation or other physical abuse occurred. Instead, they need to believe the victim and get them evaluated by a forensic nurse. This examination will not only provide more detail about the severity of the injury but will also protect the victim from life-threatening medical issues that can manifest long after an event.

5. Recognize and Document Stalking Behavior

Many perpetrators stalk their victims, and this behavior is a reliable predictor of future violence against a victim. However, stalking behavior continues to be overlooked by many officers.

According to scholar Delanie Woodlock, domestic violence perpetrators control their victims by using tactics that are not viewed by others as overtly aggressive or breaking any laws. For example, some offenders may simply use technology to communicate with their victim. However, they can do so in a way that isolates that victim or makes her feel like she is always being watched and controlled.

A law enforcement officer must document every stalking behavior by a perpetrator because it can be very important for a future prosecution. This stalking behavior includes any behavior that shows the offender micromanages, threatens, shames, isolates, or conducts surveillance on the victim.

Such behaviors should be documented even if they are not directly related to the particular DV call to which an officer responds. The observations an officer makes in a report may later be used by a prosecutor as evidence of a pattern of behavior.

6. Interview Children as Victims and Witnesses

Domestic violence perpetrators are always looking for ways to manipulate and control their victims. Children are often used as a means of control by DV offenders, just like technology and other stalking-related tactics. Children who live fully surrounded by the behavior of a DV offender and are often both witnesses and victims in domestic violence incidents.

Studies have found that children as young as 12 are able to recognize and describe controlling and coercive behavior by an offender. The same study found that children in DV households become used to monitoring the situation in the home with great vigilance. Many children have even learned to intervene in strategic ways to help the victim when they sense an incident is imminent.

Recognizing the role that children play in DV households can help officers and prosecutors hold perpetrators accountable. It is also incredibly important that officers recognize the children as victims themselves. Officers can better serve these most vulnerable victims by taking steps to ensure they are appropriately interviewed and assisted in the same way as traditional partner victims of DV.

DV Cases Are Challenging, But Officers Can Help

A law enforcement officer plays a critical role in stopping domestic violence and helping victims break the cycle of violence. Domestic violence training for officers is essential to understand how to best respond to these incidents and what steps are the most important when it comes to keeping victims safe and building a case against an offender. Organizations such as the National Sheriffs Association can help by providing specialized, interactive training and resources to handle these sensitive situations effectively.

Domestic violence cases are not like any other crime. They are highly personal attacks, where the perpetrator is often someone who is supposed to care about the victim. These situations are wrought with history and a complex series of coercive or manipulative behavior.

Officers must show empathy, patience, and solid investigative skills to unravel the circumstances in DV crime. Approaching each DV case with that in mind will provide the best possible case to a prosecutor and help victims break free from the cycle of violence.

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