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Preventing repeat incidents of family violence: a randomized field test of a second responder program

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Abstract

This field test, conducted with the cooperation of the Redlands, California, Police Department, sought to vary one of the parameters thought to affect the impact of second response programs Victims who called the Redlands police with a domestic abuse complaint were randomly assigned (1) to receive a second response within 24 hours, (2) to receive a second response within seven days, or (3) to receive no second response. An examination of police records and surveys with victims six months after the initial complaint was called did not indicate any reduction in new abuse resulting from any second response condition. The current findings, coupled with earlier research results, strongly suggest that second response programs are at best ineffective in reducing the potential for new abuse and at worst may increase the likelihood of new abusive incidents.

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Notes

  1. Interviews were completed with 72 percent of the sample. This unusually high success rate for a domestic violence criminal justice sample was due, in part, to the low level of transience among New Yorkers living in public housing.

  2. As in the first experiment, the investigators were successful in interviewing more than 70 percent of victims in the sample at the end of the six-month tracking period.

  3. Retaining these cases as control cases did not change the outcome of the analyses.

  4. We considered using an approach suggested by Angrist (2006) which capitalizes on randomization to develop an instrumental variables solution to the problem of less than full treatment integrity. However, the overall results as detailed later suggest that even if the treatments were delivered fully there would not have been a beneficial outcome for treatment.

  5. See Labriola et al. (2008).

  6. Since home visits to conduct research interviews was a strategy of last resort, those interviews completed as a result of this method occurred 2–3 months later than the six-month target follow-up date. Since the randomization process resulted in roughly equal numbers of experimental and control assignments throughout the intake process, the delayed interviews were evenly split between experimental and control households.

  7. Following convention in studies of criminal justice interventions for domestic violence cases, we gathered information only on prior domestic incidents. Research has shown that prior domestic incidents are most closely related to the propensity to commit future domestic abuse.

  8. This might mean that recidivism using the victim interview sample might result in slight underestimates of the true rate of new abuse.

  9. Ten cases in which the identity of the perpetrator was not known were coded as “same perpetrator” based on the observation that over 90 percent of new incidents where the identity of the perpetrator was known involved the same perpetrator as the original incident.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RAND Corporation, Arington, VA, USA

    Robert C. Davis

  2. Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University Israel, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Weisburd

  3. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

  4. Police Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

    Edwin E. Hamilton

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  1. Robert C. Davis
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  2. David Weisburd
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  3. Edwin E. Hamilton
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Correspondence to Robert C. Davis.

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Davis, R.C., Weisburd, D. & Hamilton, E.E. Preventing repeat incidents of family violence: a randomized field test of a second responder program. J Exp Criminol 6, 397–418 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-010-9107-3

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