By Adam Teperski, Ilya Klauzner

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) remains a pressing public health and criminal justice issue. Concerns have been raised about police misidentification of IPV victims as offenders - particularly women - due to factors such as self-defensive violence and non-conforming victim behaviour. Misidentification can have serious consequences, including criminalisation of victims and reduced access to support services.

This study investigates whether police are more likely to charge women with IPV offences by examining whether different evidentiary thresholds are applied to male and female persons of interest (POIs) in IPV assault cases. We use a robust instrumental variables approach to compare conviction rates among ‘marginal’ defendants—those who are on the cusp of being charged or not, depending on the attending officer’s individual tendency to proceed with legal action.

The analysis draws on 52,423 IPV assault incidents reported between July 2010 and February 2023, involving 38,413 male and 14,010 female POIs. By comparing conviction rates among marginal male and female POIs, we assess whether police require less evidence to charge women. If so, this would suggest gender bias in police charging decisions and support concerns about misidentification.

Key findings

Figure 1 presents our estimates of the impact of being proceeded against on the probability of conviction by gender for marginal POIs, after controlling for case characteristics, demographics and prior offending. 

Marginal female POIs had a conviction rate of 81.7%, while marginal male POIs had a rate of 67.2%. Although this 14.5 percentage point difference suggests stronger cases against women, it was not statistically significant. 

This indicates that police officers apply similar evidentiary thresholds when deciding to charge male and female POIs in IPV assault incidents. The findings suggest no gender bias in police charging decisions among experienced officers. However, the analysis does not account for potential bias in other parts of the justice system or among less experienced officers.

• Found no difference in the court conviction rate between marginal women and men charged with IPV. This suggests that experienced police apply similar evidentiary thresholds when charging men and women in IPV assault cases. 

Study 2: The nature and extent of cross-intimate partner violence 

• Cross-IPV, where both partners face legal action, is rare but increasing—from 0.7% of IPV events in 2010–11 to 2.5% in the year to Feb 2023; cross-ADVOs also rose from 5.7% in 2016 to 13.7% in 2023. 

• Review of police cross-IPV incidents found men and women involved showed similar rates of violent behaviours and physical injury.   

• Past DFV experience in cross-IPV incidents: Men were more likely to have a longer history of perpetration, while women were likely to have experienced more prior victimisation. 

Neither study found evidence that women are mischarged in the specific circumstances considered. However, misidentification is difficult to detect in administrative records, and these findings do not rule out that misidentification occurs in individual cases or under different circumstances.  

By Avlana Eisenberg

The clamor for police reform in the United States has reached a fever pitch. The current debate has mainly centered around questions of police function: What functions should police perform, and how should they perform them to avoid injustice and unnecessary harm? This Article, in contrast, focuses on a central aspect of police culture-namely, how police envision their relationship to those policed. It exposes the vast reach of a deeply engrained "danger narrative" and demonstrates the disastrous consequences that this narrative has helped to bring about. Reinforced by police training, codified by courts, and broadly deployed, the danger narrative is an "us-versus-them" ideology that envisions "them"-all persons whom police are observing, investigating, detaining-as a lethal danger to "us"-law enforcement personnel. Structural and functional reforms have little hope of succeeding unless this toxic narrative can be displaced.

By Avlana Eisenberg

One tends to think of mercy as something that judges and chief executives occasionally dole out to convicted offenders. This picture is seriously incomplete. Many others are in a position to be merciful—from police on the street to corrections officers in a prison. In short, anyone who has power to inflict something disagreeable on another person has the opportunity to be merciful. More broadly still, mercy—understood as an act of leniency prompted by compassion—presupposes a capacity or disposition, namely the capacity or disposition to show compassion and understanding for another. This Essay develops both of the foregoing points. First, it points out that there are opportunities for mercy at every juncture of the criminal process, from policing to prison conditions. Second, it is not only the case that acts of mercy at each of these junctures are called for to help ameliorate the harshness of our criminal justice system. More broadly and more deeply, it is vital that all actors in the system approach their roles with the sort of compassionate mindset that is exemplified by, but hardly exhausted by, acts of mercy.