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Fair Treatment or Preferred Outcome? The Impact of Police Behavior on Victim Reports of Domestic Violence Incidents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Laura J. Hickman  and
Sally S. Simpson
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Abstract

This research is an exploratory test of two hypotheses emerging from debates about how police behavior may influence domestic violence victim reporting. From a procedural justice perspective, victims should be more apt to report victimization when previous encounters with police are viewed as procedurally fair. From a distributive justice perspective, denying victims their preferred outcome may discourage future police utilization. We find that satisfaction with police is related to both distributive and procedural justice but that re-utilization of police is conditioned by preferred outcome. Specifically, if the offender was arrested in accordance with victim preference, the victim is significantly more apt to utilize police in the future.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 2003 , pp. 607 - 633
Copyright
© 2003 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Pamela Alexander, Robert Brame, Joel Garner, and Raymond Paternoster. We also thank the editor and reviewers for thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft. A version of this work was presented at the 2000 meeting of the American Society of Criminology in San Francisco, California.

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