Data Suggests 40 Percent of Cops Abuse Family

[progressoid]

Police violence in undeniable. As Black Lives Matter protests and riots erupt across the nation, video after video shows cops attacking unarmed civilians. In Louisville, David McAtee was murdered by a police officer for protesting the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. But many still believe that police can be trusted to act in the public interest, protecting and serving the innocent. Surely many do, but research into the private lives of cops suggest that belief in the restraint of law enforcement is founded at least in part on faith in men who abuse their wives and children.

Research, slightly outdated and skewed by a culture of silence and intimidation, suggest that police officers in the United States perpetrate acts of domestic violence at roughly 15 times the rate of the general population. Because officers protect their own, domestic victims of violent cops often don’t know where to go. Sometimes they reach out to Alex Roslin, author of Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence, the American Society of Journalists and Authors-award winning book that constitutes perhaps the only major work on this subject.

The numbers in your book are absolutely shocking. In particularly, the number 15 is shocking. You support the claim that abuse is roughly 15 times more pervasive within police families than in the general population. Where does that come from?

The major study here was done by a police officer and a sociologist in Tucson, Arizona, working with a collaborator who had studied domestic violence in military families. It wasn’t by the police department officially. That study found that 40 percent of cops reported having participated in domestic violence in the previous year. The researchers questioned spouses and officers separately with anonymous questions and came up with strikingly similar figures.

An FBI advisory board later found that roughly 40 percent of officers who filled out questionnaires in a number of different settings admitted to being physically violent with their spouse in the previous six months. The general population data for self-reported abuse is closer to 4 percent when people are asked to report on the last 12 months.

more...https://money.yahoo.com/data-suggests-40-percent-cops-145601125.html

[hlthe2b]

1. While I don't want to paint too broad a brush stroke, policing seems to attract those with

inflexible and very black v white thinking patterns. So, I doubt many tolerate being questioned by spouse or kids.

Yet another reason for major police reform.

[lindysalsagal]

2. You have to be into the power of it all to sit in a car for days at a time.

People who need power are dangerous.