Case Study: The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment

The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment was funded by the National Institute of Justice in an effort to respond to the intense dispute over the police response to domestic assaults. A triumvirate pressure from clinical psychologists, women’s groups, and police led Lawrence Sherman and Richard Berk to test the efficacy of the police response in a field study conducted in conjunction with the Minneapolis Police Department (Sherman and Berk 1984). The three preferred methods that fueled the debate, and subsequently tested, were the arrest of the perpetrator, mediation or arbitration of the dispute between the couple, and the separation of the parties for several hours to diffuse the situation. The officers who chose to participate in the