Hands Up at Home: Militarized Masculinity and Police Officers Who Commit Intimate Partner Abuse

INTRODUCTIONOn May 7, 2013, Baltimore City police were called to the home of James Smith and Kendra Diggs by a neighbor reporting a disturbance.1 upon their arrival, officers heard a woman, later identified as Diggs, yelling, "Help me, help me" and a man shout, "Go away."2 Officers knocked on the door; when no one answered, they kicked down the door and took Diggs, who was bleeding from a small facial wound, outside.3 Officers then saw Smith, a twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore City Police Department,4 run upstairs.5 Diggs told the officers that Smith had a gun; Diggs was standing on the street with officers when Smith fired from a second floor window and killed her.6 Baltimore City Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi insisted that Smith had not been given preferential treatment because he was a fellow officer: "[t]he minute he fired at that young lady and our police officers-he was treated as a suspect," Guglielmi explained.7 When he fired a shot, Smith became a suspect-but apparently not before. Although officers had already been told that Smith had a gun and saw him flee when they approached, Guglielmi noted that the shooting was sudden and took the responding officers by surprise: "[y]ou're not expecting to go to a home of a police officer, someone you work side by side with, who engages you in a gunbattle."8Perhaps police should have expected the worst. Media reports of intimate partner abuse9 by police officers are startlingly common.10 In the same week that Smith committed suicide, the Cato Institute's National Police Misconduct Reporting Project listed a number of incidents of intimate partner abuse by police officers in jurisdictions ranging from Spokane, Washington11 to Gonzales, Louisiana12 to Fairfax County, Virginia.13 Five months after Smith shot Diggs, Baltimore City police officer Christopher Robinson shot his ex-girlfriend, Marie Hartman, and her new boyfriend, Andrew Hoffman (a Baltimore City firefighter), before killing himself.14 The shooting took place three months after Hartman ended her relationship with Robinson.15 In November 2013, District of Columbia police officer Samson Edwards Lawrence III struck his wife, who had a brain tumor, in the head in an attempt to kill her, according to Prince George's County, Maryland prosecutors.16 Lawrence hit his wife in the head with a metal lamp fixture and threatened her with knives.17 when asked about the recent increase in arrests of District of Columbia police officers, Chief Cathy Lanier noted that officers committing "interpersonal violence that occurs off duty and in the home" was not only one of the most pressing problems that her department faced, but also one of the two largest issues confronting police chiefs throughout the country.18The scant social science research that does exist on intimate partner abuse by police officers might have given the responding officers in the Diggs case further reason for caution. Studies suggest that police officers are more likely than others to commit intimate partner abuse.19 Large numbers of officers report knowing someone in their department who has committed intimate partner abuse;20 the partners of officers report higher than average rates of physical and verbal abuse.21 A recent United States Department of Justice investigation of the Puerto Rico Police Department found that between 2005 and 2010, the department received 1,459 civilian complaints alleging domestic violence by officers.22 Ninety-eight officers were arrested more than once on domestic violence charges between 2007 and 2010; many of those officers remained employed by the Puerto Rico Police Department.23 Three Puerto Rico Police Department officers shot their spouses in 2010.24The deaths of Michael Brown25 and Eric Garner26 and the almost daily news stories about abusive and violent police conduct27 are currently prompting questions about the appropriate use of force by police officers. And the history of police brutality directed towards women, particularly women of color, transwomen, and lesbians, has been well documented. …