Domestics

I just read an interesting post on Bounty, about mums, dads, fallings-out and the Police.

Now, from what I can decipher, she hits him a fair bit, he just wants to have contact with his little'un so he doesn't retalliate. One time, he pushes her away, she falls, calls the Police and he gets arrested. Doesn't seem fair really, and it probably isn't.

The poster of this thread goes on to say that the Police have side with her and the law doesn't care about dads sometimes.

I can see this from a slightly different perspective, doing the job I do.

Whenever there is corroborative evidence in allegations of domestic assault (i.e. the allegation and maybe a bruise or a scratch, or more), the Police (certainly up here in Scotland, and it'll nae be that much different in England and Wales) are duty bound to follow the Lord Advocate's guidelines, which generally means that the accused (as they quickly become) will appear at court on the next lawful day. That's bad enough, but if this occurs on Friday teatime, it means that they're in the cells from then until Monday.

Either way the allegation has to be investigated, which means that someone's getting arrested on suspicion (or detained as we call it) until the matter's resolved.

Very often I have been to incidents where a couple have fallen out and one of them in a fit of pique calls the Police, to get the other one out of their hair for a few hours. They tell us when we get there that they don't want to press charges, they just want some space for a while.

They don't seem to realise the chain of events that they set in motion, and they don't take kindly to us following our procedures.

I know a lot of cops who detest being sent to domestics for precisely this reason. There have been circumstances in the past where domestic assaults have become murders, so we always take them seriously. But spurious complaints made by males and females (we don't side with men or women, we respond to the individual circumstances) do a great injustice to the genuinely fearful and abused, who often are so scared they are the ones least likely to have the genuine bottle to call us.

Point of this post. Well, it's to say that we, as the Police, don't have a thing against the dads. Nor do we have a thing against the mums. We certainly want the best for any victims and all children involved. But we don't want to have to deal with spurious, false, exaggerated complaints borne out of spite. Because whilst we're dealing with those, a real victim could be suffering.