Thread by @sentientist

I've often seen the statistic that 40% of police are domestic abusers- the stat comes from this Neidig 1992 study. When you dig into the data, the story is much more interesting. Cops' wives and husbands are *more* violent than cops themselves. thread 🧵
policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/files/original…

The study asked 385 male officers, 40 female officers & 115 wives of officers whether they had engaged in "minor" or "severe" violence. Whether they perpetrated it themselves (self) or the other partner had perpetrated the violence (spouse) or whether either had (relationship)

Check out Table 2 again- Both male police officers and police officer's wives reported that wives were more likely to be the perpetrators of violence at 33%. Wives and officers also largely agreed on the rate of violence of male officers at 28% and 25%.

In couples with a police officer husband and marital violence about half reported mutual violence but when only one partner was said to have been aggressive, it was *33% likely to be the wives*. This means cop husbands were unilaterally violent in 17% of couples.

For some reason, female police officers look like they have much more violent husbands but it's unclear if the study has the husband data and the sample is pretty small (n=40) so I'll just post what the paper said about these couples.

Compared to civilians, men in both military & law enforcement more likely to be involved in intimate partner violence. It looks like wives of cops slightly more violent than wives of military men but in both kinds of couples, wives were similarly or more violent than husbands.

So, based on these 1992 statistics, if you have 100 couples where a cop is the husband ~60 of them will not have domestic violence and of the ~40 with domestic violence ~20 couples will have violence perpetrated by both parties, ~13 wife only and ~7 with husband only.

The 40% of police statistic is very popular among people arguing to abolish or #DefundThePolice and #ACAB type accounts. Many people just say "40% of cops beat their wives". The paper itself described above 👆 shows this is not true.

I can't make sense of how pointing out the spousal abuse rate is an argument against the police or police funding. Are they saying that if you defund the police, cops will find jobs that lead to less abuse? Or if police aren't making money their wives will leave them?

There's not good data I could find on domestic violence rates among other occupations- some evidence that meat plant workers have higher rates of domestic violence since the population rates of domestic violence and other violent crimes increase when abattoirs move into town.

We do know Black men &women are most likely to experience violence from one another at around 40% compared to Asian & Pacific Islanders at 15%. If you took away people's jobs for domestic violence, you'd disproportionately impact Black people. ujimacommunity.org/wp-content/upl…

Most of these tweets "40% of cops beat their wives so if you are supporting cops you are supporting domestic violence" - Not true, not relevant and would not be acceptable to say about any other group
twitter.com/search?q=%22co…