I can’t imagine there will be too many more updates to this thread, but I noticed this came out:
It’s… interesting that the takeaway is that the officers should be faulted for not citing Gabby. That might technically be true according to their department’s policies, but then I think that should cause some amount of discomfort in light of what I think we can reasonably infer about the broader dynamics at play in that relationship. Perhaps rather than faulting the officers for not citing Gabby based on her own protestations that she was at fault, the department (and really society in general) should be rethinking what an abusive relationship looks like and how to intervene effectively without contributing to the abuse.
The report does recommend “improved training” for officers, but that vague phrasing is typical for a throw-away term that won’t result in actual change. I hope domestic violence programs will continue to push for police training that will help cops determine when the person confessing to starting the altercation is actually the victim.
I saw that story about the Moab cops some time ago. I really think it’s unfair to impose even the slight discipline that they got. It seems (at least the version I read) that they violated policy by not arresting the alleged perpetrator, but they were just trying to give the kids a break, and instead of an arrest, just suggested that they spend the night apart. A terrible tragedy happened afterward, but cops are neither mind readers nor fortune tellers. Arresting Gabby (or for that matter, digging deeper and concluding that they should arrest Laundrie) would ultimately not have prevented this lunatic from doing what he did.
I’m not understanding this part. If Laundrie were arrested and required to attend trial in Moab (location of the domestic violence incident and incidentally far from Florida) Gabby would have been physically separated from him by jail bars.
On a vaguely related note, if you’re arrested in one state (for committing a crime in that state) and live in another state, what happens when the police tell you not to leave? Huge hotel bills? What if you have almost no money?
I’m assuming probably not for long. How long can you keep someone behind bars just for, say, slapping a partner? No one had any indication that he was a serious danger to Gabby, and even if they had – as we often see in domestic violence situations – there is only so much that the law can do.
If someone randomly slaps someone on the street there should still be some jail time, and there’s no good reason why slapping someone you’re intimate with on the street should result in a shorter sentence. Hopefully that would have been long enough to disrupt the trip.
I would have expected someone to get bail, but they would know that the police know about them.
OK, I think you’re applying a bit too much hindsight to this. As far as the police could reasonably tell, this was just a couple having a tiff. My point is that there was nothing they could have reasonably done to separate them permanently. I’m just trying to see the situation the way the police likely saw it.
The way Oregon handles intimate partner violence is pretty egalitarian. Unless there’s one person lying on the ground bruised and bloody and their abuser is standing over them in pristine condition with nothing but bloody knuckles they’ll haul both partners off, arrest them both and usually kick both loose in the morning unless some egregious information comes to light. Tends to interrupt the violence cycle pretty well and encourages victims to get restraining orders so if there’s another incident only one of the couple will be going to jail and there are unequivocal charges to be brought. Might could be that if they’d done that to Gabby and Brian, might have been enough of a wakeup call that they might have ended the trip right then and gone the hell home. Might also have kept them both on the straight and narrow for a bit, knowing the arrest is on their records and further incidents will bring real charges and they both know how much jail sucks. Hindsight is 20/20, but there’s a lot to be said about acquainting every person embroiled in an abuse situation with a good healthy dose of knowing where that path leads.
The problem with that is that too many people now have arrest records and it harms future employment opportunities because the explanation of “I was arrested for domestic battery but all charges were dropped” is almost universally met with the thought that he beat the hell out of his wife but got away with it.
I’m not in favor of any policy where we just arrest everyone and let the judge sort it out. As has been pointed out, even if Laundrie was arrested in this case, he posts bond and is out the next morning and free to do whatever it is he did.
That’s not the reason for mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence. The reason is to try to break up the cycle of violence, as @SmartAleq described.
And in case it wasn’t clear from the article, Utah is a state with a mandatory arrest law for domestic violence.
Which is exactly why the laws are already silly enough and we don’t need to add more silliness to them. Further, I’m not sure how you say “at least” Petito. Based upon the evidence they had at the scene, nobody ever alleged that he touched her. What could he have possibly been arrested for?
What exactly are you claiming is “silly” about statutes aimed to disrupt what tends to be a repetitive and escalating cycle of domestic violence?
We know that she admitted hitting him, so they had probable cause to arrest her. Hence, of the two, she at least should have been arrested.
That phrasing entails no claim that I knew of any evidence he too should have been arrested. It just does not rule it out, because we don’t know everything that was said and everything the police saw.
A physical assault shouldn’t be regarded as a “tiff”. If the police aren’t taking assaults seriously, we have a serious problem completely apart from the Gabby Petito case.
That the result often, and in this very case, would mandate the arrest of a victim of domestic violence. And even if done perfectly it does not “disrupt” the cycle of violence as bail is granted in any civilized society and the person will be released, and madder than ever.
I’m not saying do nothing, but the new policies are demonstrably wrong as demonstrated by this very case.
Twenty or so years ago, hubs and I got into nasty fight and hubs threw his coffee cup at the wall next to me. He did NOT throw it at me, he threw to miss. The mug shattered and a shard cut me in the back badly enough to need stitches. I didn’t realize that constituted domestic violence back then and actually thought it was pretty funny until the police showed up at the doc-in-the-box with handcuffs for hubs.
That domestic violence charge limited a lot of his job choices and cost us a lot of money until we were able to get it expunged.
There are no one size fits all fixes for domestic violence.
In that example, he wasn’t deliberately trying to harm you. That’s quite different from the Petito/Laundrie situation where independent witnesses observed the fighting. Clearly no accident there.
Smashing stuff is intimidating behavior (some abusers specifically only smash their partner’s stuff when they “flip out”), but I don’t know if that applied or where that falls under the law.