Summary
The goal of this institutional ethnography was to link police responses in woman abuse incidents to the larger institutional and structural factors governing police action using both abused women's understanding of their experiences with police as well as officers' accounts of their work. From the in-depth, qualitative interviews, it is apparent that women's dissatisfaction with police largely stems from officers' inability or refusal to adhere to their requests to have their abusers removed from the home, arrested, or charged. While policies and domestic violence police training shape the ways in which officers "handle" domestic disputes, their individual attitudes and perceptions also play a large role. In addition, the police response is influenced by how the officer perceives police work. Despite the intention of protocols to ensure a consistency in police responses, differences in police training, attitudes and perceptions mean that the response an abused woman receives largely depends on the officer who takes her call.