Summary Of The Sherman And Berk Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment

The Sherman and Berk Minneapolis Domestic Violence experiment was an experiment that focused on the effects of arrest with an emphasis on domestic violence cases. During the experiment, police were given three methods to use in order to reduce domestic violence cases. These methods included arresting the individual who committed the crime, an attempt to counsel both parties involved, and sending the offender away from the victim in order to cool down. As a result, some problems arose from the experiment due to “prematurely and unduly publicizing” the results of the experiment labeled as a “slippage”.
According to an article by Richard O. Lempert, police departments that have changed their arrest policies in response to Sherman and Berk’s domestic violence experiment has caused more harm than good. Lempert makes the argument against the publication of the Minneapolis experiment is that it should have awaited replication from other departments due to the fact that there may have been extensive variations across jurisdictions. This …show more content…
The reason why I trust the findings is because I do not think these problems were such a big deal. In actuality, I think it was great that the results were published so quickly because it caused another deterrent to committing domestic violence. On the other hand, publishing the results so quickly could have caused the main deterrent instead of being deterred by being arrested, being counseled by an officer or sent off to cool down which is my reason for not trusting the results. I don’t think this experiment was executed exactly as planned because it is hard to get people to participate in an experiment in order to understand if their significant was affected by the experiment in a negative or positive way (i.e., the victims & interviews). This makes it hard to understand how accurate the findings