Case in the courts [DV]

[Tahar Joblis]

So. As some of you know, I live in a city that prides itself on being one of the lowest-crime areas of the country. It's a suburban place with very little interesting going on, but a large Asian [particularly Korean] population, relevant to this story; and the police like to keep a very tight lid on news of crimes or reports of crimes, to the point of burying it. But every once in a while something leaks out into the news.

So. Here's our story today. It involves a trio of Korean-Americans, and takes place in town. Their ethnicity may or may not be relevant, but has been a central feature of the reporting on the story.

A middle aged Korean woman called the police, claiming that her fiancee, with whom she had been living for a month and whose child she was carrying, beat her with a wooden practice sword. A [Korean, also] policeman arrives at the scene, as, evidently, do the neighbors, though she shows some bruising. The Korean man she accused of abusing her denied all four of those facts - the beating, the residence, the pregnancy, and the engagement.

The neighbors back him up on this. He asks the police officer to verify the identity of the woman in question; the police officer asked her for ID, but she claims that the man hid her purse and she doesn't know where her ID is.

Now; pause a moment; I'd like the quick to jump to conclusions to think a moment about what they would do in the police officer's shoes.

Finding this an acceptable excuse for not having identification, the officer arrests the man and sends him off to jail, but he also takes fingerprints from the woman while questioning her. The man spends the night in jail before posting a $5,000 bond, and is served with an emergency restraining order preventing him from going within 100 yards of his home.

So. What do you think happens next?

When the man is able to return home, he discovers that his house has been thoroughly cleaned out. The woman has of course skipped town. The police discover, after running the woman's fingerprints [the police claim they did this on their own suspicion; I don't particularly believe that, since it seems likely they would have actually taken steps before she skipped town], that she has a complex police record under a name very distinct from the one she gave him.

It appears [her trial hasn't gone through yet] that she has a habit of finding middle-aged Korean businessmen under assumed names and then robbing them blind or coercing money out of them; either using the threat of police charges to coerce money out of them, or forcing [or faking] a domestic confrontation to get the police to remove the man from his house in order to rob him blind. She had a number of outstanding arrest warrants.

Now - this is the latest news - the man is suing the city for "emotional distress, suffering, anguish, fright, horror, nervousness, grief, anxiety, worry, shock, humiliation, insomnia and shame, all of which also negatively affected his ability to run his business."

So. NSG; judges, juries, and peanut-pitchers, what say you about this? Did the police handle this wrong? What, if anything, should be changed? What would you have done?

[Shard_Head]

They handled it correctly by dealing with the acute situation and allowing time for further investigation of the particulars of the womans case of lost identity.

[Ashmoria]

if the neighbors back him up surely it would require a bit more investigation. at least to the point of finding someone who backs HER up.

[NERVUN]

So she shows some bruising and is calling from a community that has a tendency to treat DV as something between a husband and wife, one that does not need the help of police... Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable suspicion to attempt to shelter the person making the complaint first and then work out the details.

[Tahar Joblis]

if the neighbors back him up surely it would require a bit more investigation. at least to the point of finding someone who backs HER up.

This is the same police department that had several vehicles and a number of officers surrounding me and questioning me threateningly by the side of the road for about forty five minutes after I provided them with identification proving I was me and not this other dude they were hypothetically looking for who coincidentally matched my description and had committed some heinous crime nearby. [I checked the police reports afterwards. De nada.]

And then all shut up and walked off the moment I produced my student ID. State-issued license? United States passport? We can't rule out this is person X we're looking for. Easily counterfeited student ID with cruddy photo from a nearby university and no expiration date? Oh, must not be the fellow we're looking for, he's "not a student." [If they knew that someone wasn't a student, they would have to know their identity already, which means that my identification should already have excluded me. See above, I'm pretty sure they were just bored.]

So yeah, it sticks out to me a little bit that they would just take this woman's word on who she was and leave her with the house for long enough for her to empty it of valuables and zip off to LA when she couldn't prove she belonged there. And it bugs me a little bit that this woman has apparently had a lengthy criminal career taking advantage of police policies - go on a date with a man, go back to his place, call the cops on him claiming domestic abuse, and clean out the house while they're spending the night in jail.

I mean, there are serial criminals out there, and the economic types who make a living at it are the ones who cling most strongly to that, but I don't remember hearing about a con artist or burglar who relied on using the police to pull off their crimes.

[Samuraikoku]

Is it somehow the police's fault that the woman in question turned out to be pulling off a Batman Gambit?

[Tahar Joblis]

So she shows some bruising and is calling from a community that has a tendency to treat DV as something between a husband and wife, one that does not need the help of police... Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable suspicion to attempt to shelter the person making the complaint first and then work out the details.

A little word about the neighborhood - if they didn't completely botch the location, it's actually not far from the one I lived in a couple years ago. Irvine is thoroughly suburban, and that neighborhood doesn't have a particularly high concentration of anything special, except maybe student subleasers.

While the police officer, man, and woman were all Korean [I'm guessing he was sent there because he was Korean and the police department wanted to be sensitive to the fact that the woman calling was Korean], and Irvine ranks high nationally in the percentage Korean population [11th in the nation... at a whopping 5.3%, though, it's still not much], it's not terribly likely that all his neighbors would be as well. In fact, it's most likely that none of his neighbors were Korean, especially given that he was a businessman living by himself. [If he were living with his extended family, he would most likely share a residence with them.]

Does that change your answer any?

[The Corparation]

Honestly they did what they were supposed to do. They really have to be careful and go on the safe side with domestic violence calls because its almost always he says she says. Only real person at fault is her.


@ Tahar Joblis
Its South Orange County. OC Sheriff deputies in the area doesn't really have much to do. I had my backpack searched and got interrogated by a deputy for over an hour in the vice principal's office when my friend mentioned ricin in a report on castor beans.I was lucky, my friend was interrogated the whole day except when they interrogated me. They also went and searched his house for evidence that he was planning to poison the school.

[Avenio]

So she shows some bruising and is calling from a community that has a tendency to treat DV as something between a husband and wife, one that does not need the help of police... Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable suspicion to attempt to shelter the person making the complaint first and then work out the details.

A little word about the neighborhood - if they didn't completely botch the location, it's actually not far from the one I lived in a couple years ago. Irvine is thoroughly suburban, and that neighborhood doesn't have a particularly high concentration of anything special, except maybe student subleasers.

While the police officer, man, and woman were all Korean [I'm guessing he was sent there because he was Korean and the police department wanted to be sensitive to the fact that the woman calling was Korean], and Irvine ranks high nationally in the percentage Korean population [11th in the nation... at a whopping 5.3%, though, it's still not much], it's not terribly likely that all his neighbors would be as well. In fact, it's most likely that none of his neighbors were Korean, especially given that he was a businessman living by himself. [If he were living with his extended family, he would most likely share a residence with them.]

Does that change your answer any?

Why didn't you include that information in the OP?

[Yewhohohopia]

So. NSG; judges, juries, and peanut-pitchers, what say you about this?

Sounds like the police took pretty reasonable precautions to try to prevent any harm coming to this woman, which is realistically the best standard operating procedure in cases of domestic violence, and just happened to be the wrong thing to do on this occasion?

[Tahar Joblis]

A little word about the neighborhood - if they didn't completely botch the location, it's actually not far from the one I lived in a couple years ago. Irvine is thoroughly suburban, and that neighborhood doesn't have a particularly high concentration of anything special, except maybe student subleasers.

While the police officer, man, and woman were all Korean [I'm guessing he was sent there because he was Korean and the police department wanted to be sensitive to the fact that the woman calling was Korean], and Irvine ranks high nationally in the percentage Korean population [11th in the nation... at a whopping 5.3%, though, it's still not much], it's not terribly likely that all his neighbors would be as well. In fact, it's most likely that none of his neighbors were Korean, especially given that he was a businessman living by himself. [If he were living with his extended family, he would most likely share a residence with them.]

Does that change your answer any?

Why didn't you include that information in the OP?

Either I didn't think it would be relevant to anyone's answer, or I thought that the "boring suburban place" bit in the description at the top of the OP would preclude people thinking that this happened in an ethnic ghetto. Sorry, but I hadn't considered that. The alleged serial burglar/con artist/false accuser actually had her real permanent residence in Koreatown out in LA, but the incident occurred out in the suburban hinterland.

I mean, there'll be a church that has both Korean and English on the sign down at the bottom of the hill, and at the top of the hill is where a Persian culture group of some kind has monthly picnics - people remember their roots and sometimes assemble in monoethnic groupings - but residential patterns are pretty integrated with relatively minor variations in density. [Like, for Koreans, if you look up a density map by zip code from Census data, it'll range from 3.5-7% or so].

[Terruana]

Before looking at the spoiler of what the policeman did, I thought to myself that were I in his shoes, I would have taken all of them (including the neighbours) back to the police station to interview/take statements, and run fingerprints on both the man and woman directly involved to establish both identities and establish exactly what had happened. (Though I don't know how long fingerprints take to run, on average, so maybe this wouldn't have been feasible). Still, that was an interesting story.

[Tahar Joblis]

So. NSG; judges, juries, and peanut-pitchers, what say you about this?

Sounds like the police took pretty reasonable precautions to try to prevent any harm coming to this woman, which is realistically the best standard operating procedure in cases of domestic violence, and just happened to be the wrong thing to do on this occasion?

I think the best standard operating procedure in cases of domestic violence is to prevent any harm coming to anyone - man or woman.

Though I think you may have the actual motive for the standard operating procedure correct - preventing harm coming to women. The problem with that is that men and women are equally likely to act maliciously, which means that if we persistently just arrest men and leave women alone, we enable maliciousness by women, as in this case.

This woman was apparently able to rely on the standard procedures of the police to steal men blind. When the bad 'uns are able to use the force of the state as a bludgeon against innocents, there's something wrong with policy somewhere.

I'm not actually quite sure what we would be able to do, policy-wise; only one of the couple showed signs of injury.

[Tahar Joblis]

Before looking at the spoiler of what the policeman did, I thought to myself that were I in his shoes, I would have taken all of them (including the neighbours) back to the police station to interview/take statements, and run fingerprints on both the man and woman directly involved to establish both identities and establish exactly what had happened. (Though I don't know how long fingerprints take to run, on average, so maybe this wouldn't have been feasible). Still, that was an interesting story.

I didn't either, so I looked it up.

"The average response time for an electronic criminal fingerprint submission is about 27 minutes," sez Wiki, so I think you win.

And I think I'll put that in the column for "evidence that the Irvine Police didn't run the fingerprints through until after the burglary happened, because otherwise they would have prevented that from happening."

[Avenio]

Sorry, but I hadn't considered that.

You hadn't considered the fact that very few of us would have been instantly aware of all of the important contextual details of the scenario you constructed in the OP, especially since you neglected to actually include any?

[Fluffy Coyotes]

Is it somehow the police's fault that the woman in question turned out to be pulling off a Batman Gambit?

Partly, yes. There will always be people like that, and we need to know how to deal with them.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, though. Most of the blame belongs with the false accuser, and she's the one who needs to be punished as a criminal.

[Samuraikoku]

Is it somehow the police's fault that the woman in question turned out to be pulling off a Batman Gambit?

Partly, yes. There will always be people like that, and we need to know how to deal with them.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, though. Most of the blame belongs with the false accuser, and she's the one who needs to be punished as a criminal.

The police did what they had to do. That the woman exploited this does in no way blame them.

[Neutraligon]

Before looking at the spoiler in this situation I would probably bring both of them, as well as any other character witnesses (ie. the neighbor) to the station for questioning, as well as using fingerprinting or some other way of confirming their identity. I would ensure that they were kept in separate rooms in order to ensure nothing happened to either party. Since the man had a neighbor back him up I think I would place more weight on his side of the story than hers.

[Tahar Joblis]

Sorry, but I hadn't considered that.

You hadn't considered the fact that very few of us would have been instantly aware of all of the important contextual details of the scenario you constructed in the OP, especially since you neglected to actually include any?

I hadn't considered that someone might make the mistake of assuming this happened in an ethnic ghetto of some kind, especially after I described it as a boring suburban town. In retrospect, it's an easy enough mistake to make with the ethnic identity right there...

If the neighbors say they have no idea who that woman is and that she doesn't live there, I think that would be quite puzzling in an ethnic ghetto, too, though. As I pointed out in the OP, I'm not even sure that the fact that the parties in this little drama - the couple and the police officer - are all Korean is an important contextual detail.

[NERVUN]

You hadn't considered the fact that very few of us would have been instantly aware of all of the important contextual details of the scenario you constructed in the OP, especially since you neglected to actually include any?

I hadn't considered that someone might make the mistake of assuming this happened in an ethnic ghetto of some kind, especially after I described it as a boring suburban town. In retrospect, it's an easy enough mistake to make with the ethnic identity right there...

If the neighbors say they have no idea who that woman is and that she doesn't live there, I think that would be quite puzzling in an ethnic ghetto, too, though. As I pointed out in the OP, I'm not even sure that the fact that the parties in this little drama - the couple and the police officer - are all Korean is an important contextual detail.

That's because you get so tied up in your notions that the world ain't fair for guys that you ignore other forces at work. In this case you are making an assumption that his neighbors were not Korean, we don't actually know. What I can tell you however is that many East Asian cultures do have a very regrettable tendency to overlook DV. It's not unlikely that the police officer, being Korean himself, knew this.

Or to put it another way, your notion is that the police should make it safe for both men and women in a DV situation, which is what they bloody well did. They saw a woman with signs of DV, they put in an emergency restraining order to keep the parties separated, and then they investigated and discovered, wait a sec... this ain't kosher.

That's kinda what happens in any situation, especially one where there has been instances of police blowing off DV reports and then having to go back to open murder investigations instead.

Edit: And of course it should be emphasized that the woman in question is currently jailed and awaiting trial, so it's not like she got off scott free either.

[Avenio]

I hadn't considered that someone might make the mistake of assuming this happened in an ethnic ghetto of some kind, especially after I described it as a boring suburban town. In retrospect, it's an easy enough mistake to make with the ethnic identity right there...

If the neighbors say they have no idea who that woman is and that she doesn't live there, I think that would be quite puzzling in an ethnic ghetto, too, though. As I pointed out in the OP, I'm not even sure that the fact that the parties in this little drama - the couple and the police officer - are all Korean is an important contextual detail.

That's because you get so tied up in your notions that the world ain't fair for guys that you ignore other forces at work. In this case you are making an assumption that his neighbors were not Korean, we don't actually know. What I can tell you however is that many East Asian cultures do have a very regrettable tendency to overlook DV. It's not unlikely that the police officer, being Korean himself, knew this.

Or to put it another way, your notion is that the police should make it safe for both men and women in a DV situation, which is what they bloody well did. They saw a woman with signs of DV, they put in an emergency restraining order to keep the parties separated, and then they investigated and discovered, wait a sec... this ain't kosher.

That's kinda what happens in any situation, especially one where there has been instances of police blowing off DV reports and then having to go back to open murder investigations instead.

Edit: And of course it should be emphasized that the woman in question is currently jailed and awaiting trial, so it's not like she got off scott free either.

See, this is the important thing for me, Tahar Joblis. I think the reason why you didn't consider things like the cultural context of the situation is that you had no intention of giving us the full context in the first place; the story you constructed in the OP isn't meant to show us a complex problem with no easy answers and serve as a springboard for commentary and discussion, it's meant as a means for you to shunt us down a particular path by periodically feeding us details that only you can provide, to the point where we're forced by the confines of the scenario you invented into agreeing with your premise.

Of course the problem is that real life is more complicated than the snare trap scenario you've concocted, and once that's pointed out, you start to sound like Oz behind the curtain.

[Pope Joan]

Korean or not, it is way to easy to make these unsubstantiated complaints and get someone incarcerated for an indeterminate period.

That does not smell like our constitution. Instead, it smells like PC panic.

"In Campbell v. Campbell' the Maine Superior Court concluded that
Mrs. Campbell had sought an ex parte protection from abuse order2
against her husband in an effort to gain a tactical advantage in the
custody proceeding-she did not need protection from abuse."

http://mainelaw.maine.edu/academics/mai ... ev_471.pdf

"legal scholarship notes that misuse of orders of protection against violence does occur through the filing of false petitions. For example, an abuser may file a false petition against his or her victim, perhaps to intimidate the victim or exclude the victim from a shared residence. In other cases, a person who is not truly a victim of violence, or who does not have reasonable cause to believe that he or she is in imminent danger of becoming a victim of violence, may file a petition in order to harass the respondent or to gain an advantage over the respondent in a related family law matter, such as a divorce or child custody proceeding. Misuse of the process can thwart the public-safety purposes underlying the injunctions and can result in inefficiencies and costs for the state courts system.
This report reviews the current procedures and standards governing the award of injunctions for protection against domestic violence, repeat violence, sexual violence, and dating violence, in an effort to identify the extent to which misuse of the process is occurring, or may occur, and to identify enhancements to the statutory and court-rule framework."

http://archive.flsenate.gov/data/Public ... -127ju.pdf

[NERVUN]

Korean or not, it is way to easy to make these unsubstantiated complaints and get someone incarcerated for an indeterminate period.

Here's the thing though, in the article, it mentions that the woman bore marks consistent with DV.

Now, seriously, usually someone won't go to the trouble, and pain, of beating themselves up before calling the police. Seeing signs of DV makes what happen reasonable, at least at first.

That does not smell like our constitution. Instead, it smells like PC panic.

"In Campbell v. Campbell' the Maine Superior Court concluded that
Mrs. Campbell had sought an ex parte protection from abuse order2
against her husband in an effort to gain a tactical advantage in the
custody proceeding-she did not need protection from abuse."

http://mainelaw.maine.edu/academics/mai ... ev_471.pdf

"legal scholarship notes that misuse of orders of protection against violence does occur through the filing of false petitions. For example, an abuser may file a false petition against his or her victim, perhaps to intimidate the victim or exclude the victim from a shared residence. In other cases, a person who is not truly a victim of violence, or who does not have reasonable cause to believe that he or she is in imminent danger of becoming a victim of violence, may file a petition in order to harass the respondent or to gain an advantage over the respondent in a related family law matter, such as a divorce or child custody proceeding. Misuse of the process can thwart the public-safety purposes underlying the injunctions and can result in inefficiencies and costs for the state courts system.
This report reviews the current procedures and standards governing the award of injunctions for protection against domestic violence, repeat violence, sexual violence, and dating violence, in an effort to identify the extent to which misuse of the process is occurring, or may occur, and to identify enhancements to the statutory and court-rule framework."

http://archive.flsenate.gov/data/Public ... -127ju.pdf

And what did your studies actually conclude? Fraud happens, yes, this is a given. That doesn't mean that the system itself is bad.

[Tahar Joblis]

I hadn't considered that someone might make the mistake of assuming this happened in an ethnic ghetto of some kind, especially after I described it as a boring suburban town. In retrospect, it's an easy enough mistake to make with the ethnic identity right there...

If the neighbors say they have no idea who that woman is and that she doesn't live there, I think that would be quite puzzling in an ethnic ghetto, too, though. As I pointed out in the OP, I'm not even sure that the fact that the parties in this little drama - the couple and the police officer - are all Korean is an important contextual detail.

That's because you get so tied up in your notions that the world ain't fair for guys that you ignore other forces at work. In this case you are making an assumption that his neighbors were not Korean, we don't actually know. What I can tell you however is that many East Asian cultures do have a very regrettable tendency to overlook DV. It's not unlikely that the police officer, being Korean himself, knew this.

Or to put it another way, your notion is that the police should make it safe for both men and women in a DV situation, which is what they bloody well did. They saw a woman with signs of DV, they put in an emergency restraining order to keep the parties separated, and then they investigated and discovered, wait a sec... this ain't kosher.

That's kinda what happens in any situation, especially one where there has been instances of police blowing off DV reports and then having to go back to open murder investigations instead.

Edit: And of course it should be emphasized that the woman in question is currently jailed and awaiting trial, so it's not like she got off scott free either.

Yes, they did end up making good. It's like how I knock glasses over more often than average, but often manage to catch them before they spill, thanks to my fast reflexes. They did have fingerprints, the perp did get caught after skipping town, and they eventually figured it out. Which, given that the suspect is alleged to have gotten away with it several times previously, may mean that the Irvine police are better at this than the average police department. I should give them credit for that, but I'd rather they not knock over glasses in the first place, capiche?

Now... NERVUN, you're dodging the question I asked you.

So. Let me re-iterate the facts that make that question necessary: There is well over a ninety percent chance that the neighbors were not Korean, and in fact, if multiple neighbors were talking to the police officer, the odds that all neighbors present were Korean are less than a single percent [that's accounting for the possibility that only neighbors from one house talked to the police, and it was a Korean family living next door].

Irvine's population is only 5.3% Korean, there are no Census-identified regions with higher than 7%, and the neighborhood in question is not even on the high end for Irvine in terms of Korean population. Yes, I actually went and looked up the victim just now to make sure, and yes, he lives basically where I did two years ago. Not quite close enough that I would have been one of the neighbors on the scene, but very close.

So. Unless there's something really weird about the next block of houses over that I didn't notice, we're not talking about "calling from a community that has a tendency to treat DV as something between a husband and wife," and not even talking about "Oh, Korean neighbors are covering up the domestic violence!!!" It's a pretty generic neighborhood except for its proximity to campus, which means that a lot of people have some kind of connection to the university and are thus a little more liberal and cosmopolitan than average for Irvine.

The answer sits you firmly on one or the other horn of a dilemma, at this point:

• First, if it does change your answer, then the officer was dropping the ball in some fashion, and would have been dropping the ball generically in a similar situation nearly anywhere in the country outside of some small subcommunities.
• Second, if it doesn't change your answer, then it wasn't the "important contextual detail" that Avenio claims, and you don't have grounds to complain about my failure to emphasize that in the OP.

I think it's option two: It doesn't change your answer. It shouldn't, anyway. If one partner is injured and seeking aid, the police should be putting them somewhere safe. However, I would like to tell you that doesn't mean handing them control over the other partner's property is a good idea, or something that police should do, especially when it's not clear the injured partner is even a resident of the domicile they've been called to. We have domestic violence shelters, and we also have the [at least theoretical] possibility of protective custody.

As other posters have caused me to realize, a mere half hour of questioning at the police station while while they ran her fingerprints to identify her would have sufficed to prevent the lawsuit that the man has filed over his sense of grievance for having been run through the wringer [thrown in jail, having to post bond, being served a restraining order preventing him from returning to his own home, and then discovering that he'd been burgled]. It was possible to avoid knocking over the glass in the first place.

Which leaves open several more questions about policy.

[Rational Stars]

Before looking at the spoiler of what the policeman did, I thought to myself that were I in his shoes, I would have taken all of them (including the neighbours) back to the police station to interview/take statements, and run fingerprints on both the man and woman directly involved to establish both identities and establish exactly what had happened. (Though I don't know how long fingerprints take to run, on average, so maybe this wouldn't have been feasible). Still, that was an interesting story.

Thats what i would expect as well.