Intimate Partner Violence at the Scene: Incident Characteristics and Implications for Public Health Surveillance

Using data that, to our knowledge, have not been used before for this purpose, we examined 9,231 opposite-sex intimate partner violence calls for law enforcement assistance recorded in the Compstat system of a large U.S. city. Although women were the predominant victims, injuries were documented more often for men. Only about 1% of incidents were considered to be a restraining order violation although many orders were active in the city at the time. The data appeared to be of good quality and just a few changes in recording procedures would increase Compstat’s usefulness for public health in U.S. cities.