Amanda reminds us that SCOTUS also made a ruling regarding protection from abuse orders:

Reading the decision, it’s clear from Justice Scalia’s opinion that the right to police discretion was a big factor. I agree that the police should have a lot of discretion in theory and it’s too bad that in practice they fuck it up so often. However, I can’t see that there’s a way to exert more control over the police that will fix things. Looking over the facts of the case, it’s clear that this is a training issue. Police officers need to be better trained to understand the severity of domestic violence and be prepared to respond rapidly to victims of it if they fear more violence. Cops are mostly men and many of them have a knee-jerk sympathy for a guy, regardless of his abusive past, who’s lost his wife and kids and this can muck things up. Proper training could fill up knowledge gaps about domestic violence.

My worry is that police departments around the country will feel like they “won” and subsequently dial down their attention to people with restraining orders. Police response to this case should be the exact opposite–departments need to look at the details, see where the cops failed and inject massive training to fill in the gaps. Hopefully that’s what will happen, but obviously we can’t count on it. One thing citizens can do is find out if they have a local Cop Watch organization like Austin does and help them out. Or start one if you don’t have one. It’s fair to say we can’t rely on the feds for everything and local police departments need local attention to function properly.

Well, yes. For some cops, training would be a help. But as anyone who has ever attended a domestic abuse support group will tell you, a rather large percentage of the abusers are… police officers.

And that’s a totally different problem.