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 (IPV) 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 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.