Who Gets Arrested for Domestic Violence?

Question: I’m curious: who gets arrested for domestic violence? It’s such an emotionally scarey charge. Do you bail be people out for that?

Answer: Yes, we do provide domestic violence bail bonds. I can tell you that most of the people we work with are family members of the people who have been arrested. They are many times surprised or disappointed or just don’t know what to do when their son or daughter, or ex-husband calls and says they have been arrested for something related to drugs or domestic violence, for example. It is very shocking to those people and especially so when we hear the words like domestic violence that is very, very serious.

What we find is that most people who find themselves call us are experiencing this one time event in their lives and it may or may not be a serious case. In California, specifically in Southern California, if your next door neighbor calls the police because you’re having a loud argument and the police show up, if they have any inkling that something has happened or will happen, they’re going to take somebody in for safety purposes. They would rather err on the side of caution thinking, “We know that there is probably nothing going on here but we can’t afford to come back in 2 hours and find something fatal has happened.”

I kind of see this as a major contrast to the old days when I was a kid and they would stop somebody for drinking and driving and just say, “Oh, just go straight home and drive carefully.” Well they don’t do that anymore for obvious good reason.

So what you end up with is an arrest and in many cases they go to court, but not always. Of course I’m not an attorney so I can NEVER give legal advice, but we see it happen that they go to court, they get some anger management courses, and get what some people might call a slap on the wrist.

However, I think for a lot of people it is a wakeup call. They acknowledge that “my anger is out of control” or “our relationship is out of control”, or “my recreational drug use is not appropriate and I need to do something more serious about it.” That is what I’ve seen with the people that I know.

There are many people that I know that we’ve bailed out that have gotten that help and have said, “You know there was a problem in my life and this is actually a blessing that I was arrested and now I’m able to look at things in a much different light and realize that something needs to change.”

---