World of Hurt

In the late 1980s, Arizona State University researchers surveyed 728 officers and 479 spouses from five East Coast police departments and found that 40 percent of the officers (who were granted anonymity) reported they'd acted violently toward a family member during the preceding six months. In 1992, with the help of a psychologist specializing in domestic violence, the Tucson Police Department interviewed 385 male officers from departments in the southwest. Twenty-eight percent admitted they'd been violent toward a spouse during the preceding year. The same researchers subsequently surveyed 891 policemen at a Fraternal Order of Police conference and found that 24 percent had engaged in violent behavior toward their spouse during the past year, ranging from pushing to threatening with a knife or gun. By way of comparison, a telephone survey funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention four years ago showed that 1.8 percent of 8,000 women randomly surveyed had been assaulted, raped or stalked by a significant other during the previous year.

Given that no one has conducted a thorough statistical study of police families, no one knows the extent of abuse within officers' households, the IACP's Aviva Kurash says, but that doesn't really matter. "Police officers are part of the general population, so it's at least as much as the general population, is what we say. As long as there's any amount of this going on, it's unacceptable."

To help prevent violence, the IACP recommends that departments regularly train officers on spotting signs of domestic violence and also provide them -- and their families -- with information about how to seek help before problems escalate to violence and careers are jeopardized. Such outreach and education efforts, the IACP states, should begin as soon as a recruit joins the force and continue periodically throughout his tenure.

Rita Zagarri says she'd like to see St. Louis police step up education efforts, especially in the rank and file.

"The majority of police commanders and the upper echelon of the police department seem to be very concerned about the liabilities [of domestic violence] -- they want to hold officers accountable, they want to take care of their department," Zagarri says. "There seems to be a real problem with the middle management and the street officers and their education. I know they have an enormous amount of domestic-violence training when they go through the academy -- I think the city academy was the second-highest in the nation a few years ago in terms of the hours spent on domestic violence -- but somehow it doesn't seem to be enough. And there's a lot of things we'd like to get out to police officers' families in case situations occur."

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Not even the family of St. Louis police chief Joe Mokwa is immune to domestic violence, according to court records. Officer James Daniel Goodrich, Mokwa's 33-year-old son-in-law, was arrested two years ago on suspicion of assaulting his wife Aimie Mokwa, the chief's daughter. In petitions for protective orders, the parties have accused each other of physical abuse, death threats and drug abuse.

Goodrich was arrested for assault in 2002, but the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office dropped the charges. In a request for an ex parte order of protection filed this past summer, the 29-year-old Mokwa wrote that her injuries had required hospitalization. On another occasion in June 2003, Mokwa claimed, Goodrich choked her and hit one of the couple's three children. "He hits me in my head, face, spits in my face, forces me to have sex with him," Mokwa stated in her petition for a protective order. "He hits my son in the head, slaps [him] in the face, beats him until he has bruises on him." Wrote Mokwa of the man she'd married in 1995: "He said he would kill me."

Goodrich himself has twice filed for orders of protection against his wife, the first time shortly after his 2002 arrest. In a second petition for an ex parte order filed this past summer, he alleged that Mokwa had twice tried to shoot him in 2002 -- once on March 8 and again on March 23. Additionally, a police report the Riverfront Times obtained under the state public-records law describes yet another incident on March 15 of that same year, in which Mokwa was charged with illegal discharge of a firearm after firing four rounds from her husband's 9 mm Beretta in the kitchen of the couple's south St. Louis home, while Goodrich was in a bedroom. Associate city counselor David Miller says he gave Mokwa a choice: She could plead guilty to the charge and be placed on probation for a year, or she could plead guilty to a charge of peace disturbance and pay a $200 fine. She chose the latter. Miller says he offered the plea because Mokwa was a first-time offender and there was no evidence she'd aimed at anyone.