Many communities in the United States are responding to domestic violence bydeveloping a coordinated community response, which typically involves key stakeholders such asdomestic violence shelters, prosecutors, judges, police departments, mental health professionals,as well as other service providers. Court mandated batterer intervention programs haveemerged as a key element in the coordinated community response. There has not been, however,a general consensus about whether these programs work. This has taken on an increasedurgency as there are now more programs in the community, but the level of domestic violencehas remained unchanged. One explanation has been that batterer intervention programs areineffective because they do not hold abusers accountable. This has led many states to implementminimum standards for batterer intervention programs. This paper presents a system dynamicsmodel of the problem of batterer intervention program capacity expanding while there being noobservable impact on the overall level of domestic violence. The model is at the communitylevel, and includes a number of effects, including deterrence from police arrest and battererintervention program effectiveness. The results indicate that the problem is best explained as aresource allocation problem in police arrests and not as problem with batterer interventionprograms' standards. Specifically, the single largest effect came from allocating resourcesacross the full spectrum of domestic violence crimes.
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