The extreme deleterious outcomes of domestic violence, both to society as a whole and to individual victims, require that serious attention be given to providing effective domestic violence interventions. Indeed, law enforcement response to domestic violence has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. A review of the evolution of arrest policies is offered, following by a description of the use of the crisis team model to intervention in cases of domestic violence. The current study examined the effects of the implementation of a crisis team in the response to domestic violence by comparing police report data on 96 crisis team cases with 80 randomly selected domestic violence cases that were not served by the crisis team over a 6-month period. Results indicated that while the crisis team intervention resulted in a higher number of arrests, victim cooperation was significantly lower than in the cases not served by the crisis team. The findings seem to suggest that a good program in theory may not directly translate into a good program in practice. Future research should focus on how crisis team intervention may impact patrol officer time and recidivism rates for arrests. Table, references