How a Domestic Violence Report Is Filed in California — and What Happens Next

A domestic violence report is not a decision. It is the moment a file opens.

That distinction is the single most misunderstood part of this area of law, and it cuts in both directions. People who make a report often expect to control what happens next, and find they cannot. People who learn a report has been made about them often assume the matter is settled against them already, and it is not. Between the report and any charge sits a separate decision, made by someone who was not in the room.

Here is how that sequence actually runs in California, and what each step does and does not determine.

Who can file a domestic violence report — including for someone else

Anyone can report domestic violence in California. There is no rule that the report must come from the person who was hurt.

A neighbor who hears something through a wall can call. So can a parent, a sibling, an adult child, a friend, a coworker, a landlord, or a stranger on the street. The report is a report of a suspected crime, and California does not restrict who may bring one to law enforcement's attention. Whether the person named as the victim wants the call made is not a legal precondition to making it.

Some people are required to report. Under Penal Code § 11160, a health practitioner who treats a patient for a physical injury the practitioner knows or reasonably suspects resulted from assaultive or abusive conduct must notify local law enforcement — by telephone immediately or as soon as practically possible, with a written report to follow within two working days. That duty belongs to the practitioner, not the patient. It is why an emergency-room visit can start a police file that nobody in the family called in, and why a report sometimes arrives days after the incident itself.

A third-party report is not a weaker report. Once it reaches law enforcement, it is investigated the same way, and it can support a charge on its own if the surrounding evidence holds up. What a third-party report cannot do is bind the outcome — the reporter has no more control over the charging decision than anyone else.

Where a domestic violence report is filed

In practice there are four doors, and they lead to different places.

• 911, during or immediately after an incident. This produces a patrol response, a written incident report, body-worn camera footage, recorded 911 audio, and often photographs. It is the most evidence-dense route by a wide margin.
• A non-emergency line or a police station walk-in, after the fact. A report can be taken days or weeks later. The file is thinner, but it is a live report.
• A hospital or clinic. The § 11160 duty above routes the injury to law enforcement without the patient initiating anything.
• The courthouse — but for a different thing. This is where the confusion usually starts. A request for a domestic violence restraining order is filed with the civil court, not with police, and it is a separate proceeding from any criminal case. A person can have one without the other, or both at once, running on different tracks with different standards of proof. We walk through how those orders work in our guide to restraining orders in California.

Jurisdiction follows the incident, not the residence. A report is handled by the agency covering the place where the conduct occurred — which, across Los Angeles County, may mean LAPD, the Sheriff's Department, or one of the many independent city departments, and later a courthouse in one of the county's numerous districts.

“Pressing charges” is not a thing in California

The phrase survives because television keeps it alive. It has no legal meaning here.

A private person in California does not press charges, cannot press charges, and cannot withdraw charges. Criminal cases are brought by the People of the State of California, and the decision to file rests with a prosecutor — a deputy district attorney or a city attorney — who reviews the police report after the investigation and decides whether the evidence supports a filing. That decision is theirs alone.

The practical consequences run in every direction:

• The state can proceed without the reporting party's cooperation. Prosecutors regularly file domestic violence cases where the complaining witness has asked them not to, and they do so as a matter of stated policy, on the reasoning that pressure to withdraw is itself part of the pattern they are trying to police.
• Reporting without “pressing charges” is not an option that exists. Once a report is made, what follows is out of the reporter's hands. There is no box to tick that keeps the report on file but stops the prosecution.
• Asking for a case to be dropped is a request, not an instruction. It is heard, it is weighed, and it is frequently declined. We cover what actually moves a prosecutor in whether domestic violence charges can be dropped in California.

One more correction, because it is asked constantly: California does not have a blanket mandatory-arrest rule for domestic violence. What the law requires is narrower and more specific. Penal Code § 836 makes arrest mandatory where an officer has probable cause to believe a person with notice of a domestic violence protective order has violated it — even if the violation did not happen in front of the officer. For domestic violence generally, Penal Code § 13701 requires every agency to adopt written response policies; those policies encourage arrest on probable cause, and they also require officers to make reasonable efforts to identify the dominant aggressor rather than simply the first person to speak. Encouraged is not the same as required, and the dominant-aggressor rule exists precisely because the person who calls is not always the person the evidence supports.

How long is there to report?

Longer than most people assume, and a late report is not automatically a weak one.

For felony inflicting corporal injury on a spouse or partner under Penal Code § 273.5, the limitations period is seven years from the date of the offense. That figure is current and recent: Penal Code § 803.7, as amended by Senate Bill 690 (Stats. 2024, ch. 653) and operative January 1, 2025, raised it from five years. It applies to offenses committed on or after that date, and to earlier offenses whose limitations period had not already expired.

Most domestic violence misdemeanors fall under the general one-year rule in Penal Code § 802. Which period applies depends on what the conduct is charged as — which is the next question, and not a small one.

Is domestic violence a misdemeanor or a felony in California?

Neither, until someone decides. “Domestic violence” is a category, not a charge. California prosecutes it under specific statutes, and the two that carry most of the volume sit at very different weights.

Two things follow from that table. The first is that the gap between a bruise and no bruise is the gap between a misdemeanor-only statute and a statute that can be charged as a felony — and “traumatic condition” is a low bar, satisfied by redness or minor marking. The second is that where the conduct sits between those statutes is a judgment call made by a prosecutor reading a report, which is exactly why what is in that report, and what context surrounds it, carries so much weight. Related conduct may also be charged as simple battery or under other statutes entirely.

For the record, because the search term is common: California does not classify domestic violence “by degree.” First-, second-, third- and fourth-degree domestic violence are creatures of other states' codes. If you have read about them, you have read about somewhere else.

How long does a domestic violence misdemeanor stay on your record?

The honest answer is that in California an adult conviction does not expire. There is no date on which it falls off by itself. What changes over time is not the record's existence but what relief is available against it — and how much that relief is actually worth.

• Dismissal under Penal Code § 1203.4 is what people usually mean by “expungement,” and the name oversells it. It does not erase or seal the record. The statute is explicit that the conviction may still be pleaded and proved in a later prosecution with the same effect as before, that it must still be disclosed in response to a direct question on an application for public office or for licensure by a state or local agency, and that the dismissal does not restore the right to own or possess a firearm.
• Automatic relief under Penal Code § 1203.425. Since October 1, 2024 the Department of Justice reviews records monthly and grants relief without a petition, where the person is not required to register as a sex offender, is not under active supervision or serving a sentence, has no pending charges, and has cleared the applicable waiting period — broadly, completed probation without revocation, or one year past a completed misdemeanor sentence, or four years past completion for a felony with no new felony conviction. Serious felonies under § 1192.7(c) and violent felonies under § 667.5 are excluded.
• An arrest that produced no conviction is treated separately. Under Penal Code § 851.91, a person may petition to seal the arrest record where the limitations period ran without a charge being filed, where charges were dismissed and cannot be refiled, where there was an acquittal, or where a conviction was vacated or reversed and cannot be retried.

The firearm consequence deserves its own line, because it is the one that most often surprises people years later. A misdemeanor conviction under § 273.5 entered on or after January 1, 2019 does not carry a ten-year California prohibition that quietly lapses — under § 29805(b) it has no expiry built into it. Separate federal law imposes its own long-term prohibition on qualifying misdemeanor convictions involving domestic violence. Relief under § 1203.4 does not touch either one.

None of that means a record is permanent in every practical sense, and it is not a reason to give up on relief. It means the sequence matters enormously: what a case is charged as, and what it resolves to, sets the ceiling on every option available afterwards. That is a decision made early, while the case is live — not years later, when the record is already written.

What the first two weeks usually look like

Between report and resolution the case passes through a short, dense stretch where most of the durable decisions get made.

An arrest may or may not follow the report. If it does, an emergency protective order is commonly issued at the scene, and it can bar someone from their own home immediately — before any court has heard a word of defense. If charges are filed, the first court appearance is the arraignment, which for someone held in custody must happen quickly. And if no arrest is made, the file goes to a prosecutor for a filing decision, which can take days or weeks.

That last interval — report made, decision not yet taken — is the part of the timeline people most often waste, because nothing appears to be happening. It is the period in which a decision is still genuinely open, and in which what the prosecutor knows about the incident can still change. What is preserved now, and what is not, tends to matter more than anything argued much later. You can read how the firm approaches domestic violence defense across both the criminal case and the protective order.

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