Dashing hopes?: the predictive accuracy of domestic abuse risk assessment by police

The Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Honour Based Violence (DASH) form is a standardized risk assessment implemented across most UK police forces. It is intended to facilitate an officer’s structured professional judgment about the risk a victim faces of serious harm at the hand of their abuser. Until n...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Turner, Emily (Author)
Contributors: Medina, Juanjo ; Brown, Gavin
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2019
In: The British journal of criminology
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
Volltext (Resolving-System)
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Keywords:
Domestic abuse
Häusliche Gewalt
Machine learning
Maschinelles Lernen
Police
Polizeiarbeit
Predictive policing
Risk assessment
Techniken
Vorausschauende Polizeiarbeit
Description
Summary:The Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Honour Based Violence (DASH) form is a standardized risk assessment implemented across most UK police forces. It is intended to facilitate an officer’s structured professional judgment about the risk a victim faces of serious harm at the hand of their abuser. Until now, it has been an open question whether this tool works in practice. Here, we present the largest scale European study, making the case that the risk assessment tool is underperforming. Each element of the DASH questionnaire is, at best, weakly predictive of revictimization. Officer risk predictions based on DASH are little better than random and a logistic regression model that predicts the same outcome using DASH only provides modest improvement in performance.
ISSN:1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azy074