Dashing Hopes? the Predictive Accuracy of Domestic Abuse Risk Assessment by Police

Abstract 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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:British journal of criminology Vol. 59; no. 5; pp. 1013 - 1034
Main Authors: Turner, Emily, Medina, Juanjo, Brown, Gavin
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: UK Oxford University Press 01.09.2019
Subjects:
domestic abuse
risk assessment
police
machine learning
predictive policing
ISSN:0007-0955, 1464-3529
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Abstract 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:0007-0955
1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azy074