A small constellation: risk factors informing police perceptions of domestic abuse

Abstract

Police in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) now routinely use risk assessment tools to identify common risk factors for re-abuse and lethality when responding to domestic abuse. Nevertheless, little is known about the extent to which officers understand and perceive the importance of factors commonly included on risk assessment tools for predicting future abuse. This study attempts to shed some light into this area of research by exploring the responses of 720 British and American police officers to questions regarding how important and how essential various risk factors are for evaluating the level of risk or harm a victim of domestic abuse may face in the future. Findings indicated that British and American officers were largely in agreement about a small constellation of risk factors that they considered integral to the risk assessment process: using or threatening to use a weapon; strangulation; physical assault resulting in injury and escalation of abuse. The results revealed that officers' country of employment, rather than their demographic characteristics or experience policing domestic abuse, was a particularly influential predictor of their perceptions, and that both the situational context and the victim's perception about risk are important in domestic abuse risk assessment.

The Inter-Rater Reliability of ViolenceRisk Assessment Tools Used by Police Employees in Swedish PoliceSettings

“…Belfrage & Strand, 2012;Belfrage et al, 2012a;Storey, Kropp, Hart, Belfrage & Strand, 2014); police officers' decision making in the risk assessment and management procedure (e.g. Robinson, Pinchevsky & Guthrie, 2016;Trujillo & Ross, 2008), and the inter-rater reliability/consistency of police officers risk assessments (e.g. Sebire & Barling, 2016).…”

Editorial

“…However, Trujillo and Ross (2008) found police officers to be biased in their summarized IPV risk assessments. They also found, in line with Robinson et al (2016) that police officers tend to put the greatest emphasis on a small number of risk factors in their assessments. This suggests that the poor predictive accuracy might also be due to the quality of the summarized risk assessments themselves, and thus not merely a result of the effect of interventions.…”

“…Belfrage & Strand, 2012;Belfrage et al, 2012a;Storey, Kropp, Hart, Belfrage & Strand, 2014); police officers' decision making in the risk assessment and management procedure (e.g. Robinson, Pinchevsky & Guthrie, 2016;Trujillo & Ross, 2008), and the inter-rater reliability/consistency of police officers risk assessments (e.g. Sebire & Barling, 2016).…”

The “Golden Thread”: Coercive Control and Risk Assessment for Domestic Violence

“…Previous research has shown that police officers tend to prioritize indicators of physical violence when assessing risk, and in particular whether there has been injurious violence during the incident to which they have been deployed (Robinson et al, 2015(Robinson et al, , 2016. A major inspection of the police response to domestic violence in England and…”