Forecasting Domestic Violence in Chicago

Family violence is one of the few clear examples of phenomenon that because of their nature, can be more effectively prevented by adaptive predictive policing tools than by the conventional policing strategies. This is due to three of its inherent characteristics:

First, family violence is widespread. According to a 2005 report by the US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, family violence amounted to 11% of all the reported and unreported violent incidents between 1998 and 2002.

Second, family violence often goes unnoticed even though it tends to be chronic, given that it almost exclusively happens in private spaces and within family structures that are difficult to intervene by others. Also, because these incidents usually go unreported and are usually engrained within family dynamics, they usually happen numerous times in the same household.

Third, and most important, family violence is systematically unreported for a myriad of reasons, including financial dependency of the victim to the offender, psychological intimidation, public shame or religion. According to the same DoJ report, two out of five family violence incidents go unreported, with the most common reasons being that the incident was a “private/personal matter” (34% of the time) and to “protect the offender” (in 12% of occasions). Other important reason for not reporting family violence could be fear of retaliation, especially since of all incidents reported to police between 1998 and 2002, only 36% resulted in an arrest.

In order to produce an algorithm that can predict risk of family violence, or rather its most commonly reported manifestation, domestic battery, we used the city of Chicago as the testing ground, taking relevant open data from the city that could be translated into possible predictors of the latent risk of family violence, following the main axiom behind Environmental Criminology that crime “is patterned according to the criminogenic nature of the environment.”

The positive aspect of a model that predicts domestic battery is that it can be translated into preventive measures alternative to the continuing over policing practices that are commonly put in place in the majority non-white neighborhoods of Chicago. For example, this tool could be translated into the allocation of social worker services, targeted information about services for reporting physical abuse, or community workshops that tackle family violence on a more approachable and preventive level.

The complete project report can be found here.