Title
Identifying Police Officers at Risk of Adverse Events
Abstract
Adverse events between police and the public, such as deadly shootings or instances of racial profiling, can cause serious or deadly harm, damage police legitimacy, and result in costly litigation. Evidence suggests these events can be prevented by targeting interventions based on an Early Intervention System (EIS) that flags police officers who are at a high risk for involvement in such adverse events. Today's EIS are not data-driven and typically rely on simple thresholds based entirely on expert intuition. In this paper, we describe our work with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) to develop a machine learning model to predict which officers are at risk for an adverse event. Our approach significantly outperforms CMPD's existing EIS, increasing true positives by ~12% and decreasing false positives by ~32%. Our work also sheds light on features related to officer characteristics, situational factors, and neighborhood factors that are predictive of adverse events. This work provides a starting point for police departments to take a comprehensive, data-driven approach to improve policing and reduce harm to both officers and members of the public.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2939672.2939698
KDD
Field
DocType
Citations 
Psychological intervention,Computer security,Computer science,Officer,Racial profiling,Adverse effect,Artificial intelligence,Situational ethics,Law enforcement,Applied psychology,Harm,Machine learning,False positive paradox
Conference
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.53
1
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Samuel Carton161.57
Jennifer Helsby240.53
Kenneth Joseph3709.46
Ayesha Mahmud440.53
Youngsoo Park5345.07
Joe Walsh6334.40
Crystal Cody740.86
Estella Patterson840.53
Lauren Haynes951.56
Rayid Ghani10114299.45