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Evaluating a Lethality Scale for the Seattle Police Department Domestic Violence Unit, 1995-1997

Metadata Updated: November 28, 2023

The specific aim of this project was to evaluate the usefulness of the Seattle Police Department's (SPD) Lethality Scale in identifying misdemeanor cases that might be high risk for escalating violence and subsequent felony incidents. Data provide information on 11,972 unique couples with incidents occurring between January 1, 1995, and December 31, 1997, involving intimate couples in which the suspect was at least 18 years old and the victim was at least 16, with no age restriction for cases referred to the juvenile division. The researchers reformatted the Domestic Violence Unit's (DVU) database to reflect a three-year history of violence between unique couple members. Only intimate couples were considered, meaning suspects and victims who were married, divorced, had a child in common, or were dating. The Lethality Scale was derived from the data in the DVU database. It was composed of six incident characteristic components (offense score, weapon score, location score, injury score, personal score, and incident/other score) with varying values that contributed to an overall score. The Total Lethality Score was the sum of the values from these six components. The lethality score referred to an individual only and did not reflect information about other people involved in the incident. To interpret the score, the DVU specified a period of time--for example, six months--and computed lethality score values for every person involved in an incident during this period. Information on individuals with a Total Lethality Score over a certain cut-off was printed and reviewed by a detective. Data are provided for up to 25 incidents per unique couple. Incident variables in the dataset provide information on number of persons involved in the incident, time and weekday of the incident, beat, precinct, census tract, and place where the incident occurred, type of primary and secondary offenses, if a warrant was served, charges brought, final disposition, weapon type used, arrests made, court order information, if evidence was collected, if statements or photos were taken by the DVU, and sergeant action. Dates were converted to time intervals and provide the number of days between the incident date and the date the file was sent to the prosecutor, the date charges were brought, and the date the case was officially closed. Time intervals were also calculated for days between each incident for that couple. Personal information on the two persons in a couple includes age, gender, injuries and treatment, relationship and cohabitation status of the individuals, pregnancy status of each individual, alcohol and drug use at the time of the incident, and role of the individual in the incident (victim, suspect, victim/suspect). Lethality scale scores are included as well as the number of incidents in which the unique couple was involved in 1995 and 1996, and 1989 median household income for the census tract.

Access & Use Information

Restricted: This dataset can only be accessed or used under certain conditions. License: us-pd

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Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023
Publisher National Institute of Justice
Maintainer
Identifier 2967
Data First Published 2001-12-21T00:00:00
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2012-08-22T09:05:04
Rights These data are restricted due to the increased risk of violation of confidentiality of respondent and subject data.
Public Access Level restricted public
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id f85716ab-e449-4459-bc0d-cf8408b20d2b
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Program Code 011:060
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash abb3d1bb70f81a104c2549b5351badb56671f2702d9cb39ec027950c9f1b40cb
Source Schema Version 1.1

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