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Identifying Police Officers at Risk of Adverse Events

Published: 13 August 2016 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Problem officers and problem behavior: on the object of early intervention systemsPolicing: A Journal of Policy and Practice10.1093/police/paaf00219Online publication date: 29-Jan-2025
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  • (2024)Private security and public policeJournal of Empirical Legal Studies10.1111/jels.12393Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    KDD '16: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
    August 2016
    2176 pages
    ISBN:9781450342322
    DOI:10.1145/2939672
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 13 August 2016

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    1. law enforcement
    2. police

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    KDD '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 66 of 1,115 submissions, 6%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)Problem officers and problem behavior: on the object of early intervention systemsPolicing: A Journal of Policy and Practice10.1093/police/paaf00219Online publication date: 29-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Therapy for Therapists: Design Opportunities to Support the Psychological Well-being of Mental Health WorkersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869578:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Private security and public policeJournal of Empirical Legal Studies10.1111/jels.12393Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
    • (2024)An exploration of recurring early intervention (EI) alerts to address at-risk officers through the lens of police reformPolicing: A Journal of Policy and Practice10.1093/police/paae13318Online publication date: 23-Dec-2024
    • (2024)A Mixed-Methods Study of Early Intervention System Policy, Supervisory Review Practices, and EffectivenessJustice Quarterly10.1080/07418825.2024.2333414(1-30)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2024
    • (2023)FATE in AI: Towards Algorithmic Inclusivity and AccessibilityProceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization10.1145/3617694.3623233(1-14)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2023
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    • (2023)The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence10.1093/oso/9780198883098.001.0001Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023
    • (2023)Explainable machine learning for public policy: Use cases, gaps, and research directionsData & Policy10.1017/dap.2023.25Online publication date: 20-Feb-2023
    • (2023)„Computer sagt nein“ – Gesellschaftliche Teilhabe und strukturelle Diskriminierung im Zeitalter Künstlicher IntelligenzDie Digitalisierung des Politischen10.1007/978-3-658-38268-1_2(23-44)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
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