A Case Study of Domestic Violence Arrests during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Miami-Dade County

ABSTRACT

The global health crisis that started early in 2020 has triggered a surge of interest in the effect (if any) of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) on patterns of domestic violence. The first systematic review and meta-analysis examining domestic violence during the pandemic revealed quite a lot of diversity in the approaches used to measure potential effects. Drawing on the time series forecasting literature, this brief report contributes to the growing body of evidence around the issue of domestic violence during the pandemic. Arrest data from Miami-Dade County are leveraged along with a robust approach toward model identification, which is used to generate a suitably accurate forecast against which the observed pandemic period domestic violence data can be compared. Although our analyses of long-term post-lockdown data provided some evidence for increases or spikes in domestic violence that were greater than expected, at the same time the evidence shows neither transient nor consistent change in the overall number of domestic violence arrests during the time periods examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic violence
• COVID-19
• crime
• forecasting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Decomposition and seasonality boxplots are provided in the Appendix to help readers visualize the trend and seasonality inherent in the Miami-Dade County domestic violence arrest series.

2. The full results of cross-validation for the first and second periods of interest are available in the Appendix for interested readers.