This book explores the potential of domestic abuse data to assess the level of harm caused to victims and the amount of resources required to respond to it. Policing domestic abuse has become a major activity for the police service in England and Wales. Part of the police strategy is to gather hundreds of thousands of detailed records about victims and suspects - the single largest set of domestic abuse records available, but one that to date has largely unexplored by researchers. In this volume, Matthew Bland and Barak Ariel analyse three substantial datasets taken from police forces across the country and ask:

·         Can police data be used to derive meaningful insight?

·         How should we use these data to measure harm?

·         Just how much domestic abuse involves a repeat victim?

·         Does abuse get more serious over time?

·         Can serious domestic abuse be predicted before it occurs?

This volume illustrates the scale of the challenge the police and other agencies face with reducing domestic abuse. A small proportion of individuals generate a majority of harm; this book argues that police records offer opportunities to identify these individuals before the harm occurs. Demonstrating that statistical techniques can be used to profile domestic abuse to target harm reduction strategies more precisely and even identify a sizable proportion of serious cases before they occur, this volume will be of interest to law enforcement officials, policing researchers, and policy makers interested in reducing the phenomenon of domestic abuse.

Matthew Bland, PhD, is a Lecturer in Evidence Based Policing at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Criminology. He previously worked as a crime analyst for more than 15 years. His work primarily focuses on advancing the evidence base in policing by developing police analytical capabilities and conducting research to test the efficacy of existing and emerging responses. His 2015 article with Barak Ariel, 'Targeting escalation in reported domestic abuse: Evidence from 36,000 callouts' was one of the first published articles to evaluate common theories of escalating severity in domestic crimes.

Barak Ariel, PhD, is a Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Lecturer in Experimental Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge. He has been involved in dozens of research projects with police agencies around the globe, with specific focus on crime and technology. He is the recipient of the Academy of Experimental Criminology Young Experimental Scholar Award, European Society of Criminology Young Criminologist Award and a Fellow of the Division of Experimental Criminology. He is also a Jerry Lee Scholar at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University.