Miami-Dade: A Case Study of Domestic Violence Arrests During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The global health crisis that started early in 2020 has triggered a surge of interest in the effect (if any) of COVID-19 on patterns of domestic violence.1 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 (US) are leveraged along with a robust approach towards model identification, which is used to generate a suitably accurate forecast against which the observed pandemic period domestic violence data can be compared. The pattern uncovered for Miami-Dade County was similar what was found in other U.S. cities that during the pandemic experienced spikes (+95 CI) in the level of domestic violence arrests that were greater than expected. Interestingly these spikes appeared shortly after dips (-95 CI) in observed arrests fell below the expected level.