The Inter-Rater Reliability of Violence Risk Assessment Tools Used by Police Employees in Swedish Police Settings

Abstract

Abstract Risk assessments are used by the police in order to identify the need for victim protection. The aim of this study was to examine the inter-rater reliability of two violence risk assessment tools; the Police Screening Tool for Violent Crimes (PST-VC) and the Brief Spousal Assault Form for the Evaluation of Risk (B-SAFER), used by police employees in two different police authorities in Sweden. The inter-rater agreement was evaluated for both tools, with respect to global risk assessments, recommended protective actions and risk- and victim vulnerability factors. The main results showed that the inter-rater agreement was highest for the global assessments and widely varying, from very low to fairly high, for the structured variables. The fairly high reliability for the global risk assessments was most likely due to shared assumptions (heuristics, tacit knowledge) among the assessors rather than being based on the information obtained by the tools.