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

Abstract

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.