The impact of overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool

Abstract

Pre-trial risk assessment tools are used to make recommendations to judges about appropriate conditions of pre-trial supervision for people who have been arrested. Increasingly, there is concern about whether these models are operating fairly, including concerns about whether the models' input factors are fair measures of one's criminal activity. In this paper, we assess the impact of booking charges that do not result in a conviction on a popular risk assessment tool, the Arnold Public Safety Assessment. Using data from a pilot run of the tool in San Francisco, CA, we find that booking charges that do not result in a conviction (i.e. charges that are dropped or end in an acquittal) increased the recommended level of pre-trial supervision in around 27% of cases evaluated by the tool.