Domestic violence calls for police service in five US cities during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020

Tesleem Babalola; Tianna Couch; Morgan Donahoe; Rachel Kidman; Amy Hammock; Rebecca Monastero; Douglas Hanes; Jaymie Meliker

doi:10.1186/s12889-022-14901-3

Domestic violence calls for police service in five US cities during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020

BMC Public Health. 2022 Dec 29;22(1):2455. doi: 10.1186/s12889-022-14901-3.

Authors

Tesleem Babalola¹, Tianna Couch², Morgan Donahoe³, Rachel Kidman⁴, Amy Hammock^{4

5}, Rebecca Monastero⁶, Douglas Hanes^{4

7}, Jaymie Meliker⁴

Affiliations

¹ Program in Public Health, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA. tesleem.babalola@stonybrookmedicine.edu.
² Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA.
³ Westhampton Beach Senior High School, Westhampton Beach, NY, USA.
⁴ Program in Public Health, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA.
⁵ School of Social Welfare, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA.
⁶ School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA.
⁷ Centre for Gender and Sexual Minority Health, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto ON, Canada.

Abstract

Background: When COVID-19 stay-at-home orders were instituted, there were concerns that isolation may lead to increases in domestic violence (DV). Reports of increased rates of DV during the stay-at-home period have been suggestive of this but inconsistent across different locations. We sought to complement the existing studies by characterizing changes in DV trends in US cities of Chicago, Los Angeles (LA), New York City (NYC), Philadelphia, and Phoenix using police call volume data from January 1st, 2018, through Dec 31st, 2020.

Methods: The stay-at-home orders were generally instituted for most US states in the second half of March 2020. We used the call volume for the pre-COVID-19 period (Jan. 2018 to Feb. 2020) to model a forecast against the stay-at-home order period (Mar. - May 2020) and the period after lifting the order (June - Dec. 2020) using the interrupted autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series model.

Results: During the stay-at-home order, increases in mean DV calls relative to pre-COVID-19 were observed in Chicago (47.8%), Phoenix (18.4%), NYC (3.5%), and LA (3.4%), but a decrease in Philadelphia (-4.9%). After lifting the stay-at-home order, changes in mean calls relative to pre-COVID-19 remained elevated in Chicago, slightly elevated in Phoenix, and returned to baseline in NYC and LA.

Conclusion: Results suggest that the stay-at-home orders may have contributed to an increase in DV calls in some cities (Phoenix, and to a smaller extent LA, NYC), but the increase seen in Chicago (and to some extent Phoenix) persisted beyond the stay-at-home order and therefore may not be attributable to the stay-at-home orders. Additional studies are needed to help explain why the association between stay-at-home orders and DV police call volume seems to only appear in some locations.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; Domestic abuse; Domestic violence; Intimate Partner violence; Pandemics.

MeSH terms

COVID-19* / epidemiology
Cities / epidemiology
Domestic Violence*
Humans
Pandemics
Police