| Summary: | 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.
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