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Whatcom County work group hears plans to validate local use of PSA pretrial risk tool
Summary
Dr. Zachary Hamilton outlined a statistical validation project for the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), describing measures the research team will use to test accuracy, time windows and potential bias in Whatcom County data; the project is funded in part through an AOC grant.
Judge Evan Jones convened a meeting of the Whatcom County Pretrial Processes Work Group and invited Dr. Zachary Hamilton to present on a project to validate the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) that local pretrial services have been using.
Dr. Hamilton, a professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha, told the group he will test whether the PSA’s risk scores predict three outcomes tracked by jurisdictions: failures to appear (FTA), new criminal filings and new violent criminal filings. “The tool itself ... is designed to score so that higher scores indicate a higher likelihood of each one of those three types of outcomes,” Hamilton said.
Why it matters: jurisdictions use PSA scores to guide release conditions and pretrial supervision. If a risk-assessment tool misclassifies people for the local population, it can affect…
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