For this project, our team focused on Child Protective Service (CPS) data for Alleghany County.
We cannot speak on all of the details since the data we have is protected, but we want to give a bit of an overview about the problem we are investigating. In 2019, there were 4,000,000 referrals (phone calls) made to CPS which accounts for about 8,000,000 children. Out of the children, less than half are screened-in, meaning that no action was taken after the initial referral.
Our project focused on looking at the zip codes in Allegheny county with the highest count of referrals, seeing if there were any zip codes that had a high proportion of calls that were initially high risk that were then screened in, and seeing what people were making the most CPS calls (law enforcement, school personnel, etc.). We also looked a little bit at the predictive analytics model that CPS uses to determine a child’s risk.