The ODARA Domestic Assault Risk Assessment Scoring Form

The ODARA scoring form is a 13-item checklist that a New Jersey police officer fills out after arresting someone for certain domestic violence offenses against an intimate partner. Each item is marked 1 if present or 0 if not, and the total predicts the statistical likelihood that the accused will assault a partner again within about five years. The Division of Criminal Justice designated the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment as the state’s approved domestic violence risk tool, and the completed score feeds into pretrial release and detention decisions under the Criminal Justice Reform Act.

When the Form Is Required

The Attorney General’s directive requires the arresting officer to complete the ODARA whenever the defendant and victim are intimate partners and there is probable cause for a listed offense. Those offenses include homicide, aggravated assault, simple assault involving physical contact or a weapon, sexual assault, criminal sexual contact, false imprisonment with contact or a weapon, kidnapping, second-degree burglary with contact or a weapon, terroristic threats with contact or a weapon, robbery, and any other crime involving a risk of death or serious bodily injury.¹

One boundary matters here. Officers complete the form regardless of the genders involved, but the results are only relied upon for complaint-warrant and pretrial decisions when the defendant is male and the victim is female. The tool was developed and validated on male-on-female intimate partner violence data, so the Attorney General’s guidelines limit its formal use accordingly.¹

The Thirteen Items

The official form is published by the Office of the Attorney General and takes roughly ten minutes to complete.²³ Each item scores 1 if present, 0 if not, and the total is the sum.

Prior domestic assault appearing in a police report or criminal record, where the victim was a current or former partner or that partner’s child.
Prior non-domestic assault on any other person, appearing in a police report or criminal record.
A prior final court disposition that included at least 30 days in an adult or juvenile custodial facility before the current incident.
A prior violation of conditions of bail, parole, probation, pretrial release, or any protective order, including a TRO or FRO.
A threat by the defendant to cause physical harm or death to any person other than themselves during the incident being assessed.
Physical confinement of the victim, meaning the defendant prevented or tried to prevent the victim from leaving the scene.
The victim’s expressed concern, fear, or certainty that the defendant will assault her or her children again.
A combined total of at least two children between the victim and defendant, whether shared or from other relationships.
The victim has at least one biological child whose other parent is not the defendant.
An assault on the victim while she was pregnant, either during the current incident or a prior one.
Two or more indicators of substance abuse by the defendant from a defined list.
At least one barrier the victim faces to obtaining help, drawn from a defined list.
Prior violence by the defendant against any non-domestic victim, whether or not it was reported to police.

Where the Information Comes From

Accurate scoring depends on records rather than what people say at the scene. The officer starts with the defendant’s New Jersey State Bureau of Identification number, the unique identifier tied to fingerprints on file with the state, which opens up the full New Jersey criminal history.⁴ The Domestic Violence Central Registry shows active and expired restraining orders, which directly affects the conditional-release-failure item. The National Crime Information Center adds out-of-state convictions and pending warrants.

The victim’s account is essential for items the databases cannot capture: concern about future assault, barriers to support, and details about threats or confinement during the current incident. The immediate police report supplies the rest.

What the Score Means

The raw score runs from 0 to 13 and sorts defendants into seven risk categories, each tied to a recidivism rate measured over an average follow-up of about five years:

Score of 0: 7 percent
Score of 1: 17 percent
Score of 2: 22 percent
Score of 3: 34 percent
Score of 4: 39 percent
Score of 5 or 6: 53 percent
Score of 7 through 13: 74 percent

These percentages reflect how often people in each category committed another partner assault that came to police attention during the follow-up. A defendant scoring a 4 is roughly five and a half times more likely to reoffend than one scoring a 0. At the top of the scale, nearly three of every four defendants scoring 7 or higher went on to assault a partner again.

How the Score Affects Pretrial Release

The ODARA does not replace the Public Safety Assessment that New Jersey Pretrial Services runs on every defendant. The directive tells officials to consider the ODARA alongside the PSA, not instead of it, because the ODARA captures domestic-violence-specific risk factors the PSA does not.³

A high score gives prosecutors support for a motion for pretrial detention under N.J.S.A. 2A:162-19, which authorizes detention motions for domestic violence crimes.⁵ The arresting officer lists the individual risk factors identified by the ODARA in the affidavit of probable cause but does not include the numeric score in the complaint-warrant application itself. The score reaches the court later, through pretrial services.¹

Timing is tight. When the defendant is held on a complaint-warrant, the court must make an initial pretrial release decision within 48 hours of commitment to jail.⁶ If the prosecutor files a separate detention motion after the first appearance, the detention hearing must be held within three working days of that filing. Either side can request a continuance, up to five days for the defense or three days for the prosecutor, excluding weekends and holidays.⁵

If the court sets conditions of release instead of ordering detention, those conditions can include electronic monitoring, mandatory check-ins with pretrial services, no-contact orders, or other requirements tailored to the risk level.

The Victim’s Role

Before administering the ODARA, the officer must explain how the information will be used and who may see it, and then give the victim the chance to decline participation.¹ If the victim declines, the officer still completes the form from available records and the current incident report. Prior domestic assault, prior custodial sentences, and conditional release failures can all be scored from databases alone.

Other items rely heavily on the victim. Concern about future assault, barriers to support, and specifics about threats or confinement are hard to score accurately without her cooperation. When an item cannot be confirmed, it is scored as 0, which can produce a total that understates the actual risk. A victim weighing whether to participate should know that her account directly shapes how the system measures the danger she is in.

Challenging the Score

At the pretrial detention hearing, the defendant has the right to counsel, may testify, present witnesses, cross-examine the state’s witnesses, and submit information by proffer. The standard rules of evidence do not apply, so the court can consider a wider range of material from both sides.⁵

Because each item is binary, contesting the factual basis for a single item can matter. Defense attorneys commonly argue that a prior incident was miscoded, that the defendant was not actually on conditional release at the time in question, or that the officer relied on unverified information for an item that should have scored 0. Flipping one item can drop the defendant into a lower risk category with a meaningfully different recidivism percentage.

Attorneys have also raised broader concerns about actuarial tools of this kind, including that the ODARA was developed using Canadian data and may not perfectly reflect the New Jersey population. The gender restriction on formal reliance already acknowledges one limit of the tool’s validation. These arguments rarely result in the score being excluded outright, but they can affect how much weight a judge gives it against the rest of the record.

1
Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. Office of the County Prosecutor – ODARA Directive
2
New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. ODARA Scoring Form
3
Office of the Attorney General. Attorney General Law Enforcement Directive 2016-6 v3.0
4
New Jersey State Police. Criminal History Record Information Help
5
Justia Law. New Jersey Revised Statutes 2A:162-19 – Pretrial Detention
6
New Jersey Judiciary. Overview of Criminal Justice Reform