AI Tools in Violence Risk Assessment: What New York Courts Will Ask Before the Output Comes In

Stephan M. Carlson, MD, MBA, FAPA · Violence and Threat Risk

An algorithm can output a risk number, but it cannot account for the score it produces, defend the population it was trained on, or testify to what it left out. In a New York courtroom, a violence risk opinion stands or falls on the reasoning behind the number, not the number itself. What a violence risk opinion is actually answering Forensic violence risk assessment is not prediction in the lay sense. No instrument, statistical or computational, tells a court that a particular person will or will not commit a future act of violence. What a competent assessment provides is a structured, transparent account of the factors that raise or lower the probability of harm, the conditions under which

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